25,643 research outputs found
Interview with Thomas Duncan by Mark Madison, April 21, 2001
No full textOral history interview with Thomas Duncan with Mark Madison as interviewer.
Mr. Duncan discusses early life and how he wanted to be a waterfowl biologists. He would work as a temporary employee for the Fish and Wildlife Service before becoming a permanent employee with Fisheries. Mr. Duncan shares several stories of his time with the Service including flights he was on while in Alaska, becoming friends with Bob Hines, and his retirement.
Organization: FWS
Name: Thomas Duncan
Years: 1954-1983
Program(s): Fisheries
Keywords: History, Biography, Biologists (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), Wilderness, Wildlife management, Wildlife refuges, Work of the Service, Fisheries, Bob Hines, AviationINTERVIEW WITH THOMAS DUNCAN
BY MARK MADISON APRIL 21, 2001
MR. MADISON: Tom, like we said, we’re just going to ask you some informal
questions to find about your career in the Service, and have a conversation.
MR. DUNCAN: You wanted to know when I was born?
MR. MADISON: Yes.
MR. DUNCAN: June 5, 1928 in Washington, D.C. in Sibley Hospital. My father was a
Treasury Agent. We lived in D.C. until 1939 when he was transferred to Oklahoma.
When I was a kid I used to go to the Smithsonian. My Dad’s office was right across the
street from the Smithsonian, and right across the street from the FBI building and the
Internal Revenue Service [building]. I would go to the Smithsonian and spend Saturday
mornings there. That’s where my interest in wildlife started. I also played in the woods
in Glover Park in D.C. I found out a few years ago that I was playing in the Civil War
entrenchments down there in the woods. I would bring home salamanders and everything
under the sun, out of the woods. Of course, my mother would scream every time, but
nonetheless that was my youth. In Oklahoma I was taught the art of hunting by a friend
of mine, a kid in the neighborhood. We went duck hunting. I had a .410 shotgun. I will
never forget it. It was called a Black Prince. His father let me use it. The first thing that
happened was a flock of Wood Ducks came in and landed in decoys. There were about
thirty birds. I was all excited, thinking that we were going to shoot them. But he said,
“We don’t shoot Wood Ducks! They are protected, and very scarce. We very seldom see
them.” And right after that, a Black Duck came in and landed. He said, “We don’t shoot
Black Ducks. They are very, very rare here.” Pretty soon, some Bufflehead’s came in, so
my first duck was a Bufflehead. That started my interesting waterfowl. At that point, I
decided that somehow, I wanted to be a Waterfowl Biologist. After military service in the
Marines for three years, between World War II and the Korean War, I went to school at
Oklahoma State University. I got my degree in Wildlife Conservation. I came very close
to doing to Delta Research Station when they didn’t have any money. Al Hokebaum
[sic?] said, (I have a bunch of letter from Al who is my hero). He told me, “I’ll give you
food, and a place to sleep, but I can’t give you any transportation home”. I thought,
“How in the world am I going to get from Canada to Oklahoma, or from Oklahoma to
Canada?” I didn’t have a dime. I had to barrow the money from my Dad to go to Seattle.
I got a job offer in Alaska. When I was in college, I worked for thirty days at Salt Plains
National Wildlife Refuge under John Vandinacker. Vandinacker came up on June 30th and
Congress hadn’t appropriated any money that year. They delayed the appropriations,
which you know they do occasionally. So he says, “I have to lay you guys off.” There
were three or four of us who were ‘temporaries’ so we had to be laid off. That was the
end of that session, but I loved it out there. I decided, after doing fence post for miles and
miles, of the government way in sand, that I had really learned something, because that is
an art. That was between my freshman and sophomore year.
MR. MADISON: What year are we talking about roughly?
MR. DUNCAN: That would have been 1950, 1951. Then I went to Yellowstone Park
with Ollie Cope’s Rocky Mountain Fishery investigation. Incidentally, Walter P. Taylor
was the co-op leader at Oklahoma A and M at that that. That is now Oklahoma State.
Stebler came in after that. Dr. Stebler came to me one day, and he said, “Hey Tom,
you’re interested in the Fish and Wildlife Service aren’t you?” I told him “Yeah.” He
asked me how I would like to apply for a summer temporary job. This was through the
Albuquerque Regional Office. That’s how I got the job with the Rocky Mountain
investigation. I had to go out to Yellowstone. I hitchhiked out there, which was an
experience. I came in the east entrance. I went in and checked in and thought that I had
died and gone to heaven when I went into Yellowstone. I worked up there all summer
down at the south end of Yellowstone lake working on cutthroat tagging and retrieving
tags off of Pelican Island. I was digging through the dung, and picking up our fish tags.
Here again was a great experience. I met Fent Carbine who was a Regional Fisheries
Director out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had come up there for some reason or other.
He was the kind of guy that talks to you about things like what year you’re going to do in
your career and what year you are in at school. I told him that I was going to go into
waterfowl. He said that there was no way that I would ever survive in waterfowl, “ducks
are on the way out.” He said, “I’m a fisheries man, what you want to do is to stay in
fisheries!” I found out the next year when I went to North American when I was a senior
in 1953. I went to North American and I met Al Hokebaum. I thought that I would work
on a master’s degree. But he couldn’t fund me with any money. And I didn’t have any.
Fred Baumgartner was my advisor. He was a Quail Biologist more that anything else.
Fred told me that I should just look for a job. He said that he couldn’t help me any more.
The guy who I worked for in Yellowstone was Harvey Moore. Harvey had transferred to
Seattle. I had written to him and told him that I was looking for a job. He told me that
they needed a couple of people, early, to go up to Alaska. I said, “I don’t know anything
about Salmon.” He said, “You took Ichthyology didn’t you?” I said, “Yeah, I know
where they are classified, that’s about it. And I know that they come in a can!” So I
went to Alaska. I went to Seattle and they put me on an airplane. Harvey said that I was
the only person that he had ever seen picked up at the Seattle airport that was standing in
the rain looking up with his face in the rain. I told him that we hadn’t seen any for sixth
months in Oklahoma. I went from Seattle up to King Salmon, Alaska. I was all prepared
for cold weather. I had a big, old, heavy parka. And when I got off of the plane it was
something like 70 degrees. I was melting like a block of ice that had had salt poured on it.
When we were coming in on the plane, I noticed a big flock of swans on the Naknek
River. I remarked to somebody, when we got off of the plane that that was a big flock of
swans up there. I was told, “Yeah, they come in here all of the time.” Curiosity killed
the cat. I was walking up the river and I heard them trumpet. And they weren’t
whistlers they were trumpeters. I came back, and I said, “Hey, I thought they said that
there weren’t any trumpeters outside of Montana!” The guy said, “No, you don’t see
them outside of Montana.” I told him, “Well, there are trumpeters out there!” He then
told me “Those are whistling swans, they are always around here.” I told him, “No
they’re not! They are trumpeters!” Being so young and naïve, I thought that here was [a
topic] for the first paper that I could write. The next year somebody published a paper,
“New Flock of Trumpeter Swans Found on Bristol Bay”. I thought to myself, ‘Well, I
know who found them, but it’s too late now!’ I came back to Seattle and I worked over
on Cook Inlet, Alaska in the Anchorage area; The Kenai Peninsula, Lake Tustamena,
Kenai River, the Upper Russian River, Cooper’s Landing, you know all of these places.
There was another lake that was on the way to Kenai. Dave Spencer put us up for the
night many times when we would go to Kenai. But I traveled all over. I went out to the
other side of Mount Redoubt and Grecian Lake. I worked in the canneries out there,
taking Salmon samples. I went out in Bristol Bay. I was trying to think of the fellow
that took me out on a gill netter, so I really learned how to gill net Salmon because we
were tagging them in Bristol Bay for a management project. His first name was Burt, but
I can’t remember his last name.
MR. MADISON: What was it like to be up in Alaska in the 1950’s as a Fisheries
Biologist?
MR. DUNCAN: Well, the road to Kenai was a cord road. It was all dirt. The only
paving was from Anchorage, down to the junction where you went to Seward. That’s
were it was paved. But when you turn off to go to Kenai, it was dirt. This is one of the
things I always remember about Kenai; we used to fly in there once in a while, later on.
And you’d fly right over Main Street. I mean, with the wheels [landing gear] down you
could take the roof right off of the building, because the airstrip is right there! It was an
experience! As a Biologist, I really enjoyed it. It was outdoors, all of the time. We lived
on a lake, and they put us in a tent and had to survive. There were several times…
In fact a fellow who is still in Seattle, Kenny Liston, he and I worked together most of the
time during my first year up there. Most every summer Ken and I worked together. He
is about 5’2”, and I am 6’3”, so he’d always make me look for the Brown Bears when we
were going through the tall grass. And I had to whistle or something to scare them off.
We did these Salmon surveys on all of the spawning streams. We collected a lot of data
off of [word unintelligible] fish. I came back to Seattle, and after about my third year
they decided to put me in a different position. I took over what we called the ‘technical
staff’, editing and doing the graphic work for the Biologist’s papers, and photography. I
did a lot of photography. I became the lab photographer. That’s why I was asking you
why you didn’t have a photographer. I looked back in the Archives upstairs and I found
a lot of stuff that I had taken pictures of. There were SSRs, fisheries, and sonic tagging. I
was pretty proud of the fact that I had a cover on Electronics Magazine. From Seattle I
went into the tenth Departmental Management Training Program. This was another great
experience. It was a good training experience because you were interacting with people
from every other agency in [the Department of] Interior. I found out why we have such a
short administrative manual. This is because we’re kicked around from one place to the
other so often that that they don’t have time to build one. The National Park Service has
one that goes from this wall to that wall two or three times. They’ve got information on
how to drive a nail in the wall. They can tell you. Ours was real short. It was never
more than three volumes. I even had to write some administrative manual stuff. But I
had experiences, even up in the Secretary’s office, which was really good experience.
MR. MADISON: Who was the Secretary [of the Interior] during this period?
MR. DUNCAN: Seton. Seton was Secretary. And then, about a year later, Russ Sollen
who was the Executive Secretary; and this was the longest title for the smallest grade, I
took his job. Russ Sollen was the Executive Secretary for the Stalick-Kennedy Advisory
Committee to the Secretary of the Interior. Now isn’t that a title? And it was only a GS-
9! I stayed in that job for about two years. That’s when it was used to be the Bureau of
Sport Fisheries and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife
Service had an Assistant Secretary who was the one that came in… Arnie Swamlaw was
the Commissioner of Fisheries. I always remember going in to Arnie’s office to talk to
him about things with this Committee. I remember his desk was clean as a pin, and he
would be reading Sports Afield or Outdoor Life or something. I found out that this was a
political appointee. I don’t know if we ought to record this part! Then I was there at the
transition when John F. Kennedy came in. The first thing they did was to introduce all of
the employees to the new Secretary of the Interior. That was Stuart Udall. Man, what a
guy, he was super! We’d go up to the Secretary’s suite. I don’t know if they still do
this. It was really a top dog thing. One day I was coming out of Don McKerndon’s
office and I was coming down the hall, well first I have to tell you something else. When I
was first assigned this job, Elmer Higgins was the Editor in Chief of all publications in
both Bureaus for the Fish and Wildlife Service. They didn’t really have a place to put me
in the organization chart. So they put me under him. He said, “I don’t know why they
put you in here Tom. But they don’t have another place for you anyway”. He said that
he had to edit all of my reports. I said, “O.K.” He was one of the finest men that I ever
worked for. When he assigned me my desk, Elmer told me, “This is hallowed ground.
This is Rachel Carson’s old desk that you are sitting at”. She had just left a few months
before. I was really impressed by that. So after two years in that job, Paul Thompson
came over from Sport Fisheries. And I think Ed Carlson was involved in this. I saw him
the other day and I remember thinking that I knew him. But I think it was Paul and Ed
Carlson. They asked me if I would come to Arkansas. He said that they couldn’t get
anybody to take the Reservoir Investigations job in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I said,
“Fayetteville! I practically grew up in that place!” My Dad went to school there. He
was from right across the border in Oklahoma. He said, “You’re just the guy I need,
Tom!” About three weeks later, he came over and asked me again. He caught me at a
time when I was angry about having to do all of these reports. I went to Fayetteville. I
transferred down there, and transferred agencies. I went down to Fayetteville and set up
the South Central Reservoir Investigations. We worked on a Beaver reservoir, which was
under construction. We had a lot of contracts with the University of Arkansas. We did a
lot of cooperative work with the Arkansas Fish and Game Commission. We started off
on a very ambitious program. Then Bob Jenkins came from the Sports Fishing Institute
and headed up the whole national program. It was unfortunate, because to be quite
truthful about it, Bob and I conflicted. He was always telling my people what to do and
he didn’t go through me to do it. It was frustrating because I had been in the Management
Training thing, and I said “chain of command, chain of command!” Since he didn’t follow
it, I didn’t either. There were several other stations set up. And they closed all that
down in 1983. I transferred down to Arkadelphia when they set up the new one. That
was the Multi-outlet Reservoir Study. The SGA guy told me that we were the first
federal agency that had ever contracted with a private University for an office. There had
always been Land Grant schools. And this was a Baptist University, but they had a
water Chemist was renowned
Nationally, especially today. His name is Joe Knix. He got us over in their offices, and
they fixed us up with a real nice place to work.
MR. MADISON: We are doing three oral histories at once! You know, it’s a great
weekend! We want to try and catch everything.
MR. DUNCAN: Well, like I said, if you want someday I’ll just make a tape of all of
these stories and send it to you.
MR. MADISON: That’s great too. We will transcribe it and add it to the archives.
MR. DUNCAN: I was thinking about doing this for my kids because some of the stories
of things that happened to me when I was up in Alaska are pretty hair raising. I can name
all of the pilots; the ones that I liked to fly with, and the ones that scared the daylights
out of me.
MR. MADISON: Well tell us some stories about the pilots. Who were the good one,
and who were the scary ones?
MR. DUNCAN: Well, there’s one of them that is still around. His name is Tom
Wardley. Tom was a young buck at the time. He was the one that was always the hot
rodder. That’s what we thought of him. Tom Wardley, after he left the Fish and Wildlife
Service, became an inspector for FAA. I felt that he knew all of the tricks. There was no
doubt in my mind. He flew an “old Silver”. It was a Drummond Goose that we flew out
of Anchorage. They refurbished it and they flew it down on Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He
flew it down from Anchorage.
MR. MADISON: Was that for the Air Show there?
MR. DUNCAN: Yes. Wardley took me in on Lake Tustamena. There were Ken
Liscomb and I, and Carl Elling who was our supervisor out of Seattle. Carl is still alive.
It is eighty-something years old. He still goes fishing. We came in to Lake Tustamena
which is thirty miles long and about five miles wide. There was about a thirty or thirty-five
miles per hour knot wind blowing. The waves were about this high at the point were
we needed to go in and land and go in shore. Wardley says, “Well, we’ll just land
crosswind”. And I thought, “Golly!” I was in the Marine Air [Division] when I was in
the Service. I said, Crosswind? In this wind?” He said that yes, they were going to put
it down on top of a wave. We were drifting this way with the wind, and the waves were
going that way too. So he did, he laid that big Goose down on the top of a crest of a
wave. But you know what? That wave went right out from underneath it and right down
in the water we went. I just saw water fly everywhere. And I thought we were going
under. I couldn’t see anything but bubbles! I wanted to grab a lifejacket. I am telling
you, it scared the life out of me. But we got into shore. I looked at the tips of the blades
on the propellers, and they were pitted all the way up to the center of the hub. I am not
kidding. They were pitted like I have never seen. I had seen pitted propellers when I was
in the Marine Air Corps when these guys would come down and hit the deck too hard.
