174,848 research outputs found
Grover C. Gilmore interview, 14 August 2017
No full textGrover C. Gilmore is the Dean and Professor of Applied Social Sciences at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University. He received his Ph.D. from The John Hopkins University. This 2017 interview was collected as part of a yearlong, community-wide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Carl Stokes\u27 election as mayor of Cleveland
Jerry Grover
No full textNarrative by Jerry Grover of his career with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Jerry Grover was the first with a number of National Fish Hatcheries that eventually led to the position as Chief of the National Fish Hatchery System. The last 20 years before retirement, Jerry was a supervisor of field operations in both the Fishery program and Ecological Services program Deputy mostly on the West coast dealing with a wide range of contentious issues in fish husbandry of anadromous fishes and their habitats and basin-wide restoration programs.
Organization: FWS
Name: Jerry Grover
Years: 1961-1997
Program: Hatcheries
Keywords: History, Biography, Employee, Biologist, Hatcheries, Management, Fish ponds, Training, Fish husbandry, Department Training Program, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Tribal lands conservation, Administration, Endangered Species, Young People (YACC), Area offices, Fish production, Klamath River Fish and Wildlife Restor1
Oral History
of
Jerry C. Grover
Retired 1997
Deputy Assistant Regional Director
Ecological Services and California / Klamath Ecoregion
Portland Regional Office, Oregon
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
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Oral History
of
JERRY C. GROVER
Date of Interview: November 20, 2000
Final Edit: January 25, 2017
Location of Interview: Tigard, Oregon
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife
Service: 36 years from 1961-1997
Offices and Field Stations Worked,
Positions Held: Fisheries Mgt. Biologist GS-482-5
thru 11 at National Fish Hatcheries at White Sulphur
Springs, WV; Leetown, WV; Craig Brook, ME; Cortland,
NY; Winthrop, WA; Ennis, MT; Coleman, CA; Dept
Mgt, Training Prog, Washington, D.C. GS-11; Manager,
Carson NFH, WA. DS-11; Ass’t. Area Mgr GS-12/13
Jacksonville, FL; Division Mgr Columbia River Fishery
Offices GS-13; Chief NFH System, Washington D.C GM-
14.; Fishery Supervisor CA / Klamath R. Basin / Western
WA. GM-14; Deputy Ass’t. Regional Dir. Eco Services
and Supervisor CA-Klamath Basin GM-14
Colleagues and Mentors: George Balzer, Ray
Vaughn, Paul Handy, Tom Luken, Wally Steucke,
Howard Larsen, Marv Plenert, Dale Hall, Judy Grover
Most Important Issues: Completing the ‘user
pay’ funding agreements with Bur of Recl; implementing
a comprehensive salmon evaluation program;
implementing the Klamath River F & W Restoration Act;
maintaining a coherent family setting and getting 3 sons
thru the university with degrees.
Brief Summary of Interview: A southern
California farm boy completes his university education
and begins a career spanning over 36 years with the
Service. He was first with a number of National Fish
Hatcheries that eventually led to the position as Chief of
the National Fish Hatchery System. With 14 job transfers,
6 times transcontinental, working in a number of
reorganization configurations, a wide range of experience
was gained. The last 20 years before retirement, he was a
supervisor of field operations in both the Fishery program
and Ecological Services program Deputy mostly on the
West coast dealing with a wide range of contentious issues
in fish husbandry of anadromous fishes and their habitats
and basin-wide restoration programs. He did this as a
vital part of multiple organizational changes and
configurations.
Jerry C. Grover
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4
ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW:
JERRY C. GROVER
PORTLAND, OREGON
11/20/00
INTRODUCTION
ood morning, this is Jerry C. Grover dictating
my interview for the Oral History Project.
I’m recording the interview myself. The purpose of this
interview is part of a program to preserve the history,
heritage and culture of the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service
(FWS) through the eyes of its employees. This effort is
supported by the Association of Retired Fish & Wildlife
Service Employees and the Service’s Heritage Committee.
I am an Association Board member and a member of the
Committee.
My name is Jerry Carlton Grover. I was born in
Pasadena, California on July 19, 1936. My father was
Carlton O. Grover, an Iowa farm boy that moved to
California right after high school and worked in a number
of jobs. Mostly, he began as a meat cutter, but later on
mostly as a rigger dealing with cranes and cables and so
on. My mother was Bernice Stratford, [born in Chicago].
She was a real rounder. In her younger days she danced in
the ballet in the New York theatre in a chorus line. Their
marriages, this was both their second marriages. I wasn’t
born until she was thirty-six years old. In 1936 this was
kind of rather old to be having children. She would go on
to have two more children, giving birth to the last when
she was forty-two.
When I was growing up she taught ballet. She
had a small studio in Alta Loma, California, (now Rancho
Cucamonga) on an orange grove. It was her desire
growing up in Chicago that when she moved west she
wanted to live on a ranch or a farm and have all the
critters. We had horses, cows, goats, pheasants, turkeys,
ducks, plus the routine dogs and cats.
EARLY YEARS
lived on an orange grove. We lived at the last
developed place & paved road going up the
mountain hillside. Everything else was dirt roads,
sagebrush. As a young boy I did a lot of hunting, and
when the opportunity and season presented itself I did a
lot of fishing. My other leisure time was exploring in the
pucker brush on my horse. A lot of my off time was spent
doing farm chores, milking the cow and the never ending
task of irrigating the orange grove and while going to
school.
