The person bidding against Neilson on some of these projects was John Burnett. He worked with Chinook Research in Lebanon, which is right across Highway 34 from Corvallis. Burnett was working on Lost Creek and Applegate Lake, so I contacted him and asked if he need someone in limnology that could do this work on these two reservoirs. He hired me. In 1986 and ’87 I worked for him on these reservoir projects. I was also hired full time at the community college in 1986. This all happened in less than a week. The day before Thanksgiving I lost my job but Monday after Thanksgiving weekend I was working full time at the college because the physics teacher had suffered a heart attack.
What a change?
I didn’t even have a day off, Steve. It just fell together. I had talked to people here who knew I was interested in teaching. I walked into the classroom and I grinned the whole day. I knew that I was a teacher. I really hadn’t planned on teaching, but it kind of fell my way and I realized that this was a part of life that I really enjoyed. Being with young people and preparing lessons and grading papers. It really is a challenge to be with people everyday and to be stimulating.
I taught the rest of the year part-time. I was put on full time the following fall. I told them I needed a full time position or else I was going to have to find something else. The college realized it had four science instructors, all biologists. They didn’t have any physical science instructors- no physics, no chemistry, no astronomy, no meteorology, no geology. I was the person hired to fill that physical science niche. I’ve been here now 12 years. This job did a couple things, including freeing me for summer again. The job with John Burnett ended in 1987 on a really bitter note, with a court case where it was found that he owed me about $13,000 that I never received. He went bankrupt and left the state, which was kind of sad. I inherited a lot of his equipment. I was able to continue work with limnological equipment that I bought from him at his auction when he sold his lab.
Is that when you connected with Greg Bennett?
I would call us both hustlers. We were both looking for opportunities to get work. Of course summer for me were a complete blank, so I could do anything, Greg was in the same situation. Some how we were both connected with Doug. It may be that Greg’s wife, Sharon, was a boat pilot for the concessionaire. Doug connected us both with the person who was successful in this bid to work on these two reservoirs. In February 1986 we started working for John Burnett doing research on these two reservoirs. To be honest, I’ve never worked with anyone as closely and as well as I’ve worked with Greg. We were both very responsible and didn’t ever let each other down. We worked together for 22 months and every week we would go out to these reservoirs. The monitoring and samples were taken for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was hard when the project ended, and it ended bitterly, because John Burnett was not doing all the work that he was contracted to do. The Corps of Engineers said that all the fieldwork was being done wonderfully and they wanted us to keep doing it. The lab work was in such bad shape that they didn’t have any other avenue but to stop. I was let go again towards the end of the 1987. The whole project ended, within weeks of me leaving. I think they call it defaulting. It was actually awful working for John Burnett because he would not support us as managers in the field. When we needed equipment, people, or supplies, we would have to buy it out of our own pocket. He would give us whatever money he could afford, both for salary and supplies. I was spending the money he sent me to run his project and putting very little away for myself. I wasn’t making any money. I was enjoying the work, but not getting paid what he said he was going to pay me. In the end we went to court, and he went bankrupt.
