CREATING CONNECTIONS TO CALIFORNIA’S RESOURCES:
THE HISTORY OF INTERPRETATION IN CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS
A Thesis
Presented to the faculty of the Department of History
California State University, Sacramento
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
History
(Public History)
by
Carolyn Jean Schimandle
FALL 2014 © 2014
Carolyn Jean Schimandle
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii THE HISTORY OF INTERPRETATION IN CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS
A Thesis
by
Carolyn Jean Schimandle
Approved by:
______, Committee Chair Dr. Patrick Ettinger
______, Second Reader Dr. Lee Simpson
______Date
iii Student: Carolyn Jean Schimandle
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis.
______, Department Chair ______Aaron Cohen Date [
Department of History
iv Abstract
of
THE HISTORY OF INTERPRETATION IN CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS
by
Carolyn Jean Schimandle
California was one of the first states in the nation to have a state park system. While a general history of the system up to 1980 has been written, the history of interpretation in the California
Department of Parks and Recreation (more commonly know as California State Parks) had never been documented and analyzed in a single focused study. Of particular interest is how the evolution of interpretation in the California state park system compares to that in the rest of the
United States, especially the National Park Service.
Data for this thesis was gathered from many sources. For the history of California State Parks interpretation these included the department document archives and photographic archives, the
California State Archives, the Center for Sacramento History, California State Parks publications, and private collections of department documents made available to the author. The author also conducted three oral history interviews with past department employees. These oral histories will be deposited in the California State Parks Archives, in both digital recording and transcript form.
The national context was also researched using a wide variety of sources. The website of the
National Association for Interpretation and a publication from that organization provided a broad overview of the development of interpretation in the United States, as did seminal works on interpretation theory written throughout the twentieth century, and historical books and journal v articles on interpretive techniques, trends, and issues. Additional information, especially on specific interpretive methods, came from the National Park Service.
The study reveals that interpretation became increasingly professionalized in California State
Parks throughout the twentieth century, as it did nationwide during the same period.
In virtually all cases, interpretive techniques, training and planning lagged behind the
National Park Service—usually about a decade behind. The main reason for this seems to be
chronically insufficient funding and staffing to carry out programs, not a lack of knowledge
of what was occurring in the National Park Service and other agencies. In the case of distance
learning, California State Parks was a pioneer, and still is ahead of the National Park Service
and other park agencies in the nation in having a system-wide organized program of distance
learning.
______, Committee Chair Patrick Ettinger, Ph.D.
______Date
vi Preface
Visitors to special places such as state parks expect signs and exhibits, nature walks and campfire talks, provoking their interest and inspiring them to care about what is there—although they may not know that the term for this is interpretation. California's state parks have been offering interpretation ever since their beginning in 1864, presenting information in ways that have evolved in the half century since. This thesis explores the history of interpretation in California State Parks.
Those who introduce themselves as interpreters are often asked, “What languages do you speak?” The type of interpretation under discussion here is not language translation. The National Association for Interpretation, an internationally recognized professional organization, defines interpretation as “A mission-based communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and meanings inherent in the resource.” The resource may be cultural, natural, or recreational. Interpretation is most commonly associated with parks, museums, and zoos; interpreters also work for private tour companies. Communication that could qualify as interpretation has existed for thousands of years, but it is only in the last hundred years that the profession of interpretation has become recognized and standards developed.
The profession has reached the point where it is important to preserve and review that professional history. Where have we been, and where are we going? What has been tried and failed, what has worked and should be revived or continued, and what has
vii changed along with changing social norms, tastes, and technology?
The establishment and development of the first state parks in California during the nineteenth and early twentieth-century coincided with the establishment and development of the field of interpretation as a recognized profession. Therefore, the history of interpretation in these parks and the later additions to the California State Park System can serve as a case study of how the field has evolved, while helping inform its future course.
I have been an interpreter for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, more commonly known as California State Parks, since 1996—first as a volunteer, then since 1999 as an employee. I have also been a member of the National Association for
Interpretation since the late 1990s. I have given both natural and cultural history interpretive presentations, helped plan interpretive exhibits and park-wide interpretive programs, and currently work as the Planning and Programs Section Supervisor in the
Interpretation and Education Division. In 2010 Donna Pozzi, the chief of that division, asked me to compile a history of interpretation for the department. That project led to this thesis. While an overall administrative history of California State Parks up to 1980 has been written and published, the history of the department’s interpretive program has not.
I focused my research on trends in interpretation in California State Parks in the context of interpretation practice in the United States. Less than a handful of books and articles have been written about the history of interpretation in the United States; there is room for much more work on this topic. There is one 2006 book on the topic, Tim
viii Merriman and Lisa Brochu’s The History of Heritage Interpretation in the United States.1
A few articles and a slim book on the history of cultural resource interpretation in
U.S. national parks, plus a recent volume on the history of public history in the national
park service have been written. I am grateful especially to the latter two, Barry
Mackintosh’s Interpretation in the National Park Service: A Historical Perspective and
Denise D. Meringolo’s Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New
Genealogy of Public History for providing further national context for this thesis. I found
the National Park Service’s online history resources, which include digitizations of
historical NPS books and reports, helpful when seeking information on the evolution of
specific interpretive methods nationwide.2
Widely-referenced and respected books on interpretation philosophy and
technique also provided broader context, especially Adventures of a Nature Guide by
Enos A. Mills, Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage, and Sam H. Ham’s
Environmental Interpretation: A Practical Guide for People with Big Ideas and Small
Budgets.3
1. Tim Merriman and Lisa Brochu, The History of Heritage Interpretation in the United States (Fort Collins, CO: InterpPress, 2006). 2. Barry Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service: A Historical Perspective (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service,1986); Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) 3. Enos A. Mills, Adventures of a Nature Guide (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920); Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1957); Sam H. Ham, Environmental Interpretation: A Practical Guide for People with Big Ideas and Small Budgets (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1993). ix One secondary source specific to California State Parks—the existing volume on
the system’s history—was an important source for this thesis: California State Parks:
from 1864 to the Present, by Joseph Engbeck.4
Since the secondary sources on California State Parks are lean, I conducted most of the research in primary sources. I sought out department internal reports, interpretive plans, newsletters, photographs, and publicity on interpretive programs. These were invaluable in documenting what interpretive activities took place when and the evolving department structures in regards to natural history and cultural history interpretation.
Primary source materials also included oral history interviews with long-time department employees—both existing interviews and interviews that I conducted and transcribed.
The latter are included as appendices to this thesis.
I found many of these written primary sources in the California State Parks
Archives, and more in the California State Archives. Since the department has begun just in the last few years to formally archive older information, there are many other primary sources tucked away in individual park archives and offices throughout the state. For this project, I was able to use material from the archives at Big Basin Redwoods State Park and in the Interpretation and Education Division office. The Big Basin archives were a good resource both because they are well organized, and because the park is now the
4. Joseph Engbeck, State Parks of California: from 1864 to the Present (Portland, Oregon: Charles H. Belding, 1980). x oldest in the system that was purchased with public funds.5
Unwritten state park sources also informed this thesis. The department
photographic archives provided source material in the form of photographs of interpretive
facilities, exhibits, interpretive programs, and personnel. The California State Parks
Museum Resource Center contains artifacts and exhibits that document past department
interpretation, and the catalog records for these were useful as well. Conversations and
emails with present and past interpretive employees of California State Parks provided
much of the information on recent developments.
I also consulted primary sources outside of the parks department and the state
government. For example, the University of California, Berkeley, Regional Oral History
Office (ROHO) interviewed William Penn Mott, Jr., and Newton B. Drury, both
influential past directors of California State Parks who made significant changes to the
department’s interpretive program. The transcripts include some valuable nuggets on
interpretation practice and policy.
This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 provides the context with a
brief history of interpretation in the United States. Chapter 2 is the history of the
California State Park System and interpretation’s place in that system. Chapter 3
describes the evolution of interpretation in California State Parks. Chapter 4 is the
5. The area immediately surrounding the James Marshall Monument at Coloma (now a small part of Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park) became a State Historic Monument earlier than Big Basin became a state park, but it was purchased with private funds and donated to the state. The purchase of Big Basin by the state specifically for use as a park was a groundbreaking event in the park system’s—and California’s—history. xi analysis and conclusion.
This thesis is not meant to be a definitive history. I hope that others will build upon this work as more information comes to light. It instead gives the reader an opportunity to see how national trends in interpretation have been reflected in California, and therefore more fully understand where interpretation in California State Parks and the nation has been, where it is now, and perhaps even where it may evolve in the future.
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As with any large undertaking, this was not a solo effort. Many people helped me gather the information, organize it, and complete this thesis. First of all, I would like to thank the narrators of the three oral histories: the late Elmer Aldrich, Wes and Celeste Cater, and Doug Bryce. All were gracious, welcoming, and very informative. While I did not find as much information in the interviews that I could include in the thesis as I had hoped, the oral histories will be stored at the
California State Parks Archives and will certainly be useful—and in some points, entertaining— to future researchers.
The two readers, Patrick Ettinger and Lee Simpson, certainly deserve acknowledgement for their support and assistance in reviewing and editing this thesis, plus their patience with the long process and my many questions.
Coworkers in the Interpretation and Education Division were very helpful and generous with information and resources. One member and two past members of the division deserve special thanks. Division Chief Donna Pozzi, who began working for California State Parks in 1976, shared both materials and personal communication about past interpretation organization, methods and media in the department. She was also very supportive of my need to take days off work to research and write. John Werminski (now retired) also shared wisdom from his decades with Parks, and his own research on the history of department interpretation. Especially helpful were the many folders of documents from this research that he gave me upon his retirement. Joe
xiii von Herrmann, founding supervisor of the Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students
(PORTS) program before his retirement, was an indispensible source of information on the genesis and early days of that important and groundbreaking interpretive effort. Heather Holm and Ellen Clark also provided me with information on their areas of expertise.
Department archivist Lola Aguilar and Photographic Archives head Wil Jorae guided me through the process of finding relevant information in their realms. In addition, since both graduated from the CSUS public history master’s program, they assured me that it was possible to finish and matriculate. Susan Blake of Big Basin Redwoods State Park also went out of her way to supply
relevant information.
Others whom I would like to thank are my sister Joy Fatooh, who provided her usual careful
editing and useful suggestions on the early sections, and Nikki Varzos and Maylene Luc, who
offered time management and organization tips, and kept after me to complete it.
Finally, perhaps predictable but certainly heartfelt, appreciation goes to my two daughters and
late husband—Iris McLeary, Kit Schimandle, and Jim Schimandle—for their support both of
working on this thesis and returning to school in my 50s. The times Jim picked me up from
evening classes with a hot pizza in the car were especially thoughtful. That alone probably got him into heaven, if his other good acts did not land him there.
xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page
Preface ...... viii
Acknowledgements ...... xii
List of Tables ...... xv
List of Figures...... xvi
Chapter
1. THE HISTORY OF PARKS INTERPRETATION IN THE UNITED STATES...... 1
2. THE CREATION AND EXPANSION OF CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS ...... 8
3. THE EVOLUTION OF INTERPRETATION IN CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS ...... 45
4. CONCLUSIONS ...... 108
Appendix A. Elmer Aldrich Interview ...... 112
Appendix B. Wesley and Celeste Cater Interview ...... 156
Appendix C. Douglas Bryce Interview...... 204
Bibliography ...... 244
xv LIST OF TABLES Tables Page
1. Proposed 1953 master plan parks and topics...... … 74
2. Parks representing California natural provinces in 1961 recreation program...... …. 75
3. PORTS Program Locations, Units of Study, and Targeted Grades, 2014/2015
School Year ...... …. 107
xvi LIST OF FIGURES Figures Page
1. Division Chief Newton Drury addressing 1957 Park Naturalist Conference at Big Basin
Redwoods State Park.………………………...... ………………………………. 18
2. Leonard Penhale in the Big Basin Redwoods exhibit workshop, 1951 .……………. 19
3. Division of Beaches and Parks Curators' Conference, April 16-17, 1953 ..………… 23
4. Fallen tree exhibit at Richardson Grove State Park, 1940..…………………………. 47
5. Visitors view the Pictorial History of the Redwoods at Big Basin in 1938 ...... 51
6. Standard Display Shelter at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, 1958...... ……………. 60
7. Standard Display Shelter still in use at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park,
April 2011……………………………….………...... …………………………. 61
8. PORTS program in progress, June 2012..………….………………………………. 102
xvii 1
Chapter 1: The History of Parks Interpretation in the United States
To understand the history of interpretation in California State Parks, one needs
some context—the history of interpretation in the United States. The National
Association for Interpretation defines interpretation as “a mission-based communication
process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the
audience and meanings inherent in the resource.” But the use of the word “interpretation”
for the activity that we now call by that name—and the understanding of what
interpretation involves—have changed somewhat through the years. California State
Parks’ interpretation philosophy and training of interpreters have changed along with this
national understanding of interpretation.6
Writing and speaking about nature and history can be traced back to the ancient
Greeks, and probably earlier. But the use of the word “interpretation,” and the genesis of the philosophy and practice of natural and cultural resource interpretation as a field, can perhaps be dated to 1871. In that year John Muir wrote, “I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.” One can feel in this passage the connection that Muir had with the natural world. Creating a connection between the audience and resources, both natural and cultural, a connection that inspires the audience to care for the resources, is now the foundation of all interpretation. Since Muir inspired
6. The Definitions Project, “Definitions Project,” National Association for Interpretation, http://www.definitionsproject.com/definitions/def_full_term.cfm (accessed October 7, 2012). 2
others to appreciate and learn more about the Sierra Nevada and other wild places
through his personal presentations and writing, he was an interpreter.7
Muir’s protégé Enos Mills pioneered the practice of nature guiding at Long’s
Peak and Rocky Mountain National Park in the first two decades of the 1900s. Mills regularly used the title “nature guide” instead of interpreter, but did use the word
“interpret” to describe the nature guide’s work. In his 1920 book Adventures of a Nature
Guide, Mills wrote, “A nature guide is an interpreter of geology, botany, zoology and natural history.” More tellingly, in his essay “The Evolution of Nature Guiding,” he described that work in very much the way modern interpretation is defined: “nature guiding, as we see it, is more inspirational than informational . . . The nature guide arises interest by dealing in big principles—not with detached and colourless information.”8
While Mills was trailblazing interpretive techniques in Colorado, interpretation
was also being further developed farther west. The rise of interpretation in California led
to more widespread programs in the national parks around the country. Inspired by
experiences in Europe, C. M. Goethe, a Sacramento businessman, initiated nature
programs at Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe. In 1919 National Parks director Stephen
T. Mather visited Fallen Leaf Lake and experienced these nature programs, which led to
experimental nature guiding at Yosemite. The California Fish and Game Commission ran
the Yosemite program in its first two years, 1920 and 1921. It was managed by Dr.
7. Sierra Club, “Quotations from John Muir,” Sierra Club, http://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx (accessed August 26, 2014). 8. Tom Danton, Foreword to The Adventures of a Nature Guide, by Enos A. Mills (1920; repr., Estes Park, CO: Temporal Mechanical Press, 2001), 1-10; Mills, Adventures 1920 ed., 194; Mills, Adventures 1920 ed., 249. 3
Harold C. Bryant, the Fish and Game Commission’s educational director, and Dr. Loye
Holmes Miller, a University of California, Los Angeles, professor who had provided nature programs for teachers for many years. Bryant and Miller had given the Fallen Leaf
Lake presentations, and Mather had personally asked them to try a similar program in
Yosemite. The Yosemite Free Nature Guide Service proved very popular. At the end of the 1921 season, Bryant recommended that NPS take over management of the program— which they did. The success of this effort led to the initiation of nature guiding programs in other national parks. NPS started the Yosemite Field School of Natural History in 1925 to train park nature guides for Yosemite and other locations, both inside and outside of national parks. The school continued until 1953, except for a break during World War II.9
Concurrent with the rise of guided interpretation, nature and history exhibits were being developed at national parks and historic monuments. The first national park museum exhibit was created at Yosemite National Park in 1904. It was an arboretum near the Wawona Hotel. By 1905, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Arizona had a small informal museum of artifacts from the site. Both were popular with visitors.10
At the same time, interpretation was not just entertainment for visitors; park managers recognized early on its value as a management tool. “Interpretive programs, including guided tours, campfire talks, and museum exhibitions, protected fragile
9. Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service, 14; Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation”: 31. C. M. Goethe is now held in disrepute, due to his deep involvement in the eugenics movement (including praising Adolph Hitler’s eugenics programs). Nevertheless, he did also work to advance parks and park interpretation. 10. Ralph H. Lewis, Museum Curatorship in the National Park Service: 1904-1982 (Washington, D.C: National Park Service, 1993), 1-2, 12. 4
resources by controlling movements and training the perceptions of tourists,” according to Denise D. Meringolo. And park management became more important as visitor numbers grew. After World War II, at a time when good roads and more cars increased travel opportunities, parks boomed—and along with them, interpretation. Visitors to parks began to expect exhibits and guided walks, and park managers increasingly turned to interpretation to spread messages about resource protection and park regulations.11
The number of national and state parks grew through the post-war years to meet the greater demand, and the number of interpreters naturally increased as well. More formalization of the practice and philosophy of interpretation came with the publication of Interpreting Our Heritage by Freeman Tilden in 1957. Tilden was hired by the
National Park Service in 1954 to study the agency’s interpretive programs. He spent the next two years attending programs throughout the country, and leading tours at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument. Through observation and practice he developed six principles of interpretation. Tilden’s six principles codified ideas expressed by Mills and others, spread these ideas more widely, and provided measures against which interpretation could be evaluated and improved. The six principles are:
1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or being described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile. 2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information. 3. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable. 4. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.
11. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments and National Parks, 158. 5
5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part, and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase. 6. Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults, but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.12
Interpreters embraced Tilden’s principles, which are still taught to this day.
Interpretive practice improved, with interpretive presenters and exhibit planners seeking
to spark interest in their audiences rather than deluge them with more facts than could be
absorbed.13
As interpretation continued to become more common through the next decades, so
did scholarship on the topic. Other influential authors after Tilden include Grant Sharpe
(Interpreting the Environment, 1976) and Sam Ham (Environmental Interpretation,
1992). Their works continued the professionalization of the field; both were widely used as textbooks in college courses on interpretation. Sharpe’s text, which mainly focuses on interpretation management, planning, and techniques, lists three objectives of interpretation. Like the rest of the book, these objectives stress the practical rather than the philosophical:
• The first or primary objective of interpretation is to assist the visitor in developing a keener awareness, appreciation, and understanding of the area he or she is visiting . . . • The second objective of interpretation is to accomplish management goals . . . • The third objective of interpretation is to promote public understanding of an agency and its programs.
12. Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 9. 13. The 50th anniversary fourth edition of Interpreting Our Heritage was published in 2008, a testament to the timelessness of Tilden’s work. 6
Interpreting the Environment is no longer a staple of college classes in interpretation, but
these three objectives still form the basis of any institution’s interpretive efforts.14
Environmental Interpretation combines both practical and philosophical information on interpretation, all based on research. While the nuts-and-bolts section of the book is now dated, the first section—“Interpretation Concepts”—continues to be a valued resource for both new and experienced interpreters. Ham’s emphasis on thematic interpretation, in which each interpretive message has a main idea for the audience to remember (not just a topic), has made a major impact. The theme illuminates what is important about the topic, and often provides a take-home message of an action the audience members can take to protect resources. As Dr. Ham states in his book, the theme should answer the question, “So what?” Answering this question goes a long way toward connecting visitors to the resources.15
Interpreters banded together to form professional organizations as the profession
matured. The Association of Interpretive Naturalists was formally founded in 1958, and
the Western Interpreters Association in 1968. They merged in 1988 to become the
National Association for Interpretation (NAI), which as of 2008 had 5,000 members
worldwide.16
14. Grant Sharpe, Interpreting the Environment (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), 4. 15. Ham, Environmental Interpretation, 23. 16. Merriman and Brochu, The History of Heritage Interpretation in the United States, 33-36; National Association for Interpretation, “Who We Are,” National Association for Interpretation, http://www.interpnet.com/nai/About/Who_We_Are/nai/_About/Who_We_Are.aspx?hke y=4cdd6596-2d83-432c-80a4-fe1384c8a42a (accessed June 1, 2013). 7
Today, many professional interpreters complete college coursework in
interpretation as well as either natural history or cultural history-related degrees. NAI
also offers professional certifications for interpretive guides, interpretive planners, and
interpretive trainers, a further indication that interpretation is now a recognized
profession in the United States.
Audiences, too, have grown increasingly sophisticated. While visitors would flock
to a park museum exhibit in the 1930s because of its novelty, and attend a campfire
program or guided hike—regardless of its quality or relevance—because there was little
other entertainment in a campground, they now expect a more engaging and
professionally-presented experience. Perhaps this is because they compare the experience
to the many well-produced movies, television shows, and other informative entertainment
available to them now; perhaps it is because as interpretation has become more
sophisticated they have learned to expect a higher level of quality. Either way,
interpreters and audiences are bound to continue to drive the field of interpretation to an
even higher level of quality in the future.17
17. “Redwoods Pictorial Historic Museum Attracts Thousands of Visitors,” California Conservationist, November 1938, 19; Myron Cropsey, interview by Maureen Amos Jackson, 14 September 2002, transcript, Visionaries, Visitors and Valued Workers: Big Basin Redwoods State Park Centennial Oral History Project, vol. 3, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; Jim and Alleen Brush, interview by Kim Baker, 30 August 2002, transcript, Visionaries, Visitors and Valued Workers: Big Basin Redwoods State Park Centennial Oral History Project, vol. 3, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; Ruth Crawford Carroll, interview by Eva Fewel, 23 April 2003, transcript, Visionaries, Visitors and Valued Workers: Big Basin Redwoods State Park Centennial Oral History Project, vol. 1, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA. 8
Chapter 2: The Creation and Expansion of California State Parks
In 1864, at the height of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed
legislation that granted the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to the state of
California as a reserve to be enjoyed by all the people. Why was this important? In a
broader context, it was important because this was the beginning of the National Parks
idea, and one of the world’s first State Parks. For our purposes, it is important because
this grant made Yosemite the first California state park.
Early interpretation in the state parks was confined mainly to a few enthusiasts or
entrepreneurs working alone, or employees not classified as interpreters who included
interpretation in their other job duties. As the story of the California State Park System
starts with Yosemite, so does the system’s interpretation history. Galen Clark, Yosemite’s
first Guardian (a position akin to ranger), guided visitors around the valley. He continued
this activity after his two terms as Guardian. James Mason Hutchings wrote in his 1886
In the Heart of the Sierras that from the Guardian
. . . can be obtained information, not only concerning the rules and regulations adopted by the Board of Commissioners, for the management of the Valley in the interests of the public; but the best places to camp, the points most noteworthy to see, and the best time and manner of seeing them, with answers to every reasonable question intelligent persons may ask concerning this wonderful spot. In short he will, to the best of his ability, be the living embodiment of a cyclopedia of Yo Semite; and that politely, cheerily, and pleasantly.18
Another early Yosemite interpreter was John Muir. As noted above, Muir has been credited with initiating the use of the word “interpretation” in 1871, while living
18. Michael G. Lynch, Rangers of California’s State Parks (Auburn, CA: 125th Anniversary Committee, 1996), 13. 9
near Yosemite, and his written works about Yosemite certainly provide the spark of
inspiration along with information that qualify them as interpretation. Muir was not only
an interpretive writer; he also provided personal interpretation of Yosemite to some
fortunate visitors to the park in its state-run years, including President Theodore
Roosevelt.19
Muir was not the only one writing interpretively about Yosemite. Other written works about the Yosemite state grant that could be considered interpretive include the
1869 Yosemite Guide-book by California’s state geologist J. D. Whitney, and the previously-quoted In the Heart of the Sierras by James Mason Hutchings. Hutchings
could also be considered another early Yosemite provider of personal interpretation. He
“entertained his guests by lectures on the geology of the region and by conducting them
on tours” during his years as a Yosemite hotelier, which ended in 1874.20
Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove stayed in California’s control for almost 40 years, but were chronically underfunded and, hence, not well managed. Finally, in 1906,
California returned the grant to the federal government to be added to the surrounding
Yosemite National Park, which had been designated in 1890.21
19. Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service, 1. “Personal interpretation” includes all interpretation personally presented by an interpreter to an audience, for example guided tours and living history demonstrations. 20. Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service, 1; C. Frank Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation through World War II,” Journal of Forest History 22, no. 1 (January 1978): 26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3983253 (accessed January 16, 2011); Hank Johnston, The Yosemite Grant 1864-1906: A Pictorial History (Yosemite National Park, CA: Yosemite Association, 2008), 76-81. 21. The return of Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to federal control was at least partially the result of John Muir’s conversations with President Teddy Roosevelt. Muir 10
Yosemite may have been the first California state park, but it was not the only one
by the time it returned to federal control. A strong historic preservation movement had
developed in California in the late 1800s. The Native Sons of the Golden West was
founded in 1875 as a fraternal order dedicated to preserving the State of California’s short
but significant history. Their first major action took place in 1889, when they persuaded
the state legislature that a monument to James Marshall was needed. The state had a large
bronze statue topping a granite monument erected overlooking the site where Marshall
discovered gold in 1848. The Native Sons gave the state 25 acres of land surrounding the
monument in 1890, and the monument was dedicated and opened to the public that May.
The following year the Native Sons transferred Sutter’s Fort to the state.22
In this same era, concern about the destruction of California’s notable natural resources was growing, especially the shrinking redwood forests. Artist and photographer
Andrew Hill visited a privately owned redwood grove in the Santa Cruz Mountains in
1900 on a newspaper assignment to take pictures of the impressive trees. The owner would not allow Hill to photograph the trees. Hill was incensed that these natural wonders could not be shared with everyone. He gained the support of influential friends, who banded together to form the Sempervirens League. They succeeded in their campaign to convince the state to establish a public park at Big Basin, a few miles from the grove Hill had first visited. California Redwood Park was established in 1902, the
was critical of California’s management of the reserve. He urged Roosevelt to have the federal government take over the state-run portions of Yosemite. 22. Native Sons of the Golden West, “About Us,” Native Sons of the Golden West, http://www.nsgwca.com/about-us/ (accessed September 7, 2014); Engbeck, State Parks of California, 35-36. 11
first California state park purchased with public funds. The park is now known as Big
Basin Redwoods State Park. Hill stayed on at the park to paint and photograph, and to inform visitors about the redwoods. This was the beginning of interpretation at Big Basin.
Hill’s informal interpretation and that of his predecessors in Yosemite paralleled similar informal interpretive efforts in the national parks around this time. For example, in an interesting coincidence, J.E. Haynes—a photographer with a studio at Yellowstone
National Park—gave talks at Old Faithful c. 1907, the same timeframe that Hill was at
Big Basin.23
These first California state parks, and others added to the system in the early twentieth century—for example Fort Ross State Historic Park and Humboldt Redwoods
State Park—were managed by an assortment of different state agencies and commissions.
It was not until 1927 that the legislature created one entity to manage them all—the
Division of Parks, under the Department of Resources.
While a formal program of interpretation was begun even before the establishment of the state park system, it differed in one major aspect from the state parks interpretation program of today: natural history and cultural history interpretation were separate programs. The analysis in this chapter will begin with natural history, and then address cultural history interpretation.
Natural History Interpretation in California State Parks
In 1926, the California Fish and Game Commission established the first formal
23. California Department of Parks and Recreation, Interpretive Training Manual (Preliminary Draft) (Sacramento: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1968), section 1-B, 1; Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation”: 28. 12
state-run natural history interpretation program in any of the state parks, at California
Redwood Park. This was one year before the establishment of the California state park system, and six years after the Fish and Game Commission had begun the Yosemite nature guide program. Financing came from Fish and Game License fees. The first guides were J. B. Newell and Emily Smith, both graduates of the Yosemite Field School of
Natural History. They presented daytime field trips and evening lectures on fish and game conservation. For the first three years, the guides worked without immediate supervision; then in 1929 the Fish and Game Commission hired Rodney Ellsworth to organize and lead them. When the Division of Fish and Game had to stop paying
Ellsworth due to financial constraints in 1932, he stayed on as a volunteer, splitting the program cost with one of the concessionaires. Two years later, the Division of Parks took over the nature guiding program at Big Basin. Ellsworth continued working there for more than 10 seasons.24
A formal nature-guiding program had begun in Rocky Mountain National Park about a decade before the one at California Redwood Park. Like the California program, the park did not directly fund the Rocky Mountain program: the guides were employed by local hotels but licensed by the National Park Service.25
24. California Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fish and Game, Thirtieth Biennial Report for the Years 1926-1928 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1929), 85; California Department of Parks and Recreation, Interpretive Training Manual, section 1-B, 1; Earl Hansen, “The Better Ranger,” News & Views (Sacramento: California Department of Natural Resources, Division of Beaches and Parks), July 1957, 3. 25. Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation”: 28. 13
The year following the creation of the Division of Parks, state voters passed a bond measure to provide matching funds to obtain new state parks. Frederick Law
Olmsted, Jr., was hired to perform a statewide survey identifying appropriate park locations. Olmsted recognized the need for a program of education. He wrote in his report that in order to preserve the state parks and have visitors fully enjoy them it was necessary “to teach the great mass of well-intentioned people how to get what they want in enjoyment of scenic and recreational values, how to get it successfully for themselves now and on their own initiative, and how to get it without destroying the natural assets on which the continued enjoyment of such values depends.”26
Passage of the park bond led to rapid expansion of the state park system. When the bond passed in 1928, there were 17 state parks and historic monuments in the system.
By 1938, there were 70. Generous donors had provided land gifts or funds for land acquisition, and bond funds had matched these donations. But at first—especially at the beginning of the Great Depression—there was concern about how the parks would be developed. This problem was solved when President Franklin D. Roosevelt created first the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1933, and then the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) in 1936. The WPA and CCC built trails, roads, picnic areas, campgrounds, visitor centers, museums, employee housing, and more in state and national parks around the country. These efforts in California created the infrastructure that allowed the young state parks to open for public use. More important for interpretation, they built museums, visitor centers, and campfire centers. As will be
26. Joseph H. Engbeck Jr., State Parks of California, 58. 14
further explored in chapter 3, the WPA created museum exhibits for two of the most
popular California state parks.27
Personal interpretation continued despite the Depression. Other parks besides
California Redwood Park started with guides employed by organizations outside of the state park system. For example, the Save-the-Redwoods League started a nature guide service at Richardson Grove in 1934. The Carnegie Institute employed a guide for Point
Lobos Reserve in 1935. The Division of Parks took over funding of both of these guide positions in 1936. The Garden Club of America hired a guide at the Garden Club grove in
Humboldt Redwoods State Park for several years starting in 1936.28
The institution of the California civil service system in 1936 brought about the creation of the State Park Nature Guide classification, and the first group was hired that year. Seasonal guides were selected from the eligible list and assigned to Point Lobos
Reserve, Big Basin Redwoods, and Richardson Grove for that summer. In 1938, the
Division of Parks hired a full-time permanent nature guide for the first time—Earl
Hanson, who had been the first state-funded nature guide at Richardson Grove. He worked out of the San Francisco headquarters office, where his duties were to guide in one of the parks during the summer season and prepare publications during the rest of the year. He also traveled the state presenting a public information program with colored slides on the California State Park System. In 1940 Hanson became General Supervisor over the entire education program. At that time, this included recreation leaders in the
27. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 57-66; Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation”: 41. 28. Hanson, “The Better Ranger,” 3. 15
parks, since the recreation leaders were in charge of leading campfire programs.29
The beginning of World War II led to the end of the CCC and WPA, and to a
quieter time in California State Parks. Some parks closed, and some of these closed parks
were used for war exercises. Attendance was lower at the remaining open parks, as gas,
oil and rubber rationing led to decreased travel around the state. But this proved to be a
temporary lull. The end of the war brought a huge surge in park use due not only to the
lifting of rationing, but to a California population boom, better roads, and more
automobiles per capita. Correspondingly, the interpretation efforts of the Department
grew. The Conservation Education section was established in 1946, becoming the fourth
of four sections that comprised the headquarters organization at this time. According to
the California State Park Commission Postwar Report, the new section was “responsible
for a conservation education program within the State Parks, interpreting the natural
values of the park system to visitors, park biological surveys, planning and creation of
nature museum displays and trails, publications, general public information, and
lectures.”30
The formation of this new section reflected concern over the degradation of the natural features the state was working to protect, caused by the tremendous boom in park
29. California Department of Parks and Recreation, Interpretive Training Manual, section 1-B, 2; California Department of Parks and Recreation, Interpretive Training Manual, section 1-B, 3. Hanson had a long and illustrious career with California State Parks, eventually serving as Deputy Chief for many years. 30. California State Park Commission Postwar Progress Report: January 1, 1946 to June 30, 1948 (Sacramento: California Department of Natural Resources, Division of Beaches and Parks, 1948), 2; California Department of Parks and Recreation, Interpretive Training Manual, section 1-B, 2. The other three sections besides Conservation Education were Administration, Engineering and Planning, and Land. 16
use after the war. The intent was to use conservation education to protect park lands, by
educating the public on rules and regulations, and raising their appreciation of nature so
they would be inspired to preserve it. The first supervisor of Conservation Education was
Edward Dolder. His duties included hiring and training nature guides and recreation
leaders, supplying them with the equipment they needed (such as slide projectors),
writing and producing park brochures, taking photographs, and preparing slide shows. In
1947 the summer nature guide program was enlarged to five guides. They worked at the
busiest parks—Richardson Grove, Calaveras Big Trees, Big Basin Redwoods, Pfeiffer
Big Sur, and Cuyamaca Rancho. Dolder had sought a sixth guide for Prairie Creek
Redwoods, but housing could not be provided and he was not able to find a candidate
who was willing to camp out for the entire summer.31
The state park system grew quickly throughout the late 1940s and 1950s to keep
up with the new demand, and again, interpretation grew as the system expanded.
