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Dot Baker
No full textDoteen "Dot" Baker oral history interview as conducted by Jerry Grover
Dot first started working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a part-time Clerk/Typist at the Carson National Fish Hatchery, and worked her way up to the Service’s Portland Regional Office as Chief, Division of Contracting and General Services.
Organization: FWS
Name: Doteen "Dot" Baker
Years: 1972-1980
Program: Hatcheries
Keywords: Biography, Employees (USFWS), History, Fish Hatcheries, Carson National Fish Hatchery, Willard National Fish Hatchery1
Oral History
of
DOT BAKER
Chief, Contractor and General Services
Portland, Oregon
August 9, 2015
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia 2
Oral History
of
Dot Baker
Interviewed by:
Jerry C. Grover
Date of Interview: August 9, 2015
Location of Interview: Tigard, Oregon
Interviewer(s): Jerry C. Grover
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 23
Colleagues: Jerry and Judy Grover, Don Weathers, Sam Buzbee, Barbara Winczewski, Barbara Whitesitt, Mike Bowen, Gloria Parrish, Lola Gannon
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Clerk/Typist (GS 3) at Carson National Fish Hatchery, Clerk/Typist at Willard National Fish Hatchery, in the Portland Regional Office beginning as a property technician (GS-5). She worked in purchasing, finance, and contracting, eventually became GM-14 Chief, Division of Contracting and General Services for the Pacific Region of the Service.
Most Important Projects: As a contracting officer working on the Midway Island NWR clean-up Project in the property transfer from the U.S. Navy.
Brief Summary of Interview: Dot first started working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a part-time Clerk/Typist at the Carson National Fish Hatchery, Carson, WA. Her husband Dick was a Field Engineer with the U.S. Forest Service Wind River station on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and they occupied excess hatchery housing. When they had to move from Carson National Fish Hatchery, she then worked at Willard National Fish Hatchery, also as a Clerk/Typist. When her husband was transferred to near Eugene, OR, she attended the University of Oregon and graduated with a degree in Business Administration. When her husband was again transferred, this time to the Forest Service office in Vancouver, WA., she applied for a vacancy in the Service’s Portland Regional Office working as a property technician, then in purchasing,
and finally into contracting where eventually she would become the Chief, Division of Contracting and General Services. Her career promotions were from GS-3 Clerk typist to GS-14 Administrator.
She shares a couple stories of her time with the Fish and Wildlife Service, what type of work she did when she didn’t work for the Service, and of people she worked with. She really enjoyed her time with the Service, but now that she’s retired, she and her husband travel back and forth between Arizona and Washington homes. They have their two sons and grandson close by in Oregon & Washington.
Dot Baker, August 2015
3
THE INTERVIEW
Jerry: This is Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office. I’m in my home in Tigard, Oregon, doing this oral history with Doteen Baker. Joining us today is Dot’s husband Richard, and my wife, Judy, is also sitting in on this interview. The purpose of this interview is part of a program to preserve the history, heritage and culture of the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service through the eyes of its employees. Dot, would you state your full name, place of birth for the record, and your birthday
Dot: I was born Doteen Marie Mundy in Washta, Iowa; March 1941.
Jerry: Is it Doteen or do you go by…?
Dot: It’s Doteen, and I go by Dot.
Jerry: Dot, when you retired what was your grade, your job and when did you retiree.
Dot: I retired in 2003, I was a GS 14 in the Portland Regional Office. I was the Division Chief of Contracting and General Services when I retired. At that time Region 1 consisted of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California, and Hawaii, Guam and the Trust Territories of the Pacific.
Jerry: Did you do fish and wildlife things in Iowa? What attracted you to an agency like the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Dot: I fished for catfish in Iowa in the Little Sioux River. But no, actually when I grew up we didn’t have a lot of choices, being females. We could be a school teacher, a nurse, or a secretary and when I graduated from high school there was a new career, which was a dental hygienist. So I was a dental hygienist for approximately twenty years before I switched careers. How I actually became associated with the Fish and Wildlife Service is interesting; my husband was with the Forest Service and we moved to a remote station. It was remote for us because we lived in Beaverton, Oregon (a suburb of Portland) and we moved out
into the forest, 14 miles north of Carson, Washington.
Jerry: That would be the Gifford Pinchot National Forest (GP)?
Dot: That’s correct. Dick was working for the GP, and the Forest Service rented some extra housing on the Carson National Fish Hatchery. That’s how I ended up even knowing about fish hatcheries, just by living on a fish hatchery.
Jerry: How did we come to meet?
Dot: This is a funny story. We were living at the hatchery; let’s see we moved there in 1971 and you came in ’72?
Jerry: Correct
Dot: We had lived there approximately a year when you came as the manager of the hatchery. One of the very first things I remember, we were sitting on our big open area out in the hatchery, we were having a get together and drinking a beer and Oren Reynolds’s dog came and lifted his leg on your leg or something.
Judy: On his back!
Dot: ….on his back, it was just like “OHHH!”
[Everyone laughing]
Jerry: Yes, I remember that. We arrived in June; it was absolutely one of those glorious western, in-the-Cascade- Mountain-best-summertime evenings and it was after work and we decided to have a beer and we just gathered up on the lawn and Oren’s dog, Fido, and Fido peed on me. And poor Oren was our head hatcheryman; I mean he was just aghast that his dog peed on the new boss.
Dot: Everybody thought, “Oh, Oren’s in real trouble now.”
[Everyone laughing]
4
Jerry: So you’re living on the hatchery, there’s more into this and I think I can explain later on about the Economy in Government Act and how the Forest Service employees ended up renting quarters on a Fish and Wildlife Service hatchery. How did you get working for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Dot: There was a secretary there, her name was Karen Gladjo, her husband was a Forest Service employee and they were transferred and you were looking for another secretary. I thought I would be interested in that, so I took the Civil Service test and qualified as a Clerk-Typist and I got started there, it was a part-time job, and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t ever think I would like office work, but I really did enjoy that work.
Jerry: What was the grade that I hired you?
Dot: Was it a GS-3?
Jerry: Yeah, ‘cause they were pretty cheap in those days.
Dot: I don’t know, it was fun. I just had to walk down the road from our house to my job, what three mornings a week; I don’t even remember how many hours it was, but it was really nice.
Jerry: Yes, very convenient for us to be living there and to have a decent house. Of course in those days the Hatchery Manager was required to occupy the government quarters because of standby and things that happened after quitting hours until the next morning; a lot of things can happen on a fish hatchery and a lot of them are bad.
Dot: Do they not have to live on the hatchery anymore?
Jerry: They’ve lifted that, they’ve had to do other arrangements. Yeah, they ended up with a new ruling on that. But anyway, you’re working for the Fish and Wildlife Service and then Dick gets transferred.
Dot: Well I think what happened is they took away the housing for us there.
Richard Baker: Yeah!
Dot: Because I remember Jim McBride, was also a Forest Service employee, but he ranked higher than Dick, so he and his family got the housing.
Jerry: Oh, I don’t remember that. Okay this was a Forest Service thing.
Richard Baker: Because they dictated who lived in the hatchery housing.
Dot: Yes. And it was available when we moved up there, but then when then McBride’s came, he was higher ranking or his job was more important than Dick’s so he got the house, but there was housing available over at Willard National Fish Hatchery, where there was a Forest Service engineering center where Dick worked. That’s how I ended up over at Willard.
Judy Grover: But weren’t you working over there out of Willard National Fish Hatchery anyway?
Richard Baker: Yeah, some days I had to travel back and forth between the Wind River station at Carson and there.
Judy Grover: Okay, so it was easier for him.
Dot: It all worked fine because they needed a secretary over at Willard NFH.
Jerry: So your career continued?
Dot: Yes, not even a break; I think I just went from one to the other.
I should tell you something about Willard, which I thought was interesting. I worked for Manger Jim Holway there, and he said, “If you’re working here, then you’re going to have a raceway of fish.” So he made me project the food for the fish, sample the fish, take care of a whole raceway of fish. Then the Little White Salmon River flooded and all that dirt comes in with the raceway water supply and he said, “That’s your fish, you go clean the raceway.” So I had to go out and clean the raceway too.
Jerry: So here was a clerk/typist doing hatcherymen, fish husbandry work.
[Everyone laughing] 5
Dot: Dick was transferred to the Willamette National Forest and I went back to dental hygiene for about eight years. When living in Eugene, home of the University of Oregon, I decided I wanted to get a college degree. I attended Lane Community College and the University of Oregon and ended up with a degree in business administration. I must have been fairly unusual because I was referred to as “the older woman in class.” When I finished my degree I thought I would like to go back and work for the government again, so Dick and I would have the same holidays.
Jerry: And then you ended up back, or Dick ended up transferred into the Vancouver Forest Service office, just across the river from Portland
Dot: I was fortunate enough to be hired in the Service’s regional office as a property technician but Dick was still in Eugene. I rented a room from a wonderful lady, Jo Jasperson, who had a dog named Dexter. I drove from Eugene to Portland on Monday morning and did the return trip on Friday afternoon. I enjoyed telling everyone I lived with Jo and Dexter during the week and with Dick and Dan on weekends. After a year of that I was ready to resign when Dick was transferred back to Vancouver.
Jerry: That began the Portland Regional Office career. And what grade was that, Dot?
Dot: I think that was a GS 5, if I recall correctly. And that was in 1985.
Judy Grover: So we were in D.C.
Dot: Right because I remember you coming back in the Portland office.
Jerry: Okay and from there just you’re training for the contracting and you ended up in a series of jobs from property technician to be the head of CGS.
Dot: Right.
Jerry: That’s a pretty responsible position.
Dot: I just happened to be in the right place at the right time; I think I was very, very fortunate in the fact the Don Weathers liked me and obviously thought I was competent. He was the head of administration.
Jerry: ARD for administration.
Dot: I was doing the moving of the people into the region when he came to Portland from D.C. I moved him into the region and I guess he liked his contacts with me. In property moving people was one of those “other duties as assigned.” Later that became a full time position. Something else just popped into my mind about my time in property. A new property tech was being hired and those of us working there asked our boss not to hire a smoker or make sure they couldn’t smoke at their desk as we were tired of breathing second hand smoke from a previous property tech. Isn’t it interesting how things have changed over the years.
I went into finance on a temporary assignment, working under Sam Buzbee, for a few months and that office was next to Don’s office so we had additional contact. I moved back to property, applied and received a purchasing position. In that position I was assigned for a couple weeks in Denver with purchasing agents and contracting officers from the other regions, putting together a purchasing manual for the FWS. After a few years in purchasing I applied and was selected for a contracting officer position. I was jumping around here and there, but I was always in administration.
Jerry: Okay. These people, all names that are institutions in the Portland Regional Office; these people all had successful careers.
Dot: Sam was there and Sue Jung; I think she’s still there, I’m not sure.
Judy Grover: I heard she was.
Dot: Great, great lady. I’m trying to think of who else. It’s interesting, you forget when you’ve been gone for so long. Barbara Winczewski, she lived out this way, do you every see her?
Judy Grover: Yes, occasionally and we’d greet her and, I think we saw here at Freddy’s and we’ve tried to get her to come to the luncheon, she won’t come, she just kind of avoids it; her husband died. 6
She’s alone and whatever her life has done, I don’t know.
Jerry: You being the support staff, you must have known a lot of the folks in there or everybody.
Dot: Let’s see, when I started in property Alice Molinar was my boss. In purchasing, Barbara Whitesitt, was my boss. Mike Bowen was the head of contracting at that time. And then I think, how much can I say here?
Jerry: This is your interview.
Dot: Mike Bowen was the head of contracting but I think he and Don Weathers, the head of administration, had some kind of a personality conflict because while I was in purchasing Don Weathers demoted Mike Bowen and brought in Gloria Parrish from GSA. Gloria, she was a great boss. I’m just trying to remember all these people. Lola Gannon was there and she ran the show. Lola loved “her contractors” and most everyone else, but you didn’t want to get on her bad side.
Richard Baker: Petey the Snake.
Dot: Yes, Lola always told her Petey the Snake story and everyone loved it.
Richard Baker: Dot says it the same way.
Dot: I do Petey the Snake and everyone thinks it’s funny.
Jerry: I remember she had a lot of fun on that, and going away parties.
Richard Baker: Oh she did.
Jerry: While you were in there, in CGS, what were some of the big projects that you worked on, the things that usually everybody had to turn elbows on?
Richard Baker: Midway.
Dot: I was assigned the Midway Island Project. It was when the Government was doing base closures and the Navy was getting rid of Midway and the Fish and Wildlife was taking Midway over as part of the Refuge System. I was the contracting officer and I had to go out to Midway with, I don’t know if it was two or three different contractors that were interested in bidding on the job as part of the process of taking Midway over. There was also a gal from San Francisco who was interested in eco-tourism.
Jerry: Was this taking over, was this the clean-up process before we actually had it or did we have Midway at that time, because there was a lot of contaminants, old batteries from submarines and stuff you can’t imagine that wasn’t good for wildlife.
Dot: I don’t know, I think we already had Midway. I was shocked to see all the metal garbage in that gorgeous water. I was told it was a huge Navy operation during the cold war and they had many towers with listening devices which were simply dropped in the ocean when they left. We went to Midway in a National Guard plane out of California which we boarded in Honolulu. We had to stop at Johnston Atoll with a delivery and then wait so the birds would be resting when we arrived on Midway after dark.
Stopping at Johnston Atoll was an experience. When we got out of the plane, we were told, “You go straight to the terminal, you don’t wander around here.” We looked out on the runway and there was a man on a jeep with a machine gun which we assumed was loaded. In the terminal we asked, “What’s going on?” and were told, “They destroy chemical weapons here and you can’t just wander around. Everybody that works here is carrying a gas mask in case of an emergency.” That was true, we saw many people carrying gas masks, which gave me the chills. We stayed right at the terminal or we could step a few feet out but we couldn’t wander around at all. That was a really shocking experience for me.
I didn’t want to go to Midway, I was thinking of all kinds of reasons that I shouldn’t go out there. Once I got out there, I didn’t want to leave and I was hoping when the airplane took off for Honolulu that it would take some birds into the engine so we’d have to wait another week, but that didn’t happen.I believe that was the very best experience of my whole career.
7
Judy Grover: I can remember telling her, “You go, and you enjoy that.” I was so jealous.
Jerry: Did they have a new gathering spot, Captain Brooks, the restaurant/bar?
Dot: No.
Jerry: Did they have the cafeteria where you eat or was it at the old Navy dinning room?
Dot: We were in the old Navy places, with Sri Lankans running the mess hall. Everything was curried, and anytime they fixed meat it was like shoe leather. The curried food wasn’t the greatest, but it was still a wonderful experience.
Jerry: How long were you out there?
Dot: Just a week; I wish it could have been longer.
Jerry: Were there any repeat trips?
Dot: No, I’ve never been back. Ken, his last name escapes me, was a manager out there.
Jerry: Manager on……on site?
Dot: Yes. At Midway.
Dot: Ken, I thought I’d remember his name forever; really nice young man. We would sit and discuss things such as, “We don’t want to end up on Time magazine’s front cover.” We worried we would do something wrong, or the media would think it was wrong and we would end up as big news. We checked things over many times before that contract was ever issued.
Jerry: Were there other big moments or big projects that you worked on?
Dot: One of my funniest experiences when I first became contracting officer, we put in a new fish raceway out at Warm Springs Hatchery. The contractor didn’t do a very good job, and we were having a meeting about it. Chuck Weiss was the engineer, I was the contracting officer and the foreman for the contractor was obviously new. He had a really strange smarty attitude and I was new as a contracting officer. He made some smarty remark and I off handedly said, “Well we could just have you tear it out and do it over again.” He said, “Oh, we can do that.” I was just dumbfounded, I didn’t know what to say except to keep my mouth shut because I thought if he’s dumb enough to do that then let him.
Jerry: What was the issue?
Dot: The raceway was not done nice and smooth, it was just bad; the concrete was not a good job, but it was something that could have been fixed. Chuck and I had talked about it as something that could have been fixed but then the foreman offered to tear it out and redo it.
Jerry: And you paused?
Dot: Yes, Chuck and I just sat there and kept our mouths shut and let him redo the job. I thought he probably didn’t have a job with that contractor very long.
Jerry: And we ended up, the government ended up with a satisfactory product?
Dot: I don’t remember any problems after that but I was just flabbergasted that he would volunteer to rip it out when it could be fixed.
Jerry: Okay dealing with the people, you were in a pretty big office there was like, what 300 folks in the regional office in total; I think a third of them were probably ES folks that were biologists. In the admin section, did you run across Jerry Van Meter?
Dot: Jerry Van Meter, he was gone pretty much; wasn’t he before Don Weathers?
Judy Grover: Yes.
Dot: When they brought Don Weathers in, Jerry was pushed aside to some other position. He was an administrator when I first came on board but I was so new to everything I don’t remember anything about him other than he would give out these little badges and everybody laughed about it; whatever the little badges were.
Jerry: They were “Attaboys”.
Dot: Is that what it was? I don’t remember, I was only there possibly a year when he had that 8
administration job and I didn’t have any contact with him.
Jerry: Other folks in the regional office that you deal, you have any memories, fond or otherwise, but memories nonetheless?
Dot: My best memory is going for a walk with Judy every day for how many years, fifteen?
Judy Grover: I don’t know how many years, but I miss them.
Dot: I know, every lunch hour we would go for a walk and it would be raining and people saying, “Are you going out in that rain?” We would look at them and say, “We haven’t shrunk yet.”
Jerry: This was your lunchtime break, you’d walk half your lunch hour away and then the other half walk back.
Dot: What would we do, grab our lunch I guess…
Judy: Grover: I brought my lunch…
Dot: …you always ate an apple.
Judy Grover: I would eat it at my desk before we left.
Dot: Maybe that’s what I did but I know the lunch hour was all; 45 minute walk through the…
Judy Grover: Yeah, through the neighborhood.
Richard Baker: You guys went quite a ways.
Dot: Walk, talk, and see the old Portland houses; there were some big, old beautiful houses around the Lloyd Center. That was the best part; and a way to blow off steam too.
Judy Grover: It was good for us.
Jerry: In your opinion, dealing with the people that you had to deal, the Regional Director’s Office, contracting, and their programs. How
Robert P. Smith
No full textRobert P. Smith oral history interview as conducted by Jerry Grover.
Mr. Smith’s interest of living creatures started at an early age and was influenced greatly by his uncle, Parker Benton Smith, who also worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service years before. He shares how he came to work for the Service, the places he worked and the issues he worked on. Mr. Smith had a successful career, not only helping protect endangered species and establishing refuges, but also helping to get people to understand why it was being done.
Organization: FWS
Name: Robert P. Smith
Years: 1978-2004
Program: Ecological Services
Keywords: Biologists (USFWS), Biography, Employees (USFWS), History, Work of the Service, Wildlife refuges, Fishes, Endangered and/or threatened, Endangered species, Riparian environments, Rivers and streamsOral History
of
Robert P. Smith
by
Jerry Grover
Date of Interview: February 3, 2016
Location of Interview: Ahualoa, Hawaii
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 26 years [1978 – 2004]
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held:
- Fish and Wildlife Biologist,GS-7,
Ecological Services, Cookeville, TN
- Fishery Biologist, GS-9, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN
- Colorado River Fishery Project GS-9/11, Grand Junction, Colorado
- Field Supervisor, Western Colorado Ecological Services Field Office, CO
- Departmental Manager Developmental Program (DMDP); GS-12, D.C.
- Deputy Assistant Director, GS-12, Fish and Wildlife Enhancement, Washington D.C.; - Chief of Division of Endangered Species and Habitat Conservation, D.C.
- Deputy Assistant Director, ES, GM-14, D.C.
