Transcript of interview with Cecile Dotson Crowe by Darin Toldisky, April 27, 1981

UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe i An Interview with Cecile Dotson Crowe An Oral History Conducted by Darin Toldisky Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2018 UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe iii The Oral History Research Center (OHRC) was formally established by the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada System in September 2003 as an entity of the UNLV University Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The OHRC conducts oral interviews with individuals who are selected for their ability to provide first-hand observations on a variety of historical topics in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. The OHRC is also home to legacy oral history interviews conducted prior to its establishment including many conducted by UNLV History Professor Ralph Roske and his students. This legacy interview transcript received minimal editing, such as the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. The interviewee/narrator was not involved in the editing process. UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe iv Abstract On April 27, 1981, Darin Toldisky interviewed Cecile Dotson Crowe (born October 17th, 1911, in Millville, Utah) at Clark County Library in Las Vegas, Nevada. This interview covers Mrs. Crowe’s account of the building of Hoover (Boulder Dam). Mrs. Crowe discusses the Six Companies, Boulder City, and recalls President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s visit to Nevada by train to dedicate the dam on the 30th of September, 1937.UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 1 Good afternoon. I would like to interview the listener, Mrs. Crowe, who has been living here for a long time, and she’s going to tell us about her activities in Las Vegas. Good afternoon. I’m Cecile Dotson Crowe. I’ve lived in Las Vegas since 1923. We moved here with my father and mother. At the time, the town was a very small railroad town and it was quite an experience to come into a town where everyone knew everyone else. But it was a friendly little town and we’ve enjoyed living here and glad to call it our home. I grew up here, went to school here and married here, to Charles Gerald Crowe, better known as Jerry. And we have children and grandchildren and my brother and two sisters, Ted, Mary and John, still live here. That’s all that’s left of our family. Living in Las Vegas has been quite an experience and going to the high school here gave everyone an opportunity to develop his talents. We’ve seen the town grow from a little railroad town through and we’ve survived depressions due to the building of Boulder Dam and later with the legalization of gambling, we know that Las Vegas is still a thriving town. Mrs. Crowe, would you please tell the listeners the highlights of your last fifty-seven years in Las Vegas? Well, that would be a little hard to condense in a few minutes but, after finishing high school, I attended the University of Nevada. And then, I didn’t complete that but I came back and went to work for the Chamber of Commerce, when it was just a little two room chamber at the head of the stairs in the Declan building Downtown. Old-timers here will know exactly where that was. Then with the coming of the construction of the dam, I took a civil service examination and qualified to be selected for employment at the Boulder Canyon, on the Boulder Canyon project. I went for my first interview with Mr. Earl R. Mills, who was the chief clerk, having previously met Walker R. Young at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon and having interviewed him at the UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 2 Old Mormon Fort; where the Bureau of Reclamation was conducting a concrete testing lab. He suggested, Mr. Young suggested that I take the civil service exam and then as I said I later was employed as the first woman, female employee on the Boulder Canyon project, here in Las Vegas. The offices were at that time on the second floor of the Beckley building, in Downtown Las Vegas, on the southwest corner of Fremont Street. This was the first of November 1930 when I went to work for the Bureau of Reclamation. At that time, the only work that had been done, construction that had been done on the dam, was the driving of the silver spike to start the spur railroad track to the Boulder site. That was driven by Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur on the Seventeenth of September, 1930, at a point some distance south on the railroad line. From November in 1930 until the fall, the spring of 1932, our offices were in Las Vegas while Boulder City was being built. Having, also having built a highway to that site. We moved the administration building in the spring of 1932, continuing still to drive back and forth to work each day until the houses, housing for the employees, of the government employees was finished. Since the topic of our interview is the Boulder Canyon project, we would like to get into topic. Of course, right now we are at the stage at which that housing for employees has been accomplished. When the housing was completed the employees then moved to Boulder City. Six Companies, Six Companies, I better explain about Six Companies, ah, this was such a large project that it was necessary for six of the construction companies to combine in order to bid on this tremendous project. And that’s, they were known later then, all through the building of the dam, as the Six Companies. The contract was signed for that as the work began. Much preliminary work had to be done. The riverbed had to be dried out by the building of diversion tunnels, each UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 3 side of the canyon, and then began the building. The first concrete was poured on the Sixth of June, 1935, and continued until 1937, when the dam was dedicated on the 30th of September 1937. My husband Jerry and I lived in Boulder City from the time of our marriage on the 30th of September 1932 until 1937, when we moved to town. But Jerry and I were privileged to live in a community that was full of interesting people who had come from all parts of the country to contribute their efforts to the building of this dam. The BMW people who rolled