Grand Coulee Dam

Yeah.

Roosevelt's New Deal, when Grand Coulee and Dow's, Hoover Dam, TVA, nothing.

Yeah.

We're living, we're cannibalizing an obsolete structure.

So he went on a great big tour of the Pacific Northwest and Montana and so on.

He went to open the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, which is something that he saw as a kind of great legacy of Roosevelt's New Deal.

And he ended up in Chicago in May 1950 with the view to having an enormous rally to be introduced by Adlai Stevenson, of course, who was another coming man within the Democratic Party.

This great big rally where he would have relaunched the party.

Yes.

And enormous amounts of electricity provided by the Grand Coulee Dam.

Yeah.

They built the B Reactor there, which was the first full scale plutonium production reactor in the world.

Nearly 90 years after Grand Coulee Dam cut these fish off from the ocean, Steven Bird still fishes upper Columbia rainbows that behave remarkably like steelhead.

Today, we are heading to the far northeastern corner of Washington to talk about spey, swinging soft tackles, reading water, and what Steven has learned from decades spent fishing the upper Columbia River.

Steven Bird is back on the podcast today.

I live in extreme northeastern Washington, a mile from the Canadian border.

So I live right where, I live beside the river right where it comes into the States from Canada.

We're above Grand Coulee Dam.

We don't get salmon and steelhead up h- here anymore, but, uh, we have big trout.

Uh, it's also like everywhere else nowadays, very troubled.

They had presupposed that the entire United States and all of its infrastructure would be abandoned by man, and what structures would still be left 5,000 years hence? There were three structures that they speculated would still be up.

The World Trade Center, the Centennial Arch in St. Louis, and the Grand Coulee Dam.

Now, does that tell you anything about how well they built those buildings?

Yeah, it certainly does.

They had presupposed that the entire United States and all of its infrastructure would be abandoned by man, and what structures would still be left 5,000 years hence? There were three structures that they speculated would still be up.

The World Trade Center, the Centennial Arch in St. Louis, and the Grand Coulee Dam.

Now, does that tell you anything about how well they built those buildings?

Yeah, it certainly does.