A little later there was an opening down at Casa Grande. Boss Pinkley was the superintendent there and Hugh Miller was his assistant. James V. Lloyd, the assistant superintendent at Grand Canyon, recommended me for this job and he arranged transportation with a dealer that furnished some supplies for the new community building in Grand Canyon. This provided me with a ride to Phoenix. From Phoenix I took the bus on down to the monument and I had a pack my 40 pound footlocker about a quarter mile from the highway where the bus left me off to the headquarters. Hugh Miller set me down to take dictation immediately after I got there and of course, that was a little bit rough. He wasn’t too satisfied with my efforts, but I spent about a week and a half there, and at that time Luis Gastellum was there temporarily (1). He didn’t have the political clearance for the position (2). After a few days his clearance came through, so they wanted to keep him. I went back to Grand Canyon, but at the same time there was an opening at Petrified Forest.
For some reason, Hug Miller decided that I’d be a good man for that job and he recommended me shortly after I got back up to Grand Canyon. The clearance came through, and so I went on down to Petrified Forest. White Mountain Smith was superintendent there at that time and the monument had one CCC camp. It was under the CCC camp that my appointment was approved and I was the only clerk there at the
Time (3). In addition to the office work, he had me go through the accounting sheets and old vouchers to reconcile’em. Shortly after that, the auditor came in and he looked things over. He said, “You’re already done my job for me. I don’t have anything else to do here.”
I wasn’t under Civil Service for clerical work at that time, but I took the examination. In 1939, I believe it was, the U.S. Bureau of Mines came along with strategic war mineral exploration work. They picked me up from the resister, and from then I was doing clerical work, hiring and arranging camp facilities for crews that were doing the exploration work. My first job was at Tungsten Metals out of Ely, Nevada. When that was finished, I was up at Dunsmuir and finished up the paperwork for a chrome project there. From there I went back into the Bureau of Mines office in Tucson, and then up to Patterson, California, to set up a mercury project there. After that I was back in Tucson and they sent me over to Desert Center, California, where we used the metropolitan water district pumping station facilities. We worked on the iron deposits there with core drilling and sampling, that laid out an iron project that was later developed by Henry Kaiser for his Fontana plant. That job went for about a year and a half, after which I got back into Tucson and took a couple weeks leave.