I went to a little grade school. There were
fourteen of us in eighth grade. This class went to a
consolidated high school, Chaffey High School that
represented the entire west-end of San Bernardino County
in Southern California. The school had nearly four
thousand students. There was nearly a thousand in my
graduating class, so taking fourteen young people from a
little country school for a 1 hour bus ride and throwing
them into this was something that was really an eye
opener. It did have its advantages. With the large number
of students they had advanced and specialty classes. Not
only did you have English, but you had English Lit.,
Composition, etc. and you could get into report, technical
writing, chemistry; not only inorganic but organic
chemistry, and so you had a wide array, many of which
were pre-university level classes. The shops, they had all
kinds of woodworking shops, metal shops and automotive
shops so it was a pretty good background for high school.
From there, I went to junior college. Chaffey
Junior College was adjacent to the Chaffey High School
that I attended. I went there for two years and during that
time I was working intermittently in a gas station. I’d
work after hours and on weekends and that provided the
money to keep my car going and the other things I wanted
to do. Then it was to Utah State University, Logan Utah,
where I completed a B. S. degree in Fisheries
Management Biology.
By the time I transferred to Utah State University,
I had met Judy Moffitt who would turn out to be my wife.
We attended Utah State together the first year, my junior
year. By our senior year we were married and she
dropped out of school and to work for Thiokol
Corporation, [a maker of solid fuel rocket engines] clear
on the north end of the Great Salt Lake, near Brigham
City. I’d take her downtown at six in the morning to catch
the bus and pick her up at six at night. It was kind of a
long stint.
G
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wasn’t a particularly good student until right
after I met Judy and got to Utah State. I kind of
calmed down and became focused. My junior and senior
year I really re-knuckled down, with the course work
getting greatly more interesting. Rather than taking
English 101 and Political Science 101 and all those other
basic courses that are required, I started getting into the
fisheries and wildlife management and the ecological kind
of courses that were much more interesting. I made the
Dean’s List for the last two years. I did apply for grad
school and was accepted, but by that time I was getting
schooled out and was looking for an opportunity to go to
work. Also at those times, it seemed advanced degrees
were headed toward a career in teaching or research,
neither of which perked my interest.
During the summer’s, before & after my junior
year and after my senior year I worked for the State of
California as a fisheries seasonal aide out of Chino,
California. Immediately upon graduation I went to work
for California Department of Fish and Game again on a
seasonal appointment. Even though a native Californian, I
had no desire make my career there. In the mean time I
had applied through the Federal Service Entrance
Examination for any number of jobs, whether it was with
the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries or the Fish and
Wildlife Service. I kind of just threw my applications out,
along with a number of select state agencies. Ultimately, I
was to get offers at the Federal level that interested me
and I finally accepted my first job which was with the
Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, later to become
the Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Fish
Hatchery in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
BEGINNING WITH
THE FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
hen I reported to work at White Sulphur
Springs it was in February 1961. I came on
as a GS-482-5 Fisheries Management Biologist expecting
to do typical fieldwork I did with the State of California.
When I was hired to go there I was told that, “your job
would be the same.” I felt, ‘Well, here we’re going to
little old backwards West Virginia with all the coal mining
problems and acid mine waste issues,” and things like
that. I’d be working out of a fish hatchery. Well, when I
got there my first job was scrubbing ponds and sweeping
fish shit out of ponds, feeding fish and high-tech mowing
grass [powered lawn mower]. This was a little
disappointing, but it took every nickel that we had to get
back there and so there was no turning around. Then as I
got going with my job, it was pretty interesting work. It
was different than what I had expected, but I grew up on a
farm learning how to raise and care for things, so fish
culture was un-different and interesting work. I met folks
in another hatchery and saw where they were going in
their careers and I began to see the opportunities that were
there over all. It wasn’t a bad job.
It was an entry-level job at GS-5, and the guy I
worked for was George Eisenlore. George, I would come
to find out later, had the reputation of being one of the
“unholy three.” There were three managers that were
absolute bearcats to work for. They were just tough old
goats. The experience I had with George is that he didn’t
particularly care for college graduates. He knew
everything, and you know you were here to learn, and so
he told you what you needed to know. I was just another
worker on the place, but beginning to become acquainted
with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
One thing about George, he kept scrupulous
books. Smaller staffed stations generally did not have a
clerk to do the payroll, pay bills, order supplies, and
answer correspondence. George filled this role at White
Sulphur Springs and which he threw me into. I wasn’t
quite his right hand man; I was his ‘pinky’ and had to
learn the current operations and budgeting systems and
besides, I could type better than him. This later would be
greatly appreciated and gave me an advantage in other
jobs.
After a year and a half there, I transferred to
Leetown, West Virginia, over on the Eastern panhandle.
It was a hatchery co-located with the Eastern Fuish
Disease Laoratory. I was acting assistant manager as a
GS-7. Both these hatcheries, White Sulphur Springs and
Leetown, were what are called ‘combination hatcheries’.
They raised trout as well as warm water fishes: bass, blue
gill, and catfish. The trout were generally stocked into
state managed waters, mostly on national forest lands,
while the warm water fish were part of the Federal Farm
Pond Program.
