Robert E. Benton Oral History Interview
Interviewer: Stephen R. Mark, Crater Lake National Park Historian.
Interview Location and Date: Interview conducted via telephone on March 9, 11, 21, and 22, 1994, Oregon.
Transcription: Transcribed by Chris Prout, August 1997
Biographical Summary (from the interview introduction)
Robert E. “Bob” Benton. Crater Lake National Park superintendent 1984-1991. Everyone who worked for or around Bob Benton while he was park superintendent will always remember him. His seven years at the helm (1984-1991) were certainly tumultuous, but also presented opportunities to expand NPS staff and forge new programs. Among the latter was history, a new emphasis which reflected management’s increased concern with historic preservation and the retention of institutional memory at Crater Lake. It is only fitting that the superintendent who supported creation of a historian position in 1987 should become part of the park’s oral history program which began that year.
Materials Associated with this interview on file at the Dick Brown library at Crater Lake National Park’s Steel Visitor Center
taped interview; Notes and correspondence related to the interview are lodged in the park’s history files. Some notes from the interview and photos in file, other file correspondence dates from the period while he was superintendent.
To the reader:
Everyone who worked for or around Bob Benton while he was park superintendent will always remember him. His seven years at the helm (1984-1991) were certainly tumultuous, but also presented opportunities to expand NPS staff and forge new programs. Among the latter was history, a new emphasis which reflected management’s increased concern with historic preservation and the retention of institutional memory at Crater Lake. It is only fitting that the superintendent who supported creation of a historian position in 1987 should become part of the park’s oral history program which began that year.
The following transcription was obtained from four telephone interviews recorded with equipment provided by former computer specialist Dave Somers. It follows from a series of questions which are included as an appendix. Those were formulated in advance so that this extended interview could retain some structure and focus. Notes and correspondence related to the interview are lodged in the park’s history files.
Stephen R. Mark
October 1997
This is an oral history interview with Bob Benton conducted via telephone on March 9, 11, 21, AND 22, 1994.
MARCH 9, 1994
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in South Dakota. My folks lived in Nebraska, but I was actually born in South Dakota. I was raised in the Black Hills of South Dakota, only about 10 miles behind Mount Rushmore.
So you had some experience in Park Service sites?
It was right there. Mount Rushmore was about 10 miles away, and we just accepted it as a fact of life. It was no big deal. Wind Cave National Park was perhaps 25 miles away, and it was a big thing to go down there about once a year for one reason or another and go to the cave or see the prairie dogs. And Jewel Cave National Monument was over in that same neck of the woods, perhaps 40 miles away. As I grew up, Jewel Cave was pretty much in the backwater. It subsequently became a premium area, but it was not very well known when I grew up. We didn’t think much about it.
What is your educational background?
As far as education was concerned, I went through high school and played around at different colleges. I went to Colorado A & M for a while, University of Montana for a while, and actually graduated from a small school in South Dakota, Black Hills State College. I always say that I hung around long enough to graduate.
What was your major?
I graduated in biology. I also had a minor in physical science, chemphysics. I had a major in education, too. I spent about five years in college.
What was the date of your birth?
1935.
And you finished college?
In 1959.
Was it at that point that you had your first appointment with the Park Service?
The Park Service is an interesting story. The rules were a lot different in those days. I actually started as soon as I was old enough to go to work for them. You could go to work for the government at 18. I actually went to work for the Forest Service in the same little town [where I grew up]. I worked for them all the way through school. The Park Service was kind of an interesting offshoot. I happened to know the forest supervisor’s son. We went to the same school. I was majoring in forestry, and my goal was to get into forestry. One evening, when I was over at the forest supervisor’s house, he commented that based on what I seemed interested in, he suggested I might be happier with the Park Service than the Forest [Service]. He obviously had access to my files, and he based this simply on the standpoint that I was more interested in preservation and people than in cutting trees. The jobs that I’d had with the Forest Service, except for the first year, tended to revolve around recreation. For example, for a while I ran 22 campgrounds. I had a couple of lakes that I had to keep track of. So I was more of a recreation-type of person.
Those were all in the Black Hills area?
Yes. Anyway, he suggested that what I really needed to do was try the Park Service. In fact, he suggested at one time that he could wrangle a way that I could go to work at Mount Rushmore. In those days you could do those kind of things. I didn’t do that. I figured that if I was going to try the Park Service, I would try it on my own. I didn’t need any help.
What brought you to Devil’s Tower, instead of Rushmore or one of the South Dakota sites?
It was kind of a serendipity-type thing. I have a major in education and when I graduated I went over into northeast Wyoming and taught school. I taught chemistry, physics, and biology for three years in a small school in Hulett, Wyoming, which is right next door to Devils Tower. So it was a logical step for a summer job, just 13 miles away.
So you were an interpreter that first summer?
Yes.
Were they, at that time, expected to be subject-matter specialists?
You have to remember that the term “naturalist” [means different things] in the sense of the folks that float around Yosemite and Yellowstone and some of the other [parks]. I was never convinced, and have never been, that the subject-matter specialist was nearly as pronounced as people think it was. There were an awful lot of people out there that were interpreters that weren’t “subject-matter specialists.” What they did have was a degree in a biological science or geology. In other words, you didn’t find someone who had majored in law enforcement interpreting. But you might well find a person who was a biologist that interpreted geology.
Perhaps a little more focused than today, as far the degrees go, but not necessarily subject matter?
Exactly. Sure, there were those people who were like Louie Shellback at Grand Canyon, who I suppose in his day knew more about Grand Canyon than anybody. That doesn’t mean that all the interpreters down at the Grand Canyon were [as knowledgeable as Shellback]. For the most part, though, they all had a biological or natural science background.
What were the main changes you witnessed in the NPS from 1962 to 1972?
You are really talking about radical changes that occurred in that period of time. In that early 60’s period, you saw people that were fairly specialized. They had a degree in natural science, both the rangers and the interpreters tended to have a similar background. They could be, for the most part, largely interchangeable. Speaking of the naturalists, the way most people got an interpretative position was to come from the ranger ranks because there were more rangers than interpreters. I played around with that for a while because I truly did really like interpretation. I was hired on as a ranger. I thought of gradually inching over towards interpretation. In fact, I cut a deal with the superintendent at Everglades to do some interpretation as a ranger. The naturalist at Everglades at that time said no way, you were either fish or fowl. You simply didn’t cross over. By the time that ’72 had come around, much had happened. You’d gotten into the technician series (1). The service had expanded very rapidly. There were many more people out there and a larger mission in the sense of the recreation areas. Interpreters were more diverse people than rangers were. There were a lot of things happening in those days.
It seemed like it was happening too fast compared to the pace of change now, which seems rather slow compared to then?
