Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California General Wesley Peel: Beverly Willis Oral History Project Interviews conducted by Victor W. Geraci, PhD in 2008 Copyright © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ********************************* All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and General Wesley Peel, dated September 29, 2008. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: General Wesley Peel, “Beverly Willis Oral History Project” conducted by Victor W. Geraci, PhD, in 2008, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2008. iii Discursive Table of Contents—General Wesley Peel Interview 1: September 12, 2008 Tape 1 Working with Beverly Willis on the Army's Aliamanu Valley Housing Project in Hawaii— Willis's Collaborative Professionalism, Ability to Finish the Project On Time and Under Budget—Adaptation of Architecture to Hawaiian Style and Climate—Peel's Army Experiences on Baffin Island, in Vietnam, in the Aftermath of Hurricane Camille at Biloxi, Mississippi, and at Ford Leonard Wood—Retirement from the Army, and Back to Texas A & M to Oversee Construction and Development. Introduction to this interview by Beverly Willis The Aliamanu Valley community in Honolulu, Hawaii, adjacent to Pearl Harbor, is a planned community of 11,500 inhabitants. The 525-acre site, located in an inactive volcano crater, was used as a massive ammunition storage site during WW2. To serve the population of 11, 500 people, we planned housing, school buildings, parks, and a small town center with a fire station. The site plan was composed of four villages, each containing from 500 to 1,000 homes. The village was divided into two or three neighborhoods of 20 to 35 acres. Each neighborhood had a recreation center within 600 feet walking distance of any home. Within a neighborhood, we planned three to five clusters of multi-family housing. Each cluster was composed of 50 to 100 homes covering five to eight acres. At the cul de sacs, two taller `portal' buildings on either side of the entrance defined more private areas. Educational facilities were provided for 2,100 children from kindergarten to the eighth grade and approximately 850 in the ninth and twelfth grades. High school students were bused to existing off-site schools. 1 Interview 1: September 12, 2008 Begin Audiofile 1 01-00:00:00 Geraci: Quiet time. Today is Friday, September 12, 2008, and we are in the Bryan, Texas home of General Wesley E. Peel. This interview with General Peel is being conducted by Victor Geraci, Associate Director of the University of California Berkeley's Regional Oral History Office, and the interview is part of the Beverly Willis Oral History series of interviews to document the life and work of artist, architect, urbanist, lecturer, and writer, Beverly Willis. Funding for these interviews comes from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. General Peel was a client representative for the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Hawaii and negotiated the design of the 1978 completion of the military housing project. Help me with this. How do you say it? 01-00:00:55 Peel: Aliamanu. 01-00:00:57 Geraci: Aliamanu. The project serves as a benchmark for Ms. Willis's career because of the use of her firm's newly developed computerized approach to residential land analysis, referred to as CARLA. First of all, thank you for agreeing to do this. 01-00:01:16 Peel: You're quite welcome. 01-00:01:16 Geraci: We're sitting here in the midst of waiting for Hurricane Ike to strike Houston or Galveston. 01-00:01:21 Peel: I hope we finish this before it hits. 01-00:01:24 Geraci: Before it hits. It would be best to start a little bit with your background of your general life, and then as we move through the interview, we'll move to your experiences in the Army Corps, and in particular, your experiences with Beverly and with the project in Hawaii. So I guess start at the beginning. 01-00:01:46 Peel: Well, start at the beginning—how long do you want? Okay. I grew up in northeast Texas. Entered Texas A&M College, now Texas A&M University, in 1942. In 1943, the war was not going so well, and as you may know. Texas A&M College at that time was an all-military, all-male school. Most of our classmates and upper classmen had already gone to the Army, or to the Air Force, or to the Navy, and the freshmen class was about all that was attending the college at that time. In April of forty-three, we were afraid we were going to miss the war. So 137 of us hitchhiked to San Antonio one Saturday 2 morning and joined the Army. It was four days before I was eighteen, so I had to forge my application for service. I went to World War II in Europe, came back, completed my education here at A&M College, and taught vocational agriculture for four years. Then the Korean War came along and I was recalled. Then I decided that I would make the Army my career. I applied for regular Army and was accepted into the Corps of Engineers. A lot of projects. A lot of assignments between then and when I first met Beverly Willis. I had been assistant district engineer of St. Louis, district engineer in Korea, Far East District, and then had gone back to the office of the Chief of Engineers as Executive to the Chief. My assignment from there was to Hawaii. I was the engineer for United States Army Pacific, responsible for all engineering activities in the Pacific. Stayed in that job for a year and then I was transferred as the division engineer of the Pacific Ocean Division. The Pacific Ocean Division was one of ten divisions of the Corps that performs both civil works and military construction for the Army, as well as for the Air Force. And the job in Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean Division was to plan, design, and construct all Corps of Engineer projects in the Pacific, whether it be Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Thailand, the Hawaiian Islands, Enewetak, American Samoa, or some other island. There were projects that we had. 01-00:05:50 Geraci: Now, what types of projects? 01-00:05:53 Peel: These were both military construction, as well as civil construction projects. Military construction would be post camps and stations. We built complete camps in Korea. In American Samoa, for example, we built an infrastructure for the city of Pago Pago, and had an interesting experience on island of Ta'u, which is one of the five islands of the American Samoa islands. This was a project to build a dock for the people who live on Ta'u. They can grow almost anything. It's a volcanic soil. They can grow almost anything, but they can't get it to market over on the big island, which is where Pago Pago is. And so what the Department of Interior wanted us to do was to build a channel from the ring of coral, about a mile out, which prevented ships from getting in close to the island. It was not convenient to ship produce from Ta'u to anywhere else. So my job was to build the channel and the dock. 01-00:07:39 Geraci: A new experience. 01-00:07:41 Peel: Yes, a new experience. These kinds of experiences happened all over the Pacific, and it was fascinating. But back to Hawaii. When I came into contact with this project, I had been assigned, as I said, from the Pacific engineer to the Pacific Ocean Division engineer. This was one of our many projects. It was a project to build family housing for Air Force and Army families in what 3 was an old volcanic crater.