From Getting Hired to Getting Ahead – Part II 

Compiled from Retiree Interviews, Winter 2008 

As Bureau of Public Roads employees moved up the ranks, they were often supported by 

others in higher places. Retirees recalled the times they offered the helping hand, and 

shared their views of hiring and promoting once they had moved into supervisory and 

management positions. 

As BPR emerged from the 1940’s, its supervisors had values and standards that 

had been developed during the early years of the agency and some of the most 

tumultuous decades of the 20th’ century. Ray Westby came to work at BPR a few years 

after the war, and he recalled “we had some pretty good people – supervisors – from the 

World War II era.” He worked as Project Engineer on the Smith River project in 1955, 

and recalled “the old guys – they were old then – they really went all out to help you.” 

His supervisor, Sam Cook, worked out of the Region Office in 

Portland, and it was his generosity in particular that 

Ray recalled. “I lived in Seattle and never got home 

but maybe once every six weeks or so. Sam 

Cook...would come down: ‘Well, Ray,’ he says, ‘I 

want you to go back to Portland.’” Ray would make 

the trip, then take advantage of the closer proximity 

to get on a train for a visit home. 

The values of those early supervisors were 

some that Ray came to share. “I don’t want to pat 

myself on the back,” he said, “but I was one of the 

favorite project engineers.” Ray recalled he was 

Chief of the Project Development Division in the 

Vancouver office when one young engineer came to 

Western Direct Federal Division. “Just before I 

retired, Pat Wlaschin came out here as a hydraulics 

engineer and he wanted to get ahead. It’s pretty hard 

to get ahead as a specialist,” Ray said, “but he was 

sharp.” 

Pat was looking to get some special training, 

so Ray wrote a letter on his behalf. “We were just 

getting these little computers – Texas Instruments,” 

he said. The high-powered calculators had the 

potential of saving a lot of tedious calculations

BPR Field Office, 1948. WFLHD 

Archives

 “if you knew how to do it. Pat was an expert at that and he taught quite a few of the 

guys around here how to use them.” 

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It was the women in the office who particularly benefited from having Vern Ford

in their corner. “I was a fighter for the gals in the office,” he said. He knew most of the 

women, noting that some had started long after he had come to the BPR. He spent his 

first 22 years in the field, coming into the office in 1976, and said “sometimes you 
wouldn’t see them except in the wintertime, (but) they were a critical part of the 

operation. There wasn’t any doubt about that.” 

He cited in particular the women in the financial and contracting fields. “They 

were excellent people. It was rare, really rare, that we ever had a contract go out of here 

and get out to the field, (with any) kind of clerical error in it. It just didn’t happen.” 

Vern felt frustrated on their behalf by what he saw as an unfairly low grades. “As far as 

promotions were concerned, and money, it was always the same old thing. When I talked 

to Personnel they’d say, ‘Oh, we can get that work done – they’re easy (to find), easy to 

hire...’ 

“It used to make me so darned mad,” he said, “because I thought those girls were 

really (great workers.)” Personnel and management “had a lot of discussions over it, and 

they finally started breaking loose and upgrading them.” 

Another supervisor who advocated promoting people from lower ranks was John 

Bucholtz. He spent several years as head of the drafting department, and said the 

drafters – and later the CADD operators – that he hired were not necessarily educated in 

the field, but he trained them and “we had some good people.” Because of unrelated 

education, however, they couldn’t be promoted. “About GS-5 was about it,” he said. 

The north corner of the upstairs drafting area, 1965. From left, employees have been 

tentatively identified as Lynn Tingey, John ?, and Everett White. WFLHD Archives. 

John’s strategy was to get “them moved out into the design squads so they could 

be promoted – I hired John Acerbi and Bob Toops....They got out in there and then they 

got a chance to grow.” 

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That move, however, eventually led to the elimination of the drafting department, 

“which I thought would be OK, because you got some experienced people out there (in 

design).... 
“We put out some good plans while I was running the department. I wanted the 

people to have a chance to get ahead, and they couldn’t.” He explained that at that time, 

there was a two-grade interval in civil engineering and technician positions, “so if you 

were a 7 and you wanted to go to a 9, you had to really get good . There was no halfway 

between. Between a 5 and a 7 there was no 6.” Even though those who made the twograde promotions enjoyed “quite a pay raise,” John said he continued to push on behalf of 

the people working for him. Eventually, he said, they went to one-grade intervals “to fill 

in those (grades).” 

