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Interview with Clyde Bolin by Thomas Goettel, May 1, 2002
No full textOral history interview with Clyde Bolin. Thomas Goettel was the interviewer.
Mr. Bolin was a law enforcement/pilot for the Fish and Wildlife Service. He discusses always wanting to work for the Service, cases he worked, and shares some stories from his time in the various locations he worked.
Organization: FWS
Name: Clyde Bolin
Years: 1968-1989
Program: Law Enforcement
Keywords: History, Biography, Aircraft, Bird banding, Employees (USFWS), Personnel, Waterfowl, Pilot, Nesting surveys, Law enforcement, Bill Snow, Flick Davis, Howard Brown, Eider Duck work, Military, Tommy Wharton, Jerry Stout, Management and Enforcement, Howard MendelINTERVIEW WITH CLYDE BOLIN
BY THOMAS GOETTEL MAY 1, 2002
MR. GOETTEL: It’s May 1, 2002 and we’re sitting in a room at the Holiday Inn
Express in Hadley, Massachusetts. I was presently surprised today when Paul O’Neal
stuck his head in my office and said that Clyde Bolin and his wife were in town visiting.
So I asked Clyde if he would consent to do a quick oral interview and he said yes. Maybe
you could start out Clyde be telling us how you got started with your career with the
Fish and Wildlife Service.
MR. BOLIN: It was a long road. I had been trying to get on with the Service for about
three and a half years or four years. I didn’t have a degree in Wildlife Management or
such at that time, and they said I should go back and get an additional degree. I started to
do that, and while I was working on that degree I had an opportunity to go to work for
Kansas Fish and Game. At that time it was the Kansas Forestry Fish and Game
Commission. I already had a degree, so I took a job as a State Game Protector for Kansas.
I worked for them for two years. I was getting ready to; I had been accepted and taken
the physical and was getting ready to go into the Kansas Highway Patrol. They were
expanding their air division and I wanted to be involved in Law Enforcement flying. Two
weeks before the Academy for the Kansas Highway Patrol was to start, I was going to
leave Kansas Fish and Game; I got a call out of the clear blue from Flick Davis. I don’t
know if they were called ARDs at that time or not. He was the Regional Office head for
Law Enforcement in the Twin Cities. He wanted to interview me and wanted to know if I
was still interested in the job. So we agreed to meet in Kansas City. He came down from
the Twin Cities. I rented an airplane and wanted Nancy to come along. We met him up
at Kansas City downtown airport in our little rented airplane. He flew in commercial.
We met and spent the afternoon eating doughnuts and drinking coffee. I guess we got all
of his questions answered. He had a flight out; we met before lunch and he had a flight
out at about 3:00pm or so to get back to the Twin Cities. He said he would let me know.
He had to go and discuss this with the Regional Director. So we got in our little airplane
and flew back. At that time I was in Coffee County, Kansas which. is about fifteen or
twenty miles southeast of Emporia, Kansas. I got a call from the operator. She said she
had a telegram for me. She wanted to know if I wanted her to read it or mail it. I told her
to read it and mail me a copy. She did, and it was from Flick. I had been accepted for a
U. S. Game Management position. That’s what it was called at the time. The job was in
Port Clinton, Ohio.
MR. GOETTEL: What year was that?
MR. BOLIN: 1968. She [the operator] asked me if I wanted to reply. I told her I would
have to call her back. There were five positions open in the Region, and Flick said that I
could fill three of them. One of them was in Port Clinton. So we had to stop and so
some thinking. I was two weeks away from going to the Highway Patrol Academy with a
guaranteed flying job. They wanted me to work on the ground for a year. They were
expanding and wanted me to fly with their air units. I said that this was the job that I had
always wanted. I had been trying to get on with the Fish and Wildlife Service for over
three years. I even drove down to Albuquerque and I met with the RD down there,
because everybody in Law Enforcement was out of the office. That was back in 1965 or
1966. He was very cordial, a very nice gentleman. I had kind of given up on going to
work for the Fish and Wildlife Service. I told them, “Yes, we’ll take the position, where’s
Port Clinton, Ohio?” We had never really traveled east of the Mississippi, and very little
east of the Missouri.
MR. GOETTEL: So you were already a Pilot at that time?
MR. BOLIN: I had my private license. And I was building up hours any way I could. I
was also a rated Navigator in the Kansas Air National Guard. We were flying the old RB-
57 Canbarras. [Sic-a type of airplane] I was doing some flying as a Navigator. We ended
up moving to Ohio. We spent four years there. Everybody knew that I was wanting a
flying position. They told me that I kind had to wait my turn like everybody does. A
position opened in Rhode Island. Of course, I was in Region 3 at that time. I applied for
it and I guess there was, I heard that there were some ten or twelve people who had
applied for the position. I got it. We moved to Rhode Island after four years in Ohio.
While I was in Ohio, I worked and got my commercial pilot’s license on my own. I think
that kind of helped pave the way for the position out here. I came out here and we had a
little L-19 on straight floats, kept on Ohio Fish and Game property at the Great Swamp
in Rhode Island on the Warden’s pond. There was an agreement when Bill Snow was a
pilot there years before. The Service had built a hanger on State property, dug a canal in
to it, put in a formal concrete footing on it. You could taxi a plane off of Warden’s pond
in to this little short canal, which about 100 or 150 feet long. You could taxi the plane up
to the hanger, run an electric hoist out on a big beam, hoist the plane up, pull it in this
hanger, and close the hanger doors. It was a nice hanger for just a straight floatplane.
That’s what was there when we came to Rhode Island. I flew that plane for about four
years. I got to take that plane for two summers up to Labrador with Bill Snow and
Howard Brown. They went up to service amphibious Beaver out of Maine. We went up
and did Eider Duck work with the cooperation of the University of Maine out of Orono
with Dr. Howard Mendel. We did that for two summers. Bill Snow retired shortly after
that. That must have been in 1974 or 1975 or 1976. I think Bill retired in 1976. I think it
was mandatory. They put everybody on notice in 1972 and they were supposed to be
gone by…I got my instrument in 1977. Anyway, Bill retired and I inherited the Beaver.
They were going to put another pilot in up there. So the L-19 went to either North
Carolina or South Carolina State Forestry Department. They were going to use it for
forest fire spotting. We took it off of the floats and put it on wheels. They came out and
picked it up and now I had the Beaver. I flew it for about two and a half years and then
put in for a new aircraft and got it approved. So in 1978 we took delivery on a new
Cessna 185 “amphib” on Whip Line floats. Forney Air Service out of Lafayette,
Louisiana got the bid. They picked the new plane up at the factory in Wichita, flew it up
to the Twin Cities where Whip Line is. They landed on the river up there on wheels.
They put it on the floats and flew it back down to Lafayette, Louisiana and when it was
all ready to go I got on a commercial flight and flew down to Lafayette, Louisiana. Their
pilot got on board with us and got me all checked out on the plane and flew back with us.
I got some cross country [experience] and did some checking out on the plane. We had
one over-night on the way up from Louisiana. I came up and spent the next afternoon,
and day checking him out on the Beaver. He had a little time. Of course, he had quite a
bit of flip plane time. I checked him out in the Beaver and at about 3:30 or so in the
afternoon he’s going to head back to Louisiana. I asked him why didn’t he wait until in
the morning. He said that he wanted to go as far as he could. He took off for Lafayette,
Louisiana in the Beaver. It ended up, because there was getting to be fewer pilots,
particularly fewer LE pilots, and fewer LE pilot duty stations I ended up spending
seventeen years in Rhode Island, which was very unusual after only one duty station in
Port Clinton, Ohio. But I wanted to keep flying. I got inquires from a couple of different
duty stations. They tried to get me to go to King Salmon, Alaska. This was “no where”
Alaska. It is on the mainland just up above the Aleutian chain.
MR. GOETTEL: And the Peninsula.
MR. BOLIN: Right up there. For someone who wanted to hunt and fish and live off of
the land it would have been heaven. We still had a boy in school with college coming up
and I said no. I thought King Salmon was a little too…you know, if a family can’t hack
it, it’s not going to work.
MR. GOETTEL: I was up there a couple of years ago, and it is remote.
MR. BOLIN: It’s like a vacation thing. It’d be nice to go to for a few days, or a week or
two but year round, I couldn’t see that. We never really had any regrets. We did very
well in Rhode Island. With the Amphib we did quite a bit of Eagle transplanting work
from Canada down to here. I picked up birds from several different places in Canada and
brought them down for transplanting on Quavin [Sic] Reservoir, and down on the Virginia
shore down in the Chesapeake area where they went down there to the various States.
Some of that, we did with a rental plane. I could rent a 210, which is a pretty fast
retractable gear, high winged Cessna. In transporting Eagles, you kind of don’t want to
dilly-dally. My plane would only do about 120 knots, or about 128 mph. That 210 we
were leasing out of Providence would do about 150 or 155 knots, I don’t recall for sure,
which is getting up to around 165 or 170 mph. It was a lot faster than my plane. It had a
higher surface ceiling and retractable gear. It was pretty fast. It was a big jump up from
what I was flying.
MR. GOETTEL: What was it like working in Ohio with…I guess you were right around
the Lake Erie marshes?
MR. BOLIN: Yeah, Port Clinton is right on the Lake. In the marshes, the gun clubs were
all around Port Clinton. All around the Sandusky Bay, most of it’s…most of them are
pretty much from Sandusky well west of Cleveland from Sandusky and Sandusky Bay
and west, but east of Toledo. You’ve got about 25 or 35 miles of lakeshore there, were
most of the old, traditional clubs were. They were still pretty much in operation when I
was there. They’d gotten smart. Once Jacobson got that case through Federal Court, I
don’t remember when that was but I think it was in the 1950’s, it might have been early
1960’s but I think it was the 1950’s. I could be totally wrong. But the case got a guy
sent to prison for baiting. He had been caught several times before and he got before
Judge Clobe and he got sent to Federal Prison. That was the wake up call. There is so
much money there. You can fine those people forever. That was just like the old term,
“water off a duck’s back”. That didn’t have any influence with them. When they started
looking at prison time in a Federal Prison, that was a real wake up call. It didn’t totally
stop it, but it pretty well stopped it. There were still those who wanted to play the little
game. I don’t think they baited as much, and I don’t think they baited as long during the
season. I think most of it was pre-season, trying to get the ducks initially coming in. We
made a few baited cases, but they were sparse. You’re trying to cover so much area up
there with one Agent to get around and just check the hunting activity, and looking for
bait while you were there. But there were so many places. Some of the marshes were so
large. Even flying, it was difficult to come up with much on baiting in the years that I
was there. And just being there for four years, I was just beginning to know it pretty well
when this opportunity came up for this flying position. If you could put somebody in
there, and have them there a minimum of, I’d say six years or eight to ten years and have
them get intimately familiar with those marshes. Because there are locked gates, and there
are back ways in and this way and that way in. Sometimes when you get to know it well
enough, you can get from this marsh to that marsh without having to come back out and
come through the gate. You just follow the dikes. You could just go from one to the
other, to the other, to the other. Or, a couple of you could put a twelve-foot canoe in
there and you could just go from spot to spot to spot and be pretty effective. But it’s
extremely time consuming and takes a lot of work.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you work by yourself most of the time?
MR. BOLIN: Yeah, but I had real good cooperation from the State there in Ohio. They
were. Tommy Wharton who came on with the LE was with Fisheries Unit out of
Sandusky. He came on with the Service just a couple of years after I left Ohio to come
out here. He got hired. Our careers criss-crossed several time through the years. We
stayed pretty close friends. We’ve lost contact with one another pretty much since, but
…Some officers… it’s like that anywhere, didn’t care to work with the Federal officers.
They didn’t have a lot of interest in waterfowl or hunting waterfowl enforcement. It’s
the same way down in Rhode Island. You’ve got your coastal people, and if it’s not in a
shell or has fins and gills, they’re really not interested. They are just interested in
shellfish and fisheries and whatever. They’d get a little diving duck and coastal duck
work shoved down their throat but they would kind of swallow the bitter pill and go on
to what they wanted to do and what they were interested in doing. That’s the way it is
anywhere. Not all inland Wardens are even around salt-water coast or have any interest
in waterfowl. They’d rather work upland hunters or deer hunters or on night deer
poaching or something like that.
MR. GOETTEL: That’s the way it was when I was in Maine. After I left Great
Meadows, I was up in Maine for ten years. The Maine Wardens up there, there were
some that were good waterfowl workers, but most of them were into deer, bear and
moose. That was their bread and butter. The marine Wardens were into lobsters.
They’d work with you when you asked them, and they were good people. But they’re
just not interested in waterfowl.
MR. BOLIN: Yeah, that’s the way it was. The Maine people were always good. But
like I said, different people have different interests. Some people like to hunt waterfowl
and some don’t. They’d rather hunt Pheasants or Quail or big game. It’s the same way
with some of the Wardens. Usually their interest was kind of what their hunting interest
was. If you find people who like to hunt geese or hunt ducks, or coastal ducks, which is
kind of different in itself then you’d enjoy that type of Enforcement.
MR. GOETTEL: Where did you get your basic training to be an Agent?
MR. BOLIN: We were in the last school that was in Washington, D. C. We were the last
group to go through Washington, D.C. in 1973. I went down in the spring of 1973. And
they were cleaning out the walls, and cleaning out their desks and hauling the files off
when we finished up. Then they moved it down to Glencoe.
MR. GOETTEL: Where was it in Washington, D. C.? Was it in main Interior?
MR. BOLIN: We were up on Rhode Island Blvd. They only had us down to main
Interior for two weeks when we finished up with that. It was the basic school for
everyone except the FBI and the Secret Service. It was just like it is down at the Federal
Law Enforcement Training Center now. There was Coast Guard people there, and on and
on and on. Like I said, everyone except Secret Service and FBI.
MR. GOETTEL: How long was your training? Do you remember?
MR. BOLIN: At that time it was fourteen weeks. It was twelve weeks there, and I think
it was two weeks at main Interior when we finished up with that. It was kind of unique.
We stayed in a motel downtown. We had to walk about, because most of us didn’t have
cars there, those of us that were any distance away. And there was no place to park
anyway. You drive over to where the training facility it was but it was about six blocks.
It seems to me that we stayed in a hotel called the Rhode Islander, or what was that
hotel? Not that I am hung up on Rhode Island. It was on Rhode Island Blvd, and the
NRA Headquarters building was just down the block from us. We’d walk by that all of
the time. It was interesting. They would send us on assignments. We’d get photography
assignments and night photography assignments. We’d get out to where we were
supposed to be tracking these people. We were supposed to be conducting foot
surveillance of these people, walking around all over downtown D. C. We were supposed
to be discreet so that they would not know that we were following and watching them
and whatever. Most of us got by with it. I’d say half of us, or a third of us did. I didn’t
get found out. Because there were supposed to point out the people that they knew that
they had seen during the assignment. I was able to maintain my undercover role.
[Laughing] I was kind of distinctive at that time. I was still wearing a short crew cut flat
top hairstyle. A lot of people had “normal” haircuts. I thought, “Oh man, I’m sunk.
They’re going to pick this short crew cut out.” It wasn’t so much in style at that time. I
thought that they would know that they had seen me. But nobody picked me out. I was
kind of glad to have done that. It was kind of unique, and kind of fun to have gone
through that in D. C. And there is so much to see and do in D. C. I got to see a lot of the
Capitol that I would probably have never, ever gotten to see. I went to the White House.
Nancy and my son came down for 3-5 days when we were finishing up down on main
Interior. They came down and we got to see some of D. C. That was the only
opportunity that they ever had.
MR. GOETTEL: So you were the “old school” so to speak, where you were the Game
Management Agent when you started out?
MR. BOLIN: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: You did a lot of Management work too?
MR. BOLIN: Yeah, we did. At that time we were M and E, Management and
Enforcement.
MR. GOETTEL: So you did a lot of waterfowl flights?
MR. BOLIN: No, when I started out, of course they thought that everybody needed to
get out and do some banding and some this and some that. But when I started out, I felt
fortunate. I got to do nesting pair and nesting success surveys up in Canada with Jerry
Stout, he and I. He drove the car, and I walked the ponds.
MR. GOETTEL: Who is Jerry Stout? I don’t know that name.
MR. BOLIN: Jerry was the…Jerry had been working on the Canvasback. He was the
Fish and Wildlife Service Canvasback expert extraordinaire out of the Dakotas.
MR. GOETTEL: Was that Northern Prairie, Jamestown?
MR. BOLIN: Yes. Out of the Research Center out there. He’d been studying
Canvasbacks, secondarily Redheads but because of the precarious… he had known, and
he’d had these study areas up there. I know he’d been doing that for fifteen or twenty
years before I went up there with him. I was up there the summers of 1970, 71 and 72. I
came on with the Service in 1968. I didn’t have to go on banding assignments. The first
thing they’d do to break an Agent in was to send him off on an all-summer banding
assignment. That’s when the Agents would go up and pull a trailer. They gnats, and this
and had that. They would travel up there on the big lakes and some of them had airboats.
I really enjoyed my work with Jerry because it was oriented a little stronger towards
research rather than just banding. We did no banding. Ours was a nesting survey. We
did a nesting survey, and then a production survey. We’d go up in June, and stay gone a
month. We’d come home for two weeks and then go back up after mid July, I believe.
That was shorter because we’d mark nests and we had an inventory on each, on all of
these ponds. Some of these ponds with the rare ones, we wouldn’t find anything on.
But we’d kind of go by them and take a second look anyway because we felt that there
might be a late nesting, like an over water nester like a Ruddy Duck or a Canvasback,
Redheads, so we’d always take another look. Some of the nests had gotten predated and
things had happened. But it was all good data. It was all extremely accurate data. For
the survey areas that we covered it was very intensive coverage. He had data for years
and years and years of these. We covered Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. We
pretty well stayed on the move. You wore your hip boots down to breakfast, and after
breakfast you went out and got in the car.
MR. GOETTEL: You said you started in 1968, but you didn’t go to Washington until
1973.
