Even after nearly 50 years, my recollections of the beginnings of my association with Cornell, Howland, Hayes, and Merryfield (as it was then) remain vivid! At the request of Fred Merryfield, Harvard degree in hand, I flew from Kansas City to Corvallis to interview for an engineering position. None of the people who would supervise me (should I be hired) were present that weekend. So I spent most of it with Fred who asked no questions about my qualifications but drove me all over Corvallis and up to the summit of Mary’s Peak whilst extolling the virtues of the area and its family friendliness. He was the worst driver I’d ever ridden with because he almost never looked at the road ahead but mostly at me in the passenger’s seat. He offered me a job but at a lesser salary than I currently earned. Pleased though I was to have survived Fred’s tour of Corvallis’ environs, I declined the job offer and flew home. At the time, I remember that the flight home was a fitting end to the weekend. Kansas City was socked-in, so we were diverted to Chicago where a 60-mph crosswind made landing difficult. The aircraft, a four-engine Convair, broke the left side main landing gear; so we had to deplane via the “chute.” I eventually got home to Kansas City 15 hours late aboard the Santa Fe Chief railroad train!
Fast forward 1 month — I began receiving telephone calls and telegrams from Fred saying that I was supposed to be in Corvallis at work. He eventually convinced me that my future lay with CH2M. Guess what? He was absolutely correct!
I was hired on as an E-3. After meeting my new boss, Sid Lasswell, it was decided that I might be able to handle a project even though he wasn’t sure that anybody not educated at OSU was going to be very useful. My first project was the design of a septic tank for the Corvallis Country Club. It worked, so I graduated to more complex designs. The next in line was a sewage lagoon for Cave Junction. On that project, I worked with Dick Humphrey, who showed me how to climb fir trees with linesman’s spurs so we could locate a clearing in which to locate the sewage pond. He also taught me how to walk through poison oak.
Gene and his wife, Babs, enjoying an outing during his time in Alexandria, Egypt. 1981
As time went on, I did get to use some of the engineering wisdom that had been imparted to me during my graduate studies. And as a result, CH2M’s first activated sludge treatment plant was completed for Albany, Oregon. Up until that time, all of our designs for secondary sewage treatment were based on trickling filters. Jerry Boyle came down from Seattle to be our resident engineer on the Albany project and became one of my closest friends. Also about that time, John Filbert, with whom I had worked in Kansas, joined the firm. So the ranks of ex-Kansas State Board of Health employees (Russell Culp, myself, Elmer Seegmueller, and John) continued to increase. In a way, all of us joined because Ralph Roderick was an ex-Kansan. He recruited Charlie Bayles (our chief estimator for years), Elmer Seegmueller, and Russ Culp. Russ recruited me and so on. I recruited a large number of the current staff of project managers.
I loved to undertake the making of proposals and the “ selling” of our services to clients. With the assistance of a number of mentors, chiefly Sid Lasswell, I eventually got to be pretty good at sales. I usually wore a conservative suit that Sid called my “gold suit.” For one reason or another, the success ratio whilst wearing the gold suit was higher than when I wore a different suit. Therefore, Sid commanded that I should wear the gold suit even though by then it was threadbare. I think maybe the reason we were so often successful is that clients looked at my shabby suit and felt sorry for us!