Interview with James Phillips

              


Oral History Interview

with

James D. Phillips


Interview by

Tim Scanlon
21 October 2006

CSHP 0034
Part 1


Colorado Springs History Project
CSHP




















Pikes Peak Library District, Special Collections
Copyright 2015


Colorado Springs History Project
     
     The Colorado Springs History Project was conducted between the years 2005-2010 in a joint effort to document and update the history of Colorado Springs from mid-20th century to 2010. This volunteer team included members from the region’s major academic libraries and faculties, as well as the Pikes Peak Library District and the Pioneers Museum. Administered and supervised by the Colorado Springs History Project Committee, the project interviewers consisted of a number of local volunteers. 

      The oral history portion of The Colorado Springs History Project identified and interviewed individuals who had helped to shape the city of Colorado Springs in various and diverse ways. Subjects were also sought as representative of inhabitants of the Pikes Peak region and could provide insight into the city’s story in the second half of the twentieth century. The interviews reflect the rapid growth of Colorado Springs and touch on business and government relations, religious organizations, the Air Force Academy, Colorado College, and the growth of many important charitable services within the community. 


     The collection is comprised of 50 tapes, 19 CDs, and 2 DVDs with 32 individual interviews. These interviews are housed in the archives of Pikes Peak Library District’s Special Collections. A complete listing of the interviews is available at the Special Collections reference desk. Transcripts for many of the interviews are available for use. 


Digitization
     Audio from the Colorado Springs History Project was digitized between 2009 - 2011 and is available for study and use in the Special Collections department.


















The Colorado Springs Oral History Project	
		James D. Phillips
		Oral History Interview
		CSHP 0034, part 1 

		Tim Scanlon 
		21 October 2006
	 	Colorado Springs, Colorado

Scanlon: Okay, my name is Tim Scanlon. Today is October 21, 2006, and I am here with Mr. James D. Phillips at his residence at 2530 Paseo Rojo, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80904. And Jim, if I may call you that, could you identify your date of birth and where were you born.

Phillips: Jim Phillips. I was born in Victor Cripple Creek, Colorado. I lived in Victor, January 8, 1932. 

SCANLON: And, you are married. Could you identify your spouse’s name, including her maiden name?

PHILLIPS: Elizabeth Ann Coley.

SCANLON: Was that Anne with an “e” or just Ann.

PHILLIPS: Just Ann. C-O- L-E-Y.

SCANLON: And where were you married?

PHILLIPS: We were married in Manitou. Yes, we’re giving all the secrets. 

SCANLON: Now this is a tough one. Your wedding date?

PHILLIPS: August 20, 1955. I didn’t need that; August 20th is a long time to be together. 

SCANLON: Okay, and can you identify your parent’s names?

PHILLIPS: Yes, my father was James Paul Phillips.

SCANLON: Do you happen to know where he was born? 

PHILLIPS: Born in Colorado Springs, and I don’t know the exact date. 

Elizabeth Phillips:: Well, his sister picked out the house on, I forgot.

PHILLIPS: Colorado Avenue.

SCANLON: Which side?

PHILLIPS: Colorado Avenue.

SCANLON: Okay. And your mother? 

PHILLIPS: My mother was Florence B. Phillips.

SCANLON: Do you happen to recall her maiden name?

PHILLIPS: Florence Broome, B-R-O-O-M-E. 

SCANLON: And do you know where she may have been born? 

PHILLIPS: She was born in, what is it, Houton?

Elizabeth Phillips: No, Boston, Michigan. 

PHILLIPS: Houton, Michigan.

Elizabeth Phillips: There may have been some confusion. 

PHILLIPS: The two of them are almost the same city. 

Elizabeth Phillips: But she came to Victor when she was, what, four or five years old. 

SCANLON: Okay. And do you have children?

PHILLIPS: Yes. 

SCANLON: And the first child?

PHILLIPS: First child was Catherine 

Elizabeth Phillips: I’ll help with the vital statistics. 

SCANLON: I-N-E Catherine?

Elizabeth Phillips:: Yes. With a C.

SCANLON: With a C. And she was born?

Elizabeth Phillips: In Boulder, Colorado. 

SCANLON: And the date of birth?

Elizabeth Phillips: October 11, 1958. Do you want her married name? 

SCANLON: Yes, married name would be fine also.

Elizabeth Phillips: Resch. R-E-S-C-H. 

SCANLON: R-E-S-C-H. Okay. And your second child?

PHILLIPS: Pamela. 

SCANLON: And she was born in?

PHILLIPS: She was born, well,

Elizabeth Phillips: Colorado Springs.

PHILLIPS: Yes, it is easier.

Elizabeth Phillips: July 24, 1961. And her married name is D’Amico, Capital D-’-A-M-I-C-O.

SCANLON: Okay. We have identification of your education in one of the newspaper articles that I picked up. It identified that you had attended the University of Colorado, went back to the Colorado College, got your degree at the University of Colorado. 

PHILLIPS: Didn’t get a degree. I didn’t finish.

SCANLON: Oh. 

PHILLIPS: Got clear out to the end and everybody was arguing over what credits I got at CC (Colorado College) and what I did there. And I had a baby and a wife, and I had used my GI Bill. Because CC had closed the engineering department down, and I lost a year’s money and everything. So I quit and I never went back to finish the 12 hours afterward. 

SCANLON: And you concluded your university education in what year?

PHILLIPS: Oh boy.

Elizabeth Phillips: Well, Cathy was born in 1958 and that would have been 1959.

PHILLIPS: 1959.

SCANLON: One of those articles identified you had an early interest in commercial art. Is that true?

PHILLIPS: I was going to try to be a commercial artist. Yes.

SCANLON: And what led you, what motivation did you have for that?

PHILLIPS: What reason did I have for that?

SCANLON: Yes. Was it ability, personal interest, mentorship?

PHILLIPS: I started at the University of Colorado in architectural engineering. And that did not end up with what. I ended up in Korea instead. And when I came back from Korea, I had decided. I had been in the combat engineers, and I decided I would become a civil engineer. I had also worked for the city as a engineering aide before that on the Blue River Project. I was hired as a toady on a surveying crew. And enjoyed the work. It was great work. So then, I got more or less out of the art, the artist portion of it. I had gone back as a retirement thing to do some painting and carving and that kind of thing. I didn’t ever try to make a livelihood at it. 

SCANLON: Okay. Let’s go back to your early life. You were born in Cripple Creek, but you said you grew up in Victor?

PHILLIPS: No, I didn’t grow up there. I stayed there until I was four years old. And at four years old, we moved to Canon City. And it was during the Depression. We stayed in Canon City for about three years, I was seven or eight. I was about eight years old when we left for Oregon. Lived for a short time in Oregon, Washington, and then finally in California. And at that time my father passed away in 1941. And we came back to Colorado Springs. I’ve been here ever since. 

SCANLON: So what profession was your father in?

PHILLIPS: Trying to live. 

SCANLON: Jack of all trades?

PHILLIPS: Yes. He had worked in the mines in Victor and Cripple Creek. He and my mother married when he was just out of high school. Both of them actually were. And he had started college, but had the unfortunate situation of spending all of his tuition money and his books and his year’s money on the Max Schmeling fight, I think it was, something like that, some big fight that he knew he had the winner, and he lost, and his sisters who were putting him through school said “That’s it. We did what we could, and that’s it.” So, he had gone back to work in the mines when he and my mother were married. The mining was not a pleasant life to live. My mother didn’t want to stay there, and also in Victor, it was falling apart by then. And so Canon City was pretty good. But then we moved onto California. And as I say, he passed away in California. 

SCANLON: Did you have any siblings?

PHILLIPS: Yes, Ruth. She is my older sister. She is still living in Denver and Arizona. And she’s quite bright. She was the leader of the crew.

SCANLON: So, how many years older is she?

PHILLIPS: She‘s two years older than me. 

SCANLON: Two years older. Okay. So you lived a time in California. Was that formative at all?

