Did you stay at headquarters?
We parked at headquarters a couple times, but also a few times in Rim Village.
Where the cabins were?
No, there was a big open field below the lodge. There were trailers and campers parked there (13). We parked there sometimes. It was really a shoestring operation and I could see that I wasn’t going to get a lot of research done. I was going to try to make the best of it, since I couldn’t afford to drop the program and go to another school. I was just getting too old and my wife was getting tired of me being in graduate school. You know what it’s like to be having to study every night and on weekends, then you’ve got term papers. In the summer I’d be gone on these long expeditions around the state, so I wasn’t home much and after three years at OSU she put her foot down. I’d been in school since 1959 and knew it was time to bring this to a halt.
Your field work at Crater was during the summers of ’68 and ’69?
Yes, I made three field trips each summer to the lake. I was training Ross Kavanagh and brought him down there a couple of times in 1970. I recall one particular trip where it was raining with lightning and thunder when we came up the trail. He was just exhausted. The trail packer broke down and we had to haul equipment out by hand. I had to go down a couple times and haul equipment. He just went to the camper and collapsed. It was a bad day and that was my last trip to Crater under Donaldson’s program. It was probably in July, 1970. Donaldson and I had gone down there in June and we had brought the Boston Whaler back to OSU. Incidentally, all of this is documented with pictures. I’ve got several hundred slides.
I’d like to see them.
The pictures also include the work I did in the ’70s and early ’80s I probably have about 800 slides.
Was there any linkage between lirnnology and oceanography? None, really, but Donaldson was sending his students to [the Department of] Oceanography because fisheries and wildlife didn’t offer anything.
To round out your program?
Yes, those courses gave it some meaning.
