No one else called it the coffin house but me. We sold caskets, but most of the people couldn't afford the cost of a casket. Coffins were made of wood, but the caskets were made out of ceramic and I don't know what all.

[Draws diagram of Kensett] Here was the bank, and here was the store back over here. Daddy owned all of this in here. Half of this block here. He built the telephone, the hotel and the so forth along here. Back here was the Methodist Church. Granddaddy Fondren gave this land to the Methodist Church. That's where the post office is now. Now the coffin house was in here - the livery stables were here.

The coffin house was a solid building. The joists and everything were hewed - made by hand. The foundation of the house was perfect. The walls were sturdy, and had siding. It had a little porch on the front that was roofed over. This was the first place that Daddy bought. It had windows in the front and windows on the side. Well, Daddy had made a deal to buy coffins and caskets from a distributor in Little Rock. The coffins and caskets would come in by railroad into Kensett, and we'd put them in that house. In other words, he made that the funeral home. It had a little office space on the side, and that was Daddy's first office space. I think the building is still there.

I helped take coffins out of the boxcar and put them in the wagon and bring them out and store them in this building. I didn't call it the coffin house back then. But then later we made that a storage area, in back we stored pumpkins, produce, onions - when we'd run out of space in the store. The front part was still the display of coffins. The coffins came in another box, a well-made box. They'd use the box to put in the grave sites, and then the coffin was put into that.

When somebody died, Daddy would take me to help him. We had to take the coffin out of the shipping box to put the fixtures on the coffin. And as a boy, I helped Daddy do that. I would hold the lamp. You had to put the screws and the handles on and all of that, all the fixtures on the side of the coffin. We didn't have any electricity, but we had lamps that were gasoline, plus kerosene lamps and lanterns. But putting on the fixtures, you had to be able to see because it wasn't marked where the handles go. So Daddy had to mark about where the handles went and then he would use a hand drill to drill through for the screws. I would tighten up the screws, attach the handles.

We did this off and on for about a couple of years. As time went along, he got away from that business. We did away with the coffins and caskets.

For funerals, we had a team-drawn hearse and then we had a regular automotive hearse too. Daddy always had a good team of white horses. I would handle the team of horses. I'd have a reliable black person with me and Daddy would be behind with the other people in the surrey. That's the way we took people to the graveyard for burials in Kensett, Arkansas. So I went to many funerals as a boy. Witnessed many a funeral. My first girlfriend died. She got a whipping in school and about ten days later she died. Beth. A tragedy. I think I told you about that. She and Fern Cowan were great friends. Fern's father owned the big hotel and Beth's father and mother owned the other big hotel across the DK&S. There was quite a big hotel business in town. Beth and Fern and I were the same age, and we went through all the grades together in school. And as we were growing up, we became pretty close. So that was quite a tragedy.

And one of Bill's sisters died early in life. She was such a beautiful girl. Everyone in town cried over Tolly's death. I can't remember what the cause was, typhoid perhaps. Some of the diseases then, you could die pretty early in life. Tolly was about Merle and Sybil's age, you see. And that was a tragedy.

Many times, death and all those funerals affected me, when I'd start to think back on them. But I finally shook it off. Well, when I got married to your mother, that's when I shook off all that sad memory. It disappeared. That was a closed chapter in my life.

We lived in that hotel that Daddy built. It was two-story. I don't know how it was arranged. We had a telephone exchange in one part of that place and it was kind of set back from the store buildings. Any kind of a justice of the peace trial, civil trial, was held in my Daddy's office. And that's the way he became acquainted with so many politicians, you see. Some of Daddy's boyhood friends became quite prosperous in Little Rock too. One had the Cadillac agency - Bob Cook. They were good friends with Mother and Daddy. And quite often they would go down to Little Rock and have dinner with the Cooks. They had grown up together as young men. I had met the man - he was quite likable.

Daddy knew a lot of the lawyers down in Little Rock. He knew all the people in the retail and the wholesale business in Little Rock. So naturally it kind of grew from all this business. They had a Justice of the Peace. The senior Williams was the Justice of the Peace for years. Not worth a damn. They had a court. And also the mayor of the town would hold court in Daddy's business. There was the dry goods part of the business. In back was where Daddy's desk was. "The Desk." As a kid, I'd bother my Daddy at the office, to see what he was doing. I was always in the office, getting in the way. When I was a boy I watched this doctor kill this guy in my Daddy's office. And they laid him out in our dining room, which was adjacent to Daddy's office. The kitchen and so forth was back there, the telephone. They put two chairs together and put a plank on top and laid him out there.

The doctor ran over and killed one of this farmer's prize pigs. The doctor wanted to settle with him but the man was so outraged by it. And the doctor wouldn't give him the amount he wanted. So it came to court. This farmer was kind of an oddball among the farmers in the area. For example, he raised goats. Nobody raised goats in Kensett. Nobody raised goats. He gave all the neighbor farmers trouble - it seemed like that was the general gossip that I overheard. I delivered groceries for many a year, and as I was delivering groceries, some of the people on the farms down there anywhere from two to three to four miles away, many times they'd get to talking about Dr. Harrison killing this guy, you see. And the goats survived, and some of the farmers, they went into the goat business.

It was a well publicized incident that happened. This was a Justice of the Peace trial. Daddy was not the Justice of the Peace; he wasn't even the Mayor at that particular time. But the trials were held in his office and the Justice of the Peace occupied my Daddy's chair at the desk.

Dr. Harrison was a well known man in town. The women just loved him. So did my father. He helped bring Dr. Harrison out of Kansas City. He had his office out at Donafan. He was mainly the doctor for the mill, the Donafan Lumber Company. Due to the owners of the mill, Daddy and a few influential people got the first doctor to come and set up practice in Kensett. Dr. Harrison did several successful surgeries on my mother, which was rare for the time. Women died back then, but he saved my mother. So everyone talked about how wonderful Dr. Harrison was. He was a young surgeon as well as doctor. So he was well-liked by all the people in Donafan, Kensett, Searcy, all around. He was the first to have an automobile, a Maxwell. He rented horses from Daddy. I would do a lot of errands for him. Later on, he set up a temporary office in the hotel, on the second floor. He brought in another doctor and gave him that office in our hotel, and he moved down the street and had an office there. So the two of them had offices in Kensett. Threlkill was his name. He was crazy about my Daddy and Mother. Eventually Dr. Harrison moved over to Searcy and then he built the first hospital in Searcy. He brought in the doctor that Fern married; they were partners together in this hospital. Eventually, Dr. Harrison retired.

Well, the trial was under way - proceeding in the proper manner. Somewhere in the middle of the trial, the farmer disagreed. Some way word had gotten around town that he was going to kill Dr. Harrison. He had made threats. The farmer came to town in his overalls, with a pistol underneath the bib. And the doctor came to court with a pistol too. The farmer got up out of his chair and turned to Dr. Harrison and pulled the gun out. I was just a kid, sitting up there on the feed sacks. All I remember was "Bang, bang." Of course, the story was retold many times. But as the guy was pulling out his gun, Dr. Harrison beat him to the draw. Dr. Harrison put a shot right through his head. Killed him - bang - just like that.

It was self-defense, but they had to go to trial. They had to put Dr. Harrison in jail overnight in Searcy. Oh, White County just raised hell - putting Dr. Harrison in jail, self-defense - oh, the men and women just raised hell. They threatened to go over and break him out of jail.

Dr. Harrison wound up being one the best surgeons in the entire southwest. He later became one of the chief surgeons for Missouri Pacific Railroad Lines, which was a big job in Little Rock. Then during the war, WWI, he went into the Army as a doctor.

So it was the farmer that was killed and laid out in our dining room. They put nickels on his eyes. And I took one of the nickels off his eyes, and the maid said, "Miz Fondren, that boy is getting nickels off that dead man's eyes!" That was a story that was told quite a bit in town.

My grandfather had a livery business in Searcy. He had the biggest livery business in the county. About a hundred head of horse were kept there. The main building that housed the horses was quite long, about a hundred and fifty feet long, I guess. Behind that he owned the pasture land.

My mother's step-mother had a sister that lived in Searcy, and she never did marry. And her brother, after his marriage, came and they both lived together. He was hired by my grandfather. He was a Doneghy. He later moved to California. Well, anytime I wanted to hear stories about my grandfather and step-grandmother, I'd go see Uncle Nunk. I don't remember his real name, but everybody in Searcy called him Nunk. Nunk was known quite a bit. He drove the stage line in the early days from Heber Springs to Searcy. That's about a far as my grandfather went with his stables. Another stage line took off from Heber and went on to Missouri. This was before the railroad was built. Freight, mail, passengers. They had the stage coach and then later on the surrey type. It was more open, but you had curtains that you could drop down. They would roll up and you could snap them.

My Uncle Doneghy was in the construction business in Little Rock. He was a builder and he became quite prosperous. He built a quite a bit of the famous Hendrix College. Hendrix was a Methodist college. Galloway was a Methodist college, meaning endowed by the Methodist Church. But Hendrix was the leading college for men and Galloway was the leading one for the women. My uncle Doneghy in Little Rock built the first major buildings at Hendrix College. In the beginning it just ha small frame buildings, then they rebuilt the entire campus, more or less. Doneghy got the contract and he built quite a few of the buildings and classrooms and the dormitories, his construction company did. That's were he first made his big money. Later on, he got into the banking business and then bought some farms. Back in those days when people got some money, they put it into a "good-paying farm."

He gave most of his money away. He returned a lot of his money to Hendrix in the form of an endowment program.

He built a modern office building, the biggest and best office building in Little Rock. That's when I was down in Little Rock. It was a nine-story building, strictly an office building, real plush-like for back in those days. Good electricity, good plumbing, good wiring, modern elevators. Some of the buildings in Little Rock had the old style of elevator but this was modern all the way. That would have been in 1922, because I came back and finished in '23 in Searcy.

A few times Mother and Daddy would go down and have dinner with the Doneghy's. They had a palatial home in Little Rock. You know the first thing people did if they became rich, was they wanted to build a palatial home for the wife and the children. It seems that was part of our history.

Doneghy had a good friend in McGee, Arkansas. And I had never met the man. Daddy would say, during the time I was at the University of Arkansas, "Why don't you go down and talk to Doneghy. Maybe when you get out of school, he could find a job for you." This was during the Depression. But I never did, I never met Doneghy. I never knew him personally although I grew up knowing quite a bit about him.

But I met his friend one time, when I was with the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg. We had a big job and we were quartered out on the river near McGee, Arkansas. I got pretty well acquainted with the business people in McGee, purchasing supplies and repairing the automobiles. Sometimes we worked up and down the river by automobile, sometime we were up and down the river by boat.

This man was quite a friend of Doneghy, and he owned a dealership in McGee. Well, when I first got acquainted with this guy, which was about two years prior to this particular time, I was in charge of the whole outfit and usually I went into town with the steward who was responsible for the meals and such. So we'd go into town to buy food and get repair work done on the automobiles.

So that's when I met this guy in McGee. Well, he was a great friend of Doneghy's. "Oh, he'd come down and we go on deer hunts - we don't call them bear hunts anymore. We don't do much killin', but we go through the motions. He's getting pretty old now, but he's a wonderful man." And after I told him of my connection, he said "You mean to say you never met the man?"

I said, "Well, my mother and father have of course, but I've never met him."

He said, "Well, he's due to come down in a few weeks, so you keep in touch with me. I'll let you know when he comes down. And I'm sure he'll want to see you. He'd be proud to know about you."

This man didn't know my Daddy but he knew some of the men he used to go deer hunting and bear hunting with down to McGee. There's a dismal kind of swamp area down there where they used to hunting, but McGee was the jumping off point.

Well, guess what? Well, the next time I was in town I went to see this fellow. He said, "Well, I'm glad to see you. I was going to call you."

Doneghy was well thought of.

When I first went to Little Rock, I had to go get vaccinated. I came down to live with Lorene and Dean Pittman before school opened, so I could get adjusted to Little Rock and help out. Both Lorene and Dean were working so I sort of baby-sat for Betty Dean, who was still a baby then. I had made the football team and we had two weeks of practice before school opened. I had to get vaccinated even though I had been vaccinated before. I had already had small pox (I survived), so the deal was the shot didn't take, but I had to go through the motions. So Coach Quigley was a great friend of the doctor Smith who was on the top floor of this building, the Doneghy building. Coach insisted we run up the steps. I was huffing and puffing and he's not even out of breath. Coach said, "I thought you were in shape. You look in good shape, but you're sure winded."

So we go in to see Dr. Smith. When he saw that I was from Kensett, he said, "So that's where you're from - that bad ol' railroad town of Kensett?" And of course he knew Dr. Harrison.

Doneghy willed that building to the community college in Little Rock.

(I didn't know you went to high school in Little Rock - how long where you there?)

Until I flunked out.

I had finished my junior year in Searcy, and had talked my mother and daddy into letting me go to down to live with Lorene and go to Little Rock High School to play football. The year before they had won the national championship. They had a well know player named Wykoff who went to Georgia Tech and another who went to Alabama - he was the quarterback. Back in those days they were paying under the table some of these high school players, maybe give them jobs on campus.

Douglas Wykoff made history at Georgia Tech in the Southeastern Conference. Wykoff was the fullback on the team. I made the team as halfback. I saw Douglas Wykoff several times. I saw him down in Little Rock. Later on he became a wrassler. He was a big man.

When I registered, I had given the wrong name, address and telephone of where I was staying with my sister Lorene. I don't know why I did that. But I did. I guess I was afraid I was going to be kicked out

Dean had a good job as a wire chief with AT&T. They rebuilt the telephone system in Little Rock, modernized it. Lorene worked at Aetna Life Insurance Company. They had a maid that helped take care of the baby while they were both working. Well, she wasn't really a baby. I guess she was about two years old at that time.

They would take me to school. I still kept some of my books. So they would let me out on the edge of the campus and when they would pull off, I would head on down to the YMCA about 3 or 4 blocks north and change my clothes at the YMCA. I had a locker there, you see. I'd get in my work clothes and head down to the bridge. Most of the time, I was let out on the grounds about 7:15.

I guess that lasted about 2 weeks before they found me out.

I had already played 2 games and when the first round of examinations came up I didn't do so well.

We had played Pine Bluff.

Across the street from the Printcraft Building was the Ebbitt Hotel, a two story hotel to the west of our office. We used to look out our window and watch all the comings and goings at the hotel - and even look into the windows when the blinds were left open. (Laughter)

The Printcraft Building - we had about 3 or 4 floors in this building. It was designed originally for people in the printing business. This was where our second offices were.

H Street bounded by 10th on one side and 11th on the other. They had a dining room in the Ebbitt Hotel and many times we had our lunch over at the Ebbitt Hotel. We sometimes stayed longer than we should - we'd be talking and then look and see it was one o'clock, two-o'clock coming up. One time we said, "Well, instead of going back to work, why don't we go over to the burleycue?" Magruder was in the crowd, Casper was in the crowd - maybe Brown was too. Ed Fitch was out on job somewhere. Anyhow, we called the office and told them we were taking annual leave. Didn't tell him where we where going, just that we were taking annual leave and doing some "touring of Washington." We didn't dare take off without reporting in, so we reported in. We went down to that burleycue. (Laughter) And then we came back to the office and went back to work.

And one other time, a group of us got together and went to the burleycue.

[What was it like?]

Oh, it was the typical burleycue - vaudeville acts. They always had one guy, a comedian sort of guy, and he would introduce a girl and they would put on a skit. She would come out all dressed and they would get down to her bra and the other, you see. Not like what they do nowadays - even on television! They were burleycue girls and they had a certain routine and they stuck by it. Or so I was told. Nowadays they do all that gyrating and whatnot. But these girls were very nice. Seductive and all of that business, you know, but nice.