They would pick up water and pit the propeller. He got in, and unloaded us. And when
he took off it didn’t take him long to get off of the water because he went into that wind
and he was up in the air before you could blink your eyes. That poor airplane took a
beating! That was the last time that I wanted to fly with Wardley, but I flew with him
several other times. Warren Nicestrom came to pick us up on a lake called Blue Lake on
the west side of Cook Inlet, across from Kenai. It’s a little round bowl surrounded on
three sides by pretty high hills. But there was an opening on the south side that you
could out of. But there was a row of Cottonwood trees down there, about one hundred or
so yards off of the lake. To get off of the lake with a Grummond Goose, you had to go
around in circles and whip up the water real good for a few minutes. You had to go
around at least three licks. Well, Warren came in and he had a habit. We’d always fix him
something to eat because he hadn’t eaten all day. He always picked us up in the last part
of the day. We were sitting there frying some Spam, which is good for up there. We had
some Spam, and we were cooking. Warren pulled the plane up, the tail was sitting in the
water. We sat around and ate that, and cleaned the frying pan, put the gear away, and
stowed all of the gear in the plane. We were getting ready to leave, and took off. We
were trying to take off. We were going around skimming the water and he says, “You
know? This plane feels heavy for some reason or other!” I was sitting up there, and Tom
Costello was with us. Tom says, “Yeah, there’s something wrong here!” Well, when we
started to take off, he just gunned those engines. He hit them both, just full throttle.
That plane was just screaming across that lake. And I could just see the land coming up,
just like this. All of sudden, he dropped those flaps down, and that plane just lifted up,
just as we got to the shoreline. I said, “Holy Cow!” And I just buried my head! Well the
next thing I know, the plane is going over like this, and I see trees out of the window.
Just right there, and the pontoon took off the top of a tree! The plane finally went,
[makes a sighing sound], and he said, “Man, that was close!” He said, “I didn’t know
which tree to go between!” Costello said, “You did a good job Warren!” But I will never
forget it. We were climbing up out of there, and he said, “There’s something wrong, I’ve
to trim it. There must be water in it or something.” A Goose has a couple of windows up
on the edge of the cockpit where you can see out. As we were climbing up he said,
“We’ve got water streaming out of here like a jet!” When we got back to Anchorage, or
on the way back to Anchorage, and I’ll tell you, I told somebody that I have a guardian
angel because I knew that she was with me this trip. As we were flying back, he pulled
up to five thousand feet. That’s about as far as you can go in Anchorage because of
airspace and Air Force regulations and stuff. We were coming out of the sun at that
particular time. Tom Costello was an ex-Navy fighter pilot in jets. Tom took the wheel
up there, and he pushing it forward real quick while Warren was flying. Warren said,
“What are you doing?” All of a sudden a jet went right over the top of us. I mean, you
could see the guys face in it. [The jet] He pushed it just enough, it didn’t quite hit
Bette Duff
No full textBette Duff oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison and Paul Tritaik. Bette Duffs’s mother worked for the Department of Interior in the Bureau of Mines for over 40 years, and through her mother would end up as a research assistant for Rachel Carson during the writing of Silent Spring. She talks about the work she did for Rachel Carson, which included going to libraries and taking notes from books, pre Xerox days, doing some interviews, and occasionally entertaining Roger, Rachel’s adopted son and she mentions where the idea for Silent Spring came from. Ms. Duff and Rachel became good friends, Rachel Carson even went to Bette’s wedding. Also mentioned are Dorothy Freeman, Linda Lear, Olaus Murie, Dr. William Beebe, Howard and Alice Zahniser.1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Bette Duff
Date of Interview: April 5, 2010
Location of Interview: Sanibel, Florida
Interviewer: Mark Madison and Paul Tritaik
Brief Summary of Interview: Bette Duffs’s mother worked for the Department of Interior in the Bureau of Mines for over 40 years, and through her mother would end up as a research assistant for Rachel Carson during the writing of Silent Spring. She talks about the work she did for Rachel Carson, which included going to libraries and taking notes from books, pre Xerox days, doing some interviews, and occasionally entertaining Roger, Rachel’s adopted son and she mentions where the idea for Silent Spring came from. Ms. Duff and Rachel became good friends, Rachel Carson even went to Bette’s wedding. Also mentioned are Dorothy Freeman, Linda Lear, Olas Murie, Dr. William Beebe, Howard and Alice Zahniser. 2
Indistinct conversations
Mark Madison – Alright, today is April 5th 2010, and we are in Sanibel, Florida, doing an oral history with Bette Duff -- B E T T E D U F F. Also in the room is Paul Tritaik – T R I T A I K, and Mark Madison. And Bette, thanks for doing this.
Bette Duff – Oh, it’s my pleasure.
Mark Madison – Our first question is, what, if any, affiliation did you have with the Fish and Wildlife Service… you might have had a familial affiliation.
Bette Duff – Actually, my mother worked for Interior Department for over 40 years. She worked in the Bureau of Mines…
Mark Madison – Okay.
Bette Duff – … in Interior. And… but, you know, when you work there, you get to know everybody. and so she… actually the summer I graduated from high school, she knew someone in Fish and Wildlife, and she had had me take the civil service exam and do all my typing. So I worked in College Park at the Fish and Wildlife Service...
Mark Madison – Sure.
Bette Duff – … with Visual Information, the Chief there was Rex Gary Schmidt. And it was a wonderful summer. I saw all the photographs… I saw the first photographs of Rachel and the tidal pools, and all the historical photographs, which I hope you have now, up in Shepherdstown. There were just tons of them.
Mark Madison – A lot of them came to my archive.
Bette Duff – Did they?
Mark Madison – And a lot of them were shot by Rex.
Bette Duff – Is that right?
Mark Madison – He was a heck of a photographer.
Bette Duff – Yeah, he was, and a good friend of Bob Hines. So anyway, that was my summer. And that was my connection to Interior. And then it was my mother who got… went down to see Mr. Banks, in the library at Interior, ‘cause she worked with him, and she said I was looking for a job. This was between my junior and senior year in college, summer of that year. And he said “Well, Rachel Carson had just called and asking if he knew anybody.” So my mother raced back to the office and called me at home, and I called Rachel, and it had only been about a half hour since she had talked with Mr. Banks, and she said, ‘So soon, he got somebody?’
General laughter 3
Bette Duff – And I said yes. And so she questioned me carefully and found out I was a biology major, and I’d done a lot of scientific research, you know, as much as you can have done by the time your 21. So she said, well, come out and we’ll interview. So that’s how it all started. And she lived in Silver Spring and I lived in College Park, so it was nearby.
Mark Madison – Oh, yeah. You know, her house in Silver Spring is still part of the Rachel Carson Council.
Bette Duff – Is that right?
Mark Madison – And in two weeks I’m going to give a talk… once a year they have an open house and…
Bette Duff – Oh, neat.
Mark Madison – … do Carson stuff. It’s preserved like when she lived there…
Bette Duff – That’s really wonderful.
Mark Madison – … and it looks like 1964, basically, when you go in the house.
Bette Duff – Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Madison – It’s very neat.
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – Well, what was the interview like with Rachel? What questions did she ask?
Bette Duff – Oh, it was wonderful. Well, first of all, you know, when I saw her I thought ‘can this be a famous author?’ ‘Cause, you know, she looked really tired, you know, and she had on an old skirt and sneakers, and, you know, I thought ‘this is not the way a famous author looks.’ But I… you know, she had me sit down and asked me questions, and we talked. And she soon was comfortable with my credentials. And then she found out that I’d left my mother sitting out in the car, in the 90 degree Washington, D.C. heat, which is where I thought all parents belonged when their offspring were having interviews with famous people. Right? And she said ‘That’s terrible.’ So she went running out with me, and she apologized to my mother. Of course, I had completely overlooked the fact that, if it hadn’t been for my mother, I never would have gotten the job. That’s a typical offspring for you. So, we set up a system. I would go to her home and she would have the 3 by 5 cards out that she kept her references on. And she would hand them to me, tell me which libraries they were in, and then… I had a small notebook, and I just set off to Agriculture Library, or Interior Library, or NIH Library sometimes. And I’d find the books and stack them up, and go through them and take notes. It was an all day job. It was before xerox. 4
Mark Madison – Yeah.
Bette Duff – People forget this, you know. I later did research, and I’d just go and xerox them all, you know, give them the whole book. But Rachel had to take… rely on the notes to see if that was something worth doing. So that’s what… that’s what we did.
Mark Madison – Bette, we should ask you, what year was this that you were…
Bette Duff – Yeah. This was… I wrote it down ‘cause it just seems like yesterday, but I know it wasn’t. It was the summer of 1958.
Mark Madison – Okay.
Bette Duff – So she must have just moved into her new home in Silver Spring. Roger was there, her… very active, and he was about six. She had her hands full. She had her hands full.
General laughter
Mark Madison – What type of information was Rachel trying to have you research, specifically?
Bette Duff – Some of it was just case histories, where these sprayings had happened and what had been the result. And she tried to get these from as many different varieties as possible. And ironically, a lot of the sources were the chemical companies magazines, because they… they would say, you know, what had happened. And Agriculture was pretty open about it, at least then they were pretty open about it. They got kind of nervous about it later because… of course, Rachel was not, you know, against all pesticides. She was very… she knew that they… DDT had played an important role or two in saving many soldiers’ lives when they got into these infested… mosquito-infested islands. But she just knew that it had gone too far. And something people don’t realize, maybe, but the Washington, D.C., area in the 1950s, there was a frenzy to get rid of mosquitoes. And we had these big trucks that had, like, fire hose nozzles. And they’d go up and down the street, and they’d spray everything. And this was before air conditioning, so when the windows were open it would go in your house. If your baby happened to be out in a playpen, it would go over the baby. It would go over your clothes. And of course, they also… so that was what they did in our neighborhood, like College Park and Silver Spring. And, I mean, they did this once a week or so. And pretty soon some of the neighbors, who were bird people, began to notice the birds were disappearing. And they, you know, nobody quite knew what to do about it. It was at that stage. And if you made a protest they’d say ‘Well, the University knows what they’re doing’ or ‘The Government knows what they’re doing.’ And of course, that was an attitude she was especially against and trying to combat in this book. She once said ‘It’s not just a book about the, you know, foolish use of pesticides. It’s a book about society…’ well, as she put it, ‘man against himself, or society against itself.’ ‘They’re not being careful; they’re not being reflective; they’re too willing to take people’s opinions of what’s right, and not investigate for themselves; and they want fast and easy answers.’ And she knew, and rightly so, this was a path for disaster. I don’t think our 5
neighborhoods ever really recovered from that, in that area. And this was where Howard Sonheiser lived too, so he knew what it was about.
Mark Madison – Sure. How did Rachel describe the book when you first came to work for her in 1958? She must have given you an overview so you could focus your research.
Bette Duff – Well, yeah, she told me that it had started… well, actually, a friend of hers had called from… I think Massachusetts and an airplane had come over and sprayed this whole refuge area, which this friend and her husband had saved and conservation… and soon they saw these… they hadn’t known the airplane was coming, they saw all these dead animals and birds. So they called Rachel, who was their good friend, and I think they said something, like, ‘Can’t you do something about this?’.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – And she said… well, I… the way she explained it to me was, she tried to get other people to do something about it, and write this article. So she started writing an article -- it was going to just be an article. And I guess she showed it to William Shawn, at the New Yorker, and he said ‘This is terrific and I want (I think he said) 500,000 words.’ You know, he wanted it serialized in the New Yorker. So then she had her hands full. And some of her friends… well, Dorothy Freeman, who was a good friend, called Rachel, ‘Why are you doing this, you know, at last you have some peace and quiet, your mother’s sick, and Roger’s here, and you know…’
Mark Madison – What did you think of the project? You were a junior… was it a biology major…
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – … at Bryn Mawr?
Bette Duff – Yeah, at Bryn Mawr. I thought it was really fun to do, fun to see all sides of the issue. And she was very good about that, very… had a lot of integrity about her work. So I would deliver them, and she would collect them I guess, and file them. And I guess, when she finally started writing, she’d write at night when Rodger was asleep. So this was… too hard to work when he was up.
Paul Tritaik – Can you explain who Roger was?
Bette Duff – Roger was her nephew. He was orphaned he was… her niece’s child, and he was orphaned when he was a little baby, and she adopted him as her own. And, you know, it… it was tough, because when you have kids, usually you have a community, you know, of mothers. And you exchange ideas, and you have play groups. She was out there in Silver Spring, with this very bright little boy who was…
Mark Madison – Right.
6
Bette Duff – And she didn’t have time to go to play groups. Sometimes she’d get me to take him to the movies, you know, to see these dragon pictures or something. But she was… that’s who Roger was.
Mark Madison – Did she have you… beyond pulling articles and so on? Did she have you interviewing people, or doing other types of things?
Bette Duff – Yes, she did. At first she did them, she did most of the interviews. But then, when I… I was on my way after… in the fall I went to medical school; I was going to be a physician. And then I decided I didn’t like medical school, so I came back. And the next summer I worked again for her, before I was married.
Mark Madison – Was that 1959?
Bette Duff – That would have been… I went… that was 1960.
Mark Madison – 1960, okay.
Bette Duff – And… yeah. And she had me go and do one or two interviews. And sometimes that worked well, and sometimes it didn’t. They were getting… people were getting pretty alarmed by then. The cranberry thing came out. I don’t remember the details, but some big cranberry alarm… and she was trying to find out the details of this. And people in the government weren’t ready to release the details. And I walked into an interview with a man, and he thought I worked for the Department of Interior, so he was giving me all this information. And then he stopped and he said ‘Where do you work?’ And I said, ‘Well, I work for Rachel Carson.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s all we have to say.’ And so I left, and I called her and I told her I had failed miserably. And she said… she said, ‘well…’ I can’t remember the guy’s name, and she said, ‘Oh, I know him,’ she said, ‘He wouldn’t… all those people are ready to hide under their desks,’ she said, you know, ‘I’ll get the information,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I have friends. I’ll get the information.’ So I did do some of those interviews. But she was very kind. At the end of the summer, that first summer, she called and told me she really appreciated my notes. I think she just really started to read them, because she was beginning to write, and she appreciated the work I had done. And that was very nice.
Mark Madison – Of course, she must have felt an affinity for you - a young female biologist. I mean, did she ever offer you career advice or anything?
Bette Duff – No. No. She was, you know, she was a very kind of laid back lady. She wasn’t overpowering in any sense at all. We’d… when we had lunch, we’d sometimes sit outside, and I was always amazed, you know, ‘cause we’d be talking and we’d hear a bird call, and she’d say, you know, that’s the yellow-breasted something or other. And I was always… you know, ‘cause naturalist wasn’t my thing, and I was just very much in awe. No, she was a… Linda Lear mentioned that in her book, that when Rachel met me she must have had an affinity for me ‘cause I must have looked like what she had looked like when she was starting out it. It was a very kind thing to say. But she did like me. 7
We had a good sense of humor. Fortunately, she had a good sense of humor. I remember one day I said… she said something about, you know, ‘That was in the article I wrote teaching my nephew to wonder.’
