Members' 25-Year Reminiscences

Peter B. Dorram, AICP

Dorram Associates, Inc
Bloomingdale, New Jersey

Anniversaries are fun when one remembers them. Happy 25th, APA!

It was in 1951, when as a veteran of two wars, a foreign student from Israel, and a freshman architecture student at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, my beer-drinking classmates convinced me it "was a must." Hence, I joined ASPO. I never regretted it, since ASPO later became APA, and of course, AICP was there all along. They all were good to me, and the planning profession at large.

After Tech came Harvard, and following that came a few years of corporate practice in New York and New Jersey, which in turn were followed by private practice. It was all a lot of fun and now, at the age of 79, I still enjoy a full-time practice.

Sometimes I wonder how I will respond to St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, should he ask me to account for myself. While I am at it, should I also say a few words about APA? "Well, Sir," I might say, "APA was good to me."

Occasionally, I was invited to speak at the local or national conferences, and it was a lot of fun. Then APA also published my book, The Expert Witness, and now it's a test book at the University of Melbourne. So for all I know, it might have done some good for some young planners. As for the 50-odd years of planning, they flew by too fast. APA was always there to help, and one can only hope that all the years of planning might have contributed to enhance the quality of life of some of our fellow men.

Keep going, APA, the next 25 will be easier…

P.S. I enjoyed an advance peek at Karen Lapidakis Melby's reminiscences about slide rules, magic markers, and typewriters.

In my pre-ASPO/APA days, my very first "planning job" was right after the Israeli War of Independence. I was a gofer/draftsman in Tel Aviv, on a design competition for the new Town Plan for Beer Sheva. In those days, blueprinting was solar. The original tracing or vellum was placed over a sheet of print paper, stretched over a large bow, or convex board, with a transparent acetate cover clamped over the original. I would then take this frame three flights of stairs up to the flat roof of the office, and expose the frame to the sun. Timing was critical, and by the seat of m pants. This done, I would race with the frame down three flights, and place the loosely rolled print paper in a wooden tube with an ammonia container at its bottom. I can still smell the heavenly aroma of the ammonia fumes, and again, the timing was everything. Good timing meant that — voila! — there was a blueprint. When the timing was off, it meant back to the roof again.

Anyhow, 55 years later, Beer Sheva, once a mere Bedouin oasis, has become a fast-growing rural town with similar problems to its cousins, the fast-growing regional centers in the U.S. and elsewhere.