Holly Cornell Oral History Interview, February 22, 1982

JENNIFER LEE: You previously mentioned Professor Charles Mockmore, and that he was involved in some of the early projects. Was he interested in becoming part of the firm?

HOLLY CORNELL: He was head of the department of civil engineering and didn't want to I guess. I don't remember.

JL: Was it ever brought up?

HC: Well, I never brought it up. I don't know whether Fred talked with him or not.

JL: Do you think if Fred Merryfield had not pushed the idea with the four of you, you would have started the firm without him? Would you and Mr. Howland and Mr. Hayes have gotten together?

HC: I rather doubt it. I think he was the spark that really got it moving and kind of convinced us that we could do it. I don't think the rest of us really knew enough about how it worked, unless Burke might have, to recognize the opportunity without Fred's urging and conviction that it was a good thing to do.

JL: What were your expectations when you started in 1946? Were you just going to play it by ear and continue getting more and more projects, or did you have a vision of the large firm that you have today?

HC: No, I think we started out with the idea that the four of us, with a little help in the drafting and maybe the clerical side of it, would just go on forever doing our engineering thing. I don't believe we really had any long range plans for growth or that sort of thing. We didn't really recognize how such an operation as we now have worked. And there weren't any firms as big as we now are at the time we started. There were a few in the Midwest and in the East that had maybe as many as fifty or a hundred employees but the firms that were the size of ours didn't really get started until about the 1960s or so.

JL: Is that one of the reasons why Fred Merryfield thought it would be a success because there weren't many other firms in the Northwest?

HC: There was a lot of work to be done and, yeh, that was one of the reasons why, I think. We were fortunate in that when we started, the local established firms weren't able to handle all the work that needed to be done so we kind of took the work that they couldn't do in a sense.

JL: There was enough work to go around, then?

HC: At that time there seemed to be, yes.

JL: Were there other professors who were starting their own consulting businesses or was Fred Merryfield unique?

HC: There were a lot of professors who did individual consulting work. And there were professors in the other parts of the country that were also members or principals of the consulting engineering firms. There was nothing like that out here and there was a certain amount of objection, at least by the two established firms in Oregon, toward Fred being part of a consulting firm and also a professor on the public payroll.

JL: How was that resolved?

HC: It never really was. Well, Fred didn't teach full-time after we started the firm. I don't remember or know what the arrangements were. But he was on a part-time status at the university, and the university had always encouraged professors to work outside. They had never required that they limit their working to just teaching for the college.

JL: Why was there a protest then?

HC: Well, the established firms felt that that gave him an advantage as a professor, and they even accused us of using students in class to do the work and then charging clients for it.

JL: Did he use students in class?

HC: No. For a while there was a certain amount of complaint and bad feelings about it but after a while we established ourselves solidly enough and became large enough that they kind of gave up on the complaining bit because it was obvious we were independently operating. We had to be very careful about anything that we asked or tried to do through the college. At that time, the college had more equipment and this type of thing but, of course, they made that available to anybody. So we were very meticulous about making sure we paid the college whatever they charged for any equipment used or lab tests or this kind of thing that we had them do.

JL: What kind of equipment are you talking about?

HC: Anything from laboratory equipment, surveying equipment, stream measuring equipment, to traffic counters and all this sort of thing.

JL: They let people outside of the university use it when it was available?

HC: They would charge for it, yeh. But this was part of how the university managed to finance that sort of thing was by charging a fee for its use when they weren't using it.

JL: It wasn't legitimate then for students to work for you for a class project, for example?

HC: No. We never did that, or allowed them to. We hired students sometimes on a part-time basis, and hired them in the summer. Several people that are still with the firm started out that way as part-time employees and we still do that to some extent. It's no longer very economical to do it that way. Today's students, at least, don't know enough about the practical ends of engineering to be of real help. If they're a good draftsman, or good with the computer or mathematics, they can be used now in some relatively routine kind of work. I guess we still hire college students on survey crews temporarily in the summer and this type of thing but primarily we do this summer work as a means of getting acquainted with the good students and helping us in recruiting them to come to work for us later.

JL: Were students better trained in previous years?

HC: Oh, right after the war, of course, there were a lot of older people going to college that had had some kind of experience before the war, or during the war, or something like this; that made it more possible, plus the fact that engineering projects in those days were not as complex and involved as they are now. We've come a long way in the technological advancement of almost everything we do.

JL: And the students are not being trained for these new technological advances?

HC: Yeh. And some of the students come to work for us know more about computers and some other specific theoretical things than we do. But it's quite a step from there to applying it to a specific work that needs to be done, or the practical application if it.

JL: So what they're lacking is experience, then?

HC: Ummm, hummm. But in those early days, there were people-Bill Watters, Carl Ryden, Ken Bielman and several others-who had actually worked on construction. You see, most of them had spent anywhere from three to five or six years during the war at some type of thing. Earl Reynolds, for example, had been in the Army but he had worked on what they called the Alcan Highway. So, there were a lot of people who had some considerable experience who were going to school at that time. This was a lot different than it is now.

JL: I want to talk about the contributions of these founders. I'm going to start with Fred Merryfield. Can you remember him telling you how he happened to come to Corvallis? I understand there's an unusual story connected with that.

HC: I'm not sure that I can remember it completely. (pause) Why he came to the United States from England, I don't know. I'm sure he told us once, several times. But somehow he ended up getting off the train in Corvallis and going to school here. Maybe when you talk to Burke or Jim Howland, they can fill that in. My memory just won't bring it back to me now. He went to school here; and he worked for a couple of years for the railroad on the survey of the tunnel that goes through the Cascades-what do they call it? Willamette Pass-and then came back and went to teaching here, I think. You know, Fred was a fighter pilot in World War I and he flew the British-what do they call them? The Jennys-and had some kind of a crash; and there was a rumor for a long time, I know it was around when I went to school here with Fred as a teacher, that Fred had a silver plate in his head because of this crash, or crashes, that he had during the war. I finally asked him that one day and he said, "No, that's not true. I don't have any plate in my head." He said, "I may have some lack of brains but no plate."

JL: (chuckle) He had a sense of humor, then?

HC: Yeh.

JL: Well, besides his enthusiasm for starting the firm and his contacts with clients, what contributions did he bring to the firm?

HC: Well, of course, the contacts and the knowledge of people and of prospective clients in the Northwest and in Oregon were major contributions. Plus Fred had a very good knowledge of sanitary engineering, water supply, waste treatment, and a wide background of experience in that kind of work which, in the early days, particularly before Ralph Roderick and Archie Rice arrived, helped to keep us straight; and he was able to guide us in where to go when we had a problem, to find a good answer, particularly technical.

JL: I understand he was interested in cleaning up rivers in the 1930s. He was taking samples of the Willamette?

HC: He had a project, I don't know exactly how it was financed but I think through the state, for sampling the water quality in the Willamette River, and he worked on that during the 1930s before the war started. And he was instrumental in developing the legislation which Oregon eventually passed which led to the initial steps in the cleanup of the Willamette River. And for a long time, he was on the Oregon Water Resources Board and at one time was chairman I think.

JL: So he had the vision to know that this would be important then in the future-cleaning up the rivers? Because that was way before the environmental movement.

HC: Oh, yes. I think you have to recognize that Oregon is probably and has always been at the head of the rest of the country in that phase of the environmental movement, and was cleaning up the Willamette River long before anybody heard of the term "environmentalism". Fred made those stream measurements. He recognized that the river was sick and that things had to be done; and somewhere in the period from the mid-1930s through right after the war, Oregon did undertake to pass the legislation that required that communities treat their sewage, and that discharge of raw sewage into their streams was not to be done. And this, of course, was one of the things that made it look to Fred like getting into the consulting business at that stage was a good move, because he could see all of this work that was coming up; and it turned out to be right. That's the reason that the work for consultants was so much more than the established firms in the state could handle. That and the fact that for five or six years during the war, almost everybody's municipal facilities-water supplies and streets and this type of thing-had been let go because there was no possibility to make any regular improvements or major maintenance and replacement until after the war was over. The materials and the labor and everything else were not available.

JL: So part of the success of the firm is due to the fact that you were there at the right time?

HC: The timing had a lot to do with it, I'm sure. And then we were able to get started right away, right after the war, which is the time when you needed to because there was a big need for a lot of things that had been let go during the war plus the stream pollution abatement program for which engineering skills were required.

JL: Would Fred talk about pollution abatement in his classes?

HC: Well, you see, I went to school in the mid-1930s. I don't remember that he did, particularly in terms of the general environment. I'm sure that he talked about the fact that the streams were polluted because I know one of the projects we had to do for him when I went to school was to try to design a sewage treatment plant, which I did my best on but (laughter) looking back on it now, it was pretty sad I would have to say.

JL: He was a man ahead of his time, obviously.

HC: Yeh. Fred had vision and always did.

JL: Did his place in the firm change over the years?

HC: Yeh, as we grew and become larger and Fred gradually spent more time, he did a lot of things. He organized our technical library and set up an index which is still known as the Merryfield system. It's an indexing system of library-type information based on Roman numeral I, capital A, Arabic 1, lower case a, and then 1 in parenthesis, a in parenthesis, and so on.

JL: Like an outline.

HC: An outline type of numbering system. And he did that primarily for cataloging and indexing technical information for which the Dewey Decimal System, which we now use, didn't at that time seem to be very suitable. We could have used it then, I think. We don't essentially use it anymore, but it served well for quite a while. He helped in the development of design guides and this sort of thing and then, you'll have to ask Jim Howland just when this was, but along in the mid-1960s sometime, Fred became what we now call personnel director. And there was a time when he scheduled all of the work in the firm and assigned the people to it and so forth. That was at a time when we were maybe fifty or sixty people, not two thousand, so one man could do that. And he used to have a room in the office with charts all around it with everybody's name and all of the projects listed, and kept moving that around trying to meet the schedules and keep everybody busy, and then he did most of the interviewing and the hiring of new people.