I wasn’t very long at Leetown, West Virginia
when I was transferred to Craig Brook, Maine. This was
an Atlantic salmon hatchery, and it was involved in a
program that President Kennedy had just started - the
Accelerated Public Works Program (APW). It was to help
counter the high unemployment in Hancock County,
Maine, a high unemployment area. The assistant manager
had retired, so I went up there as a GS-7 and worked at
that hatchery in the GS-9 position. We had a lot of APW
make work projects where we could hire lots of labor.
Mostly we were thinning out the forest, the land the
hatchery was on. But the focus there was Atlantic salmon,
the fish culture work was focused on the culture of this
species, trying to get them up to size, and getting good
migration and survival rates once they were released to the
ocean.
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From there I went to Cortland, New York to the
Fish Husbandry In-Service Training School. It was a
research station, the Eastern Fish Nutrition Laboratory in
upstate New York between Syracuse and Cornell. The
Lab developed the Cortland #6 trout diet universally used
throughout all the trout hatchery systems. It was
compounded on-station. It was 50% ground meat – liver
and spleen, either pork or beef – and 50% dry meals such
as wheat middling’s, distiller solubles, cotton seed meal
and similar products.
The focus of the school was nutrition, husbandry
and disease. Basically, it was the Fish and Wildlife
Service’s effort to professionalize their fish culturists, fish
husbandry and provide some technical training specific to
the needs of fish husbandry. When I was hired into the
Fish and Wildlife Service I was part of a wave, a vanguard
of folks that came in with college degrees. Here-to-fore,
hatchery managers were generally selected from the ranks.
You started out as GS-1. If you showed promise, kept
your nose clean and could work hard and all that, you
could end up as a hatchery manager. Well, in the
professionalizing they were wanting to keep pace with the
states with the monies that the Dingell Johnson Act was
providing to the states. It was a general
professionalization of the Fish and Wildlife Service. I was
in this vanguard group of folks that came in about that
time with college degrees and while we knew the good
biology of things, we were grounded in the university
education. The more practical aspects of raising
salmonids were accomplished through this school in
Cortland, New York.
By this time we’d had two children. One was
born at White Sulphur Springs when we were there, our
oldest son Jeff, and our second son Joel was born in Craig
Brook Maine. After completing the course in Cortland,
New York, we were heading off and going west. Here I
am a western person finally getting an assignment in the
west.
I was assigned to the Winthrop NFH, Washington
in 1966 where I was introduced to the culture of Pacific
salmon. This was a hatchery on the Methow River, just
below the Canadian border by about thirty miles. I was
there not too long when a GS-9 Assistant Manager job at
Ennis NFH, Montana, came up. I applied and was
selected. This hatchery was on the Madison River in the
heart of the Madison Valley just outside Yellowstone
National Park. It was an important rainbow trout
broodstock station. Here I not only got back into trout,
entirely trout, but I got into a different aspect of it. The
Ennis strain of trout was a major egg source for other
National Fish Hatcheries, state hatcheries, and if we had
any left over, for the commercial trout farms. We even
shipped eggs to South America – Chile. They could get
eggs from the Feds at that time.
ome stories that you remember were
humorous. I meant to mention that certain
things that happen to you, stick with you, and this is all
part of the learning process. I was ordering supplies for
the Ennis National Fish Hatchery. It wasn’t very big. We
only had a staff of six or seven people there, and you
know, GSA, you could buy writing tablets, pens, typing
paper, tools and whatever you needed from the GSA, the
General Supply Schedule. It was really much cheaper
than what you could get out in the boondocks like at Ennis
and the quality was excellent. So I’m at work preparing a
routine order through the GSA catalog. They had these
standard issues, these standard packs. I looked at them
and said well…here’s a standard packet…it was a pack of
one hundred and forty-four, and I said well, one hundred
and forty-four writing tablets, they’ll probably last about a
year. So I order one hundred and forty-four. Going to
typewriter paper…we don’t type that much. You know,
with carbon paper and stuff…maybe twelve. Well, being
out in the boondocks, thirteen miles from town down a
dirt road, whenever the GSA supplies came in, they were
usually dropped off at the hardware store or somewhere
and they let us know so when we were in town to pick up
the mail we picked up the supplies. But, I knew we were
in trouble one day when all of a sudden I saw a delivery
truck heading out our road. When he backed up at the
station, those one hundred and forty-four tablets I ordered
actually were one hundred and forty-four cases. It filled
up our coffee room and then we had to back the truck up
to the garage. I had ordered more damn paper, I had
ordered more of this and that…it was an embarrassment.
The Manager, Bill Baker was so embarrassed that he
wasn’t going send it back and get his money back. So
what we did, we started packing this stuff up and putting
labels on it. We sent them to every fish hatchery that we
knew and kind of got rid of it that way. When I left there
we still had gobs of paper and their probably still using it.
But, that’s what happens when you’re still learning if you
don’t have your wits about you and when you take a look
at a standard pack.
It was in June 1968 that my third son Jared was
born. It wasn’t very long after that another job opened up
and I applied. I was selected as a GS-11 and went to
Coleman NFH, California as the Assistant Hatchery
Manager. We packed up in September 1968 and headed
for California, our home state. Coleman National Fish
Hatchery is on the Sacramento River in northern
California between Red Bluff and Redding. It was there
that I again got reacquainted with Pacific salmonids. They
had basically three, four stocks of fish that they were
raising. One was the regular fall Chinook, they had a late
fall Chinook, as well as the steelhead trout and then there
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was a big effort to establish a Kamloops fishery into
Shasta Lake. This latter fish is a landlocked variety of
Sockeye salmon.