- Assistant Regional Director, Fish and Wildlife Enhancement, GM-15 Portland, Oregon; - - Chief of the Office of Ecological Services, Honolulu, Hawaii;
- Pacific Island Manager in charge of ES, Realty & NWR’s Pacific Islands, Hawaii
- Administrator, NW Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve, Department of Commerce, Honolulu, HW
Most Important projects: Colorado River Fishery Project; establishing national wildlife refuges such as Midway Atoll, Matagorda, Guam, Hakalau, Kealia Pond, Palmyra Atoll.
Colleagues and Mentors: Parker Benton Smith, Tom Talley, Pete Crittenden, Don Berry, Frank Dunkle, Ralph Morgenweck, Mike Spear, Marvin Plenert, Judy Grover, John Doebel
Most Important Issues: Endangered species such as the northern spotted owl, Concho water snake, desert tortoise, Bruno Hot Springs snail, ‘alala.
Brief Summary of Interview: Mr. Smith’s interest of living creatures started at an early age and was influenced greatly by his uncle, Parker Benton Smith, who also worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service years before. He shares how he came to work for the Service, the places he worked and the issues he worked on, and stories from each. Mr. Smith had a successful career, not only helping protect endangered species and establishing refuges, but also helping to get people to understand why it was being done.
2
THE INTERVIEW
Jerry: Good morning. I’m Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office and representing the Association of Retired Fish & Wildlife Service Employees and also the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Heritage Committee. My wife Judy, also a career Service retiree, is joining us today.
I’m in Ahualoa, Hawai’i at the home of Robert Smith to do an oral history with him on his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 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. Robert, would you please state your full name, where and when you born.
Robert: I’m Robert P. Smith, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, April 4, 1951.
Jerry: When you retired, where, when and what grade were you?
Robert: That is almost another story. When I actually retired I was working with Department of Commerce. When I left the Fish & Wildlife Service, I was a GM-15, the Pacific Island Manager in charge of Ecological Services, Realty Division, and Refuge Division for Pacific Islands, Hawaii from January 1990 through November 2000. I was in Hawaii with USFWS from January 1990 through November of 2000. In December of 2000 I was asked by President Clinton to head up the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve as its first employee and manager. So, I was Pacific Islands Manager for USFWS from roughly 1992 through 2000--about 8 years. From 1990 to 1992 I was simply the head of the Ecological Services Division in the insular Pacific.
Jerry: Robert, as a young boy, what led you, what interested you to end up doing the career that you did?
Robert: Well, Jerry, I bet my story is very similar to that of others. As a young boy, I was always interested in anything alive, snakes, tortoises, frogs. My uncle, my dad’s brother, was Parker Benton Smith. And Parker Smith was a fixture around our home and an entertaining guy and he was also one of the first special agents for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Parker started his career with the Bureau of Biological Surveys and I believe in 1936, and later he was a waterfowl biologist for the Tennessee Game and Fish Commission. And then even later in his career, he was one of those dual duty biologist/enforcement officers for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, back then, of course, the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. So when he would come over and I was a little boy, he would take his pipe apart and make a turkey call and all those things that fascinated little boys. I think I already had the biologist in me and the interest in living diversity and like that, but Uncle Parker sure made all that come out in me.
So as long as I can remember as a young kid, I was always up to something having to do with living creatures. I kept lizards in the house; we had these little store bought green anoles that would turn brown if they crawled on something dark. And one day my mother came in my room and both the lizards were gone out of the cage and she asked me where they were and I told her I didn’t know. So we started looking and it got warmer and warmer as we looked, and finally mom reached over and turned the portable fan on and that’s where they were. So we had pieces of lizard all over my room, just one of those early stories that let you know that I had this stuff everywhere and enjoyed it everywhere.
When I was in junior high school, I won a science award for a really extensive butterfly and moth collection I had, where I’d actually go out and find the adults, either butterflies or moths, find them laying eggs and get the food plant and allow the egg to hatch and the larva to grow in the food plant, and ultimately see the thing pupate or form a chrysalis and get to see the complete metamorphosis. The real purpose, of course, was to get a perfect specimen of the adult. So I did that a couple years and to give you an idea of how things go with a guy man like me anyway. Along about the ninth grade the whole bugs and bunnies things started to fade; I began to understand there were girls out there and cars and I mean—
Jerry: Motorcycles.
Robert: I was not allowed a motorcycle because one of my dad’s brothers had been killed on one, but it’s the first thing I bought when I went off to college, so you’re astute in that observation. Anyway, just a quick story, in the ninth grade in junior high, girls were discovered and I had some choice moth pupa cocoons actually in a cigar 3
box in my locker and, of course, at the end of the school year I found the cigar box and opened it up and the moths had hatched out and beat themselves to death. So it’s kind of like that’s the demise of wildlife for a little while.
So my high school days were spent working hard at school and those were also rather odd times socially. I don’t think it was even different in Chattanooga, Tennessee, than anyplace else. The Vietnam War was raging, I was seeing young boys that may have been a class or two ahead of me go off to war and either not come back or come back completely different people. And we were struggling through the late ‘60’s, peace, love, drugs, alcohol, you name it. It wasn’t all unpleasant; it was just all sort of confusing and hard to keep up with. And finally my parents convinced me that what I should really focus on was getting good grades in high school so that we could get me into college.
I ended up going to college on academic scholarship, so their advice, high school grades did come through. And when I entered college, my dad said, “Okay, do something that you like and money will take care of itself.” So I thought, maybe I wanted to be a veterinarian because I knew you could work with living things and the clients would pay your bills, that kind of was what I knew. So I entered college as a pre-veterinarian medicine student, went to work in a vet clinic for a couple of summers, found out what that was about and that I really wasn’t too interested in that.
Jerry: Which college, you ended up going to school?
Robert: The school that I went to was the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. It was a school that was within a hundred miles of home and I was able to get an academic scholarship for my undergraduate work, so that’s where I went. And I was lucky the University of Tennessee at the time had some terrific professors, Michael Pelton in Wildlife, Ralf Dimmick in Waterfowl, Larry Wilson in Fisheries, et cetera, et cetera. And just at that time I was in need of deciding on what my major was going to be. I entered school as a pre-veterinarian medicine student, I worked in a vet clinic for several summers, and sort of decided that wasn’t for me. So University of Tennessee started a Wildlife and Fisheries Science major, and by the time I got my first degree in animal science, I was able to enter into that Wildlife and Fisheries Science Program and ended up with a master’s degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences.
Jerry: And that first degree was what?
Robert: The first degree was in Animal Science.
Jerry: And that’s 1976?
Robert: 1973. And my Wildlife and Fisheries Science master’s was in 1976.
Jerry: Okay, you have your degrees now, Robert, and out to the big world.
Robert: Right. And before I entered the big world, let me tell you one quick story from my school world. My major professor in graduate school was Dr. David Etnier, who is the fellow who at the time discovered the snail darter, a small species of perch, in the Little Tennessee River. I had a friend from Chattanooga who was in law school at the time, his name was Hank Hill. And Hank and I would get together after school or whenever we could and drink beer and do what you do after class in college. Hank commiserated with me one day that he had to write a paper on environmental law for his professor Zyg Plater. And I was giddy that day because my professor, David Etnier, had discovered this rare, new fish in the Little Tennessee River. Well, from that discussion, Hank decided to write his paper on the Endangered Species Act and took that idea to Zyg Plater, his professor. And as it turned out, Plater ended up getting with David Etnier over the subject of the snail darter. And to make a long story short, that chance introduction turned out to be Hill vs TVA, the famous lawsuit in which the U.S. Government was challenged over building the Little Tennessee Dam, Tellico Dam, and destroying the habitat of the snail darter. Those years in dealing with the snail darter issue, really were years that put the term, or the phrase, endangered species onto the lips of the average American.
Those of us who were in wildlife biology, of course, knew of the red book list deal and the new Endangered Species Act and were very excited about it, but your average person didn’t know anything about it until all the news reporting over the tiny 3 inch fish stop, say, I think at that time a hundred million dollar dam. And that endangered species then became not only a national phrase on the tip of people’s tongues but a world phrase as well. So in my post graduate work, I worked with Dave Etnier; I did some consulting with him. And my first job was at Buffalo Springs Fish Hatchery, which was a state fish hatchery in Tennessee. But the story I have for you there is, I also went and did some with the Erwin National Fish Hatchery in Tennessee. And I was there one day, I think delivering a truck load of large trout to 4
Erwin. And I saw in the hatchery manager’s office a picture of an elephant hanging by a chain from a railroad trestle and I just wanted; I’ll never forget that. And I inquired about the picture, and the old crusty federal fishery manager at that time said, “Well, the elephant was in town here in Erwin as part of a circus, and it accidentally stepped on a man and killed him. And the town’s folk herded the elephant out on the trestle and put a chain around its neck and dumped it off the trestle; hung it.” And that was an impactful story and I wish I had asked for a copy of that picture. And years later, I was working with the Office of Management Authority on issues like the African Elephant and I thought about that picture.
After my fish hatchery work, I went to work in 1976 in western Tennessee as an environmental biologist, that’s what they termed the job.
Jerry: Who was signing your paycheck at that time?
Robert: A fellow named Gary Myers, and Gary was the Director of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, awfully good guy. My job was mainly to look into matters of the Clean Water Act, the Rivers and Harbors Act, and I also did some work with black bass because my master’s degree was comparing the two subspecies of largemouth bass, so when the state of Tennessee did black bass work, they asked me to come along. It was really good work; one of the things I did there was I started flying western Tennessee and literally drawing on USGS maps, sites where it looked like there was something going on in the waterways that shouldn’t be going on, whether it was dredge and fill or what-have-you. And I was able to present some of those maps to federal authorities, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and EPA, in particular, the Corps of Engineers, as well. And it was really quite an interest in how many different things were going on in western Tennessee in those river basins, the Wolf River, the Hatchie, Loosahatchie, Obion, Forked Deer, and a lot of stuff was going on without permit or authority.
And so one day my boss found out about it, not Gary Myers, he was my big boss, but a fellow named Wilbur Vaughn, who was the regional manager. And he was livid; what had happened was one of his constituents had called to say that there was a young fellow in his office that was stirring it up and this guy had to stop his channelization project. And anyway, so I got my butt chewed out and my immediate supervisor said, “I want you to go to Congressman Ed Jones’s father’s home. He’s got some catfish ponds, he says his catfish aren’t doing too good. On the way, stop at the grocery and get some dye,” he said, “I want you to take some test tubes and put some pond water in the test tube then pour yellow dye in and blue dye in when the test tube turns green, you tell that old man everything’s all right.” And he said, “Oh, by the way, you get a week off, paid, and I’ll see you in two weeks.”
So I left and rattled the door when I shut it, and instead of going to the grocery store to get food coloring, I went to our local fish hatchery and got a Hach kit along with some help and went out to Congressman Jones’s father’s farm and we seined his catfish ponds and it turns out they were way overcrowded. So we stretched some burlap across the ponds and poisoned half of each pond with rotenone and the old man about had a heart attack when some of those catfish started coming up different sizes and dead as a doornail. And anyway, we cleaned up his fish feeders and really did a first class job restoring his catfish ponds. And it took a couple of days, and then I got back and packed up my belongings for a week-long time and I went to Atlanta and started shaking hands at the regional office of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Jerry: So you’re shaking hands in Atlanta in the Fish and Wildlife Service. This is what year now?
Robert: This would be 1978. After my trip to the woodshed, so to speak, with my boss with Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency, I was left with distaste and as I mentioned I’d been working with many of the federal folks on Clean Water Act, and Rivers and Harbors Act violations in west Tennessee. So I drove myself to Atlanta and basically walked into the regional office cold, and started shaking hands and introducing myself. There were two people there that were in from the field that showed some interest in me; one fellow’s name was Joe Hardy from Mississippi, from the Vicksburg Ecological Services Field Office, and the other fellow was Tom Talley from the Cookeville, Tennessee Field Office. And to make a long story short, there were two of us boys at that time, young men, in close competition for an Ecological Services job; one of the young men was named Dale Hall. And Dale and I ended up basically in the same interview for a job in Vicksburg, Mississippi. And Joe Hardy ended up hiring Dale, which left me open for the interest of Tom Talley at the Cookeville, Tennessee Field Office, so I went to work for Tom.
One of the, I guess, one of the most interesting things about that job, no longer with the state, now with the 5
feds, got a little more resources. And I was working basically the same issues that had caused me to get my butt chewed out with the state: I was working 404 and Section 7 violations; I’m sorry, 404 and Section 10 violations and also working on large Corps of Engineer reviews under the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act. And it was those Coordination Act large-scale projects that pushed us to try to capture a wetlands delineation scheme for the entirety of west Tennessee. And we ended up using low level, aerial, black and white photography, which was readily available from the Soil Conservation Service. And we were able to discover enough signatures from that photography taken at a thousand feet elevation, and fairly crisp, to come up with a wetland determination for every significant acre that we could find in west Tennessee. And we transposed that aerial photography, wetland delineation, onto USGS Quads and it was that information that we used in Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, discussions with the Corps of Engineers, and with discussions with others like some of the drainage districts there, to get proper mitigation for Fish and Wildlife due to all the channelization and other things that were on the deck at that time.
Jerry: That’s pretty heady stuff, Robert. What grade were you hired in and what was your job series?
Robert: I was hired on as a GS-7, Fish and Wildlife Biologist.
By the way, anecdotally, this country in west Tennessee and all the river basins that we were mapping at the time for the wetlands, were the same places where my uncle, Parker Smith, many decades before, had purchased wetlands for waterfowl management areas. So it was kind of fun being able to cross paths with my uncle’s work that happened decades before.
Jerry: Did any of those lands, by chance, turn out to be a refuge like Hatchie Refuge?
Robert: Absolutely.
Jerry: Wapanocca?
Robert: Uncle Benton bought much of the Hatchie River bottom and was later transferred to the feds and become the Hatchie River Refuge; yeah, that’s fun stuff.
Jerry: You know what a small a world it is, as you and I are talking, you’re talking west Tennessee; our next Fish and Wildlife Reunion is going to be in Memphis, and our day trip is going to be out to Hatchie Refuge.
Robert: Oh neat, wow!
Judy: Better come!
Robert: It’s a beautiful place. My tour with Ecological Services was a reasonably brief because at that time, the promotion opportunities, I was young, promotion opportunities were pretty slim. And I got a chance to go work in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a fishery biologist. It was a two- person field office, and I entered that position in 1979. And I went to work for a fellow named Pete Crittenden and Pete was one of the old school fish biologists at that time.
Jerry: Did you get a promotion out of that?
Robert: I did, I think I went to a GS-9, And we managed fishes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, along with Blue Ridge Parkway, and a number of military bases both in Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina. And I also got to have a group of young people that worked directly for me, the Young Adult Conservation Corps (YACC). And we did some awfully fun things; feral pig control in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, black bear surveys. A lot of this work was done on horseback; it was just fabulous.
And also, we did some fishery work, rediscovered a species of catfish that lives up in those cold streams called the Smoky Madtom and some other things. If you all, that are listening, remember those days of the fishery aid stations, we lived on a shoestring budget. And often times we would have to do things that were a little bit out of the realm of the fisheries station in order to make the budget work. And so one of the assignments I had was to go up into the Clinch and Powell River Basin, and this would be Kentucky and Virginia Appalachia; Hatfield and McCoy country, and do an economic assessment on the proposal to list critical habitat for a number of fresh water river mussels, mollusks. And I’ll tell this quick story. I was in an Economic Development Office in Kentucky, eastern Kentucky. And I went in to meet the gentleman and his office was overlooking a stream, one of the streams that we had interest in and I
Jack Downs
No full textJack Downs oral history as conducted by Jerry Grover.
Mr. Downs discusses his use of undercover agents throughout his career that led to several major take downs and convictions of long time, establish rings.
Organization: FWS
Name: Jack Downs
Years: 1956-1982
Program: Law Enforcement
Keywords: Biography, History, Employees (USFWS), Military, Law enforcement, Endangered and/or Threatened, Wildlife impacts, AviationOral History
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JACK DOWNS
Interviewed by Jerry Grover
Date of Interview: May 4, 2016
Location of Interview: On the banks of the Rogue River, Grants Pass, Oregon
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 26 years [1956 – 1982]
Offices / Field Stations Worked, Positions Held:
GS- 7 - Law enforcement in Seattle, WA.
GS-9 - Special Agent in Charge in Sacramento, CA; - also flew as a pilot for seven summers in Alaska;
GS-12 - Special Agent in Charge, NY;,
GS-14 - Special Agent in Charge in Portland, OR
Most Important Issues: Sockeye Salmon Treaty Act; commercialization of waterfowl and deer; Tule white-fronted goose; use of spotted cats for furs; operations at New York Port of Entry.
Brief Summary of Interview: Mr. Downs talks about how he got hired with the Fish and Wildlife Service, the different positions/offices he worked at, and his time with the Fish and Wildlife Service in general, his role in establishing Wildlife Inspectors at Ports of Entry. His supervision of 11 staff while at Sacramento as a GS-9 is unheard of in today’s position classification. His use of undercover agents throughout his career led to several major take downs and convictions of long time, establish rings. He shares several stories, talks about his family, and how he feels about the direction the Service has taken. He feels completely satisfied with the work he did and felt he had a tremendous career.
Colleagues and Mentors: Leo Childress, hired Case Vendel, Kenner Harrington, and Paul Gladdys.
Jack Downs, May 2016
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THE INTERVIEW
Jerry: This is Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office and a Board member representing the Association of Retired Fish & Wildlife Service Employees and the Service’s Heritage Committee. I am in Grants Pass, Oregon attending a gathering of retired Law Enforcement agents to do an oral history with Jack Downs on his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 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.
For the record, would you please state your full name, when and where you were born. Follow that please with when and where you retired.
Jack: My name is Jack Downs. I was born in Boise, Idaho, in 1927. I retired from Portland, Oregon, in 1982. I was the agent in charge for the Northwest District; I was a GS 14.
Jerry: For the Fish and Wildlife Service Law Enforcement Program?
Jack: Yes.
Jerry: And how in the world do you get into something like this as a young man?
Jack: I grew up in a small town in eastern Oregon, south eastern Oregon; Lakeview. And a small town, and that was a wildlife rich area of the county, Lake County, and I’ve been interested in hunting and fishing. I went into the Air Corps as an Air Cadet and when I received my discharge I went to work for my father, and he was a sawmill superintendent in Lakeview and I learned to grade lumber. I’d wake up in the morning sick and tired of the smell of sawdust. A friend of mine mentioned to me that the Oregon State Police were putting on additional game law enforcement officers and wanted to know if I’d go up with him and I said, “Sure.” I went up and was accepted in the State Police to enforce the game laws in the state of Oregon.
Jerry: How old were you then, Jack?
Jack: I was 21 years old. I was assigned to Klamath Falls, Oregon, and I worked with the United States Game Management Agent. Then it was called Management and Enforcement at that time. And I worked with him quite a bit, and he recruited me more or less, talked me into taking an examination for entry into the Fish and Wildlife Service Game Management and Law Enforcement. And I did that. I was lucky enough to pass it, and was accepted by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1956; in December 1956, and my first assignment was in Seattle, Washington.
Jerry: What were you doing up there?
Jack: The Seattle office, primarily then, was waterfowl law enforcement and working with the state and Lacey Act, black bass cases, because of the commercial fishery there in Seattle. And then one day the agent in charge and I were in our office doing reports or something and a representative of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries came in and introduced himself and said, “Are you people ready to enforce the Sockeye Salmon Treaty Act?” I didn’t even know what it was, but we became very familiar with it then because we were going to enforce provisions of the Act.
The State of Washington had been doing it and they got in an argument with Fisheries for some reason or another. “Okay, this is your baby, he said. It’s a treaty between Canada and the United States and the fishery regulations; we’re not going to do them anymore.” And there we were.
Jerry: They were claiming federal responsibility, but unable to administer it as a federal agency - Bureau of Commercial Fisheries but they didn’t have law enforcement.