JL: How was he at selecting new people?

HC: Fred had a tremendous ability to assess peoples' capabilities. It wasn't systematic or a systematized process. Fred just had a good feel for people and pretty generally he was right about the people that he hired, or that he recommended we hire, in terms of their capability. He's responsible for the fact that Ralph Roderick and Archie Rice joined us, which they did about a year after Jim and Burke and I started-a year or two, I can't remember just what the calendar was; and he's responsible for the fact that Bob Adams, Fred Harem, Sid Lasswell, Jim Poirot and a whole group of the key people that now are managing and running the organization joined us, I think.

JL: He just had a knack of knowing who would be exceptional?

HC: Ummm, hummm.

JL: I understand he talked quite a bit.

HC: Yep. Fred enjoyed talking and was an excellent storyteller.

JL: Oh, can you give me an example of a story?

HC: Well, he used to tell stories about his experience in the survey and the tunnel over the Cascades. And he had a series of his favorites which won't come back to me now, that some of us, after we heard them about the fourth time, you know, had a little trouble staying awake.

JL: Oh, no. (chuckle)

HC: But, the first time you heard those stories, they were really good, and Fred would illustrate them with gestures and very vivid word pictures. You know he had a deep and very powerful voice and a marvelous control of the language so that he could make a very interesting and impressive story or presentation.

JL: I wish you could remember a story.

HC: Well, I may think of one pretty soon.

JL: Do you know why he was thinking about starting the firm in the 1940s instead of much earlier? If he had this idea, why didn't he start it earlier?

HC: Well, if you remember, the 1930s was the Great Depression.

JL: Didn't he start teaching though in the 1920s?

HC: Yeh. He was in the British Army, or British Air Force, when he was seventeen by lying about his age so that he was in his early twenties when he graduated from Oregon State. And then, somewhere in that stage, he got a master's degree from North Carolina in sanitary engineering. I don't know exactly when that was. Are you going to talk to Anne Merryfield?

JL: No, I'm not. I wasn't planning to.

HC: Yeh. Well, I'm sure that information is available on the old resumes and stuff.

JL: What were some of the major problems in those early years?

HC: Well, part of it was financial. That is, we were in, today, we would say that we were in a tight cash flow position. We didn't have enough operating capital. The only way we could meet the payroll was by getting paid for the work that we were doing, and there was a period of time in there when the partners didn't pay themselves. It was pretty tight at times. I can remember once, I may have told you this before, it was my turn to be the business manager and we didn't have enough money to pay the quarterly payment to the IRS for the withholding, and for a couple of weeks there I didn't sleep very well because I was afraid every morning that I might come and find the door padlocked by the Internal Revenue Service. Fortunately, somebody paid us and we paid it up and never got caught.

JL: But none of you ever lost heart or lost faith that you would make it?

HC: (chuckle) No, maybe we just didn't know enough to realize how bad a situation we might have been in. We eventually arranged to get some help from the bank; I think the first loan was either for three or six thousand dollars from what then was the Benton County State Bank, which eventually became the First National and now First Interstate, and that was rather difficult because we didn't have any assets essentially to provide as a basis for the bank loaning us money. For a good many years, the four partners had to individually sign the notes, as well as the partnership, so that all of our assets, our homes, our cars, everything else was on the line as far as paying that debt was concerned.

JL: Was that first loan for equipment, salaries?

HC: No, just for operating capital so that we had enough money to pay the salaries at the end of the month, even though we didn't get paid by the client until the middle of the month or maybe the next month. For a good many years that was one of the problems that we were constantly working on.

JL: You had no problems in finding clients, then? You had plenty of projects to work on?

HC: Well, we worked very diligently to develop business and to find clients and to get work to do.

JL: Who was the best at finding clients?

HC: Well, Fred was; Fred Merryfield was probably the best at finding them. And then from there, the rest of us took it over to develop the work and establish the fee and negotiate the contract.

JL: Who did that? Was it equally shared depending on the project?

HC: I did it. Jim Howland did it. And Burke.

JL: Who was best at making presentations to the client?

HC: Oh, Burke was excellent. And Archie was very good. Your approach or method of presentation would vary to some extent on the audience.

JL: Did some of you work better with some particular types of audiences than others?

HC: Yeh

JL: Tell me, who worked better with who.

HC: Well, let's see. I would say Archie worked best with audiences that were technically sophisticated, and therefore were interested in the technical aspects of the project. Jim Howland would do a better job with the type of people who were down-to-earth, practical, and economically inclined-that would watch costs carefully. Fred worked best with a large audience where an inspirational or an exciting type presentation was called for. Burke was a very smooth presenter. As long as he knew that the discussion, or the presentation, was about a subject that he was familiar with, he did an excellent job-he had a good presence (pause).

JL: You left out two people.

HC: Ralph had a kind of an old shoe approach. This will sound like a derogatory term but it's not meant that way. He worked best with the "old boy" type of person. Now who'd I leave out? Me? I don't... I guess I worked the best with client boards and groups who were a combination of businessmen and doers, or leaders in the community or the business or whatever it was we were working on. You know, when you go through it as long as all of us have, why, you make presentations to all types and mixtures of audiences, so it's a little hard to say exactly how that happened, but I think the way I've summarized it is pretty good.

JL: One person said that you and Burke Hayes did better with a sophisticated audience like city people, whereas the other three, excluding Merryfield, did better with a smaller town audience.

HC: Well in general, that's probably true. I don't think Archie is in that category. He got some of the biggest jobs, like the big sewage treatment plant in San Francisco, that was purely Archie's doing.

JL: Was there one particular individual that provided more leadership than the others?

HC: It was pretty much a kind of mutual thing. Fred provided the big picture thinking. Jim Howland, who you know was President and General Manager for...Maybe I'd better start back a minute. When we first started, of course, I was the first one back here so I was the General Manager. But we were also doing the technical engineering work so for a while we rotated that [the function of manager]. I'd take it for six months and then Jim would take it for six months. I can't remember how long that went on.

JL: Just the two of you? Not Fred Merryfield or Burke Hayes?

HC: No, Fred didn't have the time because of his teaching load and Burke, for some reason, didn't want to do it. At any rate, Jim and I rotated that thing and traded off every six months. After a while, they got to deciding that Jim was probably a better manager than I was, so he took it over and he managed it and was President after it became a corporation.

JL: How was it that he was a better manager? What do you mean by that?

HC: Oh, he paid more attention to details and was more energetic about it, I guess. And then every once in a while, one of us or the other would get heavily involved in a big project and couldn't spend the time on the business management end that we should, and that may have been why we stopped the rotation system. I don't know, except that we began to realize that there needed to be more consistency and a continual effort on that and that changing that responsibility every six months was really not a very wise way to do it so, just by mutual agreement, Jim gradually became the General Manager.

JL: Under protest?

HC: No. I think we all felt that that was the way that we ought to go and that he was the best at managing the thing at that stage, and so we just told him that's what he was going to have to do. In the early days, we used to have a partners meeting every Monday at noon, I think; and for a long time, we'd have a hamburger and a milkshake brought into the office. That's when those kinds of decisions were made.

JL: One of his contributions then was his ability to manage the firm?

HC: Ummm, hummm.

JL: Was he able to find time to work on projects as well?

HC: Yes, he did; quite a few, too, also in that period. And then, as the thing developed, we took the Northwest and we split it into territories. My territory was east of the Cascades from the Canadian border to central Oregon. Archie Rice's was west of the Cascades and south of Salem, and Ralph Roderick's was west of the Cascades and north of Salem which then included Portland and Seattle. And when we started that, I was spending a lot of time traveling to eastern Oregon and Washington, and so Jim Howland managed the operation and the business development and the project management in those...

JL: He oversaw...

HC: The whole thing.

JL: Does that mean then that each of you people had charge of the projects in those particular geographic areas?

HC: Ummm, hummm. And the development of new projects and new work in

those areas.

JL: What if Archie Rice needed your skills in his area? Was there overlap?

HC: I helped him. Burke's job at that time was to work on power and what they now call energy projects, and so he would help us all on his phase of the thing.

JL: I'd like to talk about Burke Hayes and his contributions to the firm. What do you think he brought?

HC: Well, of course, you recognize that Burke's education and background and experience had been in the mechanical and electrical work which Jim and Archie and Ralph and I were not trained for. Plus he brought a meticulous ability to analyze things and to develop technical solutions, and a knowledge of the electric power and mechanical electrical field that none of us had; and that was his major contribution. One of the reasons, I think, we were able to grow and develop as we did is because we had the capability to handle electrical and mechanical technical problems through Burke all in-house, whereas most of the other consultants were, for example, just civil engineers and, if they needed an electrical or mechanical expertise, they had to go out and find another consultant to help them with it. One of our strong points, we thought, and we used to use this in our promotional efforts, was that we could provide the whole thing in one place and from one source.

JL: What do you think Hayes' greatest achievement was? The FLOmatcher?

HC: Oh, well, yeh. Prior to that, he was the one who convinced the Eugene Water and Electric Board that we could do the expansion of two of their power plants which were major projects for us in the early days. He was responsible for developing that business, and then the FLOmatcher, and the technical application of what at that time were advanced concepts of control and electrical/mechanical applications to the waste treatment, and the pumping stations, and the water supply operations that we were working on.

JL: He was innovative, then?

HC: Ummm, hummm. Out of the need for variable speed pumping system for the sewer pumping stations that we were designing that had a large difference in the rate of flow, due to the fact that in the summer when it didn't rain there was very little flow and in the winter when you'd have these big storms it was very high, came the development of the FLOmatcher.

JL: That must have been exciting?

HC: Well, yeh. And for a long time, we'd design the FLOmatcher and have the contractor build them from drawings on the plans. Eventually we started the FLOmatcher Company as a separate operation which Burke managed for a while and then Archie took over and we eventually sold it. I can't remember when that was, sometime in the 1960s.

JL: Burke Hayes shied away from being the manager?