MR. BOLIN: They were hiring only, preferably State Conservation officers that had
some wildlife law enforcement background, preferably the more years the better
depending on the person’s age. Then they decided that everyone…they started sending
people through in 1970 or something. And as many people as they could get through,
they decided that all of the Agents needed to go through this Special Agents Basic
Training, which all Federal Officers were going through. It was kind of grit your teeth and
think, ‘wait a minute, I’ve been working for so many years, and I’ve been doing this and
that’. It was good training. I think that for many of us it was the leaving home, and being
gone from home
Interview with Getty Atwell by Thomas Goettel, June 20, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Gerry Atwell by Thomas Goettel.
Mr. Atwell started his career with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game before joining the Fish and Wildlife Service. He talks about his experiences in Alaska, Montana and the Philippines.
Organization: FWS
Name: Gerry Atwell
Years: 1959-1970's
Program: Refuges
Keywords: military, refuge manager, tagging, wildlife counts, Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit1
INTERVIEW WITH GETTY ATWELL
BY THOMAS GOETTEL JUNE 20, 2001
MR. GOETTEL: It’s June 20, 2001 and we are at Gerry Atwell’s house in Searsmont,
Maine. Gerry is a long-time Fish and Wildlife Service employee, now retired. He is a
Biologist. It’s a beautiful summer day here. We are overlooking his small farm, or his
medium farm, I guess and his pond, hummingbirds and Lupines, and everything. So
Gerry, I know that you are from Framingham, Massachusetts.
MR. ATWELL: Yes.
MR. GOETTEL: How did you get into wildlife? How did you start off in your career?
MR. ATWELL: Well, in Framingham when I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s it
was a rural situation, unlike what Framingham is today. I spent a lot of time, as soon as I
could walk, out in the woods, or around ponds and streams around our home. My folks
encouraged my interest in wildlife. My Dad built me a special cage for snakes, and we
had an old bathtub, which we sunk into the ground out in back for turtles. I had
Salamanders and the whole works. It was awful easy to continue that interest. I can still
remember the day that my folks told me that they had learned about a situation where the
states used people that were called Biologists, and you went to school for it. I was about,
maybe twelve years old at the time so that really sparked an interest in me. Through my
high school years I worked and took classes that were designed so that I could go on to
college, which I did, at the University of Massachusetts. In 1954, I graduated with
bachelors in Wildlife Management, and went into the Service [military], as a tank unit
commander with the First Armored Division. After a couple of years there, I came back
out and tried to get a job in wildlife, in Massachusetts. At that time, the head of the
wildlife section told me that they weren’t hiring any wildlife biologists at the time, but
they were going to bring on some fisheries biologists the next spring. He suggested that I
get some fisheries courses. I called up the University of Massachusetts and told them
what the situation was, and they said, “Sure, come on back up to graduate school.” So,
two days later, I was up there at the graduate school. I took fisheries courses there in
1956, and 1957. But then I realized through one of the professors that I was working
with, Tom Andrews, (he was a wonderful person). He encouraged me to go on for a
master’s degree. I decided that I would, but rather than fisheries I was interested in
upland, or big game. I ended up going to the University of Montana to work with John
Craighead at the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit there in a study involving Magpie
predation on Pheasants in the Bitterroot Valley. I did that for two years, and I got my
master’s in December of 1959, and took a position in the Alaska Depart of Fish and
Game as the Assistant Regional Management Biologist in Anchorage. The staff was very
small at that time. The office for the whole region, and there were three regions in the
state, was two enforcement officers and about four or five biologists, plus the secretaries.
Two or three of the Biologists were fisheries biologists; they were divided into
commercial fisheries and sport fisheries. We had a small group of people, but it was
tremendously interesting. It seemed that no sooner had I arrived than I was made
responsible for the first, either-sex Moose season on the Kenai Peninsula for years and
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years and years. That really got my attention because I had to coordinate this particular
hunt with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alaska Command, the military. It
was a pretty big operation and I was real nervous, but it went well. It was a good hunt.
Quite a large number of animals were taken under fairly severe conditions. People were
hunting at twenty [degrees] below. They were local people of course, so they knew how
to take care of themselves in that type of weather, so it worked out well. We had a lot of
challenges, and in wasn’t long before I was the acting Regional Management Biologist.
From there I went to be the State Biologist for Moose, in Alaska. I traveled over much of
the state, and it was extremely interesting. We had all kinds of different experiences. I
did a lot of flying, of course.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you fly, yourself?
MR. ATWELL: No. I never did. I had a problem with kidney stones, which I still have
to this day. And as you well know. . .
MR. GOETTEL: I seem to remember that.
MR ATWELL: I can be O.K. one minute, and not so great the next. So I wouldn’t make
a good pilot in that respect. But I did do a lot of flying, and game counts. We’d get sex
and age composition counts of Moose each fall, and we’d count several thousand Moose.
We were quite good and sexing and aging them from the air.
MR. GOETTEL: Aging them too?
MR. ATWELL: Yes, within reason. I mean, we could say whether they were adults, or
calves or yearlings and that sort of thing. I was never in a plane that had any real serious
problems. Some of our people crashed landed, and we couldn’t contact them for several
hours and we were real concerned about that. The plane was destroyed, but they came
out of it all right, with no serious injuries. I know a time I went down to the McNeal
River. It is a state-owned area where the Brown Bears congregate in the summer when
the Salmon are going upstream. At that time, we’re talking about 1960, there was hardly
anybody coming in to watch them. Now I guess you have to make reservations a year or
two in advance, and it is very strictly controlled. I was just dropped off there, by a fellow
in an airplane and there was a Stream Guard. Stream Guards were people who were
summer hires by the State, to monitor fishing streams, particularly the mouths of rivers
where commercial fishing boats could come in and really create havoc taking fish as they
were about ready to migrate up the rivers. The fish would congregate there. The
fishermen could wipe out practically a whole run, so they had to be watched. There was
a fellow there who was a Stream Guard, he had a little cabin, and I staid with him for a
week. It was tremendously interesting for me. It was the first time, other than in
Yellowstone with the Craigheads that I had been around big Bears. There were
sometimes thirty or forty Bears at one time at the falls. We would meet them on the trails
and paths. It was just extremely interesting work. I had a lot of interesting projects.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you have any close calls with the Bears at all?
3
MR. ATWELL: Not there. I did later, on Kodiak. But when you are around them a lot,
you get to know what to look for, and they give you body language and certain sounds
that mean that maybe they are upset and you want to back away. I carried a 357 Magnum
with me at that time. One day, the Stream Guard and I decided that we were going to
have some Salmon for supper. We went up the river a ways, and waded out. We had hip
boots on, and were fishing to catch Salmon. I heard him say, “Hey, Gerry, I think you’d
better get you gun out”! I looked over my shoulder, and here was two cubs, just running
lickety-split right towards us. We were evidently in their favorite fishing spot. They
were cubs of a year, and the female was coming up behind them. She saw us but the cubs
didn’t. She wanted to get between us and the cubs. So she was barreling right in at us.
There was no way that I would use that pistol to try stop the Bear at all. I did take it out,
as I recall. I was going to shoot up into the air if I had to. We just backed up into the
water where it was deeper and once she between the cubs and us, she was fine. She just
herded them along. But that was the only instance there. One day I walked down the
beach, by myself. There was a huge pile of boulders that fallen off of the cliffs nearby.
These boulders were half the size of a good-sized house and there was just a huge mound
of them. The tide was out, and I was walking along there, and all of a sudden this mighty
roar came out! [Makes a Bear roaring sound] It was like a domestic Bull. I didn’t realize
it, but there were two, two year old cubs that were littermates that were in amongst these
boulders. They were just playing and one of them roared at the other. I couldn’t see
them and so that got my attention real fast. But they never came out. I did see them later
in the day. They came up the beach, and I assumed that it was the same Bears. They are
just not that aggressive. They are easy to get along with. They have people now that go
up to the McNeal Falls, and I don’t know how many people a year because it’s such a big
thing. They are limited, I think by permit. But I know of no instances up there, where
people have been hurt by the Bears. I worked later on Kodiak, and when I was there in
the 1970s there were only a couple of instances on record of people being hurt by the
Bears. They were just minor situations like when a trapper walked out into a stream
where a sow with cubs was feeding and he just walked right out of the Elders and he was
right on the Bears. The sow turned around and slapped him, and knocked him down.
She opened up his arm a little bit, and bit into the pack on his back and walked away.
Then a few years later, a fourteen or fifteen year old fellow was out hunting deer. He was
hunting upwind near a Salmon stream. And again, he walked onto a sow with cubs. She
knocked him down, and bit him once and walked away. I think he was in the hospital
overnight. But that’s pretty amazing, with that tall grass and all that, and people are
walking through that all of the time. We were around the Bears a lot, every day pretty
much, when we were in the field. Again, they are just like people. Each one has it’s own
personality. And if there is one that is a rough and tough three-year-old, then you’re
going to kind of give him birth. Most of the older ones have been around people to some
extent and they back off, or they come at you, and you back off. The only real spooky
time I had was once I was coming out of the mountains by myself, and I didn’t have a
gun with me. There were just some Elders and Willows around and there was an opening
about fifty or sixty yards long. There was a bear towards the other end of the opening
where I wanted to go. I yelled at him to get his attention so he would get out of the way,
so that I could go by. Well, he ran at me, and normally if they do that you just wave your
4
arms and yell, and they’ll stop. I did that, and he didn’t stop. He kept coming, and
another one came behind him, so there were two running at me. I thought, “Well, this is
going to look great”. I was Refuge Manager at Kodiak at the time, and I could see it the
newspapers. You know, “Refuge Manager Gets Mauled by a Bear”! That was the last
thing that I wanted. So I turned around, and looked over my shoulder. There was a little
opening in the willows behind me. There was a ditch, just before they would get to me,
and I thought that when they got to that ditch, I would turn around and go back to that
opening and yell again. And if they continue on I’ll just roll up in a ball. So I ran back,
and whirled around, and they went roaring down into that ditch and they didn’t come out.
I couldn’t believe it. I staid there for a few seconds, I didn’t yell any more! I just turned
around and walked away, rather fast. It kind of unnerved me a little bit. But that was the
only time felt concerned out of all of the time we were around bears. I had other ones run
at me, but they were “bluff” charges. And this one, at the time, didn’t seem that it was a
bluff charge. It was during the breeding season, so I think it was a male with a female,
and he was guarding the female and didn’t want me around. No, there was no problem
with the bears. Although people have been killed by them, and I guess there always will
be [problems] unfortunately. Because we’re in his or her habitat, and as I say, each bear
is an individual and has an individual psychological makeup. There’s going to be ones
that are going to be more aggressive.
With the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, we worked on Moose each spring.
From helicopters, we would tag about two hundred calves each spring. We wanted to
follow a certain population in the [sounds like] Matanuska valley. I learned very quickly
then, that each of them is a different animal too. Because some of the cows, as soon as
they heard the helicopter, would run and leave the calf. Then there were some who, no
matter how big the helicopter was, even if we used a huge military Skorskis, with two
blades, one on each end, they wouldn’t leave. They’d just turn around, and pivot on their
hind feet and paw at the helicopter, even though it was fifteen, or twenty times bigger
than the Moose. We learned to just leave those Moose alone. Most of them would just
run a short distance when the helicopter came in. The calf would drop and we’d jump
out. But you had to jump into the muskeg. The helicopter couldn’t land because it was
so wet. Then you would try to run through the muskeg and catch the calf. When the calf
was less than a week old you could normally catch it without too much of a problem. But
you got awful tired; we would start at about two o’clock in the morning. This was around
the 25th, 26th or 27th of May when most of the Moose calves were being dropped and were
available to us. We had a military newspaper correspondent type person come out with
us one morning. He wanted some pictures, and he had his camera slung over his back.
We started to chase a calf after we jumped out of the helicopter, and I looked behind me
to see how he was doing, and just as I did, he tripped and he went headfirst into the mud.
His camera, I remember, came flying up over his head into the water. He never asked to
come back again. A lot of people thought that it was going to be fun. In a sense it was,
but it was very fatiguing. And after about the second of third Moose calf, we would
frequently loose our breakfast, because we were just so tired and using so much strength
up. It worked very well, and we learned a lot about that particular population through the
calves that we tagged.
5
MR. GOETTEL: So you darted them from the helicopter?
MR. ATWELL: No. We just ran them down. We started a new population too, down at
Burnis Bay with a few of the calves. It was an area that was cut off by glaciers and there
was no Moose population. It is in southeastern Alaska in the panhandle. We took with
the help of the National Guard, twelve Moose calves down there and it worked extremely
well. They were liberated there after being partially raised. They have a fine population
of Moose down there now, and they have for quite a while.
MR. GOETTEL: Do you want me to let her in? [Opening door for Mr. Atwell’s pet] You
said that there were only four or five biologists for your area. That must have been a
huge area.
MR. ATWELL: Yeah, it was. I don’t know how many thousands of square miles. I
know that we worked with Wolves too, but it was mainly just a census thing. I know of
one Wolf study area we had was twenty-six thousand square miles. They were big areas.
There were three Regional Management Biologists at that time in the state. There was
one for the Artic, one for the central and one for the southern part of Alaska. I happened
to be working in the central area with included the Aleutians. It was a tremendous area.
We had to fly because there just weren’t that many roads. So we did a lot of flying.
MR. GOETTEL: So you did wolf work too?
MR. ATWELL: Just census work. The populations were pretty low then because there
was a bounty of fifty dollars a head on them. In addition, the Service and hit them pretty
hard with poison for a number of years. But they did come back. I worked for the Fish
and Wildlife Service quite a bit on census work, down on the Kenai. I working with
them on the hunting and fishing regulations each year, and management. Dave Spencer
was Refuge Manager at Kenai at the time, and I’d meet with them once or twice a year,
and discuss what regulation we would work up affecting the refuge. That was such a
large area too. One year we decided to make it illegal to hunt wolves down there and in a
sense, it didn’t help right away because there were no wolves. They had been extirpated
from the Kenai. But after a few years, the wolves had found their way back in and we
built up a good Wolf population down there. Since then there have been several detailed,
lengthy studies on Wolves in Kenai. But anyways, I could go on and on talking about my
work with the Alaska Fish and Game Department. Jim Brooks was my immediate
supervisor most of the time. He was an extremely talented and dedicated person. I think
he left home when he was about fifteen or sixteen, and rode a freight car out west and
ended up in Alaska. He was just an amazing person. Much of the big and small game
management that was accomplished can be attributed to his direction.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you work much with the native populations?
MR. ATWELL: No. I didn’t. I did on Kodiak, but not when I was working out of
Anchorage. I left there in September of 1963, and went back to Montana. I took a
position as an Assistant Unit Leader with John Craighead, at the Montana Cooperative
6
Wildlife Research Unit at Missoula, Montana. That was very enjoyable too, because I
had known John from my graduate work. Much of my responsibility was with graduate
students, and with the administration of the Unit. I also worked some in research. I had
an Elk project in Yellowstone Park with the north Yellowstone Elk herd. I was
determining their summer range. That was extremely interesting. When I was down
there for summers; you’d just take a pack on your back and leave on a Monday and come
back on a Friday or Saturday. We would just go out and be with the Elk. We had
marked Elk with color-coded collars. We could individually identify an Elk with these
collars. Much of the time, that’s what I was doing. Once in a while I would take a
graduate student with me or maybe a student from another country, we had quite a few
from Africa. These were students who were interested in wildlife, and taking wildlife
courses, so they would accompany me. It wasn’t a real sophisticated study. It was sort of
like the old naturalist type studies where you get out with the animals and live with them.
There wasn’t any electronics involved, but we got a lot of good information and mapped
the summer ranges. I was pleased with that. I would work at times with John and Frank
Craighead on the Grizzly Bear work in Yellowstone. I had been to Yellowstone in 1947
and 1948, and it’s always been a very special place to me. I go back there as much as I
can. I was there last fall, and it’s just like going home. My wife Linda feels that same
way about it. She’s been there enough. It’s a wonderful spot, just fantastic. I remember
one time when I had the weekend off, and on Saturday I went down in the Haden Valley.
I just put a pack on, and took a lunch for the day. I also took camera equipment. I was
walking along, and I saw a Grizzly coming towards me across Sagebrush flat. With the
wind direction, I knew that he was going to get my scent before long. I set up my 400
mm telephoto lens on a tripod and followed him in. And sure enough, all of a sudden he
just stopped, dead in his tracks, and stood up on his hind legs. I was able to take a picture
of him. I liked that. And then he turned around and of course he ran like crazy. That
same day, and this was in the summer time, I think it was in July; I could see a wall of
white coming across the Haden Valley. I thought, “Oh boy, we’re in for a real shower”.
There was a thermal pool, or a stream actually, near by. I took out my thermometer and
followed the stream until it was about 106 or 106 degrees and took off my clothes and put
them under my poncho and got in the stream and laid back. The rain came, only it wasn’t
rain, it was snow. It was snowing and snowing like crazy! And I was in there for about
an hour, and there was about three inches of snow. I said, “Well, this is absurd. I’ve got
to walk out of here”! But the last thing that I wanted to do was to get out of that nice,
warm water in that snowstorm. Well, I figured that I had about five or six mile to walk
out so I had to do it. And I could feel each and every one of those snowflakes hit me
when I got out. {Laughing] So I was a little wet. I walked out, and came up on some Elk
that were bedded down and I didn’t even see them until they all stood up because they
were all covered by snow. You can get snow in Yellowstone any month of the year
although normally you don’t get that much at that time of the year.
But you are up seven or eight thousand feet. [Above sea level] I enjoyed working at the
University of Montana very much. They had great people there. Les Bengali and just a
whole bunch of fine people were there. I knew quite a few people in the Bitterroot
Valley. Linda and I are still friends with a rancher there. We just saw him last year. He
is just like a member of the family, a wonderful person. He has people up at Nine Mile
7
that have a ranch. I guess you make
Kevin Gormley
No full textKevin Gormley oral history as conducted by Thomas Goettel.
