Holly Cornell Oral History Interview, February 10, 1982

JENNIFER LEE: In the Horner Museum where I work, we have a copy of a diary by William Cornell written while he was traveling from Alexandria, Ohio, across the plains to Portland. I know you were born in Boise April 5, 1914. Why did your family come to Portland and then go to Boise?

HOLLY CORNELL: My father, Harvey Baeff Cornell, worked for a manufacturer's representative in the food business and they wanted to start an office in Boise so he moved over there in, I don't know, 1911 or 1912, I guess. So that's how I was born there.

JL: Was your father's name Holly Austin or was that...

HC: That's my grandfather. Now, wait a minute. Yeh. That's my grandfather. In the Oregon Historical Society's quarterlies back two or three years ago, there is a story of that diary and some of the background of the family written by Karen Offen, one of the members of the family. It published the diary and tells a little more about the story. Holly Austin was born in Oregon. You see, William started across the plains with his brother-in-law.

JL: Who did?

HC: William Cornell, my great grandfather. My grandfather's name was Holly. He was named after an uncle of my grandmother's. Well, I'll have to dig that out if you're going to want to put it in here; I'd better get the story straight. I thought it was interesting. At any rate, the one who came across the plains in about 1852, that's right, was William Cornell. But he left his wife [Added by Mrs. Cornell: Emily Castle Cornell, and five children, in Alexandria, Ohio, where their parents and siblings lived. A year later Emily took the train from Ohio to New York and took a clipper ship to the Panama Canal, got on a flat car for part of the distance across the Isthmus; and then the children were carried by Indians from there on, and they got lost and finally got together on the Pacific side to San Francisco and then finally to Portland.

JL: Were these stories passed down or did you read this in the diary?

HC: It's passed down. But I think there are two versions of where my grandfather, Holly Austin, was born, and I think it was William Cornell that came across the plains and the diary is his.

JL: Right. And then there was Emma, I think her name was, who wrote about going around the Isthmus of Panama.

HC She has written two letters about that. We've got, or did have, one that says Holly Austin was born in Ohio and came around the Isthmus; and in the other one [it says] that he was born here. I think probably he was born here.

JL: You are fortunate that you know so much about your family background.

HC: Well, yeh. I don't know all that much but that diary has been in the family for a long time. My father had it and I knew about it, and we gave the diary to the woman who wrote these articles. I think the original, now, is at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland. But there were several copies made one way or another.

JL: Your father was employed with whom?

HC: It was Kelly Clark Company, as I remember it. I don't know whether they are still in existence or not. They may be. They were manufacturers' representatives for canned goods and groceries and so forth. In those days, most of the canners and so forth didn't have salesmen, as such, and sales outlets and warehouses. They engaged these companies that were called manufacturers' representatives, who represented a lot of different manufacturers and they did the selling in the local areas. So when this office wanted to start an office in Boise, my father went over to start it.

JL: Was your mother employed?

HC: No.

JL: And how many brothers and sisters did you have then?

HC: A brother and a sister.

JL: What were their names?

HC: My brother's name is Harvey Holman Cornell and he's still living in Tigard. He was vice president in charge of international banking for the U.S. Bank when he retired there in, I don't know, 1972 or 1973. Then he went to Pittsburgh and worked for the Equibank for five or six years and he's back now.

JL: And your sister?

HC: My sister died in, it must have been about 1968, of cancer. She lived at that time in Minneapolis. Her name was Riggs. Her husband was Frank Riggs and she had five children.

JL: When you were young, what were some of your hobbies and major interests?

HC: (chuckle) I remember making model airplanes; I guess that was one of them.

JL: Gee, that would have been some of the earliest planes and war planes.

HC: We used to make models of the World War I airplanes. They weren't the flying kind; they just looked like one. And sports, I guess. I was always trying to play baseball or football or something. I went to grade school in Boise. Then the Depression came in 1929 or 1930, and my father moved back to Portland and eventually went back to work for the same company, so I went to high school in Portland.

JL: And you moved back to Portland in 1929 or 1930, did you say?

HC: Yeh. I graduated from Grant High School in January of 1932. I just discovered that the other day because they're having a fiftieth reunion.

JL: Oh, I hope you go. So you like to build airplanes and you liked sports, then?

HC: Oh, I think my boyhood was much like anybody else's. I didn't like to cut the lawn, and I enjoyed playing and horsing around and athletic games and making things with my hands. My dad used to build model ships and one thing or another. He was very good at that kind of thing, so maybe I just kind of copied him.

JL: Do you remember a time when you first considered becoming an engineer?

Was it because of this tinkering with airplanes and radios?

HC: No, I don't think I really decided to do that until after I graduated from high school in 1932. It was the Depression. My dad didn't have a job. I finally got a job as a messenger for the Bank of California at what was at that time an excellent salary of sixty-five dollars a month. I worked there for two and a half years because I didn't start school at Oregon State until the fall of 1934 (pause). That's right. So it was during that two-year period that I got to...I kind of thought I always would go to college and I was able, on that sixty-five dollars a month, to pay twenty dollars at home and live on twenty dollars and save the rest of it. I did pretty well. You know, I don't remember now much about it but I didn't have any trouble saving the twenty-five dollars and making out on that. Still took out the girls and one thing or another. You know, seventy-five cents would be a big evening.

JL: How times have changed. What did your parents want for you? Did they

encourage you to get an education?

HC: Hummm, hummm. My mother had a teaching certificate and taught for a while.

JL: Oh, you mean during the Depression?

HC: No. I think that was before they were married. My father didn't go to college. My uncle, my father's brother, went to Cornell for two years. The Cornell University had, at that time-I don't know if they still do or not, I think they do-the descendant of the Cornell family with the Cornell name, can attend the university tuition-free, not board- and room-free, just tuition-free. And he went to school there. He worked for Portland General Electric. This is my uncle William, Billy as we called him. He worked for Portland General Electric for most of his life. At one time he was a radio bum, or expert, and, for the power company-and this is way back in the twenties-he had a mobile radio in his automobile with an aerial on it and he would go around and try to find where the power company's system was interfering with the radio reception.

JL: My gosh. Why didn't you go to Cornell University?

HC: I don't know. It never occurred to us, I guess. And I couldn't have afforded it at that time.

JL: Even with free tuition?

