328,175 research outputs found
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
2
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
3
4
ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW:
JERRY C. GROVER
PORTLAND, OREGON
11/20/00
INTRODUCTION
ood morning, this is Jerry C. Grover dictating
my interview for the Oral History Project.
I’m recording the interview myself. The purpose of this
interview is part of a program to preserve the history,
heritage and culture of the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service
(FWS) through the eyes of its employees. This effort is
supported by the Association of Retired Fish & Wildlife
Service Employees and the Service’s Heritage Committee.
I am an Association Board member and a member of the
Committee.
My name is Jerry Carlton Grover. I was born in
Pasadena, California on July 19, 1936. My father was
Carlton O. Grover, an Iowa farm boy that moved to
California right after high school and worked in a number
of jobs. Mostly, he began as a meat cutter, but later on
mostly as a rigger dealing with cranes and cables and so
on. My mother was Bernice Stratford, [born in Chicago].
She was a real rounder. In her younger days she danced in
the ballet in the New York theatre in a chorus line. Their
marriages, this was both their second marriages. I wasn’t
born until she was thirty-six years old. In 1936 this was
kind of rather old to be having children. She would go on
to have two more children, giving birth to the last when
she was forty-two.
When I was growing up she taught ballet. She
had a small studio in Alta Loma, California, (now Rancho
Cucamonga) on an orange grove. It was her desire
growing up in Chicago that when she moved west she
wanted to live on a ranch or a farm and have all the
critters. We had horses, cows, goats, pheasants, turkeys,
ducks, plus the routine dogs and cats.
EARLY YEARS
lived on an orange grove. We lived at the last
developed place & paved road going up the
mountain hillside. Everything else was dirt roads,
sagebrush. As a young boy I did a lot of hunting, and
when the opportunity and season presented itself I did a
lot of fishing. My other leisure time was exploring in the
pucker brush on my horse. A lot of my off time was spent
doing farm chores, milking the cow and the never ending
task of irrigating the orange grove and while going to
school.
I went to a little grade school. There were
fourteen of us in eighth grade. This class went to a
consolidated high school, Chaffey High School that
represented the entire west-end of San Bernardino County
in Southern California. The school had nearly four
thousand students. There was nearly a thousand in my
graduating class, so taking fourteen young people from a
little country school for a 1 hour bus ride and throwing
them into this was something that was really an eye
opener. It did have its advantages. With the large number
of students they had advanced and specialty classes. Not
only did you have English, but you had English Lit.,
Composition, etc. and you could get into report, technical
writing, chemistry; not only inorganic but organic
chemistry, and so you had a wide array, many of which
were pre-university level classes. The shops, they had all
kinds of woodworking shops, metal shops and automotive
shops so it was a pretty good background for high school.
From there, I went to junior college. Chaffey
Junior College was adjacent to the Chaffey High School
that I attended. I went there for two years and during that
time I was working intermittently in a gas station. I’d
work after hours and on weekends and that provided the
money to keep my car going and the other things I wanted
to do. Then it was to Utah State University, Logan Utah,
where I completed a B. S. degree in Fisheries
Management Biology.
By the time I transferred to Utah State University,
I had met Judy Moffitt who would turn out to be my wife.
We attended Utah State together the first year, my junior
year. By our senior year we were married and she
dropped out of school and to work for Thiokol
Corporation, [a maker of solid fuel rocket engines] clear
on the north end of the Great Salt Lake, near Brigham
City. I’d take her downtown at six in the morning to catch
the bus and pick her up at six at night. It was kind of a
long stint.
G
I
5
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.
I
W
6
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
S
7
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
Telegram from Samuel L. Clemens
No full textHandwritten telegram from Samuel L. Clemens in New York on June 25 to Frances Folsom Cleveland in Princeton, NJ after the death of Grover Cleveland in 1908.Courtesy of the State of New Jersey Division of Environmental Protection, the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Historic Site, Caldwell, New Jersey.RECEIVED at 6/25 190 - Dated SD New York 25 - To Mrs Grover Cleveland - Your husband was a man I knew and loved and honored for twenty five years. I mourn with you. - S. L. Clemens 1051p
Nomination for President for the Democratic Party of 1888
No full textUnique document composed by the Nominating Committee of the National Democratic Party 1888 presented to Grover Cleveland for renomination during his first presidency. Signed by representatives from every state and territory within the nation.Courtesy of the State of New Jersey Division of Environmental Protection, the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Historic Site, Caldwell, New Jersey.Washington, D. C., June 26-th, 1888. - To the Honorable Grover Cleveland of New York. -
Sir: - The Delegates to the National Democratic Convention, representing every State and Territory of our Union, having assembled in the city of Saint Louis on June 5-th inst. for the purpose of nominating Candidates for the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States, it has become the honorable and pleasing duty of this Committee to formally announce to you, that without a ballot, you were, by acclamation, chosen as the Standard bearer of the Democratic Party for the Chief Executiveship of this Country, at the election to be held in November next. Great as is such a distinction under any circumstances, it is the more flattering and profound when it is remembered that you have been selected as your own successor to an office, the duties of which, always onerous, have been rendered of an extraordinarily sensitive, difficult and delicate nature because of a change of Political Parties and methods, after twenty-four years of uninterrupted domination. This exaltation is, if possible, added to by the fact that the Declaration of Principles - based upon your last Annual Message to the Congress of the United States relative to a Tariff-reduction and a diminution of the expenses of the Government - throws down the direct and defiant challenge, "for an exacting scrutiny of the administration of the executive power, which four years ago was committed in its trust to the election of Grover Cleveland President of the United States, and for the most searching enquiry concerning its fidelity and devotion to the pledges which then invited the suffrages of the people." An engrossed copy of that platform - adopted without a dissenting voice - is herewith tendered to you. In conveying, Sir, to you, the responsible trust which has been confided to them, this Committee beg, individually and collectively, to express the great pleasure which they have felt at the results attending the National Convention of the Democratic Party, and to offer to you their best wishes for official and personal success and happiness. - We have the honor, Sir, to be - Your Obedient Servants, - Patrick A. Collins, [sig.] Chairman; Thos. S. Pettit, [sig.] Sec'y; Jno. H. Caldwell [sig.] Alabama, Wilson E. Hemingway [sig.] Arkansas, Wm. D. English [sig.] California, Casimiro Barela [sig.] Colorado, Wm H Barnum [sig.] Conn, E.R. Cochran [sig.] Dela., John Triplett [sig.] Georgia, James S. Ewing [sig.] Illinois, AW Conditt [sig.] Indiana, Wm W. Baldwin, [sig.] Iowa, S. F. Neely [sig.] Kansas, Charles D. Jacob [sig.] Kentucky, John Fitzpatrick [sig.] Louisiana, R. W. Black [sig.] Maine, Wm S Wilson [sig.] Maryland, Chas. D. Lewis [sig.] Mass, Thos F McGarry [sig.] Michigan, John M. Allen [sig.] Miss, John Ludwig [sig.] Minn., Jasper N Burks [sig.] Missouri, X [X on this line for Nebraska missing here?], Jas. S. Mooney [sig.] Nevada, G. Byron Chandler [sig.] New Hampshire, Solomon Scheu [sig.] New York, Thos. W. Strange [sig.] North Carolina, M. V. Ream [sig.] Ohio, M S. Hellman [sig.] Oregon, R. S. Patterson [sig.] Pennsylvania, Isaac Bell Jr [sig.] Rhode Island, Leroy Springs [sig.] South Carolina, M. T. Bryan [sig.] Tennessee, W H Pope [sig.] Texas, John D. Hanrahan [sig.] Vermont, Basil B Gordon [sig.] Virginia, B. F. Harlow [sig.] West Virginia, R. B. Kirkland [sig.] Wisconsin, Jas Sullivan [sig.] Montana, Antonio Joseph [sig.] Mew Mexico, Wm M. Ferry [sig.] Utah Ter., J. R. Dixon [sig.] Wyoming Ter, J. J. Browne [sig.] Washington Ty, J M Silcott [sig.] Idaho Ter, L. Gardner [sig.] Washington D. C., John T. Carey [sig.] Alask
Grover McCormick, Sr. Trials Scrapbook
No full textA scrapbook highlighting several of Grover McCormick, Sr.'s trials. The trials include Ashcraft, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Shiloh
Interview with Earl Walker by Jerry Grover, February 27, 2002
No full textEarl Walker oral history interview with Jerry Grover.1
INTERVIEW WITH EARL WALKER
BY JERRY GROVER FEBRUARY 27, 2002
MR. GROVER: Good morning, my name is Jerry Grover. I am here in the Portland area
in the little town of Canby. I am here this morning to do an Oral History with, Earl
would you state your name?
MR. WALKER: Earl Walker.
