Holly Cornell Oral History Interview, March 17, 1983

JENNIFER LEE: What’s the Merryfield System?

HOLLY CORNELL: 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.

JL: I learned earlier from you that he was considered to be quite a talker. Did that ever cause problems between him and any of you?

HC: Well, I mentioned some about it when I said that after the time you'd heard the stories three or four times, they began to get a little boring. Sometimes he'd take over the conversation.

JL: You weren't concerned that he would dominate conversation when working with clients, or be insensitive to their feelings?

HC: Well, usually when we were meeting or talking to clients, Fred with his gift of language could make an excellent presentation, and so it didn't often cause that kind of problem. Fred was a strong character, and you either liked him very much or you disliked him quite a bit; so you had to be careful not to take Fred with you, when you had somebody that you might think was not on good terms with Fred.

JL: Oh, his not being taken along didn't result in hard feelings between him and the others?

HC: Oh, I think we knew Fred pretty well and we all recognized this; he couldn't do everything anyway so normally we would get him to help us where we felt it would fit.

JL: He didn't try to dominate those Monday luncheons?

HC: No, surprisingly, he was often very quiet on those, unless you happened to get into a subject in which he had strong feelings.

JL: Like what?

HC: Oh, personnel selection, and engineering excellence, I think is the term which should be used to describe it-believing in doing a good technical job regardless of how that fit with the fee or the profit picture.

JL: So in his mind economics wasn't the prime motivation for doing the project?

HC: No, and normally whenever it came to a matter of what we were going to get paid-fees-Fred would be very quiet while the rest of us had to work that out.

JL: Why was that?

HC: He had a reluctance to discuss any monetary matter with people who he considered to be his friends. Where that came from I don't know; it's partly related to a strong professional feeling that you should do the best job you can and let people pay you what they might, which obviously in running a business you couldn't do; and it was just hard for him to talk about money matters. Can't explain it any other way very well.

JL: So he was uncomfortable about discussing prices and thought the client should decide how much the job was worth to them? Did he understand the practicality of running a business?

HC: Well, not too well sometimes.

JL: Did he let his opinions be known about that aspect of the business?

HC: Well, he used to get upset sometimes when we got to what he felt to be too monetarily concerned. He felt we ought to be satisfied with whatever we could make, and that we shouldn't try to drive a hard bargain with a client.

JL: Why did he want to go into the consulting engineering business in the first place? I mean that's usually a motivation.

HC: It was not to make money. It was to do a good engineering job, an interesting engineering job, I think. I didn't, I never talked to him obviously, but I understood that he didn't really participate in the projects directly.

JL: He taught at the college and handled personnel matters, but didn't so much get involved with projects, so it seems contradictory...

HC: Well, that's right. It didn't work out that he could participate directly, although every once in a while he'd get involved in one or we would ask him to give us some help in working out a theory or a concept on the basis of which we'd do the detailed design. So he'd get involved in it from that standpoint.

JL: And that was enough to satisfy him then, that that was his...

HC: Well, I don't know if that was enough to satisfy him, probably wasn't completely, but this is just the way it worked. He was not available to be able to undertake these things, and he had a reluctance to take full charge of a project or something, partly because he didn't understand the financial part of the operation, and second, because Fred had a little problem, I think you would have to say, in actually fully completing something and wrapping it all up. He enjoyed the conceptual part of it, and the hard thinking that had to go in to develop the concept, but he sometimes lost interest when it got to the day-to-day effort that it took to complete the thing.

JL: Didn't that affect his teaching? Isn't it part of engineering to see a project through from beginning to end?

HC: Yeah, I don't think it did because Fred was one of the best...he would read a report turned in by a student and there would be marks all over it. He'd do that thoroughly. I think the problem was that he was so busy in teaching as we were getting started that he didn't have the time to do anything but kind of consult with us and meet with us to give his advice or thoughts. By the time it got to the point where he had stopped teaching and spent full time here, the process of engineering that we went through had become complex enough that he was reluctant to take the whole thing on. Every once in a while he would do a report or a critique or something like that; that he would do completely. I guess the reason that I am asking so many questions about him is that he's not here to make a contribution about himself and what part he played in the firm's history.

JL: If he liked to do engineering and that's why he set up a consulting engineering firm, why didn't he quit teaching? He would have been pretty much in the same situation that all the rest of you were-the three of you-no other job, a family, a wife.