HC: He managed projects but he didn't normally manage the firm. (pause)

JL: Can you talk some more about Jim Howland? Would you talk about what you felt to be his greatest achievements?

HC: Well, Jim had the responsibility primarily for soils and foundations and for highway work, what little we did in the early stages; and was instrumental in developing what later became or what is now the geotechnical discipline, because he took his mas ter's work at MIT in that field, and so he could add that to our technical capability; and he also helped to develop the business and to control the costs and to manage the financing and, at that stage that we were in, that was a difficult thing because we had no resources to begin with and we had to watch everything very care fully. It seems funny now, but we used to worry a great deal about costs which now we pay no attention to, but you had to do it in order to lift yourself by the bootstraps which is essentially what we did. And that I think was the real contribution Jim made, because he insisted that we had to operate within our income and that we had to keep the costs down. At our partners meetings we used to argue with him that we ought to raise the partners' salaries and he would insist that we couldn't afford it, and so we didn't. If we did have a year in which we made some profit, we tended to leave it in the business and not pay it to ourselves.

JL: The others of you felt like you should get a salary raise?

HC: He would try to show us, you know, that we needed the money to expand the business, and we'd have to wait until later for that [salary raise], and it was often a compromise. But all the same, Jim kept us straight and kept us from getting into too deep water financially, and I'm sure that that's one of the vital factors in us being able to develop and grow. Eventually it worked out fine but times were pretty hard for a while. But Jim stuck to his guns and he ought to get a lot of credit for doing it because it was real important.

JL: This "no frills" attitude?

HC: Ummm, hummm.

JL: That was tough on the rest of you, though?

HC: Oh, I don't know that it was that tough, you know. We were interested in what we were doing, and though we worried a lot about it, we enjoyed it. So we managed to make out; nobody starved to death.

JL: During these partners meetings in the earlier years, did you discuss each project individually?

HC: Quite often, and try to work out who was going to do it and what the solutions were, and sometimes we got into talking about the technical problems; and also, every week, we'd have a report from Jim on what the income was and what the costs were and what our bank balance was and all this sort of thing; and then we always spent time on what we called business development-what the new projects were and how to proceed to try to get this assignment or that one, and who could do it. So we worked together very well, I would say, for four, which later became six, people with diverse backgrounds and different approaches. By being able to communicate regularly, we got through the early stages of the development.

JL: How were conflicts resolved during these meetings?

HC: Oh, we just kept talking about them and working on them until we finally reached some kind of a solution that everybody would accept, reluctantly or not.

JL: I'm sure you're all strong-willed independent people. Wasn't it difficult to resolve conflicts?

HC: Yeh, except I think we all had the recognition that we needed to do the thing that everybody could support, and felt some enthusiasm for going ahead with, so that, as a result, nobody really had any concern about their own personal feelings or their ego or anything else. They just tried to keep working on the problem until we worked out a solution that was acceptable. And we managed by a consensus on the major decisions for a long time. You know, somebody who was opposed, if it looked like everybody else thought he was wrong, he'd eventually say, "Well, all right. If you guys think you're right, go ahead." And he would support it.

JL: Nobody went stomping out and said, "I give up"?

HC: No. That's probably where part of the strength of the company comes from, you know, was the fact that maybe all of the decisions weren't as good that way as if one man had made them but they held the whole thing together, and everybody supported the decision when it was made and understood why it had been made.

JL: It doesn't sound like there were very many personality conflicts either?

HC: Well, no, there weren't in the sense that we didn't jaw at each other. There were personality differences. I guess all of us were old enough by that time to recognize that personality conflicts had no place in the thing.

JL: They shouldn't, but often they enter into it.

HC: They do, but somehow we managed to keep that out of it. You know, Fred Merryfield was a driving individualist and he could be real difficult at times and Jim, as the manager, had his troubles with Fred, I'm sure. I know because I was in on some of them.

JL: You had to appease him, you mean?

HC: Yeh. Trying to appease him. Trying to convince him. Fred was always trying to get us to do more things than we were capable of doing at this stage. This resulted in conflicts, but we managed to resolve them and Fred eventually would agree. And one thing about Fred, he left the financial and the business management of the operation up to us, partly because, in the early stages, he wasn't available enough to be involved in detail anyway; but he left the financial and the business decisions up to us.

JL: Up to the other five?

HC: Yes.

JL: I know that Archie Rice was the fifth partner, and came about the same time as Ralph Roderick. Can you remember your first encounter with Archie Rice-how that came about?

HC: Well, Fred had said, "Look, Archie Rice is getting out of the Army, and he's the smartest guy I believe that I've ever taught in sanitary engineering." See, Jim was a straight civil with a soils special, and I was a structural engineer, and with Fred being busy most of the time at the college he thought we had to have a good sanitary engineer, and so he recommended that we hire Archie. You'd better talk to Archie and get this story straight, but he almost didn't come to work because of something like a ten or twenty dollar a month difference in salary between what he thought he ought to get and what Jim would offer him.

JL: Oh. (chuckle) Fred Merryfield had kept in contact with him when he was in the military?

HC: I guess. I'm not sure about that.

JL: You heard Fred Merryfield talk about this exceptional student and say, "We've got to have him."?

HC: And by that time, Archie had been out of school for four or five years and had worked for the Oregon State Sanitary Authority before he went into the Army and then had been, I don't remember what they call it, but a sanitation officer in the military. He worked on the water supply systems and sewer systems at the Army bases; I think his last assignment was in Savannah or Augusta, Georgia, somewhere.

JL: How did you people feel about adding another person to your payroll?

HC: Well, I think at that time we had work to do and we needed some good help and here was somebody that seemed to fit. If we could afford to pay him, we were going to hire him, which we did fortunately.

JL: Can you talk about his contributions then?

HC: Archie's contribution was in the sanitary field; and Archie was a brilliant designer, and he could write very well and wrote excellent reports. He came along just about at the stage we began to get the jobs on the waste treatment along the Willamette River and also the additions to the water systems that had been neglected and so he managed the water supply and waste treatment projects and essentially designed them, and I'd do the structural and Burke would do the mechanical and electrical and Jim Howland would do the foundations. And as it gradually began to work out, Archie would mostly do the waste treatment plant studies and designs and Ralph Roderick would do the pipelines and the water treatment work, and I spent more of my time on business development and doing the structural design, and Jim managed it, and Burke did the electrical and mechanical and also the business development.

JL: I understand that Archie Rice was very involved in MicroFLOC?

HC: Yeh. This developed from a process that kind of, by necessity, was developed by Walt Conley and another man at the atomic plant in Richland, Washington. This was a high rate filtration system, and eventually we got to using the so-called dual or multimedia filter bed. At the time, we called it the General Services Company which eventually became MicroFLOC. The development that I think. Archie probably contributed mostly to there was the development of a system using a pilot filter by which you could control the chemical dosage for water filtration-it eventually became the so-called MicroFLOC system. Along sometime in the mid- or late-1960s, we sold it to Neptune Meter Company in exchange for Neptune Meter stock. We were having some difficulties in engineering because people were accusing us of having a proprietary interest in the MicroFLOC system and therefore, you know, we weren't providing truly objective engineering decisions, plus the fact that we weren't really constituted as a manufacturing and equipment marketing organization; we were basically engineers. So it looked like it was better to split that off. For a while, we did operate separately, and then sold it to Neptune and split it off as a separate equipment operation.

JL: Was it a positive move?

HC: Oh, I think so, yeh. Then for five years, Archie managed Neptune MicroFLOC. He was not associated with CH2M at all, other than being on the Board of Directors and helping us out, he didn't work here at all for that five-year period. During that time, he got Walt Conley on the MicroFLOC payroll and built the business; and so, at the time that it was sold, it was a pretty good deal and six, eight, I don't know, primarily the six of us, did pretty well on that stock eventually.

JL: The six original people?

HC: Ummm, hummm.

JL: I understand he's quite a character. I saw some photos in the archives

of him dressed up as a woman?

HC: Yeh. Archie is pretty outgoing and a lot of fun and he enjoys that type of thing. The picture you're talking about was a skit that he and some others put on at a section meeting of the American Water Works Association; he was an irate lady customer as I remember it. He and Jim used to be....he used to be Santa Claus and Jim Howland used to be Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Jim would come in with a blinking light on his nose pulling a wagon in which Archie as Santa Claus would sit and he'd dole out the presents...

JL: Oh, he would be sitting in it? (chuckles)

HC:...well we couldn't hardly pull a sled. And Archie would be the Santa Claus and give out the presents with all kinds of, you know, funny gimmicks and cracks about people and stories about what they'd done. He did that for eight or ten years. He's kind of a ham, yeh. Finally got tired of it. But he was always up to something. I can remember some of these stories. One of them is, I guess I was the manager at that time, anyhow, Archie and Ralph Roderick were at Pendleton running a pilot plant. Have you heard this story?

JL: I don't think so.

HC: Well, they were running a pilot plant up there at Pendleton on the waste from a pea cannery which is highly polluting. They were trying to figure out a way to handle it because we were working on the design of a treatment plant for Pendleton and so they had a bunch of tanks and pumps and one thing or another all put together there in Pendleton that they were trying to run. This is secondhand and if you're going to talk to Archie, maybe you'd better get the story straight from him. But, anyway, they had wires wandering all over and one thing or another, and somehow Ralph got caught in the middle of one of these basins about this deep in pea waste and Archie says, "Turn off the motor;" and Ralph reached over to the switch box and of course, the minute he hit it, he got a shock that knocked him over into the pea waste. And Archie died laughing.

JL: (laughter) Good heavens.

HC: And, let me think. I may have told you this. When Archie and Ralph were up there at Pendleton they used to play cribbage every night, and Ralph Roderick is an expert cribbage player. Finally, at the end of the month, Archie sent in his expense account and one of the entries on there was cribbage losses-twelve dollars or something like that. Knowing full well what had happened, Jim Howland, who was checking his expense sheet, put a big red circle around it and said, "Disallowed". This just tickled Archie to death; he knew that's what was going to happen. And he was always trying, and doing things like this, to make life fun and interesting; and he did. He contributed a lot to good nature and laughter in the operation.

