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Robert "Bob" Stratton
No full textRobert "Bob" Stratton oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Mr. Stratton discusses how he got started with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and refuges he worked at. He shares several stories, one concerning monarch butterflies and the Program, Planning, Budget and Evaluation or PPBE.
Organization: FWS
Name: Bob Stratton
Years: 1962-1995
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Biography, Employees (USFWS), History, Wildlife refuges, Wildlife management, Farms and farming, Management, Waterfowl, National Elk Refuge, Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge, Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge, Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, Union Slough National Wildlife Refuge, Washita National Wildlife Refuge, Optima National Wildlife Refuge, Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge, Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, Mark Twain National Wildlife1
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Name: Bob Stratton
Date of Interview: April 13, 2015
Location of Interview: National Conservation Training Center, Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 33 years
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: National Elk Refuge, Wyoming; Quivira Refuge, Kansas; Fish Springs, Utah; Alamosa and Monte Vista Refuges, Colorado; Salt Plains Refuge, Oklahoma; Union Slough, Iowa; at the Washita and Optima Refuges, Oklahoma; Sequoyah Refuge, Oklahoma; Laguna Atascosa, Texas; Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska; Mark Twain National Wildlife Refuge, Illinois.
Colleagues: Fred Bolwahnn, Harold Miller, Pete Bryant, Marc Nelson, Lyle Stemmerman
Brief Summary of Interview: Mr. Stratton begins by discussing where he went to college, how he got started with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the different refuges where he worked. He shares several stories, one concerning monarch butterflies and the Program, Planning, Budget and Evaluation or PPBE. He also talks about how things have changed concerning grade increases, difference between when he was a refuge manager and refuge managers today, and even training. He really enjoyed working for the Service and says he “wouldn’t have changed it.”
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Mark: Today is April 13 and I’m Mark Madison doing an oral history with Robert “Bob” Stratton. And first thing, Bob, is can you spell your name?
Bob: You bet, Stratton is STRATTON.
Mark: Okay. And usually, Bob, the first question we have is about your education.
Bob: I graduated from Colorado State University, bachelor’s degree in wildlife management, 1965. Actually midterm; I spent a few too many hours hunting and fishing and had to catch some courses that I should have taken earlier, but it was an enjoyable experience. At that time in the field of wildlife conservation there were two schools of thought really: Colorado State and Utah State; not to diminish the other good schools around the country, but those were the two that really kind of turned out the graduates. So I looked in the catalogs and said, that’s the place, drove up there and saw the mountains and I said, oh, this is the place.
Mark: Where are you from originally, Bob?
Bob: Northern Illinois. And in my career it was interesting to see the number of graduates from the mid-west; Illinois, Iowa, kind of interesting that those areas supplied a lot of the early graduates, but when you think, Leopold was from Iowa, Burlington. I’ve had the privilege of visiting with Ira Grabrielson at a refuge that he in fact established. He came back for a visit, and I’m sure he looked at me as this young pup as not going to be able to do much, but it was fun talking to him.
Mark: What refuge was that?
Bob: Union Slough, northern Iowa.
Mark: Alright. Well, let’s backtrack a bit though.
Bob: Okay, sure.
Mark: You graduate, what was your job post-graduation?
Bob: Actually need to back up even further. I was privileged to begin under a program that’s no longer in place and probably will never be put into effect again, the old Student Trainee Program. And in 1960, I can remember seeing a posting on the bulletin board at the Forestry and Wildlife building at Colorado State. And it said, “Mr. George Barkley from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be here to provide background on the Fish and Wildlife Service for promising careers.” I signed up on a big list and I thought at that time, you either need to be the first interview, or you’ll need to be the last. So I signed up last, 3:00 in the afternoon on a Friday. Had a meeting that night of two, three hundred students and to my surprise Dr. Gilbert stood up and said, “Is Bob Stratton in the audience?” He said, “Mr. Barkley would like to meet with you tonight. You’re the only one listed for Friday and he wants to get an early start going home.” So I walked up, met Mr. Barkley, he said, “Send Larry Means a letter up at the National Elk Refuge and tell him I told him to hire you.” “Okay.” So I sent a letter to 3
Refuge Manager Means, a couple months later he replied and he said, “We’re going to start the irrigation season in May on National Elk Refuge, if you accept the job, send me a note.” And I thought, Wow!, sent a note and that was the start of my career. I woke up every morning looking out at the Tetons and I thought it just doesn’t get any better than this. From there we worked a series of refuges; went from there to Quivira Refuge in the state of Kansas, and then Fish Springs in Utah, the desert of Utah. Came back from there and went to Monte Vista and the Alamosa Refuge, in fact, I was the, I guess I had the distinction of posting the very first refuge boundary sign on the Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge back in ’66. And had some real disgruntled land owners watching me do that at the time; it was one of those condemnation things and it didn’t make people real happy. From there Monte Vista, Salt Plains Refuge in Oklahoma, then up to Union Slough in Iowa, back to Oklahoma at the Washita and Optima Refuges, across the state to the Boston Mountains in Sequoyah Refuge. From there we went to, a real cultural shock, Laguna Atascosa on the coast of Texas; spent four years there basking in the sun in the 70 degree winters and decided wanted to try Alaska, so we went to Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge on the island, spent oh a year and a half or so there, decided that $25 pizzas and flying everywhere was a little much. Moved to Mark Twain on the Mississippi and had the three states, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri under our management operation; retired from there in December, no, January of 1995 with 33 years of service. I had an interview with a newspaper writer at Quincy, our headquarters, and I believe today as I did then, that I was so fortunate in having a job, if you want to call it that, that I never ever really had problems waking up in the morning. I was just one of those things that you kind of, you know, a high school kid living a dream and it never ended.
Mark: That’s great. Now what was the first refuge you were manager of?
Bob: Union Slough; Union Slough in Iowa, 1968, June of ’68 we moved up there. I was an assistant manager trainee under Pete Bryant, a great old time manager at Monte Vista, and then went to Salt Plains as the primary assistant with Fred Bolwhann, another fine gentleman. And that’s where we became acquainted with and good friends with Harold Miller, the longtime clerk of the typewriter fame that we just represented to you. [Mark laughing] And then from there to Union Slough and I was manager for rest of my career.
Mark: How did managing a refuge change over three decades, or working in a refuge since you…?
Bob: You know, and it certainly has, Mark.
Mark: You had a long career.
Bob: Probably, and I can still remember the day that we received the call that we were going to have these training sessions. And if I mention the acronym PPBE, do you, okay.
Mark: No.
Bob: PPBE stands for, and some of the old time guys if they ever hear this recording; Program, Planning, Budget, and Evaluation. And that was put in 4
place by, we referred to them as the Schmidt brothers in Washington, D.C., and they were kind of nameless, faceless people that we never saw. They sent these memos out, said, “We’re going to bring the National Wildlife Refuge System into the 21st century. We’re going to start managing by this process, PPBE.” Part of that, an important part of it, was the designation of RBU, so we called them “Bennys”, Refuge Benefit Units. Each operation, each wildlife species, each anything on a refuge was assigned a Benefit Unit; one duck for one day was one RBU.
Mark: I have heard about these.