HC: Well, he was older for one thing. And I think it was partly he liked the financial security of the university position and the permanency of it. Until he was old enough to retire with a state pension, he continued to work about 90 percent at the university-90 percent time I think they called it.

JL: It seems like he was a man of contradictions.

HC: Well, to some extent he was. He had a very strong personality and enjoyed being the leader, or the prominent person in any activity.

JL: Except in this firm.

HC: Well he was pretty prominent in the firm, too, from that standpoint. We took care of the workings of it, but he was a strong figure in developing our image initially and in public relations types of things that we tried to do to get our name in front of the types of people who needed our services. He was, you know, national president of the American Water Works Association, and active in several of the engineering societies, and he enjoyed those types of things.

JL: But apparently he was domineering and contradictory and seemingly insensitive. Yet you, Howland, Hayes, Roderick, and Rice all knew him pretty well, and were nevertheless willing to put up with the problems and inconsistencies?

HC: (chuckles) Sometimes it would be pretty irritating and at times we had some pretty hot arguments, but I guess it goes back to the same concept we all had, and that was we had to hold the thing together, and somehow compromise, or work out, or solve a problem of difference between us, so we could keep on going. If we always let those things get in the way, we never could operate efficiently.

JL: So many businesses, and so many partnerships do let such things get in the way.

HC: Yeah, it's perhaps surprising that we kept the four or five, six of us kept together as well as we did. It was usually a willingness on the part of all of us to try to work out a mutually acceptable solution. Sometimes that didn't work with Fred, and once in a while we would have to say, "No, Fred, we're not going to do it that way". Generally if it had been discussed long enough he would accept that.

JL: Who worked best with him?

HC: Burke, probably. And Jim and I next, I guess. The reason that it might have been a little harder for Jim and I was we were either managing, or president, or something, and had to make these decisions. Burke wasn't quite in that position so he didn't get into as many confrontations. You mentioned that Fred was good at making presentations.

JL: Are there any presentations that stand out in your mind as being outstanding?

HC: I can think of a couple of papers that he gave at American Water Works Association meetings and the American Society of Civil Engineers meetings that were well done. I don't specifically remember what they were now. And on presentations to clients, regarding our capability and this type of thing, he would do very well in introducing the general subject and discussing the broad scope or approach to be used; then we worked with him as a team and presented other parts of the thing. As I mentioned here before, he had a good voice, and a stage presence and a sense of the dramatic if you want to call it that that made his presentations quite effective, I thought.

JL: So he gave the introduction and the rest of you filled in behind?

HC: Sometimes.

JL: Even though he wasn't involved in the particular project?

HC: Well, this was usually in an effort to make a sales pitch to the client.

JL: Oh, before you have the project?

HC: To get hired. Seldom did he participate in the presentation of the results except on something where we needed his particular expertise, like an elaborate treatment process or something.

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: Yeah

HC: Tell me, who worked better with who.

JL: 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: Can you talk about his personality and how he fit with the others?

HC: Burke had a pleasant, easy-going personality, and normally was not argumentative, particularly. Once in a while he'd get a particular thing that he felt strongly about and would make a strong argument for it; but he was generally willing to compromise, and did a lot to help us keep the group on a relatively even keel, and not get all split off over arguments.

JL: How did he do that?

HC: Just by a calmness, and a careful analysis of the problem, and a willingness to listen to the other side.

JL: He was in charge of the electrical aspects of the engineering. Can you talk about how that aspect was developed by him?

HC: Well, I mentioned that he was responsible for getting us started in the electrical power work with the Eugene Water and Electric Board. He generally kept contact with most of the electrical utilities in Oregon, then later in the Northwest, and on beyond that nationwide. He was well respected in the electrical engineering field, is still well-known and looked up to by a lot of the electrical engineers, particularly around the Northwest. Burke could make an excellent, dignified, but practical impression. He was not as aggressive as, for instance, Archie or Ralph and perhaps I was; but at the same time, he kind of stuck with things and carried them through pretty well.

JL: You mean aggressive in getting projects?

HC: Yes. And, you know, the pushing things through to completion. Burke made a real contribution. Some of us were discouraged at times because of his liking for experimental and investigative type engineering work, and sometimes he would wander off on one of those tracks rather than sticking with the project he was trying to finish. That, at times, would get a little frustrating; but at the same time we needed somebody with that kind of analytical ability who could kind of stand back and look at the whole picture, and come up with the suggestions or ideas or solutions that may have been needed.