Mr. Gormley discusses how he got started with the Fish and Wildlife Service, differences between refuges he worked at, and shares stories of his time with the Service. He also talks about why he decided to go into Law Enforcement, how Law Enforcement has changed, and why he decided to retire.
Organization: FWS
Name: Gormley
Years: 1978-2008
Program: Law Enforcement<br/.
Keywords:YACC (Young Adult Conservation Corps), Bluebird Nesting Project, FLETC (Federal Law Enforcement Training Center), Firearms Division, Natural Police Training, Field Training Officer Program, Wood Duck winter nest count study, Biologist, Wildlife surveys, Collateral officer, Zone officer, Waterfowl enforcement, Refuge Manager Training Academy, Refuge Management Training Academy, CISM (Critical Incident Stress Management), Barnegat National Wildlife Refuge (Now Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge)1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Kevin Gormley
Date of Interview: August 18, 2010
Location of Interview: Bucksport, Maine
Interviewer: Thomas Goettel
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 30 (1978-2008)
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: YACC temporary laborer/maintenance worker, Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, New Jersey; Maintenance worker/Collateral Duty Officer at Barnegat National Wildlife Refuge, New Jersey; Lead Firearms Instructor, Firearms Divisions at Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Georgia; Zone Officer, Patuxent Research Refuge, Maryland
Colleagues and Mentors: Jack Fillio, Gaylord Inman, Tony Leger, Kevin DesRoberts, Hal Laskowski, Lou Hinds, Ted Gutzke, Bob Garabedian, Tom Goettel, Harvey Cooper
Most Important Issues: Not having enough staff to support everyday refuge duties
Brief Summary of Interview: Mr. Gormley discusses how he got started with the Fish and Wildlife Service, differences between refuges he worked at, and shares stories of his time with the Service. He also talks about why he decided to go into law enforcement, how law enforcement has changed, and why he decided to retire.
Keywords: YACC [Young Adult Conservation Corps]; Bluebird Nesting Project; FLETC [Federal Law Enforcement Training Center] Training Center; Firearms Division; Natural Police Training; Field Training Officer Program; Wood Duck winter nest count study; biologist; wildlife surveys; collateral officer; zone officer; waterfowl enforcement; Refuge Manager Training Academy; Refuge Management Training Academy; CISM [Critical Incident Stress Management]
2
Thomas Goettel: Today is August 18, 2010, and we are sitting on the banks of the Penobscot River right near Fort Knox, Maine, and we're talking to Kevin Gormley. My name is Tom Goettel. We are actually both retired, but this is Kevin's oral history interview. So, to start out Kevin, maybe you can just tell me a little bit; where you are from and how you got started in the [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kevin Gormley: I was born and raised in north central New Jersey in a suburban area. I always enjoyed the outdoors and I got an opportunity to participate in the YACC [Young Adult Conservation Corps] Program at Great Swamp [National Wildlife] Refuge to decide what direction and career I wanted to take.
Thomas Goettel: What year was that?
Kevin Gormley: That was in 1978. That was a program that was a one year program, to get individuals that were I believe 17 through 23, in that area, just to give them a path or guidance possibly in the Service. I never even heard of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, never even knew what a National Wildlife Refuge was before I joined the YACC Corps. I was very interested in what they did, I loved to work in the outdoors and with animals and a lot of the different programs they had there; the Bluebird Nesting Project, they had a Grasslands Management Program, they had Catch, Tag, and Release Program for raccoons and deer and all sorts of studies that used to go on.
So I showed them I had a decent work ethic and after my year was done there, they hired me as a temporary laborer/maintenance worker. I stayed there on one year appointments until 1983, when I applied and got a position of a maintenance worker with the Collateral Duty Law Enforcement down at Barnegat, New Jersey.
Thomas Goettel: Who was the refuge manager at Great Swamp when you worked there?
Kevin Gormley: Great Swamp's manager while was there was Jack Fillio.
Thomas Goettel: Oh yeah.
Kevin Gormley: When I transferred down to Barnegat Refuge, it was a satellite refuge of Brigantine [Wilderness] Refuge, which now they are both known as the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. At the time, Gaylord Inman was the project leader at Brigantine and Tony Leger was the satellite assistant manager at Barnegat. Tony left a couple of months later to transfer out and I went to Basic Law Enforcement Training School down in FLETC [Federal Law Enforcement Training Center] in Georgia.
I worked there from October of 1983, through November of 2001, when I transferred down and I applied for a position down at FLETC Training Center in the Firearms Division.
3
The Service, since we send officers to be trained there, we are committed to giving them different bodies for instructors for anywhere from three to four years. I applied for the position and was down there as our lead firearms instructor for the Service in the Firearms Division until 2005, the end of 2005.
Then I transferred to Patuxent [Wildlife Refuge Research Center] Research Refuge in Maryland and then six months later became a zone officer and finished my career there; December of 2008, retired with just about 30 years in and almost 25 years Law Enforcement.
Thomas Goettel: So when you went to FLETC the first time, when you were a student there, what was your, how long was your training?
Kevin Gormley: Training back in 1983 was for nine weeks, and then there was an extra probably three to five days for refuge-specific regulations. And now in, or actually when I left, I don't think there's much that of a difference now, a couple of years later, in the end of 2005, the training is up to 18 weeks of Natural Police Training. Then we also have, additionally, they have another three month program for training with [which I don't even know what the name of the program is].
Thomas Goettel: Field Training Officer Program.
Kevin Gormley: Yes, thank you, Field Training. I've been gone for a year and a half and can't remember the name of it anymore! Field Training Officer Program.
Thomas Goettel: So in essence, you're talking about realistically probably six months of training and travel out of an of officer now, where back when I started up it was about two and a half months, at the most.
Thomas Goettel: Yeah, I know when I went to FLETC it was four weeks long. It's funny, because of course back then four weeks was like a year and to me it felt like a year. We were going back and forth between, the Fish and Wildlife Service was going back and forth between like a nine week period. Training for refuge officers and, of course, there were a lot of people that had started that had no training at all, they just got the old badge and the gun. So I somehow squeaked in under the four week training, which is, looking back on it, I think it was completely inadequate. But like I say, a month back then was a long period of time. Now, like you say, they're up to essentially six months’ worth of training. Which is good, it shows to me that how much we've professionalized in the last few years.
Thomas Goettel: But anyway, what do you remember about, what do you remember most about the Great Swamp?
Kevin Gormley: Well, before you get to that, to add to that though, the reasons we've increased our training like that is because of the need. Not only after 9/11 [September 11, 2001], but because we have so many, we have such higher visitation now than when we 4
did in the '70s and '80s on refuges. People know who refuges are now. The need for that additional training in all different venues is really minimal compared to like what you said with what we got back in the time, four to nine weeks.
Great Swamp, what was that question again?
Thomas Goettel: Yes, I was just. . . Let me add something onto that. Because, you know, people don't believe when I say this, but it's the honest to God's truth, is that after 9/11, when I was detailed to Washington for a while, people in the Department of Interior had no idea that the National Wildlife Refuge System even had refuge officers, which was a wakeup call to me.
But my question was, and we can back to that later, but my question was what do you remember most about the Great Swamp? Anything you want to talk about as far as the Great Swamp, the projects you did, etcetera.
Kevin Gormley: The Great Swamp was a fantastic, I guess you could say, training area for me. It was great at my particular entry level, I'd do a lot of the field work when it came to, like I say, would either assist or actually perform some of the duties with the Wood Duck winter nest counts and so forth. Go through the boxes, clean them out and take all sorts of biological data down as far as successful hatches and so forth. Again, that was the whole reason that I was drawn to the Service to begin with, was to get out and perform things like that.
I think the best part of working at Great Swamp was some of the mentors that I had there, the likes of Hal Laskowski, Lou Hinds. Hal Laskowski was a biologist/assistant manager there, Lou Hinds was head of maintenance. Ted Gutzke was also assistant manager and ultimately, before he transferred out, was the deputy project leader/assistant manager, I guess they called him at the time. Those three guys, specifically, really did a lot to steer me in the right direction for a career. They really, really helped me a lot. Because I went there no knowing a lot about a lot and they were real patient with me, took me under their wing and really, really helped me out. Whether it was dealing the day-to-day maintenance needs or from a biological standpoint. They seemed to enjoy teaching as well as I enjoyed learning. But honestly, without their mentorship, if that's the word I should use, I don't know what direction my career would have gone. I think, looking back on it, I had a pretty successful decent career for what I accomplished.
So that, to me, and it was one thing I did want to talk about today. It seems like, again, starting from the very beginning, a laborer, where you're, we used to call them rounds, you'd go throughout the office as needed, but at least once a week, cleaning toilets, cleaning floors, emptying the garbage, going out to the Wildlife Observation Center, where the public was, cleaning those bathrooms and working your way right up the system and you got to know everything. Back then, like now, we were understaffed for what we had needs to do.
5
So, it wasn't just exclusive maintenance that we did. We were also involved in wildlife surveys, we were also involved in outreach programs, we were also involved outdoor rec [recreation] planning programs with the public.
So, it was really nice because at that level, the need was there for the body of a person to perform some of these things, but it really helped me in my career to really understand what a National Wildlife Refuge was, what it was there for, why it was there, and also really introduce me to the Service.
So, I think, I think we may be missing that today. We do have some programs intact with the field training officer, but that's more geared towards law enforcement. It's not geared towards the interpretation side of it, the biological side of it. It's just 100% law enforcement oriented. Which is needed, which there's a lot of agencies that have gone to that now for different liability reasons and I think it's a long overdue program.
Years ago, in the '80s and the '90s, usually the new kid on the block, the new rookie officer would just be thrown with the senior officer and basically shadow that officer for a couple of weeks and say, "This is how you fill out a ticket, this is what you do for here, this is the assistant in the United States Attorney's Office, and here's the phone numbers and so forth." Now, with this Field Training Officer Program, it's much more regulated, it's more uniformed, it's got a lot more information. It's definitely superior, obviously, to just off the cuff what we used to do years ago.
But again, we're losing, because we don't have the other divisions, if you will, of a refuge. That's one of my, I don't know how it could be done, but one of the thoughts I had was to possibly, once the officer is finished with all of his training and gets back to his duty station refuge, maybe they could spend a few days or a week with the biological team, if there is one. To go on surveys, to understand and hopefully even motivate the officer to have another interest. But if nothing else, to educate the officer. Same with the outdoor recreation planner, same with even maintenance. Because they're going to know maintenance workers, historically, are the individuals who have been at the refuges the longest and they have an incredible amount of history that they can tell you about the refuge. And even law enforcement, history of the refuge.
So, it's one of things where I think, over the years I think we got a little lost on and I see some of our officers now, like 100% law enforcement, from a mentality law enforcement and safety, officer safety mentality, they have to be thinking that way. Absolutely. However, from a National Wildlife Refuge, Fish and Wildlife Service side, they also have to be looking at other, the totality of the picture of what a refuge is there for.
The bottom line is they, above anyone one staff, is going to routinely represent the Service to the public. Because they're going to be coming across them in sometimes not good situations, when they have to perform their duties as an officer, but they also could be assisting the public in different things. They may come up to the officer and ask, "What (in the middle of the water, the pond there's a telephone pole with what looks like a platform or some sort of wooden structure sitting on top of it), what is that?" If the 6
officer doesn't know what an osprey platform looks like, he can't educate the public and just say, "Well, I can give you a phone number where the biologist is, you can talk to them."
So again, through an additional program, I guess you could say, of having the officer go to the different divisions in the refuge (now I'm talking specifically at their refuge, because that's where they'll be working for a few years) it would really broaden their experience and it would help the refuge, I think, immensely. Because, again, they'd be able to explain a lot of the different programs to the public when they come across them. That was a long-winded answer to your. . .
Thomas Goettel: That's alright. So, okay, so after the Great Swamp you went to Barnegat, the Barnegat Division?
Kevin Gormley: Yes.
Thomas Goettel: What type of things did you do there?
Kevin Gormley: I was the, actually other than the assistant manager, I was the only employee there other than a part-time secretary. Primarily, my job was maintenance. It was the few pieces of equipment that we had to maintain those pieces of equipment. I got a lot more into boat usage, because a lot of the land that Forsythe owns, the Service owns, is marshland or islands, where we have a lot of endangered species, state and federal, nests out there. So, they have to be patrolled during the off-season and patrolled during the on-season to make sure the nesting birds aren't harassed and so forth. So there was a lot to do and, unfortunately, it's spread out over in, the coast of New Jersey I think it was like 50 or 60 miles, which is quite a distance for only a couple of people to handle. Especially when you're talking boat, upland, beach environment. Where you have problems with not only walkers, but incidents of beach buggy, jet skis, boaters, etc. So, there was just a little bit of everything there, whether it was wintertime or summertime.
Again, like Great Swamp, it was frustrating not to have enough people to perform all the jobs, but it was nice because everybody worked as a team. Whether the assistant manager would help me with a maintenance project, putting up signs or posting or reposting an area, or I would help them going out on the bay and around the beach and perform a wildlife survey with them. It was, again, we had to work as a team because the necessity. Actually, I enjoyed working as a team because it really taught me more and more about the Refuge System and basically the environment as a whole.
Thomas Goettel: So you went from. . . How would you compare Barnegat to Great Swamp? I mean, I worked at Great Swamp a little bit and Great Swamp was pretty intensively managed. It had a lot of, a lot of impoundments, a lot of waterfowl management. How did Barnegat compare to that?
Kevin Gormley: Yes, Great Swamp definitely was a very, very controlled environment as opposed to Forsythe. Forsythe was more open because there was, there was less 7
opportunity to really have that much management in the area. We did start some, in the Barnegat Division, we began surveys on woodcock and actually clearing some areas for them to, in their breeding cycles and so forth, in their meeting habits, to attract them. So we were starting learn more about the woodcock and them being in the area.
Also, one of the big management projects at Forsythe, because, again, you're talking the Jersey Shore, where there's historically a lot of money during the summer, mosquito population control. The county had ditch diggers and so forth; they'd go out and they would perform all sorts of open marsh water management techniques, etcetera. And that's about the, primarily, the high point of management at Forsythe.
Brigantine, as opposed to Barnegat, had, they did have a couple of impoundments also. They had an auto tour route there that was about 7 miles long for the public. In the background you could see Atlantic City. In the impoundments there would be tens of thousands of snow geese and brant, wintering over.
So again, it was a real good diversified area. But the difference, like you said before, Great Swamp was a very controlled atmosphere, very management-oriented. Where Brigantine, because of the layout, didn't have that many management programs.
Thomas Goettel: And then when did you get into full-time law enforcement then?
Kevin Gormley: Full-time as a collateral officer, after training in '84, through November of 1988, is when I applied for and got the job as a full-time officer at Forsythe. So I didn't have to transfer, I basically just assumed the position of a full-time officer. I took a pay cut of about I think it was $2500.00 a year.
Thomas Goettel: Did you drop the GS level or something?
Kevin Gormley: Well, actually, I was raise graded, I believe I was a raise grade of 8, and came down to a GS6.
Thomas Goettel: So why did you make the switch? What made you want to switch?
Kevin Gormley: Well, in going back to Great Swamp, one of the things I started to get interested in law enforcement was through frustration. Through being a labor and maintenance worker I was out in the field a lot, whether it was maintaining different structures, or even in mowing the fields there for their grasslands managements. I would see some things going on. It could be something as trivial as car pulling over and having a 5-year-old and pick about three or four dozen flowers along the edge of the road. Call in and nobody could come out and talk to the individuals and educate them, because technically we're really not supposed to approach them if you're not in law enforcement.
It sounds like picking flowers or picking plants isn't a big deal, but it's not there for the next people to enjoy. And there were other instances and incidences that I observed in the field where, unfortunately, because of other commitments, the collateral duty officers 8
were either off or couldn't respond for whatever reason. So I started to get frustrated to say, "Well, you know, if I get a credential I won't have to worry about it. When I see things, I'll be able to act right then in the field.” That's when I transferred to Barnegat.
Then at Barnegat we were, we were, well, I guess the best way to put it is we were overwhelmed with law enforcement problems at Barnegat. It's the South Jersey pineland, "good old boy" mentality. They used to shoot whatever they wanted to shoot. Whether they'd take it home and eat it was irrelevant most of the time, a lot of them didn't. It was a, the Barnegat Bay area, Manahawkin Bay area was a huge waterfowl hunting area, going all the way back to, like a few of the islands actually that the Refuge owns now, Babe Ruth hunted from them, Lou Gehrig was out there years ago, back in the '30s and so forth, actually waterfowl hunting. Barnegat Bay has an incredible history of waterfowl hunting.
When we got there in about '84, we heard stories that people would be shooting hundreds of Blue-billed [duck], of [The Greater] Scaup in the area, hundreds of [American] Black Ducks. To the point where it got so blatant, where the Agway Seed Truck, in the late '70s, would actually backup to the dock and sell their 100-lb sacks of corn to the hunters right there, right off the dock, that's how bad it was.
The first year we were there, Hal Laskowski was a collateral duty officer, as was I, and it was a big learning curve us that first year, in '84. A lot of friendly people out there, not knowing that we had anywhere near the bait that we thought we had. The following year we finally ed
Interview with Harry Sears November 21, 2000 by Thomas Goettel
No full textHarry Sears oral history interview with Thomas Goettel. It should be noted that at the time this interview was conducted, Mr. Sears was still an employee with the Fish and Wildlife Service.INTERVIEW WITH HARRY SEARS
NOVEMBER 21, 2000 BY THOMAS GOETTEL
MR. GOETTEL: It’s November 21, 2000, we are sitting here at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge
maintenance shop in Sudbury. I am Tom Goettel and we are talking to Harry Sears. Harry has spent forty-two
years with the Fish and Wildlife Service. About how old are you now Harry?
MR. SEARS: I am eighty-two.
MR. GOETTEL: You’re eighty-two and you are still going strong. [Following remark is tongue in cheek]
You’re the head of the Maintenance Department here, and have been for many years. How did you get
started in the Fish and Wildlife Service Harry?
