In 1947, I decided that a continued career in the Park Service was to my benefit. I had been in contact with Red Hill and other park service people in connection with a coordinated Forest Service/National Park planning and development program. The Park Service, at that time, had the concept of trying to move the major use areas out of the park and letting the surrounding national forests take care of the camping, many of their administration buildings, and the communities for park personnel. So I was involved in that and then I found out there was this opening at Coulee Dam for a resident landscape architect. Along with an increase in a pay rating, why, I went up to Coulee Dam in March of ’47. That was a wonderful experience. I enjoyed doing the National Park Service type of master planning. Then it was a wonderful place to live, Coulee, and most of the people there were college-trained people. The work on designing the master plan from Coulee Dam up to the Canadian border was very challenging. Coulee Campgrounds and special areas for resorts, boating facilities, and things of that order. So I finished the master plan study for Coulee Dam and Newton Drury was the director. He approved it and, at that time, funds were running pretty low in the Federal Government. Many of the engineering personnel at Coulee Dam were being let go. I thought I saw the handwriting on the wall. So I elected to return to southern California, where I grew up, and opened up a private practice in landscape architecture, which I did for about six months.
I was so busy I didn’t have time to see my family, and it dawned on me that this wasn’t the career I wanted. And, lo and behold, I had a call from Dam Hull, who was the first chief landscape architect for the National Park Service. He had retired as the chief landscape architect for the California State Parks System and he told me the job was open and suggested that I take the next exam, which I did. Then I was asked to be the chief landscape architect for the California State Park System. It took several months before I moved up there [Sacramento] in August 1949. My family came up about six months later after we had sold our home. I had a career there from 1949 to when I retired in 1973. The first year I was the only landscape architect in the California State Park System.
That was an associate position. Then a senior position opened up in the Office of Architecture. There was only one other senior, so I took the exam for that and was appointed as the second senior landscape architect for the Office of Architecture, which was an entirely new facet of landscape design for me: mental hospitals, state prisons, office buildings, and I even had the National Guard armories. It was a major program because there was quite an appropriation for all these new state buildings. I was involved in it from the Oregon border down to the Mexican border.