JL: Would that get the firm in trouble, his coming up with experimental engineering work?

HC: No, I don't think it ever did. Burke was pretty sound and always did things after discussing them with the rest of us. I don't remember any times when we got in serious trouble.

JL: I was referring to, CH2M HILL putting together a pamphlet proposing some bunkers along the coast, from an interview you did with a fellow named Hilton, and talking about proposing projects to the clients.

HC: I think that's a pump storage project in Coos Bay.

JL: You didn't name the project specifically.

HC: I wouldn't say that really got us in trouble. Some of our competitors complained that we were doing free engineering because we put together the pamphlet and some pictures, and a description of this idea. In today's time nobody would even think about worrying about that thing, but at that time, our competition was sensitive to that kind of thing.

JL: Who was the one that proposed some basketball machine?

HC: Oh, (chuckle) well, that was Slats Gill. What he was looking for was a machine that would retrieve the basketball and give it back to the guy who was taking practice shots. I guess we built one once, or Slats did, and we were talking about the possibility of going into the development of this because Slats says, "well, hell, I can sell that to several hundred universities and all kinds of high schools."

JL: Who did he sell it to in the firm?

HC: I don't know, I guess it was probably Burke; but I think the reason for that was that Burke's responsibility at the time was what we had organized as a general services company which was taking these kinds of ideas. We spent some time looking at it, but I don't remember that being any particular matter of getting us in trouble. I'm not even sure that Burke didn't eventually say "look, that thing just doesn't have the market potential" we now call it, "that it should have," and it kind of petered out. At one time, we used to depend on Burke to look at these kind of ideas that come in. (chuckle) Somebody was always coming in with an idea that could make them a fortune, you know. Even one guy used to come in and talk to one or the other of us about a perpetual motion machine he had invented, and he wanted us to build it. (chuckle) You know, people are always coming up with the thought that there is some way to make a machine that will keep running; you don't have to constantly turn. You know, you get close to it with some clocks, one thing or other. The energy requirements are low and you can wind the spring for a long time, but they still require energy.

JL: You weren't convinced?

HC: (chuckle) No. Hardly, but that's a far out example. But there were people who came in often with some kind of a machine to do something, and this person convinced one of us that it might have some merit, why we'd get Burke to dig into it. That was part of his responsibility as director of this company which we used at that time to develop new ideas. And then, you have probably learned, we did develop half a dozen of them. Some turned out better than others.

JL: Why would people come to you, to CH2M?

HC: Because we were engineers.

JL: I know, but weren't you mostly requested to go out and consult on particular projects, not have people bring projects to you to react to them?

HC: No. Sometimes people were looking for an engineer, I guess. I don't know how they would find us. Look it up in the phone book, or somebody would tell them to come see us. Even still we have people just walk in the door and want some help on something.

JL: I understand that part, but I guess I don't understand....

HC: (chuckles) Well, you know, people get an idea and they are always out looking for somebody to do two things: one, to work out the engineering or the details of it so it will work practically, and the other, to bankroll it. You know, a lot of the time they said, "Well I'll give you half the profits on this after the costs are paid if you will develop it for me." Well, (chuckles) in our position, particularly in the early days, we couldn't afford that, because we had to get paid for the hours we spent, and if we weren't receiving payment for most of the hours that we worked, we hadn't enough money to live on. So we tried to keep the charitable contributions as we used to say, to a minimum; but, in the process all of us have gotten involved in things that didn't pan out.

JL: Was Burke responsible for bringing H. Zinder and Associates into the firm? I know you were involved, but weren't the electrical groups also involved?

HC: Yes. They were primarily electrical consultants in the utility field. They did not design specific facilities, like a substation. They worked on the general aspects of electric power. Mostly hydropower. Back in the days when Eisenhower became president, he changed the Pacific Northwest public power operations from what up to that time had been a government financed 100 percent arrangement, to what in those days was called a partnership arrangement in which the government would put up part of the money and the individual utilities would put up the rest of it. As a result of that, Zinder became quite prominent in development of some of the big power plants on Columbia and the Snake River. They were affiliated with a Washington D.C. based group whose interests were somewhat different. They had an economist and they had some good electric rate and electric-power system study people, and I think the first approach, as far as Zinder was concerned, was made to Burke. Sol Schultz, who was running the Seattle operations for Zinder and was essentially the one who started that organization, spoke to Burke about it. I was in Seattle at the time, running the Seattle office, so I took over the negotiations from there, worked the deal out with with Sol Schultz and Hershal Jones and Hal Moser and (pause) two, three others. Sally Ruggles, for example, was their bookkeeper and secretary. She still works for the firm. She's the administrative manager for the San Francisco office.