HC: Well, no. You know, you had to go all the way across the country and then it was much more expensive to live there and one thing or another. I don't know. We just never really considered it. You graduated from high school in Portland and you worked as a bank messenger for two years, and in that time, you decided to go to OSC in engineering.

JL: Why didn't you pursue business, for example, since you were working in a bank or even continue working there?

HC: I guess my mother kind of wanted me to be a lawyer. I didn't particularly like that, and I guess I finally decided that I liked to build things and maybe being an engineer was the way to do it. During the time that I was working there, I was trying to study up to be sure I could get into college and one thing or another, and I got to working on algebra and discovered I kind of liked the mathematics which I had always been fairly good at, and as a result, somewhere in that period of time, I decided I'd try engineering. I don't know who I talked to or how I... I can't remember now what particular thing triggered it.

JL: I was going to ask who was influential in this decision?

HC: I don't really remember. It was kind of my own, I think. I suppose there was something I read somewhere, and the interest in the mathematical things, and then the building. I guess I thought I was going to build bridges when I started out in engineering.

JL: And not airplanes or ships?

HC: No, bridges. That's what I wanted to do. When I got that idea, I don't know; whether it was after I got to college or before, I can't say.

JL: Were you always such an exceptional student? I saw your transcripts from OSC and you had excellent grades. Were you as good a student in high school?

HC: I flunked English in high school.

JL: Oh, well.

HC: Nuts. (chuckle) And I did pretty well in algebra and geometry and those things. No, I don't think I was a very good student in high school. My last year, I finally realized that I'd better get some fairly decent grades if I wanted to get to college, so I did better I think the last year.

JL: You still hoped that you could go to college in spite of the Depression? It wasn't so prohibitively expensive that you wouldn't be able to make

it?

HC: No, no. A lot of my friends in high school there were going to college, and they were doing it one way or another. You know, you could work your way through college. I saved enough in that two and a half years to be able to take care of myself for-well, I think I got pretty good jobs during the summer working for the highway department on a survey crew, so putting those together, I think I took care of myself for a little more than three years. The folks were a little better off by that time and they helped me for the last year.

JL: Your father lost his job in the Depression and then later...

HC: Things picked up and he went back to work for the original company.

JL: That must have been tough for everybody.

HC: Yeh. Well, my brother was living at home at that time and he was also working for the U.S. National Bank so the two of us managed to take care of things for the family until Dad got back. He had two or three jobs in the interim and finally ended up back with his original company.

JL: In looking over your college record, I see that you were in a lot of leadership positions-treasurer of the freshman class and during your sophomore year you were president of that class and then almost president of the student body. Did you also have these leadership qualities and capabilities in high school and earlier? Did people seem to look up to you as being the leader?

HC: I don't know. I was president of the student body at Grant. In the fall of 1931, was it? Yeh, it would have been. How that happened, I can't remember. I think I had taken public speaking, and somehow or another they had a public speaking contest and I had to give a speech to the whole student body that spring. Since I had changed schools and one thing or another, I was a half of a year behind, or a semester behind, I guess, is what they called it. So, when they were looking for candidates for student body for the fall of, would have been for 1931, I made this speech and I got nominated, and somehow that gave me enough exposure, as they call it today, to be elected. Well, so then, when I came to Oregon State there were a lot of Grant High School and Portland students down here so I guess my name was known to some extent.

JL: You were chairman of the Blue Key and president of the Manager's Coop

and a number of other positions.

HC: Ummm, hummm.

JL: People just seemed to look to you as being the leader?

HC: Either that or I didn't know how to say no. I don't know which, (chuckle)

JL: Well, (laughter) I wonder what that special talent is that you possess?

HC: Partly luck, partly being in the right place and, you know, getting your name known somehow. I imagine that if I hadn't gone to Oregon State, I wouldn't have known so many people or been known by many and probably never had done any of that or much of it. But you must have enjoyed the positions, too.

JL: Is that right?

HC: Oh, to some extent. It got a little wearing because I was taking a full engineering course which, in those days, was eighteen or nineteen hours. I don't know how that compares to what today's is, or how they figure it today. And usually on the summer jobs I got, I'd have to leave two or three weeks before school was out in the spring, so I was always trying to make those things up. Of course, the last term I was a senior, Jim Howland was involved in all this, too. He was the senior class president in the same class, if you remember. And the politics that was going on, and all these activities we'd gotten ourselves involved in were getting too much; and we both were writing theses, which seniors did in those days. He and I moved; he lived in one fraternity and I lived in another, and the two of us found a room down on 11th Street or something at about Tyler. We rented it for the spring term and we disappeared down there, so we could concentrate and get our studying done, and finish our thesis, and all that stuff.

JL: Your social life or your political life was getting in the way of your studies?

HC: Yeh. (chuckle)

JL: First, before we go into your time at OSC, why did you choose Oregon State College rather than some other place?

HC: Well, I guess it was the engineering program. I knew a lot of people who had come to school down here. And, while I was working up there at the bank, they used to invite me down to fraternity functions and one thing or another, and it just always seemed like a logical place to go; and it was close and it was fairly inexpensive and I felt I could manage it.

JL: And your goals were to go into civil engineering with the prospect of building bridges?

HC: I guess so. I can't remember that it was that specific when I started engineering. I didn't know enough about what engineering was to be able to make that kind of a choice at that time.

JL: Having been out of high school a couple of years you were probably more mature than most of the students, weren't you?

HC: Yeh. That was one advantage; and probably why I was able to get fairly good grades in college, was because I'd had these two and a half years out. I was a little older. I felt it was real important. When I was a freshman, I was nominated for president of the freshman class and I declined. I refused to run; I said, "I don't have time to do that." I think I was treasurer, anyway; I don't remember how that happened. I really went to work that first year, and I think I got one B the first quarter. And, you know, once you've done that, it makes it a lot easier, because everybody automatically assumes now that you're a pretty good student and so they'll give you the break.

JL: You mean the professors?

HC: Sure.

JL: (laughter) I never heard that.

HC: Well, that's true.

JL: Well, it must have been a closer knit group of professors back then?

HC: Oh, sure. They knew everybody. You know, there were-I can't remember; at least in the civil engineering, there were only seventy or eighty of us as freshmen, so every professor knew all of us.

JL: What did you think of the engineering school?

HC: I liked it.

JL: You realized by that time that engineering was the subject that you wanted to study? You had no regrets?