MR. SEARS: Parker River wanted somebody to break up a piece of land, a salt marsh down on the tip of the
island in the Ipswich section. Gordon Nightingale wanted somebody to do it so he asked me if I would be
willing to work for thirty days. “Sure, I’ll help you”, I said. So I went down and I think I stayed there around
six weeks. We broke the marsh up, and seeded it down. I finished that and moved up to the north pool, and we
seeded that down. Then, I quit; the job was done so I went home for the winter. Anyway he asked me if I
would come back the next spring, and I told him that if I wasn’t doing anything, I might consider it. Come
April, he called me up and asked me if I could come back and work for him. I told him that I would give him
thirty days, or six weeks, whatever, so I worked for six weeks and at the end of that he said, “Harry, did you
every think of getting on permanent”? I said, “Nope”. He then said, “The first rainy day, you come in and
we’ll fill out papers”. I told him that I wasn’t interested. He said, “Yes you are”. Well, a rainy day came, and
he came after me and we went in and filled out papers. Within six or seven weeks, I was on permanent for
Parker River.
MR. GOETTEL: Would that have been in 1958?
MR. SEARS: In 1957 I started permanent. In 1956 I worked part-time. I worked there for twelve years, at
Parker River. When they opened this [Great Meadows] up they downgraded their staff to three, and that left
me out. I was the low man on the totem pole. They told me that there was a job down at Great Meadows,
and you can go down there. I wasn’t too happy about it. I was thirty minutes from home at Parker River, and
it takes an hour to get here. Sometimes it takes and hour and a half or two hours to get here. I stuck it out.
Down there, I was WG-10, and I came up here as an “8”. They said that this is what they had, so I took it.
When Dave Beall was here, he said, “How come you are only an ‘8’? I’ll get you a ‘9’”. I told him, “That
would be fine if you could, but I don’t think you can”. So, he did.
MR. GOETTEL: Good for him!
MR. SEARS: He did, he got me a “9” and that’s the last one that I got. That’s what started me in Fish and
Wildlife.
MR. GOETTEL: What did you do before you worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
MR. SEARS: I was a foreman for CBS Hightrone [sic?] in Newburyport. And I was a farmer at the same
time. Two years before I came up here, I had a fire. It burnt the barn, and I lost fifteen cows, three tractors,
two trucks, all of the milking equipment, so I hung it up right there, as far as farming goes. I lost my shirt.
Then, CBS Hightrone went out of business, or they moved out. They moved down south, and wanted me to
go with them, but I wouldn’t go. That’s went I started up again, and I went to work full-time for Fish and
Wildlife. I’ve been around for a long time here.
MR. GOETTEL: I know that I have known you for over twenty years here. I started working here in 1974 I
think it was. That’s twenty-six years. I was a summer student, and I sure learned a lot from you. I know that
you are a jack-of-all-trades; you can do just about anything. You can weld and you’re a good carpenter and
mechanic.
MR. SEARS: I made all that stuff over in the Visitor’s Center.
MR. GOETTEL: All of the displays? Really?
MR. SEARS: I made them all. I made all of the refuge signs.
MR. GOETTEL: I know that your farming experience must have come in handy too.
MR. SEARS: Oh Yeah! There are no more farm boys. You can go out and plow, harrow, and seed. You
can do anything. There ain’t anymore now, they can’t even hook up a mower. Oh no, there’s no more farm
boys. They’re gone.
MR. GOETTEL: It gave you a lot of good experience. You can do just about anything I guess.
MR. SEARS: That’s what you’ve got to look for when you hire somebody.
MR. GOETTEL: I am curious. You said you were breaking up the marsh down there at Parker River.
What were you seeding it with?
MR. SEARS: Millet, rye, buckwheat; anything that had a good seed to it. Then we would flood it. We
would put the pump into one burrow pit, and pump into the other. This would flood it. Then the ducks
would come in there and they would just swim along and scoop up that seed. We had thousands and
thousands of birds; you ask Tommy [Stubbs].
MR. GOETTEL: So, you would actually plow up the salt marsh?
MR. SEARS: We would break it up with a rotor-tiller. It was a big Waukesha rotor-tiller behind an OC-6.
You would put a stone boat underneath it so that when the wheels would sink you would only come down
about two inches into the mud, and you would be pulling on the stone boat. That kept you from sinking
into the mud.
MR. GOETTEL: What are some of the projects that you remember the most from Parker River?
MR. SEARS: We put in a water control structure. We had a Bueyrus-Airy shovel, drag line. We operated
that; loaded trucks, hauled it onto the dike, capped the dike.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you build that big dike there?
MR. SEARS: No, we didn’t. That was built in the WPA days. But we had to maintain it and cap it. There
were numerous things. Mostly it was farming, and roadwork that I did. Then when J.C. Appel, do you
remember him?
MR. GOETTEL: I never met him. I know his name, but I never met the guy.
MR. SEARS: When he came, we were doing a lot of farming. But when he came, he said,
“Boys, no more dollars for ducks, dollars for people”. That’s when we started widening the
road all of the way down, putting in new parking lots, and putting up observation towers.
That’s how it started. They stopped the farming there. They haven’t gone back. They still
mow the fields, but that’s about it.
MR. GOETTEL: Was that in about 1960 maybe?
MR. SEARS: Yeah. That was in 1963 and 64 when knocked it off.
MR. GOETTEL: You worked for some pretty good managers; Gordon Nightingale, J. C.
Appel, both of them are legendary refuge managers.
MR. SEARS: Yep. There was Hal O’Connor. Do you remember Hal O’Connor?
MR. GOETTEL: Sure.
MR. SEARS: I don’t know where he lives, but I saw him seven or eight years ago. He knew
me.
There was also Bill French; he was Andy’s father.
MR. GOETTEL: There was George Gavutis. Well, George would have been there after you
left, is that right?
MR. SEARS: No, George Gavutis started from being an intern. He came there and worked
under J. C. Apple. George was in charge of banding. And Apple would say to him, “I want so
many birds today, I want so many [an amount] birds tomorrow”. He was right on George’s
neck all of the time. I’m sure that he knows that. But there have been a lot of managers and
assistant managers that I have gone through.
MR. GOETTEL: Here at Great Meadows you worked for the first woman refuge manager,
Linda Gintoli.
MR. SEARS: Yeah, she was working out of Concord. Linda Gintoli. She got into botulism.
Remember that?
MR. GOETTEL: They were in the impoundments there.
MR. SEARS: I picked up ninety-six dead birds. We took them up to the state incinerator and
burned them.
MR. GOETTEL: What brought that on?
MR. SEARS: We drew the pool down, and it got hot as hell. The food on top of the water
rotted. If she had pumped water in there, that would not have happened. But we had no way
of putting the water back. What she wanted to do was to seed around the edge of it. But it
came up awful hot and it just dried the hell out of it. They [birds] got into that goddamned
rotten mud and food, and it killed them. You have to be careful when you do that. You have
to have something on standby. We have a pump on standby you know?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, you do now don’t you?
MR. SEARS: Oh, we sure do!
MR. GOETTEL: Is it a Gator?
MR. SEARS: Yeah, a Gator pump that hooks on to the back of a tractor. You can pump a lot of water in
a few minutes.
MR. GOETTEL: I heard a story; it was before my time, you must have been here when they were blasting
out in the impoundments.
MR. SEARS: That was Lee Tibbs. Do you remember Lee Tibbs?
MR. GOETTEL: Yes. I met him up in Maine when I lived in Maine.
MR. SEARS: Well, I’ll tell you about that. He wanted to put a channel out in front of the water control
structure so that it would draw the water out. He said, “Well, we may be able to get a backhoe, and get in
there. Or, we can hire an excavator and put it right in there and dig it out”. Well, we haven’t got the money,
and you can’t dig it. He said, “I’ll go up and get the Army Corps of Engineers, the demolition boys, to come
down and blow that out”. I told him that it would not work. I told him that they run detonator cord on top of
the ice. If you are going to blow that out, you have up put cratering charges down in a hole. I told him I
would dig the holes. He said, “No, this young Sergeant knows what he’s doing”! I said, “I hope so”. So they
come down, and run out fifty feet of detonator cord on top of the ice, and there was nothing. It didn’t even
crack the ice! So he said, “I’ll fix that, I’ll run out one thousand feet”! So he did. I told Lee that he was going
to be in trouble. He said, “Don’t you think that young Sergeant knows what he’s doing”? I said, “No, he does
not”! Come four o’clock, I said, “I’m out of here”! “O.K., see you in the morning!” Well, come 4:30, when
they got ready to go they touched it off and it blew out windows and televisions down as far as Bedford and
Concord! I came in the next day, and said, “Lee, how did you make out”? He thought I was being wise. I told
him that I was really interested in how they had done. He said, “You know? I think I had better go back to
school”! I asked him what happened. He told me, “If I could have gotten a hold of you last night, we were out
here until two o’clock in the morning, nailing up windows”! I was surprised. He said, “I had to get Comeau,
and they got eighty sheets of plywood, and they went around nailing up windows”. I asked him if he had
called Tom Horne. Tom Horne was the regional director. He said, “Yep.” “Well, what did he say?” “Well, I’m
going back to school!” Two days later he was out of there. I didn’t hear from him for quite a while. He was
down in Maine, Baxter State Park. He came by here one day and he said, “Is Harry around”? I had been off
somewhere, but he still wanted to see me. I understand that he is retired now. Do you?
MR. GOETTEL: He was married to Helen Forsythe’s sister. Helen was the Clerk up there. He used to
come down and stop at the refuge. That is where I met him. He actually quit Baxter Park and started his
own company.
MR. SEARS: Oh he did?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, but that’s the last I saw of him. I have been gone from there for ten years. I haven’t
seen him.
MR. SEARS: That story went around. Every refuge in the country knew about that. That was a shame.
But when we were down at Parker River, J.C. Apple wanted to put some potholes in the marsh. He went
over to Ellison’s Island and got the Army, and they used cratering charges. I wou .
MR. GOETTEL: You have seen a lot of changes here. I know that Rice’s property kind of came and went.
MR. SEARS: They had corrals, and outbuildings there. I tore them all down. I tore down fourteen buildings
around here. The last two, Beale wanted down. He was going away for two weeks, and told me that when he
got back, he wanted to see those buildings down. I asked him how he wanted me to do it. He told me just to
take them apart and take them down to the dump or something. I was surprised that he expected those big
buildings to come down in two weeks. He said, “Yeah, you can do it”! There came on a rainy day, it was
foggy as hell. I took five gallons of diesel fuel and went upside, up and down. I started a fire, and burned two
buildings down in less than six hours, right to the ground.
MR. GOETTEL: Were those the ones the two on the top of the hill?
MR. SEARS: Do you remember that old car that Steve Wunderley [sic?] had?
MR. GOETTEL: The old Gremlin?
MR. SEARS: I dug that out of the ground, and Steve said, “Oh, that was stolen”! He had buried it there.
But he got rid of it. He got a Junker to come and get it. He thought that someone had stolen it, and
buried it there.
I have taken down a lot of buildings around here, and everywhere, Rice’s too. There were a lot of buildings at
Rice’s. That extended right out to the road. Then the house burned. Somebody bought it to get the timbers
out of it, and try to restore it. I don’t know how they ever made out. It’s been interesting though.
MR. GOETTEL: You have done duck banding.
MR. SEARS: Yeah, I have done a lot of duck and goose banding with everybody. I worked with the State,
banding. When Bill French was here, he said, “We’ve got to band some Eiders from Monomoy”. He told
Donny Grover and I to go down and band Eiders. We went down there for a week, and we tried everything. We
tried corn, and everything. We would stay up until two or three o’clock in the morning when the tide would
come in.
[Phone rings and Mr. Sears answers it. One hour later…]
MR. GOETTEL: We are back here after an hour interruption. We have Tommy Stubbs in the room now
with us. Tommy was the Maintenance Foreman at Parker River for how many years?
MR. STUBBS: I was here for forty years.
MR. GOETTEL: I don’t know exactly where we left off, but one of the things I was going to ask you about
was law enforcement. I know that you used to do law enforcement too didn’t you?
MR. SEARS: Yep.
MR. GOETTEL: Where you just checking duck hunters or doing everything?
MR. SEARS: I checked duck hunters.
MR. STUBBS: You did some “public use”.
MR. GOETTEL: You probably worked with some of the agents.
MR. SEARS: I worked with the agents. I worked with Donny Grover.
MR. GOETTEL: I tried to interview Donny but he doesn’t want to. He is kind of bitter
about his experience with the Fish and Wildlife Service so he doesn’t want to talk too much.
MR. SEARS: Why?
MR. GOETTEL: Well, I’ll tell you later.
MR. SEARS: [To Mr. Stubbs] how long was Donny in?
MR. STUBBS: He must have been in thirty years.
MR. SEARS: Thirty! He couldn’t have been!
MR. STUBBS: He retired a year before I did. When did you start at Parker River?
MR. SEARS: That was in 1956.
MR. STUBBS: He started about the same time you did. That’s thirty years.
MR. SEARS: I asked him once why he didn’t hang in there. He was bitching at Jack. He
wasn’t too old when he retired. He just bailed out.
MR. GEOTTEL: When you first started working here at Great Meadows, the office was
down in Concord right? Or was it in Bedford?
MR. SEARS: The office was in Bedford. [Unintelligible] In order to get the desk in there,
we had to cut the feet off, and drill a hole and peg it, after we got it in. When they moved,
they left it there.
MR. GOETTEL: What that a rental property?
MR. SEARS: GSA rented it. They rented the office in Concord too, right there on Sudbury
Road. GSA handled that, but I guess it came out of our budget. They handled everything.
We stayed there, until we came here.
MR. GOETTEL: I remember the office in Concord. When I started it was in Concord. The
Refuge Manager’s office was way in the back and every time they would flush the toilet
upstairs, it would run and drip down on the desk.
MR. SEARS: You were in the other room there. Who was the other guy?
MR. GOETTEL: Daryle Lons.
MR. SEARS: Where the hell is he?
MR. GOETTEL: He is up in Alaska.
MR. SEARS: Is he?
MR. GOETTEL: There was also Doug Mackey.
MR. SEARS: Doug is down south isn’t he?
MR. GOETTEL: I think he resigned. His father got cancer, and he moved back to Portland, Oregon. I don’t
know what he is doing now. I’ve lost track of him.
MR. SEARS: They had a safety meeting. He had a wooden leg, so he says “I’ll take my leg off and poor
some ketchup down here. You take a chainsaw and see what they say!” [All laughing] I told him that I
thought it would get their attention! That went over real big. Those guys in that office were all good guys.
MR. GOETTEL: Then we bought this place here. The Elbanabscot. I remember moving down here.
MR. SEARS: Yeah. Chrissy Tougas, do you remember her? She used to be the ORP. That was the first
ORP we had. She found this place. She found out that they were going bankrupt. So she came back and told
Beall about it. Beall was there at the time that she was there. That was it. They wanted this place bad, and
they went after it. We got it but they couldn’t pay for it. They got somebody else to pay for it until they got
the money for it. Do you remember when we moved here? [To Mr. Stupps] Do you remember the beds we
took out? We took out a hundred beds out of that place. They had more toilets in that place.
MR. GOETTEL: [m1] How many buildings did you take down out here?
MR. SEARS: Fourteen. The last two, I burned. I got sick of that. Then I had a lot to
tear down at Rice’s. You remember that. I tore them down by pulling them down with
a truck. Then we hauled them down to a field and we burned them. There have been
a lot of changes. But Chrissy Turgis, she went to California. She’s been gone a
number of years, probably about fifteen years. Then she showed up here. The
Sudbury police had picked her up down here. She said she worked at Great Meadows,
and they brought her down here. Firsk was here. I was at Concord, and Firsk called
me. He said, “Do you know a girl by the name of Chrissy Turgis”? I said, “Yeah, she
worked here”. But she was just floating around, didn’t do anything. She was a
handsome girl. You remember that.
MR. GOETTEL: What did they pick her up for?
MR. SEARS: Because she looked like a tramp. She was bumming, and she was coming
here. She had been living on the Appalachian Trail. That’s were she was, and that’s
where she went back to after she left here. She went back out there. She went to hell.
She was a hell of a nice looking girl.
MR. GOETTEL: I guess. That’s too bad. She was a smart gal.
MR. SEARS: She was blonde, and nice. You knew her.
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah.
MR. SEARS: And Bill Lawrence knew her. But we’ve had a lot of people come through.
MR. STUBBS: [To Mr. Sears] what year did you come here Harry?
MR. SEARS: I was at Parker River ten years, right after that, I came up here. So it was about
1966 or 1967. Moses was here when I came here. Moses went to Parker River when I came
here. Remember that?
MR. STUBBS: I thought Moses was already at Parker River.
MR. SEARS: No. He was at Great Meadows. I guess he was there a few days at the last end
of it. He was down there, and I came here, and Lee Tibbs was the one who took his place.
Remember him?
MR. STUBBS: Vaguely. I think I met him a couple of times.
MR. SEARS: Lee was the one who blew out all the windows around Concord.
MR. STUBBS: I remember hearing something about that, what happened?
MR. SEARS: He went and got the Army to blow a trench in that water control structure.
They used detonator cord on top of the ice. It never even cracked the ice!
MR. STUBBS: Oh yeah?
MR. SEARS: It cost Great Meadows and the government $50,000.00 to replace that stuff.
That came out of our budget.
MR. STUBBS: I remember coming up to Great Meadows and burning both pools. I don’t
know who I brought with me.
MR. SEARS: I was there.
MR. STUBBS: Were you? I remember that I went up to the Fire Department and told them
that we were going to burn. We set fire, and it sounded like a freight train coming down. You
wouldn’t believe the flames! But it didn’t get out. It just went to the river.
MR. SEARS: It was Cattails.
MR. STUBBS: Can you imagine the trouble we would get in today if we did something like
that?
MR. SEARS: Do you remember the time that we put a telephone pole behind the Jeep and
dragged it over the ice and dragged the Cattail down to break it off?
MR. STUBBS: Yeah!
