William Ball | Interview 1 | July 6, 2010

STEIN: Okay, it's July 6, 2010. This is Julie Stein, and I'm here with Mr. William Ball. This is our first interview. So, the way that we usually start these is by asking you to state your name, when you were born, and where you were born.

BALL: Name: William Bertram Ball. I was born June 21, 1915 in the city of Oakland, state of California, and before I was a year old I moved, my parents moved, and we wound up in the small town of Wheatland, California, which is a sort of a country town, agricultural area about forty miles north of Sacramento, where I grew up and graduated from high school. After high school--

Perhaps I should tell you just a bit about Wheatland. There were 500 people there, very small town. We all knew each other. We almost knew what we all had for breakfast [laughter] each day. And so it was a wonderful place to grow up, and my parents, while they were strict disciplinarians in the behavioral sense, they were very lenient in allowing me at an early age to explore the woods, the river and the countryside around.

We had a river, it was called the Bear River, and it would take about twenty minutes from my back door to reach the river where I and a number of my 00:02:00classmates used to camp overnight or go down to swim. As a matter of fact, that's where I learned to swim. Even though our town had just built a swimming pool, I preferred the river. It was a wonderful place to be, and I would credit that with nurturing my love for nature because things were so quiet, so wonderful down in that part of the countryside.

STEIN: Now what did your parents do in Wheatland?

BALL: Pardon?

STEIN: Your parents. What were they doing in Wheatland?

BALL: I'm sorry--

STEIN: Your parents. Your mother and father.

BALL: Oh, parents. Oh. My father had 00:03:00originally when he moved to Wheatland with my mother and me, did practically anything because he was new to the area, but he soon developed a business of harvesting. He assembled a crew of people where he would go around to the different farms and harvest their wheat and other crops.

Before long we moved to town to get me into school. At that point, then my dad began operating a small repair shop. It was a little sort of an add-on or a lean-to from the livery stable in town. Soon he began getting more and more 00:04:00customers, and finally when my grandparents had moved to the home at the north side of town and my grandmother had passed away, we moved in with my grandfather and my dad then took over the barn that had been part of the property and turned that into a machine shop and auto repair business and service station.

So when the Depression really was in its worst, Dad had a business that kept coming. The farmers couldn't afford to buy new equipment, and so Dad would repair the old stuff for them. He also developed new pieces of equipment for the 00:05:00farmers. So we had a business. My mother supplemented the family income by doing bookkeeping. She had previously before marriage been a bookkeeper for the Fageol Motor Company here in the city of Oakland. That was before they had met. So she was able to do bookkeeping for a couple of businesses in the town of Marysville, which was thirteen miles north. But I guess that brings you up to date with people and my parents and me and up to the point where I graduated from high school.

STEIN: Can I actually ask you a question about your high school?

BALL: About my what?

STEIN: Your high school.

BALL: Okay.

STEIN: Do you remember what that experience was like? What classes you liked or what your social life was like in high school?

BALL: Social life was wonderful.

STEIN: Yes.

BALL: Because there were so few of us that we had to get along.

STEIN: How many were there?

BALL: Much of what we did was centered around the school, although we did have little parties. I remember the Blackfords, who were a little more affluent in town, always had parties, and we would go and spend a Saturday night at the party there. But much of what we did, as I say, centered around the school,

where we would go out and bring things in from the countryside in the way of leaves from trees and branches from trees and the various flora and fauna from 00:07:00around the countryside. Then we'd put on a play or something at the school.

If you read the book, you may have read where I thought I had killed one of my classmates. I don't know whether you remember that at all, but that was because we were coming in with a lot of decorations and she was standing on the running board of the old, do you remember the automobile called the Ford Olet.

STEIN: I've read about it.

BALL: Well, anyway, that was the vehicle I was driving and the steering system failed and Carol was wiped off the running board and I was trying to control the 00:08:00car and concerned about Carol and thought that I had killed her. But she wasn't injured, and she recovered quickly. But that was the sort of thing we were doing in high school.

My classes? All my classes were the favorites. We had good teachers. They were, I think chemistry might have been one of my favorite classes. Then there were the math classes. They were introducing algebra. My mother, incidentally, saw to it that I never went to class unprepared on my algebra, and she was able to learn the algebra along with me and make sure that I was doing it correctly. So, brief shot of my parents and high school.

STEIN: So after that when you went off to college in Sacramento, is that right?

BALL: Yes, I went to college in Sacramento, and I have to tell you that going to college in those days didn't cost a dime. No tuition, no costs of any kind except board and room, which my parents paid for. I also managed to make some money by playing in a dance band. Almost the first week I was in college in Sacramento there was an advertisement on the bulletin board for tryouts for a dance band organized by a man by the name of Tom Curry. So I tried out and made 00:10:00the band, and my roommate also made the dance band. My roommate was Forrest Lackland. His father had been a Navy captain but had died from some disease down in South America.

In any event, my college days were really very wonderful, playing in dance band, making sure I was getting educated in engineering and having a fine time at the home where I stayed along with three others during the time I was there. I guess I could say that Sacramento was really a very wonderful institute; that is, the 00:11:00college. It turned into a four-year college the year I left there. I left from Sacramento to go to Cal Berkeley.

STEIN: Can I ask you about Sacramento. What was it like moving from a very small town of Wheatland to Sacramento, which was much bigger at that point?

BALL: Well, because I had had the experience of going to Marysville, which might be called an interim step, on the way to a large city, I probably became more used to people, so when I finally got to Sacramento it wasn't much different.

STEIN: Okay.

BALL: Of course, I was also involved with school, and that probably occupied 00:12:00enough of my attention so I wasn't too concerned about the difference in the large number of people in Sacramento.

STEIN: So then, I suppose the next step was moving to Cal to Berkeley, which felt like a much bigger transition. Is that right?

BALL: Transition to Berkeley was probably sort of a shock. I stayed originally in a place, a dormitory, and I felt sort of lost. I was amongst maybe 250 people at that dormitory, and it was just above the stadium, the Cal stadium. It wasn't 00:13:00too long before I received an invitation from my fraternity Theta Xi to come and see if I'd like to join that fraternity. I went there, I decided it was for me, and I joined the fraternity. I still am a member and contribute annually to their fundraising efforts.

STEIN: What was it like being a fraternity in, what is this, 1935 maybe?

BALL: It was 1935 that I joined the fraternity. Yes. What was it like? It was great.

