Along with the cement picnic tables and the metal firegrates. It was as if every park was designed to look like every other park.

You gave that talk to my class about the uniqueness of the state parks of Oregon. I learned a lot through that thing, but realized that even the fireplaces were important to the design of state parks. Where did they get their ideas? From the national parks. You go into the California parks and see what Drury did down there (47). Then the Park Service lost that so fast to utilitarianism. You hate to see that being lost. I think you have to do a certain amount in budgeting things. You have to go utilitarian often times, but look at the sign for headquarters. There used to be a beautiful rock pillar there with redwood sign saying National Park Service headquarters. Now you got a 4 x 4. I guess it’s still hanging there. I don’t know if it’s been changed. It’s just kind of hanging there, swinging in the breeze. No style, no style at all. Then they bulldozed down the old entrance station signs and put up the rusty metal instead. The idea was never to paint because it will oxidize and turn black on its own accord (48). That work in the desert. Old farm machinery does that. It doesn’t keep rusting. That thing is sandblasted every spring and every fall it starts rusting again. They still look ugly not being painted. But they’ve saved a lot of money.

Who knows where the money went.

The budgets have gotten bigger and bigger. It seemed to me the very best operation of the park was when Medford had the main office (49). Because you kept the bureaucrats out of the park. A park was a park. Things that can be done anywhere could be done in Medford. It wasn’t like the cluster office, where they could never decide what the chain of command was going to be (50). That was the problem with the cluster office. I still think it was a good idea. It just didn’t work because it was unworkable from the way it was set up and not establishing way of command. Who was in change? Ernie [Borgman], or was it Mr. Betts? Well, on paper Ernie was but really Betts was, that type of thing.

While Medford was winter headquarters, was most of the administrative support down in Medford for nine months of the year?

Only the superintendent and usually a file clerk and a couple of others moved up to the park in the summer. All the personnel, purchasing, procurement, bookkeeping was done in the Medford office. Usually, you get the kind of people in that kind of a job that stay around for years. Marion Anderson, I think, was in Medford for 30 years. Have you ever contacted Marion and Mary Anderson? I’ve got to get you their name, and also Earl Wall. He [Anderson] he spent 30 years at Crater Lake and she spent about 25. She as divorced and then her husband died. He’d never been married. Marion was probably 50 and they were both getting ready for retirement and they got married. They’re living right over here by KTVL Channel 10. They only live about a half mile from the TV station. Wonderful people. I haven’t seem then for a couple of years but we’ve kept in pretty good contact. What it [having headquarters in Medford] did was it didn’t put stress on the park facilities. Every time you bring somebody in to fill a position, you’ve got to have all that surrounding stuff.

It’s led to quite a housing crunch.

Now we’re going to have to have more housing. You’re got to have more of this and more sewers. You’ve got to cut down more trees just to take care of the support people. You’re got to have more parking, more garages, when the park can be run by about 15 people year round other than seasonal, I mean. I don’t think you need much more than 10 to 15 permanents to run the park. So why put up with all this? If the park wasn’t so fragile, that would be different. But having had put the park headquarters in the heaviest snow zone of the whole park, Munson Valley, which gets more snow, I guess, than any other place in the park except maybe toward Kerr Notch and, of course, the rim area. But people shouldn’t be living there year round that don’t want to live there. They’re city folk. They can go to Medford and buy their homes and have a more normal life for those that want it.

There seem to be very few public complaints from people, like say the Ranger staff, who were there during the wintertime. No letters referring to any kind of problems they were having during the winter. That doesn’t happen until you get support staff having to live there all year long.

You see, this is what I am getting at. Then it starts feeding on other people. I think a lot of ill will then comes out because of that. These people are working together, playing together, socializing together, drinking together, and its just always the same. And then they just start feeding off of each other. Then everything that’s wrong just becomes accentuated.

You tend to have a lot of problems from November through about March.

That park is too pristine, is too beautiful, to have to lower itself to that kind of trash that is going on. People should be up there getting an experience and really want to be there instead of thinking “Boy, I can hardly wait to get out of here.” I still think that an off-site administrative office is, by far, better.

