What necessitated the creation of a staff ranger position at Crater Lake?
A staff ranger has the ability to work on ranger-type issues without being wrapped up with operations. First, as a sub-district ranger, it was my goal to get every damn thing I could for my sub-district, even though the other sub-districts may have had needs that were as great as mine or greater. As far as I was concerned, hell, I wasn’t objective about that at all. I wanted it. I wanted everything he had. As a district ranger, exactly the same thing. As a superintendent, my goal was to have it in the context of competing for money. So having a person who is a staff ranger, this is a person that can deal on ranger issues for whatever is needed without being locked into a district or a sub-district or law enforcement or resource management or any piece of turf or function. That is nice to have. It’s a very good role for a chief ranger to have. I don’t know how George is using these people, you know, but as a chief ranger I would have loved to have had a staff ranger. I think they serve a real good function.
We talked about maintenance quite a bit before and some of the pressing needs. Did the needs seem to shift substantially through the time you were there?
Yes, of course. Basically, what we’re really talking about in a lot of ways is reconstructing an operation during the early days. If you have a brand new building, it doesn’t require much maintenance. In fact, one of the bigger arguments that I had in this thing was the need to have a full-time janitor. Lon Ryder, I don’t know if he is still around (52). There was a big reluctance on behalf of the maintenance folks to say, no, we don’t need a janitor. We have one of the guys come up from the B&U crew (53). Well, see, that doesn’t do it because you don’t need anything with a brand new building. You go in there and sweep the floors and dust the furniture and that’s about it. But as that facility gets older and older and older, you have to have the mindset built into the maintenance operation so that the buildings are maintained. And you start that with a janitor.
