Wayne R. Howe Oral History Interview
Part Two
So it was very much a working uniform?
It as a working uniform, except in those days we had no working uniform such as you has now. In other words, we had a good uniform and then we didn’t have anything. And there wasn’t anything, as I recall, we might have had a ski cap, we must have had a ski cap. But we had no real wintertime uniform and we had no real work uniform except straight Levis.
Do you think the stricter uniform standards may have something to do with the bureaucracy expanding so that then it becomes much more a military…?
I imagine you’re right Steve, on that part of it. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. But I think you’re probably right.
Because the sixties had that tremendous explosion in units.
That’s right, and I don’t recall whether the stricter uniform regulations came from the top or whether they worked up from the middle part. I suspect that Frank Kowski may have had something to do with it because he was quite active, of course, at the training center. And he was also very much interested in uniforms. So I think maybe he had something to do with it. Although I’m not trying to lay blame on him, that’s just my feeling that he may have had something to do with it. And I’m not saying it’s all bad. Some of the uniform was not, it wasn’t suited. I know it was when the women’s uniform was just starting in. And boy, some of the fights and arguments we had. Because, in all fairness to the men, they obviously didn’t know what a woman wanted in a uniform, but we couldn’t get a women to say what she wanted in a uniform either. So they didn’t know whether they wanted “airline hostess” uniforms or bright color, or what they wanted. It always seemed like they’d turn around and blame us for trying to put them into a uniform which they didn’t want, so it got to be quite a hassle for a while. But I think that we have turned out now a pretty good looking uniform, which of course is a continuation of what we had in 1946 and 1947.
Well, to go back to Leavitt. He drove around in a big black, I think it was a Chrysler; it was a government car, of course. There probably wasn’t much work to do in the first place, but I don’t think he ever stayed in the office after about 4:50 at night. You could see his car going up the hill to the Superintendent’s residence, which was just dedicated last week (14). And he took very little part in what was going on here. Now in the wintertime, he and his wife would usually come up here about twice during the winter. They tried to get up here shortly before Christmas. I genuinely think that she was really interested in what was going on up here. Now Ernest Leavitt might have been the same way, but it’s not the way it affected me and it’s not the way he affected a lot of people.
Jean Howe: He’s just more reserved. She gave Christmas gifts to every child in the park. One Christmas she made Christmas stockings for every child in the park. She was just a very nice lady.
She was very nice. Now they had an apartment, the building is still there, it’s the building that is right behind the fire house, where the steps go upstairs, and I don’t know what’s up there now if anything (15). But is there still a wooden building this side of the machine shops and everything?
Yeah, there’s a machine….
Well the machine shop and the garage and everything are all a new building. But on this end of it isn’t there still a wooden building of some sort?
Yeah, there’s a small wooden structure there.
It has an upstairs to it?
The old machine shop?
O.K. the old machine shop. Well, upstairs there was an old apartment. I don’t know if there is still anything up there or not.
Well there’s a skeleton of an apartment and different uses.
Well, the first winter I was here, we used that as the chief ranger’s office up there. Because Carlisle [Crouch] wanted to get out of here. He thought it [a first floor office] was too dark because the snow did come down. See, our Ranger office was over in the southwest corner of the Administration Building.
Bottom floor?
Bottom floor, yeah. And that middle part of it was the chief ranger’s office and the bigger part of it…which is what now? It’s a coffee room or something of the sort, is it a lunch room?
Yes.
O.K. that was kind of a bull pen for the permanent rangers, which I say was two, and at times three. But this apartment, when the Leavitts would come up, they would stay in that apartment. Now they would usually come up again in March or something like this. And sometimes they would stay overnight and sometimes they would stay a couple of nights. So this was usually the size of it; they would come up twice during the wintertime. And that was the only thing that we would ever see of the Superintendent during the wintertime. Now, the chief ranger at that time was acting superintendent, and I don’t ever imagine that it was designated this, but he was the Acting Superintendent up here at the Park. So he would have to go to Medford occasionally to talk and to conduct business down there. Right after the war, Carlisle Crouch stayed through the first summer and through the next winter, and I think he left probably in the spring of 1947, something like this. And he went back to Assistant Superintendent at Blue Ridge Parkway. I don’t know if Carlisle is still alive or not.
Well, as far I know, last year he was in Tucson.
Oh is he? O.K. He had a son, Jimmy, and a wife, Thelma, and I think I heard that she was dead, but I’m not sure. Well Carlisle, I thought, was a good chief ranger.
He and Leavitt seemed to get along very well.
They probably were the same type of person, in that they were both old enough to have started back in the twenties sometime with the Park Service, you see. And Carlisle, he was kind of standoffish all right, but he was a real nice guy and he wasn’t too darn stiff and he wasn’t strict. He could be all right. I don’t think we would have ever been very good friends, you know, real close friends. But he was a good man to work for. When he left, by this time there had been a man here before the war named Clyde Gilbert, who was just a park ranger here. He had started out as a park ranger in Yellowstone and he had skied, to hear him talk, about 1,000 miles at Yellowstone, by the time he got through it was about 5,000 miles at Yellowstone. And that was one of his principal topics. He had a wife and he had a small daughter, so he was not taken into the army in WW II until late in the war, so he did not get out until early ’47. When he came back, he was appointed acting chief ranger. Now he and Leavitt in conjunction both tried to get him on as chief ranger. We know that this is a fact. That he and his wife were having problems at this time, probably the time he came back from the service. Well, I sure before that time because of some of the stories he told us later. And she said that she would not seek a divorce until after he got this job, if he got the job. Leavitt was a very straight-laced individual. He certainly did not approve of divorce. But anyway, Gilbert was employed finally as chief ranger. And about this time things started to go from bad to worse as far as personnel around here was concerned.