MR. GROVER: Earl what was your title? What were you doing when you retired?
MR. WALKER: I was in the Regional Office.
MR. GROVER: In Portland?
MR. WALKER: Yes, I was in sort of a review position in what was Ecological Services
then. It was sort of almost like the old River Basins regional unit. They did away with
that when they reorganized so there was no Regional Office Supervisor for Ecological
Services. It was done more on a staff basis than on a supervisory basis. I had a lot of
other [responsibilities], any time power lines or Indian rights came up, or anything that
dealt with policy or procedures came up, that ended up in my lap.
MR. GROVER: When did you retire?
MR. WALKER: In January on 1981. It’s been over twenty years now.
MR. GROVER: My goodness that’s long time to be retired! Where were you born?
How did you get started in this?
MR. WALKER: I was born in Newark, New Jersey but I grew up in Scotland. My
father has a bad accident and decided that the compensation would go further back in his
hometown in Scotland, and off to Scotland we went. From the time I was seven until I
was eighteen, I lived in Scotland. Then when I was eighteen I got into the U. S. Air Force.
MR. GROVER: So you spent high school, or the equivalent in Scotland?
MR. WALKER: Yes, and I got a superior education there. I think it helped throughout
my career, grammatically and so forth.
MR. GROVER: So at eighteen you went into the Air Force?
MR. WALKER: Yes, I went into the Air Force.
2
MR. GROVER: The American Air Force?
MR. WALKER: Yes.
MR. GROVER: How long were you in the Air Force?
MR. WALKER: Nearly three years. I joined in London, so it was practically all
overseas duty. A friend in the Air Force and I decided that after the war were going to
raise rabbits. We got all of the information we could on raising rabbits while sitting at a
Base over there in England. After the war, and I got discharged, I looked him up and we
raised rabbits in California for a while. We had four hundred does at one time.
MR. GROVER: Well obviously you didn’t stay a rabbit raiser. How did you get into
the Fish and Wildlife Service? What interested you [in getting into it]?
MR. WALKER: I graduated from a little college in California, Redlands University, in
southern California.
MR. GROVER: I know it. I grew up right next to it.
MR. WALKER: I went to school there. And in the summer I went to Stanford’s
[unclear name] Hocking Marine Station and spent a summer taking courses in Marine
Biology and Ichthyology. I went back to Redlands and finished up my degree and went
to graduate at the University of Washington School of Fisheries. About that time I spent
a summer at [unclear name] Fredley Harbor at their marine laboratory. That sort of set
my up for a Fishery [career]. By this time it had been about three and a half years and I
had got a college degree and a year of graduate work in, in three and a half years.
MR. GROVER: What year was this?
MR. WALKER: This was 1949. I was about burned out. They were looking for
somebody to take a job working with Shad. So I got a job there, and I went to Beaufort
for a short time.
MR. GROVER: In North Carolina?
MR. WALKER: Yes. It was a trawling survey off of North Carolina. I was the Fishery
man there, checking the catches; the species identification and so forth.
MR. GROVER: Was this a commercial operation or research?
MR. WALKER: It was research. They were starting the Shad investigation at that time
and New York was going to get the first research group. Connecticut was really annoyed
3
because they wanted the first research group on the Connecticut River. So they just
calmed Connecticut down, they sent me up there by myself to do a study on the
Connecticut River! I tagged Shad and got fishermen’s logs that they had had for many
years. I recovered Shad tags and did just a sort of a general and historical study to get to
know the fisheries and the people there.
MR. GROVER: How long were you on the Connecticut?
MR. WALKER: I was there for that summer. For that Shad run on the Connecticut. I
just had a temporary job. It wasn’t a permanent position. The full Shad Investigation
was moving up to Connecticut but there wasn’t room for me in anymore. There was a
job out in California that was a Sardine investigation. So off I went to California to study
Sardines.
MR. GROVER: Was that at Terminal Island?
MR. WALKER: No that was down at La Hoya. When I was in Connecticut, I met a girl
on Ferry Road, which was where all the Shad fishermen lived. That’s my wife now.
MR. GROVER: That Anita?
MR. WALKER: Yes, she’s from Connecticut. From Connecticut I took her out to
California.
MR. GROVER: What year was this?
MR. WALKER: This was in 1950. I went out there and spent a couple years as a Cruise
Biologist on these cruises. I took samples and these samples went various steps and
various distances to pickling and bottling and so forth. I worked two weeks at sea and
three weeks off and two weeks at sea and three off, and after a couple of years that got a
little old. After so long we were supposed to spend a year in the research part of if but
they told me I had to stay another year at this two weeks on and three weeks off, so I
quit. Luckily a job turned up on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It was at the
Chesapeake Biological Lab there at Solomon’s Island, Maryland.
MR. GROVER: Was that a permanent appointment then?
MR. WALKER: Yes, this was a state job. It was a State Lab for Maryland. I was there
for about five years doing research on Shad and Stripped Bass, and working with the
other people there. We had a very small staff for the various investigations. So when the
man who was doing Oysters was doing his work, I was helping him and when I was
doing fish, he was helping me. So I worked in clams, and crabs and fish. Part of my job
was supervising the Shad hatchery and the Yellow Perch hatchery. I did some studies of
4
the Shad hatchery there, trying to link up the levels of stocking and the levels of returns
and so forth. Of course, it turned out to be a waste of time. Stocking was not really
having a significant affect because row Shad has got four hundred thousand eggs there.
The numbers didn’t play out there.
MR. GROVER: What role did habitat play in this time? Was it degradation of the rivers
or the spawning areas, or was that a concern at that point?
MR. WALKER: It was a concern. The pollution really was a concern. The industrial
complex got going after the War. It didn’t have much restraint on it. My concern was
water supply, because sometimes you wanted to store water for critical times for the fish.
When the fish needed the fresh water flows. Most likely the Shad would go as far up the
headwaters as they could go. Those were suitable areas for Shad. But then when you
started taking off the water, I guess it moved back down stream and you didn’t have a
favorable habitat for Shad then like you did before. A lot of it was blamed on over
fishing, but I didn’t see that too much there.
MR. GROVER: So you saw mostly habitat degradation?
MR. WALKER: Yes.
MR. GROVER: Do you remember what your pay was at that time? I hear you guys on
the Chesapeake Bay had made your Shad studies. Were you happy with the pay at the
time?
MR. WALKER: I think it was probably around something like 35.00! He was a good Doctor. But the girls were
starting to get ready for school and we wanted to get something better than…southern
Maryland was not a great place for children, as far school. So I started looking, and I got
a job back with the Fish and Wildlife Service again.
MR. GROVER: What year was that?
5
MR. WALKER: That was 1956. I got job with River Basin Studies in Salt Lake City,
which was a long way from the type of habitat that I had been working with.
MR. GROVER: What grade were you hired in at?
MR. WALKER: GS-7. I got to Salt Lake City, and there was Lake Powell and Glen
Canyon Dam. When I got to Salt Lake City, the River Basin Study report on Glen
Canyon was overdue. There was no money left in the budget. They had spent it all on
other projects. All of the data was available, but the guy who had worked a little bit on it
had left it behind down in the canyon on a rock. All of the notes were down in the
canyon on a rock somewhere. I had an overdue project with no information, no money
and no time. That was my introduction of Fish and Wildlife. It didn’t change much over
the years really. So I wrote the report on Glen Canyon Dam.
MR. GROVER: So you went down and retrieved the notes off of the rock?
MR. WALKER: No, they were gone forever. I had no notes. The guy who had worked
on it and transferred out didn’t want to talk about it because he had goofed it up pretty
bad, so I couldn’t talk to him. I didn’t have money to go down and make a trip myself.
So I sat there in Salt Lake City and wrote the report on Glen Canyon Dam.
MR. GROVER: How long did that take you?
MR. WALKER: I was out there for a couple of years I guess. But that was on several
different projects. It was a totally different type of habitat than I had been in down at
Chesapeake Bay.
MR. GROVER: Who was the boss at that office at the time when you came in? Do you
remember?
MR. WALKER: Ralph Schmidt was the Supervisor in Albuquerque at the time. He was
in charge of River Basin.
MR. GROVER: But he oversaw that Utah office as well?
MR. WALKER: He supervised the several field offices there in the Region. I got the job
out there in Salt Lake with the Service because nobody wanted to work for Ralph
Schmidt. He was a difficult man to work with. I found that out when I got to Salt Lake.