It was. That was exactly what’s happened. Things were very slow to change, and all of a sudden there was this period of massive expansion. Then again, they have kind of gone back now to somewhat of a slow-moving organization. Too fast. I don’t know. I have always been, and the longer I look backwards, a big Hartzog fan. I think that Hartzog, and the team he had assembled with him in Washington, saw better than anyone else the need for moving rapidly. And we did. There were some things that perhaps should have been looked at a little more cautiously, I suppose, but I think it was basically good. I think the service would be far better off today had we continued in that vein. Everybody said that George was not a career employee. Well, maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. But he damn well understood the Park Service from A to Z. Flat understood it. And he did some very important things. As an example, the superintendent was expected to have spent some time in the central office before being assigned to a park. There is no doubt that that was a positive thing. Similarly, a regional director would not be a regional director unless he had been a superintendent. In other words, it was expected that the people that ran the organization, the regional directors or the powers in Washington, had to know what the Park Service was all about on the ground. That was a Hartzogism that people don’t often speak to, but was very true. Now, we end up with a lot of folks that – how was it my Dad used to say – don’t know sheep shit from Arbuckle coffee about the Park Service. And they really don’t.
Did the recommendations of FOST affect you directly? (2) know that had a lot to do with interchangeable rangers and cluster offices. On paper, it seemed to signal a lot of change, but was it more sweeping in some areas than others?
The FOST concept was bastardized from the word go. I was just down the hall from the FOST operation. Basically, it was never put into practice the way that it was envisioned. I don’t know what could have been done about it. I simply don’t know. The problem was the instant filling up of the technician series with essentially professional rangers that the day they got in started hollering to be professional rangers (3). So it never really became a workable technician series. The concept was good. It should have worked. It didn’t. As to how it affected me, probably not very much. You have to remember that some of the things, like the clusters, had been done a long time before. For example, the southwest parks and monuments have a cluster group that’s still in existence in some form now, I think. It wasn’t revolutionary. We operated, for a while, as kind of a cluster thing out of New York when I was at Fire Island. But down at my level, it wasn’t known at all. It didn’t affect us at all.
In the Hartzog years, were you associated with a new area or were you mainly in established areas?
I was the first district ranger at Fire Island. Under that concept, I also was responsible in quite some measure for interpretation. But nobody knew how those lines were drawn. In other words, we had both a chief ranger and a chief naturalist and so the district ranger, which is where I was, was kind of pushed by two different people. You really had, in some ways, two bosses. So it was a little awkward, and interpretation somehow got a little short-shifted. In most cases, it was because the system had never been drawn up in a way that it would work, I’ve always believed that if you’re going to have a chief of I&RM (4), then you are going to take it to the finest point, you often need a district I&RM. You have to subtract that all the way down. It’s very difficult.
Are you a believer in that idea, or would you rather have them separate?
That’s a complicated question. First, we have an awful lot of people competing to get into the National Park Service that really are not equipped to be in the Park Service. They don’t have the right academic background and they don’t have the right seasonal experience. We have an awful lot of people out there that have no business being in ranger uniforms. You do have to have a balanced outcome. If not subject-matter experts, you do have to have people that academically are oriented towards where you want to be. In other words, Crater Lake, within the parameters of ranger interpreters and whatever, really has to have some people that know something about law enforcement. You do definitely have to have people that are sensitive and have a background in biology. You do have to have somebody in geology. You have to have those people somewhere in the mix. And you have to have a historian.
That’s what you were looking at when you were trying to add some positions at Crater Lake?
Gotta have it. Management, be it the superintendent or a division chief, has to have within the sphere of the operation that expertise that you can draw on. It would have to be a viable part. We had to bring history into Crater Lake. We had to have that mix so that it wasn’t totally dominated by any one side. For example, when I was at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, we had an interpreter. It could have been argued that it was a historical area with natural-area overtones, or the other way around. The way that Theodore Roosevelt had dealt with that particular problem, because they only had one interpreter, was one chief interpreter would be a naturalist, the next chief interpreter would be a historian, and the next one would be a naturalist. They flip-flopped trying to keep some sort of a balance. It actually wasn’t too bad. The books in the natural history sales tended to change fairly often. It did work, but far better would it have been if we had one of each. It really wouldn’t make a terrible difference, at the park, who was the chief duck and who was the other one. You didn’t need two division chiefs, you just needed one. But if the chief was the historian, the other one ought to be a naturalist.
Who in WAS0 influenced you the most during your participation in the DMP (5)? What were the things they emphasized to prospective superintendents?
When I went into the DMP, I wanted to break myself out of the mold of “ranger.” There were a bunch of us in that DMP group who came from a ranger background. I had more interpretation than most, because I had seasonal time and as district I&RM I kept my hand in the interpretive business, including getting to go to some of the really high-powered interpretative schools as a ranger. I was the only ranger that ever made that great nine week long Harper’s Ferry school. In answer to your question, I avoided going in and working in the ranger office. They asked me where did I really want to work, and I said in park planning. I really wanted to be a part of the planning process, feeling that as a division chief or superintendent some time, I had to be able to understand how the planning went into the parks and where the parks were. So I put myself in the planning end, so I could go anywhere I wanted, practically. Jim Stewart, who at that time, for all intents and purposes, headed up the master plan work in Washington office. So I worked in that for a while. I learned buckets about how the planning process worked. Some of that is the stuff that’s behind the scenes. A lot of times, in those days, when they gave you a master plan, there were a lot of things that were done under the table or in the back room. Jim Stewart certainly had to be a major player in that. I spent, but not as much as I would have liked to, a lot of time around Howard Baker, who was the associate director of operations on that Hartzog team. Except for George and his deputy, he [Baker] probably was the most potent guy in there. Howard had some perspectives on things that set me in pretty good stead.
That was after he had been regional director?
Yes. There were a lot of folks, but those two kind of stand out as contributing things that I felt that I could use and, in fact, did. When they reorganized the Washington office section, I ended up over with Wilderness Studies. I didn’t particularly like that. Hartzog was one of the people that thought the Wilderness Act as related to the National Park Service was kind of stupid. He didn’t think it was right. But the decisions and the way that the wilderness studies went forward were pretty grim. As a result, we never did get out of the Wilderness Act what might have aided the parks a lot. Well-meaning people are always trying to lay an extra layer of bureaucracy in a park. A classic example might be Crater Lake. Crater Lake’s Organic Act is totally adequate to protect the resources of Crater Lake if the superintendent’s got any guts. They can protect that park. All they need to do is to be able to have enough guts to make it happen. Yet, there was a desire to put some wilderness on top of Crater Lake because it would give it an extra layer of protection. What a bunch of bullshit! You don’t need that extra layer of protection. Okay, that was Hartzog. More recently, in addition to the wilderness area recommendations for Crater Lake, is this nonsense about having a research natural area designation on top of the wilderness area on top of the park area! That was a big thing for a while when I was at Crater Lake. My reaction to that is that no, no we are not going to! There were all kinds of threats made against me and all kinds of stuff. And I said it is not going to happen. You are not going to put that extra layer on here because to do so you are preventing the National Park Service and the superintendent from properly administering that area. You are putting road blocks in that aren’t necessary. If the superintendent isn’t protecting Crater Lake, change superintendents. But don’t be laying another layer of crap on there. Each time you do that, you may lose a modem of control that you need in order to manage effectively the park.
