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.