HC: Yeh; and then, you know, I worked hard the first year, particularly, and managed to succeed, and you always like something where you think you can do pretty well. So, yeh, I liked it. And I got to know the professors and got the chance to talk to them. A group of professors, particularly in civil engineering, were Fred Merryfield and Dr. Mockmore, Charlie, as we called him; Glen Holcomb, who is still living here in town, I think; and, I can't think of the structural engineering professor's name, I'll think of it when you give me the draft. They were interesting and things were informal and small enough, at that time, that you could talk to them. They would go to the engineering society meetings and one thing or another and we could go with them. So, yeh, I enjoyed the engineering aspects of going to school very much. I wasn't quite as happy with the political part of it. It began to get wearing and for some reason not as much fun as it had been; partly, I guess, because I carried a full engineering load, and then trying to do all these extracurricular activities got to be more than you could comfortably do.

JL: I can imagine. How did the Depression affect the attitudes and the goals of other engineering students? Were they optimistic or pessimistic about jobs, or the economic situation, or did that seem to affect them?

HC: I don't remember that we really talked about it too seriously. Most of the graduates were getting jobs of some kind-sometimes not in engineering, sometimes just on survey crews for the highway department. Quite a few of them took ROTC and, where they could, got a permanent commission in the Army. There was some kind of an act at that time that allowed the Army to give permanent commissions to ROTC graduates. I can't remember the name of it. Jack Graham or General Graham, retired now, was one of those. A whole series of people. One of our, Jim Howland's and my classmates became an ace in World War II flying airplanes in Japan. I'll try to think of his name for you. But I guess, particularly in the early stages, we didn't worry very much about getting a job. I think most everybody got a job sooner or later.

JL: Can you remember your first encounter with Fred Merryfield?

HC: (pause) No. (chuckle) I think I had him as a professor when I was a sophomore. I don't believe he taught anything that I took as a freshman.

JL: Now, was that in hydrology?

HC: Hydraulics, I think. I don't remember what the first contact was.

JL: You knew him as a sophomore.

HC: Ummm, hummm.

JL: What kind of a professor was he?

HC: He was a wild one. Fascinating to me at least, as a younger guy, because he had this tremendous enthusiasm. He was kind of a tough instructor but a very outgoing, outspoken, strong one, in a sense, he entertained you; he put on a show. I can remember once that he was working some hydraulic problem up on the board and...the way that he'd do, he would ask somebody a question about, "All right, now what? What's next in this formula?" And sometimes if he didn't get the right answer, he'd turn about and throw the chalk at the guy that missed it. But I remember one day - it was in the spring and the window-what's the engineering lab, what do they call it now? The engineering laboratory, which is across from, you know where Merryfield Hall is now? Across the alley up Monroe Street from that.

JL: Okay. I know where the engineering building is.

HC: I don't know what they call it now; we called it the engineering lab in those days. Anyway, it was in a classroom there, and it was the spring and the windows were wide open, and somebody gave him some kind of outlandish answer, and he had an eraser in his hand and he said, "Oh, my God." And he threw it up in the air and the eraser went up, and at the same time he gave a big kick with his foot. He drop-kicked the eraser out the window. (laughter)

HC: Oh no, I bet everybody was surprised.

HC: It brought down the house.

JL: Oh, gee. So did that cause the students to be prepared when they came to class?

HC: You bet. You know, there were only two ways you got along with Fred. You either were his fair-haired boy or he was your enemy. There was not very much in between.

JL: Somebody mentioned that he considered you and another student to be the best students he had had all through his teaching career.

HC: I don't remember that. He never told me that.

JL: Apparently he told somebody else that. But you enjoyed his class?

HC: Oh, yeh. Somehow we got acquainted-a group of us. I can't remember who they all were, but every once in a while, Friday nights or something, we used to go over to Fred Merryfield's and sit around and listen to Fred talk. You didn't talk to Fred very much; you listened to Fred talk. You could ask him a question or two and if that's what he wanted to talk about, he'd take off on it.

JL: He had quite a few students that wanted to listen then?

HC: I don't remember. I can't remember now how many of us used to do that. I used to and two or three others. Jim Howland, I think, went with us some. I enjoyed that. And then Glen Holcomb and Charlie Mockmore were good. They were different. They weren't as wild-eyed as Fred was but they also were interesting to work with and, I don't know, built your enthusiasm for engineering.

JL: How did it come about that Fred singled you out and talked to you about starting a firm? Did those conversations start before you had graduated?

HC: No, not really. When Jim Howland and I graduated, and Burke Hayes was in mechanical engineering - that was the Depression too, you know, and he, Burke, had come and gone; he had started a couple of years ahead of us but, as I remember it, he graduated the same time we did. The thing, I think, that happened was that Fred and Charlie Mockmore convinced Jim Howland and I that we ought to take advanced degrees, and they went to work to try to help us find a way to do this. And Fred talked, on my behalf, to Hardy Cross at Yale, and somehow I got a fellowship along with a man named Grant Robley who was an instructor there at Oregon State at that time and who later became-(pause) I was going to say dean of engineering but that's not quite right-assistant dean at Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. And Jim Howland got a Tau Beta Pi fellowship. So Grant Robley and Jim Howland and I took a trip across the country in Grant's car and went back there together that summer.

JL: One of you on the trip kept a little diary about the trip because I read it in the archives.

HC: Yeh, there is one around. Jim Howland has it. I've got one, I think, somewhere. Some pictures and one thing or another. At the same time, Burke Hayes had some kind of a fellowship at Harvard. Jim Howland went to MIT and I went to Yale. We saw each other once or twice. I spent two years there and Jim got his master's degree in a year. Jim Howland and I ended up working for Standard Oil of California. I was in San Francisco and Jim was in El Segundo.

JL: You're moving too fast. Just a second. You haven't graduated from college yet. (chuckle)

HC: Oh, okay. Well, we graduated from college and got these fellowships and took a master's.

JL: Why did Fred Merryfield and Professor Mockmore want you to get a master's degree?

HC: They thought that was the right thing to do.

JL: You followed their suggestions then?

HC: Well, by that time I realized there were a lot I didn't know, and this Hardy Cross, Professor Cross, was very well known and Fred felt that he was probably-even though I was a structural engineer, and not sanitary or an environmentalist you now call it that Fred was-he thought I ought to get a master's degree and he and Charlie Mockmore went to work on Cross, and I got an offer as a part-time instructor at Yale, and Jim got the Tau Beta Pi fellowship. They just felt, I guess, that we were good enough students that we ought to go further; that we shouldn't just quit there and go to work somewhere.