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. completed a second survey from 1946-1950 to again identify
important places for preservation and recreation, focusing on coastal areas. Many of these
were subsequently acquired, especially in the late 1950s. Beach parks were particularly
emphasized in the new acquisitions, a development foreshadowed by the division’s name
change to Division of Beaches and Parks in 1941.32
Edward Dolder’s successor as supervisor of Conservation Education was Elmer
Aldrich, who greatly expanded the section and the seasonal naturalist ranks from 1949-
1957. In 1948 there were seven seasonal naturalists in seven parks. At the end of
31. News and Views, December 1948, 4; Engbeck, State Parks of California, 81. 32. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 77-95. 17
Aldrich’s tenure, there were 25 seasonal naturalists in 16 parks, two seasonal Supervising
Naturalists who traveled between parks, and one full-time naturalist at Anza-Borrego
Desert State Park who assisted elsewhere during the summer season. The naturalists not only led interpretive programs, they conducted research and compiled lists of plants and animals in their parks as well. Aldrich also instituted five-day-long annual trainings for all of the seasonal naturalists. These “naturalist conferences,” begun in 1952 and held at
Big Basin Redwoods State Park, increased the professionalism and skills of the seasonal naturalists. They included practical training in interpretive techniques and research methods, and discussion of issues facing the state parks.33
33. Postwar Progress Report, 15; Newton Drury to Santo J. Prete, memorandum, 18 October 1957, private collection; List, California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1958, Natural Heritage Park Naturalists Correspondence collection, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; Elmer Aldrich, interview by Carolyn Schimandle, 19 February 2010, Digital recording and transcript, California State Parks Archives; News and Views, August 1956, 10-12. Some time between 1948 and 1954 the classification name changed from “nature guide” to “seasonal naturalist.” Anza-Borrego’s busy season, then as now, was in winter. 18
Figure 1: Division Chief Newton Drury addressing 1957 Park Naturalist Conference at Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Elmer Aldrich is to Drury’s left. Earl Hanson is to Aldrich’s left. (Photographer unknown. Courtesy of California State Parks, 2014.California State Parks Photographic Archives, Sacramento, catalog number 090-P45429.)
Nonpersonal interpretation, such as indoor and outdoor exhibits and interpretive panels, became a regular part of the interpretation program in 1948. In that year, Leonard
Penhale became the organization’s first exhibit designer and fabricator, hired into the newly created position of State Park Naturalist. Penhale was an experienced exhibit designer and taxidermist who had previously worked for the California Academy of
Sciences. His first California State Parks workshop was a small room at the back of the
Big Basin Redwoods State Park Nature Lodge. In 1952 a new exhibit laboratory was built in Sacramento, an indication that nonpersonal interpretation’s importance was 19
increasing. Penhale was moved to Sacramento and given a staff.34
Figure 2: Leonard Penhale in the Big Basin Redwoods exhibit workshop, 1951. (Photo by Elmer Aldrich. © 1951, California State Parks. California State Parks Photographic Archives, Sacramento, catalog number 090-3858.)
Cultural History Interpretation in California State Parks
California State Parks had devoted substantial time and attention to nature interpretation through the first half of the twentieth century. What of the interpretation of historic sites? For the first decades of their existence, interpretation was handled separately and differently at units classified as State Historical Monuments (as the State
Historic Parks were then called) than it was at the units classified as State Parks.
34. News and Views, August 1948, 5; Elmer Aldrich to Newton B. Drury, memorandum, 21 January 1953, private collection. 20
Interpretation at these sites was the responsibility of custodians. Among their other
duties, custodians conducted visitors on tours and organized exhibits. They were
permanent year-round employees, supervised at the field level. There was no
headquarters oversight devoted to history. Descriptions of historic sites and the state’s
history during this period use words like “quaint,” “colorful,” and “picturesque,” which
gives a strong hint of how interpretation was handled at these parks.35
The California State Park Commission issued a Historical Monuments
Administration Policy in 1937. It called for interpretation at State Historical Monuments, supervised by a trained historian, if possible. Section 6 of the policy states:
Interpretation: Visitors should be given full opportunity to learn the meaning of each historical monument through signs, publications, museum exhibits confined to objects appropriate to the site, and through guidance by qualified and properly trained custodians. When practicable, the system of State Historical Monuments should be supervised by an officer of the State Park Commission, preferably a trained historian, acting under the Chief of the Division of Parks. Upon such officer would rest responsibility for publications and museum exhibits, for protective work and restoration, and for instruction of custodians and guides.
Apparently the centralized supervision was not “practicable” at that time and for 15 years thereafter, when at last a State Historian was hired.36
The bifurcation of cultural and natural history interpretation was a concern to a
35. “Activities of the State Division of Beaches and Parks for the month of April, 1945,” A.E. Henning, Chief Division of Beaches and Parks, report to General Warren T. Hannum, Director, Department of Natural Resources, folder F3735:91, Natural Resources-Administration-Director Beaches and Parks Division Monthly Activity Reports file, California State Archives (hereafter cited as Director Monthly Activity Reports file). Curators were called “custodians” until the name was changed with the concurrence of the State Personnel Board in 1945. 36. “Historical Monuments Administration Policy Is Announced by the State Park Commission,” California Conservationist, October 1937, 21, 23. 21
number of individuals in California State Parks in the 1950s. In 1952 the Division of
Beaches and Parks hired Hubert O. Jenkins, who had worked as a naturalist at both state
and national parks in California, to do a study and prepare a report on the interpretive
services in the California State Park System. Despite only studying the natural history
interpretation (per instructions), one of Mr. Jenkins recommendations was to remove the
divide between cultural and natural history interpretation. As he pointed out in the report,
“There can be no hard and fast line drawn between historical monuments and parks.
Some historical monuments also have natural history features and many natural parks
have a wealth of human history as interesting to the visitor as the natural history.”
Despite this recommendation, supervision of historical monument interpretation
remained separate from natural history interpretation for eight more years.37
History interpretation received a major boost in 1953, when Dr. Vernon Aubrey
Neasham was hired as the first State Historian and put in charge of the newly created
History Section. He stayed in this position until 1960, overseeing historical interpretation in California State Parks, among many other duties. This was not Neasham’s first work for the division, though it was the first time he was a division employee. He had been one of two editors of the California Historic Landmark Project, which was cosponsored by the California Division of Parks and the Federal Writers’ Project (part of the WPA). The
Landmark Project produced essays and monographs on California state parks and historic sites, and historical monuments. Later, as a National Park Service historian, his services
37. Hubert O. Jenkins, “Report on the Interpretive Service of the State Parks of California,” 1 November 1952, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA, 29; “Roster of Personnel: Division of Beaches and Parks,” October 1960, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA, 2-3. 22
were made available to the California State Park Commission for several historical studies and plans, including the first master planning studies for Columbia during the period when the division was attempting to acquire it, in 1948. The significance of
Neasham’s appointment was expressed by Division Chief Newton Drury in the employee newsletter:
A milestone in our affairs has been passed in the establishment of a History Branch in our Division and the appointment of Dr. V. Aubrey Neasham, on January 5th, to the newly established position of Historian. The filling of this post by a pre-eminently qualified historian like Dr. Neasham represents an important step forward in the organization of a well-rounded State Park System in California. Equally important is the fact that we have gained proper recognition of this phase of our work by the Legislature and other state authorities. California’s rich historical background is one of its great assets, and technically guided preservation and interpretative programs at our State Historical Monuments will make the most of this resource for the education and enjoyment of our visitors. We administer some outstanding historic properties, and have an able corps of Curators and Rangers at these sites. Many of them have worked with Dr. Neasham on our historical program. He will be the keeper of our conscience in historical matters, and the chief coordinator of our historical interests. . . . Twenty-two major historical monuments as well as several important historical parks are a part of the California State Park System, and under Dr. Neasham’s guidance, and that of the staff that we hope gradually to build up for him, we aim for a classic accomplishment in preserving, restoring and interpreting these eloquent reminders of California’s historic past.
Neasham dove immediately into his new work, touring the State Historical Monuments and consulting with the staff at each. He organized a Curators’ Conference that was held just four months after he was hired. (The classification name had been changed from
“custodian” to “curator” in 1941.) Neasham was not a direct supervisor of the curators at historical monuments; this was the responsibility of the area supervisors. In a 1956 job description he stated that he provided “technical supervision” to field personnel, 23
“particularly the curators.” He provided considerable guidance on interpretive techniques to the area supervisors, district superintendents and curators. The History Section also produced publications and advised on exhibits for the historic monuments.38
Figure 3: Division of Beaches and Parks Curators' Conference, April 16-17, 1953, Santa Barbara, California. The curators discussed problems at the State Historical Monuments plus potential future acquisitions. Division Chief Newton Drury is at the far left; Aubrey Neasham is in the third row from front, third from right. (Courtesy of the Center for Sacramento History, catalog number 1982/078/1131.)
Natural history interpretation continued to be managed separately. A 1953 memo from Division Chief Newton Drury announced a new Interpretation Section with both cultural history and natural history. He referred in the memo to a new organization chart
38. University of California San Diego Library Special Collections and Archives, “California Historic Landmark Project Collection,” Regents of the University of California, http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0204.html (accessed October 28, 2014); News and Views, January 1953, 1; “Job Description,” 1956, Aubrey Neasham Collection, 1982/78, Center for Sacramento History, Sacramento, CA (hereafter cited as Neasham Collection). An interesting sidenote on Neasham is that he suggested the National Park Service arrowhead emblem in 1949. The state park system was divided into a few large districts, which were further divided into areas. 24
showing this change. But the 1955 employee roster still listed two separate sections.39
By 1957, the name of the Conservation Education section had been changed to
Natural History and Conservation. John Michael succeeded Elmer Aldrich as section supervisor that year. Aldrich had been tapped to head the staff of the California Outdoor
Recreation Plan Committee, the first plan of its kind in the nation. Two years later,
Aubrey Neasham and John Michael wrote a joint memo to the Deputy Chief of Technical
Services, recommending formation of a new Interpretation Section to include both cultural and natural history. They cited a recommendation by the Legislative Analyst’s
Office and Sub-Committee on Beaches and Parks of the State Assembly. They also noted that the combined Interpretation Section had appeared on the Division’s Organization
Chart for many years (probably since the 1953 Organization Chart referred to by Drury), though it had not occurred in practice. The “Natural History and Conservation” and
“History” sections finally merged in the summer of 1960. John Michael became the head of the new “Interpretive Services” section. His staff included a naturalist, historian and archeologist. The Interpretive Services Section handled natural and cultural resource management, as well as interpretation.40
Protection of park resources continued to be emphasized as an important outcome
39. Newton Drury to All Personnel, memorandum, 16 March 1953, Neasham Collection. 40. Aubrey Neasham and John Michael to the Deputy Chief of Technical Services, memorandum, 8 July1959, Neasham Collection; “Roster of Personnel: Division of Beaches and Parks,” October 1960, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; “Roster of Personnel: Division of Beaches and Parks,” October 1961, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; The Resources Agency of California, Department of Parks and Recreation, Division of Beaches and Parks, Naturalist Training Manual (Sacramento: The Resources Agency of California, Department of Parks and Recreation, Division of Beaches and Parks, 1963), chapter 2, 13. 25
of interpretation. Educating and entertaining visitors was just a means to the end of
getting them to care about resource protection and follow park rules. The 1963
department Naturalist Training Manual stated that, “Only through the cooperation of an
informed citizenry can these important areas in public trust be adequately protected.
Heightened knowledge and understanding of the natural and historic features and a
consideration of the importance of preserving these features, for the enjoyment of this
and future generations, should add greatly to visitor enjoyment and afford lasting and
satisfying benefits.”41
The structure of the department’s Interpretive Services Section changed again by
1963. That year’s roster shows a separate “Archeological Survey” section with a State
Park Archeologist and a Historian I, and no archeologist in the Interpretive Services
Section. Otherwise Interpretive Services stayed the same. With history and natural history personal interpretation management at last merged, all that remained was for personal and nonpersonal interpretation to come under the same roof. In 1966 the
Interpretive Services Section’s Exhibit Laboratories merged with the rest of the section, which moved to joint facilities at 16th and L streets in Sacramento.42
An interesting side-note from 1966 was the hiring of the “first lady Naturalist,”
Jeanette Reddehase, who worked at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Since Emily
Smith had been one of the first two nature guides at Big Basin in 1926, under the
Division of Fish and Game program, Reddehase was not technically the first female
41. Naturalist Training Manual, chapter 2, 10a. 42. “Roster of Personnel: Division of Beaches and Parks,” October 1963, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA. 26
naturalist in a California state park. She may have had the distinction of being the first female naturalist hired directly by California State Parks, but probably not. In a 1972 oral history interview, Newton Drury recalled the California Division of Parks hiring two women as nature guides in 1934. Even if Reddehase was not the first female California
State Parks naturalist, it is interesting that a female naturalist was an oddity worthy of note in 1966, given the overwhelming number of female interpreters versus male currently in the department.43
Larger changes to the management of the California State Park System led to more changes to the Interpretive Services Section in 1967. Coincident with the combining of the Division of Beaches and Parks and the Division of Recreation into the
Department of Parks and Recreation, the Interpretive Services Section was completely reorganized into a division of the new department, and its functions limited to just communication and interpretation. A Public Information section was added, and natural and cultural resource management moved to a new Resource Management and Protection
43. Burgess W. Heacox to All Park Interpretive Specialists and Supervising Park Interpretive Specialists, memorandum, 28 December 1966, private collection; Newton Bishop Drury, Parks and Redwoods, 1919-1971, by Amelia R. Fry and Susan Schrepfer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office, 1972), 249-250, http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/subjectarea/natres/parks_envir.html (accessed January 20, 2013). Newton Drury had a long history with California State Parks, starting when he and brother Aubrey became involved in the early days of the Save-the-Redwoods League, which was founded in 1917. Drury served as the league’s secretary for many years. Before the advent of civil service in California, he was concurrently the Acquisition Officer for the Division of Parks. Drury headed up the National Park Service during World War II and into the late 1940s, then returned to California and became director of the state park system. He remained involved in the Save-the-Redwoods League and state park matters until his death in the early 1970s. 27
Division. The result was the new Division of Information and Interpretation.44
There was also a change in department philosophy and mission around this time,
spurred by societal changes. System growth had continued in the 1960s, although at a
slower rate than in the preceding three decades. In the late 1960s, as a response to urban
unrest and the growing movement for racial, ethnic and gender equality, the department
began to reach out to a more diverse population. Outreach was especially targeted at
urban residents who did not visit remote state parks. The drive to become more relevant
to all Californians was spearheaded by William Penn Mott, Jr. Mott had been appointed
director of the Department of Parks and Recreation by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967.
It coincided with a movement in the National Park Service to make their interpretation
more relevant to diverse audiences. The department’s outreach efforts led to the
acquisition of Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park (SHP), the first California state
park to commemorate African American history, and Candlestick State Recreation Area
(SRA) in San Francisco, the first urban California state park. Another result was the Park
Experience trailer, a 40-foot trailer adapted to bring exhibits to urban areas where
residents often had not visited any state parks. (The Park Experience trailer is covered in
more detail in chapter 3.) The trend toward urban parks continued through the 2000s,
with the addition of three in the city of Los Angeles: Kenneth Hahn SRA, Los Angeles
SHP, and Rio de Los Angeles SRA.45
44. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 104-105. 45. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 115-118; Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service, 79. Mott’s long career in parks included leading both Oakland city parks and the East Bay Regional Park District before his time at California State Parks. Early on, he had been a landscape architect for the National Park Service, and in 28
The role of the state park ranger changed in response to changing times in the late
1960s, too. A study called “Crime Control in the California State Parks,” completed in
early 1969, documented a rise in criminal activity within the boundaries of the state
parks. It recommended comprehensive law enforcement training for full-time, permanent
state park rangers. Director Mott concurred, and rangers began receiving this training in
1969.46
Increased law enforcement was not the only change to the rangers’ duties in the final years of the 1960s. Mott decided in late 1967 to reorganize field interpretation, which not only affected the rangers, but shook up the practice and organization of interpretation throughout the department. The director intended for permanent staff to take the lead in interpretation. He thought that interpretation was too important to be left to seasonal workers, and that some of the seasonal naturalists, most of whom were teachers, viewed their summer positions merely as nice paid vacations. Mott eliminated the Seasonal Naturalist classification, and ordered the hiring of a permanent employee, either a Historian or Naturalist, depending on the dominant focus in the district, to oversee interpretation in each of the six districts. The rangers, with help from other personnel, were now expected to handle front-line interpretation along with their other duties. Rangers had not been trained in interpretation before this change. In most locations, interpretation was not among their regular tasks. The district interpreters were
that position had been involved in the CCC projects in California State Parks. After his tenure at California State Parks, he became director of the National Park Service. The exhibit trailer had had a previous life, as the “California 200” exhibit trailer, which is covered in chapter 3. Unlike the Park Experience Trailer, this previous incarnation had not been planned as an outreach to urban residents that did not visit parks. 46. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 105-106. 29
funded through the elimination of the seasonal naturalist positions. A new seasonal
ranger classification was created at the same time. All of the seasonal naturalists from the
previous season applied for seasonal ranger positions, but, like the rangers in permanent
positions, the seasonal rangers had to perform other duties besides interpretation. In
general, this did not work out well for the ex-naturalists hired as seasonal rangers, and
some were unable to qualify to be hired.47
The new system was quickly implemented. Hiring of district interpreters began in
February 1968. After a trial run over Easter week, the changes in interpretation were in
place by the summer season. The reports from the field at the end of that first summer
showed mixed results. The loss of the seasonal naturalists had a major effect on the
amount of interpretation that took place. For example, in the summer 1966 season there
had been 31 dedicated seasonal naturalists in 23 parks with interpretive programs.
Suddenly the rangers were expected to cover for those 31 naturalists, with less time to
devote to the task. The total number of interpretive programs statewide in summer 1968
were about half what they had been the previous year. While permanent staff at most
parks prepared for and presented regular programs, this was sometimes during
uncompensated overtime. Completion of other ranger responsibilities slipped in some
47. William Penn Mott, Jr. to John H. Knight, memorandum, 22 November 1967; William Penn Mott, Jr., “Managing the California State Park System, 1967-1974,” by Anne Lage, in Services for Californians: Executive Department Issues in the Reagan Administration, 1967-1974 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office, 1986), 18, http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/subjectarea/pol_gov/reagan.html; Engbeck, State Parks of California, 105; Douglas Bryce, interview by Carolyn Schimandle, 22 January 2011, digital recording and transcript, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA. 30
cases, too: there was grumbling that operations and maintenance were suffering from the time taken for interpretation. In many locations seasonal staff members did much more of the actual interpretation than the director intended. The drop in program numbers and the larger amount presented by seasonals than intended was not due to overwork alone. The permanent ranger staff did not universally embrace the opportunity to present interpretation; a few refused to give programs or did so only grudgingly.