JL: He provided comic relief, I bet, in those partners meetings then.

HC: Yeh. Tremendous wit and always coming up with something.

JL: I understand Ralph Roderick joined the firm about the same time as Archie Rice; they both came at the end of 1946. Can you remember your first encounter with Mr. Roderick?

HC: Well, he and his wife showed up. They were living in a motel and they had a little spaniel, a small edition of-I can't quite remember the breed-and they didn't have any place to keep him. We were living over in a little house on Tyler Street just off Ninth and we had a fenced-in yard and we had a cocker, so we took care of Ralph's dog. I don't remember for how long, several weeks until they got settled.

JL: And that's the first you knew him?

HC: That's my first real memory. I'm not sure whether I talked to him when he came out the first time or not. I may have been off in Forest Grove or something. It's hard to remember all the sequence of that without going back and digging it out. But at some stage in there we had just finished the job of building a reservoir for Forest Grove and decided that they needed a water treatment plant; and Ralph Roderick designed that, as I remember it, and I worked with him on that thing. I think that's the first project we worked together on.

JL: Do you remember the discussion about hiring Roderick?

HC: Not specifically. That was only 37 or 38 years ago. I know, I have a hard time remembering what happened last week. I'm sure I was in on it and I agreed with what they were proposing to do.

JL: You don't remember the specifics. I know that you offered the job to the fellow he came with, his brother-in-law, was it?

HC: Yeh. Charlie Bayles.

JL: Charlie Bayles and you didn't ask Charlie Bayles to be a partner?

HC: No we didn't ask any of them to be a partner until after they had been here for a year or two.

JL: But I think Archie Rice joined with the idea of becoming a partner.

HC: Well, yeh. I think maybe we had said something about we'd give him some kind of chance at having interest in the business. I think we probably said the same thing to Ralph. The only answer I could give you to that was that Charlie Bayles just was not a leader and a manager of people and operations.

JL: And that's what you were looking for? That's what you needed. All of the ones that were partners had those qualities?

HC: Yeh. We thought we did.

JL: Can you talk about Roderick's contributions?

HC: Well, he had worked for a consulting engineer and then for a city in Kansas before the war so Ralph probably had more experience on actual design and contract administration and all of that than any of us. So his contribution was to give us the experience and the background of how to handle the municipal work on the contract administration, and also a lot of practical capability on the actual design of the facilities that we were working on.

JL: What do you think were his greatest achievements while he was working with the firm?

HC: Well, my personal opinion is that Ralph's greatest achievement was in insisting that we go ahead with the design of the advanced waste treatment system at Tahoe. I think, if it hadn't been for Ralph, that we'd all have got cold feet, but he insisted that you could do it. We were going to apply the MicroFLOC system of filtration to the thing, and he got Russ Culp out here to go to work for us. He just pushed that thing and insisted that we do it. I think that if it hadn't been for him we probably never would have done it and that was one of the things that really got us started on a nationwide reputation, because that was the most advanced system there was for a long time.

JL: The rest of you didn't think you could do the project or supply the system needed at Lake Tahoe?

HC: Well, that was getting pretty advanced. It was out of my field; I didn't have much to do with it. But I know that some of the other people that were working with Ralph, the sanitary engineers and so forth, were afraid of it and weren't sure that it would work. And Ralph insisted that, "Yeh, we could make it work," and so we went ahead with it. But there is no question in my mind, that's Ralph's biggest contribution. Now Ralph managed this office for a long time too, you know. And he and Delia Hickey [head secretary) , they wouldn't do it that way now, but he and Delia Hickey just on their own decided that, by golly, they were going to put the specifications on what, at that time, was a new advance which is the IBM MTST magnetic tape selectric typewriter and we had the earliest computerized, if you want to call it that, specifications system of almost anybody I know. He went ahead and did that just because he thought it would work, and they made it work and it worked good for a long time.

JL: So he was a man ahead of his time also? He was a motivator?

HC: Yeh, you bet. Ralph was a motivator. Ralph was not afraid to try something and he worked hard at it. He saw ahead to what was coming and he tried to get us to move in that direction. Ralph is very conservative in his personal life and all this kind of stuff, but in engineering he looked ahead.

JL: What motivated you four partners to ask Archie Rice and Ralph Roderick to become partners? Did you not feel like you were sharing more of the pie than you wanted to?

HC: They were working just as hard as we were and contributing just as much and getting just as little out of it. So we figured, in order to make it worth their while to stay, we ought to give them a piece of the action.

JL: All four of you agreed to asking them to be partners?

HC: Yes. I don't remember that it was any kind of a difficult decision. I don't know. It took two or three years before they became full partners and I don't remember now all the details of it but there was no question what they were equal partners in terms of responsibility and one thing or another. I can remember saying to Archie once,"Well, hell, if you're going to do as much work as the rest of us and contribute, then you might as well join us and accept some of the liability." (laughter)

JL: It was very significant though, adding these two as partners?

HC: Yeh. Kind of from that came the general philosophy that people that contribute ought to also participate in the ownership and the benefits, if any. Because, eventually, before we incorporated, there were twelve partners, I think, wasn't there?

JL: Yes, there were. Can you talk some more about Ralph Roderick?

HC: I mentioned about these things that he did when he used to be manager of the Corvallis office. At that time he and Delia set up the the specification system. He was constantly working on new ideas, or trying to get us into new fields.

JL: New fields?

HC: Well, new applications within the sanitary engineering field I guess you would say. He worked hard, he worked with people well.

JL: What about his contact with the Hill organization?

HC: Yes, I guess that that is something that was important. You have to remember that at the time that was going on, I was deep in operations in Seattle. We actually merged with the Hill organization in 1971, was it?

JL: Yes.

HC: Well, I was in Seattle till 1971, so Ralph had worked, and Jim too, I guess, and Archie, with the Hill organization and I had not had very much direct experience with them; so I am not really familiar with the developments that went on there.

JL: Didn't he make the initial contact with the Hill organization in the fifties?

HC: I think so, yeh. I think their first contact, as I remember it, I'm talking kind of about hearsay; but I think their first contact was a problem they were having with the City of Redding with a pump station that cost too much when it was designed by somebody else, and somehow Ralph got to talking to Clair Hill about the possibility of using a Flowmatcher type application; and eventually we did design it for them. I think that's the way it started. I don't know. Does Ralph confirm that, or did you ask him?

JL: As I remember from Rice the first CH2M contact was when Rice bumped into another fellow he knew in Brookings.

HC: This fellow worked for Clair Hill. Clair Hill was there and that was the first initial contact. I don't I don't know about that. I guess I said in here before, he [Ralph Roderick] was quite conservative in his private affairs, but in the engineering side of the business, was aggressive and forward-looking and innovative,and wasn't afraid to try something new.

JL: What do you mean conservative in his private life? You mean he was politically conservative, a Republican?

HC: (Chuckle) Yeh. Politically and (pause) his ideas were pretty normal for an individual who grew up in the Middle West. You know, belief in people standing on their own feet and taking care of themselves and a resentment of interference and so forth by government and lack of tolerance for any kind of (chuckles) (pause) wild or-I'm having a hard time thinking of the right term. (long pause) Well, he didn't believe in wild parties or (pause), or what people called at the time, the advanced ideas of social progress and redistribution of wealth and those types of things.

JL: Was he more conservative than the rest of you?

HC: Yeh, to some extent. Archie was a pretty good Democrat and he was not anywhere near as conservative as Ralph. They used to get in political arguments that were a lot of fun.

JL: How about the others of you?

HC: Oh, we were various shades of conservative, I guess.

JL: Maybe this is none of my business, but I periodically attend the Unitarian Fellowship and I have been looking in their archives at some of their old papers, and when looking at one of their rosters, I saw your name.

HC: Yes. Uh, well, (chuckles). I don't know a great deal about Unitarians, but the people I know at the Fellowship their philosophy seems very liberal.

JL: I have never seen you there, but...

HC: I haven't been there. The reason for your seeing my name was that when we took our children, or maybe it was the second child, to the Presbyterian or United Church down there on 9th and Monroe, the one on the southeast corner.

JL: Methodist or Baptist?

HC: No. Southeast corner

JL: Presbyterian?

HC: Presbyterian Congregational, I think it was a combination at one time; I don't know who runs it now, but anyway, before they'd let us enroll our daughter in Sunday school, we had to sign a statement that said we would teach or support the church's teaching about the Garden of Eden, and the birth of Christ by Mary who was a virgin, and all of this that we consider to be religious flap trap, and Cleo and I wouldn't do it.

JL: You had to sign a statement saying this?

HC: Yeh. So, we said the hell with them. And we took our kids to the Unitarian Sunday school, where we felt they would get at least a more open type of discussion, and opportunity to see several sides of something.

JL: Did you find that to be true?

HC: Generally, yeah, I think. I don't have any trouble with the Unitarian church. Some of our more conservative people might, I guess. It's a Christian-type religion; it just isn't as dogmatic as some are.

JL: Maybe this isn't the place to have a discussion about this topic.

HC: (chuckle) Well, I don't know. (Tape recorder turned off for a short time.)

JL: Would you say you're one of the more liberal minded of the six partners?

HC: I suppose so. I have never talked to any of them about their basic religious beliefs in the sense that you and I have been talking about it. That may be one of the things that helped us all manage to keep together, because we figured each individuals personal life was his own and it was none of our business what he wanted to do with it, or how he wanted to think, or what beliefs he had, so long as it didn't get so outlandish or too radical that it hurt the image of the company.

JL: I guess I assume that you are all very close friends and that discussion of religion would naturally enter into your relationship?

HC: I would not say that we are close friends from the standpoint of discussing with each other our personal life, or our personal problems, or something like that.

JL: So if you had personal problems, you wouldn't look for support from these other original partners? You might rather take your problems to someone else?

