How about demolishing the lodge? I know that Dickinson had to go in front of Weaver at one point in ’84, but I’m not sure if that was before you got here?
The thing about it was, of course, if you’re making judgments based on dollars, to redo the old lodge made absolutely no sense at all. It was made out of crap the day they built it, and 60 years didn’t do it any good. So once the decision was made that we were not going to tear it down, and the Congress and Senate [went along1 with it and said we’re going to fund it, then, heck, let’s go for it. The only question is to do it as absolutely well as possible, so that when we’re done with it we have something that the National Park Service and the people of Oregon can stand there and hold its head up and say, “There ain’t anything better than this.’! I suspect that’s about what it’s going to be, isn’t it?
I think one of the keys behind that is having pretty stable supervision. Did you meet Ray Todd?
Oh yeah.
Having him here for the life of the construction project has made an enormous difference.
That was one of the things that I spent a lot of time with. We had to have an absolutely super person in there, and we had to be able to count on him year after year after year after year until it was done. And we got it. I hope, and I just assume. . . I can’t imagine anything that could have changed that dramatically. . . I suppose that next year when you open that thing up, it ought to be just an eye-stopper, comparable, I always use comparables, except for its newness, it ought to ranked right there with the El Tovar and the Ahwahnee. It won’t, but it certainly is in that parameter of a really nice, elegant lodge.
Were there substantial changes in the number and type of seasonals employed at Crater Lake between 1984 and 1991? Did the numbers fluctuate at all?
I don’t remember. We moved numbers around a lot because that might have made perfect sense at one time did not always. All of a sudden you had a larger RM program, you all of a sudden had fire programs. You had a lot of other little tangential things coming at you. I don’t have any idea where that’ll go. You’d have to look at the numbers.