Were some of the wilderness studies and plans complicated by new public involvement procedures that Hartzog put in place?
Absolutely not. I don’t think so. It was mostly a lot time to buy votes and do this and get people to sign up. As an example, they had these clever little ideas called enclaves. You had this big map of wilderness and then you’d have an enclave of development out in the middle of the wilderness. That might be the Sperry Chalet in Glacier. That might be an enclave. If it’s a wilderness area and it’s got a Sperry Chalet in there, that is such an insignificant spot of mankind as not even to be important. Forget it. So it’s there. Just accept the fact that it’s there. Don’t let it expand. But don’t worry about it. Look at the big picture. But they got all excited about this enclave nonsense because that was going to be a big deal. As an example, we lost some very neat historical stuff at Crater Lake due to this crazy enclave thing. They wanted to have these enclaves, and they looked around and whoever was worrying about Crater Lake at the regional or park level, got all worried that Crater Lake had to have all these enclaves where the backcountry patrol cabins are. So they burned them all down. Tore them down or burned them or both. All seven of those backcountry cabins were deliberately destroyed, not because it was ever thought out whether they needed to be destroyed or didn’t need to be destroyed, but they wanted to get rid of them so we wouldn’t have those evil enclaves at Crater Lake (6). How crazy can you get. They were there. I don’t know whether they were good or bad. I’m sure they probably varied some. But we lost them all. We lost a little bit of Crater Lake history that should never have been lost due to this big fear of enclaves.
As far as the program in Washington goes, was there training in various aspects of resource management?
It depended on where you wanted to be. You could structure the thing about anywhere you wanted to go, within limits. We pushed Herbie Douglas really hard for me to work in the Congressional [Liaison] Office. Hartzog initially said that was fine, that was a great deal. But his political people surrounding George thought it was too dangerous to have a fledgling parkie, one of these young upstarts, farting around in the Congressional Office. So they stomped on that in a big rush and I never got to go over and work with a congressman. Eventually, they reconsidered and a group after mine was able to do that. But I was able to work in the Assistant Secretary’s office and I tended to steer myself into those areas I thought at some point might be of interest to me. I spent some time with Les Glasgow in the Assistant Secretary’s office, who was really interested in resource management. So I steered myself in there. But again, I wanted to avoid the stigma of having only the background of a ranger, ranger, ranger, ranger. . . Other people didn’t feel that way. They steered themselves other places.
Were the CPSUs and the organizational structure in support of science developing in the time that you were in Washington?
Yes. They had a different name. One of them was a collaborator. They had way back in the early ‘sixties. I remember we had a couple of just really nifty science types floating around Everglades when I was down there that were getting deeply involved in some of the science programs. A lot of parks have that type of thing, the coop type science things. Universities have been fooling around in and out of national parks forever, I think.
Did you participate in the negotiation of any concession contracts while you were there?
Concessions was a pretty important thing in the parks. That was a superintendent-type thing. It still is, basically, except for the concession specialist. At Everglades we had large concession when I was sub-district ranger. So we were pretty close to the day-to-day operations.
Concessions contracts, no. That was a highly political thing. It had those long 30-year contracts and a lot of dumb stuff that went on, maybe for a reason. But the work-a-day ranger never got anywhere near that kind of stuff.
We touched a lot on concession things and the need for concession-type development when I was in master planning in the Washington office. I spent little bit of time on a couple of cases with Howard Baker on some cute little concession-type problems. You have to keep in mind that in the early days when I was in the Park Service, we had really up-front leadership that was actually doing some leading. You don’t see near as much of that today as you did then. The director was the director.
Is it because of the political nature of some of the top jobs?
People have always said politics and the Park Service is relatively johnny-come-lately. That’s really not true. It’s always been there to a fair degree. There is no doubt, in the Nixon tapes, it referred to the need to get the Park Service under control. Nixon mentioned on one of the tapes that he needed to get Hartzog out of there. This led to a general weakening of the leadership at the Washington office plus, not only the director, but those key players that the director has to have, speaking of the career employees. The same thing [is true1 in the regional directors. Gee whiz, golly. We’ve had some marvelous regional directors in contemporary history. Perhaps one that I felt was the pick of the lot was Lorraine Mintzmyer. [She] was absolutely a superb, tough, real leader as a regional director. She survived up until very recently and they finally got her. It was not through lack of ability. It was just that Lorraine was going to stand there and be counted on behalf of the National Park Service. There were people that did not like that. So they finally arranged some kind of donny brook thing and got her. I don’t know all of the players, today, Some of them, I ‘ m sure, are very, very good. But I question that there are more political animals that, despite their titles, really don’t know what the Park Service is all about.
That is really too bad, and that carries down to the superintendent. You have superintendents that don’t really know what the Park Service is all about. They just don’t. The fact that you have Dave Morris here indicates that Crater Lake is an exception (7). Dave certainly knows what the parks are all about. But there are an awful lot of superintendents that don’t. They are being made superintendents for all the wrong reasons, and I think it is showing. It is showing in areas that you don’t see. It’s is the real leadership that’s going to carry us into the next 10 years. I had thought maybe this Secretary Babbitt might really be able to move things back into a sense of where there was leadership in the Park Service. I don’t know anything about this new director, but the fact that I have heard nothing indicates that he ain’t the guy.
How did funding procedures [PCP versus current system] change for NPS construction projects during the Vietnam War era? Did money for park housing disappear in the late 60s?
No, there never was any. The thing that really happened, and this is pretty harsh commentary on the Park Service, but it’s an absolute fact. You can fight anybody over this. The quality of housing in a national park is directly dependent upon the superintendent’s willingness to have good housing. If he wants it, he’ll get it. If he doesn’t want it, he won’t. Housing, if it’s important to that superintendent, will happen. If it is not important, it will not.
Do you think some of the previous superintendents at Crater Lake expected that move out of Munson Valley rather than try to go for new housing in Munson Valley?
Yes, they don’t give a rat’s ass about housing. It’s that simple. The question of whether you have good housing in Munson Valley or whether you have good housing down at Annie Creek or wherever the heck you want to put it. However you want to do that, and I argued both sides of that. The important issue for me was getting not just good housing, but very, very good housing for Crater Lake, My feeling was that you have to do that if you are going to get and keep good people and keep the faith. Everybody wants to sweep that issue, living at Crater Lake, under the rug. They have never, with rare exceptions, really got out and tried to deal with the problems of why people go nuts at Crater Lake.
And why the turnover is so high?
I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe that’s a good thing. The problem that a lot of folks don’t realize is that they say Crater Lake is not as awful as Alaska. There are areas in Alaska that are worse. There are some studies out there, in the files somewhere, that say something along this line. It said that Crater Lake may be the most difficult area in the National Park Service to live in because of Medford. Because if you are living in Alaska, and it’s awful and terrible, everybody that you are around for hundreds of miles are all living in this condition that is awful. At Crater Lake, it’s awful. But all you have to do is jump in your car and drive 80 miles to Medford and suddenly, it’s nice. And the ability to go out and see what is out there on the other side of the world, and then knowing you have to back into the middle of winter, is absolutely, psychologically devastating.