PHILLIPS: Oh, I think so. I came out of Colorado Schools, so I had kind of fun in California. I ended up in the University of California experimental school in Berkeley. Because I’d shown a, I had a little higher IQ, I guess, that kids that age normally did. And then I was, we moved to Oakland and met all the Japanese and other children. I’d never been around kids, other than children like myself. And saw them all removed when the war hit in 1941. They were all taken away to the internment camps, which was kind of a shock to everyone. Got to sit in a house at night when the airplanes were going over and everything was dark, with my sister, because my mother was with my father at the hospital, visiting him. It was quite an experience for a kid that age, nine years old. It was a different way. But California was a good place for us. It was warm, and got good relatives out there. My aunt was the city treasurer for the City of Berkeley, and they were the people who convinced us that we should come out there to live. So we went there. 

SCANLON: I imagine. Have you been back to Berkeley since then?

PHILLIPS: Yes, oh yes. We went back. Everybody out there now has passed away. So we haven’t been out there the past few years. But we went back a number of times, business and pleasure. 

SCANLON: Are there any elements of Berkeley that remain from when you lived there?

PHILLIPS: Very little. When I lived in Berkeley, I lived right across from the University in an apartment building and that area is now much of a slum. It’s pretty well torn apart. The last time we were out there, anyway. So Berkeley had slipped and gone downhill, but it’s like every other town. They slip and the come up and go down. New York City is especially the kind of thing you see. 

SCANLON: There’s an ebb and flow.

PHILLIPS: Yes. 

SCANLON: So, you returned to Colorado when?

PHILLIPS: In 1942. 

SCANLON: So the war was raging at that time? 

PHILLIPS: I guess. It was moving pretty well along and the west coast was pretty shaky. They didn’t know what was happening. Work was not that steady. My mother had not been able to find any work or anything, so we came back and she, we moved to Colorado Springs and she went to Blair’s Business College to get some training so she could go on and take care of her two kids. Which she did a magnificent job of. 

SCANLON: And when you came back, do you recall where you lived? 

PHILLIPS: Yes, I lived at 322 West Bijou. Underneath the big motel that is over there where they are building the bridge now. 

SCANLON: So, let’s see, in 1942 you would have been ten, so you went to,

PHILLIPS: I went to Washington (Elementary), West Junior (Junior High School) and Main High (Colorado Springs High School). 

SCANLON: Now Main High is known as Palmer, but it used to be known as Colorado Springs High School.

PHILLIPS: Yes, that’s right. 

SCANLON: So you attended back in the old building, that great big marvelous gothic type structure?

PHILLIPS: No, it had just been torn down about a year or two years before that. There were some pieces of it left, but the building itself was gone. 

SCANLON: So you graduated from high school. Did you have any memorable jobs? Most students at the time worked during high school. 

PHILLIPS: I started working when I was still in grade school. When I was in the sixth grade, I started working in a small grocery store. Burnam Brown’s Friendly Cash Market over on Bijou Street. He let me stock shelves and sweep the floors and didn’t make much money or anything, but it kept me busy. I worked for him for a time until high school in the summers, and finally was a clerk. Delivered the groceries, drove his truck and everything to deliver groceries and that kind of thing. One time I used a wagon. I pulled groceries in a wagon around the neighborhood to deliver them. Those were the days before the big markets had taken over entirely. 

SCANLON: Back when people had corner markets. 

PHILLIPS: Yes, and also when you had ration stamps, little stores were able to get stuff, and if you had friends in the market, you got what you needed for your rations stamps. So it worked out very well.

SCANLON: Also at that time, it was not just food that was rationed, but gasoline, tires and the like. Were you part to the network to track down these goods for family or friends?

PHILLIPS: No, that wasn’t anything I got involved with. That was beyond me, partially.

SCANLON: You would have been pretty young though.

PHILLIPS: Yes. 

SCANLON: So you graduated from high school and out of high school, you decided to go on to school?

PHILLIPS: I had decided I was going onto to school, yes, in architectural engineering. So my first job was at Fort Carson. 

Elizabeth Phillips:: I’m going downstairs. You have some great stories to tell about your summers.

PHILLIPS: My summers?

Elizabeth Phillips:: On the range.

PHILLIPS: She’s talking about the, when I was young, in the summers, I spent most of my time on a ranch in the Tarryall, the Lazy River Ranch. It belonged to an aunt and uncle, the Hammers. Bess and Gerheart Hammer. And so I spent time on horses, driving cattle, having a good time being a cowboy for about a month and a half out of every summer. 

SCANLON: So you were a cowboy as well as an urban boy. 

PHILLIPS: Yes. My mother wouldn’t let me go totally become a cowboy. They wanted to stay there and become a cowboy. She was a teacher, the aunt. 

SCANLON: And she would have taught up at Lake George?

PHILLIPS: She taught at Tarryall, and she taught at Lake George, Florissant, Woodland Park, Cripple Creek. Very, very good teacher. It was amazing from a small town school situation. She produced something like twelve or fifteen doctors, two or three people who won high education awards, all of these things. She had all of these people, she really knew how to teach. She had a sister also who taught up there. Mary was not as good a teacher as Bess was, but she did a grand job. She also taught at Woodland Park, all those schools up there. 

SCANLON: So, you’ve graduated from high school. You decided you are going to go on to college, but obviously you are not in an affluent family. 

PHILLIPS: Right.

SCANLON: And so how was it that you intended to pay for your schooling?

PHILLIPS: Well, I went to work. I quit the grocery store. It wasn’t paying enough money to do anything. My first job, as I started to talk about, was rather interesting. I went to the state offices and they had a job at Fort Carson digging fence post holes. So I had done that on the ranch. I knew how to dig fence posts. So I took the job. They gave it to me and shipped me out to Fort Carson, way out there. And the guy told me to use a machine to dig fence post holes. I had never seen one or how to run one. So the guy, he felt sorry for me and he gave me another job stoking the stoves for the recruits that were coming in and being trained at Fort Carson at that time, during the summer months. And I did that for a little while. But that was not going to work out very long. 

SCANLON: So you were residing down there as well?

PHILLIPS: No.

SCANLON: You were commuting down there?

PHILLIPS: No, I had a Model A Ford. 

SCANLON: Was this your first car?

PHILLIPS: Yes, I got it when I was sixteen. It was made the first year I was made, in 1932 and it ran like a top. My uncle with the farm, the rancher, had had it overhauled just before it was given to me. And it was given to me when I was fifteen, and for a year I had to sit and look at it because I was not allowed to drive it. But I learned to drive it when I was about twelve. So, I could run it. But I used it to drive back and forth to the job down there, like that. But then, once the job was over at Carson, I started looking in the city and I knew a man named Jack Rundle, who was the head of the Pikeview coal mine for the Golden Cycle Corporation. And Jack said “I know a guy over at City Hall and they are, I think they are hiring for a new division.” And it was called the Blue River Division. And it was coming out of the city engineers’ office rather than out of the utilities. And he called the guy, and they said yeah, they are looking for some kids to cut branches and stuff and serve on a surveying crew. So I went over to that. And I did live in the field on that one. And we traveled. City Hall and we stayed in Lake George and Hartsell and Fairplay and all the places as we worked as the pipelines location from the side of Pikes Peak up to the Blue River tunnel.

SCANLON: So this would have been just after the war?

PHILLIPS: That was just after the war. Let’s see, I’ve got all these nice things. That was July 24, 1950. Engineering Aide One. A hundred and eighty-eight dollars a month. 

SCANLON: It’s interesting, going through the newspaper index, we would run across little news blurbs that would identify, you know, employees getting a raise. And how that could be news was beyond us. But we thought it was curious that city employee’s salaries would be newsworthy.

PHILLIPS: Oh, they were the big thing. One of my biggest fights as I went along was getting better wages for the employees. 

SCANLON: Well, city utilities had a reputation in this town dating back to the very early days, particularly through the Depression, it provided a great deal of operating revenue for the city itself. 
PHILLIPS: Yes. I had a book here. It’s downstairs, I guess. And that may be something you might want to add to these books you were talking about. It was given to me by John Biery, who was the city manager at that time. 

