Vic Affolter said that there was a lot of dissention between permanents and seasonal.
I was there answering the telephones. I was there at dispatch center when all these newsmen were calling. So I saw all this happening. When the park was closed and nobody was supposed to go in, Sims would sometimes go down to the gate and pick people up and show them around the park (23). Newsmen, cameramen and people like that. He did try to help people out. I guess he felt bad with the park being closed and so he’d do things on his own. Sims went out of there just absolutely stripped of his career, everything. It was horrible. As for the Chief Ranger they gave him an opening, “Okay, you want to go there.” He’d turn them down. Finally, Cape Hatteras came open and they offered it to him and he said no. They said you have no choice, and he was jerked out of the park with his four or five kids. I think he was made a district ranger at Cape Hatteras. The following year we went by and visited them and spent the nigh.
I think it was a period the guys up in the park were trained in the field. That was before the Park Service really had good training programs for people that were coming up. You had a kind of limbo, and these guys really didn’t know. They were bureaucrats and that was about all they were.
And then Betts Who cam ever forget Frank Betts? (24) And then Sholly what a combination (25). Those guys were so professional. Betts and Sholly would get into it. I was telling you a little bit on the telephone about that. They’d scream and yell. You’d hear them in there just going around and around. Nobody was going to give up on this. But at the end they were friends. And I’d see Sholly tearing into Frank. Frank was not going to get away with this. “What does that man think?” They had their cat fights, but it was wonderful. The park just soared under these two guys. The euphoria with the seasonal and everybody working up there. These men could walk on water. They couldn’t do anything wrong. It was a wonderful feeling.
I was going to go back and finish that story on Einar Johnson. I was working on my Crater Lake history a lot during that time. I’d have a few spare minutes toward midnight and I’d typing, looking things up, and so on. I had it laying on the counter where you talked to people. I was going through doing something and Einar picked it up and started flipping through it. In it, I had the date for the loss of the dark woodwork in the building. It said, as I remember, “The dark woodwork is painted over after gracing the building for x amount of years.” I saw Einar’s eye stop at that. He didn’t say a word. He looked up and pulled out his pen and scratch, scratch, put his pen in his pocket, and walked off. So I left it out of that particular edition, but I put it back in there again after he left. That was censorship, but I had put a dig in there.
