You didn’t visit Fort Klamath during your stay there?
No, I didn’t
I found a copy of Nature Notes in 1949 with your name on it in the park library. The reason I found that significant was that two years before you arrived a man by the name of John Funkhouser wrote an article on amphibians of Crater Lake. I was wondering if you ever got a chance to meet him. I know you reviewed his work.
No, I didn’t meet him. I knew his work. I believe he became connected with a medical school in the Midwest, did he not?
I’m not sure.
Don Farner and I were aware of his work on the amphibians in the park and attempted to contact him. We wrote to him but never did get a response. We had a question about one of his amphibian observations in the park, and that was the reason we wrote to him.
I noticed that Farner didn’t have an article in the 1949 edition, so he might not have known this man, either, but Ralph Huestis was there at the time.
Ralph was there?
He had several articles that year. One of them became a separate Nature Notes, the only time a special edition has ever been done. It was on golden mantled ground squirrels (18).
Yes, I was the editor of that one as you may know. The manuscript was lying around at the park in the possession of Doc Ruhle. It was then given to me the first summer I was there, with the idea that I was to edit it and find the illustrations. And that’s what I did. As a matter of fact, that was my first contact with Ralph Huestis. I had never met him at the time. It was that summer, as I said previously, that he and his wife visited park. I got acquainted with him.
Who supplied the photographs in that edition? Was it Ralph Florence Wells?
No. The Ralph and Florence were not there at the time. This was the first year. They came the second year. Those are in the file.
Did Ralph [Huestis] take some of those photos?
No, the pictures that were in the golden mantled ground squirrel volume were not Ralph’s at all. They were some that we had in the files. These had been taken previously by someone else. I don’t know who.
Was it considered unusual by Doc Ruhle or others on the staff to have a special number of Nature Notes just on one topic?
It certainly was unusual. I think that was the first time. Has it ever occurred again?