SCANLON: During the 1950’s.

PHILLIPS: But that was after he was no longer city manager and I was working for the utilities at that time. And he gave me this book. And it’s a lawsuit that was filed. Colorado Springs had three power companies, before the Depression. And things in Manitou, both hydros in Manitou were built. There was a plant that was downtown, approximately, I don’t remember what buildings are there now. They have torn everything down. But it was over on Colorado Avenue. But Tesla (Nikola Tesla) used to blow off the line every Sunday morning. He was trying to get a, he was on Memorial Hill where Memorial (Park) is, and the park, and he had a big antenna there, and he was trying to put a bolt around the earth. And he would juice up that power plant, and he’d cut it out, and he’d blow the power plant up, and nobody would have any lights. 

SCANLON: I had heard he had done this once. You are indicating, he did this more than once.

PHILLIPS: Oh, he did it more than once. Oh, yes, from what I understand, it was done four or five times. They finally told him he could not do that anymore. But those were all private companies. And then they also, there one down there in this book that explains all these, the names of them. One of them was making natural gas on the side, out of coal and then the coke that came out of the coal was shipped to Pueblo to be used in the steel mills. But the gas was used to light the seventeen gas lights downtown in Colorado Springs. It’s a nifty book.

SCANLON: I know Charley Morgan had done a book on the history of power in Colorado Springs. I have a copy of that. But this is not that book. It is something else.

PHILLIPS: Oh, no. Let me go and get it, if you want to shut off your thing.

(Digital recording interrupted.)

PHILLIPS: This is a book that was given to me by him. The city manager at that time, and was sent to the City of Colorado Springs by General Electric Corporation and was the story of the electric companies in Colorado Springs from the beginning dates, clear up until the utilities department became a reality. And there are not many of these around, from what I understand. 

SCANLON: (reads) The Colorado Springs Lighting Controversy by Floy, Illuminating Engineering Publishing Company.” On the flyleaf, it has a picture of city hall without pavement. This was New York Illuminating Engineering Publishing Company, 12 West 40th Street, 1st edition 1908 by Henry Floyd, MAME. That’s pretty neat. And you say this was given to the city manager. This would have been Mosley (John Mosley)?

PHILLIPS: It was given to Mosley, I guess. And Mosley didn’t want it. He passed it onto the next city manager, and he gave it to me not as the utilities director but as something, he said, that utilities wanted this. It’s historical. And so you can keep it. Well, you know, my family is not going, if they want this to put into the historical stuff, I will give it to them.

SCANLON: Oh, that would be wonderful. Perhaps, this will be another topic, but I will come back to it. The Starsmore Center in the basement of the Pioneers Museum is now the official city repository. So we try to funnel all related public documents to them so that people can study in 
the future. That’s a wonderful bit of book. Okay, when we last left off, you had begun working. It was the Blue River project. And who, do you recall who came up with the idea of diverting river from drainages to provide water?

PHILLIPS: Well, actually, drainages, the first one was back in the 1800’s. And they moved water from the western slope up north into Greeley and in that area. Downstairs is a drawing of that. Something I picked up, I don’t remember when. That ditch, and moving it through, and this was when the first trans mountain diversion took place. Colorado Springs’ first move to do that was the Blue River. When that was started was when the Air Force Academy was making comments that it might like to come to Colorado Springs. And the water was not great enough to meet the needs of the Air Force Academy and the future building of what they thought the city would do. There was no idea that it would look like it is now. But Ray Nixon and Sid Nichols were the major drivers on this. John Biery was the city manager and the utilities department at that time was somewhat what it is now. The electric division was the strong one. The gas division was kind of bubbling along. Wastewater had been in effect clear back in Palmer’s (William Jackson Palmer) time. He had built a sewage farm. It was a vegetable farm, down on Las Vegas Street, and the sewer lines were put in downtown, and they are still using them. Those eight inch lines in there, I see the things in the newspaper about, well they found a line that was made out of clay. Well, all of the lines downtown are made out of clay, and they all drained down to those fields down there on Las Vegas Street and they raised vegetables down there and they peddled the vegetables back up into the city. 

SCANLON: So was that in the vicinity of Franzhurst Farms?

PHILLIPS: No, it is where the wastewater treatment plant is now. 

SCANLON: Oh, okay. That was built in the mid-thirties.

PHILLIPS: 1934. By the WPA (Works Progress Administration). The front porch lamp that is on my back porch, they purchased it from the city when I retired. They had torn the buildings down and they had that laying in the stockpile down there, and the employees bought it from the city and gave it to me when I retired. Because I had been superintendent of the wastewater division for a number of years. 

SCANLON: It’s interesting that wastewater pipe has been clay for centuries and still is one of the most effective materials to use for sewage discharge. 

PHILLIPS: Well, the big problem with this, that type of piping is the jointing and roots. Roots that are looking for water go down. The joining on clay pipe is, you normally use concrete or bond mastic or something like this, but the roots begin to break in around it. And they get on that edge, then they begin to break the tile. And so that’s why it has lost its. Also, the weight on it. Once you get up above eight inches in diameter, it gets heavy. Up to twelve, and you can just about move it with two guys, and above that, fifteen, eighteen on up you’ve got to have a piece of heavy equipment to move the tile. It’s hard to lay, short joints and everything else. And nowadays they got all kinds of big plastic that are supposed to last forever, but I bet you they are not going to have a hundred years on them. 

SCANLON: Well, it is interesting. They now have devices which will send a rod through the pipes and draw the plastic behind it so it will shatter the clay and it allows you to replace the pipe without any excavation.

PHILLIPS: I’ve heard about those. They did not have those when I was with the, about the time that I left down there, we were real happy to have brushes and other things to clean the lines. They were not man-driven, but machine driven.

SCANLON: So, in order to lay the pipe, of course, you get in there with, I imagine you had earthmovers at the time and you use shovels and backhoes, but then also I imagine that, as you indicated, you had repair crews that would have to go in and fix the breaks. 

PHILLIPS: A lot of guys got killed in ditches in those days, cave-ins and stuff. It was a dangerous time. But that came later, much after the Blue River. 

SCANLON: So there was a certain sense of camaraderie and fellowship amongst the crews of the time?

PHILLIPS: Oh, yes. There always was. The crews for the utilities always worked together. They never lost, during the time that Ray was there. He was the first utilities director. You will find some things that state that the gentleman who headed up the gas division had been the utilities director. That was not true. The utilities director was the city manager, but he always had somebody do the work in utilities. But Ray Nixon was the first one that was ever hired as the utilities director. And he was brought in here out of Trinidad (Colorado). He had run the utilities, the electric utilities in Trinidad, and he had been hired by Trinidad out of Kansas. Some little town in Kansas, he had run an electrical operation out there. And he’d come then through Trinidad to Colorado Springs and was really a fine utilities director. But he had to learn the gas business and the water business and the wastewater business when he arrived, just like everybody else does that normally comes aboard, having four of those types of engineering organizations. Takes a little bit more than training than normally is given in schools.

SCANLON: Well now, you replaced Mr. Nixon as utilities director.

PHILLIPS: Yes, but that was a number of years later. 

SCANLON: And he came in, in 1954 and you were appointed in 1972.

PHILLIPS: 1972. It was the time the gas moratorium took place. 

SCANLON: We’ll get to that in a second. Now Mr. Nixon, you know, has a facility named after him. Obviously a lot of people looked up to him. Was it a consequence of his management ability, his leadership, his creativity, or just his personal charisma?

PHILLIPS: I think all of those things. He was a delightful man to work with. He, more or less, left me with what I wanted to be, and I tried to run it the same way. When Phil (Phil Tollefson) took over, I had no idea what took place in there, and he and I probably spoke to each other once after he took over the utilities, and that was it. He did what he needed to do, or wanted to do, and never talked to him again. 

