How was planning at this time different from that done during Mission 66 period? One of the things I was thinking about was that the park system was expanding fast under Hartzog versus the emphasis of getting facilities into parks under Wirth.
I hadn’t thought about that, but now that you mention it, I remember when I was still at Sitka Glacier Bay working on Mission 66 planning. And it was, as I recall, it was more facility oriented. There had been an article in Reader’s Digest, “Let’s Close the National Park.” The purpose of it was to get the national parks up to standard by 1966. That was under Connie Wirth. Then later when I was involved in master planning and even at Crater Lake, after the Mission 66 plan cut-back, we started getting into another kind of master planning. I’m not sure I’m correct in saying “another kind,” but this is how I remember it; I remember looking at park programs, the total environment of parks within several hundred miles of park, trying to look more into the future, of being more analytical, taking the environment into strong consideration.
Did the landscape architects have much say in all this process?
When I was in the San Francisco office, landscape architects, I would say, dominated. Most of the people in the planning teams were landscape architects, there was never a planning team without a landscape architect. Bill Bowen who had been a park field man, was overall head of planning center. He was replaced by Glenn Hendrix, who, by the way, had been at Crater Lake at one time as a landscape architect. After being in charge of the San Francisco planning center Glenn was in charge when they moved to Denver.
Another factor was Connie Wirth being a landscape architect. So that probably had some influence on their status. I think landscape architects are ideally suited to be park planners because they bring a whole lot of expertise into it, and a broadness of perspective, too. That’s needed. Generally, a landscape architect would be the team captain, although we had a time when we’d just trade jobs, sometimes a team captain would be a team member. I was a team captain for a while on a couple of projects, Redwood bring one of them.
