2,397 research outputs found
Interview with Harold Miller by Jerry French, June 18, 2002
No full textOral history interview with Harold Miller as interviewed by Jerry French.
Mr. Miller discusses growing up on his family's farm, joining the military,and working for FWS for 43 years. He shares several stories of his time with the Service and some of the people he worked with.
Organization: FWS
Name: Harold Miller
Years: 1946-1984
Program: Refuges
Keywords: History, Employees (USFWS), Personnel, Wildlife refuges, military, biography, Lynn Greenwalt, Seth Lowe, Tex Dale, Salt Plains NWR, clerk, laborer, patrolman John Vanden Akker, Les Beatty, Richard Hitch, whooping craneINTERVIEW WITH HAROLD MILLER
BY JERRY FRENCH JUNE 18, 2002
Also present Mrs. Velma Miller and Mrs. Pat French
MR. FRENCH: Today is June 18, 2002. This is Jerry French and I am sitting in the
home of Mr. Harold Miller. Harold was the Refuge Clerk at Salt Plains from probably
the 1940s up until he retired. He spent forty-three years in government service. Harold
has had a long career and got to work with everybody; from me, on one end of the scale,
clear up Lynn Greenwalt on the other. Harold, if you would…I know that you grew up
here and that your parents sold land to the Refuge when it was first established. Would
you care to tell me a little about that?
MR. MILLER: This is Harold Miller speaking now. My parents owned a farm on the
north side of Salt Plains Lake. They settled there in 1920. I grew up on that particular
farm. A portion of it was purchased by the Corps of Engineers when they built the dam
in 1938-1941. After four years service in the Air Force, I returned back to the old sand
hills to raise my family. I married my married my childhood sweetheart, Velma. We only
lived three or four miles apart as children. Then, in 1946 when I returned to the farm I
was offered a job by Seth Lowe, who was at that time the Refuge Manager of the Salt
Plains National Wildlife Refuge. I started to work in October of 1946 and continued until
December of 1984. I enjoyed a long time with the Refuge System.
MR. FRENCH: Would you tell me just a little bit about your Military service? I know
that you spent a little time in Italy, didn’t you?
MR. MILLER: Yes, I was in the service for approximately four years, with the Air
Force. I settled down with the 15th Air Force Command in [sounds like Berry] Italy. My
duties there in Berry were as a File Clerk. I did quite a bit of copy writing for the
Officers in charge of my Unit.
MR. FRENCH: I believe you also worked down in Texas on what is now or near
Matagorda Island on the peninsula which was actually a bombing range.
MR. MILLER: Yeah, I was assigned there in my early years with the Air Force. It was
the Matagorda Peninsula. At the time I was stationed there I think it was two different
units on the island. One of them, the one that I was connected with was more or less a
target range area. Were as the Matagorda Island was managed for ground target practice.
Also, Matagorda Island was not being used by the Whooping Cranes at that time but it
was under the control of the Department of the Interior, the way I remember it.
MR. FRENCH: Harold and I worked together from 1974 until 1977. He used to tell me
all the stories. Harold, when you first started at Salt Plains was there any public use at
all? Or were the gates pretty much locked?
MR. MILLER: The way I recall, there was very little public use. In fact, all of the gates
were locked and we weren’t even permitted to destroy anything. We couldn’t even cut
limbs off the trees around the houses. The Refuge Manager at that time thought that the
only thing we could kill was feral cats, so he carried a gun to kill the cats.
MR. FRENCH: Through the years, you’ve worked with I don’t know how many
different Managers. You’ve worked with many Assistant Managers. Probably one of the
most prominent men you ever got an opportunity to work with was Lynn Greenwalt.
This was almost one of his first assignments wasn’t it?
MR. MILLER: That’s right. The way I remember, he was Assistant Manager when he
came in, but it was his first assignment I believe under that title. He was a great man to
work with. He made snap decisions that were usually right on target. He was correct in
most of the decisions that he made.
MR. FRENCH: I recall one time when Tex Dale, who was the Foreman here for years; he
said that when he worked with Lynn, it was very difficult. Tex was a very short man and
he said that Lynn was so tall that they’d start somewhere and he was almost having to
run to keep up with Lynn. Lynn would be in a hurry to go somewhere and he wouldn’t
run, he’d just walk. His stride was so long, it just kept everybody else in a sweat keeping
up with him!
MR. MILLER: It was not only in walking. We had to hurry to keep up with him
mentally. He was so sharp it seemed like. He had an excellent memory and related real
well with the crew. But he didn’t try to hold that over us. He was just one of the family
in the Refuge System. We all got along real well with Lynn. I appreciated his ability to
make decisions and to the right thing that needed to be done at the right time.
MR. FRENCH: Well, while we’re talking about refuge family; one of the great refuge
families which is still around is the Beatty family. You got to work with Les Beatty, Sr.
and of course you remember Les Beatty, Jr. when he was still a young man. Would you
like to tell us a little bit about the Beattys?
MR. MILLER: Les Beatty was an excellent man to work with. He was real cooperative.
Anybody who worked with him would enjoy and appreciate him. He was more or less
an engineering mind. He developed a lot of our sites to make small ponds on the Refuge.
His son grew up on the Refuge and graduated from Jet High School. I remember him as a
young boy going to school.
MR. FRENCH: Let me borrow the microphone for a minute and I’ll do some talking
while you wet your whistle with that water. I know how this thing becomes. Harold and
I had a good working relationship when I was at the Refuge. One of the stories that he
used to tell me was that one time he had found a sick Whooping Crane. The only thing
they could do with it was to try to get it to a zoo. The only zoo around what was
capable of handling a creature like that was the zoo in San Antonio, Texas. So Harold put
that sick Crane in the truck and headed off. If you could tell us a little about that story,
I’d appreciate it.
MR. MILLER: At the time this Crane was found, it was located by some high school
students near Attica, Kansas. So we got word that they had this Crane up there that was
not able to fly. So the Refuge Manager who was John Van Den Akker at the time, and I
went up to Attica and picked up this Crane to see what was the matter with it or if we
could help it. After several contacts with our Regional Office on what to do with the
Crane it was suggested that it be taken to San Antonio, Texas to a zoo there for the
Veterinarian to take care of it. Well, we debated who was going to take the Crane to
Texas. But here it was Halloween evening and the Van Den Akker family was expecting a
new child. The family of Harold Miller was expecting a new child pretty soon, but mine
was due a couple of months later. So who gets the job to go to Texas? So I put this
Whooping Crane in the front seat of the pick up. It stood on the floor on the right hand
side of the pickup. I left Salt Plains Refuge at about eleven o’clock on my way to San
Antonio. Just before we got in to Mineral Wells, the Whooping Crane began to gasp and
get his breath and flopped a few times. Then he fell over dead. So here I was with a dead
Whooping Crane wondering what to do. So I called and talked to Mark Nelson. He
suggested that I locate some dry ice and pack the bird in the dry ice and take it on to San
Antonio. They could decide what to do with it. That’s just what I did. It was only a
thirteen and a half hour drive at fifty-five miles an hour at that time. So they got the
Crane. They got the Crane on a Saturday afternoon to do what they needed to do.
MR. FRENCH: One of the great things about working with Harold; of course that was
back when those positions which did the administrative work load were called Refuge
Clerks. I believe now they are called Administrative Technicians. Harold handled all of
the typing and he would not use an electric typewriter. He had an old, black Smith
Corona and he just pounded that thing to death. He did all of he filing and everything like
that. But then, he was also available all of the time to assist with anything else. One of
the interesting things was he was probably the only one on the Refuge who was capable
of handling that motor crane. Harold, if you’d care to tell us a little about your experience
handling that crane, and maybe digging some of the trash out of Sand Creek as it piled up
against the bridge abutments?
MR. MILLER: I need to go back to my title. My title was Refuge
Clerk/Laborer/Patrolman (and other duties as assigned), so [All laugh]. So I was outside
at least fifty percent of the time. It seemed like it was fifty percent anyway. I’d help do
the farming. We acquired an old motor crane from the military that needed transmission
work on it and so forth. Who was going to run it? Since I had gotten familiar with some
of the levers and so forth while we were moving the crane in, I volunteered to learn to
operate it. We used it then to dig out the trash around the culverts and bridges and so
forth and the Highway 11 Bridge was stopped up quite often with debris like limbs, trash
and mud. We had an agreement with the Highway Department that I would help clean
that out. We put on an old clamshell bucket that was a little bit larger than it should have
been for the size crane we had. And if we didn’t put the outriggers on, why, it would pull
it over to a pretty low degree of upsetting! Many a time, the banister held up the crane
so it didn’t fall over! Of course, not being an experienced operator, I dropped the bucket
several times. It didn’t break the cable, but I sure stretched it!
MR. FRENCH: We’ve talked about some of the Managers. I know that you worked
with John Van Den Akker. One of the great stories that I recall was when I believe it was
John who was sent to Salt Lake City, or maybe it was Bear River Refuge for an airboat.
Would you tell your story about him bringing the airboat back over the mountains?
MR. MILLER: I am sure that was quite an experience for Mr. Van Den Akker. He had
taken back to Salt Lake City. That was where he originally came from before he came to
Salt Plains. He was to tow that airboat back to Okalahoma behind his car. Well, some of
those passes were a little bit steep coming across Colorado so his car wouldn’t pull it up
the hill. So he just went back and started the prop on that old airboat and then he got in
the car and over the mountain they came! It was a safe trip for them after all. And it’s
one that he remembers and would remember it well if he were interviewed on it.
MR. FRENCH: It’s one of those stories of years ago when Managers used to do things
like that; and it was expected of them. Any more they’d probably be sited for safety
violations and everything else. He told you, you told me and now we’re going to record
this so that other people can hear about the way things used to be.
MR. MILLER: Well, the way it used to be, I enjoyed, because it was a challenge to me.
It was not only a challenge but it was educational. I thought that if anybody else could do
a job, I could do it too! So I was willing to try to do my best.
MR. FRENCH: Well, you did more than that because as we were talking about before we
began the interview, when I started here I was probably a little greener that I thought I
really was. I thought I was a little more experienced, but we’d start out on a job and
Harold would say, “Okay, where you headed?” “Well, the Manager told me to go over
and plow in field C-12,” for example. And Harold would say, “Okay, when you get over
there stay away from this corner of the field because there is a boggy spot and then there
will be a sandy ridge that runs down through the center.” He knew every corner of the
refuge that I ever encountered. It was just a wonderful resource; as the youngest
Assistant Manager, keeping me out of trouble. The only thing he didn’t keep me out of
trouble on was, I tended to get stuck a lot. I was always getting stuck. I’d bury the
truck; bury it here, bury it there. The signal on the radio was to make a call and say, “Are
there any taxis running today? Because I need a ride!” Usually, if there were any taxi
running, why, Harold was the one driving the taxi. He’d rescue me from where ever I
was. We’d either get the pickup back upright, or I’d at least get a ride back to the
Headquarters. That was the signal, “Are there any taxi running today?” He say, “Well,
where do you need picked up?” I’d answer that I was over on Wilson Pond, or some
such place. “I’ll get you in a little bit”.
MR. MILLER: Yeah, those were fun days. We didn’t have four-wheel drive equipment
so we depended on two-wheel drive to pull us through. That’s what made it a family
operation. Each of us depended on somebody else to help us out. I enjoyed doing some
of the fieldwork, but if I left the office to go to the field, I made up for it. Because was
behind in the office. Quite often it meant that there were longer hours in the office of an
evening finishing up. If not that evening, it was the next day. So it was still a family
affair. Got another question?
MR. FRENCH: Well, that’s the stories that I have run into. We talked about Seth Lowe
a little bit and we talked about John Van Den Akker. Do you want to make any
comparisons or talk about any of the other managers you worked with? I don’t know
who all you worked for. I know you worked for Les Beatty for a while. How about
some stories about Dick Hitch, Mr. Hitch, I should say?
MR. MILLER: Mr. Hitch, he was another great man to work with. One of his by-words
was, “Sock-o-Son-of-a-Gun!” If he made a little error…one morning he put up the flag. I
hadn’t gotten out to do that morning and he put up the flag. It wasn’t long till he looked
out the window and said, “Son-of-a-gun, Sock-o, Sock-o!” He tore out the door and went
out and put that flag up straight. That was pretty funny! But he was a great inspiration
to me. He was a great man to work with.
MR. FRENCH: I never had the privilege of working with Mr. Hitch, but to everybody
who did, he was never, ‘Dick Hitch’. He was never ‘Richard Hitch”, he was “Mr. Hitch”.
I never heard of anybody who ever worked with him refer to him by anything other than,
“Mr. Hitch”. I think he’s somewhat alone in that category because most people get a
little more informal and refer to people by their first name. But not Mr. Hitch! He was
always Mr. Hitch.
MR. MILLER: Well, I don’t know how to answer that. He didn’t demand recognition
that way that I recall. But we all respected him and referred to him that way. He was a
very good southern gentleman I guess you could say.
MR. FRENCH: Well, Harold we’ve had very good interview, and I always give people
the opportunity to say any of the last things they’d care to say if they wish to. Then
we’ll get on back to our joshing, and story telling.
MR. MILLER: Well, I do want to thank you for putting my name on the list of
interviews. Sometimes I feel so inadequate that I…I try to keep my stories right, and as
they were. We’ll just call it quits, and say that it was a true story. Thank you!
MR. FRENCH: Thank you, Harold. Just for the for the transcriber’s information, the
other people in the room are Harold’s wife, Velma and my wife Pat. We’re sitting here in
Harold’s ranch house here in central Oklahoma and enjoying some good spring water. We
thank you much Harold and Velma
Interview with William J. Mobley by Jerry French, June 4, 2001
No full textOral history interview with William J. Mobley as interviewed by Jerry French.
Mr. Mobley discusses his family farm and how it became part of the Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. He would work on the refuge and talks about his duties, the weather, equipment, and early years of the refuge and the issues associated with it.
Organization: FWS
Name: William J. Mobley
Years: 1964-1994
Program: Refuges/Law Enforcement
Keywords:History; Employees (USFWS); Personnel; Wildlife refuges; Law enforcement; Biography; Work of the Service; Wildlife refuges; Waterfowl; Insects; Youth; Public attitudes; Weather impacts; Farms and farming; Youth; Restoration, Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge; family farmINTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM J. MOBLEY
BY JERRY FRENCH, JUNE 4, 2001
MR. FRENCH: Good afternoon. It’s June 4th, 2 pm. I am interviewing Mr. William
Mobley. This is Jerry French. We are doing the interview on the front porch of his brick
home in Maxwell, New Mexico. Bill is a longtime Service employee and recently retired
after spending thirty years. The interesting thing about Bill’s background is the Maxwell
Refuge. Much of this refuge was built on his family’s property. Bill, tell us about your
parents and grandparents and what it was like to grow up on that property.
MR. MOBLEY: My parents and grandparents came to this part of the country around
1920. My grandfather bought this property. Originally, it was 215 irrigated acres, which
at that time was sufficient for two families. He passed away in 1943 and my father took
up the payments on that piece of property. He was living there at the time that the
government bought it. Although he wasn’t farming it, I had begun to farm it in 1962. We
didn’t sell to the government until 1966. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how
you look at it, I went to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service. I count my thirty years
with them as some of the most valuable time that I have ever spent anywhere. I really
cherish every day that I worked for them. As far as growing up on the farm; my earliest
memories date back to probably 1939. 1939 was the tail end of the depression here.
Nobody had anything. Everybody was reasonably well satisfied because nobody had
anything. Everybody was broke. We were pretty well off. My Dad had diary cows and
he separated the milk and produced cream, which was shipped to the creamery. Mother
had chickens and she sold eggs to the local store, and traded them from groceries. That’s
how we got along until probably 1943 or so. Some of the earliest work days that I
remember were following a pair of workhorses behind a corn cultivator. At that time,
cropping is this area was pretty diversified. We had sugar beets, corn, small grain, and
soybeans. Of course the root crops suffered pretty much because of the introduction of
European vine weed. That was introduced into the area in the sugar beet seed, as I
understand. When that exists, it’s hard to raise anything without using chemicals. Now,
it’s gone now to alfalfa cropping, or alfalfa rotation systems. Soon after the refuge was
established, we discovered that we had to either farm it, or find somebody else to farm it.