Jack: No, not at that time. And so I was in Seattle for four years, and during all those four years we were responsible for it. And what we did then was use the state equipment and the state people. They would take us to enforce those Sockeye Treaty regulations, would take us to the boats if there’s a violation and then we’d take it over and cite the violator into federal court.
One of the exciting things that happened to me on that was there was some really angry fishermen there. They were hard to get along with. And we caught this person in violation of a sockeye regulation, and the state guy pulled the boat up and told him we were coming aboard and he said, “He said you take care of this, Jack.” I went up there and I could tell that the guy was a little angry, and I calmed him down as best I could and cited him, got 3
back on the boat, he says, “The State guy says, Jesus, that was easier than I thought it was going to be.” And I go,
What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, this guy is on probation for beating his brother, who is another fisherman, over the head with a two by four, fighting over fish. And he said there was a warrant out for him in Ketchikan, Alaska, and the Federal Marshal Service was serving a warrant and the guy picked him up and threw him off the boat.” And I said, “Why didn’t you tell me that before I went aboard?” But we were able to cite him on those charges. That was the most highly, exciting thing I did in the Sockeye Salmon Treaty Act enforcement.
Jerry: Jack, you said you were accepted, hired in by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Did you have any training, I mean they just strapped a gun on you, gave you badge; what was your qualifications?
Jack: The state police did have training. I went through that, actually I was one of the first Oregon State policemen hired and because of that training, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Chief of Enforcement in Washington and the Regional Director saw that we were pretty well trained. So we recruited several other Oregon State police officers, about a half of a dozen, in fact, because of that training. The Fish and Wildlife Service at that time, what was Management Enforcement, didn’t have a training program. They relied on hiring experienced wildlife law enforcement officers.
Jerry: What grade were you hired in at, what was the entry level?
Jack: The entry was a GS; went to Seattle as a GS-7.
Jerry: Did it require a college education or anything?
Jack: Not at that time, experience was a weighted factor and not college experience, I had about two years at Oregon State, which didn’t amount to much. I got married out of the Service, but it was not a requirement like it is now.
Jerry: When you talk about the Service, and you were in the military, what did you do there; was any of that qualifying?
Jack: I entered, while in high school. The recruiters come along and we took examinations. I took an examination to become an air cadet in the U.S. Army Air Cadet Program. I was successful and was accepted and because of that they graduated us early. So I left in 1944 for the Air Cadet Program and went to Gulfport, Mississippi, as an air cadet.
Jerry: But had you done any law enforcement?
Jack: Had no law enforcement but I learned to fly, which proved valuable later on.
Jerry: Okay, four years in Seattle and Sockeye Salmon Treaty work, then what happened to you?
Jack: I got promoted as the agent in charge, GS-9, in Sacramento, California.
Jerry: GS-9 in Sacramento, that’s a big area down there.
Jack: Big area, big important area. It was one of the biggest management enforcement offices in the country. I had more people working for me than most any agent in the country.
Jerry: How many people were working in that office approximately?
Jack: Well, we had two out of the office and one biologist. We hired a biologist that worked under me because we had so much depredation in those years in the 1960’s. They hired a biologist to try to help us solve some of the problems we were having with depredations. And so we had that and we had agents then in Stockton, Fairfield, two in Sacramento, one in Colusa, one in Chico, and then one up on the coast, Eureka. There were 11 of us in all!
Jerry: Okay, so just basically the northern part of California.
Jack: All of northern California.
Jerry: Bay area north. You say depredations were big, were there other issues?
Jack: Well, at that time, waterfowl enforcement was very important. It was probably the more influential people hunting waterfowl in California than any place I am familiar with in the rest of the country. And there was commercialization taking waterfowl at that time. During my time there, we made several commercial waterfowl cases.
Lacey Act was a big enforcement issue and we made one of the biggest deer cases in the history of that area down there. It was commercialization on wild deer killed in Oregon and transported to California and sold in a couple 4
of restaurants in San Francisco. And in cases like that there were several, one of the biggest ones and one that I became famous for, I guess you might say, was the big horn sheep case where a fellow by the name of George Gamble, who was an heir to the Proctor & Gamble people, was assisting in hunters taking desert big horn sheep illegally in the desert of California. We convicted him in federal court in San Francisco. He lost an airplane, eventually lost his wife, and all his trophies.
Jerry: That sounds like a pretty harsh punishment.
Jack: Oh, he deserved every bit of it.
Jerry: When you say commercialization of waterfowl, were they selling ducks in the restaurant?
Jack: Oh yes. One of the cases that I enjoyed making was a commercial case involving a hotel and the Chinese Tong from San Francisco. But what we would do in enforcing the regulations, the hunters that would participate in this commercial hunting, shot all the waterfowl at night. They’d go in the night, the ducks feeding in the rice fields and shoot, sometimes there’d be as many as 100 ducks killed in one hunt like that. Then they would bring them in and they had sources that would bring them. And one case that’s a favorite of mine was that we caught these hunters and there was a young fellow and I told him that they’d be going to jail. And he came to me and said, “Well, why aren’t you catching the people these ducks are going to?” And I said, “Well, we need a little help here.” And he was a young man, just started a family and he became an informant for me, and as a result of that, I made several big commercial cases of people selling. There was a hotel, the Chinese Tong, restaurants in the area, all buying ducks from these people.
Jerry: And the people buying these ducks didn’t mind a lead pellet or two?
Jack: No. They knew where they came from and how they were killed.
Jerry: At that time, I too worked for the State of California about that time, and I was thinking that there was some issues on duck hunting clubs, particularly in the upper Sacramento?
Jack: Oh yeah. Our technique then was, and nobody had worked that prior to my time, the way that I decided it to be worked. We’d go in there by boat, these big clubs in the Butte Sink is the famous. Probably the best duck clubs in the whole country for success. I became acquainted with some of the people, I kind of curried favor with some of the caretakers and told them they wouldn’t be named or anything and they kept me informed of what was going on. So we’d go in there by boat and hide and count drops, as the people killed the ducks. We’d count and we’d make over limits quite regularly. And they had several ways to try to hide the fact that they were killing too many ducks. Three or four of the clubs, I called them poor boxes, they would go out in channels, it was all deep water duck clubs and had to go by boat to their blinds and then they all gather and there’d be one channel back to the duck club. Well, where that channel began to go back to the club, was a big box and they’d throw their surplus ducks in that box. And the caretaker would have to get it; they never wasted any, I never found any wastage but the caretaker would have to come and take care of those things. Well, I don’t think they sold any, but they distributed them in one way or another to the other hunters. Those people loved ducks and they didn’t waste any, but they would shoot too many.
Jerry: Any particular duck?
Jack: Mostly pintail, they loved pintail; a rice fat pintail was a delicacy to those folks.
Jerry: Okay, poor old mallards were second.
Jack: Yeah, well the deep water clubs got probably more mallards in that area, but the market hunters would go after the pintail feeding in rice fields.
Jerry: Did you have depredation issues with ducks on rice fields?
Jack: Not so much, a little bit at the beginning of the season, before the harvest. We would have all kinds of materials from flash bombs, cracker shells, this sort of thing and even rocket grenades, flash and sound type things and issue them to the ranchers or the farmers around there to frighten the waterfowl off the rice before they harvested it.
Jerry: And were you ever involved in California’s effort, at the time, to harvest coots, white bill? I can remember working with Fish and Game and they came out with a campaign,” white bill are good eating.”
Jack: Yeah, that was done and recipes created by the biologist I mentioned earlier.
Jerry: That you hired?
5
Jack: Yes. And what I’d do, in Sacramento, I issued kill permits in the spring to kill the coots or the white bills and organized hunts. Some of the Italian folks from San Francisco loved that, they’d go down and have a big coot feed. Coots were a big problem, in the Central Valley area especially.
Jerry: What kind of big problem, what was the issue there, Jack?
Jack: Eating all the winter wheat and alfalfa, young alfalfa and greens like that, and golf courses. They would descend on golf courses that had big water areas and just; I think the worst thing was the poop the golfers had to wade through.
Jerry: But there were plenty of coots in California?
Jack: Oh, there was a surplus of coots at that time. But some of the animal preservation people got pretty adamant about my kill permits and I had to satisfy them by not issuing blanket permits; it had to be individual and controlled, and it worked out ok.
Jerry: And still got done what had to be done.
Jack: Yes.
Jerry: So how long were you in Sacramento doing that?
Jack: I was in Sacramento 14 years.
Jerry: When does your flying come in?
Jack: During that time I had a commercial pilot’s license and got an airplane. I was assigned an airplane and a pilot agent. So I applied for flight authority through the Fish and Wildlife Service and gained it and did some of the flying.
There was a decision to try to determine where the Tule white-fronted goose breeding area was in Alaska. It was political pressure, there was a fellow by the name of Bob Elgas that was a permittee that raised wild geese and was a wildlife artist and he had enough influence that we were pressured into going up there and trying to find the rare Tule white-fronted goose.
Jerry: Ok, you were still stationed at Sacramento?
Jack: I was still stationed at Sacramento then; spent seven summers in Alaska flying.
Jerry: Well, who took over your job while you were gone? Somebody had to do the job.
Jack: Oh yeah. I had a good administrative assistant and agent there that would take over the duties.
Jerry: So you’re flying in Alaska looking for white-fronts.
Jack: Yeah, we started out of Anchorage and then went to Bethel, spent a summer in Bethel around Dall Lake and south of the mouth of the Kuskokwim River. And we’d find the molting geese and band them and take taxonomic measurements to determine whether or not it was a Tule white-front or a common white-front. And sometimes we thought we were more apt to find a pigmy race than a giant race. And we never did find, in all the areas; in all the areas we worked and banded and surveyed and now refuges, Fish and Wildlife Refuges basically for all wild critters but waterfowl breeding area.
Jerry: And those areas have names?
Jack: Yeah, there’s; oh, they’re named for the area, the rivers drainages they were in. One, of course, stands out to me, the Iditarod and that area there is; I can’t recall now some of the names, but all those in the interior are now refuges where those areas that we were. You can find them on Google Maps.
Jerry: But the upshot, the common and the Tule were essentially the same bird but occupied different areas and winter range?
Jack: Yes. The winter range we identified, and this Bob Elgas, the private citizen, was the one that found them and they wintered on the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. And from there, we figured they probably were from Alaska because that was where most the birds from other banding information we had. So we went up there in search of that rare Tule white-front. But it turned out, they were right close to Anchorage, down in the Kenai, is where they summered and nested and their breeding area.
Jerry: So that was good bit of biological information then. So you did seven years in Alaska; what was your grade at that time?
Jack: I was an 11 then, GS-11.
Jerry: And this would be in 19--?
Jack: Well, in the 1960’s from about ’62 until, my last assignment though was in 1973; my last time I went up there.
6
Jerry: And then what? Was there a Mrs. Downs somewhere along this process? When did she come into the picture?
Jack: We were married in 1947, and my wife was a naturalized citizen from Norway. And we had a daughter and three sons; I had twin sons, they were the last.
Jerry: So you were moving her around too.
Jack: Oh yeah, she was willing to go. When I was transferred to and promoted to, the agent in charge in New York, we found a beautiful, one of our favorite homes in all our moving, was in Connecticut.
Jerry: So you went from Sac-of-Tomatoes, to New York and you were promoted to agent in charge of what the New York office or in Long Island?
Jack: The main function there, in New York, was the port and it was because of the Endangered Species Act and importations program. I had started one in San Francisco and it was successful. And New York was much larger and more difficult situation and I was told to go back there and do what I did in San Francisco in New York. They were having a hard time getting started there.
Jerry: And they designated the POE’s [Ports of Entry] at that time?
Jack: Yes, they were initially the ports, and New York, of course, is one of the most important.
Jerry: San Francisco logically on the west.
Jack: Los Angeles and Seattle.
Jerry: Okay, was Newark in that?
Jack: Newark came after I left New York and they put an office there. They didn’t have one at the time.
Jerry: So you have this beautiful, favorite house in Connecticut and you’re challenged with the Port of Entry things in New York. How did that turn out?
Jack: I thought the world had come to an end when I had to leave Sacramento, but I put myself wholeheartedly into that assignment and it was successful.
Jerry: Did the promotion help?
Jack: Well, it helped, it helped my wife; she hated to leave Sacramento and California.
Jerry: And what was the grade at that time, just for the record.
Jack: A GS-12. Had New Jersey; that was part of my district. Most of my time was concerned with; and some of the cases we made there were very significant. We made one of the biggest alligator cases ever made out of New York. And my good friend Wills, was down in Louisiana, he was participating, and they were hauling alligators illegally killed in Louisiana into the port of New York. The buyer there was [unintelligible#4@00:09:31], and they were being shipped mostly to Japan, and we stopped that.
Jerry: Isn’t there, the LE group, don’t you have a story book on, The Longest Tail, the story of tailing a suspect from Louisiana to New York?
Jack: Yes, Jerry Smith. You know there’s a sequel to that that he should write. It was even more intriguing. We stopped them temporarily, but there was too much money involved and they started it right up again. Well, then I created an undercover and put undercover agents right with these people that were involved in the traffic. And I had a female agent involved in that and then an informant, who wasn’t an agent, that worked and we made that case and it involved even more alligators
Robert Fields
No full textRobert C. Fields oral history interview as conducted by Jerry Grover.
Mr. Fields began his career with the Fish and Wildlife Service in the National Refuge System, and shares where his journeys took him from the mid-continent wetlands to the west coast in a variety of managerial positions dealing with big game, range management, wetlands management and waterfowl issues that eventually led him to be the NWR Supervisor of the Klamath Basin and California/Nevada National Wildlife Refuges.
Organization: FWS
Name: Robert Fields
Years: 1958-1959, 1962-1995
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Rangelands, Water management, Management, Employees (USFWS), Biography, Energy, Sheldon Natinoal Wildlife Refuge, Natinoal Bison Range, Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge, J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge, Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Garrison Diversion ProjectOral History
of
© Robert Fields
Interviewed by:
Jerry C. Grover
1
Name: Robert C. Fields
Date of Interview: February 1, 2004
Location of Interview: Tigard, Oregon
Interviewer: Jerry Grover
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 37 1/2
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held:
Range survey crew at Sheldon Antelope Range; refuge
manager trainee at National Bison Range; assignment
manager at Charles M. Russell; Project Leader at Fort
Niobrara Refuge, J. Clark Salyer, and Klamath Basin
Refuges; and in Portland as the Refuge Supervisor for
California and Nevada refuges including the Klamath
Basin Complex.
Most Important Projects: Garrison Diversion Project;
Klamath Basin Refuges, Central Valley Project
Improvement Act.
Colleagues and Mentors: Ben Hazeltine, Charles Rouse,
C.J. Henry, Casey Jones, Fred Staunton, Dave Hickock,
Marv Kaschke, Bob Burkholder, Forrest Carpenter, Joe
Mazzoni, Forrest Cameron, Mike Nunn, Homer
McCullum, Richard Voss, Merrill Hammond, Ed Smith,
John Carlson, Jim Gritman, Larry Debates, John Doebel,
Gray Kramer, Rick Coleman, Gary Zahm, Clark Bloom,
Tom Charmley, Joel Miller, Jim McKevitt
Most Important Issues: Range management and surplus
animal disposal issues at Ft. Niobrara; Klamath Basin,
dealing with Bureau of Reclamation, local irrigation
disstricts, and farmers who leased land on Tule Lake and
Lower Klamath; water rights at Klamath; Pacific Power
Line; steel shot versus lead shot, implementing the Central
Valley Project Improvement Act
ABSTRACT: Robert Fields grew up in a rural area east of
Olympia, Washington. There he would hunt, fish and
become interested in the outdoors and wildlife. While in
college he discovered the major of Wildlife
Management/Conservation and started taking courses in his
second semester of college. He took the civil service exam
and began his career with the Fish and Wildlife Service,
Bureau of Sports Fisheries and Wildlife, in the National
Wildlife Refuge System. He started with his refuge career
in 1958 but was interrupted by a stint in the Army. He
talks about the various locations he worked, people he
worked with, projects and issues, and how things have
changed since he first started working the Service. His
journeys took him from the mid-continent wetlands to the
west coast in a variety of managerial positions dealing with
big game, range management, wetlands management and
waterfowl issues that eventually led him to be the NWR
Supervisor of the Klamath Basin and California/Nevada
National Wildlife Refuges. He retired in January of 1995.
Bob & June Fields - 2012
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
2
THE ORAL HISTORY
Jerry: This is Jerry Grover, a retired Fish & Wildlife Service
Ecological Services & Fishery Program supervisor in the
Portland Regional Office. I’m doing an oral history today with
Bob Fields regarding his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service. The purpose of this interview is part of a program to
preserve the heritage and culture of the U. S. Fish & Wildlife
Service through the eyes of its employees. It’s February 1,
year 2004. Bob would you, for the record, would you state
your name, birth place and your birth date?
Bob: My name is Bob Fields but my official name is
Robert C. Fields. I was born on July 13, 1936 in Olympia,
Washington, and I was raised in a little town just east of
Olympia called Yelm.
Jerry: Bob what got you interested in this area of
conservation, Fish and Wildlife Management?
Bob: Well when I was a kid growing up we lived out in a
rural area and I always hunted and fished and had a .22
rifle and shot everything that moved, which I’m not so
proud of now. When I was in early years in high school I
got involved in a group called Washington State Junior
Sportsmen Council, and got interested in some of those
kinds of things. I remember going to camp on Orcas Island
in the early 1950’s. When I graduated from high school in
1954 I went to Washington State College, it’s Washington
State University now. I was going to be an engineering
major. That worked just fine until I took my first math
course and figured out that I didn’t know very much about
mathematics. So I was kind of depressed and laying there
one night on my bunk thumbing through the college
catalogue, and low and behold here’s this major in Wildlife
Management or Wildlife Conservation. And it gave the
name of Helmet K. Buchner at Washington State to go
over and talk to. So I thought, ‘WOW, this is a
profession!’ I had NO idea. So I went over to talk to Dr.
Buchner and he told me about what was involved with the
major and suggested I take his first course in Principles of
Wildlife Conservation. So I signed up for that my second
semester in college.
The textbook he used was Durward Allen’s book Our
Wildlife Legacy. I was so enchanted with Dr. Buchner and
what Durward Allen had to say, I just really clicked with it
and I thought this is where my future is, and so I declared
my major in Wildlife Conservation. They had two
programs at Washington State, one was Wildlife
Management and one was Wildlife Conservation. The
reason I took Wildlife Conservation was because it was
easier, you didn’t have all the strict scientific courses and it
gave you more flexibility for electives. Being the kind of
student I was, I thought ‘well if it’s easier, it’s got to be
better.’ And it fit my agenda quite well because it gave me
an opportunity to take the wildlife management courses I
wanted and also to take elective courses that I was
interested in.
Jerry: Did the school, the University or State College at
that time, did they sponsor summer work internships, what
did you do in the summers between semesters?
Bob: The first summer I worked for the Forest Service out
of Packwood, Washington. I started out as a fire lookout
and that didn’t appeal to me very much. There was a guy
who wanted to be a lookout and he came off the trail crew.
I signed up for the trail crew and worked in the Goats
Rocks Wilderness Area relocating the Cascade Crest Trail.
Between my sophomore and junior year I worked for the
Washington Department of Game at the Sinlahekin Game
Range up in north central Washington. I worked with a
couple of biologist just doing vegetative surveys and then
we went down in the Blue Mountains and did some more,
primarily vegetative surveys with transects for elk and deer
use. And then in my third year I took a break from that and
worked as a boat dock hand and speed boat driver on
Wallowa Lake in north eastern Oregon and that’s where I
met June. That was the best decision I ever made.
Jerry: Her maiden name was?