JL: I was looking at your transcript in the archives. You got three C's and all the rest A's and B's. The C's were in hydraulics, roads and pavements, and calculus. Do you remember that?

HC: No, I don' t. I don't know what happened that I did that in hydraulics. Roads and pavements I could never get very interested in. What was the other one?

JL: Introduction to calculus.

HC: I think that was my freshman year and that year I got this job with the highway department. I needed it so I left school early in May I think, and I had to come back that summer and take the exam from the mathematics professor separately. I hadn't remembered that particularly.

JL: How did you meet Jim Howland in college?

HC: We were in the same class, taking the same courses.

JL: You were just naturally attracted to each other as friends.

HC: I don't know. Couldn't help it. There were only about twenty of us in class at a time.

JL: Did you ever talk about setting up the firm with Howland before you graduated from OSC?

HC: Not that I remember.

JL: What I'm trying to have you talk about is how this idea of the firm got started and why you particular individuals came together-what qualities you possessed or whatever it was that caused you to come together.

HC: It's too bad that you can't talk to Fred Merryfield because he's kind of the one that brings it up.

JL: Well, he sounds like a real character. I really wish that I could have talked to him.

HC: Well, you got to carry the story a little further I guess in order to solve that, or in order to answer that. After Burke and Jim and I got out of school or got through our undergraduate work at Oregon State, we went back there for the master's and Jim and I ended up working for Standard Oil of California-not in the same city and I don't think we had actually seen each other-and Burke went to work, I don't remember, either in Boston or for the consultant in Oklahoma.

JL: He was in Boston first and then Oklahoma.

HC: Jim Howland and I both had reserve commissions in the Engineer Corps of the Army. So come 1940, whatever, just before Pearl Harbor - I went on active duty a year before Pearl Harbor-things were getting kind of shaky in San Francisco at Standard Oil, and I wasn't sure I was going to have a job and I got this notice from the Army that they were going to call up the reserves and I think I went a little sooner than I would have had to, although they would have got me within six months or so. I don't remember just when Burke went into the Navy, maybe a little later, but Jim got called to duty about a year after I did. All three of us were in the service until late 1945 or early 1946. Somewhere in the process of coming back on leave and one thing or another, we would always go talk to Merryfield.

JL: You'd come back to Oregon when you were on leave?

HC: Yeh. I was married by then. My wife was living here and I had a son then-he was about two I guess-and they were living here in Corvallis. So every time we'd come back or something, why, we'd come down to see Fred when he was here. You know, he was in the service for a while, too. I remember, I was back here twice, once in about the fall of 1944, just before I went to Germany, and then sometime in the middle of 1945. After I'd come back from Germany, I was on what they called POM leave because I was supposed to go to Japan; but they dropped the bomb while I was here and that never happened. We'd always go talk to Fred and, somewhere in this process, he got to talking to Jim and I about the possibility of going into the consulting business. I think Fred wanted to.

JL: Why you two students? Why not somebody else?

HC: I guess he thought, if he was going to team up with somebody, we'd be the best ones to do it with. That's all I know. We'd always been kind of his favorites for a period, for some reason or another.

JL: Jim Howland also? Or just you?

HC: Yeh. We had gone and gotten the master's degrees, you see. And Jim had taken soils, you now call it geotechnical engineering, in his graduate work, and I'd taken structural engineering, and Fred had a master's degree in sanitary engineering; so that made us a pretty good team. Then we got to thinking about Burke with whom we could have the mechanical/electrical capability.

JL: How well did you know Burke Hayes in college?

HC: Oh, not very well really, I guess. I knew Jim Howland a lot better.

JL: So you never talked about the firm idea until you were in the military and came home on leave? It was never mentioned in conversations between you and Jim Howland at all?

HC: Not that I remember. Well, after Fred brought up this idea late in the war, then Jim and I corresponded back and forth a little bit about it. I don't remember whether we got together before we got out of the Army to actually talk to each other about it. I think maybe we did once, but I can't remember.

JL: When you went off to Yale, what were your goals at that time? Did you still want to build bridges? Was that still your dream?

HC: Yeh. If I could have found the job that would pay enough, I would have stayed in New York.

JL: Why?

HC: Well, I liked New York. It was romantic in the big city and all of this, you know. And Hardy Cross said, "Oh, I can get you a job in New York if you want one, but it'll only pay you about $130 a month and you've got this offer." By that time, I had an offer from Standard in California at $185. And he said, "I think you'd better go to California, and anyway you're not going to like New York," he said, "after a while."

JL: Nice to visit but not to live in?

HC: Of course, New York was a lot different, you know, forty years ago than it is now. It was the big city. And it was exciting and romantic and there were all these places to go and things to do and they were having the World's Fair at that time, one of those they had, I don't remember [which]. As a matter of fact, that year, my wife and I went to two world's fairs. We went to the New York World's Fair and the one at Treasure Island in San Francisco which must have been 1940, I guess.

JL: Professor Hardy Cross was influential in your development at Yale University?

HC: Ummm, hummm. Yeh. I'd never say this to Fred, but I think Hardy Cross was probably the best teacher I ever studied under. He was a fascinating kind of a guy, too. Little, short, rotund. He had a table at the front of the class and he'd lift his little pot belly like this and lay it on the table and stand there and lecture to you. (chuckle) It wasn't quite that bad but that's what it looked like. And he was much like Fred Merryfield. A little bit sarcastic. Spent a good part of the first two or three months convincing us that we didn't know half as much as we thought we did, and trying to get us to use our heads and not just the formulas. Little things like that give you some idea what his philosophy was. And, I guess, that's where I got the great love for engineering, and part of the reason I wanted to work in New York is that's where the big firms were doing the big bridges and the tall buildings and that stuff.

JL: But he was convinced that Standard Oil would be better for your career?

He thought it was a better offer and he said, "I don't think you'll like it back here. I think you'd better go back West. That's what I'd do if I was doing it."

JL: Well, I know you taught at Yale. Did teaching appeal to you?

HC: Oh, I kind of enjoyed the teaching but I never had any interest in being a teacher in the sense of a career. I guess I've done a lot of teaching in a sense all my life, but I didn't want to be a professor. I wanted to be out there building them someplace.

JL: Had you thought about starting your own firm at that time-not necessarily with Fred Merryfield? Had that crossed your mind before?