And that might explain why spring is so difficult here?
It does. The study is there. You have it in your files. The thing is, I used to have a secretary that when, she would freely admit it, at this time of year, every time she gets to the park boundaries she burst into tears. A lot of the times where good friends were punching each other out, and husbands and wives that were happily married most of the time were on the threat of divorce, or one of them thumped the other one, all of that existed early in my tenure at Crater Lake. That stuff is largely gone, I would hope. It was gone when I left. We didn’t have people thumping on each other and getting drunk and. . . That was one of the prime issues in which we had to get good housing and something like the TV system or the movies. All of those things really had to get in there if we were going to compete in the real world. Because the morale issue at Crater Lake was just pretty awful. There were people that had to whip off every year for a tour with AA. . . and there were lots of strange things happening. According to this study that is there, the reason was the fact that you could get out and see summer, like I’m sure Medford is today. Yet you knew that you had to back in the middle of winter. That’s one of the reasons we worked very hard at having a good place to live, good working conditions, the tools to work with, and so on. This just reminded me that one of my mottos was that National Park Service people are not second-class citizens, so by God they aren’t going to live like it. And we didn’t.
The question that you asked earlier was about housing money. It’s a big misconception. Superintendents love to do this. They love to say I just can’t get money to fix up the housing. I remember a classic from my predecessor. He couldn’t get money to shovel off the roofs at Steel Circle. So he had to round up everybody out of the office. They had to go over there and get people to shovel off the roof. What a bunch of bullshit! The reason that they got office people over there to shovel off the roof at Steel Circle was because the superintendent did not place enough priority on getting the roof shoveled off. It’s that simple. No arguments.
One of your priorities was to expand staff enough to where we could get a lot of these bases covered. That seems like it is a related theme, the fact of getting funds, just like the housing?
You do have to hustle a buck. There is no question about it. And there are ways to hustle a buck and there are ways to hustle a buck. And part of it is through the person, and part is just through the planning process. In other words, they can go clear back to Connie Wirth (8). He used to say, “1 know, by gosh, some day there’s gonna be money to develop the national parks. And I’m going to have the plans on the shelf so that when that day comes and there’s money, I’ll have the plans done.” I think that probably this is not totally as altruistic as it may sound. I think he also was a planner by nature, and he had an awful lot of landscape architects and architects around the Park Service. But the point is, he did do a lot of planning.
One of the things that we did in every area that I was superintendent of, certainly Crater Lake, was we had plans. We had plans for everything. And we worked really, really hard at making sure that that planning was in place. You’d be surprised how much money we got at Crater Lake because we had plans and some other area didn’t. I used to manage to screw some of the other parks out of an awful lot of coin because I had the plans and they didn’t. So when there was money around, late in the fiscal year or any other time, I happened to have a plan where I can use that money. With the proof, all we had to do was go and build it or go do it.
Was that one of the reasons that you were appointed superintendent at Crater Lake, because you had had a history of getting plans that would be effective in place?
If I had to say why was I given the job at Crater Lake, I would say that I probably got the job for two reasons. I think the more important one was that I had a history of cleaning up really bad messes and getting them straightened out. I had done that in a series of jobs. They were pretty awful places, getting them straightened out and getting them running right. And then the one that you mentioned.
Did you expect to stay at Crater Lake as long as you did when you first took the job?
No, I didn’t. I probably stayed there about two or three years too long.
Did you look at what you set out to do in something like a curve, where you peak at a certain point and then it levels?
I think there is that. There is no doubt that you lose an edge. There is no doubt about it. You only can tilt at a wind mill so many times when you no longer are enthralled by tilting a wind mill. It also probably requires another set of eyes, looking at it from a different direction that may accomplish the same thing but from an angle that you never ever, ever would have considered.
I think I was probably two, maybe three years, too long at Crater Lake. Crater Lake had to be one of those type of areas. Other areas that I had been in, you could see that those things that really needed to be accomplished were going to be accomplished within a do-able length of time. Crater Lake was simply so big, so immense in the number of problems that had to be addressed that there was absolutely no way that any one superintendent was ever going to be there long enough to get it all done (9).
Did you know Jim Tobin from before?
No, I didn’t. I had met Tobin on a number of occasions. I knew a little bit about where Tobin was coming from. There was no doubt, I think, that Tobin was uncomfortable with the manner in which I went about some of the things I did. There is no doubt about that.
Was his death a real setback to the program?
Not a bit. He and Briggle were at absolutely opposites ends on the scale. Briggle was Briggle, and Tobin was a far gentler man. There was absolutely no doubt, as it related to Crater Lake, what was necessary to be done at Crater Lake. There was also no doubt that Tobin was uncomfortable with the way I did things. But not the results. He liked that.
Had you ever had an assistant superintendent prior to arriving at Crater Lake? How has such a position worked at CRLA?
No, I had not had an assistant superintendent. Second, an assistant superintendent, at the time I was there [at Crater Lake], was a pretty good idea. I really like Elaine Hounsell. She’s a real gutsy lady and she did some things. I got along well with Elaine. The flip side of that is that we were an awful lot alike and probably that is a mistake. You probably don’t need two Elaines or two of me in a park at the same time.
Two different styles over the long run is an advantage?
Yes. Contrasting styles would have been a real advantage. I think, I don’t know where Odegaard is coming as it relates to his superintendents. He no longer has the mediating influence of Briggle. Whoever this new deputy is, as I understand it, is essentially a political hack. Odegaard does not need that. Odegaard needs, himself, some park people in there, and he didn’t have them when I left, except for Briggle.
As far as regional office support, were certain people really helpful, in operations or design/construction?
Okay. The operations folk, i.e. rangers, on a scale of value to Crater Lake from one to 10, were about a two. Interpretation was variable. Certainly they had some interpreters in there that were of some help. History. Toothman and some of her people in that section were of a lot of help (10). There was no doubt about that, The big one is the planning. The Dan Babbitts of the world (11). That was a tremendous asset of being at Crater Lake. No doubt about it.
Which park policy areas did you target for change when you arrived at Crater Lake? How many could you address in your first year here?
First, we had to get the people on board that we didn’t have before. We had to get those people on board that gave us the ability to compete in the National Park Service. And we didn’t have them. We didn’t have them in the ranger division, we didn’t have them in interpretation, we didn’t have them in administration. We had Frank Whittaker in maintenance (12), but that was all, We had nobody else around him. We had Elaine. We simply did not have the horses capable of competing in the National Park Service. We had some. I’m not saying every single person. I don’t mean that. But as a group [we had problems.
Okay. When did Jon Jarvis arrive?
He was there when I got there. Jarvis was absolutely invaluable (13). Absolutely. He set the stage for many wonderful things that we see today at Crater Lake.
And you had to have the infrastructure to be effective?
Yes. And there wasn’t much around him. So we had to have the people on board, capable of competing in the National Park Service. We’ve already talked about housing, I think, and having good places work. We had to have housing. We had to have equal focus on places to work. You can’t expect people to work in a damn tent and we had some pretty awful stuff. It was awful. Talk to Maureen [Briggs] sometime and she’ll tell you about how awful things were (14). And they were.