Bob: June VandeBrake and she was from Thorp,
Washington, a little town in central Washington. We were
both juniors at Washington State but didn’t know each
other until we got to Wallowa Lake. She was a home
economics major in dietetics and was a waitress at the
lodge and I worked at the boat dock renting boats. They
had a speed boat that we gave people rides around the lake,
so it was kind of an interesting summer. She made all the
money and I had all the fun.
Jerry: Back to school, you graduated in…?
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
3
Bob: We both graduated in 1958 and then I went to work.
We didn’t marry until November of that year. Earlier in
1958 I took the Federal Service Entrance Exam, and now
everybody has to have a score of about 104 to even be
looked at. I think my score was something like 87. But that
was back in the days before grade creep, and so I got a
notice after taking the test that I was to go to an interview
for a job. I went up to Turnbull Refuge in Cheney,
Washington, which is about oh 50, 60 miles north of
Pullman. The manager there was Rogers, and I think his
name was Bill but I’m not sure, William Rodgers, but it’s
Dick Rodgers’ father. Now Dick Rodgers is retired from
the Fish and Wildlife Service, he had been manager down
at Finley Refuge; he’d been in the Regional Office and is a
very well-known and respected person. Dick’s dad is the
one who interviewed me back in 1958 and Dick always
said that his dad didn’t make many mistakes but approving
me for being hired was probably one of them!
Jerry: I see you and Dick have some friendly banter. But
that was your introduction into the United States Fish and
Wildlife Service or at that time, the Bureau of Sport
Fisheries and Wildlife.
Bob: Right, and upon graduation I had a job. I was to
report to Lakeview, Oregon, and work on a range survey
crew where we were doing a vegetative analysis on the
Sheldon Refuge; it was called Sheldon Antelope Range at
that time.
Jerry: That was before they added Hart Mountain?
Bob: They were separate refuges. Sheldon was managed
by Ben Hazeltine and Hart Mountain was managed by Bob
Watson. Sheldon’s headquarters was out on the refuge at
the Little Sheldon Headquarters, and Hart Mountain
headquarters was out at the Hart Mountain Refuge. Our
office was in Lakeview where I worked. My first
supervisor was Charles Rouse. He was several years older
than I was for sure; everybody was older than I was at that
time. But Charlie had been around a long time. He
worked at the Wichita Mountains NWR (National Wildlife
Refuge). He had been a biologist and came into the service
in, I think, when it was still Biological Survey before 1941,
in the late 1930’s.
Another colorful person, who I associated with at that time,
was Ock Demming, he was the biologist out at Hart
Mountain and Sheldon refuges. He had been a CCC
person and came into the Bureau of Biological Survey after
the CCC Program in the late 1930’s.
Jerry: These are all people with your first job out of
Lakeview?
Bob: Ock Demming had worked several places before, I
don’t know exactly where, but he ended up being the
biologist at Hart Mountain and Sheldon. But he came into
the Fish and Wildlife Service shortly after the year I was
born
Jerry: It sounds like you didn’t get bugged by the
military; it was right at the end of the Korean War when
you graduated from high school. You didn’t have any
reserve time or military time?
Bob: When I went to work for the service I was 4-F, I had
a hernia and so I wasn’t too worried about military service.
And in November of 1958, June and I got married in
Ellensburg, Washington and she came down to Lakeview
with me. And sometime shortly after that I had a problem
with that hernia and had to have it operated on and
corrected.
Of course the military at that time wanted you to go in for a
physical every year, so I went in for another physical and
they said, “Hmm, you look pretty good. We want you to
report for active duty on the day before Thanksgiving in
1959.” So that’s what I did. I went into the Army, drafted
in, reported to Fort Ord in November 1959 and did my
basic training there. I ended up, through kind of a fluke,
finding out about a job down at Hunter Liggett Military
Reservation in wildlife work. I interviewed for that job
with the military officer who was in charge of the wildlife
program, got the job, thought I was going to be assigned
there and then they said, “Well you can’t go directly there
because you have to have a MOS, a Military Operation
Specialty and we don’t have one for wildlife.” So they sent
me to clerk typist school. In the meantime June moved
down to Seaside, California. After clerk typist school, I
then went to Hunter Liggett. I was there for almost two
years working on a managed deer hunting program. We
raised pheasants, I worked with a Predator and Rodent
Control guy hunting mountain lions, trapping bobcats, and
just generally had a hell of a good time for military service.
So I served two years, three months, and three days.
Jerry: And you mustered out of Hunter Liggett?
Bob: Mustered out of the Army at Hunter Liggett in
February of 1962. I was assigned to go to the National
Bison Range in Montana. Originally I had been assigned
to go to Hart Mountain, but I got caught up in late 1961 in
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
4
the Berlin crisis and everybody in the military was
extended. I had to tell the Service I didn’t know when I
was getting out, so I didn’t go to Hart Mountain. And I
was to get out in November but I didn’t get out until
February, went to the Bison Range and that was probably a
good stroke of business.
Jerry: And what were your primary duties there?
Bob: I was a refuge manager trainee.
Jerry: A GS…?
Bob: Five. No, excuse me, I was a GS-7. I had
experience and I had time in grade so I transferred to the
Bison Range as a GS-7. My job was, like I said, a refuge
manager trainee so I did a little bit of everything. I did
quite a bit of work with photography, photographed a lot of
plants and animals and left a lot of pictures there for the
refuge. But I also was pretty well versed in range
management. That was one of my major thrusts in college
and what I had worked at when I was in Lakeview, so I
helped with a lot of their vegetative surveys. But I just
generally got acquainted with what it was like to work on a
National Wildlife Refuge.
Jerry: What were the issues that were facing the refuge at
that time you were there?
Bob: Well you know that was back in probably the good
ole days. C.J. Henry was the refuge manager. He was
another manager that came into the Service in the late
1930’s. When I came in 1958, I came at a time that a lot of
the managers and biologists who came into the Service in
the late 1930’s, as the result of J. Clark Salyer’s thrust and
acquisition and expansion of the National refuge system,
were retiring. They hired a lot of people in the 1930’s. In
the 50’s, those people had 20, 25 years of experience and
were really the experienced managers. I got to know some
of these people and C. Jerry Henry was one of them. His
first job was at Lower Souris Refuge in North Dakota,
which I subsequently became the manager of but that’s a
story for a little later on.
Jerry: Was there another difference too at that time Bob,
that a lot of those folks that in the ‘30’s and early ‘40’s that
were managers, were also without college degrees? Seems
to me as I recall from doing interviews with other folks that
there was a wave of new people coming into the Fish &
Wildlife Service with Bachelor of Science degrees now
required to qualify for some of these positions? Were you
among that group?
Bob: I just had a Bachelor’s of Science. C. J. Henry was a
college graduate and my first boss, Charlie Rouse was also
a college graduate. I did know some of the other folks who
had not completed college and were working with the
Service. But work at the Bison Range at that time was
pretty routine. Some of the problems were invasive species
like goatweed and those sort of things. We had a disposal
program at that time where we shot excess deer and elk and
disposed of them through the school lunch program. So it
was a pretty exciting time; it was a great time to get started
in the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Jerry: Were there any bison on this range, you talk about
plants and deer?
Bob: Oh yeah, we had about 300 bison and the herd was
intensively managed with a roundup every year. We sorted
out the ones to dispose of and they were all disposed of at
that time by butchering. We shot them in a slaughterhouse
and butchered the meat and then the meat was sold at
auction.
Jerry: Okay after the Bison Range, Bob, what was your
next assignment?
Bob: I went to the Bison Range in February of 1962 and I
left there in November of 1963. I transferred to the Charles
M. Russell Game Range in Lewistown, Montana. My job
was the Assistant Manager on the West Unit at what was
called the Slippery Ann Game Station, which was about 75
miles north of Lewistown right on the Missouri River. The
West Unit was nearly 100 miles long and encompassed
about half a million acres.
Jerry: What was your grade at that time?
Bob: I transferred there as a GS-9. By this time we had
one son, who was born while we were in the military. Ray
was our youngster. He was born in September of 1960 in
King City, California. But while we were at Slippery Ann
from November of ’63 until July of ’65, another son,
Bruce, was born in Lewistown in November of 1964.
But this was quite a remote location and it was a real
experience. There was one maintenance man, Casey Jones,
who had been around a long, long time. He worked at Red
Rock Lakes back in the ‘50’s and then transferred to the
Fort Peck Game Range, the original name until it was
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
5
changed to the Charles Russell Game Range. He and I and
our families were the only ones that lived out there on the
station on a permanent basis. The manager at that time was
Fred Staunton, who started back in the ‘30’s also. He was
one of the fathers of the Wetlands Program, while he was
at Waubay Refuge, South Dakota, in the 1950’s. He saw
the need to have some kind of a program to stop the
Department of Agriculture from draining all those
wetlands, and Fred Staunton was one of the early people
who worked on that. The assistant manager was a fellow
by the name of Dave Hickock, who worked for the Service
for a while and then went on to Alaska and worked with,
boy I’m not sure, but I think it was The Arctic Research
Institute in Alaska.
Marv Kaschke was at Charles Russell at that time. I
replaced Marv at Slippery Ann but Marv was still on staff
as a range specialist. He was a real source of knowledge.
Bob Burkholder transferred in from Alaska as a pilot
biologist; Lloyd Ramelli another old timer was there; Joe
Mazzoni came in and was there about a year and a half as
Assistant Manager after Dave Hickock. So Charles Russell
experience was really great.
Jerry: You’re kind of listing a who’s who, Bob, of people
who that have ended up in the Pacific Region’s hierarchy
of managers.
But what was your job at Slippery Ann, I mean what were
you doing, you and the maintenance man out there?
Bob: Well my job was the management of the west unit. I
was in charge of issuing grazing permits and just
overseeing the whole thing. We had a major flood in 1964,
when the Missouri River flooded and caused extensive
damage, washed out a lot of our roads, bridges and farm
ground. We had some farming tracts where we did
cooperative farming. Those were pretty well devastated.
After the flood we did a lot of reseeding of all the bottom
lands; I was the only person that could fly with Burkholder
in the back of an airplane and dump sweet clover seed out a
side door without getting airsick. So that was one of my
jobs (chuckling.) But it was a great experience. The
winters were severe, we were out there on our own, June
and I and the boys were living next door to Casey and
Vernadine Jones and their kids and it was just a wonderful
experience.
Jerry: How long were you there?
Bob: I came there in November, moved into the house on
the day President Kennedy was shot in 1963, and left in
July of ‘65.
Jerry: When you left in July of ‘65, where’d you go after
that?
Bob: I went to my first job as a Project Leader at Fort
Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Valentine, Nebraska.
It was a buffalo and longhorn cattle refuge and it also had
elk and other wildlife, but the primary emphasis there were
buffalo and longhorn cattle. The longhorn cattle have since
been removed to a Nebraska State Park. Fort Niobrara was
in Region 3, and the Refuge Supervisor at that time was
Forrest Carpenter. My immediate supervisor was Ed
Smith, who finished his career out in Region 1 as a Refuge
Supervisor.
Jerry: Was that a promotion for you Bob?
Bob: Yes. That was a GS-11. We lived on the refuge in
refuge housing and that’s the only refuge I’ve ever lived at
where the community really supported you. The day we
moved in, there were people from town who came out and
welcomed us. It was because it wasn’t a controversial
refuge. The controversy that had been there had been
taken care of. They let people cut hay on the refuge. I
replaced Howard Woon, who had moved to Minneapolis to
work in the Job Corps Program.
It was a good job. I had a small staff. Forrest Brooks was
my administrative assistant and clerk, and cowboy. James
Vaughn was maintenanceman and excellent animal
authority and cowboy. He was born and raised in the
Nebraska Sandhills working with cattle and horses all his
life. Joe Tinkler was the maintenance mechanic who grew
up in Brooklyn, NY. We were the four permanent staff.
Larry Vaughn, Jim’s son, was a temporary worker. You
were riding horses and chasing buffalo and rounding up
longhorn cattle and all these sort of things. We instigated a
new program that was actually new to the Fish and
Wildlife Service. We set up a program where we sold
buffalo by live auction
William F. Shake
No full textWilliam F. Shake oral history interview as conducted by Jerry Grover.
Bill Shake talks about the various jobs that he held curing his career with the Service including working for Animal Damage Control/Wildlife Services, the Departmental Management Development Program, and being ARD for various programs of the Service.
Organization: FWS
Name: William F. Shake
Years: 1967-2004
Program: Refuges
Keywords: History, Biography, Employees (USFWS), Biologists (USFWS), Endangered and/or threatened, Fisheries management, Columbia Basin Ecosystem-Refuges, Michigan Wetland Management DistrictOral History Cover Sheet
of
Name: William F. Shake
Date of Interview: February 10, 2008
Location of Interview: PortlandTigard, Oregon at the home of Jerry Grover
Interviewer: Jerry C. Grover
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife
Service:
37½ years from 4/17/1967 to
12/31/2004
Offices and/ Field Stations Worked, Positions
Held:
Started outBill Shake began his career with the U.S. Fish &
Wildlife Service in Region 3 Minneapolis with as a temporary
appointment with in the Animal Damage Control ,( ADC)
program, in Lafayette, Indiana. His first permanent then got
permanent position was as a field biologist in Region 3 with
ADC . Then and was assigned to Ohio, few for several weeks,
to help the Wildlife Services program on Lake Erie., W when
finished , he with became the Assistant State Supervisor with
ADC in Lansing, Michigan. He then wWent to the Regional
Office in Minneapolis as a staff biologist with ADC/Wildlife
Services and, was the acting Endangered Species Biologist.
His next move was to Washington, then went to D.C., for the
year-long Departmental Manager Development Program (
DMDP) Program. Part of his training assignment was
withWorked for Dick Myshak, Deputy Assistant Secretary for
Fish, Wildlife & Parks on a task force to implement the Alaska
Native Clams Settlement Act. NextAt the completion of the
training program, he served as Wwaas staff biologist with the
Division of Program Plans in D.C. ,
in In 1982 he transferred to Region 1 Portland was as the
Assistant Regional Director (ARD) for Endangered Species
and Federal Aid, from there he went on to become then became
the Assistant to the ARD for Ecological Services, the Deputy
ARD for Fisheries eventually becoming the, then ARD for the
Fisheries Program of the Pacific Region. He then moved on to
become the multi-program Became was the Geographic ARD
for the Columbia River Basin. He and then becamecompleted
his career as the Special Assistant to the Regional Director for
the Columbia River issues.
Colleagues and Mentors: Dr. Hank Sather (professor),
Dick Smith, Dick Myshak, Fred QuartzelCourtsel, Wes Jones,
Jack Hemphill, Bob Herbst, Jack Berryman, Ed Verburg, Mike
Spear, Ed Chamberland, Wally Steucke, Joe Blum, Sandy
Wilbur, Wayne White, Gail Kobetich, Dave Riley, Fred
Vincent, Jim MorinWarrien.
Most Important Issues: Bill was intricately involved in
dDeveloping a wildlife resources restoration and management
plan for the Klamath River Basin in NothernNorthern
California, was the Service policy represenitiverepresentative
on the Pplanning process for the Columbia River dealing with
operations of the hydro-power system which is operated by the,
Bonneville Power Administration, Corps of Engineers and the
Bureau of Reclamation. He aAlso dealing represented the
Service on the with Snake River water rights adjudication
which involving involved the tribes, the and Bureau of
Reclamation and private water interestswater issue in Idaho.
The and NOAA Fisheries listing of the Pacific Salmon was also
a factor in the negotiations.
Bill and Deanna Shake - 2010
Brief Summary of Interview: Bill tTalks about where
he was born, growing up near the college he went to, becoming
interested in the outdoors and the Fish & Wildlife Service. He
talks about when he met his wife, going to college and graduate
school, getting a job with the FWS, getting married and having
two daughters. He talks about the various jobs that he has had
2
2
with the Service including working for Animal Damage Control/Wildlife Services, being in the Departmental Management Development P Program, and being ARD for various programs ofr the sServices. Bill talks about high about the high and low points of his career, things he thought were good ideas and others that he would consider doing over. He also talks about people who influenced him, and the good and bad changes or decisions that have occurred in the FWS. And he mentions some of the fun times that he has had working for FWS and he gives his final thoughts on his career, the accomplishments that were made and the people he worked with.
Insert
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THE ORAL HISTORY
Jerry: This is Jerry Grover a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office. This is Jerry Grover I’m doing an oral history today with, with Bill Shake regarding his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The purpose of this interview is part of a program to preserve the heritage and culture of the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service through the eyes of its employees. Joining me us is Deanna Shake and Judy Grover. Would you state your name for the record, please.
Bill: This is William F. Shake. e…I was born in Macomb, Illinois on January the 20th, 1942.
Jerry: What is Macomb, Illinois like? Is that farm city?
Bill: It’s, kind of a dichotomy - it’s both a, a farming community and the home of Western Illinois University, where I went to kindergarten all the way through a master’s degree; 22 years at the same campus. iIt’s in west central Illinois about forty miles from,and equal distance from the Mississippi River and the Illinois River. It’s a very rich farming country. and it also is the home of Western Illinois University, where I went through kindergarten all the way through a master’s degree; 22 years at the same, same campus.
Jerry: (Inaudible) What got you interested in the Fish and Wildlife thingsresources?
Bill: Well I think my parents really helped me learn to enjoy the, the out doors. My, both my parents were avid fishermen 3
2
and I started it you know as soon as I was able to hold a cane pole fishing rod and when I was finally old enough, my dad would take me duck hunting. This was, even way before I could even carry a shotgun but I’d go, go out to the duck blinds with him and his friends.
Jerry: And you had to swim out for the ducks?
Bill: No, I’d (chuckling) I didn’t have to do that but I really enjoyed watching the birds and the hunting the experience and from there I just sort of progressed. We had a friend that had a cabin out on the Mississippi River and we bought a little runboat and motor about (unclear) and then I started trout line fishing on the river for catfish and catch snapping turtles and enjoyed just poking around in the marshes along the, the river. I and just had a wonderful, wonderful childhood enjoying the outer doors.
Jerry: What’d your parents do?
Bill: My father was affiliated with the Western Illinois University. He originally taught physics there and then eventually moved, as part of the facilityfaculty, moved intothen, he was in charge of the physical plant at the University so you know which included all the heating, cooling, electricityal , everything;and maintaincemaintenance work. hHe managed all of the, the folks that made the, you know, the physical plant work at the University.
run.
Jerry: Okay, so you were living a pretty good life!
Bill: Yes, we lived right across the street from the campus from, the street from the campus. I literally walked, you know, a couple blocks to school and to the University. My mom was originally a schoolteacher and then after that she had me, she was a stay at home mom.
Jerry: During those early years, as you were growing up and got into high school, did you have jobs, school, after school jobs?
Bill: I, itt seemed like I was always working. I, aAs soon as I was big enough to ride a bicycle I started delivering newspapers. I remember I had like 80 people on my newspaper route and I’d deliver papers seven days a week and I remember on the holidays you knowwhich had big sale editions on a Sunday paper; I’d have to make two or three trips with my bicycle to be able to get those papers delivered. Also, you know I worked in a grocery store, I mowed yards you knowand all the usual types of things that, that kids, types of jobs kids had back then.
Jerry: Did you have any time for hobbies?
Bill: Hunting and fishing , you knowwere my main hobbies. I was also active in Boy Scouts and I earned the Eagle Scout rank. .
Jerry: Okay.
Bill: Then mMy folks really got me started doing that; those were probably my major hobbies. I enjoyed playing with my neighbors and friends and kids.
Jerry: Let’s jump into something, you mentioned, that you went to Western Illinois University.
Bill: Yes.
Jerry: And yYou said you had (inaudible), gotrecievedreceived a masters degree. What year were your degrees? And what was your major?