While the transition was rocky, the change to the department’s interpretation structure did have at least one positive effect that first season: because the presentation of interpretive programs was not dependent on the assignment of a seasonal naturalist to a park, interpretation could take place in parks where it had previously not. The end-of- season reports noted that 1968 was the first time interpretive programs were given at any
State Recreation Area or State Beach. The groundbreakers in this were parks on the
Central Coast: Carpinteria, Pismo Beach, Gaviota, and Point Mugu48
The season-end report for 1969 was more positive. While seasonal interpretive personnel had to be hired in some areas (a necessity that Director Mott had wanted to avoid), there was “a great deal more willing participation [in interpretation] on the part of permanent employees than we had experienced previously. Our rangers were constantly seeking and developing new ideas and innovations; and for the most part were very successful.” Employees were looking forward to statewide interpretive training workshops, to be held in the winter. District Interpretive Specialists also planned to hold
48. John H. Michael to Robert G. Bates, memorandum, 3 October 1968, private collection; News and Views, April 1968, 10; Burgess W. Heacox to All Park Interpretive Specialists and Supervising Park Interpretive Specialists (seasonal), memorandum, 28 December 1966, private collection. 31
their own local trainings. While the enthusiasm for the new arrangement had increased,
there were still some bumps in the road. The number of campfire programs (the only type
of programs for which there are statistics for the two years immediately after the change)
stayed about the same, still much lower than the numbers previously. The field districts
again reported understaffing issues, with several commenting that more permanent
interpretive personnel were needed. This may have been the reason for the continuing
low program numbers.49
Mott not only changed who was providing interpretation, he made changes in how
interpretation was funded. The Cooperating Associations program, which continues to be
a vital source of funds for department interpretation, was started in 1971. Under this
program, non-profit groups have a contract with California State Parks to help support
interpretation in a specific park or parks.
Some changes to the department came from the outside. Legislative action added
the Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation (OHMVR) Division to the department in
1971. The first two State Vehicular Recreation Areas (SVRA) joined the system in 1973.
Interpretation was not initially part of the mission of the OHMVR Division. It was not
until 2008 that a formal interpretive program began in the division. 50
William Penn Mott Jr.’s shift of interpretation from seasonal to permanent employees was one indication of the increasing recognition of the importance of interpretation in California’s state parks. Another was the clarifying of the department’s
49. John H. Michael to William C. Dillinger, memorandum, 22 September 1969, private collection. 50. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 118; Ellen Clark (former head of interpretation for the OHMVR Division), in discussion with the author, July 2014. 32
mandate to provide interpretation to park visitors. Legislation clearly added interpretation
to the department’s mission in 1974. Up to that point, the mandate for interpretation was
inferred from the legislation that established the California state park system in 1927,
based on the language that directed the department to provide for public enjoyment and at
the same time protect the parks.51
But the organization of interpretation in the department had gone backwards. By
1974 headquarters interpretation support and projects were once again split into several
separate locations. Four were under the Operations Division: separate Natural Resources
Interpretation and Historical Interpretation sections under the Visitor Services Branch,
and Exhibit Preparation and Interpretive Collection Sections under the Maintenance
Services Branch. These sections supported interpretation in the field. In addition, the
Interpretive Unit of the Design and Construction Division’s Project Development Section
handled large bond-funded interpretation projects such as development of exhibits for
new museums.52
Again, interpretation support and development was ripe for consolidation. The
Resource Preservation and Interpretation Division was created in 1975. The staff that had
been working on interpretive capital outlay projects was merged with the exhibit shop
staff and the rest of the Operations Division interpretation staff into the Interpretive
Services Section. The separations between historical and natural history interpretation
51. Donna Pozzi, “A History of Interpretive Planning in California State Parks,” n.d., private collection; Naturalist Training Manual, chapter 2, 10. 52. California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1 January 1974, Org Charts 1971-1979 file, DPR Organization Charts Collection, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA (hereafter cited as Organization Charts Collection). 33
were once more dissolved.53
One of the accomplishments of the Interpretive Services Section was the completion of Interpretive Plans and Interpretive Prospectuses for every unit in the park system. The Interpretive Prospectus provided a focus and topics for interpretation in each park, plus broad recommendations for facilities and media. The Interpretive Plan fleshed out the media and facility recommendations with details such as facility locations and media content outlines. Though there had been system-wide interpretive planning and some individual park planning in the past (including a few interpretive prospectuses), the completion of these brief plans for all the parks was a major step forward in organization and strategic planning for future interpretation at the park level—another indication that the discipline was becoming more professionalized.54
Director Mott was the main impetus behind another change that was much less controversial than the elimination of seasonal naturalists: the founding of the department training center at Asilomar. Mott initiated department training at Asilomar in one of the original Julia Morgan-designed small buildings, the Outside Inn, starting in 1969. A dedicated training center was completed in 1973, the first dedicated central training center in any state park system in the nation. (The department again lagged about a
53. Anthony M. Knapp to William C. Everhart, memorandum, 23 October 1974, private collection; Donna Pozzi, “A History of Interpretive Planning in California State Parks;” California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1 January 1974, Org Charts 1971-1979 file, Organization Charts Collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1 January 1975, Org Charts 1971-1979 file, Organization Charts Collection. 54. Donna Pozzi, “A History of Interpretive Planning in California State Parks”; Bryce, interview by Carolyn Schimandle, 32-33; California Department of Parks and Recreation, Guidelines for the Preparation of Interpretive Prospectuses and Plans (Sacramento: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1974), 16. 34
decade behind the National Park Service, which established its central training center in
1964.) It was first called the Center for Continuous Learning, and was renamed the
William Penn Mott, Jr., Training Center in 1976. The first training at the center was Park
Management and Operations. This was designed for area managers and their backups. It included interpretation training among its many topics. By the following year there were seven trainings on the schedule. On the occasion of the its 20th anniversary in 1993, the training center’s anniversary booklet noted that the center provided ranger cadet, continuing law enforcement, maintenance, resource management, administration, management and interpretation training. Continuing Interpretation Training was added to the schedule in 1975. It was still on the schedule in 1993, adapted to include a more hands-on approach. The 20th anniversary booklet also noted that the department provided
Interpretive Methods Training, in conjunction with the East Bay Regional Parks District, and that this training was recognized nationwide for its excellence. The 1995/1996 schedule included a new training that was definitely beyond the basics: Interpretive
Program Management and Supervision. By 1998/1999, interpretive training had become more specialized: that training year, Coastal Marine Interpretation appeared on the schedule, and the more general Continuing Interpretation Training did not. The following year, there were two focused interpretation trainings: Skills for Interpreting to Children, and Cultural Resource Interpretation. A year later, the interpretation training offerings had blossomed to six different sessions. A variety of trainings for interpreters has continued to be offered yearly since then, except for a period when all department training was scale back during the recession that began in 2007. The wide range of 35
interpretation trainings reflects the broad mission and goals of California State Parks.
Recent training offerings, many of which have been repeated multiple times, include the
more focused trainings that started in 1998/1999, plus Natural Resource Interpretation,
Interpreting in Recreation Areas, Interpreting to Diverse Audiences, Urban Interpretation,
Training for Interpretive Trainers, and the newest training, Strategic Planning for
Interpretation. The required Basic Interpretation for Guides and Interpreters training,
which was instituted in the 2004/2005 training year, provides a sound base of
interpretation and interpretive planning skills in line with the latest philosophy and
practice. The quality of the training is indicated by the reputation of the training center. In
its over forty years of existence, the William Penn Mott, Jr., Training Center has grown
to be recognized as a leader in park-related training. Employees from other park agencies,
including some from overseas, pay for and attend trainings along with California state
park staff. Before the establishment of the training center, most of the department
employees’ training was on-the-job. Regular interpretation training beyond the ranks of
seasonal interpreters—and the subsequent growth in number and variety of training
sessions—has been another sign of the increasingly more professional role of interpreters
in the department, as it was nationwide.55
55. State of California Department of Parks and Recreation Office of Marketing and Public Awareness, The William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center: The California Department of Parks and Recreation; September 1993; 20th Anniversary 1973-1993 (Sacramento, CA: State of California Department of Parks and Recreation Office of Marketing and Public Awareness, 1993), 4-6; Engbeck, State Parks of California, 107; National Park Service Stephen T. Mather Training Center, Mather Training Center at a Glance (National Park Service Stephen T. Mather Training Center: Harpers Ferry, WV, 2013), http://www.nps.gov/training/stma (accessed October 11, 2014); California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott, Jr., Training Center: Training 36
In 1977, yet another development in the continuing professionalization of interpretation in California State Parks occurred, when the State Personnel Board established an interpreter series. The classifications in the series were (and still are) State
Park Interpreter Assistant, State Park Interpreter I, State Park Interpreter II, and State
Park Interpreter III, with the last designated the supervisory level of the series. Seasonal staff had once again taken on many of the interpretive duties, both at parks and at headquarters. The new series was a response to demand in the department to recognize the work of interpreters by creating the opportunity of permanent positions besides the
District Interpretive Specialist, instead of asking too much from seasonal interpretive staff.56
Schedule 94/95,” n.d., private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott, Jr., Training Center: 1995/96 Training Schedule,” n.d., private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center: 1996/97 Training Schedule,” n.d., private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center: 1997/98 Training Schedule,” n.d., private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center: 1998/99 Training Schedule,” n.d., private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center: 1996/97 Training Schedule,” n.d., private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center: 2000/2001 Training Schedule,” n.d., private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center: 2001/2002 Training Schedule,” n.d., private collection; California State Parks, “William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center,” California State Parks, http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=21759 (accessed November 16, 2014). . 56. California Department of Human Resources, “State Park Interpreter Assistant (Permanent Intermittent) (2825),” California Department of Human Resources, http://www.calhr.ca.gov/state-hr-professionals/pages/2825.aspx (accessed September 21, 2014); California Department of Human Resources, “State Park Interpreter I (2826),” California Department of Human Resources, http://www.calhr.ca.gov/state-hr- professionals/pages/2826.aspx (accessed September 21, 2014); California Department of Human Resources, “State Park Interpreter II (2827),” California Department of Human 37
Another incarnation of the headquarters interpretation structure was born in 1980:
The Office of Interpretive Services (OIS). OIS was initially led by Keith Demetrak. He reported directly to the Deputy Director of Professional Services (this was the Deputy
Director of Operations by 1983). The OIS had four sections—Interpretive Planning,
Interpretive Productions, Audio Visual, and Interpretive Collections. OIS was formed for two purposes—to resolve management inefficiencies and to recognize the importance of interpretation to the Department’s mission. The Interpretive Productions section was responsible for all exhibitry and had to work closely with the Development Division as well as the field.57
Interpretation wasn’t just the purview of professionals. Volunteers had been involved in park interpretation and other park functions from early in the department’s history. Public involvement in running parks—and in interpreting them—grew in 1981 with the initiation of the Volunteers in Parks program. The Volunteers in Parks program formalized the relationship between the department and volunteers, and provided guidance for recruiting, training and managing volunteers. In 2012, there were 35,659
Resources, http://www.calhr.ca.gov/state-hr-professionals/pages/2827.aspx (accessed September 21, 2014); California Department of Human Resources, “State Park Interpreter III (2828),” California Department of Human Resources, http://www.calhr.ca.gov/state-hr-professionals/pages/2828.aspx (accessed September 21, 2014). The State Park Interpreter Assistant classification is now rarely, if ever, used. Currently (2014) there are no State Park Interpreter Assistants. The District Interpretive Specialist classification was created in 1969. The classification name was changed to Regional Interpretive Specialist in 1984. 57. California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Charts, Org Charts 1980-1988 file, Organization Charts Collection; “1982 Update: Organization Charts and Statements of Responsibility,” Org Charts 1980-1988 file, Organization Charts Collection. 38
California State Parks volunteers. Park volunteers help with trail work, resource
protection and public safety, as well as interpretation.58
Dramatic budget reductions in 1992-1993 led to a major reorganization of the
department. It was spearheaded by the Phoenix Committee, led by director Donald W.
Murphy. The Phoenix committee was made up of fourteen California State Parks staff
members chosen by Murphy, most of whom were in senior positions such as district
superintendent, Division Chief, and regional director. Former department director
William Penn Mott, Jr., was a special advisor to the committee. Murphy charged the
committee with two tasks:
1. Develop a new organizational structure which would allow for a $22.9 million budget reduction; and, 2. Evaluate the current functions of the department and recommend changes to allow for more effective delivery of public services.
The committee developed their recommendations after seeking and receiving input from
other department employees at all levels and in all areas. After the committee submitted
their recommendations to Murphy, a transition team was chosen to implement the
recommended changes, which included extensive reorganization and service reductions.
The results of the committee’s work came to be known as the Phoenix reorganization, or
just “Phoenix.”59
58. Margo Cowan, Volunteers in Parks Program 2012 Annual Report (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 2013), http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/755/files/volunteers_in_parks_2012_final.pdf (accessed November 29, 2013). 59. Phoenix Committee, The Phoenix Committee Final Report: 1992/93 Budget Revision Project (Sacramento: State of California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1992), np.; California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1988, Org Charts 39
The Phoenix reorganization drastically changed department interpretation organization. The committee recognized the importance of interpretation. The 1992
“Phoenix Committee Final Report” stated among its “Organizational Prinicipals” that
“Meaningful park experiences require an appreciation of the intrinsic values of the parks.
Accordingly, interpretation and visitor information are essential elements of the park experience and, therefore, will be essential components of the Department.” The conclusion of the committee was that interpretation had to be overhauled to become an
“essential component” of the Department. Quoting again from the Phoenix final report:
Efforts of OIS have not been completely effective in meeting the needs of department interpreters. Exhibit preparation is slow and difficult to coordinate with field needs. Interpretive planning is often abstract and prepared too far in advance of funding, making later plan revisions necessary to meet budget and changing requirements. Collections continue to grow without specific plans for use or display. Too little of the collection is cataloged or available for research and exhibit. Interpretive program support (AV, materials, training, etc.) is needed by field units but is not well integrated into operations.60
The overhaul of department interpretation was extreme, in the view of OIS employees. Despite their major efforts to prove its value and continue its existence, the
Office of Interpretive Services was eliminated. The response of OIS employees was nicely summed up in a memo from Publications Section writer Joseph H. Engbeck, Jr., to
Division Chief Demetrak:
The findings of the Phoenix Committee with regard to OIS amount to an abbreviated list of the frustrations and difficulties that OIS has been suffering through and complaining about for years. Given the widely
1980-1988 file, Organization Charts Collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1994, Org Charts 1992-2001 file, Organization Charts Collection. 60. Phoenix Committee, The Phoenix Committee Final Report, np. 40
recognized and well documented nature of those frustrations and difficulties, it seems to me that any objective analyst of the situation who cared about DPR’s interpretive mission would pay special attention to the comments and recommendations of those staffmembers who, despite many obstacles, have devoted themselves and their careers to carrying out the department’s interpretive mission. I find it bizarre, therefore, that the committee has chosen to disregard OIS comments and proposals. The committee’s recommendation to “eliminate the Office of Interpretive Services” amounts to shooting a starving, injured, and partially hog-tied marathon runner in order to keep that runner from running too slowly.
