Albert Hackert and Otto Heckert Oral History Interview
This is an oral history interview given in Jacksonville on October 31, 1991. The interview is a little different from others I’ve done since I am interviewing two man at the same time. Otto Heckert and Albert Hackert are seated beside some of their relatives who have brought out a photo album. I am going to give the microphone to Otto for an introduction, and then it will go to Albert. We’ll proceed toward talking about Crater Lake.
Otto, when were you born and how did you grow up in Jacksonville and how did you come to Crater Lake?
I was born in 1904 and I went to school in Jacksonville. After I got out of eight grade, I stayed home for a year or two and then went looking for a job. My brother already worked at Crater Lake some, so we went over and applied for seasonal work and were hired by Alex Sparrow. My brother Albert drove the supply truck and hired out as a truck driver, and I thought I could be a truck driver. I could driver a Model T, but I couldn’t driver anything bigger then that, so they started me off driving a little old GMC truck from Medford. They didn’t have any brakes on them trucks in the park area in those days. Of course, they had signs on all the trees: Check your brakes! But we didn’t have to bother because there were no brakes. And when another truck driver was driving a Reo Speedwagon that they’d bought for a supply truck, instead of this old truck that I was taking up there and he was going to show me, be sure that I got to Crater Lake with it. So when we got up to Laurelhurst, up at McCleod, we had to detour across the Laurelhurst bridge and up the other side. It came out at the Green Mountain Ranch they called it. In doing so, I had to ram the front end into the bank occasionally to slow it up to go down that grade to get across this bridge. When I got across the bridge, it muffled out when I got pretty near to the incline on the other side of the bridge and it rolled back. We cranked it up, and when I went up the second time it slipped out of gear and I was freewheelin’ and missed the bridge when I came back down. It dumped a bunch of stuff out of the back end of that thing into the river. About six inches of frame of that old truck hit the upright approach to the bridge and that was the only thing that kept it from going in the river. We had to go down the next day with chain blocks and pull that old truck up out of there. A crew from the camp came back down the next day. I don’t know what they ever did with the old truck from there. I guess they just took it out and wrecked it. I don’t know what else. So then one night, I made such a bad job of getting that old truck up there, they hired me as a teamster. Of course, I got a dollar a day extra, which was fairly good money in those days. So I drove the horses on the grader, grading the park roads and hauling gravel. Of course, they split the four horses when they put them up on these Studebaker dump wagons to haul gravel, you know, and keep the roads repaired. We had quite a long experience up there with just general work. You know, shoveling snow and keeping the roads in shape and everything repaired, that they did.
This dock business over on the island, why, we went around to the Wineglass. That was later in the season, of course, and we felled these trees and peeled the poles and skidded them over a gin pole, they called it, at the head of that Wineglass and shot them over the top. Two guys with a peeve would start the poles over there and they’d run and give them a start and they’d do down that Wineglass which is a pumice slide. Some of them would go clear into the water from the rim around the Wineglass. And then some of them would go down and hit that narrow place, and other ones would come along behind and just splinter. Of course, we had to follow down through, then clean that all up on the way down and be sure to get all the logs down to the water, and then they rafted them together. Next day the launch (1) would come by and hook on to the raft that we’d built there, tie all the poles together and floated them over to the island. We stayed on the island until we’d built this dock.