Bob: Okay. And it was, you know, it was the haves and have nots because a little old plains refuge like Washita in 1970, there’s no way we could compete with waterfowl use days for some of east coast or west coast. Well, we had to do something. Well, in the back of the book, monarch butterflies were worth 50,000 RBU’s and we had a host of those little colorful suckers slinging through there. You ever try to census monarch butterflies?
Mark: No, but I just heard this story…
Bob: You did, okay.
Mark: …’cause we’ve just put millions of dollars into monarchs.
Bob: Okay.
Mark: And I told an old time refuge manager you might have known
named Denny Holland…
Bob: Oh, I know Denny, sure.
Mark: …about this. And he said, “I got to tell you a story sometime,” which he
hasn’t told me, “about the RBU’s for monarchs.” He was looking for them, I think, in South Carolina or something.
Bob: Well, we were looking for, in fact, you have to realize in the refuge managers were only as good or as successful as the crew, the staff. And we were so fortunate in those early days and today too, of having some fantastic people. Well, can you imagine here’s an old, hard core farmer, rancher that is now wearing the FWS patch (and you know I, am one of them now!). And a young pup manager coming out of the office and saying, “Well, Jack, I want to go out and count monarch butterflies because we’ve got to get our RBU count up.” And it was like “well, what are we going to do.” So they took a refuge vehicle and I said, “Just go back out in grazing unit 5, get a count, come back.” And he came back and he kind of laughed, he said, “Saw a lot of them!” So being a good refuge manager, we decided okay we’d extrapolate; I said, we ought to have at least 25,000 of those. Okay 25,000 times 50,000 RBU’s; man we shot to the top of the list, because it was budget-oriented. The more, supposedly, the more RBU’s, the more your budget could be.
Mark: Yes.
Bob: Well, when my whopping 67 million RBU’s for monarch butterflies hit the Schmidt brothers in Washington, I’m sure the laughter could have been heard across the hall and it was like, “Well, nice try.” [Laughing] They wiped it out so. That was the beginning of, you asked how it had changed. 5
Mark: Yeah.
Bob: That’s kind of how it; we from pretty much seat of the pants, I mean, adapting and working with established wildlife management principles, but at the same time feet on the ground, tires on the trails, that type of thing to managing by computer and a lot more technologically-based.
Mark: When did that come in, PPBE?
Bob: 1970, ’71 in that range; I was at Washita in western Oklahoma. And that’s about the time, and you know the Service is great for having meetings and training sessions; that probably hasn’t changed.
Mark: No.
Bob: And I can remember…
Mark: Hence this place.
Bob: By the way, are there people here today training?
Mark: Yeah, yeah, we’ll have a couple groups…
Bob: Okay, good. Well anyway, that was probably the biggest change when we went to PPBE. And then the next was the computerization, however, and I don’t know how many managers would agree with me on this, but the real change, politically, management oriented-wise, came, and I don’t know whether you were in Minneapolis at the same time. But it came about when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made the regional directors SES’s, Senior Executive Service. A lot of perks, unlimited annual leave and having a lot of benefits, but it removed them from the protective umbrella of Civil Service. I was around when a regional director received a phone call saying, “Clear out your desk, you’re no longer the regional director.” Prior to that the directors, the regional directors were there for years and years and years, and really developed a staff and a management philosophy . When that came about, I’m sure there were benefits to changing over, and a lot of people did that. But the establishment of the regional directors as a Senior Executive Service Branch, or SES’ers really changed the complexion of the Service.
Mark: Now Bob, even by our agency standards, you moved a lot. Why was that, I mean people did move, but I’d say on average people that worked in the same period as you, maybe six stations but I heard even more than that in your…
Bob: We had 13 stations; a couple of them were complexes. But the philosophy back then, Mark, and I guess it’s understandable that they no longer can afford, budget-wise, to do that. A lot of the refuges, most of them were rural, of course, and they had housing; old farm houses, old ranch houses. In some places, Monte Vista for instance, they built complexes; Fish Springs, there was nothing for a 150 miles so they built complexes out there. That, I guess, by having refuge housing it enabled young managers to move, to gain an experience base without being burdened by selling this house, trying to find a rental home, that type of thing. And it provided, I think, a flexibility for the management staff in the regional office. But the philosophy then, and I can still 6
remember the regional supervisor, Marc Nelson, fine gentleman; since passed. His philosophy was, “I want to expose my young managers to as many different refuge management programs. You may start out on a wintering area, but I want you to go to a transition area, nesting area experience is next one, and the only way you can do that is to move.” There was also an unwritten rule that you did not get a grade increase, in place; you could not go from a 5 to a 7, you transferred. You could not go from a 7 to a 9 in place, you transferred. And it was unheard of to go 5, 7, 9, 11 and up to the, what we referred to then as the GS-a millions, in one place; you could not do that. I retired as a very high step 13, but it took 33 years to get there and a lot of moving. I was fortunate I have to put in an plug for my wife, who’s standing over there. You could not have done something like that without a family that was totally behind you, and I’m sure you’ve heard that and seen that from a lot of folks.
Mark: I’ve heard that from everybody, it’s a team effort.
Bob: It really is. And actually, one thing that the, I think, the managers today, and I don’t say this in a disrespectful way, but it’s kind of an 8 to 5 job now. It’s good and it’s bad; there are a lot of pluses and minuses. But when you lived on the refuge 24 hours a day, you became so intimately involved and familiar with the goings on, and I’m not sure that same feeling is there today because at 5:00 you lock the door and you drive 50 miles to your home. Whereas we might have walked 50 feet to our home and then got a call, “Number 2 crossing is washed out, we need…” you know that type of thing. So there was, I think, a big change when the refuge housing was kind of pushed to the side. Good, bad, I don’t know.
Mark: What was the housing like; somebody that stayed in 13 of them.
Bob: We started our married career in a 16 foot travel trailer with sling bunk beds; we soon modified that, but that was in the desert of Utah. I followed, I missed working for the great director, Lynn Greenwalt. Lynn was the original manager at Fish Springs, and he left just shortly before I arrived with Lyle Stemmerman as the manager, and Lyle just passed away here a couple of months ago, was not able to visit with him much. We went from the desert of Utah, trailer, to a home in Colorado where as we irrigated the front lawn in the spring, it washed the balls of snakes that had been hibernating under the house into the yard and my wife didn’t think that was at all necessary. And I advised her that they were also considered wildlife and could not be dispatched. And we ran a trap line in several of the houses, catching mice and I don’t know how many we caught that first summer in Colorado but we’d be there at night, half asleep and, “SNAP, SNAP.” And it was all right if they were killed outright but when you just wounded them the trap would kind of bounce around the house. We had, we had lots of “fun” experiences; she put up with a lot.
Mark: Still is from what I understand.
Bob: She still is.
[Laughing]
Mark: What was, to just go back one last time, what was your first job like at 7
Elk Refuge, besides being drop dead gorgeous? I know the vista well.