JL: So Zinder approached Burke Hayes about joining with this firm?

HC: Yeah.

JL: By the way, this is probably a naive question, but, your firm is in Bellevue, isn't it? It's not in Seattle. Is there a reason why it's not in Seattle?

HC: (Chuckle) Well, we started out in Seattle. We had an office in downtown Seattle in the Logan Building at (pause) can't remember; it's a block from the Olympic Hotel; and we were there until 1969 or 1970. We needed more space; we couldn't find it there in that building; it was difficult all around Seattle; that was before they had started to build most of those big office buildings down there. And at that time, I was no longer managing the Seattle office; I was doing what was called the engineering production study. Jim Poirot couldn't find any other solution, and a canvas of the employees indicated that they would all like to live in Bellevue, and so eventually we found this space over there which is more economical. Some of us were concerned, including me, that when you moved out of the big city and couldn't say you came from Seattle, that people would not recognize you as a major operation, and that big City of Seattle wouldn't want to hire us because we weren't operating within the city limits. I would say that in general, that that concern didn't pan out to be that important. We might have lost a little, and we still call it the Seattle office even though its address is Bellevue. We do that a lot. The Denver office is not really in Denver; its in Littleton, but the post office box address is Denver. (Chuckle)

JL: What would you have done if you had been in Seattle still?

HC: I would probably have stayed in Seattle.

JL: Just found some place and paid the higher price?

HC: I don't know how I would have done it, but I wouldn't have considered as strongly as Jim did, the possibility of going to Bellevue.

JL: Do you want to say anything else about Burke Hayes? Are you pretty satisfied with what we've got?

HC: (Pause) Well, you know, he was for a long time on the Oregon Board of Engineering Examiners and made a good contribution there. That's a kind of ornery type of job and it doesn't pay anything, but I think the firm and Burke contributed a lot in that aspect of the things. I guess in a way I always wished that Burke had been more aggressive in respect to developing work and moving us into the major aspects of the power industry. But you kind of had to live with Burke as an individual-with his approach and admittedly he didn't have very much to sell there because we didn't have a strong power- or electrical-oriented group at that time.

JL: How could he have developed more work in the power industry?

HC: Oh, in regular attendance at meetings of the various organizations that represent the power industry of the Public Power Association and the National Electric Board and the engineering societies, whole series of other things. Part of what we did in the water and waste field was developed through a consistent and aggressive attendance at all of the Water Works and Sewage Works and related organization functions, and taking part in the activities, being on committees, being the president of local sections, or something like this, all of which gave you an opportunity to meet potential clients and learn about possible projects and develop them. Burke did some of that, but he got a little discouraged with it because he said those things were closed shops and they are run by other people. Well, when we got Sol Schultz and Hershal Jones and Hal Moser on board [from Zinder and Associates], they were already actively participating in those things, and continued to do so, and we've done better since.

JL: Couldn't he have sent somebody else in his place, or do you feel that he was the only one that could have really make the contacts?

HC: Well, I think he did send somebody else. I think Dick Nichols went to those things pretty religiously, but Dick was not the promoter type I guess is all you could say. And to some extent, I guess Burke is not.

JL: I am sure all of you had shortcomings that the others recognized. Was there anything like an open forum where you could give criticisms and suggestions to one another?

HC: I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.

JL: You said that you didn't feel that he was aggressive enough in acquiring more projects or clients in the electrical field. Was there an open situation in the firm, among the principals, so that you could feel comfortable in giving criticism or making suggestions to another. Did you have that kind of a relationship?

HC: I think I talked to him about it and his answer was, "be that as it may, that thing is a closed shop, and I don't know how to get in there." He had a little harder time than the rest of us. You see, about the time we started this, Fred Merryfield was the power in the water and wastewater field. He had been president and long time secretary of the Pacific Northwest section of the American Water Works Association, and later on became national president. He was well known in the Sewage Works Association, and from that acquaintance would get Archie and I and Ralph to give papers, and get on the programs, and do all of this kind of stuff, which helped. Burke didn't have anybody to help him do that kind of thing, or give him the opportunity. So I don't know, maybe I was expecting too much. Probably was to some extent.

