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Jerry Grover
No full textNarrative by Jerry Grover of his career with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Jerry Grover was the first with a number of National Fish Hatcheries that eventually led to the position as Chief of the National Fish Hatchery System. The last 20 years before retirement, Jerry was a supervisor of field operations in both the Fishery program and Ecological Services program Deputy mostly on the West coast dealing with a wide range of contentious issues in fish husbandry of anadromous fishes and their habitats and basin-wide restoration programs.
Organization: FWS
Name: Jerry Grover
Years: 1961-1997
Program: Hatcheries
Keywords: History, Biography, Employee, Biologist, Hatcheries, Management, Fish ponds, Training, Fish husbandry, Department Training Program, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Tribal lands conservation, Administration, Endangered Species, Young People (YACC), Area offices, Fish production, Klamath River Fish and Wildlife Restor1
Oral History
of
Jerry C. Grover
Retired 1997
Deputy Assistant Regional Director
Ecological Services and California / Klamath Ecoregion
Portland Regional Office, Oregon
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
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Oral History
of
JERRY C. GROVER
Date of Interview: November 20, 2000
Final Edit: January 25, 2017
Location of Interview: Tigard, Oregon
Years worked for Fish and Wildlife
Service: 36 years from 1961-1997
Offices and Field Stations Worked,
Positions Held: Fisheries Mgt. Biologist GS-482-5
thru 11 at National Fish Hatcheries at White Sulphur
Springs, WV; Leetown, WV; Craig Brook, ME; Cortland,
NY; Winthrop, WA; Ennis, MT; Coleman, CA; Dept
Mgt, Training Prog, Washington, D.C. GS-11; Manager,
Carson NFH, WA. DS-11; Ass’t. Area Mgr GS-12/13
Jacksonville, FL; Division Mgr Columbia River Fishery
Offices GS-13; Chief NFH System, Washington D.C GM-
14.; Fishery Supervisor CA / Klamath R. Basin / Western
WA. GM-14; Deputy Ass’t. Regional Dir. Eco Services
and Supervisor CA-Klamath Basin GM-14
Colleagues and Mentors: George Balzer, Ray
Vaughn, Paul Handy, Tom Luken, Wally Steucke,
Howard Larsen, Marv Plenert, Dale Hall, Judy Grover
Most Important Issues: Completing the ‘user
pay’ funding agreements with Bur of Recl; implementing
a comprehensive salmon evaluation program;
implementing the Klamath River F & W Restoration Act;
maintaining a coherent family setting and getting 3 sons
thru the university with degrees.
Brief Summary of Interview: A southern
California farm boy completes his university education
and begins a career spanning over 36 years with the
Service. He was first with a number of National Fish
Hatcheries that eventually led to the position as Chief of
the National Fish Hatchery System. With 14 job transfers,
6 times transcontinental, working in a number of
reorganization configurations, a wide range of experience
was gained. The last 20 years before retirement, he was a
supervisor of field operations in both the Fishery program
and Ecological Services program Deputy mostly on the
West coast dealing with a wide range of contentious issues
in fish husbandry of anadromous fishes and their habitats
and basin-wide restoration programs. He did this as a
vital part of multiple organizational changes and
configurations.
Jerry C. Grover
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
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wasn’t a particularly good student until right
after I met Judy and got to Utah State. I kind of
calmed down and became focused. My junior and senior
year I really re-knuckled down, with the course work
getting greatly more interesting. Rather than taking
English 101 and Political Science 101 and all those other
basic courses that are required, I started getting into the
fisheries and wildlife management and the ecological kind
of courses that were much more interesting. I made the
Dean’s List for the last two years. I did apply for grad
school and was accepted, but by that time I was getting
schooled out and was looking for an opportunity to go to
work. Also at those times, it seemed advanced degrees
were headed toward a career in teaching or research,
neither of which perked my interest.
During the summer’s, before & after my junior
year and after my senior year I worked for the State of
California as a fisheries seasonal aide out of Chino,
California. Immediately upon graduation I went to work
for California Department of Fish and Game again on a
seasonal appointment. Even though a native Californian, I
had no desire make my career there. In the mean time I
had applied through the Federal Service Entrance
Examination for any number of jobs, whether it was with
the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries or the Fish and
Wildlife Service. I kind of just threw my applications out,
along with a number of select state agencies. Ultimately, I
was to get offers at the Federal level that interested me
and I finally accepted my first job which was with the
Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, later to become
the Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Fish
Hatchery in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
BEGINNING WITH
THE FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
hen I reported to work at White Sulphur
Springs it was in February 1961. I came on
as a GS-482-5 Fisheries Management Biologist expecting
to do typical fieldwork I did with the State of California.
