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.