JL: I'm just asking what kind relationship…

HC: Yeah. We talked about it. And I would say, "Burke, you ought to go to the Pacific Northwest Public Power Association meeting." Well, he didn't so as much as I think he could have.

JL: On page 43, I don’t think that’s your handwriting that must be your wife, I think I’ll leave that out.

HC: That’s alright.

JL: On page 48 you mention Ralph Roderick and…

HC: Yes, she was the head secretary. She was in charge of what we then would have called the typing pool.

JL: Do you remember the discussion about hiring Roderick?

HC: Not specifically. That was only 37 or 38 years ago.

JL: I know, I have a hard time remembering what happened last week.

HC: 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: Yeah. 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, Yeah. 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: Yeah. We thought we did.

JL: 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 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, yeah. 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?

As I remember from Rice the first CH2M contact was when Rice bumped into another fellow he knew in Brookings. This fellow worked for Clair Hill. Clair Hill was there and that was the first initial contact. I don't remember if they had any business dealings with him then, though. I don't know about that.

JL: So he was innovative then?

HC: 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) Yeah. 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: Yeah, 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).

JL: I don't know a great deal about Unitarians, but the people I know at the Fellowship their philosophy seems very liberal. 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: Yeah. 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.

JL: I was real curious because I guess when I first started this project and the research I did in the archives and from what I knew about you I probably just assumed that you were all Christian in fact that was a large part of your philosophy and that’s why you got along so well, so I was rather surprised when I saw this -

HC: You don’t consider the Unitarians to be Christian?

JL: No, many people do not. I guess my definition of Christian is believing Christ to be the son of God.

HC: If that’s your definition then I’m not a Christian either.

JL: That’s pretty basic to the Christian faith. It’s not my place to be discussing this. I think that people would disagree with that.

HC: Sure. All the Baptists and most of the Presbyterians would.

JL: I don’t know that much about it but there are Unitarians who are a complete different religion - agnostic, atheist, that sort of thing.

HC: Well it wasn’t like that when we did it.

JL: Well of course each congregation differs, and I of course don’t know - you don’t go to the Unitarian fellowship anymore?

HC: No. That was before we went to Seattle. I don’t remember what we did after we went to Seattle. We sent our daughter Joanna to the young life group up there, and she got religion pretty strong at one time for a few months.

JL: Was that a concern with her parents?

HC: Some, I don’t remember too much about it. I thought it was a little bit far out. She outgrew it I guess. We didn’t try to talk her out of it.

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: Yeah. 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.

JL: That would be about one-third of the staff, if the national statistics are accurate, and if they are typical Americans. Was that point important to Jim Howland?

HC: Oh I think it is. Yeah.

JL: 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. Yeah. 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, its 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.

JL: 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…

HC: Ostentation and...

JL: Yeah, 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, yeah.

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

HC: Yeah, 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 an 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: Yeah. 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 huh.

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 any more, 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: Yeah. 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. Yeah.

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 years 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, yeah. 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? Coaligna?

HC: No, we were coming back from Arizona and we went within five miles of that town on 1-5 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, yeah. 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: 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, yeah. 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: Yeah, 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 man ager 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.

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: Would you discuss problems from the firm with your wife?

HC: To some extent. After she gets bored with them, why I’d stop doing that as much. Then after a while a problem sounds like they are all the same, and I guess they are really.

JL: You are saying that your wife was a support to you through the years?

HC: Yeah.

JL: A wife of a principal has to be pretty understanding.

HC: Yeah. Yeah, there have been articles about that and apparently a lot of the wives of top executives, a lot topper than I am, have had difficult problems because of single mindedness, that they consider neglect, and that is probably what it is.

JL: Knowing the national statistics on divorce, it's surprising that out of six individuals, and Clair Hill, none of you have been divorced.

HC: Yeah. If we were from the current generation, yours for example, that might not be true. We were raised with the fact that a marriage was for life and that's the way you did it, and we have somehow adjusted to whatever the difficulties were.

JL: That says a lot for the wives.

HC: It was not easy for them. They sure had problems I can bet, lonesome times, and a lot of neglect.

JL: How difficult has it been for your wife to adjust to your being around the house so much now?

