Executive Committee Report..... 453 By C. W. S. Sammelman, Secretary, St. Louis, Mo. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, at the kick-off you all recognize that term as in common use at this time of the year-I want to submit or sound a keynote. I wonder whether it will recur throughout the convention. Mine is not a one-man report. Sometimes a chairman can not even get a reply from the members of his committee, therefore he has to make a one-man report. However, the committee of which I happen to be chairman this year did very excellent work. I received replies from each one of them when I wrote, and with one exception each one of them has really done excellent work in assisting to get the papers which are to be presented to this convention on behalf of the committee. I do not know whether that keynote will be carried out or not. I trust it may be. I have no formal report to present. We had in mind that we would not send out questionnaires to get a lot of data that nobody would read. We had this feeling, though, that we are rather at the threshold of things in the development of pavement in its design and construction; that the various governmental agencies spending money in experimenting, as they are, are learning things that we feel will revolutionize the whole thing within the next few years; that various associations of manufacturers, through their technical work are doing a similar service; and that, finally, the municipal engineers in practice putting into actual construction and operation all these things as they are developed, are taking the final step to learn and prove the things that are successful or unsuccessful by reason of their failure or success in actual operation. We concluded that the best contribution we could make to the membership and to the country at large was to get papers concerning these outstanding developments, showing the trend in design, and present them to the convention through the most eminent authorities obtainable. We will present some of the papers next Thursday morning at the joint session between this Society and the Asphalt Association, and there will be some useful information presented in other committee reports, although we have tried not to steal any of their thunder. I do not know whether all authors of papers to be presented are present, but I know some of them are. With these few remarks, I would simply suggest that the program proceed, in so far as the authors are here, in regular order. |