The Dam Builders (second in a series)

This is the second in a series of interviews with people who actually worked on building Pensacola Dam in 1938-40.

W.N. Bill Holway, youngest son of W.R. Holway, the Chief Engineer, should have had a cushy job while working on the dam during summers while at college. But his father gave him one of the nastiest jobs around one summer, painting the insides of the 15-foot diameter Penstocks with hot, black tar, coating the pipes with a half inch of the stuff. The coatings made the water slip through the pipes easier into the turbines. It took him more than a month to do the work on the four penstocks at that time. "It was hot, smelly and a nasty job," he recalls.
Our interview took place at the Holway Point family compound on Drowning Creek, where the Holway family once owned a considerable amount of waterfront. Bill drove down to his dock to welcome us as we tied up the boat. He is a kind man with a generous smile and seemed to enjoy our visit.
The main house at Holway Point reminds one of the Woolaroc Ranch Main Lodge, west of Bartlesville, built by Frank Phillips. The room is large and has a big grand piano on one end. A photo of W.R. and his wife, Hope, sits atop the piano, taken in the early 1920's when both looked like movie stars.
The house was built in 1948 and Bill was kind enough to go over the many photos in the family collection and also documents and literature on the building of the dam.
Bill, at work, computed the amount of concrete required for the Buttresses, which are five feet thick at the bottom and varying to two feet thick at the top; he did surveys around the lake to elevation 755 and higher for the backwater curve. He recalls that survey teams used six 1940 model Dodge sedans to go around the lake for surveying. Some places had no roads and they had to cut their way into the shoreline.
Once, on what would be Drowning Creek, the survey team dropped Bill off deep inside the woods and said they would be back for him in an hour or so. Three hours later, Bill was worried he might not get out, but they did return and picked him up.
He recalls the calculations which would today take seconds by computer, took weeks back then, using slide rules and a calculator.
Bill lives in Tulsa with his wife Polly and they still make frequent trips to the lake. When asked if he had thought in 1940 there would someday be 18,000 property owners on Grand Lake, he replied "never in my wildest dreams."
He told the story of Holway and Associates doing some sewage work for the City of Grove in the late 1940's, but they never got paid. One evening Bill and his father, W.R., drove to Grove to what they thought would be a city council meeting hoping to collect on the bill, but as it turned out the meeting had been cancelled and all the council had gone to the movie theater. So Bill and his father walked into the theater and spoke to each council member during the movie. They got paid shortly after that.
Bill attended MIT with a degree in Civil Engineering. He later worked on other GRDA projects such as Kerr Dam and the pumpback units, with Holway & Associates.
(this interview was conducted in the Spring of 2005 by the Editor)