Mark Madison – Mm hmm.
Bette Duff – And I said [voice drops very low – can’t hear on tape], as only a 21 year old can say [voice drops very low – can’t hear on tape], I said, ‘I thought Ann Morrow Lindbergh wrote that.’
General laughter
Bette Duff – She said, ‘No! She didn’t write that. .I wrote it!’
Mark Madison – That’s funny.
General laughter
Mark Madison – There’s a reason for that though. That original article in, like, Ladies Home Companion, and they had a picture of… I don’t know if it was Roger, but…
Bette Duff – It was Roger.
Mark Madison – … a little kid on the beach.
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – And then it had Ann Morrow Lindberg, who had written some other article inside, and then Carson’s name was written very small on the cover. ‘Cause we have one of the originals, and Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s name is huge.
Bette Duff – Right.
Mark Madison – And I don’t even remember what her article was.
Bette Duff – Right. Well, I feel better about that.
Mark Madison – So you had a reason for that.
Bette Duff – She might… she… from her response, she must have had other people say that.
General laughter
Mark Madison – Did you have a sense, working with Carson in ‘58 and ’60, how important this book was going to be? 8
Bette Duff – I really didn’t, you know, I… I could tell… sometimes she would have me file her correspondence and I’d get so… such bad form, I’d get so interested in these letters she had, that it would take me all day, ‘cause they were from famous people all over the world. And I knew she had a lot of support, from a lot of important people. And I know her stock broker was getting concerned, because he discovered that she had some stock in chemical companies. When I went there one day…
General laughter
Bette Duff – … ‘Oh, I just had this terrible discussion with my stock broker, you know,’ and I… she said, ‘I told him to sell those stocks.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that. They’re the best stocks.’ ‘No, I told him to sell those stocks.’ So, yeah…
Mark Madison – That would have been awkward, if she’d had a lot of stock...
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – … in Monsanto or Dow.
General laughter
Bette Duff – Yes, that would have been discovered very quickly. Very quickly.
Mark Madison – Did she ever talk about the process of writing the book?
Bette Duff – No, just… just that she was having trouble deciding how to present it. She did mention that. and her… the woman, Jean Davis, maybe you know, who worked with her a lot, probably knows more about this, because Jean worked with her after I left, and worked with her for a long time. ‘Til her death, I think. I guess she didn’t know how to present it, whether to present it, you know… so many facts. How she could get them in. I guess she figured it out. She wrote… I think she wrote at night; she wrote on a board. And I could never have done that. I guess, when you have to, you do that.
Mark Madison – Did she send you a copy when it was done?
Bette Duff – She did. And… I have left here… I brought some xerox material for Paul, and one of the is the cover of the original book, where she wrote ‘to Bette’… it was Bette Haney, I was Bette Haney when I worked for her, H A N E Y, and she said, ‘for deep appreciation for the work when this… when the book was getting started’. So it was really the early days of the book.
Mark Madison – Well, that’s very interesting.
Bette Duff – Well, it was fun. It was a lot of fun. And then, when it was published, of course, it was beginning to get lots of fame, and so she invited us down to her publishing 9
party in New York City, which was really exciting. Houghton Mifflin gave her this big… big whoop-de-do. I’d never been to a publishing party, and… lots of people there. And I remember, she came over and I didn’t recognize her. And, this is another typical 20-year-old kind of comment; they had had… I guess the publishing company had taken her out, you know, or sent her out, to get really re-done. And she had a really beautiful… I guess it was a wig because she probably lost a lot of her hair by then, because of her cancer.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – But she had beautiful clothes. And she said ‘Bette’ and I said, ‘Rachel, I didn’t recognize you. You look so good.’
General laughter
Bette Duff – Fortunately, she laughed. But it was true. I was thinking about that today, when she… she was always very casual at home, and of course, you know, she liked nothing better than to wade around in tidal pools and things.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – But when she went to interview these executives, and when she even went down to the library, she was like getting armed for combat, you know, she dressed up. And in those days, sometimes, you even wore a hat.
Mark Madison – Do you have any other questions? I’ll circle back to the visual information stuff.
Paul Tritaik – Okay.
Mark Madison – ‘Cause I’m very interested in that, actually.
Paul Tritaik – Well, the whole reaction to the writing of this book… people were catching wind and starting to pull back, it seems like. How much of that was prefaced by the New York Times article, or was that… were you working with her on that?
Bette Duff – You mean the New Yorker?
Paul Tritaik – I’m sorry, the New Yorker.
Bette Duff – Probably when that came out, that was pretty near the end, I think. That got people alarmed - a lot of people. Well, one of the things I said I learned from her was, you have to be ready to accept all kinds of criticism when you’re doing a project like that, because you’re stepping on some people’s toes. And people knew… they knew that there’d been mistakes made, but nobody wanted to admit it. And the Agriculture Department would be blaming the Interior Department, and the Interior Department 10
would be blaming somebody else. Although, I understand that Stewart Udall was very supportive of this whole thing. And she had a lot of support from the Interior Department. Agriculturel… you know, I had a friend who worked… this is another kind of funny story, but he was an entomologist. I think he’d done a lot of the early work on DDT. And when I went to Agriculture, I wanted to take out some of the books, so I went up to this other neighbor of mine and asked him if I could use his library card and he said I could. So I took them out under his name. And then he found out what it was about, and he was, he told me to take the library books back, because I was working for Rachel Carson.
General laughter
Bette Duff – You know, they always said, ‘Oh, she hasn’t got her facts right.’ But the fact is, she quoted directly from these journals. I don’t think she interpolated too much, or interpreted. I think she let it kind of speak for itself. But people were concerned. And, you know, rightly so, ‘cause… oh, she got a lot of criticism, ‘cause she was just a little old lady, living out in the country, with her cats. An old maid. And then, why should she care about future generations when she was a spinster, had no children of her own. And then, one day she was asked to speak… this was just at the beginning of the book… as
Mark Madison speaks with Lisa Mighetto
No full textLisa Mighetto is the Executive Director of the Amerian Society for Environmental History.MARK MADISON: Hi. Today is May 11, 2011, and this is Mark Madison at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and on today's Podcast we're very fortunate to have Lisa Mighetto, who is an environmental historian and currently the Executive Director of the American Society for Environmental History.
Welcome, Lisa. Thanks for coming out here.
LISA MIGHETTO: Well, thank you for having me.
MARK MADISON: Lisa, why don't you tell us a little bit about what the American Society for Environmental History does.
LISA MIGHETTO: We are a nonprofit organization of educators and scholars. We study the history of human interaction with the natural world over time.
Basically what we do is provide context for current environmental issues. For example, we have people who study natural disasters, the historical background for hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods. We have people who study public lands, fish and wildlife. We have people who study environmental justice issues, urban issues. Very broad interests.
MARK MADISON: If people wanted to learn more about ASEH, is there a web site they could go to?
LISA MIGHETTO: Yes, it's www.aseh.net.
MARK MADISON: Great. You're also an environmental historian. Could you give us a case study for environmental history that you might have worked on?
LISA MIGHETTO: Well, this could provide an example of what environmental historians do and how-- basically if you're interested in the environment, you're interested in environmental history, because it provides the background, as I said, for current issues.
I worked before I became director of ASEH as what's called a public historian, that's history outside the university, and I worked on many contracts for government agencies, such as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Forest Service. And I did a lot of work on salmon issues since I live in the Seattle area, the Pacific Northwest. That work basically assisted biologists who were looking at endangered species.
A lot of this work intensified in the early 1990s and late 1990s, coinciding with endangered species listings, and there was a need to research the many stocks of salmon in the Northwest in terms of their population distribution and their habitat, the changing habitat conditions. And historians often know where little-known records are that can help biologists document.
MARK MADISON: Were there some interesting things you learned about salmon and their history?
LISA MIGHETTO: Yes. This, again, gives an example of sort of the range that environmental history provides. When you look at salmon, you could look at commercially important species. You could look at planting records, that is, fish culture and how biologists try to propagate fish. You could look at policy issues and regulations. You could look at, for instance, how the so-called trash fish that were deemed inconvenient were removed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You could look at social history, even, user groups, from tribal fishers and Native peoples to sport fishers to government biologists to just people who are recreating on weekends and all these groups interact. You could look at the history of the importance of an animal like salmon, or fish, in terms of cultural history, how important it's been to Native peoples, to sport fishers in literature over time. So the history of ideas becomes important, too. But that's how wide ranging, just by looking at one example, like salmon, and if you expand that out into many, many species--
MARK MADISON: Are there other case studies you've worked on?
LISA MIGHETTO: Oh, well, yes, there are many, many. I used to research wolves-- well, because fish and wildlife was my specialty, that's what I--
MARK MADISON: That's good.
LISA MIGHETTO: Right. I thought that might be of interest here.
One of the things that interested me was I also did work on litigation support for large court cases, and the court often had a need in large litigation cases to establish the state of biological knowledge at a certain time. Environmental historians analyze that and study that. And I remember one biologist who I worked with who was very, very good in his field, in fact a leader in his field in the Seattle area, and we were talking about how this one area we were studying in terms of changing habitat conditions, they had removed all of the crud in the streams because they thought, well, we'll clear it out and make it nice and tidy for fish. Well, of course, now, when you look at that and you say, well, what about all that large woody debris that was there that we needed?
We also looked at the bounties on trash fish and how some of those trash fish had been removed and the repercussions, the consequences. And I said to him, jokingly, "Well, these mistakes had been made in the past." And he said, "Yeah, they didn't know what they were doing then." And I said, jokingly, "Oh, but we know what we're doing now, right?" And I was kidding, but he was serious, and he said, "Yes, now we're correcting the mistakes of the past." And I thought, well, this is why you need the historical perspective, because it shows you how the state of knowledge evolves over time. Scientific knowledge is not a static thing.
MARK MADISON: Yes, perspective is critical.
LISA MIGHETTO: Right.
MARK MADISON: Now, we have a journal. There is an environmental history journal. That's a great place to get an introduction to the field. Were there any environmental history books that influenced you?
LISA MIGHETTO: Well, I studied with Roderick Nash in the '70s. So that was quite a while ago. "Wilderness in the American Mind" was one of the books that founded the field. But ASEH was founded in 1977, so it coincided with the emergence of the environmental movement.
But we have lists of books on our web site, which again is aseh.net, if anybody is interested in looking at the most influential books in environmental history. I noticed just walking around NCTC all of the photographs of important people like George Bird Grinell, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Ira Gabrielson, Ding Darling. The list goes on and on. Our members have written books, biographies, very good books, about these individuals and their impact. And those books are listed in these bibliographies.
MARK MADISON: Well, Lisa, thank you very much. Lisa Mighetto is the Director for the American Society of Environmental History. If you wanted to learn more about them, you could go to their web site, www.aseh.net.
You look like you wanted to add something, Lisa. Jump right in.
LISA MIGHETTO: Not only do we have a journal, but we have an annual conference that brings together not only academics but journalists and activists and government agency people.
MARK MADISON: Where's the 2012 conference going to be?
LISA MIGHETTO: In Madison, Wisconsin.
MARK MADISON: I like the sound of that. It's going to be right near Aldo Leopold's shack.
LISA MIGHETTO: We're going to visit Aldo Leopold's shack and we're going to visit John Muir's farmstead. So it will be an interesting conference.
MARK MADISON: Actually, before we let Lisa go, she knows quite a bit about John Muir. Tell us a little about your experience with John Muir and why he's important to us today.
LISA MIGHETTO: Well, at the time that I was writing about John Muir, I mean, that was many years ago, but I should mention that there's been a resurgence of interest in John Muir. So if you're at all interested in John Muir, there's a new movie coming out, "John Muir and the New World," I think it's called. There's a recent biography by Donald Worster about John Muir. So, very important naturalists. And I grew up on the West Coast, so, of course, he was a--
MARK MADISON: Kind of a founding philosopher of the Park Service ideology and the Sierra Club.
LISA MIGHETTO: And an important Sierra Club figure.
MARK MADISON: Great. Thank you-- go ahead, Lisa. I interrupted you.
LISA MIGHETTO: Thank you for having me.
MARK MADISON: Well, thank you, Lisa. And once again, it's Lisa Mighetto, Executive Director of the American Society for Environmental History, and thank you for taking the time to listen
Mark Madison speaks with Taggard Siegel
No full textQueen of The Sun is an in-depth investigation to discover the causes and solutions behind Colony Collapse Disorder; a phenomenon where honeybees vanish from their hives, never to return. Queen of The Sun follows the voices and visions of underrepresented beekeepers, philosophers, and scientists around the world, all struggling for the survival of the bees. The film unveils 10,000 years of beekeeping, highlighting how our historic and sacred relationship with bees has been lost due to highly mechanized industrial practices. Featuring Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Gunther Hauk and beekeepers from around the world, this engaging, alarming and ultimately uplifting film weaves together a dramatic story that uncovers the problems and solutions in renewing a culture in balance with nature. An independent filmmaker since the mid-1980’s, Taggart Siegel is best known as the director of the 2006 grass-roots hit The Real Dirt on Farmer John. This critically acclaimed feature documentary about a maverick visionary farmer, won 31 international film festivals awards and was released theatrically around the world.MARK MADISON: Hi. I'm Mark Madison, and today is May 10th, 2011 and we're talking today with Taggart Siegel, who's a filmmaker, whose most recent film was called "Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us".
Taggart, thanks for coming out to the National Conservation Training Center. Appreciate you showing your film out here this evening.
TAGGART SIEGEL: Thanks, Mark.
MARK MADISON: I guess the first question is: What are the bees telling us?
TAGGART SIEGEL: They're actually telling us a lot. I mean, where the bees are going right now, they're actually saying, let's-- I'm going to disappear if you don't start looking at the way we're treating them. And so bees have been really knocked down systematically by every system we put in place in agriculture, for example, and bees are-- they've kind of had enough. So from pesticides to mechanized beekeeping to trucking bees across the country is really hard on bees to over queen breeding, to feeding bees corn syrup, genetically engineered corn syrup. Oftentimes the bees are given that. And as Michael Pollan says, nothing more viscerally offensive than feeding the creators of honey genetically engineered corn syrup.
MARK MADISON: That's another great quote from Michael.
What does the film look like, for viewers that might want to go see it?
TAGGART SIEGEL: It's a really uplifting film, too. So it's not all doom and gloom. It's beautifully shot. There's characters from all over the world, from France, a beekeeper that tickles his bees with his mustache, to a woman dancing with 12,000 bees. But then we get very serious with Gunther Hauk, who is a biodynamic beekeeper and very philosophical and very-- like really guides us in what colony collapse is and what's caused it.
So even in New Zealand I loved the family that their whole family are beekeepers, the father, the mother, and the three daughters, and they roll their wax and sell it to support their ponies, their horses.
MARK MADISON: Why should we care about bees?
TAGGART SIEGEL: Bees are really what's keeping us alive, bees and all pollinators, and without them we could really-- the earth will not be the same. Birds will die out. Plants will die out. And eventually the ecosystems will collapse. There will certainly be things alive on earth, but it won't be the same earth that we see.