So I spent a couple of years…Well the thing was, everything had to be perfect. But the
problem was you didn’t have the time or the resources to make everything perfect. A lot
of the time you had to do it off of the top of your head, from your background. I had a
good basis in theoretical biology and zoology. Most of the people that I worked with in
FWS didn’t have a good idea of, let’s say, the biology of the fishery organisms. They
knew something about the fish, but when you got down to say, ‘what are these fish
eating?’ and ‘what are the limiting factors on these food items?’ that’s what you had to
look at. You can’t worry about the fish. You had to look back on their food and how it
6
was affected, or how the spawning and swimming areas and conditions were affected. I
had a pretty good background and worked through it.
MR. GROVER: Were you hired as a Fisheries Biologist or a Fish and Wildlife
Biologist?
MR. WALKER: A Fisheries Biologist.
MR. GROVER: There weren’t very many people in that 482 series Fisheries Biologist.
There weren’t very many college people at that time that weren’t in Research.
MR. WALKER: After I left Salt Lake City I was offered a job in Vero Beach, Florida.
MR. GROVER: That was what, in 1958?
MR. WALKER: That’s about right.
MR. GROVER: So in 1958 you were in Vero Beach. Did you get a promotion when you
went down there?
MR. WALKER: Yeah, I got a promotion, but I was supposed to get another. So I was a
“9” down there. I worked on what became a large part of Cross Canal and water for the
Everglades, and did some Fisheries work.
MR. GROVER: Was that when the Cross State Barge Canal started then, in 1958?
MR. WALKER: I don’t think so.
MR. GROVER: It was on going, when you were there, The Corps of Engineers study?
MR. WALKER: The planning was on going.
MR. GROVER: I was in Jacksonville in 1979 and that thing was big then, and still
going.
MR. WALKER: Most of the Vero Beach projects were coastal projects. They mainly
involved the [unintelligible] type localities there. I had a good background there. I had
the Chesapeake Bay, and I had the west coast courses that I had taken. I had a good
background there.
MR. GROVER: What were the issues there? Dredging, fill?
MR. WALKER: There was dredging and filling and dredging and soil disposal. Soil
disposal was one of the big problems there. What I started there, which I continued later
was; when they are showing you a plan, it’s too damned late. You’ve got into the
7
business or the courses too late. “Well here’s our plan”. Then you already missed the
boat.
MR. GROVER: Yeah, because then, the only thing you can do is spoil it. And then, you
are the bad guy.
MR. WALKER: You don’t mess with the plan. But I did try to get close in Engineering
and say, “before you have a plan, before you decide what to do, let’s look at it’. Then
sometimes I could affect where they put the spoil. Otherwise, they had already told the
local people where they were going to put the spoil and so forth. I wanted to put the spoil
over here, but it was going to cost more. But if I got that into the plan it made the whole
difference. I tried to concentrate on getting closer to the planners just as early as possible
before they had a project.
MR. GROVER: Were you successful?
MR. WALKER: Yeah. It didn’t always work out. Sometimes I’d have to go into a
screaming fit and demand to see the District Engineer. “No, you can’t talk to him”. I
would say, “Oh yes and I can him and anybody else!” They would say, “No, don’t talk to
him, we’ll see what we can do.”
MR. GROVER: Was the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act a part of that, at that time?
Had that passed?
MR. WALKER: Yes.
MR. GROVER: So that at least gave you entrée to talk to the Corps planners. Did you
do anything with the South Florida Water Management District?
MR. WALKER: Yeah. Some of the stuff I was working with was a whole series of
entrances to the Everglades; as you went along the trail there. The Corps was trying to
open them up. And if you tried to work with them and get some better releases there.
MR. GROVER: Were endangered, threatened or imperiled species a concern at that
time? Had it made its heyday?
MR. WALKER: No, not really. They didn’t have an Act there at that time. A lot of it
was checking on Lake Okeechobee and there was St. Lucie on one side and
Caloosahatchee on the other side, both of which had fisheries and so forth. And the Lake
had a fishery. Some of the distribution canals had fisheries. There was quite a bit of
fishery work there.
MR. GROVER: So, how long were you in Vero Beach then?
MR. WALKER: I was there for a couple of years. We were checking the depositions of
silt and so forth. We were out on the St. Lucie River with bamboo stakes and bottles.
8
We were sticking those on the bottom and going back and checking the amount on silt
that had come up there. So two of us were out there checking on this and the propeller
fell off of the out board motor. The tide was going out, and we went zooming out the St.
Lucie River out into the ocean. We couldn’t do a damn thing about it. We were up the
coast a little ways and we had a plastic swimming pool. We used it to cover the motor
and so forth. And we had these bamboo poles that we were staking out the sampling
bottles with. We put up the bamboo poles and put out this plastic swimming pool and
sailed back in to the coast with that. I called the boss at the office and told him we were
up the coast a little ways with out little boat.
MR. GROVER: That sounds like quite an experience!
MR. WALKER: It was.
MR. GROVER: Did you have a life jacket? Where there no oars in the boat?
MR. WALKER: There were oars in the boat, but this was out in the middle of the St.
Lucie where in widened out so you couldn’t row anywhere. We were just zooming out
with the tide. I worked on the water projects for a couple of years and then I moved up to
Raleigh.
MR. GROVER: You moved to Raleigh, North Carolina? Was that still in River Basins?
MR. WALKER: Still in River Basins. I had a lot of coastal projects. We were doing
sometimes, in ten days you’d do twenty projects. We’d go down here and there would be
three or four small watershed projects that had to be covered, and we did those. And
there were farm ponds and so forth, so we did that. Plus, we were doing the channels and
the disposal areas for the Chesapeake Bay. That’s were I got some of these things, on the
Chesapeake Bay. We changed things, like where the canals and the spill areas would be.
MR. GROVER: At the Raleigh office you were looking at farm ponds for stocking?
That was a fisheries project. Weren’t there any fisheries guys around? Or were you the
fisheries guy?
MR. WALKER: I was the fishery guy, and I did a lot of the writing and editing. I was
important there. We had a lot of people there that could not write. That was a problem
we had. We had a problem with organizing material. I tried to train people as I went
through there. I tried to get them to write one little that tells what this paragraph is about.
And one little sentence about another paragraph, and another. And I told them that they
might want to put this paragraph up, before this paragraph, and then you’ve got an
organized report. That was the hard part, getting good reports.
MR. GROVER: And you were dealing with college graduates?
9
MR. WALKER: College graduates. They had degrees in fishery biology or wildlife at a
bachelor’s level, but that wasn’t enough really. I didn’t have an advanced degree, but I
had the broader training there. They just didn’t have the training there.
MR. GROVER: Do you think your experience in Scotland and your education there was
helpful?
MR. WALKER: Oh yeah. When I was in school the War was on over in Britain there,
and I dropped out of school when I was sixteen and was working for the Royal Air Force
on repairing and maintaining bombers on the North Sea there. I spent a couple of years
on that. When I started college in the States and finished up, I figured that I almost a
college degree when I got out at sixteen. Some of the people in the dorm were majoring
in Latin and Latin languages. I was far ahead of them in French, and they were majoring
in the subject. And I was still ahead because I had had five years of French and five
years of Latin. It made a difference, really.
MR. GROVER: What was the area covered by that office in Raleigh? You said that the
Raleigh office covered an area as far north as Chesapeake and as far south as what
Georgia?
MR. WALKER: Yeah, Georgia. The next office was down in Georgia.
MR. GROVER: At Savannah.
MR. WALKER: We had a lot of the big Sounds down in North Carolina. We had those.
MR. GROVER: You had the Albemarle?
MR. WALKER: We had some of the rivers there that had significant Stripped Bass
populations. The people there were concerned about the Stripped Bass there, so we were
worried about Stripped Bass populations there. Of course when we got up into the
Chesapeake Bay, then we got into Oysters.
MR. GROVER: But Stripped Bass were big in the Chesapeake Bay, and Rock Fish.
MR. WALKER: Right. And Shad were big, and Spot and Croaker. Spot and Croaker
populations were in pretty bad shape.
MR. GROVER: Did you get involved with any of the blue water fish, or off shore fish?
MR. WALKER: No.
MR. GROVER: You were still dealing with fish that were in the estuarine?
MR. WALKER: Yes.
10
MR. GROVER: From Raleigh you went to where?
MR. WALKER: It must have been Boston.
MR. GROVER: Boston? Was that in the Regional Office?
MR. WALKER: Yes, I was Assistant Regional Supervisor.
MR. GROVER: O.K. What was your grade? You must have got promoted somewhere
along the line.
MR. WALKER: I was a GS-12.
MR. GROVER: A GS-12. And what year was this, Earl, when you went to Boston?
MR. WALKER: That was in 1960. I went to training school, the senior development
thing. In 1963, I went to Washington on that.
MR. GROVER: O.K. Was that the DMDP, the Departmental Management
Development Program, the senior level? Which was for GS-12s, yes. What did you
work on down at that training? What was your focus there? Did you work over on The
Hill?
