Great Lake

Sometimes, if the day is clear enough, the work of W.R. Holway is best seen from the window of an airplane soaring eastward out of Tulsa.
Across the hazy blue landscape below, the products of his engineering masterpieces glint like glass on the curving horizon: Lake Hudson. Lake Eucha. Spavinaw Lake. Grand Lake.
But Holway's greatest engineering achievement might be measured with a look back at the modern Tulsa skyline and the city that spread outward along the Arkansas River.
The city that wanted to call itself ``The Oil Capital of the World'' may never have lived up to its name, historians say, if Holway had not successfully directed a massive public works project in the 1920s to build a 55-mile-long pipeline and dam known as the Spavinaw Water Project that brought clean water to Tulsa.
Young Tulsa was finding it difficult to realize its oil boom potential as long as brackish water from the Arkansas poured thick and syrup-like into tubs of Tulsa homes. Residents of the town of 70,000 typically toted around five-gallon jugs with drinking water drawn out of wells or springs.
The idea to connect Tulsa to the distant Spavinaw Creek was unheard of in that day. It would require what was then the longest raw water line ever built. It would cost $7.5 million, or the current-day equivalent of $270 million. For it to succeed, Tulsa voters had to approve the largest per- capita bond issue in U.S. history to that date, according to research by the Tulsa Department of Public Works.
Holway, a New England-born engineer with a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already had established his reputation in Tulsa from when he was hired in 1918 to run a water filtration plant at what is now Newblock Park.
His name was William Rea Holway, but he always went just by his initials, ``W.R.'' He had started a private architectural company when, at the age of 28, the city hired him in 1921 to be the chief consulting engineer for the Spavinaw project.
Over the next three years, Holway had to coordinate hundreds of workers and more than 60 engineers, build a rail line along the 55-mile path to deliver tons of materials, cope with heavy rains and some of the worst flooding in northeastern Oklahoma history and work through a series of conflicts between contractors and engineers.
The last section of pipe was fitted on Oct. 19, 1924, and cold, clear water began flowing from the new Spavinaw Lake to the Mohawk Reservoir, setting off city-wide celebrations.
In the years that followed, Holway's reputation would carry him around the world to consult with cities or oversee water projects from Santiago, Cuba, to Moscow, said his son, W.N. Holway.
W.R. Holway's sons, W.N. and D.K., would also become engineers and join with their father as Holway and Associates. Over the years, the firm would engineer a second dam at Lake Eucha and a second water line to further boost Tulsa's water supply.
Among the Holway firm's other achievements, the Pensacola Dam on the Grand River, built with funding and labor help from Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression era work programs, remains the longest multiple- arch dam in the world, W.N. Holway said. It was completed in 1941.
While his company modernized, W.R. Holway still used the same 24-inch slide rule until he died, April 23, 1981, just six days from his 88th birthday.
``He never used a computer,'' W.N. Holway said.
The son now keeps his father's slide rule, and he said he thinks about all the things his father did with it when he's up in an airplane, when the sky is clear and he can see from Tulsa to Grand Lake and everything in between.

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