Bob: Unbelievable. It was a summer irrigation job. At that time the Elk Refuge had alfalfa fields and, you know, tame grass fields that we would irrigate and it was critical because the snow melt lasted such a short period of time and we needed to make use of the irrigation water as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So they had three of us (Les Beaty, Gary Lunt, and myself) that were summer irrigators, and then as we worked into the program, I think they used that, and the manager was kind of, “We’ll see how these boys do. And if they show any promise, we’ll get them out of the hip boots and let them really see what a refuge is about.” And I was fortunate enough to end up doing a lot of the census work, high mountain lake trumpeter swan census work; just kind of a general orientation. The early managers, at least in my career, were, and I really benefited, they were interested in developing young managers and seeing that their career move forward, but they were also equally as ruthless. If they didn’t think you were interestedor could cut the work, you didn’t last very long; the phone call, and it was like, “Well, thank you, we appreciated your service and hope you do well.” You know that type of thing. But the National Elk Refuge was, for a young fellow, just outstanding. All biological work, and all in the field. And one of the things that my wife has reminded me of, as you move up in the career chain, you move farther away from the field. As an assistant manager at Salt Plains, you know, I was plowing fields, cannon netting geese, coordinating muzzle loader rifle hunts, waterfowl census. I did, later on in my career, just to kind of add spice to the life, I went ahead, and with the approval of a fine gentleman in Minneapolis, went ahead and got my commercial and instrument pilot’s license. And we had a Service plane, [number or November] 708 stationed at my headquarters there in Quincy, Illinois. So for the last, oh ten years or so, I served as a dual function pilot and refuge manager; got to see a lot of the country; it was a fun tour.
Mark: Tell us a little about the booklet you brought down here today.
Bob: We had, as I mentioned to you, when we drove in, this training facility is just fantastic. The first one at Arden Hills, Minnesota was a bit different! I think the goal was the same, how they reached it was certainly a little different.
Mark: Do you remember the year of that?
Bob: May, April/May 1966 probably in that range.
Bob’s wife: Sounds about right.
Bob: The very first one was in 1965, and that was kind of the, we’re going to see how this works. And they had a small staff and a smaller number; ’66 was the first where they brought young managers in from all over the country. And very formal, you did not have a very relaxed atmosphere; Dr. Green, Dr. Bill Green was the director of the academy. Forest Carpenter, supervisor of Region 3 was kind of the main mover and shaker behind that, and there were several others from Washington, but very, very formal. You did not go to the classroom except in your Class A with a tie; those are those old gabardine wool, stand them 8
in the corner and wait for you the next morning.
Mark: We have them in the closet here.
Bob: Well, I’m going to be buried in mine, [everyone laughing] that was the only thing they were good for!; you know people are going to say “My, doesn’t he look nice in that.” But it was very formal and very, very structured. Now the list that I gave you of the original instructors, most of those gentlemen
sadly have passed away. But they were photographers, law enforcement agents, refuge managers, fisheries biologists first and then they were pressed into service because of their expertise in the field to come and tell us young folk how it was done. Most of that group went on, with very few exceptions, to have long term careers in the Service. And one of the first managers that I ever worked for; I had this idea that it would be real good to maybe be a biologist and move to Washington. And he took me aside and he said, “Bob, I want you to know that refuge managers always have a land base attached to their position. All you have in Washington is a desk, if you’re lucky.” And he said, “You make the choice.” And I had several opportunities to move into the offices, but for our personal needs and enjoyment we stayed in the field and I haven’t regretted a single moment of it; it’s been great.
Mark: Is there anything else you want to add before we…?
Bob: No, other than, I would like to say that the staff that you have on refuges, and a lot of them are called by different tit
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No full textIn his three June 2024 interviews with Skye Doney, UW-Madison Emeritus Professor Bob Frykenberg details his personal, academic, and professional life spanning from the 1930s to 2024. To learn more about this oral history, download & review the index first (or transcript if available). It will help determine which audio file(s) to download & listen to.In his three June 2024 interviews with Skye Doney, UW-Madison Emeritus Professor Bob Frykenberg details his personal, academic, and professional life spanning from the 1930s to 2024. Frykenberg begins the interview with discussing his early life, having been born and raised in India, his schooling, and his interest in history. He then outlines his family's journey to the United States, his college-years in the Midwest, and how he eventually joined the UW-Madison History Department. Afterwards, Frykenberg talks about his colleagues and students, and reflects on various changes in the History Department. Throughout the interview, Frykenberg discusses Indian history and changes to Indian society and politics that he has noticed. The interview ends with Frykenberg's predictions for the future of history as a discipline and advice to history majors. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Archives & Records Management oral history collection
Interview with Thomas Duncan by Mark Madison, April 21, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Thomas Duncan with Mark Madison as interviewer.
Mr. Duncan discusses early life and how he wanted to be a waterfowl biologists. He would work as a temporary employee for the Fish and Wildlife Service before becoming a permanent employee with Fisheries. Mr. Duncan shares several stories of his time with the Service including flights he was on while in Alaska, becoming friends with Bob Hines, and his retirement.
Organization: FWS
Name: Thomas Duncan
Years: 1954-1983
Program(s): Fisheries
Keywords: History, Biography, Biologists (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), Wilderness, Wildlife management, Wildlife refuges, Work of the Service, Fisheries, Bob Hines, AviationINTERVIEW WITH THOMAS DUNCAN
BY MARK MADISON APRIL 21, 2001
MR. MADISON: Tom, like we said, we’re just going to ask you some informal
questions to find about your career in the Service, and have a conversation.
MR. DUNCAN: You wanted to know when I was born?
MR. MADISON: Yes.
MR. DUNCAN: June 5, 1928 in Washington, D.C. in Sibley Hospital. My father was a
Treasury Agent. We lived in D.C. until 1939 when he was transferred to Oklahoma.
When I was a kid I used to go to the Smithsonian. My Dad’s office was right across the
street from the Smithsonian, and right across the street from the FBI building and the
Internal Revenue Service [building]. I would go to the Smithsonian and spend Saturday
mornings there. That’s where my interest in wildlife started. I also played in the woods
in Glover Park in D.C. I found out a few years ago that I was playing in the Civil War
entrenchments down there in the woods. I would bring home salamanders and everything
under the sun, out of the woods. Of course, my mother would scream every time, but
nonetheless that was my youth. In Oklahoma I was taught the art of hunting by a friend
of mine, a kid in the neighborhood. We went duck hunting. I had a .410 shotgun. I will
never forget it. It was called a Black Prince. His father let me use it. The first thing that
happened was a flock of Wood Ducks came in and landed in decoys. There were about
thirty birds. I was all excited, thinking that we were going to shoot them. But he said,
“We don’t shoot Wood Ducks! They are protected, and very scarce. We very seldom see
them.” And right after that, a Black Duck came in and landed. He said, “We don’t shoot
Black Ducks. They are very, very rare here.” Pretty soon, some Bufflehead’s came in, so
my first duck was a Bufflehead. That started my interesting waterfowl. At that point, I
decided that somehow, I wanted to be a Waterfowl Biologist. After military service in the
Marines for three years, between World War II and the Korean War, I went to school at
Oklahoma State University. I got my degree in Wildlife Conservation. I came very close
to doing to Delta Research Station when they didn’t have any money. Al Hokebaum
[sic?] said, (I have a bunch of letter from Al who is my hero). He told me, “I’ll give you
food, and a place to sleep, but I can’t give you any transportation home”. I thought,
“How in the world am I going to get from Canada to Oklahoma, or from Oklahoma to
Canada?” I didn’t have a dime. I had to barrow the money from my Dad to go to Seattle.