Bill: I majored in Zoology. T and I, wethe University didn’t have a wildlife management or fisheries management curricularum, and it was either zoology, microbiology or, botany, nature. I got my Bachelors of Science in Zoology in 19’64 and I got my Masters of Science in Zoology in 19’67. I did my master thesis on a wood duck nesting study and how the impact of starlingss at that timewhich were taking over wood 4
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duck nest boxes and really causing a lot of wood ducks to abandon their nests. and not raise broods during that particular year by taking over the box and they wanted, w
We wanted to see if they starlings were having the same affect in natural cavities in trees. so I, I spent two years, two summers gathering data and then the final year I wrote my thesis.
Jerry: (Unclear) dDid it go up to the jJournal of Wildlife Management or anything like that?
BBill: Yes it did, yeah it was published.
Jerry: Published there so…
Bill: Yes.
Jerry: …it was a good piece of work then.
Bill: Yes.
Jerry: Okay. What, sSounds like you were getting pretty well prepared if you were doing your masters on wood ducks. Was that wherewhat, led you to your first job?
Bill: Well it, yYes it was. I, I really, I knew I wanted to go to work for either the state or a federal fFish and wWildlife aAgency and back at that time Illinois had an opening,the Illinois Department of Conservation, had an opening. and I applied, and as luck would have it, and this really is was torturous fortunate that the secretary lost my application. T and they found it after they had already selected somebody. ; I found out later. But in order to cover themselves they had to go through the process of interviewing me so under the pretense that the job was still open. I went to Springfield and they interviewed me and unbeknownst to me, the guy that got the job was sitting out in the you know the foyer waiting to come in and talk to the guys that were doing the interview. So it was good news that I didn’t get hired by Illinois Department of Conservation because I wouldn’t have had the, the great career I’ve had with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And it just happened that my, my major professor, my advisor who at that time the was Dean of graduate school, Dr. Hank Sather he knew Goodie Gordon Larson. H really, really well in Minneapolis he was Personnel Director for the rRegional oOffice in Minneapolis. He put me in contact with Goodie Mr. Larson and on April 17, I was, of 1967, I was hired on as a four 4-month temporary GS- 5 because of a job freeze for permanent hires.
Jerry: You had graduated by this time?
Bill: Yes I had graduated. So this temporary appointment was with the ADC, Animal Damage Control program, Wildlife Services at that time I think it was, and we moved to Lafayette, Indiana. and I think my annual salary at that time was less than $5,000. back in 1967.
Jerry: That would have been your GS 5 then?
Bill: A GS 5 starting out and sSo I did my four4-month assignment and the job freeze or whatever you know ended. I was able to resign from that position and then they picked me up the very next day as a permanent, full-time employee.
Jerry: Okay.
Bill: And bBecause I had my masters degree I was eligible for a GS- 7, so I got a raise.
Jerry: Were you able to avoid the military? or did you…
Bill: No. I… went up to Chicago, back when we had draft cards, and I had to go up for a physical. And I’ve always had a high blood pressure problem. A, as a kid I couldn’t play football in high school because of my blood pressure but I could play basketball; I never did understand that, but anyway I went up to Chicago., wWhen they checked my blood pressure it was high so the procedure was they put you up in a room overnight and took take your blood pressure twice. then tThe next and day it was still high so they gave me a 1-Y status on my draft card, which means if they go to war and they really need a warm body they would of drafted me but otherwise I didn’t get drafted. I and was able to complete college and, and go right to work for the Service.
Jerry: Deanna is with us today. When does she come into the picture?
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Bill: Well she and her brother and their folks moved to Macomb probably when I was a high school semaphoresophmoresophomore, freshman.
Deanna: You were a Junior.
Bill: She’s telling me when I was a junior twhen they moved here.
Deanna: OH!
Bill: No, no they moved to Macomb before that.
Deanna: I moved when I was in 7th grade.
Bill: Yes, so Deanna was in 7th grade when she moved there and I was two years ahead of her in school. And her brother and I were in the same grade and so I always walked to school with him and Deanna. B (someone saying something in background) being the little sister, she would always walk up ahead of us and you know like I said it was only a couple blocks to the school and you know she was really attractive (unclear, chuckling) in 7th grade, I thought she was pretty. (inaudible). But aA year or so later I, I did ask her to go out and her folks asked their son, my friend Ron, you know what kind of guy I was and he gave me a glowing report and so I was able to take Deanna out on our first dDate and… a long story short we’ve been going together and had been married for 46 years.
Jerry: Been a long time and been married and yYou had children, I take it.
Bill: We have two daughters; Chantal Shantel and Jennifer, both of those girls were born after we were transferred up to Lansing, Michigan.
Jerry: The daughters are on the west coast now?
Bill: Yes Chantal Shantel lives here in Portland and Jennifer lives up in a suburb near SalemSeattle.
Deanna: Seattle.
Bill: Or Seattle I mean, I’m sorry.
Jerry: Okay. Let’s, let’s take a jump back to start on your career now. You got have your temporary appointment; you now have been hired as a GS- 7 Biologist in Region 3. in Minneapolis office. What was that job?
Bill: It was a, I was field biologist with Wildlife ServicesAnimal Damage Control and basically what we were doing is when people were having problems with depredating birds or, or voles in apple orchards, roosting birds you know in cities or whatever, they would, would call our office. and wWe’d come out and provide assistance on showing folks how to, how to reduce the, the affects of the animals; whether they’re groundhogs and (someone speaking in background)in pastures or you know blackbirds birds eating corn , or eating fruit off of commercially grown fruittrees
.
Jerry: In other words as a biologist you are now all of a sudden your killing things.
Bill: That’s correct. We were, we were quite good at it actually.
Jerry: And the division you were a wildlife biologist, wWhat was the division? It was Predator and Rodent Control that then they went to Animal …Jerry and Bill: …Damage Control and then they went to…
Bill: …Wildlife …Services!
Jerry and Bill: …Services.
Jerry: And you started out…
Bill: Then back to ADC, I think it was…
Jerry: Animal Damage…
Bill: I think it was Animal Damage Control when I…
Jerry: (inaudible, speaking at same time). That’s when the federal government had taken on…
Bill: Right.
Jerry: …The Service waswe were doing coyotes in other parts of the country. But you were working primarily on bird depredation?
Bill: Yeah eExactly.
Jerry: But you were, you would sayworking primarily on bird depredation? Which is… 6
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Bill: Yeah we,Yes cCoyotes hadn’t become really a problem in the mid-west like they are now. I know Tthey’re more, certainly more prevalent now thaen they were when I was a field biologist. then but wWe dealt mostly with rodent control,and bird control. things like that. We even had a program, at that time, where we would, cities would or municipalities, counties would call us that if they had landfills and if theythat were overrun with rats. and wWe would go out and make a survey of the dump the at night before and, you know with flashlights, and count the number of rats we’d see. and tThen we’d go buy cases of canned dog food and mix up the dog food with a chemical called zinc phosphide. and then wWe’d go out with these buckets of this mixture and we’d plop it all around the dump. And then we’d come back to the dump about three or four days later do another survey to see how effective we were. And…
Jerry: Were you?
Bill: We were.
Jerry: Who was your first boss?
Bill: My first boss was Fred QuartzelCourtsel; he was athe sState sSupervisor in Lafayette, Indiana. We also hasd a bait station at Lafayette where we mixed up lots of thesebait compounds and then supplyied those it to county extension agents and, to other wWildlife sWServices offices around the country. So it was kind of a, you know,a combination field office and a bait station.
Jerry: How long were you at Lafayette then?
Bill: Ten months.
Jerry: Ten months, tThen what happened?
Bill: Well I had been assigned to over to Ohio and to help out the Wildlife Service’s Office over there do some corn depredation surveys up on Lake Erie. And aAt the time Dick Smith was the State Supervisor at Columbus and so I went over there for several weeks and, and did corn damage assessments. W and then when I got back from that, and this was in the late summer/fall, and when I got back from that assignment I got a call to come over to Columbus. and I took Deanna with me and walked into Dick Smith’s office. Before we saw Dick the secretary said, “Oh you must be the new person going to Lansing, Michigan.” Well this was all news to me. So she kind of let the cat out of the bag.
but…
Jerry: What year was this?
Bill: That would be 1968.
Jerry: ’68.
Bill: So, you knowI, talked to Dick, and he offered me the job as Assistant State Supervisor in Lansing, Michigan. and iIt was a one person station and then I’d be in charge of all the ADC work in, in Lansing and I remember…Michigan.
Jerry: Did you get a promotion?
Bill: Yes I got arecievedreceived a GS 9 out of thatpromotion to GS-9. We went out to Dick’s house for lunch and Dick put the sale on, ontalked to Deanna about moving to Lansing. and we lived in, iIn Lafayette we lived in this this one hundred year old… farmhouse and it was on about 360 acres and it was great; had a small mouth bass stream in the back yard and pheasants and quail you know and it was pretty nice. We raised bird dogs at the time and so it, we really enjoyed Lafayette. B but Michigan was, waswas also a really a nice place to live as well so.
Jerry: WOkay again, what was your, what were your daily activities? You’re a one-man office.
Bill: We worked a lot up there with orchardists, either blueberry growers orin their apple orchards showing them how to control voles, which would you know girdle the fruit trees. Some of the species of voles would actually eat the roots and really reduce the vitality of those trees and the amount of fruit 7
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that they could produce. and of course tThe birds physically were causing damage and also lo loss to cherries, and blueberries. So we were working, we did a lot of work with the Service’s Denver Research Lab. and tThey had a bird group out there, a bird depredation group and so we would run a lot of field tests using various noise makers, using spray- on repellants and of things like that to …ssee if we could finds ways to, to reduce the depredation.
We also , in Michigan, gotwere involved with an endangered species - issues the Kirtland’s warble warbler. They only nest, only in jack pine stands in central Michigan, north central Michigan. And tTheir habitat tree age was really specific it would beand the birds would only nest in stands that were only seven to fifteen, seventeen years old. and fFire was the you know the you know the regenerative factor for these, these habitats. and a lot of it was on a national guard base. The birds were, were not doing well at all there’s just you knowwith the population level down to a few hundred birds I mean less than like two or three hundred. I think, if I remember right. And we found out if you; they were having problemsThe reason for the decline was with cowbird parasitism. where The cowbirds would lay an egg or two in the Kirtland’s warblers nest, they were a ground nesting bird, and then the of course the cowbird fledgling nestling would take over the nest and, and eat all the food and the Kirtland’s nestlings wouldn’t make it. And so this was a big reason why they were, were not doing well. So wWe found outdiscovered that if you trap the cow birds that we could significantly increase the, the fledgling rate for Kirtland’s,. significantly, really significantly.
Richard "Dick" Kuehner
No full textRichard "Dick" Kuehner oral history interview as conducted by Jerry Grover.
Mr. Kuehner worked in Portland, Oregon as a Recreation Planner and as a Public Use Specialist working on interpretative signage and various visitor's centers for refuges and hatcheries.
Organization: FWS
Name: Richard "Dick" Kuehner
Years: 1978-2000
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Biography, Employees (USFWS), History, Interpretation, Public accessOral History
of
Richard A. Kuehner
by
Jerry Grover
Name: Dick Kuehner
Date of Interview: February 2, 2016
Location of Interview: Captain Cook, Hawaii
Interviewer: Jerry and Judy Grover
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 22 years - 1978 – 2000 Federal Service - 34 years including BLM & U.S. Forest Service .
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: GS-12, Recreation Planner; Portland, Oregon GS-13, Public Use Specialist; Portland, Oregon
Most Important Projects: Working on interpretative signage and various visitor’s centers for refuges and hatcheries
Colleagues and Mentors: Ed Murczek, Dick Myshak, Larry Debates, John Doebel, Bob Fields
Most Important Issues: Finding funds for projects, drawing the public onto a refuge or hatchery and gaining their support, gaining public access to refuges
Brief Summary of Interview: After obtaining degrees from Humboldt State and Michigan Universities, Mr. Kuehner returned to Humboldt State 1966 to teach courses in Environmental Design and Dendrology. After 5 years, he joined the ranks of the Bureau of Land Management as a landscape architecture, also doing some specialized work for the U.S. Forest Service on Bristlecone Pine. By the time he went to work for the Fish & Wildlife Service in 1978, Mr. Kuehner was a full level professional in landscape architecture, social survey research, and natural resource interpretation. Under his leadership, he developed an intensive program of interpretative signage for refuges. Challenged by the lack of funding, he sought innovative ways of locating available funds to keep the program moving. His successes led to instructional workshops in other Regions. As a Public Use Specialist, his efforts in design led to construction of visitor centers throughout the region on National Wildlife Refuges and National Fish Hatcheries. His leadership effort in developing individual informative leaflets for each station changed the whole Regional approach to public use interpretation and access on Service lands. He continues his interpretative work in retirement in Hawai’i assisting Refuge and National Park projects.
Richard Kuehner, February 2016, Captain Cook, Hawai’i 2
THE INTERVIEW
Jerry: This is Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office and representing the Association of Retired Fish & Wildlife Service Employees and a member of the Service’s Heritage Committee. I am at the home of Richard Kuehner in Captain Cook, Hawaii to do an oral history on his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 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. Joining us today is Dick’s wife Barbara and my wife Judy, also a FWS career retiree.
Would you please state your full name, when, where you were born for the record
Dick: Good morning. Well, my formal name is Richard Andrew Kuehner, and I was born in southern California, San Diego, in 1940.
Judy: That was a good year.
Dick: It was a good year, is that your year, too?
Judy: Yeah, and southern California.
Dick: And southern California, yeah.
Jerry: Dick, what got you interested in pursuing the career that you pursued with the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Dick: Well, let’s see, I was working for Bureau of Land Management and I’d done some work as an interpreter and outdoor recreation specialist designing visitor’s centers and things for them. And then finally I got out of that job and into another job, mostly just to get a grade increase and that was to direct and write environmental impact statements. And I spent quite a bit of time doing one on the nuclear power plant and their transmission lines to San Diego from the Colorado River, and that wasn’t all that fun. And all of a sudden I saw this job come up with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and it was for the regional office to promote and design, and to develop public facilities on national wildlife refuges and national fish hatcheries, so that sounded pretty good. And so we went for it and moved to Portland and ironically, that’s where Barbara was from originally and so we were kind of back to her old haunts, not mine; it was a little too cool for me, that’s why we’re out here in Hawaii, but spent 20 years there with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Jerry: What was your title and grade when you retired and what year was that?
Dick: Well, let’s see, it was the year 2000 when I retired. I was the Branch Chief of the Public Use Division in Refuges.
Barbara: Yes, 2000.
Dick: 2000, and I was a GS 13 Public Use Specialist in charge of public use programs for refuges and fish hatcheries.
Jerry: Is that in the Division of Realty or was that just in refuges?
Dick: Just in refuges, but it included work for the National Fish Hatchery System plus other special assignments and teaching throughout the country.
Barbara: Can I add something here.
Jerry: Sure, go ahead.
Barbara: Originally, he taught environmental design at Humboldt State College and his background was really in design, architecture, and that kind of thing. So that’s why the job in Portland, he was getting back to something that was really important to him; that’s how he stood the clouds for all those years.
Dick: That’s true, actually. I’m still doing design things for the National Park up here, well, on a volunteer basis. So I’ve been doing that for a long, long time, and enjoy it.
Jerry: Okay, what were you hired at in Portland?
Dick: I was a recreation planner, GS-12. When I got promoted to Branch Chief, that was a GS-13
Jerry: So you had the years in with the BLM and then you actually transferred over to Fish and Wildlife.
Dick: Right, right. And I had worked with Forest Service too up in Bristlecone Pine Forest in California. I remember I did some other research for them on interpretative trails and that sort of thing in California. 3
Jerry: So you weren’t a young kid out of school?
Dick: Well not too young, but yeah.
Jerry: Where did you go to school, Dick?
Dick: Well, undergraduate at Humboldt State in California and graduate for master’s at University of Michigan. Barbara and I met at the University of Michigan, and that was also under the forestry program, forest recreation. But it was really a hybrid between forest, landscape architecture and social survey research. At that point I didn’t know whether I was going to go into more academic stuff or not, and I did actually stay in academia for a while, went back to Humboldt and taught for four or five years before I went on to the BLM.
Jerry: What years were those that you were teaching there?
Barbara: ’66 through ’71 or something like that. Yes
Dick: Right, yeah. It was a good place, it was an interesting place; I enjoyed teaching. I taught some courses that were for all of the different resource fields that could be for fisheries or wildlife or natural resources. I taught dendrology and I taught environmental design, which was basically an introduction to landscape architecture for people that were in the resources. And photogrammetry, a number of things that they don’t even teach anymore.
Jerry: What was your first job when you got to Portland, can you recall?
Dick: Oh gosh!
Jerry: That’s a long time back?
Dick: Yeah, yeah; first assignment basically.
Jerry: What year was that you came to Portland when you finally pulled the plug?
Barbara: ’78 I think; it was during the oil embargo, I remember that. It was a horrible time to be moving.
Dick: I think it was about then, about ’78.
Barbara: Yeah, Heather was born in ’73 and she was five, so I think that was it, ’78.
Jerry: So you arrived in Portland about ’78?
Dick: Yeah, the first thing I guess I got involved in there was trying to figure out what the Fish and Wildlife Service was wanting to do for the public, if anything, and that varied a lot as to who you talked to in the Service. A lot of refuges, mostly I worked with refuges but I also worked with fish hatcheries. The refuges people primarily were biologists and had very little background in dealing with the public and serving the public, and had no budget for serving the public. In fact, they would rather at the time, I think, wanted the public to go away and then they could get their work done. And so a lot of my effort was to try to convince some of the refuges, and to some extent the fish hatcheries on Public use. But somehow or other, the fish hatcheries seemed to be fine with the public; they seemed to be happier with having the public around. It was perhaps a more controlled situation and they could get the public to come and watch, keep an eye them or whatever.
But I found that early on, I guess some of those early on things, some of the refuges said, “Maybe we should have something or a sign that says ‘Welcome’ to the public.” “Yeah, yeah, that would be good, and maybe you ought to tell them a little bit about the refuge, tell them what it does,” because they hadn’t done that; never occurred to them. And then when we finally put in little kiosks and interpretive signs and kind of “Welcome” and “Come on” and here’s some of the things you can do rather than all the things you can’t, on a sign, which was common, or more common back then. The public would come to the manager and say, “Thank you so much for putting that stuff in; that was interesting.” “Oh yeah, been meaning to do it all the time, just never got around to it,” was the Refuge Managers answer.
Yeah, right, okay. So basically, I saw that as our function to help the refuge manager plan the facilities and the programs for the public because they needed that support base, they needed the public to support what they were doing and have some kind of an idea of what that was. And so that’s what I got into first. It was slow at first because we had to find money to do that. And a lot of times, well, I figured out; I had enough courses in budgeting in BLM and buying things and contracting and all that. So I found out that often times at the end of the year, there were various refuges that didn’t spend what they said they were going to spend and the money was going to have to go back. Well, it occurred to me that if you had the plan and a contract ready to go, if that money came back I could divert into one of these projects that we already defined; kiosk, or a tour road, or a tree house, or whatever that might be, a visitor center. And so we did, and really the whole program was started, not as a main line program but something that utilized some of the money for gains that served the public a little bit better. 4
Jerry: Interesting; that’s a good beginning. Who’s your boss at that time, who signed your performance? Was that Larry?
Dick: Well, it was Ed Murczek.
Jerry: And who was the Regional Director at that time, do you recall?
Dick: Myshak. Dick Myshak. And Larry Debates was ARD in Refuges.
Jerry: Okay, so that was quite a crew there.
Dick: I worked with John Doebel, quite a bit, he was very helpful in getting funding for things.
Jerry: So, on these projects, what were some of the normal ones that said you were finally able to divert money and get some things; are there some that stand out that was really a breakthrough?
Dick: Yes, I guess one of the first was down at Finley Refuge; that one had nothing for the public at all.
Jerry: And that’s that main Willamette Valley Refuge?