HC: Yeh. I guess so. I don't know. I don't know what kind of problem that would be. If something was related to the financial aspect of the firm, or my relation with it or something, I wouldn't be afraid to go talk to them about it. Maybe the other guys have talked back and forth to each other about these things, but I always respected the other guy's privacy in his personal life and beliefs, and they respected that in me, near as I can tell. I might tend to be more liberal about some things than they are, but that's partly talk and not all real, you know. But your religious beliefs have just never been a matter of concern by any of us that I know of. I know I get a little irritated with Jim Howland sometimes because of his emphasis on character and-can't think of some of the words he used to express it. My tendency is to feel that yes, you got to be honest and you got to be trustworthy, but we aren't hiring people to be models of somebody's idea of a good character. We're hiring people to get a job done, and if they can get the job done, and their personal lives don't otherwise interfere with it, why, let them go.

JL: I see your side, but the other side is that obviously the personal life can't be separated from the job. I mean, a lot of times it enters in whether people want to or not, doesn't it?

HC: Doesn't have to. I don't think. I admit that I'm not quite the same as some others, you know-the people around here that have said that we ought to fire people cause they got a divorce. That would be about one-third of the staff, if the national statistics are accurate, and if they are typical Americans.

JL: Was that point important to Jim Howland?

HC: Oh I think it is.

JL: Yeh. What had he done about it in the past, when he was president?

HC: Well, you've seen the Little Red Book, or what he now calls the revised edition.

JL: Oh, Chairmen Jim Speaks?

HC: Yes

JL: What do you think about this book?

HC: Well, on the face of it I don't disagree with anything that is in there, but you can see the kind of approach is somewhat like "father knows best," which is not my style. I tend to try not to tell people what they ought to do or anything else, but expect them to produce.

JL: What do you think he expects from books like that?

HC: That that will help people be better members of the organization, I guess.

JL: But he's looking beyond the organization, you're saying?

HC: To some extent, I think. Yeh. You can't help but put his own personal attitudes in there. And that's all right.

JL: Over the years, how have you-not you personally, but all of you, dealt with Jim Howland's feeling about this? Do the others agree with his approach?

HC: Some don't disagree very much. Sometimes I've said, "Hey, it's none of our business what somebody thinks or believes. What's he doing that's wrong"? Or, "How does that make him a worse contributor to the firm's interest"? Sometimes I've talked him out of some of that. It is strong. And Jim is pretty open-minded. He doesn't try to insist on his ideas being followed in every way. So, from that standpoint, it's never been a real problem, I don't think. This varies, you know. You can go make a survey of the firm and you'll find that probably, surely half of them, maybe a lot more than that, like Jim's approach. One thing that was mentioned by several of the others, the people I've spoken with at great length, and that is Jim Howland's attitude towards perks and (pause)-I don't know how to put it...

JL: Ostentation and... Yeh, that seems to be very important. How do you feel about this attitude of his?

HC: I agree with Jim on the perk thing. I don't think that the top guy ought to have a bar in his private office, drive a Cadillac, and get free vacations on the company airplane, and use it to go to the Rose Bowl and these kind of things. I think that, simply from his position, he more or less has to have some additional things. If he wants a private secretary, he ought to have one. He should have a better office than most of them, and there is a certain amount of things you have to do to give the right image to the clients, but I don't believe in all these fancy perks that a lot of the top administrators tend to get. And some of it I get a little irritated with. I regularly get fancy engraved invitations from the American Management Association indicating that I have been selected to be a member of-I can't remember what they call it. They have a group of top business people that they take into this thing; and they periodically have 2-week retreats, or something like that, in some resort they have got fixed up in Florida, or one up in Maine, which is just an ego trip for all of those guys; they sit around and brag to each other about how well they are doing. I don't have much use for that kind of thing.

JL: But the problem is that you have been successful. You and the others.

HC: All right, but if I am successful I want to be recognized for my success not for how ostentatious I can look.

JL: So you agree with that part of his philosophy?

HC: Oh, yeh.

JL: One comment was about his view of private secretaries.

HC: Yeh, I agree with it.

JL: That you shouldn't have private secretaries?

HC: Well, in the sense that your girl Friday whose main job is to get your coffee, and pay your personal bills, keep your appointments and see that your tie is straight; otherwise sit there and manicure her nails until you holler.

JL: Oh, boy. Is that what executive secretaries do?

HC: Well, that is what some of them do. I guess the thing that cured me was that I was trying to get a job from the Boeing Company, and I was talking to some people. They had an engineering office in one of the old hangars up there and they had partitioned it off. All around the outside of this big open space there were private offices. There must have been thirty or forty of them. Out in front of each one was a secretary with a typing desk and a typewriter, and all the times I spent going in there I didn't see a tenth of those secretaries doing anything but sitting there ready to answer the boss's telephone. Or at least that is my impression, I'm sure that's not completely right but...

JL: Gosh, apart from its being boring, how uneconomical.

HC: I believe a guy ought to have the services he needs to have to do his job efficiently; that he shouldn't have to do a lot of detail work that can be shifted to someone of lower salary who is perfectly capable of doing it. I don't have any objection to that. I have objection to the concept of the girl Friday, and this is what a lot of the people think that a private secretary is. It is a poor use of resources, people, and everything else. There are a lot better ways to do it, and you find that nowadays the progressively organized companies provide an administrative group which services a group of executives. This gives them the ability not only to trade off when somebody's gone, but to specialize in the kind of things they handle; and it supports the individual a lot better than one person being an errand person who carries the bosses' stuff to somebody else to have it done. Everybody won't agree with me on that, either.

JL: That leads into another question, that of management styles. I'd like you to compare your management style with Jim Howland's, with Harlan Moyer's and Archie Rice's too. Can you make some comments about that?

HC: Yeh. I think I tend to be a more permissive manager than either Archie or Harlan. And I might appear to be more permissive than Jim Howland, but I don't really think I am. By permissive management, I mean trying to give somebody a responsibility and then leaving them alone to get that accomplished, rather than to tell them how to do it, or be very emphatic about the method they use or how they go about it.

JL: And this goes along with your philosophy of "smarter than a dog"?

HC: Um hmmm.

JL: How would you apply this philosophy of permissiveness?

HC: Well, I try to make sure they understand what their responsibilities are; to make the definition of their job and their responsibilities clear, and see that they understand it. And if I did it all right, I'd ask them to develop their goals of what they're going to try to accomplish in the position they've been given, and then review that with them periodically to see what kind of progress they're making. And the theory: if the progress is poor and I can't see an improvement, then I better change the person.

JL: How does that compare to Jim Howland's approach, then?

HC: Well, Jim's a little more directive about the things that he feels are important and tends to be I guess you would say. Hard for me to answer because he doesn't talk to me as an employee or something. He talks to me kind of as an equal. So I'm not sure just how he operates, but I've observed that he tends to be a little-all I can say is dogmatic, not exactly demanding, more specific on what should be done. When you get right down to it, Jim isn't half as tough as he sometimes comes across, because

normally Jim doesn't really make a major move without a consensus. Now Harlan doesn't do it that way. And neither does Archie. They'll figure out what they think is right and they'll go ahead and drive it through.

JL: So how is that working in this firm? Or how did it work in the case of Archie?

HC: Worked pretty good, I guess. Archie tends to get more accomplished than all the rest of us do. But there are some people that have trouble working with him.

JL: So why didn't he take over then after Jim Howland? Why wasn't he considered the intermediary between Harlan Moyer and Jim Howland?

HC: Oh, well, there was no intermediary between Harlan Moyer and Jim Howland.

JL: Didn't you come in as interim President after Jim? And that was so that Harlan Moyer could finish up in Redding?

HC: Where'd you get that? You're a cycle out.

JL: I thought that there were six choices that the firm was considering for President. And...

HC: That's when I was President.

JL: Right. Okay. That's true. But I thought-you better set me straight.

HC: At the time that Jim decided he was not going to be President anymore, the Board of Directors sat down and tried to figure out who to make president. And, the possibilities at that time were Poirot, Weirson, Moyer, Rice, Reynolds, probably Adams (pause) Suhr also probably, and finally me. When the Board of Directors set out to make this decision they threw me out because I was a candidate.

JL: Threw you out of the Board?

HC: The Board meeting. But as I understood it, and I think this is reasonably correct, they didn't feel that any of the other candidates could quite move into that job immediately-that they needed more seasoning or something else. They couldn't really agree, but they decided that I would be harmless enough that they could put me in as President for a sort of interim period...

JL: Oh come on, what's that mean? (chuckles)

HC: (chuckles) Well, I think they were looking at acceptance, and the problems that they might have with a bunch of people untried and a job as big as that.

JL: Why didn't Jim Howland just stay until someone definite was chosen then?

HC: Well, I don't know exactly. I think he felt he'd been President long enough, and I think that both Archie and I, who had talked to him about this, felt the same thing.

JL: That he had been in long enough?

HC: That he had been in long enough, that it was hard on him, and that we needed some new ideas and some new approaches in the management of the company. To some extent due to the fact that he'd grown up from the beginning in a relatively small organization, it was hard for him to adjust his approach to what had now become a multi headed monster. And I don't know whether-I don't know just why Jim decided to-I think Jim had that same kind of concern.

JL: So it needed-there was a feeling the firm needed a new approach?

HC: Well and they thought that making me President would provide a good transition and give us time enough to make a better analysis of what to do about the next President.

JL: Why did they choose you, now? Why do you think besides that you would be the least harmful?

HC: Well, they thought that I would have acceptance from the firm in general, that I had the experience and background, and was old enough and so forth that I could manage the thing better than anybody they had on the list that I named for you.

JL: Did you enjoy that position? Would you have wanted to continue in it?

HC: I'd never particularly gone out to be President. I got my kicks out of being one of the guys that started the thing, and my name was on the door, and I didn't feel I had to have the title and so on. Well, yeah, I accepted it because I wanted to see that the firm proceeded-went ahead in the direction I considered it ought to go. And I tried to do that. Didn't get a lot of it done at the time I was president. So then, I don't remember what I said, but I said I was not going to be President for three or four years or something like that. Then I began to do some thinking and talked to some of our management consultants, including a friend in Seattle who helped us on the long range planning.