the pipe, the steel into pipe, for the big tunnels and the tremendous construction people who were there. We were privileged to be present at all important stages in the construction of this dam. From the first bucket of concrete, the big blasts, the important blasts, the diverting of the water through the diversion tunnels and we were privileged to witness the outlet works in full display, on both sides of the canyon below the dam. Wait and they told us that never again would that site be seen. During, at the time, there were a lot of interesting things happen, we would make periodic tours to the dam. I was in charge of the mails and files department of the project. And so, periodically, Mr. John Page, who was then office engineer later Commissioner of their Bureau of Reclamation would take me to the project. That I might have in my mind’s eye, the relation of one part of the project to another. And at one time I rode down the intake tower in a bucket at the time they were building those—those intake towers above the dam, on the Lake Mead side. At the time that the lake, the riverbed was being dried out, there was still little pools of water and catfish in them. (Laughs) So one day when we visited down there, the inspectors who were working on the riverbed gave each of us catfish to take home for our dinner. Mrs. Crowe, let’s get into the project, we’ll try to discuss the way that it has been managed, from the administrative point of view and from the operative point of view. UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 4 Yes, there was an office crew, an office force, and a filed force. Walker R. Young was the chief construction engineer over the whole project. John C. Page functioned as the office engineer, who also had knowledge of the project as a whole. Ralph Laurie was the field engineer and he was in charge of all the personnel in the field. The linemen, the rodman, the inspectors, all of those who were working out in the field, away from the office. It was a beautifully coordinated organization and it was a real privilege to work in such an efficient organization. Much has been said about government employees and in a derogatory way but I would like to say that this was the most efficiently run operation that I’ve ever had anything to do with. Each of these men were top engineers and those who had the design, John Savage and some of the others from the Denver office, who were the designers of the dam, did a beautiful job. And every aspect was taken care of. There were—those of you who go through the dam will sometimes get concerned because it seems as if things are leaking. But every one of those drip holes are monitored and measured and kept track of and there is, grout is forced into holes that are specifically provided for that. Grout being a thin concrete and water mixture. I’m sure that you know and, that those who come to see the dam are awed by the—and perhaps even then are not fully aware of the gigantic project that this was and just a few statistics. We’ve heard a lot of people say that’s an awful big hole to fill with concrete. And this is really truly the case. There’s more than three million cubic yards of concrete containing over three million barrels of cement and nearly six million tons of sand, gravel, and cobbles. And the volume of the dam is greater than the largest pyramid in Egypt. Its thickness in the base, at the base, is more than the length of two ordinary city blocks. And its height, from bedrock to crest is nearly that of a sixty story building. The actual placing of the concrete was only one of the problems, as a tremendous mass concentrated in a relatively small space, between the canyon walls. And the enormous pressure of water on the UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 5 canyon walls and the upstream dam base, introduced questions of design that never before had to be considered. Boulder Dam at that, at the time of its building, was as you know, the largest one in the world. The concrete itself would retain heat generated by the setting of the concrete, for several hundred years, if it hadn’t been cooled by a natural process. And in order to do this, a refrigeration system was worked out to cool the concrete. I have no idea how much tubing, of a half inch, or a one inch diameter was placed throughout the dam. But it required almost, well, I do see it here, that it’s five hundred and eighty miles of pipe, approximately, five hundred and eighty miles of pipe. And each line of tubing ran from the supply header in the eight foot vertical slot in the middle of the dam, out to an abutment and back to the return header in the slot there in the center. Then grout outlets were installed on the sides of the columns, and feeders went out in, from there. A water of two different temperatures was called precooling and refrigerated was pumped through these pipes, these cooling lines. They had more than four hundred electrical thermometers installed throughout the structure, to determine, to keep a record of the temperature. And the extent of the cooling was also ascertained by inserting thermometers, twenty-five to thirty feet into the tubing, after the cooling water had been shut off for twenty-four hours. Now the temperature of the precooling water was increased as much as twenty-one degrees and the refrigerated water, seventeen, by it passes through the dam. Construction record after construction record was broken as the contractors transformed the Black Canyon from a narrow river channel to a dry gorge and the dam structure and its contributing features rose from the canyon floor and the canyon walls. The fifty inch tunnel for, fifty foot diameter tunnels for carrying the river around the dam, were pushed through the canyon walls and concrete lined in the first two years. The huge earth filled coffer dams were raised in the next five months, and excavation for the dam, already to pour the first concrete on the Sixth of June, 1933. Two years UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 6 and two months after operation started in Black Canyon. A million cubic yards of concrete were swung out over the canyon by cableways lowered to the pouring sites and dumped, in the steadily mounting pile of dam, within six months. And this rate of pour was continued throughout the construction, twenty-four hours a day. The