They would have been Permanent staff who would have been in here.
No, they were seasonal, too. There could have been permanent secretaries that came up from Medford. But I’m a little hazy on how many secretaries or female workers there were that came from Medford.
Ethel Wilkinson was the only one I know of who was Permanent and she stayed, I think until ‘47
To get back to the duties a little bit, it sounds like we did nothing. That’s not true we did a lot of things. A lot of it had to do with shoveling places out and keeping fire hydrants shoveled out all the time. We had to take the weather every day. The weather station at that time was down by the firehouse. I think that it now is back behind the Administration Building. But it was at that time by the firehouse and we had to climb the snow bank and then trudge back to that to take the weather every morning and then every afternoon. It sounds like a small job, it didn’t take too long. But it was a job that we had to do. There, even in the forties, there was paperwork to be done. There were reports to be written, like the Chief Ranger’s monthly report. In those days, there was a Superintendent’s monthly report that went from the Superintendent of each park, to Region, and then went on to Washington.
Now that was curtailed in the early fifties?
No, it was later than that. Because when I was in Washington in the sixties we were still getting monthly reports in; it was curtailed during that part of the time.
We have very good records from the National Archives for some of the stuff, but after ’53 it’s really difficult to talk about the following decades.
Well, I’ll be darned. I used to write the Superintendent’s monthly report at Bryce. A good deal of it, and that was ’56-’58. I’m quite sure that we’ve still got them, because they would be circulated in the Washington office and I was in the Washington office from ’66-’69. But I think it stopped before ’69. They decided it was a waste of time. It was a waste of time.