SCANLON: Well, you were in, at the end of Mr. Nixon’s tenure, you were deputy in charge of operations?

PHILLIPS: Yes, I had moved upstairs. They knew Ray was going to have to retire. PERA (Public Employees Retirement Association) was beginning to say “He has been there too long and he needs to get on with it.” And so, he did not want to retire. He was, I don’t remember how old  he was, but it was, he was getting along in years. 

SCANLON: Now, at the time, let’s see, the city managers, there was Mosley; he left in 1947 along with a Wendleker, Wendleken? He was a city attorney.

PHILLIPS: Well, the city managers, there was an A. M. Wilson from 1921 to 1929. Mosley was there from 1930 to 1937. Mosley was a powerhouse. 

SCANLON: He was president of the ICMA. 

PHILLIPS: Yes. 

SCANLON: That’s the International City Management Association. 

PHILLIPS: Then the next guy was Clarence Hoper. He was there from 1947 to 1948. And Ken R. Card, 1949 to 1950. Ken died in office, as I remember. I think he had a heart attack. And then I had Harry Blunt, who was the acting city manager and Mayor at the same time. 

SCANLON: Mayor at the same time.

PHILLIPS: 1951.

SCANLON: I didn’t know that. And he was associated with Blunt Mortuary.

PHILLIPS: Yes, over on Colorado Avenue. Old Blunt Mortuary. And then John Biery was there from 1952 through 1966. 

SCANLON: That’s a good long tenure. 

PHILLIPS: John was a grand man, a good man. Really believed in utilities because when Ray took it over, it was kind of a non-entity. It didn’t know whether it belonged under the city engineering department, under direct push by the city manager, or whether it needed a manager of its own to become something on its own. There were battles over that. 

SCANLON: There were battles about whether to sell off portions or all.

PHILLIPS: Well, yes, that was one of the things that people would have liked to have done was to sell it out. Those things went on.

SCANLON: Was that a consequence of not wanting to perform that function, not believing city government should be involved with that function, or that there is an opportunity to cash in on something of value?

PHILLIPS: It was mostly that cities should not be involved in that function. Everybody had come from places where there were private companies. And surrounding Colorado Springs was that, there was private companies that were selling power. Denver was a big power operation and people wanted to sell that. That was a job, a business to be carried out. Not by a city, but by a private company. 

SCANLON: So the profit motive and capitalism were the proper domain for that function?

PHILLIPS: Yes. And the gas division was, who knows? It was just coming into vogue.

SCANLON: It was the stepchild?

PHILLIPS: Everybody had been burning coal and the Pikeview Coal Company, north of the city, sold coal to the people in Colorado Springs. Hauled it all over the city and dumped it. And natural gas was kind of a strange thing, and then it started to grow. And so, things began to move that, it was time to form something. And so Biery, literally formed, John Biery formed the first, more or less, department to itself, outside the engineering department. As I was saying, the Blue River operation was under the city engineering office at that time. And, it continued to operate under that with Black and Veatch actually headed it up, I can’t remember the name of the man who was head engineer. 

SCANLON: So Black and Veatch was an engineering firm. I know they had a branch office in Kansas City.

PHILLIPS: And at that time they were brought aboard by Biery, and Ray Nixon, probably, because he had them do some work, and they were looking for somebody that did good work. And then they formed the crews out of local people.

SCANLON: And when you formed a crew, did they have a tendency to hang together, or would individuals be traded between crews, depending on the need?

PHILLIPS: Well, in the beginning, no. I was put on a crew that had two gentlemen on it, who were from Latvia. And they spoke very little English. Pete Vapdolis and, can’t think of the other ones’ name right at the moment. And Warren Marriage was the American civil engineer who was head of the crew. And then he had these two engineers that were to help him, who were actually hired on as instrument men. And then we had four other people that worked as brushmen, chainmen, all these little things that are done on a surveying crew. 

SCANLON: And Marriage, there was a lady in charge of landscaping and nurseries,

PHILLIPS: Yes, his mother was the one who owned the big nursery over there on the hill where we have a city park now. Warren Marriage’s mother.

SCANLON: Okay, so, you are working in the field, with a crew. And you would commute daily to your job, or?

PHILLIPS: We lived, when we were working on, we went from the north slope of Pikes Peak to the tunnel up above Fairplay. Four times we left, four times we walked that distance. Four times. And we lived in Woodland Park. We lived in Lake George, we lived in Fairplay, and what’s the little town in between?

SCANLON: Alva?

PHILLIPS: No, no, it’s a little thing.

SCANLON: Hartsell?

PHILLIPS: Hartsell. Which was a horrible place. But we had a motel.

SCANLON: It was unfriendly, or?

PHILLIPS: Well there was nothing there. It didn’t even have an outhouse, it was a terrible thing. But we were only there for about a week. And we decided we’d rather drive from up north than stay there any longer. So we moved out of there. But we walked that distance and laid out four different service lines that would have come from the tunnel all the way down. But the City of Denver said “We can save you some money. Why don’t you bring the pipeline down and dump it into the river and let it run down into Eleven Mile Canyon , and then you can build a pumping station from just below, or just above where the river runs into Lake George, and pump it onto Pikes Peak then.” And so we did. And things went along fairly well and during those years, I was kind of in and out. We’ll go into that, I guess, in a little bit later. But finally, the City of Denver raised the rates for storing the water for us, and they wanted more water and on and on and on. So then they then built a pipeline on around Eleven Mile Canyon and then I worked that part of the thing. But we had laid that line out in the earlier days. How we could get around Eleven Mile Canyon, and they used part of the design work we had done on that.

SCANLON: Well, I think we may have skipped over your college years. 

PHILLIPS: Well no, I hadn’t even got there yet. I didn’t have enough money to go to college. And so I made enough money. I worked a year for the city on the Blue River crews and had enough money to get together then after a year to go to CU (Colorado University). I went to CU, went into the architectural engineering, had a year there. At the end of the year, Uncle Sam had decided that architectural engineers, even if you were in ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) were non-essential. And I started getting all these little notices that you are going to have to come visit us. Well, I had a knee that was bad. It had been hurt in football. I ran with the wolf pack on the Westside over here as we were called. And I wasn’t doing too well to be in the army with that thing. I could swim, and I was on the swim team when I was at Main High and all those things. But that knee wasn’t working too well. So the Army held off. And so I went back to school, but about every thirty-six days, well, I had it operated on that summer. And I went back to the city, again on pipeline work. And by that time, I had had enough mathematics and stuff that I was moved up to an instruments man’s job. 

SCANLON: So the city was still surveying?

PHILLIPS: Yes. I worked the summer for the city on surveying crews, and again on the tunnel. The big tunnel, that’s up north of Fairplay. I can’t think of the name of it right now either. It has two entries on the north side of it, but that wasn’t my fault. I was not the surveyor. That was another one, that was a local professional. We missed. 

SCANLON: So, was this part of the Independence Pass tunnel?

PHILLIPS: Yes.

SCANLON: Okay.

PHILLIPS: I can’t think of the name of it right now. Pushed so many tunnels. But then, when that was over, I went back to the University of Colorado, and I had my knee operated on, and things were getting a little warmer, and suddenly Uncle Sam said “Okay, you get to go.” So I was sent to Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

SCANLON: So you were actually drafted into the Army?

PHILLIPS: Yes. And sent to Fort Belvoir, Virginia for OCS (Officer’s Candidate School). And got back there, and,

SCANLON: And OCS, that was a consequence of you having some college? 