MR. SEARS: We also used to put skates on and skate around and tend to the Wood duck
boxes. Somebody would take the shavings; somebody would take a couple of tarps, and
hammers. Do you remember that Tom?
MR. STUBBS: Oh yeah!
MR. SEARS: We had some good times then, Tom, but we worked! We worked like hell!
MR. STUBBS: Yeah. We did a lot of work. Al Zelly was at the Refuge. He went to the
north pool by himself and was taking care of the boxes. He had skates on, and he fell through, and it was
over his head. He barely got out. He was hollering for help and two people that were over on the
boardwalk heard him and they came over. He was just about done for.
MR. GOETTEL: Boy! I never heard that!
MR. STUBBS: You know, you shouldn’t go by yourself when you go out over water that it that deep.
From the way he told it, he was just about ready to give up. He couldn’t get out. MR. SEARS: Tommy,
when we came up from Parker River, how did we get into the
impoundments. Think!
MR. STUBBS: We didn’t do down the railroad tracks, we went across the railroad tracks.
MR. SEARS: And where did we come in?
MR. STUBBS: Right at the dike, or right at the spillway where you took the gr
Interview with Frank Gramlich by Thomas Goettel, May 23, 2000
No full textOral history interview with Frank Gramlich. Thomas Goettel as interviewer.1
INTERVIEW WITH FRANK GRAMLICH
BY THOMAS GOETTEL MAY 23, 2000
MR. GOETTEL: It is May 23, 2000, and we are sitting in Readfield, Maine with Frank
Gramlich. Frank retired in 1982 as the Wildlife Assistant Supervisor in Augusta, Maine.
Maybe you could just tell me Frank, how you got into the Fish and Wildlife Service.
MR. GRAMLICH: I retired from the military in 1959. Before I retired I had already
talked to the people in the Biology department at the University of Maine. When I went
into the Army I was 19, and I retired as a Major. But the thing is, I didn’t have any
education. I had one year of High School. I always wanted to be a soldier, and go
places. I enlisted before the war in 1939. I wanted to go to the Philippines, as far away
as I could. And they said, “Well, on your first enlistment, you have to go where we send
you. You are going to Hawaii”. I didn’t think that was too bad for a first enlistment. I
learned to “soldier” in Hawaii. We were all soldiers there, and being in the service, the
rest of the people were civilians, they didn’t count. We were elitists. I left Hawaii two
weeks for the “Japs” bombed it, and the war started.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: The fact is, that when the “Japs” were bombing Pearl Harbor, I was
in jail in Salinas, California.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no!
MR. GRAMLICH: It was one of our Saturday nights. Me and my buddy Rich, and
another soldier that came back from Hawaii with me, we just went to Salinas. We were
stationed at Fort Ord. The cops said, “Come with me”. And we said, “What are we
doing?” We had had a few drinks, but we were sober and were getting ready to go back
to the base. He pulled a gun out, and marched us in. There was a guy standing at the
desk there, and he says, “Oh, it looks like you got them!” They took our prints, “bing,
bing, bing,” and luckily the next morning, they said, “Boy, you guys are lucky!” They
had found that they had a set of prints from somebody else that fit our description. So we
got out of jail, and found that the “Japs” had bombed Pearl Harbor! We got back to Fort
Ord, we were regular Army, and everybody else practically, at that time were draftees.
They had been drafted for a year. They were all laughing at us. It was really easy for
regular Army people to move up pretty fast. I wound up as First Sergeant when I was 21
years old. All my life I wanted to be a biologist, and work with wildlife. Since I didn’t
have any schooling or anything, I took a test to get into the University. They accepted
me, and I started. I liked it, and did great. I was on the Dean’s List all the time I was in
the bachelor program. After I graduated in 1963, I went into the master’s program.
Every summer, I went and worked for Fish and Game. The first summer, I dipped
salmon down on the Machias in Whitneyville. Then, another year I worked with Skip
Spencer on duck banding. Year after year, I went to Moosehorn. I got to know the
people in Fish and Wildlife pretty well. There was Wes Jones, and Doug was in my
class, he was a classmate of mine.
2
MR. GOETTEL: Doug Mullen?
MR. GRAMLICH: Doug was quite a character. He used to have a pet wildcat, a bobcat.
MR. GOETTEL: I heard about that.
MR. GRAMLICH: He was always “gung ho”. But, I got along good with the Wildlife
people. When I got my masters, I was married and had four kids. I had my Army
retirement pension, but I thought that I would like to get a job with Fish and Wildlife. So
I applied, and the next day, they hired me.
MR. GOETTEL: Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: I had to move to Great Meadows in Littleton, Massachusetts. It was
Great Meadows/Monomoy. I fought the traffic, and worked as much as I could. I kind of
enjoyed it. For Massachusetts, it’s at least a decent place, for me, with the wilderness and
all.
MR. GOETTEL: Were you the refuge manager at Great Meadows?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, and at Monomoy. I was the manager at both of them. Of
course, Bill French was up at Parker River. He had the refuge program up there. He was
my supervisor, and we got along great. One day Bill Hickling came down and wanted to
look at Monomoy and Great Meadows. I showed him around the refuges. Bill Hickling
was still with Wildlife Services. Tom Horne was the chief of refuges at the time and he
didn’t want to go with Tom. But he was Tom Horne. He wanted the rocks to be painted
and the fenced fixed. He was more interested in the latrines and stuff, than he was in
wildlife. But he was all right. I liked Tom. Everybody got along good with Tom. But
Bill Hickling came down, and we went down to Monomoy, it was at the end of the
summer. He said, “I might want to stay tonight”. I said, “Well, we can get you into a
hotel, no problem.” And he said, “Geez, they charge an awful lot!” I said, “It will cost
you three dollars a night!” One of the guys in the park owned a motel, and that’s what he
charged the government people.
MR. GOETELL: No kidding?
MR: GRAMLICH: He was impressed, he said, “Boy, this is great at this time of year!” I
wanted to get back up to Maine so I talked to him. And he said, “O.K., I’ll see what I can
do.” And in a little while he called, and arranged for me to transfer up to Orono, he had
offices in Orono. And Ed [unintelligible] had the place then. So I moved my family up
to Bangor. We still owned the house in Bangor, and we moved in. I got started with
Wildlife Services there, getting chipmunks and squirrels and gardens and things. It was
great, I learned a lot. In those days, you didn’t have a secretary so you had to do your
reports and stuff all by yourself. I could do twenty words a minute on the typewriter, or
something like that. But you had to spend too much time on paperwork. Then, they said,
3
“Well, we want you to come to Augusta.” It was closer to Maine Fish and Game. I
worked together with them. I knew a lot of people at Maine Fish and Game because I
had worked with them summer after summer. I came and found this place. I had a friend
who was in the Army with me; he was one of my Lieutenants, while I was a Captain in
charge of him. He says, “Hey, there’s a place right up here that’s for sale. You might
like it.” I looked at it. This place is two hundred years old.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: This part is new, but we spend more time in here.
MR. GOETTEL: It’s nice and light.
MR. GRAMLICH: It was built in 1790 something. Way back. Anyhow, I looked in the
front window, and said, “I’ll take it.” I paid sixteen thousand, and it came with twenty-two
acres. We bought it, and put a roof on, and other things that it needed. But anyhow,
when I got to Augusta, I got very close with the commissioners of the Fish and Game and
we had a good relationship. We move into the Federal Building. We used to have an
office right next to Fish and Game out on Sewell Street. But they moved me into the
Federal Building. I moved in there with two Federal wardens, U. S. Fish and Wildlife
wardens. They were great, but we didn’t have any secretary. The thing is, we had to
have a girl. It was such a better job, having a good secretary. Me, and Dave Sealy, we
chose a secretary. There was one nice blonde girl who came in. She had some
references. This other girl worked for the IRS part-time, and she wanted a full-time job.
She was in the hospital, having a baby. We talked to the Chief of the IRS, and he said,
“Well, if you get her, you’ve got a good girl, she really works.” So we hired her while
she was in the hospital having a baby.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We never saw her. She came in and we were pleasantly surprised.
She said she was halfway married, and she and her almost husband had two kids and she
had just had another. She was a jewel. We had her for sixteen or seventeen years. She
just handled everything. She handled the phone and all the paperwork.
MR. GOETTEL: Her name was Kathy what now?
MR. GRAMLICH: Kathleen Chapman.
MR. GOETTEL: Chapman. That’s right, I remember her.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. I gave her everything I could, you know. She was a “6” I
guess. I couldn’t get her higher than a “6. She deserved more!
MR. GOETTEL: Oh yeah, they all do.
4
MR. GRAMLICH: She and her husband have a horse-riding academy down here. She
got me interested in horses again. We used to have them when I was in the service
[military]. We inherited three Hungarian cavalry mounts.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: Lieutenant Henley retired, well, he didn’t retire, he went home. And
when he went home, I took over his mounts. And for years I had them. When we got
married, we lived on the Continental Divide, close to [unintelligible] and I had a big
prison camp, Moramar, that I was in charge of. I used to have one of the prisoners take
care of my horses. He would saddle me up, and I would ride home at night. It was
probably three or four miles to where I was staying with my wife.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: In the morning, I would ride back.
MR. GOETTEL: What was the name of the prison camp again?
MR. GRAMLICH: I can’t remember. It was a big prison camp. We had soldiers in it,
German soldiers. They hadn’t released them yet. The Nuremberg Trials were still going
on. Anyhow, I was a second lieutenant. I really loved my horses a lot, and learned to
ride. During the day, I used to canter around a little bit. There was a building on the
outside of the barbed wire fence, and there was a grassy area about twenty feet wide,
between the fence and the building. I was cantering along between the fence and the
building, and all of a sudden there was a jeep! It was going in the gate to the camp. They
didn’t stop or anything, and I had to pull back! I still remember those guys’ faces!
[Laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: I thought you were going to say that it was Eisenhower or something in
the jeep!
MR. GRAMLICH: No, but those guys can remember still!
MR. GOETTEL: So when you were working here in Maine, you worked a lot with
Eagles. How did you get involved with Eagles?
MR. GRAMLICH: I remember exactly how I got involved with Eagles because I got in
close fairly close with the chief of Audubon. The President was Dick Anderson. He says
to me, “Goddammit, Gramlich, people are killing our Eagles! You are a Federal boy, and
I want you to do something about it!” I was getting dead and wounded Eagles all of the
time. I said, “O.K., let’s do something. His idea was to start an education program for
people, tell them about Eagles and protecting them. We had thirty-three nests in Maine
then. This was not a lot, compared to now. I talked to Mel Coles up at the University and
told him that I thought we ought to have somebody from the University here. Maybe we
could start a joint Eagle program. He got Bucky Owen to work with me on Eagles. We
5
needed to protect the nesting sites. And we started a program of landowner agreements
that would govern utilization around the sites, and keep them as far away from the
Eagle’s nests as possible. We also had articles published in the paper to educate people
about eagles. Pretty soon we weren’t seeing as many dead or wounded Eagles. There
was an Indian trapper, up on Indian Island who shot an Eagle one time. And I raised hell
with the Chief. We got a letter from an Indian kid, who lived up on Indian Island. It
said, “I am an Indian, and I was up on the river the other day, and saw an Eagle flying,
my whole being changed then. I could remember my ancestors. I really love Eagles!”
This was from a little kid! Then, we weren’t getting good production. We knew we had
thirty-three nests, but thought, ‘where the hell is the production?’ They weren’t
producing young. I hired this kid, Bob Baugh, and we looked at some eggs. He was a
“monkey”, a tree climber. He was great, because it was kind of tough, getting to an Eagle
nest. There were a lot of dead branches and stuff, and it was hard to get in. But he would
go like a monkey. He was careful and he never hurt himself. He never fell. We took
some eggs and sent them to Patuxent. I forget who was the chemist at Patuxent, but we
worked very closely.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Lucille Stickell?
MR. GRAMLICH: No. I wasn’t her, but maybe it was her boss. We started getting
Wildlife Journals and stuff. He was great. He said “Well, this has got too much DDT”.
We wanted to increase production, and we said, “If those eggs are no good, let’s get some
eggs from some other places. Who the hell is going to give us an Eagle egg?” Some
people from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois said, “We got some nests, and we can
take an egg from a few nests and give them to you”. We sent a suitcase. [Asking
himself] Who the hell was the Fish and Wildlife guy who used to bring them in a little
egg box?
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Paul Nickerson maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes, Paul Nickerson. He was a good guy. Any time when we put an
egg in a nest, why, we’d have somebody from television there to show it. They would
[Eagles] produce and we’d band the young, and the whole works. Then we decided after
a while to try not just eggs, but young eagles. We placed young ones in the nests. We
wondered what would happen. We didn’t know for sure if they’d accept the young ones.
It might be hard with the young ones up there squeaking while “you” [an Eagle] were
trying to work the nest. I think it was down in Washington County where we put a young
one in a nest. We had already taken the eggs out. And he was up there going “Squeak,
squeak”, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen. But the Eagle answered back.
The eggs we had taken out were failed eggs. We were down on the ground and we
wondered, “What are you going to do”? And she flew right down and sat on the nest, and
they went “beak, beak” and they were bonding right away! It was great!
One other time, we put a young one in a nest, and it was close to an Osprey nest. The
Eagles and Osprey were having interaction, fighting each other, and all that stuff. We put
one in, and that Eagle flew down grabbed that young one and flew away {killing it]. He
probably thought that it was an Osprey. He didn’t recognize it as an Eagle.
6
MR. GOETTEL: Aw, that’s too bad!
MR. GRAMLICH: As far as I know, that was the only one we lost.
MR. GOETTEL: Well that really turned the Eagles around, because I know there’s what,
two hundred nests now? Something like that?
MR: GRAMLICH: Yeah, and there was winter-feeding and stuff like that you know.
We could take carcasses off the roads or highways, and set up feeding stations. We
would check and see how many banded ones came in.
MR. GOETTEL: Where did you have the feeding stations?
MR. GRAMLICH: Mostly down east around Penobscot Bay. That was my biggest thing
that I accomplished was working with Eagles. But I had lots of help you know from
everyone. And help from the State. And since I was involved personally, it really made
me feel great. That was my fun job, working with the Bald Eagles. Another thing was
that we had Dr. Everhart. He was the Fishery man up at the University. He said,
”Gramlich, we’re having trouble, we’ve got this big hatchery here in Maine, and we’re
taking the Salmon, and taking the eggs and raising the smelts, and we put them in the
river, and we’re not getting results from it. Now we are tagged them, and we want to see
results from the tags”. He said, “We think there may be some relation between smelts,
and Cormorants.” He told me he wanted me to go down and see what I could find out.
Down in Whitneyville, I had a couple of truckloads of smelts. They weighed an eighth of
a pound. They were good-sized smelts. I put a couple thousand into the Machias River.
The next morning I went out and shot a Cormorant. I opened him up and there was fifty-five
tags [in the bird’s stomach].
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding? Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: I said, “Holy, Christ! I have an idea now what’s happening”!
MR. GOETTEL: I guess that now you know where they are going!
MR. GRAMLICH: The great breeding island was Old Man Island, down off of Cutland.
It was just one hundred yards from the house that I owned down in Cutland. It was a
hundred yards to the water, and about a half a mile as the crow flies. I was out there and
there was all those young Cormorants. There was a lot of tags that had been regurgitated
by the adults and the young ones would eat those tags. You could pick up hundreds of
tags there. This had to be the end of the Cormorants. We tried a lot of things, but we
wanted to get rid of them fast. I wore myself out every day shooting them with a
shotgun.
MR. GOETTEL: So did you get rid of the colony down there then?
7
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. There used to be trees on it. And they built their nests into the
trees. The Cormorant droppings killed the trees and they went down. The trees were all
snags then. The birds would build their nests on the stumps or on the bare ground on the
rocks. I persecuted them for, oh, I don’t know, five or six years, but after that, there
weren’t any more Cormorants on the island. We broke the eggs and poisoned the nests,
but we had to shoot most of them. We would go there in the morning and stay all day.
“Bang, bang, and kill about one hundred Cormorants in one day.
MR. GOETTEL: You worked a lot on Seagulls too, didn’t you?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah, I also worked to protect Puffins, and Terns. Once we got
chemicals that was the big thing. What do they use know? I can’t think of what we used
then.
MR: GOETTEL: That would be “13-39”.
MR. GRAMLICH: We used to call it something else.
MR. GOETTEL: Starlecide, maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, that’s it. We did the work with Dr. Wolfe, from the
manufacturer. He was a chemist. We were trying to use it to inhibit the reproduction in
pigeons, and other birds, and kill them. We went out and feed them, and feed them.
Then we when out and trapped hundreds of pigeons, we would dye them and release
them and follow the nesting. It kind of worked pretty decent. There was goddamn little
production from the nests. But we started finding a lot of dead pigeons too. We learned
that it was a lethal agent and it worked pretty damned good.
MR. GOETTEL: I never heard that. No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We used it for everything. Dr. Wolfe would come down and we
would go over and look. Things happen when you’re doing something like that. When
you have them marked, and have flocks of brilliant red pigeons you can find out where
they were feeding. You can trap them there. You don’t know whether they are from
downtown, sitting on the Sears building. But you release them, and go downtown, and
there they are sitting on the Sears building. So you know that those are the ones that
were feeding out at the railroad station. We did a hell of a lot of work on pigeon, gull,
and Cormorant control. Those were the big ones.
MR. GOETTEL: I think you worked with Bill Drury out on Betinicus Rock was that and
maybe Carl Buchiester too?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: I think that was some of the first gull control.
8
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. The whole while we used it. We used Bill Snow’s boat. Bill
Snow was the federal warden. He didn’t really approve of it, but he went along with it.
He didn’t tell us that it wasn’t a good idea. I’d go down and get, I don’t know how many
loads of stale bread. I would cut it up and mix “13-39” with margarine do it wouldn’t
dissolve in the water too much. I made sandwiches. On Saturday and Sunday we would
take a lot of these sandwiches out there, and at a table we would say, “Here, gully-gully!”
and “whoosh” they would come and get them. After a while we would get so many gulls,
the fishermen would start to raise hell. They wanted to know if we wanted to kill all of
the gulls. But we said, “No, just around these certain islands”. They were upset by it.