The fraternity was down to about five or six members when I first joined, and by the time I had been there for maybe four or five months, the numbers had increased to about twenty. So we had quite a group of guys, and it was interesting getting to know them all. Some were football players, one was a boxer. His name was Jim Castle, and he turned out to be the Pacific Coast champion in the light heavyweight division. What a pleasant guy he was, you know, you would think of a fighter as being pugnacious, but Jim was very soft-hearted and a very nice guy to be with.

But my other fraternity brothers run the gambit from all kinds of tough guys to studious guys to people dedicated to getting ahead and making a career for themselves. So I would say my fraternity experience was very valuable.

STEIN: Could you tell me something about what Berkeley was like as a city when you arrived?

BALL: Well, Berkeley was a sort of an avant garde city at that time. Where we lived in a fraternity was sort of separated from the main city, that is to say 00:16:00it was up in the hills. You don't know Berkeley, but it was up by a creek that came running down from the hills and ran right by the end of our house. To get to our place, you were just about as up as far as you could get before you got into the very densely vegetated Berkeley hills.

So we were sort of isolated, but we could, on the other hand, look out of our windows to the west and see the bay, and we could also look out our windows to the west and see a sorority house [laughter] where we could, one of our guys had a pair of binoculars that his father had brought back from World War I, and we 00:17:00would sit up there and spot the girls sunbathing down below. That was an activity that was practiced now and then. Anyway, it was a wonderful experience.

STEIN: How much of your time did you spend in class and how much of your college experience was more of the social aspects, whether it be football games or dances?

BALL: Well, one of the things I did was take photographs. There was no tuition, and the student body card would get you into all the games, football, baseball, 00:18:00basketball, everything. I used to take photographs along the sidelines of the football game, then I'd rush back to the fraternity where I had my little dark room, developed the prints, and then try to sell the prints at the end of the game when people were filing out of the stadium. I didn't make much money.

STEIN: All during one game.

BALL: All during--

STEIN: In two hours.

BALL: Right.

STEIN: Wow! [laughter]

BALL: I didn't make much money, but I made a little. I made enough to buy my camera equipment, and I used a Contax 35mm, and I had a 135mm telephoto that I used to get close-ups of the players and various items that I wanted to take 00:19:00during the game. Anyway, it was a very interesting and fun experience.

STEIN: The time that you were in college was the same time as some of the hardest years of the Depression. Was there a sense of how the Depression was affecting people in college?

BALL: When we got to college because my parents were I guess you'd call it recession-proof or Depression-proof because my dad had that business that kept him going, and my mother supplemented the income, so we didn't really feel the Depression as much as a lot of people did. I can remember, for example, it 00:20:00probably was 1932, this was before I was in college, when the farmers growing peaches, which was one of the big crops around Wheatland, couldn't get enough money to even harvest the peaches so they let them all fall to the ground and rot.

Now my parents never went through that kind of situation, and that made a lot of difference to me. I felt so badly that those farmers could stand there and watch their hard work just fall to the ground and rot. But throughout all of this time, I guess, I was busy in my classes and busy with the fraternity where I was 00:21:00also an officer for two semesters.

STEIN: Okay, so you were talking about the fraternity, about the Depression, about your experience in college. I would love to hear I read in your book that you worked at the resettlement agency in San Francisco.

BALL: Oh, yes. Well, when I was in my senior year at Cal I was working half day for five days a week in San Francisco. I would stay at the fraternity, I'd run 00:22:00down to Shattuck Avenue, jump on the red train, rush all the way to the ferry boats, jump on the ferry, have breakfast, and feed the seagulls [laughter] on the way across and run up to the office where we were working. I did drawing work for them.

I was an excellent, and this is bragging, [laughter] I was an excellent draftsman. I was able to do a lot of the drawing work that went on there. In addition to that, during vacation times I would go with the crew on survey trips where we would lay out those migratory labor camps. Of course, I saw some of the 00:23:00people coming in from the Oklahoma dust bowl.

What we were building were essentially tent camps, but there would be a main building, a sewage disposal plant, a water treatment plant, and tent houses for the residents coming in. They could come there, settle in one of those tent houses, use the central facilities of washing and showering and all of the other clean up functions that they needed to do.

I think it was probably one of the most wonderful things done during the 00:24:00Depression year. I'd have to say that everything that was done by the government during the Depression in order to try to get us into a recovery situation really didn't do much. Now that may be a controversial statement. But as I remember it, nothing did much to lift us out of the Depression. Do you remember ever hearing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speech where he said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."?

STEIN: Yeah.

BALL: Unfortunately, he was not clear on what fear he was talking about. But the 00:25:00fear finally happened. It happened December 7, 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and sank a big part of our Pacific Ocean fleet. It scared the daylights out of us. It stopped the fighting between the Democrats and Republicans. It stopped the competition between business and labor.

It stopped all of the manufacturing processes that we were producing for automobiles and other things that were having a hard time being sold during the Depression, and the result was that America finally outproduced the world. We 00:26:00supplied war materials for Russia, England, France and all of our allies. Then at the end of the war when Europe was a torn up mess, we instituted the Marshall Plan which got Europe back on its feet.

Now the result of all of that is it cost the United States a tremendous amount of money, and we decided that we could finance it by creating a national debt. That national debt is what is sinking us now. At the end of World War II it 00:27:00probably was in the billions, but today our national debt is around 12 trillion dollars. That consumes about half of our taxes, and it is paid to banks, China, Japan, India, and other people who buy those bonds and live off the interest. I think if that debt were to be called by those countries today and we tried to reduce it completely, we would be in the worst economic depression you ever saw.

So we are hanging on by a thread. Every time our government prints money, that national debt increases. Sooner or later it will be unsustainable and sooner or later we are going to have to face the job of reducing that debt. We may not be able to achieve it. If we cannot, I will sort of leave it up to anyone who may be listening to conclude what will happen.

STEIN: It's fascinating because you have seen the first Great Depression, or not 00:29:00the first, but a Great Depression in our country's time, and it sounds like you had a really individual view of the work of these resettlement camps and trying to find places for all of these migrants from the dust bowl coming to California.

BALL: Well, I guess the reason we were able to do that resettlement project was that we still hadn't increased the national debt to the point where money was difficult to come by. So there was money available for that, and it didn't cost that much to build those migratory labor camps.

STEIN: Where were they built?

BALL: They were in Bakersfield, Shasta, Brawley, Indio, in the southern part of 00:30:00the state.

STEIN: Were you aware of the presence of migrants while you were in college? Was it something that you would see?