I inherited that job for this refuge. I established the system of sharecropping, the
cooperative farmer agreement system. This worked very well until 1977 when we ran out
of cooperative farmers that either got too old, or too lazy to farm. We began to farm
some of it ourselves then. We did farm a lot of the acreage up until the time that I retired
in 1994. I had to stop and think about it a little bit. [What year] It seems like about two
days ago, actually.
MR. FRENCH: Bill, there’s a lot of wildlife here. Maxwell is very well known for the
Eagles that come out there, and for the Goose populations. What were the wildlife
populations out there when you were a child?
MR. MOBLEY: When I was child waterfowl populations were pretty good. Probably
because of the diversified farming methods. But then in later years, about the time that
the refuge was established, you had to really look to find a Canada goose. There were
quite a few ducks, but the Canada goose was nonexistent. I never saw an Eagle for about
ten years during that period, either bald or golden. It is unusual not to see Golden Eagles
in this part of the country. Anything that looked like it might fit on the dinner table
went. Pheasants, quail, we had a fellow at one time who raised “franklins” out there.
These are Partridges. They lasted about six months I think, before somebody got a hold
of them. You never saw a deer. I never saw a “coon” until I was probably sixteen years
old. Of course, Prairie Dogs have always had a place. They were more under control
then, than they are now. Really that’s about it.
MR. FRENCH: One time, years ago; Bill and I have known each other for many years;
[to listener] we were eating lunch of something and you were telling me how as a child,
your parents sent you out to the fields with two clapboards.
MR. MOBLEY: Yes.
MR. FRENCH: And you would go out there to keep the ducks of off the crops.
MR. MOBLEY: Yes, that’s right.
MR. FRENCH: Would you relate what that experience was like?
MR. MOBLEY: Well, years ago we used to cut our grain crops with a binder. This put
it in nice little bundles that weighed about twenty pounds apiece probably. We came out
and piled the bundles up into shocks. The shocks would have seven to nine bundles in
them depending on the kind of grain. And we always put a cap shock on the top, flat.
The ones that you put on the side, you stood upright, with the butt end down. You put
the cap shock on top to keep the hales from shelling it down. This was an ideal place for
mallards. At that time, at the tail end of the depression, money was short and nobody
had money enough to buy ammunition to scare these things off. They did come out with
a kind of a cracker shell that they used. They weren’t too effective. But I used to have
two boards about maybe six inches wide and about two feet long. And it was my job to
go down to the grain field at about sundown and whack these two boards together. It
made a sound like a gunshot to scare the ducks off. Then I got sophisticated. We hinged
the two boards together with a handle on the outside so all you had to do was put your
hands together.
MR. FRENCH: Just keep you thumbs out of it!
MR. MOBLEY: Yes, keep your thumbs out of it! You didn’t have to be told but once!
But anyway, that’s the way we would keep the ducks off. If you could keep them off
until after the sun went down, they didn’t seem to bother it much, but there was about an
hour before sundown that you had to keep them scared out. They would just clean a
grain field in two or three days.
MR. FRENCH: Aside from waterfowl, you talked about how there were no deer; tell me
about the coyotes and rattlesnakes and some of these other creatures that people are
always interested in.
MR. MOBLEY: I never saw a coyote or rattlesnake until I was probably about eighteen
years old. So that will tell you about how many we had. As I say, we saw prairie dogs
pretty regular, but I don’t know that I ever saw a coyote until I was eighteen. That
would have put it at about 1952 or somewhere in there.
MR. FRENCH: For the interest of the transcriber, Bill and I can go back and relate
stories that we have talked about before. Would you tell us a little bit about the country
following the dust bowl days of the 1930s?
MR. MOBLEY: I don’t remember all that much about the 1930s because I was born in
the mid 1930s. In the late 1930s we were just sort of recovered from the dust bowl days.
What made it hard here was that in 1941 we have an excessive amount of moisture in the
fall and it washed out several of the irrigation lakes, including the one at Hebron where our
irrigation water came from. That made us for several years there, dependent on
floodwater only. We didn’t have a storage facility and the only way we got any water
was when it would rain in the mountains, and a flood would come down. And you’d best
be ready for it when it came because they turned it out in large quantities, for a short time.
That’s kind of how I got broken in to irrigating I guess, the flood irrigating, through that
method. I can tell you quite a bit about the 1950s. I can remember three years with not a
tenth of an inch of rain. All of the fences that had any sort of weeds growing in then
collected blow dust and we would find a fence at original ground level, and another fence
on top of a sand dune, which covered up the original fence. That was quite a mess. It
took about twenty years to get all of that blow sand scattered out again. And in places on
the refuge, there are still sand dunes from that. Along about the winter of 1955 it started
to get some moisture again. It started to rain, and finally turned into snow. We had
pretty good years through the late 1950s, and early 1960s. You have to figure on periodic
droughts in this part of the country, it’s just a part of the ecology of this area. It has been
proved that about every twelve or thirteen years, you get a dry one and maybe more than
one, sometimes as much as five or six in a row. If you don’t have sufficient water in
storage to cover those dry times you’re out of luck. You don’t raise anything. During the
time that I farmed for the refuge, I can only remember one year when we had trouble.
One year we had one fortieth of an acre-foot of water allocated. Needless to say, we put
it all in one place, but we still didn’t raise very much! That would have been in the late
1970s.
MR. FRENCH: When Maxwell Refuge started, you were the only employee for quite
some time. I know that you answered to other people, but you were the only employee
on the ground. Would you like to relate some of those experiences and what it was like to
take this farmland, which had been so devastated by the 1950s and try to turn it around
and try to make it productive and restore it again?
MR. MOBLEY: Well, it was quite an experience. I’ll say that! The hardest thing about
those years that I was by myself, it was seven years; these were the years immediately
after the refuge opened. The hardest thing about that was trying to convince people that
they couldn’t do anything that they wanted to on the refuge. Their philosophy was,
“Well, the government owns it, and we own the government, therefore it belongs to us,
and we can do whatever we damn well please”! That was a little bit of a problem. Plus,
in those days we didn’t have a law enforcement Academy. When I went to work, the
Refuge Manager came up and he brought me a book about three quarters of an inch thick.
It said, Law Enforcement for the Fish and Wildlife Service Officer. He also brought me a
pistol and a badge and said, “Go to it”! I put in a lot of sleepless nights trying to figure
out if I was doing the right thing, or not! I think that was the hardest part of it. A lot of
the land had been over used. It had been over grazed. There were many places where
there were natural stands of grass and climax vegetation had occurred and been dry for so
long that that vegetation had died. And that all needed to be restored, mostly to keep it
from blowing away. We had an area around where the office is now located that was
particularly bad. It took a lot of manipulation to get that back to where it didn’t blow
away and to get a little grass started on it. We used several different methods on that.
We used a method of strip florigation. [Sic] The idea being, that if you rough it up a little
bit, it catches the sand and doesn’t have a chance to get started. We piled dead trees in
windrows to break up the wind so you didn’t just devastate the land. We used clover as a
cover crop whenever there was enough moisture for clover. That worked really well. We
finally got some grass started, and I think it’s pretty much grassed over now. It’s safe
now that I don’t think we have to worry about it blowing away. But when I first went to
work for them I put in many days at the office where you couldn’t see Lake 12, which is
about a quarter of a mile south of the office. You couldn’t see that lake at all, for the
blowing sand. That is not good advertisement for any land owning agency, regardless of
who they are. But like I say, it was interesting. It took a lot of work. For seven years, I
was here by myself. Anything that I couldn’t do by myself didn’t get done. In 1975 I
believe, we got an Assistant Manager up here, and he was able to do a lot of the office
work. That let me out into the field and I could get a lot more done. Plus, he could help
me with the things that took four hands instead of two.
MR. FRENCH: If you go out to the refuge now you would never be able to envision
what it looked like then. Most of the refuges anymore have lots of people, and nice
buildings. They have good equipment. Would you relate what your buildings and
equipment were like during your first few years?
MR. MOBLEY: We had seven farmsteads, I believe. The best one of those buildings
would have made a good outhouse. That’s about the best I can say for those. The houses
were all right. The barns and outbuildings had been left to go to rack and ruin. We
couldn’t do very much in the way of salvage but we finally managed to get rid of all of
those. Some of the old houses, which had not been occupied for several years, were
without windows, doors, roofs or floors and just a shell. Those had to be gotten rid of.
Where the office site is now; that was an old farmhouse. It had four rooms and a
bathroom, I believe. It served us very well until the new office was built. The shop was
a converted chicken house. At one time, the man that had lived there raised chickens on a
large scale for the eggs. He had this big building and it was all right except that it only had
about a six-foot plate on it, and you couldn’t get anything but a pick up into it. We had a
little problem with that. But we got it to where it had three bays in there where we could
park our pickups in. Our fire truck that we had at the time was parked in there and keep
it heated to that it didn’t freeze. It wasn’t the best, but it served its purpose.
MR. FRENCH: Would you describe some of your other equipment? I’ve seen pictures
of you on some pretty ramshackle old farm equipment. Relate some of your equipment.
MR. MOBLEY: During the early years we had what nobody else wanted. I think our
first tractor was an old Farmall. It was a pretty good machine, I guess, for the day it was
built. But it didn’t really serve our needs all that well. We got real prosperous along in
the late 1960s when we got a little Massey-Ferguson front-end loader with an box blade
on the back of it. We just worked the heck out of that thing. We had a lot of use for that.
We didn’t really get any real good equipment until the early 1970s. The bicentennial year
gave us funds for a lot of those. But the old equipment, we didn’t have much of it. The
first fire pumper we had was a fifty-five-gallon barrel mounted on a missile dolly with a
little pressure pump. It ran off of a gasoline engine. You could get about forty pounds of
pressure out of the thing. It was a little positive displacement pump. It could put out a
fire if it wasn’t any more than five feet across. At that time we had a lot of problem with
people smoking. Smoking was a popular thing, and throwing a cigarette out of the
window was the thing that everybody did. You could see a little column of smoke along a
public road, you would right quickly get the little fire pump in the back of your pickup
and see if you could put it out. As far as I know we never did have to call the fire
department during all of those years. We managed to get it done every time. It was
mostly luck though mostly luck.
MR. FRENCH: I’ve seen pictures of you pushing an old bulldozer around. What was
that?
MR. MOBLEY: Well that was a surplus. Actually we had two of them at different
times. One of them I got from Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Benford, and that was the
better of the two. One of them came from Lubuck, as surplus equipment. It didn’t last
very long. It had sat out for a while and down in that part of the country if full of red
sand when the wind blows. So it didn’t last very long. But with the one that we got from
Rocky Mountain Arsenal, I did a lot of that moving the blow sand out of the way. And
pieces of old buildings had been left there just rotting. I pushed them together and burned
a few, and buried a lot of them. Before I left, I tried to make a kind of a map with the
areas where these landfills were. I sure hope that somebody doesn’t go out there and try
and dig a well or something in one of those, because they have everything in them. There
are rocks, concrete, a little bit of wood. It’s not anything that would taint the water I
don’t think; it’s all just building scrap.
MR. FRENCH: During the time that I worked with you, I know we found several old
cisterns. I believe we dropped a tractor into one of them one day. Would you tell people
what it’s like to work around all of those old homesteads?
MR. MOBLEY: The first that you do is to walk about a three-foot grid through the
whole thing. And then if you don’t find anything that way, get on the equipment. You’ll
soon find it then. As Jerry says, I fell into several cisterns. I thought that I knew where a
lot of these areas were around these old farmsteads but apparently I had forgotten. It
used to be a popular thing for everyone to have a well house that was built underground.
When they left most of them just piled straw or something on top those well houses, so
when you moved the bale of straw, you went into the well house. If the well house was
of any size at all, you had a little trouble getting out. The wells here don’t produce the
quality of water that is potable. You can’t drink it. It is so hard that it bounces. So
people use these cisterns to either catch rainwater, or to haul water from the village for
their needs. Everybody had at least one cistern, sometimes two. Sometimes they would
fill one cistern from the irrigation water and another from the town water so that they had
water to cook and take a bath in. All of those had to be filled up. A lot of the old ones
were brick on the inside. It is quite a job to tear one of those things up. They are pretty
well constructed. They are made sort of like a Greek urn, about that shape. There are
curved sides and the top locked together on top. They usually had about an eighteen inch
round hole in the top. [Unintelligible] So when you hit one of those, you knew that you
had hit something. It seems like to me that I counted up one time, twenty-six of those
cisterns and wells out there. I think that there might have been maybe one or two that I
didn’t get covered up!
MR. FRENCH: I know of one that sits there just north of Lake 12. We went out to
cover it up one day and we sank the tractor on our way out there. In fact, not only did
we sink the tractor, but I think we sank the tractor that was going to go and rescue the
tractor.
MR. MOBLEY: We almost sank the Maintainer that we were trying to put the other
two out with! Yes, I remember that!
MR. FRENCH: Bill, one thing which we suffer in this part of the country; and I’m not
sure other people can particularly appreciate it, is being hit by hordes of grasshoppers.
You’ve seen them come all of your life. Would you like to relate a little bit about what
it’s like to farm around these things, and suffer these devastating hordes?
MR. MOBLEY: The Bible tells us about the swarms of locusts and it’s about the same
as that. It takes a certain type of year for the grasshoppers to hatch. Apparently the
eggs stay in the soil for several years. And when the conditions are just right, they hatch
out. When you’ve got them, you’ve got a lot of them. And there’s really not a whole lot
that you can do. When chemical insect controls first came out, everybody sprayed.
Chloredane was the insecticide of choice at that time. I believe that if Chloredane would
kill you, you ought to be dead by now because I ingested quite a lot of if from the time I
was probably fourteen years old up until it was banned in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
We had to spray about every third year for grasshoppers. In later years, they came out
with a biological control for them. It was protozoa that worked on their alimentary
system. It proved to be about at effective as the pesticides. I used to enjoy seeing the
salesmen that sold these pesticides. I enjoyed them coming around because they would
say; “Now this product is the answer to all of your prayers! You use this, and you
won’t have any grasshoppers”! I used to tell them that I had been spraying for twenty
years and we’ve still got grasshoppers, “So somebody’s not telling the truth”! One or
two of them got a little sore about it too! But that’s ok. Well, there’s just no way that if
you’ve got that many grasshoppers; if you can figure out a third of the crop and that’s it,
at best.
MR. FRENCH: Well, my first year at Maxwell was 1988, and it was a particularly hard
year for grasshoppers. Bill, maybe between us we can describe what it is like to have the
sidewalks, the sides of buildings crawling with them. They are eating every green thing
that they can get their hands on. Without seeing it, it’s hard to describe what it’s like to
live in those kinds of conditions.
MR. MOBLEY: It really is. There just isn’t a whole lot of ways to describe it, other
than “a plague of locusts”. I have seen them eat all of the leaves off of trees, even.
Ward and Charlotte French and Jerry Fink
No full textWard and Charlotte French, Jerry Fink (right), and another woman standing in front of a CAT airplane
Interview with Pamela Hawthorne by Jerry French, December 4, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Pamela Hawthorne and Jerry French as interviewer.
Pamela Hawthorne discusses life as a wife of a Service employee living on a Refuge.
Name: Pamela Hawthorne
Keywords: History, Biography, Work of the ServiceINTERVIEW WITH PAMELA HAWTHORNE
BY JERRY FRENCH, DECEMBER 4, 2001
Mr. FRENCH: This is Jerry French; I am at the home of Billy and Pamela Hawthorne.
