Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

when you have a State agency that doesn’t care about whether or not it complies
with state law. There’s not much you can do and that’s what happened.
Q. When you went away to college, was that the first time you lived away from this
area
A. Yes it was.
Q. Tell me about where you went.
A. I went to Occidental College in Los Angeles. I wound up there, sort of process of
elimination. I tell people I went east to look at colleges and I could have probably
gotten in almost anywhere. I didn’t need money to go to school and I had really
good grades. We went east and looked at colleges and I just was astounded
that people lived where the weather was as bad as it was on the east coast. I
just couldn’t imagine. When I went away to college, it had never occurred to me
that people planned what they wanted to do around the weather. Literally, that
had never dawned on me that that would be a factor in deciding what you do the
next day. I didn’t understand why they did the weather on TV. It doesn’t vary
very much. The question is how many more degrees hot will it be tomorrow than
it was today. When you’re a kid, you don’t care. I just couldn’t imagine going
east and it seemed too far away. But I did want to go away as I said earlier to
sort of escape the “big pink building”, which I had broken ground for. (After my
father died the building was built.) So it colored my world. So I decided
California was the right thing to do. We went and visited the good, private
Interview with Grady Gammage
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