Sort of like what Lassen has with Mineral.

Of course, Mineral is a beautiful area. It’s just too bad that it couldn’t have been put in, in Prospect or someplace where there are some support facilities to a certain extent. Mineral’s a very tiny town. But Redding is what, an hour away, maybe.

Munson Valley was designed with the idea that the headquarters would be at Union Creek, and the park would have that extension (51).

Then it was over to the panhandle.

It pretty much died as of ’82 when they did the rehab on the headquarters buildings.

They have too much invested up there now.

It’s still on somebody’s back burner.

I think it’s too far from any support facilities. Why destroy an area that hasn’t been destroyed? What difference does 15 miles make? But 30 and 40 miles make a lot of difference. You’re still going to get heavy snow there. People are still going to have to drive just as far to get into town. The schooling is going to be a problem with the kids. So get them into some area where the commute is better.

There are about three sets of cost studies done on the panhandle and they said for what you are getting, it isn’t worth the move.

I guess they even thought about taking over Wilson’s at one time in the early ‘eighties.

Then, of course, the Denton Park, Peyton had the RV park there (53).

Is old Mr. Wilson still there, do you know?

I haven’t run across him.

At Wilson’s? You mean Wilson’s still running?

Yes.

We used to get there for seven dollars a night. Mr. Wilson must not be running it.

Probably different.

He was really getting old. You know a lot of those buildings came over from Sand Creek.

They were built in 1940.

He was buying up a lot of the old buildings, dismantling them, and hauling them down there. The stoves he has in those cabins are the stoves out of some road camps at the rim. He told my brother that story.

It would be interesting to look around them.

He sold several of his buildings, too, which is really sad. You see some empty foundations to mark what used to be there. Have you ever been inside one of those cabins? It’s really something; knotty pine interiors, really nice for a man who was just building this out in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t a real true artisan as such. He just built to be practical but to make it look nice at the same time.

I’d like to check out that and Sand Creek truck stop on 97, because I think that may have been his originally.

I know he bought a dance hall somewhere and lugged it up and used the lumber off of it, I guess. The cluster office and all of the area’s support personnel really should be outside the park.

Was there a notable change in the operation once the cluster office closed?

Yes. It just got horribly cramped. People left and right. “I don’t want to be here. My home is in Klamath Falls.” Jeri Ziegler bailed out as quick as she could. That big tall procurement officer bailed out. [Adams] bailed out. Ernie Borgman bailed out. They didn’t basically have anybody that showed up at the park, except maybe one or two. Then they transferred the Chief of Interpretation back into the park about ’77 or ’78 (54).

Now who was the Chief?

John, I was trying to think of his last name. He was down at the cluster office almost then years. A real nice looking guy, real friendly, but no power (55). He basically took care of the books.

Did [Ranger] Tech jobs extend into Interpretation, too? (56)

Yes.

The Rangers talk about them as something they would rather forget.

For a while, GS-7 was running the whole interpretation program and that was it. One person had to run the whole naturalist program up there. So you can see why there’s such a period in there where not a whole lot was done. They had a GS-11 at the cluster office who supported the program, but was rarely ever on site. You never saw him except during the training of interpreters.

I suppose that would affect other units in the cluster like Oregon Caves.

The Caves are basically run by the concessionaire, so it’s a concession park if there ever was one. John Miele, bless his soul, is a wonderful man but he wasn’t very forceful (57). I guess he’s doing a pretty good job at Crater Lake, isn’t he?

He’s the Management Assistant.

Oh, is that what he is?

I wonder if Lava Beds had difficulties.

It never really left San Francisco (58). I think it was still being pulled toward San Francisco and the cluster office was trying to operate it. Crater Lake and Oregon Caves were always together.

Ever since the Park Service got the caves.

It pulled away, then it came back (59). Isn’t it under the Superintendent of Crater Lake now?

It is.

It is now?

Yes, with a district ranger at Oregon Caves.

So there’s no Superintendent down there anymore? Was Miele the last Superintendent? What Lloyd and I, and all these old timers keep talking about, is if you’ve seen them once, you can see it again. This is the way Oregon Caves was operated for so many years. Now it’s back under the Superintendent of Crater Lake again. When I first started at Crater Lake that was just normal. It was an extension of Crater Lake. And we saw all those guys. They’d come up for the training. Then a new concessionaire bought out the Chateau and we started seeing them less and less (60).