 At the time that Ray, Vern, and John were helping or promoting those below 

them, Jim Hall was looking at the organization from a different perspective. Focused on 

the long-term needs of the agency, the Division Engineer could see the value in 

developing people from within, but also recognized the need to hire well-trained people 

who could hit the ground running. 

When he took over as head of the Direct Federal operations in headquarters in 

1974, Jim said, “we had 1,100 people....When I got out here (in 1978), we had less than 

half of that. If you lose half of your staff, and you (keep) doing what you’ve always 

done, you’re going to go out of business. 

“When I came here, John Mors said to me, ‘If this office gets below 155 people, 

close it. I’ve analyzed it every way I can think of, and that’s the minimum we can get by 

with.’” 

There were fewer than that, Jim noted, not too long after he arrived in Vancouver. 

“We were going down – as an agency – two percent a year, but this office was taking 

bigger cuts because we had the highest staffing relative to the workload we had. So to 

save Eastern and Central staffing, we were taking huge cuts every year.” 

At the same time, the nature of the 

work was changing. “When I got here, this 

office was mostly building BLM roads. 

BLM didn’t need a sophisticated design; 

they needed good quality construction, and 

we had that. The project engineers we had 

hired as young boys and grown up to our 

program were just outstanding. I would 

like to have kept it that way.” 

 The reductions in staffing, however, 

changed the way the office had to work. 

While the Bureau of Land Management 

continued to feed BPR small construction 

projects, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 

Dan Jackson and Gene Timmerman do the survey 

of Flowery Trail Road prior to recent construction. 

WFLHD Survey Archives 

1980 and the growing Forest Highway program created a need for roads that, he said, 

required “lots of engineering.... 

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“It amazed me how people would say that we keep needing to hire GS-2s and 

raise them up. I love that concept,” he said, but they were already building more projects 

with fewer people. “If half of your people are GS-2s and you have one person per 

project, you’ve got a GS-2 (in charge of) the project.” Jim said when he looked into the 

future and saw that GS-2’s would be running the projects, he had to say, “No, we’re not 

going to be doing that.” Though employees who had advanced through the ranks in that 
way would try to engage him in discussion about “hiring people like (them) and bringing 

them up,” he noted, “I loved the concept, but it wasn’t going to work.” 

At the same time, costs were going up, and “relative to construction, costs weren’t 

going up near as fast as people’s salaries.” Jim observed that “when I got here, there 

were guys like Lyle Hewitt who had twenty people on one project doing great work, and 

everything laid out perfect. But if you put twenty people on one of our projects today, 

(salaries) would cost more than...the project....These were the people overseeing the 

(contractor). You couldn’t criticize the notes, the surveys, the overview – they were 

perfect. Everything (was) perfect, but it can’t keep going that way,” he said. “We have 

to get leaner.... 

“I could see that 20 years ago,” Jim said. “I was 39 and I knew what was going to 

happen, but I didn’t know how to communicate that. I was not old enough, experienced 

enough, or maybe smart enough. I had been around and I knew what was happening. I 

wanted to plan the organization for 20 years down the line, not (for) tomorrow.... 

“One of the things I decided early,” Jim continued, “(was) that I wouldn’t hire 

somebody if I couldn’t see their job twenty years later, (and) that it would be one they’d 

be happy with.” Some supervisors would come to him with a request to fill a job, but he 

didn’t want to fill a menial job if it had no potential. “(Some) people...wanted to hire a 

GS-4 that would be happy to be a GS-4 all their life. I just couldn’t resolve myself that 

any organization full of people who would be happy to be a GS-4 all their lives would be 

a good organization to be in.... It put me in conflict with those who would do that.” 

He wanted people to be able to develop into something more. “You basically hire 

somebody as a young person, (and) you’ve got the rest of their life in your hands. If 

you’re going to go out of business, you don’t want to do that. When you finish work 

here, you can’t really go to work someplace else for the same salary; you almost always 

have to take a big cut back, and it’s really hard on a person’s psyche.” 

Although Jim held firm to his philosophy, he admitted that “gradually, before I 

left, I started turning loose of authority and letting people have more authority.” He took 

a back seat and let supervisors make the hiring decisions, but admitted that sometimes “it 

would just drive me crazy to watch what they would do...because they just didn’t have 

the same vision of where we were going.” If they’d had that vision, he believes, they 

might have been better prepared for the future. “They know now what their problems are 

now, but they should have known those problems 20 years ago.” That ability to 

anticipate future needs is important, he believes: “Then you’re ready.” 

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If you have comments on this story or can identify people or places in the photos, please 

email Marili Reilly at marili.reilly@fhwa.dot.gov.