731 research outputs found
Parker Benton Smith
No full textParker Benton Smith oral history interview as conducted by W.T. Olds.
Mr. Smith would change agencies four times within the four years before joining the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1941. He took a brief leave from the Service in 1946, and returned in 1958 working out of the Regional Office in Law Enforcement.
Organization: FWS
Name: Parker Benton Smith
Years: 1941-1946, 1958-1973
Program: Law Enforcement, Refuges
Keywords: History, Biography, Employee, Law enforcement, Aviation, Refuges, Wildlife ranger, Game management, WPA, Banding, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Airboat, Wildlife technician1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Parker Benton Smith
Date of Interview: June 14, 1995
Location of Interview: Decatur, Georgia
Interviewer: W.T. Olds
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service:
20 years (1941-1946, 1958-1973)
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Game Management Agent at Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia
Colleagues and Mentors: Hayden A. (Tony) Carter, Bill Fisher (Forest Service), Charlie Elliot, Bill Davis, Raymond Fleetwood, Jay Kelsey, Oren Steele, Billy Birch, Agent Whitehead, John Boswell, Jim Silver, Roy Moore, Bill Davis, Warren Upton, Jake Wolfley, Rudy Oswald, Johnny Lynch, Wesley Perkins, Noah Long, Jack McLanahan, Jim Elliott, Walker Harrod, Boots Hammond, Yoke Row, Dave Barnes, Walt Price, Charlie Young, Walt Gresh, Donald Hankra, Harvey Nelson, Paul Quick, Bob Smith, Mort Smith, Walt Crissey, Don Smith, Tommy Lines, Art Holkin, Art Bradley, Willie Parker, Cotton Soaper, Manny Carr, Dr. Ted Creaser, Bill Lee, Herman Zeigler, Jim Schuler, Houston Gascon, Van Carlton, Phil Peru
Most Important Issues: Law enforcement, banding
Brief Summary of Interview: Mr. Smith gives a brief history of his early life, becoming a wildlife technician in Cornelia, Georgia and changing agencies four times within the four years there, working for the Forest Service, and then becoming a wildlife ranger for Georgia’s Game and Fish Commission before joining the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1941. He took a brief leave from the Service in 1946, working for the Tennessee Conservation Department and then returning to Fish and Wildlife in 1958 working out of the Regional Office in the Law Enforcement section. Mr. Parker tells many stories of his time with the Service and talks about some of the other agents he worked with. Most of the stories occur in what is now Region 4.
Keywords: history, biography, employee, law enforcement, aviation, refuges, wildlife ranger, game management, WPA, banding, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, airboat, wildlife technician.
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W.T. OLDS: This is W. T. Olds, and I’m with the Southeast Region of the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) in Atlanta, GA, and I’m visiting today with Parker B. Smith, a law enforcement officer with the FWS for many years, and we’re at his home in Decatur, GA. And, of course, it’s Wednesday, June 14th, at about five after ten in the morning. So, Parker, I appreciate the opportunity to come by and chat with you, and if you can, just tell me a little bit about your life and your career with the Service.
PARKER: Well, if you can ___, we can go back a long, long way. Like that. And I guess I’m going to say for the introduction, I was born in Elberton, GA, in 1911, and grew up there. And I was twenty-two years old when I left Elberton. I worked in the granite shed there and during the depression, I was right in the middle of that, and then anything that came along in the way of work; I recall working in the silk mills shortly after I married, and was making $13.10 a week.
W.T. OLDS: Was that at Elberton?
PARKER: That was at Elberton, and that was the basis of getting married, have a good, steady job. Three months later they laid me off, along with others, and then I had to find something else to do. And I ended up working for an ice company, driving a wagon for a while and selling ice on the streets, and then driving a truck and selling ice in stores throughout the rural parts of two or three counties around. The whole time, from the time I was five years old, I knew that I wanted to be in the wildlife business of some sort. In trying to make that work out, I watched the news and the names of people who wrote books on wildlife, and every time I got a new name, I would write them and apply for a job. And, eventually, I hit the right man, and his name was Tony Carter, Hayden A. Carter. He was working for the Resettlement Administration as a wildlife biologist, he was the regional supervisor for the whole southeastern part of the country.
W.T. OLDS: And this was regional resettlement?