For entertainment, there were three theaters in town. Two had vaudeville shows and the third had more theatrical type of productions. It was behind the Mayflower Hotel on E street. That was the main theater and they always put on stage plays. I never went to that one. But I went to the other one. They had vaudeville and stage shows and motion pictures. There was the Earl Theater and Loews on F Street.

We went to theaters in Washington quite often for entertainment. I remember one time going there with Pearle before we were married. Sometimes I would go up to her apartment and get her and bring her in to town. We'd go out to dinner somewhere and then go to the theater. That's when I first found out how quick she was to get up and leave. I could never catch her. (Laughter) She would go up that aisle going out and, boy, I mean she would head out! And I was tagging along behind every time trying to catch her. "Come on, Jimmie! Let's go!" Then I'd take her back to her apartment there on Fort Stevens Drive.

The Printcraft Building was at least five stories high and was designed and built for heavy duty printing and machinery. (Looking at map) Let's see, the streetcar tracks were on 7th then they'd wind up on Georgia Avenue going out to Maryland. Sometimes I'd take the streetcar and get off at New York Avenue then walk. So it was on the south side of H near 8th or 9th? I can't remember.

The main business area was on F Street. Our first office was 13th and E - the front part of the Mayflower was off F Street. The Earl Theater was across the street and it had vaudeville and motion pictures. We were there for several years. But we started getting more people so we needed more space, so they moved us over to the Printcraft Building. There were a number of vacancies in that building when the printing people moved out, so the Government took over three or four floors there in the Printcraft Building. Then from there we moved to Beltsville, at the Agricultural Research Center. That's where we were when you children were growing up.

Softball on the Mall

We had team shirts supplied by commercial people - can't remember who exactly. It was guy who was in the ice business - produced block ice, crushed ice. He supplied hotels and restaurant in the area. He had a couple of plants in the area.

Our team was the Soil Conservation Service, Division of Cartography. We had a softball club as well as a baseball club. And one year we won the department championship. Maybe it was two years.

Our athletic field was on the side of the Reflecting Pool. We'd hit the ball and it would go in the Reflecting Pool and we'd have to go get it. We also played near where the Jefferson Memorial is now. That area was all vacant. It was all surrounded by cherry trees, and when they built the memorial, they had to tear out this line of cherry trees (indicating on map). One afternoon, we came out to play ball, and here were all these women chained around the cherry trees. It was after 5:00, so the contractor had gone. We hadn't heard any news of it even though it was in the papers. We were all surprised to see these women chained to the trees! It took quite a few days to get those women to stop doing that.

We went over and talked to them, kidded them, I guess. Told them we were going to play some softball. I played the infield, but some of the outfielders were getting pretty distracted by the women.

That was somewhere around 1937-8. Maybe '39.

I only had to fire two people in my career - one was in the Vicksburg Engineer District and the other was in the Soil Conservation Service. In both cases, everybody agreed, "Why didn't you fire them months ago?" It so happened that one was pretty capable and the other one was, well, he was ready for confinement.

The guy was hired off of the Civil Service register with top ranking, numerical grade ranking. And he didn't have much experience, but he made a top grade on his Civil Service examination. The guy was supposed to be an experienced surveyor, but he was not. They had a local Civil Service Board in Vicksburg, and I could have gone and looked at his paperwork, but I decided, nah - the less I knew about what he did with Civil Service, the better off I was.

Well, he was going to kill me.

I had done everything I could for him to be successful. He was Chief of Party, which was a responsible job. The first day or two, I went out with him and his crew. I could sense immediately that, uh oh, something's wrong - he's not the man he's supposed to be. But I put up with him for a couple of months. I had him turn in the books every day, and I would go through his notes and could see that several different things were wrong. So I assigned him to a job across the river, and then without him knowing about it, I had one of my reliable crews go back a redo the job. So I had proof, proof, proof. I submitted it all the Vicksburg.

Ordinarily my chief would have come over. We were at Monroe, Louisiana across the river from Vicksburg. It was the tail end of that particular project - I guess we have been there six months or so. I thought that my boss would come over, but he said, "No, you fire him."

So I set the date. I had given him preliminary notice which was customary, and he acted okay. But the guy was partly psycho. Well, I don't know the right phrase, but he was nuts. Well, all of my people were worried about him because he had made threats after I had given him the preliminary notice.

The entire crew knew what was going to happen before it happened. We had rented office space in Monroe in a commercial building and there was a counter separating the front part from the back where we had files. We had instruments, rods, transits, levels, books that were kept up there because we were still operating on the river. I had a desk back of the counter with a short door between.

So the word got around the night before that he had made threats - that he was going to kill me. And Jack Faulkner (he was a relative of the writer, William Faulkner) called me on the phone and said "Jimmie, come over." I was staying in a hotel there in Monroe. He said, "Carter, Gray and I want to talk to you. I'm telling you we're afraid of this guy. We don't know what he's gonna do."

I said, "Well, do you know whether he's got a pistol or not?"

He said, "Yeah, he's got a pistol. And he's also got a big, old switchblade knife."

I said, "Well, what do you think I'm gonna do? Do you think I'm going to back out of it? I'm going to fire him."

He said, "Well, can't you put it off?"

"Oh, I'm not going it put it off. I think I can handle it. I'll talk to him."

So, the next day, I had dispatched the whole crew and called this fellow in to my office. The first thing I know, before I could call him over, here came my entire outfit. About forty people. Well, they all filed in and just stood there, without saying anything. I didn't say a word to them either. I knew what they were up to and I knew they were going to prevent anything from happening.

So I called this fellow up, and my clerk was standing with me. This guy had had his switchblade knife out, cleaning his fingernails. Well, I had my jacket on and I had cut the lining out and I had a pistol in my pocket. I had borrowed Jack's pistol. And when the guy approached the desk, I could see a bulge in his jacket too.

Well, as it turned out, with all the other guys standing there, he didn't pull his pistol. And I wasn't going to pull mine. I was pretty calm. Of course, when it was all over I was shaky, but at the time I was calm.

So I handed the paper to the man and said, "I need your signature right here where the X is." He signed it.

"I need your signature here." He signed it.

Then he said, "Is that all, Jimmie?" And I said, "Yeah, that's all. Here's your voucher check for your salary that's due to you through today." After he looked at it, I said, "Is that about right?"

He said, "Yeah, that's about right."

And I said, "Well, good." Then I said, "Where are you going from here?"

"I'm going back home to Arkansas."

I asked him what town, and he told me. I knew of the town and said, "Well, that's a good place. I didn't know you came from there." And we talked a bit, you know, about Arkansas.

Then he reached forward with his hand and said, "Jimmie, it's been a wonderful experience to have served with you," and shook my hand. So polite and so nice. Then he shook hands with some of the guys as he went out the front door. They couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe it.

After he left Jack was still concerned about what he would do. So Jack sent his crew out and stayed in town, just to see what happens. We thought he might take out to the highway and start walking, since the only way to get up to the north would be to take the bus or to hitchhike up to where he could catch the train. And that's what he did. He checked out of his boarding house and started walking. And Jack trailed him in his car, keeping out of sight. Then a few miles out of town, Jack picked him up and drove him up to Green, Arkansas, where he was able to catch the train. Jack made sure he got his ticket.

And that's the last we heard from him.

What an experience.

We had what was called a stadia board, and it was a board about a foot wide and fifteen feet long. It didn't have any nails on it. There were graduations painted on it just like a survey rod, measured in feet and tenths of a foot, with a diagonal pattern you could read to a hundredth of a foot. They were not easy to handle.

So there was a pile of stadia boards in the bow. The blacks had put some crosswise, misarranged, not piled down flat. They were out there relaxing, having a lot of fun. I was up in the bow house and I came out and saw that junk out there in the bow of the boat. So I hollered down, "Hey, you guys down there! Get all that damn stuff off the front of the boat. Store it alongside back there."

So there were doing that, and one of these strong black guys picked up his stadia board. And it was a little bit muddy on the end of it. His reaction was this: the bow of the boat was about ten feet in width, and we were coming downstream at high speed. He sticks this damn stadia board down in the water to wash it off! Just that quick, it sprung him over into the river and we ran over him just that quick. And it was cold weather. He had on new leather boots, and new clothes, I remember that. And a jacket on. It was cold weather, in February. Well, I hollered to Wilbur, "Stop the engine." And of course we had a bell to ring down to the pilot in the engine room. We stopped the stern wheel. I could hear him bumping coming underneath. Well, immediately, we had one steel hull boat and then we had two other fast boats over the side. They had marine engines inside. We got two boats going. Two guys got in a boat and got the engine started. Of course we had stopped, but we were still floating.

Well, the guy came up. The fellows in the boat went downstream and squared around him. They got close to him, and as one was reaching out ready to grab him, the other guy -- I guess he got excited or something -- and somehow he spurted the engine and went on by him, just when the guy in the boat was ready to grab him. So he circled around and by the time he circled, he had to go downstream of course. And before he got back there, the guy went down for the third time. And he drowned. Just like that.

Oh, my. It all happened so fast. Here I am a young guy in charge of a big survey outfit, and I have a drowning. God.

Well, we went on down the stream. We didn't have anything to throw out to dredge with. It wasn't uncommon for people to drown in the Mississippi River.

After we made an attempt to find him, of course Wilbur was an old, experienced pilot, and we were all young surveyors, they didn't know what to do, Wilbur said we might as well just forget about it.

I said, "No, we can't just forget about it. What are we gonna do?" We were pretty close to the site we were going to and I said, "Turn around and let's go back upstream to where he went in." I'll tell everybody to get on back and see what they think about it. Mainly the blacks, because I didn't know how they were going to react. They didn't say anything. There's always one leader, you know. And I said, "You guys, I don't know what to do. I don't know whether to get on back to work or what. I know enough about death to know how you feel about it. But you men have got to go to work. I'll go back to headquarters" where the quarterboats were tied up, I'll go into town and report it. We had a station in Greenville. "And we'll get some men and boats and search the river for awhile." And they didn't say anything. "I'm going to take one of the boats and go back to the quarterboat, and I'd like you men to go on and work your assignments." They didn't say anything. I says, "What's going on here? You're refusing to go to work, huh?" Then I got the spokesman, he thought the world of me. He said, "I'll tell you, Mr. Fondren, I don't think it's wise to put these men back to work. I don't think it's wise. What I think you should it all get back on the boat and take these men back to the quarterboat and give them what they're owed and what they saw. If you have to put us on a no pay status, okay, because I could do that. He said, "Wait till I come back to the quarterboat."

I said, "Well I think you're right."

We didn't have any communication into town. If we were going to stay a long time, we would run a telephone line out, but for this particular job, we moved about every three days.

I came out with great respect. This older spokesman for the blacks said, "Can I go into town with you? I said, "Sure - what is the purpose of it?" He said, "You may not be familiar with the customs, but I want to get a minister." We had trucks

"More to Come"

The stage coach would go where there were no railroads - that's what you had to use to get goods and people from places where there were no railroads. They didn't have stagecoaches everywhere. The stage lines had to be where people wanted to get to, but there wasn't any other way to get there. When people would move away to the Ozarks or to Little Rock or gone to Texas or gone to Chicago, and they came back to visit home, they didn't have their horses, so there was no other way except to hire horses or take the stage. The stages would only hold about 6 to 8 people.

We didn't have automobiles - you had to take a horse or hire a horse and a buggy. A person would perhaps keep the horse and buggy a week or so, then come back and catch the train to go back to where they live. So that's the reason why the livery business was a pretty good paying business. My daddy and grandfather both were in the livery business. My daddy's territory was mainly to the bottom country, to the south and east of the railroads. He'd rent to people in town, too -Sundays were big days. Say you had a sweetheart and you want to take her out for a ride, to maybe kiss and hug, you'd hire a horse and buggy from my daddy and go out in the rural areas or wherever you wanted to go. Or someone might want to dress up and take his sweetie-pie to church in a horse and buggy. Then after church, they'd drive around a little bit. Yes, Sunday was a big-paying business as I recall. If you wanted to put on the dog, so to speak, and act like you were real prosperous, you would hire a two-horse surrey, driven by two horses. And it was a double-seater. You could carry four easily; if you wanted a crowd you could carry six in the surrey. The body of the surrey was made by Fisher Body Company. It was a carriage, well-made. That was a big industry up north. It had a top on it you could fold over. Most surreys had a fixed top. Buggies had a top you could fold back, sort of like a convertible top on a car. You could fold the top on a buggy back and have it open all the way. The top had a plastic type of material for the window part that was called Isinglass. That was the forerunner of plastics. Automobiles had Isinglass curtains.

Back in the Spanish day, they held a lot of territory in Florida and the southern part of Mississippi and Alabama. Alabama didn't own down to the coast. Neither did Mississippi. And all the way into New Orleans, you see, well, not into New Orleans, because the French already had their boundary around the French territory. The Spanish had a capital in Pensacola.

Andrew made the survey of the present day boundary between Florida and Georgia, and the terminus of the line is on the St. Mary's river. St. Mary's River in Georgia winds around and eventually goes into the Atlantic Ocean. That's where the boundary terminated as a latitude. Virginia and the Spanish finally held a treaty and they struck off a boundary of a latitude, a geodetic latitude. And that went from St. Mary's River westward to the Chattahoochee River. Ocean going vessels would come up the Chattahoochee, Spanish did, the French did too. So it was contested there. So they finally settled in their treaty that it would come about 20 miles upstream on the Chattahoochee then go westward to the Mississippi River to Yazoo. Virginia claimed to the Mississippi River - they didn't know where it was but they had heard the Indians talk about it and they pronounced it Yazoo. It's in Mississippi now, on the Yazoo River. Okay, who was going to make the survey of this unknown territory? Who was going to do it? Well, Andrew Ellicott thought he could make a little money. So he went to New Orleans and he got enough information there.

I had written a letter to Eddie Grimes. I had read about this at the University of Arkansas, in the Engineering Library. I still had some of my publications about how every state was surveyed and how the boundaries were surveyed. Plus I wrote a report in one of my engineering classes on the boundaries of the United States and how they were surveyed. And I took out a lot of books on the subject from the Government Printing Office. So it's old hat to me. I summarized this survey I was speaking about in a letter to Ed Grimes one year and I kept a copy of it. It's about four pages.

Benjamin came down and went to Cuba and dealt with the Spanish authorities. He went by steamship. He got some money from the United States government and the authority and some money from the Spanish government. And he formed a crew and made the survey. He started on the St. Mary's River and went all the way across to the Chattahoochee River and back then the Spanish had monuments on the Chattahoochee River at different places where they claimed territorial boundaries. And he ran out of money and a lot of people had quit or died. And he was putting a marker every mile, and he wasn't using the method of transit, the chain and sight. He used the method of latitude and longitude observation with astronomical instruments, observing on the sun, primarily on the sun, and maybe some other stars, using an ephemeris. In the early days of navigation, that was what they used. And he made these under all kind of conditions. And they said to stop the survey. So he went back to Washington and he went back to Ellicott City. After a period of time, he heads back with some gold coins, trying to finance it on his own. The Congress had not authorized him to do this. He went back to New Orleans and got some of the influential people in New Orleans to finance him. He went back to the Chattahoochee River and completed his survey all the way over to where the treaty said was the western terminus.

Now to finish the story, back in the days of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, they resurveyed the entire boundary and they didn't change it one damn bit. The same monuments that he put in every mile on that boundary. That is wonderful for any civil engineer. That was wonderful. He established the boundary astronomically.

(End of tape)

It was an event that involved horses, saving the lives of horses.

