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THE BROTHERS SMITH
Twin brothers, Lloyd and Larry Smith were raised 80 miles southwest of Crater Lake National Park, in the Rogue Valley town of Phoenix, Oregon. They first saw Crater Lake at age 7, during a family outing, at which time they hiked the old Rim Village Lake Trail with their grandparents from Montana, their parents and a host of relatives. Since their father worked for the Tucker Sno-Cat Corporation of Medford, Oregon, and since Crater Lake was being used during this period as a proving ground for the original Sno-Cats, the brothers often visited the Park during the winter. They feel especially fortunate for having seen the frozen lake in 1949.
Lloyd and Larry attended LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas and Southern Oregon College (now University) in Ashland, Oregon, graduating with degrees in both engineering and education.
Lloyd began working seasonally at Crater in the summer of 1959. During his 21 season at Crater Lake and Rocky Mountain National Parks, Lloyd’s assignments included: park maintenance, trail crew boss, construction, entrance and campground ranger, and law enforcement ranger. Lloyd spent 25 years teaching Science and Math in Grants Pass. Following his retirement, Lloyd has operated his own business and served as a business manager. He is currently living in Longview, Washington with his wife Helen, where he operates a crematorium. He is married to Helen and raised two boys at Crater Lake – Kenneth and Keith. And two “bonus kids”, Christopher and Jeannie.
Larry started working seasonally at Crater Lake in 1961. During his 23 seasons at Crater Lake and Oregon Caves National Monument, Larry’s assignments included: park maintenance, trail crew, entrance and campground ranger, law enforcement ranger, park dispatcher, and park interpreter. Larry spent 33 years teaching elementary school in Historic Jacksonville. He now works as a substitute teacher. Larry co-authored the book, Crater Lake, The Story Behind the Scenery.
Larry is married to Linda and he raised Brian and Amber at Crater Lake.
The brothers have been active in the Friends of Crater Lake National Park and have spent several summers teaching field studies in the Park. Larry has served as the winter volunteer coordinator for the Friends of Crater Lake and Lloyd has done some volunteering at Mt. Rainier National Park.
To the Reader:
Larry Smith can be credited with initiating the first effort to compile the Park’s history in an easily digestible format. It started as an extension of a report type that the NPS once called an “important event log,” but with continual growth and refinement soon brought about The Smith Brothers’ Chronological History of Crater Lake National Park. An oral interview on February 10, 1989 marked the beginning of his unflagging assistance, which continues to the present. He and his twin brother Lloyd have contributed to park programs in many ways, most recently as volunteers in the Friends of Crater Lake. Our correspondence since the interview is extensive, and touches on many topics pertaining to history at Crater Lake and the surrounding area. Copies of those letters, along with related material, are in the Park’s history files.
Stephen R. Mark, Crater Lake National Park Historian September 1997
They Drive Visitors Nuts
Crater Lake’s Look-Alike Twin Rangers Can Create Confusion
By Lee Jullerat of the Klamath Falls, Oregon Herald and News
Summer 1978 (This article appeared both in the H/N and the Crater Lake National Park summer paper – “Reflections”)
Crater Lake – For years they have been driving visitors nuts.
The stories are many, but take a representative sample: a family visiting Crater Lake National Park drives in the north entrance, pays the entry fee, and visits with the pleasant, helpful ranger.
Within the hour the family is in the Rim Village area listening to an interruptive talk. When the talk ends they stop the ranger, do a half shuffle and finally wonder aloud, “How did you get so fast from the north entrance?”
Twins Larry and Lloyd Smith, 38, have been creating confusion for many years.
“This started back in elementary school,” says Larry, by four minutes the oldest of the Smith twins. “Somehow,” he quips from his repertoire of replies, “we did end up with different wives.”
Park visitors aren’t the only ones victimized by the look alikes.
At times Larry and Lloyd have swapped nametags and traded work assignments, “but I never tell anyone about that,” deadpans Lloyd.