Now Clyde had a girlfriend down in Medford. He was free, as far as his conduct was concerned. But the woman that he was squiring around down there was the wife of a man who owned a music store. And it was supposed to be a real friendly sort of a platonic situation. But she would come up here sometimes, and this could be summer or winter and stay up there at the Chief Ranger’s house [House 28] for as much as three days at a time. Her car was parked out in front, so we knew she was living there, and everybody around here knew she was there. And the superintendent could not have helped but know she was there because he drove up and down the hill in the summertime and saw her car parked there. I’ll allude to this later on. O.K., it got to be sure hell around here because I happened to be the low man on the totem pole. Now and again I know that this sounds like sour grapes, but I’m telling it as I remember the situation.
The other permanent ranger, Dewey Fitgerald, was not exactly honest. Well I better go on with Gilbert…one at a time! Clyde would go down, he’d say, “I have to go down to the office down there”. His days off were Thursday and Friday. The reason they were Friday was because he was a great football buff and he wanted to see Medford High School play on Friday night. ‘Course they didn’t play on Friday night but he still wanted to be there. So he took Thursday and Friday off. He would go down on Tuesday in order to be at the office on Wednesday, to conduct his business so he could have Thursday and Friday off. Well it doesn’t take much of a mathematician to figure out how many days he would spend at the park. He would usually be there, and sometimes he would not get back until late Saturday afternoon. And it got so that sometimes he would not get back until Sunday morning and he would leave on Monday morning. And he was our chief ranger. And at that time there were three of us here, three Rangers. There was a chief, Fitzgerald, and myself. So again, you can see what the damage was as far as getting your work done. One day he was still squiring this gal down there and it was getting pretty hot and heavy. He was on his way down to Medford. I don’t know if you remember, but there is a ranch down there that has a big white fence around it. It’s about, it’s probably a little over half way down to Medford. But a woman ran out in the road and flagged him down and says, “My husband’s having a heart attach!” He went in, the man, as I recall, was dead at the time, and of course he was the shoulder for her to lean on. Well, I mean she was the sole heir of this ranch. Clyde immediately changed his love life to this woman and he married this woman. But in the mean time, the woman in Medford thought that she was very badly jilted and she went to the superintendent and started to raise all kinds of charges. One of the charges was that Clyde had used the station wagon, the government station wagon, for immoral purposes.
Well I know this is the case, I mean there is no question in my mind about it. When I say I know, I didn’t see it. But anyway it got to be a real investigation. Leavitt got them in from San Francisco, our chief legal man from San Francisco, who was kind of an old time lawyer and tough as nails. And he had practically everyone in this park over in the Administration Building questioning about what we knew about it.
This was NPS or Interior?
This was NPS. And I was implicated, and I use that word very lightly in a way, because one time the girl from Medford was coming up and she and Clyde were going across over to Sliver Lake, somewhere over in there. Presumably she was kind of a writer or something, it was a book kind of a deal she was going on, and so Clyde sent me down to the west entrance to make sure that she got through all right. I had gone clear outside of the park on the orders of the chief ranger, of course, and escorted her. “Well why did you do this type of thing?” were some of the questions that came through. Well, after this was all taken care of, Clyde was given the choice. He could either face charges, or he could resign quietly and he could get the heck out of here. Well he resigned quietly and got out, believe me. And Leavitt had the gall to call all the park people together up here and just almost plead with them, as to why we hadn’t told him about this. And here he was going up and down the hill all the time with it right in front of him. He could have not known that it was going on. And there’s a lot more to Clyde. He used to come down when we used to live down at Annie Spring, and he told stories.
Jean Howe: No, we were up here by then.
Well, he did it down there too, honey. But we were up here yes, he’d come in and he’d sit and talk to me.
Jean Howe: Almost every night he’d come and see us.
And he’d tell stories about when they used to ski up here in the early part of the war. And he had some gal down in Fort Klamath that he was squiring too, and he was quite a character. He is dead now. I don’t know what all happened, but he was driving a logging truck the last I knew about him. And he died of a heart attack, I think, later on after that time. I think he died way back in the fifties sometime.
So he was here during the war?
He was here part of the time during the war, probably in ’41, ’42. I don’t know when he came from Yellowstone but it probably would have been in ’41, something like that and he probably went off in the service in late ’44, something of that sort.
Well, there are a few events that we don’t have much on, like the downed planes in the lake and when, I guess people were coming from the various military hospitals during the war.
I’m sure that they did because they certainly used Yosemite that way. But this I don’t know anything about because I wasn’t here, and Jean worked her before I did. She worked up at the concession in ’42, when they had to close for the tire situation.
Jean Howe: Yes it was only about six weeks that the lodge was open that year. They had to close early because they were not getting travel. And so we closed at the end of Jul, I guess. They didn’t open ‘til the middle of June.
So the C camps already closed by that time. There weren’t any workers around at all?
CC camps were pretty much gone.
By ’41?
Now there was one at Tiller. I know because I can remember my father and mother, and Jean and I, after we were married, while I was on furlough for a time going up to CC Camp up around Tiller. So, that was in ’43, but it was in the process of being closed down at that time. There were only a few administrative people around.
We’ve got a list of campus, actually. One of the Forest Service Historians has gone through and at least gotten a list of names.