Dick: Yeah. And that one got started and I can’t think of the name of the manager now; times goes on. Anyway, he got all excited about serving the public after we got that going, and he turned away and he found he got a lot of support from the local community. It was a simple thing and not very expensive, and that was the case with most of these projects; they weren’t all that expensive, you know, there were some signs interpreted, exhibits and that sort of thing. Plus also the refuge leaflets, the general leaflets that describe the refuge; they had little sheets that were one-paged mimeographed; they were pretty sad when they were trying to compete with full-color Park Service brochures and that sort of thing. So there was one time when I talked to, well, sold the idea for the whole Service actually, to have a leaflet for every refuge and in full color.
Jerry: Were they individual or did they want one size fits all?
Dick: Well, they sort of wanted one size fits all, but part of the idea of a leaflet, what was special about that particular place and you wanted to highlight that, each refuge or each hatchery; what did you want to focus on? So they had to be a little different, they had to look similar, look like a matching set, but they also featured what the place was about. And we got, actually, we got some money out of, I can’t remember exactly how, but went to a meeting back in D.C. and ended up with a million dollars just to do leaflets throughout the Service.
Barbara: Was that the ISTEA or was that something else?
Dick: Well, it could have been.
Jerry: What was the question?
Barbara: Oh, I just asked if it was the ISTEA money because I know he got money from federal highways to help to fund these things.
Jerry: Oh, okay.
Dick: I think it might have been, yeah, I’m pretty sure it was. The federal highways, that was another source of funds, because if your leaflet had a map in it, that’s part of federal highways, and so they were willing to fund it. You had to be creative to find funds to make things happen and that did, one way or the other, but you’re right.
Barbara: I know over the years you built quite a staff of talented people that were doing these things.
Dick: Yeah, we had about fifteen people; designers, artists, writers.
Judy: Very talented people.
Dick: Had a good group, it was a fun group to work with. Now I understand , it’s becoming more just common place, it’s just part of the system, just more and more, it’s just automatic that you get something for visitors and try to cultivate the local people as well as others that collect refuges as it were; go from place to place and know what the whole system’s about. So, a lot more support these days, I think, which is good.
Jerry: On another note, were you involved with the Lower Snake River Comp Plan at all, the design of those facilities, working with the Corps and the Service?
Dick: Not personally, no. We had some people in the group that did; I headed up the group. So, but no, I wasn’t personally involved in those just from the administrative prospect.
Jerry: But you were on visitor’s centers. I have to say, at least from my perspective, one of the things that I saw the Service maturing over the years was with visitor centers where you just had kind of had just a little room or dedicated small space or something like that. Suddenly 5
when you built a visitor center, you built a full blown real interpretive visitor center. And you were part of that?
Dick: Oh, yes.
Jerry: I know that one you designed for Coleman NFH, I thought, was one of the premier ones.
Dick: Oh, yeah. I have always wanted something; what you’re doing basically when you go to a particular station on a hatchery or a refuge, you’re designing not just a thing, you’re designing an experience. And when you design a whole refuge or a whole hatchery, you take that visitor, the visitor guides it. You know, did they get lost trying to find the hatchery, were there signs adequate to identify it once they were there, was there something to tell them what they could do rather than all of the things they couldn’t do? And then each of those experiences, was it easy to find them, was it fun for them, was it new, was it interesting? So this is the mindset that you had and all my staff the same way, educated to the public interest and excitement so that they would pick up on that and try to really serve the visitors.
So if you’re going to do a little visitor’s center, it shouldn’t be just a little alcove off of the office, it should be something that they remember, it was something nice about that place; it allowed them to see the fish up close, or suggested they come back in the wintertime when the eagles were there, or something, some activity that would be fun for them.
We have a neighbor down here that lives up in the bay area and he likes to go bird watching, he’s not a professional at it or anything. So I suggested he go to Sacramento Refuge to take a look, because he lives part-time here and part-time there. And I said, “If you go up there in the wintertime, you come in there at the end of the day and watch all the snow geese come back into the refuge.” That’s an experience, you just can’t describe. You got to be there, you’ve got to do it, but you’ve got to know that that exists, so that’s something that works everywhere.
Jerry: Like Klamath, they have an eagle watch at Klamath Refuge.
Dick: That’s what I was thinking.
Jerry: For the bald eagles, and I mean some of our retirees volunteer. Bob Fields, for one, has gone down there annually for years and kind of led Audubon groups or Audubon-sponsored groups and tours to look at the large number of eagles on that series of refuges in the Klamath Complex.
Dick: That’s the famous one and a very nice one. You get up there on this elevated hillside above the refuge and the eagles are roosting up there; it’s dead silent, it’s just about dawn, and it’s colder than heck [chuckling]. But it’s beautiful to watch these eagles just sort of float on down to the refuges and take their place on the ice and sit there.
Jerry: Looking for that poor duck that ain’t going to make it.
Dick: Well, you know, they’re scavengers, they’re not killers like the golden eagle, but they scavenge. They sit there, they can sit there the longest time waiting for that duck to die and then walk over and eat it. But that’s a beautiful experience, just something you’re not going to get and you’re not going to understand unless you’ve been there.
Jerry: There are any number of interagency agreements between the Fish and Wildlife Service, and I’m thinking, like BPA and BIA where we shared refuge or hatchery facilities. Did you work cooperatively with those groups or were you pretty much just Service- oriented?
Dick: It was pretty much Service- oriented although we did do facilities at some airport’s exhibits and things of that sort. Going up to Palau, I did one exhibit in Palau, did one in the Honolulu Airport, a big globe and focusing mostly on endangered species. I was out there for quite some time. We did a few of those cooperatively, we did some things cooperatively with states when they had a refuge near a federal refuge, and we’d incorporate stories about the good neighbor type policy to suggest things that they could do, so that was also a good possibility; it worked. But there were so many different places; I mean, over the years, I was working at this for twenty years so we covered quite a few places and all sizes from Desert Refuge from a million plus acres to tiny, little postage stamps like Kīlauea Point on the Island of Kauaꞌi, and just a whole variety of facilities and fun different ideas.
Judy: And now to the visitors that were interpreting from what you put out, I mean, it’s just wonderful; that’s what they were trying to do is educate the public.
Barbara: More recently in Spearfish NFH, South Dakota, a number of years ago when he worked for Fish and Wildlife, he helped design and interpret place. Have you been to Spearfish?
Jerry and Judy: Oh yeah. 6
Barbara: The way the community and the Friends group has really come on board and almost taken over a lot of that, I mean, it’s a real focal point for community effort, but it began as Fish and Wildlife.
Dick: I was called out on different assignments to other regions that were a bit larger in efforts to do designs for those specifically. And Spearfish and its historic fish hatchery was a fun one, and was an interesting one. They didn’t have a place to welcome the visitors and take them across the creek and stuff like that. So we built a little building that was sort of a bridge and pulled them across that way, and identified it. And then they had talked about the fish train, you know going to Yellowstone originally supplying the fish out there.
Jerry: Yeah, they’ve got that fish car in there, and they restored it.
Dick: I strongly urged them to do that, to put something in there, get one of those in there because I said you’re not going to see that story anywhere else. And they did a nice job, they put it in, restarted nicely.
Jerry: Well, that Friends Group out there, as far as fisheries go, is probably one of the strongest friends support groups in the Fish and Wildlife; you talk about active, they put their money where their mouth is and they worked hard.
Dick: I bet.
Jerry: And they got the fish car, they searched for it, and got an original, genuine one, not a replica. They found an old fish car somewhere and got that sucker out there in the middle of the creek, got two rail tracks and put a set of rails under it and restored it.
Barbara: It’s beautiful.
Jerry: And then they had a dedication, I think we had a retiree’s reunion there about 2000 or so, and they dedicated the fish car.
Dick: Oh, okay.
Jerry: And the other feature that they have was as you come into the hatchery, there’s kind of a little waterfall and a pond and they have a bronze statue of a guy showing this little girl how to fish. I don’t know
William (Bill) Henry Meyer
No full textWilliam (Bill) Henry Meyer oral history interview as conducted by Jerry Grover.
Mr. Meyer moved to Ohio for his first job with the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife-River Basin Studies. Soon followed attending the Department of the Interior Management Training Program in Washington, DC. Working for the Division of Planning in DC he began a record setting series of work assignments that forever changed the Service.
Organization: FWS
Name: William (Bill) Henry Meyer
Years: 1965-1987
Program: Deputy Regional Director
Keywords: Biography, History, Biologists (USFWS), Planning, Research, Work of the Service, Management, Personnel, Public policies, maintenance, budget, anadromous fish, Bolt decision, Employees (USFWS), National Steel Shot issue, Columbia River Anadromous fish, Boldt and Delloni, Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act,Oral History
of
William H. Meyer
Interviewed by:
Jerry C. Grover
NAME: William (Bill) Henry Meyer
DATE OF INTERVIEW: March 4, 2008
DATE OF EDIT INTERVIEW : September 9, 2016
LOCATION OF INTERVIEW: Portland Oregon
INTERVIEWER: Jerry C. Grover
APPROXIMATE YEARS WORKED FOR FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE: 22 (1965 – 1987)
OFFICES/ FIELD STATIONS WORKED, POSITIONS HELD: -River Basin Studies, Lebanon, Ohio
-Department Management Training Program, D.C.
-Regional River Basin Office, Minneapolis, MN
-Grad School- Economics, College Park, MD
-Office of Program Analysis; Washington D.C.
-Office Program Plans; Washington D.C.
-Deputy Regional Director, Portland, Oregon;
-Assistant Regional Director, Public Affairs, Portland, OR
COLLEAGUES AND MENTORS: Henry Meyer, Bob Cleary, Kahler Martinson, Mike Spear, Vic Schmidt, Bill Atchison, Spencer Smith, Bud Schlick, Lynn Greenwalt, Dick Myshak, Ken Sipple, Bob Peoples, Jan Rife, Warren Nord, Bud LaPoint, Jim Pulliam, Joe Kathrein, Thor Marston, Tom Fowler, Jim McBroom, Sharon Clark, Jim Langford, Morris Splutzstasser, Tom Baskett , Bill Sweeney, Joe Blum, Arch Meyerhoff, Chuck Lobdell, Julian Martinez, Dan Rasovitch, Jim Teeter, Bill Shake, Ed Chamberlain, Dave Hudak, Fred Vincent, Dave Klinger, Larry DeBates, Wally Steucke, Felix Smith, Larry Wills, Dave McMullen, Keith Parcher, Clark Bavin, Bob Scott
BRIEF SUMMARY OF INTERVIEW: From an early life in rural Iowa– high school, college, wife/marriage, kids; summer work in construction, biological surveys, etc.; & going to work for state of Maine. He moved to Ohio for his first job with the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife – River Basin Studies. Soon followed attending the Department of Interior Management Training Program in Washington, DC. It was back to graduate school for economics at the U. of Maryland. Working for the
Division of Planning in D.C. he began a record setting series of work assignments that forever changed the Service. It began with completing an intensive inventory of maintance needs resulting in vastly increased budgets at Service facilities. Soon a task force to align Service scientific talent to better address devastating environmental impacts lead to the formation of the Office of Biological Services. Accepting the Deputy Regional Director position in Portland brought him to the forefront of the National steel shot issue, long standing issues of the Columbia River anadromous fish and the accompanying Boldt and Delloni court decisions, the powerful agri-business groups and contentious water issues in California and the continuing implementation of the Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts.
2
THE INTERVIEW
JG -- Good afternoon. This is Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office and representing the Association of Retired Fish & Wildlife Service Employees and also the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Heritage Committee. I will be doing an oral history interview today with Bill Meyer. 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. Bill’s wife Nancy is also present as is Judy Grover. Would you state for the record - your name, place of birth, and birth date.
BM -- Bill Meyer -- William Henry Meyer, born May 14, 1937, in Cherokee, Iowa.
JG -- Thank you, Bill. Cherokee, Iowa – what kind of a place is that?
BM -- Well, they had an insane asylum [laughter] which was just up the hill from where we lived. It was a northwestern Iowa town, about 7000 people. We lived there until I was through the fourth grade, then we moved to Sioux City, Iowa. I completed elementary and Jr. High School there. We then moved to Storm Lake, Iowa prior to my freshman year of high school. All of these homes were in the northwest portion of Iowa, and I enjoyed them all.
JG -- As a young boy, what did you do? You did hunting and fishing?
BM -- Did hunting and fishing, often with my dad, my brother, Gene, and sometimes my mom would also go fishing. If we wandered into my den right now I’d show you a picture of my first pheasant that I shot when I was nine years old. I fished a lot for walleye, northern pike, crappie, blue gill, yellow perch and other warm water fish. My mother’s parents had a cottage on West Lake Okoboji, in northwestern Iowa very near the Minnesota border. It was a beautiful deep, glaciated, lake -- almost 200 feet deep. The cottage was built in 1914 on lakeshore property. I knew the north end of that lake very well, and was able to fish it successfully every summer, until I was old enough to get a summer job--about eighth grade.
JG -- What did you do for summer jobs?
BM -- Oh, probably the first one was carrying washing machines up and down stairs for a rental company in Sioux City, Iowa. When we moved to Storm Lake I de-tasseled corn for DeKalb as part of the process to develop specialized seed corn. And I worked in a greenhouse shoveling dirt in and out. I don’t think I ever touched a plant. It was simply to get fresh dirt into the flats so they could grow more flowers.
I also worked construction a couple of summers for a small company building commercial buildings. Later, I was a groundsman for the Iowa Public Service Company for two summers. The year before I was married, I did summer construction in Yellowstone Park. They were all good jobs, working with individuals who helped teach me their trade while also allowing me to grow up some. During the summer, I also played on various baseball teams, being awarded 14 letters during high school in baseball, football, basketball, track and golf.
JG -- Where did you go to high school then?
BM -- Storm Lake High, Iowa,.
JG -- Basically all rural areas.
BM -- Yeah, pretty much. Farming with many businesses associated with farm economies. Good places to grow up. People had a strong work ethic, but politically and socially they were a little more homogenous than I now desire.
JG -- You went on to college. What motivated you to go to university?
BM -- My parents were very much oriented towards education. My dad was an electrical engineer and became District Manager of the Iowa Public Service 3
Company in Storm Lake, Iowa. He was several credits short of having an electrical engineering degree from the University of Denver. He left school during the Depression to help support his mom and four siblings when his dad left the family. He began his career reading meters to put bread on the table.
My mother graduated from Iowa Teachers College (now Northern Iowa University). She taught elementary education or assisted young teachers entering the teaching field when I was in high school.
I really didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career once I got out of high school. But, I very much wanted me to go to college. There parenting was very important for both my brother Gene and myself. A nature library in the Dickinson County Nature Center, Spirit Lake, Iowa is named in their honor.
I was oriented toward going to college, had pretty good grades and had been in the National Honor Society. I started out in engineering -- although my dad had not pressured me in any way to follow his profession. I was in the engineering school for four quarters; business for a couple of quarters; and finally decided that fish and wildlife was what I really desired and what I’d like to do for my life’s work. That was at Iowa State. I earned a bachelors degree there in 1960; a fish and wildlife management masters degree in 1961 -- with a minor in statistics and immature insects. I also was named to a couple of academic honor societies.
JG – While going to the University at Iowa State, did you work summer too? Was this when you were working in Yellowstone or...?
BM -- I was actually working at Okoboji the first two summers that Nancy and I were married. She was 20 and I was 21. And as part of the fish & wildlife curriculum, you were required to work in the conservation field for a couple of summers. I worked on a biological survey crew. We test-netted all of the freshwater lakes of Iowa. I made eight dollars an hour the first summer, and nine dollars (because I was an assistant supervisor) the second summer. Really enjoyed those field trips we had, because I’d get a little per diem that would help a little bit. We could actually eat something other than fish.
JG -- You said you got your masters in 1961. Did you start right off into a career... your career field then, or... where did you have your first job after graduation?
BM -- I had a lot of opportunities for jobs upon graduation; a different situation than present day graduates seem to face. Present graduates are restricted by our bad economic times that further restrict State and Federal budgets. I had four or five job opportunities and stipends to continue my education toward a doctorate degree. I remember it got down to a decision at Auk Bay, Alaska, with Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, or the state of Maine as a fishery biologist. I chose to go to Maine. There were six Fishery Regions in the state, and I was an assistant regional fishery biologist. Our region had well over a thousand lakes and ponds, and it extended from Bangor up through Baxter State Park and West to Québec. We did much of our work using single-engine planes on either floats or skis. It was a wonderful job, doing basic field biology in an often near- wilderness setting. It is perhaps what many of us might have imagined when we were going to school. I was there for four years.
JG -- Four years -- from ‘61 right on to ‘65?
BM -- Right. At the time, I probably could have been satisfied and challenged if I were to have stayed there the rest of my career -- I enjoyed it so much. Plus, the field work was very productive, and I enjoyed that kind of work. The Maine part of my career is documented in a book. (“The Origin, Formation & History of Maine’s Inland Fisheries Division”. August 2014. AuClair, Suzanne, Editor. 385 pp. Publisher; Moosehead Media Services, Rockwood, Maine.) However, at that stage we had two children about to enter the local school system. In that town of about 3000, the valedictorian couldn’t pass college entrance boards. That situation bothered both us. I decided career-wise that it was a good time to go elsewhere while I was still young. It was then that I decided to look for work with Fish and Wildlife Service--or at that time, the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife.
JG -- Want to step back for a minute, Bill -- you said you had two children. Sounds like you’ve got a 4
wife acquired along the way. How did that happen? Who is she?
BM -- Nancy... Nancy Nelson Meyer. When I moved to Storm Lake as a sophomore in high school, she asked me out for our first date--a hay ride. We went together through most of high school. She was Valedictorian of our class, homecoming queen and also in National Honor Society. She went to the University of Iowa. I went to Iowa State. So, we went our separate ways for a while. After I had returned from working in Yellowstone that one summer, she stopped by our cottage at the lake and we went out that night. Shortly thereafter we decided to get married and we did the following year on June 21, 1958 (the shortest night of the year ). One of our elderly friends that came through the reception line [chuckles] said to both of us that he thought we were a little brighter than to do that. [Chuckles] Anyway, we will, this year, celebrate our 58th wedding anniversary. She has been a delight and continues to be my guiding light and my very best friend.
JG -- You mentioned that you had two kids. Where were they born?
BM -- Our son, Jeff, he was born in Ames, Iowa, at Mary Greeley Hospital in 1960. He lives in Seattle, and works in Everett, Washington, as a senior software engineer. Jeff went to Reed College for three years where he earned a math degree, and two years at University of Washington for a computer science degree. He retired March, 2016 from the Danaher Company, which bought out Fluke, the company he first joined. Jeff and his partner, Heidi, are now enjoying his retirement.
Our daughter, Cindy, was born at the Charles Dean Hospital in Greenville, Maine in 1962. She lives near to us in Portland with our two grandchildren, Emily and Ian. Although Emily is now attending school at Northern Arizona University in Flagstff Arizona. Cindy went to Portland Community College studying to be an x-ray technician. She has worked for Kaiser-Permanente starting in 1992, and is now the regional Team Lead for mammography, after having had many other responsible assignments with Kaiser.
They have both done very well in professions that so far have avoided most of the economic bumps in the road. Both have been successful professionally and are good citizens, as are the grandchildren.
JG -- Let’s go back to Maine now. You’ve been there working for the state of Maine for four years, and all of a sudden there’s an opportunity with the Fish and Wildlife Service!
BM -- Yes. I’d contacted Goodman Larson, who was the personnel officer for the Minneapolis Region 3. He sent me weekly ‘green sheets’ displaying advertised Bureau job possibilities. During one of our vacations to the Midwest, Nancy and I visited Minneapolis and I had an interview with him. We subsequently had a job offer to join a River Basin Studies Office in southwestern Ohio. The Supervisor was Bob Cleary, who had worked some 17 / 18 years for the state of Iowa as a fishery biologist. He joined the Fish and Wildlife Service, later became supervisor and subsequently selected me to serve in that Office in March/April of 1965.