When I was hired to go there I was told that, “your job
would be the same.” I felt, ‘Well, here we’re going to
little old backwards West Virginia with all the coal mining
problems and acid mine waste issues,” and things like
that. I’d be working out of a fish hatchery. Well, when I
got there my first job was scrubbing ponds and sweeping
fish shit out of ponds, feeding fish and high-tech mowing
grass [powered lawn mower]. This was a little
disappointing, but it took every nickel that we had to get
back there and so there was no turning around. Then as I
got going with my job, it was pretty interesting work. It
was different than what I had expected, but I grew up on a
farm learning how to raise and care for things, so fish
culture was un-different and interesting work. I met folks
in another hatchery and saw where they were going in
their careers and I began to see the opportunities that were
there over all. It wasn’t a bad job.
It was an entry-level job at GS-5, and the guy I
worked for was George Eisenlore. George, I would come
to find out later, had the reputation of being one of the
“unholy three.” There were three managers that were
absolute bearcats to work for. They were just tough old
goats. The experience I had with George is that he didn’t
particularly care for college graduates. He knew
everything, and you know you were here to learn, and so
he told you what you needed to know. I was just another
worker on the place, but beginning to become acquainted
with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
One thing about George, he kept scrupulous
books. Smaller staffed stations generally did not have a
clerk to do the payroll, pay bills, order supplies, and
answer correspondence. George filled this role at White
Sulphur Springs and which he threw me into. I wasn’t
quite his right hand man; I was his ‘pinky’ and had to
learn the current operations and budgeting systems and
besides, I could type better than him. This later would be
greatly appreciated and gave me an advantage in other
jobs.
After a year and a half there, I transferred to
Leetown, West Virginia, over on the Eastern panhandle.
It was a hatchery co-located with the Eastern Fuish
Disease Laoratory. I was acting assistant manager as a
GS-7. Both these hatcheries, White Sulphur Springs and
Leetown, were what are called ‘combination hatcheries’.
They raised trout as well as warm water fishes: bass, blue
gill, and catfish. The trout were generally stocked into
state managed waters, mostly on national forest lands,
while the warm water fish were part of the Federal Farm
Pond Program.
I wasn’t very long at Leetown, West Virginia
when I was transferred to Craig Brook, Maine. This was
an Atlantic salmon hatchery, and it was involved in a
program that President Kennedy had just started - the
Accelerated Public Works Program (APW). It was to help
counter the high unemployment in Hancock County,
Maine, a high unemployment area. The assistant manager
had retired, so I went up there as a GS-7 and worked at
that hatchery in the GS-9 position. We had a lot of APW
make work projects where we could hire lots of labor.
Mostly we were thinning out the forest, the land the
hatchery was on. But the focus there was Atlantic salmon,
the fish culture work was focused on the culture of this
species, trying to get them up to size, and getting good
migration and survival rates once they were released to the
ocean.
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From there I went to Cortland, New York to the
Fish Husbandry In-Service Training School. It was a
research station, the Eastern Fish Nutrition Laboratory in
upstate New York between Syracuse and Cornell. The
Lab developed the Cortland #6 trout diet universally used
throughout all the trout hatchery systems. It was
compounded on-station. It was 50% ground meat – liver
and spleen, either pork or beef – and 50% dry meals such
as wheat middling’s, distiller solubles, cotton seed meal
and similar products.
The focus of the school was nutrition, husbandry
and disease. Basically, it was the Fish and Wildlife
Service’s effort to professionalize their fish culturists, fish
husbandry and provide some technical training specific to
the needs of fish husbandry. When I was hired into the
Fish and Wildlife Service I was part of a wave, a vanguard
of folks that came in with college degrees. Here-to-fore,
hatchery managers were generally selected from the ranks.
You started out as GS-1. If you showed promise, kept
your nose clean and could work hard and all that, you
could end up as a hatchery manager. Well, in the
professionalizing they were wanting to keep pace with the
states with the monies that the Dingell Johnson Act was
providing to the states. It was a general
professionalization of the Fish and Wildlife Service. I was
in this vanguard group of folks that came in about that
time with college degrees and while we knew the good
biology of things, we were grounded in the university
education. The more practical aspects of raising
salmonids were accomplished through this school in
Cortland, New York.
By this time we’d had two children. One was
born at White Sulphur Springs when we were there, our
oldest son Jeff, and our second son Joel was born in Craig
Brook Maine. After completing the course in Cortland,
New York, we were heading off and going west. Here I
am a western person finally getting an assignment in the
west.
I was assigned to the Winthrop NFH, Washington
in 1966 where I was introduced to the culture of Pacific
salmon. This was a hatchery on the Methow River, just
below the Canadian border by about thirty miles. I was
there not too long when a GS-9 Assistant Manager job at
Ennis NFH, Montana, came up. I applied and was
selected. This hatchery was on the Madison River in the
heart of the Madison Valley just outside Yellowstone
National Park. It was an important rainbow trout
broodstock station. Here I not only got back into trout,
entirely trout, but I got into a different aspect of it. The
Ennis strain of trout was a major egg source for other
National Fish Hatcheries, state hatcheries, and if we had
any left over, for the commercial trout farms. We even
shipped eggs to South America – Chile. They could get
eggs from the Feds at that time.
