I was going to ask you something about Solinsky. When that big scandal happened, I know you just got here at the tail end of it all, how did people react to it? Were they supportive of him? Did they like him a lot? Did they feel like it was an injustice?
(DR) Yes, they seemed to be supportive. The only thing that they didn’t realize…To answer you question, they did. He was well liked. He was a big rotund type of an individual and expansive in his way of dealing with people in certain situations. And he was liked. He was out everyday. Dave followed the same pattern. He would be down in that yard in the morning when the crews dispersed with any last minute instructions or any questions. That’s the way he ran the show. Yes, he was liked. But the thing was…
And what he did was not the cause of suspension. It wasn’t so much for personal gain as it was he merely took money out of this pocket and put it in this pocket to cover up something that shouldn’t have happened. And the loss of that boat. But, when they got to delving into it, they found that he had taken the big park limousine, taken groups of people, and footed the bills. And that was kind of bad. The man that I as working for, Mr. Gould, got his fingers in the ringer by having taken some checks down to Fort Klamath to Tony Castor, who ran the Klamath store, and cashed them. And they were phony checks. He didn’t keep the money, but he was involved in that and that’s what did him in. Then Mr. Erwin was guilty of having written the checks trying to cover this exchange of, from the 201 to the 210 or whatever account number. Then Davidson, the construction man, in charge of construction up here, I forget what his title was, but anyhow, it turned out that he was using Park Service trucks and Park Service facilities to gather rock to haul to Medford for rock houses at that time. There’s two of them. There’s one on Crater Lake Avenue just before you get to Main Street and there’s one on Main Street and Willamette (18). And those houses were involved in this hassle at that time. But Solinsky himself, other than the use of his position, as far as anyone knew or came out, didn’t benefit. Everyone was for him. They thought it was too bad. Then they brought in these two General Accounting Office men and they were here all the summer of 1934 and boy, people walked the straight and narrow (to) make sure that if they took a government car it was for government business. That’s about to the Army engineers.