BALL: I wasn't aware of it until I started working in San Francisco, and then I became aware of it only peripherally, and then as I was out on survey and we began building those camps, I saw some of the laborers coming in, I mean some of the people who were fleeing the dust bowl coming in.

Do you remember John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men?

STEIN: Of course.

BALL: That is a very fine depiction of the status of the United States and the 00:31:00people from Oklahoma.

STEIN: I imagine that must have been fairly shocking as a young man to see entire families--

BALL: Yes, it was. Of course, there was the movie after, and that movie depiction I think was one of the best, that was, as I remember, it was Henry Fonda who was one of the leads in that movie, but the depiction of the movie of the dust bowl plight is very accurate.

STEIN: Yeah, and do those images, do you recall the images of seeing families of workers coming to those camps?

BALL: Well, I just remember it as a general panorama. While I saw some of the 00:32:00immigrants, I didn't get close enough to them to really get a feel for their plight individually. I knew the general plight, and, of course, there were the photographs by some of the women photographers of that day who depicted that period of time. Dorothea Lange and others that did such a wonderful job.

STEIN: Let's talk about how you got involved in surveying and draftsman work and--

BALL: How I got involved in what?

STEIN: In engineering and surveying work.

BALL: Well, when I was thirteen years old I had an uncle who was managing the 00:33:00Sacramento Corps of Engineers, and he said to my mother, "I'll give the kid a

job if you think he's up to it." So, I left home when I was thirteen years old to work during summer vacations on a survey party. I worked there each year throughout until I was out of high school. Each year we would, of course, work all summer long stripped down to the waist so that we could get a beautiful tan to come home and impress the girls.

STEIN: Of course.

BALL: I have been paying for it ever since. I have probably had oh, something 00:34:00like 100 or 125, maybe even more, skin lesions desiccated and excavated and burned. It goes on and on and on, and it never will stop. And so I am paying for my sunburns and probably will the rest of my life.

STEIN: For somebody who doesn't know a lot about survey parties and the work that you were doing, can you explain what the goal of these survey parties was?

BALL: Well, the goal of the survey parties was to survey the Sacramento River to be sure that it was kept clear of sand bars and snags. Snag is a tree that has 00:35:00fallen and gotten into the river one way or another and impedes navigation. In those early years there used to be a great deal of navigation from the Bay Area up into Sacramento and above, carrying wheat and other products down to market.

So the Corps of Engineers, one of their assignments was to make sure that that river was kept clear and free for navigation. That extended into streams up into the Sierra Nevada mountains. On some of my vacation survey trips we were up as 00:36:00far as Cisco, which is probably around six or seven thousand feet, where some of the rivers started, to determine how much silt and other products were being carried down into the Sacramento. So it was a wonderful experience for me to have that background in surveying.

And I remember on one of the occasions in Sacramento Junior College, we were taking a course in surveying. You don't know, but we use a thing called a tape. It is a quarter of an inch wide steel little bar 200 feet long, and you bring it 00:37:00together in loops of five feet. Then you flip those five-foot loops into a two-foot loop.

One of my professors was doing that, and the chain was twisting. He was having a terrible time, and I said to him, his name was Teale, T E A L E. I said to him, "Mr. Teale, if you turn that tape around and let it out, then it won't twist like that. He looked at me with a baleful eye and said something like, "Mr. Ball, when I need information, I will ask for it." But later on I caught him 00:38:00taking the tape and changing hands and doing it right. [laughter]

STEIN: Did you learn most of your knowledge about surveying just on the job?

BALL: Yes. Yes, I learned just about everything there was to do about surveying including the drudge work of hacking out bushes. In order to do a survey you have to be able to see from the instrument to the front stakes and back stakes. We called them front and rear. A lot of that was just dirty, hard, sweaty work, and I didn't catch poison oak at that time, and so when anybody ran into poison 00:39:00oak, a shout would go out calling for Ball to come forward to go through the poison oak. [laughter] I would hack out the path through the poison oak for somebody else, so I had more than my share of work with the machete and brush hook. You know what a machete is?

STEIN: I know what a machete is. I don't know what a brush hook--

BALL: A brush hook is a long axe-like thing which at the end has a curled hook, and you take that and pull it, and it pulls the brush toward you.

STEIN: Okay.

BALL: Anyway, I got lots of practice at that.

STEIN: This job sounds like a young boy's dream. You get to be outside all day--

BALL: It was. It was indeed.

STEIN: --and you're doing important work.

BALL: Let me tell you just briefly about one of my experiences. We were always out on survey at lunch time, and we would take an hour for lunch. Our survey leader was a very strict believer in starting to work on time, and at the strike of one o'clock he'd jump up and we would be off again on survey.

But this time we were up on the, I think it was the American River just above where it comes into the Sacramento River, and we were having lunch. I was enjoying a sandwich, it was a beef sandwich, and I thought it was pretty good 00:41:00for that day. One of the guys said, "Oh, God Almighty. Have you looked at your sandwich?" I hadn't even paid any attention, so I peeled the bread apart and my beef sandwich was about 30 percent maggots. All I can tell you is but up to that moment that tasted just fine.

STEIN: Oh, no. [laughter]

BALL: But after that, it didn't. [laughter] But anyway, that's a little tale from the survey days.

STEIN: So you started doing this at thirteen. Did you decide soon after that you wanted to go into engineering?

BALL: When I was very young, the first sounds I ever heard were the tractors 00:42:00starting up in the early morning before daylight. My mother was cook for those harvest hands. She would get up around 3:30 or thereabouts and have breakfast ready for oh, around 4:00 or 4:30.

STEIN: Wow!

BALL: Because the harvest didn't start until daylight, and so I heard all of those sounds. I finally was able to totter around and see these things being prepared for harvest, and I was fascinated by the sounds and the sights that I saw. It was a sort of a natural thing for me to want to know more about those 00:43:00big things that made noises and clattered and chugged around.

Then when my father finally began his business, I was further involved in watching the pieces get put together that made an engine and an automobile and whatever else my dad was making. So I just sort of you might say segued into the business of machinery equipment, engineering and everything connected to it.

STEIN: So at what point in your life did you start seriously studying engineering?

BALL: The moment I graduated from high school I knew that's what I wanted to do 00:44:00in college. There was no question about it. For me, it was engineering, and that's what I did. I can't say that there was any pressure on the part of anyone, my folks, my parents, didn't pressure me to be an engineer. It was my own decision. It was a natural thing. I suppose I was maybe you might say destined to be an engineer. Or maybe my experience made it such that there was no other choice.