Some of the OIS duties, “key functions which are needed to coordinate statewide
interpretive and museum services,” went to a new Interpretation Section under the Park
Services Division. The Publications Unit and video staff were supposed to be moved to
the Office of Public Relations, but only the Publications Unit was moved. One
interpretive planner was moved to Development. A reduced collections staff was moved
to the Resource Protection Division. The balance of OIS functions, most notably exhibit
development, were moved to the new Northern and Southern Service Centers, also under
the Park Services Division.61
While the Interpretation Section coordinated statewide museum and interpretive services, and made recommendations on department interpretation policy, the Service
Centers worked more directly with the districts. They provided concept design, cost estimates and small-scale fabrication of interpretive projects. Other interpretation duties assigned to them included preparing interpretive plans, assisting Districts with the preparation of contracts for interpretive projects, and advising the districts on exhibit design and production. They provided curatorial support to the districts to help manage
61. J. H. Engbeck to Keith L. Demetrak, memorandum, 7 May 1992, private collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Organizational Responsibilities,” October 1992, private collection, 809-811. 41
and care for artifact collections, which also supported interpretation.62
Phoenix also changed interpretation in the field. Some time between 1970 and 1992 the six large districts had been restructured into five regions. San Simeon Region had no districts underneath it; the other four regions were divided into 43 small districts. Instead of six District Interpretive Specialist, one for each large district, there were five—one per region. Phoenix substituted twenty-three districts divided into two divisions. Each of the districts had an interpretive coordinator (usually a District Interpretive Specialist, but sometimes another classification), for a total of 23. This major increase was one step toward accomplishing the Phoenix goal to strengthen department interpretation. A major responsibility of the district interpretive coordinators was to increase the amount and quality of interpretation in the district, bringing it more in balance with other visitor services. District supervisors were to establish an annual budget for interpretation out of the district’s budget.63
The Phoenix reorganization was traumatic for department staff. Employees had to
move to new positions or were laid off when their old positions were eliminated. Some of
the new district interpretive coordinators were Rangers who changed classification to
District Interpretive Specialist when their ranger jobs were eliminated. The staff of the
Office of Interpretive Services fought for certain positions to be kept in the new
62. California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Organizational Responsibilities,” October 1992, private collection, 813. 63. California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1988, Org Charts 1980-1988 file, Organization Charts Collection; Brian Cahill, (presentation, California State Parks Training for District Interpreters, Marconi Conference Center, Marshall, CA, February 13, 2014); California Department of Parks and Recreation, ”Focusing on Interpretation,” August 16, 1993, private collection. 42
Interpretation Section instead of being eliminated altogether. These included a
photographer and audiovisual staff. They were unsuccessful, though. The photographer
position was cut, and the audiovisual staff members were only kept on until their
preexisting projects were completed.64
Since the major upheaval of Phoenix, the headquarters interpretation organization
has been relatively stable, with a few mostly minor changes. In 1996 the Interpretation
Section became a division, with the Division Chief reporting directly to the Deputy
Director of the Park Stewardship Branch. The Northern and Southern Service Centers
remained under the Park Services Division. By 2001 the service centers had been moved
to the Park Design and Construction Division, which was under the Deputy Director of
Acquisition and Development. There has been one recent major change: as mentioned
above, a division-wide interpretation program was initiated for the Off-Highway Motor
Vehicle Recreation (OHMVR) Division in 2008. The program began with field
interpreters in each of the SVRAs. In 2009 the division hired a State Park Interpreter III
to supervise the program. This organization and division of headquarters interpretation
duties is still in place in 2014.65
Department philosophy and direction were examined and refined after Phoenix. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, California State Parks developed a strategic plan. The
64. California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Department of Parks and Recreation Transition Plan,” October 1992, private collection. 65. California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1995, Org Charts 1992-2001 file, Organization Charts Collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation Organization Chart, 1996, Org Charts 1992-2001 file, Organization Charts Collection; California Department of Parks and Recreation Organizational Structure, 2001, Org Charts 1992-2001 file, Organization Charts Collection; Ellen Clark, in discussion with the author, July 2014. 43
Seventh Generation: the Strategic Vision of California State Parks was published in
2001. The plan identified the department’s new strategic initiatives: increase diversity,
increase leadership in parks and recreation, focus on cultural resources, utilize
technology, increase leadership in natural resource management, develop a new image,
create an urban connection, and expand recreational opportunities. The Seventh
Generation report assessed that “Interpretation and education remain core programs
within the Department as it meets its commitment to The Seventh Generation.” The
strategic initiatives were updated in 2008. Among other more minor changes, an
additional strategic initiative was added to address climate change. Department
interpreters work to and to address the strategic initiatives in interpretation planning, and
incorporate messages that support the initiatives into their personal and nonpersonal
interpretation.66
As in previous times, not all was rosy with California State Parks interpretation as the new millennium progressed. The economic downturn of the late 2000s negatively affected the department’s budget, along with those of other state agencies. This culminated in 2012 with the threatened closure of 70 state parks. Days before the parks were slated to close, the governor signed legislation allocating more money to the department. California State Parks had also worked on partnerships with cooperating associations, concessionaires, and non-profit organizations to keep 40 state parks on the
66. California Department of Parks and Recreation, The Seventh Generation: the Strategic Vision of California State Parks (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 2001), 19; California Department of Parks and Recreation, The Seventh Generation, 8; Ruth Coleman, Director, to Director’s Policy Staff and District Superintendents, memorandum, 8 February 2008, private collection. 44
closure list open. Though services were drastically reduced at many of the parks on the closure list, ultimately only one closed: Providence Mountains State Park, which also had serious infrastructure issues that needed to be addressed. The department’s money woes also affected staffing at parks not on the closure list, at the district offices, and at headquarters. This effect has continued to the present day. Many positions have been eliminated or remain unfilled, including interpretive positions. While state park interpreters and their support staff believe in the department’s interpretation mission, and work hard to fulfill it, they are hard-pressed to perform just part of what the formerly larger staff accomplished. This has meant a reduction in services to the field and to the public.
Throughout its growth, and despite the many organizational and funding changes that have affected it, California State Parks has continued to evolve and improve its interpretive offerings. The next chapter will go into more detail on these offerings and how they have changed through the years. 45
Chapter 3: The Evolution of Interpretation in California State Parks
As documented in the previous chapter, California State Parks grew and changed through its first 150 years, and the organization of interpretation in the department did as well. So too did the practice of interpretation in the parks. This mirrored the evolution of interpretation as a profession, and its growth in the United States, though the California system tended to lag behind the National Park Service. California State Parks also has had fluctuations in funding through the years that have affected the amount and types of interpretation that could be provided.
Guided walks were the earliest form of interpretation in the California state parks.
As was typical around the nation, in California guided walks or tours preceded museum exhibits. Galen Clark, Yosemite’s first Guardian during its initial years as a California state park, also served as a guide and educator to visitors starting in 1886 or earlier. The prominence of guided walks as interpretation continued in the early twentieth century.
Fish and Game division nature guides at Big Basin led “field trips for both adults and children” in the 1920s. Nature walks were popular at Richardson Grove State Park in
1936. Earl Hansen wrote in his end-of-season report that “nature walks were conducted four days of the week, always in the mornings from ten thirty to twelve noon, or slightly later. People of all ages attended, the average being about twenty-five per group. One or two walks attracted fifty people.”67
Like other forms of interpretation, nature walks were recognized early on for their
67. Lynch, Rangers of California’s State Parks, 125; Division of Fish and Game, Thirtieth Biennial Report, 85; Earl Hansen, “Report of the State Park Nature Guide, Richardson Grove, 1936,” 1 October 1936, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA. 46
importance in achieving natural resource protection and management goals. According to
a report from the 1940s, administrators “felt that integration of Park rules and regulations
into nature walks and evening campfire programs has done much to assist the regular
ranger force in preserving the parks.”68
Natural history exhibits seem to have had their start in California State Parks in the 1930s. In March 1933 a large redwood fell at Richardson Grove State Park. Through the efforts of the Save-the-Redwoods League it was made into an outdoor natural history exhibit, possibly the first in California State Parks. It may even have been the first natural history exhibit of any type in California’s state parks, indoors or out. The Save-the-
Redwoods League published a companion booklet called The Story of a Fallen Redwood
Tree in 1934. Written by Emanuel Fritz, it gives detailed information about the Fallen
Redwood exhibit. Fritz was a professor of forestry at University of California,
Berkeley.69
68. Report, no author identified, n.d., folder F3735:151, Natural Resources- Administration-Director Beaches and Parks Division History and General Information file, 1931-1959, California State Archives. The 1940s date is an estimate. 69. California Department of Parks and Recreation, Interpretive Training Manual, section 1-B, 1; Emanuel Fritz, Story of a Fallen Redwood Tree (Berkeley, CA: Save-the- Redwoods League, 1934). 47
Figure 4: Fallen tree exhibit at Richardson Grove State Park, 1940. (Photo by Earl Hanson. © California State Parks, 1940. California State Parks Photographic Archives, Sacramento, CA, catalog number 090- 17015.)
An early museum exhibit, perhaps the first formal museum exhibit in the
California State Park System to include natural history, was the “Pictorial History of the
Redwoods,” installed at Big Basin Redwoods State Park in 1937. This exhibit was
created by Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists based in San Francisco. This
was part of a nationwide effort. New Deal programs were creating museum exhibits for
many parks, including quite a few for the National Park Service. The WPA hired local
workers for its projects, so Northern California artists created the Big Basin exhibit.
These included Clarkson Dye, who went on to become well known for his landscape
painting. State Park Nature Guide Rodney Ellsworth was the technical advisor for the
project. In 1931, when he was educational assistant at the park with the State Division of
Fish and Game, Ellsworth initiated the idea of an exhibit at Big Basin that would tell the
story of the park’s cultural and natural history. According to the report “WPA Artwork in 48
the California State Park System,” “The objective of the ‘Pictorial History of the
Redwoods Museum’ at Big Basin State Park was the education of the public regarding
the preservation of the natural environment there.” Big Basin Redwoods was the most
used park in the system, and this was causing damage, especially to the sensitive redwood
root systems. Initial exhibit funding came from the California State Emergency Relief
Administration (SERA) in 1934 and 1935. Ten percent of the project was completed
under SERA. When SERA was terminated in 1935, the WPA took over the project,
completing it in 1937. The Division of Parks was project sponsor, and paid for 40% of
the cost.70
As with nature guiding, natural history exhibits in California State Parks lagged behind the National Park Service. The first dedicated natural history museums in the national parks opened at Yellowstone and Yosemite in 1920 and 1921. Even before that, in 1915, a natural history exhibit was installed in the Yosemite ranger station. In 1932, five years before the completion of the “Pictorial History,” Harold C. Bryant, by then the assistant director of the NPS Branch of Research and Education, wrote that “museum development has received considerable attention in the past few years with the result that many of the national parks and monuments have natural history or historical museums, even though the exhibits are not as yet adequately housed in every case.”71
70. California Department of Parks and Recreation Interpretive Services Section Interpretive Collections Management Group, “WPA Artwork in the California State Park System,” 23 May 1979, California State Parks Interpretation and Education Division Library, Sacramento, CA, 14-15. 71. Ann Hitchcock, “NPS Museums 1904 to 2004,” National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/museum/centennial/about.html (accessed October 18, 2014); Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation”: 49
The “Pictorial History of the Redwoods” premiered at Big Basin Redwoods State
Park in the summer of 1937. It was immediately wildly popular, viewed by tens of thousands of visitors each year in its first years. The exhibit was housed in the Recreation
Hall, a 1902 building also known as the Governor’s Cottage, which was the oldest building in the administrative core of the park. Nineteen redwood cases, also constructed by WPA workers, held displays on a wide variety of topics, with the common thread that all were related to redwoods. The subject matter was much less focused than would be found in a modern exhibit. Displays covered the history of the area before it became a park, including pioneer settlement, the uses of madrone, and tanbark harvesting; the founding of the Sempervirens Club and establishment of the park; illustrations of how to split shakes from a redwood log and how to build a log cabin; the animals and plants of the redwood forest; a full six cases on the natural history of redwood trees; works depicting historic events that took place over the lifespan of a redwood; a portrait of
Cherokee chief Sequoyah, after whom the redwood genus was named; and even a display of poetry about redwood forests. Artwork was executed in oil, watercolor, gouache, pen and ink, and pastels. The exhibit also included photographs and plant specimens. The
“Pictorial History” differed from the National Parks museum exhibits of the time in that it featured no three-dimensional objects other than the plant specimens, and no historical, ethnographic or archaeological artifacts. The NPS exhibits relied heavily on mounted
30-31; Harold C. Bryant and Wallace W. Atwood, Jr., “Part 1: The Educational Program in the National Parks,” in Research and Education in the National Parks (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932), under “Museums and Observation Stations,” http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/resedu/index.htm (accessed October 19, 2014). 50
specimens of local animals, Indian baskets and arrowheads, and historical artifacts
(which in the case of the Yosemite museum, ranged in size from hotel registers and small arms to two stagecoaches). The “Pictorial History” more resembled a thematic, organized art show with text. The artwork was somewhat variable in quality. Well-executed works, such as oil paintings by Clarkson Dye and Hermann Richter, were mixed with works by less-skilled artists. The only criteria for employment on the project were that the artist must be out of work, and must have been a professional artist at some point. But this variability did not dampen the public enthusiasm for the exhibit. The following description of the “Pictorial History” appeared in the November 1938 California
Conservationist, the California Department of Natural Resources magazine for the public:
The panel sequence of the exhibits depicts and explains characteristics and uses of redwoods and related plants and animals. Of special interest are the panels revealing details of early logging operations, pioneer family life, and pioneer use of madrone and tanbark. Two panels of native wildflowers, colored with care for detail, are excellent guides to the identification of plant life in the redwood region. A series of watercolors vividly pictures ancient plant and animal life on the earth in the time of the earliest redwoods, and the fossil deposits from which such scenes were reconstructed. A number of portrait-sized oil paintings picture the historical background of the naming and preservation of the Sequoias, with particular emphasis upon the Coast Redwoods in Big Basin.72
72. Interpretive Collections Management Group, “WPA Artwork,” 17-19, 59; Lewis, Museum Curatorship in the National Park Service, 5-7; “Redwoods Pictorial Historic Museum Attracts Thousands of Visitors,” California Conservationist, November 1938, 19. A number of paintings from the “Pictorial History of the Redwoods” are still part of the California State Parks museum collections, including some by Clarkson Dye and Hermann Richter. 51
Figure 5: Visitors flocked to view the Pictorial History of the Redwoods at Big Basin in 1937 or 1938. (Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the California State Parks, 2014. California State Parks Photographic Archives, Sacramento, CA, catalog number 090-3970.)
Despite its initial popularity, the “Pictorial History of the Redwoods” had a short life. Items that were not specific to Big Basin were removed from the park in 1945. Some were stored in a state park building in Sacramento; others went to a new museum at
Humboldt Redwoods State Park headquarters in Dyerville. Most of the exhibits remained in the Big Basin Recreation Hall until 1947, when they were moved to the newly created
Nature Lodge (about which more later.) The material that was not used in the Nature
Lodge also went to the Dyerville museum. Sadly, a 1955 flood of the Eel River partially 52
destroyed the museum, which was dismantled. The “Pictorial History” items from
Humboldt Redwoods are presumed lost in the flood.73
As the “Pictorial History of the Redwoods” was being completed, the WPA began a second California State Parks exhibit: the “Pictorial History of Mount Diablo.” The application for funding was made on June 10, 1937. Work began on October 20. Like the
Big Basin exhibit, the Mount Diablo exhibit was an ambitious project that included both cultural and natural history. The effort used many of the same artists and other workers who had created the “Pictorial History of the Redwoods,” including Rodney Ellsworth as
Supervisor and Technical Advisor. A new museum and observatory building was planned for the exhibit, made of steel and concrete and faced with native sandstone quarried from the mountain. This fit with the Park Rustic architectural style, which emphasized using local materials so the buildings and other structures would blend with the landscape. The exhibit plan called for a “Hall of Science”—with exhibits on geology, paleontology, botany, and zoology; and a “Hall of History,” which was to contain exhibits on Indian life, Spanish exploration, American exploration, industrial development, scenic and recreational development, and the state geological survey. In addition, the museum tower would also have exhibits. These were to be on the coast geodetic survey, the first land survey, and “Mt. Diablo a Landmark for Every Generation [sic].” Media were to include extensive murals, dioramas, museum cases containing fossils and other specimens, a relief map, photostats of historical documents, and carefully executed artwork in oil,
73. Interpretive Collections Management Group, “WPA Artwork,” 19-20. 53
watercolor, gouache, pen and ink, and pastels (like the “Pictorial History of the
Redwoods). These media were state-of- the-art for two-dimensional exhibits at the time.74
On October 15, 1938, the first part of the Pictorial History of Mount Diablo exhibit opened to the public. It was temporarily housed in a building at the summit that had been acquired with the park in 1931. Work continued on the exhibit until 1942; the project was then terminated as the nation’s attention turned to the war effort. The remaining materials in the project studio were crated up and put in storage, where they remained for decades.75
The completed exhibit materials were not supposed to be stored for long. From
1939-1940, the Civilian Conservation Corps built the planned new museum building at
the Mount Diablo summit that was supposed to be the permanent home of the Mt. Diablo
“Pictorial History.” Unfortunately, the porous native sandstone leaked, creating an
environment unsuitable for the exhibit. By 1989, after many attempts at repairs, the
building finally was used to house a few exhibits, but the “Pictorial History” was long
gone.76
By sometime in the 1940s, the portion of the “Pictorial History” that had been on
display was removed from its temporary home in the earlier summit building, crated up,
and moved to the old CCC camp chapel in the Live Oak area of the park. At some point
the exhibit items from the project studio were moved to the same location. Like the new
74. Interpretive Collections Management Group, “WPA Artwork,” 25-26; State Division of Parks, “Mt. Diablo Pictorial History,” 1939, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA, 4-9. 75. Interpretive Collections Management Group, “WPA Artwork,” 27-28. 76. California Department of Parks and Recreation, Mount Diablo State Park General Plan (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1989), 76. 54
summit building, the former chapel leaked. In addition, it was infested with rodents and prone to vandalism. When the exhibit was inspected in 1951, Elmer Aldrich estimated that “fifteen or twenty thousand dollars worth of exhibits in partial stages of completion are almost worthless.” Park supervisors repeatedly urged that the exhibits be moved to better storage, but nothing happened. Finally, in 1956 the remaining pieces were moved to storage in the department’s Exhibits Lab. They are now stored in the State Museum
Resource Center. High-quality photographs of some of the natural history illustrations are now at last on display at the Mount Diablo Summit Museum, part of an Interpretation and
Education Division Deferred Maintenance Project completed in 2012.
