He took over for Lawrence Merriam.
Right, and he stayed there till Hartzog was in Washington for a year or two. Then he had Howard come back to Washington for awhile. He was Director of Operations, he stayed there until he was about ready to retire. Then he moved back to Omaha for about a year, or something like that. A real fine guy. Some of those things like I was telling about how the system works in those days, that’s the way it was, you know. There was no such thing as you wanting to apply for a job; there was no way to apply for a job. There was no system to go into, like there is today. I remember when, oh gosh, it was probably around mid-sixties when an avenue was set up where you could apply for a job.
So that was really the first time?
Yeah, there wasn’t any way previously. You know somebody, it was a family group, and it is, course it is much larger now than it was then. There was no avenue, you couldn’t put anything on the floor, because you never knew there was a vacancy. The only news you had was the Courier, put together by Tiny Semingsen in ’54 or ’55, when he was Superintendent of Wind Cave. I didn’t know that until I moved to Rushmore. He was the guy that had all this stuff about people moving; that’s the only way we knew anything.
So, there was no other way, noting official?
There was nothing.
There was just official conferences like the Chief Ranger Conference and the Superintendents Conference?
There was one Chief Ranger Conference in my time, that was held in Washington in probably ’56; now wait a minute, it would have been ’59 or ’60. That is the only one I know was held, now there may have been one other after that I missed.
There were several planning conferences for Mission ’66?
Oh yes, there were a lot of that, but the Chief Ranger/ Superintendents Conferences used to be held annually that was changed to, course they get pretty expensive. Then they started going to zone conferences, regional conferences and gosh, you got six regions and that kinda wears everybody out.
Were there official training courses, like there are now?
I went to one that was called Tolsen Tech in 1955, held in San Francisco. It was held ever other year, once in the east and once in the west, and Ranges, as far as I know it was just Rangers, were selected to go to that. They have about forty of them. That was the only training program in the National Park Service.