HC: Not really.

JL: You always assumed you'd work for somebody else then?

HC: Well, I thought maybe I'd eventually be a part of some firm or something. I didn't know. I guess, at that stage in your life, you can't see all the possibilities; and consulting firms in those days were not very many. The fancy bridges were being done by the state highway departments. There were consulting firms that were doing the big bridges. Cross was a good friend of a man named Moisseiff who was the foremost expert on suspension bridges at the time. He designed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and it's kind of my theory that that failure killed him.

JL: Failure?

HC: You haven't ever heard of the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge? Sorry. It essentially blew down in about 1940. It's an old classic. The wind happened to be approaching at the right angle, and it was an advanced design and the deck stiffening was not sufficient, and it began to go this way and then finally [collapsed].

JL: Was it the engineer's fault?

HC: Well, yeh. They don't build them that way anymore. Well, I don't know whether he exactly took the responsibility but it wasn't long after that that he died. And the stories that I've heard, and this is just stories, were that he became so depressed and discouraged that probably he had a nervous breakdown and died. Where was I? Oh, we were talking about the big bridges. There were several other firms that were doing that. But by that time I was married; and making a good living was pretty important, too, so we went back to San Francisco which we loved. We lasted there about eight months and went into the Army.

JL: How did you meet your wife? I understand she graduated from Oregon State also.

HC: I met her [Cleo Ritner] here in school. We went together most of the time that I was in school.

JL: What was she studying?

HC: She has a degree in education and she taught. She graduated a year before I did. She taught typing and shorthand and so forth at Ontario. I don't know what they called it then.

JL: Ontario, Oregon?

HC: Yes. We were married the day before Christmas in 1938. I'd gotten to Yale that September. She helped put me through graduate school.

JL: She put you through graduate school by doing what?

HC: Or helped. I got pretty good pay back there, when we got back there, one of the instructors had died, or left, or something so we, Grant Robley, the other fellow that went back to Yale with me, and I essentially taught almost a full instructor's load in engineering mechanics-well, I wouldn't say full, but anyway they increased my salary and I got $160 a month as I remember it.

JL: Almost as much as you got...

HC: And Cleo had a job. She worked for some guy who was a climatologist who was supposed to be one of the toughest in the school to work for and she got one hundred dollars a month. We had more money and were more prosperous (chuckle) in that two years at Yale than I think we were for the next twenty years. We didn't have much expenses; lived in an apartment; didn't have a car; did fine.

JL: And at that time, you always kept in contact with Jim Howland at MIT?

HC: Yeh. Jim met Meisy, his wife, back there. I think she was going to Radcliffe was it?

JL: I think so.

HC: Or Vassar. I don't remember. Radcliffe, I think. They came down to visit Cleo and I a couple of weekends once or twice as I remember. And we kind of kept in touch there, but even then we weren't talking about this business. I don't think that had ever entered our heads.

JL: You just assumed that you would go one way and he would go his own direction?

HC: Yes.

JL: But you didn't want to stay at Yale and so you took this job in California?

HC: Well, I don't remember that I had any opportunity to stay at Yale, if I'd wanted to. Maybe if I'd worked on it, but I didn't want to stay there and teach.

JL: How did you like working for Standard Oil? Is that what you wanted?

HC: Oh, I guess I didn't mind it; and it was kind of interesting, too. I'd just started out as a lowly peon in the structural engineering department and had a long ways to go. But it was a good experience because I remember I had to design and draw the detailed plans for a refinery supports for a bunch of fractionating columns which are tall, steel columns; and in that area, even then, you had to design them for earthquakes. I had to draw up the details and I was working for an old, tough, chief draftsman who only had a high school education, and he didn't think too much of these hotshot young guys with all this fancy education and their high theories; and, boy, he really turned the screws and put me through the ropes and insisted on the details being right; and made me redo it until I got it right. And that's probably where I learned how to check drawings. But then, I remember I got this notice from the Army that they were going to call up people and you could go now or later. I talked to my boss, a man named John Renne who later was President of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He talked to the chief engineer and he said, "I can't assure you that there is going to be a job here this long. Things aren't looking very good and maybe you'd better take it." At that time, before Pearl Harbor, we were just called up for a year. We were supposed to get out by the end of the year. "Maybe you'd better take that and come back at the end of the year and see what it looks like." So I did. [I took a] Commission of active duty in the Army. I probably could have avoided going for a while if I hadn't done it, although eventually I would have gone, I know. Jim did and so did everybody else who had a commission.

JL: Eventually you went to Europe.

HC: Ummm, hummm. Because of my teaching experience, I was lucky. Oh, they sent us to a refresher course or whatever you call it at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and I was assigned to an engineering replacement training center at Fort Leonard Wood which was a brand new camp at that time. It was mostly mud and so forth. I was there for about a year, I guess, training recruits.

JL: Teaching?

HC: No. I don't call that teaching. It wasn't. I was at first a platoon leader and eventually company commander. Our company was about 250 draftees. We had to make soldiers out of them. I was there at the time of Pearl Harbor; and shortly after that, I guess because of my teaching experience, I was transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, which is an infantry post. I was the assistant engineer instructor, I guess you would call it, for the infantry offices they were training at the time. It was, you know, training draftees to be infantrymen. And that was a nice assignment. I was there for about three years.

JL: You liked military life?

HC: No. But, if you had to be in it, that was as nice a view as you could have. Eventually, I got a little itchy about that because all my friends were going over and fighting the war, and here I was just sitting around doing office sort of stuff.

JL: What were you teaching exactly?

HC: I was teaching engineering subjects to infantry personnel; and what it involved was how to build floating bridges, how to handle explosives, and just general instructions to the infantry personnel on engineering kinds of military work. We had a big demonstration that we put together there called attack of fortified positions. You know, that was the time that the French had a so-called Maginot Line, which was a whole permanent set of forts all along, to stop the Germans. It hadn't worked.

JL: That must have been challenging to you.