Yeah it would be real interesting to find some of these people that were heroes, to get some information from them. Now I’ll get back to Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was kind of an arrogant son-of-a-bitch and pardons my words. He lived right across the street from us. How he decided to make some money was, see we required chains a good deal of the time with Annie Springs. We kept a truck down at Annie Spring with chains on it. It was a fairly light truck, only about a two, two and a half, three ton truck down there…we would load it up with gravel, and it had chains on it, and we could pull people across the hill. Because the road went up from the entrance station, it went up like this, went up and made a sharp curve and then went up to the top of the hill (16). And so, in going around there, people would get stuck quite frequently and we would go up and hook up and pull them up. You wouldn’t think of doing something like that now, but we did in those days. But anyway, if you came up there and we had snow on the road and it was one of those days that we did require chains to go up to the rim, why there would be people come up from Klamath Falls. The sun might be shining down there and the sun might be shining up here, but still, if it was right after the storm you had packed snow on the road, and you had to have chains on. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make it, but you were worried about what someone else was going to do. So we required chains and the guy would say, “Well, Fitzgerald got a hold of several sets of chains, some of them which he got out of the winter house down here and he had them hanging at the entrance station. And he said, “Well gosh, we just happen to have a set here and we usually get a dollar out of them but if you want them, why you can got put them on, why, I’ll help you put them on.” He wanted to help put them on and off they’d go up to the Rom and they’d come back they’d give him back his chains and he made a dollar. He made enough money out of chains down there on government time and government chains to buy himself a movie camera and a screen. And he told me this. So, I’m not guessing at this part of it.
Course in the wintertime the Lodge completely closed up and they kept a caretaker up on about the third floor, I guess is where it was. I can’t remember were it was, I think it was on the third floor apartment that the caretaker stayed in. He was an old fella; this was in the last two years ’48-’49, ’49-’50. I don’t remember who did it the time before. His name was Ole and I don’t know what the rest of his name was. He was deaf at that window there. Fitzgerald got on the right side of him and Fitzgerald carted off steaks and roasts and turkeys and this kind of stuff and they ended up in his deep freeze down at Annie Springs. So he didn’t have to buy much food. Now if I sound bitter, I am not bitter anymore. I was bitter at the time. And it wasn’t because we weren’t getting it, but because it was just plain, wasn’t right. And very frankly in the era of about early’48, I would have gone to the Forest Service. I would have quite here and gone to the Forest Service if I had a forestry degree. I just about had it.
Jean: Mostly because of Gilbert, I think.
Yeah, it was mostly because of Gilbert. It was just, it was getting so rotten that it was really a tough place to work. And of course it was known all over this area up here. I don’t know if the people in Medford knew what all was going on but everybody was a close knit group and everybody knew what was going on here. And they knew that he was not doing anything and they knew what his carrying ones were and they were just plain disgusted with it. Now fortunately, after they got rid of Gilbert, Lou Hallock came in. Lou came here from Lassen, I think. I think he was the district ranger and it was just like a breath of fresh air. We started having square dances. We used to square dance in this building, the Administration Building. The back room there was the chief clerk’s, it was the clerk’s office and the chief clerk was at the far end there.
Jean: Big room on the first floor.
Is it that same open area that’s there now?
Yeah. It seemed like it was twice as big in those days. But we had two squares in there. And we’d put kids to sleep in the superintendent’s office, which was in the southeast corner over there.
First floor, instead of second, where it is now.
And it was carpeted, it was the only room in the place that I think was carpeted, and we probably had about a half a dozen kids sleeping in there while we were square dancing.
Jean: [Lee] Sneddon came within about another two months.
Lee was a District ranger down in Lake Texome which is in Texas. It was one of the first recreation areas, and it folded up and went over to the Forest Service or the state, I don’t remember which. And so they were finding spots. John Rutter, who was my Regional Director up in Seattle, was down there, as were several other old timers.
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.
Some of the names, Doc Ruhle. I don’t think I mentioned to you, one of the reasons why Doc didn’t seem to get along with other people, or with the ranger force so much was that Doc was gone so much. Doc’s a good man. I think Doc is still alive. He was in Washington at the time I was anyway. Which is a long time ago, but I think he’s still alive. And he’s a very smart man. Very, very smart man, but he would go off for days at a time. Now I suppose that Leavitt knew where he was. But we people didn’t know where he was. And because you don’t know where a person is, and you don’t know what he’s doing, you think he’s goofing off. So, it just wasn’t a good situation.
Now the Clerk was Ray Stickler, and Ray later became chief clerk up at Olympic. He was there when I went to Olympic. Then he finally became superintendent at Whitman Mission. And in the midst of a prostate operation he had a heart attach and died. So he’s been dead for quite some time. The chief clerk was a man by the name of Darly Crumley and in the summertime he lived up there above the hospital. And of course he went back down to Medford at the wintertime.
The chief mechanic was a man by the name of Hash, his first name was Lon, his wife’s name was Phronsie, believe it or not. She’s dead, too, and Lon may be dead by now, I don’t know. He later became the head mechanic, or chief of maintenance, shop superintendent, whatever they called it at that time at Yosemite. So we knew him both places. One of the mechanics was Rex Trulove and I think he’s still around, if I’m not mistaken, or relatives are.
Yeah, I’ve heard that name several times.
I think he lived in Fort Klamath.
He still might be there. (18)
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Our electrician was a man by the name of Paul Koehler, and his wife was the telephone operator. The telephone switch board at that time was located, as you go into the main entrance of the Administration Building, to the left there was the switch board, and that’s where she was kind of a receptionist. If anybody wandered in, she was there to take care of it.
That’s the way it was until two years ago (19).
All right. And let’s see, in the warehouse there was a man by the name of Paul Turner and Paul lived in the first small house. Paul and Doris lived in the first row.
The one furthest north?
Yes, he was a warehouse man. He’d been here before the war; he was a few years older than I am. And he’d been here, I think, maybe more as a seasonal before the war. I think he was in the Navy during the War, came back and became the permanent warehouse man. And then while Lou was here, after I left, he became a ranger here. And then went on and became a ranger at Olympic, and at Sequoia, and finally retired. I think his first wife died after that time. He remarried and he lives n California, I think. His helper was a man by the name of George Woodley. And George was a character.