We are going to do an interview with Pam Hawthorne. We’re going to talk about what
it’s like to be the wife of a; I’m not going to say ‘itinerate’, but pretty close, moving
around the countryside. Pam, if you could just tell us a little bit about your background;
where you’re from. We don’t have to get into all of life with Billy. Maybe from the time
you left college and started traveling around. We want to talk about some of the goods
times and tough times of being on some of these Refuges; the housing; what it’s like
raising kids. So, the “mic” is yours.
MRS. HAWTHORNE: I grew up in Colorado between Denver and Fort Collins. I went
through college with Bill. When he got his first assignment in Needles, California I had no
idea what we were going to be getting into. I grew up in the city. I didn’t know if I was
going to like living in a small town, and all else that I imagined was going to happen. But
over all it was just a wonderful experience, being in the Refuge system. When we moved
to Needles there were wives there to meet you and make you comfortable. It was just a
really good network of support. Some of the housing left a little to be desired. But you
slapped up a little contact paper and a little paint and made it work.
MR. FRENCH: At any time, if you want to tell us of any instances. I believe you were
relating one to me before we started this interview about where the maintenance men
preferred to paint, and where they didn’t paint.
MRS. HAWTHORNE: That’s right. In Needles, they didn’t paint any of the insides of
the windows underneath the blinds because nobody ever opened the curtains. The walls
had probably ten coats of paint and the original paint was on the windowsills. Another
time, when we moved to Tishomingo, I had this terrible fear of snakes. I don’t know
why, but I did. I said, “Well now, do you think there’s any Rattlesnakes there?” That
was my criteria for moving. And he said, “Oh no, there’s not any Rattlesnakes there.”
So we drove in and the Refuge office was closed for lunch. We just waited. I think it was
Kenny Locke who met us there when he came back from lunch. He was showing us the
house that we were going to live in. We walked under this tree and he’d only said about
ten words before he said, “You know? We found a Rattlesnake hanging out of this tree
last week!” I was ready to turn around and go back to Needles! But again, I found the
same thing in “Thish”. The wives and all of the co-workers were just a big family. There
was lots of support. Our children were of course quite young during the times that we
lived on the Refuge. I think it was a neat experience for them. We didn’t have children
who had to bused in for school for miles. It was a fun experience, and never a problem as
far as raising kids there. I think it’s a great environment. I am sure a lot of problems as
they get older and get more involved with school and activities.
MR. FRENCH: Do you want to relate a little bit about what it’s like living on the Refuge
but having to go to town all of time for groceries and even making community runs;
checking with the neighbors to see what they need?
MRS. HAWTHORNE: It was something I enjoyed. We lived in town when we were at
Port Lavaca. And of course most of our career was here in Albuquerque. Needles was
not too far from town. For shopping though, we preferred to shop for a month at a time
in Las Vegas, Nevada, so we got to go and have a little fun. We thought we’d saved
enough money so we could go to a show and stay over night and do our grocery shopping
there, rather than pay the prices in Needles. So that was kind of a fun adventure.
MR. FRENCH: Now, my wife would tell a completely different story than I would tell,
if I was to ask her. But one of the things that she always had problems with was that she
was at home, she had small kids. I’d get a call late at night and be gone. Could you relate
some of your feelings about Billy’s Law Enforcement work?
MRS. HAWTHORNE: Well, that was something that you just had to deal with. He had
a two-way radio in the house in Tishomingo, and when he was on duty, and they called,
he left. And you always worried about whether or not he was going to come home, but
he always did. That was kind of scary.
MR. FRENCH: Where there any adventured during your moves?
MRS. HAWTHORNE: When we left Tishomingo…We always moved ourselves in a U-Haul
and some of the guys were helping Bill load the truck. Ernie would come over
maybe every thirty minutes and he’d make a walk through the house. Then he’d walk
through the truck and say, “It’s never gonna fit!” But it fit. All day long he did that.
And I think we almost lost Bill. He and Bill loaded the freezer, which was full of frozen
food. Bill was on the inside and Ernie gave it a big shove, to jump it up over the edge and
he ‘bout squashed Bill in the load!
MR. FRENCH: I know after Aransas, you moved back to Albuquerque. Is there
anything significant about your life here with Bill in the Regional office, and on the road a
lot. I know he was traveling a lot, and still trying to raise kids. When father is lost
somewhere in the marshes of Texas, can you relate any of that?
MRS. HAWTHORNE: I guess it was just something that you did. You dealt with it,
and you made it work. Bill was always available on the phone. We would talk at night,
and if there were any problems, we’d handle it that way. We had great kids. And we
tried to make it an adventure. Here in Albuquerque when Bill was gone we’d always try
to go out to eat once. Usually MacDonald’s or something, but that was a treat when you
were eight, nine or ten years old!
MR. FRENCH: I have two questions that I want to ask. And Bill, if you’ll not say
anything, I’d appreciate it. I know you lived on refuges with a lot of wildlife. And
sometimes that was a good thing. Sometimes that was a bad thing. What was one of the
most difficult things of that life? Traveling, and moving and new houses, and Ants and
Opossums and all of these things?
MRS. HAWTHORNE: I think any time you move, and that goes for anybody in any
career, it’s a big change; finding Doctors and getting established into a community and
making new friends. I think that’s probably the most difficult part.
MR. FRENCH: Now on the other side of the coin, what was your most enjoyable part
of it? Of living with Bill and his career?
MRS. HAWTHORNE: As I say, every bit of it was an adventure. Moving was never a
problem. It was like; ‘we’re going to live in a new place and see new county’. That was
always fun. Probably, the most memorable time, and the most fun was Tishomingo. As I
say, I grew up in the city, and I didn’t know what to expect but it was just a wonderful
spot. There were wonderful people to work with and we enjoyed living on the Refuge.
That’s really the only Refuge that we lived on. In Needles, we lived on a Compound, but
we were in town. It was just really a lot of fun to have Deer in your back yard and
Raccoons in your garbage! And snakes; I’d call the office, “There’s a snake coming up
the yard!” And they’d come and get it, and move it out. But I think it was just a lot of
fun.
MR. FRENCH: Is there anything else that you would care to add?
MRS. HAWTHORNE: No.
MR. FRENCH: O.K., Thank you
Gale Monson
No full textOral history interview with Gale Monson as interviewed by Jerry French. Also present for the interview are Larry Smith and Pat French.
Mr. Monson briefly discusses parts of his career, people he worked with, and issues he faced. He also shares a few stories about his time with the Service.
Organization: FWS
Name: Gale Monson
Years: 1933-
Program: Refuges
Keywords:History, Employees (USFWS), Personnel, Wildlife refuges, John Gatlin, dredging, Havasu National Wildlife Refuge, Regional Office, J. Clark Salyer, J.N. "Ding" Darling, wild burrows, Luther Goldman,INTERVIEW WITH GALE MONSON
BY JERRY FRENCH DECEMBER 13, 2002
Also present Larry Smith and Pat French
MR. SMITH: I was interested in your comments about the squatters and the
concessionaires along the river there. Primarily at Imperial, I guess it was.
MR. MONSON: Also at Havasu Lake.
MR. SMITH: But when I came, when I moved in to the Regional Office here at
Albuquerque in 1974, why, they were still having problems with some of those things.
They had a large release of water from that dam there in about 1982. We flooded a lot of
them out when they raised the Colorado River water level. So that got rid of some of
them that way.
MR. MONSON: Our chief antagonist on Havasu Lake was the Bureau of Reclamation.
If I ever disliked any organization, it was the Bureau of Reclamation.
MR. SMITH: I’ve got to tell you, my youngest son works for them!
MR. MONSON: They started dredging right through [unintelligible] Swamp. They
knew I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do about it. It just so happened that
this dredge they had, which cost them a hundred and fifty thousand to build to clear the
sand out of this Colorado channel; they were just taking the sand out of the channel and
putting it up on a levee. They were destroying wild habitat by the acres. I was at the
Regional Office; I was called in there. While I was there John Gatlin called me in and he
said, “We just heard today that the dredge sank! It’s sitting on the bottom of the river.
And it’s a good thing you’re in here or you’d get the blame!”
MR. FRENCH: The last time I was out there Gale, they were up on the Bill Williams
unit raising Cottonwoods and trying to get rid of some of that Salt Cedar. They were
raising the cottonwoods on the Bill Williams unit and transplanting them; trying to get
them going down on the riverside where you were fighting them forty years ago.
MR. MONSON: The Bill Williams Refuge was part of the Havasu Lake Refuge for
many, many years. After I left up there, they took Havasu Lake out of the refuge and
turned it over BLM. This was a good idea because BLM inherited all of those squatters
and those concessionaires. It so happened that through a lot of politics, mainly politics,
and probably the exchange of some huge amounts of bribe money a man by the name of,
oh, I can’t think of his name now; but he decided he wanted to own all of that country
next to Havasu Lake on the east side in Arizona. He managed to acquire the whole thing.
Now we have there, Lake Havasu City. It is a city of pretty close to a hundred thousand
people, I believe now. When I was there, there was not a thing there; not a thing!
McCullough was the man’s name. There was nothing there. And during the War when I
was there in World War II, I remember going from Parker Dam to Needles and back again
in the boat.
MR. SMITH: The Crisscraft?
MR. MONSON: Yeah, the Crisscraft. I think I saw one other boat out and I think that
was a squatter at Needles Landing. So things have really changed along the river.
MR. FRENCH: I believe that’s right. Mr. McCullough is the man who owns the chain
saws.
MR. MONSON: Chain saws and outboard motors.
MR. FRENCH: From the money he made from that is how he bought the London Bridge
and moved it to Havasu City. That was all…and as you say, Mr. McCullough is the one
who did that.
MR. MONSON: At one time it was on my refuge!
MR. SMITH: My first assignment out of the Albuquerque Regional Office was in 1974
when Mark Nelson sent me out. He had me fly in a private plane out to the Planet
Ranch; part of Bill Williams to kind of do a biological reconnaissance of that area. I was
picked up by the Refuge Manager from Havasu. He had an add-on air conditioner on the
car. It was a hundred and seven degrees and I hadn’t anything in quite a while.
MR. MONSON: One of the problems in the summer was getting our cars air-conditioned.
The Regional Office took the position that it was a waste of money and
pampering the refuge people. So every time a sent in a purchase order for air conditioning
for our vehicles, George Parker would say ‘no’. Finally, I pointed out to him that the
vehicles of the Arizona Game and Fish Department all had air-conditioning in them. The
vehicles of the Bureau of Reclamation all had air-conditioning in them. That finally
convinced him to okay air-conditioning in our cars. That made a lot of difference in life on
the refuges!
MR. SMITH: I guess he needed to have an extensive visit out there during the hot
season!
MR. FRENCH: Well, if you remember, in the old administrative manual there was a map
of the United States and a line. If you were below that line, you could have a white roof
on your car. Do you remember? We had the old green vehicles.
MR. MONSON: That was after my time I guess.
MR. SMITH: Did you say that you had a residence there at the Desert Museum? Did
you live on the grounds there? Presumably, they had air-conditioning.
MR. MONSON: Yes, it was a swamp cooler. Now it’s being used as an office that has
air conditioning.
MR. FRENCH: Gale, one of the things that we are trying to do find people who died on
the job. Do you remember a man named Ike Kindler who possibly drowned out at
Imperial Lake back in about 1946? He was trying to rescue some duck hunters.
MR. MONSON: No, I don’t remember that.
MR. FRENCH: That’s okay. We’re chasing these things down. It’s just one of those
many things. We are trying to backwards and pick these historical things up. When you
were down at Cabeza; do you want to talk a little bit about the burrows that you fought
with?
MR. MONSON: We didn’t have too much of a problem with them on Cabeza. On the
Kofa, they were running out of our ears! We used [unintelligible] until they passed the
Wild Burrow Protection Act; Wild Horse Anti Project. So now it’s against federal law to
shoot a burrow on federal lands. We used to shoot them every time we saw them. I
remember being with Amonson one time and we came upon a bunch of about thirty
burrows. He was a pretty good shot. I’ve forgotten now what size of rifle it was. We
saw those burrows and they just stood there and looked at us. He got out of the car with
his rifle. He had a whole bunch of cartridges handy. In the next five or so minutes he had
knocked down at least half of them. When one of them is killed, they just stand there.
They don’t run off. We got rid of a lot of burrows that way. We let it be known to the
Game and Fish Department people that they were welcome to shoot all of the burrows
they want or that they could see. So that went on until Wild Horse Anti law was pasted.
That put a stop to it. They have to trap them and moved them out. I understand it’s still
a big headache on Imperial.
MR. FRENCH: Yeah, they are still having quite a bit of problems with them. You’ve
mentioned many names that people are very interested in. Would you talk a little bit
about your relationship with J. Clark Salyer? Many people are interested in what J.
Clark was like.
MR. MONSON: Of course, you know he was a human dynamo. He was appointed to
the job by J. N. “Ding” Darling, who was picked out by Franklin Roosevelt to be the first
Chief of the new FWS. Ding was interested in refuges but he had to find somebody that
really would take hold of the job. He knew Salyer from having had contact with him in
Iowa. Salyer was a high school teacher. He made a name for himself by being very active
in waterfowl conservation. Ickes was really the man who picked who picked Salyer. He
brought Salyer to Washington and Ickes took him over and told him that they had to have
these refuges, “You go out and get them.” Salyer took that as a command and I don’t
know how many years he spent out on the field lining up these refuges; buying them and
getting them any way he could. Many of the refuges are there today on account of J.
Clark Salyer. It was too bad that he became blind. It was very sad, of course. When he
relinquished the job as Chief of the Refuge Division it was a sad day for everybody. I’ve
forgotten that name of the man who first succeeded him but he came down from Region 5
in Boston. He was Chief of the branch when I moved to Washington.
MR. SMITH: Didn’t Dick Griffith have that job?
MR. MONSON: No that was a ways later. Fran Gillette had the job most of the time I
was in Washington.
MR. FRENCH: Gale, you had an amazing career. I look down through these notes, and
it’s amazing. I thank you very much for your time this afternoon. If you’ve got some
other things you’d like to add, or Larry if you have some others questions; but I think
you’ve been very succinct in the whole thing. Like you say; from the day you were born,
right on through your whole career. It was just an amazing career!
MR. SMITH: I think you started in 1933, and I was eight years old when you started
your official job!
MR. FRENCH: [To Mr. Smith] And I’ve always thought of you as one of the old
timers! I wasn’t born until he was just about ready to ship over to India. So that kind of
shows the progression of time through this thing!
MR. MONSON: Yes, it’s hard for me to believe that I am 90 and sitting here talking to
you. It really is!
MR. SMITH: I’d be curious to know if there are any other Refuge Managers that are
that are that old, surviving today.
MR. MONSON: Tom Baugh; you both know him don’t you? He told me that I was
probably the oldest ex-Refuge Manager. It got to me, and I got to thinking about it. I told
him that I realized that maybe I was. I remember Luther Goldman. He was Refuge
Manager at …
MR. FRENCH: Laguna Atascosa was one of them.
MR. MONSON: I think he was first hired to manage the Salton Sea Refuge. Then he
went to Bitter Lake, that’s where I first met him, and subsequently to Laguna Atascosa
and Santa Anna. Then he went to Washington. In Washington he was our Photographer
for years.
MR. SMITH: He advised me on buying cameras at one time.
MR. MONSON: He was a very good photographer. His favorite camera was a
Hasselblad. He took a lot of wonderful pictures.
MR. SMITH: He is still living today?
MR. MONSON: He sure is. I heard from him during the early part of this year saying
that his wife, Betty, had died. He was absolutely devastated. I think he is still living in
the same house in College Park. He’s been there for years and years.
MR. SMITH: You’d think he’d be older than you?