It was nice being with Bill Snow. He was a typical warden. He came in one morning
and told us that he would be gone for the day because there had been a death in his
family. “I’ll see you in a day or two.” Then Kathy came in, and we told her “Bill won’t
be in today, he had a death in the family”. She said, “Family? What family has he got?
The only family that he has is his wife!” It was a Monday morning. She got a newspaper
and it was his wife who had died. He never said that it was her.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no! No kidding!
MR. GRAMLICH: Anyhow, we went to the service. And Bill took two days off. But he
was Bill Snow, that’s all. He was a good warden, I thought.
MR. GOETTEL: He lives around here somewhere doesn’t he?
MR. GRAMLICH: Well, he was born in a house just a few miles over from here. But I
don’t know where Bill is now. I have seen him.
MR. GOETTEL: I thought he was still around here somewhere.
MR GRAMLICH: He might be somewhere down around the coast somewhere but I
don’t have the slightest idea.
MR. GOETTEL: Were you born in Maine?
MR. GRAMLICH: No.
MR. GOETTEL: Where were you born?
MR. GRAMLICH: In New York, Long Island city.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, no kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We moved when I was a little kid. We moved out to around
Commack, Long Island. I went to school out there. I used to duck hunt on Long Island
Sound. We hunted rabbits all the time, cottontails. I almost killed a deer with an axe one
time, it was so tame, but it was illegal. Before I went into the service, I was working as a
laborer. We were building a road. We were building a road to a camp. The Germans
9
were making a Nazi camp. It was before the war, and they were building a camp so that
the Germans would come. We always thought that they were Nazis. We called them
Nazis because they talked German all of the time. And they were. There was a lot
Interview with Alfred Godin by Thomas Goettel, November 12, 1999
No full textOral history interview with Alfred Godin. Thomas Goettel as interviewer.1
INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED GODIN
BY THOMAS GOETTEL NOVEMBER 12,1999
MR. GOETTEL: It’s November 12, 1999 and we are in Al Godin’s house in Leominster,
Massachusetts. I am Tom Goettel from the Regional office in Hadley, Massachusetts.
We have had a little trouble with the tape recorder here, so we are going to try this from
step one. Al, I know that your are a Korean War veteran, and you were in the Navy.
What ship were you on?
MR. GODIN: Yes. In Korean I was on the Princeton. That is a CV type Aircraft
Carrier. It was an Essex class, World War II, carrier.
MR. GOETTEL: And you got out on the Navy in 1956?
MR. GODIN: No. Well, maybe it was close to 1956. The reason I left the Navy was
that I had the opportunity to go to school under the GI Bill. Under this program the
government paid for tuition and books and various lab fees plus seventy-five dollars a
month for subsistence. I staid there for four years, and graduated with a BS, and
subsequently went to work with Louisiana Fish and Wildlife as a Fishery Biologist. But
my desire, or my love was in wildlife management. From there in Louisiana, I went to
school and got my Master’s at the University of Massachusetts, and then went to work
with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a Fishery Biologist in Sandy Hook, New
Jersey.
MR. GOETTEL: What did you do at Sandy Hook?
MR. GODIN: As a Fishery Biologist I did mostly survey work, asking fisherman what
kind of lures they were using for sport fishing. We had to be able to visualize the type of
lure that he described, and ask him how many hours that he worked or fished for different
types of fish. It was mainly survey type work.
MR. GOETTEL: What is salt water or fresh water fishing, or both?
MR. GODIN: Only salt water, along the Atlantic coast. I wanted to go into wildlife, and
from there, I transferred to Denver Wildlife Research Center doing bio-essay work. This
involved testing chemical candidates to learn the feasibility of control [unintelligible] for
certain small animals like [Latin name-sounds like Microbial specie] that caused
problems for or the destruction of crops and agricultural things like shrubs and trees and
things like that. Then I transferred to Patuxent Wildlife Research in Migratory Bird
Population Station. There I was working with the [unintelligible]. We went to four areas
in the country to determine the size and the composition of the bird species by age and
sex. We also work on the criteria of determining the age of Canada Geese by the
examination of tail feathers. From there I went to work for the Division of Wildlife
Services in Region 5. My station was New Jersey, Delaware and Long Island, NY. I
focused mainly on the problems of, and hazards caused by bird populations at airports.
Most of my time was spent in New Jersey with the airport work. The other problem that
2
we had in New Jersey with the environment was a Canada goose problem. We studied
these so called non-migratory geese, because they were born and staid all of their lives in
the northeast area. They caused problems on golf courses and in a few other areas. Some
of them were called “pests” because of the amount of droppings found on people’s lawns
and places like that. Then they were the government’s problem. But when they were
cute, they belonged to the people. That was a management problem. Southern states
wanted these birds to reintroduce them to the southern states where this species of bird
migrated to for the winter. It appears that the northeast was a stopgap that stopped the
population. The population has grown to where they are now considered to be pests.
They also caused problems at airports because of their large size, and sometimes their
numbers. They might land on an airport during migration, or moving back and forth
from a feeding area to a roost site. That is just a quick sketch of the Canada goose
problem.
MR. GOETTEL: You became a fairly well known authority on bird-aircraft strike
problems didn’t you? It seemed like you were going all over the place, at one point in
time, on consultations and F.A.A. sponsored trips. Tell me a little about that. I know that
you have worked in Alaska on Bald Eagles and Canada Geese.
MR. GODIN: The three trips to Alaska were funded by the F.A.A. because they had
different problems up there. At Anchorage International Airport they had a problem with
the Canada Geese. These were birds that were being hunted along the river and they
would seek the airport as a refuge. They were not really conditioned to the aircraft traffic
so they had some aircraft collisions. There was one instance where a People’s Republic
of China aircraft stuck Geese and caused a problem with the aircraft, so they had to abort
the aircraft and repair it. This was shortly after the time that President Nixon
reestablished the cooperation and good friendship with the Chinese. That was one of the
problems up there. Other, southern airports had problems with Bald Eagles perching in
trees. What these birds would do was watch and wait for the Salmon migration. Then
they would fly from the trees to pick up fish. Sometimes they would cross an airport
runway where an aircraft would be approaching or departing. The problem there was
rather easy to solve.
MR. GOETTEL: How did you solve it there?
MR. GODIN: Well, the birds were using the trees for perching and making their
observations. So I recommended that we remove the trees. It was a simple thing to do.
Right there, the birds needed some place to look down from for the fish, if you don’t
provide them with that, they will go elsewhere.
MR. GOETTEL: How about the Canada Geese? What did you recommend for them?
MR. GODIN: With the Canada Geese the problem was the gulls on the runway, and the
tarmac. Some of the information that I gave them was this so called “food, water and
shelter” which are the three attractions to many animals that inhabit or use an airport for a
short time. It was decided to use the shell crackers. This was to find the birds, but also,
3
whoever is going to be shooting shell crackers would do it alone. And they used certain
automobiles to educate the birds that “here comes this automobile that is going to bother
us”. Sometimes, when the problem is really serious, we had to provide the airport with a
Federal Depredation permit. This regulates how many birds can be taken and so forth.
It is not a permit to have a good time and kill geese.
MR. GOETTEL: I know that at J.F.K., and at Newark you worked on Gull problems that
they had there? Tell me a little about that. What did you do there?
MR GODIN: These airports like LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark were located on the
shores of the Atlantic coast on marginal land. At one time the cities had to have a place
to dump their garbage. They dumped it on these marginal land areas, and then created
airports. So these two entities were real close together. The dumps attracted the birds for
feeding, and then they would use the airport for resting, and digesting their food. They
would be moving back and forth, and in doing so they caused a hazard to the aircraft on
takeoff and landing. We provided techniques to these airports on how to control the
birds, mainly by non-lethal methods. If that didn’t work, then they could use lethal
measures according to what was written in the permit. The permit never said that they
could go out and kill birds. It’s up to the airport management or the operations
department instructions. So that’s where I came in and provided workshops for the
people in Operations, and involved in controlling the birds. It was like, “Do this, and
don’t do that”, and so forth. Periodically, I would go out with some of these Operations
people and I would examine what they were doing, and if they were doing it right.
MR. GOETTEL: You were in New Jersey, I know, for sixteen years, down in Trenton,
New Jersey. It seems that during that period in time Canada Geese went from being a
real attractive or desirable species to being a pest species. That is a real tragedy to see
something like that happen isn’t it?
MR. GODIN: Yeah. The problem there started there, I think in the 1920s. Originally
the birds, and when I say ‘birds’, I am talking about Canada Geese, they flew down on
their migration from some place in the Hudson Bay, or Jane’s Bay, using the Atlantic
Flyway. They went as far south as southern Florida. Some of them went to Texas and
down in that area. That was the way it was for a long, long time. Then man came along
and started building communities, and this and that. They have nice, green beautiful
lawns and all of that “pretty” crap. I shouldn’t be talking like that. This attracted the
birds to their lawns and golf courses and things like that. In addition, you could not hunt
the birds and in some places in New Jersey, you can’t even hunt in a Township. Their
excuse is, “No discharge of firearms”. So the birds can sense, in a way, that they are not
being harmed and so that’s where they stay. It’s like survival for anybody. You’re not
going in an area that might cause you a lot of harm. You stay away from it. Some of the
southern states wanted these “nuisance” Canada Geese, that’s what we used to call them.
I don’t know what they call them now. But they used to come up for the Round Ups.
These occurred in the middle of June, usually during the third week of June. This was
the time when adults molted their primary feathers, and the young birds or goslings were
growing their primaries [feathers]. So the birds were unable to fly at that time. We went
4
to several places where there were large numbers of these geese, and the southern states
took these birds to their states in order to provide the birds a “nitch” where there used to
be hunted. I don’t want to say “hunting” but mainly that was all.
MR. GOETTEL: Now, I know that you are a native of Fitchburg, Massachusetts which
is the next town over, from where we are now. And that you have had a life long interest
in New England, and one of the things that I don’t think a lot of people in the Fish and
Wildlife Service know, is that you’re the author and illustrator of The Wild Mammals of
New England book which is to me an incredible book, because not only is it illustrated in
pencil sketches of all of the mammals of New England, but it also has a lot of natural
history and biographical information about them. I guess “biographical” is the wrong
word, but it has a lot of information on the animals habits and food and so on. How did
you get involved in taking a project like that on? That’s quite a project, to do something
like that.
MR GODIN: I am always interested in wildlife. I was always that way. I found out that
there was not much literature on the wild mammals of New England. Some of the things
that were out there were special reports, but there was not one book that would indicate
what the mammals were, and about their distribution, or lives, or habitat and where they
were found and all of that. So this was mainly to impart the knowledge of some of these
animals that occurred in New England. It took a long time. Mainly this book is a
compilation of other people’s work. And that is sited in the book anyway. But my main
contribution was that I examined about twenty-two thousand specimen of mammals that
are found in museums. To site a few: I went to the National Natural History Museum in
Washington, D.C. and looked at all of those mammals that were from New England. I
plotted these on maps, as far as their distribution. I got the measurements and weights of
these. And I went up as far north as Orono, Maine and looked at the species there they
had in the museum. I looked at all of the states in between as well. That is my main
contribution; where they were found at that time, and mainly which counties and the
numbers that were taken. One thing that I really learned from this was the marine
mammals such as Whales and Seals that occur along the coast of New England. Some of
them would become stranded on land. So I have information on those. I some
information from the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and again, the National Natural
History Museum in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.
MR. GOETTEL: That is an absolutely remarkable book, and I hope that it is in every
National Wildlife Refuge office in the northeast anyway, because it’s just a beautiful,
beautiful book.
MR. GODIN: Yeah, I mean, my focus and mission about was to impart knowledge, and
tell the people that we have wild animals and they are here for us too, and so forth. So
we shouldn’t go out and indiscriminately kill them. The press asked me, after the book
came out, to write an update, and a new book. I couldn’t it because I was getting too old,
and it’s like “backtracking”. You know, you do something, and then move on. One of
the things that I moved on to was; my age was catching up to me and it was time to retire.
But all in all, I had a great time with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and if I had to do
it again, I would do it.
5
MR. GOETTEL: You were talking about ten years ago, at age sixty-two.
MR. GODIN: [joking] No, that was fifty-two! You work that out!
MR. GOETTEL: O. K., age thirty-two!
MR. GODIN: Yeah, I like that one! That’s better!
MR. GOETTEL: Tell us what you got into then. How you spent your retirement years.
MR. GODIN: Believe it or not, Whales. I got fascinated with Whales when I wrote the
book, Wild Mammals of New England. I saw that these animals were found along the
coast, always migrating and moving along the coast, and some of them became stranded.
So they were mammals of New England. And it’s mainly because they are gentle
animals, they don’t go out and kill anybody, or attack this and that. That’s a lot of
bullshit, about the Moby Dick thing. I just liked the Whales, and that was my
introduction to them when I was writing the book. And after I retired, I still loved
wildlife and I decided; don’t be offended, Fish and Wildlife Service, but I think I had
enough about the birds and decided to go for the Whales, and try something new. The
Whales are closely related to me because they are Mammals. And sometimes, I might
look like a Whale. What I have been doing was researching anything I could find about
the different species of the large Whales, especially those that are endangered. I kept
doing research about it, and I met a lot of people who are also researching Whales, and
they helped me out a lot. I have a couple that I have done in bronze.
MR. GOETTEL: So you have spent the last ten years or so, or almost ten years sculpting
Whales. I know that we have gone through the process here today about how you about
it. It’s quite an involved process, how you go from the raw clay to the finished bronze.
This tape will eventually end up in our Archives at our National Conservation Training
Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Maybe at some point in time you could have a
display there of some of your sculptures. [Stumbled on the word sculptures]
I am starting to talk like you, after all afternoon here! [Joking]
MR. GODIN: It’s that good?
MR. GOETTEL: They are absolutely beautiful. They are incredible! You think that
the Whale is sitting right there in your living room. I am looking at a Sperm Whale and
Blue Whale. I’ve never seen a Sperm Whale. I have been fortunate enough to see Blue
Whales, and Humpback, and some of the other ones. But these things are just incredibly
accurate, and just absolutely beautiful works of art.
MR. GODIN: Well thanks!
MR. GOETTEL: I know that now you are working with the New Bedford Whaling
Museum, where they are assembling a skeleton of the Blue Whale.
6
MR. GODIN: Yeah, it’s a young Blue Whale that was stranded in Massachusetts. I
think that the U. S. Department of Commerce has helped by funding, in addition to the
New Bedford Whaling Museum. In that new wing, there will be a skeleton of a young
Blue Whale that beached itself on the Massachusetts coast. The New Bedford Whaling
Museum, when I brought my Blue Whale there, last night. One of my friends was giving
a speech on Blue Whales. He has been researching Blue Whales for years, and he is well
known about it. But as a result, when the Museum saw the sculpted Blue Whale they
asked me if I would display it along with their Blue Whale skeleton, which may be on
exhibition by July 4, 2000. I said it would be O.K. Mainly, it’s because they want to
show what a Blue Whale looks like with the skin on, compared to the skeleton. One
thing leads to another, and it keeps me happy. Although I liked the Fish and Wildlife
Service, I’m telling you now, retirement is great! [Laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: So, you’ve had a whole new career, I think since you retired almost.
It’s just incredible. What are some of your most memorable experiences in the Fish and
Wildlife Service? When you look back, what do you think about?
MR. GODIN: I guess it’s the airport work. I always liked to be at the airports. I had
access, working with the Operations people. There would be times when my bosses, I
had a lot of bosses, they would say, “I’d like to come down”. And I would say, “Come
on down”. He would tell me what airport he would be coming in to, and on what flight.
I always liked to be at the airport maybe an hour before he arrived. That way I would
have a place to park, and all of that. But mainly it was to look at the people that are
getting ready to fly, and people coming off of the aircraft. It’s the human behavior about
this that I enjoyed watching. And I would say to myself “Well, at least we’ve got a safe
flight that came in”. That led me to believe that I was going my part in preventing the
birds from colliding with aircraft, with all of these happy people coming in. That, right
there; if I had to do it all over again, I would do the airport thing, because of the public
safety. That’s about all.
There was some things that I didn’t care too much about. The Fish and Wildlife
Service. Especially some of the jobs, but overall, I am glad that I staid with the Service.
It was a good place. And I met a lot of good people too, a lot of them. We had some
good times, and we had some bad times but that goes with life.
MR. GOETTEL: I think that one of the tragedies about animal damage control, or
wildlife assistance was when it went to the Department of Agriculture. And I say,
tragedy, because we were all part of a family it seemed. We all worked very close
together. Even though I was in Refuges, I was working with you guys all of the time it
seemed. You guys were Field Biologists, and it’s hard to get, fifteen years later, it’s so
hard to find good Field Biologists that have good, practical experience. Speaking for
myself, I really hated to see that part of the Fish and Wildlife Service get transferred
away. Because the fact of the matter is that we just didn’t work that closely any more. I
mean, we did, but it was a little bit different I think.
7
MR. GODIN: Yeah, that’s right. Working as a biologist, whether a field biologist or an
office biologist, we were really dedicated. I know that some people might that that is
bullshit, but we were. And as you interview other people you will see how the puzzle fits
together to have a nice organization. I had a good time. I hope that at least, I helped
other people. Not only the birds or mammals or whatever, but it’s the people.
MR. GOETTEL: After sixteen years in New Jersey you spent about six months in the
Regional office, I guess, or four months in the Regional office. Then you transferred up
to Augusta, Maine as the Wildlife Assistance Field Biologist-State Director in Maine.
MR. GODIN: One of the problems that I first heard about in Maine was about the
Canada Geese and Blueberries. These are the low-bush Blueberries that occur in Maine.
What the Canada Geese would do was just walk into the bush and eat the Blueberries.