Coleman NFH was the largest hatchery in the
National Fish Hatchery System. It was a Central Valley
Project mitigation hatchery associated with the
construction of Shasta Dam and one of the most important
program responsibilities in the Fish & Wildlife Service.
WASHINGTON D.C. - DMDP
After 3 years there I was selected for the
Departmental Management Development
Training program in Washington DC in 1971. So in
September I reported as a DMDP trainee as a GS-11 at
that time. There were twelve of us from the Fish and
Wildlife Service. I think there was like thirty over all
from the Department of Interior representing the Park
Service, BIA, Mines and others. During this yearlong
orientation and training program there was an opportunity
for a number of work assignments.
As a Departmental Management Development
Program (DMDP) trainee I had two assignments I thought
were quite notable. I had a stint with the National Park
Service. I worked for Bernie Hartzog who was the
Director of the National Park Service. The focus of my
effort at that time was assisting in addressing the people
problems in Yosemite Park in California. Plans were
being developed there that would ultimately lead to fewer
cars, fewer camp grounds, and what they would do is have
a tram or a bus system that would take people into the
park. This was in 1971, and it wasn’t until November of
year 2000 that there was finally a plan that had been
introduced and that the Secretary was expected to sign off
on. This plan would encompass many of the same ideas
that were being floated around and developed during this
training assignment. And here it is, twenty-eight years
later, twenty-nine years later that this is finally a plan.
That was my first lesson that things don’t always move
quickly in Washington, no matter who the power is behind
it.
One of the things I remember about Bernie
Hartzog is a story that he relayed it to me, so I believe it
was factual. He had a pretty steadfast policy. He told his
national park superintendents, “Any of you guys fib on a
performance evaluation or a recommendation…,” you
know recommending a turkey to one of your fellow park
superintendents. If he found out about it that person
would be coming back and “he’d be working for you for
the rest of your career.” No matter where you went the
guy was gonna transfer with you. And I think he put the
fear of God in them -- he did have a fairly open
performance evaluation. I don’t know of anybody that
ever ended up with one of these people. If you got a
problem you don’t transfer him. Bernie Hartzog’s motto
was “You take care of it.” “You hired him, you take care
of it, but you don’t pass him on to someone else.”
Another assignment as a DMDP, I thought was
really a good one. I worked up on the Hill for about forty-five
days. I worked on the Senate Interior Subcommittee.
I worked on Allen Bible's staff…he was a senator from
Nevada at that time. That was really kind of exciting,
working with the Congress, and seeing the Senate at work.
It was a very interesting assignment. Two big issues that
we were working on - - one was the Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act, and the other one was expanding rivers
and having hearings on adding river systems to The Wild
and Scenic Rivers Act. One of the river systems was in
Northe
Letter from Grover C. Moreland to Oscar Monnig
No full textLetter from Grover C. Moreland to Oscar Monnig about sending the meteorite. Including a shipping invoice
Grover C. Smith Oral History Interview
No full textOral history interview by Mary Heers with Grover C. Smith, Topics include: Living in several U.S. States in his youth; Studying math and physics in college; Employment with a multi-national oil company studying seismic activity and international travel; Learning on the job and rising in the ranks; Tectonic plate movement; Mapping the earth through seismic data; Visiting family in Hyrum and making it home; Helping his father upholster furniture in his youth; Retirement and retirement work projects such as working at the L.D.S. Temple and getting book published; Being an introvert, taking a speech class, and participating in theater; Joining the Army to pay for college and returning years later to finish his education; Being introduced to geophysics by his oil company job; Places he would like to visit; Not letting little blips on a seismographs keep him from living a normal life; A power grab by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1980s and U.S. oil companies going bankrupt; Waiting in line for fuel at gas stations; Interesting projects in the Dominican Republic, at the Great Salt Lake, and in Indonesia.Mr. Grover Smith lives in Hyrum, Utah, but was originally from Muskogee, Oklahoma. He has lived all over the country during his career as a geophysicist, doing seismic surveys and data analytics, primarily for oil and gas companies. He tells lots of interesting stories of seismic activity and oil drilling
Oral History Marvin L. Plenert Office of the Directorate
No full textMarvin L. Plenert oral history interview as conducted by Jerry C. Grover.
Mr. Plenert was the former Regional Director of the FWS Pacific Region.
Organization: FWS
Name: Marvin L. Plenert
Years: 1961-1994
Program: Refuges, Land Acquisition, Regional Director, FWS Pacific Region
Keywords: History, Biography, Work of the Service, Wetlands, Public policies, Wildlife refuges, Employees (USFWS), Endangered and/or threatenedOral History
MARVIN L. PLENERT
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTORATE
Interviewed by:
Jerry C. Grover
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Name: Marvin L. Plenert
Date of Interview: February 1, 2002
Location of Interview: Oregon City, Oregon
Interviewer: Jerry C. Grover
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service:
1961 – 1994, 33 years
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions
Held:
Jamestown, North Dakota – Wetland Program
Montana – Land Acquisition
Lewistown, MT – Wilderness Studies
Anchorage, AK – Refuges, Native Claims Act
Denver, CO – ARD Refuges & Wildlife
Washington, D.C. – Dep. AD, Refuges & Wildlife
Portland, OR – Regional Director
ABSTRACT: In a 33+ year career ending with his retirement
in 1994 with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a common
theme developed. It could be best described as cutting edge,
contentious, adversarial but always successful as he came to
know and understand the real biology and political aspects of
some of the most controversial and contested issues and
programs of the day. Some of the highlights described in this
narrative begin with:
The acquisitions of prairie wetlands at a time when one
Government program was paying farmers to drain the
land while another was trying to preserve valuable
habitat for the Nation’s waterfowl.