So one out of four bites that we eat are from bees, and we don't want to lose these valuable creatures. And not only that, our forests, we want to keep them intact, too, and so bees are the crucial link to our environment and they are the canary in the coal mine.
MARK MADISON: Who is the target audience for the film?
TAGGART SIEGEL: It's everybody. I really feel that this film needs to be seen by everybody, just as Rudolph Steiner says in the film, everybody needs to be a beekeeper or interested in bees because they are what's keeping us alive. So my feeling is that it could be for a scientific audience. It could be for somebody that's really interested in philosophy or in bees or in history. I really feel it kind of combines a lot of elements in this film to keep it kind of light and also heavy, and then at the same time, let's get us out of the mess.
MARK MADISON: Taggart, if people wanted to find out where the film is showing, how could they learn that?
TAGGART SIEGEL: Well, you could come to queenofthesun.com, come to our web site. You could Facebook us and like us. There's over 5,000 people now following us. It's a kind of film where it's grass roots oriented, where all these great organizations help get the word out, and also individuals that really care about the environment.
MARK MADISON: Thank you very much, Taggart. It's an extraordinary film. I had the pleasure of watching it a couple nights ago with my family. We all really enjoyed it. The title of the film is "Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?" It's in semi-wide release, I guess, around the country, including here in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and we hope to bring it back here. And, Taggart, we will be going to queenofthesun.com?
TAGGART SIEGEL: Yes, and it's opening in New York and L.A. on June 10th and June 17th, getting ready for Pollinator Week, which is June 20th. So we're going to be celebrating that with the bees.
MARK MADISON: Can't think of a better way to celebrate Pollinator Week. Go see "Queen of the Sun," and, Taggart, thanks for bringing the film out here for a screening.
TAGGART SIEGEL: Thank you very much, Mark
Carl Madsen
No full textCarl Madsen oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Carl Madsen would do research as a student at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center before joining the Service in 1967. He is known as the father of the Private Lands Program.
Organization: FWS
Name: Carl Madsen
Years: 1967-2004
Program: Migratory Birds
Keywords: Employees (USFWS), History, Biography, Wetlands, Biologist, Military, Habitats, Land acquisition, Nest, Predators, Farm Act of 1985, Restoration, Easements, Crops, WaterfowlOral History Cover Sheet
Name: Carl Madsen
Date of Interview: March 2, 2000
Location of Interview: Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 37 years (1967- 2004)
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Wetland and Habitat biologist, Division of River Basin Studies, Fergus Falls, Minnesota; GS 7, 9, 11 Wetlands Office, Devils Lake, North Dakota; Wisconsin Wildlife Enhancement Office, Stevens Point, Wisconsin; Wildlife Biologist, Region 3; Migratory Birds Program Mid-Continent Mallard Management Unit; GS 13, Fergus Falls, Minnesota.
Most Important Projects: Private Lands Program
Colleagues and Mentors: Bob Stewart Sr., Lucille Stickel,
Most Important Issues: Egg programs; Predator Management to help increase nests; wetland destruction of prairies
Brief Summary of Interview: Mr. Madsen grew up knowing he wanted to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service after reading an issue of the Weekly Reader. He would do research as a student at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center before joining the Service in 1967. He worked with the Service during several reorganizations, and is known as the father of the Private Lands Program. He talks about the various positions he held and offices he worked at, noting the he knew working at the Regional Office wasn’t his cup of tea, programs started, and issues that he faced.
Keywords: USFWS employee, history, biography, wetlands, biologist, military, habitats, land acquisition, nest, predators, Farm Act of 1985, restoration, easements, crops, waterfowl.
Mark Madison:
This is Mark Madison, the Service Historian on March 2, 2000 at NCTC in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and today, I’m conducting an oral history with Carl Madson, M-a-d-s-o-n.
Carl Madsen:
s-e-n
Mark Madison:
s-e-n, I’m sorry. M-a-d-s-e-n, and then, Carl, the first question for you would be when and how did you enter the Service?
Carl Madsen:
Well, I began as a student at Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in the spring of 1965. I worked for Bob Stewart, Bob Stewart, Sr., not Jr. and Harold who were doing a wetland classification study. I worked with them there for the summer, then stayed on until January 1, then did some research for my graduate work back at Michigan State University. I went back to the University and then came back and was hired by the Service full-time in September of 1967 and went to Fergus Falls, Minnesota as a Wetland Habitat Biologist. At that time, we called it WHP, whips. We were in the Division of River Basin Studies, and we did a lot of the work surrounding the wetland destruction of the prairies. In fact, I remember, the Department of Agriculture was still paying for a subsidized drainage of wetlands and were providing technical assistance to drain. Even before that, back to my earliest recollection,
I suppose at age four or five as a youngster, and I want to say living in Wisconsin and not growing up, because I’ve never grown up and don’t ever intend to grow up.
Mark Madison:
Where in Wisconsin?
Carl Madsen:
In Racine County, southeast Wisconsin. Mark Madison:
I’m from Wausau personally.
Carl Madsen:
I went to school in Stevens Point, and I’ve been to Wausau a few times. So anyway, we lived kind of on the edge of town, and we could never figure out if we had a small farm or a big garden, but next to that was a nice wetland and small woods, and I spent an inordinate amount of my time there even as a pre-schooler and all the way through my grade years and so forth, and there was a time, and I don’t remember what grade I was in, maybe about sixth grade or something, remember the old Weekly Readers?
Mark Madison:
Oh, yeah.
Carl Madsen:
There was an article on that Weekly Reader about going north to Van Dyne, had this crew of the Fish and Wildlife Service going north, and I read that thing, and I kept that thing until it was wore out to nothing, and I said, “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to work for that outfit.” I think that, so I’ve known what I wanted to do ever since grade school.
Mark Madison:
That’s great.
Carl Madsen:
And known about the Agency since then from the Weekly Reader. About, would have been about 1980, there was an old guy in Minnesota who, he said, one day he said, “Here, I just found this going through some stuff.” He said, “I thought you’d like to have it.” It was a copy of that Weekly Reader from 1950.
Mark Madison:
Wonderful.
Carl Madsen:
And going north to Van Dyne, and I said, “Well, it’s probably not safe in my hands.” I sent it down to Patuxent to the Migratory Bird Office. I don’t know whatever became of it, but sometime in 1950 that Weekly Reader was out there, and I came across it again. I says, “Yeah, this means something to me.”
Mark Madison:
That’s great. Did the Service live up to your expectations?
Carl Madsen:
I’d do it all over again. So what’s this, 2000, and I started in ‘67, so next fall will be 33 years full-time with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mark Madison:
Wow!
Carl Madsen:
If you put the military time, and I had a little time with the Forest Service and with the temporary time in the northern prairie, I think I have over 36 years right now. I could retire, but it’s still fun. I look forward to going to work every day, and I have since the day I started. I wake up in the morning, and I’m anxious to get going, get to work, and maybe to a fault. So there’s the old saying, and maybe I’m guilty of that, “if you are what you do, what are you when you don’t,” and there’s a little bit of fear I have of leaving this job and, because I’ve become this job and, but I have a lot of other interests, and I’ll do fine when I do decide to retire.
Mark Madison:
Sure.
Carl Madsen:
The thing I like now is there’s a lot of bright, young people coming in and I can kind of give them the experience of the years and let them do the heavy lifting and heavy learning, and let them get going, and we really do attract a lot of bright, young people. I’m glad I’m not competing with them today for a job, because they’re really, that part is really increased over the years. I think when I first started in the Fish and Wildlife Service, it was basically all white males. I don’t know of any women that were in the field. We had women secretaries and that sort of thing.
Mark Madison:
Yeah.
Carl Madsen:
I started in Region 3, and I met Lucille Stickler early on, and I see her pictures on the wall up there.
Mark Madison:
She’s a hero here.
Carl Madsen:
Yeah, and other than Lucille, I’m sure there were some women in the field. I didn’t know them, I never saw them, and it was all males, and all white males. I never saw a minority. Of course, that’s changed, and not probably changing fast enough, but it is changing, and every time I see some of our people over there talking about, it’s still, where are we going with this and how fast will we ever get to where we are. It’s an interesting process and kind of exciting to see that change and to see people with other attitudes coming in, picking up, and learning the business. That’s kind of nice.
Mark Madison:
How did your career go from Fergus Falls? Where did you go after that?
Carl Madsen:
Remember we said we were in River Basin Studies in wetlands and that was a division that was mostly, that is now Ecological Services Division, River Basins were, and they were doing studies with the Corps of Engineers in the mid-west. They’re doing the big dams in the Missouri River and that sort of thing, which they were working on, and we were doing wetlands working with, for, and against Department of Agriculture in their drainage efforts and others who would drain, and remember that in 1962, the Accelerated Wetland Acquisition Program was authorized, where we spent our Duck Stamps for, quite a small, Duck Stamp proceeds for acquiring small wetlands, primarily in the prairies, and the goal there was to buy the nucleus brood areas, acquire some other wetlands around it with easements, and then fill in the other opportunities on private lands with whatever we could. Well, we got going real good with the acquisition program, and if you look back on that today, now some nearly, what, 40 years later, it’s got to stand as a monument that’s never been equaled in the conservation field probably anywhere in the world. I mean, there’s been hundreds of millions of dollars spent to buy land. We’ve bought hundreds of thousands of acres of land and hundreds of thousands of acres of easements, and it continues to move forward. But we were very slow at getting started in the private lands pickups in between that, and that was my realm from early on. I’ve never been a game warden, never been a refuge manager, always been kind of out there trying to do what we can without a budget, without authority, without legislation, and we were able to do a few things, but it was a pretty slow step. I think people who wanted to do something, we sometimes found a way to do it. From Fergus Falls, I spent two years there, and then in 1969, I moved to the Wetlands Office in Devil’s Lake and spent three years there, and grade-wise, I started, I came out of Michigan State with a Master’s Degree and started as a GS-7, which was for the unheard of salary of 5,000 and even less, and to start at 2500 or 15,000, a nice house, and you could rent a house for 100,000, two FTE’s, go do something someplace.” He says, “You guys decide wherever you want to go,” and he left the room, and after a lot of discussion, it was decided that they would put these two positions in Fergus Falls and hire two people to go out and see what they could do on the land, and we kind of decided that what was needed was filling in some habitat on those private lands between what we were already doing with the Acquisition Program. I was selected for that position. That was a Grade 13, and when I left Stevens Point and came into the Regional Office, I was a 12. I was there for five years and then went on as a 13 and continue as a 13 to this day, so I’ve been a 13 for more than 20 years, which is fine with me. And so we did that count and stuff there for 10 years, and we worked within the egg programs and tried to tickle a few changes there and worked with the legislative process and the various farm bills, got our foot in the door here and there. We tried some predator management to increase nest success. We did some habitat developments on private lands, but again, really without a budget, and we scrounged money from wherever we could through whatever partnerships we had, and it was in the mid-80's, the early ‘80's where Ducks Unlimited formed their field office in Bismarck, North Dakota, and they joined us then with funding and with engineering services to do projects. That kind of jump started the Private Lands Program, which we were doing in three counties in western Minnesota, wetland restorations, grassland restorations. We had some other funding that came to us then from the Service, and we started to do these things, and then when the ‘85 Farm Act was passed, the Service was given a role in that, and it took us a couple of years to get in gear, and we started private lands coordinators in each region, and I think Region 3 was the first one to do that, because I was called in there to help set that up in the Regional office, and we named an individual to be the Farm Bill Coordinator in each state, and I mean, that was in 1987, and then people started getting going with doing various things in various states around the country, but probably in the prairie states jumped out ahead of that first. North Dakota comes to mind as one that got pretty aggressive there because of some of our people that were really innovative and jumped on this quickly, and so the Private Lands Program now was going, what we now call Partners for Fish and Wildlife. It started off being called Partners for Wildlife, which was a good name. It didn’t reflect any agency. It didn’t reflect what we did. It just reflected that it was a partners program. It wasn’t, because in one part of the country we might do wetland restoration, another part we might do tree restoration, another part grassland restoration, and whatever. When they changed it to Partners for Fish and Wildlife, I was a little dismayed about that, because I consider wildlife to include fish. I consider wildlife to include insects, amphibians, reptiles, and if we say partners for Fish and Wildlife, I look on that as a division more than a unity thing, which is what it was intended for, and should we have a Partners for Wildlife, a Partners for Fish and Wildlife, or a Partners for Fish, Wildlife, Insects, Amphibians, Reptiles and compartmentalize all those, or Partners for Wildlife was a more umbrella term. Also, when you say Partners for Fish and Wildlife, it’s almost like you’re bringing the Agency name in there, and when you’re selling and you’re first meeting someone and you want them to join Partners for Fish and Wildlife, it’s like asking them to jump in bed with the Fish and Wildlife Service. On the prairies that’s not a real, it’s a big leap for someone to do that, and so if you have just this Partners for Wildlife, wildlife was already a leap for them, and so I hope we go back to Partners for Wildlife someday.
Mark Madison:
Let’s talk about that a minute, because you spent most of your career in the mid-west, it sounds like.
Carl Madsen:
Yes, yes.
Mark Madison: Did you see changing perceptions about the Fish and Wildlife Service over the 33 years, and has it been a tough sell?
Carl Madsen:
Really, really not. I can go off almost any place in the Dakotas right now, western Minnesota, and the Fish and Wildlife Service is usually not held in high esteem by farmers and ranchers. They fear endangered species. They fear regulation of wetlands. They don’t like land acquisition because it takes land off the tax rolls and removes land that they might buy. But the other side of that is they love land acquisition when they want to sell land. They complain about our easements, but when they need some cash, they love our easements, and they take our cash. We’re doing more easement work in South Dakota now than we have ever done.
Mark Madison:
Sure.
Carl Madsen:
And we’ve got more people lined up at the door to get in the program than we have dollars for, and we have more dollars now than we’ve ever had, and so they say well they don’t like it, but still they come in, they like to do business with us, but they don’t like us, and one thing that I found the same now as the same then is the Agency, as a group, is perceived as an outsider someplace. It’s this big, bad brother thing. One farmer, many years ago, told me, he says, “We used to hate you guys until we got to know you,” and I think that was the hallmark of the Private Lands Program. It’s a one on one thing. Our relations, in the agricultural community are very personal. They’re one on one. People buy their machinery from someone they know. They sell their grain to someone they know. Typically they buy their vehicles from someone they know, and they do it very personally. They don’t respond well to postcards or mailing things or television ads and just send off and do it. You’ve got to get to know them personally, and that’s been a hallmark of the Private Lands Program, also of the Wetland Acquisition Program. The appraisers that have been out buying land have established a very personal relationship with the people they have worked with and, but still it’s not, it’s only a minority of people that we’ve worked with, but almost all of them, once we’ve worked with them, are friends and allies, although they don’t go to bat for you on everything. Endangered species is a very hard sell out there yet, and there’s a strong property rights feelings and private ownership of property and any threats that are perceived to be pretty serious.
Mark Madison:
Yeah, those are always problems with farmers and ranchers. Is there some places of conservation, though, you do find common ground with farmers? Is it easier to get them to agree to, for example, to waterfowl propagation or something?
