MATERIAL WITNESS

The politicians can compare all the arcane notes they want, and they can hire all the pollsters they like, and they can jawbone all they choose in every little room they can fill with stogie smoke, and they will not come as close to it as this:

Nixon’s resignation speech was watched by fairly large audiences in Pleasant Grove and Northeast Dallas precincts. North Dallas did not watch the speech in such comparably heavy numbers. Instead, they watched, in greater numbers, the commentaries by network newsmen before and after the speech.

There was measurably less response to President Ford’s address to the nation in Pleasant Grove. Far North Dallas watched to the end. Northeast Dallas tuned out a little early. The latter viewers didn’t necessarily turn their sets off; they just walked away from them.

Smug of me, I know, considering the imprecision of political gaugings as a science. But my smugness stems from the knowledge that I am unas-sailably correct.

Then Nielsen told me, you say. Or A.R.B. or Arbitron, or Donald Seg-retti? No way. Compared to my source, a Nielsen rating is primitive guesswork. Nielsen is clanking around in a Sopwith Camel and I am flying at Mach 1.5 in an F-104.

I’ll tell you something else you didn’t know. You thought Patton was the biggie of all the television movies? It was second place. First was Airport and that 30-minute segment between the time the bomb went off in the biffy and the captain (even though it was Dean Martin) landed the plane, was probably the tensest half hour in television since John F. Kennedy’s Cuban missile speech.

When nobody in town goes to the john for 30 minutes, is that compelling drama? It is.

I know all of these things for facts. I know they are so, for the City of Dallas Water Utilities Division tells me so.

The chronicles of Rome called it augury by fire when their ancients, their oracles or their chiropractors peered into the flames to divine the prophecy of events, which were usually sinister. From augury by fire we have progressed to interpretation by water. It’s all in a day’s work for the gauge readers at the City of Dallas water department, or, for that matter, at any municipal waterworks large enough to need pressure gauges.

It is more than simple, it is inevitable and biologically basic that when a sizeable number of people watch a particular television show, the gauges of the city waterworks are going to show a perceptible drop immediately after the show. Any show.

On an autumn Sunday afternoon after the last gun of the game, your basic fan crumples his beer can, tosses it over with the others and sloshes to the bathroom. A fush dispenses with five gallons of water. So do the flushes at 236,000 other residential water meter outlets in Dallas and its environs, and there goes 1,180,000 gallons of water. Don’t make me say it: down the drain.

This megagurgle shows on a bank of gauges imbedded in the cream-colored walls of the computer control room at the city’s Southeast Service Center, a room looking like a cross between a vertical pinball table and the control center of the submarine Richard Basehart used to command on Sunday evening TV.

These gauges are monitored around the clock by men with that perpetual and feline stare of radar operators.

When Fred Williamson is a flop in his first night on Monday Night Football, the guy out there on Municipal Street knows it before producer Roone Arledge does. A very minimal drop in water pressure all over the city indicates relatively few viewers have risen to visit the bathroom, don’t you see.

“But it was a pre-season game and that is a factor to take into consideration.” Who said that, Pete Rozelle? No, it was Don Rauch, assistant pumping station manager at Southeast Service Center.

Rauch’s boss, B. L. Hindman, is the supervisor of pumping operations, a lanky, craggy and bespectacled engineering graduate of Texas A&M. He has skated gracefully through his 50’s, is retired from a career as a pumping engineer for an oil company and has been converted from petroleum to water in the eight years since he came to work for the city.

The Dallas water services system, for those who are impatient with the tenacious mediocrity of many of the other city departments, is considered a paragon among urban water departments. The computer control system is visited frequently by waterpersons from Chicago, Denver, Tokyo, to see how planning, automation, and riparian know-how can take a city from a precarious drouth to reasonable water wealth in two decades. Hindman says the credit for much of this excellence goes to city water superintendent Henry Graeser, who was saying in 1954, “How are the people going to have water in 1974, 1981?” Somehow he got those visionaries who gave us North Central Expressway to apply a more intelligent yardstick to the needs of water.