In Alaska he was in the middle of the Native Claims
Settlement Act on conflicting claims of selecting
Native lands vs. land set aside as National Wildlife
Refuge areas.
The identification and acquisition of numerous land
areas to be entered in the National Wildlife Refuge
System in a climate of competing land use controversy.
As the Regional Director for the Pacific Region
embroiled in some of the more controversial
Endangered Species Act listings [read spotted owl,
California gnatcatcher, and seeming like everything in
Hawaii], Klamath River Basin and California’s San
Francisco Bay / Delta water and wildlife issues, all at a
political level reaching to the White House.
Throughout, he kept and maintained a sense of the value of the
career people, a sense of fairness of values and an outspoken
and a clear willingness to make a decision based on the biology
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and facts at hand. This ability earned him the Department of Interior’s highest awards and the respect of his fellow Service employees.
The Oral History
MR. GROVER: This is Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office to do an oral history on Marv Plenert at his home in Oregon City, Oregon, regarding his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. With me is my wife Judy, formerly Marv’s Administrative Assistant, and his wife Carol. Marv, for the record what was your job when you retired?
MR. PLENERT: Well, for the last five years of my career with the Fish and Wildlife Service I was the Regional Director for Region 1, which is the Pacific Northwest. It included the states of California, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii and the Trust Territories of the Pacific. It was quite a large area.
MR. GROVER: Marv, tell us a little about yourself. Where were you born? And how did you get interested in, or get started in fish and wildlife?
MR. PLENERT: Well, I grew up on a farm in Kansas. I probably got interested in fish and wildlife resources and management because I liked to hunt and fish. I guess that was probably everybody’s dream way back then. So I ended up going to Kansas State University. First I went to a small college in my hometown for a couple of years. That was Taber College in Hillsborough, Kansas. And then I went into the Army.
MR. GROVER: Was that your hometown, Hillsborough?
MR. PLENERT: Yes, Hillsborough was my hometown. That’s where my wife Carol is from too. She’s from Hillsborough as well. Our families knew each other when we were growing up. I went to college there for two years and then I went into the Army for a couple of years. Then when I came out I went to Kansas State at Manhattan, Kansas, and got my bachelor’s degree in Biology and then my master’s in Wildlife Management. I graduated in 1961 with my master’s degree.
MR. GROVER: How did you and Carol get together?
MR. PLENERT: Well I’ve known her all of my life, I suspect. And I guess when I got out of the Army we kind of got serious in the late 1950’s and started dating. Then we got married in 1958. We had two children, a boy and a girl. She worked and helped me get through college. You know how it was in those days. Of course I had the GI bill but still, she helped me get through.
MR. GROVER: What did you do in the Army?
MR. PLENERT: I was stationed in Fort Bliss, Texas believe it or not. I was in the guided missile program. It was kind of the first ground to air missile program. It was in the late 1950’s, 1956 I guess. Then we got shipped over to Germany. I spent a year over in Germany and then I got discharged from there. I was in for two years that’s all.
MR. GROVER: After Kansas State, did you go right to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
MR. PLENERT: Yes I did. After I got out of school I had several job offers. In fact, they weren’t very plentiful in those days and were really few and far between for anybody in wildlife management but I was lucky and had several. You’d have to work for a state or for the federal Government; they were the only ones with those type jobs. There wasn’t any body in the private sector that was hiring people. So I had a job offer with the State of Kansas. I had applied with the Fish and Wildlife Service and got a call from Region 3, headquartered in Minneapolis. The call came from Goodman Larsen who was the Personnel Director there. Goodman T. Larsen, I’ll never forget him. He offered me a job in North Dakota. Well, I had a choice of North or South Dakota. It was with the Wetlands Program, and I’ll get into that in a little while. So I just went right from College, to Jamestown, North Dakota. That’s where they offered me the job. The pay wasn’t very much but in those days it was better than nothing. The federal job was probably one thousand dollars more that what the state had offered me for a year.
MR. GROVER: Were you started as a GS-5?
MR. PLENERT: A “7”. I started as a GS-7 because I had a master’s degree. We moved to North Dakota in a little U-Haul trailer from Kansas. We hauled everything we had, which wasn’t much. At that time Jamestown was just a small town. There were probably seven or eight thousand people. There wasn’t any place to rent. There were no houses, apartments or anything. We finally conned some guy into renting me a little house. We lived in a rental house because I couldn’t afford to buy one. We rented the whole time we were there.
When I started off, the issue was the Wetlands Drainage Program. It was the government’s USDA subsidized drainage that they paid farmers a cost share to drain wetlands off of their agricultural lands. Of course this was in direct conflict with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which wanted to protect the wetlands. It’s another case of two agencies in the federal government having separate mandates and having both of them different. I mean, here we are dealing with Agriculture doing away with habitat, and we’re trying to protect it. They came up with using Duck Stamp money to preserve and protect the small Wetlands Program. My job when I first went there was to look at what they called drainage referrals. The farmers would fill out a little sheet. They would go at that time to the ASCS, the Agricultural Stabilization Committee. It was separate from the CSC, which did the technical work. They would fill out a little map. We’d get the map in Fish and Wildlife and we would go out and look at what was there.
