ARCHITECT OF A MORE ABUNDANT LIFE
Coleman, Mcalister
Architect Of A More Abundant Life By McALISTER COLEMAN THE name John Lucian Savage is not, of course, as well known as the names of a lot of Fat Boys and Brass Hats, baseball players, and moronic...
...Characteristic of Savage was his response to the request of the government of New South Wales, a progressive outfit...
...They sent him out to Idaho to the Minidoka Project...
...Then came the designs for Wheeler in the revitalized Valley, and Boulder, and Shasta, and finally Grand Coulee, the most massive single structure ever conceived by the mind of man...
...It is lucky for all of us that he isn't quitting entirely, but will continue to act as consulting engineer whenever he is called on...
...Feels pretty good, I guess, though he doesn't tote a scrap-book of front-page publicity and nobody throws ticker-tape at him when he rides around Denver...
...When Mr...
...One wonders what it is like to sit down for a space and look back on a life filled with such good and titan works...
...Jack" Savage, as his intimates in the Bureau of Reclamation in the Department of the Interior call him, is retiring at the age of' 65...
...Savage received the cablegram from down under, he wired his chief, former Commissioner John C. Paige of the Bureau of Reclamation: "Any assistance given Government of New South Wales will be gratis, and I shall not accept any fee or other form of compensation or any reimbursement...
...A pretty good start in life...
...His extraordinary gift is the ability to bring a fresh mind to new problems in engineering...
...Savage, who had gone for a while into private engineering practice, was called into the Government service again to design the gates for Arrow-rock...
...quoted in Dave Lilienthal's splendid book, TV A—Democracy on the March...
...Savage made extensive surveys for Giant Power postwar developments in the flood-plagued territories around the Yangtze...
...Savage gave the Indian authorities may some day end such dispatches as these: "Approximately 10,000 Indians were drowned in the past week by floodwaters of the Khari River which swept suddenly through nearly 100 villages...
...His approach is daring, but his plans are sound...
...He grew up with the organization...
...It is a name, however, known and respected by the handful of men and women who are architects of a more spacious civilization for the 135,000,000 of us Americans and many, many millions more in China, India, and the Antipodes...
...For 34 years be has been a designing engineer for the Reclamation people and since 1924, Chief Designing Engineer...
...He worked on the farm, went to high school in Madison, and in 1903 received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin...
...At that time the Boise project centering on the Ar-rowrock Dam was one of the largest irrigation plans in the country...
...The Norris Dam, of Savage's designing, is 250 feet high and 1.800 feet long...
...When George Norris had won his gallant fight against the privateering wolves, and saved Muscle Shoals for the benefit of the people, Savage went to work on designs for the dam...
...If special privilege does not intervene, the shrewd advice from his wealth of experience which Mr...
...WThat does a man think about who can go out into his Denver home and look up to the mountains and know that he has drawn plans for the building of such mountainous structures as Grand Coulee on the Columbia, Shasta Dam in California's Central Valley Reclamation Project, Parker Dam on the Colorado River—in all, more than a billion dollars worth of big dams...
...HE went from Wisconsin into field work for the old United States Reclamation Service, now the Bureau of Reclamation...
...WHEN Ickes heard of Savage's plans for retirement the other day, the Old Curmudgeon, who knows a good man when he sees one and has gathered a company of such in the Department of the Interior, paid the top designer of the nation this graceful tribute: "Jack Savage in a very real sense has epitomized the Bureau of Reclamation...
...He told his friends, as he packed for the long voyage in 1940, that he "needed a vacation anyhow...
...Some years back a Socialist youngster who had been working for TV A said to me: "I don't go for this star-spangled-banner, sentimental stuff...
...But I can tell you that the first time I saw the flag flying at Norris, and realized all that was back of that dam, besides the water of course, I felt like crying for sheer pride in my citizenship...
...that was to be named after the great Senator, on the Clinch River above Knoxville...
...Under the tutelage of Arthur P. Davis, Chief Engineer, young Savage was in on the planning of reservoirs and other irrigation structures...
...It is small as compared to Coulee, the Big Boy of them all, but it is large in sentimental value...
...His approach is daring but his plans are sound...
...NOW and then in the midst of the stories of some military action in China there will be an obscure item telling of the loss of men and good earth in that tragic country far exceeding anything which the Japanese have done by way of devastation...
...Off hand can you think of anything better to say about such a man as John Lucian Savage than...
...John Lucian Savage was born on a Wisconsin farm near Cooksville, appropriately enough in view of his many presents to America, on Christmas Day 1879, the son of Edwin Parker Savage and Mary Therese (Steb-bins) Savage...
...Architect Of A More Abundant Life By McALISTER COLEMAN THE name John Lucian Savage is not, of course, as well known as the names of a lot of Fat Boys and Brass Hats, baseball players, and moronic movie stars...
...From China, Savage went on to India, where famines follow floods with such depressing regularity, to look over irrigation projects in Bengal, Madras, Mysore, and the Punjab...
...There is an undertaking called the Yangtze Gorge Project to irrigate 10 million acres of land in the valley of that cantankerous river, and incidentally develop some 10 million kilowatts of electrical power which, if completed, would give a more abundant and secure life to millions of China's farmers and workers...
...These were the pioneering years when the new Reclamation Act was stimulating enormous Federal irrigation projects which turned the arid lands of Idaho into a national agricultural asset...
...I w^ish that all those who may be influenced by such pettifoggers as Friederich Hayek and the other little scarey men who say that if we Americans plan, we are doomed to serfdom, that our governmental services are filled with strutting bureaucrats, that "whatever the government does is done wrong," would read the story of the life of this engineer of works such as man has never before tackled in all human history...
...The important work of the designing men of the Bureau of Reclamation is done at Denver and there we find Savage, in 1916, onee more in our service in the newly organized office of the Chief Engineer...
...For his labors in China, Savage received a gold medal from the Chinese Ministry of Economic Affairs for Humanitarian Services, which sounds like a pretty good governmental organization, and one which we could well emulate over here...
...There is a law on our books which prevents our governmental employees from accepting emoluments from foreign countries...
...In 1944, at the request of the Chinese Government, Mr...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 31
