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.