That’s where the rehabilitation of the buildings came in?
Yes. We had to have buildings that people could work in. If you remember, the ranger building, the one they are in now, wasn’t occupied (15). Rat Hall was kind of it because the Headquarters building was an absolute abomination (16). We had to have those things with which to work, whether it be – my God, we didn’t have a good typewriter in the Headquarters building! We did not. We had a couple data point computers, but we did not have a decent typewriter in the Headquarters building, let alone anywhere else in the park. That’s how bad it was. It was buying typewriters. It was buying computers. s&e. We had to have tools to work in the shop. Hell, we didn’t have tools down there. We had to have cars. We had to have equipment. So that was the thing. You had to have people. You had to have places for people to live. You had to have places for people to work. And you had to have the things that people work with.
March 11, 1994
How were CRLA and Oregon Caves associated between 1980 and 1985? Did they share staff after the group office closed?
No. As far as I can figure out, there were a lot of funny little things that happened with Oregon Caves. when they were part of the group office, I think that, by and large, the group office really did kind of take care of Oregon Caves pretty well. I don’t think they left them out to dry moneywise. I think they did okay. In retrospect, looking back at it from my perspective, they did not pay enough attention to it on site. In other words, people really did not watch what was happening over there to the degree they should have.
Was there much assistance from Crater Lake?
None at all. We had nothing to do with it. The problem, from a regional perspective at least, according to Briggle and Sarff, there were some really awful, awful problems at the caves (17). Of a magnitude, according to Sarff, that there was absolutely no choice but something radical had to happen over there. There were three obvious options. One was to continue as it was with probably a new person at the helm. Two [was] to put it under the auspices of the U.S. Forest Service and let them run it. Aztec Ruins is a national monument, which is a park area, I think it’s Aztec, is a precedent to that. There is another Park Service that’s run by the Forest Service.
Was that seriously considered?
I don’t know. From my perspective, and I was kind sick of that whole mess, it wasn’t a very good option. But Sarff, on the other hand, is an old Forest Service guy and he spent a lot of years with them. And I think he felt it was a viable option. And the third one was to leave it up to Crater Lake. I had been a part of, actually, a number of those kind of areas. We had little interlock with New York City at Fire Island in the last month I was there. We ran detached areas out at North Dakota when I was there. We had Fort Union Trading Post. Not only that, but we had Theodore Roosevelt, which was divided into three areas. So they in some ways became almost like satellites. And Colorado Monument was part of a cluster. So I had probably an unusual amount of experience, of the goods and bads, of those type of link ups. So I was up to my ears when the decision was finally made that we would run it. The agreement, which I hope to heaven is kept waved in front of Ackerman and the superintendent all the time so that they really realize that that’s the way it has to work, was very carefully crafted (18). As an example, George Buckingham has absolutely no control over the ranger functions at Oregon Caves. Nor does Kent, nor does anybody else (19). It’s strictly an advisory-type thing. That’s one of the dangers of the clusters is that the larger area retains dominance in every field more than an advisory capacity. That’s probably the niftiest document that was ever written, in my opinion, to make those kind of areas work. And I think it says it well when the fact that it’s been borrowed by 10 or 12 other areas with similar things. They are using the same agreement now.
I know it was pretty successful, in my case, when region kicked some money loose for projects rather than a situation where there was no money and I was picking up those duties.
That’s right. It worked well. Oregon Caves, after the group office broke up, had to have some real bad problems. And we had nothing to do with it. It created a little heartache for us, occasionally, because we were often thought as the Park Service in southern Oregon and some of the things that went on over there used to give us a little bit of trouble.
Was Frank Whittaker already here [at Crater Lake]?
Yes, Frank was there. I don’t know how long he’d been there. Frank was one of those really good individuals that had absolutely everything that he needed as far as attitude and stuff to make just an absolutely excellent chief of maintenance. He didn’t have as thorough a background as he would have liked to have had, and he had nothing around him to help him. He was it. Kathleen Conlon was a big help, but he just simply didn’t have any horses at all. That probably was the sorriest maintenance crew in the National Park Service, and that made it awfully, awfully difficult for Frank. That wasn’t his fault, you know. He inherited all that stuff.
On the theme of external relations, I came across the Klamath Indian hunting case of 1984. Were you directly involved in that? That seemed like it had a lot of pretty big-time implications if it had gone the other way?
It never was probably nearly as serious a threat to Crater Lake as a lot of people thought (20). e Indians did not want to take on Crater Lake in the court case. The one that they took on and lost, they felt they had a lot better chance to win. It was pretty obvious that didn’t want to get arrested.
They wanted the publicity?
Oh, yeah. There is no doubt about that. I know they queried us, and said what are you going to do when we show up there with our guns and all that stuff. We said we’re going to write you a citation just like we would write anybody else. “What, do you mean that you’re not going to arrest us and haul us off to jail?” We said hell, no, we don’t do that. We’re going to write you a ticket, we’ll write you a citation. So they decided that wasn’t worthwhile, either.
That could have been bad. I never worried nearly as much about that as other people did. They just simply would’ve, probably, set the whole Indian movement way, way back. And it might have set back their tribal ambitions, which, of course, they subsequently gained [Federal] recognition (21). But that might have set those back simply from the standpoint that you go futzing around in America’s favorite political entity, i.e. the National Park Service, you’re likely to get burned pretty bad. People may demonstrate at the Statue of Liberty or something, but they really don’t want to take on the national parks. Basically, we’re too popular.
So they would have preferred another federal agency or the state forest or something?
If you’re going to pick on the Park Service, let’s don’t pick on a national park, let’s go pick on a national monument, Oregon Caves or something.
I also came across, again talking about external things, about the moving of park headquarters to Prospect. How serious was that?
We looked at it as a viable option. The only thing that really made sense, taking into account the historical resources that we had there at Munson Valley, was to do what we ultimately did. However, we were asking for an awful lot of money, in terms of housing and shops and buildings and so on.
For the Munson Valley option?
Yes. We spent a lot of money. So obviously, you better look at some other things. So we looked at it. Would it have worked? Yes, it could have worked well. The largest loss, of course, is once you move the key staff away from the action, so to speak, you lose contact with the problems of the park. I have seen that happen all too many times, even in areas that I have left. I moved out of a park for a while as superintendent at Colorado, and all of a sudden things that were happening after hours that I would have gone out and looked at or been a part of on scene, I didn’t do because I didn’t jump in a car and drive the extra mile. I simply didn’t do it. And we [at Crater Lake] would have lost that. And that’s a huge negative in terms of park operations.
Did you talk to Briggle at all, concerning his experience at Mount Rainier and his moving out of headquarters from Longmire (22)?
No. We never touched that. I don’t remember ever talking [with him] about that. The other thing we would have lost is, ultimately, through benign neglect if you will, all of the Munson Valley historical structures.
And that was certainly a selling point to the historic preservation people.
