The Oregon state employee., June 01, 1944, Page 20, Image 20

18
Graduates of the Merit System
When President Roosevelt in his 1944
budget message to Congress, called on
critics of government employees to look
behind the personnel statistics to the
work the employees do, he may well
have had in mind not only the anony­
mous workers who do the routine, un-
glamorous, but indispensable tasks of
government, but also some of the almost
equally anonymous engineers, scientists,
technicians and administrators who have
never sought either money or publicity,
and who are known only through their
achievements.
The Reclamation Bureau of the In­
terior Department has been served by
many men of this type. The present
Commissioner, John C. Page, rose
through the ranks during 30 years*
service from topographer to the post
of chief administrative assistant in the
construction of Boulder Dam. Since his
appointment as Commissioner in 1937,
he has been responsible for 60 reclama­
tion and irrigation projects, 16$ dams
and 28 power plants in 17 Western
states.
Two key men of the Reclamation
Bureau, with a world-wide reputation
in engineering circles, but almost un­
known by their employer, the people of
the United States, are John Lucian Sav­
age, chief designing engineer, and Frank
A rthur Banks, chief construction en­
gineer.
Mr. Savage, since 1903 a government
employee, has built 60 major American
dams and thousands of other structures
and has been lent as consultant to
the governments of Australia, India and
Mexico and many states and cities. He
designed such mammoth structures as
the Shasta and Friant dams in Cali­
fornia, the Norris dam and Wheeler
dams and power plant for TV A, and
the Boulder and Grand Coulee dams,
largest water-power plants in the world.
Nearly $,000,000 persons in 17 states
are dependent in one way or another on
facilities he has designed. He is the first
engineer in the world to have designed
a billion dollars’ worth of structures.
Yet his salary has never exceeded
$10,000 a year.
Frank A rthur Banks is junior to Mr.
Savage in the government service by
only three years. He went to work for
the Bureau of Reclamation upon his
graduation from the University of
Maine in 1906. He helped build small
dams and irrigation projects throughout
the West and was gradually entrusted
with more and more important struc­
tures until, in 1933, he was appointed
chief construction engineer and assigned
to the Grand Coulee project in Wash­
ington. Situated in an area where sup­
ply difficulties were as great as those of
commander of desert armies; where all
supplies, from food to cement, steel and
lumber, had to be hauled in from $0
to 100 miles away, construction of
Grand Coulee involves new problems of
every kind. W ith the largest artificial
lake in the world— 1$1 miles long— at
its back, with horsepower four times
that of the great Dnieperstoy dam in
Russia, and with a final cost estimated
to be $404,000,000, its construction
engineer is content with an annual sal­
ary of $7,$00.
The unthinking who lump all public
employees together as "payrollers” and
"tax-eaters” probably do not know that
John C. Garand, inventor of the Gar-
and rifle, is an ordnance engineer at the
Springfield, Massachusetts Armory; that
the Hollerith tabulating machine, used
by thousands of business establishments,
was invented by a clerk in the Census
Bureau; that the inventor of radar is
Dr. A. H oyt Taylor, a physicist at the
Bellevue Research Laboratory of the
(Continued on next page)