But as they were doing this, they would trample over the low bushes, and a lot of the
berries fell off onto the ground. This would cause an economic hardship for the
Blueberry growers. They phoned me and asked me what they could do. I said that they
could use the shell crackers. And if it became evident that the problem was not
improving, I would investigate it a little more, and make bird observations to see what
they were really doing. That’s how we solved the problem of Canada goose depredation
of Blueberries, at least when I was there, just by using shell crackers. They were really
worried about people, much more than Gulls would be.
MR. GOETTEL: You worked on Cormorants I think too, didn’t you, up there?
MR. GODIN: Yes. One of the problems that the State Fish and Game had was the
Atlantic salmon depredation with the Double Crested Cormorant. In Maine there is at
least one Fish and Wildlife Service hatchery that grows these Atlantic salmon. They
release them as smelt. This is up in the Penobscot River. Then the fish would migrate
down to the ocean, and be on their way to return, and then, go back south. So, the
Cormorant was causing depredation. They were eating a lot of the smelts. Nobody made
an assessment of how much that the birds were eating, or if it was a natural mortality of
the fish, or if the birds were taking more of these fishes. What we did when we were
working the State Atlantic Salmon Commission and the State Fish and Game
Commission was to work on the upper and lower Penobscot River, collecting the
Starlings. We divided these into certain areas, like A, B, and C, and so forth. With the
Cormorants that we got, we did crop seed, and
Interview with George Gavutis, Jr. and Tommy Stubbs by Thomas Goettel, August 30, 2000
No full textOral history interview with George Gavutis, Jr. and Tommy Stubbs. Thomas Goettel was the interviewer.1
INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE GAVUTIS, JR. AND TOMMY STUBBS
BY THOMAS GOETTEL, AUGUST 30, 2000
MR. GOETTEL: Today is August 30, 2000 and we are in Kensington, New Hampshire
with George Gavutis. We are at George’s house and we’re also talking to Tommy
Stubbs. Tommy worked at Parker River for quite some time on the Maintenance staff?
MR. STUBBS: Yes, on the Maintenance staff.
MR. GOETTEL: He was the head of the Maintenance department. We thought we’d get
together here today and talk a bit about their careers with the Fish and Wildlife Service,
in the Division of Refuges. George, you are from right around this area aren’t you?
Aren’t you from New Hampshire?
MR. GAVUTIS: Massachusetts.
MR. GOETTEL: Lawrence, Massachusetts?
MR. GAVUTIS: Lowell.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, ok, Lowell, Mass. How did you get started with your career with
the Division of Refuges?
MR. GAVUTIS: I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in the back in the
late 1950s and 1960s and I got hired as a student assistant, which was a summer program
at Parker River. The manager of it was J. C. Apple at the time, and that’s when I met
Tom. And Woody Sears, and Harry Sears were all there then I believe. Tom was the
maintenance foreman, either then or thereafter at some point, and ran that part of the
program. I worked there for three summers, and went back to school in the fall. When I
graduated worked there during the fall, and then I went in the Military for a while.
MR. GOETTEL: In what branch?
MR. GAVUTIS: I went into the Army Reserves for six months. I was down at Fort Dix
for eight weeks of basic training, and then went to meetings on weekends and summers
for about eight years thereafter, because I jumped around a lot in the Army.
MR. GOETTEL: So, did you go to UMASS in wildlife, was what your major?
MR. GAVUTIS: Yes, Wildlife Management. I was under Professor Tripanzi, and Dr.
Sheldon, who was the woodcock person.
MR. GOETTEL: What a character!
MR. GAVUTIS: What a guy! And then, Fred Greeley, I believe took over up there. I
kept coming back to Parker River. J. C. Apple had me doing the cratering charge, you
2
know, blowing potholes with Army. And then he tried to make the regional blasting
expert. In fact, I still have my Blaster’s Handbook, and all this. I went up to
Montezuma, which was my first assignment. We started mixing ammonium nitrate and
fuel oil, which is the cause of the demise of some buildings as you may recall recently out
in Kansas City [referring to Oklahoma City Federal Building]. My father used to talk
about the Texas City fire on the coast of Texas, when a big ship caught fire, and
exploded. It was like at atomic bomb had gone off down there. So when I was working
with this stuff, he was nervous. I was nervous too. We used blasting caps and detonating
cord, which you could wrap around a tree and cut the tree right off! We used that to blow
these potholes. We’d mix fifty pound bags, in plastic, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and
diesel fuel. Then we’d stick a blasting cap in, or “det cord” in and dig a hole and through
it in, and blow- holes. In the marsh, basically it was kind of a prelude to open marsh
water management. It was basically putting deep- water sumps in the upland edge, or the
high part of the marsh, where the mosquitos’ breed, and the minnows couldn’t get, except
during extreme tides, and they couldn’t stay there. They’d come out with the tides, and
couldn’t eat the mosquitoes. So that’s why the mosquito breeding was so bad.
We went over the Nelson’s Island.
MR. STUMP: We’ve got pictures of those.
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah, I’ve got all that.
MR. GOETELL: We just had a battery failure. So George you were talking about
blasting. Doing your blasting. Tommy, you mentioned having pictures. And there were
some narrative reports?
MR. GAVUTIS: There was actually a Cratering Charge Report filed, and I have that on
file. With the black and white photos of the geysers, and maybe some colored photos
too. If again, you can’t find it at the Refuge, or it isn’t available, I have all that stuff. I
have a lot of the narrative reports too.
MR. GOETTEL: I’ll look into the Narratives, because they are supposed to be archived.
So, if they are archived somewhere in the official government archives we’ll be all set.
Maybe we can at least take a copy of some of your other stuff. And maybe sometime this
winter when you’re looking through your memorabilia, and if you think of it, just set
some stuff aside, and I would be glad to make copies of it. We certainly don’t want to
take the original copies from you guys. Whatever, you’d like to see put in the archives.
Because that’s the type of stuff that will meant a lot. So much of the time we are always
reinventing the wheel, and so much of this stuff gets lost. You started talking George,
about going to the different stations, you were the regional blasting guy?
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: You went to a whole bunch of different stations?
3
MR. GAVUTIS: J.C. Apple said, “you are a new employee, and the best way to fame
and fortune is to be an expert in something. You would get to see the whole region, I
think we should designate you the regional blasting expert”. I guess I knew as much
about ammonium nitrate as anybody, or more. The military came out with the crater
charges first, from Fort Dix. And they did them at Parker River during the first stage.
After that we just built our own components. We’d get heavy- duty plastic bags, and
you’d buy ammonium nitrate fertilizer at Agway, or wherever, I guess they had Agway
then. And then a certain proportion of diesel fuel was added. We used to stir it up. We
actually did it in the bags. They were very tough bags. I can’t remember what we’d use
for a paddle. We would pour the diesel fuel on the “pril” ammonium nitrate. It looked
like little beads, or circles. It would soak up the diesel in just the right proportion. It
would soak down through and as I recall, we either sloshed the bags around, or stirred it.
Then you insert a piece of the detonating cord or a blasting cap into the bag. Then you
just tied the end, or taped the bag shut. We’d dig a hole, two or three feet deep with a
posthole digger. Usually it was in organic soils, there in the marsh, so it was pretty easy
digging once you got through the sod. Then you’d bury this thing, and you’d do a whole
series of them. Then you would evacuate the area, and touch it off with a detonator,
electrically, or you’d light the detonating cord. I really was nervous about all of that!
Thinking that you could get blown up here you know! This was serious stuff! [laughing]
But it was very exciting and interesting and scary when that stuff went off! You wanted
to be well away. Chunks of mud, and pieces of clams shells, and rocks went way up in
the air. The narrative pictures, and that report that I did were replete with pictures of
these blasts, and the craters that resulted.
MR. STUBBS: We even got some aerial views.
MR. GAVUTIS: We had aerial views, like Tom said, that looked like a moonscape right
afterwards. But the stuff kind of melts down, and you end up with these fairly clean
looking areas.
MR. GOETTEL: It would be interesting to see what it looks like now from the air.
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah. We took pictures when I went back to Parker River as the
manager, many years later. We did a survey there. They were still there. You could see
the rings. They were on the latest aerials that the SCS would take every few years.
MR. STUBBS: But they had filled in some.
MR. GAVUTIS: They filled in depth wise. That happened pretty quickly, within a year
or two. Because the tides would come in and out, the debris around the edges kind of
melts down, and they may have been more that four feet. But they ended up around three
or four feet deep. But then they didn’t change. I was the manager in the early 1970s and
they were blasted in the early 1960s, around 1962, right around the time I was graduating
from the University of Massachusetts, before I went into the Army for a while. They had
already mellowed by then, and had re-vegetated. But the rings, the circles are still there.
4
I don’t know how they are now. It’s been fifteen or twenty years since I was at Parker
River as the manager.
MR. GOETTEL: But they were there then?
MR. GUVATIS: Oh, they were. That was the interesting thing. It was kind of like
killing a fly with a sledgehammer, but the basic premise was to super-saturate the upland
edges to keep the mosquitoes from breeding, where the minnows can’t live and linger
long enough to control the population of mosquito larvae with these sumps and reservoirs
that will hold these minnows. And every time it rains hard or a tide seeps in a little bit,
they immediately go out from these reservoirs and then they can retreat back into them.
They aren’t picked off by birds, or stranded, or have to go back to sea, where ever they
have to go to keep up with the water, because they have a little sump there that they live
in.
MR. STUBBS: Now, was it done mostly for mosquitoes?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah. I always felt that it was. When we did it some of the marches,
we did it in dense areas. When we did it in Montezuma it was actually more for habitat
interspersion. Habit improvement, because we went into dense cattail stands. There was
some mosquito problem, but it was really to break up the marsh, and breeding ponds.
That’s a good question Tom. But at Parker River, it was. At least, I felt it was. Because I
studied the mosquitoes as part of my student assistant duties for the summer before we
did it. I logged, and basically marked all of the breeding spots with stakes. I remember
having lathe, or construction stakes. And we dug a hole underneath each one of those
stakes and blew a big hole. In some places there were like four or five in a row that
almost touched each other. And then there would be a big gap, because there would be
no breeding there. Then there would be one here, and one there. I could dig out those
photos, it wouldn’t take long, before you left today, although, my house is upside down
with the renovations here. So I shouldn’t say that. I know about where they are.
MR. GOETTEL: You say that it was overkill. But, these days we’ve got all of that ultra
low ground pressure equipment that you didn’t have back then. So it was probably the
best way to get the job done.
MR. GAVUTIS: We did other things, too. Tom had an “OC-6” and an “OC-3” at Parker
River with cleat tracks, old crawlers. They don’t even make that stuff any more. That
stuff could practically run over your foot in the marsh, and not hurt you. But, when I was
the manager there, with Bill Faller there as the biologist, we bought a backhoe unit for
that “OC-6”. The problem was that it didn’t have enough reach. It wasn’t a big enough
machine. The ones that they are using now are much bigger machines with some reach to
them. You can do the same thing with these very low ground pressure excavators now,
much faster. What are you talking about for a price tag on one of those things, a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars?
MR. STUPPS: One hundred and fifty, to two hundred thousand dollars.
5
MR. GAVUTIS: So, still there still may be some application for the blasting technique.
I wrote up a paper on it. Like I said for this study. A report. And it went on. After that I
oversaw at Montezuma and Bombay Hook, and Brigantine, I did Brigantine too, off the
north dike at Brigantine. Mostly salt marsh stuff though, except for Montezuma. Then
other Refuges, more and more, picked up on it. It wasn’t that complicated a technique.
And they either had the National Guard, like up at Iroquois, and Great Meadows got into
it too.
MR. STUPPS: The reason why I think Parker River got into mosquito control was when
the land was taken, Fish and Wildlife Service went on record, saying that we would
contribute toward mosquito abatement.
MR. GUVATIS: We were committed.
MR.STUPPS: As a matter of fact, we used to buy DDT. I think we had one thousand
dollars, which was a lot of money back then, each year for DDT. We’d buy as many as
ten, fifty-five gallon barrels of 25% DDT. We would give it to the State and they would
aerial spray around the perimeter of the refuge.
MR. GUVATIS: I can remember the last time they did that. I was a student there. And
there was an encephalitis scare that year. It was in August or early September and they
sprayed. They weren’t supposed to spray in the impoundments but they did that year. In
fact, I don’t think we gave them that DDT. I think the Governor mobilized the National
Guard and everything else because there was such a health crisis. A couple of people had
died. So, they were going up in these big transport planes. They were big planes, I
remember seeing them, flying wing-to-wing, going right up Plum Island sound. But they
also sprayed the impoundment, so it killed all of the white perch. We had a big white
perch die off that year.
MR. STUPPS: I remember that year.
MR. GUVATIS: That was my recollection. I wasn’t in charge of the Refuge or anything
else then. I was just a student, but I reported on my findings. I remember that “J.C.”
[Apple] was pretty concerned or upset that they had sprayed the impoundment, and that
they hadn’t really talked to us, or got our permission, or coordinated the spraying of the
marsh. It was about the time that DDT banned. Rachel Carson’s studies were coming
out in her books and everything, and we had lost all of our ospreys and eagles nesting on
the east coast. So it was about that time that it shut down. I think it was 1960 or 1959 I
would guess, that I was there as a student. And that was probably the end of it, the end of
DDT. I am surprised that it went that long. When you think now, that wasn’t that long
ago. When you think of it, it was one hundred years ago when they sprayed 100% DDT,
and agent orange. When I was as Iroquois Refuge, which was my third assignment,
which would have made it in the mid 1960s, for a month, I sprayed agent orange on
boundaries with a pumper unit. I was in an old command car, just going along spraying
boundaries with agent orange. Then, a few years later, I was at another Refuge, and
6
Larry Smith was still at Iroquois, everything refuge did it, it was what we did. When I
was at Parker River, they had me experimenting with bait. No, it wasn’t bait. It was
“urea ” soil sterilant that I was doing. They said the side effects would be equivalent to
taking an aspirin. You didn’t have to wear a mask or anything. I was going into these
cattail stands with a cyclone seeder and it would just bounce back at you after hitting this
wall of cattails. For quite a few years, that strip of cattails staid there. We used to take
pictures of them. If we had put it on by plane, it probably would have been better. It was
a soil sterilant.
MR. STUPPS: It worked pretty well too.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, it kept in open. We were trying to make openings in the cattail,
because it was a very shallow marsh. Cattail then, was like “loostrife, and fragmities” is
now it was kind of a noxious weed in that concentration.
MR. STUPPS: I remember that you had the “cattail crusher” when you were a student,
I’ve got a picture of that.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, but you made it. Oh had it stuck in a hole. Those picture are all
in the narratives with the big OC-6 stuck up in the air and you guys trying to pull me out,
because I had fallen into one of the holes with it. These were some interesting photos of
personnel in action!
MR. STUPPS: The narrative reports were really good back then.
MR. GUVATIS: They were.
MR. STUPPS: Do they still have the Refuge report?
MR. GOETTEL: Well, we do. We’re supposed to, but for five or so years there wasn’t a
lot of …stations just didn’t do them. But we’re getting back into doing them now. I’ll
tell you, it was the biggest tragedy, not to do the narrative reports.
MR. GUVATIS: There are some gaps there now. Some of the stations are backed up a
couple of years. Some years will never get done, with personnel changes and things like
that.
MR. GOETTEL: And all of that is lost. I remember the first thing you used to do when
you got to a new station was to sit down and read the narratives.
MR. STUPPS: Absolutely, absolutely!
MR. GUVATIS: What a wealth of information! And you wouldn’t have to reinvent the
wheel at the field level anyways. I think that a lot of the “reinventing the wheel” stuff
that you talked about was budgetary stuff. We went through budgetary crisis and
exercises. They call it “ZBB” and all these names. Every administration that came in
7
had a new idea about how to track your finances and get budgeted for funding, and going
to Congress. That, and the political change in the Service, every time the administration
changes, or there is an election, it changes. There has been a lot of stability at the refuge
level, except on the supervisory end of things kind of fell apart at some point along the
way. There was no guidance from Washington down. It used to be, in the days of Jay
Cox Salyer and the early days, there was a real Service hierarchy just like there would be
in the military, all the way down through. That pride kind of filtered up and down the
tree. I can remember that even in my tenure the Washington office was just basically
emasculated. And even the regions! It became almost like the refuge managers had total
control of the programs. And sometimes that was fine and good, and sometimes it
wasn’t. Some managers needed or wanted some guidance. They weren’t all experienced
in every area. And I would hope that someday that this turns around again.
MR. STUPPS: One thing I remember from when I first started to work was that the
regional refuge supervisor would come out and did inspections. Each vehicle was
inspected, and they even went as far and to inspect the residents.
MR. GUVATIS: They inspected the logbooks.
MR. STUPPS: I remember George Spinner. I guess his wife didn’t keep a very clean
house. Erase that, I guess I shouldn’t say that! They used to inspect everything!
MR. GUVATIS: Even the quarters. They’d tell you that they needed to see the quarters,
and “what would be the best time?” And they would come and look at it. The log books,
the vehicles and the tractors, everything. That’s the way it was when I started. Mert
Radway was the assistant supervisor, and Tom Horne was the supervisor. But that kind
of thing would come and go a bit. I remember when Tom McKantor, Ed Moses, and I
were the three supervisors for the region. We did conduct some inspections of that type.
We would bring a person from CGS sometimes, on the team when we did the station
inspections. Every five years we’d do every station. So it would go in a five-year cycle.
Someone would concentrate on the books, some on budget and finance. Someone from
personnel would concentrate on the personnel actions and interview all of the staff. I
don’t know if you ever got called into one of those, but they’d actually bring each staff
member in by themselves and talk to you. That was probably in the early 1980s when I
was still around. Then it kind of went away after that.
MR. STUPPS: Oh yeah, I remember those! When Arthur Miller was the Regional
Refuge Supervisor, his big thing was that all of the tracks had to be tight on all of the
dozers. We didn’t really believe that it was that important. And I remember that one
time when he came out I took wood on a sprocket and backed a machine up to tighten the
tracks. If he had ever looked to see how those tracks were tight, but they were tight!