PARKER: Yeah. So I hitchhiked to Decatur, GA from Elberton, and talked to Tony at his home. And he decided that I was going to do for the job, so he put me on at Cornelia, GA, as a wildlife technician, and that was in 1936, and that was the beginning of my wildlife career. Before that, in trying to get work, I wrote to people like Aldo Leopold. I have a copy of a letter from him right there in the folder. And I wrote to Herbert Stoddard down at Thomasville, GA, and got a visit with him, on his plantation south of Thomasville. And he was looking for a mammalogist to work on the plantation with him, so I didn’t work out for that, but at least I had the privilege of knowing Herbert Stoddard and he was one of the finest guys I ever met in my life. But anyway, all that ended up with me working as a wildlife technician at Cornelia, GA, for the Resettlement Administration, and for four years, I guess, approximately four years, I was stationed in Cornelia, doing the same type of work, but I was transferred to four different government organizations; they were trying to get rid of the land that had been bought, there were forty-four thousand acres of land, lying between Cornelia, ___, and Tallulah Falls. And we bought it all up, and, my working in woods, I knew where everything was that was to be known about that place, including all the whiskey stills. I’d run into these guys on the creeks, and, that’s beside the point, but anyway, they kept me on because of my knowledge of the land lines, the corners, the people that lived in there, and I stayed there until finally they came to me and told me that that work was going to run out. And, I’m thinking back now. I worked for the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Bureau of Agriculture 3
Economics, all in Cornelia, and then they transferred me to Gainesville, and I went to work for the Forest Service. And I worked just a short time with them and the emergency funds that they were using then were running out, and the director, Bill Fisher, who was the supervisor for the Chattahoochee Forest, came to me and told me that I’d better try to find something else if I was going to stay in the wildlife work because they were not going to be able to maintain the salary for me.
W.T. OLDS: This was what, at about 1940?
PARKER: 1940. And then I went to work for the Game & Fish Commission, Charlie Elliott, and I never will forget, Charlie called me in to his office and he said, “Now, you’re going to be a wildlife ranger and that means you’re going to have to catch the people that are violating the law, and I want you to strap that gun around your gut and leave your conscience on the mantelpiece and get out there and get them.” And that was just the lecture that I got, I still remember it and I got a big bang out of it. But I wasn’t with the, I worked at Blue Ridge, GA, for a short time, and then from Blue Ridge, they transferred me to Thomaston, GA, and then gave me a job as the supervisor of that section down there. And just shortly after that, Gene Talmadge was elected as Governor of the State of Georgia, and he fired us all, from the director down to the janitor, and then I went to work for the FWS at Piedmont Refuge, and Jim Silver, who was the regional director at the time, worked up a job that I could hold on to until I could get an appointment as a game management agent. In 1941, I went to work as a game management agent in ___, GA, and stayed with the law enforcement until, I’m looking at a note now, 1949. Let me see, that’s not exactly right. In 1941, game management agent, through 1946. I wasn’t particularly hot on law enforcement, I was always interested in the biological end of the game, and I had an opportunity, with the help of Bill Davis, my supervisor, to go to work in Tennessee, for the Tennessee Conservation Department. And I went up there and I was their waterfowl habitat development project leader, and I stayed there twelve years and then realized that I wasn’t accumulating anything for my old age, which I’m at now. So, I reapplied with the FWS and, wonder of wonders, they took me back, and I came back to the Regional Office in the law enforcement section. But I was handling mainly the biological projects like banding birds and doing surveys and things of that kind.
W.T. OLDS: When did come back with the Service?
PARKER: Yeah, and I stayed with them until I retired, and I retired in 1993. That pretty well covers a long, long road.
W.T. OLDS: It does. When did you come back with the Service from Tennessee, you say you spent about twelve years in Tennessee?
PARKER: 1946, no I came back in 1958. I’m not sure about that. Let me get my eyes on here and see what happens. No, Tennessee again in 1958, I came back to the FWS and stayed until 73, in the law enforcement section. I get confused with dates.
W.T. OLDS: But it was in 73 that you retired?
PARKER: Yeah, it’s been a while back.
W.T. OLDS: It has been a while.
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PARKER: I keep forgetting when I talk to people how many years have gone by, I’ll see somebody from Tennessee and, you remember so and so; never heard of him. Well, that guy’s up, gone and died since I knew him, and I forget about how many years have passed. But, I will say one thing: the people in the wildlife business that I’ve dealt with and worked with are the best that I ever saw. I don’t think I saw five people in my life that were engaged in wildlife work that weren’t good folks, and I really liked them. And you don’t find that, I think it’s because they like what they do and they’re in a business that they’re interested in, and as a result, they’re just good folks. You ought to know, you’ve been in it a long time, too.
W.T. OLDS: Yeah, I’ve been in it for a little while. Well, when you were first with the FWS, you say you spent some time down at Piedmont until Jim Silver could get a job in management and enforcement. What were some of the things that you were doing when you came to the Service in the management and enforcement group?