MR. WALKER: I was working with the Park Service for part of the time there. I called
in erosion. In some of the eastern parks, they could take quite a bit of pressure and
recover and re-grow and grow back. But in some of the western areas, they could do
damage there and it wouldn’t grow back in a hundred years. So there had to be some
control of access and use, depending on the….
MR. GROVER: So you were helping the Park Service on this? That sounds like a good
project.
MR. WALKER: Yeah. One thing is, I have a little hesitancy here; I’ve got Parkinson’s
disease which some affect on your speaking. It makes you get sort of thick toned.
MR. GROVER: That’s all right. You sound like you’re doing fine. Was it just one year
in Washington?
MR. WALKER: It was six months, and then I went back.
MR. GROVER: Oh, six months.
MR. WALKER: I made a good impression. I don’t have the social abilities. I just didn’t
make t
John Parvin
No full textOral history interview with John Parvin as conducted by Jerry Grover. Helen Parvin is also featured.INTERVIEW WITH JOHN PARVIN
WITH MRS. HELEN PARVIN
BY JERRY GROVER JANUARY 29, 2002
MR. GROVER: Why don’t you introduce yourself John?
MR. PARVIN: I am John R. Parvin. My middle name is Ray, without the “mond” on
the end. It’s just straight Ray.
MR. GROVER: When were you born?
MR. PARVIN: January 24, 1914.
MR. GROVER: So you just turned 88?
MR. PARVIN: I’m 88 as of last week.
MR. GROVER: Where were you born John?
MR. PARVIN: Gaston, Oregon.
MR. GROVER: Gaston, Oregon. So you are a native to the northwest.
MR. PARVIN: There’s only one reason I was born there. My father was a manager of
an apple orchard up in the [unintelligible] area. And my grandparents lived at Gaston, so
my mother went home to have her brat.
MR. GROVER: And you were “the brat?”
MR. PARVIN: That’s right.
MR. GROVER: Did you go to school in Gaston?
MR. PARVIN: No, I only stayed there long enough to get my diapers on and take off for
Hood River.
MR. GROVER: So you grew up in Hood River?
MR. PARVIN: My dad was a hired manager. He would rather have farmed for himself
so I grew up around this area.
MR. GROVER: Where did you go to school?
MR. PARVIN: Which school? High School? That was the old Vancouver High School
at “26” and Main.
MR. GROVER: Did you go to College?
MR. PARVIN: Yes, and no. I took college courses wherever I was stationed. But I
didn’t have any opportunities to go to College. That was in the depth of the Depression.
I was looking around for something to do. And I lived on a farm, but the farm wasn’t big
enough for more than one. My father had the farm. I though about it and said that if I
could find something, I would sink my teeth in, and do the best I could with it. I took all
of the Civil Service exams that I could come across. One was for Apprentice Fish
Culturist. It was with the old Bureau of Fisheries. In June of 1938 I was offered a
position at Spearfish. I was offered three or four positions, but that was the closest one.
So by that time we had our daughter. She was a month old when we left to go to
Spearfish. We drove. We had an old Essex. Have you ever seen an old Essex? They are
one of the poorest cars you’ll ever see. But anyway, we drove there and it us a week to
get there.
MRS. PARVIN: Ten days.
MR. PARVIN: Now you can do it in about twelve hours.
MR. GROVER: I see that your wife Helen is with you. Where did you meet Helen?
MR. PARVIN: What? [Mr. Parvin is hard of hearing]
MRS. PARVIN: Where did you meet me?
MR. PARVIN: She pushed my baby buggy! [Laughing]
MRS. PARVIN: I am three years older than he is. He has always told that I pushed his
baby buggy, but I don’t think so.
MR. PARVIN: And I will say this; she was the best. The best thing that I ever got was
her. She backed me to one hundred percent. We went to Spearfish, and I think that that
was the best move that we ever made. She became her own person. She was just newly
married and she was depending on her parents. She became her own person and made her
own decisions. I think that was a great deal because it carried through then to thirty-seven
years with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and/or the Bureau of Fisheries. Right
now, we have been married for sixty-five years.
MR. GROVER: That’s a fair amount of time! What did you first do when you first
went to Spearfish?
MR. PARVIN: What was my first duty?
MR. GROVER: Yeah, what did they have you doing?
MR. PARVIN: Grinding fish food. That was the first assignment. We had a power
[machine]… like a sausage grinder, about that long. It had a hopper like that. So you fed
the livers and spleens and various things into that. Then you had a mixer that you put
them in and it stirred them up. It put salt in them. The salt bound the spleen. That was
my first assignment. Oh, and my first Supervisor was Ted Kibbe. Have you heard of
him?
MR. GROVER: No, I haven’t heard of him.
MR. PARVIN: Well you better look. Ted Kibbe was, as far as I am concerned one of the
best Supervisors you’ll ever run across. He taught his people. He was a person who
believed in research. Ted Kibbe, K-I-B-B-E. I think he is long gone now. Because he
was older than I am. He was transferred from Spearfish up to the new Hatchery in
Montana. It was in Bozeman. Of course, Bozeman has become a Research Station.
MR. GROVER: A Technology Center, they call it nowadays.
MR. PARVIN: Yeah. But he was transferred up there. And he operated and got that
started. He was one that believed in research. And I believe one hundred percent in
research.
MR. PARVIN: How long did you stay at Bozeman?
MRS. PARVIN: He was at Spearfish.
MR. GROVER: I am sorry, how long were you at Spearfish?
MR. PARVIN: Have you ever run across Fred J. Foster?
MR. GROVER: Yes, I know the name.
MR. PARVIN: He was the original Regional Supervisor out here. He was there when I
came out there. I came out the second year on vacation to visit and so on. I took some
annual leave and we came out here. I went up to Seattle where the Regional office was, to
meet the guy. He transferred me the new Station at Carson. He didn’t even let me go
back to Spearfish. He was the Regional Director over the whole bit, so he can do that.
They had a new Hatchery up at Carson. Well you know where it is.
MR. GROVER: I was Manager at Carson. But that was in 1972. You must have been
there in 1940.
MRS. PARVIN: Somewhere in there.
MR. PARVIN: Well, the records are there. But I am sure that it was in 1940 when I
transferred to Carson. There was three…there were four people. There was Pop
Meyers. We only knew him as Pop Meyers. He was the Manager, only he wasn’t, he
was Superintendent. Because he was in charge of not only Carson, but the lower
Columbia River hatcheries there. There was The Little White, Big White and Carson were
the three that he was over. We stayed at Carson a while, and I was transferred to the
little Station out from Estacada, Oregon. It was Delf Creek at that time. It was a little
Trout hatchery, but we made a Salmon hatchery out of it.
MR. GROVER: How long were you there?
MR. PARVIN: I was there two times, probably for a total of about five years.
MRS. PARCIN: That sounds right.
MR. PARVIN: This was during World War II and our Secretary of the Interior had all of
us made exempt from military service because we were in food production because of the
Salmon. Then I was drafted and I sat there, and sat there and sat there. We got all ready
for her [Mrs. Parvin] to be taken care of. By that time we had two children. And nothing
happened. I got tired after a while and made a trip up to my original Draft Board, which
was Carson. They said, “Oh, didn’t we send you a notice that you were too old to be
drafted?” I was all of thirty! I said, “No, you didn’t.” They told me that I had been
deferred because of age. So I went back to work.
MR. GROVER: Were you at Delf Creek then?
MR. PARVIN: I was at Delf Creek.
MR. GROVER: How long did you stay there?
MR. PARVIN: Approximately five years. Delf Creek was one that kind got me. I have
a problem with, and I have had for many, many years, with blood circulation in my left
leg. I was talked into having an injection for a varicose vein that I had. It got away from
the Doctor and clogged some other veins. I have a problem, and have had it. But I guess
it doesn’t have anything to do with longevity!
MR. GROVER: No! After Delf Creek, where did you go?
MR. PARVIN: Then I was involved with the Civilian Defense. I was very deeply
involved with Civilian Defense. I said that if I was too old, I wasn’t too old for that. So I
did that as an extra to my job.
MR. GROVER: What kind of duties did you have for Civil Defense?
MR. PARVIN: What kind of duties? I organized the communities.
MR. GROVER: After that, where did you go for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
MR. PARVIN: I was transferred as Assistant Manager up on the Skajet [sic] River.
Then to Leavenworth.
MR. GROVER: What grade were you at that time? Had you been promoted?
MR. PARVIN: We were all SP grades. There is no SP grades any more.
MR. GROVER: Not anymore.
MR. PARVIN: GS, General Schedule grades is what there is. I was a GS-5 at that time.
MR. GROVER: And an Assistant Manager?
MR. PARVIN: Yeah, but when the Bureau of Fisheries was transferred to the Interior
Department, the grades went up to no one. When I retired I was a GS-13.
