Getting Hired at the Bureau of Public Roads 

Compiled from Retiree Interviews and Letters 

Retirees have recalled the early years of the training program and their experiences 

coming to work for the BPR. Whether hired from college or straight off the streets, 

they’ve begun with staking and survey, drafting, or other assignments, and those 

experiences have been the subject of many fond BPR memories. 

The Federal Lands Highway Program has reached its 25th anniversary, an event 

celebrated September 10, 2008, at the Western Federal Lands Highway Division office in 

Vancouver, Washington. Many retirees were present, and one of them – Francis “Mac” 

McConnell – brought a letter outlining some of his earliest memories. “On Monday, 

May 9, 1949, I was hired for the Packwood, Washington, White Pass Highway,” he 

wrote. He was 19 years old at the time and recalled that “some of the other new hires 

were Donald Smith, Bill McLoughlin, and Merle Hewitt.” Other employees he 

recalled being on the job included “Everett Furgason, Vern Ham, Ron Langness, (and) 

Burt Carnegie...Ted Danils,” he said, was also there for a short time to “teach us how 

to survey. He had worked on the Pan-American Highway during World War II.” 

Other retirees have 

recalled how they were hired, 

and that often very little time 

passed between getting hired 

and getting down to work. 

 Five years after Francis 

McConnell arrived, Vern Ford

remembered that the Bureau of 

Public Roads was gearing up for 

BLM projects in Oregon. 

“When I went to work....they 

were hiring people like mad. I 

put in my application for a job 

on a Friday in September 1954 

and I went to work the 

following Monday. They were 

scrambling for people.” Ford 

spent the next five years doing 

survey work, then moved over 

to construction. 

 John Bucholtz had a 

similar quick-hire experience 

into the drafting section in 1958. 

“My son and a neighbor kid 

John Bucholtz recalled the names of a few of the members of the 

drafting section. “Jim McGuire (foreground) was a draftsman 

when I came here and then eventually they just turned the asconstructed projects over to him. He was deaf.” At the desk 

ahead of him in the white shirt is “the back of Les Becker. He 

was the head of the drafting department...I took over” when he 

retired. George Robertson (who told him about the job) is 

toward the back, to the left of someone in a plaid shirt. Clyde 

Boutwell is in front of the window at the left. (WFLHD Archives)

went to school together,” Bucholtz related. “The neighbor kid’s father, George 

Robertson, worked down here as a designer. He found out that I was just graduating 
from Clark with a drafting degree,” and passed along the information that a pending 

retirement meant that a position would be opening up. 

Bucholtz had not been aware of BPR’s presence here, but, he said, he had lived 

close to the freeway when it was being built, “and I was amazed at highway work,” so he 

decided to give it a try. Wendell Strubel was head of Design at the time, and Bucholtz 

said it was “he and George Forest (who) interviewed me. The only question I really 

remember was, did I spend my Saturday nights in a bar? and I says ‘No.’” 

Then they asked, “‘Are you under the federal register?’ And I says ‘No.’ I’d never 

heard of it.” They told him to go to the BPR Personnel office in Portland for guidance on 

how to get his name onto the register. 

He went home that evening and thought about the job, then finally decided, “I 

might as well. (If) I don’t get that job, I might get another job.” As soon as he told them 

his name at the Regional Office, they said “‘Oh, yeah, Mr. Strubel called.’ I would have 

had the job (anyway),” he observed. “I didn’t know that, but that’s how they worked.” 

It was also Wendell Strubel who sent Willis Grafe to the Packwood project, and 

Francis McConnell recalled in his letter that Willis arrived sometime after he did. Willis 

was already in the BPR Junior Engineer training program and related that Mr. Strubel 

pulled him out of a transit-man course. “He said, ‘Bill Utz just fired his transit-man up at 

Packwood....’ Three weeks later I was sitting on top of the White Pass....We had the 

camp and the contract up there. I never saw anyone else the rest of the summer.” 

Both Grafe and McConnell remembered the Resident Engineer from that the 

project. Ray Westby got to know Utz later and received from him a handful of books 

and manuals when Utz retired in 1953. Westby arrived in 1950 and noted the Resident 

Engineer was already “pretty old.” 