HC: Got very repetitious. I imagine that I've crossed the Chattahoochee River a hundred times building a bridge, you know; and we had an engineer company there with us, and they got so they could put that bridge together in their sleep. We'd put it on as a demonstration for the infantrymen to watch and then we'd get infantry to go across it. I was an assistant to the regular Army officers who were engineering instructors at the infantry school. The second one left to take over what they called an engineer combat group, and through his connections at the Pentagon and Washington, D.C., he got me transferred in as his executive officer, and that unit went to Europe in the fall of 1944, I guess it was. We meandered around over there and chased Patton all across France and through Germany and stopped on VE Day, which was Victory in Europe Day, at Linz, Austria on the Blue Danube River. Came back, and our unit was to retrain and be a part of the task force that was going to land on the main Japanese island. At least that was our guess. Fortunately, with the bomb on Hiroshima and the surrender of the Japanese, we never went. We never did it.

JL: You earned a bronze star, didn't you?

HC: Ummm, hummm. I don't know what for, really. I was no big hero. I didn't go out and rescue somebody under fire or anything.

JL: Why do you think they gave it to you, then?

HC: My boss got it for me, the same guy that asked for me, and got me transferred into his unit for managing the group while he went off and...he was a great goer. He was an all-American football player, and a tremendously smart guy. At the time that he graduated, he had more swords or sabers or whatever they give you at West Point than anybody before him. And he liked to go off and be right up in front in the middle of things, you know, and so my job was to stay back there and keep everything going and try to keep up with him, and I guess that's what I got it [the bronze star] for. I was never under very serious battle conditions. Sure, we'd get shot at and bombed and shelled at times.

JL: I know you must have been popular with your men because there's a letter in the archives that says, "To the best lieutenant colonel in the whole Army," and then it has all of your men's names under it.

HC: Is that right? I don't remember that. Are you sure that was for me?

JL: I think so.

HC: Well, it's, you know, at that time, we got to the Rhine River or were near it at the time the Ramagen Bridge was captured. There is a movie about it, in the last five years, The Bridge at Ramagen, I think they call it. I finally saw it one night when it got on TV, and (chuckle) it isn't really the whole story but, well, maybe it is. All I can remember is the middle of one night, Ken Fields, who was the officer I was executive to, called up and said, "Move everything we've got to" I think it was Weissbaden, which is a little town right by this bridge, "as fast as you can. We've captured this bridge and got it first" we had one general engineering company, "I'm at their place and they're moving directly to the bridge right now." So we maintained that bridge and were assigned a special crew of experts in steel construction and welding. That thing was a tied arch and somehow the Germans were to blow it just as our tanks started to cross or just as we got there. When they set off the charge, the charge on one of these rids went off but the other one didn't, so it hung there kind of cocked like this, and the crazy tank jockey that was leading the company or the column that got there first, just took off.

JL: On this bridge that was half falling down?

HC: Ummm, hummm. It was a railroad bridge.

JL: Oh, my gosh.

HC: So bumping across the ties, he took off and he took-I don't know, a whole company of tanks got across there-and spread out and held the bridgehead. And, of course, the minute they got that damn thing they moved everything they could find as fast as they could because that was the break that-you know, we were going to have to cross the Rhine in the assault boats under fire and here they caught this bridge because some German made a mistake, or something went wrong with their explosives. So our company got to the bridge about six hours after the tanks had gotten across. By that time, they were pouring everything they could find across there-guns and tanks and infantry and everything.

And for about two weeks, that company and all of us went to work on that bridge. They floored it, and they kept the traffic going on it, and we got this special crew and, with torches, jacks and one rib or another, they cut that rib that had been broken and welded a big heavy steel plate. That thing was just an open box. The rib is a box. There was a big steel plate on each side of the break and they had jacks in there-great big hydraulic jacks that we'd flown in from the states-and they were going to jack that bridge back up, get the bridge back up level, and then weld it all together. They were just starting the jacking process when the thing let go.

JL: Oh.

HC: I was never sure, and we were never sure, whether that was a result of a shell that the Germans hit the bridge with or whether in the process of starting to bring the bridge back something else let go that we hadn't seen. Anyway, the bridge failed, and it went this way and dumped the whole company into the water and everybody else that was on it. By that time, we had five or six more bridges across the Rhine in that area so, oh, two-thirds of them I the men on the bridge] floated down the Rhine until they could get on the next floating bridge. But I think we lost about a third of the company.

JL: My gosh.

HC: Actually, by that time, it didn't matter militarily. We were sad to lose the men. This was the first serious loss of life our unit had experienced. We had so many bridges and so much traffic and so much power over there on the ease side of the river the Remagen bridge didn't need that bridge anymore.

JL: Did you help in the construction of these bridges?

HC: Well, the unit or the group did. We had two battalions and a special bridge company and two or three separate companies; they put the bridges across. I sat back there and tried to guess what the old man was going to want, and get the stuff moving, and keep them supplied.

JL: With your background, you must have been a key person?

HC: I wouldn't say so. (chuckle) Well, you know, hell, it isn't all that fancy. You just got to keep at it and use your head and do what you need to. It was not highly technical engineering except the thing that those guys were doing on that rib. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to work on that as much as I'd like to have. If I'd had my choice I probably wouldn't be here. I would have probably gone with the bridge. (chuckle) Anyway, from then on, we were moving forty to fifty miles a day trying to keep back of Patton to back him up with the engineering support he needed. He was carrying a big pincher around in the south into Austria to trap the Germans-and I can't remember when that bridge thing was. It was about February, and the Germans surrendered that June. We were down on the Danube River and we'd made a forced crossing of the Danube, oh, a week or so before that. We'd do that with a bunch of little row boats which the infantry guys carried down by hand, and launched them, and paddled them across.

You know, if the enemy sees you at the time and they're situated right, they'll just murder you because you're a sitting duck out there on that river. But by that time, we had enough fire power that the far side of that river looked like a picture of the moon. They blew everything out of there to the point where there couldn't have been anything alive. You don't want the war stories and all this do you?

JL: Yes, it's very interesting. During this time you kept up a correspondence with Jim Howland and Fred Merryfield?

HC: Not really. I'd see Fred when I got back from Germany. I'd go over and see Fred and I remember Charlie Mockmore got to me to talk. They had students here who were getting degrees in engineering as a part of a government program to train engineering officers I guess; I don't quite remember. I remember Charlie talked me into giving a lecture to them one night. They had to come. They were running it like part of the Army.

JL: This was when you were on leave?

HC: Ummm, hummm. I remember telling the story about the bridge and I had some pictures.

JL: I'm sure you had everybody on the edge of their seat.

HC: Oh, I was a big hero.

JL: (chuckle) I can imagine.