PHILLIPS: Well, I took the exams and I was smart enough to become a first lieutenant, or second lieutenant, I think. They thought. But I was smarter than that, because there had just been a cycle started, so I was sent Mines and Demolition school. Which was fine. That took up a little more time. I wasn’t over there looking at bullets from the Chinese. And then when it came time to go to OCS, they came around and had this piece of paper that said “You’ve got to sign up for four years, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” And I told them I thought I didn’t want to be in the Army for four years. And so the next thing I know, I was on a slow boat to China. Was sent to Korea, and I was in Korea for eighteen months. And then over a two year period, before I was sent back to the United States. But I was in the combat engineers in Korea. Which was great training, because I got to do things that I would never have been able to do in the United States. I got to learn how to run heavy equipment. I was with an organization, the 185th Combat Engineers that built Panmunjom. They were a rather unique group. We were direct support to the First Marine Division, and when they left, when the Chinese had pushed the American troops backwards off the Yalu (Yalu River), in Inchon, they were told to blow up all the equipment that was sitting on the beach. But it was easier to load it into landing craft. And they had hundreds of landing craft sitting out in the water. So they filled it all with dozers and cranes and refrigerators and all this stuff that was going to be abandoned or left. They filled up because it was easier to load it in those things and tow them away than it was to blow them up. And then when we came back in, on the other coast, at Inchon, we had more equipment that any construction battalion in Korea. So we were picked to build Panmunjom. And we were in North Korea when the war, the truce was signed and then we moved south to build Panmunjom out of North Korea and away from the First Marine Division. That’s where I spent the rest of my time as a battalion motor sergeant for the 185th. But I got to do a lot of things a motor sergeant, had control of all the vehicles for officers and everybody. So I got to go where I wanted to. Had a grand time. 

SCANLON: People wanted to stay on your good side.

PHILLIPS: Oh, yes. And I wanted them to stay on my good side. It worked out very well. Played bridge with the officers. It was a, I was a college kid that was over there. I just hope, when they left, they told us that if this truce falls through, you all have to go back. And here we are in 2006 and I’m looking for my uniform and the only thing I can find is my hat. So I don’t know if I have to go back or not. 

SCANLON: Well, some things never change, it seems. 

PHILLIPS: They don’t. And it is sad, because we should have gone through and finished that when we were over there. That’s where we started falling apart as a nation, when we gave up the ability to win. 

SCANLON: Okay, so you mustered out of the army, and glad to do so, and you were on the GI Bill.

PHILLIPS: Got off the bus, this is part of it, got off the bus in Fort Carson and it was, I can’t remember the date, but it was after school had started again in September. I was discharged at 
Fort Carson and they gave me seventy-five cents transportation money. I tried to get discharged on the West Coast and they didn’t want to play, because they paid you big money to move from the west coast home. At Fort Carson I got seventy-five cents, stepped off the bus, and John Frederick, who worked for the waste, was the superintendant of the sewer division. I had done some surveying work with him, or for him, when I was with the other crews, and he knew I was out of the military, and he said “Are you back?” and I said “Yes.” and he said “You can come back to work the day after tomorrow. I need you bad.” So I went to work with the wastewater division. 

SCANLON: So there was a manpower shortage here in Colorado Springs?

PHILLIPS: I don’t know, I have no idea.

SCANLON: Or was that a way of John’s convincing you to join?

PHILLIPS: I think John knew I could do the work he wanted done. Strangely enough, laying sewer lines is pretty touchy. You don’t just go out there and slop a line in the ground and then throw the pipe in afterward. You have to have it all set up so that every stake is perfect so they dig them the right depth and the whole thing so that they got the right grade on it and the whole thing as they went. And so he knew he’d get a good job. So he got a good job. And so I spent another year, I think it was, outside the service. But I was taking some courses by mail, and also had a wife, who was a girlfriend at that time, who was going to CC. So I was busy. But when the year was up, I went back to CC full time. And I went there for a year. 

SCANLON: And CC just because it was handy?

PHILLIPS: Yes, and they had an engineering school and they looked at my credits and they accepted all the credits I had in architectural engineering. And so I went there. Well, one year, fine. Had grades all set up and everything. Then they closed the engineering school. I could have taken my credits then as they were set up and gone to California and gone to prestigious schools in California that was tied to CC at the time. And they would have kept all my credits. The University of Colorado wouldn’t even accept their own credits. So I was starting all over at the bottom. So it just took so long, in and out, that I just didn’t have the money or the time. I worked every summer for the city. I’d come down and I’d have a job waiting for me and I’d work and I’d move on up . And I was going along with that.

SCANLON: So you would stay with your mom while you were working here in Colorado Springs.

PHILLIPS: Yes.

SCANLON: And then when you were going to school, presumably you worked also?

PHILLIPS: Well, no. You couldn’t find a job in Boulder to save your neck.

SCANLON: Oh, that’s right.

PHILLIPS: And as I say, Boulder would not accept the credits. It was not fun. I was having to take twenty hours a semester to catch up, to try to catch up, and I was going to school at night. And then we were at the medical school to get my chemistry, to get my P Chem (Physical Chemistry). I used to get over with the doctors because I could not take them on campus because you could only take fourteen hours on-campus. And I needed the extra hours.

SCANLON: I imagine the school was very crowded just after the war.

PHILLIPS: Yes, it was. Very crowded, and it was a rather interesting situation, because a lot of the professors that were very angry at the GI’s coming back. 

SCANLON: Why?

PHILLIPS: They felt that, like they do today, that we shouldn’t even have been there in the first place. We were like Vietnam. They didn’t like us. When we got out, off the ship in Seattle, coming back from Korea, the only people that greeted us was the Red Cross demanding money, and we had not seen any money for two years. We had script, but we didn’t have any money. 

SCANLON: Well, it seems interesting, because after World War II, when the GI Bill became popular, colleges just swelled.

PHILLIPS: Oh, yes. And they lived well off them. But the Korean vets were the first ones that were given a hard time because we were military. I had a calculus professor. We all had registered to go into his calculus course and the first day we walked in and he stood up and said “Were any of you officers that are here, or how many of you were in the military?” And there were about six of us who stood up. And he said “How many were officers?” And there were one of them. “How many of you were non-coms (non-commissioned officers)?” and there were about three of us. “Just regular?” So they all sat down. And he said “I want you all to know you can’t pass this course, it doesn’t matter how good you are.” He said “You people were mass murderers in Korea and didn’t deserve, and on and on and on.” And he made that come true. There wasn’t one of us that made it through the course. And there was nothing you could do about these kinds of things. 

SCANLON: Not at that time.

PHILLIPS: Even in other parts of engineering school, I ran into.

SCANLON: It seems interesting. I can understand, maybe, some of the social sciences taking that approach, but not the engineering schools.

PHILLIPS: Well, strangely enough, the engineering schools had the same problems. A lot of the math professors, and those people, the engineering professors direct, who were teaching, the engineering courses, were okay, but the math profs were all a bunch of idiots on this. They just did not like Korean vets. I don’t know whether they did not like the Second World War vets. That’s because they had a pretty fun time. But, it was fine. But we kept going. But as I said already, I worked. I had to take all these special hours and everything because I was working for both a civil and chemical degree. And I was having a hard time convincing them that I had taken the course in drafting that was when I was in the architectural engineering setup. They said I had to go back and take beginning drafting all over again, and on and on and on. And I had taken courses at CC that I just had to take over, there was no argument. I couldn’t again. But, it worked out fine. 

SCANLON: So, were you thinking of making your career with Colorado Springs at that time?

PHILLIPS: Not particularly. In fact, when I got my job, back with the wastewater division, I was headed to California. I had a job with the City of Los Angeles in their wastewater operations. 

SCANLON: So you had sought that out, you wanted to go?

PHILLIPS: No, I had not. I was looking for work and they came through with people that were, in those days, the colleges, they came to the colleges and talked to people. And I talked to some people there. And I knew two of the city engineers for the City of Los Angeles that graduated with me in high school and ended up in Los Angeles. One of them ended up as the head of the Los Angeles water and streets and everything. He’s the highest paid individual in the United States on state pay, I mean city pensions. It was in the Reader’s Digest. Tom Tiedmenson. But, when I arrived here, I stopped to see John and say goodbye to everybody, and he said “Give me a few minutes.” And I came back in and he said “Let’s go up to town, Ray Nixon wants to talk to you.” So we went back to see him, and they said “We’ll give you twenty-five dollars more a month than Los Angeles. We can’t do better than that.” I would have taken fifty bucks less, easy. So we didn’t go. We stayed here.

