We received a number of compliments from the newspapers and local newspapers around the Crater Lake area for our work. I might say that we also had a small, three C workshop at Lave Beds National Park. There the wood was more of hickory type or a hard pine nature from which we’d make furniture; rustic furniture with a seating base made out of heavy twine cloth and very comfortable to sit in. It had more of the rustic features, because we used just the round members of the natural wood, rather than trying to cut it as we did on the benches. Many of these pieces of furniture were copied in time, as I recall, I remember one furniture store in Klamath Falls displayed furniture of the same type that we had made in our three C camp at Lava Beds.
But I later found out that two of the three C boys that made this furniture, when they got out of the three C they set up a workshop of their own in Klamath Falls and sold a number of pieces of furniture they had learned to make at the three C camp in Lava Beds and they did very well. I don’t know what happened to that, but they had an excellent idea had they been able to carry it out. We also made a number of pieces for the Oregon Caves in the dining room. We made one big table; we had a solid oak top. This piece of oak was given to us by a native from around Applegate, and he finished the piece of oak timber in a rough texture and we did the finishing work of sanding and polishing later. This one table we made was made up of several lengths, I think it was about 25 feet in length, it had a number of pieces of oak wood doweled together and it was sanded down and polished and made a beautiful dining room table. It was used at the Oregon Cave Lodge for a number of years and I don’t know what’s happened to it since. Perhaps it’s been stored or salvaged or might have been destroyed. But, our furniture program was quite important; we received many comments from people at the Yosemite National Park staff and also at the Mount Rainier staff where they also followed our program of making furniture. I would feel proud to think that we had been park of that one-phase furniture construction when the three C boys not only learned a lot, but they could show the skills of young people could be developed with proper protection and guidance and the end result was most complimentary to the young men that did it as well to the CCC organization itself.
I would like to mention some of the young men that I think did an excellent job during the days of the three C camps. And I am particularly proud of a number of them for what they became in later life. All of these young men that worked with us in the State Parks, in the National Parks, all of them were college graduates from Oregon State, the University of California, and Washington State University. They were all young men who got out of school in the ’33s when job finding was most difficult, yet they all had a determination to contribute in their professional field, be it architecture or landscape architecture.