HC: Oh. No. After I got back from Germany and went back down to Camp Gruber, Oklahoma to get ready for the next move, I had talked to Fred about it [starting a consulting engineering firm) and so then I found out where Jim was and I guess I wrote to him or he wrote to me, I can't remember which. Jim had some of that correspondence around here the other day. And we began to talk about this a little bit.

JL: There is some correspondence from that time period in the archives. Your goals hadn't changed then during the war years with all of these events that happened in your life? You still wanted to come back and build bridges?

HC: Oh, that damn war, that was just an irritating interruption. I really didn't think I was much of an engineer yet. I'd only worked at it for about a year, and then I spent six years in the Army. I knew some guys who somehow didn't get in the Army. They were 4Fs or something, and now they had six years of intense engineering experience, and I figured I was just getting farther and farther behind. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get going.

JL: Well, you had some experience in the Army.

HC: That wouldn't do you a hell of a lot of good when it came to doing what this company does-unfortunately (chuckle) . In my resume, in the original, I tried to make it sound like it did but it really didn't.

JL: Just in your telling it, it sounds like there was quite a bit of engineering involved especially with the bridge.

HC: It was basically administration. It wasn't engineering. I can remember finding Fred Merryfield over underneath a truck carryall fixing something. He had what we now call a carryall with a laboratory in it. He was sampling the water up on the Willamette River, and he was saying, "They are going to clean up the Willamette River, and there is going to be an awful lot of work and we ought to get together and put together a company and do it."

JL: Had he been doing consulting on the side already?

HC: Yeh. He'd worked for years for the two big consultants in Oregon who were John Cunningham and Associates, and Stevens and Coon. He and Glen Holcomb and Charlie Mockmore did engineering for Camp Adair which was an Army training camp. They had a whole camp there at one time. They built that thing, I guess. And so he had worked for these consultants. He knew an awful lot more about the business than any of the rest of us did, surely, which wasn't too much really.

JL: Did you ever consider going into business with your professor, Hardy Cross?

HC: No. He was basically a teacher. That's what he did and what he wanted to do. He was getting pretty old at that time. You see, he started his teaching career in

something like 1910, so, by 1945, he must have been close to the seventies.

JL: I see.

HC: I remember, I wrote a letter to him and told him what I was thinking about doing. I said Fred Merryfield and Charlie Mockmore say they'll help us, and he wrote back and said, "Well, if Fred and Charlie will help you, give it a try."

JL: Was Charlie Mockmore involved in the infancy of the firm?

HC: He was not actively engaged but he was awful helpful and helped us out a lot. I can remember, I suppose I'm getting ahead of the story again, but one of the first design jobs that we got was a water reservoir of concrete up at Forest Grove. And I can remember I was up there inspecting construction, and Charlie brought his senior engineering class up there one day, and we put on a show for them pouring concrete and vibrating it and all that stuff. I guess I was the first one back, and I got discharged from Camp Gruborough, Oklahoma, some time in, must have been in October of 1945. I came right back here because my wife and Steve, the first child, were here. And after I'd been here about a day or two, I made the mistake of going over to talk to Merryfield.

JL: A mistake?

HC: Because I came back [from talking to him] with a big roll of plans and bunch of stuff on jobs that he had. Because of what we had started to do, he had already taken on two or three assignments.

JL: With the idea that you'd get together?

HC: Yeh.

JL: Well, had you said that you were going to come back to Corvallis and start the firm?

HC: I guess so. I don't think it was that definite but Fred, being the way that he is, he got these opportunities to take on these jobs, and one of them was up at Crystal Springs Water District which is just outside of Hood River. Another was a reservoir for a little water district outside of Eugene. The first thing that I undertook was that reservoir for Eugene, and then I went through a preliminary design and estimated the cost and I went back to Fred and I said, "Hey, Fred, I don't think you're right. That reservoir is going to cost about five times what you said it was." Fred had made some mistake in arithmetic when he'd done it. (chuckle) So he and I had to go one night and tell the board the sad news about what it was going to cost. I don't remember that we worked for that organization anymore.

JL: What appealed to you about starting your own firm and working with Fred Merryfield? Did his personality affect you one way or the other?

HC: His enthusiasm had something to do with it. And by that time, you know, we had lost this time or I thought I had. I wanted to get to doing some engineering and kind of recognized that the big companies were going to be slow and difficult to work up in, so we decided we'd give it a try. Fortunately, we didn't know enough about the business or anything else to know what kind of a thing we were undertaking. But with youth, enthusiasm and not knowing what you're doing really, we took off.

JL: Fred didn't know either?

HC: Not really. About all we had for capital to start out with was...you build up a certain amount of leaves in the service, you know, you've got two weeks vacation a year or some damn thing, and so when we got out, when we were discharged from the Army, why we continued to get paid until all that leave was used up. And I think they gave you an extra thirty days on discharge or something if you'd been on active duty. So I was getting paid as a lieutenant colonel from that October when I got back until some time in April of the next year. Jim Howland had the same thing and I guess Burke did. That's really the only kind of capital or anything else we had.

JL: When you left Yale, you chose a job in California because it would pay you twenty-five dollars more than a job in New York, even though you would have preferred to stay in New York. How did it happen that you were now willing to put yourself in a situation where there was a possibility that you wouldn't make anything?

HC: Well, you know. We were young and full of confidence and it never occurred to us that we wouldn't be able to make it work.

JL: What were you thinking would happen?

HC: Oh, I can remember Jim and I saying at one time, "Gee, you know, if we just keep working at this, we'll get it to the point where we can make ten thousand dollars a year, and we'll be on easy street." Well, at that time, if we could have made ten thousand dollars a year, we would have been. Remember, a dollar in 1946 would be about the same as ten dollars today. I remember that I finally got paid for the design work on the Forest Grove Reservoir I was talking to you about, and it was a check for thirty-four hundred dollars. That's the most money I'd seen in one chunk in my life. I was almost afraid that it wasn't real.

JL: And they were satisfied with your job there?

HC: Yeh. I guess we're still working for them. We went on from there, and Ralph designed a water treatment plant for them, and we rebuilt the pipeline, and then we later designed a sewage treatment plant, and we've worked for Forest Grove [since] and I guess still are.

JL: So Fred Merryfield really got the jobs in the first place and you would work on them? And then Jim Howland came in January. Was Jim Howland responsible for Burke Hayes coming into the firm then?