JG -- What grade were you hired in at?
BM -- A GS 7, the same grade I would have been eligible if I would have joined the Feds right out of college -- no credit for the experience gained in state work. It was actually a bit of a decrease in salary from what I was making in Maine, but I soon got promoted to a GS 9. And then later, in that Office, to an 11. At that stage, I suppose, was the first time that we didn’t have to very carefully budget for almost everything we did. That was a new kind of freedom for us.
JG -- What was your main job at the River Basins Office?
BM -- We did the usual reservoir and Soil Conservation studies that many River Basin Offices did at that time. We were unique for our Comprehensive River Basin Studies. Bob Cleary was very much involved in the Ohio Basin Comprehensive study when I arrived. He needed somebody with a statistical background to do projections of hunting and fishing demand, and an ability to work cooperatively with a number of State and Federal agencies who partnered on the studies. The Office (primarily Bob and I) did a number of 5
such studies--the Muskingum Basin in central and southern Ohio was our next effort. I pretty much represented the Service and did the negotiating, statistical work and writing our portions of the report for the Grand River Basin in southern Michigan. I got external technical assistance from a University of a Dayton economics professor and from people with Resources for the Future. They were very helpful in determining technical means of setting up viable projection methodology. The work received favorable recognition as being state of the art. Bob taught me a lot and gave me the freedom to develop some additional skills and to gain confidence.
JG -- So you worked, beginning there in ‘65, until when?
BM – Well, in 1967 or ‘‘8... ’67 I believe - at Bob Cleary’s urging, I applied for the Department of Interior Management Training Program and was selected. We spent the next seven or eight months in Washington, DC, in that program, which was an excellent experience. Nancy and I and the kids lived in a furnished apartment in Shirlington, Virginia. We rented our house in Lebanon, Ohio furnished, right down to the renters taking care of our dog and cat while we were in Washington. I made a number of contacts during the management program; did some interesting work within the Service and within Interior, with the Water Resources Council and with EPA. The experience kind of took the mystery out of Washington, DC.
JG -- What grade were you at that time
BM – GS-11. Yes. We returned to Ohio for perhaps three months when I was asked to transfer to Minneapolis and head up a Regional Comprehensive Planning Unit within River Basin Studies. We did so, where my primary responsibilities were leading the Service efforts on two studies, the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi Basin Studies. We were there for only about a year. We had expected to be there much longer, and very much wanted to remain longer because of the proximity to Nancy’s and my parent’s living in northern Iowa, and my brother’s family in Wisconsin. We had hoped our children would have an opportunity to get to know their close family better and visa-versa. While in the Departmental Management Program, I had suggested that while the Service had world-class biological scientists I thought we were a little narrow because so many of our most serious issues were people problems having their basis in the social sciences. In my close-out interviews at the conclusion of the Department Management Program I stated it might be beneficial if we cross trained some people.
Somebody must have agreed, because in 1968 or ‘69 I was asked if I would consider doing graduate work in economics. I agreed to, under the provision that the Service establish a National Planning Group and that I would be able to become a member of that staff if I were to move our family again and to commit to returning for the economic studies. We had attempted to reduce the number of moves and if we did so to do it when it was best for our son and daughter. Particularly after they were in school we tried to move in the summer, and if they were approaching changing schools from elementary to middle or to high school--we did our best to do it then.
JG -- Okay. In Minneapolis, when you went up there, this planning group and all, what was your grade then? Did you get your 12 then?
BM – I think I was a GS-12 then....... yeah, I got a promotion to a 12 at that point.
JG -- Who was your supervisor in Minneapolis?
BM – Warren Nord was the supervisor of River Basins at that time and Bud LaPoint his assistant. Bob Burwell was Regional Director. I worked with folks like Morris Splutzstasser and Harry Anderson... old guard folks who had done a lot for preserving wetlands and prairie potholes when they were considered worthless by many in agriculture and other fields.
JG -- And you were offered to go get your cross training in economics, and you did?
BM – I did. I went to the University of Maryland for an academic year. Previously I’d had six hours of 100-level economics at Iowa State University as a freshman, well over a decade before entering the U of Maryland in their graduate economics program. 6
Suddenly, I was competing with students who had just earned their bachelors in economics. I didn’t even really remember the economics vocabulary let alone the principles. It was a real shock. And I didn’t want to blow it, because I didn’t want others to not have the opportunity that I’d been given to go back to school. There were a lot of very late nights and a lot of long weekends of study. I just, kind of, wasn’t known to my family for about a half a year while I went to class and studied at the University library or in a basement office I had at home--all in an attempt to played catch-up. I have never worked so hard in my life nor was I ever before or after really afraid of failure.
While I was attending the University, the Cambodian situation was a very contentious national issue. Student protesters were blocking the major highway that went through College Park. My hair was a flattop butch at the time. Students looked at this older guy with a flattop and thought I was with the FBI or CIA; probably there to monitor their activities. When I tried to let my hair grow out I found out I was bald. [Chuckles] The advisors in the Economics Department wanted me to write my thesis to complete obtaining a Masters degree in Economics. Because they wanted me to do it in something to do with some Department of Defense issue and I wanted only to pursue a natural resource issue, I chose not to actually write a thesis and to be satisfied with the training I had received, the classes I had attended and all I had learned in the process. Also, I was itching to get back to work in the Service. Much of the education was in economics, with a strong dose of program analysis often based in mathematics.
JG -- Who was the supervisor in that... you were able to talk to in getting this economic training...
BM – Well...
JG -- ... at that time?
BM – There was really nobody within the Service that I dealt with while actually in school, but I think some of the people that I made contact with during the Management Training Program -- perhaps Vic Schmidt and K
Dr. Robert J. Shallenberger
No full textDr. Robert J. Shallenberger oral history interview as conducted by Jerry Grover.
Dr. Shallenberger joined the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1980, and would retire in 2002. He would eventually become Chief of Refuges before returning to the field to work on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. After retiring from Fish and Wildlife, he worked for the Nature Conservancy, and spends time with two Friends’ Groups.
Organization: FWS
Name: Robert J. Shallenberger
Years: 1980-2002
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Biography, Employees (USFWS), History, Biologists (USFWS), Management, Wildlife refuges, Work of the Service, Aviation, Habitat conservation, Conservation, Endangered species, Migratory birds, Hawaii and Pacific Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Midway Atoll National Wildlife RefugeOral History
of
Dr. Robert J. Shallenberger
Interviewed by:
Jerry C. Grover
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife
Service: 22 years
Offices and Field Stations Worked,
Positions Held:
Refuge Manager, Hawaiian and Pacific Islands
NWR Complex, Honolulu, HI
Departmental Manager Development Program,
Washington, D.C.
Wildlife Biologist, Division of Migratory Birds,
Washington, D.C.
Wildlife Biologist, Division of Refuges,
Washington, D.C.
Deputy Assistant Director, Refuges and Wildlife,
Portland, OR
Deputy Assistant Director, Refuges and Wildlife,
Albuquerque, NM
Chief, Division of Refuges, Washington, D.C.
Refuge Manager, Midway Atoll NWR, Hawaii
Deputy Refuge Manager, Hawaiian and Pacific
Islands NWR Complex, Honolulu, HI
Most Important Projects: Midway Atoll,
establishing the CARE Group; Refuges 2003.
Colleagues and Mentors:
Dick Smith, Jim Gillette, Marv Plenert, Dave Olsen,
Dale Coggeshall, Joe Mazzoni, Robert Smith, John
Doebel, Mollie Beattie, Jerry Leinecke, Bob Streeter,
Don Berry, Dan Ashe, John Rogers, Rollie Sparrowe,
Ken Grannemann, Dick Myshak.
Most Important Issues:
Habitats on Midway, Refuge System organic legislation
Brief Summary of Interview: Dr.
Shallenberger talks about early life, going to college,
and figuring out what he wanted to do after he
graduated from Whitman College. After deciding to go
to graduate school at UCLA, he started his own
company, consulted on various projects, and the Corps
of Engineers before joining the Fish and Wildlife
Service in 1980, which he would retire from in 2002.
He held many different positions with the Service and
would become Chief of Refuges before returning to the
field to work on Midway Atoll National Wildlife
Refuge. After retiring from Fish and Wildlife, he
worked for the Nature Conservancy, and currently
spends time with two Friends’ Groups. He says the
two constants in his life have been flying and
photography, and feels that he wouldn’t have gotten
certain jobs without the support of various Fish and
Wildlife colleagues.
Dr. Rob Shallenberger, February 2016
2
THE INTERVIEW
February 3, 2016
Jerry: This is Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office and representing the Association of Retired Fish & Wildlife Service Employees. I am at the home of Dr. Rob Shallenberger on Kamuela, Hawaii to do an oral history on his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 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. Joining me today is my wife Judy, also a FWS career retiree.
Rob, could you start off with your full name, when, where you were born
Rob: I was born Robert J. Shallenberger on May 14, 1945 in Worchester, Massachusetts. We moved to the west coast when I was two, so I’m a west coast boy growing up; lived in Palo Alto, California.
Dad was a professor at Stanford and so we spent a lot of time around the campus; he was an avid striped bass fisherman, which is how I got into the critter kind of thing.
I have three brothers and two of us really got into natural history and two of us didn’t. So I did a lot of camping in the Sierras with my dad and one brother.
Jerry: For the record, when did you retire and what was your position; where were you?
Rob: I retired in 2002, and I was in Honolulu. My position scenario is a little convoluted, but I started with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Honolulu as a refuge manager in Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Refuge Complex. Spent four years in Honolulu in that job and somebody convinced me to go to Washington D.C., which is a story in and of itself because my wife was born and raised in Hawaii and she had no desire to go to D.C.
Jerry: We can get into that. So what was your position at retirement and your grade?
Rob: My grade was GS 15 and I was the refuge manager at, or assistant; see at that time they called it Deputy Refuge Manager for the Hawaiian Complex.
Jerry: Okay, and then your boss was the Pacific Island Administrator?
Rob: Yes.
Jerry: Okay, that’s good. Let’s go back to your Palo Alto days that led you to go to school where?
Rob: I went to school at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where I had visited the area because my grandfather was a rancher in Washington state. And also I had heard that Whitman had better pheasant hunting than the other schools I was looking at, which makes me not a very credible source of guidance for my kids on where to go to school.
Jerry: Did you get your Ph.D. there?
Rob: I got my PhD at UCLA. When I got to UCLA with its 25,000 students after leaving Whitman with about 900; it was culture shock!
Bad enough to go to L.A. but I did it because I followed a major professor who I had worked with at various projects and he helped me get in. So I did my doctorate on seabirds in Hawaii.
Jerry: After UCLA, where was your first assignment? It was here in Hawaii with the refuge system?
Rob: Actually, I got my PhD in 1973, and I started a natural history film company. I did consulting 3
work on various construction projects and highways. My first federal job was with the Corps of Engineers, believe it or not, as an ecologist in the Pacific. I traveled all over the Pacific. It wasn’t until 1980 that I actually took a job with the Fish and Wildlife Service. I think I was able to do that because I got on the Federal Register for the Corps job and that made it possible for me to be selected for the refuge manager position in Hawaii. I stayed in that job for four years.
Jerry: What did they hire you as?
Rob: Refuge manager.
Jerry: Refuge manager, not a refuge biologist?
Rob: No.
Jerry: Okay, and what grade?
Rob: I started as a 12. I didn’t have a lot of history with the Service prior to taking that job but I had hunted on a few refuges and I’d done a lot of birding and photography but frankly the idea of being able to work on the land was exciting to me.
When I had done that for four years, I began getting a lot of pressure from within the Service to go into Washington and go to the Departmental Manager Development Program (DMDP). And it was an interesting decision because we were perfectly happy in Hawai’i. My wife’s father was a cattle rancher, so I had free meat. My brother was a fisherman so I had free fish. And I lived in a house that I had paid off the mortgage and so it was real hard to pull me out of here, but I did it.
So I went into the DMDP Program, a year-long program, and a really good opportunity to find out not only what’s going on in the Service but other agencies and on the Hill and so on.
I did that for a year, and then I did a position in Migratory Birds in D.C. for a year and then I did a year in the Refuge Division; Jim Gillette was the Chief at the time. With the help of some people well established in a position including Marv Plenert and Dave Olsen and Jim, I was able to get the Deputy Assistant Regional Director, Refuges and Wildlife position in Portland
Jerry: Let’s go back one moment. When you were going through the DMDP Program, some of your assignments that you had, what were they?
Rob: When I was in the DMDP, I did three or four months on the Hill with the Environment and Public Works Committee. Then I did an assignment with the Audubon Society working on their Adopt a Refuge Program. And I did assignments in Endangered Species, and I can’t remember what else.
Jerry: Who was your mentor in D.C. for that?
Rob: Dick Smith. Dick was really interesting. I appreciated his candor and we worked really well throughout my whole career. And we fished a lot together, were in a car pool together and so I got to know him well and he was a big help.
Jerry: That’s interesting because you came out of refuges as a refuge candidate back with the DMDP, and Dick Smith was head of the Research.
Rob: That’s right. Well, I had been doing research in the Wildlife Management Branch for that year before I worked, after the DMDP and before I worked in Portland. Yeah, Dick was a big help.
Jerry: Let’s go back one other step. When you were hired into the federal position, who hired you here in Honolulu?
Rob: That was Dale Coggeshall.
Jerry: Dale, okay. Let’s go back, the connection with D.C. and the Flemming Award.
Rob: Dale had encouraged me to sort of broaden my sights; I would have been perfectly happy to stay in Hawaii, my wife wanted to be there, I was having it good, making a lot of progress, but he put me in for the Arthur S. Flemming Award, which is 4
given to ten government employees under the age of 40.
Jerry: Is this an Interior award or is it government wide?
Rob: No, it’s government wide. And I went back for a big ceremony and it was just kind of a big deal for me; I had never even heard of it. I think I was the first Fish and Wildlife Service person to ever get it, so it gave me an excuse to get back there and meet some people and I could be a little more objective in terms of what my options were. The Departmental Management Program has changed over years, as you know, but it’s still a great opportunity to get out. Dick was insistent that I take on projects outside the agency.
Jerry: Okay, that’s good but then you ended up back as the Deputy Assistant in Portland for Refuges, and if I recall, you lived up on Bull Mountain.
Rob: I did, in Tigard.
Jerry: How long were you in Portland?
Rob: Three years. Including a bit of time going out to Malheur NWR to deal with the Hammonds.
JUDY: Guess who’s back?
Rob: I know, it was interesting to see that happen. I can recall being asked to do some tough assignments including holding a meeting at Bonners Ferry about listing the Selkirk caribou. But the Hammond one, everyone got to know; “Rob, it’s your turn, you go try to do something.”
Jerry: Who was manager at Malheur NWR at that time?
Rob: Well, Forrest was there, Forrest Cameron for a while.
Jerry: Yeah, but that would have been before Forrest.
Rob: Yeah, it was before Forrest.
Jerry: The guy with the Italian sounding name.
Rob: Oh, Mazzoni.
Jerry: Was Joe Mazzoni there?
Rob: Mazzoni, yeah. When I left Portland, I went to Albuquerque as Joe’s Deputy. I remember this Hammond thing; I called him before I went out there because I knew he had had experience with it. And I remember walking through the Hammond’s living room and seeing all the elk heads on the wall wondering if there was room on the wall for mine, because nobody made any real progress with them.
Jerry: Dealing with the Hammonds, what was that particular issue; was it all grazing or was it land issue?
Rob: It all had to do with grazing a portion of the refuge when they move their cattle from their ranch to the BLM areas, and they were just leaving their cattle on areas too long and just being ornery.
Jerry: Were they the only ranchers that had permits that were leaving their animals on? What about the other?
Rob: No, as I recall, the other ones were setting a good example, but they weren’t following it.
Jerry: The Hammonds weren’t.
Rob: Yeah.
Jerry: How interesting, giving today’s situation with the refuge, and there’s still four of them left there.
Rob: Really? I haven’t followed it in the last few days.
[Break in tape]
Rob: ….because the job I really wanted, the Chief of Refuges, came up when Bob Karges retired.
5
Jerry: Chief of Refuges, D.C.?
Rob: Yeah. So I went from Albuquerque to that Regional Chief of Refuges job and stayed there for seven years.
Jerry: Wow, okay, I guess you bought a home and settled down?
Rob: Yeah.
Jerry: Did you have any family, Rob, any kids.
Rob: Well, I had two kids that were living with my ex-wife in California. And then my son, Matthew, was living with us and so he went from school to school and ultimately wound up at the end of my D.C. stint getting into William and Mary, so he stayed.
Jerry: So you were seven years as Chief of Refuges, then what? You were still a 15 then?
Rob: Yeah. And then I came up to a tough choice, because I had a chance to sort of put together a project on Midway Atoll. And then actually go out and be the first official refuge manager at this closed Navy base. That was a challenge because we established a partnership with a private company to run the operation jointly - the Midway Phoenix Corporation.
Jerry: Midway Phoenix, and they built the Captain Brooks house and some of the newer facilities out there?
Rob: Yes. That was a tough thing, and you’ll hear about it, I’m sure, when you talk to Robert Smith because he was my supervisor; he and John Doebel were sort of jointly supervising me at that time and they both were behind the selection and knew I had a lot of experience out there and could make this project work. But it didn’t work as well as anybody expected and ultimately they were kicked off the island. But the project was terrific in terms of what we were trying to accomplish and opportunity for people to visit and dealing with the environmental issues and dealing with the Navy.
Jerry: Some of those environmental issues were what? I know about the lead paint on the buildings and there were batteries that were just dumped into the ocean there.
Rob: The military spent a lot of money trying to leave that place in a better state than it was when they closed it in 1993. So the estimates were they spent over 90 million dollars, I never really documented that but in terms of the number of people and the kind of equipment and the barge trips and all that sort of stuff, I’m sure it was a lot of money. The deal with Midway Phoenix was, and it was in the agreement, that they would operate the facility at no cost to the government. Well, that didn’t turn out to be very realistic, even though everybody, I think, gave it a try; it ultimately didn’t work.
Jerry: What year are we talking then?
Rob: In ’93 there was an executive order that closed the base, or the Naval Air Facility. In ’96, the executive order transferred it from the Navy to the Interior Department, that’s when we officially got it. The agreement with Phoenix was also signed in ’96.
Jerry: And the reason that Phoenix did not operate this at no cost to the government was what, just lack of people coming out there? I understand they were offering expeditions or trips through National Geographic or what?
Rob: Well, they had a number of angles, but the ultimate issue was unless they could fill an airplane, and a big airplane; they started with a small one, but unless they could fill it and dependably fill it, they couldn’t earn money off that visitor program to compensate for the expenses of running the facility. A lot of things turned out to be more expensive than they anticipated.
Jerry: Did they also, in the agreement, were they also responsible for the power plant, and sewage, and maintenance of the roads, and buildings?
6
Rob: Yes!. And they sent some engineers out there to look at the facility before they signed the co-op agreement, so it wasn’t as if they didn’t know, couldn’t anticipate all the unforeseen expenses, but we knew it was going to be spendy. And they did put a lot of money into it, but they would have liked to amortize that expense over a longer period of time, but the relationship just deteriorated and ultimately they left.
After the Midway project….[break in tape]…..project as a refuge manager. And here after Midway, after being the Chief of Refuges, I wound up going back to the field as a refuge manager at Midway.
Jerry: But as a GS-15.
Rob: Yeah, but the only reason it’s a 15 is I said I wouldn’t take the job unless they guaranteed I keep my grade. It was funny. I have a file somewhere of all the emails and letters that people sent me when I made the decision to go from the Chief’s job to the field. About half of them lined up saying, “What were you smoking? What a stupid thing to do, you work your whole career to move forward, and then you go backward.” Well, if you knew what other people said, “You have the guts to do that and be really happy that you could do it,” which is really what the Park Service does a lot. People come into the Park system and they work up through several parks and then they go to Washington for four or five years and they come out as a superintendent at Yosemite or Yellowstone.