JL: Do you remember what his name was?

HC: Oh...I've heard that name, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

JL: This was just in the last few years-in the seventies you're talking about?

HC: Yeh. Seventy-three or something... four? And we set up a group. First we got a couple of people that were, you might say, outside committee members. One was John Gray, who was president of, among other things, I'll think of the name in a minute. The other one was a lawyer from Seattle who had been in the business of hiring engineers and watching them work for a long time. With those two, plus three or four others, I selected at random from the firm people who I didn't consider, or would themselves consider, or would we consider, as being candidates for President. We first set up the criteria for the Chairman of the Board and the President and kind of separated their duties, partly on the basis of what I thought I wanted to do because they all assumed I was going to be Chairman of the Board. And when we got that done, we discharged that committee, and set up a selection committee also made of people who were not candidates for President, and went through an interview and grading process; had the candidates go talk to an industrial psychologist to get his view on the thing and went through it quite logically and thoroughly; and came up with the selection of Harlan for president with the concept being that the President would be the internal manager, and the Chairman of the Board would be the outside man who was responsible for public relations and the firm's image and the relations with the government, and this type of thing. And so I became Chairman for a couple of years, I guess; and when I retired and was no longer a stockholder, Earl was made Chairman and I was Vice-chairman for a year to make a transition.

JL: Did Harlan Moyer turn out as expected? I mean did he meet your expectations?

HC: He met mine. Yeh.

JL: Has he carried on the tradition that you original four, and then six, started with?

HC: Well, what tradition do you mean?

JL: Well, the importance of the client, the one-to-one relationships, integrity of the firm, and other philosophies-really what Jim Howland encouraged all those year he was President?

HC: Well, I guess so, I guess in the best way he can. And you know that philosophy you're talking about is difficult, if not impossible, to follow when you've got eighteen hundred to two thousand people. Jim worked harder at it than I have, or did. Harlan works awful hard at it, in that he's around this and all the offices of the company all the time. He spends more time on the road than either Jim or I ever did. But it's tougher in terms of decisions. He's able to affect the reorganizations and reassignments of people and compositions faster and better than we did, because he's not so concerned about the consensus, and when he's once convinced he knows what ought to be done, he goes ahead and does it.

JL: So what was his reception, then, from the employees that have been with the firm under Howland?

HC: I suppose that this bothers some of them. Nobody has ever come to me, and I have never heard anybody say anything about what Harlan has done in a complaining way. You mentioned in another interview that you did with someone else, the biggest problem today are one, maintaining the quality with the size and diversity and the spread of operations; and two, motivation of the people-the firm is so large that you sort of have lost or tended to lose a one-to-one contact between people in the organization.

JL: What do you do about solving that problem? Or what's Harlan Moyer doing about that? Or is there anything that can be done?

HC: Well, the way I can see that you can do that-particularly with the one-to-one or at least the evidence of personal concern for the individual-and the way I always do it, is to do it the way we're doing it now, which is kind of by accident. You've got really fifteen or twenty groups of people in regional offices with a regional manager who is supposed to take care of the one-to-one personal care and feeding of employees. There's no way that the top brass can do it. You know you can have rallies and pep talks like the-what's this group of people that sells the cosmetics?

JL: Amway? Mary Kay Cosmetics?

HC: I don't know what they do, but they have big rallies and give prizes and do all that kind of stuff. So I think you've got to depend on good managers to carry on that so-called tradition. They' re the ones that have got to motivate the people. Try to work out for them how they can progress in the company if that's what their desire is, and also try to be close enough to watch the quality of the work.

JL: Are you doing anything to encourage these ideas? I understand that Mr. Howland goes around to each of the offices that requests him and talks about the philosophy and history of the firm. Are you doing that, not necessarily in the same way, but anything similar?

HC: When I'm at a regional office, if there's any kind of a meeting or get together I'm usually invited to come, and then they start asking me questions. I don't dwell very much on the history and background like Jim does. One of the things I'm trying to do is quality control, or quality assurance we call it now. That's what this report I'm making...

JL: The audit?

HC: Oh, we don't call it an audit. We call it a performance and procedure review.

JL: Is it for the whole firm?

HC: Well, this one we did for this office. But there is a team put together that makes this kind of a review of every office every two or three years. It's not always the same team. This is the first time I've done it.

JL: Who chooses these teams?

HC: Joe Worth does, whose job is (chuckles) I don't know what it is...His job is director of professional practice which involves developing programs to review and improve the quality of your work, the procedures that are followed in executing the projects, and to work on the problems that result from errors, mistakes, omissions,

whatever-try to find out what causes them, try to correct them and so forth. So he is essentially responsible for quality control.

JL: So are you going to continue being on one of these teams?

HC: I probably will be from time to time. I agreed that I'd try to work out what we're going to call a quality assurance manual combining all of these procedures, and try to develop a normal process that will ensure the quality. Then I get specific assignments on this type of thing. I'm the chairman of a review board that's responsible for the quality of the design of the deep tunnel system for Milwaukee. It's going to cost them some $750 million dollars I guess when it's done. That's a for-the-duration kind of assignment, that is the duration of the project.

JL: How does your schedule of going to Arizona and playing golf and relaxing fit into this assignment?

HC: Well, I can get to Milwaukee as easy from Arizona as I can from here probably. I'm only an hour and a quarter from Denver if I got to go meet with Harlan or somebody like that. More and more as the firm grows, the Corvallis office is not the center gravity of activities.

JL: I think you mentioned that it's been a problem having the headquarters located here. You're working then when you go to Arizona?

HC: Part of the time, yeh. I guess I've averaged working, at least on the basis of a time sheet I fill out about half the time for the last year and a half.

JL: Is that the level at which you want to continue working then? About half-time?

HC: Yes, as long as I can contribute and stay healthy enough to do it. I get a little bored doing nothing, or just playing golf all day.

JL: Do you have other activities you enjoy besides golf?

HC: Not really. I don't have a farm like Archie does. I don't have a place over in the mountains like Burke does. I've got kind of a hobby of earthquakes, but I arrived at that from the engineering association.

JL: I remember something in the archives about that. What do you do with this interest?

HC: Oh, I belong to the Earthquake Engineering Research Association. I'm on a couple of committees, both the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Water Works Association, and work on the development of procedures and methods to design facilities to withstand earthquakes.

JL: Did you go to California, then, and look at the structures down in Coaligna?

HC: No, we were coming back from Arizona and we went within five miles of that town on I-5 two days before that earthquake happened. Like Cleo said, "It's a good thing it didn't happen when we went by there, or we might not be home yet!" (laughter) I'd be over there looking into it. I'm on a list of people that can be asked to go and look at the effects of earthquakes for instance, that are set up by the Engineering Research Institute. I haven't gone on any yet.

JL: Do you do research on your own? Or is it just in connection with the activities of these associations?

HC: In a sense. One of the things-I'm on the committee now to write what they call design notes for the life line facilities subject to earthquake, life line meaning almost infrastructure-water, sewer, highways, communication, power, whatever.

JL: Why is earthquakes a particular interest? I'm surprised it's not bridges, stemming from your earlier interest.

HC: Because when I studied structures at Yale, I got to working with the analysis of structures that were subject to lateral force as against just dead weight. One of the lateral forces you have to design structures to withstand is the force of an earthquake. Also wind, but the earthquake forces are so much greater. And if you remember I started my career after graduate school, in San Francisco. John Rinne, who we mentioned, was chairman of the committee of the San Francisco section of the Engineering Society which developed the advanced approach to the design of buildings for earthquake. That development is still the basis that a lot of earthquake design is made. San Francisco is probably the most advanced in the world in earthquake design with the possible exception of Tokyo. So I enjoy this. Sure, it's kinda like a bus driver's vacation, but I go to these committees and we work on these things. It's interesting, fascinating, sometimes challenging. Like I say, I'm chairman of a section and my job is to write the part about design of water and sewer facilities for resistance to earthquake.

JL: You're not involved in any associations building bridges?

HC: Sure, yeh. There are lots of them. No, just haven't got into that.

JL: So your time's pretty much taken with research and then your half-time position with the firm.

HC: Well it could be the next three or four weeks I'm going to be working full-time. But when I get this job done and the review of this tunnel done, then I'll go spend part of my time working on this quality assurance manual and play golf the rest of the time, I guess.

JL: Earlier when we were talking about Hardy Cross, you mentioned that Fred liked to discuss philosophy? Philosophy about what? I assumed you were talking about philosophy of life, and yet you said you didn't discuss religion with any of the principals. Maybe I made the wrong assumption?

HC: Oh, in a sense I guess that's what it was. It was probably related to the profession that we were all in. (pause) Fred was a great one to discuss the basic concepts of politics, not the details of who you ought to vote for: British philosophy of government versus that in the United States; the concepts of preservation of the environment and the degradation or overusing resources; the ideas about what people needed to be not happy but fulfilled. He would enjoy giving forth on those things. And he had some good ideas. But I think that's the type of thing I'm talking about in philosophy. Not just religion. Fred never discussed religion to speak of. I can never remember talking to him about it.

JL: But I thought that you partners didn't discuss your personal beliefs-your religion or philosophy; that's the impression I got, yet I hear you saying...

HC: And now I'm saying the other thing? (chuckles) Well, it was never about religion. And it was not about a personal application of any philosophy. It was about a general concept of philosophy.

JL: Did he bring that up in his classes, then when he was a teacher, or was this just between you and him?

HC: Oh, once in a while he brought it up in classes when he got rambling. Gee, I can't remember at this stage. But I think probably he did some.

JL: What would he have thought of the environmental movement and the environmentalists? Would he have been in accord with them?

HC: He was probably the first environmentalist in Oregon.