I got a job offer in Alaska. When I was in college, I worked for thirty days at Salt Plains
National Wildlife Refuge under John Vandinacker. Vandinacker came up on June 30th and
Congress hadn’t appropriated any money that year. They delayed the appropriations,
which you know they do occasionally. So he says, “I have to lay you guys off.” There
were three or four of us who were ‘temporaries’ so we had to be laid off. That was the
end of that session, but I loved it out there. I decided, after doing fence post for miles and
miles, of the government way in sand, that I had really learned something, because that is
an art. That was between my freshman and sophomore year.
MR. MADISON: What year are we talking about roughly?
MR. DUNCAN: That would have been 1950, 1951. Then I went to Yellowstone Park
with Ollie Cope’s Rocky Mountain Fishery investigation. Incidentally, Walter P. Taylor
was the co-op leader at Oklahoma A and M at that that. That is now Oklahoma State.
Stebler came in after that. Dr. Stebler came to me one day, and he said, “Hey Tom,
you’re interested in the Fish and Wildlife Service aren’t you?” I told him “Yeah.” He
asked me how I would like to apply for a summer temporary job. This was through the
Albuquerque Regional Office. That’s how I got the job with the Rocky Mountain
investigation. I had to go out to Yellowstone. I hitchhiked out there, which was an
experience. I came in the east entrance. I went in and checked in and thought that I had
died and gone to heaven when I went into Yellowstone. I worked up there all summer
down at the south end of Yellowstone lake working on cutthroat tagging and retrieving
tags off of Pelican Island. I was digging through the dung, and picking up our fish tags.
Here again was a great experience. I met Fent Carbine who was a Regional Fisheries
Director out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had come up there for some reason or other.
He was the kind of guy that talks to you about things like what year you’re going to do in
your career and what year you are in at school. I told him that I was going to go into
waterfowl. He said that there was no way that I would ever survive in waterfowl, “ducks
are on the way out.” He said, “I’m a fisheries man, what you want to do is to stay in
fisheries!” I found out the next year when I went to North American when I was a senior
in 1953. I went to North American and I met Al Hokebaum. I thought that I would work
on a master’s degree. But he couldn’t fund me with any money. And I didn’t have any.
Fred Baumgartner was my advisor. He was a Quail Biologist more that anything else.
Fred told me that I should just look for a job. He said that he couldn’t help me any more.
The guy who I worked for in Yellowstone was Harvey Moore. Harvey had transferred to
Seattle. I had written to him and told him that I was looking for a job. He told me that
they needed a couple of people, early, to go up to Alaska. I said, “I don’t know anything
about Salmon.” He said, “You took Ichthyology didn’t you?” I said, “Yeah, I know
where they are classified, that’s about it. And I know that they come in a can!” So I
went to Alaska. I went to Seattle and they put me on an airplane. Harvey said that I was
the only person that he had ever seen picked up at the Seattle airport that was standing in
the rain looking up with his face in the rain. I told him that we hadn’t seen any for sixth
months in Oklahoma. I went from Seattle up to King Salmon, Alaska. I was all prepared
for cold weather. I had a big, old, heavy parka. And when I got off of the plane it was
something like 70 degrees. I was melting like a block of ice that had had salt poured on it.
When we were coming in on the plane, I noticed a big flock of swans on the Naknek
River. I remarked to somebody, when we got off of the plane that that was a big flock of
swans up there. I was told, “Yeah, they come in here all of the time.” Curiosity killed
the cat. I was walking up the river and I heard them trumpet. And they weren’t
whistlers they were trumpeters. I came back, and I said, “Hey, I thought they said that
there weren’t any trumpeters outside of Montana!” The guy said, “No, you don’t see
them outside of Montana.” I told him, “Well, there are trumpeters out there!” He then
told me “Those are whistling swans, they are always around here.” I told him, “No
they’re not! They are trumpeters!” Being so young and naïve, I thought that here was [a
topic] for the first paper that I could write. The next year somebody published a paper,
“New Flock of Trumpeter Swans Found on Bristol Bay”. I thought to myself, ‘Well, I
know who found them, but it’s too late now!’ I came back to Seattle and I worked over
on Cook Inlet, Alaska in the Anchorage area; The Kenai Peninsula, Lake Tustamena,
Kenai River, the Upper Russian River, Cooper’s Landing, you know all of these places.
There was another lake that was on the way to Kenai. Dave Spencer put us up for the
night many times when we would go to Kenai. But I traveled all over. I went out to the
other side of Mount Redoubt and Grecian Lake. I worked in the canneries out there,
taking Salmon samples. I went out in Bristol Bay. I was trying to think of the fellow
that took me out on a gill netter, so I really learned how to gill net Salmon because we
were tagging them in Bristol Bay for a management project. His first name was Burt, but
I can’t remember his last name.
MR. MADISON: What was it like to be up in Alaska in the 1950’s as a Fisheries
Biologist?
MR. DUNCAN: Well, the road to Kenai was a cord road. It was all dirt. The only
paving was from Anchorage, down to the junction where you went to Seward. That’s
were it was paved. But when you turn off to go to Kenai, it was dirt. This is one of the
things I always remember about Kenai; we used to fly in there once in a while, later on.
And you’d fly right over Main Street. I mean, with the wheels [landing gear] down you
could take the roof right off of the building, because the airstrip is right there! It was an
experience! As a Biologist, I really enjoyed it. It was outdoors, all of the time. We lived
on a lake, and they put us in a tent and had to survive. There were several times…
In fact a fellow who is still in Seattle, Kenny Liston, he and I worked together most of the
time during my first year up there. Most every summer Ken and I worked together. He
is about 5’2”, and I am 6’3”, so he’d always make me look for the Brown Bears when we
were going through the tall grass. And I had to whistle or something to scare them off.
We did these Salmon surveys on all of the spawning streams. We collected a lot of data
off of [word unintelligible] fish. I came back to Seattle, and after about my third year
they decided to put me in a different position. I took over what we called the ‘technical
staff’, editing and doing the graphic work for the Biologist’s papers, and photography. I
did a lot of photography. I became the lab photographer. That’s why I was asking you
why you didn’t have a photographer. I looked back in the Archives upstairs and I found
a lot of stuff that I had taken pictures of. There were SSRs, fisheries, and sonic tagging. I
was pretty proud of the fact that I had a cover on Electronics Magazine. From Seattle I
went into the tenth Departmental Management Training Program. This was another great
experience. It was a good training experience because you were interacting with people
from every other agency in [the Department of] Interior. I found out why we have such a
short administrative manual. This is because we’re kicked around from one place to the
other so often that that they don’t have time to build one. The National Park Service has
one that goes from this wall to that wall two or three times. They’ve got information on
how to drive a nail in the wall. They can tell you. Ours was real short. It was never
more than three volumes. I even had to write some administrative manual stuff. But I
had experiences, even up in the Secretary’s office, which was really good experience.
MR. MADISON: Who was the Secretary [of the Interior] during this period?