The livery business was a very important business back in those days. In the town of Kensett, we had two livery businesses, one owned by my father and the other owned by a competitor. They were friends and all that, but still they tried to outdo each other: "My horses are better than your horses. My horses can go fifteen miles to such and such stretch and yours can't." Things like that.

Booth and Bob Davidson owned the other livery business, which was located across the tracks, closer to the railroad station, in fact, where we built Milburn and Johnson, the wholesale warehouse and offices. Back then, passenger trains were met by one of the livery firms, with a buggy and a horse. Sort of like taxicabs now at an airport.

So they were competitors in the livery business. My daddy had more horses and a bigger layout than the Davidson's did.

Bob Davidson married my sweetheart schoolteacher. She was a beautiful woman. She was our teacher from the first grade to the fourth grade and we just loved her. And she was a good teacher too. Anyhow, Bob was more tolerant than Booth. Booth was...well, he could be a bad man. All men had guns in those days - and some women did too. Daddy sold shotguns and rifles and pistols. Well, it never did come down to a pistol fight between Booth and my daddy, but they would argue a great deal. Bob was the mediator. He was a good man. I liked Bob more than I did Booth as I was growing up. Later on, when Daddy got the dealership for the Ford agency, he built a garage building and Booth rented it and became the mechanic to repair cars for Daddy, This was many years after the story I'm telling you now.

Okay, here's the story.

During the flood of the Little Red River, all the creeks and branches backed up and flooded - and quite a bit of it came into the town of Kensett, over the fields and some of the roads. The floods had peaked and the water was just beginning to recede.

This salesman, or drummer, as they called him, had arrived by train and wanted to get up into the hills. He had to first go to Judsonia and then go back up in the Ozarks. We tried to talk him into not going, but he couldn't wait. So he hired a two-horse buggy and driver from the Davidson's.

Two miles out of town, there was wide creek with a bridge over it. The water was higher than the bridge because of the flooding, but the driver of the buggy thought he could make it. The bridge didn't have any guard rails and the driver, well, he missed the bridge. The buggy got lodged in the creek and the horses were in the water. As they jerked and tried to get out of their harnesses, they got over into the main stream of the water, in the downstream part of it. The horses were swimming, but still hooked to the buggy.

Someone saw it up on the hill, and telephoned into town about it. Daddy took off from the stable and he was out there in nothing flat on his saddle horse. Some other men followed him out there. And I went out there too on my bicycle.

Well, the horses were still hooked to the buggy. What were they gonna do, what were they gonna do. It was cold weather and the stream was wide and the current was strong. Well, who came up with what to do right quick? It didn't take Daddy long: "We gotta save those horses."

"Build a fire," Daddy said. He knew he was going to be cold when this was over.

He stripped down to his long-johns, borrowed a knife from John Dickey and swam out. He started cutting through the thick leather of the harnesses. He cut the collar, then cut loose the haimes, and he dove under and cut the under belly strap of the first horse. He had to hold onto the horses, because they were kicking and trying to buck loose. And then he cut the strap that fits over the collar, and the first horse was free and he took off up the bank! Then Daddy had to get the other one. That horse was pawing and kicking. Daddy was about to give out. He had to keep swimming all that time, and he was fighting the horse and fighting the current. But he finally got the last strap cut and the horse was free. John Dickey and another man helped get Daddy back to shore. He was pooped.

So Daddy was able to save his competitor's horses.

Dixie

Daddy made me a horse buggy out of an old popcorn and peanut roasting machine we had in the store. It had four wheels and rubber tires. We used it as a delivery wagon. Daddy bought a Shetland pony to pull it - his name was Dixie. I guess you could say we were the "express delivery." We'd use Old Diltz and the big wagon for the big deliveries, but Dixie and I were the express route. Someone would call up on the phone with an order, and they might say, "Could you get Price to bring that around before supper?" And Dixie and I would make the delivery.

Dixie was pretty good most of the time, but he could have a mean spell. He could get hard to control. I was about the only one who could handle him. You know how a dog will come up and lick your face? Well, Dixie would lick me like that. I'd rub his nose, pet him on the head and back of the ears.

Dixie was quite a fixture as we children were growing up. I'd let the girls ride Dixie sometimes. I wouldn't turn him loose, no. I'd just hold onto him and guide him around. I remember one time some kids were up on top of Dixie and were trying to make him run. Well, Dixie had a great way of just putting out his front legs and stopping suddenly. And off they fell. He just looked down at them and shook his head and mane. (Laughter)

He was a powerful little animal too. Sometimes I couldn't control him. One time I was coming back from Donafan and there was a nice little middle of the road that was high and dry. They kept it that way for drainage. I was trying to get Dixie to stay in the middle of the road. I kept jerking on the reins. All of a sudden he got mad, I guess. He started going around and around, hooked to that buggy. And about the second time around, I'm holding on to the reins, he whirled around and bucked and jerked me off of the buggy! Then he came over and shook his head at me. Whenever he got his way, he would do like that - shake his head and make a certain little noise. Whenever he was the victor.

He was smart as he could be.

My Daddy bred horses and we had an Arabian stallion. He was a prize animal. Daddy would sometimes race him at county fairs.

Well, I was never supposed to let Dixie and this Arabian stallion get together. They were enemies. Dixie didn't like that stallion. Well, one day, I let both the stallion and Dixie out together in the same lot. I wanted to see them fight. And, boy, they put on a real good fight. The stallion was bloody and Dixie was bloody. But Dixie was winning the fight - he'd get underneath the stallion and bite him, then he'd turn around and kick him.

Well, the stallion was making sort of a screaming sound and someone heard it and went over to the store to tell my Daddy about it. And boy, I got the whipping of my life. But the horses were okay - it didn't harm them much.

Daddy got that stallion out of Memphis - brought it out by train. They would ship them in cattle cars, designed to ship cattle, horses, even chickens.

Chickens became pretty popular; people were buying them, raising them, then shipping them up North. Daddy had an old garage building that he turned into a place to store chickens. People would rent space from him to store their chickens before they'd get shipped up North.

This was a good size building, 80 feet long by 30 feet wide. After using it as a storage house for chickens, maybe five years or so, Daddy then turned it into a place to store the city fire truck. He was mayor, so he also built an office there too.

From garage to chicken house to mayor's office - Daddy had a way of moving with the times, adapting from one period to the next.

Next to the garage building, Daddy built a 2-story building for the movie house. He bought the rights to the movie business there in town. He operated that theater for quite some time, maybe 10 or 15 years.

The films would come in by express railroad; many times I had to pick them at up the express office. They were heavy - came in tin boxes usually containing 3 or 4 reels.

I did all kinds of things in that theater. I had to build the fires - you needed two stoves going in the wintertime. I had to sweep the floors and run the projector. When the film came in, you had to rewind it onto a bigger reel. That way you only had to change reels one time during the movie, provided the film didn't break. We'd patch the film if it broke. You'd take scissors and cut off the one frame at each end, line it up with some sprockets and then patch it together with a special cement. I could patch one in less than 5 minutes. You had to be careful because it would burn if you left it near the light too long. That film in those days was really flammable.

While the film was being patched, we'd run advertising slides - the drug store, the restaurant, the cafe. We'd show them also before the movie started and then again when we had to change reels.

I'd put up the posters outside to advertise the movie. At first, we only had shows on Saturday night. Then later on, we had one in the middle of the week. Then sometimes, we'd have a matinee.

These were silent films. Merle played the piano. We also had a player piano, with rolls of music. I had a switch up in the booth so I could stop and start the player piano. Some of the bigger theaters had orchestras back then. The one in Little Rock had an orchestra.

At first, we had a hand crank projector. Then later on, we bought a motorized projector, which also had a better lens. I went over to Memphis to get it. Memphis was the main distribution point for films.

When talkies came in, Daddy was thinking about changing over, but here's what happened. I had already graduated and was at the University, so Daddy had hired a young man to run the projector. One night, Daddy had gone to a football game and couldn't get back to Searcy that night. Well, I guess this young man got excited or something, because the film caught on fire. The building didn't burn down - fortunately by then we had waterworks and they were able to put it out with a hose. But the projector and most everything else burned. Daddy didn't restore the theater. That was the end of it.

I think that's about right.

My junior year at the University of Arkansas, we went on a train trip. All engineering students were required to take this two week train trip. We went to St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit.

In Chicago, we stayed in the central part of town. That was Al Capone's territory in those days. An actual killing occurred in the street not far from our hotel. We didn't see it of course, but we read about it the next morning. They called it gangland warfare.

Anyhow, we visited Western Electric there in Chicago. They manufactured telephones and telephone equipment, telephone wiring, cables, whatever. And they had a separate place that they had built where they were researching talkies -motion pictures with sound. Others had developed some early experimental models, but Western Electric was working to produce a better model and getting all the bugs out of it. And they had a huge sign on the outside of this place that said "No Admittance." That's the reason why I remember it.

During the war, we were doing wartime mapping. In Beltsville, we were under close security and we had to be cleared by the FBI.

Well, I had been arrested in Vicksburg. Disorderly. I had had too much to drink. I never did have to go to court. I think I did pay a $25 fine. I can't recall exactly.

[Before taping: Daddy told us he had not disclosed this fact when he filled out his employment papers, but the FBI found it when they did their check]

I had to go downtown with my boss to the main Department of Agriculture Personnel Office. And he pleaded my case. It helped me that I had a distinguished career with the Army Corps of Engineers. That helped me. And an outstanding career with the Soil Conservation Service, so to speak. And I was cleared.

The FBI questioned me for about 2 hours in a room, going over my past. And at that time, you see, I had left the Soil Conservation Service, Division of Cartography, and I had worked with the Bureau of Reclamations, Department of the Interior and I had worked with Aerial Service Corporation in Philadelphia then I came back and after I resigned from Aerial Service Corporation, I went back to Soil Conservation, Division of Cartography - and had a few important assignments before wartime. In other words, I had worked many different places.

I didn't lose any days pay over it - no. But it was called to the attention of the head of personnel for the entire Department of Agriculture that I had committed a terrible, terrible sin. It was a terrible thing to lie. A little white lie - that I didn't want anybody to know about.

So I was cleared. This guy stood by me all the way.

I remember at that particular time, I was making a survey of the landing strip of the Beltsville Research Center. Navy planes and Air Force planes were practicing out there and they wanted - there was a lot of erosion. I had made a terrific survey of the entire area of Beltsville for the Air Force and Navy. Completed the entire charting of it. They had started filling in the places at the side of the runway where it was eroding and repairing the strip and all that seemed important.

One time he came out there to see what the hell I was doing.

He up and died. He and his secretary were coming back to the College Park area and he had a flat tire. He was changing the tire and he had a heart attack. I can't remember if he died at the scene or later.

He and Fitch were real buddies. They drove together to Beltsville. He was well known with the top soil scientists - he was a soil scientist. He was well known throughout the country. It goes back to the days when the entire Soil Conservation Service was formed by Roosevelt. Hugh H. Bennett - he was the top dog - the first one to head the Soil Conservation Service.

So much for that.

We had already done our system of mapping for the War Department when this came up. I think the FBI was reinvestigating us supervisors. We were doing the basic charts for the long range navigation, LORAN. In the Pacific mainly. The Navy hydrographic office and the Air Force had proven the LORAN could be used in navigation across the Atlantic. But they hadn't done anything about extending LORAN in the Pacific. Maybe into Hawaii. So we produced back in those days, all the LORAN charts, covering the Pacific.

It was mainly plotting the waves of Mercatur projection of these different stations, the "masters' and the 'slaves.' The master went out the electronic radar waves and the slaves would send it back. The slaves were many miles away from the signal from the master station. Our reproduction section could photograph our charts before they were sent and lithographed. That was high secrecy.

Discipline

We children were whipped from time to time. Mother would whip the girls. Daddy would whip the boys. Well, there was a period of time in my boyhood days when I thought I was being mistreated. Blevins was nine years younger, and maybe I resented the baby brother being cuddled. (Laughter) I didn't get terrific whippings, no. But I go what we called a "switching."

In the big house - that wonderful home we had - my bedroom was upstairs. I don't know how old I was at the time. I wasn't wearing long pants yet. I was wearing knickers. That was quite the style then for young boys. When you got to be a man, you put on long pants. Of course, we wore overalls a great deal. We didn't have what you call blue jeans back then. But when we wanted to get comfortable, we boys wore overalls. We could get on a clean pair of overalls and go out to dinner, which meant one of your playmates asked you over to their house for supper. It wasn't anything like going out to dinner now.

Anyhow, there was a period in my life when I decided I was going to run away.

It was after some event when I got a terrific switching for doing something. I don't know what. And I'd been thinking about it for some time, because they kind of noticed how I was acting. Years later, my mother would bring up the story. She said, "We figured Price was up to something."

Well, I'd been catching freight trains and be gone for several hours. Then catch another freight train coming back. We boys used to catch freight trains riding between towns. It was four miles to the south toward Little Rock and it was ten mile to the other water station at Bald Knob. We would catch the freight train and go up and bum around with the hobos and so forth. That's where the hobos hung out, at the water and coaling station. Every so often you see, locomotives had to take on coal as well as water. The water stations were closer together; the coaling stations were fifty to a hundred miles apart.

So catching trains was a great adventure. We'd hop it like a trainman would. They had stirrups on every brake car at each of the four corners of the car, and a steel ladder that you could climb to go to the top of the boxcar. Most of the time we would catch a coal car or a flat car. The coal cars were like open bins. We could climb up and get down in there. There were steel walls around the car and no roof on it, and that's the one we would usually pick out to climb up and get down inside. We could hide in there.

I think that's what I had gotten a whipping about.

And on that particular night, as Mother tells the story, I wasn't laughing and joking like I normally did with my sisters. I went upstairs to my room and turned out the light and waited for things to settle down. I waited for everyone to go to bed and the house to get quiet. So I already had my little belongings packed and when everybody settled down, I very silently came down the stairs. We had a big central stairway and I knew all the tricks about coming in late at night with my shoes off. I was going to go down and out through the kitchen and out the back porch and escape. Well, when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I thought, "I've got it made." But as I turned to head for the kitchen, here was my big daddy waiting for me! He grabbed me by the seat of the pants and said, "Where are you going, boy?" And then he marched me back upstairs and into my room.

Well, he seated me on my bed and sat down beside me. And he questioned me as to why I was running away/ And it was the first time he ever talked to me man to man/. Very gentle-like, he talked to me as a father. He had me crying and sobbing. He pulled out his big handkerchief and gave it to me. As it wound up, I hugged him and he hugged me. And my daddy never switched me again. That was it. And that was when he realized I was growing into a young man.

From then I loved my daddy.

Another time, Bill Dickey and I ran away and caught a train down to Little Rock and we worked for the circus. Carried pails of water to the elephants, helped drive the pegs to put up the tents. And we got a free pass to watch the evening show. They had matinees and evening shows, and we were working during the matinee.

At the evening show, Bill and I were sitting there, enjoying the circus. My mother and daddy had come to the circus, and I guess maybe the girls were with them. And they were seated above. And all of a sudden, here come my daddy, "What are you boys doing here? We were worried to death about you!" Boy, did we get the lecture of our life.

I didn't get a whipping though. I don't know what Bill's daddy did. John Dickey. He was big, strong man.

Did you ever hear the story about the football team getting suspended from Searcy High School?

High school teams throughout the state were invited to Conway to attend a football game and dedication of the new football stadium they had built at Hendricks College. It was the first concrete stadium built in the state of Arkansas. Hendricks was playing Centenary College from down in Louisiana. Bull McMillan was the coach at Centenary College. The president of that college became chief engineer of the Tennessee Valley Authority. I met him the time I came up to Knoxville from Vicksburg.