You mentioned here about what my opinion was about the possibility of putting headquarters at the South Entrance. We thought it was a great idea. We really did because, as I’ve said before, that we really didn’t have cabin fever. But in the Spring from sometime in late April on, it got darned old up here because then all you had was dirty snow. Now when it started to snow, Jean used to sit and watch the stuff comes up the window. And it snowed, and it was fun. And it was fun when it froze around the house, and then the pine martens would run around inside the snow caves and they’d look in the window at you; this was great. But in April and May, when you could go down to Klamath Falls and the flowers were blooming and this sort of things, the grass was green, and when you come back here it got darned old. Down there at the South Entrance, or close to the South Entrance, near the Panhandle, it as low enough so that by that time of year you had the same thing as you did outside. We thought that it would’ve been ideal place. But of course, the expense even at that time as such that they never could get into gear over the thing. If the Mission 66 had, in this Park, centered on that, I think we would’ve been better off. But I wouldn’t say that’s a better situation all around for the administration, I don’t know.
Would it have had a water problem down there?
Uh, we didn’t think so at the time. But now here again, I don’t know, at the present time.
That may have been just one of the concerns raised by the reports that were done on that alternative versus this one.
I’m sure that could have been one of them. And I think we probably do have much better water sources up here. But I would think that there are adequate water sources down there. But I don’t know. That’s one of the things.
You mentioned, “Who lived at the various residencies?” I think we’ve pretty well covered these up above here and the maintenance people, the snow plow operators, and this sort of thing lived in the ones that had been taking out down at Sleepy Hollow. I know that’s where Koehlers lived down there and George Woodley lived down there and the equipment operators, Orville Castor and John Fulton. I think Dick Varnum lived down in Fort Klamath, I’m pretty sure. There was a man by the name of Heckman, I believe, was the maintenance foreman up here, but he was an alcoholic, and he got to drinking pretty heavy. I think he was given the choice of resigning or facing some sort of charges. And this was early on. This was before Gilbert becomes chief ranger so it was that period of time, after Carlisle left here and before Clyde became the real chief ranger, so it was in that period, probably about ’47 or something like that. There was a man by the name of Charlie True, and he was here; I think he was here when the park was founded, I’m not sure. Charlie had been around for a long time. More or less of a seasonal type, but he was also almost a permanent. But Charlie, it was getting so that he to couldn’t see too well. He ran into our house with a snow-plow at 4:00 am. That will wake you out of bed!
Now, you mentioned memory and details of major accidents or tragedies at Crater Lake from ’46-’50. I think there were only three fatalities while we were here. The first one was about 1:00 pm in the afternoon, or a little later. We got a call down here, and I was down here at headquarters. There was a seasonal up on the rim who said that someone had jumped over the rim. So of course, several of us got up there right away. And just as you hit the rim, where the walk is, as your road turns in there. At that time, of course, he was very elderly (now he’d be a young man) of about 60, 61 years old. Probably a little mentally disturbed. Sat down there on the railing, the stone railing, with two of his sisters. And he wound his watch, and I don’t know if the said goodbye, but he just stepped over. Now if you recall what that looks like, there is not a sheer drop off. It’s a drop about like that. So we started down. I know Fitzgerald and myself were there and probably several seasonals. We started down there and as we got farther and farther down there we couldn’t find him anywhere. So we went clear on down to the lake. The lake shore is filled with a lot of rubble. Big rocks and this sort of thing. We still could not find him. And we even started back up to look into side pockets. Fitzgerald looked out onto the lake and he saw somebody floating out there, and what he saw was an air bubble underneath the man’s coat. The best we could tell is the man broke his shoulder when he went down. And when he got to the lake shore he got up and walked into the water and drowned himself. That’s what he had to do. Cause he could not have fallen. The terrain itself is flat like this desk; it’s filled with a lot of rubble and everything, but it’s flat. And he had to walk into the water and he had to drown himself, cause he didn’t die of anything else. So then, of course, it was the big problem of getting him back up. Well we had no winches, no nothing in those days, it was probably ’47 or something like that. So, we had to physically manhandle him back up on the stretcher, and just as we put him into the hearse, which had come up from Klamath Falls, the dog-gonest thunderstorm you ever saw let go and it just absolutely drenched us, drowned us, but fortunately it happened after we got him up.
The second one was, I think the next year; it happened the summer of ’48. And there was a couple of fellas hiking over on Applegate, far side of it. They both had slick soled shoes and they were way up, they were fairly above those kind of stops, you know little benches up there. And one of them slipped and went down and fell and he killed himself. I don’t recall how we got the word, but we did get the word. I got over there, and the chief ranger, Clyde Gilbert, and I think there were a couple of seasonals. I was the first one to find the body. What I could tell, was that it was no question in my mind that he was dead. Well Clyde was a little bit overweight and he didn’t climb to well and he finally huffed and puffed his way up there. He says, “Well, better splint this arms, looks like his arms are broken.” And I say, “Clyde he’s dead!” (Clyde) “Well, I’m not sure he’s dead.” I say “Clyde he’s dead!” I mean there was no question, I mean he was very well beat up. And well, I still had to splint one of this arms believe it or not. It’s the only time in my life I ever splinted a dead man. Well, it so happened that we had a seasonal Ranger that had come to us that summer, he’d been in the Paratroopers, I think. His wife had been an army nurse. And she had got there and she had been down on the road. So when we got him back down there, why she looked at him and said, “Why, he’s dead!” “Thank you!” So then, that was official that he was dead. I don’t know whether Clyde wouldn’t take my word for it or not.
That was up on Applegate?
Applegate. Well let’s see, the road goes around (they are looking at a map), O.K.
This is an old map.
Yeah, I know, but the road still, wait a minute, the road does go up in here. O.K
Right, that’s the Grayback Ridge.