 Memories of the project are 

still vivid for McConnell. “We had 

a 1941 Chev Crew Truck, 1946 

Chev...1946 International pickup 

and a Dodge 4x4 Army Crew 

Truck,” he wrote. “We had all the 

survey and office gear, light 

generator, Army cots and mattresses, 

(and) ram water pump to bring water 

185 feet up from Cartright Creek.” 

They moved into cabins that were 

built in the late 1930’s for the bridge 

builders, and covered the barn-like 

sides with tarpaper to keep out the 

weather. 

 “We had to kick the packrats 

out,” he recalled.

Ray Westby provided the WFLHD library with a handful of 

books and manuals that Bill Utz had handed down to him 

before retiring in 1969. (Photo: Marili Reilly)

Like Grafe, McConnell remembered driving the ten miles to Packwood for 

breakfast and dinner until the contractor could get his cook house going. 

On the project, “we had a hard time finding P Line. All the wood of the hubs had 

rotted away and left the hub tack loose in the dirt. The back sites were hub tacks driven 

through a bottle cap.” The work he was involved with, he recalled, included “some 
heavy timber falling and clearing, then some big cuts and fills. They put a crew that lived 

and worked at the upper end with another contractor. Willis Grafe was in charge of that 

crew. We left the jobs December 12, 1949.” 

Within less than a month, some of the same crew members went down to 

Lakeside, Oregon, to do ten miles of location work on Highway 101, beginning about 12 

miles south of Reedsport. They left in a snow storm on January 3, 1950, he said, to run 

lines on Highway 10 and do the railroad and topog. Those he remembered as part of the 

crew were Donald Smith, Burt Carnegie, Merle Hewitt with brother Lyle Hewitt. Four 

or five others were with Tom Van Hovel and Resident Engineer F. McCrea Thompson. 

Francis “Mac” 

McConnell and 

one of the cabins 

they used on the 

White Pass 

Highway Project, 

1949. Photos 

courtesy Francis 

McConnell. 

Then it was back to Packwood, along with Bill McLoughlin, Donald Smith, Merle 

Hewitt. Bill Utz was again the RE, and “we finished the grading, built a bridge across a 

dry gully” and used a rock crusher that they had on the job to run the screen analysis. On 

a southeast road into Mt. Rainier Nat’l Park, they also did some work on a tunnel and 

some half-constructed bridges started before the War. 

One piece of memorabilia McConnell passed along with his letter was the 

obituary of Waverly Thornton “Bill” Utz, from February 1969. McConnell said it was 

most likely clipped from a BPR Newsletter and wrote Bill was “maybe one of the first 

BPR Resident Engineers. He was my first....When I would go home to Portland, I would 

take him to his home in the Grant District of Portland.” 

The article notes that Utz came to this area from Virginia in 1900 and “was the 

designer of many scenic highways in the Pacific Northwest....He helped build many 

logging railroads....(near) Sprague, Washington,” and was later a county engineer in 

Montana and Idaho before finally joining BPR. 

At BPR he was “project engineer...on location and construction of the Glacier 

National Park Highway, Paradise Road in Mt. Rainier, Willamette National Park, the 

Stevens Pass, White Pass, Snoqualmie Pass and Willamette Pass highways.” In Oregon, 

“Mr. Utz worked on reconnaissance, location surveys and design for portions of the 

North Santiam, South Santiam, McKenzie, Oregon Coast, and Willamette River 

highways....He also had a location assignment in the Neah Bay, Washington, area during 

World War II.” 
The article ends by noting that a number of engineers, who were then still with 

BPR “were initiated into Federal Government service on projects under Mr. Utz’s 

supervision.” As Mac McConnell noted, “Bill was quite a Resident Engineer and good to 

work for.” McConnell was under Utz’s tutelage for much of his first two years “with the 

Good Old BPR,” he wrote, and added, “It will always be the BPR to me.” 

Francis “Mac” McConnell brought his hand-written memories to WFLHD’s 25th

Anniversary Open House, September 10, 2008. Vern Ford, John Bucholtz, Willis Grafe, 

and Ray Westby came into the office for interviews during January and March, 2008. If 

you have stories to share, please email me at marili.reilly@fhwa.dot.gov. (Photo below from February 1969 Obituary, courtesy Francis McConnell)