STEIN: I suppose it sounds like just before you graduated from college there was 00:45:00one more transition to the Boeing Aeronautics School. Is that right?

BALL: Yes. Well, I finally decided that there wasn't much exciting work in just plain engineering, so I felt that the thing to do, and this is one of the worst mistakes I ever made, was to go to the Boeing School, learn aircraft design. In college I had taken an aircraft alternative, and so I had some background in that. But at Boeing School if you got more than I think the number was 85 percent or 90, I don't remember which, you were assured of a job in aviation. So 00:46:00when I got out I had enough of a grade average so that I got an offer from Boeing, Lockheed and Pan American.

STEIN: Wow.

BALL: And that is repeated in my story, but those offers were about $85 a month, and remembering now that this is 1937 and 1938, and I thought that's not very much. In the meantime, I was receiving a telegram from the person that had been my boss on that part time job on the resettlement administration. He had gotten 00:47:00a job at the Grand Coulee Dam in the state of Washington and was offering me a job as a junior engineer up there at $35 a week. Now you compare that, that's about almost $150 a month compared to the $85 of Lockheed and Boeing. You could see that the choice was simple. I'd go to the

$150 a month job, to heck with all that ambition to be an aeronautical engineer. [laughter] So that's what happened.

STEIN: What did you know about the Grand Coulee Dam before you left. Had you heard about the--

BALL: Nothing.

STEIN: Nothing?

BALL: I knew, well, I guess I should say I knew it was one of the projects that was being developed during the Depression, and I knew that it was a big project. But when I finally got the job and was up there, it was a tremendous, a huge project. And I thank my lucky stars that that was my first job out of school and that I was lucky enough to have been offered a job. It was just my most cherished and my most wonderful experience to start my career as an engineer on 00:49:00that job.

STEIN: Can you tell me more about that? What was the nature of your role? What was your job?

BALL: Well, one of my jobs was to keep track of all of the forms being prepared on the job. As you know, the dam is a concrete structure, and they poured it in 50 by 50 foot chunks five feet deep. They formed those, some would be formed by adjacent blocks filling up, but the downstream and the upstream would require a form. So in addition to that, the trash racks on the upper face of the dam where 00:50:00the water is brought into the penstocks, the big tubes that take the water down to the turbines, those are complicated and very involved forms, and I had to go around over the dam at the end of the week and check all of those forms to report those in total.

So there was a pay scale for the forms. You got so many dollars for built in place forms, and so many dollars for panel forms, and the two, built in place would be one at the abutment where the regular shape of the ground made it

necessary to adjust the shape of the forms. So that was one of my basic jobs. The other was to keep track of the amount of forming inside the dam. There were six-foot and nine-foot tunnels around through the dam, and you could, of course, calculate the square footage of forms, but where they came together, the curve of the six-foot intersecting the curve of the nine-foot was a little more complicated, and you could only do those by using calculus. So I learned how to put those together to calculate that, but when I got to the big penstocks at the 00:52:00opening of the upstream face, the shape was so difficult, it was delineated on paper, but I couldn't calculate and nobody could help me with this one.

I couldn't calculate the square foot, so what I did with that one is I got newspapers, and I plastered newspapers on the actual built in place form before it was taken out to the dam. And when I got to a place where a piece of paper overlapped, I'd cut that out and save it. So I counted all the saved pieces of paper and then took the square foot of the total pieces of paper, deducted the saved pieces from it and got the square feet for that. So that was part of my job.

STEIN: It sounds like you were very creative, though, even on your first professional job.

BALL: Well, I guess I'd have to say, "Yes."

STEIN: [laughter] This is not a time for modesty. From what I understand the Grand Coulee Dam had posed a lot of engineering challenges as a project as a whole. Were you aware of some of the innovations in dam building at the time?

BALL: Oh, yeah. We had all of the drawings that the Bureau of Reclamation prepared for that job. Actually, I have still the set of specifications that were written by the Bureau of Reclamation in 19, I guess it might have been 1934 00:54:00for that project where the rates are given for labor. How would you like, for example, 50 cents an hour for certain wages and 25 cents an hour for other kinds of wages. This is in that book of specs that I have carefully kept all those years.

STEIN: That's fascinating. That's so wonderful to have still. Was it considered good wages at the time? Was this a job that people wanted to be a part of?

BALL: Say that again?

STEIN: Was it considered a good wage at the time?

BALL: Sure. Oh, yes. People were lucky to get the wages, and many people working on the job I think at some point there probably were about 5,000 or 6,000 people 00:55:00on the job all total.

STEIN: Do you know of that number about how many engineers there were?

BALL: Oh, I would say, see we were in a separate housing, I mean a separate office building, and there were probably thirty-five of us.

STEIN: Okay. So it was still a fairly elite group on a project that huge.

BALL: Yes.

STEIN: That must have been a wonderful experience.

BALL: We stayed in, originally, we stayed in a central area and later I moved from there to live with a family where I boarded and roomed for the rest of the project before I finally left there.

STEIN: Well, we're running down on the tape, so why don't we take a break right now. Is that okay with you?

BALL: Sure.

STEIN: Okay.

STEIN: Okay, so we're just starting Tape 2. This is Julie Stein here with William Ball on July 6, 2010.

So we were just talking about the Grand Coulee Dam, and you mentioned that you are, you believe, the last remaining engineer from this project, which is amazing.

BALL: Yes.

STEIN: I would love to know more about the town of Mason City. It sounds fascinating that--

BALL: The what?

STEIN: The town of Mason City.

BALL: Oh. Well, Mason City was the contractor's town and the Bureau of Reclamation town.

STEIN: Uh-huh.

BALL: Above the dam was Coulee City, which, as you might imagine, was a kind of a wide open little town for the roustabouts and the single status people working 00:57:00on the dam. It was a, maybe you might call it, a slightly sinful city, and I can tell you just one little tale about that.

I had a good friend whom I met when I first went to work up at Coulee, and he was living in Coulee City. The winters are pretty cold up there, and he was running short of wood. The apartment house where he was living was frequented, or, I guess I should say, there were several women occupying that apartment house [laughter] who were ladies of the night. When he ran short of wood, 00:58:00somebody asked him, "You're short of wood? What's going on?" He said, "I can't afford it. I got to wait until next pay day." So the next evening he was going by his wood box, and it was full. It turned out that these ladies of the night thought he was such a nice guy that they went out and got wood for him [laughter] and put it in his wood box. [laughter] That was Vince Palmer.

Other woman: Oh, my gosh. Wow.