Right, O.K., the road comes around and swings around Vidae and comes up here. O.K., it was on these cliffs right here.
Oh, O.K., what we call Dutton Ridge.
No, Dutton’s over here.
Jean: Vidae Cliff?
Yeah, we call it Vidae Cliff, it wouldn’t be that Applegate area. I guess we just we don’t refer to that specific area.
Well, you know you changed. There’s no question in my mind among everybody, as time goes on, you changed the names of things, just like common usage.
Yes.
But anyway that’s what we called it was Applegate.
Certain parts of the Park aren’t referred to very much anymore. Every year there’s a couple seasonals that go down to Llaos Hallway, but there’s still permanents in the park that don’t know where it is.
You’re going to have to refresh my memory on it.
Well it’s Whitehorse Creek next to Castle Creek and then you hike down the…
O.K. there was a fatality off of that one too.
Oh, there was?
That ridge, where the road comes up above there and down into Castle Creek. And this was after I left here. But there was a young man who was, his girlfriend as I understand, was taking a picture of him, and he just backed up too far and went off.
The third fatality that we had was late one night, or early morning, on the West Entrance Road. And this is where these telephones come into play, too. Fitzgerald got a call that there had been a serious accident and it looked like one person was dead and one person was seriously injured out on West Entrance Road. And there was no name, no nothing. He got up and got dressed and got out there and he found the dead man. I say “man”, but it was a young fellow, probably oh, very early twenties, perhaps late teens, I’m not sure. He was lying out all covered up with a blanket. The man that was still alive had nothing, he was just out there, with a …It was kind of a mystery that was never solved and of course, we had no way of solving it. Dewey got on the telephone. He called back here, he got a hold of Lou and Lou got a hold of me and we went around getting Lee Sneddon who lived in the last, up there, where the Chief Ranger’s house is. The other house [House 24] and then the one back in the corner [House 25], that’s where the assistant chief lived.
The one on the left.
Yeah, and I can remember, that we sat out there. I was driving, and we yelled and honked the horn, and Lee already had the word. And finally Lou said, “Ah, to hell with it, let’s go.” And just at that time, Lee come busting out of the door, jumped in the car. So all of us took off and went down there and Fitzgerald was pretty unhappy that it had taken us so long. But we got there as fast as was possible. And we put the man that was very seriously injured into the back of a pick up, I think it was. It might have been a station wagon, and took him to Annie Springs to the log house. And in the front of that log house, there was a kind of an office and First Aid room which was used, well for just that, office and First Aid. And we put him on a cot in there and just made him comfortable. Of course by this time, all before this time we had called an ambulance from Klamath Falls, but it takes a little over an hour for anybody to get up from there and it depends on how you get your call, or at least it did then. And so, we’d go out and look t him every once in while, that’s the only thing we could do. He was breathing all right, but he was breathing his last as far as we were concerned. But we’d check on him occasionally until the ambulance got there, but to the best of my knowledge in lived. He was very badly beat up and he was a little bit, maybe a whole bunch addled in the head. What had happened was they were young Mexican nationals as I recall, I’m not sure but they were at least Chicanos. They had come down off that road and they were really taking off down there, and it was below the White Horse curve, which is the first curve as you come on down towards the west. And they took off into the side of the road and they turned the car and it peeled the top off on some lodge pole pine just exactly like you would peel a sardine can. And I mean that literally, the top was just rolled back like that. And they were both thrown out, and of course they may have hit the trees, I don’t know what all happened. But it was a REAL automobile accident at that time. Now I think that was all the fatalities that we had here. I don’t even recall any heart attaches.
There wasn’t a …. I heard some story about a murder.
Yes, you better delve into that. That was when I was off in Korea. Lou Hallock was right in the middle of it, the FBI was. And as far as I know it is still an unsolved mystery. And when you get all the information on that I’d like to see it. I really would.
Basically what we’ve got is just a few sentences of a quotation.
Is that right?
At least of what I’ve seen so far. And I haven’t seen a whole lot.
There should be a full complete file (20). Now one thing that I learned very early on with Lou Hallock- because he had been burned on a situation at Yosemite one time, and the only thing that saved him, was the notes that he had taken and the log that he had kept in the chief ranger’s office about a certain call about a person that was hung up on a cliff. And so he was very strict about you writing down everything in chronological order that came in. I learned how to write reports under him very well. Now, I think “very well” if I say so myself! But he was a sticker for that and so I know, when he had anything to do with reports around here on that thing, it was detailed. So somewhere, there should be that.
There maybe some things at the Federal Records Center. I think that there are still things to be chased down.
If you can’t find anything else on the ting. Lou’s still in existence (21). We didn’t hear from him last Christmas, but we did the year before. He’s around Sacramento and he’s not a young man anymore, he’s probably close to 80. But I don’t think that he would be a bit averse to give you information. You can find this address in the employee and alumni directory.
O.K., his last name is spelled?
Hallock.
You mentioned personnel from other agencies such as the Forest Service and the BLM. As such, BLM was just getting started. BLM wasn’t even really an entity. I don’t think that I even knew about it for years.
Most of their lands would have been away from the park, anyway.
That’s right, and the parks that I went to, back at that time, you see Olympic has no BLM. There’s very little BLM in the State of Washington, anyway. It certainly has nothing on the Olympic Peninsula, so we had nothing to do with them there. Yosemite and Sequoia, are the same way. My first real introduction to the BLM was probably when I went to Washington, D.C.
Well, what was interesting is just that I met Gene Peterson who was the first Medford District manager.
He was the brother of Helen Fitzgerald.
Jean: Yeah I was going to say I thought you knew of BLM earlier than that because..
Oh, I’m sorry.