SCANLON: So, at that time, did you know Mr. Nixon?

PHILLIPS: Oh yes. 

SCANLON: Okay. Was it that small a group that everybody pretty much knew all

PHILLIPS: I was in direct contact with him. Once I started doing instrument work and we did, I started out telling you about our friend Mr. Vapdolis, the Latvians, they didn’t speak much English, and we had to do a lot of translation for ourselves. It was what they were doing and everything. And I got to know Ray with that, because I had an easier job translating what they were trying to say, what they were trying to do, than some of the other people did. It worked out very well. 

SCANLON: So was there someone else that was working out the easements and the acquisitions?

PHILLIPS: That was another crew. Yes. That was another crew altogether. And we traded people back and forth. In fact, in the last year, that went on for two years, the last year, Beth’s father, who was a civil engineer, he headed up the crew chief. And he was up there. I wasn’t going to work, he wasn’t my father-in-law yet, but I wasn’t going to work for my girlfriend’s old man, and I was finally shipped in there because they were having trouble. I was sent went where there was trouble, usually, trying to straighten it out. Don’t know why, but for some reason it came easy.

SCANLON: Somebody had to do the job

PHILLIPS: Somebody had to do the job, and they didn’t get yelled at. Everybody worked it out among themselves. And they had a gentleman who was reading to them from the bible every time they sat down for lunch and would stand over the transit and he’d start reading the bible and he’d forget he was supposed to be looking to the transit to keep the crews moving in front of him and all this kind of thing. And so I went up, I was sent in to bring that, because Beth’s father was not one of the more gentle gentlemen around. He had a pretty good temper, and he did not like the guy at all. So, little things like that. But that kept me going. But we made it through, and then we came back here and I went to work at the wastewater division full time. 

SCANLON: And so, you had an office job, or you were in the field?

PHILLIPS: I was the assistant to the manager, John Frederick. And I was in everything. I did 
everything from lay pipe, to survey it, to help clean digestors, scrape concrete, blow things up, design things, lay out things. John was, we were going into water times and the years just blend in to one another. But we got into a couple of water shortages and it was decided that water needed to be moved from the wastewater treatment plant and up on Patty Jewett. And they were all worried about the water. And John and I went to work on this kind of thing, and we went down to the gas division and we got the old tanks that had been used to make natural gas from the coal. They were big old iron tanks, and they had been sitting there since nineteen something, and we hauled those to the wastewater division and we overhauled them and filled them full of sand and made a filtration bed out of it and then I did all the engineering, surveying of the pipeline from the wastewater treatment plant, the pump station and everything up over the hill. And I was at that time also building a bomb shelter in that reservoir that’s up there in Knob Hill, up on the hill.

SCANLON: Is that Lunar Park now?

PHILLIPS: Yes. I was designing a bomb shelter in that thing for the city. 

SCANLON: Now the old fire station, not fire station, the police station, where the Robert Isaac Justice Center is now located, that had a bomb shelter.

PHILLIPS: Oh, yes, there were a lot of bomb shelters in town. We can see that if you want to. But this one, then all of a sudden they decided they wanted water at the golf course more than they wanted a bomb shelter. So we pulled that thing back, and put a new lid on that baby and we pumped the water in there and we ran it down into Patty Jewett, and it’s been pumped up there ever since. There’s a huge non-potable water operation going on that. There’s Memorial Park. They are just finishing a science fiction-type water in filtration operation over here right off the creek at the Garden of the Gods road, right behind the reservoir there that is going to be beyond, well, I did a lot of work for the National Science Foundation in the latter years of my career as wastewater manager. 

SCANLON: Now, the creation of a separate system for non-potable water use, was that a common occurrence in areas in that day? Or was that new?

PHILLIPS: No. It was quite new. It was something that just hadn’t been done too much. Everyone was quite worried. The health departments and everybody else. But there was not an EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) at that time. And the only people we really had to wrestle with were the people in the health department. And we did numerous, numerous, numerous, tests showing that we did not have a shred of e-coli or these things in the water that was being used, and highly chlorinating it and allowing the chlorine to blow off in the reservoir and all this stuff that it could be used on the golf course and wouldn’t hurt anybody. Even if they drank it. But we had all of these signs posting “non-potable water, do not drink.” 

SCANLON: Now, it is interesting that sand is used to filter drinking water and has been for many years. I don’t know if that currently is done, but it used to be.

PHILLIPS: Right across the street. 

SCANLON: And this area was called the Mesa. 

PHILLIPS: Yes. Another WPA plant.

SCANLON: Oh, it is that old. I thought this came about just prior to Al Hill wanting to develop here.

PHILLIPS: No, this plant has been sitting up here since 1932 or 1933. This was the first location of a water operation for the City of Colorado Springs. There was a ditch, you saw on a map downstairs, that ran through all this country, and people would go out and fill a bucket full of water and haul it in. And we had a locust infestation and they came in and the locusts were so heavy that they filled the ditches of water, and people couldn’t get at the thing, and they said “We’re going to have our own water supply.” So they proceeded to put in two pipelines in, from Pikes Peak, came down the hill and up to a reservoir right over here. And they buried them exactly four feet deep. And that winter, they froze solid and broke. 

SCANLON: Four feet is a long ways down.

PHILLIPS: Well, no, you have to be down about eight feet up in a lot of this, at times in this country. But the next move was to put two pipelines in that are thirty inches in diameter and they are still up there. They are over one hundred years old now. And they come right up alongside of us here, where that open spot is, between that island of houses up there. And they come up through Lyda Hill’s property and down Water Street. That’s why it was named Water Street. And that house in Manitou, where the water line ran off under the woman’s house, that was one of these water lines, and they and everybody had forgotten where it was over there, and she built on top of it. She’s on city property.

SCANLON: She’s not the only one that’s built on city property.

PHILLIPS: No. Oh lord no, no. 

SCANLON: So, there was a period of time in which there were water shortages and it was identified that the city needs, in order to assure its future and have a modicum of growth, we needed to start acquiring water rights. 

PHILLIPS: I think that during Ray’s time, and there were three of them during my time. There were three water shortages where we were down to where people were not allowed to water their lawns, and this kind of thing. 

SCANLON: So there were, there were, that’s down the line. There’s a couple of water firms, (phone rings), Do you need to take care of that?

PHILLIPS: No, she’ll take care of that. 

SCANLON: So, let’s see, we were dealing with John Frederick and

PHILLIPS: Building a water up the hill.

SCANLON: Recycling water up through Patty Jewett.

PHILLIPS: About that same time, John got an opportunity to come to me. Superintendent of the gas department. And that meant a nice step up for him.

SCANLON: Interesting, because you had identified gas was kind of a stepchild.

PHILLIPS: Well, gas began to grow, and become more and more important as more and more people took it. And then the power plants started to take it, and on and on, so gas began to grow through leaps and bounds. And the gentleman who headed it up for a lot of years, what the hell was his name, can’t think of it. But John took his place. And I became the superintendent of the sewer division. And I was superintendent of the sewer division for seventeen years. And during that time, we extended the water reuse larger and larger. Al Hill was totally up here, but we brought water all the way up here from the wastewater treatment up the center of the freeway. They put a line in, the State put a line in, because they were going to use it to water the grass that was to be planted alongside the sides of the freeway, which was never done. But we pumped the line up to the Garden of the Gods reservoir up there, Pikeview Number Five, which then that’s pumped up the hill up here and is used by Al Hill and his golf course. 

SCANLON: Now, wastewater is something which, you know, we had a central facility but also we had smaller firms dealing with wastewater treatment, but then also at the same time, there were some areas of town that had no facilities at all. They relied on outhouses.