MR. DUNCAN: Seton. Seton was Secretary. And then, about a year later, Russ Sollen
who was the Executive Secretary; and this was the longest title for the smallest grade, I
took his job. Russ Sollen was the Executive Secretary for the Stalick-Kennedy Advisory
Committee to the Secretary of the Interior. Now isn’t that a title? And it was only a GS-
9! I stayed in that job for about two years. That’s when it was used to be the Bureau of
Sport Fisheries and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife
Service had an Assistant Secretary who was the one that came in… Arnie Swamlaw was
the Commissioner of Fisheries. I always remember going in to Arnie’s office to talk to
him about things with this Committee. I remember his desk was clean as a pin, and he
would be reading Sports Afield or Outdoor Life or something. I found out that this was a
political appointee. I don’t know if we ought to record this part! Then I was there at the
transition when John F. Kennedy came in. The first thing they did was to introduce all of
the employees to the new Secretary of the Interior. That was Stuart Udall. Man, what a
guy, he was super! We’d go up to the Secretary’s suite. I don’t know if they still do
this. It was really a top dog thing. One day I was coming out of Don McKerndon’s
office and I was coming down the hall, well first I have to tell you something else. When I
was first assigned this job, Elmer Higgins was the Editor in Chief of all publications in
both Bureaus for the Fish and Wildlife Service. They didn’t really have a place to put me
in the organization chart. So they put me under him. He said, “I don’t know why they
put you in here Tom. But they don’t have another place for you anyway”. He said that
he had to edit all of my reports. I said, “O.K.” He was one of the finest men that I ever
worked for. When he assigned me my desk, Elmer told me, “This is hallowed ground.
This is Rachel Carson’s old desk that you are sitting at”. She had just left a few months
before. I was really impressed by that. So after two years in that job, Paul Thompson
came over from Sport Fisheries. And I think Ed Carlson was involved in this. I saw him
the other day and I remember thinking that I knew him. But I think it was Paul and Ed
Carlson. They asked me if I would come to Arkansas. He said that they couldn’t get
anybody to take the Reservoir Investigations job in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I said,
“Fayetteville! I practically grew up in that place!” My Dad went to school there. He
was from right across the border in Oklahoma. He said, “You’re just the guy I need,
Tom!” About three weeks later, he came over and asked me again. He caught me at a
time when I was angry about having to do all of these reports. I went to Fayetteville. I
transferred down there, and transferred agencies. I went down to Fayetteville and set up
the South Central Reservoir Investigations. We worked on a Beaver reservoir, which was
under construction. We had a lot of contracts with the University of Arkansas. We did a
lot of cooperative work with the Arkansas Fish and Game Commission. We started off
on a very ambitious program. Then Bob Jenkins came from the Sports Fishing Institute
and headed up the whole national program. It was unfortunate, because to be quite
truthful about it, Bob and I conflicted. He was always telling my people what to do and
he didn’t go through me to do it. It was frustrating because I had been in the Management
Training thing, and I said “chain of command, chain of command!” Since he didn’t follow
it, I didn’t either. There were several other stations set up. And they closed all that
down in 1983. I transferred down to Arkadelphia when they set up the new one. That
was the Multi-outlet Reservoir Study. The SGA guy told me that we were the first
federal agency that had ever contracted with a private University for an office. There had
always been Land Grant schools. And this was a Baptist University, but they had a
water Chemist was renowned
Nationally, especially today. His name is Joe Knix. He got us over in their offices, and
they fixed us up with a real nice place to work.
MR. MADISON: We are doing three oral histories at once! You know, it’s a great
weekend! We want to try and catch everything.
MR. DUNCAN: Well, like I said, if you want someday I’ll just make a tape of all of
these stories and send it to you.
MR. MADISON: That’s great too. We will transcribe it and add it to the archives.
MR. DUNCAN: I was thinking about doing this for my kids because some of the stories
of things that happened to me when I was up in Alaska are pretty hair raising. I can name
all of the pilots; the ones that I liked to fly with, and the ones that scared the daylights
out of me.
MR. MADISON: Well tell us some stories about the pilots. Who were the good one,
and who were the scary ones?
MR. DUNCAN: Well, there’s one of them that is still around. His name is Tom
Wardley. Tom was a young buck at the time. He was the one that was always the hot
rodder. That’s what we thought of him. Tom Wardley, after he left the Fish and Wildlife
Service, became an inspector for FAA. I felt that he knew all of the tricks. There was no
doubt in my mind. He flew an “old Silver”. It was a Drummond Goose that we flew out
of Anchorage. They refurbished it and they flew it down on Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He
flew it down from Anchorage.
MR. MADISON: Was that for the Air Show there?
MR. DUNCAN: Yes. Wardley took me in on Lake Tustamena. There were Ken
Liscomb and I, and Carl Elling who was our supervisor out of Seattle. Carl is still alive.
It is eighty-something years old. He still goes fishing. We came in to Lake Tustamena
which is thirty miles long and about five miles wide. There was about a thirty or thirty-five
miles per hour knot wind blowing. The waves were about this high at the point were
we needed to go in and land and go in shore. Wardley says, “Well, we’ll just land
crosswind”. And I thought, “Golly!” I was in the Marine Air [Division] when I was in
the Service. I said, Crosswind? In this wind?” He said that yes, they were going to put
it down on top of a wave. We were drifting this way with the wind, and the waves were
going that way too. So he did, he laid that big Goose down on the top of a crest of a
wave. But you know what? That wave went right out from underneath it and right down
in the water we went. I just saw water fly everywhere. And I thought we were going
under. I couldn’t see anything but bubbles! I wanted to grab a lifejacket. I am telling
you, it scared the life out of me. But we got into shore. I looked at the tips of the blades
on the propellers, and they were pitted all the way up to the center of the hub. I am not
kidding. They were pitted like I have never seen. I had seen pitted propellers when I was
in the Marine Air Corps when these guys would come down and hit the deck too hard.
They would pick up water and pit the propeller. He got in, and unloaded us. And when
he took off it didn’t take him long to get off of the water because he went into that wind
and he was up in the air before you could blink your eyes. That poor airplane took a
beating! That was the last time that I wanted to fly with Wardley, but I flew with him
several other times. Warren Nicestrom came to pick us up on a lake called Blue Lake on
the west side of Cook Inlet, across from Kenai. It’s a little round bowl surrounded on
three sides by pretty high hills. But there was an opening on the south side that you
could out of. But there was a row of Cottonwood trees down there, about one hundred or
so yards off of the lake. To get off of the lake with a Grummond Goose, you had to go
around in circles and whip up the water real good for a few minutes. You had to go
around at least three licks. Well, Warren came in and he had a habit. We’d always fix him
something to eat because he hadn’t eaten all day. He always picked us up in the last part
of the day. We were sitting there frying some Spam, which is good for up there. We had
some Spam, and we were cooking. Warren pulled the plane up, the tail was sitting in the
water. We sat around and ate that, and cleaned the frying pan, put the gear away, and
stowed all of the gear in the plane. We were getting ready to leave, and took off. We
were trying to take off. We were going around skimming the water and he says, “You
know? This plane feels heavy for some reason or other!” I was sitting up there, and Tom
Costello was with us. Tom says, “Yeah, there’s something wrong here!” Well, when we
started to take off, he just gunned those engines. He hit them both, just full throttle.