As I told you, history had to brought into the foreground. It had to be made a viable part of the Crater Lake operation. It just had to. So therefore, to sell down the river all of those wonderful historic structures would have been a real tragedy. That would have been the other big negative. Politically, it would have been kind of nifty and living conditions probably would have been a little better, although I’m not so sure of that. But you think of the amount of the things that we did put into the area, like the satellite television, living at Crater Lake isn’t too bad anymore.
Was Sleepy Hollow part of the equation as far as whether to move out?
One of the options we played around with that really is a beautiful, absolutely magnificent design. In fact, we thought of taking all the Steel Circle housing and making it seasonal and moving the permanents over to Sleepy Hollow and building new stuff there.
I saw the site plan, and it certainly accommodates that with the garages.
Oh, it would have been wonderful. Did you see the drawings or the model or anything?
No, I didn’t see the model.
One of the concepts, I don’t remember where that is or whether we ever even had pictures of it, was instead of duplexes was quadraplexes. And the quadraplex would have been in the form of a square, four separate buildings, all joined, but in the form of a square with a central courtyard. And the courtyard would have been covered. The whole structure would have had one great, big, huge roof allowing moveable panels so you could get light in. And you would actually have a common area courtyard in the middle where the kids could go out and play all year long, under a roof. You could grill outside and all that kind of crap. It was a wonderful, wonderful design. And that was a real hot alternative for a long time. 1 think there’s only one reason that that never happened. Tobin thought it was awful.
Why?
I don’t know. It just struck him wrong. The day that that presentation was made, he did not like that. Not one bit. But many of the rest of us did. But that’s as far as it went.
I can see a lot of advantages in flexibility.
It would have been wonderful.
Could you give me some background about the concessionaire’s development down at Mazama Village?
Basically, the concession at Crater Lake was a complete disaster. The concessioner was not willing to put the type of quality and what not into an operation that we were going to have to have. We thought that there was a tie in, a little thin, between the Crater Lake concession and the stuff in southern Utah, which I was imminently familiar with. We thought, early, we were going to do, and come with, a high quality concession operation at Crater Lake, similar to what’s being done in southern Utah. However, that never really happened, T suspect, for a variety of reasons. The concessioner had been given the campground down there on a trial, and the trial was an abject failure.
So there was a period the government had run it?
Oh, yes.
So it must have gone back to the government and then to the concessioner.
The bottom line was that it was an abject failure. [There was] absolutely no question it was horrible. So, I had put together a pretty good argument to take that back. I had everything lined up, I thought, politically and every other way, so that we would get the campground back at the end of this trial. Briggle, I talked to Briggle one time, and he said you haven’t a chance to do that. He said “It’s going to stay with the concessioner and there’s absolutely no way you can get it back.” I said, “Bullshit, of course I can get it back.” He said, “No, the director takes a very personal interest in this and he’s fully aware of what’s going on, and he’s personally decided that it will remain with the concession.” So, you don’t fight the director.
This was Dickinson?
No, this was Mott. And so we went over and we signed it away. And Briggle flat lied to me. There is just no doubt. I don’t know whether he was not knowledgeable and was just blowing smoke or whether he just flat told an untruth. But, on the contrary, Mott was absolutely adamant against concession ownership of campgrounds, including Crater Lake’s. He was absolutely, totally against it. But by then, the ink was on the paper.
I would have thought so because of his experience in California (23).
I was sold a bill of goods. Bill was an old friend. I like Bill, and I just can’t believe it of him that he would deliberately lie. So somebody may have steered him wrong, or who the hell knows what the agenda was. Only time will tell how, in the long range, that will work.
As far as the concession operation down there, it can work, it can work very well. There were things that I didn’t like that happened late in the ball game there, but that really isn’t the issue. The issue is, can it work?. Yes it can, and it can work well. It only depends on the players on both the park side and the concession side. The key. . . we lost a lot when we didn’t get that second lodge up on the rim (24). We lost a lot there, despite the money. The money would have been relatively easy to get. That wouldn’t have been too difficult. I don’t know what decision went into it. If Crater Lake was ever to achieve the grandeur and the statute that it deserves, something like that had to happen up there, That was really a decision made that I questioned. I don’t second-guess anything, but that one I do. The other thing is, will they carry out the original intent of the old lodge, which is to rebuild it. Will they really stay with the intent? If they stay with the intent that was so carefully drawn on that, that will be an ever stronger and stronger and stronger concession operation because it will develop a heritage, such as the El Tovar or the Ahwahnee or something. But who knows? I haven’t any idea what Dave or any of the people there now think.
Do you think that the complexity of the planning, since it takes place over such a long time horizon, is going to complicate things?
You know, again, we hark back to earlier questions in which I spoke briefly about leadership. If you have leadership in the places you need to have leadership, that really understands parks, yes, sure it will happen. If you end up with people that are not true leaders, that are really not committed to a cause, then perhaps not. [When] you have prolonged planning that goes [on] over a long, long, long period of time, it’s more difficult. That’s right, because you have to have more time to take potshots at you from all sides. Which is where you get into the leadership role. Is somebody going to stand there and, you know, and say the hell with you? You’re damn right we’re going to do this.
The thing is that we had some good political friends. They ranged all through the state and they ranged into the feds. I don’t know where those are now. I worry a lot about the leadership in the regional office, because I don’t see it there. I see that more as a political agenda, somewhat self-serving, as opposed to a commitment to a cause.
Do you think it’s hurt somewhat by Seattle being so far away and there may not be the commitment because we seem to be secondary [to the needs of other parks]?
No. You’re only secondary if you want to be secondary. In one sense, the political process can only help you because you can make life so damn miserable for them. If you want to sit back at Crater Lake and let the world go by you, Seattle is going to be very willing to let that happen. They’ve proved that for a bazillion years. Obviously, the area around Portland is more central [to political power in Oregon]. But if you want to sit back and let it go by, they’ll sure let you. Again, are you going to get in there? Every time you stick your nose out, every time you assume one of these leadership roles, you’re going to get burned. There’s no question about it, You’re going to get slapped around and you’re gonna get burned. And you’re going to get criticized, and a lot of people don’t like to do that. Being a superintendent is not a pleasant life if you want to do it right. It may be wonderfully self satisfying, but not pleasant. You take a lot of abuse.
Was there a lot regional office support for the changing of the road system back to a two way?
Absolutely not.
So that was really a park-driven decision?
It was a superintendent-driven decision (25). The road went one way for a while, then it went the other way one way for while, then it was this, then it was that. It’s changed a million times. But nobody never ever went and looked at it. So hell, we just went back and got hold of good maps, and we had the state look at it from the standpoint of safety of vehicles and two-way traffic. And we got the federal highways to look at it. They said it was no problem. So, if it ain’t a problem, then let’s go do it.
So that would underline your point about going ahead and not letting the world go by?
Yes. If you just like to sit down there and let it happen, it’ll let it happen. But if you want to go out there and say, “Well, bullshit, let’s find out what the truth is.” The truth was the road had its problems, but there was no way that it could not effectively be used as a two-way road. Once you had that, as a fact, not based on some idiot superintendent, but on people who know highways, then, heck, once you have that go do it.