Anyway, Bull McMillan had been a famous football player - a quarterback - and we boys, the Searcy High School football team, wanted to go to this game. But we didn't have permission. But we football players had gotten together and decided we were going to go anyway. Daddy let me have one the new Ford touring cars, a four seater, as part of our transportation. Daddy didn't know we didn't have permission. We all went and saw the game. Got there early and saw them practice too.

Well, Monday morning, when we came to school, we were marched up on stage at Searcy High School and the principal announced that the football team was suspended. One week.

That's the end of that story.

I had to do a little lying to do what I wanted to do. If Daddy was working down at the store, I'd say, "I'm going down to the store - I have a little work to do tonight." Then I'd sneak off to the pool hall. The store stayed open until 9 o'clock - not every night, no. Especially not on Saturday night - the town would close on Saturday night. The farmers would come into town on Saturdays, usually in the daylight hours, but men would look forward to Saturday nights. Men that worked in the saw mills, the stave factory, the railroad - many of the railroad men lived in Kensett.

So I'd sneak down to the pool hall. I would avoid my mother - come slipping into the house. Mother didn't run a bed check on everybody, no - she had too many other things to do. At first, I couldn't figure how in the hell she knew where I'd been. And it went on a few times, and I got scolded or punished - not a switching, - but punished by having to do some chores or something I didn't want to do. But if I disobeyed, I got punished some way or other. That's the way all of us were.

And about the third time, I guess it was the next day, I asked her how did she know I'd been in a pool hall? And she said, "I can smell you, boy!" (Laughter) She could smell my clothes were saturated with smoke from the pool hall. Whether it was summer, winter - it didn't make any difference.

Guys playing would put cigarettes on the edge of the pool table. Some smoked cigars, some smoked cigarettes. They never did put a cigar on the railing of a pool table - you had to be careful to not burn the cloth. Some people were great cigarette smokers - they couldn't do anything without that cigarette going somewhere, you know.

That's the way I got to be. People in my car pool in the latter years - at one time there were six of us - not every day - usually five of us. Five was enough. They always saved room for me to sit in the back seat - because I was smoking cigarettes. You know those vents in the windows they had back then? I'd open the vent.

(When did you quite smoking?) There are two important dates - the year I quit smoking and the year Daddy died. Daddy died in '56, I know that. Well, the year I quit was the year Eisenhower took the oath of office - January. I always liked Eisenhower - as a general, I thought the world of him. McArthur, Eisenhower - they were great generals. Black Jack Pershing - he was a first-rate, young general during the Mexican Uprising. The famous bandit, Poncho Villa - he was raiding up and down the Texas border. He would rob banks, steal horses and cattle and drive 'em back across the border - shoot up the towns. It was quite a group of bandits. So Congress decided they were gonna catch him. They put an expedition together, and Pershing was put in charge. They finally corralled him. Poncho Villa was quite a hero to the Mexicans - he distributed all the riches among the poor people.

Sometimes as punishment, I had to work on the big farm, which was between Kensett and West Point. We owned land down to the Red River. Back up on the high part of the farm, I'd be up there in the pines, and all of a sudden I'd hear a steam boat whistle. "Steamboat coming up the river - steamboat coming up the river!" Back in those days, when the river was up high, they could cross the rapids up at Judsonia, and there was a quarry out on the Red River, out from Searcy and Kensett and so forth.

For years and years, they went up to that quarry and got rock - large boulders. The boulders were used to control the banks of a river from eroding by using what was called rip-rap. In the mud flats up and down the river, willow trees would grow one to two feet apart, sometimes six inches apart. They would grow up tall and slender. We'd cut them with one whack from machete. So what the government did, in places up and down the river, where they want to hold the banks, they would put in rip-rap work to hold the banks. And to hold the rocks - the rip-rap - they would use willows, and weave them together, then tie them together with wire, into symmetrical bundles, average length about ten or twenty feet, depending on the cut length of the willow. They were called mats. The way they would sink them would be to put the heavy rock on top. So where did they get the rock? They got most of it from the quarry between Judsonia and Searcy!

As kids we used to go out there. They would blast and get a lot of rock out. They came up with barges, you see, and loaded the barges down with rock. Open barges with a flat deck. The steamboats would handle the barges. And for years, they would come up there to that quarry and come down to the White and then in to the Mississippi with the rock and sink the mats. They had a system of holding them together with cables. After they got the mat loaded to a certain amount, it would sink. It would sink all the way down to the bottom uniformly and cover underneath anywhere from twenty to thirty feet or forty or fifty feet below.

Well, never would I dream that I would have something to do with controlling the Mississippi River banks.

As a boy, and of course as I was growing up, the steamboat people would come into my daddy's store and buy provisions. Stock up. They wore a kind of a uniform - not overalls, but some kind of coat. They always had a cap, a seaman's cap, with a bill on it. The captain had "captain" across his. The other would have "pilot" across his. The aristocracy of steamboat. The crew was the captain and pilot and the engine man. Those three were the three guys. The rest of them were deckhands and "oilers," who took care of the engines. They had to be oiled.

Depending on the stages of the rivers, but say about six months out of the year, in and out of our store would be these men. They would tie up at West Point, you see.

When I was a boy, I loved the steamboats. I got to go on them several times. They would buy a wagonload of provisions - meats, beans, dried beans, rice, sugar and salt - whatever. It depended on how long they had been away from the main ports on the Mississippi, like Greenville, Mississippi - that was the nearest one before they went up the White - on down the river it would be Lake Providence, Louisiana, and on down to Vicksburg would be the next one. Greenville was quite a thriving steamboat port. Anyhow, if they were out for quite a while, they would run out of provisions if they had to stay out long. Especially sometimes the damn river would go down and the steamboats couldn't get back! They'd have to wait until it rained. Sometimes they'd be tied up more than six months before they could get back. The river would run too low. Most of the time though, they would get back.

We didn't have radio, you see. Daddy had telephones and he did have a line down to West Point. The captain would talk from a store in West Point where the telephone was (most homes didn't have phones then), and send the message through our exchange and then into Little Rock and Little Rock would send the message eventually through back to Vicksburg or Greenville or wherever on the river.

I was on steamboat a few times as a boy, just for fun. Later on as I got older, I would go by myself and take the provisions you see. A big wagon with horses. From time to time, even though they were tied up, [the steamboats] would make a trial run back and forth, up and down the river. Take about thirty minutes to an hour - to see if everything was working - keep it in order. That was the first time I got to go out on a steamboat. We went down the river a couple or three miles, and came back and tied up. I guess I was about fourteen or so.

But for two years, maybe three years, I was in charge of a long survey of the revetments in the Vicksburg Engineer District. It was quite a task, about 75 different locations, maybe a hundred. Our terminus was the White River. In these places where the current was striking the bank, they had revetments - to keep them from eroding - to control the banks of the river. Each revetment was anywhere from two miles to four or five miles long.

After they had put all these repair mats in place, we then had to come through and see if they had correctly place the repair mats in location. Under water and above water. They usually had two quarterboats, with anywhere from thirty to fifty men, sometimes sixty. We had survey crews. We had a system of sounding where we could tell for sure whether or not the mats were in position. We could survey above ground, but we still had to survey the river and the repair work. It was easy to do above ground, but underwater, it took quite awhile. We could sound by depth and position about every three to five feet underwater.

We lived on the boat - the quarterboat - called that because you were "quartered." That was the military term. We also had a couple of barges tied up to us. Quarterboats were about the length of a barge - 33 feet by 100 feet long. We'd go up and down the river by small river craft - small boats. You'd go up and down the river to locations and since we changed locations so often, we also kept a small river boat. It was diesel powered but it had a stern wheel on it. Before that, they'd have to use a steam boat to move a quarterboat. The quarterboats were not self-propelled, you see.

They had two-story quarterboats and one-story quarterboats. For bank protection work it was a single story quarterboat, and sometimes we'd operate with just one. The second plat - they had anywhere from three to six double-decker quarterboats. The second plat required a lot of men - that's where they sunk the articulated, concrete mats.

Paul Frederick became the chief man of the second plat, the engineering crew. Paul had one year of training before I ever knew him. We were together on the low water survey and I'd say Paul took quite a bit of training under me (laughter). One year Paul was with me on a revetment survey. For a short time I took him away [from his other work]. I could depend on Paul to do a lot of things.

My first boss was Jed Capin - for three months - then I went back to school and finished up. I went back to school in September of '29, after finishing roughly three months with the Corps of Engineers. Then I went back to the University of Arkansas. In June of 1929 I headed for the Mississippi River - just stopped overnight in Kensett - at home - then took a train to Helena, Arkansas. So I did three months with the Corps of Engineers, and I worked mainly as a recorder for the instrument man. I didn't have to do too much manual labor. I had a pretty good knowledge in my junior year - surveying on the grounds of the campus. And I had done some instrument work.

That was my first job - roughly three months down there. And the next year, I had passed the Civil Service examination as inspector. $75 a month - then later on, it was $100 a month. I think when I left, I left at $150 a month. Then they deducted a certain amount for your quarters on the river. Everybody had to pay a certain amount of money out of their salary to be quartered.

We hired quite a few blacks as laborers. They were paid the minimal amount. After we got enough money to live on back in those days, during the Depression, we would get to town some way or another on the weekends - especially on paydays. We had places where we could cash our check, be it a drug store, grocery store - mainly a drug store - I remember taking my check to the Post Office to get a money order. Many wouldn't send money home, but I sent money home, you see. I'd take a certain amount out of my check - whether it was $25, $50 - get a money order and mail it. The blacks needed all their money.

So Saturday was a big time to go into town. We worked Saturday mornings - four hours. A good boss would cut the activities short about 11:00 to be able to get cleaned up and get ready to go into town. They'd take a truck - later some of the men had cars. Some of the guys, their friends or parents would come and get them.

I remember one time, we were on a quarterboat, and Gene Suarez was in charge. Bill Kude was his computer. We stayed in town on Saturday night. This woman had a large, bungalow type house where we stayed from time to time. And that's where we stayed that night. We went to the movies. I didn't drink, but Gene and Bill Kude did.

When we headed back that Sunday night, it was raining and cold. It was wintertime. Gene had a chauffer - every government car has a chauffer - and after we got over the other side of the levee, the road was gravel for a ways, but then it turned to mud. So we had to walk about a mile and a half to our quarterboat. We had to take out through the woods. We had two flashlights, and our overcoats, but it was cold and we were running. Gene took the lead - he didn't know anything about the terrain. I didn't either. So we were out in a wooded area - headed for the quarterboats - and we got lost! We went this away and that away, hoping to find the river. Then up and down the river banks.

But Bill Kude - he couldn't take it. He had a hangover. Bill Kude was falling down. We would pick him up and put him on his feet, and then he'd lay down in the rain. "I'm not going another step."

And here's a guy who went on to be an important man in the military. And then years later, Kude came to Washington, and formed the Cartographic Division. Kude and several other guys he brought up from Vicksburg formed the nucleus of the Cartographic Division.

Charlie met Betty in Texas. Betty was living with an aunt. Remember Aunt Belle? She had a son who lived up on Georgia Avenue. She came to see us in Silver Spring one time (in that big, black car). Belle was a daughter of one of the Clements.

Pearle and I got engaged at the Roosevelt Hotel in St. Augustine - in the lounge. After we had had a drink - or maybe it was our second. (Laughter) We used to drink martinis in those days. That's when I put the ring on her finger - and that's where we kissed and hugged. (Laughter) It was the Roosevelt Hotel - it was a plush lounge, I remember that.

Pearle had lived in St. Augustine, and she had worked there in a beauty shop. Her first marriage didn't last long - I don't know if it was a year or what. Bill Owens's first wife had died in childbirth - Little Bill's mother.

Pearle was a beautiful woman. And Bill Owens was pretty well-off in town. He had a tire agency, as I recall. And he was well-born, you see. He was killed in a car accident - he and another fellow - in Jacksonville. I can't remember the year he died. But I have a copy of his death certificate somewhere in the files. When I was retiring, I got it to make sure Pearle could get survivorship in my annuity. It would be tied up if I didn't prove the death of William D. Owens.

Hoover Dam construction started about 1932, I think.

Hoover himself was Secretary of the Interior - he was a mining engineer. In the lower regions of the Mississippi River about 1927 - not only the Mississippi, but the Arkansas, the White, the Black - we had some prolific rains. On top of that, the snow melted up north and so forth. We had a terrific high flood area in the Mississippi Valleys - the levees broke in several places and flooded the towns and agricultural lands. It was disastrous. In 1929, we almost had another disastrous flood. Hoover got Congress to rebuild the levee system from Cairo - built it higher and build it better. That's the period of time I was down there, see. In 1929, for three months, and June 1930 until December 1935 - that's when I was down there. We were rebuilding levees, making surveys, doing a lot to the river, making cutoffs. Later on, it was determined where they were going to build some dams on the Arkansas and on the headwaters of the Yazoo, and up along the Arkansas River, White River and so forth. And they did - for retention, to keep the flood waters back. So Hoover was the engineer. Anybody in that particular endeavor worshipped Hoover -- the townspeople and the politicians.

Then he became President. He only served one term. Hoover got blamed for the Depression. He did a lot of good for the United States that he never got credit for. For example, in controlling the mining industry out West, when he was President, he got some important mining laws passed.

They already had a dam on the Colorado, south of where the Hoover Dam was built, mainly for irrigation. It was a pretty good-size dam down there. Nothing could compare to the Hoover Dam.

I toured the Hoover Dam maybe two or three weekends, because I had some friends that I worked with in Vicksburg. They were employed by the contractor, Kaiser. This guy - I can't remember his name - his job was to position the forms. I was one of the few men allowed to go out in the pod. They had four, built into the cliffs. They had to position each form - the forms were 10 feet or so high. That's where they'd pour the concrete. Then there was the stage where they'd build another form and go on higher.

Each form was positioned with real precise mathematics. How did they do all of this? Triangulation, you see. Knowing the distance between the pods and the elevations. You could compute the exact position where the pods below would intersect at a certain elevation, and the guys above could tell you exactly where each corner of each form had to go. And when the final form was in place, they'd survey again and maybe they'd take a sledge hammer and knock it a wee bit more to get it perfect. These were heavy duty timbers, bolted together.

Anyhow, he - what was his name? - got permission for me to take a cableway and go out with him. Quite a thrill. There was room for two people in the pod. The cableway was the way they handled all the materials - and how they got into the pods. The pod was steel-walled, and built into the cliffs on the side. The men who built them used pneumatic jack hammers, came down on slings and so forth, and cut out the solid rock where the pods were to be. That's the way they started, before they ever started the base of the dam. They cut out the rock from the sides, to shape the cliffs they needed. Hundreds of men were working on rope slings and cables, shaping the sides of the cliffs.

When they first started the dam, they built these huge cableways, not one but many. And they were on heavy, steel girders and I-beams, built on the upper level and entrenched in the cliffs. The cableways were used to bring out the bucket of concrete. Then they could open the hopper and drop the concrete into the forms. Heavy steel had to be put in there, and it was brought out by the cableways. Those huge turbines? They would lower the materials for the turbines using the cableways.

It was quite interesting to me.

Previously, when I was in Denver with the Bureau of Reclamation - 6-9 months - I thought I was gonna get into dam construction, get away from surveys - but I didn't. When I was with the Bureau of Reclamation downtown I spent many hours at the library - many hours - many. The assignment went to me to design a new irrigation area. It was at Wind River in Wyoming, I believe. The dam had already been built, and they had started some of the irrigation down near the dam. But it came time for them to proceed with the layout of canals and laterals - small canals and ditches, whatever you want to call them. You had to deal with the topography -- I had had great training about topography in Vicksburg. And I designed several canals on each side of this river - they ran upstream from the main canals.