In the national parks, natural history museums were ahead of those in California
State Parks, both in time and in sophistication. For example, four museums at
Yellowstone that were completed between 1928 and 1932—Old Faithful, Norris Geyser
Basin, Madison Junction, and Fishing Bridge—together covered topics similar to the
“Pictorial History of Mount Diablo.” In both parks, topics encompassed geology, flora, fauna, and human history. Besides having the luxury of four buildings for exhibit space, the Yellowstone museum exhibits were a bit more sophisticated than those done for
Mount Diablo. The methods used were similar to the “Pictorial History of Mount
Diablo”—illustrations, scientific explanations, geological specimens and a relief map— but there were also dioramas and mounted animal specimens, which were missing from both California “Pictorial History” exhibits. The 1931 Fishing Bridge Museum exhibits 55
were closest in methods to the California exhibits. Fishing Bridge had mainly graphics, with few specimens.77
At about the same time that natural history museums were starting in California
State Parks, a modest program of free written interpretive materials was initiated. There had been at least one earlier interpretive publication. By the 1920s there was an official
Redwood Park Commission-approved “folder” (what we would now call a pamphlet or brochure) for California Redwood Park, but it cost twenty-five cents. This was not an insignificant amount at that time. The folder included a trail guide, redwood natural history, a guide to the named trees of the park with a map of their locations, a hiking map, general park information, and several sections that imparted a strong resource protection message. While it is admirable that the proceeds from the sale of the folder went to a fund for trail and trail sign improvement, the cost probably dissuaded many visitors from obtaining a folder, which meant that the resource protection information did not reach everyone. A 1937 memo stated that free folders were needed for the parks, but there was no budget. By May 1938 there was a new Big Basin folder, paid for by a concessionaire. This was to be the first of a series funded by outside sources. The next month a folder for Richardson Grove was in the works, presumably also paid for by the concessionaire. At least one more folder was produced this way: the Monterey Chamber of Commerce paid for a folder on Monterey park properties in 1939. The first of these free folders is not available, but based on the earlier sale folder, a 1931 Big Basin sale
77. Ann Hitchcock, “NPS Museums 1904 to 2004”; Bryant and Atwood, “Part 1: The Educational Program in the National Parks,” in Research and Education in the National Parks under “Yellowstone.” 56
folder and a free 1946 Big Basin brochure, it appears that the first free folders would have had a mix of interpretation of park cultural and natural history, any important safety and resource protection messages, a summary of park rules, and recreation information.
(This is essentially the same content that is included in the current free park brochures.)
California State Parks was not the first American park agency to produce interpretive brochures for their parks, free or otherwise. The National Park Service provided free information booklets at some parks as early as 1912, so once again the state park system lagged behind, but followed the same general pattern of interpretive development as
NPS.78
Also at this same time, park education programs (tours or talks specifically for school groups) began. The Division of Parks entered the realm of education modestly at first, and did not become much more involved until several decades later. An early effort at providing school programs occurred in 1939, focused on older students than the current programs---which are usually for elementary school classes. Earl Hanson, by this time a full-time nature guide, began providing educational lectures in high schools and colleges
78. Chief, Division of Beaches and Parks, report to Director, Natural Resources Department, 31 August 1937, 4 May 1938, 4 June 1938, 5 January 1939, folder F3735:89, Director Monthly Activity Reports file; Official Map and Guide to California Redwood Park (Big Basin), 5th ed. (n.p., [1924?]), one copy available in Big Basin Redwoods State Park archives; [F. R. Fulmer?], General Information on Big Basin Redwoods State Park (Santa Cruz, CA: F. R. Fulmer, 1931); Division of Beaches and Parks, Department of Natural Resources, Guide to Big Basin Redwoods State Park (Sacramento: Division of Beaches and Parks, Department of Natural Resources, 1946); Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, List of National Park Publications (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), in the Library of Congress American Memory, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/r?ammem/consrv:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28amrvgvg43%29%29:@@@$R EF$ (accessed October 19, 2014). The author was not able to locate any existing copies or images of the three park folders produced in 1938 and 1939. 57
during the seasons when he was not stationed in parks—approximately September to
May. In comparison, by 1932 the National Park Service was offering opportunities for
college-level field studies in the national parks, but they were not led by staff members.
Though the college professors led the NPS field studies, “members of the educational
staff in the various parks render[ed] valuable assistance.” The National Park Service also
conducted a Junior Nature School at Yosemite National Park beginning in 1930. This was
directed at school-age children, but was a summer program. It would appear that school
programs in parks were an unrealized opportunity in the United States even as late as
1946 from this passage in The Journal of Education that year:
The development in many of our parks of trailside museums with trained naturalists should in time make possible one of the most fruitful types of experience in outdoor conservation teaching for school groups. The displays of the museums, the nature trails adjoining them, and particularly the trained and interested naturalists in charge of such programs can have great effect in making school children conscious of conservation principles as well as in giving them a sincere appreciation of the world of nature.
By 1960, this potential was beginning to be fulfilled in state parks around the nation. An article from that year, again in The Journal of Education, said of state park systems that
“More and more effort is being made to offer educational programs for school, and for youth serving agencies, by members of the area staff.” The national parks and national forests were not yet offering school programs, according to the same article. As the author points out, state parks receive more visitors who come for a single day, while the typical national park or forest’s user’s visit is multiple days because of the greater 58
distance from centers of population. Therefore, it would be less likely that a school could attend a program at a national park.79
The state historical monuments apparently had more established and frequent school programs by the 1940s, and these occurred in the parks instead of in the classroom. The Division Chief’s monthly update to the director of the Natural Resources
Division in December 1941 mentions that “many schools visit the Monterey Custom
House Museum . . . where the Custodian in charge gives lectures on California history.”80
Museum exhibits took a big step forward after World War II. As stated above,
Leonard Penhale was hired as the first natural history exhibit designer/fabricator in the
California State Park System in 1948, in the newly created classification of State Park
Naturalist. In June of 1947, he first appeared on the department roster as a Deputy Ranger at Big Basin, though he must have had an earlier position at the park: he had completed the exhibit plan and begun working on exhibits in autumn of 1946. His first task was to change the lunch counter at Big Basin into a Nature Lodge, fitted with natural history exhibits. The front room of the lunch counter became the exhibit area, and the back room was remodeled into an exhibit workshop in 1947. The workshop was the exhibit
79. Darwin Wm. Tate, report to Richard Sachse, 14 December 1939, folder F3735:89, Director Monthly Activity Reports file; Bryant and Atwood, “Part 1: The Educational Program in the National Parks,” in Research and Education in the National Parks, under “College and University Field Classes;” Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation”: 40; Reynold E. Carlson, “Education, Recreation and Conservation,” The Journal of Education 129, no. 1 (January, 1946): 26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42850037 (accessed November 9, 2014); James A. Wylie, “Education for Leisure,” The Journal of Education 143, no. 1 (October, 1960): 42, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42748801 (accessed November 8, 2014). 80. Chief, Division of Beaches and Parks, report to Director, Natural Resources Department, 16 December 1941, folder F3735:90, Director Monthly Activity Reports file. 59
fabrication facility for the entire system. Much of the construction material for both the workshop and the exhibits was salvaged from the abandoned Civilian Conservation
Corps camp in the park. The Nature Lodge included the best natural history pieces from the Pictorial History of the Redwoods. Labeled, mounted specimens of the park’s animals provided additional interest and information. Penhale prepared all of the animal specimens, which were caught by State Trappers at his request. California State Parks lagged almost twenty years behind NPS in having a central exhibit planning and exhibit facility. NPS, with the cooperation of the University of California, Berkeley, established an exhibit preparation laboratory on that campus in 1925, overseen by NPS Chief
Naturalist Ansel F. Hall. But once again, though the California parks system lagged behind NPS (with their more substantial and steady funding), it followed the same pattern of interpretation development as the national agency.81
81. Leonard Penhale, interview by Robin Holmes and Robert Hare, 19 April 1988, transcript, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; News and Views, December 1948, 5; News and Views, August 1948, 5; Bryant and Atwood, “Part 2: History of Education Movement,” in Research and Education in the National Parks, under “Developments in the Parks.” 60
Figure 6: Standard Display Shelter at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, November 1958. (Photo by Leonard Penhale. © California State Parks, 1958. California State Parks Photographic Archives, Sacramento, CA, catalog number 090-P43830.)
Outdoor exhibits became more sophisticated and common with the introduction of the “Standard Display Shelter,” designed by Penhale, in 1948. While often used just for flat panels, the shelters (figures 5 and 6) were large and deep enough to hold three- dimensional items on shelves in more of a museum exhibit style. The article that introduced them in the employee newsletter News and Views stated that “standardization of these exhibit structures will enable an inter-exchange of exhibit material, which will be prepared at our new Central Nature Workshop, located at Big Basin Redwoods State
Park.” The Standard Display Shelters were built at many parks, and several are still in 61
place and in use, including ones at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park and Marshall Gold
Discovery State Historic Park.82
Figure 7: Standard Display Shelter still in use at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, April 2011. (Photo by the author.)
The development of self-guided trails, or “nature trails,” also took off about this time. According to a 1940s report:
A system of nature trails is developing. This is a form of self-help education to supplement the Naturalist’s activities or to provide some conservation education in smaller parks where a Naturalist is not available. In addition to the signs used for nature trails, a standardized nature shelter or trail-side exhibit has been developed to be placed at the beginning of the trail. In general nature trail signs serve mainly for botanical identification. The shelter is designed to graphically explain
82. News and Views, August 1948, 5. 62
something of the fauna and ecology of the area, as well as to present a conservation message to augment the rules and regulations of the park.
Once again, the National Park Service was ahead of California State Parks in
experimenting with and implementing this form of interpretation. According to a 1932
NPS report, “Self-guiding nature trails are now available to the public in all of the major
parks, including Crater Lake, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Grand Teton,
Rocky Mountain, Sequoia, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, and Carlsbad Caverns.”83
In the realm of history exhibits, California followed in the footsteps of the national parks. As in the national parks, indoor exhibits at the state’s historic parks preceded those at nature-oriented parks. Indoor exhibits at State Historic Monuments were installed in historic buildings soon after they were open to the public, making them much earlier than the first indoor exhibit at a nature-oriented state park. The early history exhibits tended toward cases of curios, arranged by the custodians. For example, in 1928, a Division of Parks chief’s report to the Natural Resources Department director provided the information that the house at Pio Pico State Historic Monument “contains a few cases of relics.” Artifacts were mostly donations from the public, such as the Button collection that was given to San Juan Bautista State Historic Monument. Grant Button of Hollister presented his collection of old guns and other objects to the park in the late 1930s. The
Division Chief reported that they would be housed in the Bar Room of the Plaza Hotel until the Castro House could be repaired and adapted into a museum, and that the WPA,
83. Report, no author identified, n.d., folder F3735:151, Natural Resources- Administration-Director Beaches and Parks Division History and General Information file, California State Archives; Bryant and Atwood, “Part 1: The Educational Program in the National Parks,” in Research and Education in the National Parks, under “Nature Trails.” 63
then in the process of creating the Pictorial History of the Redwoods, could build cases to
house the collection. State Parks was willing to accept the collection and display it
despite the fact that the objects in the collection had no connection to the period of
history interpreted at the State Historic Monument. The construction of cases by the
WPA was a necessary expediency due to lack of funds. The acquisition of the Button
collection was threatened by the lack of proper cases to display it, according to an article
in The Bakersfield Californian on October 28, 1936. This was resolved. But the same
monthly report that gave the information about the pending acquisition of the Button
collection also stated that, “While we are glad to receive articles of historical interest for
display at the historical monuments, the cost of housing in suitable cases is prohibitive.
We need so many cases for material we already have that we are forced to discourage any
new museums.”84
The National Park Service had faced the same problem of dealing with overzealous acceptance of gifts of artifacts not always appropriate for the park’s collection. For example, Ansel Hall, then the information ranger at Yosemite National
Park, solicited and accepted artifact donations for the Yosemite museum with great success in the early 1920s, and encouraged the western park interpreters whom he later supervised to do the same. Unfortunately, some of the gifts were not appropriate for the
84. Charles B. Wing, report to Fred G. Stevenot, August 1928, folder F3735:88, Director Monthly Activity Reports file; James A. Snook, report to George D. Nordenholt, n.d., folder F3735:89, Director Monthly Activity Reports file. The report from Snook to Nordenholt also stated that “Mr. Clyde Edmondson of the Redwood Empire Association is interested in a plan for a museum at Fort Ross depicting the era of the Russian settlement in Western Sonoma County, but we have not had any definite offer of assistance in establishing such a museum.” Again, insufficient funding for interpretation led to curtailing of plans. 64
collections, but the parks were still saddled with their storage and care. In the case of the
Yosemite collections, Hall accepted Native American baskets that were valuable, but far
outside of what should have been a Yosemite-area focus—including Iroquois and Apache
works. Eventually, the park staff was unable to properly exhibit or store the collection.
The NPS Museum Division acting chief in the late 1930s realized that some museum
collections were becoming overburdened with items not relevant to the intended parks,
and developed a policy to curtail this practice of overactive, inappropriate acquisition.85
Not all of the state historical monuments’ exhibits were confined to cases of curios. Though most of the monuments followed this model, there were early efforts to develop house museums. For example, there were efforts made in 1928 to furnish the chapel at Fort Ross in an authentic manner. The Monterey Custom House was restored
“as nearly as practicable to its historic period” in 1931, according to a report from the
Division Chief to the director of the Department of Natural Resources. The Custom
House, built in 1827, is the oldest public building in California, so its historic period would be the early 1800s. But the 2010 “Monterey Custom House Historic Structure
Report” describes several features of the building that were not accurately restored or recreated to that period, or apparently to any period. This may have been due at least in part to historic structure research, reconstruction, and restoration practices of the time, which were still somewhat primitive. For example, at almost exactly this same time, the
National Park Service was involved, along with the Wakefield National Memorial
Association, in the reconstruction and furnishing of the home where George Washington
85. ; Lewis, Museum Curatorship in the National Park Service, 6, 295-296. 65
was born. This became the George Washington Birthplace National Monument in 1932.
To the embarrassment of NPS, it was discovered by 1936 that the reconstruction had
been placed at the wrong location. In addition, the Wakefield Society had furnished the
house with inappropriate reproductions.86
The National Park Service had to work with an expert in early American antiques to completely refurnish the house. This was a type of museum in which the National Park
Service had little experience and no formal policies in place, so perhaps California State
Parks can be excused for inconsistencies in its historical accuracy during this period. The first exhibits at the Custom House were the typical cases of artifacts, not always directly related to the building. For example, the first custodian planned to install an exhibit of artifacts related to Monterey’s Bohemian past in the 1880s and 1890s (outside the period of significance of the building), featuring works by notable Monterey residents such as
Robert Louis Stevenson who had no connection to the building. A 1945 department employees’ newsletter does say of the Custom House that “Schools have found it a fine center of visual education where children can learn of the culture of pioneer settlers through viewing the fine examples of clothing, dishes, furniture, and other articles used in the daily lives of our first Californians.” This may mean that there were attempts at
86. “Notes of Trip of State Architect: Fort Ross, Sonoma County,” 28 September 1928, folder F3735:88, Director Monthly Activity Reports file; Charles B. Wing, report to D.H. Blood, 7 February 1931, folder F3735:88, Director Monthly Activity Reports file; Lewis, Museum Curatorship in the National Park Service, 19; Garavaglia Architecture, Inc., “Monterey Custom House Historic Structure Report” (Sacramento, CA: Garavaglia Architecture, Inc., 2010), 54-55; News and Views, March 1945, 3; Laurence Vail Coleman, Historic House Museums (Washington, D.C.: The American Association of Museums, 1933), 34-35,100-102, https://archive.org/details/historichousemus012457mbp (accessed October 27, 2014). 66
historic furnishing by this time, but these furnishings do no fit with the use of the
building as a custom house in its period of significance.87
Neither the planned Bohemian exhibit or the pioneer Californians objects meet the best practices given in the 1933 book Historic House Museums, but from this passage it is clear that they were far from being exceptions in the United States:
It seems only too obvious that the primary feature of a historic house museum is the house itself, but quite commonly this fact is overlooked and unrelated exhibits are allowed to detract from the house or even to overshadow it. Using a historic house for general historical exhibits—or for any exhibits displayed in the formal museum way—is treating the house as a makeshift museum building. This is never necessary; collections that have no relation to a house can be stored until some proper unction to conscience can be found. It is better to keep a historic house empty of objects until suitable furnishings are acquired than to clog it with unrelated exhibits which, once in, will not go out except with friction and, therefore, probably not at all.
In at least one early instance, plans called neither for displays of artifacts nor appropriate
period furnishings in a significant historic building. The Rotchev House (also at Fort
Ross), which the State Architect called the “Governor’s Mansion,” was one of the very
few remaining Russian structures at the fort. Yet it was not to be refurnished per its
original use, according to 1928 plans. Instead, it was to provide tea room service, with
dining rooms and “old Russian rooms” as well as kitchen and bathroom facilities—a kind
of adaptive reuse, but in retrospect perhaps not the best use of such a significant building
in a State Historic Monument where history is supposed to be interpreted. Something that
may be surprising to house museum visitors of today, used to “No food or drink“ rules, is
that use of part of a historic house museum as a tea room or even dining room was a
87. “Monterey Custom House Historic Structure Report” (Sacramento, CA: Garavaglia Architecture, Inc., 2010), 54-55; News and Views, March 1945, 3. 67
growing trend across the country around this time. Turning again to the 1933 book
Historic House Museums, the author praised these tea rooms and other facilities that
provided refreshments within historic buildings: “Some officers or boards regard this sort
of thing as too commercial for historic house museums, or as subversive of dignity. But
visitors do not share these views. The public welcomes hospitality, and, since museums
are beginning to provide it, museums are becoming resting spots.” He viewed this
movement as an encouraging sign that more adults would receive the educational
experience of “motoring with a purpose” to visit historic house museums, and that the
museums would provide for their comfort. It seems quite likely that this is what the
Division of Parks had in mind at Fort Ross, especially considering its remote location and
lack of nearby services.88
Interpretation at state historic parks began to improve in the 1950s, thanks in large part to State Historian Aubrey Neasham. After touring the State Historic Monuments at the beginning of his tenure in 1953, Neasham recommended that all historic structures be returned as much as possible to their “original appearance,” and refurnished. He wrote “If properly done, these buildings will take on the status of house museums, illustrating the functions which they had during their periods of greatest importance. . . . The return of historic buildings to their original appearance will necessitate the removal of glass showcases and many extraneous historical objects from these buildings.” He further recommended that separate “interpretive exhibits centers” be built for non-house museum
88. “Notes of Trip of State Architect: Fort Ross, Sonoma County,” Director Monthly Activity Reports file; Coleman, Historic House Museums, 35, 100-102. 68
exhibits, such as one then under construction at Coloma, and an exhibit plan developed for each historic building.89
The Marshall Gold Discovery SHP museum at Coloma opened in January 1961, and was viewed by management as a milestone in museum development in the state park system, with many more new museums planned to open after this. The museum planning was accomplished in conjunction with interpretive planning for the entire park, including new house museum exhibits in existing historical buildings, a reconstruction of an 1860s blacksmith shop, and interpretive wayside panels along the trail system. Tellingly, a 1960 article about the new museum says “The museum will not be a series of cases full of relics and mementos, instead, it will exhibit carefully selected objects of the Gold Rush to tell the story . . . The house museums, the trailside exhibits, and the exhibit cases will be set up to tell a story, not to show a collection of relics.” California State Parks was at last entering an era of well-planned history museum exhibits that provided a more focused interpretive message—a focused approach that fit better with the evolving craft of interpretation at that time, as codified by Freeman Tillman. The Coloma museum also included an information counter and an auditorium, still unusual enough to be worthy of note at that time, especially since this was the first time such facilities were made available in a museum in the California state park system. Instead of being just a museum, it more closely fit the model of the visitor centers being built at that time by the
National Park Service as part of Mission 66, which is covered below.90
89. Aubrey Neasham to Newton B. Drury, memorandum, 13 July 1953, Neasham Collection. 90. News and Views, December 1960, 5-10. 69
Two of the most ambitious house museum efforts began under Neasham.
