Word: ravers
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Boss of all this public power is a grave, greying New Deal engineer named Dr. Paul J. Raver, who became BPA administrator in 1939. Dr. Raver's ambition is to put every kilowatt in the Northwest under public ownership. Backed by the White House and his two titanic dams, he has moved steadily toward this end. Said President Franklin Thomas Griffith of Portland General Electric Co.: "It is axiomatic that no private utility can compete with the Treasury...
...path of socialized power has not always run smooth. Dr. Raver's eager hands were partly tied by the original BPA legislation, which permits BPA to buy or build transmission lines and distribution equipment, but not to buy whole companies. (Now in Congress is a bill to give BPA this power.) Fifteen months after Bonneville's generators started purring, the project's first report ruefully admitted it had only one short-term customer, no transmission lines. Anti-Federal news papers headlined: "Bonneville Dam Has Everything But Customers." Meanwhile Dr. Raver's predecessor, the late James Delmage...
...Bonneville transmission lines, built in hopes of a big new customer, with almost no place to go. Four months later Portland turned down Bonneville too. So, this month, did Tacoma and Spokane. In these riotous elections the PUDs and the private utilities sometimes made cause against BPA. Dr. Raver's own campaigning was often vitriolically abetted by that of Harold Ickes, who helped lose several elections by introducing the Federal interference issue into an already three-cornered fight...
With the loss of Eugene, Powerman Raver began to turn his interest from PUDs and Municipals to industrial customers. On that front he had better luck. The luck: defense expansion, which found BPA (unlike most private utilities) with plenty of firm power to spare. First, he got Aluminum Co. to build a new plant in Vancouver; soon he lured other new industries to the quiet Columbia Valley. BPA, thanks to its industrial clients, now has contracts (of varying length) totaling well over...
With Coulee's enormous load added, the industrialization of the Northwest proceeds apace. But the influx of new customers does not cheer the eleven private utilities. They know Raver's 100% public-power dream proceeds apace...