HC: It's kind of difficult; part of the difficulty is me. I have worked so long, so much all my life, that I don't sit around and do nothing very readily. I am sure I am irritating at home and I get short-tempered sometimes; and that's why I am trying to keep busy on this other stuff and maybe gradually that will work better, but I am kind of a problem now. A problem to myself too.

JL: What do you do about that problem?

HC: Oh, I get what would be the term-oh, bored, restless, unmotivated and so then I want to go out and do something.

JL: However, it sounds as if you have a lot of opportunities to do things?

HC: Yeah, that's the fortunate part of the thing so far. Eventually they will get tired of having me sticking my nose in their business maybe, but they don't seem to yet.

JL: Speaking of retirement, Ralph Roderick retired in 1970 and is he the only one of the original group that hasn't been around the firm after his retirement?

HC: Well, he did some things after he retired. I think he was already retired as far as being a stockholder, when he went to San Francisco. He started up an office in San Francisco for us, you know, in 1970 or 1971, and he worked on several other things for a while. I can remember times when I used to say, "Ralph will you take this job on;" and he'd look at it and say, "How long is it going to take;" and I said "Oh, you got two or three weeks work now but you're going to have to watch it for the next three months or somethin;" "Naw," he says, "That's too long. I don't want to commit myself for anything that long." Gradually why, I guess we quit asking him cause he really didn't want to do it. Or at least that's the impression I got; now maybe-I don't know what he would say about that. But Burke and Jim and I and Archie too, are still at it. Archie's got a full-time job playing with that farm out there. Sometimes he's kind of hard to get to do things, but I notice he's going up to Portland Thursday to work out a contract on something that we are fussing with, and when you get any little job that kind of interests him he'll do it.

JL: Well, I can imagine it would be difficult to leave something that you started, nurtured and watched come to fruition?

HC: Yeah, but you have got to be awful careful about sitting around there and trying to wet nurse the thing after you've left and aren't really involved in it, or the first thing you know you'll take away the incentive for the guys [whose] job is to make it work now.

JL: Well, you are aware of that so you will be careful.

HC: Try to be.

JL: Earlier you named the people, the men that were involved in the selection for President and you left out the name Harlan Moyer. Was his name supposed to be included?

HC: Might check with Jim. At that time, you see, Clair Hill was still on the Board as well as Harlan, and Clair was just retiring and Harlan was going to take over as manager of Redding; and I think there may have been an assumption at that time that Harlan really shouldn't be considered for President because he had a very important job he had to do in Redding; because I know that Harlan was in on the final selection.

JL: But not on the initial selection, okay. Maybe this is a good place to stop. You said that the expansion into Florida was probably not the best of decisions. Maybe you could make a comment about that before we end here.

HC: Is that all I said? As a result of their purchase by Hercules, Black, Crowe and Eidness was not in as good financial shape as we had thought at the time we made the merger. For example, we got badly hurt by a coastal boundary survey that they had contracted for and even though Hercules paid a part of the loss on the project, it went on for a long time, we lost a lot of money on it. That was about at the time the recession, and the real estate collapse and one thing and another had hit Florida and so there wasn't a market for services that the organization had been built for, so we have had a long series of expensive losses by that organization or group until just lately.

JL: So it hasn't panned out?

HC: It's hard to tell now because it's integrated with the rest of the whole organization, and a lot of the work we are doing might not have been possible if it hadn't been for having the strong eastern representative. So I don't know that you can say that it hadn't panned out. It has been a costly investment, and it's going to take it a while before it pays out completely.

JL: You also said the expansion into Alaska was not a positive move.

HC: We had the same kind of troubles trying to make Alaska profitable. I'm not familiar with how it has developed in the last few years but I think it's probably doing better now, or I hope it is. Once you're in a position like that it's probably a mistake to close it out. Alaska is a growing community and if you can weather the rough spots you're in a position to take advantage of what, for our kind of services, is a growing operation; and that's what we live on is growth and development. So I guess, yeah I think we could have done it with a lot less loss than we have but, that's all over the dam now.

JL: Along that same line, talking about growth and development, can you discuss the engineers' responsibility for the public's interest? Do they have a responsibility? In situations where it's a question of engineering feasibility versus the public interest, what is CH2M's policy?