PHILLIPS: There were very few of those. By the time I was an adult, there were a few outhouses left in Colorado Springs, but darn few. Maybe out in Knob Hill, a few down in Ivywild, Cheyenne Canyon. They had put in a sanitary sewer system, four inch pipe. The, north of us there wasn’t anybody up along, well, Papetown, as it was called, that probably had some, but it wasn’t part of the city at that time. 

SCANLON: Was there an effort to extend wastewater treatment to areas outside of the city limits?

PHILLIPS: There wasn’t any request. You were either in the city or you were out. You didn’t have any water. Knob Hill had water. They owned the Northfield Water System, or had a lease on the Northfield Water system. The city moved in and bought that, and we kind of cut Knob Hill off short. I don’t remember the dates on that, that was earlier. Ray, Jack McCullough was the water superintendent at that time. They did that, and it was part of Ray’s setup. But we bought Northfield. And it’s still part of the water systems out here, water coming down from it.

SCANLON: I run across the name of South Suburban.

PHILLIPS: South Suburban Water Company was a water company that was formed by Broadmoor Hotel. And they punched a tunnel, which was a weekend job for me. I did blasting on that thing. But I did it off duty time. I make another buck here and there. The Rosemont tunnel. And they had a reservoir out there they kept for guests and to fish in and everything. They had a lodge. All this stuff. And there were two reservoirs that are still over here just above the Broadmoor out there in the flatlands. 

SCANLON: Yes, you can see them from the High Drive. 

PHILLIPS: Yes, and we were going to build a water treatment plant between those, but that came much later. That was in the twilight of my career. 

SCANLON: I was here for that.

PHILLIPS: We were going to build that water treatment plant there. But that was all part of the South Suburban Water Company. Colorado Springs owned the water rights from Cheyenne, Cheyenne Creek. The Broadmoor owned the South Suburban Water Company. After the annexation, Colorado Springs finally made some deals with the Broadmoor and I don’t know that I understand all of those to this day. They were done after.

SCANLON: That’s why we have water attorneys.

PHILLIPS: Yes. But that’s where that one came from. And Knob Hill, we had to continue to serve it, even though they weren’t part of the City of Colorado Springs, from the Northfield system, because they had a previous contract. And I think Ray felt he had to meet their needs. , but he didn’t say you can grow any. The first area of growth that took place up in there was called Mortgage Hill, and it was right across from the golf course. Back up in there all of those streets running up to the east off the golf course. And old Harry Hoth, can I remember, he was one of the first people to buy a house out there. And those were the most expensive houses. Those were fourteen thousand dollars for a house. How can you afford to buy something like that? On and on and on. 

SCANLON: Of course, he owned a radio station and 

PHILLIPS: Well, at that time, it wasn’t that hot a deal. But he did have a radio station, yes.

SCANLON: And then eventually he became mayor. 

Phillips: Oh yes, oh yes. Harry became mayor. I ran into Harry the other day at a party out here to say goodbye to Bud Shepard, he’s moving to Arizona. 

SCANLON: Oh, really.

PHILLIPS: And you would have enjoyed being at that one, because they were all there. Anybody that is still living and crawling around was there. And Harry was there. Harry doesn’t have a white hair on his head. He looks younger than all of us. 

SCANLON: Maybe he has got President Reagan’s barber.

PHILLIPS: Well, maybe. Well, you know, amazingly enough, he’s doing far better than I thought he might be. He just sold out his television station and all this stuff, and he just is crying all over because the federal government is really beating him up with taxes.

SCANLON: I believe it. Okay, so you become the head of wastewater, for seventeen years, and in that time, was there an evolution of management philosophy. I mean, presumably you know, as you went into it, you exercised common sense and an understanding of your division requirements, and you just did the job at hand. But starting in the 1950’s, management became a science. 

PHILLIPS: Well, right about that time when I took it over, which was just a little after the 1950’s, just a few years. The odor off the wastewater treatment plant on East Las Vegas had become so strong that if it blew over your house it might melt your roof. We got many, many nasty calls. In the summer it was just unbelievable. And very unhappy council people who lived over in that area, there were a few that lived in that area, and they had a lot of constituents that lived in those areas were screaming at them because of the odor, and so I inherited it. It was the greatest stinkpot that had been put together, and I was told “Clean it up. But don’t spend any money.” Which was one of the standard things we had in those days. But they did give me some money. John had gotten enough money out of them to build the trickling filters, which were full of rock. We won’t go into all the scientific ends of how much algae you can grow. We would have been better with activated sludge. Both of us knew this but the city did not want to spend the money to put in the big air compressors and everything to put in activated 
sludge. So we went ahead, and I ripped the rock out of the things once I got a hold of it and pt wood in it, wood lath so I could get more surface area. There were algae on it. We kind of cleaned the odor up, somewhat. And I also put covers on them. Got some of the odors by putting deodorant in the thing. 

SCANLON: The photographs in the paper back in the mid-1930’s showed those as open air pits. 

PHILLIPS: Well, in the 1930’s, those were not built. The things you were looking at in the 1930’s were the clarifiers. Maybe I can clarify that for you here. It’s water department. I think I’ve got these in the wrong ones. I just shoved these in. One of these had pictures of the wastewater treatment plant. And maybe I threw all that stuff away. Ah, here it is. Here were the first ones that come in. John was still here. I finished the job up for John. I was superintendent and that was 1966. We built the big digestors for the sludge and these were the ones full of rock. The things you were looking at were these, the clarifiers. There are a bunch of those that are down there empty today. If you drive down by you’ll see these by the

SCANLON: So that was to allow the solids to settle out?

PHILLIPS: That was to let the solids settle after they had gone through all these other things. 

SCANLON: Let’s see, that paper is dated, that is the Free Press, dated 

PHILLIPS: January 13, 1966. 

SCANLON: That’s page thirty-seven. 

PHILLIPS: I could give all this stuff, I don’t know that I need it any more. Most of it was, let’s see, this is where I started coming in. This was done with the National Science Foundation. I became a, I don’t know what they call it, a scientist or something or other, I did work for them on the sewage treatment plant, and I also did work on houses to be heated with solar panels, and this kind of thing under the National Science Foundation. I had rather nice grants from them. And it all started with the wastewater treatment plant that was built on top of Pikes Peak. They had outhouses up there that had about seventeen poofs in both sides from being ? on top of the peak. And there was a stream that appeared on the path as you were coming up the top of Pikes Peak, just clear water, just running, bubbling out there that was beautiful. And people were very thirsty and reach down and plop some , and I guess it would just take the top of your head off. It was sewage that was running out that thing. So, something had to be done. So I got the federal government to give us some money and the National Science Foundation came in with me, and we built a plant on top of Pikes Peak. And it worked beautifully, and it doesn’t work today because they got tired of keeping a guy up there to run it. And they hauled it off. They put it in a big tank that was built with this, and they haul water off the top of the peak and haul it down and dump it someplace, I don’t know where. That was kind of a fun time, and it cut me loose with the National Science Foundation, and I worked them for millions before I was through. This was stuff that was being done for the plant that is just being finished right now. Carbon, use of carbon for remove all the chemicals in the water. The water comes out pure. In fact, it’s not good for drinking because it doesn’t have anything in it that’s good for you.

SCANLON: It’s just distilled.

PHILLIPS: But we got to do a lot of fun things with that. 

SCANLON: So, what, back in the early days, what would you do with the sludge?

PHILLIPS: Well, the sludge was put on things called drying beds. Out in back of the wastewater treatment plant, maybe this has got it. There it is. See all this out here? These are drying beds. And the sludge was put in these tanks, these were the digestors, and they spent about 120 days in there at body temperature. We heated all this with the gas that came off it, and we kept these all warm, and then the sludge reached a certain age, it was released from these tanks and run out on these beds and dried. And it was dried with the sun shining on it, and there was some sand underneath it, but you know there wasn’t anything. And we ended up with sludge on the top of it. Which we loaded, and people could come and buy it and put it on their lawns. 