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There was probably twelve biologists hired at that time in Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota and we’d go out and look at these wetlands and if they had high values to wildlife, we’d tell them that we didn’t think they should be drained. And they would just take it with a grain of salt and drain them anyhow. It didn’t matter. The only way that you could protect them was to buy them or… So then the Fish and Wildlife Service came up with a wetland acquisition program. They would either buy them or take easements on wetlands. This was in the prairie pothole region, the glaciated country and there were potholes everywhere. There were large ones, small ones, both temporary and permanent. So the theory was at that time to acquire a major permanent one in one or two per township and then take easements on the rest. That way the land would stay on the tax roll. At that time land was selling for between six and eight dollars an acre. You could buy the whole countryside in that glaciated country for six to eight bucks an acre. That was in the early 1960’s. Our job was to define the wetlands that were being considered… go look at them if they were going to drain them, or delineate which ones we thought the Service should buy.
Then they set up an acquisition program in Jamestown as well. The key people that were there was Harold Benson who was a long time Realty guy in Region 3 and 4. There was Tom Smith who was in Albuquerque when he retired. They were there as the first acquisition biologists in Jamestown. We worked together and identified areas that should have been bought. If we’d have had money, or cash, we could have bought the whole county. But we didn’t have it. We had to borrow money from the wetlands, Duck Stamp funds and there was only so much money available. The program was really a success. They called it the Accelerated Wetlands Program, and I think it’s still going on.
MR. GROVER: You didn’t have the money, but how many acres, roughly, were you able to set aside?
MR. PLENERT: I can’t remember. There were millions in all of the states. We had a problem too, that if we bought too many acres in a given county the County Commissioners would get up in arms because it was land taken off of the tax roll. We paid, or the government did, three quarters of one percent of in-lieu taxes. But it still wasn’t as much as if there was a farmer living on the land. So we had problems with the County Commissioners. And we had to go meet with the Governors. In some of the counties we did really well. We preserved a lot of habitat. It was really a good program. In fact, Dick Mundinger who was in the regional office in Minneapolis and later moved to Region 1, was instrumental in the Program too. Actually when I transferred from North Dakota to Montana, Dick was instrumental because Montana was in Region 1. He helped get them in the program and they weren’t a part of the original acquisition program. Then I left Jamestown.
MR. GROVER: When was that?
MR. PLENERT: In 1966. Dick [Mundinger] was instrumental in getting a position in Montana for wetland acquisition and to look at drained wetlands. It was because the moraine glaciated area extended into two or three counties in Montana. And these were just as good as wetlands or just as many, but we didn’t have a program there. So I started the program there and did all of the delineations of all the wetlands. We hired an appraiser. Bob Miller was, I think, the first guy and he ended up retiring in Boston, in Region 5. We started the program and preserved lots of wetlands there too.
MR. GROVER: What was your grade at that time?
MR. PLENERT: I was a “9” when I was first there. Then I got promoted to GS-11. When I was in Montana I received the first and only reprimand I ever got from the Fish and Wildlife Service. It was for what I thought was doing a good job. But I didn’t realize the difference between Regions. Region 3 was very, very assertive on wetlands and acquisition and waterfowl management. Region 1, which Montana was in at that time, before they reorganized, was very conservative. If it wasn’t in Oregon, or along the coast, they really didn’t get any approval. Dave Marshall was the wildlife biologist that really did all of the approving of wetland acquisition. I had an opportunity on the north shore of Flathead Lake, which is in the Flathead Valley; the whole north shore was undeveloped. It had values other than just waterfowl. It was a big staging area for probably all of the Redheads and Canvasbacks in that area. They had Osprey and Eagles as well. I found out that the people wanted to sell it. So I went over and talked to them. I reported to the regional office that it was for sale. It was cheap. It was a hundred bucks an acre or less. The first thing I got was a note back saying, “We’re not interested”. Well, I couldn’t accept that so I contacted Senator [Lee] Metcalf. He was the senior Senator for Montana. Well no, I guess the other guy was, I can’t remember his name. [Mike] Mansfield and Metcalf were very, very instrumental in conservation efforts. In fact, Metcalf was Chairman of the Migratory Bird Commission that approved land acquisition for the Service. He was a prime member. At that time, John Dingell from Michigan was too. So I contacted Metcalf and told him about this area. I even took him out there and showed him. The next think I knew, the money showed up in Region 1’s budget. They kind of tied two and two together and found out that I had done this. Of course I got a reprimand for it. But they ended up using the money. The bought the area and it’s a fantastic area. But that’s kind of interesting, how things happen. I really didn’t think about doing anything wrong. I thought about preserving the area.
MR. GROVER: Is that area part of a National Wildlife Refuge now?
MR. PLENERT: Yes, it is.
MR. GROVER: What is the name of it?
MR. PLENERT: There’s a wetlands complex out of Kalispell that manages the north shore area of the Flathead Valley. Really, it’s a complex under the National Bison Range, which is in the southern Flathead Valley by Paulson. The Manager has an assistant in Kalispell who does the wetland work. There is the Flathead, and the Nine Pipe National Wildlife Refuges that are all one complex. But it’s a fantastic area. What they were going to do was dredge the area and fill the beaches and build houses. I decided that I didn’t think that was a good idea. I 4
proposed it for acquisition and it didn’t go very well in the regional office. But at that time Vernon Ekedahl was the Assistant Regional Director, which is Refuge Supervisor. I guess that’s what they called them at that time. And John Finley was the Regional Director. They were a pretty conservative bunch. They didn’t think that some GS-11 should be proposing things like that.