Yes, and of course let’s see, the Umpqua, yeah, it bordered us on the north but we never had anything to do with the Umpqua Forest. Now, don’t ask me why, because here they were at Diamond Lake. We did have something to do, occasionally, with the concessionaires over at Diamond Lake. That was after Lou came here. Now I don’t think that, again to harp back to Leavitt’s plan, I don’t think that Leavitt was much of a public relations man when he was up here. He may have been when he was in Medford, and this I can’t speak, not at all on. Now we had an assistant superintendent by the name of Tom Parker, who stayed in Klamath Falls, and his address was Brown’s Pool Hall in Klamath Falls. I’m being very facetious, but that was just where you would find him. And in a way I can’t blame him because he was absolutely nothing to do down there, except just for people to know that he was there. Tom was a real nice guy but he was very ineffective, too.
Was he from Klamath, or was it a concession to Klamath Falls interest?
It was concession to Klamath. Tom was old Park Service, so he’d been around. And we had another assistant superintendent while we were here. He came down from Alaska. I can not remember his name (22). And there was a hint of a scandal having to do with his move from Alaska or something that had happened in Alaska. But I don’t remember what it was, I can’t even remember his name. I know he lived upstairs in the hospital [House 34] for a while. I don’t think his family was here at all. But that would have been in probably ’49, ’50, somewhere around there. And where we went from there, we vacillated back and forth as to whether the headquarters was going to be in Medford or be up here. And I think Tom Williams was here all the time (23). I think [John] Wosky still went down to Medford (24). Tom said, “This is no way to run a railroad”. So he stayed up here.
Yeah, they didn’t sell the house off until ’65. I don’t know much about Wosky’s superintendence.
I don’t think I ever met Wosky. I knew Tom Williams quite well because he was assistant superintendent at Olympic, a very fine man. So I guess I told you about the management of the lands outside of the park.
I had one question about John C. Merriam. I’m not sure if you would have known him, but maybe his sons Charles or Lawrence.
Lawrence Merriam was the regional director of the Western Region [Region IV] at one time, I’m sure you know.
Yes.
Yeah, I knew him, but not very well.
Let’s go into the “C” section with your assignment as a ranger, and superintendent in the Park Service during the nineteen fifties and sixties.
Well, you ask how a ranger moves through changes from park to park. Well, what happened is I was on reserve status and I got called back into the Service as a First Lieutenant and changed from field artillery to the Corps of Engineers on October 15 of 1950. So, we left here, I mean with tears in our eyes. Course this was the first park we had been at. After you moved several times, why, you’re looking forward to the next park. But you see, I was going back to the Service, I wasn’t going to another park.
Yeah, your situation would be slightly different, I guess, than some employees in that you are from Roseburg, I mean so close….
Right, well you see, this was one thing about Crater Lake is that we were only about 113 miles away from home by going down and going across through Trail, and Tiller, going down South Umpqua River into Canyonville and then home. So even with the lousy road that we had you could get home from here in two and a half hours or so three hours I guess, something like that. So it wasn’t too bad of a situation. People down there were ignorant about Crater Lake, “You actually live up there all year round? How do you get in and out?”
Jean: There are people down there who still haven’t seen this place.
That’s right. Anyway, I was fortunate that I only had to spend about three or four months in Korea when I finally got there. I got back by a War Department Directive. I had been I in the reserve at the time, but not in an organized reserve unit when the War broke out, so I got back in 17 months. We got out. When I came back to San Francisco, why Jean and the two boys that we had then were waiting for me. So I went to the Regional Office and saw Merriam at the time, and I don’t know who else, the Administrative Officer down there and one of them said, “Well, you can go back to Crater Lake if you want to but we have a District Ranger job for you up at Olympic, and do you want it? Now, there is a little problem up there with the water, once in a while it gets dirty.”
Jean: No, they said you had to haul your drinking water. They didn’t say it got dirty.
Well, she was sitting in the car with the two kids down in the parking lot. So I went back down and said, “Do you want to go over to Olympic? There’s a little problem with the water.” And she says, “Sure, let’s go to Olympic!” And so I went back up and told him. Well, we got to Olympic and the water was black all of the time we were there.
Jean: It was clay, you know. And whenever you’d start using the water, this clay, this dark grey clay you have up there would fall in and you couldn’t even see your hands in the wash basin. You know it was really black.
But even with all that we had two other kids while we were there, born in the Forks Hospital. She was kept kind of busy. It’s still our favorite park, it really is. Now Crater Lake, of course, your first Park and particularly when it’s a park like Crater Lake has a special place in your heart. But Olympic is really our favorite place. And it’s because, I think, of the variety of things you have there. You’ve got the coast, you’ve got the ocean strip, you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got the glaciers, you’re got the whole bit you see. Fantastic place. Have you ever been up there?
No.
Get there sometimes soon as possible. Anyway when we went to Olympic (just as a matter of interest) the park had only been established for thirteen years. See, it was established in 1939, we went there in 1952.
So some of the bitterness over the park’s establishment was still evident?
Oh, yes indeed, yeah we had to fight that personally virtually all the time that we were there. Now I think we overcome part of it. We had a concessionary there that I worked closely with. Well, I think that we became friends before we left. And I think that he finally found out that maybe the Park Service, you know, they didn’t have tails and this type of thing. The post mistress, we became very good friends with her. And her husband was a dyed-in-the-wool logger, and he initiated me into steelhead fishing, so I guess we passed muster all right. It was tough, real tough. And one of the interesting parts of it is that one of the Assistant Chief Rangers who had been here, Lee Sneddon was transferred up to Olympic shortly after we left here. And so he was up there too. So there we were.
Jean: In the next District.