STEIN: Did you spend much time in Coulee City?

BALL: Well, when you talk about Coulee City, as I say, part of it was built on one side of the river where the government had all of its homes. They were very 00:59:00neat, beautiful little lawn planted area where the government employees lived. There must have been sixty or seventy government employees. And where I stayed is on the other side of the river in the contractors' housing.

STEIN: Okay.

BALL: One of the people from the government group was also living up there, and that is the person, person and his wife, with whom I boarded and roomed, called Tom and Monna Ostliff and I would have to say that that was where Henry Kaiser did some of the first work on the Permanente hospital business.

There was a person who had founded it down in southern California, and essentially Grand Coulee was one of the first places where they built a hospital and actually made it available to the workers for no charge. I can remember going there with a nasal infection one day and getting treated in that hospital.

So that was the beginning of the Permanente hospital plan. The rest of the business between Mason City and Coulee City and all the rest of it is just part 01:01:00of the overall tale of the construction of the project.

STEIN: Right. Did you have to enroll in the health care, or was--

BALL: No. You just went up there and showed up and said, "I've got a problem." STEIN: Okay. [laughter] And they served you?

BALL: As long as you showed your construction badge.

STEIN: Did you realize at the time that this was a very innovative solution?

BALL: Yes. I guess I was aware of it, but you know, all through the Depression people paid for their own hospital costs and they paid it in cash or check, and so that wasn't that much different. Not having to pay for it, I figured, was 01:02:00part of the job. Anyway, it was free, you'd go in, whatever you had. I remember that the guy who was my friend, Vince Palmer, when he finally came to live in the contractor's camp, he and his wife had their first child at the hospital for no charge.

STEIN: Were there many families living around the dam?

BALL: Oh, yes.

STEIN: So it wasn't just men, single men, working.

BALL: No. There were families there. That housing project, the contractor's housing, it was higher up on that side of the river, it was high. And down on 01:03:00the other side it was much lower, but above that was where they got a lot of the aggregate that went into the making of the concrete for the dam. So it's sort of a different geological formation on one side than the other.

STEIN: I'm curious, I have one more question about when you arrived in 1938. So the dam, I believe, was completed in, was it 1942 or 3? When you arrived in 1938, what did it look like?

BALL: Oh, the dam was down just about out of the water, and then there was a big trestle coming up from the dam where the trains would come out and across for 01:04:00the buckets to be taken and dumped into the lower area to form the dam. So there was a lot of work yet to be done, and I remember going out and walking across that trestle. And then there was a ladder from there down to the concrete blocks that were being formed at the lower elevation, and it was about 210, 212 feet, I guess, between the trestle and the blocks of concrete below.

STEIN: That sounds terrifying. [laughter]

BALL: Yeah.

STEIN: Okay, well I know that you wanted to tell a story about how you ended up buying your engagement ring.

BALL: Oh. Well, it was a football game, and the guys were coming around wanting 01:05:00people to participate in the pool. As you know, you have squares and all across the top and down the side is a piece of paper hiding all the numbers. You can select any square that you would like. When they came to me, there was only one square left. [laughter] No, there were two.

Somebody said, "You don't have much choice, but you could win 150 bucks." I said, "I can't afford it. I've got only $2.10 left between now and payday." What we were trying to do was save every penny we possibly could, and I would chunk 01:06:00it into the bank immediately as I got paid. So I was down pretty low, and somebody said, "Oh, come on. I'll loan you the money." And I said, "All right, Kay, if you want to loan me the money." So I joined the football pool. I got a 5 and a 1, and I thought, "My goodness, that's not going to win me anything." The game was between Michigan and Michigan State. Turned out I won. [laughter] As a matter of fact it's the only football pool I've ever won. Anyway, I got my money, and when I got back to the house where I was living and rooming and boarding, the money was in an envelope. I counted it out, and I thought to 01:07:00myself, 150 bucks, what am I going to do with that? So I bought candy for the girls, cigars for the guys, then I said, "Why don't I go over to Coulee City where the jewelry shop is and see what they have in the way of rings for my engagement.

I selected a bare diamond, and I selected a ring for engagement and another ring for wedding. I was able to buy, the diamond was only a quarter of a karat. Actually, it was somewhere between a quarter and a third of a karat. I bought 01:08:00those, I was making my inamorata a clock at the time. So when I finished the clock, I packaged it with the two rings, sent it parcel post to my wife-to-be in the regular mail. [laughter]

Anyway, she received it and called me on the telephone and calling on the telephone was a big deal in those days that long distance between Coulee and Oakland, and she was all excited about receiving her ring. But it all came about because I won a football pool.[laughter]

STEIN: Now, this may be a silly question, but did most people give diamond rings 01:09:00at that time when you got engaged to someone?

BALL: Yes. It was a big deal. That was the way it was done.

STEIN: So you must have been overjoyed that you could afford a beautiful ring.

BALL: Oh, yeah. [laughter]

STEIN: I'm sure--

BALL: She wore that ring until it sort of wore out, and we had it reset in a new one. I said to her at that time, "How about buying a better diamond?" She said, "Absolutely not. This is the diamond that started it all. I wouldn't trade it for anything."

STEIN: [laughter] That's wonderful. Was it difficult to be so far away, I imagine working all the time?

BALL: It was difficult, yes, of course, and it was four years before we were married.

STEIN: Did you work at Coulee for four years?

BALL: No, two years.

STEIN: Okay. Now did you meet Henry Kaiser during that time. Was he around?

BALL: Yes, I saw Kaiser at that time, and there was also his son, Edgar. The person who was really running the job was a man by the name of Clay Bedford, who was a civil engineer that Kaiser had hired, and Clay turned out to be a very fine engineer and one of the top Kaiser people.

STEIN: I think this is maybe my last question about Coulee, but I know that Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to visit while--

BALL: He came to see the dam, and with him was Postmaster Jim Farley. Jim Farley 01:11:00had a reputation for remembering names. I was in the car with Farley when they toured the dam, and I was telling Farley about the various things and how

the trash racks worked and so on, all the rest. Then I sent him a Christmas card that year. My first Christmas card. He answered with a short little note saying, yes, he remembered who I was and he remembered the information that I provided him, and he wanted to thank me very much for it, which is one of the hallmarks, I guess, of a great politician. Franklin Roosevelt was in the car just ahead.

STEIN: That must have been a thrill--

BALL: Yeah.

STEIN: To meet the President. So when you left that job, what state was the dam in when you left and what was the progress of the dam at that point?