HC: Yeh, I guess Jim kind of thought that Burke would be a lot of help and so did Fred. Jim had been the one who had been corresponding with Burke mostly. There are some wires back and forth in that stuff that you've got that'll tell you that story. Burke finally showed up.

JL: Did you have any doubts that there would be enough work for four engineers working full-time?

HC: Yeh. I guess we did. (chuckle) We weren't very sophisticated, you see, in those days. We didn't know how much it took. We did everything. Finally, I think, about the middle of 1946, we hired a stenographer, which we called them in those days, but we did all the drafting and all the engineering calculations. I can remember the first accounting system that we had was a big sheet-you know, one of those long accounting sheets-and down this side you had everybody's name and across the top you had each job that we were working on. And you'd take each guy's salary, and split it among those jobs depending on how many hours he'd put in, so under each job, you had hours and dollars, and somewhere in there, you had expenses. You'd add that all up this way and across this way and once you got it all to check, then you knew how much to charge each client. Simple system. Exactly what we do now, except there are a thousand jobs and two thousand employees and it takes a computer to do that all. Plus, in those days, you know, you didn't have anything like - well, you had tax withholding because I can remember once when I was acting as manager, I didn't have enough money to pay Uncle Sam his quarterly tax withholding, so I delayed it for two or three weeks. I had a little hard time sleeping in those days because every morning I'd wonder if, when I got to work, I'd find a padlock on the door and the IRS guy standing there saying, "I've closed you down because you haven't paid your taxes." But somehow, we slid by. (chuckle)

JL: Gee. What contributions did you feel you could bring to this group yourself?

HC: Well, I was going to be the structural engineer, you see; Jim Howland was going to be the soils and foundation expert; Burke was going to do the mechanical and electrical; and Fred was going to be the sanitary and hydraulics design. And that covered all the bases. We had the capability to do anything, we thought.

JL: What happened?

HC: We did it. I spent quite a bit of the time that first year over at the library, digging out things that I didn't know about and finding and reading what I could to find out how to do it.

JL: You were one step ahead?

HC: Tried to be.

JL: Tell me why you chose to come to Corvallis and start the firm here instead of someplace that would be more centrally located like Portland or a larger city?

HC: Because Fred was here, and he couldn't afford to quit teaching because he wouldn't have anything to live on. Anyway, this was the center of the Willamette Valley and our original market, we call it now, was going to be to clean up the Willamette River so this was as good a place as any to start, I guess. I was already here and my wife and child were here. Nobody else had any roots any place. We just started here, that's all.

JL: And Fred Merryfield enjoyed teaching?

HC: Ummmhmmm. Yeh. He taught for, gee, I don't know, clear up to almost 1970, I think, didn't he?

I remember one day my dad got mad at me because, I don't know where I got this idea, but anyway, it was in the early days of radio. I remember what it was. My mother sang in choirs and this kind of thing. She had an excellent contralto voice. And, back then I was reading Popular Mechanics or something and it told you how to build a crystal radio set. Somebody had started a radio store in Boise and I went down there with a list of what I needed and found out they had it. It took about ten or fifteen dollars. I went back to my dad's office and talked him into buying this stuff for me so I could put this thing together. Well, it took awhile. He had to finally help me. We finally got it put together one evening when my mother was going to sing on the radio. And I can remember fiddling around with it. Those were the days when the crystal was, I guess, just something like the silicon chips they now have. But anyway, we had a little thing on a swivel with a little fine wire, and you moved it around on that crystal until you caught the radio signal. We were fooling around with that thing, and we finally got the radio station and here was my mother singing. We could just barely hear through the earphones, and I can remember my dad, who never swore in his life, saying, "Well, I'll be Goddamned."

JL: (laughter) He was amazed that you two had done it?

HC: Yeh.

JL: So he liked to tinker quite a bit, too, then?

HC: My dad was excellent with his hands. I don't know what ever happened to them, but he used to build models of early ships. I remember he built one of a galley once, the old time galleys where the slaves....It had all the oars sticking out of it and different sails on it and it was a beautiful job.

JL: I wonder why he didn't go into something to do with working with his hands, like engineering?

HC: Too bad he didn't. His dad was an architect. As a matter of fact, there are still houses in Salem that his dad designed and built. An architect in Salem came to see me one day because he had bought this house, and he was kind of remodeling, and somewhere in digging around he found out that the house was designed by my grandfather. Well, in those days, an architect built them too, I guess. This was over on one of the main streets in Salem right across from Bush's Pasture which is now a park. We then found some old pictures of this house with the family lined up on the front porch. And when he [the Salem architect] rebuilt it, he left the exterior just like it was. There are a whole series of other houses in Salem that he built. I don't know where they are. Somewhere, in the process, according to the family, he got into partnership with some guy in the construction and building-materials business and the guy absconded with all the money. I don't think he ever went bankrupt but it was very discouraging and he had to kind of start over. Why my dad didn't go into architecture or something like that, I don't know. I guess it was because of the result of this thing. My dad was the oldest son. The younger son, William, went on to Cornell; Dad didn't go to college so he went to work.

JL: I bet your dad was pleased that you went to college and went into something like engineering.

HC: Yeh. My dad lived long enough to see me graduate, and I think it pleased him very much. He was real fascinated with me going to Yale. He died that fall that I went to Yale.

JL: What would he have thought of you starting your own firm? Would that have been something that he'd support?

HC: Yeh. I imagine. Dad was a pretty good bookkeeper. If we had really started this [before he died] , I have thought we might have gotten him to come down and be our bookkeeper and office manager. He'd been managing offices and keeping books and doing all this stuff for years and that might have been a good way to go. But, of course, he was gone long before we ever started this.

JL: It never crossed any of your minds that you would start this firm when you graduated back in 1938?

HC: I think we got the idea of going on our own somewhere during the war when we got to thinking more, and got a little older, and got to recognizing that maybe the big companies weren't all the solution. Jim and I both had offers to go back to work for Standard Oil after we got out of the Army, and we didn't do it. And Burke, I know, had two or three offers. I would guess that if we had stuck with them, we'd be pretty well up in Standard Oil by now.

JL: I imagine. Who's idea was it to start the business? Was it Fred Merryfield's more than Jim Howland's?

HC: It was essentially Fred's, in my recollection. Jim was kind of enthusiastic about it, and it sounded like a good thing to me.

JL: Burke Hayes mentioned that he and Mr. Howland would talk about it as

undergraduates. He never talked to you?

HC: I don't ever remember.