Partners in crime up there. And we had another bear situation too, but that’s beside the point. Anyway the duties up there….it were almost a “primitive” type duty up there. You were dealing with the public in the summertime. You were existing in the rain in the wintertime, is the thing. And you were hauling water virtually every day. You were on a highway, right on 101, but it was still like a backcountry type of a situation. We were isolated by the conditions with a new park, a young Park. I was the first District Ranger when President Truman signed the Olympic coastal strip and Queets corridor into the Park, and it was my district. And there were some very, very interesting days up there. It was a real learning experience as far as mostly people, was the thing. Our house sat within 40, 50 feet of the Indian Reservation. So we had a lot to do with the Indians. I was instrumental in getting the first Indian into the Lion’s Club in Lake Quinault. It was a friend of mine down at Queets. So, but anyway, the duties up there as I say you did practically everything yourself. You were the only one there.
Jean: And your wife helped.
Things had to be, well when you couldn’t do it yourself.
As far as the Indian subject goes, was there a lot more contact at Olympic with the Indians being in the park versus the way it is here where there doesn’t seem to be much contact with the Indians in Chiloquin?
I think the reason that there was more contact is because it had to be. Because they were there.
Jean: The kids went to school together.
She established the first Cub Scouts up there, and 50% of them were Indian kids.
Jean: More, I think.
I think in the school there was 60% t o65% of the kids were Indians. And they were good people. There were good people and bad people. Well, that isn’t anything worse than Yosemite, I guess. No, and we got to know some Indians up there quite well and there were, some were nice people. But see you had the Neah Bay, you had Ozette, you see you had Indian tribes scattered all along there. You had the Quileutes, the Quninaults from most of the south to you. And the Ozettes, you had three or four Indian tribes scattered along there and you were just thrown in with them. Now, since you were by yourself there were a lot of things you may have overlooked as far as law enforcement was concerned, because you wanted to come home was the thing. There were times when I just closed my eyes and kept going, because it wasn’t safe doing anything else, or at least it could have been unsafe. And our law enforcement in those days was pretty dog gone minimal, too. But that was, it was an experience I’ll never forget. The back country is fantastic. My first horse experience was up there too, I learned how to pack and I learned how to ride.
Horses weren’t much of a factor here.
They were no factor, we had no horses at all. Do you have them in the summertime now?
They were here until a couple of years ago. One of the seasonal rangers was responsible for the horses. But a difference in administrative preferences that has ended that, at least for the time being.
Well, a horses has it’s place, there’s no question about that; it can do a lot of things. I’m not sure that it does at Crater Lake, is the thing. But, of course, with the backcountry and everything well there was plenty of places for them. Now, from Olympic I went on to the backcountry at Sequoia/Kings. And the only place I asked to move from was Olympic. That sounds kind of strange when I say it’s our favorite spot. But it rained so darned much up there. Raising four kids up there with the bad water, hauling water and everything, the situation got to be such that I just plain asked for a transfer, and I said that I wanted to go anywhere that had less rainfall and more sunshine. The superintendent at the time was a man by the name of Fred Overly. And there’s mixed review over him whether he is a good superintendent or a bad superintendent. I think he wasn’t too bad. At the time I didn’t think much of him, but when I look back in hindsight I think he did a lot of things that had to be done. Anyway, Fred real quick like went to Region and got things started and I almost went to Glacier and this thing came up, this back country deal at Sequoia/Kings and it would mean me going out in the backcountry. Our youngest son was born just about a month before we left there.
Jean: He was due three days after you got the news you were moving. So it was kind of rushed.
But anyway, I got back in the backcountry. I had a wonderful summer, she had a lousy summer, no question about that. But, I mean, again I had an experience that you don’t have much anymore. This is the ting because I rode over close to 900 miles that summer. You’re talking about the bottom of the valley that Kern Canyon is in and it’s an area of 485,000 acres. Big back country.
Yeah, I was there last summer. Tremendous place.
Were you? It was a fantastic experience. I took a couple of horses behind me and rode all over the countryside and took care of a lot of emergencies. I had two seasonal rangers, it was great. Something that I wouldn’t want to do now, but it was good while it lasted. And then I become a backcountry coordinator down there when a man by the name of Ted Thompson moved off who had been the backcountry coordinator. And then I got an offer next August to go to the chief ranger’s job in Bryce Canyon. So I jumped from district ranger to chief ranger at Bryce Canyon. And I was the first chief ranger in Bryce Canyon because Bryce had just separated at that time from Zion. I mean they had to have a chief ranger before, but he as the chief ranger for Bryce and Zion.
Sort of like Sequoia/Kings in the way it was administered?
Right, so I was the first one there and initiated a number of things: law enforcement, and the search and rescue and fire control, and the public relations that they hadn’t had before. It wasn’t just me, it was because I was the first; it was easy to do ‘cause you didn’t have anything to worry about. You just did it. So what you were teaching was the things that you knew and you, like I say, you didn’t have to worry about it cause it hadn’t been done before.
Sort of like Sequoia/Kings in the way it was administered?
Right, so I was the first one there and initiated a number of things: law enforcement, and the search and rescue and fire control, and the public relations that they hadn’t had before. It wasn’t just me, it was because I was the first; it was easy to do ‘cause you didn’t have anything to worry about. You just did it. So what you were teaching was the things that you knew and you, like I say, you didn’t have to worry about it cause it hadn’t been done before.
What were some of the kinds of public relations things that were new, not only what you instituted, but service wide?
Well, for one thing the superintendent and I joined the Lions Club in Panguitch. Now, I don’t know if you know that country or not, but it’s all Mormon country. The superintendent and I were not Mormons, and the twain doesn’t always mix so well, but it did in this case. We had good friends among them.
Jean: Well, we lived in the little town when we first went there. There wasn’t any housing for us in the Park. So we lived in Tropic.
