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.
