Francis Cutler Turner
Francis Cutler Turner, “Frank” to his many friends and associates, Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration from February 24, 1969, to June 30, 1972, is the only Chief Executive of the organization and its predecessor, the Bureau of Public Roads, who spent his entire professional career in that organization. Turner graduated in 1929 from the Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College, now Texas A & M University, and joined the Division of Management of the Bureau of Public Roads as a junior highway engineer immediately upon graduation. He was assigned to field service in the Bureau’s research program in what was then called the Division of Management. He was one of a small group of college graduates selected each year to enter a training program involving the field study of construction methods (time and motion study work) designed to reduce the costs of highway construction. From this small group of young engineers were to come an astonishing number of future leaders of the Bureau of Public Roads. The nature of their work taught, them to question construction procedures then current, to be innovative, resourceful, to respond to change, and to make every effort to obtain more road for less cost by expanding production, for it must be remembered that highway engineering as we know it now was in its infancy in 1929.
Turner was transferred in 1933 from this type of work to what is now the Arkansas Division office at Little Rock, where he was an area engineer responsible for the Federal-aid highway program in a portion of that State. Here he became interested in the performance of maintenance operations and wrote a thesis on maintenance of highways as affected by the type and physical characteristics of base and subgrade soils, which was accepted by Texas A & M as the basis for a graduate Civil Engineering degree in 1940.
In that same year, Turner was transferred to the Division of Construction (now Office of Engineering) in the Washington, D.C., office and a year later was reassigned to what is now the Region 3 office, then located in Washington, D.C. Here he worked on construction and maintenance and the many wartime special projects dealing with defense access roads, flight strips, materials allocations, the inventory of trucks and buses, and many other new and special activities related to the war effort. In 1943, his expertise in maintenance and his initiative and leadership were recognized, and he was sent to the Alaska highway project as an expediter by Commissioner Thomas H. MacDonald. During his Alaska assignment he pioneered highway location, using aerial reconnaissance. When the Alaska highway was completed, Mr. MacDonald assigned him to stay on the project and work first with the War Department and later with the Canadian and Territorial Governments to organize maintenance activities and procedures. He did not return to the United States until the latter part of 1946, the last man to leave the Alaska highway project, and then on his return to Washington, he was met with the news that he had been selected to head a mission to the Philippines to restore the war-damaged roads and bridges and to organize and train a highway organization in that country, a program authorized by the Congress under the Philippine Rehabilitation Act of 1946.
Turner went to Manila in December 1946 and found an almost hopeless mission confronting him. Public Roads engineers, whom he needed to staff the project, for the most part had only recently returned from the war and had no desire for further foreign service. Furthermore, there were no living accommodations in Manila suitable for families, and unless their families could go, the engineers were not interested. Upon arrival in Manila, Turner attacked this staffing problem with his customary zeal and enthusiasm. Eight other U.S. Government agencies had missions in Manila with similar complications, and by common consent, Turner became spokesman for the group and eventually was designated by the American Embassy in Manila to solve the problem.
