By “recreation areas” was that a Park Service concern that managed those areas? Were they kind of predecessors to National Recreation Areas?
Yes.
But that’s actually a later designation.
But they were getting jobs for these people, so at that time they created the Assistant Chief Ranger job here. Now it should have been created a long time ago, so I don’t mean that this was an excess job, it was something that we should have had. So, I could stay in about six months, I think Lou came and probably in about March, April, something like that, 1949. And Lee and his wife came along in probably the latter part of the summer, maybe August, and the combination was just great. And the whole tenor of this area up here, of personnel, of morale, just changed completely. It just proves what people can do. Lee and Lucille were very gregarious people and they were square dancers, too. And they had children. They had two girls and they were about school age when they came here. See, we had no school here at all. There was nobody who had kids here of school age until they came along, so Lucille started her own school in the room at that center dormer, the first one this way, I guess, it’s the one right over the main entrance. That was the commissioner’s office in the old days. Now we had no commissioner in my time, but it was the commissioner’s office.
So before that Jean Steel had left. Apparently Frank VanDyke came sometime in the fifties…..
Steel was gone, we did not have a commissioner, so it was at that period of time. So we turned that room into a school house and used that for a school.
Jean Howe: There was one other child that was school aged. She had three children in school and then she’d take the pre-schoolers for one hour a day, too. So she had quite a nice little school up there.
Our oldest son was old enough by that time, let’s see, he was four, Kindergarten, and so he was in on that, too. And those kids have actually slid out of that upstairs window down off the snow to get out of there. You see, there was snow all over the place. And let’s see, we had another Permanent Ranger that came on for about six months. His name was Gene Earl. Oh, I better continue along with Fitzgerald, ‘cause Fitzgerald didn’t last too long after Lou came. His ways got curtailed real quick like. Lou was just a strait arrow. And Lee was the same way and instead of me being the down trodden one, Fitzgerald became the down trodden one, because he was the one that was out then. So he could see the hand-writing on the wall, he could see that things weren’t going too good. So as I say, this was into late ’49 and early ’50, and he decided that he’d go back to school and become a doctor. Well, he must have been almost 30, must have been 33, 34, something like that, not young to start becoming a doctor. We thought he was crazy to do so. He had a nice wife, real nice. Helen was a real nice gal. But anyway, that’s what he decided to do, so he’d given his resignation just before the summer season set in 1950. And that’s when we moved from the small house up here down to the log house down there (17). Because he had lived in that log house all of the time. He enjoyed it all the time it had been here, from ’46 on. So that’s when we moved down there. Well he quit, somewhere along there we got another permanent ranger. His name was Gene Earl. And Gene is probably around somewhere yet, because I’m sure he was younger than I am. He is in one of these pictures you have here. He was a misfit; you know, not everyone is destined to do everything, and Gene was one of those persons. And I think he screwed up almost everything he tried to do as a permanent ranger around here. But he was on an appointment where he could be terminated in six months. Now it’s my remembrance that his wife or friend, someone or another, was related to Mrs. Leavitt. And I think this is the reason he was up on. Nobody was very enthusiastic about it that knew him. And we didn’t put him on, but political pressure put him on. But political pressure wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t hard felt enough I guess, to keep him on after his six month period when he proved that he was not a ranger. And again he may be very successful, he may be a millionaire by now, this I wouldn’t doubt, but he was not a park ranger and that’s the point I’m making there. You just can’t do everything, that’s all. We had a lot of other personnel up here.