When Canteen got both operations, there was some interchange of management personnel.

Some of them went from Peyton’s operation and went down there. In fact, Linda [Manning], who’s running the Lodge, came out of Oregon Caves. Chas [Davis] came out of Oregon Caves. I think he’s back at Oregon Caves now.

Glenn Happel was at the Lodge for years and years. I don’t know too much about him.

There’s a real source of information, 25 years. I was at his retirement party. Jim Rouse made sure I got up and gave a speech. He engineered the retirement party for Happel. He and Happel hit it off really well. They had a good relationship. After Peyton left Happel basically became the manager of the whole operation. It was nice to see him retire in glory because he was a maintenance man for so many years and drove up from Ashland.

It seems to have happened so rarely. As far as the concession goes, even the person who owns it wound up generally not in such good straits at the end.

He wasn’t the greatest manager as such because he was basically geared to be just maintenance and stuff like that, but that guy could take two nickels and make ’em squeak. He was always talking about the money he was saving. He loved to do that. I think they saw that in him. He was just a very frugal man, anyway. That’s basically the way he ran it. He has a lot of stories. He goes back into the ‘fifties.

During the Smiths?

Yes.

He and John Maben, as far as caretakers go, seemed to be the most colorful people and told great stories.

Well, Maben could write. His stuff is documented.

I’ve seen his albums in Portland, and they are just tremendous. Some of the best shots anybody’s ever taken of various parts of the park (61).

Did you notice the way he named things? They were very sugary, real romantic. Most of his names never stuck except on paper. They weren’t too successful along that line. He captured the nation’s attention in those reports that he mailed out from the lodge. They would read them on the air, and they’d show up in newspaper accounts because he could write. People were enraptured by a man at the end of the earth with his cat, the caretaker (62).

I remember one of his pictures where he has his feet up on the table. It’s seven o’clock at night and you see a clock. It’s a great posed picture. You see by all this imagery that he had a creative mind.

Any film, negatives survive?

As far as the stills he took?

I mean the negatives.

I doubt it. It sounded like he’d just given it to a relative.

Did he ever marry?

I don’t know. One of his nieces wrote a letter, and I’ll have to read it again and see if he did. He’s referred to as Uncle John. I thing the nice – Matilda Hall of Portland – is probably still alive. She sent some photos to us last year.

In answer to your question, the I&RM division was a trial period. It made sense on paper, but it didn’t make sense anywhere else. Invariably, the Chief of I&RM was a [patrol] ranger. So interpretation just suffered because they didn’t know anything about it.

The whole problem with “posey pickers.”

Yeah, there was always the putdown. That’s how you were able to put the GS-7 in charge, or maybe a GS-9, since all the attention was toward the law enforcement side of the division. In a smaller park, it would certainly make sense. But you would have to have somebody pretty well cross-trained. You are going to have to be able to run entrance stations, you’re going to be able to give evening programs, you’re going to be able to… I was on patrol one day and they called me in. They said you like history, and I’d been typing up my little memos. I was out riding around the rim when they called me on the radio and said please come to headquarters. “Oh no, what’s happening.” I go in and they say, “You’re going to be giving a program down at Mazama in two weeks. You better get working on it.” No training, no knowledge of how you go about this stuff, didn’t even know where the resources were. And I never got around to it and they never got around to it. That was it. But somebody, I guess, had to pass that message on to me that I was supposed to given an evening program. The thought of it, even though I was a schoolteacher at the time, terrified me. Getting up in front of adults was frightening because I was working with kids, and I didn’t want to work with adults.

What were the dates for I&RM?

It would have been from about late ‘sixties to about the middle ‘seventies.

So six or seven years.

