Sure.
Had that water crisis occurred under any other superintendent, it [the problem] probably wouldn’t have gone to the extents that it had. He just was not in control of anything, he just wrung his hands. This thing kept coming down on him and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. During the hearings in Medford, [Senator Mark] Hatfield came to find out really whose fault it. “It wasn’t me officer, the other one was driving.” Everyone was blaming Peyton and Peyton was blaming Sims for not taking action. Well, every time Sims tried to take action, Peyton just ran over the top of him because Sims was so mousy. Have you ever watched Mark Hatfield in operation? He is wonderful, like a double-barrel shotgun going off. You watched how this man commands attention. And he was there from nine in the morning until about eleven o’clock that night in this hearing, and parading witness after witness through this. It seemed like it was in the afternoon in the Medford City Hall. Sims finally came to the witness stand. It was something to watch. Hatfield absolutely undressed that man in public until he just left a pile of protoplasm.
I don’t think he had any preconceived ideas about Sims. I’m sure he’d heard about him. But he said, “Where’d you come from?” “Oregon Caves.” “What did you do over there?” “Blah, blah, blah.” “Okay, so you came to Crater Lake. What was your training?” Sims said, “I didn’t get any.” He says, “Well, was the superintendent there to show you around?” He say, “No, the superintendency had been vacant for several mouths when I got here. I just came and took over.” And then Hatfield just lit into him. He say, “You mean to tell me that nobody trained you for that job?” “No.” So then he got into the “Well, how come you didn’t close the park down when people started getting sick?” “Well, I didn’t think it was this bad.” Sure, you see in hindsight that for Hatfield it was really easy to look at this thing. But Sims said “I didn’t think anybody was that sick.” And then Hatfield exploded. He says, “My God, man, did you want somebody to die first before you took action?” But when he left the witness stand, poor Mr. Sims was just devastated. He was absolutely stripped of anything and he was out of Crater Lake in a matter of weeks, along with the Chief Ranger (22).
