You were hired to do interpretation?
I was hired as an interpreter. Tana Hill married Dan Sholly and became Tana Sholly. Since the chief and assistant chief of interpretation were not hired yet, Tana sent me the box of books aimed at interpreters. I was very excited to go through that material, and I still cherish many of those books today. It helped me with questions like what is interpretation? How do you meet people? How do you design walks and talks? All that stuff was just wonderful?
That must have been an interim period between George Morrison and Hank Tanski (1)? I know that Dan would have been the chief (2).
You know what’s really strange is that Dan would have been doing this because there was no interpretive staff at that time. There was just no one out there. Pat Smith was hired soon after that (3). And Hank was hired maybe at the same time Pat was, as chief and as assistant to interpretation. When I was hired I did not talk to Pat and I did not talk to Hank. The crew who worked that summer were hired all at the same time. Although I didn’t show up until June, Pat and Hank were probably hired a month or two before me.
That is when they made a separate division of interpretation. Frank Betts was in his last few months, before Jim Rouse replaced him (4).
Yes, exactly. We got up there and attended the welcome for seasonals night. Our son was young, so we couldn’t stay out past 10 o’clock. When Marilyn and I turned around to go back to our trailer, Nancy Betts, Frank’s wife, ran and grabbed us as we started to go. She said, “You can’t leave until I find out who you are and what you are doing.” It was a very warm family feeling, those first years that we were there.
Jim Rouse and I got along famously, too. I did a lot of extra interpretive work with him, thanks to Hank and Pat letting me put these special programs on my schedule. I worked with the Rotary Club in Shady Cove and the Masons who I think still go up there (5).
I was an interpreter for five years. Towards the end of those five years I could read the schedule very easily. The problem is that at the beginning of the season I felt like I almost knew where I was going to be everyday, and almost every hour through the season. This finally started to wear on me. There wasn’t much free time in the scheduling for research.
That eventually led me to think about doing some other things. I took a year’s leave from the high school district and I went to Oregon State to start a masters degree program in chemistry. When I did that, I asked the two resource management specialists at the time, Mark Forbes and Jon Jarvis, if there was a way for me to transfer from interpretation to resource management. They thought that would be a really good thing for me to do because of my research. It wasn’t hard for me to make the transition. It happened very easily.