BALL: The dam was about 80 percent, 85 percent, I guess, completed, and I think all of the east abutment, west abutment power plants were in place, and the work was proceeding on the east abutment power plants. There was to be later a wing dam that was added with three of the world's largest generator units. Up to that 01:13:00time, the generating units in the power plant were the biggest in the world, but since that time they have been eclipsed by not only other countries, but by the three big ones that are in the wing dam.

So the dam had changed, and my wife and I were back there to see that wing dam completed. The power plant, the generators actually were visible just poking up through the roof structure of that little, gosh you wouldn't call it little, that wing dam. They were very impressive. They were big, huge things. Anyway, 01:14:00that's it for the dam and its power.

STEIN: Okay. So what did you do when you left, or what prompted you to leave?

BALL: What prompted me to leave?

STEIN: Um-hm.

BALL: I had been in touch with two other people about going into business in a partnership down here in the Bay Area, where we would, start a dredging company. We would do various kinds of work around the bay. One was a little airport, another was dredging out a canal, and that sort of thing. So we had just started that.

And I also came down to get married. On January 9, 1940, my wife and I were 01:15:00married, and after that we headed toward Carmel for a honeymoon. The story of Carmel and the honeymoon is in the book, I guess, and you can read about

it. I could tell you about it, but it was the most wonderful honeymoon. I don't think anybody could have had a better one.

We went down in a terrible storm, just awful, and in those it took two days to go to Carmel. We had one stop on the way and then finally arrived about 8:30 at night when still raining and storming and just looked like it would never stop. 01:16:00We woke up the next morning, the sky was bright, the sun was up in the blue, and all of the leaves of the trees had little droplets of water hanging like diamonds.

STEIN: That sounds wonderful. Well, can you tell me about how you ended up working for Kaiser again in the shipyards?

BALL: Can I tell you what?

STEIN: About how you ended up working in the shipyards.

BALL: The shipyards started, it was a sort of a combination of events that probably would never be repeated again, but you might know that in about 1937 or 01:17:00thereabouts, the British were trying to build ships in Britain, but they were being harassed by German bombers. So they were looking for someplace to build ships, and since the United States was not in the war at that time they said, "Well, that's a good place."

Henry Kaiser could see the end of the Coulee Dam project, and he decided that he should be looking around for something new to do, decided he could build ships. He didn't have anybody who knew anything about building ships, but that wasn't something that would deter Henry Kaiser. So he approached the British and somehow or another, talked them into that contract to build thirty 400-foot 01:18:00freighters, and these were coal-fired turbine-driven freighters. He didn't even have a piece of property to his name and finally bought a hunk of property out in Richmond. It was nothing but mud flats.

At this same time, my draft board had contacted me and said your number is up. We think since you're an engineer, you should get into a defense industry. Well, about the only thing going on at that time was that I heard that Kaiser had gotten a contract with the British to build some ships. So I contacted Kaiser 01:19:00and said, "Can I get a job?" And they said, "Sure." So I went to work on a midnight shift out in Richmond in one of the worst winters there has ever been, mud up to your knees, cold terrible weather.

By about four months I was called into the office and said, "We have a problem. The Naval architect we hired to do the original layouts has disappeared, and we wondered if you know how to do the calculations for a launching." I said, "No, I 01:20:00don't. But I think I could probably learn." So that's how I got back into the office, and I stayed in the office for all four of the

shipyards for the rest of the war until the war's end in 1945. I did all kinds of design. I was pretty young then, and I thank my lucky stars that I had that experience because otherwise it would have taken years and years and years to have that much experience in that short a period of time. I always remember the shipyards fondly for having offered me that opportunity.

STEIN: So I know that after 1941 the shipyards grew enormously, you had four 01:21:00huge shipyards. Before that when Kaiser was only building those thirty ships, was it a very different operation? What were the shipyards like then?

BALL: Well, the shipyards started with that British contract with Henry Kaiser building those thirty ships for the British, but almost immediately thereafter it seems that the United States Maritime Commission decided we should be building some ships as well. So Yard 2 was started, and then Yard 3, and then Yard 4. All four of those shipyards produced a total of seven hundred and, I think it was 741 ships. The original record of the Yard 2 where they built a 01:22:00ship in twenty-four days, twenty-three hours and some minutes, complete to getting the ship into the water and out on sea tests, set a record that has never been beaten.

All told, of course, you know that Kaiser also built ships in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. So you would have to say that Kaiser's contribution to the war effort was monumental. During that time we had the experience of the Spruce 01:23:00Goose. Do you know about the Spruce Goose?

STEIN: Yes, I'd love to hear you tell about it.

BALL: Well, Henry noted that the Germans were sinking a lot of ships, and he decided that maybe the thing to do was build a big airplane and fly over the ocean instead of taking it by ships where it would be subject to being sunk by submarines, and so he contacted Howard Hughes. I was on the first trip to see Howard Hughes, and then I was sent back to Yard 4 where we were going to assemble the flying boats on the shipways and launch them just like ships. 01:24:00[coughs] and then we would--

STEIN: Do you want to pause for some water?

Okay, so we were talking about the Spruce Goose. Can you tell me what it-- Did you meet Howard Hughes personally when you went on that first trip?

What was that experience like? How would you describe him?

BALL: Oh, it was just a meeting, and at that point he was rational and was interested in the project and decided he could go along with it. Unfortunately, what was going on here is there were two entirely different people. Henry Kaiser 01:25:00was one type of person, and Hughes another. And the two of them were like oil

and water. They didn't mix. While I was busy in laying out production facilities up in Yard 4 in Richmond, Kaiser and Hughes were fighting each other, and finally the whole project was cancelled.

But Hughes went on to build the Spruce Goose. Now you might know that they didn't use spruce in the building of the plane, they used ash. How the name Spruce Goose got involved, I suppose, is because it rhymed with goose. 01:26:00[laughter] But it isn't spruce.

STEIN: Right.

BALL: And it wound up in Oregon as a museum piece after having flown for just a few seconds.

STEIN: Were any of the tensions, you said there was tension between Henry Kaiser and Howard Hughes. Was any of that visible in the first meeting?

BALL: No, because they both had the same idea about avoiding the German submarines, and there was an objective that both felt they needed to address. So I think in the beginning they had the same object in mind. But how to get there, 01:27:00you know, there was a lot of consideration. When I was back in Richmond I kept getting different versions of that plane. Some would be twin- hulled eight engine, some would be single-hulled six engine, some single-hull eight engines, and there were variations coming through about once a day. So I was kept busy trying to figure out what it was they were really going to build.