People who look closely find the Smiths are highly similar but not identical. Larry is slightly taller and thinner.
Confusion exists. Lloyd, who lives in Grants Pass was recently in Jacksonville, Larry’s home city. The principal from Larry’s elementary school saw Lloyd, assumed it was Larry, and began talking about how life at Crater Lake must agree with him because “Larry” had put on some weight and looked much healthier.
It works both ways. Lloyd, who is also a teacher, was greeted by some of Larry’s former students wanting to chat. “It took me 10 minutes to convince them who I was,” remembers Lloyd.
The confusion began when the Smiths were born in 1940 in Los Angeles and continued while they were raised and schooled in the Rogue River Valley.
Lloyd began working as a seasonal ranger at Crater Lake in 1959 on maintenance. Since then, he has worked every summer but one, 1964, when he was at Rocky Mountain National Park. He returned to Crater Lake partly because his brother was a Crater Lake summer seasonal, too. Larry started at Crater Lake in 1961, missed the summer of 1963, and has been back every summer except 1976 since then.
Over the years the brothers have held virtually every job possible – trail maintenance, campground ranger, north entrance ranger, firewood cutter, pit toilet digger-cleaner, dispatcher, seasonal supervisor, patrol ranger, interpreter.
Look Alikes – Who are the different look-alikes?
Lloyd teaches science, biology, yearbook, and photography, “my first love,” at South Middle School in Grants Pass. Two days a week he teaches at Rogue Community College. Weekends are typically active – he photographs weddings or fashion projects on Saturdays and teaches church school on Sundays.
Since 1967 he’s been a patrol ranger handling law enforcement matters, including one day a week on horseback in the Rim Village area.
Larry teaches elementary school in Jacksonville and is the “frustrated historian” who gleans facts for his church, family, school and Crater Lake. He is the moving force behind the “Smith Brothers’ History of Crater Lake, a document memorializing park highlights and trivia. He’s also proud of having visited 89 different National Park Service areas, including 49 during the summer of 1976.
For the past two years Larry has been an interpreter leading hikes, and giving boat tours, Crater Lake Lodge and Mazama Campground programs.
During the months away from Crater Lake the brothers see each other infrequently. During the summer they and their families live side by side at the Park. Many evenings Larry and Lloyd team together while Lloyd drives patrol. They’re more than brothers – they’re also friends.
“It strengthens us,” explains Lloyd of the confusion created by their look-alikeness. ”Because what Larry does, I get credit for.”
Both have kept returning to Crater Lake for similar reasons. For Lloyd it’s only two hours from home and his busy weekend schedule. Larry likes the proximity, too, but also cites his love of the area and its history.
“I’m so involved in the history…I’ve found I have to live it.”
Both enjoy the change of pace from teaching. For Lloyd it’s a way to “recharge my batteries”; for Larry it’s a “change of pace.”
For many summers the Smiths have been making ripples at Crater Lake, not only by doing the individual jobs, but collectively, too.
When they get together, it’s confusing – only doubly so.
1980 on the Rim at Crater Lake.
The confusion began when the Smiths were born in 1940 in Los Angeles and continued while they were raised and schooled in the Rogue River Valley.
A park-inspired life April 1, 2016 By LEE JUILLERAT For the Herald and News
CRATER LAKE — “Girls,” Larry Smith told a trio of pre-teens, “would you get off the picnic tables please?”
The three girls looked stunned. There wasn’t a picnic table in sight, only fields of snow punctuated by occasional hemlock trees. Smith, who was leading a snowshoe walk near Crater Lake National Park’s Rim Village, allowed his straight face to break into a smile as he explained that, yes, the girls and others in our group were indeed standing atop picnic tables, but the tables were hidden under 12 feet of snow.