SCANLON: So people would actually buy it, or just

PHILLIPS: Oh yes, we sold it for three dollars a truckload. We loaded it, we paid for it to load it, but we charged them that for the fuel and stuff on it. It was hauled. Well finally, it just got so big and there weren’t that many people wanting to. Well, the news came out that the sludge probably had bad things in it, and it was a little stinky once in a while. Then people weren’t buying it. Well then, we started hauling it out east and we cut these big trenches out there where the airport is now, and poured it into the trenches and then filled the trenches. Well, that got us in major problems. We were going to be sent to hell with the EPA on the middle of our back. We were all bad people because we were doing this. We should have been processing it some other way. On and on and on. And then, I moved on at about the time it was at its height. I moved on to become the deputy director of operations under Ray Nixon. 

SCANLON: So all of the sudden you had to learn everything that Ray had to learn, you were just coming from a different specialty.

PHILLIPS: Yes. Now, the nice thing about it, though, was all of the managers, with water, it wasn’t too hard for me to know what was going on. I understood water treatment plants from wastewater plans. Same kind of a thing going on. I’d learned about the engineering of building that part of it from wastewater too. And I had worked on some of those jobs, had worked with them, with Jack McCullough, and so, there wasn’t much there. Gas was kind of a, I didn’t know too much about gas except that it was dangerous, and that we made a lot of it at the wastewater treatment plant and burned it on the side. But I didn’t know the engineering parts. But I had John Frederick there who, and if you asked him, maybe he’d tell you whatever you wanted to know. John was always delightful with that. Electricity was one I had never spent much time with. And the managers that were down there on the electrical plants were always pretty closed mouthed, and they were the kings of the trade. They had the most money, and they had all the goody things going on.

SCANLON: I imagine they had the most training, also.

PHILLIPS: Most of them were, well, I don’t know whether they did or not. You’d find out later, you know, that training is training. 

SCANLON: On the job?

PHILLIPS: Yes. And so, I didn’t have much to do except with the northern plant, and I blew out all the sewer lines in it. And then when I became the deputy director of operations, I suddenly inherited the Unit Number Six, at the Birdsall, at the Martin Drake, to finish it up because there was a lawsuit pending and Horace Wailer was the manager at that time, and he was too 
busy to be involved in all of this, so they decided that was a good place to break me in to the electric industry. And they broke me into it, I assure you. Douglas Jardine was suing us over some pipeline work, and this kind of thing, and so I got to go in there and see him from the belly up and the wigs down. And what was going on in the department. And I liked the guys, most of them, and they got along with me. So we did great and so I learned a lot about electricity there. Gas was still somewhat of a mystery. And so for a year, I was the deputy director of operations. And then it came time to make a utilities director. And there was nothing promised when I came in as deputy director of operations. That I would go any place at all, I wasn’t, didn’t even apply for the job, to tell you the truth as director of utilities. I figured it would be McCullough or Frederick or Wailer or one of those people. And I was called into George Fellow’s office and said “It’s yours. You got it. Climb aboard and load.” 

SCANLON: So Fellows, being City Manager at that time, had. I worked for the city for three months under George Fellows. His reputation at the time was somebody who was a congenial person who knew what he wanted, and others wanted to please him. 

PHILLIPS: George is probably one of the finest engineers I’ve ever met. And he was a ? engineer. You wanted to please him because he was usually right. I don’t remember a time when George sent us out on something that was just totally ridiculous. And at that time, the city manager was over the city utilities directory. You reported to him. And so, I had no trouble with George, ever. Don’t have any trouble today with him. If he wanted to cut the city in half, I’d cut it in half for him. 

SCANLON: Well, it is interesting that if you look at the tenures of city managers, Mosley was city manager for a long time, Biery was city manager for a long time, in-between these times you have a succession of city managers and then Fellows comes in and spends a long time.

PHILLIPS: Every one of the ones that you had were men that who really wanted to be city managers and not business managers. The thing about the utilities department and general city in those days is that we had fine people who were in the treasury areas and this kind of thing who did that portion of it. The money was there for us, we were told what we had, how we got it and how we were going to have to maintain it, not what to do with it, there it was. And it was easier to deal with. Nowadays, from what I understand, they had just blown the money part of it into chaos. 

SCANLON: Jim Wilson was Finance Director of a number of years.

PHILLIPS: For utilities, yes.

SCANLON: And then also for general city, later on.

PHILLIPS: Well, that was when, that was a different thing when he moved into that. That was when I was operating as utilities director and city manager. Which was something that should never have happened. But they were in a hurry to do something with, they wanted to flip old Blick (Larry Blick) so they flipped their wig and blew out Blick over the problem out here on the mountain. 

SCANLON: Ski Broadmoor.

PHILLIPS: Yes. 

SCANLON: We’ll get into that. But we’re back with Mr. Fellows, who was a civil engineer.

PHILLIPS: Yes. And he had had some good experience as city manager. He had been city manager of Pueblo. 

SCANLON: Oh, I did not know that. 

PHILLIPS: I don’t know how many years. But it was a good time. And George had minored in city management. He had a degree in civil engineering with a minor in city management. And I don’t know where he went to school, but he just had a good head on his shoulders. He was amazing. The men that came through at that time were all good solid thinkers. And they came out of a situation where they had to do a lot of things where you really didn’t have enough to do what you were going to do, but you had to work out something special to make it happen. And we did. All of them. I don’t know that they have that any more. I don’t know enough of these people, Deke Miller, you know, people like this. They did things with roads that you’d be amazed. Horace Wailer, I was talking about him in electric, Cy Blazing on the power plants. You could put two nails together and move the current if you had to. And they knew how to put the nails together. 

SCANLON: Well, I do know when I joined the city, I arrived in 1985, the individuals that were employed by utilities regarded themselves as the prestige organization, and kind of felt a little bit sorry for us in the general city. 

PHILLIPS: Yes. They did feel sorry for them. Because we always felt that the general city people were being pulled down and they shouldn’t be. But you were not allowed to cross the line. 

SCANLON: And then the other thing that I’ve heard more than one person remark, in the 1970’s era and the early 1980’s, was that utilities was kind of a family corporation. People knew and trusted each other.

PHILLIPS: To an extent, yes. There was a lot of camaraderie. When I was there, they really pulled together. If you had trouble with one division, and you needed help, you got it immediately. Everybody moves. There was a lot of kidding and this kind of thing, you know, that the electric division bought all the wastewater’s trucks, and things like this, but they knew what was needed and what had to be done. Wastewater Division was being paid seventy-five cents a month for the work it was doing and being asked to do. God knows how much money you’d need. But nowadays, look at what the wastewater division is making and look at what they built. I don’t know that they built anything. Well, there is the air plant down there that doesn’t smell as bad, and then they built the big sludge operations down on Nixon when I was utilities director. That was the way to get it out of town, out of everybody’s. I can hardly wait for Fountain to come in and say “You can’t do this anymore.” 

SCANLON: So you built lines to carry the slurry down.

PHILLIPS: A twelve inch line, all the way from the wastewater plant on East Las Vegas to Nixon. And that sludge is still moving down through that plant. They had to replace it, they replaced it with a twenty-four, I understand. There’s just so much going down through it. 

SCANLON: So was there a great deal of coordination necessary amongst the utility departments when you were deputy operations director?

PHILLIPS: Yes, it was a beginning of the time we did start working together. More than we ever had before, I think. I was somewhat of a surprise. There had never been a deputy director of operations. Sid Nichols filled that job, but Sid was buried in water. Water was the most important thing throughout the early days that I was in utilities management. Even in the wastewater. Most of the water projects got top priority. Electric got some because we had to have electricity in Birdsall and the power plants. The pieces were being added at that time. Things were getting old and falling down. The little Birdsall plant was, I can’t remember the year, it was new but it was tiny. 

SCANLON:  That was 1957. 

PHILLIPS: Yes. 

SCANLON: I would like to suggest, we’ve been going at this for pretty close to two hours. Would you be amendable to maybe stopping this and reconvening in the future and we could resume?

PHILLIPS: Sure.

SCANLON: I appreciate that. Thank you.