MR. GROVER: Who was at Leavenworth when you were there?
MR. PARVIN: Fred Bitle was there, but he was under me.
MR. GROVER: So he worked for you? O. K.
MR. PARVIN: In fact, I was also in charge of Entiat ‘til Roger Burrows came along and
wanted it for a Research Station. So I was moved down under John Pelnar at Coleman.
MR. GROVER: When was that John?
MR. PARVIN: When was that? I was at Coleman twice. I was in charge of it once, the
last time. And I was the Assistant Manager in charge of Production the first time. I think
it was for four or five years. It was before Eagle Creek was built. I took over Eagle
Creek.
MR. GROVER: About what year were you in Coleman?
MR. PARVIN: I know what year it was that I took over Eagle Creek. That was… [To
Mrs. Parvin] you’re going to have to tell me. You’ve got a better memory than I have.
MRS. PARVIN: For what?
MR. PARVIN: When did we move to Eagle Creek?
MRS. PARVIN: I don’t remember.
MR. PARVIN: It was in 1936?
MRS. PARVIN: No, it couldn’t have been in ’36.
MR. GROVER: Eagle Creek wasn’t built until almost the 1960’s, I think.
MR. PARVIN: I started Eagle Creek.
MRS. PARVIN: I know. But honey, in 1936 we got married, remember?
MR. PARVIN: Oh yeah. 1946, O. K.
MR. GROVER: That was during the War years. It would have been after the war,
wasn’t it?
MR. PARVIN: No, I didn’t move. I was there during the war, or part of the war. When
you get 88, your memory slips a little bit, just off the top of your head.
MRS. PARVIN: When we moved to Eagle Creek it was just nothing but mud.
MR. GROVER: How long were you there at Eagle Creek John? What was your big
program at Eagle Creek?
MR. PARVIN: I think we were there for about four or five years, is that right?
MRS. PARVIN: Something like that.
MR. PARVIN: Then I was transferred to Entiat to take that Station over when the
Manager there retired. They called Managers…
MRS. PARVIN: We went to Leavenworth twice.
MR. PARVIN: Oh yes, I know.
MR. GROVER: You said that you started Eagle Creek National Fish Hatchery? How
long were you there?
MR. PARVIN: I don’t really now, but it was quiet a while.
MR. GROVER: But you were the Manager there?
MR. PARVIN: Yeah.
MR. GROVER: What was you program in? What fish were you raising?
MR. PARVIN: We were raising Coho [Salmon], Chinooks, and Steelhead. It was an
anandremous [sic] hatchery. So now I am about out of information on that. Water
supply was not a very good one. It was taken right out of Eagle Creek. And on a
Thanksgiving day, we had five inches of rain in the headwaters of Eagle Creek. It just
flooded everything. We made some unscheduled releases because the water was over the
ponds even.
MR. GROVER: Things haven’t changed. They still do it. It still happens! They’re
cutting the trees up in the watershed and…
MR. PARVIN: I started Eagle Creek, and we had a lot of things, problems that I had
never met before, but we made it. We got returns. We racked the Eagle Creek and forced
the fish to go into the holding ponds. We carried on a program. We got our original stock
of Salmon at Delf Creek from the Clackamas River. We took it and double racked at
section right at the mouth of Eagle Creek. And we took Eagle Creek fish, in other words,
and took the eggs from them.
MR. GROVER: These were Coho?
MR. PARVIN: No, they were Spring Chinook.
MR. GROVER: So the source of Spring Chinook at Eagle Creek came out of Delf Creek?
MR. PARVIN: Yeah. Delf Creek is a tributary of Eagle Creek.
MR. GROVER: Where did you after that John? Where was your next Station, or your
next Hatchery?
MR. PARVIN: After I left the northwest I was offered a position at Lamar,
Pennsylvania.
MR. GROVER: I had forgot that you had been back to Lamar.
MR. PARVIN: I was Manager. I think that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The Regional Supervisor for Hatcheries was trying to get somebody to operate Lamar.
The largest Hatchery in Region 5 was Lamar. They finally offered it to me. And that
was a wise deal for me because I operated successfully and made a good reputation in
Region 5. From there I was offered a position back in Region 1 as the Manager of
Coleman after John Pelnar retired. So I took that. For a “13” in that time, they required
time in three regions before you were eligible for the “13” in the field. That made me
three regions; 1, 2 and 5. I was eligible, and I was the only one they could find who was
eligible. So I got Dvorshak.
MR. GROVER: So from Coleman you went up to Dvorshak? Dvorshak was brand new.
MR. PARVIN: Yeah right.
MR. GROVER: You were the first Manager there.
MR. PARVIN: Yes, that’s right.
MR. GROVER: And you retired from Dvorshak in 1975?
MR. PARVIN: Yes, that’s my career. But I thought that you wanted some interesting
things about my first appointment.
MR. GROVER: I do, and I want to ask you some other questions too John.
MR. PARVIN: Go ahead.
MR. GROVER: I was going to ask you about some of the people that you hired. Did
you hire anybody famous, or somebody that really did well? Or a bunch of them?
MR. PARVIN: You know as well as I do that you don’t hire them. You get them
referred to you, but you don’t hire them directly. The only ones that you hire is your
temporaries.
MR. GROVER: What about the ones that you developed or trained?
MR. PARVIN: I am trying to think.
MRS. PARVIN: Don Jerzak.
MR. PARVIN: Yeah, Don Jerzak was under me at Coleman.
MR. GROVER: But he was a GS-9 then. He started out as a GS-1.
MR. PARVIN: Yeah, he was a “9” at Coleman.
MR. GROVER: What about some beginning ones. Did you have some new people that
you trained?
MR. PARVIN: Oh, lot’s of people!
MR. GROVER: Who were some of the really good ones that you had that turned out [to
have] good careers?
MR. PARVIN: Your asking me to dig up memories that I am having a lot of trouble
doing.
MR. GROVER: O.K.
MR. PARVIN: I trained a lot of people because I believed in training. I believe that
Managers should also be teachers. Oh, Jack Kinchloe was one of them. I got him out of
College and he thought that he knew the whole bit. But we found out that he didn’t. I am
not going to say anything but I had a lot of fun training him because when he first came he
was very egotistical. He was out of College and has a degree. I let him go saw off a limb
while he was on it, and things like that.
MR. GROVER: Jack had a successful career. He retired as Manage of Ridgefield, and he
had been for “NIMPS”. [?] He had been all around. He was a good hand, a good man.
MR. PARVIN: Kinchloe and I are very great friends. And he turned out to be a pretty
good employee I am sure. But I took him out of College.
MR. GROVER: Can you remember some other people that you hired? Or that you
trained, some young ones right out of school?
MR. PARVIN: He just didn’t know all of the answers.
MR. GROVER: Well there was a lot of time that we didn’t know the answers. And
that’s why you take fish up to Seattle and you find ameba or Jeridaculous [sic], the
leaches that were on the gills, the fresh ones.
MR. PARVIN: Eventually, at Dvorshak, I had a Lab under me.
MR. GROVER: And you were dealing with a virus?
MR. PARVIN: We had the virus a lot more that we thought we had. And in a lot more
places too. Do you know how they were passing it out? We found that out too. They
were using visceral from Salmon canners as part of the diet. And the virus was in that
visceral. My name is on a paper with… who was the Pathologist out of Seattle?
MRS. PARVIN: Burrows.
MR. GROVER: Burrows was a Nutritionist.
MR. PARVIN: Burrows was local.
MR. GROVER: There was Fred Fish up there, hum.
MR. PARVIN: Anyway, he was the authority. And he and I ran a bunch of experiments
at Leavenworth. He and I wrote it up. My name is on that. We found the virus that was
at Leavenworth and we found were it was coming from. It was coming from the visceral
that was used in the diet. It came out of Alaska.
MR. GROVER: I can remember those days, but after they started pasteurizing the
visceral they got rid of that particular disease.
MR. PARVIN: Pasteurizing was the next step. And the next step was pellets.
MR. GROVER: What other big issues were you working on? What other things did you
do that was important, or that were problems for you, or for the Service or fish culture?
MR. PARVIN: I’d better not say this, turn it down again.
MR. GROVER: O.K.
MR. PARVIN: People again. [It was] Jealousy between the Managers at Leavenworth
and Roger Burrows that was a problem. They were trying to cut each other’s throats all
of the time. I was in the middle. I was in charge of Production.
MR. GROVER: What about the Regional office in Portland, did they do anything? The
Supervisors in Portland, what did they do about it?
MR. PARVIN: I don’t think they did anything. They eventually transferred the
Manager to Washington, D.C. That’s one way to get rid of them. Take and give them a
promotion! And they have other things to worry about than personal deals.