ome stories that you remember were
humorous. I meant to mention that certain
things that happen to you, stick with you, and this is all
part of the learning process. I was ordering supplies for
the Ennis National Fish Hatchery. It wasn’t very big. We
only had a staff of six or seven people there, and you
know, GSA, you could buy writing tablets, pens, typing
paper, tools and whatever you needed from the GSA, the
General Supply Schedule. It was really much cheaper
than what you could get out in the boondocks like at Ennis
and the quality was excellent. So I’m at work preparing a
routine order through the GSA catalog. They had these
standard issues, these standard packs. I looked at them
and said well…here’s a standard packet…it was a pack of
one hundred and forty-four, and I said well, one hundred
and forty-four writing tablets, they’ll probably last about a
year. So I order one hundred and forty-four. Going to
typewriter paper…we don’t type that much. You know,
with carbon paper and stuff…maybe twelve. Well, being
out in the boondocks, thirteen miles from town down a
dirt road, whenever the GSA supplies came in, they were
usually dropped off at the hardware store or somewhere
and they let us know so when we were in town to pick up
the mail we picked up the supplies. But, I knew we were
in trouble one day when all of a sudden I saw a delivery
truck heading out our road. When he backed up at the
station, those one hundred and forty-four tablets I ordered
actually were one hundred and forty-four cases. It filled
up our coffee room and then we had to back the truck up
to the garage. I had ordered more damn paper, I had
ordered more of this and that…it was an embarrassment.
The Manager, Bill Baker was so embarrassed that he
wasn’t going send it back and get his money back. So
what we did, we started packing this stuff up and putting
labels on it. We sent them to every fish hatchery that we
knew and kind of got rid of it that way. When I left there
we still had gobs of paper and their probably still using it.
But, that’s what happens when you’re still learning if you
don’t have your wits about you and when you take a look
at a standard pack.
It was in June 1968 that my third son Jared was
born. It wasn’t very long after that another job opened up
and I applied. I was selected as a GS-11 and went to
Coleman NFH, California as the Assistant Hatchery
Manager. We packed up in September 1968 and headed
for California, our home state. Coleman National Fish
Hatchery is on the Sacramento River in northern
California between Red Bluff and Redding. It was there
that I again got reacquainted with Pacific salmonids. They
had basically three, four stocks of fish that they were
raising. One was the regular fall Chinook, they had a late
fall Chinook, as well as the steelhead trout and then there
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was a big effort to establish a Kamloops fishery into
Shasta Lake. This latter fish is a landlocked variety of
Sockeye salmon.
Coleman NFH was the largest hatchery in the
National Fish Hatchery System. It was a Central Valley
Project mitigation hatchery associated with the
construction of Shasta Dam and one of the most important
program responsibilities in the Fish & Wildlife Service.
WASHINGTON D.C. - DMDP
After 3 years there I was selected for the
Departmental Management Development
Training program in Washington DC in 1971. So in
September I reported as a DMDP trainee as a GS-11 at
that time. There were twelve of us from the Fish and
Wildlife Service. I think there was like thirty over all
from the Department of Interior representing the Park
Service, BIA, Mines and others. During this yearlong
orientation and training program there was an opportunity
for a number of work assignments.
As a Departmental Management Development
Program (DMDP) trainee I had two assignments I thought
were quite notable. I had a stint with the National Park
Service. I worked for Bernie Hartzog who was the
Director of the National Park Service. The focus of my
effort at that time was assisting in addressing the people
problems in Yosemite Park in California. Plans were
being developed there that would ultimately lead to fewer
cars, fewer camp grounds, and what they would do is have
a tram or a bus system that would take people into the
park. This was in 1971, and it wasn’t until November of
year 2000 that there was finally a plan that had been
introduced and that the Secretary was expected to sign off
on. This plan would encompass many of the same ideas
that were being floated around and developed during this
training assignment. And here it is, twenty-eight years
later, twenty-nine years later that this is finally a plan.
That was my first lesson that things don’t always move
quickly in Washington, no matter who the power is behind
it.
One of the things I remember about Bernie
Hartzog is a story that he relayed it to me, so I believe it
was factual. He had a pretty steadfast policy. He told his
national park superintendents, “Any of you guys fib on a
performance evaluation or a recommendation…,” you
know recommending a turkey to one of your fellow park
superintendents. If he found out about it that person
would be coming back and “he’d be working for you for
the rest of your career.” No matter where you went the
guy was gonna transfer with you. And I think he put the
fear of God in them -- he did have a fairly open
performance evaluation. I don’t know of anybody that
ever ended up with one of these people. If you got a
problem you don’t transfer him. Bernie Hartzog’s motto
was “You take care of it.” “You hired him, you take care
of it, but you don’t pass him on to someone else.”
Another assignment as a DMDP, I thought was
really a good one. I worked up on the Hill for about forty-five
days. I worked on the Senate Interior Subcommittee.
I worked on Allen Bible's staff…he was a senator from
Nevada at that time. That was really kind of exciting,
working with the Congress, and seeing the Senate at work.
It was a very interesting assignment. Two big issues that
we were working on - - one was the Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act, and the other one was expanding rivers
and having hearings on adding river systems to The Wild
and Scenic Rivers Act. One of the river systems was in
Northe
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