Beau McMillan was a great subject for sports writers. He played at Centre College in Kentucky. He was a quarterback and he had real quarterback legs. This was when Beau had quit playing and he came to Kensett one time. There was a guy in Kensett that married Fern's older sister and he went to Centre College, before Beau did. So Beau visited one time in Kensett but I didn't get to see him. But I did… (Tape garbled)

Two guys who were famous on the University of Arkansas baseball team were Glen Rose and George Cole. George was short stop and I was the second baseman. And I was the captain my last year. They built a modern stadium on the campus and they named it George Cole Stadium. The other guy, Glen Rose, he was from North Little Rock. Glen and I were pretty good buddies. He was a big, tall guy. We got acquainted when we were in high school. He played at North Little Rock the two years I played football at Searcy. We beat North Little Rock every time. Glen and I would talk over the games. We were roommates on trips. He played first base. He was a damn good athlete. He played tackle and he was very good in basketball. He coached for the University of Arkansas basketball team for about twenty years.

George Cole was pretty good. He was too short for a quarterback.

I stayed at the Cavalier Hotel on 14th Street, the same one where your mother later worked in the beauty shop. The first place that Charlie and Betty lived was upstairs over a dentist's office. They had an apartment on Georgia Avenue - way out in the high point of the District of Columbia. The dentist and his wife lived downstairs and Betty and Charlie had the apartment upstairs. And as you know, we did a heck of a lot of drinking in those days. What I mean is that every time we got together, we would always have to have a drink. Before we ate. We usually ate and all that. We would have anywhere from one to two to three to four drinks. It depended on how much we argued and discussed and talked. I didn't have any other ties in Washington to amount to at that time. I was staying downtown on New Hampshire and R Street - before I moved to Rhode Island. I was in and out of Washington still on jobs. But I spent a lot of time out with Betty and Charlie. At the office Charlie would say, "Jim, what are you doin' tonight? Why don't you come out?"

The main reason Charlie was there in Washington was when we closed down field operations, more or less it was my job to designate which one we were going to relieve and which one we were going to retain. Of course, we held meetings about it. It so happened that most of the guys that worked for me during that period of time, two and a half years, we gave them permanent jobs in Washington. Also, we got promoted from the Photogrammetric Unit to the Division of Cartography, so we started doing lots of kinds of mapping. Well, Charlie and Red came, but Red didn't stay very long. Fitch, Weber, practically all the Chief of Parties, we kept them. And they all became leading men in our organization. All of them did. Ed Fitch outdid all of us.

As time went on in Charlie's job, we had what we call template lay down work. From each aerial photograph over which we had control, we had a table that originally on the floor. Later on we built it up waist high. An aerial photograph was about seven by nine inches in size and, you see, anywhere from two hundred to five hundred to seven hundred to a thousand photographs per project. And we also got into the county survey that made the project much larger. All these field photographs were plotted on a geodetic grid, which had latitudes and longitudes, and those points were plotted by the geodetic position - latitude and longitude. And a template was made on cardboard - this was one of the jobs that Charlie worked on quite a bit - you take a photograph and you punch holes. These points were identified, they were the controlling points. But they had other points on the photograph, at least nine per photograph, transferred to each photograph. Photographs were in line with flights a d it took flights to assemble the whole area. Well, each photograph had a template. And these holes we punched through the photograph onto the cardboard template. You put the cardboard down then the photograph on tip of it, and then you punch these holes in it, nine or twelve of these points and then you pick up the photograph and circle each one, each point, you see. Then you put the photograph aside, then take this cardboard with the prick points and you'd take it to the slotting machine and cut radial slots leading to the center of the photograph and punch a slot about two inches long and about a quarter of an inch wide. There was a lot of labor and tedious work associated with it and Charlie could see good stereoscopically. That was the main thing Charlie did. From time to time we'd have a field job - Charlie, myself and two or three others would just go out and do the job - get out of town, so to speak. Charlie just loved to get out of town - and to get away from Betty. "Doggone, it sure does feel good to be out here and go to the hotel and have a dinner and not argue around with Betty about what you're doing. And, 'Charlie, you gotta do this and Charlie, you gotta do that'," he'd say. Oh, not too much, but from time to time. I'd listen to Betty's troubles, I'd listen to Charlie's troubles, and I'd talk in such a way to smooth it out, s1o to speak.

Now, I'm getting up to this point: Charlie was still working with the Soil Conservation Service, Division of Cartography, in the Printcraft Building on H Street - we'd moved away from 13th and E. But Charlie hated that job. He just hated what he was doing - he couldn't stand it. Well, anyhow, he endured. Then there came a time there when they went down to St. Augustine, and Betty was worried about Pearle. It was that period of time when Bill got killed and Pearle was kind of in a crisis. Little Bill's grandfather had died prior to that, then the grandmother died, and that left Little Bill with his Uncle Jinks, which Pearle didn't want any part of, see? So she was fighting with Uncle Jinks over control of Little Bill. Finally, Charlie and Betty got the money together and Charlie went down to get Pearle and bring her back to live with them. That's when they had the apartment on Fort Steven's Drive. They had moved from the small apartment they had on Georgia Avenue, over to Fort Steven's Drive, which was a new apartment building, and they had a larger apartment down there. It was a ground apartment - I think there were four apartments there in that building.

Well, Charlie went down by train, you see, and they came back in Pearle's car, with Charlie and Little Bill. By that time, she had got guardianship of Little Bill over Jinks - in court. And the trust was more or less set up by Curty Cox. Pearle really liked Curty Cox - she really trusted him. See, he took care of all the finances while we were raising Bill to a mature age. Anyhow, Pearle and Bill had one room together - two beds - and Charlie and Betty had the other room, you see. And there was a small kitchenette and so forth.

Okay, when Pearle came to town, they had already been out to Fort Steven's Drive and gotten settled, and that evening I was told to meet them at a cafe -- a nice café across from the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue. And so, I delayed - I was on needles and pins - and I said, what the hell has Charlie gotten me into? Charlie had been talking to me more than Betty did about Pearle. I deliberately waited - I was supposed to be there at such and such a time, I guess 7:00 or whatever. And I walked in about 15 minutes late. They didn't tell me much about Pearle - I can't recall one word that Betty told me about her sister Pearle. If they had I guess I would have remembered.

Well, anyhow, I walked in and of course Charlie got up and met me before I came back to the table. There were Betty and Pearle sitting there at the table - I walked in - said, "Hello, Betty," then I looked over and said, "Hello" - and Pearle got up. "Hello, I'm Pearle. Are you Jimmie?" I said, "Honey, I sure am!" (Laughter) I looked at her and thought, what a beautiful woman! I sat there at the table and said, "Charlie, this is one of the best things you ever did in my life!" So that was that.

Things grew from there. And as time went on, I don't know - I was in and out of Washington. Meantime, I had left the hotel where I had an apartment, where later on, Pearle got the beauty shop job. Betty was working downtown - at the Department of Agriculture in the South building, and Charlie was working with the Soil Conservation Service, Division of Cartography, in the Printcraft Building. We had the whole building - and it was about three stories. We were a tremendous outfit. Along came the war and we got into wartime mapping, you see.

After we bought the house - maybe six months - less than a year - Pearle and I said, "Charlie and Betty, you don't have to live down there in your apartment. Come and live with us." So they left the apartment and lived with us.

Charlie was disgusted because he couldn't get a raise with the Division of Cartography. Well, he got annual raises, small amounts. And he got to drinking more than usual. Charlie and Betty were living in Silver Spring with us, they had the front bedroom. Little Bill had the one over the garage.

Well, Charlie quit. I forgot now where he went. I guess he went to Fort Meade? After Charlie left the Division of Cartography - he resigned in good standing - it must have been about 1941, because Pearle was pregnant with Joyce - Betty and Charlie knew they'd have to find another place to live. Charlie wasn't about to stay in Washington. He disliked Washington. I guess they went to Texas first? Went to Lufkin and stayed awhile. Charlie knew a lot of men doing exploration in the oil industry - and it didn't take Charlie long to get acquainted with anybody. The huge drilling operations in Texas at that time were over. They were still finding oil wells in Texas, yes - but they had done most of the exploration work. Not all of it, no. And maybe Charlie got a job with exploration for awhile. And maybe they lived with mother Mettauer. I can't remember exactly.

Then Charlie and Betty left and went to South America. Charlie got a job with an exploration company, you see, looking for oil in South America. First they went to Caracas, Venezuela where they had a headquarters office. Charlie did exploration work in the deep jungles of Venezuela. It was a pretty tough assignment - and pretty different from survey work. What the exploration company did was this - they had to do some transit and chain traversing, They would drill a hole in the ground - motorized - and they'd put in these drill holes a charge of dynamite down inside of these holes at various depths. Most of then weren't very deep. And they would go to another place maybe several miles away and put another drill hole - sometimes several holes within a half a mile - maybe a dozen or more, depending on their intuition. They had to know the elevations of the ground, and that was part of the job in this survey party. And then they explode this dynamite and they had receivers whish would see the echo waves coming out of the ground, you see. And they would record on these receivers. That's a crude explanation of exploration of oil. During the rebound in the earth with these recording instruments, they could guess whether there was oil down there or not.

My sister Sybil went down to Brazil. She was down there for awhile, and then she came back and went to New York.

Betty told a story of coming back by train with the girls from Texas, and crossing the river, maybe at Vicksburg, maybe at New Orleans - but that was a trying trip on Betty's part. I remember her talking about it. She made it back to Ft. Meade from Texas. I can't remember why Charlie wasn't with them coming across Texas - maybe he went up to Carolina and got this job. I remember the company - it was Palmetto Quarry and something. It was a rock quarry in South Carolina, not too far out of Columbia. That lasted a short time - maybe two years, I don't know.

He remarried.

During the war to keep from going to Denver, I resigned from the government. Joyce was born in March '42, so it was June 1941 when I resigned from the Bureau of Reclamation. And I took a job with Aerial Service Corporation in Philadelphia. The reason why, there were two guys I knew in Vicksburg, Ed Shuck and Harvey Wheeler, who enticed me. They sent me telegrams and offered me a job with Aerial Service before I resigned. I didn't resign cold turkey, but I resigned in a few days and went to Philadelphia and took this job. I was still surveying and mapping. First I went to Texarkana. Pearle was pregnant with Joyce, so I left Pearle in the good hands of my mother in Searcy, Arkansas. The hot months of July and August 1941.

I was there for three or four weeks in Texarkana. I would come home every weekend to Searcy - pick up soldiers on the way. Instead of coming on back into Philadelphia, I had another assignment up in Illinois. I did the same kind of job as I did down in Texarkana.

Pearle went back to Silver Spring. Charlie and Betty were living in the house. She came in on the B&O to the Silver Spring station. They had quite a good passenger service back in those days.

To piece it together, at that particular time when I took a job with the Bureau of Reclamation, the Division of Cartography ran out of funds and was cut down to a bare skeleton force. So we had to find jobs elsewhere. Some got jobs with Geological Survey, some elsewhere in Washington. One reproduction section was kept. We had a pretty good-size reproduction - photographic - section. I had a choice of assignments, without losing my rating. I was an Assistant Civil Engineer rating - it was considered damn good in those days. So the Bureau of Reclamation took me on assignment, but with the option when I signed up that I would go to Denver, Colorado. I signed the option all right but I put down with the provision that I would give them one month notice before I resigned from them. I was supposed to go to Denver right off the bat. But I didn't want to leave Silver Spring and a new home and a baby about to be born.

Anyhow, that's the reason why I had to do all that. So I had to resign. The Division of Cartography began to build back up again. When the war started, jobs came in from everywhere. Well, when I resigned from the Bureau of Reclamation, Harvey Wheeler and Ed Shuck talked me into coming up to Philadelphia. As it turned out, it had no real future. I was promised a tremendous raise - two hundred a month. And after I finished the job in Illinois, I did some work south of New York, in New Jersey I think it was, and did all these jobs quickly, thoroughly efficiently, and the boss would not give me a raise. We had contracts to map the Atlantic coast - Aerial Services did - and he would not give me a raise. The way I resigned was this - I resigned when the head guy was down in Washington. I turned in my papers, told Shuck and Wheeler and Louis Magruder goodbye, and took my little suitcase and went back to Washington.

In the meantime, Soil Conservation was back up, and they agreed to take me back. I got reappointed at the same title that I had when I left, as Assistant Civil Engineer. Later on they changed it over to Cartographic Engineer. So from on it was stay put in Silver Spring. I knew that if the Division of Cartography folded up or whatever, I could get jobs elsewhere in Washington.

So that was the crisis, and how you grew up in Silver Spring. If it hadn't been for those decisions, it could have been elsewhere.

When I was with the Bureau of Reclamation, I got to know all these old time engineers, whose entire careers were with the Bureau of Reclamation. Did I get a history about the Bureau of Reclamation! How the West was developed. The Bureau of Reclamation was one of the main things in the development of the West - irrigation-wise, farming, reclamation, whatever. I never did leave Washington. One of those old-timers lived out here in Silver Spring. We shared driving to from the office for a while.

The Soil Conservation Service had a drafting unit in what we called the Standard Oil Building. The offices were on the upper floors. It was kind of a self-service station down below - they must have had six, maybe eight pumps down there. It was one of the most modern service stations in town. Soil Conservation had temporarily rented the space up above. That was drafting and whatever. So that outfit was moved to 13th and E. We already had people who could do good drafting, then we set up a field survey operation.

Well, that's enough of that talk.

When I first came to Vicksburg, it was surveying, surveying, mapping and mapping, charting and charting. You see, there was a ten-year program after the 1927 floods and they started up a tremendous program for controlling the floods of the Mississippi River. The Army Corps of Engineers, even though they went back to the 1800's or whatever, knew they didn't know enough about the river and the levee system to redesign it. So I reported to what was called the General Water Survey, and it was mainly surveying the river from the levees to anywhere from between half a mile to two miles landside. You get over the levees, and it was farms and cotton, whatever. We drew up these charts - large scale - and they were peppered with elevations. Elevations were the main thing about where to control. Plus any man-made structures.

Well, we took two and a half years to finish that job. See, I first came three months during the summer, then went back to University to graduate. It was 1929. That's when I came to know about big operations, see.

We had two double-decker quarterboats to house men on the river. We moved by steamboat. We had barges to keep the supplies on. Motor boats, big boats, small boats, steel-hull boats that we used for workboats. It took a steamboat to move us. We would tie up at a certain place, and then we worked by trucks on the land and worked by boats up and down the river, surveying all the land between the levees.

I went back to school in 1929, and got my degree in 1930. And I passed the Civil Service examination up at school. And when I reported for duty, I was in the Civil Service register. And all I had to do was come in and fill out some more papers and I had a job.

By then, the outfit was at Greenville, Mississippi. The same outfit. I stayed with that outfit until we finished the whole thing, all the way down to Vicksburg, and further down into Louisiana. Temporarily, I was one of the engineers in charge of certain things. We had a draftsman who was in charge of the drafting. When Gene Suarez left and George Stone was in charge, the engineers started building the great Ft. Peck dam on the Missouri River up in Montana. I was George Stone's right-hand man. I was next to the engineer in charge. It entailed surveying, transits, levels, traversing, and triangulation. That's where I got practical experience about how to operate whatever I did with the Soil Conservation Service, see. I had already been trained and proven as an engineer. Oh yes, and we finally got aerial photography too before the General Low Water Survey.

The survey was done when to river was low. It didn't take more than a few weeks for the flood waters to recede. Sometimes that flood water would come up to within a few feet of the top of the levees. It's an awful feeling, I can tell you.