Carl Madsen:
Our easiest sell is if we’re working with livestock operators. We have grass. They value grass, they need grass for livestock grazing and for hay, and they also need water in conjunction with that grass, and that’s really what the prairie and wildlife is about is water and grass. That’s our easiest sell is to restore or develop wetlands and improve or restore or protect the grasslands on which livestock graze, and that’s a very compatible common ground thing that’s throughout the Dakotas. There is a growing trend toward more grow crops and less diversified agriculture, less livestock in the eastern Dakotas. I think North Dakota is probably further advanced in that than South Dakota is, and I’ve never been able to figure out exactly why. But as the farms get larger, there is less livestock. There is more interest in rural crops as opposed to small grain and hay and the diversification farming. There’s more pressure on removing obstacles like wetlands and grasslands and other habitats, and that trend has been growing slowly over the years, and I’ve seen it, for example, in 1970, there were almost no soybeans in northwest Minnesota and in South Dakota, the whole state of South Dakota. Today we have over 4,000,000 acres of soybeans in South Dakota, and that’s made a big impact on land use and farms are big and getting bigger. I’ve seen that over the years, too. People buy out their neighbor and others. One farmer, where there used to be two, and those trends are going on. I was visiting with a farmer the o
Mark Madison speaks with Amy Vedder, author, conservation biologist with The Wilderness Society
No full textWhen Bill Weber and Amy Vedder arrived in Rwanda to study mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey, the gorilla population was teetering toward extinction. Poaching was rampant, but it was loss of habitat that most endangered the gorillas. Weber and Vedder realized that the gorillas were doomed unless something was done to save their forest home. Over Fossey's objections, they helped found the Mountain Gorilla Project, which would inform Rwandans about the gorillas and the importance of conservation, while at the same time establishing an ecotourism project -- one of the first anywhere in a rainforest -- to bring desperately needed revenue to Rwanda. Vedder’s book, In the Kingdom of Gorillas, introduces readers to entire families of gorillas, from powerful silverback patriarchs to helpless newborn infants. Vedder take us with them as they slog through the rain-soaked mountain forests, observing the gorillas at rest and at play. An expert in conservation and ecology, Dr. Vedder is Senior Vice President for Conservation at The Wilderness Society (TWS) in Washington, DC. She has worked for more than 30 years in dedication to wildlife and wildland conservation, applying ecological and social science to save biologically rich and threatened places. Amy Vedder is widely known for her pioneering studies of mountain gorillas in Rwanda during the late 1970s and as co-founder, with her husband Dr. Bill Weber, of the Mountain Gorilla Project. She is the author of several books, including In the Kingdom of Gorillas, which she wrote with Bill Weber, and is the subject of a biography written for middle school students titled, Gorilla Mountain.MARK MADISON: Hi. Mark Madison, and today is April 7th, 2011, and I'm at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and I have with me two folks that help conserve gorillas, mountain gorillas, in the wild in Africa. Very fortunate to have with us today Dirck Byler, who works for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for the Africa portion of our Great Ape Conservation Fund, and Dr. Amy Vedder, who works for the Wilderness Society as a Senior Vice President, and she is an expert on mountain gorillas, who recently reissued her book "In the Kingdom of Gorillas".
So, Dirck and Amy, welcome to NCTC. It's a pleasure to have you.
AMY VEDDER: Thank you.
MARK MADISON: And I think I'll start out with Dirck. Dirck, what does the Great Ape Conservation Fund do?
DIRCK BYLER: We fund projects all throughout Africa and Asia that focus on the different species of great apes... gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans, and also the lesser ape species of gibbons. We provide funding for applied research, for law enforcement, for work on infectious disease, community conservation/education, anything, really, that helps with conserving apes in the wild.
MARK MADISON: Great. Is there a recent project you've funded that you would like to describe in more detail that you thought worked out really well?
DIRCK BYLER: Well, we've got some great ongoing funding in West Africa, in particular in the Ivory Coast, which has been in the news recently, so I'll bring that one up.
One of the things we found over the years is in conflict areas sometimes conservation gets neglected because it's difficult to work in many of these places, but we've got a great project in Tai National Park in southwest Côte d’Ivoire that is keeping the park intact even during this time of crisis in the country. So they're doing a great job of protecting chimpanzees and making sure that the park stays intact during a civil crisis.
MARK MADISON: Great.
Well, Amy, you're reissuing your book "In the Kingdom of Gorillas" that you wrote with your husband Bill Weber. Tell us a little about the book.
AMY VEDDER: Well, the book was a labor of love and sort of a slice of our lives, and it started back with our first early career work going out and studying mountain gorillas and studying their conservation problems and issues and trying to get some conservation efforts going. But we've been really fortunate to be able to follow that story over more than 30 years and actually see the results of not just the launch that we were involved with but so much work with so many people who have made it a real success story.
MARK MADISON: Well, speaking of success stories, Dirck told me one of his projects that worked well. What did you and Bill do to help preserve gorillas that you thought worked well?
AMY VEDDER: Well, we were very interested in making sure, one, that the gorillas could be fully protected, but, two, that that protection would be something people locally cared about and the nation would be engaged in, and we worked mostly in Rwanda, which was considered the third poorest country in the world and the most highly densely populated country in Africa at the time. So you get that combination of huge human poverty in the midst of something biologically without value, priceless, and it's a real challenge. And so we felt that one of the most important things that we did was helping to set up what became known as an ecotourism project and getting people in to see gorillas from outside the country, paying good money to do so, and, therefore, producing local, and especially national, benefits in the process, and it has turned the country around to be strong, strong, strong supporters and implementers of conservation, and the gorillas have done well because of that.
MARK MADISON: Well, how are the gorillas doing in Rwanda?
AMY VEDDER: Surprisingly, the population actually spills over the border into Congo and Uganda, but that biggest of the two world's populations of gorillas, mountain gorillas, went from about 450 animals, so the biggest in the world was tiny to begin with, down to about 275, and a bit lower, and now over the last couple decades, despite war and genocide and all sorts of challenges, again, poverty, the population is back up to 480 we found out just a month or two ago. So, back above the original estimate. It's just incredibly exciting and wonderful to know.
MARK MADISON: That's great. Let me ask you one final question, Amy. You mentioned you've been working with this group of mountain gorillas for over 30 years. What's the biggest change you've seen in that period since when you started working with the gorillas up to the present?
AMY VEDDER: Well, the biggest change for them is that they're living in a more peaceful area, there are more gorillas, and the sizes of the families are bigger. So those people who are doing science now are studying families that are two or three or four times as big as they used to be. So all the social interactions that are really fascinating have changed given big sizes.
But I want to turn back to Dirck, too, and say the kind of work that the Great Ape Fund does is helping to ensure that gorillas like this or primates in other parts of the world or elephants and other species funds, they make a huge difference in protecting
these wild, wonderful creatures of this world. So thank you, Dirck!
MARK MADISON: That's a good segue. Dirck, if people listening to this Podcast wanted to learn more about international affairs work, protecting rhinos, elephants, great apes and so on, where might they look?
DIRCK BYLER: Well, you can look on our web site at www.fws.gov/international and you can choose your species from there.
MARK MADISON: Great. And, Amy, if they wanted to learn more about what you're doing now with the Wilderness Society, where should folks go?
AMY VEDDER: Yeah, now my work is here in the U.S., and I love it. We save the most special, wildest places in this country. And it's easy. It's wilderness.org.
MARK MADISON: I like the simplicity of that. And thank you, Amy. Thank you, Dirck, very much for doing this Podcast with us. And thank you for taking the time to listen. And if you would like to see other Podcasts that we've done with conservation biologists, you can find us at training.fws.gov or you can look under "National Conservation Training Center" on iTunes University. Thank you very much
Michael Field
No full textMichael Field oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Michael Field discusses growing up in Maine, where he went to college, and the experiences he had while working for the Randolph Mountain Club in New Hampshire.
Name: Michael Field
Keywords: Camping, Environments (Natural), Hiking, Public access, Writing, Biography, Climbing, History, Maintenance, Mountains, Geology, Crag Camp, White Mountains1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Michael Field
Date of Interview: August 6, 2010
Location of Interview: Randolph, New Hampshire
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Brief Summary of Interview: Michael Field was born January 20, 1948 in Portland Maine. His father mainly sold insurance and his mother was a housewife. Growing up in rural Maine, a lot of his time was spent doing outdoor activities such as wandering the woods and going to the family cabin on the lake. He grew up in Phillips, Maine and went to school there until his parents decided to send him to Exeter. He went to MIT then, to graduate school and eventually got his Ph.D. in geology at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He worked as a caretaker for Crag Camp in the summers of 1957 and 1958. He discusses how he got the job and how he had never been to the White Mountains before this. He talks about what a typical day was like for him, some of the people that came up, his experiences in general and he shares some stories about his time there like the one he calls ‘The long Day’ and his 42 mile hike. He really enjoyed his time at the RMC and he remembers being at Crag Camp thinking, “Right now is a really good time.”
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Mark: Well the first question is easy; can you say and spell your name for the transcriptionist?
Michael: I’m Michael T. Field. M I C H A E L T. F I E L D.
Mark: Thanks. And today is August 6, 2010 and we’re in Randolph, New Hampshire and the voices you might hear on the tape would be Steve Chase or Mark Madison. And Michael the next question is almost as easy, where and when were you born?
Michael: I was born in Portland, Maine on January 20, 1938.
Mark: Ok and what did your parents do?
Michael: My father did miscellaneous things. He worked for the state for a short while but then he worked with his father, which is something that’s always staggered me. I can’t imagine any body working with their father.
Mark: And then…
Michael: But his father—mostly sold insurance. There was also a real estate dealing and in his time his father had worked for the bank and the railroad and the steamboat line and had his finger on almost any place where there was a buck to be made. My father mainly sold insurance. My mother was a classic housewife.
Mark: As a young boy what outdoor activities did you do?
Michael: When you grow up in rural Maine, everything is outdoor activity. And then when I got big enough to wander in the woods, I wandered in the woods with some friends and my brother. And we also had a family cabin on the lake and we spent a lot of time there. 3
Mark: Okay and where did you go to school?
Michael: I grew in the town of Phillips in western Maine, so I went through school there. That was a time where you could go from kindergarten through high school and be with the same kids all along the way, there were about 15 in each class.
Mark: And then how…?
Michael: And then my parents thought I should go somewhere else for school, I don’t know if they were right or not but they sent me to Exeter for a few years. You want to go on from there?
Mark: Sure go ahead.
Michael: After that I went to MIT and then graduate school, Caltech, although that didn’t work out so well. And then I dropped out for several years and then I went back and got my doctorate at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This is all in geology.
Mark: In geology, okay. We just had a geologist here earlier. A generation removed from you I think.
Michael: Dyk Eusden?
Steve: Jonathon…
Mark: Jonathon…
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Steve: Gourley.
Michael: Nope, don’t know him.
Mark: He’s a young guy.
Steve: He’s the next generation past Dyk.
Michael: Oh.
Mark: All right and then are you married obviously?
Michael: Yes.
Mark: Do you have any—when did you marry, that’s one of our questions?
Michael: Which time?
Mark: I don’t know. Question writer. (Laughing).
Michael: I got married in 1969 and had two children.
Mark: Okay.
Michael: And I got married again in 1997.
Michael’s wife: ’97.
Michael: ’97.
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Mark: We didn’t mean to put you on the spot. We ask everybody the same question so there’s some consistency. What eventually brought you to the RMC to work for the Randolph Mountain Club?
Michael: One of the teachers at Exeter had been told to find somebody for Crag Camp. And, you know, I’d written a couple papers about hiking in the woods, he’s like “I’ll try this guy.”
Mark: What year…?
Michael: That’s how I got it.
Mark: What year was this Michael?
Michael: ’57.
Mark: 1957 and how old were you at that time?
Michael: 19.
Mark: Okay. So what did you do for the RMC?
Michael: I was caretaker for Crag Camp in the summer of 1957 and I went back again in the summer of 1958 because I liked it so much.
Mark: Okay, same place?
Michael or Mark: Crag Camp, both times.
Mark: What kind of experience prepared you for the job?
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Michael: I don’t know if they asked if I had any experience for the job, they asked if I was interested. Hiking and camping, I don’t think they asked about living in log cabins with wood stoves so, which I had done.
Mark: And you wrote some papers on hiking, so you were well set up.
Michael: Yeah.
Mark: Had you visited the camp before you went to work there?
Michael: No.
Mark: How did you envision the camp would be?
Michael: I’d never been to the White Mountains before.
Mark: Really? What did you think it would be like before you saw it?
Michael: I can’t remember.
Mark: That was a long time ago.
Michael: It’s been erased of what actually happened.
Steve: Did you know it was a cabin?
Michael: Yeah.
Steve: The reason we’re asking that question is someone said, someone a few years ago would’ve got the job at Crag and thought it was just going to be a lean-to and then when they got to Crag they went “OH MY GOSH, LOOK AT THIS PLACE!” 7
Mark: All right.
Michael: They don’t hire caretakers for a lean-to.
Steve: Yeah, right.
Mark: What was a typical workday like at the camp for you?
Michael: Typical work day back in ’57, ’58 typical day was nobody showed up.
Mark or Steve: No body showed up.
Michael: And it’s amazing, sometimes two or three days. For the whole summer, I bet I was alone almost half the time. Which makes your schedule very easy if you want to take a long hike the next day. All the people that came were fun.
Mark: Do you, do you remember any particular groups or people that came through that got stuck with you over the years?
Michael: Well there are two categories, the teenage kids from Randolph that came again and again so I got to know them. And then there were other people hiking through. I don’t remember anybody unusually good or bad.
Mark: That’s probably good.
Michael: I remember one that was quite disorganized which she; she’s kind of a separate story.
Mark: Would you want to share that story with us?
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Michael: Uh—it’s a long story because she was part of a day—it’s called the long, I call it ‘The long day’. (Says, “I’ll check that again” and looks in his journal.) July 24, ’57,
I didn’t leave until eleven in the morning. I mean this day continues until about midnight. So I went up Madison and then down the Howker Ridge Trail, just over the top of Madison at the top of the Howker Ridge, one of the longest trails up this side of the mountains, I ran into this group of 10 campers, they said “Hey mister, where are we?” You might ask that half way up the Amphibrach Trail but at the top of the Howker Ridge Trail, well they were almost up. I went down there through a cloud burst, went to the post office, then over to Chris Goetze and Brian Underhill, they were the trail crew. They stayed in a place, a cabin next to I think it was Anna (name). Okay then I went back up the road a couple of miles. I didn’t want to go straight back up to Crag Camp so I took Lowe’s Path up to the Log Cabin. It was raining for most of the trip. I started off again up Lowe’s Path but after stopping at an intersection I got turned around and took the Randolph Path instead and didn’t realize my mistake until I was well along and I hate to turn around so I just kept going.
Steve: Did you go left or right there?
Michael: I was going up you know…
Steve: Yeah.
Michael: …eventually ended up at Crag Camp.
Steve: Okay.
Michael: So I went to the right, headed in the direction of the Perch.
Steve: Yeah.