Lloyd, Larry’s twin brother, nodded knowingly while listening to his brother and watching the girls’ expressions. Spending time with Crater Lake visitors is something the Smith brothers have been doing for more than a half-century. The 75-year-old brothers are park icons. Lloyd has spent portions of 57 years at the park working on seasonal trail crews, as a law enforcement ranger and other jobs and, the past several years, as a Friends of Crater Lake volunteer. Larry has been involved for 55 years, mostly as a seasonal interpretive ranger and with the Friends as the person who coordinates, organizes and spends winter weekends as a volunteer interpreter.
Few people know as much about Crater Lake and its history as the Smith brothers, who have detailed events significant and obscure in their Smith Brothers History of Crater Lake, which is available through the Crater Lake Institute web site.
Their Crater Lake history is impressive. Larry and Lloyd’s inaugural Crater Lake visit was in 1947 as 7-year-olds with their parents, Elmer and Ruby while living in nearby Phoenix.
Larry remembers being told, incorrectly, that Wizard Island was the top of ancient Mount Mazama, the 12,000-foot tall mountain that exploded and collapsed about 7,700 years ago and created the caldera that contains the lake. Others told him the lake — which he since learned is 1,943 feet deep — had no known bottom. In the years since he’s focused on providing visitors with accurate information.
Lloyd’s memories of his first visit are more idyllic — “The biggest thing I remember is magical. Everything was magical.”
Magic was evident during the snowshoe walk for the small group that included visitors from Southern Oregon, Southern California and New Zealand. Larry led the way to high spots overlooking Crater Lake Lodge, the lake and, of course, over Picnic Hill’s snow-buried tables on a winding route up and down forested slopes during the hour-plus snowshoe walk. He pointed out pine marten tracks, explained how bears survive months-long winters, told about Mazama pocket gophers and patiently answered questions.
After the morning walk, Larry and Lloyd told about later Crater Lake visits in the 1950s with their father, a machinist for Tucker Sno-Cat in Medford.
“Old Man Tucker was a wild driver,” Lloyd boasted, explaining how he would load 20 to 30 people in a trailer and tow them along the lake’s rim. In those years, too, before the Cleetwood Cove was built from the rim to the lake in 1960, the route descended 1.7 miles from a trailhead near the Crater Lake Lodge.
“I remember going down that trail and how narrow it was,” Larry said of the hike, which he and his brother first did as 7-year-olds. “I remember the rocks falling.”
Summer job
In 1959, when the brothers were students at then-Southern Oregon State College, Lloyd heard about summer jobs at the park. That summer, driving his ‘57 Chevy, he began his first season on a trail crew. Larry was recovering from surgery and stayed home. In following years the brothers became fixtures, tackling a variety of jobs.
Both went into teaching, Larry in Jacksonville, where he still lives and teaches — and serves as the town crier — while Lloyd taught in Grants Pass until retiring and moving to Longview, Wash. For many summers, Lloyd’s family, his wife, Helen, and their children, and Larry and his wife, Linda, and their children, lived in side-by-side seasonal housing.
“The kids thought they owned the park,” Lloyd laughed.
The Smith brothers don’t own the park. The park and Crater Lake own them.
“Remember the word magical,” Lloyd said of why he, his brother and their families keep returning to Crater Lake. “It’s still magical. Larry and I love to share our love for the park and the lake with people. It’s magical.”
July 30 2006 From: “James S. Rouse” <jsrouse@fidalgo.net>
Congratulations Larry (Smith) on your AASLH award. A most deserving honor. You have established a remarkable track record and made an outstanding difference in the Crater Lake interpretative programs. I only regret that I didn’t capitalize on your remarkable knowledge of the Crater Lake history while I was there. Although I was aware that you and Ron Warfield were working on and completed the “Behind the Scenes” story while I was there. (I think I still have my copy)
I sat in on many of your campfire programs, and like most of the visitors, learned a lot about that special place.
Wish we could spend more time together. My best wishes again.
Jim Rouse former CRLA superintendent
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