The Corps of Engineers office building in Greenville was a two-story building, and it was right at the base of the levee. The height of the building was about 40 feet, and you could sit on the upper floor and see the water rise. One time when the floods came, and the flood waters were about two feet below the top of the levee, here was this steamboat going by, and the waves would go over top of the levee, even though the steamboat had slowed to their slowest speed. And how high was this steamboat above where we were at ground level? Thirty-two feet! Here were the flood waters thirty-two feet above the town of Greenville, Mississippi!

The '27 flood was a disaster, and in '29 they had a pretty bad one too, pretty high all up and down the Mississippi valley.

This past flood in 1993 was up there near Kansas and Nebraska and a little down into Missouri; below St. Louis it was bad. I can't recall what it did in Arkansas. Memphis sits on hills, the mountainous part of Tennessee comes in there at Memphis, and then the hill runs recede to the east and you have this flat land all the way down to Vicksburg, all the way to the Mississippi hills. And all that land was where the Mississippi used to wander back and forth during geological times. They built the levees all the way from Memphis down to Vicksburg. They had to stop at Vicksburg because that's where the Yazoo River comes into the Mississippi.

The levees broke several times up and down the river. The levees were not as high then. The '27 flood lasted quite a while and you get seepage through the levees. Eventually they get so much water, the levee would get saturated, and certain spots would get weak and it wouldn't take much to blow through. They called it a blow-out. And it would start just a little bit then boy, does it widen fast. Then when it comes through it really gouges out all of the land for about a quarter of a mile from the levee. In the water you could see this mud and gravel and sand all over the rich cotton land. And of course all the villages and all the houses would flood like you see in pictures recently. Television shows what flood waters can do. Naturally we didn't have television back those days.

One year, the Yazoo had a tremendous flood way up in the upper regions. One of the branches flooded, you know. I had a job - there were three of us - estimating the flood damage of the Yazoo Valley. All the way almost to Vicksburg. Almost to the Tennessee line all the way down. That's about two to three hundred miles. Well, after that Yazoo flood in about 1933, the Corps of Engineers became more knowledgeable that they needed to have other reservoirs up and down some of these major streams and what not, you know. They got forty million dollars to make a survey of the seven dams and reservoirs in the Mississippi delta country and the Yazoo valley. And who did they put in charge? Me! (Laughter) Had about fifty men - had about seven survey chiefs. I think it was during the spring when we started. I finished those surveys; in fact I came up with some different ideas to eliminate a lot surveying. Well, four of those dams and reservoirs were built. They decided they didn't need the others. That took quite a while.

[Was this the same as the revetment work that you did?]

Oh, no. The revetment was down on the river, on the main Mississippi. They had a few revetment works on the other rivers, like the Arkansas, the Missouri River. They had some revetments and a system of pile dikes. The cheapest way was to be to put in pilings. Here comes the current coming down and you want to keep the current from eating out both banks. You would put a pile driver on a barge and anchor by cable and then put the pile driver in position to wherever you want to drive the piles down. And they would drive the piles down deep enough that they would stay put. They wouldn't rot - the wood down in the water would stay so saturated that it would take a long time to rot. So pile dikes would last a long time. They would put a row of pilings out, say perpendicular to the shore line. First they would put in horizontal timbers across, maybe spaced about two or three feet apart, all across the face of these pilings. And when the current would come through, some of the water would go through the openings of the timbers on the piling. That was what they called a pile dike. It would semi-divert the current away from the eroding bank. That's a system of bank protection work.

Well, there was about one year or so when I was in charge of a complete survey of the existing revetments. And they were always repairing them - every year you had to repair the revetments. It was quite an operation. It would take days and days to describe, especially about putting in the protection works. One type was a section of concrete slabs about two feet wide and about a foot this way and about four inch space in between, and it took twenty-five blocks to call a section. They were cast on wire cables and they were flexible. See they were held together with cables running through the longitudinal part of the section, plus wires between the sections. It was quite an operation.

We had a casting plant in Greenville. Along the shore of the river they had pilings. They were put them out in the river because at different stages so that this operation could be carried out at any stage of the river. The river is constantly receding and rising, so you had from low stage to a bank stage, say a height of about thirty feet. Along this was a string of steel barges, thirty feet wide, a hundred feet long, with a square bow on each end. You could sink those barges to a depth of six feet and still have about two feet of freeboard. Freeboard is the part of the boat that is above the water line. The barges had flat decks, and kind of square shaped, and with keels that helped them as they were towed through the water. The difference between the barge loaded and unloaded was about six feet. There was a string of barges, about ten, end to end, about a thousand feet long. On the barges you had steel frames, forms to pour the concrete in. And the sections were twenty-five feet long. The deck would be thirty by a hundred. Each form had to have space for workmen to work between each row. So you had rows of these forms on each barge. Then the barges would butt end to end and you had the same thing on down. How did they pour the concrete? There was a floating mixer plant on a larger barge and it had a tower in it, and you could pour in gravel, you could pour in sand. There was a mixer down below. The cement came in by rail, and the cement came down on a conveyor belt. They had a cement hopper, a sand hopper, and a gravel hopper and the mixing plant on the floating barge. How did it operate? It wasn't by electricity. It operated by steam engine originally. In my day and time, they had a diesel engine, huge diesel engine that operated the mixing plant. From the mixing plant you had a chute going out and they had men on the barges that controlled the chute to fill the forms. Then they had a way of leveling it off and all that. There were always one or two steamboats around to keep the mixing plant barge from floating off down the river. And who was the captain of one of these towboats at the mixing plant? A guy from west Arkansas, Ft. Collins - he and I went to school together in Searcy. His father had a big ranch and cattle business. The few times I wasn't doing anything, I'd go down and visit him, maybe spend several hours up in the pilot house with him. They had barges tied across the river and tied at the mixing plant, and David had to move all this stuff, you see. But you never let that mixing plant get away. How did they get sand and gravel? They were on barges too. There was a crane for the gravel and a crane for the sand. There were three different hoppers, and the crane would take the sand off a barge and put it in the hopper at the mixing plant. Quite an operation.

After one pouring was done, you'd have to wait a day or two for the concrete to cure. Then they would come back and make another pouring. The forms were about four inches high. Each one of these stacks was four inches thick, four feet wide and twenty-five feet long. That would be one mat. They would put tarpaper or some kind of paper between each stack so it wouldn't stick together. The forms would be set back up and they would start at the upper end and make another run down, pouring concrete in the forms. They would continue this process until the stacks were up to a certain height, about head high. The barge would be sinking down, from the weight of the concrete. They would go until it got to the freeboard line on the barge.

When that was all completed, they were ready to be towed up and down the river to where the bank protection works were. A steamboat couldn't tow more than four of those barges, sometimes just two. The Corps of Engineers had about four steamboats, stern-wheelers, and they were powerful boats, powerful work boats. It took quite a captain. No one in the country could contract for this kind of business. Nobody. No contractor would touch it. They tried to contract it once, but the government was the only one that could do it.

The mat-laying itself was quite an operation. The mat-laying barges were a hundred feet long, maybe fifty or sixty feet the other way, and they would all be tied together. The barge had a sloping deck and a system of chains underneath. Can you visualize something like a moving stairway? It operated on cogs with an endless chain that could move these concrete mats. Cranes would position a section of the mat on the barge. The sections would be tied together with sections on the other barges by galvanized cables and u-bolts.

After the entire section was assembled on the mat-laying barges, it was ready for launching. Each launch was tied together with the previous launch. The ends of the previous launch were still back up on the mat-laying barge. These ends were tied together with the mats on the barge.

The mat-laying barges were connected to another series of barges projecting out into the current. This was a system to gradually move out into the river. It took a lot of cables to hold this. I never was assigned to the mat-laying barge, but Paul Frederick was. He was the instrument man there at the sinking plant quite a while. But as you moved the launching deck out, the barges out in the river would start to quiver and so forth. The instrument man had to keep them lined up because, see, each launch had to overlap the other one upstream. Each launch overlapped the previous one. You started downstream, down current, and you go upstream with the launching. And the idea was to completely cover the floor of the river, the mighty Mississippi. And it was a mighty mess! Launching could get nasty in other respects too. I tell you - from an engineering point of view, it was a wonderful thing. It is just mind-boggling how they could do this. Oh, by the way, they had another big outfit that would grade the banks. Here there were rough banks to start with, you see. And here was the remaining bank protection work on each side, they were still repairing, you see. Not only the bank itself, but underneath, on the floor of the river, anywhere from four hundred, five hundred, six hundred, sometimes seven hundred feet. That's two football fields' length out into the river. And here this current is moving about five to seven miles an hour, all the time. They could overlay each launch. The launching barges had to be precisely moved out as this hundred-foot section of concrete mats would drop down into the flow of the river. So we had these controlling barges at the end, that's the only way it would work. But it took a lot of cables and so forth, special wenches too, to tighten up the cable because it would sag. And cables would break and so forth, and they would come up out of the water just like a snake. Some men were killed by being struck by the end of a broken cable. Some of the guys on the deck were killed by derrick men swinging a slab of concrete and dropping it on them. That was a dangerous assignment. It was dangerous all around.

That's enough of that. But for about a year and a half I was completely in charge of making the surveys where they were going to repair the river.

Well, I got started there on how I so-called got to take control of the mighty Mississippi. Well, here was this young guy with dreams of being an engineer. Those five years, I'm telling you, I was just wild-eyed boy. (Laughter) Everything was great to me. I mean it was something an old country boy never dreamed of doing.

Anyhow, this [assignment] was very important in my particular career. Of course, they had been making surveys like this long before I came there - this wasn't new to the Corps of Engineers. But they stepped up the operation, so to speak. I knew about mat-laying and rock-laying in Searcy, Arkansas. I knew about mats because Thomas' father was a civil engineer with the Corps of Engineers. He lived in Searcy and he was in the tail end of his career. His son was Foxy Thomas on the football team. Foxy.

The steamboats would come up near my home town and get the rock. That's why we knew what it was for - they used rock to sink the wood mats. They'd quarry the rock right there between Judsonia and Searcy.

Well, back to being in charge of this particular _______. Usually it started in the spring of the year when the river went down. Heck, I remember now - we started in February. We started in January that year. That was 1934, I guess. It was before two other major assignments that I had. One major assignment was the last profile - cross-section - of the Mississippi River. [And the other was] reservoir surveys. That was the last two.

But this particular time, I had no idea of ever meeting the Corps of Engineers. In other words, every time I could get an important assignment, I was so proud, you know?

Well, we started with a small quarterboat and had two party chiefs - or maybe it was three party chiefs. And with each party chief, we had 2 or 3 whites, but only one black at that particular time. Of course, we didn't have to go too far into the woods or anything like that to amount to - only to a control line up in the woods on the banks.

Some of these bank protection works were anywhere from two miles to six to ten miles long. Not too often ten, but many times five. Of course we had records on file in Vicksburg - on every one of the locations, you see. We knew exactly where each one was, no doubt about that. You could scale down to the foot - actually down to a tenth of a foot.

Well, this outfit had one quarterboat and it housed about 30 men - maybe more, I forget now exactly. We had a towboat - a diesel engine towboat that stayed with us - that was assigned to us all the time. And naturally we had the secondary boats - steel hull, good-sized marine engine in it - a powerful boat. A couple of those, then some smaller boats. The small boat was the one we called the sounding boat. We had to topographically survey the Mississippi underneath - the bottom, you see. Plus the banks. We had control lines up on the banks - we didn't just go in and start somewhere. Everything was controlled - everything was to the tenth of a foot and all that, horizontally, and to the nearest foot in soundings. Of course we surveyed the banks, got all the elevations on the bank. Sometimes the bank has little ____________ to them. Sometimes where it loaded ____________________ it went between this mass [the mats?] of protection work - it would go into the bank sometimes twenty, thirty, forty, fifty feet into this entire _________________, you see. And we surveyed the ________________ of course. And we had to survey the existing part of each side of these ____________________. Sometime there was 2 or 3 places on each side. ________________________________________. Whatever.

And the way we did it -- and this the first time they ever used it - we pulled up with the idea to multiply the sound____________________________ fathoms. A fathom is six feet. And __________________________ have different colored knots on them. This is how you know about how far the slug - I'll call it a slug right now - there's another word for it - the weight - went down to the ground. The way you did it, you bounce along, see - you kept the line kind of straight and you bounce it along the bottom. And the deck hand would holler up to the captain in the pilot _______ how many fathoms. Each fathom had a certain kind of name, a code - so you didn't have to say six feet - that was the old days with steamboat. We could measure one foot. We had a wheel, something like a bicycle wheel, ___________________ cross wise on wood boats, with and inboard/outboards drive that you could control, something like a what you call - outboard motor. We didn't have the outboard engine because it was too fast. We had an inboard engine. It would control an outboard type drive which could rotate easily. You need to control the boat with the current, steady-like. We could control this boat out in the river. Now what we did, we anchored on piano wire. We had a reel on the boat with a system of gears that you could measure how far in feet, how far your boat was out in the river - away from where it was anchored. And we'd survey - we knew exactly where the anchored part was. So the boat was out in the river. We start on the (other?) shore with about 25 feet progressions ________.

The sounding wheel was on a bicycle shape and it had a meter on it which we could drop the weight in the water. We could measure by how many feet the weight was down in the water. Well, the boat could take the sounding - you'd start in downstream and swing out in an arc. And you could take -- you had a plane table man up here - when the boat took a sounding read the sounding - the man up here on the plane table would cut _____________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________. He knew exactly where the boat was at all times. So when you tool a sounding, you would intersect this arc that the boat was swinging on. That gave the exact location. So we could exactly plot on a chart exactly where the soundings were underneath the water. And you'd ____________ depending on how much the bottom had eroded. _______________________________________________________________________________ The boat would swing upstream and you had to keep the tie line, the spring line, tight so it would keep swinging in an arc. You'd come upstream slightly beyond where it was before and kind of drift back and the ___________________ could feel that the lead line - it was on piano wire also - he could feel when it was vertical. More or less guess at it - make a pretty good guess. We tested ourselves many times. If it didn't look right, we'd do it over.

__________________________________________ way out, anywhere from 500 or 700 feet offshore, the boat would be tied on piano wire. Heavy duty piano wire. It came in reels; we bought it in big reels. It was treacherous to have - you could snap it. So _______________ we could overlap each place. You had to move up and down the anchor point, that boat was swinging so we got the entire width that we wanted to survey - on the bottom of the river. We were on rafts, you see - now we would come - plot out - we would have elevation points on the river bottom which was in "datum" common to the elevation points on the shore, you see. They were ground elevations on the bottom of the river. That took quite a few days to do that. We had to do it each place. Then we would do base lines too and well, when we got through the - well, each time we got through with each revetment site, I would take - we would draft these up on the boat - I had a draftsman on the boat - just one draftsman, one drafting table. We would draft our survey of the shoreline and the bottom of the river - in elevations. You see, only by elevations could you tell the degree of how much had to be graded. After looking at these elevations charts, design engineers in Vicksburg could come up with a grading plat - a working plat - to grade the bottom of the Mississippi River. To fit(?) these elevations that we surveyed. __________ long boom it had a big diesel engine to run it - and they could absolutely grade the bottom of the river. They had to back grade too - sometimes they'd cut back into the bank more. The idea was to have a uniform slope on the bank protections. They were kind of curved-like, you see, so the flow would pass over them without tearing them up. So in other words, I had charge of the basics before they did any kind of repair work. It was less than 100 --? You see it was up and down the river all the way from Helena, Arkansas down to Vicksburg. 100 sights? I forget exactly how many. But we finished all of them that needed repair work that particular year.

(Question: "Isn't it hard for a draftsman to draft on a boat?")

