Patterson, Roger K., Oral History Interviews
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ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWS ROGER K. PATTERSON Ë Ë Ë Ë Ë Ë STATUS OF INTERVIEWS: OPEN FOR RESEARCH Ë Ë Ë Ë Ë Ë Interviews Conducted and Edited by: Brit Allan Storey Senior Historian Bureau of Reclamation Ë Ë Ë Ë Ë Ë Interviews conducted–1994-2000 Interviews edited and published–2011 Oral History Program Bureau of Reclamation Denver, Colorado SUGGESTED CITATION: PATTERSON, ROGER K., ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWS. Transcript of tape- recorded Bureau of Reclamation oral history interviews conducted by Brit Allan Story, senior historian, Bureau of Reclamation, from1994 to 2000, in Sacramento, California, and Lincoln, Nebraska. Edited by Brit Allan Storey. Repository for the record copy of the interview transcript is the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. Record copies of this transcript are printed on 20 lb., 100% cotton, archival quality paper. All other copies are printed on normal duplicating paper. i Table of Contents Table of Contents.............................................................. i Brief Chronology of Career ................................................... xxiii Statement of Donation........................................................xxv Introduction .............................................................. xxvii Oral History Interviews.........................................................1 Born in McCook, Nebraska, in 1949 .........................................1 “. grew up on the farm there. Non-irrigated farm. My neighbors seemed to be into irrigation, mostly groundwater wells, but my dad decided that was not the way he wanted to go, which, having worked three or four summers for one of the neighbors helping them irrigate, I appreciated his decision, because it’s a lot of work . .” . 1 Want to a One-room School ...............................................1 Attended High School in Hayes Center, Nebraska ..............................2 “. we were kind of twenty miles from anywhere, twenty miles from McCook, twenty miles from Hayes Center, Culbertson, Maywood. Our address was McCook, went to church in Culbertson, and went to high school in Hayes Center . .” ........2 “I guess the expectation was that I was going to go to college, because there was never any question that that’s sort of what my folks had in mind. And so I headed in that direction. .” ....................................................2 Attended McCook Junior College for Two Years ...............................2 Received a Bachelor’s Degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Nebraska .....2 Married in 1971 and His Wife Finished Her Degree at the University of Nebraska and He Took a Masters Degree in Civil Engineering, Both Receiving Their Degrees in December of 1973 .................................................3 Worked for Reclamation During the Summer While in College....................3 “Spent most of the time in Kansas and lived on per diem, and as a GS-3, I was in tall cotton. .”.............................................................4 Jobs Were Plentiful, but He Chose to Work for Reclamation......................4 “I had been sort of negotiating with Bob Kutz . He’s the project manager in Grand Island, Nebraska, and he started with the Bureau when he was seventeen. He’s worked forty-seven years on the same project, and he’s now the project manager. .” . 5 “. I was smart enough to read the rulebook, and I saw that if you had a master’s degree you could start as a GS-9, and Kutz thought I ought to start as a GS- 5, which was sort of déjà vu, because when I started in the summer, in college, he wanted me to start as a 1. I didn’t know what it was, but I asked him if he ever knew anybody that was a 1, and he said, ‘No.”. I said, “Gosh, what about a 2?’ . .” ...................................5 “It turned out my first job was a non-engineering kind of a job, which was fine with me. It was the guy that basically talked to all the water districts and decided how to meet their schedule, how much water do we release, and where do we release it from . .”........................................6 Was Late to Work His First Day on the Job at Reclamation.................7 Oral History of Roger K. Patterson ii “. my master’s degree was actually in sanitary engineering. which is part of the civil engineering department in Nebraska. Again, there you can take certain electives and I took a lot of the environmental engineering things, whatever they had. .” ...7 “. we called him Fox. he was the guy that taught surveying. He really loved surveying. and he had written all the textbooks. you had to run levels from a certain point on the campus all the way around and down by the stadium and whatnot. Every class for forty years had run this same set of levels, right? So my roommate and I . But we figured that those levels were pretty neat. You could watch the coeds around campus, so we managed to get our hands on the same set of levels everybody else’s were in. We knew it was 0.88 elevation difference and all of that, so we kind of filled the field book out and we were out there watching the levels. And that was great, looking through there and watching all the girls and this and that. It was all fine until Lego comes up and, ‘Let me see your field book.’ And he noted that our field book was done and we were only halfway through. (laughter) So we had a little visit about that, and he made us run them three times and he was on our case for it . .” .....................................8 How Water Scheduling Worked at That Time .................................9 Started to Work on a Supervisory Control System for the Systems Operated out of McCook..................................................10 “We were on that transition from ‘do everything manually and fill all the forms out,’ to ‘Is there any way computer systems can make our job easier and help with some of this?’. .” ..........................................11 Reclamation Wanted to Keep the Cost of the Supervisory Control System Reasonable................................................12 Double Checking the System to Make Sure it Worked Correctly ............13 His One Room School ...................................................15 “At that time, if you went to college, you didn’t go back to the farm. Now the only way you can go back to the farm is if you’ve been to college and have a business degree and agronomy degree and all this other stuff. .” ...........................16 Learning to Do Water Scheduling in the McCook Office ........................17 “I truly never did have an engineering job with the Bureau. .”..................17 “And as John Lawson always tells me, ‘It’s better to be lucky than smart.’. .” ......17 Loss and Waste in a Water Delivery System..................................20 “. it turned out that the highest yields were coming from people that use less water. There was a curve that your yield increased as your water supply increased up to a point, but then above that, as you applied more water, the yield actually became less. And that’s something I’ve always remembered as, hey, just plowing more water on to it is not even good for you, let alone everybody else that needs to rely on that. .” ....................20 “The people that really had the yields were very judicious with the way they applied the water that they got. They stretched it out, they applied it at the right time, and they were good stewards that way, where the other folks just kind of turned it on and let it run and didn’t have the yield. .”..........20 The Work Ethic in McCook...............................................22 “Employees, I think, want to do a good job, and they’re sort of like my two teenagers. I have an eighth grader and a ninth grader now, and whatever you expect them to do they’ll pretty much do, but they’re always going to be pushing over on the edge. And if it turns out that you don’t care, then pretty Bureau of Reclamation History Program iii soon they don’t care about it. .” ..............................23 “. two-, three years ago . we did that survey of all employees in Reclamation, and one of the things that came back was that employees, in general, thought that Reclamation didn’t have very good supervisors and managers. A lot of the supervisors and managers, well, they didn’t believe that. Well, to me, it was as true as the sun coming up every day. I’ve seen it a lot. And it’s because a lot of the things you have to do as a supervisor can be kind of hard stuff . .” .................................................23 “It’s really a challenge. I mean, communication in an organization is really hard, and during times that things are changing and people are concerned about the future, and what their future is, and what’s really going on out there, just makes it harder. .” ........................................24 “We always sort of make the best technical person in the branch into the supervisor. a lot of times those don’t work out very well. They just aren’t the kind of people that are going to be very good and very comfortable at being a supervisor. .” ............................................25 Things Supervisors Need to Do That Don’t Come Naturally to People.......25 Reclamation’s Organizational Development Seminar...........................26 “But the point of that was, I think that some of finding out what people are good at ought to be done before we cast people in the role of a supervisor . .” ..............26 “. probably the most important thing that we do is select people and put them in the job. .” ...............................................27 “My experience has been that if you have somebody that’s not doing a very good job . Ninety percent of the time, they’re just not in the right job. .” 27 W. Edwards Deming’s Seminar............................................27 “. he said the best data you can get is to talk to somebody that you have confidence in that has worked with this person for at least fifteen years.