That plane was just screaming across that lake. And I could just see the land coming up,
just like this. All of sudden, he dropped those flaps down, and that plane just lifted up,
just as we got to the shoreline. I said, “Holy Cow!” And I just buried my head! Well the
next thing I know, the plane is going over like this, and I see trees out of the window.
Just right there, and the pontoon took off the top of a tree! The plane finally went,
[makes a sighing sound], and he said, “Man, that was close!” He said, “I didn’t know
which tree to go between!” Costello said, “You did a good job Warren!” But I will never
forget it. We were climbing up out of there, and he said, “There’s something wrong, I’ve
to trim it. There must be water in it or something.” A Goose has a couple of windows up
on the edge of the cockpit where you can see out. As we were climbing up he said,
“We’ve got water streaming out of here like a jet!” When we got back to Anchorage, or
on the way back to Anchorage, and I’ll tell you, I told somebody that I have a guardian
angel because I knew that she was with me this trip. As we were flying back, he pulled
up to five thousand feet. That’s about as far as you can go in Anchorage because of
airspace and Air Force regulations and stuff. We were coming out of the sun at that
particular time. Tom Costello was an ex-Navy fighter pilot in jets. Tom took the wheel
up there, and he pushing it forward real quick while Warren was flying. Warren said,
“What are you doing?” All of a sudden a jet went right over the top of us. I mean, you
could see the guys face in it. [The jet] He pushed it just enough, it didn’t quite hit
Madison Price Family History
No full textMadison L. Price authored this family history as part of the course requirements for HIST 550/700 Your Family in History offered online in Fall 2019 and was submitted to the Pittsburg State University Digital Commons. Please contact the author directly with any questions or comments: [email protected]
The Family History of Madison P. Rexwinkle
No full textMadison Rexwinkle authored this family history as part of the course requirements for HIST 550 Your Family in History offered online in Spring 2019 and was submitted to the Pittsburg State University Digital Commons. Please contact the author directly with any questions or comments: [email protected]
Oral History Interview, Bob Harvey (2308)
No full textDuring Grandparents University, Renewable Energy Studies Major Chloe Peterson, age 14, interviews her great uncle, Bob Harvey, about how his relationship with energy has changed since his childhood. To learn more about this oral history, download & review the index first (or transcript if available). It will help determine which audio file(s) to download & listen to.During Grandparents University, Renewable Energy Studies Major Chloe Peterson, age 14, interviews her great uncle, Bob Harvey, about how his relationship with energy has changed since his childhood. Harvey shares his perspective on the importance of personal and systemic sustainability measures, and how the focus of conversations about humanity's impact on the earth has shifted from rising populations to climate challenges and solutions. This story was collected in collaboration with the Wisconsin Energy Institute (WEI) and is being stored within the Oral History Program at the UW-Madison Archives
Gift inscription in Minions of the Moon: a little book of song and story
No full textThis edition includes a gift inscription possibly penned by the author, Madison Julius Cawein, "Frank on Valentines Day, 1914. M.J." Madison Julius Cawein (1865-1914).Cawein, Madison Julius, 1865-1914
Poetical Works of James Madison Bell
No full textThis volume of poetry includes a bigraphical sketch of the author, James Madison Bell (1826-1902), by Bishop Benjamin William Arnett (1838-1906). According to Arnett, Bell was an African-American poet, orator, and political activist. He was an Ohio native who lived in Canada and San Francisco before settling with his family in Toledo in 1865
Bette Duff
No full textBette Duff oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison and Paul Tritaik. Bette Duffs’s mother worked for the Department of Interior in the Bureau of Mines for over 40 years, and through her mother would end up as a research assistant for Rachel Carson during the writing of Silent Spring. She talks about the work she did for Rachel Carson, which included going to libraries and taking notes from books, pre Xerox days, doing some interviews, and occasionally entertaining Roger, Rachel’s adopted son and she mentions where the idea for Silent Spring came from. Ms. Duff and Rachel became good friends, Rachel Carson even went to Bette’s wedding. Also mentioned are Dorothy Freeman, Linda Lear, Olaus Murie, Dr. William Beebe, Howard and Alice Zahniser.1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Bette Duff
Date of Interview: April 5, 2010
Location of Interview: Sanibel, Florida
Interviewer: Mark Madison and Paul Tritaik
Brief Summary of Interview: Bette Duffs’s mother worked for the Department of Interior in the Bureau of Mines for over 40 years, and through her mother would end up as a research assistant for Rachel Carson during the writing of Silent Spring. She talks about the work she did for Rachel Carson, which included going to libraries and taking notes from books, pre Xerox days, doing some interviews, and occasionally entertaining Roger, Rachel’s adopted son and she mentions where the idea for Silent Spring came from. Ms. Duff and Rachel became good friends, Rachel Carson even went to Bette’s wedding. Also mentioned are Dorothy Freeman, Linda Lear, Olas Murie, Dr. William Beebe, Howard and Alice Zahniser. 2
Indistinct conversations
Mark Madison – Alright, today is April 5th 2010, and we are in Sanibel, Florida, doing an oral history with Bette Duff -- B E T T E D U F F. Also in the room is Paul Tritaik – T R I T A I K, and Mark Madison. And Bette, thanks for doing this.
Bette Duff – Oh, it’s my pleasure.
Mark Madison – Our first question is, what, if any, affiliation did you have with the Fish and Wildlife Service… you might have had a familial affiliation.
Bette Duff – Actually, my mother worked for Interior Department for over 40 years. She worked in the Bureau of Mines…
Mark Madison – Okay.
Bette Duff – … in Interior. And… but, you know, when you work there, you get to know everybody. and so she… actually the summer I graduated from high school, she knew someone in Fish and Wildlife, and she had had me take the civil service exam and do all my typing. So I worked in College Park at the Fish and Wildlife Service...
Mark Madison – Sure.
Bette Duff – … with Visual Information, the Chief there was Rex Gary Schmidt. And it was a wonderful summer. I saw all the photographs… I saw the first photographs of Rachel and the tidal pools, and all the historical photographs, which I hope you have now, up in Shepherdstown. There were just tons of them.
Mark Madison – A lot of them came to my archive.
Bette Duff – Did they?
Mark Madison – And a lot of them were shot by Rex.
Bette Duff – Is that right?
Mark Madison – He was a heck of a photographer.
Bette Duff – Yeah, he was, and a good friend of Bob Hines. So anyway, that was my summer. And that was my connection to Interior. And then it was my mother who got… went down to see Mr. Banks, in the library at Interior, ‘cause she worked with him, and she said I was looking for a job. This was between my junior and senior year in college, summer of that year. And he said “Well, Rachel Carson had just called and asking if he knew anybody.” So my mother raced back to the office and called me at home, and I called Rachel, and it had only been about a half hour since she had talked with Mr. Banks, and she said, ‘So soon, he got somebody?’
General laughter 3
Bette Duff – And I said yes. And so she questioned me carefully and found out I was a biology major, and I’d done a lot of scientific research, you know, as much as you can have done by the time your 21. So she said, well, come out and we’ll interview. So that’s how it all started. And she lived in Silver Spring and I lived in College Park, so it was nearby.
Mark Madison – Oh, yeah. You know, her house in Silver Spring is still part of the Rachel Carson Council.
Bette Duff – Is that right?
