Range Operations 55 



You mentioned Captain Hedrick. Who was the Dahlgren Commander when you came to 

 the station? 



The Commander of the Station when I arrived was Captain Furlong. The 

 man who preceded him was Captain Schuyler. He was something! I got there 

 shortly after Captain Schuyler left, and they were still talking about things that 

 he did. One of the things that they talked about was Schuyler and the grass fires 

 we had that started out in the fields in the fall and early spring when everything 

 is dry. We were always having grass fires, and sometimes they were pretty bad. 

 They'd get in the swamps where we have all the cat-o'-nine-tails, and they would 

 be real hard fires to handle. But when we had a grass fire, as a rule, all the fire 

 trucks would get out there, and people took wet burlap bags and shovels to try 

 and beat out the fire. Back in the early days of the Station and, in fact, for many 

 years after I arrived, anytime there was a fire, every able-bodied person 

 on the Station, civilian and military, turned out to fight the fire. We were 

 expected to do that because we didn't have a fire department. Just like aboard 

 ship, everybody turned out to do what they could to fight a fire. 



Anyway, the story they liked to tell was about a big fire out north of the Plate 

 Battery. It was spring, and the ground was pretty wet. There were times out 

 there, I remember, when we had some holes in the ground where bombs had 

 gone in. In the spring, the water level in those holes was even with the surface of 

 the ground, and it stayed that way until it dried out in late spring or early 

 summer. Well, it seems when they had the fire. Captain Schuyler went out, too. 

 He was the "Fire Chief of any big fire on the Station. He ordered the fire truck 

 into the field to a place where he thought it should be to fight the fire. Well, the 

 driver said, "If I go in there. Captain, I'm going to get stuck. I won't be able to 

 get in there and get out," but the Captain ordered him to get in there. So he 

 went in, and the fire came along, and before they could put it out, the fire 

 burned up the fire truck. 



Is it true that five foremen, per diem workers, ran the Station when you came here? 



Well, I would say that all depends on your point of view. When I arrived in 

 December 1935, there were civilian professionals. Dr. Thompson and myself, 

 and some physicists named Lipnick, Riffolt, Barker, who was a mathematician, 

 and Scott, who was a mathematician. Then there were two ballisticians, but they 

 were not professionals. They called them ordnance engineers. They were good 

 men, but they worked up through the ranks. Roger Dement had the range 

 operation, and Milton Dement was the ballistician. Aside from that, all the rest 

 of the employees on the Station were per diem employees. Of course, they 

 reported to the foremen. To that extent, the foremen did actually run the 

 Station so far as most of the employees were concerned, but the foremen did 

 not run the professional end of it at all. The professional end of it was pretty 