Then after we kind of finished the wetlands program, I was asked to do the Wilderness Studies for Region 1. So I stayed right in Montana. And after the Wilderness Bill was passed, I think this was in late 1968 or something like that, so for two years I did wilderness studies on the major, large National Wildlife Refuges in Region 1. I worked on the Desert Refuge, Sheldon and Hart Mountain in Nevada, and C. M. Russell and Medicine Lake in Montana.
MR. GROVER: Were you stationed in Montana the whole time while you were doing this?
MR. PLENERT: Yeah, I was in Lewistown. I worked out of Lewistown at the headquarters for the C. M. Russell range. Oddly enough, one of the things that is kind of interesting; as I said, about like the Wetlands Program, the guy that was instrumental in blowing the whistle on the Agriculture for draining wetlands was a guy by the name of Fred Staunton. He was the Manager at Waubay Refuge and Wetland complex in South Dakota in the late 1950’s. He saw all of these wetlands being drained and people were getting paid to do it. He got a Field and Stream magazine editor out there and they took some pictures, and wrote an article in Field and Stream. That really started the work of putting a stop to the cost-share drainage and that sort of thing. Fred ended up as the Refuge Manager at C. M. Russell while I was there. He was the Manager of that million-acre refuge. And issues there were another set of issues that we worked on, not only in conflict with the Department of Agriculture, but with our own Department of the Interior. That was BLM [Bureau of Land Management]. In those days when it was originally set up, the criteria was that BLM would manage the grazing under the Taylor Grazing Act. The Fish and Wildlife Service would manage the wildlife. They were just incompatible. There were conflicts just one after the other. Fred was right in the middle of that. Then in about 1970, the Secretary of the Interior, Wally Hickel,, gave the whole National Wildlife Refuge to the BLM. He signed an order, abolished it and gave it to the BLM. Well then, the conservation organizations got up in arms and raised all kinds of heck. Then Congress passed a law that turned it all over to the Fish and Wildlife Service and got BLM out of there. Then the Fish and Wildlife Service managed the whole thing. So it was kind of a real fight with an agency within in the Department of Interior again. My whole career was kind of dotted with those kinds of conflicts, I think, from the time I started to the time I retired.
After Montana, I applied for a job in Alaska in 1971. Dave Spencer was the long-time Alaska Refuge Supervisor. He was up there his whole career. He flew there during World War II, and just stayed in Alaska with the State. Well, it was a Territory then. But Dave Spencer was the Refuge Supervisor and I worked as his Assistant in 1971. Then about 1973 or 1974 they passed the Alaskan Native Land Claims Settlement Act, which required that the natives had a chance to select lands around their villages. There was a township or two or three, depending on the size of the village. Now you had to enroll back to those villages so they’d be eligible for land and the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] was involved in getting the enrollment. They were enrolling people back to villages that didn’t exist. They just weren’t there. They were just names on a drainage [report] or something. and they called them a village so they would get land; like up to a full township around each one of these so-called bogus villages. I went to Gordy Watson who was the Area Director as it wasn’t a region yet, we were still under Region 1, and I told him about this. And I went to the Solicitor. The same Department of Interior Solicitor who represented the BIA represented us, and I got nowhere with him.
So on my own, I filed a protest. I just did it. I wrote a letter. It was in the enrollment provisions that you could protest. So I filed a protest, and signed my name. The next thing I knew, I got a called from [Lynn] Greenwalt who was the Fish & Wildlife Service Director at the time. He asked me what I thought I was doing. I said, “well, they’re taking lands that don’t belong to them,” and I told him, “I’m filing a protest.” Well, I didn’t know anything about the law, and when you do things in a legal way you’re supposed to serve notice to both parties and I didn’t. I didn’t send the other lawyers a letter. I did it all illegal. But anyway, they put a stop to it. Again, John Dingell who I mentioned earlier, got involved. I contacted him. He was a friend of ours and he put a stop to this, and made the Department of the Interior assign a separate Solicitor to Refuges to work with me. I had to work with the Solicitor to put a stop to these bogus villages. We had hearings and they sent out federal judges and we had to line up witnesses. They gave me a Solicitor in San Francisco to work with. He was a young man. I can’t think of his name now. We built a heck of a case. There must have been six hundred thousand acres that we were successful in keeping in the National Wildlife Refuge System, or we’d have had to buy them back at a later date. So it was very positive and it all turned out pretty good. These villages didn’t exist and we showed it -- they just weren’t there. That was one of my interesting Alaska [experiences]. Then I got involved in selecting new refuges.
MR. GROVER: Did you get promoted when you went up to Alaska?
MR. PLENERT: Yeah, I did. I got promoted to a GS-12 at that time which I thought was a pretty good deal because you got a twenty-five percent cost of living adjustment. It wasn’t that bad up there. It was a fun place to live. There were great people. I got involved in day-to-day Refuge activities. I got to fly around the whole State. Then we got involved in looking for new lands under the Land Claims Act to go into the Refuge. I felt I had a part of selecting all of the new Refuges as well. That was very gratifying.
