This is an oral history interview with Emmett Blanchfield in Sacramento on March 7th, 1995. I’ve got a number of questions for him. We’ll start with Section A about his educational background and seasonal work at Crater Lake.
Well, Steve, this is a great get-together. Discussing one of the favorite places on earth for me is Crater Lake! My first visit to Crater Lake was in 1930, my first job there. I don’t recall the year that I haven’t been back. One year during the war, I even flew over it with an Army plane. But other than that, and with my son having worked there six seasons, and the fact we’ve camped up there at Diamond Lake, why Crater Lake has been one of the key places in my life.
I think there probably are a number of reasons why I worked at Crater Lake and got started there working. Maybe it was because of where I grew up and the lifestyle I had up to college days. I was born in Oakland, California, in 1909. But shortly afterwards, because of the 1906 earthquake which preceded me, my father [a businessman] moved his publishing business to Los Angeles, where we had a lot of relatives. So I grew up in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. My family had a beach cottage just a half a block from the sand at Santa Monica. We had the Malibu Mountains and the Santa Monica Mountains all around us. So I kind of grew up between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains, where I would not backpack – we had knapsacks in those days.
With the Scouts, we would camp up at Topanga Canyon and places. Then I had family that we involved in cattle ranches. So I grew up with a great love for things out of doors. I worked on a cattle ranch right on the edge of the Angeles National Forest. Then one of my uncles took out a special use permit in the Angeles National Forest in one of the major canyons. One of the family friends was a recreation staff officer for both the Angeles and the San Bernardino [national forests]. Another family friend was a chief forester for Los Angeles County and they were Yale graduates. That got me thinking about working out of doors. It also got me up to Oregon State College, where I started as a forester.