Well, yes. We'd try to wait until we could tie up in a place on the river - a pocket - where the current of the river was smooth. Sometimes the current would form a kind of whirlpool - it depended on the speed of the current. And sometimes there's a gap in the middle of the whirlpool too. Sometimes in these pockets, you'd get a big tree that would get in the center of these pockets and down would go the tree! Sometime a whole tree - all the leaves still on it.

Generally, we'd tie up the quarterboat in a smooth part of the river. But a little bit of rocking didn't bother the draftsman. He'd gotten use to that. (Laughter) He first had to pencil it in onto a chart. The plane table man had a working sheet, about 18 by 24, that was in pencil. Hard lead, 6H. The draftsman would transfer this to the overall charts that he had. He had copies of the existing charts of these sites, you know. They were dated - everything was by date.

They would grade it and see what happened, and as the grading outfit drew up river, they made some preliminary checks. Not like our outfit did in detail, but another engineering outfit out of Vicksburg - they came back and made some underground rough checks to wee what happened between the time of the survey and the time in which they were going to lay the mats - a rough check.

In 1934, after I got away from the survey for bank protection works, I did a few surveys for the cutoffs near the Greenville bends. You can still see them on the map here, close to Greenville. The engineers in Vicksburg had decided where they were going to try some cutoffs - cutting out the ox bow bends. I made the location surveys, because all the monuments of the survey had been destroyed along the riverbanks. We had no control of all the banks of the Mississippi River. We had the charts that were tied into a projection grid, but you couldn't go out onto the river and say this is such and such a place on the chart because there weren't too many thing to the right or left you could identify where you were on the river, except maybe the bottom of the bend is here, or the bottom of the sand bar is up here. But how are you going to say where are we going to start this cutoff across this neck? Here it is on the chart, and here's where we want to put it across, but where is it on the ground? I put in three of them. Sometimes we had to start out on the levee and then come in - which is quite a task - coming up accurate traverse, getting a starting point, getting an observation on the North Star and so forth.

I did three of those. I think they did a total of seven, but by then I was gone and in Washington, DC.

I remember one time on that job that my mother and my father came to see me. At that time, I was staying in Winona, Mississippi. My daddy didn't know where I was exactly, and he didn't do any calling around or anything. He and mother drove from Searcy to Vicksburg, and went to the Corps of Engineers' office, right there in town in Vicksburg. And he found out where I was, up in Winona. I was staying at a hotel there - there was only one hotel in town. We didn't have any kind of office there at that time - we had offices in Oxford, but not there. So I happened to be at the hotel at that time, and was upstairs looking as some photographs. They told me that there was a gentleman down at the desk who wanted to see me. I came downstairs with a notebook and the photographs in my hand, and when I saw my Daddy and my mother, I dropped everything on the floor! Naturally, I ran over and kissed and hugged my mother, and Daddy gave me a big handshake and a hug. And of course I had to tell them all about what I was doing.

Blevins came to see me unannounced too. I don't know if he was still in high school, or maybe he was in Hendricks by then. He came with a friend from home, Hike. That's was everyone called him, but his name was Howard. He was the son of the hotel owner in Kensett and he was the brother of Fern Cowan. You remember me talking about Fern Cowan? We were kind of sweethearts when we were young. Your mother met Fern - they played bridge together. That was when you mother stayed those several weeks with my mother and daddy in Searcy.

Anyhow, somehow Blevins and Hike got down to where I was in southeast Arkansas. I had an outfit on the river. We were working by land - we weren't working by boat, although we had boats on the river. The town was Eudora, Arkansas and I was staying down there in a hotel. I had been into the office at Greenville - they had a district office there - and was coming back. You had to take a ferry across the river then, there was no bridge, like today. I was getting ready to drive my car on the ferry - waiting the other cars to get off first - and who did I see on the back of a roadster? Here was Blevins and Hyke. I recognized Blevins and hollered at him - and stopped my car right quick. They were trying to find me - they were headed for Greenville. I put them in my government car and we drove to Eudora.

Blevins stayed two nights with me. He wanted to stay longer. He was thinking about getting a job with the Corps of Engineers. He wanted to get away from Daddy. But I talked him out of it - told him he was going back to school. I took him to McGee, Arkansas and put him on a train. The train from McGee went straight through to Pine Bluff then to Little Rock. All he had to do was catch the bus into Searcy. That was the best decision I ever made.

[Why did Blevins have a tough time with your father?]

We all had a tough time with Daddy! We had so many things to do! And he was always checking to see whether you did it or not. Blevins had taken over the store - he took over my duties.

Blevins became quite successful in his time I would say - as an executive who helped to found Monasco. Do you remember him coming to Silver Spring? I can remember two, maybe three times he came to Washington. One time, I went downtown to the Shoreham where he was staying, and met his engineers and lawyers he had with him. They had just come from a big convention in New York, and were having a meeting in Washington. They had a big suite. These men were sitting around playing poker, using the numbers from dollar bills. And drinking whiskey.

They got into missiles production too at Monasco - missile components. They were the leading manufacturer of aircraft landing gear in the United States. The only other one was in Cleveland, and they outdid the one in Cleveland. All types of aircraft landing gear. I toured the plant between Dallas and Fort Worth. Blevins was so proud of that building. He was the driving force in getting that built.

The other one was out California, in Burbank. Originally it was a washing machine company. They took it over and manufactured landing gear. They grew mighty fast. A lot of people in the aircraft industry - military, civilian, commercial, whatever - a lot of men put money into Monasco to help establish it. Famous names.

This plant between Dallas and Fort Worth - it was on the Trinity River. At that time I was on a teaching expedition with Soil Conservation - Magruder and I. We had come into town, and I had a message for me at the deck to call Mr. Fondren at such and such telephone number. And it was Blevins. He and Jerry were in town. Monasco was having a big celebration party for the plant. So I attended one night and it was a celebration all night. Lots of drinking. They were staying over at Ft. Worth at a plush job. Blevins and I had already been out to the plant Saturday. But Sunday he had to go out there. The big party was Saturday night - Jerry and I had a hangover. But Blevins got up Sunday morning and he's down there at the plant checking on things. We kept waiting for him to come back for breakfast. Finally Jerry and I got room service. I remember we had a couple of sandwiches a piece.

That afternoon I had to leave. We were in town just for the weekend and we had to be back on Monday. Magruder was staying with the guy who was in charge of the cartographic unit in Ft. Worth, Doc somebody. They went to the football game Saturday night - he had a hangover too.

I did get to see the entire plant. And it became very successful. That's the end of the story.

Pearle and I visited Wilbur Mills and Polly at their apartment down off Connecticut Avenue. They kept that apartment for many years. Wilbur and I grew up together. His father was a competitor of my father in business. His father didn't have as much of a spread as my father. (Laughter) Wilbur's dad would come up to my daddy's office and they would sit and talk about business, whatever. And my daddy would go down to visit Wilbur's dad at his little office.

I'm a year or two older than Wilbur. In those days, Bill Dickey and Wilbur and I would ride the train together over to Searcy - the DK&S. Bill graduated from Searcy I think, the year I was at Little Rock. The three of us grew up together- of course we didn't know what the future held for us. Who would dream! Baseball was Bill's main thing - always baseball.

Wilbur talked about going to Hendricks. I had no part of Hendricks, because I didn't like the Hendricks boys. We played the Academy every year - I didn't like 'em - they were too snooty. We had a dislike for the Hendricks Academy football team.

But anyhow, Wilbur graduated from Hendricks, then he went to Harvard. Then he got his law degree. I preceded Wilbur into Washington by a couple of years, I guess.

In the latter days of my daddy's business - primarily the wholesale grocery business - my father had stock in Millburn and Johnston. Polly's father also had stock in the company. There was a third person - a guy named Jack Ballard. He was a great one for sports and so forth. My daddy and Polly's father were the salesmen. Her maiden name was Billingsley. The Mill's and the Johnston's and the Fondren's, well, we were well known people in Kensett.

Well in later years, after Wilbur became so famous, many years after he came to Washington, I went home and here between Kensett and Searcy they had put up a big sign: "Home of Bill Dickey and Wilbur E. Mills" as you approach Kensett. I took offense. Why didn't they say, "and of James P. Fondren"? (Laughter)

I took pride in the fact that I was the first one to graduate from the University of Arkansas Engineering School from White County. I looked it up in the registrar's office. I thought that was quite an honor. I'd already completed my term with the Corps of Engineers, and people in Kensett know all about my career - 'cause I knew Daddy and Jack Ballard told 'em all about it.

I knew when Wilbur was elected - Merle or Mother wrote me. There came a time later when there a crisis about my career and Wilbur looked me up. It was before I married your mother. We talked, and he said, "Is there anything I can do for you?" I shook it off.

The first time I took Pearle over to meet Wilbur and Polly, we had dinner down at the Shoreham, down on Connecticut Avenue. We visited at least one more time - Polly and Pearle really hit it off. Polly was a smart girl - she graduated from some girl's school - I guess it was Galloway.

One time, before I married Pearle, Wilbur and I got together and went to a baseball game, and we went down to the locker room to see Bill. New York was in town playing the Washington Senators. Griffith Stadium locker room - hot and steamy. So we got together after the game - Wilbur, Bill and myself. We walked across Rock Creek Park - over the bridge, I remember that. We talked over old times in Arkansas. Later, Bill and I had a beer together at his hotel - was it Wardman Park? Anyway, there were some other players there too having a beer before dinner. One was Earl Combs, centerfielder, and Ben Chapman, the third baseman. There was a third one there - the little short stop - was it Crosetti or Rizutto? Most of the time, they were kidding Bill and me about being from Arkansas. That was a real treat for me.

Then later, Wilbur and Polly joined us and we all had dinner at the Shoreham. That was great get-together.

One time I looked up Bill in Chicago, and this big guy opened the door and said, "What the hell do you want?" He was taking a nap. In Chicago the games were played in the daytime, so they were getting a nap before going to Wrigley Field. It was about 10 o'clock in the morning.

"I want to see Bill," I said.

"Who are you?"

"I'm from Kensett and I want to see Bill Dickey."

He called Bill to the door and Bill introduced me to Ben Chapman. He stuck out his hand, gave me a big strong grip. I said, "Ben! You're breaking my hand."

Then Lou Gehrig got up off the bed and came over and said, "What the hell is going on over here?" The three of them were rooming together in this suite. They all kidded Bill about being from Arkansas.

I told Gehrig, I said, "If you don't know it, this is one of the greatest events in my lifetime, to meet you." I never knew much about Chapman, except I knew he was a tough guy. I knew that much about him.

"I know quite a bit about you," I said to Gehrig.

"How come that is?"

"My sister told me all about you. Bill didn't tell me, but my sister did." Merle went up to Columbia University in New York one time for a summer course. She was pretty baseball-minded too, and she looked up the history about Gehrig and so forth. Merle knew a lot - maybe she got it from Johnny Dickey, Bill's sister. I knew she graduated from Columbia University.

Gehrig was a gentleman all the way. Absolutely.

That was time of Babe Ruth, when they had such great teams. Another time I ran across them in Atlanta - the third time. We had dinner together. Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth came around to our table. Earl Combs - I always called him the silver-haired Kentuckian. His nickname was 'Colonel' too. He was a good centerfielder - tall, well-built man. Man, he could go get 'em in the outfield. Well, of course all the Yankees were damn good in those days. This was in the thirties - well, it was after I came to Washington. I had left the Corps of Engineers. I came to Washington in December '35. So say 1936-1940. Of course between 1939 and 1940, I was courting your mother, so the hell with baseball!

I recall it was the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta - it was a plush hotel. The old one - I forgot the name of it - it burned. One of the major hotels in downtown Atlanta. You went one way and there were movie theaters, down there on Peachtree Street. I stayed there one night before it burned. That's when I was with the Soil Conservation Service. We had jobs in the Carolinas, and down in Georgia and so forth. Some in Mississippi, some in Alabama.

Off and on I was in Atlanta at a field office in the new post office building in Atlanta. Operated out of there for about a year and a half or so. That's how I got acquainted with Atlanta. I had never been there before. The saying back then was you stand on the street corner and watch the pretty girls go by. The Georgia Peaches.

This was their spring training. Atlanta was not in the majors - it was in the Cellar League. Little Rock was in the Cellar League - Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans. Some of those baseball leagues we always thought were the best in the country. A lot of good ball players came out of the Cellar League. Cavanaugh Field in Little Rock. The Arkansas Travelers - that was the name. I had forgotten that. They played at Cavanaugh Field in Little Rock - high wood fences all around. A few times on Saturday, when I was going to school in Little Rock, I remember as kids looking for a knot hole to look through. We didn't have a dollar to get in to the stadium. Lorene gave me 50 cents a day, and that included trolley fare. I had to eat lunch with 25 cents. (Laughter)

Eventually I got in the stadium quite a few times and watched baseball. Or we'd come up from Kensett and go to the ball game. And that's where we played our Little Rock High School football games - at Cavanaugh Field. And you know the pictures of Little Rock High School in desegregation days? You remember the beautiful looking façade of the high school? That was new - I didn't go to that one. That was down near Cavanaugh Field.

My English teacher at the University of Arkansas was Jo Bell Holcomb. She was the leader in getting the amphitheatre built on campus. I made the ground survey before they ever built it - drew the drawings up, shape of the ground and all that, with my prof helping - Prof Spencer. Eventually the grounds superintendent put it under contract. She was always coming out to the construction site, during the construction stage. I worked with the contractor - did all the instrument work on the layout of the entire stadium - seats and so forth, stages. It was called the Greek Amphitheatre. Ron took some pictures of me sitting in it. They still have events out there.

[Note: This was a special request from Susie Palas to Daddy]

Well, Susie, you have asked for me to talk about your father.

There are many things I can't remember, but I do know that your father went to the University of Arkansas, at least for a couple of years. Even though we talked about it a great deal, I cannot recall in great detail what your dad did there. I assume that he was in the College of Engineering in his freshman and sophomore year.

The first time I met him was six months after we had formed the Soil Conservation Service in Washington, DC, at 13th and E Streets, located across from the Earl Theater. I had left the Corps of Engineers in December of 1935, and reported to Soil Conservation before Christmas that same year. Charlie and Slocum were working out in the field at that time, somewhere near Cleveland. I've forgotten now where, maybe it was Zanesville, Ohio. It was the wintertime. But I didn't meet Charlie until the spring of 1936, because he was out in the field during the first six months that I was there in Washington. Slocum was the chief of the outfit that Charlie worked on many different times. I think Slocum and Charlie had worked together for the Forest Service out from Lufkin somewhere. And I believe it was Slocum who was later responsible for bringing Charlie into Washington to work.

Slocum and Charlie had stuck it out there in Ohio during the cold weather that winter, and they were so happy to get their next assignment in Texas. So they came to Texas and the first job was out from Waco somewhere. By that time we had reorganized and had changed our headquarters, so at that time I was working out of Springfield, Missouri. I had spent a few months in the Carolinas and in Georgia, and in Alabama and Mississippi with the other Chiefs of Party. I've forgotten now what month it was, but it was around summertime of 1936. I was bringing their pay checks to them. The party consisted of Slocum, Charlie and Red. Red was from Purdue University. He and Charlie were great friends. So that's when I first met Charlie. And I spent about a week with their survey party then I went elsewhere.

I guess it was the next year, 1937, when we had a big job in Waco mapping the Bosque River watershed. The Bosque comes into the Brazos a short distance down the river from Waco. Susie, you don't probably know, but our main job was controlling aerial photography for these different places that Soil Conservation wanted to map and publish soil surveys. Our main job was horizontal control, controlling the aerial photography, geodetic positions, latitude and longitude of each point on the photographs. The photographs were assembled in Washington. But in the field it took a lot of transit and traverse work, measuring angles back and forth, observing on the North Star for azimuth, night observations. We operated under strict specifications doing our work for the government at that time and we had to do certain things with certain specifications. Some of it was real tough to meet. Computing up the traverse work, using calculators. We had one little Monroe calculator - hand crank - and Charlie was good with a calculator. And he was pretty good computing. A lot of times, Slocum would leave Charlie to do the computing while he and Red were out. We hired anywhere from two to three other people to form the rest of the party. Mainly the party consisted of five men: two rod men, two chain men and the instrument man. The instrument man was the Chief of Party. Well, so much for that.