I got a chance to witness the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. I saw all the pipe lying there, and they put it in and that was a kind of an historic event. You know, to open up the big oil field up there, and pump all of the oil down to Valdez and haul it away in tankers. Also during 5
that period of time in Alaska, the Fish and Wildlife Service embarked on a program management system. Rather than manage by functions, or get your funds by function, they embarked on this system. I don’t know, the people that devised it, the Lynn Greenwalts of the world, the Directors probably liked it. But for the people in the field it was really difficult to manage your functions by program. In the c
Grover McCormick, Sr. Personal Scrapbook Page 2
No full textThe second page of the Grover McCormick, Sr. Personal Scrapbook. This page features a letter to Grover McCormick, Sr. from R. C. McClerk. It also features a group photograph
Interview with Grover C. Stephens
No full textFounding Chair of the Department of Organismic Biology, 1967Dean of the School of Biological Sciences, 1982-1986Professor of Developmental and Cell Biology, 1967-1991Digitized 2013 by Avant Productions, Inc
Interview with Grover C. Stephens
No full textFounding Chair of the Department of Organismic Biology, 1967Dean of the School of Biological Sciences, 1982-1986Professor of Developmental and Cell Biology, 1967-1991Digitized 2013 by Avant Productions, Inc
Grover McCormick, Sr. Bolton College Certification Letters
No full textTwo certification letters for Grover McCormick, Sr. and C. T. Davenport for Bolton College with an accompanying envelope
Nomination for President for the Democratic Party of 1888
No full textUnique document composed by the Nominating Committee of the National Democratic Party 1888 presented to Grover Cleveland for renomination during his first presidency. Signed by representatives from every state and territory within the nation.Courtesy of the State of New Jersey Division of Environmental Protection, the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Historic Site, Caldwell, New Jersey.Washington, D. C., June 26-th, 1888. - To the Honorable Grover Cleveland of New York. -
Sir: - The Delegates to the National Democratic Convention, representing every State and Territory of our Union, having assembled in the city of Saint Louis on June 5-th inst. for the purpose of nominating Candidates for the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States, it has become the honorable and pleasing duty of this Committee to formally announce to you, that without a ballot, you were, by acclamation, chosen as the Standard bearer of the Democratic Party for the Chief Executiveship of this Country, at the election to be held in November next. Great as is such a distinction under any circumstances, it is the more flattering and profound when it is remembered that you have been selected as your own successor to an office, the duties of which, always onerous, have been rendered of an extraordinarily sensitive, difficult and delicate nature because of a change of Political Parties and methods, after twenty-four years of uninterrupted domination. This exaltation is, if possible, added to by the fact that the Declaration of Principles - based upon your last Annual Message to the Congress of the United States relative to a Tariff-reduction and a diminution of the expenses of the Government - throws down the direct and defiant challenge, "for an exacting scrutiny of the administration of the executive power, which four years ago was committed in its trust to the election of Grover Cleveland President of the United States, and for the most searching enquiry concerning its fidelity and devotion to the pledges which then invited the suffrages of the people." An engrossed copy of that platform - adopted without a dissenting voice - is herewith tendered to you. In conveying, Sir, to you, the responsible trust which has been confided to them, this Committee beg, individually and collectively, to express the great pleasure which they have felt at the results attending the National Convention of the Democratic Party, and to offer to you their best wishes for official and personal success and happiness. - We have the honor, Sir, to be - Your Obedient Servants, - Patrick A. Collins, [sig.] Chairman; Thos. S. Pettit, [sig.] Sec'y; Jno. H. Caldwell [sig.] Alabama, Wilson E. Hemingway [sig.] Arkansas, Wm. D. English [sig.] California, Casimiro Barela [sig.] Colorado, Wm H Barnum [sig.] Conn, E.R. Cochran [sig.] Dela., John Triplett [sig.] Georgia, James S. Ewing [sig.] Illinois, AW Conditt [sig.] Indiana, Wm W. Baldwin, [sig.] Iowa, S. F. Neely [sig.] Kansas, Charles D. Jacob [sig.] Kentucky, John Fitzpatrick [sig.] Louisiana, R. W. Black [sig.] Maine, Wm S Wilson [sig.] Maryland, Chas. D. Lewis [sig.] Mass, Thos F McGarry [sig.] Michigan, John M. Allen [sig.] Miss, John Ludwig [sig.] Minn., Jasper N Burks [sig.] Missouri, X [X on this line for Nebraska missing here?], Jas. S. Mooney [sig.] Nevada, G. Byron Chandler [sig.] New Hampshire, Solomon Scheu [sig.] New York, Thos. W. Strange [sig.] North Carolina, M. V. Ream [sig.] Ohio, M S. Hellman [sig.] Oregon, R. S. Patterson [sig.] Pennsylvania, Isaac Bell Jr [sig.] Rhode Island, Leroy Springs [sig.] South Carolina, M. T. Bryan [sig.] Tennessee, W H Pope [sig.] Texas, John D. Hanrahan [sig.] Vermont, Basil B Gordon [sig.] Virginia, B. F. Harlow [sig.] West Virginia, R. B. Kirkland [sig.] Wisconsin, Jas Sullivan [sig.] Montana, Antonio Joseph [sig.] Mew Mexico, Wm M. Ferry [sig.] Utah Ter., J. R. Dixon [sig.] Wyoming Ter, J. J. Browne [sig.] Washington Ty, J M Silcott [sig.] Idaho Ter, L. Gardner [sig.] Washington D. C., John T. Carey [sig.] Alask
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