Columbia State Historic Park, a large segment of an 1850s gold mining town that was
acquired in 1946, underwent a major program of reconstruction, restoration and
interpretation in the 1950s and 1960s. The buildings were authentically reconstructed,
restored, and furnished as much as possible. Hearst San Simeon State Historic
Monument, known informally as “Hearst Castle,” was acquired in 1958. It still contained
William Randolph Hearst’s elaborate furnishings. Initially the state owned the building
and the Hearst family retained ownership of the furnishings; gradually over more than a
decade the Hearsts donated the contents to California State Parks, extending the period in
which they were able to write them off on their taxes. The department took on the
responsibility of conserving these objects—some of which were centuries old—and
maintaining the building and grounds, at significant expense.91
Aubrey Neasham also boosted written interpretation for state historic parks. He stated the need for the “institution of a well-rounded publication program” for these parks in July of 1953, and noted that free leaflets were soon to be available for Sutter’s Fort, the separate Monterey historic monuments (later consolidated into Monterey State Historic
Park) and Columbia State Historic Park. He also proposed a series of inexpensive booklets for key state historic monuments, in the model of one then available for 25 cents at Sutter’s Fort. Neasham left the Division of Beaches and Parks in 1960 to form his own
91. California Department of Parks and Recreation, Planning Milestones: 2008 (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 2008), 20; California Department of Parks and Recreation, Planning Milestones: 2008, 26; News and Views, April 1962, 3; Wesley and Celeste Cater, interview by Carolyn Schimandle, October 16, 2010, digital recording and transcript, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA. 70
historical consulting firm, but his influence continued. Having performed the initial state
study of Old Sacramento in 1957, while he was still State Historian, he was responsible
for much of the historical research on Old Sacramento done in the 1960s in preparation
for its new life as a historic district and State Historic Park. He advocated for the historic
district’s formation, and his consulting firm wrote the historic district plan. He was also
largely responsible for successful negotiations that led to the change in the route of
Interstate 5 in order to preserve a larger area of Old Sacramento.92
In 1962, two years after Neasham left his position as State Historian, California
State Parks implemented a new and very different type of house museum environment.
The department acquired the first parcels of Bodie State Historic Park, after working to obtain the town site since 1954, under Neasham. Planning for the innovative manner in which Bodie was to be interpreted began at the same time as efforts to acquire the land.
From the first, Bodie has been maintained in a state that California State Parks named
“arrested decay,” though at first the concept was just described without a set name. All buildings are preserved to appear as they were at the time of acquisition, and the town is interpreted as a ghost town. Arrested decay was a milestone for cultural history interpretation nationwide, going against the trend of restoration and reenactment so prevalent then (and now), including the department’s own Columbia State Historic Park.
It has not been implemented on a similar scale anywhere else in the world, other than the
92. Aubrey Neasham to Newton B. Drury, memorandum, 13 July 1953, Neasham Collection; Lisa Prince, “A Past for the Present: Old Sacramento Historic District” (master’s project, California State University, Sacramento, 2003), 24-25, http://csus- dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.9/1451/FINAL FINAL A Past for the Present .pdf?sequence=33 (accessed November 8, 2014). 71
ruins of the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, which are preserved as a somber
memorial of the massacre by the Nazis that occurred there in 1944. The preservation of
Oradour-sur-Glane is not called “arrested decay, but the practices are the same.
Preservation of artifacts and structures in the town was carried out on a case-by-case
basis until an overall plan was developed in the 1980s. (It must be acknowledged that this
use of arrested decay for commemoration is a much more serious—and more
meaningful—application, as opposed to Bodie, which is often the site of romanticized
visitor connections to the California Gold Rush.)93
The plan to preserve and interpret Bodie in this manner was conceived by Clyde
Newlin, the superintendent of California State Parks District 3. He laid out this plan in a memorandum to Aubrey Neasham in 1954. Neasham concurred with this approach. In summing up the concept, he wrote “To crystallize Bodie for all time exactly as it is when we acquire it would be the principle to follow. The only compromise to this principle would be simple facilities for operation, personnel housing, a small refreshment concession, and, perhaps, an interpretive exhibit.” The “crystallization” of Bodie has not been an easy or inexpensive process. Buildings have had to be reinforced for visitor
93. California Department of Parks and Recreation, Bodie State Historic Park Resource Management Plan, General Development Plan, and Environmental Impact Report (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1979), 31; Diana Strazdes, “The Display of Ruins: Lessons from the Ghost Town of Bodie,” Change Over Time 3, no. 2 (2013): 237-240; Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 1, 198-199; Dydia DeLyser, “Authenticity on the Ground: Engaging the Past in a California Ghost Town,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 4 (1999): 602. Though Strazdes makes the incorrect supposition that arrested decay was a financial decision in the planning of Bodie (it is actually quite an expensive approach), she does point out that it was a bold move on the part of California State Parks to take this approach. 72
safety, but in a manner that still leaves the impression of authenticity and decay. This involved careful and creative planning by department architects, which resulted in elaborate reinforcing structures hidden inside each building. Maintenance workers regularly make repairs using materials that mimic (at least in appearance) those of the original construction. Just as these methods of preserving buildings in a certain apparent level of decay is very different from restored and reconstructed historic sites like Colonial
Williamsburg and Columbia, the early conceptualization of park interpretation at Bodie was very different than that at many parks: there would be no interpretive panels and minimal signage in the historic area, and little to no guided tours. The buildings and their in situ contents would speak for themselves, with a little assistance from a guide brochure, and visitor center displays would either be housed in one of the old buildings or in a new visitor center away from the historic core. Other than the guided tours that are now a regular offering, these early plans are still being followed.94
More innovative planning for the department’s natural history exhibits also began in the early 1950s. In a 1953 memo to Division Chief Newton Drury, Elmer Aldrich identified the need for a statewide interpretation master plan that would include exhibits
94. “Proposed Bodie State Historical Park: Report Submitted by Department of Natural Resources Division of Beaches and Parks to California State Park Commission,” Sacramento, California, March 25, 1955, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; Aubrey Neasham to Newton Drury, memorandum, 27 February 1956, in “Report on State Park Potentialities of Old Town of Bodie, Mono County, California: Project No. 3033,” California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; Dydia DeLyser, “Authenticity on the Ground” : 614-615. The memorandum from Newlin to Neasham is not available, but it is listed with a description in the table of contents of the 1954 report to the state park commission. California State Parks still has plans to build a visitor center outside the historic core, but funds have not been found for this expensive undertaking. Currently, one of the historic buildings contains a small visitor center. 73
highlighting topics for interpretation in busy parks “from the view of the park system as a whole.” This was a departure from past planning, which had been done on a park-by-park basis, just taking into account the important topic to interpret in the individual park without a system-wide perspective of the significant topics that should be interpreted for the entire state. The representative parks and topics as listed in the memo are given in
Table 1. Two topics were listed without related parks: the Cascade Range and the Inner
Coastal Ranges. The former had to be McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park, since the location was near Mount Lassen (site of the most recent volcanic eruption in the nation at that time) and the description mentions a waterfall. The latter had to be Clear
Lake State Park, since that is by far the largest naturally formed lake in the Inner Coastal
Range. The choice of parks and topics shows an effort to reach visitors all over the state, and highlight the diversity of California’s natural resources and landscapes. Three years later, the National Park Service’s “Mission 66” plan would also take a system-wide interpretive facility planning approach, but unlike the California plan, Mission 66 did not propose coordinating interpretation topics throughout the system—probably because of the more dispersed nature of the national parks.95
95. Elmer Aldrich to Newton Drury, memorandum, 21 January 1953, Neasham Collection. Borrego Desert State Park was a separate state park until it was combined with Anza State Park to become Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in 1957. 74
Table 1: Proposed 1953 master plan parks and topics Park Topic Listed in Memo Proposing Master Plan Calaveras Big Trees State Park Giant Sequoias; Their Place in Living Things Morro Bay and Huntington State Beaches The Beach; its Origin and Visitors Mt. San Jacinto State Park Deserts to Mountains; Contrast in Life Needs Borrego Desert State Park Desert Problems in Survival Caswell Memorial State Park California’s Great Valley; Little Left of What We Once Knew D.L. Bliss State Park The Sierra Nevada; Its Make-up a Recreational Asset McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State The Cascade Range; The Most Recent Park (location inferred by topic and Vulcanism in the Nation Produces a Scenic description in memo) Wonder Mount Tamalpais State Park The State Park Story; Tamalpais Sets a Pattern for the Preservation of a Recreational Area Adjacent to a Metropolis Clear Lake State Park (location inferred by The Inner Coastal Ranges; Climate and topic) Terrain Create a Large Lake for Outdoor Recreation Source: Elmer Aldrich to Newton Drury, memorandum, 21 January 1953, Neasham Collection.
A similar but more ambitious statewide plan was part of a recreation program
presented to the governor by the department and the California State Park Commission in
1961, one of the results of the recreation plan effort shepherded by Elmer Aldrich. Under
this plan, each of seven California “natural provinces” would have a major “museum-
visitor center” located in a representative park. The seven provinces and parks are shown
in Table 2. 75
Table 2: Parks representing California natural provinces in 1961 recreation program Province Park Coast Redwoods Humboldt Redwoods State Park Shasta-Cascade Volcanic area Castle Crags State Park Sierra Nevada Calaveras Big Trees State Park Central Coast Range-Foothill area Mt. Diablo State Park South Central Coast Morro Bay State Park South Coast Torrey Pines Beach State Park Desert and Desert Mountain Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Source: State Park Commission and Division of Beaches and Parks to Edmund G. Brown, report, 2 January 1961, private collection, 21-23.
The plan also called for small interpretive centers at nineteen parks throughout the state, and six 40-foot interpretive trailers for interpretation and orientation at schools and county fairs. These proposed major and minor interpretive facilities would have been a much more costly and time-consuming development project than the exhibits in nine existing facilities proposed by the 1953 plan. It is quite possible that the concept of a network of major interpretive facilities was inspired by the National Park Service’s
Mission 66 plan. It certainly was influenced by the NPS plan, since the state plan called for “museum-visitor centers.” The name “visitor center” and the concept of a park building that would include restrooms, information desk, and interpretive functions had been developed as part of the Mission 66 plan. Mission 66 was a major influence on state and national park systems throughout the world. Indeed, as mentioned above, California
State Parks had completed the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park museum that included features of the Mission 66 visitor centers the previous year.96
96. State Park Commission and Division of Beaches and Parks to Edmund G. Brown, report, 2 January 1961, private collection, 21-23; Sarah Allaback, Ph.D., “Introduction,” in Mission 66 Visitor Centers: The History of a Building Type (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000), under “The Visitor Center,” 76
The ambitious state park system plan never was fully implemented, perhaps because of the great expense. The total estimated cost of the seven proposed natural history museum-visitor centers in the plan was $2,880,000, a major sum in 1961. The least expensive by far was the Morro Bay facility, at $80,000. The other six ranged from
$400,000 to $650,000. The Morro Bay Museum of Natural History was already under development at the time of the 1961 plan. It was authorized by Senate Bill 1451 during the 1957 legislative session. By 1959 planning was completed and the project was ready to commence. The museum was opened in October 1962. At the time of its completion, its emphasis was (per the 1961 plan) the Central Coast region:
an overall picture of the topography, geography, geology, marine environment, flora and fauna of the vast region from Point Sur on the north to Point Conception on the south. This area is bounded on the east by the Salinas Valley and the great San Andreas fault zone and on the west by the beautiful Pacific Ocean.
The original exhibits were six dioramas of different habitats in the area. Leonard Penhale prepared the mounted animal specimens in the dioramas. Well-known California landscape artist Ray Strong painted the backgrounds. As a museum, not merely a visitor center, the Museum of Natural History has served as a research facility as well as an educational and interpretive facility, with extensive natural history collections. The
Morro Bay Museum of Natural History is the only one of the seven proposed major museum-visitor centers in the 1961 plan that was completed with a regional focus, though eventually some of the other larger and smaller museums and visitor centers were built with a local park focus. One 40-foot long park trailer was developed over a decade after http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/allaback/vc.htm (accessed October 26, 2014). 77
the plan—thanks to outside funding. The exhibit trailer is discussed in more detail below.
97
Interpretive and educational opportunities continued to be refined and expanded through the 1960s. Self-guided trails received a boost when headquarters sent a memorandum to all district field offices in January 1962. It gave the procedure for establishing a self-guided trail, and stated:
We believe the self-guided interpretive trails, complete with guide leaflet, which have been established in several parks already have proven very successful. They provide a fairly simple method of describing the dominant natural and historical features of a park area for the visitor’s benefit and enjoyment, at the same time relieving some of the burden of answering many of the more common questions about the park. There are other benefits which accrue to both the visitor and the park staff from the installation of a self-guiding facility.
The memo outlined how to choose part of an existing trail, preferably a loop one-half to three-quarters mile long, write a guide leaflet, and install numbered posts for the stops.98
A 1964 report titled “Program Description: Natural History” reveals that more
interpretive media were available to department interpreters by this time, though, as it
stated, “there has never been an adequate substitute for the interpreter in person.” It listed
the following examples of “new tools” being used in California’s state parks: the visitor
center, audio-visual programs, self-guiding tours, publications, trails, and museum
exhibits. The irreplaceable live interpreter apparently was not available at enough places
97. News and Views, December 1959, 5; News and Views, December 1962, 4; Penhale, interview. The author was unable to locate any documentation for the reason that the full plan never came to fruition. The Morro Bay Natural History Museum dioramas were removed during a new exhibit project in the 1990s. They are now stored at the California State Parks Museum Resource Center. 98. News and Views, March 1963, 6-7. 78
or in large enough numbers in 1964: the report mentioned a proposal to increase
interpretation by providing seasonal naturalists at 22 additional parks, leading to an
addition of 50 more seasonal personnel. This “would provide only the minimum coverage
necessary to adequately carry out the ‘live’ interpretive program and offer a public
service so vital to interpretation, conservation and protection of park values and public
support for the over- all park program.” The proposal was not implemented: a 1966 end-
of-season report on the naturalist program lists just 13 parks with seasonal naturalists.99
Expansion of personal natural history interpretation to additional parks came about in a different way, though it did not lead to more interpretation staffing. It did, however, create opportunities for programs of a different type. As mentioned above, the
1968 change to use of permanent staff for interpretation allowed for the expansion of regular interpretive programs beyond the busy summer season, including programs for school groups. Thus, this change was the beginning of a regular educational program in the California State Park system. And also as stated in the last chapter, the switch to ranger-led interpretation allowed for interpretive programs in parks where seasonal interpreters had never been assigned.100
New social and cultural awareness in the 1960s and 1970s led to major changes in
cultural history interpretation throughout the United States. Black, feminist, Latino, and
99. “Program Description: Natural History,” no author identified, 30 November 1964, private collection; Burgess W. Heacox to All Park Interpretive Specialists and Supervising Park Interpretive Specialists, memorandum, 28 December 1966, private collection. The self-guiding tours included at least one automobile tour, at Van Damme State Park, but since the author found little information on this or any other auto tours, their history is not included in this document. 100. Burgess Heacox to Darwin Thorpe, 17 October 1968, private collection. 79
Native American groups and individuals, as part of the rising tide of political activism,
were pushing for their place in history to be recognized. As one black historic
preservationist said at that time,
“One does not have to be a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution to be interested and concerned about their roots,” insisted a black Kansas City preservationist: “It was good that we saved, and now maintain, Williamsburg, Virginia. And for the same reasons, we must save and maintain the slave cabins and some of the shotgun houses, little frame churches, jails and one-room school houses around the country that tell the story of black people in America.”
One outcome in California State Parks was Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.
