Well, during the time that I was on the planting crew, a man by the name of Lincoln Constance, who was on the staff at the University of California at Berkeley, was a ranger-naturalist. He had to leave in early August to go back to Cal. They started their term at that time of the year. The park-naturalist, Don Libby, asked me how’d I like to carry out the rest of the season as a ranger-naturalist to replace Lincoln Constance. So I said great, because that was what I wanted to do. Fortunately, one of the rangers from the year before had sold me his Park Service uniform because I fully expected at some place along the line I’d become a park ranger. That was one of my objectives. So I spent the rest of the season until mid-September as a ranger-naturalist and enjoyed very much guiding and taking the walks up to Garfield Peak, and down to the lake, and leading the automobile caravan around the rim. Construction on the new rim road had been started in 1930. Much of it was brand new (6). Also, at that time, they were just starting to build the road from Union Creek into Diamond Lake. So a lot of this area was just opening up to the public. I imagine that people driving the paved roads today just don’t understand that not too many years ago we were driving on wagon roads that were there when the park was brand new (7). One of my college professors in engineering at Oregon State was the engineer on the rim road that was built around 1912. He and I had quite a bit of discussion about Crater Lake. He was with the Corps of Engineers.
What was his name?
Sam Dolan was my surveying professor at Oregon State.
During that period of time, in 1931, I met a lot of interesting people. One of them was the President of Bank of America. He founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco (8). I met the editor of the Christian Science Monitor, and it was that summer of ’31 that E.C. Solinsky, the superintendent, introduced me to Horace Albright. He had just been made the new director of the Park Service after Stephen Mather died in 1930. I also met Dr. Merriam of the Carnegie Institution. Dr. Merriam, along with Professor Frank Waugh and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., was appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to study public use at Mount Hood.
