I had not met Betts when he and Sholly came that winter [of 1975-76]. I had gotten a heating bill for close to 100 dollars. They billed us after the fact in those days. They didn’t use a stick, they’d just come in and kind of look and estimate about how much oil you used out of your tank, and that’s how much you got the bill for. It was not very scientific. This bill was close to a 100 dollars and we had run the store for only three days. The rest of the time we used wood. I used it the first three days to get the cabin dried out; this was in one of the stone houses. So I called up the local furnace man and described the stove, which was one of those old little flame-type stoves. “How much heat would it use in three days?” And he said, “Probably ten dollars worth of oil, maybe less.” I wrote back to the park and I said this doesn’t work. I don’t see how it could be close to 100 dollars. There has got to be a mistake. They wrote back and said they’ve checked their records. You know how people are, they checked their records, sure. The have no records to check. “We have examined this thoroughly and you do owe this amount of money.” So I wrote back saying “I don’t feel I should be made to pay something that I don’t feel I should pay.” A fiery letter came back saying you will pay or else. So I said okay, wrote out the check and left the letter on the table and my wife [Linda] took it down and mailed it to the park. She goes around to our box there was a letter from Bett’s nephew, who had lived right across the road from us. Well, he lived in Hank’s house (26). We were living in 24. And he also had a high bill. This is the superintendent’s nephew. So he’d written the park and had gotten it reduced. So my wife reads the letter with this good news that the park reduced the bill. She went around to the window and asked for the letter back that’s going up to Crater Lake? So they found it in the mail and gave it back to Linda. Again, this is how little can changes the direction of your life. I got home that night and Linda says “The Nelson kid got his changed.” He was just married and had a little baby, same size house and everything. So I said, “I don’t think we should pay this thing. I think they still make mistakes.” So I wrote the fourth letter. And that’s when I found out about Mr. Betts. I got a letter about two or three days later. I opened it up and I was fired. He had gone to the files and changed my evaluation, which I found out later was illegal. But he changed it to no rehire after I had gotten high marks. He changed it and put me on the non-rehire list because this letter, which just smoked when you picked it up. This man was wonderful, but boy, this whole story is to show what kind of man Bettts was- very professional, but don’t ever get a letter from him. I cried when I got done reading that letter. Here I’d worked for the park for about 17 years and I suddenly was without a job for the summer. I was being disgraced. I was being thrown out for something where I was right and the park was wrong. I was absolutely devastated. I went over and looked up my brother first thing and I balled. I was 35 years old and I thought I’d lost my career with the Park Service. Lloyd still had his job, and we agreed we’d go up and try to talk Frank out of this thing. We went up and met Sholly for the first time. Sholly says let’s go see Frank. See what he can do about it. So we went into Frank’s office and talked. It was real stiff. He still hadn’t figured it out and he wouldn’t back down. So he got up, shook hands with Lloyd and said, “I’m sorry you’re not going to be here next summer.” Lloyd says, “No, it’s him.” So Lloyd almost got fired instead of me. I left absolutely crushed because I’d had a career jerked away from me for no fault of my own. We’d been talking about traveling back east, so that was the summer of ’76, and it was the Bicentennial. It was a good year to be on the road. So we took off. We spent the summer traveling.