MR. MONSON: I think so. I think he outdates me by, oh, I don’t know how many
years. But I know people who retire and loose their interest real quickly. They don’t
give a hang about refuge history or nothing. But I’m not that way. I keep on being
interested in refuges. I am afraid that some people think I’m too nosey, but…
MR. FRENCH: Well, if it wasn’t for people who were concerned, we wouldn’t have any
of them today. But there are people like Larry; Larry continues to fight for them. And
you’ve been retired for about fifteen years now?
MR. MONSON: He’s doing more than I am.
MR. SMITH: I retired in 1984.
MR. FRENCH: Okay, so we’re getting close to eighteen years on you. And you’re still
fighting for them. Well, I will conclude this. And Gale, again, I thank you very much for
your time.
MR. MONSON: You are very welcome
Larry Smith
No full textLarry Smith Oral history interview with Jerry French. Mrs. Smith is also featured.
Mr. Smith discusses how he came to work with the Fish and Wildlife Service, the various refuges he would work at along with the Regional Office in Albuquerque before retiring in 1984. He and his wife also share several stories of Mr. Smith's employment.
Organization: FWS
Name: Larry Smith
Years: 1951-1984
Program: Refuges
Keywords:History, Biography, Wildlife refuges, Migratory birds, Monomoy Island, Montezuma Refuge, The Great Swamp, employee(FWS), military, Oak Orchard, Iroquois NWR, Albuquerque Regional Office, Arthur Miller, Hal O'Conner, George Gavutis, Ed Moses, Tom McAndrews, Dick Griffith Paul Steele, John Carlson, Gordon Hansen, Dave Olsen, Dave Blankenship, Ray Erickson, Meritorious AwardINTERVIEW WITH LARRY SMITH
BY JERRY FRENCH AUGUST 24, 2002
Also present Mrs. Smith
MR. FRENCH: I am doing an interview with an old friend, Larry Smith. Today is
August 24, 2002. It’s about quarter to three in the afternoon. We are sitting up at the
Shurry Lodge up in northern New Mexico. Larry, if you would please tell us your story.
I know that you worked for the service for many years. I know that you had an
interesting career with the U.S. Air Force. It was probably the Army Air Corps, at that
time.
MR. SMITH: Right.
MR. FRENCH: If you would just begin where ever and tell us your story, however
you’d care to do it.
MR. SMITH: I’ll start in like Jenny said I should. My dad always hoped that I would
either go into the ministry or go into conservation work. He was quite a dedicated
conservationist on a small farm. We had a maple sugar bush and there were just enough
cows to keep me busy. My name officially is Lawrence Stanley Smith. I’ve been called
everything since then. In the Air Force I was Smitty. I became Larry somewhere along in
the Fish and Wildlife Service. And plenty of times I’ve been called Shorty.
I guess before I went into the …I volunteered to be drafted so I could go with a
friend into World War II. That didn’t really work out very well because we got to the
reception center on Long Island and he got called that his mother was having medical
problems so he went home. Two or three days later when he got back, I was off to basic
training for the Army Air Force. He later went into the Infantry and when we were flying
B-29 bombers in McCook, Nebraska he landed on the shores of Normandy as an
Infantryman. He had been a friend for all of our lives. He was finally hit by friendly fire
thirty days after hitting the beach at Normandy. We managed to be college roommates
after the war. I was in general Biology and I kind of majored in Biology and Agronomy
where I got in to quite a few soil courses. I also took some Fishery courses. I graduated
from Cornell in 1949. I stayed on for masters and got an assistantship with a relatively
new professor who had graduated a doctorate several years before. He was a Canadian,
and his name was Oliver Hewitt. He talked he into being his assistant, which was a real
pleasant opportunity. I was able to get to know the staff at Cornell better and to attend
some of the National Wildlife Conferences with him and the head of the department;
Gustav Swanson who later ended up at Colorado State.
After I got my masters we didn’t have an immediate offer of a job so we were
home. I was taking a few extra courses to kill the time until I might have an opportunity
for a job. We were home on Easter vacation when a phone call came from the Boston
Regional office of the Fish and Wildlife Service. They were wondering if I might be
interested in a position as Refuge Manager at Monomoy Island, which runs south from
Chatham on Cape Cod. Just prior to this I had sort of made a commitment to work on a
summer job with the State of New York on an Atlantic salmon program on the lower
Hudson Valley. But we jumped in to the car and went up to Chatham, Massachusetts.
Luckily I spoke to the right person there. We probably would have turned around and
went home. I heard that ten people had been there and looked at the job and didn’t want
anything to do with it. The property had been taken through condemnation by the
federal government prior to the war. Post war, it sat there, and with no legal control you
might say; it became a big playground for Chatham people and those living on Cape Cod.
They would go down and fish and hunt. There was all kinds of illegal hunting and fishing.
There was commercial fishing for striped bass going on which wasn’t supposed to be
taking place. We drove into town and went past the Methodist Church. It looked like
the Pastor’s home was next door. He was outside so we drove up. Later on, we learned
that his first impression was that we were a young couple who were trying to see if he
would marry us. I told him what I was there to see. We went up on the top of the
Church steeple. When we looked out, we could Monomoy Island across the little private
property in between. He told me that there was one person in town who I ready had to
meet and that was Dr. Keane. He called Dr. Keane and a few minutes later, Dr. Keane
rolled up in this old Model A Ford pick up. When he heard what I was there for, he said,
“Shake the hand of the only friend you’ll have in Chatham!” I guess these other ten
people who came and looked at it didn’t talk to the right person! We decided to take the
job. My future supervisor in Boston, Arthur Miller had said, “You’re in the shadow of
the Regional Office. And if you have any problems that you can’t get answered by
phone just drive in.” I became a Refuge Manager without going through being an assistant
manager, like most people do today. I had four wheel drive rig on the island and one on
the mainland. And there was a boat and a motor to get back and forth. The first day, the
local Massachusetts Game Warden, Red Madden, had sort of been using our vehicle to
patrol the beach now and then. He took me down for my orientation trip on the island.
He showed me where to get the best oysters and a few things like that; soft shelled clams
and cohogs. From then on, I was pretty much on my own. I was the only full-time
employee there for the two years I was there. It was a tough life in the community.
Everybody in the community was wondering why the government had to take this [land]
away from them. There were probably thirty cabins on the island and only one piece of
property that officially had a deed to it; that was a lighthouse area at Monomoy Point.
There were several big Coast Guard buildings up at the north end where we kept our
vehicles. There was one at the middle that had deteriorated. And at the south end, there
was a gigantic storage building and a very massive living quarters where the Coast Guards
had been stationed. All of these were ours to use in any way we could see fit or want to.
Some of the places had places to camp out and stay over night. We had so much fun. I
know one time I thought, ‘jesus, the sun’s getting awful low!’ I didn’t have a watch. The
day got away so fast! I was having so much fun; I didn’t know where the time was going!
I got home pretty late. By the time you park a vehicle, get a boat and get to the mainland
and get home, it takes quite a while.
There were of course lots of interesting incidents there. The first time we crossed
over, there wasn’t a pier. We later got use of a Coast Guard marine railway building to
keep the truck in, and to leave my boat at. You had to pull the boat up on the shore. I
learned about tides pretty quick. When it was time to go home I two hundred feet of sand
to drag the boat through to get to the water! We got into the heavy equipment, which
was brought in from Brigantine. We made some dams across some tidal pockets and dug
some ponds in some low inland swale areas that are still ponds today, which is
interesting. We were there for two years and I’d say we did develop some close friends
but by and large….I had joined the Chatham Band and at some of these social events, it
kind of got on you after a while because everybody was always saying, “Why did the
government have to take this property?”, and all of that. I hired a college student and an
old fisherman as laborers. I should have kept some of the stories that the fisherman told.
They could have been printed in a book after he died. The college friend is now retired.
His parents owned one the cabins that we had to take away from them eventually. He is
writing for the paper and volunteering for the Cape Cod National Seashore. He says now
what a wonderful thing it was that the government took that land. After living through
two years of unpleasantness with the local people, they realized finally that it had been
the correct thing to do.
MRS. SMITH: One day this very nice looking man came to the door. He started
haranguing about his cottage down on the island and about how it had been taken away
from him. I listened for a while and then I got kind of angry. I don’t know what I said to
him, but come to find out, he was the Regional Director in Boston. And he had come
down to invite us out to dinner. He was almost afraid to tell me who he was after that!
MR. FRENCH: Larry, you said you played in a band. What kind of instrument did you
play?
MR. SMITH: The clarinet. We had a great band there. I guess after I left there, I don’t
know if I ever play again. Maybe once or twice for Church. We had a marching band and
went to Moore Farm on Field Days and things. They had a bandstand in the park in
Chatham. Every Friday night or something like that, there was a massive crowd. The
town just filled with tourists and lots of people would come and sit on the grass.
MRS. SMITH: It was well enough know that it was featured on Public Television later;
since we’ve moved.
MR. SMITH: The Regional Supervisor called one day and wanted to know if I’d like to
move farther west. He wanted me to go to the Montezuma Refuge at the north end of
Cayuga Lake in central New York, and off we went. By that time, we had had a little son
named Rodney. We moved to Montezuma in 1953. That was an assignment that I really
enjoyed. There were nice working conditions. The Refuge was well accepted in the
community. One interesting thing was the gigantic Muskrat harvest that was possible
there in those marshes. The land had been worked on. At one time they had tried to farm
it and didn’t make it. The land was kind of sold to the bank or something and the
government purchased it for…I don’t remember the fee now. But for five years during
the years of World War II, the Muskrat harvest off of that equaled the acquisition cost of
the Refuge! To manage the cattail, you had to manage the Muskrats. You counted the
houses in the wintertime from the ice. You estimated probably five muskrats per house
or something like that. You determined how many you could get. We had share-trappers.
They got half the fur and we hired a temporary guy who took care of skinning all of the
animals, our half of the animals anyway. He also took care of stretching them. The
trappers took care of their own skins. It resulted in a real high quality fur that went for
auction. We also used the muskrat meat packed in brand now wooden bushel baskets. It
was shipped by railway express to Baltimore, Maryland where they were sold for food.
It was amazing. I think some years there were four or five thousand muskrats that we
trapped. Even then, we weren’t keeping up with them eating out the cattail. But then,
Carp got into the pools. There was one large main pool and another storage pool of about
equal size; maybe three thousand acres each, or something. The New York Throughway
was being built just as we arrived there. The fill was right there across the main pool
marsh. That was kind of a hard thing to live with. The contractor on that…they had
started with another Manager and then had to deal with me. They were trying to pull all
kinds of shenanigans like using our dikes to shorten their haul route to get to where they
wanted to carry the fill. Meanwhile, these dikes had been made out of…they had a core
of marl which was the nearest thing they had to something waterproof to prevent water
from going through them. They were covered with deep muck, or black muck soil that
was very soft on top. These dump trucks were beating that down and we had a constant
battle with them. The last thing that held the Throughway from opening was the bridge
over the Seneca spur line from the main barge canal down the Cayuga Lake and over to
Seneca Lake. The big bridge across the Hudson and been built and finished and they were
chaffing to have Governor Dewey open the highway by driving the whole length in a
convertible. The road is about four hundred miles, I guess, from New York to Buffalo.
We went down to watch the engineers sweating to finish. It was supposed to be
concrete. But in order to open the highway on time, they blacktopped this bridge. It was
quite a massive bridge, really.
MRS. SMITH: Suzanne was only about a week old and I drove down and watched
Governor Dewey go by and waved to him as he went by.
MR. SMITH: She parked on the overpass and watched him come across the Refuge.
They built a big fenced on each side of the Throughway crossing to try to keep the deer
and so forth from being too much of a problem. As years went by we could begin to see
some dips and so forth in the road!
We did quite a bit of share cropping for leaving the share of corn or millet or
something for the birds. I remember the year we had to control the carp breeding. We
had to drain the main pool and treated the burrow pit areas with rotenone. We had more
dead fish there than you could ever imagine! It’s a good thing we weren’t near town. We
did that one year and the storage pool another year, I guess. But we had all of these
exposed muck flats. The cattail had been eliminated essentially. There was one
interesting thing; there had been an area of water in use called the ‘goose pond area’ out in
the middle. For the first time walking out on these flats, we came on mounds of little
stones with a little nick on each side. We found out that those were sinker stones from
nets that the Indians used to fish there. We were hand-seeding millet with these cyclone
seeders while walking on snowshoes on the mud. We hired a small airplane to scatter
millet. That fall we had a crop of millet and one of these old muskrat trappers whose
name was Lester Helmer knew his ducks. We were standing by the HQ one night and
two little ducks go by. He said, “Oh, that’s the first time I ever saw and Blue winged teal
flying with a Wood duck!”
From Montezuma, we went west. My supervisor asking me if I had given any
thought to where I wanted to go next. I said, “Yes, the Bison Range”. We had circulating
reports like that. So he said that he had had that idea too but it was eight miles west at
the new Oak Orchard Wildlife Refuge. The deal there was that they were going to acquire
one hundred and twenty-one private parcels of the swamp and woodland area that would
comprise twelve thousand acres. There was a State area of five thousand acres on the east
side of it already in existence for several years. At that same time, the State was acquiring
the Tonawanda Game Management area on the west side, which would be another six
thousand acres or so. It would be close to nineteen thousand acres all together there, or a
little more than that. When we moved there, they probably owned ten properties of
which two had residences or farm building and houses. The Supervisor told us to make
one our home and one the office. We tried the drinking water in both places and then it
was a drawn conclusion of where we were going to live because of the poor water in one
place. We were in the middle of the swampland on a sandy knoll so we did have a
shallow well that provided pretty good water. The property that we used as an office
was soon used by four or five engineers working for Realty on surveys. One or two
Realty people were there for a big share of the time. Charles Edsit, and a fellow names
Stolby, and another guy who went to Washington; I can’t think of his name. We were
essentially doing housekeeping for them as far as maintaining the office for these folks.
They transferred a maintenance man in from a Refuge in Massachusetts for somewhere
who was a maintenance man who could do; he couldn’t repair automobiles, but he could
do fence work and that type of thing. You probably remember Hal O’Connor?
MR. FRENCH: Oh yes.
MR. SMITH: Well, Hal’s start with the Service was with me. He was a real go-getter.
He was quite puzzled at the title of Maintenance Man for Oddie Olson. Finally, he kind
of figured that, ‘well, he does fence work and this and that, so I guess you can call him a
maintenance man!’ Harold was a go-getter. We had more direct contact with Martin
Redway who was an Assistant Regional Supervisor who was out there frequently. And
after spending a day with Harold, when we were back the office, the two of us were
talking together and Martin said, “You know, some day we’ll probably both be working
for him!” It came true for me. When I moved to Albuquerque, he was Deputy Regional
Director. So that’s the way it goes. It took a number of …we were involved in the
master planning of the thing. There was a Dale Sutherland from Boston who was out as
more of a Biologist. Paul Steele was in the Boston office at that time. Paul would be out
for a week and back in Boston for a week. He was working up things for the engineers
and things. So over a period of time we did produce a master plan for the Refuge, which
was quite detailed. Part One was part of a visionary thing and Part Two was all the
engineering stuff. When the Job Corps came in, they decided to put a Job Corps Camp
on the Refuge. We figured our master development plan would probably cost a million
dollars. They spent a million dollars building the Job Corps Camp and then we had to try
to develop a Refuge with these unskilled youth. But they hired a staff of something like
thirty-five people who were working with these 135 youth who they brought in. They
were mostly from big cities like New York and they were scared of the frog sounds and so
forth out there. We had some pretty capable people working with them; the heavy
equipment operators and carpenters and so forth. Actually, before that started, I got in
on a bonanza of heavy equipment that we were going to need to develop the Refuge.