Mark Madison – And in two weeks I’m going to give a talk… once a year they have an open house and…
Bette Duff – Oh, neat.
Mark Madison – … do Carson stuff. It’s preserved like when she lived there…
Bette Duff – That’s really wonderful.
Mark Madison – … and it looks like 1964, basically, when you go in the house.
Bette Duff – Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Madison – It’s very neat.
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – Well, what was the interview like with Rachel? What questions did she ask?
Bette Duff – Oh, it was wonderful. Well, first of all, you know, when I saw her I thought ‘can this be a famous author?’ ‘Cause, you know, she looked really tired, you know, and she had on an old skirt and sneakers, and, you know, I thought ‘this is not the way a famous author looks.’ But I… you know, she had me sit down and asked me questions, and we talked. And she soon was comfortable with my credentials. And then she found out that I’d left my mother sitting out in the car, in the 90 degree Washington, D.C. heat, which is where I thought all parents belonged when their offspring were having interviews with famous people. Right? And she said ‘That’s terrible.’ So she went running out with me, and she apologized to my mother. Of course, I had completely overlooked the fact that, if it hadn’t been for my mother, I never would have gotten the job. That’s a typical offspring for you. So, we set up a system. I would go to her home and she would have the 3 by 5 cards out that she kept her references on. And she would hand them to me, tell me which libraries they were in, and then… I had a small notebook, and I just set off to Agriculture Library, or Interior Library, or NIH Library sometimes. And I’d find the books and stack them up, and go through them and take notes. It was an all day job. It was before xerox. 4
Mark Madison – Yeah.
Bette Duff – People forget this, you know. I later did research, and I’d just go and xerox them all, you know, give them the whole book. But Rachel had to take… rely on the notes to see if that was something worth doing. So that’s what… that’s what we did.
Mark Madison – Bette, we should ask you, what year was this that you were…
Bette Duff – Yeah. This was… I wrote it down ‘cause it just seems like yesterday, but I know it wasn’t. It was the summer of 1958.
Mark Madison – Okay.
Bette Duff – So she must have just moved into her new home in Silver Spring. Roger was there, her… very active, and he was about six. She had her hands full. She had her hands full.
General laughter
Mark Madison – What type of information was Rachel trying to have you research, specifically?
Bette Duff – Some of it was just case histories, where these sprayings had happened and what had been the result. And she tried to get these from as many different varieties as possible. And ironically, a lot of the sources were the chemical companies magazines, because they… they would say, you know, what had happened. And Agriculture was pretty open about it, at least then they were pretty open about it. They got kind of nervous about it later because… of course, Rachel was not, you know, against all pesticides. She was very… she knew that they… DDT had played an important role or two in saving many soldiers’ lives when they got into these infested… mosquito-infested islands. But she just knew that it had gone too far. And something people don’t realize, maybe, but the Washington, D.C., area in the 1950s, there was a frenzy to get rid of mosquitoes. And we had these big trucks that had, like, fire hose nozzles. And they’d go up and down the street, and they’d spray everything. And this was before air conditioning, so when the windows were open it would go in your house. If your baby happened to be out in a playpen, it would go over the baby. It would go over your clothes. And of course, they also… so that was what they did in our neighborhood, like College Park and Silver Spring. And, I mean, they did this once a week or so. And pretty soon some of the neighbors, who were bird people, began to notice the birds were disappearing. And they, you know, nobody quite knew what to do about it. It was at that stage. And if you made a protest they’d say ‘Well, the University knows what they’re doing’ or ‘The Government knows what they’re doing.’ And of course, that was an attitude she was especially against and trying to combat in this book. She once said ‘It’s not just a book about the, you know, foolish use of pesticides. It’s a book about society…’ well, as she put it, ‘man against himself, or society against itself.’ ‘They’re not being careful; they’re not being reflective; they’re too willing to take people’s opinions of what’s right, and not investigate for themselves; and they want fast and easy answers.’ And she knew, and rightly so, this was a path for disaster. I don’t think our 5
neighborhoods ever really recovered from that, in that area. And this was where Howard Sonheiser lived too, so he knew what it was about.
Mark Madison – Sure. How did Rachel describe the book when you first came to work for her in 1958? She must have given you an overview so you could focus your research.
Bette Duff – Well, yeah, she told me that it had started… well, actually, a friend of hers had called from… I think Massachusetts and an airplane had come over and sprayed this whole refuge area, which this friend and her husband had saved and conservation… and soon they saw these… they hadn’t known the airplane was coming, they saw all these dead animals and birds. So they called Rachel, who was their good friend, and I think they said something, like, ‘Can’t you do something about this?’.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – And she said… well, I… the way she explained it to me was, she tried to get other people to do something about it, and write this article. So she started writing an article -- it was going to just be an article. And I guess she showed it to William Shawn, at the New Yorker, and he said ‘This is terrific and I want (I think he said) 500,000 words.’ You know, he wanted it serialized in the New Yorker. So then she had her hands full. And some of her friends… well, Dorothy Freeman, who was a good friend, called Rachel, ‘Why are you doing this, you know, at last you have some peace and quiet, your mother’s sick, and Roger’s here, and you know…’
Mark Madison – What did you think of the project? You were a junior… was it a biology major…
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – … at Bryn Mawr?
Bette Duff – Yeah, at Bryn Mawr. I thought it was really fun to do, fun to see all sides of the issue. And she was very good about that, very… had a lot of integrity about her work. So I would deliver them, and she would collect them I guess, and file them. And I guess, when she finally started writing, she’d write at night when Rodger was asleep. So this was… too hard to work when he was up.
Paul Tritaik – Can you explain who Roger was?
Bette Duff – Roger was her nephew. He was orphaned he was… her niece’s child, and he was orphaned when he was a little baby, and she adopted him as her own. And, you know, it… it was tough, because when you have kids, usually you have a community, you know, of mothers. And you exchange ideas, and you have play groups. She was out there in Silver Spring, with this very bright little boy who was…
Mark Madison – Right.
6
Bette Duff – And she didn’t have time to go to play groups. Sometimes she’d get me to take him to the movies, you know, to see these dragon pictures or something. But she was… that’s who Roger was.
Mark Madison – Did she have you… beyond pulling articles and so on? Did she have you interviewing people, or doing other types of things?
Bette Duff – Yes, she did. At first she did them, she did most of the interviews. But then, when I… I was on my way after… in the fall I went to medical school; I was going to be a physician. And then I decided I didn’t like medical school, so I came back. And the next summer I worked again for her, before I was married.
Mark Madison – Was that 1959?
Bette Duff – That would have been… I went… that was 1960.
Mark Madison – 1960, okay.
Bette Duff – And… yeah. And she had me go and do one or two interviews. And sometimes that worked well, and sometimes it didn’t. They were getting… people were getting pretty alarmed by then. The cranberry thing came out. I don’t remember the details, but some big cranberry alarm… and she was trying to find out the details of this. And people in the government weren’t ready to release the details. And I walked into an interview with a man, and he thought I worked for the Department of Interior, so he was giving me all this information. And then he stopped and he said ‘Where do you work?’ And I said, ‘Well, I work for Rachel Carson.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s all we have to say.’ And so I left, and I called her and I told her I had failed miserably. And she said… she said, ‘well…’ I can’t remember the guy’s name, and she said, ‘Oh, I know him,’ she said, ‘He wouldn’t… all those people are ready to hide under their desks,’ she said, you know, ‘I’ll get the information,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I have friends. I’ll get the information.’ So I did do some of those interviews. But she was very kind. At the end of the summer, that first summer, she called and told me she really appreciated my notes. I think she just really started to read them, because she was beginning to write, and she appreciated the work I had done. And that was very nice.
