Were there problems with Oregon State having been selected as sort of a host institution? I knew Doug Larson lost out as principal investigator to Gary Larson.
The news media somehow got a hold of Doug. He suggested that there might be pollution from the sewage lagoon below headquarters. The news media contacted me and I tried to explain the situation. I was convinced that this was not the case. Well, the reporters didn’t stop at that. They went back to Doug and said that the superintendent doesn’t agree. He came back with something like that is a crock of baloney. Forbes might have come in my office when I was getting a call from one of these reporters and I said, “Well, you can contact USGS if you want to. I’m not disputing what Mr. Larson with might be, but I’m soundly convinced otherwise.” At any rate, Doug had done some very good research, but it wasn’t in the same direction that we were going in the ten year program. He probably felt like he was left out. I remember a meeting with Jim Larson. We felt that the way Doug was oriented was not the course we believed was needed for Crater Lake.
I have a question about union representation. Was that a complicating factor in the park operations?
It became that. I can’t give you the particular date. It was probably about 1982. This came about when we selected a carpenter to come on board. I tried extremely hard to talk with people coming to Crater Lake to let them know the living conditions, and what it was like in the winter so that there wouldn’t be any surprises. There was a non-Park Service man coming to the park from Veterans Affairs. He was a qualified carpenter and I guess the best that the register had to offer. He wasn’t there long before he started agitating other employees as to the value and benefit of them having a union. He couldn’t understand why there wasn’t an employee union all ready in place. To his way of thinking, management would just run roughshod over employee right without a union. This appealed to maintenance employees, so contact was made with a union group in Portland. I met with the union leader (49). Unions were being pushed in a number of park areas at the time. The managers and those who work with them needed to have training in collective bargaining, so the department set up some training programs. We selected various employees to complete this training course. I attended a week long seminar in Denver on collective bargaining. We worked things out and a contract was drawn up. I can’t remember which union it was, but we worked out some kind of an agreement (50). I don’t think we had any problems after that.