MRS. PARVIN: May I say something now?
MR. GROVER: Helen, why don’t you speak a minute. You look like you’re getting
ready.
MR. PARVIN: I found the life of the hatchery man’s wife, was a rather lonesome. You
can’t make any good friends because the other people would accuse you of being partial.
That’s all I wanted to say.
MR. GROVER: But you worked at the Hatcheries too.
MRS. PARVIN: I cut fins.
MR. GROVER: You cut fins? Did you feed fish when John was gone?
MRS. PARVIN: I fed fish when he was gone, there are Delf Creek.
MR. GROVER: Did you cook for the visitors? Any surprise lunches?
MRS. PARVIN: Yes. Well, did I have any other choice?
MR. GROVER: Did John surprise you often?
MRS. PARVIN: Not after a while. After I made a few comments, why, he didn’t.
MR. PARVIN: She’s leaving out a very important thing. And that is encouragement.
She was my great encourager.
MRS. PARVIN: If I hadn’t done that, he would have resigned a long time ago. A long
time before he did. He wanted one Hatchery so bad, and he didn’t get it. “I’m going to
retire!” he says. And I talked him out of it.
MR. GROVER: What Hatchery was your great desire?
MR. PARVIN: The one that I thought I should have gotten?
MR. GROVER: Yes.
MR. PARVIN: The new one where the Lab is, Abernathy.
MRS. PARVIN: I did a good thing then, encouraging him not to resign.
MR. GROVER: John you said you had some stories to tell about Spearfish or
something, for the record.
MR. PARVIN: You mean just stories?
MR. GROVER: Yeah, reminiscing.
MR. PARVIN: You know, at the time when I took my oath of office, there was Leonard
Hunt who was a Fish Culturist at that time. There was one other Fish Culturist who
lived in that little house. I can’t remember his name. He was a newspaperman and
thought that he would try something else. Then when the war came they offered him a
job as a war correspondent. He took that and left Fisheries entirely. But there was me,
and two apprentices. There was the Fish Culturist, Leonard Hunt and there was Ted
Kibbe to begin with and John Harrington during that last part of my stay there. And a
story…
I came out of the little house I was living in. You know there’s a circular drive?
MR. GROVER: At the Hatchery?
MR. PARVIN: Yeah. I came out of the front door to do something, I don’t know what.
Leonard Hunt came running and he puts on his brakes. It was an oiled road. He squealed
his tires and backed up and went around the other way. I asked him when I got over to
the Hatchery, “What’d you do that for?” He says, “There was a black cat who ran across
in front of me! And you don’t ever run across a black cat’s path!” I laughed and I was in
his doghouse!
MRS. PARVIN: I have to tell you about this. We lived in a little house too, for a long
time. That little tiny house?
MR. GROVER: I think that one is taken down now.
MR. PARVIN: I can tell one on Ted Kibbe. We were invited up for dinner and we had a
little girl, Rose. She’s much more than a little girl now. She is in her sixties. Anyway,
she left a diaper up there. They had one boy, the Kibbe’s did. At about ten-thirty or so
in the evening there was a knock on the door. There was Ted Kibbe at the door with a
diaper. He said, “You don’t ever want to leave a diaper up here! We’ll have another
child!” There were considerable more superstitions then than there is now.
MRS. PARVIN: While we were living in that little house, I would go out and do my
washing and hang it up. There was a great big black snake that’d come out of the stone
wall and watch me, every time. I don’t know what kind of snake it was. It wasn’t
poisonous. But it was a huge snake, about that bid around, and long. He would come out
every time I hung out clothes.
MR. GROVER: On most of your stations, did you live on the Hatchery?
MRS. PARVIN: Most of them yes. As a matter of fact, we went to Leavenworth two
our three different times.
MR. PARVIN: One winter morning, we woke up. It was a weekend and I wasn’t on
duty. We had to take turns being on duty on weekends.
MR. GROVER: Where?
MR. PARVIN: The sun was shining bright and the temperature gage said thirty below
zero. We went out and it seemed nice. We went out for a nice long hike in thirty below
zero with snow on the ground. It was fun! Isn’t that right, M
Grover McCormick, Sr. Letter from Mother Page 1
No full textThe first page of a letter addressed to Grover McCormick, Sr. from his mother. Although it is addressed to Mr. G. N. McCormick, Jr. in order to differentiate from Grover McCormick, Sr.'s father, George Newton McCormick
Oral History Marvin L. Plenert Office of the Directorate
No full textMarvin L. Plenert oral history interview as conducted by Jerry C. Grover.
Mr. Plenert was the former Regional Director of the FWS Pacific Region.
Organization: FWS
Name: Marvin L. Plenert
Years: 1961-1994
Program: Refuges, Land Acquisition, Regional Director, FWS Pacific Region
Keywords: History, Biography, Work of the Service, Wetlands, Public policies, Wildlife refuges, Employees (USFWS), Endangered and/or threatenedOral History
MARVIN L. PLENERT
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTORATE
Interviewed by:
Jerry C. Grover
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Name: Marvin L. Plenert
Date of Interview: February 1, 2002
Location of Interview: Oregon City, Oregon
Interviewer: Jerry C. Grover
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service:
1961 – 1994, 33 years
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions
Held:
Jamestown, North Dakota – Wetland Program
Montana – Land Acquisition
Lewistown, MT – Wilderness Studies
Anchorage, AK – Refuges, Native Claims Act
Denver, CO – ARD Refuges & Wildlife
Washington, D.C. – Dep. AD, Refuges & Wildlife
Portland, OR – Regional Director
ABSTRACT: In a 33+ year career ending with his retirement
in 1994 with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a common
theme developed. It could be best described as cutting edge,
contentious, adversarial but always successful as he came to
know and understand the real biology and political aspects of
some of the most controversial and contested issues and
programs of the day. Some of the highlights described in this
narrative begin with:
The acquisitions of prairie wetlands at a time when one
Government program was paying farmers to drain the
land while another was trying to preserve valuable
habitat for the Nation’s waterfowl.
In Alaska he was in the middle of the Native Claims
Settlement Act on conflicting claims of selecting
Native lands vs. land set aside as National Wildlife
Refuge areas.
The identification and acquisition of numerous land
areas to be entered in the National Wildlife Refuge
System in a climate of competing land use controversy.
As the Regional Director for the Pacific Region
embroiled in some of the more controversial
Endangered Species Act listings [read spotted owl,
California gnatcatcher, and seeming like everything in
Hawaii], Klamath River Basin and California’s San
Francisco Bay / Delta water and wildlife issues, all at a
political level reaching to the White House.
Throughout, he kept and maintained a sense of the value of the
career people, a sense of fairness of values and an outspoken
and a clear willingness to make a decision based on the biology
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and facts at hand. This ability earned him the Department of Interior’s highest awards and the respect of his fellow Service employees.
The Oral History
MR. GROVER: This is Jerry Grover, a retired Ecological Services & Fishery supervisor in the Portland Regional Office to do an oral history on Marv Plenert at his home in Oregon City, Oregon, regarding his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. With me is my wife Judy, formerly Marv’s Administrative Assistant, and his wife Carol. Marv, for the record what was your job when you retired?
MR. PLENERT: Well, for the last five years of my career with the Fish and Wildlife Service I was the Regional Director for Region 1, which is the Pacific Northwest. It included the states of California, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii and the Trust Territories of the Pacific. It was quite a large area.
MR. GROVER: Marv, tell us a little about yourself. Where were you born? And how did you get interested in, or get started in fish and wildlife?
MR. PLENERT: Well, I grew up on a farm in Kansas. I probably got interested in fish and wildlife resources and management because I liked to hunt and fish. I guess that was probably everybody’s dream way back then. So I ended up going to Kansas State University. First I went to a small college in my hometown for a couple of years. That was Taber College in Hillsborough, Kansas. And then I went into the Army.
MR. GROVER: Was that your hometown, Hillsborough?
MR. PLENERT: Yes, Hillsborough was my hometown. That’s where my wife Carol is from too. She’s from Hillsborough as well. Our families knew each other when we were growing up. I went to college there for two years and then I went into the Army for a couple of years. Then when I came out I went to Kansas State at Manhattan, Kansas, and got my bachelor’s degree in Biology and then my master’s in Wildlife Management. I graduated in 1961 with my master’s degree.
MR. GROVER: How did you and Carol get together?
MR. PLENERT: Well I’ve known her all of my life, I suspect. And I guess when I got out of the Army we kind of got serious in the late 1950’s and started dating. Then we got married in 1958. We had two children, a boy and a girl. She worked and helped me get through college. You know how it was in those days. Of course I had the GI bill but still, she helped me get through.
MR. GROVER: What did you do in the Army?