Mark Madison – Of course, she must have felt an affinity for you - a young female biologist. I mean, did she ever offer you career advice or anything?
Bette Duff – No. No. She was, you know, she was a very kind of laid back lady. She wasn’t overpowering in any sense at all. We’d… when we had lunch, we’d sometimes sit outside, and I was always amazed, you know, ‘cause we’d be talking and we’d hear a bird call, and she’d say, you know, that’s the yellow-breasted something or other. And I was always… you know, ‘cause naturalist wasn’t my thing, and I was just very much in awe. No, she was a… Linda Lear mentioned that in her book, that when Rachel met me she must have had an affinity for me ‘cause I must have looked like what she had looked like when she was starting out it. It was a very kind thing to say. But she did like me. 7
We had a good sense of humor. Fortunately, she had a good sense of humor. I remember one day I said… she said something about, you know, ‘That was in the article I wrote teaching my nephew to wonder.’
Mark Madison – Mm hmm.
Bette Duff – And I said [voice drops very low – can’t hear on tape], as only a 21 year old can say [voice drops very low – can’t hear on tape], I said, ‘I thought Ann Morrow Lindbergh wrote that.’
General laughter
Bette Duff – She said, ‘No! She didn’t write that. .I wrote it!’
Mark Madison – That’s funny.
General laughter
Mark Madison – There’s a reason for that though. That original article in, like, Ladies Home Companion, and they had a picture of… I don’t know if it was Roger, but…
Bette Duff – It was Roger.
Mark Madison – … a little kid on the beach.
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – And then it had Ann Morrow Lindberg, who had written some other article inside, and then Carson’s name was written very small on the cover. ‘Cause we have one of the originals, and Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s name is huge.
Bette Duff – Right.
Mark Madison – And I don’t even remember what her article was.
Bette Duff – Right. Well, I feel better about that.
Mark Madison – So you had a reason for that.
Bette Duff – She might… she… from her response, she must have had other people say that.
General laughter
Mark Madison – Did you have a sense, working with Carson in ‘58 and ’60, how important this book was going to be? 8
Bette Duff – I really didn’t, you know, I… I could tell… sometimes she would have me file her correspondence and I’d get so… such bad form, I’d get so interested in these letters she had, that it would take me all day, ‘cause they were from famous people all over the world. And I knew she had a lot of support, from a lot of important people. And I know her stock broker was getting concerned, because he discovered that she had some stock in chemical companies. When I went there one day…
General laughter
Bette Duff – … ‘Oh, I just had this terrible discussion with my stock broker, you know,’ and I… she said, ‘I told him to sell those stocks.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that. They’re the best stocks.’ ‘No, I told him to sell those stocks.’ So, yeah…
Mark Madison – That would have been awkward, if she’d had a lot of stock...
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – … in Monsanto or Dow.
General laughter
Bette Duff – Yes, that would have been discovered very quickly. Very quickly.
Mark Madison – Did she ever talk about the process of writing the book?
Bette Duff – No, just… just that she was having trouble deciding how to present it. She did mention that. and her… the woman, Jean Davis, maybe you know, who worked with her a lot, probably knows more about this, because Jean worked with her after I left, and worked with her for a long time. ‘Til her death, I think. I guess she didn’t know how to present it, whether to present it, you know… so many facts. How she could get them in. I guess she figured it out. She wrote… I think she wrote at night; she wrote on a board. And I could never have done that. I guess, when you have to, you do that.
Mark Madison – Did she send you a copy when it was done?
Bette Duff – She did. And… I have left here… I brought some xerox material for Paul, and one of the is the cover of the original book, where she wrote ‘to Bette’… it was Bette Haney, I was Bette Haney when I worked for her, H A N E Y, and she said, ‘for deep appreciation for the work when this… when the book was getting started’. So it was really the early days of the book.
Mark Madison – Well, that’s very interesting.
Bette Duff – Well, it was fun. It was a lot of fun. And then, when it was published, of course, it was beginning to get lots of fame, and so she invited us down to her publishing 9
party in New York City, which was really exciting. Houghton Mifflin gave her this big… big whoop-de-do. I’d never been to a publishing party, and… lots of people there. And I remember, she came over and I didn’t recognize her. And, this is another typical 20-year-old kind of comment; they had had… I guess the publishing company had taken her out, you know, or sent her out, to get really re-done. And she had a really beautiful… I guess it was a wig because she probably lost a lot of her hair by then, because of her cancer.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – But she had beautiful clothes. And she said ‘Bette’ and I said, ‘Rachel, I didn’t recognize you. You look so good.’
General laughter
Bette Duff – Fortunately, she laughed. But it was true. I was thinking about that today, when she… she was always very casual at home, and of course, you know, she liked nothing better than to wade around in tidal pools and things.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – But when she went to interview these executives, and when she even went down to the library, she was like getting armed for combat, you know, she dressed up. And in those days, sometimes, you even wore a hat.
Mark Madison – Do you have any other questions? I’ll circle back to the visual information stuff.
Paul Tritaik – Okay.
Mark Madison – ‘Cause I’m very interested in that, actually.
Paul Tritaik – Well, the whole reaction to the writing of this book… people were catching wind and starting to pull back, it seems like. How much of that was prefaced by the New York Times article, or was that… were you working with her on that?
Bette Duff – You mean the New Yorker?
Paul Tritaik – I’m sorry, the New Yorker.
Bette Duff – Probably when that came out, that was pretty near the end, I think. That got people alarmed - a lot of people. Well, one of the things I said I learned from her was, you have to be ready to accept all kinds of criticism when you’re doing a project like that, because you’re stepping on some people’s toes. And people knew… they knew that there’d been mistakes made, but nobody wanted to admit it. And the Agriculture Department would be blaming the Interior Department, and the Interior Department 10
would be blaming somebody else. Although, I understand that Stewart Udall was very supportive of this whole thing. And she had a lot of support from the Interior Department. Agriculturel… you know, I had a friend who worked… this is another kind of funny story, but he was an entomologist. I think he’d done a lot of the early work on DDT. And when I went to Agriculture, I wanted to take out some of the books, so I went up to this other neighbor of mine and asked him if I could use his library card and he said I could. So I took them out under his name. And then he found out what it was about, and he was, he told me to take the library books back, because I was working for Rachel Carson.
General laughter
Bette Duff – You know, they always said, ‘Oh, she hasn’t got her facts right.’ But the fact is, she quoted directly from these journals. I don’t think she interpolated too much, or interpreted. I think she let it kind of speak for itself. But people were concerned. And, you know, rightly so, ‘cause… oh, she got a lot of criticism, ‘cause she was just a little old lady, living out in the country, with her cats. An old maid. And then, why should she care about future generations when she was a spinster, had no children of her own. And then, one day she was asked to speak… this was just at the beginning of the book… as
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