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Title
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094
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Transcription
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Not until I set up my survey crew, did I realize what the depression was for some people, who could not get jobs. I usually had four men on a crew, I had young fellows with several years of college, and one who had degree in engineering, but could not get work, so he enrolled as a private in the CCC camp.
Our survey crews were kept very busy. We were building small earth dams and terraces with teams that the farmers ha available. We had to have two farms surveyed each week to keep the construction crews busy.
Training men for the job, proved to be a difficult task. Some of the supervisory personnel and most of the enrolled men had no farm experience. Some had never been around horses, and had to learn how to drive a team, hold a plow in the ground, and load a fresno. A man who had been raised on a farm and knew how to do these things soon was a sergeant and supervising crews.
An Engineer who had no farm experiences was useless at the Fairbury camp, he might have the technical training but know nothing about farm crops and farming problems. Unless some one was with him in making the surveys, he would treat an alfalfa field the same as a corn field. The farmers would be very unhappy, and it wasn't always easy to calm them down.
It was the responsibility of the army to take care of the men, but it was difficult some times to separate the work project from camp projects. We had 200 men transferred to Fairbury from Arkansas in 1935, and many of these boys ha never worn shoes. They were issued a pair of shoes that they were required to wear in camp, but when they got to the field the shoes would come off. They would follow the teams and equipment all day in bare feet. By the time November came and snow was on the ground, some still went barefoot.
There were days when we would have as many as 45 or 50 teams in the field. We built dams and terraces that I saw in operation fifty years later. The tree planting project for wind breaks was another thing that proved to be very useful.
I learned more the first year in camp than I did in a year of college. It is one thing to make surveys and draft plans in the class room, and another to do it in the field with help that has never been off the streets of New York, or from Mississippi where they never saw ice or snow.
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Metzger Memories