MR. PLENERT: I was stationed in Fort Bliss, Texas believe it or not. I was in the guided missile program. It was kind of the first ground to air missile program. It was in the late 1950’s, 1956 I guess. Then we got shipped over to Germany. I spent a year over in Germany and then I got discharged from there. I was in for two years that’s all.
MR. GROVER: After Kansas State, did you go right to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
MR. PLENERT: Yes I did. After I got out of school I had several job offers. In fact, they weren’t very plentiful in those days and were really few and far between for anybody in wildlife management but I was lucky and had several. You’d have to work for a state or for the federal Government; they were the only ones with those type jobs. There wasn’t any body in the private sector that was hiring people. So I had a job offer with the State of Kansas. I had applied with the Fish and Wildlife Service and got a call from Region 3, headquartered in Minneapolis. The call came from Goodman Larsen who was the Personnel Director there. Goodman T. Larsen, I’ll never forget him. He offered me a job in North Dakota. Well, I had a choice of North or South Dakota. It was with the Wetlands Program, and I’ll get into that in a little while. So I just went right from College, to Jamestown, North Dakota. That’s where they offered me the job. The pay wasn’t very much but in those days it was better than nothing. The federal job was probably one thousand dollars more that what the state had offered me for a year.
MR. GROVER: Were you started as a GS-5?
MR. PLENERT: A “7”. I started as a GS-7 because I had a master’s degree. We moved to North Dakota in a little U-Haul trailer from Kansas. We hauled everything we had, which wasn’t much. At that time Jamestown was just a small town. There were probably seven or eight thousand people. There wasn’t any place to rent. There were no houses, apartments or anything. We finally conned some guy into renting me a little house. We lived in a rental house because I couldn’t afford to buy one. We rented the whole time we were there.
When I started off, the issue was the Wetlands Drainage Program. It was the government’s USDA subsidized drainage that they paid farmers a cost share to drain wetlands off of their agricultural lands. Of course this was in direct conflict with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which wanted to protect the wetlands. It’s another case of two agencies in the federal government having separate mandates and having both of them different. I mean, here we are dealing with Agriculture doing away with habitat, and we’re trying to protect it. They came up with using Duck Stamp money to preserve and protect the small Wetlands Program. My job when I first went there was to look at what they called drainage referrals. The farmers would fill out a little sheet. They would go at that time to the ASCS, the Agricultural Stabilization Committee. It was separate from the CSC, which did the technical work. They would fill out a little map. We’d get the map in Fish and Wildlife and we would go out and look at what was there.
3
There was probably twelve biologists hired at that time in Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota and we’d go out and look at these wetlands and if they had high values to wildlife, we’d tell them that we didn’t think they should be drained. And they would just take it with a grain of salt and drain them anyhow. It didn’t matter. The only way that you could protect them was to buy them or… So then the Fish and Wildlife Service came up with a wetland acquisition program. They would either buy them or take easements on wetlands. This was in the prairie pothole region, the glaciated country and there were potholes everywhere. There were large ones, small ones, both temporary and permanent. So the theory was at that time to acquire a major permanent one in one or two per township and then take easements on the rest. That way the land would stay on the tax roll. At that time land was selling for between six and eight dollars an acre. You could buy the whole countryside in that glaciated country for six to eight bucks an acre. That was in the early 1960’s. Our job was to define the wetlands that were being considered… go look at them if they were going to drain them, or delineate which ones we thought the Service should buy.
Then they set up an acquisition program in Jamestown as well. The key people that were there was Harold Benson who was a long time Realty guy in Region 3 and 4. There was Tom Smith who was in Albuquerque when he retired. They were there as the first acquisition biologists in Jamestown. We worked together and identified areas that should have been bought. If we’d have had money, or cash, we could have bought the whole county. But we didn’t have it. We had to borrow money from the wetlands, Duck Stamp funds and there was only so much money available. The program was really a success. They called it the Accelerated Wetlands Program, and I think it’s still going on.
MR. GROVER: You didn’t have the money, but how many acres, roughly, were you able to set aside?
MR. PLENERT: I can’t remember. There were millions in all of the states. We had a problem too, that if we bought too many acres in a given county the County Commissioners would get up in arms because it was land taken off of the tax roll. We paid, or the government did, three quarters of one percent of in-lieu taxes. But it still wasn’t as much as if there was a farmer living on the land. So we had problems with the County Commissioners. And we had to go meet with the Governors. In some of the counties we did really well. We preserved a lot of habitat. It was really a good program. In fact, Dick Mundinger who was in the regional office in Minneapolis and later moved to Region 1, was instrumental in the Program too. Actually when I transferred from North Dakota to Montana, Dick was instrumental because Montana was in Region 1. He helped get them in the program and they weren’t a part of the original acquisition program. Then I left Jamestown.
MR. GROVER: When was that?
MR. PLENERT: In 1966. Dick [Mundinger] was instrumental in getting a position in Montana for wetland acquisition and to look at drained wetlands. It was because the moraine glaciated area extended into two or three counties in Montana. And these were just as good as wetlands or just as many, but we didn’t have a program there. So I started the program there and did all of the delineations of all the wetlands. We hired an appraiser. Bob Miller was, I think, the first guy and he ended up retiring in Boston, in Region 5. We started the program and preserved lots of wetlands there too.
MR. GROVER: What was your grade at that time?
MR. PLENERT: I was a “9” when I was first there. Then I got promoted to GS-11. When I was in Montana I received the first and only reprimand I ever got from the Fish and Wildlife Service. It was for what I thought was doing a good job. But I didn’t realize the difference between Regions. Region 3 was very, very assertive on wetlands and acquisition and waterfowl management. Region 1, which Montana was in at that time, before they reorganized, was very conservative. If it wasn’t in Oregon, or along the coast, they really didn’t get any approval. Dave Marshall was the wildlife biologist that really did all of the approving of wetland acquisition. I had an opportunity on the north shore of Flathead Lake, which is in the Flathead Valley; the whole north shore was undeveloped. It had values other than just waterfowl. It was a big staging area for probably all of the Redheads and Canvasbacks in that area. They had Osprey and Eagles as well. I found out that the people wanted to sell it. So I went over and talked to them. I reported to the regional office that it was for sale. It was cheap. It was a hundred bucks an acre or less. The first thing I got was a note back saying, “We’re not interested”. Well, I couldn’t accept that so I contacted Senator [Lee] Metcalf. He was the senior Senator for Montana. Well no, I guess the other guy was, I can’t remember his name. [Mike] Mansfield and Metcalf were very, very instrumental in conservation efforts. In fact, Metcalf was Chairman of the Migratory Bird Commission that approved land acquisition for the Service. He was a prime member. At that time, John Dingell from Michigan was too. So I contacted Metcalf and told him about this area. I even took him out there and showed him. The next think I knew, the money showed up in Region 1’s budget. They kind of tied two and two together and found out that I had done this. Of course I got a reprimand for it. But they ended up using the money. The bought the area and it’s a fantastic area. But that’s kind of interesting, how things happen. I really didn’t think about doing anything wrong. I thought about preserving the area.
MR. GROVER: Is that area part of a National Wildlife Refuge now?
MR. PLENERT: Yes, it is.
MR. GROVER: What is the name of it?
MR. PLENERT: There’s a wetlands complex out of Kalispell that manages the north shore area of the Flathead Valley. Really, it’s a complex under the National Bison Range, which is in the southern Flathead Valley by Paulson. The Manager has an assistant in Kalispell who does the wetland work. There is the Flathead, and the Nine Pipe National Wildlife Refuges that are all one complex. But it’s a fantastic area. What they were going to do was dredge the area and fill the beaches and build houses. I decided that I didn’t think that was a good idea. I 4
proposed it for acquisition and it didn’t go very well in the regional office. But at that time Vernon Ekedahl was the Assistant Regional Director, which is Refuge Supervisor. I guess that’s what they called them at that time. And John Finley was the Regional Director. They were a pretty conservative bunch. They didn’t think that some GS-11 should be proposing things like that.
Then after we kind of finished the wetlands program, I was asked to do the Wilderness Studies for Region 1. So I stayed right in Montana. And after the Wilderness Bill was passed, I think this was in late 1968 or something like that, so for two years I did wilderness studies on the major, large National Wildlife Refuges in Region 1. I worked on the Desert Refuge, Sheldon and Hart Mountain in Nevada, and C. M. Russell and Medicine Lake in Montana.
MR. GROVER: Were you stationed in Montana the whole time while you were doing this?
