Did housing affect the quality of seasonals available?
Yes. Absolutely no doubt about it, it does. This business of the old Park Service adage that we can get the people to commute from the surrounding communities does not work in a place like Crater Lake. For the same reason that we needed really good, high quality housing for the permanents, you need that same thing for the seasonals. If a guy is a good ranger, interpreter, maintenance guy, or whatever, and hopefully he brings his wife, or his wife and kids, and he comes out there, you can’t throw him in some of the things that we used to throw people in and expect him to be happy. This is not 1940.
I never saw the old Sleepy Hollow because in my first summer there were trailers there. That was still being occupied when you came on?
Oh, sure. Even the house torn down, down there by the campground (72).
The Annie Spring house.
It was just awful. It was just absolutely a travesty. It was so bad that I played around with the idea of reestablishing the old tent frames. Actually, because the houses were [so bad], tents would have been better. And you have to have it. You just simply have to have decent housing for your seasonals. The same thing is true for concession. You’ve got to have places for those young people to live if you’re going to attract the quality and the continuity from year to year to year to year that you need to make it happen.
Were the Coldwater cabins still being used when you came on?
Yes. It seems like we shut them down one year (73). That was more of a political thing to force the concessioner to get off his behind. Those were pretty awful.
What amount of discretion is granted to a superintendent in following the recommendations of an operations evaluation? I know some things happen on a time line and others don’t seem to happen.
I don’t know. I’ve always tried to separate out from the operations evaluation those things that they’re really saying they want done, those things that they think would be nice, and those things that they put on paper but really don’t feel very strongly about. Sometimes it’s very difficult to do. I, quite frankly, ignored an awful lot of that stuff. I always did. I did it in every area I was in. I didn’t ignore anything that fell into the list that they really wanted done.