Camp Drum up north of Watertown, NY. We had seen something advertised and I went
up and met a Colonel. When he found out what we needed on the Refuge he was real
enthused about trying to help us out. We got two D-6 bulldozers. He said that he’d pin
and bush them before you get them, and that he had a lot of people that needed the
experience so we got two D-7, two D-6, a D-4 and a Bucyrus Erie half yard drag line with
a shovel front and a back hoe front and all of that stuff. All I had to pay was for two
brothers who were local to go up there and get it for us. We had all of this equipment
sitting outside of what had been an onion storage building. There had been tracks that
were farmed on the refuge in the muck soils. We had quite a sizable building and
improved it. Outside of it was all of this heavy equipment and people were wondering
what was going to happen. Then Olsen one day was complaining, “We’ve got all of this
stuff here and I can’t even find a shovel!” The Job Corps went over pretty good with the
local public. Then, Johnson’s anti-poverty program got hit with poverty so the Job
Corps went out. Next, the New York State Narcotic Addiction Control Commission
decided they could use it. They would spend a certain amount every year on materials
for them to work on the Refuge. We ended up building; with the Job Corps and with this
crew quite a number of impoundments, dikes, control structures and so forth. They were
people were the kind that their staff had to worry about working with these inexperienced
kids and stuff. They had brought in a bulldozer from Moosehorn Refuge that had gone
through the ice. They brought it in to be torn all apart and put back together. I remember
one of the said, “Mr. Stothers, it’s only got one gear forward!” He was asked, ‘How
many gears backwards?’ and he said, “Three!” They had to take the transmission out and
turn in around! They got into building a lot of Wood Duck boxes for other refuges. They
also built fiberglass canoes that were transferred out to other refuges.
I had quite some experiences with various assistant managers. I had Arthur
Miller as a Supervisor I guess through half or more of my tour there. We finally went to
his retirement down at Brigantine Refuge. Art had sent me three different people, which
he said, “You got to get rid of these guys.” Why somebody else had to get rid of them, I
don’t know.
MR. FRENCH: Yes, I know the problem.
MR. SMITH: One of them, about the first thing he did was turn a truck over on curb.
We got him a job as an Earth Science teacher at a parochial school.
MRS. FRENCH: I don’t know what kind of teacher he was.
MR. SMITH: He was a better teacher than he was a Refuge Manager. We had a chap
that you knew just wasn’t going to make the grade, and George Gavutis was with us at
the time. He was a good man. He and I had a talk with him one day and convinced him
that this wasn’t his place. He ended up in the Coast Guard. There was Art Pelletier,
who followed be at Monomoy Refuge after two or three other people, and got into some
trouble there. They sent him to me and whenever Art
Interview with Delores Bello by Jerry French, December 6, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Delores Bello. Jerry French was the interviewer.
Mrs. Bello worked for several different federal agencies before joining the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1991 in Contracting. She briefly discusses her experiences and what she will do post-retirement.
Organization: FWS
Name: Delores Bello
Years: 1991-2001
Program: Business Management and Operations
Keywords: History, Biography, Employees (USFWS), Forestry, PoliciesINTERVIEW WITH DELORES BELLO
BY JERRY FRENCH DECEMBER 6, 2001
MR. FRENCH: Good morning, my name is Jerry French. I am the interviewer of a long-time
Service employee Delores Bello who will be retiring in eleven days is it?
MRS. BELLO: January 3rd.
MR. FRENCH: So we are doing this a little bit prior to retirement. Delores has worked
in Contracting and General Services in the Regional office for many years. Delores if you
will just tell us about where you grew up and a little bit about your education, what your
work experience was before you came to the Service. Then tell us what it was like
working for the Service.
MRS. BELLO: I started my career with the National Park Service in Santa Fe in 1964. I
worked as a Secretary for the Lands and Water Rights Department. Then I was moved
upstairs to one of the Deputy’s offices. I worked for them for about three years. Then I
got married and I came and moved to Albuquerque. I worked for the Air Force Base for
about five months. I didn’t like military type work, so I looked for another natural
resources agency and I found the Forest Service. I went to work for them, and worked
there for seventeen years in various areas. I worked in the Division of Public Affairs for a
while, that was very interesting. I got to work a lot of the Regional Forester and the
Deputy Regional Forester and a lot of the issues that were current or were brought to the
forefront at that time. Some of these were pesticide spraying in Arizona. That was really
opposed. We had demonstrations in front of the building sometimes. We were told not
to go out until things were O.K. It was interesting. From Public Affairs I went
to…where did I go? Oh yes, I worked with Fire for a few years, and that was really
interesting. I was their Chief Secretary, but I did get to pinch in as Dispatcher during the
height of the fire seasons. We had two huge fire seasons; one in 1973 and one in 1974.
We had to big fires on the Santa Fe National Forest that attracted a lot of national
attention. That was very exciting. I didn’t have a child at that time it was just my
husband and I. He was a teacher and during the summers he got to work for the Forest
Service. He was a fire patrolman on the Sebola [sic] National Forest. So during the
summers we hardly got to see each other because we were both putting in twelve-hour
days, whatever it required. It was a very exciting time. Then I did have a child and I quit
for seven years. I came back part-time for the Division of Contracting with the Forest
Service. I worked four hours a day. They did give me a permanent part-time status.
This was really exciting because it contributed to my retirement. I worked maybe four
years for four hours a day with the Division of Contracting. Then I transferred to the
Sebola National Forest for two reasons. Mainly it was because my son was getting older,
he was going to start preschool. There was a school right across from Sebola, so I thought
it would be real convenient. So I moved there. I worked there full time for about five
years, still in the Division of Contracting. After that, I came back to the Regional office
with the Forest Service. I worked in Contracting and I got a lucky break. I was made the
Chief Procurement Clerk and from there I was given the opportunity to move into the
Contracting Officer field. I had a trainee job, and I worked that for about two years.
When the job with Fish and Wildlife was advertised I put in for. It was an entry job, I
think it was a 7-9, I happened to be lucky enough to get it. I have been with Fish and
Wildlife since 1991. I have moved from a 7 to a 12, and I am very proud of that since I
don’t have a college education. I have worked my way up just by doing hard work and
being very diligent. I like people. I like to give it my all. I like to serve people so
working in Contracting has given me that opportunity. Plus, I also get to visit Refuges
and see what life is like on the Refuge. It’s totally different from being in the Regional
office. So I do sympathize with people on the Refuge and I like to help them as much as
I can when it comes to getting their projects completed. I have really enjoyed my work
with the Federal government, with all of the agencies except the military. It wasn’t my
cup of tea. But I do like the Natural Resources agencies. It’s just what I like. I like
nature. I like getting out in the field and seeing what the people are doing and how they
are preserving it for future generations. I kind of instilled that in my son a lot. He was
going to go into Fish and Wildlife but then he saw that the money wasn’t there. And
being a young guy in the 1990’s or 2000’s or whatever, he was after the money, so he
changes careers. But he is still interested in it. He is a conservationist I guess you’d call
him. He really likes to go in for recycling and things like that. And I believe I had that
influence on him. My husband was always in Education. He too likes nature. We do
camp. He and our son go fishing. I like camping. I like going with them to the
mountains. I don’t fish, but I sure enjoy the outdoors and hiking in the mountains, and
biking and stuff like that. That’s about it.
MR. FRENCH: Delores, would you be willing to say what you thought was probably
your most difficult assignment with the Fish and Wildlife Service?
MRS. BELLO: I think my most difficult assignment was when I came over from the
Forest Service. They were highly organized. When I came to Fish and Wildlife, I found it
less than organized. It was hard for me to switch my thinking in the way Fish and
Wildlife approached things. When I did come to Contracting, things were in turmoil. The
Region had been threatened by the Washington office for all of the warrants to be taken
away. So we got a new Chief in Contracting. We formed a team and we said that we
were going to get it on track here, and that we were going to get things done correctly as
far a regulations went. But we still wanted to serve our customers. It was a task that was
difficult, but I think we accomplished it. And I believe I had a lot to do with that because
I was kind of the middle person, between the Chief: who poor thing, she had a hard task.
She had to be a taskmaster. I was kind of in between because I could work with
Engineering, and I didn’t have to carry the tasks out the way that she did. But I still
could help her in getting some of those things across to the end users. That was the most
difficult. We did turn it around, and we were allowed to keep out warrants. I think our
reputation now is different in that, I think we have a reputation now that we like to serve
and work with our customers but still do it legally correct.
MR. FRENCH: On that same line, what would you think was your most enjoyable
assignment?
MRS. BELLO: Working with the Refuge people. I didn’t get to work much with the
Regional office people, but I sure got to work with the Refuge people; the field people. I
liked seeing what they were into and how I could help them. That was the most
enjoyable.
MR. FRENCH: Just to throw some reference in here; and I can’t remember the
gentleman’s name, was it Jim? Who was the Contracting Officer when you started?
MRS. BELLO: Actually, when I started, there was no one.
MR. FRENCH: Was it before Emma Bickley started?
MRS. BELLO: I started a month before Emma.
MR. FRENCH: O. K. So there was another gentleman in, and I know that in the field we
went through quite a bit of turmoil because Emma was a very organized individual and she
scared us. Maybe you were part of the scare tactic, I don’t know. We did go through
quite a transition as that time. And as soon as she trained all of us to tow the line, it was
much better and faster and I appreciate that. On that same note, sitting in on this
interview is B. J. Golec. Beverly is the proper name. Before the interview started, we
were talking. We had both worked for the Forest Service. And we talked about how
organized they are and the difference between moving from the Forest Service to the Fish
and Wildlife Service. And how everything was in manuals and if you drove a nail in
Florida, it’s the same way you drove in Montana. When you come to the Fish and
Wildlife Service, we’re not quite that tight with our regulations.
MRS. BELLO: Right. That’s true.
MR. FRENCH: Well, Beverly; I’m sorry, Delores, before we end this interview; what
are your post-retirement plans?
MRS. BELLO: I don’t have any at this time. I’m just going to de-stress. Because
contracting is stressful, even though I enjoy it. I am going to de-stress for about a year.
I’m going to get my life organized at home; get things cleaned out, get rid of stuff that we
don’t need. After that I would like to; we do have two elderly mothers that we are taking
care of. So they take some time. I’d like to be able to do more things with them. Also, in
about a year or so, I’d like to start doing volunteer work for the Ronald MacDonald
House. I have a friend who is the head there and I’ve talked to her about it. She says that
as soon as I am ready, I should look her up and she will put me to work. That’s what I’d
like to get into. Also, I love to sew. I have a lot of small pieces of fabric. And one of the
things I would love to do is to make little kids clothes, and just give them away. So that
little kids that are needy can have something new to wear.
MR. FRENCH: By listening to your interview, obviously you’ve been doing contracting
work, and this type of work for a long time. Do you want to do any of that post
retirement?
MRS. BELLO: No I don’t.
MR. FRENCH: So if you work with the Ronald MacDonald House, you don’t want to
do budgets or contracting or things like that?
MRS. BELLO: No, I just want to work with something else.
MR. FRENCH: Delores, before we close this, I just want to ask if there is anything else
you’d care to add?
MRS. BELLO: No, other than when I first came, I was unhappy because it was so
different. But as I got used to the people and got to know them I figured that they were
just people that I could help. And I think I helped them. I think I have gotten things in
order. I did bring a lot of the stuff from the Forest Service to organize contract files, to
get things in line, to get systems in place, and I really think that that has helped the
Service. And I know that Ray, my present boss is grateful about that. I just think it was
a great opportunity for me to give what I can, and I think I have.
MR. FRENCH: As one of those who was on the receiving end, we certainly appreciate
your efforts. Because there was a lot of chaos, and if you started at that time, I know
how tough it was.
MRS. BELLO: It was.
MR. FRENCH: The field was fighting the Regional office, and back and forth. But I
appreciate the fact that you suffered through it and made us tow the line. Because it is
now better than it has been, ever.
MRS. BELLO: I think it is, I have that feeling. And I know that Engineering and
Contracting didn’t really get along, but now, we’re a team. And people just can’t put a
wedge in between us anymore. We worked together as a team, and it’s wonderful. I think
it really is. I think it’s for the betterment of things out there in the Service. When things
are built now, they are built to code and I think that’s great. It’s the safety factor, and
also just to be within code. I mean, we’re a Resource Division that wants to preserve.
And doing things right, environmentally also, as far as building goes, we should be setting
the example, and I think we are.
MR. FRENCH: O.K. Delores, I thank you very much.
MRS. BELLO: Your welcome
Interview with Larry Dunkeson by Jerry French, May 16, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Larry Dunkeson with Jerry French as interviewer.
Mr. Dunkeson retired with 33 years in the Fish and Wildlife Service, and discusses how it seemed to go by so quickly. He really enjoyed working for the Service, starting out in Predator and Rodent Control, switching to Refuges, and at one point worked in the Realty Office.
Organization: FWS
Name: Larry Dunkeson
Years: 1967-2000
Program(s):Refuges, Ecological Services, Migratory Birds, Predator and Rodent Control, Realty
Keywords: History, Biography, Employees (USFWS), Wilderness, Wildlife Management, Wildlife refuges, Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, Lynn Greenwalt, Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge, Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge, Desert Game Range1
INTERVIVEW WITH LARRY DUNKESON
BY JERRY FRENCH MAY 16, 2001
MR. FRENCH: This is an oral interview with Larry Dunkeson, in his home. Today is
May 16, 2001 and it is about a quarter to two in the afternoon. Larry, this is not a formal
thing. If you would care to just tell us your story, or any aspect of it. And tell us any of
your favorite parts of the Fish and Wildlife Service. You can begin with your schooling,
and your first assignment if you wish to.
MR. DUNKESON: O.K. It doesn’t seem possible, but when I retired, I retired with
thirty-three years in. That’s the part that doesn’t seem possible, because the thirty-three
years went by so quickly. And they were so enjoyable, and so memorable to me. I really
feel old when I think about the fact that I was in the Service for thirty-three years. I went
to school at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I went down
there to study, I didn’t know what, for sure. But I looked at the Course Catalog for the
University, and there was a heading for Wildlife Management. And I said, “That’s it, I’m
gonna do it”. That’s what I studied during the years at New Mexico State. I graduated
with a bachelors in Wildlife Management. I didn’t know for sure what I was going to do,
although I went home and finished the requirements for a teaching certificate. Even
though I wasn’t sure I was going to do that. My wife was going to be a teacher and we
thought that it would be nice if we were both teachers. Before I actually graduated in
teaching, I got a call from my major professor, Dr. John Wood, who is now long gone.
He told me that a friend of mine from school had just quit his job in Albuquerque with
the Fish and Wildlife Service. He was working for what we then called, Predator and
Rodent Control. He told me that I might think about that. I did, I knew immediately that
I wanted to do that. So I called Albuquerque, which is two hundred miles away. I set up
an appointment to go interview with the director of the state Predator and Rodent Control
division. I went up to Albuquerque and interviewed him. What he wanted was someone
to go out and trap Coyotes, which was fine, except that I didn’t know anything about
trapping Coyotes. I knew what a Coyote looked like, and that’s about as far as it went.
He hired me anyway. They gave me an area to work in, and to run trap lines in. Most of
it was east of Albuquerque, where there were small ranchettes. The people were being
bothered because their pets were disappearing to Coyotes. So I went out and set up trap
lines, as I had been instructed to do, or in the manner in which I was instructed to do. I
didn’t catch anything! It was a long time before I finally caught my first Coyote. And I
was so proud of myself, even though the Coyote was dead, that I went into town,
Moriarty, for breakfast. I had that dead Coyote in the back of the International Scout that
I had been issued. I thought that people might ask me about that Coyote lying back there.