Yes, I found that road survey and it’s very good.
Yes. No big deal. But again, you know, there’s always somebody going to say, “Oh, you can’t do that. Oh, oh, oh, you can’t do that.” Then, of course, you can do that. All you need is the facts. If the facts had said don’t do this, then we wouldn’t have done it.
Did you have any contact with some of the people that had been superintendent at Crater Lake before, like Frank Betts?
I stayed away from Frank Betts (26). Frank pushed very hard to put his kid, who had lived there, into Crater Lake. I was not about to buy into that type of concept at all. That makes no sense.
And I suppose that there were other people that would go further back, like Don Spalding?
Let’s stay [with Betts]. So I always kind of stayed away from him. I know Frank, but that was never a part of it. I talked to Don Spalding a couple of times about some issues over the years. And one person that I talked quite a lot to, on a number of occasions, particularly as it related to wintering over and use of the historic buildings and how people survived and so on, was Len Volz (27). I spent quite a number of hours talking to Len about the period of time he was here. He wasn’t here all that long, but Len had an unusual insight into people and problems. He was a pretty fair regional director. 1 had known him when I was superintendent at Colorado Monument. He had been regional director for a while there for me. And he was unusual, which gave me a chance to ask questions, and to get some insights, that I might not have trusted from some other [person]. Einar Johnson. No, I don’t think I ever talked to Einar.
And I suppose that there were other people that would go further back, like Don Spalding?
Let’s stay [with Betts]. So I always kind of stayed away from him. I know Frank, but that was never a part of it. I talked to Don Spalding a couple of times about some issues over the years. And one person that I talked quite a lot to, on a number of occasions, particularly as it related to wintering over and use of the historic buildings and how people survived and so on, was Len Volz (27). I spent quite a number of hours talking to Len about the period of time he was here. He wasn’t here all that long, but Len had an unusual insight into people and problems. He was a pretty fair regional director. 1 had known him when I was superintendent at Colorado Monument. He had been regional director for a while there for me. And he was unusual, which gave me a chance to ask questions, and to get some insights, that I might not have trusted from some other [person]. Einar Johnson. No, I don’t think I ever talked to Einar.
What were the major differences in the interpretive division at Crater Lake between 1984 and 1991?
Okay, when did Kent come?
’86.
Warfield wanted to be a writer (28). Hank Tanski certainly knows what an interpretive program is, and had some things going for him (29). There is no doubt about it. I still think the world of Tanski. His problem was that he had been at Crater Lake way, way, way, way too long. Any time a new idea or a new thrust or something came up, Hank would go into cardiac arrest. Of course, Kent was hired, first, because he would get out of his naturalist mode. He can run a good interpretive program and he is not bothered by the fact that he’s a historian by background (30). at we had to do was to get Kent in there and get him some people who could work, and come up with a good program. Which, of course, he has.
That was one of the reasons you put history and museum under interpretation?
Right. Absolutely. You put it all in a nice package there. I like compartmentalization to the extent where you try to put like functions where they belong. I felt, at that time, and now this could change in future time, but T like that concept of being able to wrap all that stuff into one person or one division. I thought it worked admirably, at least from my perspective. I was most pleased.
March 21, 1994
When did you first see the need for historians in natural areas?
I don’t think that these things just instantly happen. It was pretty obvious when I was at Theodore Roosevelt, in a natural area that had historical overtones, which most parks do, at least any of the older ones, you have to start considering that history plays a really important part in the park itself. You may not think it does, but the Park service has now been around for long enough that it’s creating its own history. Beyond that, almost all of our natural areas had a history about them that pre-dated the National Park Service. So as far as I was concerned, it was something that we needed a long time ago. I used to try to hire, within the confines of the seasonal ranks, some people that had some knowledge or interest in fields other than the traditional ranger, interpreter, or naturalist.
To try and balance out the staff?
Exactly. It became obvious, even though Colorado Monument had been around for a long time and it really didn’t have the numbers [of historic resources] perhaps, where you could justify a historian. Bryce Canyon, a fairly old park, but again it didn’t have as much human history as a place like Crater Lake.
I was just going to ask you about Crater Lake in particular. It seemed that, with all the turnover over the years, you didn’t have anybody here that had been here, like so many of these natural areas where a person often plays that role of historian.
That’s absolutely true. As Carolyn, my secretary, commented at one time, she thought that the minute I transferred out of Crater Lake the big turnover of the past would stop (31). I laughed and said no. A lot of people might have thought that, but that isn’t the way. . .Crater Lake is destined to be that type of a park. We can improve things, through housing and offices and equipment and stuff like that, but you’re not really going to eliminate that. You’re going to have a rapid turnover because of the living conditions. They’re so horrible.
We have to start chronicling, which you are doing very well, the history of a park and how it evolved. I think now that we’ve established that within Crater Lake, I think that will continue. I know that other old line natural areas contacted me, oh, gosh, several of them, about how in the world did I ever pull it off to get an historian in there. And how did I see it and why, the same type of questions you’re asking. So I think that we are going to see those, if they haven’t already occurred, in other natural areas.
Was the backlog of project work a factor? It seemed like, before you showed up, very little had been put on paper.
Crater Lake had just been allowed to go to hell, you know, in a word. We had to do things, and obviously, we needed to start looking at the total resource. We talked a while back about the travesty of the Wilderness Act, and some of these things that constantly threaten good park management. That’s not an assist to park management. That’s an enemy to be fought. Those we really have to watch carefully. Had there been a historian on board at the time that Superintendent Rouse, I think it was, decided to destroy all the back woods patrol cabins, that never would have happened (32). There would have been somebody saying, “Hey, wait a minute there, superintendent, you can’t do that.” So you do have to have the protection of a person with a historical bent. It comes to mind. Bryce Canyon, as a park, located as it was in a limestone area, actually had a limestone cave in it. It wasn’t much of a cave, but it was a cave. It was a true natural feature of Bryce Canyon. And some superintendent decided that, gee, that thing could be a safety hazard and filled the damn thing up with tons and tons and tons of rock. So here’s this park, as a natural heritage, and to some extent the history of the park, and it’s destroyed. So you can’t always trust superintendents.
That’s something which should come out in the documentation somewhere?
But it never did. It’s not there. I found it out because I knew the old farts around Bryce Canyon.
And Bryce doesn’t have an administrative history, does it?
It didn’t.
Okay. How did Crater Lake’s come about? That was something you were interested in?
Sure. Absolutely. I felt I had to proceed on every front possible at Crater Lake because it was in such awful shape. You really had to move forward. If you had taken the normal, lackadaisical Park Service approach, Crater Lake, you know, would remain in the dark ages. We had to go and push on every facet throughout there with an awful lot of aggression. But we did not proceed on Crater Lake with any sense of diplomacy or delicateness. We simply didn’t do that. If I had it to do all over again, the only thing I would have done is probably done it even more so. We were only gonna get one shot at that. We had Tobin, and we had Briggle, and we were only gonna get one real crack at bringing Crater Lake into the modern age, kicking and screaming. We had those folk, as well as real good movers and shakers such as Dave Babbitt and Stephanie [Toothman], even in her lesser role that she used to occupy. So we moved fast.