PARKER: Well, down at Piedmont, there was, as I said, it was a, something to give me employment until I got to be a game management agent, and I was supervising a crew of WPA workers that were rebuilding and patching up highways on the refuge that had been purchased. That didn’t last long, thank goodness, because I didn’t like it down there. And that makes a story pop up in my mind, I have to tell you. There was an old man that worked on the WPA project, and every morning at daylight, he would come driving in on an old, old Packard, with three or four guys that he’d picked up, and he never drove over twenty miles an hour, and he drove in there one morning right at daylight, and there were three chickens, still dead asleep right on the bumper of his Packard.
W.T. OLDS: A long way from home.
PARKER: Yeah, and that’s what you call a sedate speed, that he was using. I remember that very clearly. A guy named Raymond Fleetwood was the Refuge Manager, and he was bugs on banding birds, he just, he banded several thousand chimney sweeps, down at Macon, and the following year, as I recall, a mining engineer for the Anaconda Copper Company was walking along a trail in Peru, doing some surveys, looking for copper, I suppose. He had an Indian guide and they met a naked Indian coming down the trial with a blowgun, and he had this necklace made out of bird bands. And the guy told him to, made motion he wanted some of the bands and the story goes, the Indian backed off and got his blowgun up and was going to protect himself. And the guide finally got it over to him that he could, wanted to trade for some of them. And they ended up trading him a hunting knife, and getting several bands, as I recall, seven bands, and five of them were from Fleetwood bandings in Macon, GA.
W.T. OLDS: My goodness.
PARKER: And although they knew the chimney sweeps went to South America, they didn’t know where, and the Indian told them that he killed the birds that he got the bands off in a cave, five thousand foot elevation I believe, in the Andes Mountains. So we had an authenticated ___ of where they go.
W.T. OLDS: Right, well that’s sure an example of where bird banding pays off.
PARKER: Oh, yeah, I’ve always been interested in that, it’s been one of my long suits. I banded a couple of thousand doves around Decatur, along with the help of some of the agents that would take the time to go with me on it. And we’ve got a lot of good information from 5
banding them. Since doing that, I have had a tendency to think that the emphasis of law enforcement, and the emphasis on saving them from the hunters, might be misdirected some, because they have a mortality rate that shows up in the banding, that shows a very minor loss as far as guns are concerned. And even including crippling loss, it seems to be, you know, not too bad.
W.T. OLDS: There are a lot more factors out there that impact on their life than just the hunting season. Well, who were some of the agents that you worked with in the early part of your career?
PARKER: I worked with a few who were hired when they merged during the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, in the past. Guys like Jay Kelsey and Oran Steele, Billy Birch, a lot of them the names I’ve forgotten, but they were old-timers and I was the junior agent when I went to work at first, and not too long before I went, the only agent I ever heard of being killed on the job was killed in Georgia, a guy named Whitehead. And he was followed by John Boswell, and, I don’t know, I don’t recall who followed John, maybe not anyone. But anyway, I did have the dubious privilege of dealing with that bunch of wild men. They were good ones. They were good agents, that’s for sure.
W.T. OLDS: What was the circumstance on Whitehead’s death, do you remember?
PARKER: Yeah, he was taking his wife down to Brunswick from Savannah, to a party, and he was driving down the road at King’s Ferry, ___ River, and he saw this black guy run across the road with a sack and a shotgun, and he knew him, and he stopped the car and called his name, and said wait a minute, he wanted to talk to him, and he started walking toward him. And that guy was hidden behind a tree and he just shot him down, right there, his wife looking at him. There was a, but like I say, that’s the only one. I’ve known of one or two others that have been shot, but that’s the only one I know of being killed on the job.
W.T. OLDS: Who was in charge of the agents at that time, in the region under Jim Silver?
PARKER: Ummm, Roy Moore.
W.T. OLDS: Roy Moore.