Nobody cared. All they really wanted to know was that it was dead. It’s gone. That was
an introduction. I staid with trapping Coyotes for about eight months, and pretty quickly
came to the decision that I didn’t want to spend my whole career trapping Coyotes, and
setting out “Coyote getters” which we used at that time. So I made a trip across the street
in downtown Albuquerque to interview with somebody, I didn’t care who, about maybe
getting over into Refuges. I wanted to spend some time in Refuges. As it turned out, the
first person I talked to was the lady who was in charge of the office. Her name was Mary
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Bolivar. She is long gone now. I told her what I wanted. She led me to the back, down a
corridor to an office where I had never been before. And she introduced me to a man
who was at that time, the assistant regional supervisor for refuges. His name will be
familiar to most people. His name was Lynn Greenwalt. Later, he became the director of
the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And Lynn was very nice to me. He interviewed me
and knew that I didn’t know a whole lot, because I had just gotten out of school. But, he
said, “Where in the U. S. would you like to go with Refuges, geographically”? I said, “It
doesn’t matter, I just want to get on a refuge”. He asked me what kind of refuge would I
like: migratory, breeding, or winter stopover. I told him that it didn’t matter. “I just
would like to get on a refuge”. He said asked me if I had any children. I told him, “No,
we haven’t been married too long. We’ve been in school we don’t have any children”.
He then said, “Well, I have a place for you”. Two weeks later, after lining up the moving
truck, my wife and I arrived at Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, which is out on the
salt flats in Utah. It seemed like, at that time, a really godforsaken place, but it was a
refuge, and it didn’t matter to me. That’s what I wanted. An interesting story is that, on
the way in there, Fish Springs is a long ways from anyplace, and we drove, and drove,
and drove. Finally, we came around the last corner, and saw the headquarters. At that
point, my wife, Pat, thank goodness she’s here, burst into tears. And I don’t mean little
wet spots around her eyes. I mean alligator tears that ran down her cheeks! Her
comment was, “ I’m going back on ‘the Pill’ “. That was a good plan, but as I’ll tell you,
it didn’t work out. We were at Fish Springs. We had arrived at a refuge, and that’s what
I had wanted. That was the beginning of my career with Refuges. Of course, I was
already an employee with U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. From Fish Springs, we
traveled, literally, all over the country. If I can remember all of it, we went from Fish
Springs to Mackay Island in North Carolina. That was a long way. It was a big
adventure to go all the way across the country. From there, we went to Mason Neck in
Virginia. It becomes a blur after a while. At Mason Neck, I went into what used to be
called the Departmental Training Program. I think it’s called something else now, but I
was able to go through that. From there, I switched over to Ecological Services because
there was an opening in Ecological Services in Washington, state. I can’t think of the
town. Any way, it will come to me. We transferred out there to Olympia. That was it,
Olympia, Washington. We staid there for about two and a half years. That’s a beautiful
place, we enjoyed that assignment. After that, an opening came up at the Desert Game
Range, down in Las Vegas, Nevada. I applied for that. And I was able to get it. The
Desert Game Range, it was then called “Game Range”, it was so big. It was one and a
half million acres, much of which we couldn’t even get on, because it was a bombing and
gunnery range for the Air Force. A lot of it, we couldn’t even go on because there was
live ordinance lying around. We staid here for about a year and a half, then I had a
chance to transfer back into the Washington office. {D.C.] Which meant that we made
another move, back into Virginia. I worked in the Division of Refuges, there, in the
Washington office. I worked in the Division of Migratory Birds while I was there, also.
That was a good assignment. There was a lot of science going on there. It doesn’t sound
like it, but there was. From there, we had a chance to move, again, to Albuquerque,
which is where we started. We always thought that we would like to get back to
Albuquerque. I applied for the job, here in Albuquerque in the Division of Realty. I was
selected, and we moved back to Albuquerque. Our kids made one comment when we got
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back to Albuquerque, after living in Washington, and seeing all that there is to see in
Washington. They said, “This is a nice place to live, there aren’t very many museums
here for us to see”. Although my youngest boy was somewhat afraid to move here,
because he was sure that he was going to be the “Anglo” in all of his classes. And that he
would have to wear a sombrero, like all of the other kids were probably wearing. He
found, when he got here, that this wasn’t the case. I staid in the Division of Realty, for
about fifteen years. Those were good years. I got to see a lot of country, and I got to
meet a lot of people. We bought a lot of dirt that eventually ended up in national wildlife
refuges. We even bought some land for fish hatcheries. Then, after being in Realty for
fifteen years, things changed. Supervisors changed, the job changed, and it became clear
to me that retirement was probably the next step I should take. And I did that. I retired
from the Fish and Wildlife Service in July of 2000, which is about, almost two years ago
now.
MR. FRENCH: It’s right at one year.
MR. DUNKESON: One year ago. Time flies when you’re having fun.
MR. FRENCH: Larry, you were, as I understand it, one of the first managers at Mason
Neck. Is that correct?
MR. DUNKESON: That is correct. I opened up Mason Neck.
MR. FRENCH: Would you care to discuss what it’s like to open a new refuge.
MR. DUNKESON: It’s difficult, because Mason Neck was established for the Bald
Eagle. It was established because of pressure from local residents who wanted that area
preserved. They used the Bald Eagle as their reason for preservation. I think that the
more overlying reason was because with a refuge established there, there wouldn’t be any
more building. Since they had homes out there, this would protect them [the residents]
from being overrun by Washington’s sprawl and people. They were taking care of
themselves. The refuge was established, and I did a lot of “kibitzing” with people, even
doing news stories with the local television stations. That was part of setting Mason
Neck up. The other part was getting out on the ground, and trying to see what it was that
we had out there. We established some trails. I put in a bridge over a ditch. In this part
of the country we call it an “unroyo”, but it was a ditch caused by the rain. Then the
refuge manager from Blackwater, whom I worked for, came over and saw that bridge, he
said, “No that won’t work because it’s too flimsy”. So I had to rebuild the bridge. And
as far as I know, that bridge is still there today. The trails are still there. We really didn’t
have any money, being a new refuge. I had enough money to buy gas for my used
pickup. I got a used pickup that was going to scrapped I think. That’s what I used to go
back and forth to Blackwater. We built a visitor contact station. And subsequently,
somebody who didn’t like the refuge got out there one night and burned it down. I got a
call from a local friend, and he said, “Larry, your refuge in on fire”! Which caused me a
lot of concern. So I ran out there, and the fire was out by that time. But that was the end
of that visitor contact station, which I think they have rebuilt since. Mason Neck has
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been added to several times. Both by purchasing land that went into the refuge, and by
picking up excess land from the military that was added to the refuge, even though it was
disjoined from the refuge. Mason Neck gets a tremendous visitor visitation now, and it is
a very popular spot in the Washington area. In fact, from the refuge itself, you’d stand
out on the Potomac River, a lot of the refuge fronts on the Potomac River. If you look up
river on a clear day, you could see Mount Vernon. That gives an idea of where it is. It’s
right down the river from Mount Vernon.
MR. FRENCH: Larry, through your interview, you’ve worked with Animal Damage
Control, Refuges, Ecological Services, a tour in the Washington regional office. Would
you care to comment on these varied experiences? Your experience is certainly different
from what many of us have had. Many of us get in one place and stick there. You’ve
had the courage to venture out. Would you care to discuss how these things added to
themselves or possibly detracted?
MR. DUNKESON: That’s been one of the high points of my career. The chance to see a
lot of different places, and work on, not only refuges, but lands within the Fish and
Wildlife Service in different places. Our tour in North Carolina, which was at Mackay
Island National Wildlife Refuge, was a fun place to be. And it was interesting because of
the people who lived there. Many of which were descendents of the original settlers of
the Outer Banks who came in from England. They spoke with a very heavy early English
accent. Some of them, I couldn’t even understand. But I got to know them and became
friends with them. That was an advantage to moving around like we did, to all of the
different places. My children, who are now grown and have families of their own,
remember a lot of those places, even though they don’t remember exactly where they
were. They remember having been there. And they remember people from being there.
We moved a number of times. And that was back in the days when the Fish and Wildlife
Service had enough money to move people. It was an adventure for us. I would
recommend, having been through it, taking the opportunity to see all these different
places, and experience all these different locales. From Gettysburg, on to the Outer
Banks in North Carolina, to Olympia, Washington, which was a beautiful, and fun place.
Once you got used to the fact that in Olympia, no matter what you did, it was going to
rain. Once you accepted that, you were ok. My tours, and time in the Fish and Wildlife
Service have done a lot, I think, to broaden my perspective on life. It certainly it gave us
the chance to see a lot of places that we probably would not have seen otherwise.
MR. FRENCH: You’ve done a lot for my career. Long ago, you got me interested in
collecting old refuge signs. And I know that you have been interested in the heritage of
the Service for a long time. Would you care to expand on how you got interested in that
particular aspect of the career?
MR. DUNKESON: Well, beginning to gather old things happened pretty much at Mason
Neck. On the private land at Mason Neck, there were a lot of old trash piles, and outdoor
“johnnie” sites. We found that digging into an outdoor johnnie was a good place to find
old bottles. Many times, men would go out there, and drink in the outhouse, and drop the
bottle down the hole. Of course, over the years, all of that rotted, so it wasn’t a bad
5
experience. But there were a lot of trash piles on the private land, if you could find them.
Sometimes that was difficult, and sometimes it wasn’t. I started to collect old bottles out
there, and I got into an antique bottle club. That was fun for me because it provided me
with bottles from other members of the club. From then on, it was just a natural jump to
start collecting refuge boundary signs. Being in the Division of Realty, later in my
career, I was able to visit a lot of refuges. The people who worked there said, “We use to
have those old signs, and they’re still out there on posts. But they are all Interior
boundary signs”. They don’t do anything. They get shot at. So, occasionally, I would
pick up a boundary sign from an old refuge. The old refuge maintenance man always had
a pile of old signs somewhere, if you could just get him to remember, or admit where that
junk pile was. Every refuge has a bone yard and often times, the pile of old signs would
be down in the bone yard. They were not being used anymore, or they were outdated, or
whatever. They ended up being junked, down in the bone yard. After starting on old
bottles at Mason Neck, like I say, it was a natural jump to go to old signs. I collected
boundary signs for a long time. I had quite a full collection of metal signs, as far as I
knew. Those have all been donated to the Fish and Wildlife Museum, back in
Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
MR. FRENCH: Larry, I thank you very much. If there is anything that you care to add,
we’ll just kind of close this thing up. And for the benefit of the transcriber, my name is
Jerry French I failed to put that in at the first. That makes it easier for the transcriber to
know what’s going on. I appreciate very much your thoughts, and remembrances.
MR. DUNKESON: There is one thing that I’d like to point out. This just occurred to
me. And I think that Jerry will go along with it: We did so much moving around, and
each move was an adventure, and each move was strongly gone along with by my wife.
She wanted to see other parts of the country. And wanted to meet other people. For
those people who are still in the Fish and Wildlife Service, and who are in jobs that are
going to cause them to move around, or see different places, if you can find a life partner
who is also interested in doing that, and enjoys doing that. I would sure recommend it,
because it makes moving, and new jobs so much more enjoyable if you’ve got somebody
there to talk to, and who encourages you, and enjoys doing that.
MR. FRENCH: I can’t agree more with you. As my wife says, “We’ve never made a
bad move”. We lived in some strange houses. We got the kids in some strange schools.
It wasn’t until my daughter got into college that she said “This is the longest I’ve ever
staid in one school”. But we gained a great deal from it. The two daughters got to
“sample” more than just one community, and more than one way of life. O. K, Larry, I
thank you very much.
MR. DUNKESON: You are quite welcome. It was my pleasure
Interview with Jeff Fountain by Jerry French, May 17, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Jeff Fountain and Jerry French as interviewer.INTERVIEW WITH JEFF FOUNTAIN
BY JERRY FRENCH, MAY 17, 2001
MR. FRENCH: The time is 8:37 [P.M.], on May 17th. I am sitting in a motel room in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I am going to introduce Jeff Fountain. Jeff has had a long
career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Jeff, you can start anywhere you wish.
MR. FOUNTAIN: Well, we won’t cover it all tonight. I was born on September 18,
1942 in St. Petersburg, Florida. We moved to North Carolina early on, and I grew up in
North Carolina. I went to North Carolina State for College. I graduated in January of
1965 with a degree in Wildlife Biology. My first day with the Service was a June day in
1962. I reported to Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, as it was then. There, I met Mr.
Huelin, one of the classic examples of a Refuge Clerk back in that day. Preston W. Lane,
or “Press” Lane, as he was called was the Refuge Manager. He is a legend in that part of
the world. The Biologist was a gentleman by the name of Mel Melenger. He was truly a
classical type individual. I worked there for the summer, and did a number of things. I
remember primarily spraying Alligator Weed with a jeep. I almost turned a couple of
jeeps over racing them around the dikes. Also, we went down to Blackbeard Island on
occasion. Lawrence Wynland was there at the time as the on-site Manager. Lawrence
and his wife had about fifteen beagles, and thirty or forty rabbits, which they raised for
food. Lawrence did not have a degree, but he was a biotech of sorts, they changed that
title back and forth a number of times. But he was a biotech who later went to Pelican
Island. He was truly one of the legends at Pelican Island, he staid there for a number of
years. After the summer at Savannah, I went to Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in
the summer of 1963. Virginia was in Region 4 at the time. Charlie Noble was the Refuge
Manager there. Charlie and I crossed paths later, at St. Vincent’s Island in Florida. The
assistants were Dave Hall, who was a public use assistant that summer; before he got into
law enforcement. Larry Calvert was also an assistant. The Clerk was Chuck Harden who
was later to become quite famous in two Regional offices. Chuck died on the job much
later. I believe he was in Denver at that time. Otho Justice and Harry Wetzel were there
as Maintenance workers. Otho was another classical fellow. Then there were a number
of the local “Chincoteaguers”, as they call them. When I got to Chincoteague, they had
had the Ash Wednesday storm, which flooded everything, the year before, I believe.
They had just built the bridge over to Assateague Island. There was no Park Service, or
National Seashore then. The beach was pretty much closed, and there was a twenty-mile
stretch of sand flats behind the beach. You could drive up and down the beach, if you
worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service, but not otherwise. The ponies were there but
they weren’t quite as closely regulated as they are now. They did not have the deer then;
the little deer that they hunt, at least I don’t think they did. I worked there for the
summer and then I worked two weeks during Christmas vacation. They had a rather
subdued Christmas party that year. The year before, they had carried everybody home in
the front-end loader and dumped them out, one by one. So they were a little reticent to
have the same sort of party. However, we did just go out in Tom’s Cove and gather up
bushels of oysters for the party, as I remember. At Chincoteague I did a number of things
including a Beach Grass surveys and other surveys. I learned a little bit more about Mel
Melenger who had been the Manager there at one time. I dealt quite a bit with the
Chincoteaguers also. They still at the time spoke an old English brogue. They called me,
“Geoff”. [Pronounced like Gee-off]. I can remember distinctly at one time, they said,
“Look it deem tamp over ‘err, Geoff, look it deem tamp”! They were saying, “Look at
the stumps”. Then they were telling me about old John Smith. They said that “old John
Smith was a mighty nice man, but he weren’t no Chincoteague”. The other guy there said,
“Yep, he died the other day, he was ninety-five, but he weren’t no Chincoteague, he came
here when he was six months old”! Now that is clannish! [Mr. Grover laughs] At any
rate, Chincoteague was a wonderful experience as well. The next summer, I worked at
Back Bay, Virginia, at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. I was stationed actually out
on the Refuge. At that time, they had no road down to the headquarters. You parked in a
farmer’s back yard, got in a government vehicle with sand tires and drove down the beach,
roughly five miles below the end of the road at Sand bridge Beach. You went over the
dune to the headquarters. While I was there that summer, they had a rain of twenty-one
inches, in twenty-four hours, which knocked out most of the dikes around the
impoundments. The Manager when I went there was Don Embrosen. He was of the
very old school. Instead of taking any vacation, Don took every other Monday off, to
use up his leave. As far as I know, he never left the office. The other Manager, the Field
Manager at Back Bay was John Fields. John pretty much staid there, but he later went to
Pungo National Wildlife Refuge. I think he died on the job at Pungo. He died of old age,
but at the Refuge. Another one of the classical people who was there was a gentleman by
the name of Romey Waterfield. Romey was about fifty when I was there and a very hard
worked. He did everything. Romey was one of the old beach people who was from that
area. He used to drive a 1953 Chevy down the beach. He never got stuck. I got stuck
frequently in a four-wheel drive truck, but Romey never got stuck. Romey was very
proud of working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, and on Friday nights, I staid with
Romey. There were two houses down there. Actually I didn’t stay with Romey then.