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Michael: Yeah went up to the Perch and then started back on the Gray Knob Trail. And I was almost to Gray Knob and I came up behind a woman, who had taken the Randolph Path instead of Gulfside. She was with a group of people, they went this way and she went that way and nobody seemed to care. Anyhow, she walking really slowly, you know usually if I come up behind someone walking slowly and I don’t have far to go I change pace, you know. But she was going so slowly, so I said okay see you at Crag Camp. Okay we’re not to Crag Camp yet and half way from Gray Knob to Crag Camp is the spring where Crag Camp gets its water. There was a man and two boys who’d been there the night before and the boys had been playing in the stream and knocked the hose out cutting off the water supply at Crag Camp, which is not really, I knew how to fix it, it’s not real easy especially when the trees are wet. That summer they put in a new waterline, replaced the iron pipe that, Rolf Goetze may have told you about with the sections of PVC pipe, three to four hundred foot lengths. The way to fix it was to stick the hose back into the stream and then you walk four hundred feet down to the next junction, take out your jackknife cut it out and wait until the water gets going again then you shove it back together and that’s the, four hundred feet down is the level so you only need to do it that one place. And it’s a tromp through the brush all the way and as I said it was raining earlier. Okay I went back to Crag Camp—and there were a few more people. The woman eventually showed up but of course she did start worrying a little bit about her group, they didn’t seem give a damn about her. So I thought okay, this is long before the days of radios and okay I will run over to Madison Hut and tell them, it was only forty minutes but you know it’s work and then I had to come back. At Madison Hut the place is packed so I yelled at the top of my voice “Any anybody here know so and so?” Eventually somebody came out of the crowd. I don’t remember what we arranged for how they would meet again but anyhow I went back to Crag Camp. [There was no problem with her staying, as there were plenty of extra blankets.] The day’s not over. Okay so I got her squared away along with a half dozen people. Everybody goes to bed. About eleven o’clock at night there’s a landslide somewhere; you wouldn’t believe how long those things can go on. And after it finally stopped, people were in bed but they weren’t asleep yet, I got up and said I think I’ll step outside and take a look somebody said, “Make sure there’s something to step on before you step outside.” I couldn’t see 10
anything. There was a relatively new slide right below Crag Camp that had come down two or three years ago, and I was sure that was it. Though some days later I went down to the slide and that wasn’t it, it was something up on the headwall and I couldn’t tell for sure and tried to look at pictures I took then and pictures I took later, never knew for sure but boy that was a landslide and it just went on and on and on. And that was the end of the day that started at eleven in the morning at Madison.
Mark: Now that was not a typical day.
Michael: No.
Mark: (Unintelligible).
Michael: No that was one of my two long days.
Mark: Did you have any favorite hikes or paths when you were up there?
Michael: Favorite spot I think is Adams 4.
Mark: Okay.
Michael: Do you know what I mean?
Steve: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah.
Mark: That was your favorite spot?
Steve: That is nice.
11
Michael: Yeah. Anything above tree line.
Mark: Okay. Did you have any encounters with wildlife while you were caretaker up there?
Michael: Not even mice.
Mark: Really.
Michael: I know other caretakers have told stories about trapping hundreds of mice, I had some squirrels around. When you’ve got just a plain roof like at Crag Camp, when a squirrel runs across the roof it sounds just like a squirrel’s running across the floor. It’s up there and you’re looking down. Nothing bigger, not even a skunk or a raccoon.
Mark: What was the best part of the job?
Michael: It was all really nice you know a lot of times in your life you look back and say “Oh that was a really good time.” I remember being at Crag Camp and thinking “Right now is a really good time!” And there aren’t many times in your life you can say that. Well it was a good bunch of people, a handful I had some issues with. There were kids from the valley that came up regularly that was nice cuz I knew them.
Mark: Right, right.
Michael: And the other people that came by were complete strangers were also very nice you know we swapped stories.
Mark: What was the worst part of the job?
Michael: I don’t think there was one. Hauling stuff up was certainly work but I found out after I got in shape that with a sixty-pound pack, it took two hours.
12
Mark: Do you have…?
Michael: Of course know I look back and say “I used to go up there with a sixty pound pack.” Then my inner voice says, “What did you weigh then?” Well it’s about the same. (Everyone laughing).
Mark: Did you have much contact with the AMC or the Forest Service when you were up there?
Michael: No I remember running into a, I remember running into a ridge runner once on top.
Mark: Okay.
Michael: But that was after my brother was working for the Forest Service in Gorham. AMC, I remember once in some kind of crude looking guys came in and slouched down on the couch in the middle of the day and said, “Any of the goofers leave some lemonade?” [AMC employees used the term “goofer” for any hiker that was not one of them.] So they must have been AMC.
Mark: Did the time you worked in Randolph affect or shape your career or lifestyle decisions that came later?
Michael: Don’t think so, you know, I’d run around in the woods before and I ran around the woods after, it was—very nice time but I don’t know, don’t think it bent me one way or another.
Mark: What was your most dangerous or frightening experience?
Steve: You didn’t ask me that?
13
Mark: We ran out of tape.
Steve: Yeah we did.
(Mark laughing)
Michael: I think I was above tree line once and a thunderstorm came in but passed over quickly—I even survived the day I tried to wear myself out but I did survive.
Mark: Do you recall a humorous experience?
Michael: Once there was some project on, so there was a bunch of other people up there, the trail crew and Klaus Goetze and a few other people; they were building something, I forget what. But somebody decided we should have a square dance at Crag Camp, it was all guys. It was hilarious. (Everyone laughing). I did learn something then that I’ve seen repeated a couple of times, if you are going to have a really, really great party, have people work together on a project for a day first. This is probably why the old barn raisings were so much fun.
Mark: Do you have any advice or anything you like to tell others about your time working in the mountains?
Michael: No because it’s changed. There are a lot more people, there’s no stove. How can you welcome people in out of the rain when there’s no stove, I mean they’re out of the rain, but.
Michael’s wife: Tell them about your cooking.
Michael: Gee you didn’t ask that.
14
Mark: We only have some questions; we don’t have all the questions. Tell us about your cooking, what did you do on that stove?
Michael: It’s the first time I’ve been by myself cooking for myself so I’m, I was not frightened of it, I looked at as an opportunity. And if I woke up and it was you know cold, gray, pouring rain, okay, time to bake stuff. I’d fire up the stove and practice baking cinnamon rolls and what not.
Mark: That’s great.
Michael: That was usually when I was alone, but it’s cozier when there are a bunch of people. There was one time we had a whole bunch of people and everybody would, they just wouldn’t come and go off, they would hang around during the day and so since I had the stove going to dry everybody out, I said “Oh this is a good time for baking.” And there was some guy there that was washing dishes like crazy and I kept putting dishes on the pile and at one point he said, “Wait a minute, I already washed this one.” The stove at that time had the oven, and also the water tank on the back, and we changed the valves on the side to change which way the smoke goes up and suddenly you’ve got ten gallons of boiling water.
Mark: Do you have any other reminisces you like to share that we didn’t ask about?
Michael: I did hook up a shower. Let’s see—there was a left over piece of the PVC piping.
Steve: We used black pipe.
Michael: What.
Steve: Was it black?
15
Michael: Black, yeah black, vinyl.
Steve: Heats the water real good.
Michael: Well there was also, there was a big copper tank up there and hope it’s still around somewhere, it was too good to throw away. The old water system had been so leaky they had a tank to store it in and leave that in the sun all afternoon, just fine or you could use the water tank on the back of the stove if it’s not too hot. And then you just get the suction going, zoom down the trail about a hundred feet to where I had the shower set up. I introduced a few other people to it. I can remember their faces glowing when they came back “Fantastic, that’s great!”
Mark: Yeah that was wide open, we’re still into wide open, anything else?
Michael: Tell you about the, the end of the, tell you about the long hike. At the end of the second summer, I figured I must be in as good as shape as I’m ever going to be, maybe I’ll take a long hike. So I left early in the morning, said goodbye to people sleeping on the porch and had left for Mount Washington. Mount Washington would be about a quarter of the way, and continued on down the Crawford Path to Crawford Notch.
Steve: (Unclear, speaking low).
Michael: Okay. Then I went down on the road for a few miles and came back up on the Davis Path; boy that’s a nice path, I can still remember that. It was made for horses so the grade is wonderful; I was a little tired so I appreciated it. I can still remember it. And then about the time I got back above tree line, it started to go dark. I was getting a little tired but then I went around Mount Washington. It was quite dark, the fog was coming in—and went along there, I had cached a flashlight at Edmond’s Col, which turned out to be a good idea.
Mark: Yeah. 16
Michael: And, at Edmond’s Col I was pretty tired, you know, at Gray Knob I thought I’d just go in and sleep for a minute and then I hear people moving around and thought oh well I don’t want to disturb them. So I got back to Crag Camp around midnight, said hello to the people sleeping on the porch. (Everyone laughing). As I measure on the map, it was 42 miles.
Mark: That’s a lot.
Michael: Along the crest of White Mountains.
Mark: That’s pretty good.
Michael: And uh—I had a little something to eat after I got back and then threw-up. (Everyone laughing). The next day some friends arrived from Maine to stay a couple days and then take me back home. We went up on Mount Adams, but I was pretty slow.
Mark: Yeah, I bet. That’s a great story. Anything else you want to share?
Michael: Oh and, I don’t if it was later or at the time I was thinking, “Let’s see, I’m walking at night, in bad weather, above tree line, I’m exhausted and now have violated every rule that’s on the sign at the tree line.” But when you’re that age, you can do it.
Steve: Yeah but you were a caretaker so it that was all right.
Mark: Anything else you want to share with us Michael?
Michael: I don’t know what they do now a days in a place without a stove.
Mark: Well the critical piece of furniture was the stove.
17
Michael: At that time, there were few enough people; very few people came. Now I know if you’re burning wood you have to have somebody there so people don’t cut green trees next to the camp. So in my spare time I’d wander around in the woods, there’s a fallen tree and there’s a fallen tree. When a bunch of kids came up from the village I say, “Okay well it’s wood gathering time, let’s bring them back.” And it was no problem getting enough wood for that day and more and of course the kids thought it was fun. Good thing about kids.
Mark: Do you have any questions?
Steve: Nope, I’m good.
Mark: Well Michael thank you very much. This is an excellent oral history, we will; I enjoyed all your stories. I like the long hike one.
Michael: Yeah.
Mark: Forty-two miles
Jay Eisenhart
No full textJay Eisenhart oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
During the summer of his college years, Jay Eisenhart worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service doing the Rampart Dam Survey in Alaska. He then became involved with trapping, hunting, and farming.
Organization: FWS
Name: Jay Eisenhart
Years: 1960-1979
Program: Unknown
Keywords: History, Biography, Employees (USFWS), Trapping, Hunting, Bird banding, Farms and farming, Rampart Dam Study, Yukon River, Yukon Flats, Mount Schwatka, White Mountains, Native Land Claimis Settlement Act1
National Heritage Team of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Oral History Program
Subject/USFW Retiree: Jay Eisenhart
Date: July 19, 2009
Interviewed by: Mark Madison
Mark Madison:
Well the first question we start with is the pronunciation and spelling of your name, that's an easy one.
Jay Eisenhart:
Yeah, Jay is easy! Eisenhart, like Eisenhower but its Eisenhart.
Mark Madison:
All right, and we are interviewing you outside Middlebourne, West Virginia. And the interviewer is Mark Madison and today is July 19, 2009. And thank you for agreeing to do this, we appreciate it.
Well let's start with your education, where did you go to school?
Jay Eisenhart:
I don't know whether you want it all or not, but anyways I went to, well we had 6th grade in a 2-room school and this is outside of Albany, New York. And after you got to 6th grade you had to go into the city, and so that was 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th that I went to Mill, and I went there for 6 years. I had the same teachers; I had the same homeroom teacher for 6 years. After that I went right out of that and went to Cornell for 4 years.
Mark Madison:
And what did you study at Cornell?
Jay Eisenhart:
Wildlife Management, I mean that was my major.
Mark Madison:
And then what did you do after you graduated from Cornell?
Jay Eisenhart:
I went to Alaska.
Mark Madison:
This is the good stuff? And what did you go to Alaska to do?
Jay Eisenhart:
Well I was not a person that would just go to Alaska and find a job, no. I had connections, and I had a summer job with the Fish and Wildlife Service and it was for the Rampart Dam Study because Senator Gruening wanted to dam the Yukon River. 2
Mark Madison:
Do you remember about what year this was Jay?
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, 1960; I was 25 years old and I was raring to go, 25 years old live like I could do anything. And that's where I met Jim King right away, and for 4 summers I did the census Okay, they wanted to dam the Yukon River and that the Yukon Flats, that floods oh 300 miles or something like that up and down the Yukon River. And this is where ducks nest, millions of ducks or thousands of ducks, and so we did the census there. And so for 4 summers I worked there and Jim King was pretty much the boss, but then Cal Lensink; and maybe you know who he was...
Mark Madison:
Sure, very famous.
Jay Eisenhart:
And so we worked together, and then other college students, well it was 4 years of that. But what I did, okay so I did that for 3 months out of the year. But gee-whiz, come September boy I was on my own and I said, "Well I'm going to be a trapper because I know I could do it!" Or I said I could do it. And I got along very well with people in Beaver, that's where I stayed was in Beaver, which is on the Yukon River. And the first year I couldn't trap because I was not a resident, but I walked over that trap line and... Well there were these two old Sweden boys over there and they were retired, well they were old men, they were from Sweden and they called them the Sweden boys. But one was a Norwegian, Victor (unclear), and Victor told me, "You go out there and there's you a trap line right there, nobody but those Indians aren't going to, they won't know." Even then, in 1960, or '61 or '62, they won't know. And so I went in 1960, well it was '61. But I walked the whole trap line, they said, "There are 5 cabins out there, you can go right out and walk them. There's a 50 gallon lard can, you've got a little bit of rice, a little bit of flour, a little bit of a sugar, and there's a stove in every cabin, and you can do it." And so I made a little toboggan about 5 feet long and I pulled it across the river and I went, and then I came back to Beaver. This was in the spring of the year, in March and April...
Mark Madison:
What were you trapping?
Jay Eisenhart:
I didn't trap then, I'm telling you this is the first year and I wasn't a resident and I couldn't trap, but I wanted to investigate. And I did, I walked all the way up to the fifth cabin, and then there's Mount Schwatka up there, and that's in the White Mountains, that's between the Yukon and Fairbanks. And I said, "I'm going to climb it, I'm going to climb it!" And I did, and I went up there and up on the top of that mountain. Somebody had been there, some surveyor. There's the Victoria Mountain and there's Mount Schwatka, between the Yukon River and Fairbanks, the Victoria is higher but Mount Tuwaka in a haystack is like this; Victoria Mountain is rounder. I climbed it and up there there were all of these 3
wires sticking around there where somebody had a little think like that, and I said (unclear) I don't know when, sometime. But I was smart, I took a little bottle with me, a little mayonnaise jar, so I wrote a note in it and I made a beacon, I made a little pile of rocks and I put it in there saying I'd been there.
Well now you're not the one but Roger Kaye, do you know him?
Mark Madison:
I know Roger well, yes...
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, because he was up there at the last cabin hunting sheep and doing stuff like that. But anyway, I did, I climbed that mountain? What else did I do... The next year I was a trapper, yes sir.
Mark Madison:
And what were you trapping that second year?
Jay Eisenhart:
When white men gets the fever he kills whatever he can kill, and not people of course! Game laws, forget about them!
Mark Madison: So you trapped anything?