STEIN: So where were those versions coming from? How did the pipeline of those ideas work, and where were you in that process?

BALL: Well, I was in, as I say, I was in Richmond, and we would get phone calls telling us, and then we would get Xeroxes or copies of the new design or the 01:28:00tentative design. So we were seeing all these variations coming through and trying to say, "Well, I guess we can manufacture almost anything on those shipways. So finally when the end came and the whole project was cancelled, I guess I sort of felt somewhat relieved about it.

STEIN: Did Mr. Hughes, did he have his own engineers?

BALL: Pardon.

STEIN: Did Howard Hughes have his own engineers?

BALL: Yes he did.

STEIN: So they would come up with a design, let's say double-hulled six engine--

BALL: Yes. That's right. Kaiser had no engineers capable of designing an 01:29:00airplane of that type, so all of the changes, all of the designs were coming out of Howard Hughes' organization.

STEIN: And then when you were involved, even though it didn't end up happening, was your role to design a shipyard that could create a plane, or was it to help finish the design?

BALL: Well, we had a shipyard all ready, and we thought we could adapt that to the production of the plane. For example, if we had a twin-hull, we would construct one hull on one way, and another one on another way. We'd launch the two, and then join them together in the water.

STEIN: Okay.

BALL: And then move them over under a crane where the wings would be attached. And if we had a single hull, then we would launch it off from one shipway, then take it over under the crane and have the wings attached. So all of that was planned, it wasn't much of an achievement to do it. And what I was doing was not much of an engineering job, it was just adapting the facilities that we already had.

STEIN: Okay, okay. It sounds like there were some really interesting engineering innovations that had to do with prefabrication.

BALL: I don't think the engineering innovations were very great. When you scale 01:31:00up an airplane, there are some constants that you can't extrapolate completely.

But generally speaking, everything else is extrapolatable in ratio of size.

STEIN: Okay.

BALL: And so, yes, you can just blow it up. In other words, like it was on a balloon. You could blow it up to any size you want, but they had to be careful about the size because a certain amount of horsepower is required to lift a certain size plane off the water and keep it afloat with cargo, and so they had to stay within those limitations.

STEIN: Okay. That must have been interesting to use some of your aeronautics 01:32:00training from Boeing. [laughter]

BALL: Oh, yes. I used to follow their changes fairly closely because I could see how they were thinking. But I wasn't making any contribution to that at all.

STEIN: Okay. Well then let's talk about ships again because that sounds like it really was the crux of what you were doing.

BALL: Okay.

STEIN: From one historian that I was reading, explained that one of the really unique things about the Kaiser shipyards was that they were so big so you could assemble everything outside.

BALL: Well, I guess you could say that it came about as the result of somebody deciding that they could build parts of a ship somewhere in another facility and 01:33:00then bring them to the shipway or the ship basin and just drop them on the ship, and so there was another building built called the subassembly building. And forepeaks, which are the bow, and afterpeaks, which are the stern of the ship, and the cabin structure, those were built in this facility and then put on trailers and taken to the shipyard and placed on the ship being built.

So we were essentially using the principles of mass production and automobile 01:34:00assembly. You know, an automobile is built by starting out with a frame on a conveyor and as it progresses, various parts are being added including axles and wheels and body and engine and pieces and this and that and the other thing until finally as it comes off the end of the line you have a complete car. Same thing in modified form in the shipyard, and that was done by Kaiser.

STEIN: Did Kaiser have an engineering vision himself, or was there a chief engineer who helped him envision this type of system?

BALL: There was a chief engineer in the shipyards for whom I and the other 01:35:00engineers worked. His name was Harry Bernat, at one time, and Einar Larsen for another, and as I say, there were probably about fifteen of us engineers who did all of the work for all four of the shipyards in Richmond, starting out with the shipyard in Yard 1 for the British contract, and then progressively working through the rest of the yards.

Yard 4 was a particular problem because it was built on an inner channel where the amount of water was limited for launching a ship, and so we had to build 01:36:00that with a slope of one and fifty, and then when it got into the water, build a curve slope which dropped it quickly into the water. I remember the curve was 909.75 feet.

STEIN: You still remember that? [laughter]

STEIN: That's amazing.

BALL: How that got that way, [laughter] to get the maximum depth at a given point, and so that's the way the number turned out. Anyway, that launching was a little spectacular because the ship would go in and the stern would dive down, 01:37:00and people liked to ride one of those launchings because as the stern dove down it was sort of exciting.

But they kept adding more and more equipment to the ship, and I warned them that if they continued that, they would wind up tearing out part of the shipways. So one day they had had, I've forgotten what it was, but enough so that when the ship was launched, the water came up over the stern and doused everybody riding there. There were excited people running to escape the water and get out of the wash that was created from the launching. So they finally decided they wouldn't 01:38:00add any more stuff to the ship and they'd avoid that dousing again. Anyway, what fascinating business.

STEIN: Yeah. So the other shipyards, how did they launch their ships?

BALL: They launched them the same way, although they didn't have any restricted area of launch and so their shipways were straight slopes, no curve at the end.

STEIN: Because they had enough space in front of them.

BALL: There was enough water to launch them.

STEIN: Was every ship launching a celebration?

BALL: Yes, every launching was carried out by some woman who would come out to the shipyard and break a bottle of champagne over the bow of the ship as it was launched.

STEIN: Seven hundred and forty something times.

BALL: Pardon.

STEIN: Seven hundred and forty something times.

BALL: Yes. Right.

STEIN: [laughter] It's a lot of bottles of champagne.

BALL: Right.

STEIN: Can you describe a typical day on that job, or was there even a typical day?

BALL: I'll describe one. This is on the first launching of the first British ship in Yard 1.

STEIN: This is the first ship to leave any of the shipyards.

BALL: Yes. We had prepared a large circular affair with cable wound around it, one- eighth inch cable wire rope tied to the ship, and we had a movie camera looking at that, and the thing was marked off so that as the thing rotated you 01:40:00could tell how fast the ship was moving. You can determine the amount of acceleration and a few other things from that.

To slow a ship down when launched, we had decided that we would tie two- ton blocks at three points to the ship, and the ship had what they call bollards along the rail of the ship on both sides. The bollards would pick one of those two-ton weights up, and then as it got further, pick another, and then finally the third. So when we launched this ship, somehow the bollards on the right side 01:41:00of the ship had not been properly connected to the concrete blocks. So the ship started to turn, obviously being held by the blocks on one side, drug that side to the left, and over on an adjacent wharf there was a Russian ship being loaded. As our ship started swinging toward that Russian ship, we saw that, and I was in a power boat out in the launch area with a movie camera to take photographs of our ship being launched.