That summer I staid in a trailer-house that had a gas refrigerator out front. And due to the
location, the rental fee on that trailer, if I remember correctly was five dollars a month,
which seems appropriate. It was an outstanding place. But as I said, Romey was very
proud of working for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Since I think that he is retired now, I
feel like it is safe to say on Friday nights, Romey would put on his cleanest and best
uniform. We’d get in his car, we’d drive up to the liquor store and he would go in. They
always knew “Mr. Waterfield” because he was in uniform. We would go to the liquor
store and he would buy a bottle of whiskey and take a drink. Then he would go to the
grocery store, where they knew “Mr. Waterfield”, in his uniform, he would also do any
other sundry chores that he had to do. Then we would drive back down the beach to the
residence. At that time, the residence was an old Gun Club lodge, I believe. It had no
insulation what so ever in it. That summer, we also went to the Back Bay Gun Club; I
believe it was called, one time. It was south of the Refuge, and one of the famous, old
Gun Clubs along that area. While we were there, I struck a deal with the caretaker. On
my next trip back to North Carolina, I picked up a charred, three-gallon keg, which I gave
him in return for a gallon of “mighty fine, homemade whiskey”. At any rate, Back Bay
was also a very good experience. In addition to other things, I hold the Lighthouse
Restaurant all time record, of one hundred and thirteen jumbo shrimp, at one sitting, that
and a couple of beers. Back Bay was also a Coastal Refuge. We did mostly waterfowl
work. We did a lot of work on the dikes, and on the dock to the boathouse. Now, while I
was at Back Bay, this was in about 1964, it was not uncommon for us to be out in the
marsh and find old wooden decoys. We picked these up and put them in the boat, and
threw them in the boathouse. I wish that I had some of those now. But that was not an
uncommon thing. In January, as I stated earlier, I graduated from North Carolina State. I
went back to Back Bay until about March. During that time, the house trailer was not
available and I staid with Romey. From January until March, I lived with Mr. Waterfield,
in an upstairs bedroom. Romey said that he didn’t like any heat in the shop until the
tools started freezing to his hands. He was a tough rascal. At the time, the Back Bay
came up almost to the ocean. You had the ocean on the east, Back Bay on the west, and
about one hundred yards, in between. My, the wind did blow. As I said earlier, those old
gun clubhouses had no insulation; I slept under eight blankets in the wintertime. You
couldn’t lie on your back because your feet would hurt. But we did a lot of duck trapping
at that time. We used the old Ohio walk-ins. That is just great fun because you’d have a
line of eight or ten or fifteen traps out in the marsh and you’d put your bands around
your neck, and your banding pliers in your pocket and you’d got to each trap and there
would be three to five ducks in there. You would band them and move on to the next
trap. It was a wonderful way to do it. We did a lot of marsh burning for snow geese at
that time. And I believe, at that time there was a new Refuge, I have forgotten the name
of it. I’ll look it up later. That’s where I first met Larry Dunkinson who was the first
Manager. That particular Refuge was on the inside of the Bay over in North Carolina I
believe. Since Back Bay was pretty close to the North Carolina line. I can remember a
couple of nights, when late at night, going down the beach, they had one reflector on a
telephone poll, and a big tire that had come off of a barge. If it was foggy, you had a
tendency to miss that reflector, and miss the turn into headquarters. More than once, I
got almost to the North Carolina line twenty miles down and had to turn around, and find
the way back over.
MR. FRENCH: Was that Refuge Mason’s Neck?
MR. FOUNTAIN: That’s it, Mason’s Neck. I believe Larry’s office was in a chicken
coup, if I am not mistaken. Let me backtrack. When I was at Savannah in 1962, we had
just acquired that summer, Harris’ Neck. Harris’ Neck was an old Army Air Force base if
I remember correctly. We did some initial survey work, and wandering around. They did
not have anybody stationed there. They did still have, on the property the three-story
house that had been there for quite some time. It had an indoor swimming pool. I
remember going up to the third story and walking around the old house. While I was at
Savannah, I was in a rooming house and one of the gentlemen who stayed in the rooming
house with me said that some ten years before, he used to frequent that house at Harris’
Neck. It was a house of ill repute then, and you could buy whiskey on Sunday. The
Sheriff had been liberally plied with funds I think to stay away. Harris’ Neck at that
time, in 1962 was new. In March of 1965, I left Back Bay. I spent roughly two years in
the Army. I went to Military Police school, and Jump School at Fort Benning. I was
posted to the 97th Civil Affairs Group in Okinawa. Just as a sidebar, during that time I
spent the perfect amount of time in Viet Nam. I was the first Lieutenant not to be
reassigned to Viet Nam out of my unit. I was traveling from Bangkok, Thailand to Manila
in the Philippines on “R and R”. I got off at Tonsenut [sic] Air Base. I had a cold
Budweiser and they said, “Time to board”. That was my entire time in Viet Nam! After
the Army, I called Josiah Mahan who was the Personnel Officer. It surprised him
somewhat to hear from me again. I think that he thought he was rid of me. I said, “Where
do you want me?” After some thought, he said, “How about St. Mark’s Refuge in
Florida?” So after a bit of time, I packed my U-Haul It, and put it behind a 1963
Volkswagen, Carmingia [sic] and toad my worldly belongings down to St. Mark’s. I
arrived on a Friday. My brother was with. We left the U-Haul It, and I settled myself in
a little trailer out behind the office, with at that time was on the main highway. I went
down to the Seabring, twelve-hour races in Seabring, Florida. I returned on Sunday
afternoon and reported for work at right o’clock on Monday morning. At this time, I met
Mr. Harhy Wambole, he Manager. Mr. Wambole looked at me, and he said, “Are you
through playing around yet?” Apparently, I should have started work on Friday, I don’t
know. But at St. Mark’s there was another wonderful cast of individuals. In addition to
Mr. Wambole, there was Frank Zantek, the Forester, and Ralph who was the Assistant
Forester. Red Giddin was the Biologist. Red is a true classic. I was a Junior Assistant at
the time, and the other Assistant Manager, who arrived shortly after I did, was Wayne
Shifflett. I hated Wayne with a passion. Wayne was a birder, and got to take all of the
birding groups on yours. I was not a birder and I got to paint pipes, and root rake by
hand, among other things. Also on the crew at that time was a gentleman by the name of
Bruce Crouse, who was the Clerk. Bruce was a wonderful individual and he never once in
the year and a half that I was at St. Mark’s had a paper returned for any correction. He
had the ability to walk in, and within two minutes, find any file on the station. He was
very good. Also on the crew was a fellow named Monroe Nichols. Monroe was one of
the old, old, poachers that the Fish and Wildlife Service hired I think to get him out of the
marsh. Monroe could “mump” alligators, and “mump” them right up to the pickup truck.
I remember one time, riding down one of the back roads at St. Mark’s at about forty miles
an hour, and Monroe slammed on the brakes. It was about three in the afternoon. He
backed the truck up, and went over into the woods. He had seen a leaf turn the wrong
way on a bush, at forty miles an hour. We went back in the woods and found a doe Deer
that poachers had shot and gutted and hung. We notified another wonderful individual,
Mr. George Byrd. Mr. Byrd was indeed the first, as far as I know, full-time Refuge Law
Enforcement Officer. That’s all that George did. Mr. Wambole kept two dogs at
government expense. These were “Hog dogs”. Back during that era, it was considered the
thing to do, and George and Mr. Wambole would go out of an afternoon with the dogs and
hunt hogs. Feral hogs were a problem. I could go on quite a bit more about George, for
example: About the first weekend after I went on duty George came by in a hurry on a
Friday night, and said, “Get you gun and your flashlight, and let’s go”! At that time, for
law enforcement, when you arrived on station if you had your own gun, you put bullets
in it. You used your own flashlight. They handed you a ticket book and said, “There
you go”. I can tell you that at a later point in time, we didn’t even have six bullets for a
gentlemen when he came on board, we gave him five, and a ticket book. Also back during
that era I carried a Colt Trooper .357 Magnum. Some people carried a .22 Automatic.
Some people carried a 1911 Colt .45 pistol. It was just about the size of a barn. A lot of
people carried .38 Specials, including one of the State Agents. We called him “Maizio”.
At a different point in time, Mr. Maizio did indeed fire his .38 Special at some poachers
who were trying to run him down. He managed to dent the chrome ring, under the
parking light. And that’s about it. He carried that bullet for some odd twenty-five years.
We didn’t fire them for practice or anything. You just carried it. At any rate, the first
weekend I was there, George came by and said, “We’ve got poachers, let’s go!” So I
paired up with George. Mr. Maizio, the State Agent was with Red Gidden, I think. We
did indeed apprehend two young gentlemen gator hunting. George had a wonderful way
about him. We were completely in the dark. As you know, they hunt at night. We had
the trucks rigged so that there were no lights, no brake lights, or no taillights, you could
switch them off. We did manage to apprehend these two young gentlemen. As we
slipped up on them, and shined the light, George said, “Boys, you hadn’t ought to done
that”! Which did indeed scare the fool out of those two young gentlemen. I remember
that another State Agent came up. I think his name was Roy. We searched one of the
young men. They had coats on. And about the time we were ready to search the other
one, he started twisting and moving rather rapidly. So the State Agent reached out, and
tapped him on the head with a six-cell flashlight, which took him to his knees. As it
turned out, he had an alligator skin wrapped around his waist, under the jacket. He was
trying to pass it to the gentleman that we had already searched. Needless to say, he
didn’t get away with that one. George used to do quite a bit of patrol on the old
Lighthouse Road. They talk about the time that George was on patrol and found a body
that had been dumped in one of the small ponds. Fortunately for George, apparently the
Mafia had disposed of this gentleman and thought that they had dumped him in the Gulf,
in the dark. But they had not. George did not run into the gentlemen when they had the
body, and that was a good thing. We chased gator poachers, coming and going. St.
Mark’s was another waterfowl Refuge. It was a wonderful area. Red Gidden as I said,
was the Biologist. He lived down at Mound’s Station on the Refuge. Red had three
children, two boys, and a little girl. His wife was an English professor. Red, if I may be
forgiven for saying so, looked “just as common as dirt”. But Red spoke Spanish fluently.
He started to get a Master’s degree. He took the course work. The professors used to
come down and let Red give the tours to the Graduate degree students, of the marsh. Red
was a wonderful marsh ecologist. I call very few people true ecologists, but Red was
there. After Red finished the course work, he decided that he knew what he needed to
know, and never bothered to get his Masters. Red and I used to do a number of things
together. He and Bruce and I used to play ping-pong. We had a table set up in the shop,
out behind the headquarters. At lunchtime we’d play a rousing round of ping-pong or
two. And in the evenings we would play a game or two. I managed to beat Red once,
after plying him liberally with Bourbon. And that is the only way that I managed to beat
him. Red and I, this being a different era, and the statute of limitations having run out,
used to go to the café at this little place, just up from the Refuge. It was a roadside café
with four tables. And after work, we sit there and have a cold beer. Only we did it in
uniform, and at that time, Red said, “They’d know who I was if I was naked”. I, being
quite young and impressionable, said, “O.K., if Red drinks beer in uniform, I’ll drink beer
in uniform”. Times have changed, and I have gotten smarter. At any rate, St. Mark’s was
a good experience. We did a lot of prescribed burning at that time. Ralph Oliver was the
Assistant Forester. Ralph used to mark a lot of trees, for timber stand improvement and
for logging. Later on, that was very, very controversial. But I remember Ralph because
he finally quit the Service to become a Minister. Ralph, working hard, always carried the
tin lunch bucket. Ralph carried two of them, full. He ate both of them empty at every
lunch. He worked hard. There was another Forester, and I remember him saying…
The Foresters back then wore snake boots. I attempted at that time to get approval for
snake boots as part of the uniform, the uniform being fairly new at that time. I was told
by the Regional office that the only way I could do it was if the boots could have steel
toes. Gokey at that time did not make steel toes in their snake boots. We had Eastern
Diamondbacks in the Saw Palmetto that went up to six and a half feet I believe. I
remember that one time I had to dispatch a six-foot Eastern Diamondback. I could not get
it out of the area to relocate it. So I thought that since Red Gidden used to put snakes in
his lunchbox, and surprise people at lunch with them, that I would surprise Red. So I
showed up with the dispatched snake and I laid it out on the walk, in front of the shop
door, or the office door. We had no Visitor’s Center then. I thought that this would give
Red a little start. Low and behold, two very nice, elderly ladies came early to go birding.
They stepped right across the dead snake, never saw it and went into the office. It gave
me heart failure. But we removed the snake after that. Red also, as a sidebar, kept an
alligator in his basement in the winter. It was outside during the summer. Even though
the alligator was restricted then, and I don’t think it was listed as endangered at the time.
But Red had one, and he used it for tours and demonstrations and that sort of thing. That
was an ill-tempered alligator. I never saw that alligator when it was in a good mood. It
could have been just me. Red always kept road-kill in his refrigerator and freezer to feed
the alligator. We were always picking up road-kill things to feed the alligator. Later in
life, after Nancy, Red’s wife moved back up to Tallahassee; Red kept, well no, I think it
was before then, when she was still there, they had a pig named Arnold that grew to
about three hundred pounds. Red and the boys, and his daughter kept it at their house. I
could go on more about Red, but I will move on to another gentleman who worked at St.
Mark’s by the name of Halley Lawhorne. I wrote about Halley one time as one of the
heroes of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Hal
Interview with Billy Joe Hawthorne by Jerry French December 4, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Billy Joe Hawthorne and Jerry French as interviewer.INTERVIEW WITH BILLY JOE HAWTHORNE
BY JERRY FRENCH DECEMBER 4, 2001
MR. FRENCH: This is Jerry French. It’s the afternoon of December 4, 2001. I am at
the home of Billy Joe Hawthorne. Bill is an old friend of mine. We are going to do an oral
interview with him about his career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Bill, if you would
care to start off, and tell us a little bit about yourself; your education, and how you
happened to come into the Fish and Wildlife Service, and then some of the various jobs
that you had as you went through your career and how you ended up.
MR. HAWTHORNE: I’ll give you what I think I can recollect from over the years. It’s
a pleasure to do this, by the way, and a pleasure to see you again too. I grew up in south
central Nebraska, down in corn country, south of the Platt River and Grand Island,
Nebraska. I was born in 1939. I ushered in the end of the Dust Bowl period, my Dad
tells me. We lived on a farm out there. At the end of my high school education my dad
asked me if I was going to be a farmer. I was the last of four boys, and none of the rest of
them had farmed. I asked him if we were making any money, and he told me that we
weren’t making a cent. I then told him that I didn’t believe that I would be a farmer then.