Yes. I’m trying to think if it’s George Morrison was Chief of Interpretation. I think [Pat] Smith was the first chief to come back. George was the one that asked me to switch over to interpretation, so I did, and then he left that winter. I guess that was it. I think he was a GS-9. So that would have been ’75. Morrison left in ’76 and Pat Smith came in ’77. There was a wonderful man. He’s at Grand Teton now, but he was there for two or three years. Yeah, he came in as Chief of Interpretation and Sholly came in as Chief Ranger. Betts came in as Park Superintendent, and they had a few others they brought in. But those three set the tone for the park. I forget about mentioning Pat Smith. He did so much. He got new displays going, he got the park movie going, the Crater Lake book, the Story Behind the Scenery. He got that rolling. I was supposed to team up with Smith and do it. I ended up teaming up with Warfield instead. Warfield could get things done. Smith was an idea man, but he couldn’t always carry through on things, Warfield carried through and got things accomplished.

He got that other book, The Mountain That Used to Be, published.

Yeah, he did a lot of good writing on that, a great writer. He could have written that whole Crater Lake book (63). He deserved it, but I’d already been asked by KC Publications, so I guess Ron felt somewhat obligated.

When did the road guide go out of print? Was it first published probably in ’53?

It was out of print by the time I started working in ’77 at the Rim Visitor Center. They called it the IB, and then it became the EB. When I was working up there, it was the EB. Then Smith changed it to the VC. But IB was the information building (64). The EB was just what we called it for years and then Smith just changed it suddenly one day. The name EB comes from the big Sinnott Memorial sign that says exhibits. So that’s how the name got picked up as the Exhibit Building. Then in ’77 Smith got a new sign put out there saying Visitor Center. Then he put it right on the building. He says this will be the Visitor Center. He was great for the kind of stuff. He could just change things. He was that kind of guy, a real man of action. He probably did the best training that I’ve ever seen anybody do for interpretation. The guy really knew how to get the message across. But Warfield was an action man. Under him those publications were just pouring out. He got O’Hara in (65). He and his wife Becky made a tremendous team. Of course, things were in their favor. They had no children. They could devote hours and hours to this thing. And he did. He worked overtime and after hours and on his vacations.

Footnotes:

1. The Crater Wall Trail, which started at Rim Village and went to the south shore of Crater Lake.
2. Concessionaires from 1954 to 1958.
3. Hallock was Chief Ranger at Crater Lake from 1949 t o1953.
4. Robert Benton was superintendent from 1984 to 1991.
5. Equipment operator from 1958 to 1991.
6. Ruth Hopson Keen, who worked the summer seasons of 1947- 1949.
7. Annual leave.
8. Retirement calculations are based on the highest three years of salary.
9. Otto Brown retired as Superintendent from Crater Lake, serving from 1954 to 1961. Thomas J. Williams, Superintendent from 1954 to 1959, later became Regional Director in Sante Fe.
10. Ward Yeager retired from Crater Lake, having served as Superintendent from 1961 to 1964.
11. Building 14, originally constructed in 1954, expanded with an addition [14A] in 1964, reconfigured and expanded again in 1991.
12. Formerly Chief Ranger of Glacier National Park. Sent to Crater Lake later in his career to be Superintendent. He served from 1964 to 1965.
13. Johnson served as Superintendent from 1970 to 1973.
14. Built by CCC enrollees at Oregon Caves in 1937.
15. Presently the office of the Crater Lake National History Association. (this was the original office- left of entry)- Later moved to an opening- left of fire place.)
16. An elementary school for the children of park employees was held in the Administration Building from 1949 to 1963, and then moved to what is now known as the Community Center where it was phased out in 1966.
17. Resident landscape architect at Crater Lake, 1934 to 1939.
18. This feature appears to have been tied to Dave Canfield, superintendent from 1934 to 1937. The adaptive rehabilitation of the Administration Building took place in 1986-87.
19. Superintendent from 1973-1975.
20. This took place in August 1988. A team from the regional office, headed by then deputy regional director William J. Briggle, did the evaluation.
21. Superintendent from 1978 to 1983.
22. Jim Wiggins.
23. The park was closed for three weeks in August 1975 because of the water crisis.
24. Superintendent from 1976 to 1978.
25. Chief Ranger from 1976 to 1981.
26. House 28. Hank is Tanski, who served at the Supervisory Ranger [Interpretation] from 1978 to 1988.
27. The interviewer was hired while Benton served as superintendent, in 1988.
28. Superintendent from 1902 to 1913.
29. Building 222 was built as a school in 1963.
30. Juillerat is a reporter for the Klamath Falls Herald and News who has covered the park since 1972.
31. The Parkscape symbol. Hartzog was NPS Director from 1964 to 1972.
32. A logo endorsed by the Department of the Interior in 1973.
33. Character used to promote tidiness in public lands beginning in 1970.
34. Subject of a popular comic strip in Sunday newspaper.
35. See not 31. The Parkscape Symbol was supposed to better incorporate recreation into the NPS persona then had the Arrowhead symbol.
36. Departmental logo of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Sometimes called “the good hands” emblem.
37. The campground site served as Park Headquarters from 1903 to 1922.
38. The old roadbed, abandoned when Highway 62 and the junction were realigned in 1962. Part of it has been used as RV space for concessions employees since 1993.
39. Opened in 1936 and abandoned by 1970.
40. Known previously as he Watchman Overlook.
41. Actually the second. Building 227, next door to it, was begun in 1957.
42. Begun in 1958 and completed in 1961.
43. Buildings 15, 18, 26, 219, 221, and 226.
44. The Western Office of Design and Construction.
45. The Arab Oil Embargo of 1974.
46. Sloped roofs were added, along with an extra garage, in 1991 and 1992.
47. Newton Drury served as NPS Director from 1940 to 1951, and then headed the California State Parks from 1952 to 1959.
48. The reference is to the entrance signs placed at the north, west, and south entrances in 1970.
49. Winter headquarters was in Medford from 1917 to 1965.
50. The Klamath Falls Group Office was in existence from 1969 to 1982.
51. This extension was proposed from 1926 or so to roughly 1940.
52. Proposed from 1941 to 1968. It surfaced again in 1993.
53. About a mile south of Wilson’s on Highway 62. Presently known as the Crater Lake RV Park.
54. This occurred because John Davis left the group. There was on chief interpreter in the park from 1969, when Bob Bruce transferred, to 1977, when Pat Smith was hired. During that period, supervisory rangers Pawl Crawford and then George Morrison oversaw operations with an I&RM framework.
55. Line authority was vested in the Park Superintendent, not Group Office personnel.
56. The Ranger Technician Series [026], now abolished.
57. Miele served as Superintendent at Oregon Caves from 1974 to 1985. He then transferred to Crater Lake.
58. The park has been part of the Western Region except for the period 1969-1974, when it joined the Klamath Falls Group and became part of the Pacific Northwest Region.
59. Managed by the Superintendent at Crater Lake from 1934 to 1975, and since 1985.
60. Ralph Peyton and the Crater Lake Lodge Company sold to Canteen Corporation of Oregon [later Estey Corporation] in 1976. The Oregon Cave Company sold to Canteen in 1977.
61. The albums are held by the Oregon Historical Society.
62. Maben was the winter caretaker of Crater Lake Lodge from 1924 to 1928.
63. Crater Lake: The Story Behind the Scenery, Las Vegas: KC Publications, 1982.
64. Building 66, initially constructed as a photographer’s [Kiser’s] studio in 1921.
65. Pat O’Hara, the photographer for The Mountain That Used to Be.

Other pages in this section

• Crater Lake Centennial Celebration oral histories
• Hartzog – Complete Interview (PDF)
• Jon Jarvis
• Albert Hackert and Otto Heckert
• Hazel Frost
• James Kezer
• F. Owen Hoffman
• Douglas Larson
• Carroll Howe
• Wayne R. Howe
• Francis G. Lange
• Lawrence Merriam C.
• Marvin Nelson
• Doug and Sadie Roach
• James S. Rouse
• John Salinas
• Earl Wall
• Donald M. Spalding
• Wendell Wood
• John Lowry Dobson
• O. W. Pete Foiles
• Bruce W. Black
• Emmett Blanchfield
• Ted Arthur
• Robert Benton
• Howard Arant
• John Eliot Allen
• Obituary Kirk Horn, 1939-2019
• Mabel Hedgpeth