PARKER: Yeah, Roy was ___ sort of a job as an assistant regional director, and Bill Davis came in as supervisor soon after this. When I first went to work they sent me, incidentally it was my first commercial airplane ride, I got on an old DC-3 of Delta here and flew to Jackson, MS, and met Bill, and my job was to pick up a car that he was going to turn loose and that would be my car in Georgia. But we went on patrol, and, while we were on patrol he got word that somebody was shooting doves on the ___ of Mississippi Prison Farm. So we went up to check it out and sure enough there was a prison truck riding along and we could stop ahead of us and a rifle stick out the door and shoot the dove would fall off the wire. So, we drove up behind them, and Bill ran around to the right hand side where the rifle was last seen, and opened the door, and he said, “Federal agent, get out!” and the prisoner just sat there and looked at him, both of them. In the meantime, I was running around to the other side of the truck, and he said, “I told you I’m a Federal agent, get out!” and the guy said, “You and who’s going to make me?” And that’s all it took. Bill grabbed him and snatched him out on the road and they were down in the dirt scrambling around and when they did that, the one that had the rifle, by that time, was under the steering wheel and he was trying to 6
get the rifle on Bill, and I reached in and grabbed hold of the rifle and said, “Nope, you’re not going to do that.” And he spun around at me and I said, “Get out of the car!” and he tried to pull back, and I dragged him out through the window, and got him down in a ditch and wrestled the rifle away from him and then they both gave up. They had eight or ten doves, as I recall, and it turned out that they were killing them for the doctors there at the prison farm. Some of them had given them rifles and told them, they were trustees and they were going around giving shots to the prisoners. We were sitting around that night, and Bill said, “You notice that ___, those guys can’t pay a fine, they’re not making any money, we can’t put them in jail, they’re already in jail,” he said, “I know the governor, I know what I’m going to do.” And he picked up the phone and called the governor, and told him who he was and he said, “Governor, these guys can’t pay a fine, and they’re already in jail. I just want to recommend you have them hung.” And we all got a big laugh out of that. But that was my first case, involved in, as a Federal agent.
W.T. OLDS: And this was what, with Bill Davis?
PARKER: Yeah, W. T. Davis, you knew him. He was from Jackson, MS, and Jackson, TN, and, no, no, I’m wrong, he was from Brownsville, TN. That was his dad, the Sheriff, in Brownsville. But there’s lots and lots and lots of stories that go along with all of that time, and those fellas that we worked with, and we got into it. Another group of guys that were agents that, you probably knew some of them, Warren Upton was in North Carolina, Jake Wolfley was in Florida, and I named the whole bunch, I’ve got pictures of them yet to look at, too. But Jake was one that was a story builder, he could come up with the darndest things, he loved airboats, and he was always wanting to run an airboat and chase down those boats. And every day the supervisor let him have, I believe, three. I know the first one he got, he was riding down the road and had it on a trailer, and looked out the side of the car and there was the trailer going along right by him, it had jumped off the trailer and was sliding along the road, and tore it up pretty good. Well, they got it patched up, and then he got down in the flooded river bottoms on the St. John’s, I believe, and was going at full speed, headed ___ , another agent sitting down in the bottom of the boat, and Jake was sitting up in the high chair running it wide open, which was fifty to sixty miles an hour, and Noah told me this story, he said they, all of a sudden they hit a stump. There wasn’t supposed to be any stumps out there, and he said it split that boat from the bow to the stern, and there was a sheet of water coming up and spreading out and behind the propeller a rainbow ended, as he told it. And Jake hollered at him and said, “If I stop we’re going sink,” said, “I’m going to run in close to the boat, to the trailer, and you jump out and back the trailer far down in the water and I’ll run it up on the trailer.” Well, he said he ran close to the boat, to the bank, and he jumped out and said he skidded across that water like a flat rock for a ways. Finally got out and backed the trailer down into the water, and Jake got out and lined up and here he came, wide open, and some way or another, he failed to cut it off at the proper time, and he hit that trailer still wide open, and Noah said he went over the trailer, over the car, over him, he was hid behind the car, and hit nose-first in the swamp on the other side. Tore up the airboat, didn’t hurt Jake. That was number one that he really tore up, the next one, he was cruising around at high speed by himself, and he hit a barbed-wire fence right under the surface of the water. No, the fence was sticking out of the water and he didn’t see it, he said it was even with his knees when he was sitting in the high chair. So he threw his feet up, and hit the wire, and said the wire bent, the boat went in and then bounced back, and Jake went straight out with his feet up in the air. Hit on his rear end in the mud out there, praying there wasn’t a stump in there, skidded a hundred yards, and that was all there was to it except there was another airboat gone. And so it went. 7
W.T. OLDS: He was rough on airboats.
PARKER: One other story. He was working with a state officer down near Lake Okeechobee, and, they say the officer was driving an old car, pulling the airboat, and they ran out of gas, and it was on a narrow road somewhere down around Okeechobee, and they didn’t have any extra gas. And Jake thought about it and he said, “I’ll get up and crank up the airboat, and I’ll push you down to a service station,” and the guy said, “Well, all right, but don’t go too fast.” And Jake was a, he had a long white mustache and white hair, and he was a wild one. He got cranked up and things were going so good, he just kept on going a little faster, a little faster, and the guy was up in front, hanging onto the wheel, the guy in that car, and a state patrolman got up behind them. And he couldn’t get them to hear him because of the noise that thing made and finally he got his lights flashing and found a wide place, and
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