JL: I know that Tom McCall gets the credit for cleaning the Willamette, but apparently Fred Merryfield had a tremendous amount...

HC: Well, yeh, but I wouldn't be surprised if Fred didn't put part of the idea in his head. He was a friend of Tom McCall's. And they knew each other. Fred was a Democrat, too. And Fred was one of the first appointees to the Oregon Water Resources Board, and did make the initial study on the pollution of the Willamette River, and helped set up the criteria from which the original law was passed back before World War II or about the time of World War II.

JL: Where did this interest come from? Most people weren't thinking of cleaning up the environment and even considering that the resources might be endless.

HC: For the first part, Fred was a sanitary engineer: he worked on treatment of wastes and when you get into that you immediately start to look at what the discharge of the waste is going to do to the stream it's going into; from which he developed the concept of available oxygen in the stream and it's natural ability to purify it, or absorb or do something with wastes that came to it; plus the damage that was being done to the fishing-to the salmon runs that were coming up the rivers; plus somewhere he got the state to appropriate some money to make the initial survey. I suppose that's where it comes from. I think it probably started from a professional concern or interest in the problem of stream pollution. He was way ahead of his time.

JL: It sounds like he was. Can you describe a scenario of all six of you on a Monday afternoon? Depict each person's personality and how they reacted in the meeting?

HC: Well, Jim always had an agenda and we would start down the agenda. As I remember it, the first item on it was new business, proposals and so forth. And we'd run down the list of who was supposed to see who and who was responsible for doing what about those things. And Fred Merryfield would get started on how he knew so and so, or such and such and that this was the way, maybe, to approach it and finally somebody would say, "All right." Or Jim would say, "That's in your territory so you organize the approach and see if you can get that job." Then we'd have a financial report in which Archie and I would complain about how we were starving to death and we ought to be making more money. (chuckle) And Jim would say, "Well, damn you guys. If you'd get a better fee and do the jobs more economically, we could make enough money to pay better." And Ralph used to say, "Well, let's don't pay out the money. Let's keep it in the firm. There isn't a better investment that you could make if you've got any money than in CH2M." And Burke generally was kind of quiet and would kind of wait until everybody had argued back and forth and then would often suggest a solution or a way to work it out. And we would go at that for a while. And then we'd have a report on the major projects that we were working on, where we stood and what kind of help we needed. And that was about it.

JL: Who dominated? Jim Howland was the chairman?

HC: Yeh, but he had a little trouble dominating I would say. (chuckle) I don't know that anybody did unless Fred did if he got off on a particular thing that, at the time, he thought important or was bothering him. But sometimes, we'd just shut Fred up and go on with our own business.

JL: So everybody knew about every project?

HC: Oh, yeh. And, of course, you know, as that gradually grew and we got bigger and got to doing more and more, why [it would) worry some of us that, "Boy, we're getting too big. We haven't got the close, family kind of relation that we had, and how are we going to manage to do a good job and keep everything going and everybody motivated when we get so spread out and so large that everybody doesn't know exactly about everything that's going on and everybody doesn't even know everybody else?"

JL: How did you resolve that problem?

HC: I don't know that we have completely. But we still try to operate in relatively controllable groups. Instead of having two thousand people here, we get two thousand people spread in regional operations all over the country. The largest isn't over about two hundred or a little more, and each one of those offices tries to operate as a well-unified group where people know each other and so forth.

JL: So you sort of kept that family flavor?

HC: Tried to. We're losing it; it's not what it used to be and that's one of the things we had to sacrifice when we grew to the size we are, but we still make an awful lot of effort people-wise to keep people informed of what is going on and give them a chance to contribute and to ask questions. I don't remember just where it says this, but in the Policies and Procedures Manual we operate with an open door policy and we say, anybody can talk to anybody else no matter what his position, and we generally try to follow that. It gets kind of wearing at times but generally we try to do that. It seems to work. You know, last weekend they had the annual stockholders meeting in Portland. On Monday morning they have a four-hour session on what goes on at CH2M and they cover all the offices and all the disciplines; each one gets about ten or fifteen minutes. It's an astounding thing when you get that whole story of how much we're involved in and how many things we're going. This is kind of an outgrowth of that [open door policy] thing and everybody seems to like it because it gives them a feel for what's going on that there's no other way to get.

JL: All the project managers came to Portland in that period?

HC: All the key employees, as we call them, which, you know, covers most of the major project managers. This is really organized by Sid and Gene Suhr, and they run it very hard-headedly. Gene stands up there with a baseball bat and if you go ten seconds over your time, he hits you with it. (laughter) Theoretically, hope it's rubber.

JL: You mentioned the Policies and Procedures Manual, and I understand that you put that together. Would you consider that one of your major contributions?

HC: Oh, I suppose. You see, I left here in August of 1970 and went to Seattle to start the Seattle office.

JL: 1960, I thought you left.

HC: 1960, excuse me. And Archie, at that time, or right after that, went to work for MicroFLOC for five years, and then he came back and Jim made him executive vice-president. We never knew quite what that meant, but Archie, being the way he is, didn't have any trouble with what he thought it meant and proceeded to do it. But anyway, he and Jim, along about 1968 I guess it was, came to me one day and said, "We need somebody to take a year off and take a look at the whole firm and the organization and figure out where we're going to go and develop a program," or what we now call a long range plan. I don't remember what we called it then. And they wanted me to do it. So I turned over the management of the Seattle office to Jim Poirot, and I took on this job; and the results of that first year's efforts were what I called an Engineering Production Study which developed the concept of where we were going to go, and what things were going to look like, and how we were going to do it, and what we needed to do about things like the computer and personnel and the organization and all of this. One of the things that I came up with in that was that we had to have a policies and procedures manual; we were now too big to be able to transmit all of this stuff by monthly or weekly partners' meetings. So my first assignment after I got the report done was to write the Policies and Procedures Manual.

JL: Why did they choose you to develop this program?

HC: Well, I don't know. Just thought maybe I'd like to do it, I guess, or thought I could do it, maybe.

JL: Well, they must have thought that. But for what reasons? Were you an exceptional communicator or an analyst? Manager?

HC: I'm a pretty good communicator and fair analyst. I'm not a smart analyst as Archie is and a lot of others we've got. I think maybe they thought that if I did, and I came up with these ideas, that I could sell it and it would get accepted.

JL: So you're considered a good salesman then?

HC: (chuckle) Maybe so. It was fun. I enjoyed doing that work, that job. And, oh, that got us started in a whole series of things that we're still working on: management training and development, the centralized specifications system, the information systems that we use, the development and continuation of advanced technical effort. And I do think probably that study did have quite an influence on what we've done since because we've generally followed, one way or another, most of the things that were developed there. Haven't all taken the same shape as they looked like they would at that time, in 1970, but generally we've followed the general concepts that came out of that [study]. The one thing that study didn't do was work out a solution to the problem which we faced, which was with regional offices working in regions. There was a tendency for each region to try to build the capability so that they could handle any kind of project that came up which is not a very economical thing because it means that you are duplicating staff in all these places, and the results of the Engineering Production Study recommended the organization of what I called, in that thing, a major projects division. We started the work on that, and Archie got to working with it, and it was Archie who eventually came up with the concept of the discipline system. He worked with me on it and talked me into holding a conference once with all the regional managers and the directors and everybody in Seattle to discuss this so-called, what he called, the discipline system, and at that meeting we decided we'd go ahead with it which we did. We officially put it into effect just after we merged with Clair Hill which would be 1971, wouldn't it?

JL: What was the reception from these managers? How did they regard this new system?

HC: (chuckles) As I remember it, we presented an approach to the organization of the company which would utilize this system and presented it on the basis that it was impossible to organize every regional office so that it had full expertise in every field that we worked on. We had to have some way to do this; and here was the proposal that we were going to follow, and what did we think about it. We discussed the idea; spent a whole day at least, or maybe it was longer than that. Archie and I had kind of organized it, and I guess to some extent predetermined what the decision was we wanted to come out of it. All I can really remember is at the end of it, I said, "Well, there's the program. If nobody really objects, we're going to go ahead and do it." And nobody really objected, so we did. (chuckles)

JL: Were they just stunned or was it a consensus?

HC: Oh, I guess they kind of thought it was all right.

JL: Wasn't there some problem in convincing the other principles that the system was workable? Or was everybody in agreement?

HC: Well, if they weren't in agreement, they didn't say so right then.

JL: So everybody was in support, then, of the discipline system?

HC: In general, yeh. A lot of them had reservations. I don't think Sid, even now thinks it's necessarily the perfect answer; but we kind of had the thing well enough programmed that, looking back on it now it probably was obviously the conclusion we were going to come to. I think it's worked. That's about the only way I can see that we can do what we're doing with all these regional offices spread all over.

JL: It seems that it would have changed the position of the managers so much that there would naturally be some disagreement. They lost some of their power, didn't they, in the sense they were no longer autonomous? Or did they see it as good for the whole firm, and overlooked the loss of their previous positions?

HC: Yeh, well, you see at that time-I can't remember when that was, I think it was about 1970, or 1971-there weren't all that many empires. There was a Seattle one, of which I was essentially a manager and Jim Poirot was, at that time. And Boise with Earl Reynolds. I guess we had something going in Portland but it didn't amount to very much-was primarily planning. Then Redding; at the time we did this must have been either right at the time of merger or just after, because I remember Clair Hill and Harlan Moyer participated in that meeting in Seattle. And I guess Ralph was running a little office for Clair Hill and for us in San Francisco. And that's about all there was. So there weren't a bunch of these empires that had to be preserved. Once you've got Seattle and Boise satisfied- and Earl by that time was a major stockholder, so it didn't really concern him that he was going to lose any position. This matrix system has also got to be one of Archie's major contributions because, I think, that is the thing that has made it possible for us to grow as large as we have and still maintain the technical excellence, and provide all the projects with whatever expertise is necessary due to the fact that there is always somebody who you can go to who can handle the technical end of it for you. And in those discipline groups people are moving around all the time; that's why there is so much travel because the guys that are expert on this, that, or the other thing, are in demand all over the company.