And it was a lot of hard work. Difficult work. Working on highways. And I might say, we never did get anybody killed on the highways. Never. We never had a serious accident, because I preached safety control. In Vicksburg, I would have to deal with a safety engineer on all the operations of the Army engineers up and down the Mississippi River.

Well, at some point, Charlie left Waco and got married, but I've forgotten where. So when I came back to see the outfit, I hadn't yet met Charlie's new wife.

I first met Betty at a dance the guys had one night. There was Al Weber and his wife Kay, and Sam Hand and his wife, and Slocum and his wife. Sally. Ed Fitch was there too, but he wasn't married yet. And, of course, Charlie was there with his new wife. So I met Betty at the dance. She was so full of energy. I was very shy and not a good dancer. And your mother, Susie, got me out on the floor and made me dance!

So I guess that was in the fall of 1937, maybe '38. But before that job was completed, Ed Fitch was thinking about getting married. And Charlie kept bugging him to get married. He had already met Helen some way or another. She was from Savannah, Georgia. So Ed finally got engaged. Well, Charlie and I decided to take Ed into Fort Worth to help him pick out a suit of clothes. Bill Therell was with us too. Fort Worth was the nearest big city. At that time, most of the guys in the field only had one dress outfit. Well, we bought the suit of clothes for Ed to get married in and some other clothes too. And on the way back, we had a few drinks. To keep from getting arrested, we would pull off the highway and pass the bottle around. I'm not sure where we were, but we were pretty close back to Waco. Ed wanted another drink, and Charlie wouldn't let him have one. Of course we had all had enough. We were in Ed's car. We had finally taken Ed away from the steering wheel. I think Bill Therell was driving at that point. Ed was leaving town the next morning, and we wanted to get into town some way that he could be sober by then. So we stopped at a culvert and kept Ed in the car, and Charlie threw the whiskey bottle underneath the culvert. Ed was hollering and carrying on. I guess we all drank too much in those days.

So Ed went back east to get married, and then Helen came back with him.

Well, we finished the job in Waco. We had to fire some of the guys because we were ceasing a lot of the field operations. But most of the guys came into Washington and that's what Charlie did. Charlie and Betty had an apartment above a dentist on Georgia Avenue. During that period of time, we still did some fieldwork, and Charlie was always happy to go out with me. He was always ready to get out of town for awhile.

During that time, me being a bachelor, many times Charlie would say, "Jim, how about coming out tonight?" He always called me Jim. Charlie and Betty were my main social contacts, you see. So I spent a fair amount of time at Charlie and Betty's apartment. Then they moved from Georgia Avenue to an apartment on Fort Stevens Drive, and I visited them there many times too. Charlie and I were buddies, so to speak.

He was always the leader in getting the group together. He would get Ed, he'd get Weber, and he would get George Walker. He was a great one to get the guys together - dinner, a cookout. He was a great organizer.

We then moved our offices to the Printcraft Building on 10th and H Streets in Washington. And Charlie worked there too. But Charlie was becoming disgusted with the job that he was doing in the Printcraft Building - slotting templates and getting down on the floor for assembly of aerial photography and so forth. It was tough on the knees. Charlie was trying to get a better rating. I think he already had the highest rating as an engineering aide.

Well, one day, Charlie got mad as the devil. He got mad about something and he was going to quit. Kelsh was over us at that time. Kelsh called me in and said, "Your friend Charlie says he's going to quit." Kelsh and I talked about it for awhile. Charlie was working under me. So I called Charlie in my office and said, "Kelsh tells me you had a little run in. Come on - let's go across the street and you can tell me about it." We had a favorite little place not far from the office building. We got some coffee and Charlie told me all about it. Well, he said he was (pardon the language, Susie) "red-assed," meaning disgusted with his job.

So I said, "Charlie we're all going to lose our jobs some time soon. You cannot leave here like this, because you will not get a good recommendation when you leave. It would be discharged with prejudice. You're not gonna do that!" So Charlie stuck on. He went back over and apologized to whoever he had cussed out. So when Charlie left the Division of Cartography, he left without prejudice.

Then there came the time when Betty wanted her sister Pearle to come and live in Washington, Pearle's husband, William Owens, had been killed and she was still living in St. Augustine. Her husband had a son, Little Bill, whom we ended up raising in Silver Spring. Little Bill's mother had died shortly after childbirth and it was about two years or so later that Bill Sr. and Pearle were married. They hadn't been married very long when Bill Sr. was killed. Well, Little Bill was living with his grandparents after his father's death. His grandfather was a well-respected man, a civil engineer in railroad construction and operations for the Flagler system in Florida. After the grandfather died, and then the grandmother died, Pearle wanted to get guardianship of Little Bill because she didn't want him to get under the control of his uncle. She felt he would be a bad influence on him. So she got legal guardianship of Little Bill.

So Betty wanted Pearle to come to Washington and Pearle wanted to get away from St. Augustine, so the next thing you know, Charlie left Washington to go to St. Augustine. He went down by train and got Bill and Pearle and they drove back in Pearle's car. And she lived with them on Fort Stevens Drive in Washington DC.

Well, Charlie and Betty wanted Pearle to meet me. At that time I was living downtown, on Rhode Island Avenue - or maybe I had moved to my apartment out on Connecticut - I'm not sure. So they set it up. We met in a restaurant and I remember when I first saw Pearle I thought, "Oh boy, is she beautiful!"

Well, before long, we had to leave town, Susie. It came a time when the Navy, the Air Force and the Department of Agriculture came up with the idea of doing aerial photography with nine-lens cameras. So they photographed three counties in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. It was Dallam County, Texas, Cimarron County in Oklahoma, and Baca County, Colorado. They all stacked up together north to south. And they were all in the Dust Bowl area. Well, they had to have horizontal control right quick, so they could analyze and research and decide about the nine-lens photography.

So Kelsh and Snyder said, "Okay, Fondren, get ready to leave town. Who do you want to take with you?"

I said, "Charlie."

I asked Charlie if he wanted to go. "Hell, yes. Betty's got Pearle to help her take care of the home front. Let's get going!"

We took Red Watkins and Shorty Cosgrave. So it was the four of us. And I'm telling you, during that period of time, they were having some terrible dust storms in that area. It was bad, bad weather. We overcame though. We did the job real well, although there were a lot of hardships. It was a difficult assignment. It entailed a lot of ground work. I came up with some ideas to reduce the amount of ground work. There were some railroads there and I wired in and had my office send us the plans of all the railroads and some of the general land surveys. I was able to use these to reduce the amount of time we had to spend on ground work. I wanted to get the heck out of there. I wanted to get back to Washington where Pearle was!

I have three photographs of us on that job. We were at the intersection of the borders of New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. There was a monument there, a bronze tablet and with an inverted cone on the top. It so happened the weather was pretty good, the dust had subsided, so the pictures came out pretty good. We were dressed in our work clothes - khakis. And we were brown. And I had on my old black hat I brought up from Vicksburg. And Charlie and Red and I took turns taking each other's pictures at this monument.

It was on this job that Charlie pulled another one of his pranks. Most of the time I made Charlie do the instrument work. On that job, there weren't any geodetic positions to amount to anything, and on the tail end of the job, we had to run a chain of triangulations. It was difficult because sometimes we'd have to see as far apart as two to three miles - sometimes five miles apart - on triangulations. Well I remember this place exactly. We were on this butte. And I'm on the last angled turn. In triangulation, you have to turn to three or four other stations, you see. So I set up the instrument and did this and did that and I got ready to observe. I set the setting on the plates and the transit, sighted the telescope by eye without looking through the end of it, and aimed the telescope toward the station. But when I looked through the eyepiece, I couldn't see a thing. I said, "What the hell's going on here. I can't see, Charlie. What's the matter here?"

Charlie said, "Maybe the sun's in your eyes. Put your dark glasses on."

"Charlie you know I can't see with those glasses on." I kept fussing around with the eyepiece.

Charlie came over and looked and said, "Well, Jim, I can see through it."

Red came over and looked through the eyepiece and said, "I can see through it. Maybe it's your eyes, Jimmie."

Boy, was I getting frustrated. And then I detected something, a little grin, or a chuckle or something. So I looked through it again just one more time. "You guys have done something to this."

"Well, Jim," Charlie said, "suppose I take out this potato chip and then maybe you can see!"

Charlie had put a potato chip behind the eyepiece. Boy, did I get mad! It took me quite a few minutes of cussing them out. Then I asked them why they did that. They said that because I never got mad, they were wondering what it would take to get me to lose my temper.

That was quite a job working out there on that butte. But we finally got the angles turned. That was the tail end of our so-called triangulation and it was a key to the entire operation more or less on that part of the job. Because it was tying in places where we had traversed and it was very important to what we had been doing for several weeks.

I guess it was on that job that I got more acquainted with Charlie. We had to do a lot of observations on the North Star for azimuth. We would set our sticks where we wanted observe, then come back at night and try to find the location. But it was hard to find at night because it was so dark. And there were very few buildings or landmarks of any kind. You could really get lost at night. But Charlie and I had a system of flags - red, white and blue - that we would tie on certain fence corners or stakes or whatever. That would guide us from one location to the next, and tell us where to make a turn and which way to go. And we finished without any difficulty.

Usually you spend about an hour observing on the North Star, but I cut it to about ten to fifteen minutes. I didn't turn as many angles. Sometimes when you look up with a telescope to try to find the North Star, it's difficult to find. But we knew the vertical angles to turn to make sure we were sighting on the star. On that job with Charlie and Red and myself, we made the most observations of the North Star of any party. Well, that was kind of history making in the office. Charlie told everyone all about it.

Towards the tail end of completing this job, we had progressed up to Baca County, Colorado. We were staying in Springfield, the county seat. Still working out in dust storms and doing a lot of transit work. I stayed in town most of the time and let Shorty and Red and Charlie do the remaining field work. I had to do the computation work in the hotel.

Well, what happened was this. I got an assignment to go to Baker County, Oregon. I didn't get to come back to Washington with Shorty and Red and Charlie. So it was my last night in Colorado. Well, sometimes, Charlie could do some mischievous things. Here I am in my room at the hotel, which I used as an office. Charlie and Shorty were staying at private places, so they came by to see me at the hotel. It was kind of like a farewell, as I was supposed to leave the next morning to head to Oregon. I had all my work spread out there, and I was completing the last of the computations before I left town. Although I didn't usually keep whiskey in the room, I did have a small bottle, a half pint or whatever. So we were having a drink or two before dinner. Well, all of a sudden, that damn Charlie and that damn Red Watkins took my computations that I hadn't completed and took my ink bottle and my notebooks and some of the photographs and threw them out the window down into the alley!

Boy was I mad. When I asked why the hell they did that, Charlie said, "We're throwing away all this stuff so we'll have to do it over. We don't want you to leave!" I guess that was their idea.

I said, "Charlie Y. Mettauer, get the hell out of here and go get that stuff and bring it back in here!" It happened to be dry, no rain of course at that time. Some of the India ink spilled on some of the stuff, but no serious damage. So we had dinner. And early the next morning, I left. They bid me farewell. And Shorty and Red and Charlie stayed there for less than a week and then went back into Washington.

It took nearly six months before I got back to Washington. All the time, Pearle was dating somebody else. She was dating a guy I shared an apartment with. He was a graduate of the University of Tennessee.

In 1940, Pearle and I were married in Charlie and Betty's apartment on Fort Stevens Drive, with a minister. A few friends came too - Slocum, Doc Henson, Chris Henson. And Little Bill was there too.

Pearle and I moved then to the house in Silver Spring. We still weren't making much money in those days, myself or Charlie. Of course, Betty was working down there at the Department of Agriculture. She always got a steno job somewhere, to help make ends meet. They had raised the rent on Fort Stevens Drive, so Betty and Charlie moved in with us in Silver Spring. I can't remember how long they lived with us, less than a year maybe? I think they must have been gone by the time Pearle was pregnant with Joyce, because it was about that time that Frances came to town, and she lived with us for a while too.

But I can say that if hadn't been for Charlie, I never would have married Pearle and I wouldn't have three daughters!

Well, as years went by, it came time to cut the payroll. We were reassigned to various things. I was determined to get Charlie a job. They were going to dismiss Charlie entirely, and Red also. Well, Red and Charlie were pretty good men, you see - damn good men. I laid the law down to Snyder, "All the hardship these two guys have gone through, they are important guys to me. These two guys have helped me help you get where you are today. How about you see if you can get these guys jobs?" Well, with me and Kelsh and Snyder requesting, they got Red Watkins a job in the Soil Conservation Service up in New York, and they got Charlie a job out in Colorado. I think it was Pueblo. And they were there for some time. Charlie was working with soil scientists at that time. He fit in quite well and got good recommendations from the project manager out there. It was still a temporary place. All these places in the Soil Conservation Service were temporary, you see. We were building up to the stage where all the states would take over all operations and form cartographic units in each of the state capitals. That's what we were leading up to.

Well, I guess the project was closed out in Colorado. I lost touch somewhat but I think Charlie and Betty went back to Fort Meade. And, maybe I'm wrong, but from there, they went to Venezuela. Charlie had gone over to Texas and, through some of his old buddies, he had gotten a job with an oil exploration survey outfit, which entailed a lot of traversing and control work. Everywhere there was oil exploration work, they would set off the dynamite charges. They had to know where to place the dynamite - some were close together, some were far apart. Usually the exploration people would have to go into the boondocks where nobody else had been before. It could be terrible. I can't recall how long Charlie and Betty were down there. Charlie had good contacts with various oil and gas industries in Texas. It was no problem for Charlie to get around in that part of Texas. Anyhow, he took a job up in South Carolina, with a mining and quarry company. I think it was Palmetto. And of course, after Charlie and Betty divorced, I lost touch with Charlie. Betty never did say much of what she knew of his life after they split up. But I know he loved his two daughters. He loved his daughters.

Well, that's about all, I guess, Susie.

Oh, one more thing. Here's another story that's related to you in a distant way. One time Pearle and I went to Houston to visit Merle and Suzanne, and Betty went with us. We were all staying with my sister Merle at 2115 Pelham Drive in River Oaks in Houston. During that visit, we took a trip up to Lufkin to see Charlie's mother and her sisters. Was Charlie's mother's name Ada? Mrs. Mettauer's sister was Mrs. Johnson (I can't recall her first name) and she was married to a wealthy man. He was the president of a paper manufacturing company. Mrs. Johnson had planned a big luncheon for us, with her sisters, in big, downtown hotel. Afterwards, we went back to Mrs. Johnson's home there in Lufkin. Perhaps you have been there, Susie. Well, I was the only man. In this room of the Johnson's palatial home in Lufkin, there was big desk with a big leather chair.

Mrs. Johnson said, "Mr. Fondren, why don't you have a seat in Mr. Johnson's chair over here." After I was seated, she said, "The reason I wanted you to sit there was that a few days ago, one of your relatives was sitting in that chair." As it turns out, Walter Fondren III had been to visit them! He had gone out to the manufacturing sights and timberlands with Mr. Johnson. We had tried to visit Walter in Houston and found that he was out of town. And it turns out he was up there in Lufkin with the Johnsons!

So it was that the Fondrens and the Mettauers did entwine, so to speak. Well, that's about it, Susie.