As I saw the Russians, they were jumping off that ship, the Russian ship, 01:42:00running up the dock, and I wondered what was going on. [laughter] Well, our ship finally hit the Russian ship and just like a can opener, opened a big opening in the hull. I finally found out what the reason was. The Russians had been loading 50-gallon drums of aviation gasoline because they were having trouble producing gasoline for their fighter planes in Russia during the war.

So the Russians were afraid that the gasoline would get ignited some way and blow up the ship. They were just running for dear life trying to get away.

Well, nothing happened. We peeled open the Russian ship, and we did the repair 01:43:00work on the Russian ship, the Russians got back on board, and they were on their way to Moscow by the time we finally got our ship under control and searched for the reason why we had fouled up and caused that ship to do that. So it was an exciting and interesting moment in the first launch.

STEIN: I imagine. Wow, that was lucky.[laughter] You said that you had not only designed the yards, but also buildings and roads and the entire sort of system

of these shipyards. What types of buildings were there? What types of roads? Can you explain what that world looked like?

BALL: Well, the roads had to be fairly deeply provided with what we call 01:44:00ballast, that is rocks and gravel and stuff to get through the mud and then finally be paved at the level of the yard. The railways had to have the same sort of thing.

STEIN: Is that because it was easy to--

BALL: Otherwise, the stuff would sink.

STEIN: Okay.

BALL: Or be bumpy, and so we had to be very careful about the preparation of the sub grade on both the highways or the driveways and railways. Then we had a problem. Most of us had grown up learning how to design a building using steel, 01:45:00but steel was a critical material. So we had to switch from designing our buildings in steel to doing it in wood. Fortunately, at that time, all kinds of good long pieces, deep pieces of wood were available, so most of the buildings that were designed out there were wooden buildings.

I guess I could describe a method of connecting wood so that you would understand it. If you put a bolt through wood and pull, only the width of the bolt is going to resist that from pulling apart. If you dig a hole about four 01:46:00inches in diameter and make a steel ring that drops into that hole, then that, if you drill that in both the upper piece and the lower piece, then that enables you to expand the sheer value of the connection to the width of that ring, rather than just the diameter of the bolt.

STEIN: What types of buildings would you do that kind of construction for?

BALL: All of the buildings, except the plate shop. Most of the buildings were done in wood, and so we had to learn that new technique.

STEIN: Okay. You didn't build the hospitals or the homes or anything, right?

BALL: Well, we built a little facility out in Richmond, but it was a wooden facility, and it was done early in the shipyard days because Kaiser wanted to have that available for his workers in the shipyards.

STEIN: Was it a residential building?

BALL: It was essentially a residential type building.

STEIN: Okay, but the majority of your work was on--

BALL: Well, during the war when we had a shortage of steel, we, of course, used wood. But after the war when steel became once more available, we would design using steel.

STEIN: Yeah. A lot of people who have studied the Richmond shipyards talk a lot 01:48:00about the newcomers because there was a huge migration of people from all over coming to work in the yards.

BALL: Yes.

STEIN: Were you aware of any of the changes that were happening in Richmond, or even Oakland where you were living?

BALL: Yes.

STEIN: How did you become aware of those?

BALL: Well, take Richmond for example. That was the place where the shipyards were going up, and many people were moving to Richmond. They were coming from the South. Some of the people had never seen a toilet before.

STEIN: Wow.

BALL: When they found toilets in their apartments, they decided that was a good place to pluck a chicken. [laughter] So the plumbers would get calls to an 01:49:00apartment that was all plugged up,[laughter] and find feathers in the toilet. So it took a while to educate those people who had never seen a toilet before that they shouldn't put chicken feathers in it.[laughter]

STEIN: Were you also aware of the changes with so many women working in the shipyards right where you were working, I suppose.

BALL: I'm sorry.

STEIN: There were also so many women, mothers or younger women.

BALL: Oh, sure. Well, I think it was great, and I found that, you know, they talk about Rosie the Riveter?

STEIN: Yeah.

BALL: That's a misnomer. The ships were not riveted, they were welded. So I have 01:50:00always said they should have used the term Winnie the Welder [laughter] instead of Rosie the Riveter. Anyway, Rosie the Riveter still sticks, and the women learned to weld, and they did a good job. They were as capable as men as far as I could see once they learned the techniques of welding, they did very well. So I think they made a very great contribution to the war effort.

STEIN: We have only about five more minutes left on this tape, so I don't know if you have any thoughts on this small group of engineers that you were working with. It sounds like a really, fairly remarkable group of people and time.

BALL: Yes, they were. What happened is that some of these people were architects, and an architect brings something different to the business of engineering. An architect has a better feel for spatial relations and a better feel for appearance, the beauty of the building, and these people worked with us as engineers. The combination of architects and engineers together made, I think, a remarkable combination all the way through the war. I know that I 01:52:00always appreciated working with the architects, and I know that the architects likewise appreciated working with us engineers.

STEIN: Was that not a typical arrangement before the war?

BALL: No, essentially architects worked separately from engineers, but they did often have an engineer come in to do the structural work, for example. Or the heating and ventilating and plumbing and that sort of thing, but it was done separately and that was one of the problems that occurred with the Kaiser building down here in Oakland.

When that building was finished, it turned out that the engineer hadn't figured 01:53:00on the amount of sunlight coming up in the morning, and the heating and ventilating system was clearly deficient. So they had to go and put in an additional set of duct work in the building in order to compensate for the lack of foresight on the thing in the first place. So, that I would have to say was an oversight on the part of both the architect and the engineer. But, generally speaking, we are getting more and more capable of working together and coordinating our efforts and coming up with the right solutions to the problem.

STEIN: And it sounds like the Kaiser shipyards were really important to the generating of a lot of those ideas.

BALL: Right.

STEIN: Yeah. Are there any other sort of final thoughts on your experience in the shipyards?

BALL: I could go on [laughter] and on and on. It was a most wonderful experience, I guess, apart from Coulee. It is so wonderful as I think back to my career of the experiences I had, not due to something I did, but something I fell into, something somebody else offered me, and I think the shipyards and Grand Coulee were signal events in my life.

STEIN: And also in American history.

BALL: Yes.

STEIN: All right, well, I'll stop here.

[End of Interview]