Jay Eisenhart:
Well you did because nobody cared, nobody cared. The only thing was beaver because you had to tag them, you had to tag beaver. You could catch, I don't know, I think it was 20 and then it went up to 25, or it was 25 and then down to 20. Yeah mink, well mink and martin that was the main thing in the wintertime. See trapping season... Well my birthday is October 25th, and I think well you, you get freeze up. The Yukon River doesn't freeze until Election Day, but I was on the other side of the Yukon River. I was over on Beaver River and October 25th pretty much you need to get going, and I would try and get going. And that's when you want to catch martins because that's when their fur is nice and they run around early. So its martin and mink, that's your moneymaker. You catch a fox here and there. I was there for 19 years and I caught about 6 wolves, and you're never going to make money on a wolf but it's a big deal that you get a wolf, oh you got something! And the same thing with a wolverine; yeah you catch a wolverine sometimes. And then you get to Christmas time and then well that's about the end of winter trapping. And the first of February, well then you can catch beaver but it's a too cold, it so cold I cut a whole in the ice and it was like 4-feet thick and everything. But I'd stay in beaver for a week or so, and then go back and then get some beaver, and I'd get 20 beaver or whatever it was. And then ratting time, then ratting time, boy oh boy, then the sun is starting to shine and you'd go out and you'd catch them with traps! They'd put up these push ups on the ice and I had some good dogs and I'd say, "Gee" and they'd get the idea and yeah, head for that ratting house over there and oh, go for that one and go for 4
that one! I'd go around and plug the holes on them and take the shovel with me and jam the hole on that rat house and sit back in there and... Well that was difference with a rat; when you're trapping rats you had to go everyday. When I was catching those martins and I would make that trip, when I'd head for the home cabin that was 5 cabins in a row, it would take me I just said 17 days; it would take 2-1/2 weeks to go from one end of the trap line and back to the other end, and that's what it was. But those martins would freeze, you'd catch them and their dead in about a couple of hours or something, but that's the way it was. But with a rat trap you had to go every day, well you want to get the lot of them. I had one year, because I shot a lot of rats, but first you catch them in the trap, and when you catch them in the trap you eat them, but you can't them all because there are so many of them. And they're so good, you'd stick them in the oven and you'd roast them. It's just like a piece of pork, they're greasy all over and oh my, they're pretty good! And then after that when you can't... Well all of the push-offs fall in because it's warm in May, and then you walk along on the ice and you shoot them but... Well when you start shooting them, you get holes in them and they're no so good. And then after awhile, when you've got a lot of them, you've got a lot in the canoe and you're shooting (unclear). That's all there's to it, there's good ones and bad ones. But see when I talked this way... See my sister, I have a sister, she's just a couple of years younger than me, she was a librarian and she worked in Ketchikan mostly, but as a librarian in the school, and she would have her summers off and so she would come up. And I would talk to her like this and she said, "Jay you don't say January, you don't say February, you don't say April. You would say it's break off time, it's goose season, it's ratting time, it's King Salmon time, it's silver time..."
Mark Madison:
You have a different calendar.
Jay Eisenhart:
"It's moose hunting time, its wintertime trapping." And that's the way it went.
Mark Madison:
And you did that for 19 years?
Jay Eisenhart: Yes. That's the way people thought, and it's so different now, I know it is. When I went up there nobody had a chainsaw, nobody had a snow machine. Everybody lived in a log cabin and everybody had five or six dogs tied up, and they had some kind of a... They were some out on rinky dink sleds but they'd get out and get a load of wood. This is what they knew how to do and this is what they could do. But since then by the time I left there wasn't a dog damned there! And what with the welfare and that business; that's the first they did was they brought out, they had some of these things like those 4-wheelers so they could run around in the summertime, run around. And then of course they wanted a snowmobile so they could go out on the trap line, well all right (unclear). But boy you drive that thing into overflow; I don't if you know what overflow is, but if you get water underneath the snow. If you've got a dog that dog knows it, he says, "I don't want to get in that stuff!" And if you do get in it the dog would say, "I'm going to get out 5
of here, I'm going to get out!" And if you drove a 4-wheeler in there and it's 30-below or something like that and all of the small metal parts on it are 30-below, and as soon as you hit that water you're going to get stuck, it won't go anyplace. But that's what Beaver is now. Well they've all got telephones now, and I talk to them.
Mark Madison:
You mentioned muskrat hunting and so on; we have one of Cal Lensink's rat canoes in our museum, actually Alaska sent it down. Where did you learn to do all of this? You did learn how to handle a sled in Albany probably, did you just learn from the people up in Alaska?
Jay Eisenhart: Well it's hard to explain it; but I can't tell you about my father, I can't tell you about my uncles and aunts and everything. But I could adapt, that's all there is to it, I'd just say okay. When I was in high school kid right there around Albany and I could catch some opossums and muskrats, and there were red foxes there and I could catch them right there amongst all of the farms and stuff, and I just knew I could do it. And my father was a bird hunter, he was good with a shotgun, and he didn't care a thing about deer or anything like that, he didn't have a rifle. And I'd get out there and I just said, "Well gee whiz, I can to." There's a thing that... Somebody, Moses Cruickshank, and somebody recorded what he wrote, and whether you've ever gotten that I don't know. But Moses said to me, it was just about when I was going to leave, he said, "You're the last white trapper." And a white trapper, and some of them --- well I mentioned the Sweden boys, okay one's Norwegian and one's Swedish, but jeeze that was a Fin up there and there was French Jim, and there was (unclear), well he was a Fin. But there were white people up then in the 1920's when things were hard, and there were single white men, they would come in and they would take a couple of looks at what the Indians were doing and they'd say, "Well I believe I can do this." And they'd outdo the Indians. And I didn't say then, and maybe I, I don't know whether I ever said before I came back here, but I can outdo these guys. But they had all of the experience, they knew it, but they had a wife and five kids, I didn't. And the white trappers didn't have it and the white people came in and put steamboats to work. It was before my time because the steamboats were burning oil when I got up there. I just said, "Yeah, I can do it," and I did it. And then after 19 years I said, "Well, okay I've got this nice fish camp up here." "And I've got, oh gee whiz, I built that home cabin two or three times and I've got six line cabins, big cabins up there. What's left? What are you going to do? Are you going to just stay on here and go to the pioneer's home?" And the other thing is right in Beaver, right in town there; there was a time when... Oh gee whiz, I don't know when this was, in the middle of the '70s, "Red Power! Red Power!" These young kids were growing up and geeze by then now I'm 40 years old or something, and these kids boy I watched them when they were born or something like that, "Red Power! Red Power! Let's kill the white men!" There I was one day, they were doing that and I was walking up, I did, "How about right now." And they kept walking. But it was getting that way because there were murders there, that they would just... A little bit of this, this is homemade wine, I'm drinking homemade wine but they couldn't take it. Whatever it is about Indians, they can't take booze. I saw it, and I know it and they can't. And it would happen, it would happen very easily. Well, that 6
was part of it, and I said there's nothing more to do and things are just getting worse and worse. It was very nice in 1960 when I went there, and 19 years later it wasn't. The young men were not saying, "I can do better than my grandfather." Or, "I can do just as good as my uncle did." They didn't say that. They said, "Gee whiz, Uncle Sam's out there, he's going to take care of all of us Indians."
Mark Madison:
So where did you go after Alaska?
Jay Eisenhart:
After?
Mark Madison:
After you left Beaver? Did you come here?
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, I've been here, it will be 30 years on the first of September. Yes I've been here, I came right down here.
Mark Madison:
And what did you do here in West Virginia?
Jay Eisenhart:
I said, "I'm going to do what the old-timers did, right here." The same thing I said in Alaska!
Mark Madison:
Another great frontier!
Jay Eisenhart:
And I had 2 ponies, and then I had 2 more ponies, and then I had mules. I had cornfields all up there, right up here where's he's got all of that, I plowed up all of his yard, I plowed it all up, I plowed it all up. But it was a little big different, in Beaver the Indians they said, "Yes, gee." They sort of liked it. But when I got here and started doing that stuff with the mules people laughed at me. Not in my face but they said, "Gee whiz, what kind of jerk?" I said, "Well, I'm going to do it, I don't care. Yeah, I was born in New York, well I was born in Connecticut but I claim New York..." And people can, well people can if they're raised right. And I was raised right, I had a good father and I had good aunts and uncles and I had a good mother and a good sister. And yes, people can do that, and people still do it in China and they do it in India. Africa, nope I have no use for those Africans, they can't. But you can get an Indian that just is as black as you ever saw, and he can go out there. And there are people that are doing that, and they're... Gee whiz, this is not what you want.
7
Mark Madison:
But I do have a few questions; do you have any memories from those first 4 years when you were doing the bird banding? What the techniques were like? What actually the day-to-day involved? I know it was a long time ago...
Jay Eisenhart:
Well, Cal Lensink organized the thing, and he draw out all of the Yukon Flats and he drew all of these little squares. And the first way he drew them was that there were 4-square miles, and so Jim came in the summer and all the residents were there, but they would land us out in a float plane. But 4-square miles was too much, but we did that for the first year, and then after he cut them down to 1-square, which we could cover. And so we would fly out, and sometimes there would be two of us in a square mile and sometimes there would be one in 1-square mile and the other one over 3 miles. And we would just have, well we had a rat canoe (unclear), and so this little thing where you can paddle around and portage it. You can carry it; the thing weighs 30 pounds or 35 pounds. So that's what we had, we had (unclear) and a little paper to write down on, a little coffee and a sandwich or something if you wanted it, then we'd sit around and wait. And we'd go back to Fort Yukon, that's where we worked out of, Fort Yukon. And that's what we were doing; Cal did all of the figuring out of what we saw.
Mark Madison:
Did it help stop the dam? You said at the beginning you were doing this because of the dam proposal?
Jay Eisenhart:
Well, there were a lot of reasons to stop the dam; there's was a lot more than that. (Unclear) Bob Bartlett was the other one, but Groening was the one that wanted the dam and Egan was the governor. No the dam wasn't popular.
Mark Madison:
What about Roger Kaye, when you first met him he was hunting out there?
Jay Eisenhart:
I never met him.
Mark Madison:
Oh okay, but his name came up earlier in your oral history. He was there before you was he?
Jay Eisenhart:
I'm 73 years old, and not many people were there before I was, he's not one of them. No, he wrote me a letter, and somehow or other, because that letter he wrote to my sister, I have a sister in Vermont. And Ron Inouye, now does that mean anything to you?
Mark Madison:
No. 8
Jay Eisenhart:
Well he's Japanese, and he was in Fairbanks and he was one (unclear)... too long of a story. But anyways, somehow or other Roger Kaye, I don't know if he's a politician or just a writer, a newspaper writer, but he found out that Inouye knew my sister. Well anyway, he wrote a letter to my sister and she forwarded it to me, and then I found out that Roger Kaye had been out on my trap lines somehow or other.
Mark Madison:
I see, yeah, later on.
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, but then he ran into trouble. He was out; those Swede boys that I'd talked about, Victor Innolov, because the whole trap line was abandoned after I left my part of it. But I didn't have their home cabin, which was up above where I was, and that was abandoned. And Roger Kaye, well he landed an airplane... But anyways, he used it and he trapped, which was all right because I talked to him on the telephone and I said, "What about the Indians?" Because the Indians in Beaver, they have that whole trapping line. He said, "Well it wasn't on there." And I said, "Well yeah, okay." But anyways, he used that cabin and he left some grub there, he left some traps and stuff there. And then it turned out a couple of Indian boys from Beaver got over there and they took all his stuff from there! And then when I talked to him I said, "Well who was it?" And he said, "That was Sammy Blackitt and the other one." I didn't know who the other one was but I knew Sam Blackitt, I knew who that was, but this Indians kids. And so they went over in their snowmobiles and so they'd catch a few beavers or something, and whatever anybody leaves there they'd take it. And that's about what I know about Roger Kaye. Well he was, he was up, he'd fly a plane up there around my fourth and fifth cabin up there. That was his sheep hunting areas, he was up in those White Mountains there, he was sheep hunting. And he could see the cabin, because there's a plane... When I was there trapping (unclear) sideline because there's a couple of lakes down there that are pretty close to the mountains, and people would land there and they would set up a camp and then they'd walk up to the mountains. So he landed there and he saw my cabin and then he went over there, and I'd left a note in it and I said, "I'm quitting this trap line, I'm never coming back." And so he saw that and so then he got my name and knew who I was and all of that; there's one connection right there. He was sheep hunting, but I killed some sheep up there. From Beaver right on the Yukon River, when I went up the following year okay I'd go 19 miles downstream in a big boat which I built, I had a 35-foot boat, I traveled down with 5 dogs or 6 dogs and a corn mill and everything. I'd go 19 miles downstream and 50 miles upstream and had my own cabin, and then I had 5 cabins in a row. And it was about 40 miles from the first cabin to the second, third, fourth, fifth it was about 40 miles, so I had to go 40 miles, and I'm sett
Mark Madison talks with John Francis
No full textJohn Francis was in his twenties when a 1971 oil spill in San Francisco Bay jarred his comfortable life. Even as he joined the volunteers who scrubbed the beaches and fought to save birds and sea creatures poisoned by petroleum, he felt the need to make a deeper, more personal commitment. As an affirmation of his responsibility to our planet, he chose to stop using motorized vehicles and began walking wherever he went. His decision was greeted with surprise, disbelief, and even mockery—but it was only the start of a much deeper transformation. A few months later he took a vow of silence that would last seventeen years. He founded Planetwalk in 1982 when he began his walking and sailing pilgrimage around the world. To date, Dr. Francis has walked across the U.S., sailed and walked through the Caribbean, and South America from Venezuela to Argentina and a walk in Cuba. Today Planetwalk consults on sustainable development and works with educational groups to teach kids about the environment. He is the author of Planet Walker, 22 Years of Walking 17 Years of Silence.MARK MADISON: Okay. Today is June 29th, 2011, and my name is Mark Madison at the National Conservation Training Center, and this week we're having a conference for bright high school kids from around the country who might want to pursue environmental careers called the Student Climate and Conservation Congress, and one of our speakers this morning was Dr. John Francis, who has an extremely interesting career and has been kind enough to come downstairs and talk with us a little bit for this Podcast.
Let me just tell you a little about Dr. Francis. Dr. Francis was energized in his 20s when the 1971 oil spill in San Francisco Bay jarred his comfortable life as he joined volunteers to help scrub the beaches and save the birds there. He felt the need to make a deeper, more personal commitment to the environment, and, boy, did he ever! He decided to stop using motorized vehicles and eventually took a vow of silence. He topped using motorized vehicles for 22 years, is that correct, Dr. Francis, and he stopped talking and only listened for 17 years, which is kind of an inspiration to us all.
So, Dr. Francis, thank you so much for coming to Shepherdstown.
JOHN FRANCIS: Well, thanks, Mark. You know, as I said, thanks for being here, you know, because it takes two to communicate, you know.
MARK MADISON: It does. I'm sure that's a lesson you learned from your 17 years of silence.
Tell us why you made these two decisions to stop using motorized transport and stop talking.
JOHN FRANCIS: Well, you know, the not riding in motorized vehicles, it seems kind of obvious. It's a connection that I had made when looking at an oil spill and looking at myself driving a motor vehicle and realizing that the reason they were in the Bay with the oil was partly because of the demand that I was part of to have them there to get oil cheaply as they could and as quickly as they could for my use. And so that was an easy, no-brainer, as they say, to make that choice to start walking.