He then said, “Well good, neither will I!” He sold the farm that summer and we moved to
Longmont, Colorado right north of Denver. That’s when I became acquainted with
Colorado State University. I always had a great love for the outdoors; hunting and fishing
and the wildlife that went with it. So in the fall of 1956 we moved to Longmont,
Colorado and I enrolled at what was then Colorado A&M. I stayed about five quarters at
A&M. I think I snuck out just before they were getting ready to send me out because my
grades weren’t really that good. To make a long story short, I tinkered around a little bit
at a couple of jobs in the Longmont area. Then I went into the military and spent four
years in the U. S. Air Force. I came out of there in 1962 and tinkered around in a couple
of other fields that weren’t to my liking. I still had the urge to go back into wildlife. In
1966 I reentered what was then Colorado State University at Fort Collins. I was able to
finish, and get my degree in Wildlife Management. I graduated in March of 1969. I guess
the way that I got into the Fish and Wildlife Service was this; I went up to a “Wing Bee”
held up at Fort Collins. When I went to the “Wing Bee” there was a fellow by the name
of Red Shelton who was a Biologist in the Region 2 office in Albuquerque. He was there,
and we got to talking. Red encouraged me to send him an application. He said they had a
couple of jobs coming open. There was one at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge in
Roswell, and the other at Havasu National Wildlife Refuge in Needles, California. To
make a long story short, I was offered which ever of those jobs that I wanted when I
graduated in March. I got out in the spring quarter. I told Red, “ I spent two years in
Roswell in the Air Force and really didn’t like it. So I think I’ll go to Havasu.” That’s
how a started out. All of my career by the way was in Region 2. I look back and
sometimes I think that was good. Sometimes I think it would have been good to expand
my career into some other regions. But it didn’t work out that way. I enjoyed Region 2.
I enjoyed the entire career that I had there. And I think that if I was to do it over again,
I’d probably do the same. At any rate, I started out at a pretty shaky appointment,
which was to last six months at Havasu. It was not a permanent, full time position. But
Mark Nelson, who was the Chief of Refuges in Region 2 told me that if I went down and
did a good job, he would make sure that when my temporary appointment expired they’d
do the best they could to try and get me a full time job there at Havasu. So my wife and
I; we didn’t have any children at the time, packed out bags and I took off with a U-Haul
trailer pulling a Volkswagen Beetle. I had two dogs on my lap. I headed down two weeks
ahead of my wife to move in to our dream home there. It was in government housing
there in Needles, California. She was to join me two weeks later, and I spent the better
part of that two weeks trying to get that house where I figured she wouldn’t leave me on
the first night that she got there. You’ve been in government housing, Jerry, so you know
what I’m talking about. There was about three inches of crust inside the oven. I cleaned
that up. I cleaned the windows, and stove and refrigerator. When she joined me two
weeks later, we had a good time at Havasu for about three years.
I spent a lot of my time at Havasu up and down the river. The Colorado River is
still one of my favorite spots in the world. We did a lot of enforcement patrol. I did
some plain table mapping of a portion of the upper portion of Havasu Lake. We were
doing some siltation studies to determine how long it would be before many of those
wetlands actually silted in from the Colorado River flow. I worked about a year under
Refuge Manager Blaine Graves. Then Blaine transferred from Havasu and we were
without a Manager for a good period of my time there. Stan Cornelius, the Assistant
Manager was Acting Manager in Charge. I assisted Stan a lot, since he didn’t have an
assistant. I got to do a lot of Assistant Manager duties that I wouldn’t have otherwise
got to do. Along about 1972; this was those times in the Fish and Wildlife Service when
you applied for every job that came out on the ‘green sheets’ that you thought you’d like.
Then one day you’d get a call from the Regional office wanting to know when you would
be ready to go to your new assignment, the assignment of their choice! I was called by
Mark Nelson at one point there, and asked if I wanted to venture off to Tishomingo,
Oklahoma to be the Assistant Manager to Ernie Jamison. Well, I had met Ernie in 1970 in
Albuquerque when we, at that time took our forty hours Law Enforcement training. I sat
next to Ernie and we visited. I liked the old Cajun a lot. When Mark Nelson asked me if I
wanted to be an Assistant Manager to Ernie, I didn’t give it a second thought. I just said,
“You bet, I’m ready to go!”
I had a lot of good experiences there at Havasu. One of the things that sticks in
my mind about my first assignment at Havasu was this; that was the days before we had
any money to buy new trucks and buy new vehicles and buy equipment and all of the
things that I believe most Managers enjoy these days. We looked more like the Laurel
and Hardy movies on Monday morning, going around to find out where you could find a
tire to put on the vehicle that you were going to use that day to get where you were going
to go to do your work! We had flats, and we had batteries down. Nothing would start.
The equipment was just really in a shambles. We had mostly rejected stuff from the
Korean War. That was our bread and butter equipment. Most of the things that we had
were just in a state of disrepair. We didn’t have good equipment at that first assignment.
It got a little better as I went from station to station. And as time went on, the equipment
really did improve considerably. I was glad to see that. In about April of 1972 we loaded
up a U-Haul trailer. This time my wife accompanied me on the trip. We headed for
Tishomingo on the north side of Lake Texoma, outside of Tishomingo, Oklahoma. This is
a beautiful wintering waterfowl Refuge primarily for Canada Geese and a lot of Mallards
and other things. They had a good farming program going on and a good hunt program
and a good fishing program. It was really to my liking. I did get to work side by side
with Ernie Jamison who is still one of my idols as far as Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge
Managers. He was, in my opinion, one of the better ones in the country. Ernie gave me a
lot of good training. He gave me a lot of leeway to do things. We worked side by side.
We actually lived on the Refuge, again. I lived right across the street from Ernie. We were
boss and employee, but we were also good friends and compadres. We did a lot of
hunting and fishing together. We worked together on a day-to-day basis. I can truthfully
say that all of the years that I’ve known Ernie; we never had a time when we had any
disagreements. We were just a pretty compatible pair.
Tishomingo was an area where you got a lot of introduction on Law Enforcement.
We kept a good Enforcement presence on the Refuge. We also had a good farming
program farming corn, milo and winter wheat for the Canada Geese when they came in. I
guess being on my first really big waterfowl refuge; the first year when those Canada
Geese started flocking in to that Refuge, it was just a darn good feeling to see the fruits of
your labors all of a sudden come to fruition. We had a good hunt program. We had a
portion that was a Wildlife Management Area coordinated with the State of Oklahoma’s
Wildlife Department. We manned a hunt Check Station, and we had assigned blinds in
what we called the “big bottom”, which was our hunt area over there. It was a real
pleasure to run that hunt, and be involved with the hunting public. It was not without
it’s problems, but it was a good experience. We had a great crew. We had a great crew at
Havasu too, I should say. I wouldn’t slight them a bit. But we had a really good crew at
Tishomingo. We had a lot of fun with them. My gosh, I could go on for hours about the
things that they pulled on me in breaking in a new Assistant Manager!
I guess I forgot to mention that my son was born while we were back there at
Havasu in 1970. We brought a kid into the Fish and Wildlife Service at that station. We
brought my daughter into the Service while we were at Tishomingo. My son Seth is now
32, and my daughter Shannon is 28.
We had been at Tishomingo for about three years when the regional office called
me once again, and asked me if I was interested in being the Biologist at Aransas National
Wildlife Refuge. I told them that I needed to think about that a little bit. Tishomingo was
a place that I really wasn’t real anxious to leave. I was enjoying my job. I was enjoying
the area. We had a good family life going there and everything. But I talked with Ernie,
and Ernie was my mentor. He said, “Bill, you need to get some good coastal experience.
Coastal experience in necessary.” He had come up from Lacassine and Sabene and some
of the Louisiana coastal Refuges and he felt like to round out my career, some coastal
experience would be essential. So, in May of 1975, we headed south to Aransas National
Wildlife Refuge, the home of the Whooping Crane. I really enjoyed the stay at Aransas
NWR, although this was the first Refuge where we lived off of the Refuge. I wouldn’t
want to do that again. I’d like to live on the Refuge. Particularly in the early years, it’s a
good place to raise a family. It’s a good place to live. And on your off duty time, you
can be bumming around out there checking to see that goes on, on the Refuge. We lived
about thirty-five miles from there in Port Lavaca. We bought our first house there. I
drove back and forth on a day-to-day basis. My work at Aransas Refuge was real
interesting. I got to do the winter Whooping Crane surveys by plane. I think I was the
first person to be able to see sixty-nine Whooping Cranes in one day. Of course that’s
been surpassed. We’re glad to say that that has been surpassed many times since then.
But when I was on the Refuge, we peaked out at sixty-nine birds. We also worked with
the oil and gas industry. There were some pipelines coming across the Refuge. We had a
huge pipeline construction project going while I was there, and I got to be the coordinator
with the pipeline company. I was making sure of permit compliance and environmental
considerations were all taken into account. We had to see that they were done properly,
so I did get some exposure to that.
MR. FRENCH: Bill, let me interrupt you for just a minute. When you were at Aransas,
you worked for one of the great characters of the Region at that time; a guy named Frank
Johnson. Could you tell us about Frank?
MR. HAWTHORNE: Yes, I did! There isn’t anything to say, other than that Frank was
a jewel! Frank was an old fella from Mississippi. Frank Johnson was probably one of
the jewels of the Refuge System. He was just a real character. He was smart like a fox.
Frank just was an enjoyable person, and he knew how to run a Refuge. He knew exactly
what was needed, and he knew how to handle his people. He knew how to handle the
community, which was a thing that Ernie Jamison did well too. Frank did the same thing.
Frank and his wife Una lived there on the Refuge. I can’t say enough about the old
redhead because he was just a peach to work with. He was a character! Everybody that
knew Frank loved him. Everybody that knew Frank would remember him for the
remainder of their lives. No doubt about it! He had some sayings. He could come up
with stuff off of the wall that would just crack you up. But to work with the guy, he
always gave you free reign, but he also guided you too. He’d been around. And I tell
you; I was in the Regional office when I heard of Frank’s death. He had died in the night,
in his sleep. I don’t cry very often, but I went in and shut my door and the old tears just
flowed. We lost a good friend when we lost Frank. He was…..
MR. FRENCH: He was the only one there ever has been!
MR. HAWTHORNE: They threw away the mold when they threw away the Frank
Johnson mold, that’s for sure! I am glad you brought that up because I should have
mentioned it. Yeah, Frank was a jewel!
After completing almost two years there at Aransas, as a Biologist, I got a call
from Gordon Hansen who was the ARD for Refuges in Region 2. Gordon called and
asked me if I would come in and serve a couple of years in the Regional Office as an
Ascertainment Biologist. They had a big thrust going. It was called the Category 8
Program. It was the utilization of Duck Stamp moneys to acquire prime wetland habitats.
What they were doing was preparing a Category 8, which was the Texas Gulf Coast
region. It was a Category 8 land acquisition program. Well, or habitat preservation
program; not necessarily a land acquisition program. It was any combination of things
that would set aside those areas in perpetuity to maintain the waterfowl habitat and
waterfowl values that they presented. What they wanted me to do was to come in and
join others that they were bringing in to be an Ascertainment team and start looking at
these areas for their waterfowl habitats and for their inclusion into the National Wildlife
Refuge System. Once again, I drug my feet just a little bit. I had always thought that the
Regional office was probably not for me. But there was a little persuasion and I was on
my way to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We moved in July of 1977 into Albuquerque. I
came in under Tom Smith, who was the head of Realty. I’ve got to tell you; you know
you have a lot of people who help shape your career. I mentioned Ernie Jamison and
Frank Johnson. But Tom Smith, after I got into the Regional office, probably had more to
do with the shaping of my career. He was a real strategist as far as land acquisition
procedures, Fish and Wildlife Service goals, and how it fit into the whole big picture. I
learned a lot from Tom Smith. And I continued to learn a lot from him. Tom and I
traveled together a lot. We worked together a lot, while I was in Realty. Of course we
worked a lot together after I went out of the Division of Realty later on. Tom Smith was
another one of the good mentors in my career. He really gave me a lot broader
perspective of what the Fish and Wildlife Service was all about; what we should have
been looking at and doing, and how we should be including more lands and waters into the
National Wildlife Refuge System.
I worked at that land acquisition position for several years. This was in a time
when we had area offices in place. There was a fair amount of ‘rub’ at the time, as you
remember, between the area office and the regional office. [All laughing]
MR. FRENCH: That puts in very mildly!
MR. HAWTHORNE: I tried to stay neutral in that, and I think I did a pretty fair job of
staying neutral. But there was still that ‘rub’, particularly at the higher levels; the ARD
levels and the Area Managers’ levels. Tom Smith, again, whenever we traveled we
worked through the area office. We never tried to work around the area office on the
things that we did in land acquisition, knowing that what we were doing was for the good
of the entire resource, not just a certain office. That was another good learning experience.
Learning how to deal with some of these rubs, if you will, and get through them without
offending either side too much. The program that we were working on, the Category 8,
we ended up acquiring a good deal of lands on the Texas coast, which are now National
Wildlife Refuges. My career changed a little bit at that time. I had been pretty much
promised that if I were to come in and give a couple of good years and then, I could not
necessarily write my own ticket, but “show us where you’d like to go, and we’ll see that
you get there”. A couple of opportunities came up that I thought would be good to go to.
I punched my ticket, but my ticket didn’t get punched back. So, through another little
reorganization that came about, I was asked if I was interested in going back into Refuge
Operations; which I was. They came up with the Zone Supervisor jobs and the Region
was broken down into three zones, I believe at the time. Coastal Texas was one of those
zones, and I was asked if I was interested in being an Assistant Zone Supervisor, to Steve
Smith who was going to the be Zone Supervisor. This was as Area Offices were closing.
MR. FRENCH: I remember that.
MR. HAWTHORNE: I gladly took that, because I did want to get back into Refuge
Operations in some way, shape or form. This looked like a good avenue. I think
probably, the remainder of my career is pretty much history. I went from Assistant
Zone Supervisor later on, to Zone Supervisor of that Texas coastal region. Then, in later
years, they reorganized again and they put all of north Texas and Oklahoma together with
coastal Texas, and I applied for and managed to get the Zone Supervisors position. I was
an Associate Manager. I believe that’s what they were called at that time. I worked the
remainder of my career doing that. Those jobs, working with the Refuges were another
highlight of my career. That interaction with Refuge Managers, their staffs and crews,
was just…you talk about enjoying what you’re doing on this Heritage committee
business, there was nothing better in my career than being a Supervisor of a refuge from
the Regional office and going out and interacting with those people on the Refuge. I was
getting to see what they were doing, and letting them show me what they had
accomplished. They told me what their goals were and what they had envisioned to do
on that refuge and how I could help them with funding or staffing or whatever assistance I
could give in the Regional Office from my position. That was great. I am going to tell
you a story, just one story. That was at Salt Plains. I know that you are familiar with
Salt Plains.
MR. FRENCH: Absolutely! Yes, sir!
MR. HAWTHORNE: I went out, and Rod Crie was the Manager. This was when we
had the Maintenance Management system. I don’t know if they still have that or not.
But we had Maintenance Management funds. Each year you had to dole out so much to
each refuge to meet their needs. When I got to Salt Plains on that Monday morning I
went in and had a cup of coffee with Rod. The crew came in and said, “Bill if you’ve got
a few minutes, we’d like to show you something”. I told them I’d be out in just a few
minutes. I went and had coffee with Rod and then I walked on out to the maintenance
area there. They had the props all set. They had a low boy, which only had a single rear
axel, and they had an excavator all ready to lead. They said, ”Now, we want you to
watch this”. They used that excavator a lot, in a lot of different areas. They had to
transport it at the Salt Plains area, and to other refuges. When they started that excavator
up on that low boy, it just raised the back end of that tractor up clear off of its wheels.
You talk about something just as unsafe as it could be! Then they backed it off, and said,
“We knew that you needed to see this.” So I went back in, and Rod and I talked a little
while. Of course, he had a new tractor and lowboy on his Management Maintenance list,
but it was quite a ways down in his priorities. We visited a little while, and before I left
that day we had that low boy back up on the top of that Management Maintenance needs
list at Rod’s station. And the next year, when I went to Salt Plains; and this wasn’t
planned or anything, but I happened to arrive at Salt Plains on my next visit the day after
that new lowboy came in. It was a dual axle tractor.
MR. FRENCH: It’s called ‘career timing’ I think!
MR. HAWTHORNE: It was perfect timing, and it wasn’t on purpose! But those kinds
of things were the rewards of the job. Because here was a crew who were so tickled with
that new piece of equipment that was going to do the job that they needed it to do, and do
it safely and do it without any problems. That’s just one of a number of things that I
could relate to. But it was those kinds of things;
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