HC: I think the engineer has a very definite responsibility to the public, and I don't believe that he should make any engineering decisions that are going to be detrimental to the public's interest. You can look at that in a lot of different ways. There has been a lot of discussion in the engineering literature and there are some people who are working on engineering ethics as such, and are looking at things like-what's it called-whistle blowing by engineers in an organization who disagree with what the management [says] , or [with] an engineering decision, and have either gone to the press or gone to the societies or something else to complain about this. The failure of the doors on the DC-10 is an example, if you want to, you can go back and read quite a bit of literature on that thing, in which some of the engineers involved in that design felt it was wrong and finally said so; and there were some failures as a result of that door coming open which caused some airplane crashes. There have been quite a few other instances. I don't pass judgment on those but I hope that our people recognize that no matter what the client says or their boss says, if they are convinced that some things are going to be a serious detriment to the public, they ought to say so.

JL: You have been talking about cases where physical safety was involved, but what about the engineer's responsibility in cases where the detrimental effects are not so obvious, as in land-use planning, the building of dams, the environmental impacts and so on-when it's a case of the environmentalist versus the engineer. Maybe it's evident especially in the foreign, say for instance down in Latin America if a client wants you to build something that will detrimentally effect the culture of those people. Does the engineer have a responsibility to that culture that is beyond the economics and client? What do you do in those kind of situations? There is a lot of controversies you can mention like dam building.

HC: Well, I don't think it's the engineer's responsibility to set himself up as the judge of social justice, which is what you are talking about isn't it? I think that's the politicians responsibility or the elected representatives of the people's responsibility. I don't think it's the engineers responsibility.

JL: You mean in the case of the impact on the culture?

HC: Yeah.

JL: What about it?

HC: I don't know what you're talking about, unless you mean going down and destroying a pueblo civilization, or-

JL: Actually I'm talking about an article that was written by Frank Schaumburg.

HC: Yeah.

JL: He was in South America, or a Central American country, where he had gone at the request of the government. He got interested in the people and he decided that the projected transportation system was just not in the public interest-its objectives were at variance to the culture of the people involved. I don't know the end result there, but I wanted you to give your opinion about the responsibility of the engineer-for example, in situations in this country, such as dams and their effect on fish.

HC: You mean like the-what's that fish that they were worrying about over in Kentucky?

JL: The snail darter?

HC: Some kind of darters. I'm not a believer in the preservation of this planet, forever, as it is or was originally, because it never was original. I don't feel particularly concerned about the use of natural resources for the benefit of man. Now you say an awful lot when you make that statement, but I have trouble agreeing with the wilderness addicts who want to preserve it when people are starving, and out of water, with no money to observe the wilderness anyway. I think there has to be a compromise. I'm not for going out and destroying the wilderness or anything else, but I don't believe the all-or-nothing approach, which the Sierra Club and some of those people advocate, is the right solution either. And you know, species have been becoming extinct for centuries; there are millions of them that we no longer know about, and I don't get overly concerned about the snail darter, or some of the species of rare plants that they say are going to be destroyed. I think somebody has got to put a little practical balance in this thing, and therefore if you can show a valid benefit to the people or the population in general, I think you can do some things that are not perfect as far as preserving the environment is concerned.

JL: So you don't consider that a responsibility of the engineer?

HC: I don't really think that that's an engineer's responsibility, because I don't think he's trained, educated, or has the approach to properly solve the problem. I recognize what Frank is talking about, but I can also show you a paper in which he says that people that made the people in Duluth install plants to eliminate the asbestos are foolish. That it wasn't necessary; it's not hurting anybody.

JL: Has recognition of this situation been dealt with at CH2M HILL? Has it been brought up or discussed, or does it have any effect on the operation of the firm?

HC: Sure, yeah we do so-called environmental impact statements quite a bit, and we're faced with those kinds of problems. We don't have to do it. We can tell somebody else to do it.

JL: Oh, I see, within house you write the statements?

HC: Well, it is not very often that making an environmental impact study is necessary in order to get the job. We think we can do a fairly reasonable job at it if we call in the outside people who have the disinterested or the different viewpoint than we do. I guess I don't feel that it's the engineers mission to preserve the world, according to whoever's standard: the private entrepreneurs, the dictatorial governments, the nature lovers, or anybody else.

JL: You would say that when safety was involved it certainly is a responsibility of the engineer?

HC: Yeah I believe that.

JL: But when it comes to land-planning or natural resource planning the engineer really has no responsibility for the public?