The only thing I think that really failed miserably was that crazy visitor use perception survey (33). We just pissed away an awful-lot of money on that and it never should have happened.
I know that my predecessor was hired in 1987 (34). Did you have Kent here first in order to get the historian position up and running?
Oh yes. You have to start somewhere. You can’t really just go in to a guy like Ron Warfield and say, “Hey, guess what? I’m going to get you a historian.” You need to work on it.
What were your thoughts about the museum collection? I know that tended to go back and forth between resource management and interpretation. Was that part of the history equation?
As far as I was concerned it was, that it definitely should stay the hell out of resource management. I think that belongs in history, belongs in interpretation. Unless you’re in an historical area, where the major thrust of the park is history, you are not going to get the credit for such things as museum collections from people of a biologist background. It ain’t gonna happen. You really have to have that person with a sensitivity to history in order for that to go. I don’t know. I hope it’s still in interpretation.
It is.
Good. I’m glad to hear that because it would fall through the cracks. They might stand there and say how wonderful they’ll take care of it, and how important it is to them, and maybe it would be – for maybe one person. But I even would doubt that. Two years would go by, and all of a sudden it would be eased to the backburner. And the first thing you know, it would be gone. The worst thing about that is, of course, you might lose a resource because it suddenly gets packed up and stuffed in Rat Hall (35). That kind of crap.
Who lobbied for the park library? I look at other parks and we have an unusually nice library situation that’s, of course, connected somewhat to our museum collection, and they really work well together.
First, you have to have the physical facilities. Most parks don’t have good libraries. I think they miss it. Every park that I’ve been in the library was kind of always a shirt tail thing. It wasn’t all that bad at Bryce, As an integral part of the planning, we had to have a facility. Because, again, how the hell do you have a library if you haven’t got a physical place? So that came in at the very early stages of the planning process. hat was the first building we did (36).
. . . and you saw the opportunity to have really a nice library?
Oh yes. That’s the only way you’re gonna get it. We had the room. We were able to carve out a significant piece of turf because there was no competing interest for it. In other words, the rangers knew they were gonna have something down the road, the ad people knew they were going to have something down the road, et cetera. So here we could take this thing and we had space to do something right. We saw an opportunity, so let’s go after it. We did. From there, once you have the facility chosen, all it takes is money.
As usual.
But that’s relatively easy to get, you know, between the associations and the government.
We have been in an unusually good position because we had a nice budget for books.
Oh yeah, that’s right. We have a good association now with good balance and good spread, and I’m sure that’s continuing. But again, see, we didn’t have much in the early days. In order to have a good association, you’ve got to have a good board. We did not. I’m not saying they were bad people, but often Warfield used them to publish, as opposed to that really viable, wonderful board that we’ve had these last few years.
So there were some changes on the board?
Oh, radical. Oh, yeah. I don’t think there’s anyone around there anymore that was on the early [board]. You have a great board [now] .
Yes, they’ve been very supportive.
That’s right, and they didn’t have an agenda. They recognize why they’re there. I’ve always been really, really grateful that they have done what they have. They never gave me quite the money to do all the things I wanted to do, but I can’t blame them for that.
Was Bryce’s board an independent association like ours is?
Yes. At Bryce we had a good board. That was okay. [It was a] totally different clientele. You weren’t going to get that wonderful cosmopolitan board that you get in a place like Crater Lake. There’s Roseburg, Klamath Falls, Medford, and Ashland that can be drawn on for potential candidates. You aren’t going to find that in an awful lot of rural areas.
I know that in talking to the Lava Beds people. They have difficulty recruiting board members.
I can’t speak for Lava Beds. Who’s super there now?
Craig Dorman, who came from [the Eugene] O’Neil House.
I would just bet this. You put Kent Taylor in there in the position of authority and see how damn long it would take him to have a good board. And you’d find you had a good board. He would do that.
To what extent were you involved in the lake research project? I know that began slightly before you came. . .
Well, yes, but nothing serious (37). There was no question it was gonna die when I got there. It wasn’t gonna go anywhere. We were very fortunate there. There were other people that have taken some more credit, perhaps, than they deserved about that early lake program. But the mover and the shaker there was Jarvis. No doubt about it. Jon worked hard at putting together the elements of the first good program. I spent a lot time with Jon because Jon knew that if he didn’t have the superintendent on board on that from day one, it wasn’t gonna happen, particularly when [he] tends to be as outrageously outspoken as I am. So I was up to it clear to my neck, as it were.
Was Gary Larson involved from the beginning?
Gary was an absolute delight, and again, there were other people within the framework of the Pacific Northwest Region that didn’t realize what an absolute gem we had with Gary Larson. A lot of superintendents, including me, look at some of the CPSU types as not an asset at all. But, goodness sakes, Gary Larson was a gem, and not everybody realized that within the framework of the whole region. I did, because I had pretty good contacts where Gary came from. So as a result, we knew that we had a real gem from day one there. We were standing there clamoring very early in Gary Larson’s tenure.
Did the lake program come about in similar fashion as history, or were there some different circumstances?
We had a really good issue and an excellent resource with which to work. We had the players, in place, that were going to support it. We had good people within the park. We had Gary Larson. We had Jim Larson in the regional office (38). Not everybody really realized what a godsend Gary was, Where other parks of more stature than Crater Lake might have started to grab a hold of a lot of Gary’s time, they didn’t. So we were in a position [where] we had the project, we had the resources, we had the people, and the money is easy.
Were you involved with the day-to-day on that geothermal issue?
Absolutely. There was nothing [that] ever happened on the geothermal issue that I wasn’t aware of. If there were, and I found out later, I’d have had somebody scalped. I had to know, practically minute-by-minute, object-by-object, that whole doggone program. That had to happen. And that was such a tremendous political issue that I had to know blow-by-blow.
Our problem there was [Charles] Odegaard’s total cowardice (39). He is such a political animal. When that little tutti from the Reagan Administration – he had several tuttis in that program – would call, Odegaard would absolutely go into epileptic shock. Since he doesn’t have a park background, he didn’t know that he could go to the wall with those bastards and win (40). From his standpoint, if one of those lackeys – and that’s what they were, Reagan lackeys – called him up, he didn’t know that he could tell them to go to hell. So as a result we were constantly trying to respond to Odegaard’s worries about Admiral Murphy. Well, who the hell is Admiral Murphy? He’s nobody. So he’s a lobbyist for Cal Energy (41). This guy isn’t anything. You can beat him to death with one or two phone calls. But Odegaard worried about that constantly. He fancied himself the great politician. And don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of good things to say about Chuck. But he is a political animal and we needed more guts. We would’ve won that, no matter what. . . We never did have to use the real big guns. I had people that I could have called on back from the days of the Alton Coal controversy that I won at Bryce Canyon. I had people that I could have called on that we could have hammered [Cal Energy] if we’d have had to. We never did.