The not talking was a little more difficult for me because I had looked at the practice of remaining silent in my earlier life as a religious person, going in the monastery, and I thought, that's not for me, not talking, come on! But because I was in so many arguments about the decision not to ride in motorized vehicles, when people in my community mentioned that I really wouldn't make a difference, one person couldn't make a difference, I decided on my 27th birthday to remain silent for one day, and it was that one day that I learned that I hadn't been listening, and so I listened a little more, and then I realized that it was even-- it was even more profound than just listening; it was being able to tell the truth; it was being able to recognize the truth and a lot of other things that came from the silence. And discovering who I was as a person, as an African-American was paramount. So I took that vow to be silent for a year, which I renewed every year.
And it's great to be here in Shepherdstown, because the students here are just so bright and so committed already in what they're doing. I applaud you on being able to find such students. It's almost like preaching to the choir except this is a very young choir, and they are looking for direction and they're looking for inspiration from all of us. So to have that opportunity to speak with them and touch them and be touched by them and to listen to them is a great opportunity for me.
MARK MADISON: Well, you were very inspiring, and the students had a lot of questions. We could have gone three hours with their questions. We had to cut them off. But I wonder what you think-- you made your choice to stop riding motorized vehicles and to stop talking. Do you think that's a choice they should make or do you think they ought to find their own voice, no pun intended, to speak out on these issues?
JOHN FRANCIS: I won't take that as a pun.
You know, I try to keep from saying what it is that a person's journey is, because I don't know. That is something that we have to discover for ourselves. I do say that being who you are and discovering that person and being that person is probably the most powerful thing that you can do for all of us, and so that I unreservedly will recommend.
Now, some students asked me about walking, if they should walk, or if they could walk. And I get lots of e-mails from people around the country who want to walk. And so what I will say, and what I'm trying to come up with is a way that instead of going to, you know, some far-off land for-- Europe to kick around for a year and find yourself, that maybe in your own community you can become a planetwalker and just give up riding in motorized vehicles and walk, and I don't know if you want to stop talking, but, I mean, that's a possibility.
I don't think that it's something that you'll suffer. I think it's something that would be a great learning experience for you, just as maybe going to some European country and kicking around for a year or two. But it's something that you can do right here at home, and I think it has measurable benefits. You can lower your carbon footprint, and you will definitely affect your family's lives and the lives of your friends and the community, I believe.
MARK MADISON: An internal journey versus an external trip.
JOHN FRANCIS: Yes.
MARK MADISON: Now, people might be surprised that when you were not riding motorized vehicles and not talking you were not limiting yourself to a small geographic area or a small career path. Tell us some of the things you did during those years. Because I think it's amazing, actually.
JOHN FRANCIS: I did get around.
MARK MADISON: Yes, you do.
JOHN FRANCIS: I walked up-- from California, from near San Francisco, Pt. Reyes, about 500 miles every year to visit the [ inaudible ] Wilderness. It's not like one of those grand wildernesses like you can find up in northern Washington be the Paysaten, lots of views and mountains. This is kind of low elevation canyons and rattlesnakes and hornets and things like that, but it's nature, nonetheless. And I spent a lot of time there. And then I'd walk back in the fall. And I would do that, and eventually I made-- was befriended by a gold miner there and lived with a gold miner, Perry Davis and his wife Ruth, for a winter, and came out and went to school at Southern [ inaudible ] State College.
From there I returned to the bay area, apprenticed as a wooden boat builder, founded Planetwalk, started walking around the world as part of my education in the hope that I could benefit all of us, but figuring I'd figure that out along the way.
Went to Missoula, Montana, and did a master's in environmental studies there and then on across the country to Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, where I did my Ph.D. in oil spills and ended up working at the Coast Guard writing oil pollution regulations for the United States.
And from there I sailed through the Caribbean and then walked the length of South America. I started talking, though, in the East Coast of the United States in 1990.
So--
And now I'm headed back to Madison, Wisconsin to be a visiting professor there at the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies to teach Redefining Environment. And "environment" for me now has changed from just being about pollution and just being about climate change and the loss of species and habitats and things that we traditionally think of as environment, but to also have to include the human environment, because we're part of the environment, and as being part of the environment, it's our first opportunity to treat the environment in a sustainable way, or even to understand what sustainability is, is in the relationships we have with ourselves and each other. So it's a human rights and civil rights and economic equity and gender equality, and pretty much all the ways that we relate to one another that environment has to embrace in order to be effective. Because as we do all the work that we're doing, we really want it to make a difference, and I think we begin by making that difference in our own personal lives with our relationships with each other.
MARK MADISON: That sounds perfect. It's very-- a nicely-- I mean, the circle that you're at the Nelson Institute, because Gaylord Nelson, obviously, was the founder of Earth Day. He was very interested in getting humans incorporated into the environment. He was actually the first speaker we had out at this place shortly after we opened. He was a family friend, and I think he would be very thrilled that you're coming back to Wisconsin to make these connections.
JOHN FRANCIS: I would hope so. And, of course, Aldo Leopold is at Wisconsin, and John Muir is at Wisconsin, and so, yeah, I guess it's a great magnet for--
MARK MADISON: Breeding ground for conservationists.
JOHN FRANCIS: Yes, breeding ground for conservationists and activists.
MARK MADISON: John, this has been a very short Podcast, and, you know, you have had a fascinating life, and we just touched on a few episodes of it. Are there books or web sites people could go to learn more about Planetwalk and your career?
JOHN FRANCIS: Well, we have a web site, planetwalk.org, and that's a nonprofit web site, but also National Geographic, I'm a fellow at National Geographic, and my hope is this Podcast is heard on that web site as well. It has enormous reach. But National Geographic has also published two books... "Planetwalker," which will be made into a motion picture at some point, and "On the Ragged Edge of Silence: Finding Peace in a Noisy World" has just came out in March. So, yeah, you can get those at your bookstore or the National Geographic web site.
MARK MADISON: That sounds good. Do you have one take-home message for folks that are listening?
JOHN FRANCIS: Well, the take-home message for me, I think I said it before, but please take this to heart and take it home. The environment is about how we treat each other. So let's treat each other well.
MARK MADISON: Thank you, John. This is has been Dr. John Francis at the Student Climate and Conservation Congress for 2011, and he's just joining us for a brief broadcast. Thank you very much.
JOHN FRANCIS: Thank you, Mark
K. Duane Norman
No full textK. Duane Norman oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
While in college, Mr. Norman served as a student aide at Bear River National Wildlife Refuge working on the botulism research program with Dr. Wayne Jensen. Upon graduation he went to work in Woodsville, Massachusetts as a fisheries research biologist. In refuges, he would take up flying while working with the Wetlands Acquisition Program in North Dakota. Mr. Norman would retire as Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program.
Organization: FWS
Name: K. Duane Norman
Years: 1956-1983
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Biography, Biologists (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), History, Wetlands, Waterfowl, Wildlife refuges, Aircraft, Aviation, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge, Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Frank Bellrose1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: K. Duane Norman
Date of Interview: April 19, 2006
Location of Interview: Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 27
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Student aide at Bear River National Wildlife working on botulism research project; Fisheries Research Biologist at in Woodsville, Massachusetts; Assistant Manager at Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge; Refuge Manager at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Illinois; Wildlife Biologist working on Wetlands Acquisition Program; worked on Refuge Acquisition Program in Atlanta; Flyway Biologist in Washington D.C.; Pacific Flyway Biologist in Portland; Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program, from Portland.
Colleagues: Dr.Wayne Jensen, Frank Bellrose, John Koerner
Brief Summary of Interview: While in college, Mr. Norman served as a student aide at Bear River National Wildlife refuge working on the botulism research program with Dr. Wayne Jensen and upon graduation went to work in Woodsville, Massachusetts as a fisheries research biologist. He then moved on into refuges and would take up flying while working with the Wetlands Acquisition Program in North Dakota. He would make serval more moves before retiring as Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program. He shares several stories of his time flying and a memory of Frank Bellrose, whom he felt was interesting to work with.
2
Mark: It is April 19th, 2006 and we are at the National Conservation Training Center with Duane Norman doing an oral history. And the other person in the room is Mark Madison. And Duane we usually start with the first question, how did you come to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Duane: How’d I come to work?
Mark: Yeah.
Duane: Man that was about the only place you could be [unintelligible].
Mark: [laughing] What was your background before you came to work for Fish and Wildlife Service?
Duane: You mean during my school time?
Mark: Yeah, what you studied?
Duane: I went to what is now called Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which happened to be my hometown, and took up game management; graduated in ’56. And before that, the year before I worked as a student aide on Bear River Refuge.
Mark: Oh yeah, Utah.
Duane: Yeah, with Wayne Jensen working on the botulism program, research program. And then…
Mark: What year would that have been?
Duane: 1955.
Mark: ’55 okay.
Duane: And in ’56 I graduated with a degree in game management. And the only job available was with Public Health in Denver, or, and then I was offered the fisheries research biologist in Woodsville, Massachusetts which I took.
Mark: Good choice; Cape Cod’s nice.
Duane: Yeah. I worked with the sea scaup research. I was the first one to observe the spawning of the sea scaup in the wild, which is pure luck I guess.
Mark: So how the heck did you go from fisheries to migratory waterfowl?
Duane: Well I wasn’t a very good sailor. We had the Albatross, which is…
Mark: Research Vessel.
Duane: …research vessel, long and narrow like a sea [unintelligible]. Of course we were on eight hour shifts, more or less, at sea anchored out, you know.
Mark: Right.
Duane: And sit there and just roll and roll and roll.
Mark: So you thought planes would be more comfortable.
Duane: I said, no I’ve got to get out of this. So I talked to, I don’t know who it was, Salyer I think, and I wrote a letter to him in D.C. asking for any opening in refuges.
Mark: Right.
Duane: And Forest Carpenter got a hold of me and asked me if I would go out to 3
Sand Lake Refuge in Columbia, South Dakota. “You bet!” So I was assistant manager there for roughly a year and a half. And then I went to Chautauqua, you know in Havana, Illinois as the refuge manager.
Mark: I didn’t know we had a refuge called Chautauqua.
Duane: Oh yeah.
Mark: In Illinois?
Duane: Yeah, it’s right on the Illinois River, the Illinois Natural History Research Center is there, with Frank Bellrose; I worked with Frank.
Mark: Okay. So how long were you at Chautauqua?
Duane: Four years. Then Harvey Nelson called me and he says, “How would you like to go to North Dakota as a wildlife biologist?” Well that wasn’t very keen, I wanted to stay in management, but I went on up there to work in the Wetlands Acquisition Program. And at that time I took up flying; could see the land and the potholes much better, so I got my private license up there. And transferred down to Atlanta in the Refuge Acquisition Program and that was more or less a dead end; they weren’t acquiring any refuges, or adding to any of them, so. Don Smith, who took Fred Glover’s place, asked me if I wanted to come up there and be flyway biologist; jumped to the fact.
Mark: You had enough of Atlanta.
Duane: Yeah, went up there and that’s where it all started.
Mark: So where was up there?
Duane: Washington D.C.
Mark: Washington D.C. Interior Building, yeah.
Duane: I was there four years, and in 1968 I got married and moved to Portland and was the Pacific Flyway biologist there.
Mark: So you worked in at least three of the flyways.
Duane: Oh yeah, yeah. And then let’s see, 1977 I was made Chief of the Waterfowl Population Surveys Program, which I served in until I was forced into retirement in 1983.
Mark: Did that mean going back to D.C. or did you do that from Portland?
Duane: Well they tried to get me back to D.C. and I refused to go, so they relented I guess; ‘cause they had to advertise twice to people, they were trying to get people to go to Washington. I said, I’d been there, done that, I don’t need to come back here.
Mark: So what was your job as Chief of Waterfowl Surveys?
Duane: Well mainly administrating people, and keeping track of funds and so forth and making assignments to various biologists and so forth. And then getting the waterfowl banding program, running that which we employee about 30 students; we didn’t employee them really, we paid GS 2, I guess I call it, wages and we’d have to supervise them. But generally the flyway biologists were easy to take care 4
of, satisfy, except there was not; never had enough money to do things, and that was always a big stumbling block.
Mark: Are there some memorable instances in your career you care to share?
Duane: My flying career you mean?
Mark: Yeah, let’s talk about your flying career, ‘cause you’ve got a big plane beyond you.
[Laughing]
Duane: Well I, let’s see the first airplane I had was a hand me down 180 from Horton Jensen. It was a good airplane except the radios the in it weren’t the best. The only experience I had with that aircraft that was bad, I was flying IFR back to Washington D.C. and I was above the clouds and so forth in the clear and my radios went out. And I had no navigation at all and the only emergency radio I had was way in the back in the baggage compartment, so I had to keep rolling the trim ahead on it trying to get back there, and it’s start up, roll the trim some more. I finally got to it and I got into Fort Wayne, Indiana I guess and they said, after I landed there they said they could tell I was desperate. But I got the radios fixed and went on in to Washington. So with the 210 up at Edmonton Industrial Airport, which is an airport right downtown Edmonton, buildings all around. Took off out of there and blew a jug on the engine, and my heart sank, we’re going to crash. Well my observer John Koerner, I believe it was, turned white and [unintelligible] turned downwind and landed just fine.
Mark: In downtown Edmonton.
Duane: We made it back to the airport.
Mark: Did you have any other incidents when you were a pilot?
Duane: Well yeah, in 712, which was a 206 Amphib floats; well a couple experiences with that one. Just before the surveys one year I fueled the airplane full, it was an airplane I didn’t fly commonly all the time; full of fuel and loaded the observer on and I went out west of Edmonton and there’s a big lake out there, said, “Well we’ll land here and see how it performs.” Well we taxied around a little bit and went to take off, the darn thing would not get in the air; kept running out of space. And we did several attempts, you know, back and forth trying to make waves and so forth that would help us into the air without success. And I said, “John there’s only one way we’re going to get this out of here and that’s if we lighten the load.” So I taxied put pretty close to shore and said, “Get out.” [chuckled] So he got out and I made a couple of runs and was able to get it off the water, and then I came back in a 180 and landed in the field out there and picked him up there. So yeah, the other incident was with the same 206 flying just at the edge of the bush in northern Alberta, going over to the Coal Lake restricted area, military area. And of course we always flew up to almost tree top level so never really bothered about calling people when we flew through the restricted area. And anyhow we were right on the very edge of it anyway, but all a sudden the engine goes [makes noise]. And my gosh, I said “Well something has to be wrong.” I switched tanks and the engine died, switched it back again and it starts 5
sparking and I said, “We’ve got to land, or we’re going in the trees.” So I called Coal Lake tower and declared an emergency and they cleared us to land there; they were very nice to us and refueled us. It turned it out the filter, the gas filter caps were worn out and were venting fuel. And so I spent, I supposed a year’s time explaining that, why I was in the restricted area and why it was necessary to land there. So that’s basically it.
Mark: Any memorable people you worked with?
Duane: Frank Bellrose.
Mark: Tell us about Frank.
Duane: Well he was a, he worked with the wood duck. And every year when I was at Chautauqua, he would say, “Well I’m going to finish my book on the wood duck.” As far as I know, he never did finish it, but he kept finding new things in research with it. He was a very interesting fellow to work with.
Mark: Anybody else you worked with that sticks with you.
Duane: No.
Mark: Well anything else you’d like to recount from your career?
Duane: Not really I guess.
Mark: [laughing] Well then we’re done.
End of interview
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