HC: Yeah, well it doesn't seem to me that an engineer is educated or trained to make these kind of decisions. Those are social-benefit type decisions and they ought to be made by the people that are going to be affected by it, not by some engineer. I know what Franks' talking about, too. In the early days of foreign aid the American people went over and they built water systems with indoor plumbing in these primitive communities. In Africa, they went in and put in indoor plumbing and everything, and people didn't know how to use them. They used the toilets for storage and they still went out to the village pump to get their water, and they didn't have the know-how to make the system work even if they used it. This is what Frank is talking about. They will put in this fancy transportation system and, probably, because of the culture there, it will never be used. I think he [the engineer] has an obligation to call that to somebody's attention, but I don't think it is up to him to make that decision. I know he may have told the people that hired him that he didn't think it would work for these reasons, and he wasn't interested in working on the project, but he didn't decide not to do it. Those are both nice statements; and what they are trying to do is put the responsibility off on the engineer to solve those problems, and they are not engineering problems. Those things you're talking about are social problems.

JL: Is the engineer a pawn of the client then? You're saying he shouldn't have that kind of decision placed on him.

HC: I don't think it's his responsibility and I don't think he's qualified to make that decision. You really think he is? He's going to make it on the basis of what his basic philosophy is, and if his is all for clean water and air and to hell with the downtrodden who need the food and the water, then that's the way he'll make it. If he's the other way around, he may make it different. I don't think that's his position [his responsibility]. I think that's the [responsibility of the] representative of the public to make that decision someway. My personal opinion is that people are trying to blame decisions on engineers that are not properly theirs. The reason they are doing it is because engineers are making the decisions the wrong way according to them. I guess you're always going to have a problem with engineers in general who don't believe in maintaining the status quo at the medieval level, because engineers are trained, almost from birth to build things and to improve things. And they are always going to try and do it. I think they have an obligation to describe the results of their improvement.

JL: But no obligation to not do it or protest unless its on an individual level. Like the one about the air pollution.

HC: It seems to me that's preposterous.

JL: It's something to think about I guess. The engineering projects can make changes that dramatically affect the society.

HC: Dramatically? Well the automobile did, yeah.

JL: Well, I mean there's an engineer behind every structure that is built, and every consequent change that is made in society.

HC: Yeah, but he doesn't furnish the money. Society does.

JL: That's true. I'd like to change the subject. I have talked to all five of you and I have observed that despite your being so very capable and intelligent and successful at what you do, you all seem pretty unpretentious and humble. It seems that that is uncharacteristic of people in your position. Can you make a comment about why you five have this humility?

HC: No. I guess that's the way we were. Are you sure that people in these positions aren't mostly that way? Have you ever interviewed the president of IBM?

JL: No, I haven't, but I guess the stereotype of people in such positions is that, as you were saying earlier, they drive Cadillacs and have their girl Friday and are stuck on themselves; and seemingly, that's not the way you are.

HC: That's right. I guess from that standpoint, you're right. What are you asking me? Why are we that way?

JL: Yes, can you make a comment about that, I mean is there some reason you can pinpoint or do you even agree?

HC: Well, one of the reasons I guess is that the five of us, there were six of us, are all more or less equals and if anybody tried to begin to put on the dog, or be a big shot or something the rest of us had a readily available [means] to bring him down to earth again, so nobody ever really had a chance to be that big shot.

JL: Was anybody inclined that way though?

HC: No I don't think so. However you put anyone of us in some other organization, IBM or Standard Oil or what not, and we got up to being the president or the executive or something, because of the tradition and the background through which we developed we might now be doing all these kind of perks and this kind of stuff.

JL: So you think it's due to the circumstance that you're...

HC: Well, I don't know. You know if you suddenly took charge of a company that had established all these perks and a whole bunch of people that are working for you have all got their part of those kinds of things, you probably wouldn't be able to change it very much. I don't know. I think it is because we started out together as a kind of cooperative sort of venture-what Archie sometimes calls a commune not a business-in which we shared responsibilities, and really never allowed anybody to become the big king.

JL: I guess I was thinking it was because you came out of the Depression or the world war or your upbringing.

HC: All of us were products of the Depression and from that standpoint we appreciated security I suppose. I don't think that really affected that humility kind of thing you're talking about. I guess you kind of had to be that way to get along, otherwise you might get teased to death about being the hotshot or something.

JL: It's pretty amazing that you're still so compatible.

HC: Well, if anybody had tried to be that [the hotshot] the partnership would have disintegrated. Often they do.