Hindman and his staff in the pumping division are rarely surprised by anything anymore when it comes to water needs. They pump millions of gallons a day from the holding reservoirs to meet what they are pretty sure is going to be the next day’s requirement, a 24 hour job. Rauch says that they try to anticipate rain, too, which would drastically cut the next day’s requirements. They not only watch Warren Culbertson, but also subscribe to the National Weather Service. Dallas set its record for one-day water usage last July 23. It was 400 million gallons. A lot of people sprinkled their lawns that day.

On many days, by the way, they add about two million gallons a day to what the city will need, to compensate for the water siphoned from the channel by a group of farmers, ranchers and landscapists along the Trinity bed known as Water Pirates. They claim God owes them water. The city points out that God didn’t build Garza-Little Elm Reservoir, the Corps of Engineers did.

Hindman says that it’s no trick at all to measure relative television audiences. Water usage is reflected in two ways on his department’s graphs: water pressure in psi (pounds per inch) and water volume, mostly in the elevated and underground tanks, by mgd (millions of gallons per day).

The graphs leave no questions. The needle squiggles are peaks and valleys, the cardiogram of a city, recording drops, rises, stabilities in water pressure.

Hindman opens the graphs and points with a leathery, bony finger: “Now, you take this time period here, you see? A drop of 500,000 gallons here in the 2 p.m. period. We thought at first it was a line break. We checked, but come to find out it was halftime in one of those games that started early.”

“You mean it was …”

“That’s right. Always have a drop at half time when people go to the toilet… usually lasts just about the whole 15-minutes of the half time.”

I can only think what a blow this will be to the Kilgore Rangerettes.

The story is brought up about the water department in Lafayette, La., which registered a plunge of 26 psi, a stunning record, at the end of the movie Airport.

“It could happen in a city that size,” Hindman said. “Here, with our volume and our capability, I guess the most we would expect to register would be two, three psi. We’re in good shape as far as maintaining pressure over the area we serve.”

Hindman thought of something else. “I’ll tell you another rush hour for us. It’s at 4:30 in the afternoon during school months. The kids run in, get a glass of water and go to the toilet. The gauges drop everywhere. The other day, one of our controllers was running a pump into one of the north tanks and he could tell by the curve that there was a danger of overflow.

“He checked the clock, saw it was about 4:20, and he thought, ’Well, if I can just hold out until the kids get home, there’s no problem.’ He let it go, and at about 4:35, zhweeep, there went the gauges back down again. Grownups do the same thing from 5:30 to 5:45.”

There are socio-economic verities measured on the graphs as well. People in South Dallas get up at 5:30. The pressure and volume paths on the graph are almost vertical at that time period. In Richardson, it is 6:30 when citizens rise and start turning on the water. In North Dallas, closer to 7:30. Does it figure?

So far as the Flush Index is concerned in television, there are few surprises there, either. “Miss Universe is always pretty lively,” says Hindman, “but even bigger is Miss America. A big drop after that one, and on the night of a big movie, there are two drops: one at about 9:55, just after the film is over and they’re into the commercials, and another at 10:30, after the news.” It is, perhaps, bad rating tidings for Channel 8 News, which stays on until 11.

The biggest sports rating Hindman recalls on the F.I. is the Superbowl, the year the Cowboys won it.

There was a recorded drop of nearly 3 pounds of pressure, truly a Kra-katoa of Dallas water droppage.

It is comforting to know that the Graesers and Hindmans and Rauchs know their trade so well, and are staying on the ball (and float), but we must also take prudent steps to insure that such vast power of intimate intelligence never fall into the hands of evil men.

Could the term “White House Plumbers” have ultimately come to mean more than they let on? If we are going to prevent Big Brother from watching, let us make sure he does not use our flushing statistics against us.

Meanwhile, B. L. Hindman and the men behind the pumps know where it’s at. When the announcer intones, “It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your children are?” they know, they know.