We were the first non-Mormons that ever lived in Tropic, I’m quite sure. And we made enough friends down there so that the man who lived next door who was the Bishop down there, called me up the night before we left to go back to Sequoia/Kings, and thanked me for everything that I had done for him. So I thought that was pretty good. But it was an experience and we took our message a little bit to school, and we worked very closely there, the rangers and the naturalists, there was such a small crew altogether that we all had to work together. And we would take turns going out to viewpoints, staying there talking to people as they came out. Of course, this would be in the same “road patrol” so you’d just stop and wait and talk to people as they came and talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. It was a good experience, a real good experience.
Then I got a chance to go back to Sequoia/Kings as assistant chief ranger under Lou Hallock again. And he’s the one that selected me for the forestry and fire control position there. And so we spent a little over two years, June of ’58 until September of ’60 there in that job. Fortunately for Lou, but unfortunately for the rest of us, he moved on to superintendent at Bryce Canyon, and we inherited a chief ranger by the name of Pete Shuft who I could call an s.o.b. again, but he’s dead now. And he was also an alcoholic, and this does not mix too well. We had troubles the first day he was there. He didn’t like the way somebody had been doing something, and I told him that was the way it worked and so we disagreed. So we disagreed more and more. Well, that was the summer of the big fire, well the biggest fire that we had in a long, long time anyway. Was called the Tunnel Rock Fire, which was along the road that goes up from Ash Mountain to Giant Forest. And in the course of that fire he laid off of us pretty well, but the situation was getting worse and worse and worse but anyway I became noticed by the chief ranger at Yosemite and about August sometime, he called me up and asked me if I wanted to be his assistant at Yosemite. Yosemite was one of the finest places we’ve ever worked. Nice and easy in convenience, a wonderful place to work, beside getting to work for the park. But our oldest son was in high school by this time and he traveled 40 miles down to school and 40 miles back every day. And he graduated from high school from there (25).
Jean: Well it was more that just the 40 miles, it took two hours one way and an hour and forty-five minutes the other way. You had to go up and over two mountains to get there.
Well, Yosemite is a wonderful place, was a wonderful place to work at. I don’t think that I would want to work there now.
Too much of a city now?
Right, and the law enforcement situation, let’s see was it “48 Hours” two or three weeks ago-it was the 4th of July Holiday on television for Yosemite. And it was bad enough sometimes when we were there from ’60 to ’63 and it was before the advent of all the drug situation, before the Vietnam era situation, you know, all this. It was still a kind of a cozy situation. It was starting to come into its own, that’s a poor way of putting it. I mean it was starting to build up to be that. We had a ranger beaten up one time. We had drunks, and we had some drugs and we would have the robbers, and this kind of stuff. But it wasn’t anything like it is now. So it was really, it was kind of a fun place. And the skiing was excellent. And from there I was chosen to be the chief ranger at Yellowstone and of course it was as big of a job a chief ranger could have. So we were there from ’63-’66 and served under two very wonderful men; Lon Garrison and John McLoughliin. And I think John McLoughlin was the best Superintendent that ever served there.
I have a question about the NPS directors and that kind of politics from Drury to Wirth to Hartzog.
From Drur to Wirth it was probably not noticeable, as far as I was concerned, because I’m down far enough in the organization. So these things are changing, are affecting chief rangers, they’re affecting superintendents, assistant superintendents, and then into the region. They’re affecting them all right. But they’re really not affecting people further down. It’s not something that you spend a lot of time thinking about.
By the time you got to Yellowstone, it’s …
It makes a lot of difference. And particularly it makes a difference to you who’s in your regional office, who is the ones that you really have to deal with. And of course, you have a deal with Washington, too. And Washington is, well, setting some stupid ideas and some great ideas. And of course, the hullabaloo that came out of it, a lot of the rumor and this sort of thing about how George Hartzog boosted Wirth out and it may or may not be true. I don’t care. George Hartzog, in retrospect, is probably the best Director the best Director that we’ve had in a long, long time, or will have. Well, probably the best. Although Russ Dickenson is a good friend of mine.
His book’s sitting over there. I haven’t started it yet.
Oh, George’s book. I just ordered it. Yeah.
Jean: Have you read (Garrison’s) book?
I’m behind on my reading
Jean: We’ve got it, it’s a good one. (W. Howe agrees)
Yeah, I’ve got this [Hartzog’s book] ordered. I ordered it last week. I told them I wanted to get it inscribed. George is a by, we hated that guy, a whole lot of times. I mean almost literally. And I’ve seem him lose his cool, if he ever had any, with people for no reason at all. But when you sit again, ten, fifteen years afterwards you see what he was doing, and the way he played politics, and the way he was able to play politics, which you would have to do in a position like that, I think he was a master. Course the three or four we had right after him, Walker was a, he was a wimp, real nice wimp, but a wimp.
So there is a real change between the long term directors and the political directors.
Oh, yeah sure, sure. Now Russ is a good friend of mine, Russ Dickenson, and I have every confidence in the world, I think he did a great job. But I think he was pinned in so much by the political situation that he found himself in. He was there when Watt was there, and I have no sympathy for Watt at all. I think he would be the ruination of Park Service if he had stayed much longer. But I think George Hartzog, probably presided over a lot of things that were wrong, but I think that he presided over more things that were right. And he probably caused more ulcers than anybody else could possibly give. But he did an awful lot of things that were just exactly the way they should be.
Was he much different in style than Wirth?
Oh, yes, now here again I’m very emphatic at saying “Oh yes.” I shouldn’t say that because I didn’t know Wirth that well, but what I know of Wirth, Wirth is a much calmer individual. He was not George, he was not an explosive type. He wouldn’t blow his stack, at least I never saw him do it, and I never heard of him doing it. Now again, I wasn’t always around there, either. I mean, I saw him out in the field. Course he would probably, if you put it that way, he would probably be on his best behavior. But George would not be on his best behavior any time of the day.
Part Three and Four
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