Would he have objected to the Fire Fall?
I don’t think he really objected to the Fire Fall. But he recognized that these things didn’t really have a place if you were going to protect the area as a national park. I used to be a ski racer when I was a teenager. The concessionaire saw Yosemite as ranking with Sun Valley as a ski areas and these were the two biggest places before the war, except for the areas in Vermont. Father didn’t think this belonged in a national park and I believe he was right. It may be all right to have a minor thing, but to try and pattern Yosemite after St. Moritz in Switzerland was too much.
This type of promotional activity might explain why downhill skiing was popular at Crater Lake for a time.
I think that’s a good point. During the period that Newton Drury was director of the Park Service there was an attempt to move away from having the parks be attractions for things that they are not really set up to do. Badger Pass in Yosemite has no relation to the values of Yosemite Valley such as the glaciation, the geologic scene, or the Mariposa Grove. These are the feature for which the park was preserved. The ski program at Yosemite has actually expanded since the war. It isn’t in competition with Aspen and Vail and places like that, but for California it is still a major ski area.
What sort of problems would your father have dealt with as regional director in San Francisco?
I think that he covered a lot more territory than regional directors do now. He probably dealt with a lot more mundane problems. They are much more complicated today.
Was your father interested in state parks at that point?
Yes. This continued from what he did in the 1930’s. I remember the Mount Diablo projects and can remember coming to Oregon at about that time, but don’t remember the specifics. I found a lot of correspondence while doing my state park history between Dad and Sam Boardman that concerns the management of CCC projects in Oregon. He certainly was involved with planning for awhile because his name appeared on a lot of the things as the top administrator. He didn’t have much of a role at Champoeg. Some people in his office were working on those projects.
I’ve noticed that he took some slides of that area. They are in the stat library.
He was also involved with parks after his retirement. He went to work with Drury at the Redwood League office in San Francisco. Father worked as a consultant and did this until a few years before his death in 1981. Drury worked until a couple of weeks before he died.
