Very close to this time there was a opening for a Park Service limnologist. Doug applied for it since he did his Ph.D at Crater Lake. Doug was closet to the project. He knew more than anyone as far as Crater Lake went and threw his hat in the ring. I didn’t know Gary Larson at the time, and I’m not sure of who else applied for the position. Mark Forbes would know all this.
There was also another Larson. Jim Larson was a chief scientist for the region in Seattle, so we had three Larsons all mixed up in this at once. I’ll never forget the day that Doug found out that he did not get the position. Doug’s usual plan of action was to leave Portland at 3 or 4 in the morning and to pull into the park at 6 and have breakfast in the Cafeteria. We would meet him with the equipment ready to go to work about 7, which is when we went on duty. We would all go down to the lake together. Mark Forbes joined him for breakfast and told him that he wasn’t going to get the position. If I remember right, Doug turned around and went back to Portland. He wasn’t in very good spirits that whole day. You know he was branded as a non-team player. I think he did everything he could with the Park Service but he kept hitting the closed door. He didn’t know what else to do, so he just started writing letters.
Did the connection with Oregon State begin at this time when the limnologist was hired?
Ed Starkey worked for the CPSU (18). It doesn’t exist today but that was the Cooperative Park Study Unit and that is where this limnologist would be based. The aquatic ecologist there would be working at Mount Rainier, Olympic and at Crater was about 60 percent of the job, I think. That is what Gary Larson was hired to do.
We can talk now about some of the goals, objective and issues. Doug talked a lot about goals, and he still does, but at the time I don’t think he had any directed research. It was basically background monitoring of the lake itself. In the past maybe 15 years, Gary spawned a series of research projects on the lake involving all kinds of things, including the submarine program, of course. I don’t know if he directly managed that whole program but he certainly had a hand in it. While we had the submersible in the park, Jack Dymond and Bob Collier were the PI’s, but Gray was involved in that also. Doug was essentially dropped from the program. One day he was there and the next he was gone. He did go out on research boat once since then, but he’s never really wanted to go back down to the lake and do work. He’s never really been asked to do anything in the park. Gary has much of Doug’s early data. Doug works with Gary very closely as far as Gary needing historic data, and as far as Doug getting recent data. It works both directions, and I think they work together as well as can be expected.