MR. PLENERT: Yeah, I was in Lewistown. I worked out of Lewistown at the headquarters for the C. M. Russell range. Oddly enough, one of the things that is kind of interesting; as I said, about like the Wetlands Program, the guy that was instrumental in blowing the whistle on the Agriculture for draining wetlands was a guy by the name of Fred Staunton. He was the Manager at Waubay Refuge and Wetland complex in South Dakota in the late 1950’s. He saw all of these wetlands being drained and people were getting paid to do it. He got a Field and Stream magazine editor out there and they took some pictures, and wrote an article in Field and Stream. That really started the work of putting a stop to the cost-share drainage and that sort of thing. Fred ended up as the Refuge Manager at C. M. Russell while I was there. He was the Manager of that million-acre refuge. And issues there were another set of issues that we worked on, not only in conflict with the Department of Agriculture, but with our own Department of the Interior. That was BLM [Bureau of Land Management]. In those days when it was originally set up, the criteria was that BLM would manage the grazing under the Taylor Grazing Act. The Fish and Wildlife Service would manage the wildlife. They were just incompatible. There were conflicts just one after the other. Fred was right in the middle of that. Then in about 1970, the Secretary of the Interior, Wally Hickel,, gave the whole National Wildlife Refuge to the BLM. He signed an order, abolished it and gave it to the BLM. Well then, the conservation organizations got up in arms and raised all kinds of heck. Then Congress passed a law that turned it all over to the Fish and Wildlife Service and got BLM out of there. Then the Fish and Wildlife Service managed the whole thing. So it was kind of a real fight with an agency within in the Department of Interior again. My whole career was kind of dotted with those kinds of conflicts, I think, from the time I started to the time I retired.
After Montana, I applied for a job in Alaska in 1971. Dave Spencer was the long-time Alaska Refuge Supervisor. He was up there his whole career. He flew there during World War II, and just stayed in Alaska with the State. Well, it was a Territory then. But Dave Spencer was the Refuge Supervisor and I worked as his Assistant in 1971. Then about 1973 or 1974 they passed the Alaskan Native Land Claims Settlement Act, which required that the natives had a chance to select lands around their villages. There was a township or two or three, depending on the size of the village. Now you had to enroll back to those villages so they’d be eligible for land and the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] was involved in getting the enrollment. They were enrolling people back to villages that didn’t exist. They just weren’t there. They were just names on a drainage [report] or something. and they called them a village so they would get land; like up to a full township around each one of these so-called bogus villages. I went to Gordy Watson who was the Area Director as it wasn’t a region yet, we were still under Region 1, and I told him about this. And I went to the Solicitor. The same Department of Interior Solicitor who represented the BIA represented us, and I got nowhere with him.
So on my own, I filed a protest. I just did it. I wrote a letter. It was in the enrollment provisions that you could protest. So I filed a protest, and signed my name. The next thing I knew, I got a called from [Lynn] Greenwalt who was the Fish & Wildlife Service Director at the time. He asked me what I thought I was doing. I said, “well, they’re taking lands that don’t belong to them,” and I told him, “I’m filing a protest.” Well, I didn’t know anything about the law, and when you do things in a legal way you’re supposed to serve notice to both parties and I didn’t. I didn’t send the other lawyers a letter. I did it all illegal. But anyway, they put a stop to it. Again, John Dingell who I mentioned earlier, got involved. I contacted him. He was a friend of ours and he put a stop to this, and made the Department of the Interior assign a separate Solicitor to Refuges to work with me. I had to work with the Solicitor to put a stop to these bogus villages. We had hearings and they sent out federal judges and we had to line up witnesses. They gave me a Solicitor in San Francisco to work with. He was a young man. I can’t think of his name now. We built a heck of a case. There must have been six hundred thousand acres that we were successful in keeping in the National Wildlife Refuge System, or we’d have had to buy them back at a later date. So it was very positive and it all turned out pretty good. These villages didn’t exist and we showed it -- they just weren’t there. That was one of my interesting Alaska [experiences]. Then I got involved in selecting new refuges.
MR. GROVER: Did you get promoted when you went up to Alaska?
MR. PLENERT: Yeah, I did. I got promoted to a GS-12 at that time which I thought was a pretty good deal because you got a twenty-five percent cost of living adjustment. It wasn’t that bad up there. It was a fun place to live. There were great people. I got involved in day-to-day Refuge activities. I got to fly around the whole State. Then we got involved in looking for new lands under the Land Claims Act to go into the Refuge. I felt I had a part of selecting all of the new Refuges as well. That was very gratifying.
I got a chance to witness the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. I saw all the pipe lying there, and they put it in and that was a kind of an historic event. You know, to open up the big oil field up there, and pump all of the oil down to Valdez and haul it away in tankers. Also during 5
that period of time in Alaska, the Fish and Wildlife Service embarked on a program management system. Rather than manage by functions, or get your funds by function, they embarked on this system. I don’t know, the people that devised it, the Lynn Greenwalts of the world, the Directors probably liked it. But for the people in the field it was really difficult to manage your functions by program. In the c
Nomination for President for the Democratic Party of 1884
No full textUnique document composed by the Nominating Committee of the National Democratic Party 1884 presented to Grover Cleveland during his term as Governor of New York. Official presentation took place in Albany, NY in the Governor's Chambers. Signed by representatives from every state and territory within the nation.Courtesy of the State of New Jersey Division of Environmental Protection, the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Historic Site, Caldwell, New Jersey.New York City - July 28th 1884 - The Honorable Grover Cleveland of New York. - Sir - In accordance with a custom befitting the nature of the communication the undersigned, representing the several states and territories of the Union, were appointed a Committee by the National Democratic Convention which assembled at Chicago on the eighth day of the current month, to perform the pleasing office, which by this means we have the honor to execute, of informing you of your nomination as the Candidate of the Democratic Party in the ensuing election for the office of President of the United States. A declaration of the principles upon which the Democracy go before the people, with the hope of establishing and maintaining them in the government, was made by the Convention; and an engrossed copy thereof is submitted in connection with this Communication for your consideration. We trust the approval of your judgment will follow an examination of this expression of opinions and policy; and, upon the political controversy now made up, we invite your acceptance of the exalted leadership to which you have been chosen. The election of a President is an event of the utmost importance to the people of America; prosperity, growth, happiness, peace and liberty, even, may depend on its wise ordering. Your unanimous nomination is proof that the Democracy believe your election will most contribute to secure these great objects. We assure you that in the anxious responsibilities you must assume as a candidate, you will have the steadfast cordial support of the friends of the cause you will represent; and in the execution of the duties of the high office - which we confidently expect from the wisdom of the nation to be conferred upon you - you may securely rely for approving aid upon the patriotism, honor and intelligence of this free people. We have the honor to be with great respect. - Nicholas M. Bell [sig.] Secretary; Wm. F. Vilas [sig.] President; D.P. Bestor [sig.] Alabama, [illegible] W Fordyce [sig.] Arkansas, Niles Searles [sig.] California, M S Waller [sig.] Colorado, Thos. M. Waller [sig.] Connecticut, Geo. H. Bates [sig.] Delaware, Attilla Cox [sig.] Kentucky, James Jeffries [sig.] Louisiana, Ch. H. Osgood [sig.] Maine, Geo. Wells [sig.] Maryland, J.G. Abbott [sig.] Massachusetts, Daniel J. Campan [sig.] Michigan, Thos E. Heenan [sig.] Minnesota, Chas. E. Hooker [sig.] Mississippi, David R. Francis [sig.] Missouri, Patrick Fahy [sig.] Nebraska, D. E. McCarthy [sig.] Nevada, J F. Cloutman [sig.] New Hampshire, John P. Stockton [sig.] New Jersey, John C Jacobs [sig.] New York, W.D. Chipley [sig.] Florida, M.P. Reese [sig.] Georgia, A E Stevenson [sig.] Illinois, E.D. Bannister [sig.] Indiana, L. G Kinne [sig.] Iowa, C. C. Burnes [sig.] Kansas, Wm. E Haynes [sig.] Ohio, L.L. McArthur [sig.] Oregon, James P. Barr [sig.] Pennsylvania, David S. Baker Jr [sig.] Rhode Island, Wilson G. Lamb [sig.] North Carolina, Jos. H. Earle [sig.] South Carolina, Wm A Quarles [sig.] Tennessee, Jos. E. Dwyer [sig.] Texas, Geo L Spear [sig.] Vermont, Rob Beverly [sig.] Virginia, Frank Hereford [sig.] West Virginia, W.A. Anderson [sig.] Wisconsin, S T Hauser [sig.] Montana, W.B. Childers [sig.] New Mexico, G H Oury [sig.] Arizona, M.S. McCormick [sig.] Dakotah [sic.], Ransford Smith [sig.] Utah, N. B Dutro [sig.] Washg. Territory, John M Silcott [sig.] Idaho, E.D. Wright [sig.] District of Columbia - [last line has stricken out signature of John C Jacobs
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