Jerry: Yeah, but Yosemite is an SES.
Rob: Well, it wasn’t at the time, but it is now. But there was no great equity in those manager levels, well, you know that. But Midway was a fascinating place for me; I’d been out there several times as a student and as a researcher and when I first got the refuge job in Honolulu.
Jerry: But your focus was solely on Midway, you didn’t have rest of the refuge or the Hawaiian Complex, Johnston Atoll or any of the others?
Rob: Well, I didn’t until I came off Midway, and then I moved back out into the Deputy Refuge Complex Manager.
Jerry: Okay, let’s back up. When you were on Midway, who was the one that signed your performance evaluation?
Rob: Robert Smith.
Jerry: Robert Smith, and he reported to?
Rob: John Doebel.
Jerry: And then you went back to Honolulu as a Deputy to—?
Rob: Jerry Lienecke! He had filled my job when I left in 1984, so he had been there forever. So frankly, this has a lot to do with why two years after I got off Midway and got back into Honolulu and found myself doing what I did 20 years before that I decided to take a job with the Nature Conservancy.
Jerry: How old were you at the time then? Were you able to draw your retirement or was that something you postponed?
Rob: Yeah, I did when I went to the Conservancy; that was in 2002.
Jerry: So you retired as opposed to resigning?
Rob: Right.
Jerry: And how old were you then?
Rob: Well I’m 70 now, do the math [chuckling].
Jerry: Okay, we can work that out later. So now you’re on another career after Fish and Wildlife Service, you have one with the Conservancy.
Rob: Yes, I was the Director of Programs on the Big Island, and I did that for seven years and then retired from that.
7
Jerry: Retired from them, when did you retire from them?
Rob: Let’s see, it would have been 2012.
Jerry: Okay, so you’ve been three years without anything to do.
Rob: Well, the irony of that, as you probably know from most of your interviews, is it’s hard to stop doing what you were doing.
Jerry: So you’re doing TNC things?
Rob: Well, I’ve done a little contract work for TNC and the Kamuela schools and so on, but most of my time is spent working two friends groups. I’m on the board of the Friends of Midway Atoll and Friends of Hakalau Forest. And I’m, at least according to my wife, much too busy, not playing enough. But those are both projects that I was intimately involved in their evolution, so it’s fun to still stay involved but not have the responsibility on a day to day basis; you get along real well with the managers and so we have, what I consider, to be very effective and hard-working people trying to support these two refuges.
Jerry: Yeah, I see that the Friends of Midway Atoll, there is another Fish and Wildlife retiree; Bob Fields is on that group isn’t he?
Rob: He is, he was the director or president for a few years; just came off that.
Jerry: Are there other Fish and Wildlife folks on the friends group?
Rob: Linda Watters is on the Midway one, and at Hakalau Forest, Dick Wass and Jack Jeffrey are both on the board. Yeah Dick, he retired many years before that. When I first was in D.C. we were trying to wrap our arms around how these friends groups have evolved and in some cases they were just terrific relationships and they found a nice niche where they could provide financial or other help. Other cases, they weren’t so friendly, it was just a ruse for getting into the board room to make decisions for the Fish and Wildlife Service. So I ran into managers with bad experiences and others that had great experiences. Ours, the ones we have now, are really quite good. We just started an endowment funding refuge projects on the Hakalau Forest refuge to deal with the vagaries of funding that go up and down, up and down.
Jerry: Were any of your people in these friends groups, did they attend the friends training session back in West Virginia last week, the week before?
Rob: Yes, they did.
Jerry: So they got stuck in the snow - from Hawaii to the snow.
Rob: Yeah, it was funny because we had some people visiting from New York, who were here; they had left New York the day before it stormed. So it works both ways. [break in interview.]
It was all about trying to effectively manage the northwestern Hawaiian Island and trying to create protective regulations and some of that would really improve the way that area’s managed and the results. And we were pretty successful and I think we did ultimately lead to the establishment of the Marine National Monument that is unique.
Jerry: That’s the one that I can’t even begin to pronounce.
Rob: Papahanaumokuakea. It helped to clarify responsibilities of three agencies - NOAA, Interior and the sta
INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD MUNDINGER BY JERRY GROVER JANUARY 23, 2002
No full textOral history interview with Richard Mundinger as conducted by Jerry Grover.INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD MUNDINGER
BY JERRY GROVER JANUARY 23, 2002
MR. GROVER: Dick, where were you born?
MR. MUNDINGER: I was born in Burtrum, [?] Minnesota in September of 1927. I
grew up in the little town of Nimrod, Minnesota on the Crow Wing River. That was for
the first sixteen years of my life. Then, my parents moved to Glenwood, Minnesota
where I finished high school in 1945. I went into the Army in January of 1946. I spent
almost two years in the military, part of which was in Korea. This was before the
conflict in Korea. This was in the occupation Army.
MR. GROVER: What did you do in the Army?
MR. MUNDINGER: I was a High Speed Radio Operator. I was part of the G2. We
copied the whole entire west coast of Russia’s net, all of their radio communications in
their military. We sat on the top of a mountain in Korea for, well, I was there for over a
year. It was a real experience. There was thirteen of us who sat up on top of this
mountain. We’d occupied a Japanese radio facility on this mountain. And we lived in
Japanese quarters, which were these typical Japanese buildings with paper walls, and
papered windows. And it was cold that winter I was there. But I never had better
hunting in my life. I went hunting three or four times a week! It was quite an experience.
We worked around the clock, so we had eight hour shifts, then we were off for twenty-four.
And we just kept rotating. About every two or three days you could go hunting.
That was the only recreation you really had. I hunted Pheasants and Deer…
MR. GROVER: With an M-1?
MR. MUNDINGER: With an M-1 carbine. We hunted Deer, Pheasants, and ducks and
fox, and everything. See, the Koreans had no weapons. The Japanese didn’t allow them
to have any. And when we occupied Korean, the Japs left, so there was no weapons for
the Koreans. If I had had a shotgun, we’d have gotten a lot more. We were fortunate.
We had one cook in our group. He happened to be from South Dakota. And he knew
how to fix Pheasants. We lived high on the hog as a military group. We were attached to
a signal group. The Army in its wisdom, you know, has compliments of supplies built
for certain sized units. And the minimum was for fifty people. Well, the thirteen of us
drew rations for fifty. We had more food and things that we didn’t need. We would give
them to the Koreans. We couldn’t use them. We just had too much. We ran an outfit
that had top security clearance so we had no military, I shouldn’t say ‘discipline’, but
nobody bothered us. We had no inspections. Nobody came to see us. We just kind of
sat out there by ourselves. It was quite an experience for a person who was nineteen
years old at the time, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Then I came back. And went to school
at the University of Minnesota. I had started at the University of Minnesota in 1945, in
the fall. I wasn’t eight until the last part of September in 1945. So I wasn’t drafted until
after that. That was the last draft order out of Minnesota at the end of World War II. I
came back to the University of Minnesota, and enrolled in the School of Forestry. I
graduated from the University in the spring of 1952. I played football with the
University of Minnesota football team. I was drafted by the Chicago Bears so I went to
Chicago in the summer of 1952. I was with them until mid November when I got my leg
all bummed up, so I was released. That was probably the best thing that ever happened
to me, because I would have kept playing football otherwise. And I started with the Fish
and Wildlife Service on December 7, 1954. I, and Ben Shaffer who was in Washington
when he retired, started the same day. We had gone to school together at the University
of Minnesota. So that’s when I first started in the Division of Realty, in Minneapolis.
MR. GROVER: Let’s step back just a bit, Dick. So you graduated from school, and
started with the Fish and Wildlife Service. What lead you into this? What did your folks
do? How did you get interested in [the field]?
MR. MUNDINGER: I’ll tell you how I got interested in the Forestry part of it. I grew
up in Nimrod, Minnesota. And during this time was the CCC days. Right outside of
Nimrod was a CCC Camp. This was during really hard times. The leaders of camp were
Foresters. And they were making big salaries at eighteen hundred dollars a year. At that
time in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s that was a lot of money for somebody. I figured
that if those guys who were basically Foresters…I said, that if I go to school, that’s what
I wanted to get involved with. I had always been involved with the outdoor type things.
I grew up on this really wonderful river in Minnesota. I practically lived on it, summer
and winter. I was hunting and fishing and trapping and everything else, every waking
moment that I had, I think. It was kind of a natural flow. How I came with the Fish and
Wildlife Service was kind of unique. I had accepted a job with the Forest Service at
Crockett, Texas on the Davy Crockett National Forest. I made arrangements to move
down there. About a week and a half before we were to leave, I had an offer with the Fish
and Wildlife Service, right in Minneapolis. So I called up the Forest Service and said that
I wasn’t coming. Otherwise, I would have been down there in the swamps of east Texas
with all of the snakes, and everything else.
MR. GROVER: What grade were you hired at? And what was your position when you
started with the Fish and Wildlife Service?
MR. MUNDINGER: I started as a GS-5. At that time in 1954, the starting salary was
150,000.00. And I think we could have spent five million. At that
time, farmers were begging them to buy their land. The first year, I can’t remember how
many acres of land they bought in central North Dakota, but the average price was $11.00
an acre. We could have bought thousands of acres at that point, if we had had the money.
When we first started, there weren’t many restrictions on the purchases. Sooner or later
it came along that we had to get County Commissioner approval before we could buy
land. This was a process that anybody who has dealt with County Commissioners in
rural counties understands what frustrations we went through. It was a selling job. You
had go to the County Commissioners and sell your program. You really had to convince
those people that you were doing some good. That was difficult to do with a bunch of
former farmers; that you were taking their land out of production and using it strictly for
waterfowl and wildlife.
MR. GROVER: What were the big issues of the day when you went to meet with those
people? Was it taking property off of the tax rolls?
MR. MUNDINER: Yes, and stopping them from draining wetlands. We had an
easement program along with the acquisition where we’d take an easement on their
property where they could no longer drain any of the marshes. It was really tough
because the Agriculture Department was subsidizing them to drain them. So we were two
government organizations in direct conflict with each other for what they were trying to
do. And the irony of the thing today, is that the Agriculture Department is today trying
to pay those people to plug those drains up now, after thirty years.
MR. GROVER: So you were out there until when?
MR. MUNDINER: I left Minneapolis in the fall of 1963.
MR. GROVER: And that is when you came to Portland?
MR. MUNDINGER: I came to Portland, yep. Evelyn didn’t come with me right away.
We were in the process of adopting a child and we didn’t get our baby until November.
So I went back and picked her up in November, and we moved out here. I retired from
the area around Portland. When I first got here, I went to work for Howard Sergeant in
Realty. The Realty office here had four people in it, plus a Secretary when I arrived here
in 1963.
MR. GROVER: So you were still an Appraiser in Realty?
MR. MUNDINGER: Yes.
MR. GROVER: And at what grade?
MR. MUNDINGER: By that time, I transferred out here as a GS-12. I was trying to
think back. That was a level transfer. The moving process then, was not like it is today
in the government. You were kind of on your own. I look back at it though as a great
move. Because I have thoroughly enjoyed living in Oregon, and working on the west
coast. It’s just been a wonderful experience.
MR. GROVER: Dick, let’s step back a moment. You mentioned Evelyn a moment ago.
Can you tell us how that came about?
MR. MUNDINGER: [Chuckling] Well, Evelyn was a classmate of my older sister.
When I came back from the military, my parents had moved up to northern Minnesota,
St. Hilaire. And Evelyn and my sister were seniors in High School. That’s when I met
her. And we got married in 1950. We’ve been married now for over fifty-two years!
MR. GROVER: You mentioned that you are adopting.
MR. MUNDINGER: Yeah, we adopted a son in Minnesota. When we picked him up,
he was nine weeks old. We left Minnesota in a snowstorm, and drove to Oregon. We
stopped along the way in Billings and visited my good friend Bill Sweeney who is a Fish
and Wildlife Service [person]. It was quite an eventful trip coming across the country in
the winter.
MR. GROVER: What that your only child?
MR. MUNDINGER: The only child, yep.
MR. GROVER: Now you’re back in Portland, and still an Appraiser. What went on
after that?
MR. MUNDINGER: Well, I worked in Portland. I was on the Appraisal side, and Bill
Lindsey was on the Land Acquisition side of Realty at that time, under Howard Sergeant.
We were starting a program of acquiring more land in the west and we hired some
additional people in the west. Some of those that we hired were people I had hired in the
Wetlands Program. I scarfed them off of Minneapolis. Tom Smith came out here, and
Bob Miller. Bob went on to be Regional Supervisor out in Boston. Dutch Estimer came
out from Minneapolis. Who else? Jim Shaw, Jim went on to become Supervisor of
Realty here in Portland also. Those were I think, the four that we hired. We started a
Wetlands Program out in Montana after I got out here, in northeastern Montana.
MR. GROVER: That was when Montana was still in Region 1, before it was broke off
into Region 6.
MR. MUNDINGER: Yeah, that’s where we put Bob Miller. That’s right, he was over
there. I was trying to think who we had in Montana. Bob went over there, and then he
went on to Boston. Over the years I’ve had in the Realty side of it, from the Wetlands
Program people, a number of them went on to pretty good jobs in the Fish and Wildlife
Service or other agencies. A lot of them became Supervisors. Rolf Wallenstrom became a
Regional Director out here in Portland. I hired Rolf for his first job. I have been closely
associated with Rolf ever since that time, and we are still close friends. We built up a
staff here in Portland before we could do the job of acquiring a number of new Refuges
that were established, plus the wetlands in Montana.
MR. GROVER: What are some of the notable acquisitions that stand out in your mind,
something that really added to the National Wildlife Refuge System?
MR. MUNDINGER: Oh yeah, in this Region. There were the three Refuges in the
Valley here; Akeney, Baskett Slough and Findley. Findley had been started when I got
here. But we finished up the acquisition on that. Akeney and Baskett Slough were two
of them here in Oregon. Ridgefield and Toppenash were two that were in Washington.
MR. GROVER: Was Ridgefield acquired as part of an endangered species at that time?
I know it wasn’t White-tailed Deer. Was Lower Columbia involved?
MR. MUNDINGER: Later on, Lower Columbia was. I didn’t do much on Lower
Columbia. I think I had left Realty by that time when they really started doing the Lower
Columbia. But we worked on Malheur and California. We were busy in California all of
the time doing not only land acquisition, but doing the appraisal work for the states under
their PRDJ programs.
MR. GROVER: So your relationship with this program wasn’t so much the
establishment of Refuges, but once they had been approved to go out and acquire the
land, get the in-holdings…
MR. MUNDINGER: And doing the initial work on the public relations was a big job.
Like all of the public meetings that you had to go to in order to get these areas approved
by the local jurisdictions. I was involved for one whole summer with Humbolt Bay with
Travis Roberts. That is all we did. All we did was go down there and meet with those
folks and get the different factions and agencies to agree to what we wanted to do. As an
example, I dealt with many of the Indian tribes getting Hatchery sites. That was a fun
job. On the Warm Springs here in Oregon, and Knea[sic?] Bay up in Washington and the
Yacamaw [sic?] Indians on the Toppedish Refuge. That was a fun time. People ought to
all have the experience of dealing with a Tribal Council.
MR. GROVER: Ok, you’ve kind of moved out of Realty, or Acquisitions, and in
1971…?
MR. MUNDINGER: I was asked if I would take the Supervisors job in Contracting
General Services. I replaced Ike Trackenburg. Ike retired and I was asked if I would take
the Supervisors job in Realty.
MR. GROVER: Asked by whom?
MR. MUNDINGER: The Regional Director, John Findley. When John asked me to take
the job, I said, “John, I don’t know beans about this. That job has got some legal
complications that I have no knowledge of whatsoever, especially as a Contracting
Officer, and the responsibilities that go with it. Why would you select me?” He told me,
“One thing Dick, you’ll tell me when it’s right, or when it’s wrong.” I said, “Well, yeah,
I’ll do that”. He told me that he needed somebody in the job to do that. He said that he
would let me go to any school I wanted to get caught up on what I needed to do. Which
he did, I went to a lot of schools that first year. I made a lot of mistakes too. But it was
a satisfying job because here was a Division that provided service to our field people, and
that’s the only thing that they had responsibility for. It was to provide service in the
way of procurement and contracting of all of different kinds of construction jobs that
were going on, or other kinds of contracts such as research or whatever. So, here was a
job where you were really involved with helping those folks finish the job that they had
to do. I got a lot of satisfaction out of it. I had the opportunity to get all over the Region.
I met with practically every Project Leader that was out there. I had some knowledge of
most of the, and especially the Refuges and some of the Hatcheries of who these people
were and what their mission was. Once I got involved with heading up Contracting
General Services, I made it my mission to find out exactly what they were doing so that
we could be of service to them.
MR. GROVER: Is this when you got your GS-13 then?
MR. MUNDINGER: No. I was already a “13”.
MR. GROVER: When you came to CGS?
MR. MUNDINGER: Umhum. It was a good job. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had some
Supervisors that were not the best, but that goes with the territory.
MR. GROVER: Were these Supervisors who were supervising you, or people that you
supervised?
MR. MUNDINGER: No, supervising me, or tried to supervise me, I guess. [Laughing]
MR. GROVER: Are there any names that you’d care to divulge?
MR. MUNDINGER: Well, I had… they sent us an Administrative Officer out here,
which I was under at that time. His came out of the Washington office. He didn’t know
how to supervise people. He didn’t know the programs. He just was kind of sent out
because they wanted to get him out of Washington. I’ll think of his name sooner or later.
Then I had a Supervisor during the era when we went through this change in the Fish and
Wildlife Service of management by objectives. And I worked for Jerry Van Meter. Jerry
was a difficult person to work for.
MR. GROVER: He was hired out of Illinois as I recall.
MR. MUNDINGER: Yeah. He came out from Illinois. He was a very difficult person
to work for because he was more concerned about looking good than getting the job done.
MR. GROVER: He was what, the Assistant Regional Director for Administration?
MR. MUNDINGER: Yes.
MR. GROVER: And under that was the Chief of Contracting, and it would have been
Engineering and Personnel….
MR. MUNDINGER: And Finance.
MR. GROVER: Yes, Finance. Ok. That was the structure at that time.
MR. MUNDINGER: Yep. It was, and it was a difficult period. Because he’d go out in
the field and talk to people in the Field Stations and tell them that they could do things
that the couldn’t do, by law. And I’d have to come along and clean up all of his mess.
Finally, I got the different meetings that I would go to; the Refuge Managers, and the
Game Agents and the Hatchery Managers, and finally I’d tell them, “You know, before
you do some of those things that Jerry tells you, contact me. Because some of them, you
can’t do. We’ll find you a way to do them, but you can’t do them the way he suggested.”
He was difficult, a very difficult person to work for. That was probably the low part of
my career as far as Supervisors [go]. Probably the best Supervisor I had in my life was
Ted Perry.
MR. GROVER: You mentioned that your best Supervisor was…?
MR. MUNDINGER: Dr. Ted Perry.
MR. GROVER: And he was the Deputy Regional Director.
MR. MUNDINGER: Right. I worked directly for Ted. And he was one of these
Supervisors who let you do your job, and only wanted you to come to him to keep him
informed. It was one of the most marvelous working relationships that I ever had because
you were free to do what you thought was right, without having to worry about
somebody second guessing everything that you did. And Ted supported me in
everything that I did. And he was just a wonderful person to work for.
MR. GROVER: But then you went to Jerry Van Meter.
MR. MUNDINGER: [Chuckling] Yeah. First I went to Bob Bosch. He was sent out
here from Washington as the first Administrative Officer. After that period we didn’t
have one. Bob was a likeable guy, but he was way over his head in what he was doing.
He didn’t understand what the Fish and Wildlife Service was all about even, let alone
what his responsibilitie
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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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.
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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
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