MR. GUVATIS: But how were they tight? [all laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: Tommy, where are you from originally? How did you get involved in
the Fish and Wildlife Service?
8
MR. STUPPS: Delaware was where I got involved in the government. I was looking for
a job. I had just gotten out of the military.
MR. GOETTEL: What branch were you in?
MR. STUPPS: The Navy.
MR. GOETTEL: How long were you in?
MR. STUPPS: A year and a half.
MR. GOETTEL: That must have been after World War II.
MR. STUPPS: No, I was in World War II. I was in the Philippines when the war ended.
I came out, and I was looking for a job, and I went over to see the Refuge Manager, and I
got hired.
MR. GAVUTIS: This was in Maryland?
MR. STUPPS: Delaware, at Bombay Hook.
MR. GAVUTIS: You’re from Maryland or Delaware?
MR. STUPPS: I was born in Maryland. And George Spinner was the Refuge Manager,
he asked me to fill out a form. “Key” Wallace was at Blackwater then, he would come
over and help us on a job, and he was going to loose a maintenance man. He said he
would hire me if I could get on the list. I filled out the application and sent it in, and they
offered me the job up at Parker River. So in 1947, I went to Parker River.
MR. GAVUTIS: But you started down there, you actually worked down there?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, I worked at Bombay Hook as a laborer for seventy-one cents an
hour.
MR. GAVUTIS: As a temporary?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, ok. When I came up here I earned twenty-two hundred dollars a
year. I was a CTC-5 for some reason. Then in 1951, I got on permanent. But I got my
law enforcement authority in 1949. It don’t seem that they would have given it to me,
but I looked at it just recently.
MR. GAVUTIS: Well, they were pretty casual. The further back you go, the more
casual it was! “Here’s your badge. Do good things for wildlife. Don’t shoot anybody,
and don’t hurt anybody”!
9
MR. STUPPS: “Don’t do anything!”
MR. GUVATIS: “Protect the wil
Interview with Gordon Nightingale by Thomas Goettel, November 21, 2000
No full textOral history interview with Gordon Nightingale as interviewed by Thomas Goettel. Also present is Tommy Stubbs.1
INTERVIEW WITH GORDON NIGHTINGALE
BY THOMAS GOETTEL, NOVEMBER 21, 2000
MR. GOETTEL: It’s November 21, 2000, we are in the home of Gordon Nightingale,
who is a legendary Refuge Manager in the Fish and Wildlife Service. We are in
Marshfield, Massachusetts. Also present is Tommy Stubbs, who was the Maintenance
Foreman at Parker River for over forty years. Gordon, would you tell us a bit about how
you got into the Fish and Wildlife Service, and your background, please?
MR. NIGHTINGALE: I started work with the State of Massachusetts, as a
Conservation Skilled Helper on the Beartown State Forest. That is were I met my wife. I
took the job at 3,825.00 a year. I get more than that now each month on my retirement. I went to
Moosehorn in 1959, and left in 1961. I went to Bombay Hook and Prime Hook in 1961
until 1967. I was the Regional Biologist in Boston from 1967 to 1971. I was Assistant
Regional Supervisor for Planning in New Mexico, Region 2, from 1971 until 1972. I was
Assistant Regional Supervisor for Operations in Region 2 from 1972 to 1973. I then
went to Washington as Chief of Systems. That was the old PPBE, from June of 1973 to
October of 1973. That’s when the Directorate made the under-the-counter decision to
break the backs of the Divisions. The Divisions were largely self-contained at that time.
The Director maintained control, but they made all of the operations decisions, or most of
them. I went to the branch of Programming, which is budgets for Refuges from October
of 1973 to March of 1974. But the budget had been taken out of Refuge’s hands so it
was a job of providing information to the program managers. Then I went as I&R
Program Coordinator. I was given a choice of a couple of them, but I took that because
Wildlife didn’t talk, and I thought people did. I was there from 1974 to 1977. Then I
went into Washington D.C. as a Coordinator. Lynn Greenwalt asked me to take over a
difficult job where people were fighting amongst each other to try and come up with a
3
program management document. I was there from 1977 to 1979, and I got the document.
Shortly afterward I came up to the Boston Regional office in 1979 as Assistant Regional
Director for Federal Assistance and Endangered Species. In 1982, I became Assistant
Regional Director for Habitat Preservation. I was there until August of 1984 when I left.
Throughout my career, I have enjoyed being constructive, rather than obstructive. In
Refuges you are trying to get something done, as a rule. You are trying to increase
populations, and make it better for the public. But in law enforcement, you are trying to
catch somebody doing something wrong. I have done a lot of it, but I didn’t really enjoy
it that much. Habitat preservation was a little frustrating because some of the Field
Supervisors bragged that this was the fourth time that they had saved these three acres of
marsh. We were having a big fight with the Corp of Engineers, and a lot of the things
were very valid. But the Regional Director was limited to how many hot potatoes he
could logically pass upstairs to Washington. And Washington was limited to how many
they could handle. We tried to pick those that were of some significance. They used to
joke with me, when I was Acting Regional Director one day, and I signed an requisition
request and it turned out that it was for a Casino’s reflecting pool that was reputedly tied
to the Mafia. They joked that my days were numbered. Nothing ever came of it. Of all
of the work that I have done, I enjoyed Refuges the most, and Federal Aid was perhaps
the next. It’s gratifying to be able to have millions of dollars to pass out to people. You
just have to make sure that they adhere to the regulations. When I was in Federal Aid,
there was a policy; not really a rule that if you were going to use land for a match you had
twenty-five percent State, and seventy-five percent Federal. If you were going to use the
value of the land to match the Federal dollars, you had to use marshland. It was a
marshland project. I talked long and loud, with the premise being that we were all in
wildlife conservation to encourage the States to have a single project so that Fish and
Game land, anywhere in the State could be pledged as the match to the Federal money. It
worked out very well because there were many of the States that were about to loose
their money. I think it was three years, and then it re-reverted. This way it opened up a
big land bank that they could use. It also had the advantage that once it went into Federal
Aid, it couldn’t be diverted for a prison or roads unless the Federal Aid money was
reimbursed. It safeguarded a lot of land, and I did enjoy that.
MR. GOETTEL: Are you from Marshfield originally?
MR. NIGHTINGALE: Oh no. I was born in Wisconsin and lived anywhere from Maine
to Florida. I went to five schools in one year. I never got past the sophomore year of
College. I attempted to go back, but I would get a promotion, so I thought, “Why go
back?” I would file for Civil Service and they would tell me I wasn’t qualified. But
within the year I would be that, or more. So I did something right.
MR. GOETTEL: Were you in the Service?
4
MR. NIGHTINGALE: No. That’s the main reason I left the State. Because I took a
slight cut in pay to take a temporary job with the Federal government. The State of
Massachusetts had absolute Veterans preference. If you got a one hundred on the exam,
and a veteran got a sixty-one, you went to the bottom of the list. I didn’t mind ten points
or so with the Federal government.
The first meeting I attended as a representative of the Fish and Wildlife Service was the
old Black Duck Committee, back in 1950. It met in Maryland. It sticks in my mind for
two reasons; one was that the people on that committee were very wealthy. They ate at
a hotel in Maryland. I don’t know what I had, but it was the cheapest thing on the menu.
And they had drinks, and I didn’t have any. When the time came, they divided the check.
My per diem was 35.00. The
other thing was that they went on and on about how they needed more banding and better
breeding ground surveys, harvest statistics and everything and anything. I had the
temerity to say, “Well, at any one time, what is the limiting factor that controls the
population of the eastern coastal Black Duck?” Everybody looked at me, and went on as
though I hadn’t said anything. I regret to say that through the thirty or forty years that I
was associated with it, nobody has ever really attacked it from the basic questions, and
still haven’t as far as I know. Another thing that I came away with is that; I don’t know
if you are familiar with the work of Joseph Hager, the former State Ornithologist. But he
spent a lifetime on two things, the Peregrine Falcon and the Black Duck. He took and
maintained meticulous records on thousand and thousands of bandings, by hand. He had
a theory that the Black Ducks were largely controlled, at that time at least, by the
limitations on the wintering habitat. (The ducks that wintered this far north.) The ducks
moved down an estuary during a prolonged hard freeze. There is no inland wintering
habitat. Those that were furthest up the estuary, that were first pushed down, were in
the poorest shape when it really got critical. The critical habitat, clam flats and muscle
beds and so forth that are exposed at low tide, and that ducks can get to, at least until a
sheet of ice forms on them. That’s where a lot of our habitat is being destroyed. They
are ripping out the muscle beds and so forth. I spent a lot of time when I was with the
State collecting birds, and getting breast profiles and so forth. There were a substantial
number of birds that died. A lot of them were very weakened. As the State Regional
Biologist, one of my jobs was to work on the Flyway Habitat Unit Project “FHUP.” It
was anchored by Dale Sutherland, a Biologist in Refuges in the Central office. Each
Region had a representative. In essence, what you did was that you conferred with the
States, and drew up maps of approximate acreages, estimated carrying capacity for
various seasons of the year knowing that it was very rough, and the lands ability to
support hunting. What it boiled down to was that during the fall, except for a few days,
there was plenty of hunting, and plenty of room for all of the ducks that we could ever
foresee having. The critical periods were in the winter and spring. But Washington didn’t
like that, so that sort of folded up. Granted, it was empirical but I’ve got copies of
reports about that thick just for Massachusetts.
5
MR. GOETTEL: Why didn’t Washington like it?
MR. NIGHTINGALE: They didn’t want to hear that there was plenty of room. We
didn’t need to preserve fall habitat particularly, and that’s mostly what Refuges did. Of
course, at that time, Refuges were almost totally waterfowl oriented. Some of them had
shorebirds. I know that when I got down to Bombay Hook I got short shrift when I
wanted to put some of the fields at Prime Hook… We got Prime Hook to preserve
habitat, and to stop it from being industrialized and polluted. Everybody agreed that we
really didn’t need it as a Refuge. The immediate plans were to open it to hunting and so
forth. But the management plan that I drew up was that we’d have almost no farmland.
We didn’t need it. At that time we had geese coming out of our ears. We had short
stopped all of the geese from going down to the Carolinas and Maryland and Delaware.
We had more geese than we could use. The waterfowl types got in there, and they cleared
land and farmed it and they succeeded in building up a problem goose population. Even
up at Bombay Hook, I planted hedgerows through the middles of the fields to make them
less attractive to geese, and to get some other bird species in there. We planted
Alesspidies [sic, a type of plant] and this and that and the other in parts of it. We tried
to lay some field’s fallow. We had a pretty good population of Bobolink and
Meadowlark started. But after I left they put it back into maximum production again.
MR. STUBBS: We used to feed the Black Ducks with emergency feeding.
MR. NIGHTINGALE: That’s another thing. Hager’s theory was that one of the
advantages of banding Black Ducks is that they become acclimated to eating corn. I know
that down a Stage Harbor, we had a spring that is gone. It was where the Stage Island
dike is. There used to be a spring right near the base of it. The ducks would come up
there and tipple to get fresh water when it was cold. It got so that they would build
themselves something like an anthill.
MR. STUBBS: Some of them would be this high, wouldn’t they? The water would drip
off of their feathers, and it would freeze and look like a funnel.
MR. NIGHTINGALE: Yeah. And would actually take their feet off of the ground
reaching, trying to get water out of the bottom. What made me think of it was that we
spread corn out there. And we weren’t banding at that time. The ducks would sit on it.
It was a nice dry place. They didn’t eat it. Hager and his group, the Essex County
Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, or something or other, had a deal with some popcorn
makers. They got all of the “old maids” [corn that didn’t pop]. Warren Farthingham
used to run the airport. He would fly up in a Piper Cub or something, and have a door
off. He had bags of the stuff and would tip them over and hold them by the bottom of
the bag, and strew the corn out.
MR. GOETTEL: But the ducks wouldn’t eat it?
6
MR. NIGHTINGALE: Well, this was back when the State was doing a lot of banding, so
the ducks were acclimated to it.
MR. STUBBS: Ed Addie was doing a lot of banding then.
MR. NIGHTINGALE: We banded and banded and they were all showing the same
things. I ran sex and age studies when I was with the State, which showed; I don’t know
what affect it has, but most of your kill comes takes place in the first flush of hunting.
The sex and age study showed first of all that the preponderance of birds that were taken
during inland marsh hunting, or salt marsh were almost all female and young birds. Even
out on the harbor, along the edge, they were females and young. It wasn’t until late in the
season that the males appeared; the old males. And they weren’t harvested much accept
by the float hunters who actually sculled out and snuck up on the flocks.
MR. STUBBS: They were called “Red Legs” which we thought was a separate species.
MR. NIGHTINGALE: Yeah, for a while.
MR. STUBBS: Some of the people up there still do call them Red Legs. They think that
they are a different species.
MR. GOETTEL: To me, a Red Leg was a Canadian bird.
MR. STUBBS: It’s an adult bird, isn’t it?
MR. GOETTEL: It’s an adult bird.
MR. NIGHTINGALE: Yeah, that’s all it is. It is an adult male. If you keep them in a
pen, you can see them go through the color phases.
MR. STUBBS: How about the time we took Carbon Tetrachloride and sprayed the corn?
MR. NIGHTINGALE: I don’t want to talk about that. [Tongue in cheek] We stored
corn in bins. We had weevils and everything else in it.
MR. STUBBS: Why did we store the corn?
MR. NIGHTINGALE: For banding and for emergency feeding. It would get weevilly
and whatnot, so I lined the bins with tin. We took Indian backpack pumps and bought
Carbon Tetrachloride from a store stock catalog in five-gallon cans. We’d pour it in the
pumps and go in the bins and spray. We’d hold our breath as long as we could and came
out. It’s a wonder we’ve got any kidneys left at all!
7
MR. STUBBS: It was strong!
MR. NIGHTINGALE: I tried to get out of it, but Art Miller the Regional Refuge
Supervisor wanted to establish a resident goose population at Parker River. We built
pens, and got geese out there.
MR. STUBBS: I showed Tom a picture OF the pens that we built to bring them up from
down south. We got Mallards too.
MR. NIGHTINGALE: Yeah, and Bald Pate. We’d bring anything up that was available.
We had a lot of rats there and since we were talking about poison; we had the old
fashioned pump, like a huge bicycle pump. But you put in Cyanide and you’d pump
that in. It would hit the moist soil and it would dust and let out the fumes. It’s a wonder
we didn’t kill ourselves there! It was ignorance I guess, but we had pretty good control,
in fact we had control of phragmites in the pools. It later took over. We had a patrol
during the summer season. We’d go in with Urabor [sic?] a soil sterilent, with a duster.
You’d go in there and dust it and it would kill that particular thing. You had to go out far
and get the runners. We kept ahead of it. There has been some criticism of the
introduction of Japanese Black Pine on Plum Island. I am responsible. They wanted us
to farm some of the low dunes up against the impoundments. So we disked and disked,
but there was a bunch of junk so on a calm day we touched a match to it. All of a sudden
the wind picked up and the fire jumped road and went right out to the ocean. All of that
false heather, and everything burned. There wasn’t any marsh grass. It was just bare
sand. So I hurried up and got a bunch of Japanese Pine from the SCS, and we put those
in, and they have been too successful.
MR. STUBBS: Yep.
MR. NIGHTINGALE: One of the most vivid sights that I still have in my mind is going
down through that area. I was down there with my wife and we had on snowshoes. We
had had a heavy snow for the coast. And there wasn’t a track [animal] around or
anything. We went over to The Knobs, a little clump of woods there and right in front of
us, the snow just erupted. Six or seven deer were under the snow. There wasn’t a sign of
them, or any tracks. They just erupted and ran off. Your heart came right up in your
throat, but it was a beautiful sight. The pine trees, and the snow flying and the deer; and
the deer were bone dry. There was no dampness or anything. They were nice, and it was
a beautiful spot.
MR. GOETTEL: Let me ask you about feeding the Black Ducks in the wintertime. Why
did you do that?
8
MR. NIGHTINGALE: We were trying to save them. They would get a knife keel.
They just didn’t have feed. One thing is, that even when there were some muscle beds
there, as the tide went out, the ducks would all be in a maybe ten or twenty foot strip.
As the tide went out, a glaze of ice would form so they couldn’t get the muscle. Of
course muscles are sort of hard for Black Ducks to get to dislodge. They had necrosis of
the esophagus, which is a symptom of a Vitamin A deficiency, which corn is rich in. As I
remember, we didn’t run lead tests on those. But we collected some birds that were still
in good shape. I tried to devise a measurement by taking the length of the keel, in a
straight line, and a distance to the bones outer surface to try to determine how much was
flesh and how much was hair. It never really got quite worked out, but it was very
apparent that the birds, which could still fly that you shot, had far more breast, contour
that those that didn’t. And it was amazing too; I used my Lab [dog] down there. It
would be ten below, and he would get wet and icicles would form on his whiskers. He
would whine, and I would break them off. You would go along, say at eight o’clock in the
morning after the sun had been up a little bit, and the birds were up in the bushes, up in
the rack line. One would flap out to the water, but he could catch it. Some of them I put
back, and would make him leave them. You’d come back at twelve o’clock that bird
wo
Thomas Grisell letter to Thomas Rotch, 2nd mo 19th 1823
No full textThomas Grisell's letter reached the Rotch household several months before the unexpected death of Thomas Rotch in August, 1823. This is the last letter of the series and presumably the author learned of his friend's death before another letter was penned. 7.95" x 10" (20.2 by 25.5 cm
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No full textChurchmen in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries tried to regulate the costume of Italian women. These efforts failed, and regulation was largely left thereafter to civic authorities.The published version was published as Chapter 3 in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 5Izbicki, Thomas M. (2009), "Failed Censures: Ecclesiastical Regulation of Women’s Clothing in Late Medieval Italy" in Netherton, Robin and Owen-Crocker, Gale R., eds., Medieval Clothing and Textiles 5 (Boydell Press), 37-53ISBN: 9781843834519 (published book)Peer reviewe
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