JL: And Jim Howland saw it as a positive move, also? He was president?

HC: Oh, I think he did after Archie and I kind of browbeat him into it (chuckles). Archie primarily. I don't remember if I said in here or not but in making the engineering production study I had come up with some kind of a similar need and the production study kind of defined the need. I had not seen the thing Archie eventually came up with, but I had put in a separate group, which I called the Major Projects, which was supposed to undertake the major projects and provide the expertise, discipline, and one thing or another to the other people. I hadn't thought of the so-called matrix. It was not a very common term at that time. Where Archie ran into it, I don't know; I think he came up with the idea and then he went around looking for some name he could tie to it for support for doing it, and he found this stuff on the so-called matrix organization.

JL: Didn't Archie ask you to come down from Seattle to help convince the others of the need for the matrix system?

HC: Well, after we had decided to do that, then it became necessary for somebody to run the so-called discipline side of the matrix, since Jim was running the regional side. I guess Jim wanted me to do it, and Archie finally convinced me I couldn't do it without moving down here where he and Jim and I could be together; Archie was then executive vice president or something like that. So I did.

JL: You didn't particularly want to move down did you?

HC: No, we liked Seattle.

JL: Have you ever thought about moving back there?

HC: Oh, yes, we have. But the difficulty is we sold our house on the water, on Vashon Island, so we lost the place to go back to.

JL: You could always buy another one.

HC: (chuckles). Well, maybe. Those kinds of places are awfully expensive now. We should have kept it. Even if we were just selling it now, we'd get several times what we sold it for.

JL: You can say that about most real estate now.

HC: Yeh.

JL: Does the phrase you coined, "smarter than the dog" have something to do with your management philosophy?

HC: (chuckle) Well, that phrase comes from my father-in-law. It was my father-in-law's expression. Essentially he used to say, you know, if you are going to train a dog, you've got to be smarter than he is so you can talk him into doing what he needs to. I used it to apply to the concept that you've got to understand better than the individual you're trying to motivate or direct or convince-you've got to understand as well as he does how he thinks and where he's coming from in order to influence him to do what you think needs to be done.

JL: This goes for clients too, I imagine.

HC: Yep.

JL: How have you applied that philosophy?

HC: (pause) Well, I try to figure out a way so that what I think needs to be done is also something that the individual who needs to do it wants to do which is the way you train a dog. You don't hit him on the head. You convince him with praise or with reward or something to do what you want him to do. And this, I think, is the way you have to work with people. You have to try to work out a way so that his goals and the company's goals fit and then he wants to do what the company needs to have done, which means that sometimes you adjust even the company's goals in order to make them fit the individual so that he can now accomplish what needs to be done with some satisfaction that it is meeting his own needs.

JL: Is that difficult to do when working with a large organization?

HC: Well, sure because that kind of a concept you apply on a more or less one-on-one basis except that the general concept of our operation, which is to try to give the people who contribute a piece of the action, is an application of this same concept. You know, if a good engineer wants to be in a sense a participant and an owner and a contributor to the organization he's working with, then you need to give him some voice in what's going on, and some piece of the action, and some way where his rewards have some relation to his contribution.

JL: Is this where the Key Employees come in?

HC: I guess so. The Key Employees really are what used to be the partners. And the first Key Employees were the twelve partners at the time. I can't remember where the Key Employee term came from. But it was a way in which we could give them ownership of the company, and it would designated partners without calling them that; because you can't have partners in a corporation, you can only have owners, stockholders.

JL: This brings up another question. You lent me the book Engineers in Ivory Towers by Hardy Cross.

HC: Yeh.

JL: I looked at it. It was very interesting. In places, it was difficult for me to understand what he was saying since I'm not an engineer, but he obviously was a very thoughtful, astute person. He talked about the place of engineers in society. I would like you to say something about your philosophy with regard to the place of engineers in society and how they fit in?

HC: (pause) Well, currently, there is a lot of discussion about the fact that engineers don't participate in public and community affairs the way they should, and they don't use their knowledge to help make the decisions on things that have technical ramifications, because they tend to be retiring and prefer to stay working with their slide rule or their computer and their project. That's certainly a stereotype. And they're oriented to a specific task. They're doers; they're not politicians, most of them, so that they have difficulty trying to influence people, particularly the general public, and they have a distaste for the kind of conflict that, in the political world, is a way of life. I guess my philosophy is, yes, engineers should participate in public and community affairs. But I think we have to remember that engineers, despite the stereotype, are all shades of personality, and for some, this type of thing is really not possible. They just don't have the kind of a nature that can make it possible for them to succeed in trying to influence or help on decisions which are involved in the public sector, and (to deal with] the notoriety and the publicity that comes with it. At the same time, those whose personalities and interests and capabilities fit that kind of thing, should do it. I do not believe that decisions of a major nature should be made strictly by a technician, including an engineer, because they tend to have a tunnel vision that prevents them from seeing all the sides of a guest ion. Therefore, I think an engineer should participate, but the major kinds of decisions that involve a decision about a technical matter ought to have some people with other backgrounds and other interests to counterbalance the engineer's tendency to seek the perfect solution from a technical standpoint that may not be the perfect solution from the standpoint of benefit to the people or benefit to humanity or benefit to the community.

JL: After reading Hardy Cross' book, he seemed like the ideal engineer, combining the humanities with the technical field-a real renaissance man.

HC: Yeh, of course, you have to attribute this partly to his background.

JL: He started out, didn't he teach literature or English?

HC: I think he graduated from a liberal arts college.

JL: Yeh, Hampton Sidney in Carolina.

HC: He started out with a liberal arts degree. He started out teaching English. His favorite book was Alice in Wonderland, and/or Winnie the Pooh.

JL: Oh. Were those books mentioned a lot by Hardy Cross?

HC: Oh yeh. He'd use illustrations-Alice going down the yellow road-I can't remember now.

JL: She went through the two-way mirror. Yeh.

HC: No, she went down a hole.

JL: Yeh, a rabbit hole, I think. That's right. You mean in his engineering classes, he'd mention it? In what context?

HC: Well, I can't remember now. But if you'd go back and read through The Awful Witch of the West or something and quote some of the crazy sayings like they make...

JL: That's from The Wizard of Oz.

HC: Well, all right. Where's the one about the walrus?

JL: I know that Lewis Carroll's stories were philosophical stories.

HC: Yeh. There's all kinds of things in there you can interpret or twist-all kinds of peculiar, or not peculiar, but all kinds of instances. And Winnie the Pooh is a poem [book] by A. A. Milne, which is full of a lot of this other kind of poking fun at the foibles of people.

JL: So he brought a little of the humanities into engineering, then?

HC: Oh yeh.

JL: That's unusual for an engineer?

HC: Ummm, hummm. So he was always more of a general philosopher than most strictly engineering professors. Fred Merryfield was a little like that too. Fred was a great reader and liked to discuss philosophies and so forth. But that's the best I can state my philosophy on that.

JL: Do you think engineers should have more exposure to philosophy and liberal arts?

HC: That's another current argument: how much the liberal arts types of things should an engineer have? I know that when I was in college we had some requirements: we had to take some social science. I took a course in sociology which, at the time, I considered a waste of time; I'm not sure that it really was. And also I'm sure that the course I took, which was Introductory to Sociology, wasn't organized to fit the needs of somebody like an engineer; it was organized and taught on the old concept at that time, on liberal arts type of approach, so that it didn't accomplish what it could have. But, properly done, I think it's important that things like sociology and philosophy and some languages and literature should somewhere become a part of an engineer's background. I doubt, with today's highly-complex, immense technical society, that you can give an engineer a four- or five-year course and still provide all these others things that are necessary. Somehow, you've got to get it some other way, either by getting him started so that he reads and he digs that out himself, or that he takes it up later in some other kind of continuing education.

JL: Do you encourage this development in the firm? I know that you give your employees an opportunity to join Toastmasters.

HC: Ummm, hummm.

JL: Do you encourage people to take other courses?

HC: Well, we'll pay the course costs for anyone who wants to take a course in a field which improves his capability to perform his job in the company. We feel that, basically, it's an individual's responsibility to provide his own basic education. We don't normally, as a policy, pay a person to obtain a master's degree for instance. There are ways that it can be done by selected courses all of which benefit his capabilities with the firm, which eventually may end up providing him with a master's degree, but we think, as a professional, he's got a responsibility to come with the training necessary to be a professional. We aren't in the business of making professionals; we are in the business of hiring, motivating, developing, and using professionals to provide professional service. So, we do those kinds of things. We encourage people and will give them time off and encouragement and, at times, financial help to participate in community affairs and other things, and we encourage them to work with the national societies and this type of thing. We don't, as a basic policy, specifically at least, direct or have any program for the training, education, or development of knowledge other than the technical part of it. We don't discourage it.

JL: In hiring a professional, do you look for ones that have had a lot of experience and a well-rounded background?

HC: Try. We try not to get, well, I guess you might call it technical drones. We try to get somebody who has also indicated some capability to work with people, to manage, organize and understand how things get done, and to find, therefore, somebody who not only can do the technical end of it but can also work with the people that we have to work with. One of my favorite statements is, "I don't care how beautiful a technical answer you've got, if you can't convince the client that it's the right thing to do, nothing is going to happen." So you've got to be able to work with him and to express, explain, sell, if you want, the concept that you think he ought to follow. If you can't do that, then the fine technical work that you do may be wasted.

JL: Why did you volunteer to start that office in Seattle? Isn't that correct, that you volunteered to go or were you pressured to go?

HC: No, I think it was, in part, my idea. It looked to me like we had pretty well saturated the market in Oregon at that time and that we were going to have difficulty selling our services to a larger city like Seattle if we were located in a little place like Corvallis, Oregon. I had been kind of covering the eastern Oregon and Washington territory. I kind of felt that maybe a move would be something new and different and it would, I guess, help us to grow.