third millionth yard being placed on the Fifth of December, 1934, and in a succeeding three months, an average rate of fifty-four hundred cubic yards was poured each twenty-four hours. Concrete placing records were established in this time three thousand cubic yards in eight-by-one concrete mixing plant. And they transported two hundred and seventy-seven buckets of concrete by one cableway in an eight hour shift. There were special buckets built for placing the concrete, which were lowered and then opened and when they discharged their load of concrete, they were rebound twenty-five feet. Then the concrete had to be tamped. And each bucket carried eight cubic yards of concrete. It was carried by a cableway horse line through a direct sliding connection to the doors in the bottom of the bucket, providing insurance against the doors opening in transit. All the operations of the cableways were conducted by a hoist man in head towers on the Nevada side. And they were, they got telephone instructions from the signal men located at the loading and the dumping sites. It’s very difficult, it’s not even possible for me to discuss the many details of construction but even a short description wouldn’t be complete without mention of the particular attention that was given to the percolation of water, through the dam, past the dam, through the abutments and the foundations. And these are the holes that I referred to a little earlier, where, these were monitored and records kept and when necessary grout was forced into these openings at pressures as high as a thousand pounds per square inch. So that every aspect of insuring, everything that could be done to insure a permanent structure there with no danger of anything ever going wrong, all of these things were taken into consideration and even today there’s, there UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 7 are measurements upon measurements taken each day of these various holes, and grout holes and leakages and drainages, always. This project was completed only two short years after the first concrete was placed in the dam base. I very seriously doubt if a project of this sort could be accomplished, could be done in that time, in these days. This is a monument to American engineering. Mrs. Crowe, I wanted the listeners to have some beacon about the social life among the employees and their families at that time. Oh, I’d be glad to comment on that, Boulder City was a delightful place to live. It was a small community but we celebrated the opening of the post office by having a dance. We had a dance in the post office and in the government garage was a huge open area. Then the employees of B&W or Babcock & Wilcox Company, some Six Companies people and the Bureau people, of some of us organized a dance club, which met once a month for a formal dance. Boulder City Hotel, the Boulder Dam Hotel was built, which is only recently been restored and is drawing quite a bit of attention at this time. It was a place, a gathering place to go, and have a nice atmosphere. The people who lived in Boulder City had come from all parts of the country. The, from Akron, Ohio, the B&W people came, and from the Six Companies people, of course, representing six different companies, most, they were all western construction companies. I don’t remember all of the names now, Morrison-Knudsen, Shea, Bechtel, Kaiser, and there were others. But these were western construction companies and their personnel, their people mingled, in social activities. It was a great place for those who like to play bridge. There were bridge parties going on constantly. Boulder City and its surroundings provided many places for an evening’s excursion up into a canyon to, for a chicken fry, and community singing. We explored the roads that had not been previously explored and came across old mining prospectors’ places UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 8 with the interesting artifacts. It was quite a thing to go hunting the purple glass that had been changed by the sun. The old glass that had turned lavender in the sun. Everyone in Boulder City enjoyed the desert and all that it had to offer, as well as, the little city. We made our own pleasure because there was no gambling as you know. Or maybe you don’t know but they, with the government reservation, the government was very anxious that some of the aspects of life in Las Vegas would not be represented in Boulder City. And so, in order to enter Boulder City, we went through a check gate. And we had our own individual passes. No liquor was allowed in. None was sold in Boulder City. So our social life was pretty much in our homes but it was delightful and the lake provided recreation for us and swimming or sailing or boating. Those who left Boulder City and went back to their homes in the east later wrote and said, “Oh, for the sight of a cactus!” They fell in love with the desert and the beautiful colors that are seen here at sunrise and sunset. So though they may have come thinking that the desert had nothing of beauty, they left realizing that it had much and with a real nostalgia, those of us who lived in still talk about the days when we lived in Boulder City, whenever we meet these days. Mrs. Crowe, to what extent did the project answer the urgent need for work at such a bad time of the Great Depression? I don’t have the figures of the employment that was provided but I do know that the crews worked twenty-four hours a day. Six Companies built dormitories, which housed, well, I would say, I don’t know how many dormitories they had, I wish I had kept a journal. But then they rode double deck buses to, back and forth to the project site, to the concrete plant, oh my goodness, there was a, there was much employment provided because of the, there was a railroad built, there was a highway built, tunnels built through their mountains, to get the railroad down to the dam site, and the concrete plant, the Six Companies plant, the B&W people, there were several UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 9 thousands of men that were employed, I know, I which I had the exact figures, but it did provide employment for a great number of people, and it was sorely needed. The Depression was really on in the rest of the United States and people flocked here for employment, long before the dam ever started, and those who came, came many of them, without the means to provide for themselves and so they made ramshackle housing for themselves in places that have been discussed in the newspapers fairly recently, known as the, oh dear, it slipped my mind—three sites. Two or three sites met on their way, between Boulder City and the lake site. There were many ramshackle housing areas where families lived until they could provide better housing for themselves. Just anything they could find to throw together to make a shelter for themselves. Mrs. Crowe since Boulder City is the main neighboring town to the project, would you please tell the listeners a little bit more about the town and what just happened there? City has, knows, this is a beautiful city and it always has been from its planning stages. This was not a haphazard development. Boulder City was planned from the blueprint up and before the first spade full of earth was turned the lawns were planted around the government houses and those who lived in those houses were responsible for keeping those lawns in good condition. Fertilizer was furnished, but if the lawns were not kept in proper order the government would come and do it for you and then you would be charged. I don’t believe it was ever necessary to make a charge. I think all those who lived in Boulder City had enough pride in this beautiful little city that they improved and appreciated the lovely garden spot, which had been provided. Most construction cities are temporary in nature and disappear after the construction is finished. But Boulder City has continued to grow and is today a beautiful city. Everything was planned by a Denver city planner by the name of Dubaier. And his original plans were altered somewhat but they were revised and a man by the name of Wilbur Weed was the chief gardener. He was in UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 10 charge of landscaping Boulder City. The lawns, the trees, the whole area. Seven main streets in Boulder City were named after the seven states that were drained by the Colorado River: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California and Wyoming. And the parks in the center of the town were named after Spanish explorers: Coronado, Escalante, and Cardenas. People are now, now proud to live there. Some of the people in our own area have moved to Boulder City because of its advantages in many ways—and it continues to be a beautiful green oasis in the desert. (Tape ends) Mrs. Crowe, to sum up the project, I would like the listeners to have some beckon about the main personalities involved in the operation of the project. Could you briefly tell us few words about it? I worked, of course, in the administration building with Walker Young as chief engineer, as a construction engineer on the project. What a fine man and a sharp mind and a great administrator. John Page, who was the office engineer, one of the finest men I’ve ever known—tremendous, tremendous man, and I remember Mr. Young paying him a tribute because of his knowledge of the project as a whole, beyond the confines of the office. And Ralph Laurie who was the field engineer was imminently capable of fulfilling his assignment. Each of the men, and Simms Ely, who was the city manager, ran a tight ship. All of these people in the field and in the office, wherever they were found on the project, each had a very clear understanding of his responsibilities for the success of the project and each fulfilled that assignment so that the whole operation ran very smoothly. These men were—were tremendous men and I consider it a great privilege to have been associated with them for the nine years that I was on this project, at that time. UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 11 Mrs. Crowe, tell us please to what extent the project was spotlight from the national point of view? In other words, did people come in from Washington or other celebrities visit you and then how were they accepted? Being in the administration building in Boulder City was like being at the hub of something great and wonderful. Great people from all over the world came there. Might be a point of interest to say something about the sculptor who did the figure and the astrological computations that were done in the floor of that monument there at the dam site. Oscar J. W. Hansen, was an intellect. He knew where of he spoke when it came where the stars and the heavens should be placed and in relation of one planet and one star to another. So that when you see that when you see that floor, at the base of the winged figure, at the dam site, you know that those are correct down to the infinite decimal (Laughs) measurement. Why don’t you tell us please, Roosevelt’s visit and dedication of the project? President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came by train to dedicate the dam on the 30th of September, 1937. This necessitated a great flurry of preparation for his visit. A presidential visit requires a great deal of preparation and we worked over time (Laughs) getting everything set up for this visit. As you know, he was crippled but no one would ever had known and he stood there. You’ve all seen pictures, I have a picture, myself, showing the president dedicating the dam, with some of our dignitaries in the background that could be identified, Senator Pittman, Senator McCarran, our own Ed W. Clark, and it was a great day in Southern Nevada, when we had our president come right down the railroad track to the dam and go down there to dedicate that dam on the 30th of September, 1937. Briefly, Mrs. Crowe, would you sum up the whole operation, as far as its moral, its future lesson for the young generation? UNLV University Libraries Cecile Dotson Crowe 12 I can only reflect back on my nine years with the Bureau of Reclamation, and I have never, I cannot conceive of a more efficiently run office. Earl Mills was an epitome of efficiency in the office, and all of the men with whom I worked were tops in their field. It was truly the cream of the engineers of our nation and our nation provided engineers who built dams, all over this world. Some of the same men who designed Boulder Dam also designed dams in Australia, and in Europe and Asia. So it was indeed a very special part of my life. Thank you Mrs. Crowe for coming in, I appreciate that and good afternoon.