Another was more sensitive interpretation of Native California Indians. In both cases, a
major change was the involvement of the people whose story was being told in the
development of content and presentation. This was also a reflection of the nationwide
movement in cultural history interpretation, and the interpretation of cultures in
general.101
The concept of Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park did not just spring from the good intentions of Director William Penn Mott, Jr., though he did support its creation once a movement had begun for California State Parks to acquire the Allensworth town site. The idea originated with Ed Pope, a state parks department draftsman who had lived as a child in Allensworth, the only town in California’s history to be founded, funded, and governed solely by African Americans. He was working on graphs and drawings for a report on state historic sites, and noticed that, while many represented the history of
101. Michael Wallace, “Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States,” in Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, ed. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Ray Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 154-155. 80
other ethnic groups, not one out of 127 was a site connected with California’s African
American history. Pope brought this idea to two prominent California African American legislators: Assemblyman Willie Brown, then the Democratic whip, and State Senator
Mervyn Dymally, a founding member of the California Legislative Black Caucus. Both became very interested, and vowed to work to make it happen. Dymally introduced successful legislation to direct the Department of Parks and Recreation to conduct a feasibility study on acquiring and opening Allensworth as a state park. As Pope related later in an interview, “It was 1969. Not that much earlier, the Black Panthers had been in the Capitol Rotunda. Let’s just say the Legislature was in a listening mood.” Per the legislation, Mott appointed a 21-member citizens’ advisory committee. It included prominent African American Californians, an NAACP youth representative, Colonel
Allensworth’s granddaughter, a pioneering Allensworth settler, and residents of the contemporary town of Allensworth (immediately south of the original town site). The advisory committee, and ultimately the feasibility study, concluded that Allensworth was of historic significance, and was indeed a desirable location for a state historic park acknowledging the contributions of African Americans to the state. Two of the nine conclusions listed in the feasibility study involved interpretation:
1. The California State Park System is deficient in historical preservation and interpretation programs giving attention to the contributions of its Black citizens.
3. This proposed project represents the first recognition of major significance dealing specifically with interpretation of Negro participation in the historical and cultural development of the State of California. Its contribution to our social and cultural history by increased awareness of 81
the role of the Negro in this nation's development will be significant.102
African Americans from all over California worked to make the park a reality, and Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park was dedicated in 1976. It has become an important symbol for many African American Californians, with volunteers and chartered buses of visitors traveling from Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, and
Los Angeles for interpretive special events.103
In the case of greater awareness of Native American culture, the 1969-1971
occupation of Alcatraz was a major catalyst for the American Indian movement, which,
among other goals, strove to correct the Eurocentric view of history portrayed in popular
culture, scholarly works, and museums. Greater awareness in some instances was thrust
upon museum administrators. For example, in 1970 Native American students at the
University of Kansas challenged the on-campus display of the remains of Comanche,
“the only survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn.” The exhibit built around the horse
mount portrayed the Native Americans as savages, and the cavalry as victims.
Furthermore, in calling Comanche the only survivor, it discounted the value of the Native
Americans who survived the battle—and those who were killed. This slant to exhibits
about history in which Native Americans played a part was unfortunately common.
102. Alice C. Royal, Mickey Ellinger, and Scott Braley, Allensworth, the Freedom Colony (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2008), 98-101; Mickey Ellinger and Scott Braley, “Allensworth Freedom Colony: An Experiment in African American Self- Determination,” Race, Poverty and the Environment 16 no. 1 (Spring 2009), 30, http://reimaginerpe.org/files/Ellinger-Braley.Rights.16-1-10.pdf (accessed November 13, 2014); California Department of Parks and Recreation, Allensworth Feasibility Study (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1971), iv-xx, 4.
103. Royal, Ellinger, and Braley, Allensworth, the Freedom Colony, 102. 82
Whites were victims or defenders, and the Native Americans were savages. In the case of
the Comanche exhibit, the Native American students’ activism eventually led to
development of an exhibit collaboratively developed by both whites and Native
Americans. It featured Comanche as the symbol of a tragic battle, and portrayed the
history of the Battle of Little Bighorn from both white and Native American
perspectives.104
California State Parks was not directly confronted with the need to change interpretation of Native Americans, as the University of Kansas had been. Instead, the general tenor of the times influenced the department to include representatives of other ethnic groups when planning exhibits that portrayed their culture. In the 1970s, the department formed a Native American Advisory Council (NAAC) as part of the exploration of the development of a new State Indian Museum. While a new State Indian
Museum did not directly come out of that process, NAAC and DPR did create a plan for a network of museums that would represent Native California Indians in regions based on a traditional Native California Indian view of the land. The long-range goal was to have regional Indian museums for each of 13 regions. Due to budget cutbacks, the plan had to
104. C. Richard King, “Surrounded by Indians: The Exhibition of Comanche and the Predicament of Representing Native American History,” The Public Historian 18 no. 4 (Autumn, 1996): 42-44, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3379786 (accessed November 10, 2014); Clara Sue Kidwell and Ann Marie Plane, “Introduction,” The Public Historian 18 no. 4 (Autumn, 1996): 10, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3379784 (accessed November 10, 2014). 83
be altered in the 1980s to include regional Indian museums in just four existing facilities: in Sacramento, near Jackson, at Lake Perris, and in Antelope Valley.105
The State Indian Museum in Sacramento, originally opened in 1940, was designated the Regional Indian Museum for the Central Valley. Chaw’se Regional Indian
Museum was built in 1977 as the Cultural Center at Indian Grinding Rock State Historic
Park near Jackson. Following general plan recommendations made in 1983, it became the
Regional Indian Museum for the Sierra Nevada. According to its general plan, it would be the first regional Indian museum, though the museum at Lake Perris actually became the first. Ya’i Heki’, the Lake Perris museum, became the Regional Indian Museum for the southern California desert region in 1984. Antelope Valley Indian Museum was originally a private museum. It was acquired in 1979, and designated the regional Indian museum for the western Great Basin in the 1980s. One more regional Indian museum was eventually added around 1990, when the Yurok village of Sumeg, in Patrick’s Point
State Park on California’s north coast, became the fifth regional Indian Museum. An important aspect of the planning for the Regional Indian museums is that they were to include the active participation of Native California Indians. This was a major improvement over the previous department interpretation, in which the California Indian story was told by non-Indians. Again, the change not only reflected the department’s
105. Leo Carpenter, “Report on the Plan to Establish a California State Indian Museum Network,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA. Native California Indians did express frustration at the lack of progress in establishing a new California Indian Museum over the years, especially when the multimillion dollar California Railroad Museum was opened and the Indian museum was no closer to reality than it had been a decade earlier. 84
increasing sensitivity, but also the greater awareness nationwide of the bias previously
inherent in interpretation of other cultures.106
A different form of urban outreach was made possible when the Department of
Parks and Recreation finally obtained an exhibit trailer in 1969. Its first incarnation was
not targeted at urban outreach to underserved audiences. The Ida Mae Sbragia estate
funded a 40-foot long trailer to be the California State Parks contribution to the statewide
celebration of the 200th anniversary of the founding of Mission San Diego. The trailer,
called “California 200,” was fitted with California history displays. It toured the state,
stopping at schools and shopping centers. (Unfortunately, in this case there was not
general awareness that celebrating the beginning of the subjugation and slaughter of
Native California Indians was insensitive.)107
The trailer’s second life, though, was more in line with the original 1961 plan that called for six exhibit trailers. In 1974 the interior was redone using a grant from the
Environmental License Plate Fund. Renamed “The Park Experience,” the trailer visited
106. Leo Carpenter, “Report on the Plan to Establish a California State Indian Museum Network,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; Marvin Brienes, “Great Basin Regional Indian Museum Interpretive Plan,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, October, 1987, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA, 3; Engbeck, State Parks of California, 122; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Indian Grinding Rock SHP,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=553 (accessed February 8, 2014); California Department of Parks and Recreation, Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park General Plan (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1984), 39-40; California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Visit the Renewed Lake Perris Regional Indian Museum,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=26755 (accessed February 8, 2014); California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Antelope Valley Indian Museum: About the Museum,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, http://www.avim.parks.ca.gov/about.shtml (accessed February 8, 2014). 107. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 115, 117. 85
schools, fairs, and special events all over California—focusing on urban areas. Rangers
Paula Peterson (then Paula Morse) and Harry Morse were the first dedicated driving and
interpretation staff for “The Park Experience,” in 1974-1975. The exhibits were improved
and updated the following year.108
According to the Park Experience Trailer teacher packet, the interior contained:
. . . a series of exhibits on the basic building blocks of our environment, Solar Energy, Rain Cycles, Photosynthesis, Food Chains, interpreted to tie these inter-relationships together with our lives . . . The objective of the program is to introduce new and familiar concepts about our environment, create awareness and stimulate curiosity in the student.
This content and approach were in step with the environmental education movement that
was going strong in the late 1960s and 1970s, including the tie-in to how humans interact
with the environment. The National Park Service was deeply involved in environmental
education in this time immediately before and after the first Earth Day, and California
State Parks was not far behind. At the same time as the Park Experience Trailer was
bringing environmental education to students around the state, NPS was making areas of
parks around the country available to classes as Environmental Study Areas—including
some in parks set aside for their historical value. Starting in 1968, the National Park
Service had collaborated in the development of the widely-adopted National
Environmental Education Development (or NEED) materials for schools. These materials
included five “strands:” variety and similarities, patterns, interrelation and
interdependence, continuity and change, and adaptation and evolution. Students explored
108. Engbeck, State Parks of California, 115, 117; News & Views, October 1975. Paula Peterson was another groundbreaking state park employee. She was the first woman badged ranger in the department. 86
the Environmental Study Areas using these strands. These strands eventually were used
in California’s state parks in the Environmental Living Programs, which are covered
below.109
The Park Experience Trailer was not only meant to provide education on these environmental concepts, it was a way to reach people who had not visited (and in many cases, could not visit) their state’s parks, especially children who due to economic or social circumstances had not had the “park experience.” It is interesting to note that the
National Park Service and the Western National Parks Association only recently (2014) completed a master plan for a similar trailer, “to bring authentic Parks experiences to underserved populations throughout the West.” The author found no evidence that actual fabrication of this mobile exhibit has begun.110
The Park Experience Trailer was just one aspect of the department’s growing role
in education. In 1971, director William Penn Mott, Jr., and Superintendent of Public
Instruction Wilson Riles issued a joint memorandum to all school administrators and
teachers with the subject “Policy Guidelines for Educational Use of State Park Facilities.”
The memo covers selecting the proper park for a field trip, reservations and charges, pre-
planning, visit considerations, follow-up, and additional services. Reading this memo,
one has the impression that school field trips to parks were still fairly loosely organized.
109. News & Views, October 1975; Engbeck, State Parks of California, 115; State of California, Department of Parks and Recreation, “The Park Experience Teacher Packet,” n.d., private collection; Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service, 68. 110. State of California, Department of Parks and Recreation, “The Park Experience Teacher Packet”; Studio Tectonic, post on Studio Tectonic Facebook page, entry posted July 9, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=104390363014005&story_fbid=57682321 9104048 (accessed November 9, 2014). 87
Teachers were urged to hold a pre-planning conference with park personnel to discuss the
educational objectives, background information and vocabulary for the field trip, and the
age level and class capabilities, among other more mundane points. The memo stated
that, “Some units have prepared special packets for school use.”111
A few years later, more information was available for teachers using the parks.
By 1975 teacher’s packets had been developed for regular school programs at about a dozen units, including Calaveras Big Trees, the redwood parks, Marshall Gold
Discovery, and Petaluma Adobe. Teacher’s packets were in development for the Morro
Bay area units, Topanga State Park, Benicia State Recreation Area, and La Purísima
Mission State Historic Park.112
But while there were more resources for the use of parks as classrooms, there was
not yet much in the way of a formal California State Parks education program. A list of
proposed interpretive projects from circa 1976 included information on one project for
“Statewide Program for School Use of Parks.” It started by saying that “California’s state
parks are an excellent but as yet undeveloped resource for outdoor education. Teachers
are not aware of the parks’ potential, and park personnel are not trained to work with
teachers.” The proposed project was to set up teacher and park personnel training in
District 4, the Central Coast. The goal of this training was to use the recently developed
teacher guides to create a model for a statewide outdoor environmental education
111. William Penn Mott, Jr., and Wilson Riles to All School Administrators and Teachers, “Policy Guidelines for Educational Use of State Park Facilities,” memorandum, 31 March 1971, private collection. 112. William Dillinger to Herbert Rhodes, memorandum, 24 June 1975, private collection. 88
curriculum for use in state parks. The training and program development were intended to
set a precedent for other park districts and county offices of education to follow
throughout the state. It is not clear whether this proposal was ever implemented, but it
does point out the still-primitive state of education programs in most of the system’s
parks.113
Despite what this proposal said, there were at least some school programs taking
place that same year, in which teachers and park staff worked closely together—
Environmental Living Programs (ELP). The concept of the ELP was rooted in a social
studies curriculum called “Man: A Course of Study,” commonly known as “MACOS,”
and also in the NEED materials covered above. MACOS, like NEED, was widely
adopted throughout the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s. It sought to answer
three questions: What makes human beings human? How did they get that way? How can
they become more so? It led children to explore cultures in the context of their
environment, essentially approaching humans’ relationship with the environment from
the other direction than that taken by the NEED program (from humans to natural
environment instead of from natural environment to humans).114
The actual ELP experience was inspired by a 1969 second grade class’s “live-in”
at the 1885 Wolfe Cabin located in the Environmental Study Area in Utah’s Arches
113. Project Proposal List, California Department of Parks and Recreation, n.d. (pre- 1977), private collection. 114. William Dillinger to Herbert Rhodes, memorandum, 24 June 1975, private collection; Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service, 61; George Weber, “The Case against Man: A Course of Study,” The Phi Delta Kappan, 57, no. 2 (October, 1975): 81-82, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20298152 (accessed November 2, 2014). “Man: A Course of Study” was controversial both for course content and its anthropological basis. 89
National Park. Bill Taylor, an NPS interpretive specialist and former teacher, originated the idea and organized the trip. The students prepared by studying daily chores circa
1885. During the overnight experience, they baked bread, washed clothes by hand, and
“hunted” cardboard animal silhouettes. Taylor built on this first program to create ongoing ELPs. The first of these began in 1971, at Fort Point National Historic Site on
San Francisco Bay. According to the handbook for that program, “Environmental Living
. . . is an actual living over-night experience for children at any cultural, historic or prehistoric site where the interaction and interdependency of man and his environment are represented. It relies heavily on pre-site explorations and preparation, role-playing and problem solving, and ‘cross-age’ teaching—the enlistment of high school (and college) youth counselors and group leaders.” In the early years of the ELPs, students explored the site on a “Strands Walk” when they first visited—ideally during a separate site visit before the program, or at the very beginning of their program days. The Strands
Walk was a self-guided exploration in which the children noted elements about how the environment and its human influence fit together, using the NEED strands as guidance.
The environmental education-based Strands Walk was used at all of the ELP sites, even though virtually all of the ELP programs took place in parks set aside for their historical values. This fit with the National Park Service’s policies on environmental education in the late 1960s through the 1970s, which called for environmental education to be included in interpretation at all of the NPS sites—including historic sites such as house museums and battle fields. The Strands Walk was part of the Fort Point ELP, and it 90
became part of the first California State Parks ELPs when they started soon after.115
California State Parks became involved with ELPs early on for a rather pragmatic reason—the San Francisco climate. It was too cold for students to sleep at Fort Point, so they spent evenings aboard the sailing ship C. A. Thayer at nearby Hyde Street Pier in
San Francisco Maritime State Historic Park (now San Francisco Maritime National
Historical Park). The Thayer also had the advantage of having a working galley. At the
instigation of Bill Taylor, NPS and California State Parks began running the Fort
Point/Hyde Street Pier program as a cooperative venture. Soon after, the department’s
own ELPs sprouted from this humble beginning, with a program exclusively aboard the
C. A. Thayer. Glenn Burch, a state park historian at San Francisco Maritime State
Historic Park who had been assigned to the cooperative program from its inception,
initiated the new program. By 1975 there were four ELPs: at the Hyde Street Pier, Fort
Tejon, Petaluma Adobe and Turlock Lake. Burch was the driving force behind the state
park ELPs. In mid-1975 he went on loan to the Western Region of NPS for a year and a
half. He worked with Bill Taylor to develop more ELPs in national parks. Upon his
return to California State Parks, Burch led the effort to bring additional ELPs online. He
received strong support from all levels of state park management, but Operations Chief
Jack Knight insisted on one thing: the ELPs could not be a budget item. They had to be
115. National Park Service Western Regional Office, The “Environmental Living” Project (San Francisco: National Park Service Western Regional Office, n.d.), 1; Mary Lou Baldi, The Environmental Living Program (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 25. The description from the Fort Point ELP program handbook fits ELPs from then until now, with one exception: the use of high school and college students, which is not currently happening in State Park ELPs. The Ide Adobe SHP Environmental Study Program, essentially an ELP without the overnight stay, uses local continuation high school students. 91
self-supporting. As Glenn Burch said in a 2006 interview, “Well, you know, it’s always a
problem within the park system: do more with less. He was trying to make things work
and keep the budget under control.” This was one of many logistical hurdles that Burch
and the ELP site coordinators had to work out.116
The California State Park system’s early adoption of the ELP concept is illustrated by the 1975 The Environmental Living Program set of booklets published by the federal government. Four program sites out of eleven listed in the booklets were
California state parks. Glenn Burch was involved in starting the programs at three of the six listed national park sites, and worked cooperatively on a fourth—the Fort Point program. (The eleventh site on the list was a city history museum in Folsom, California.)
With seven state park ELPs now operating, Taylor and Burch’s innovations continue to live on in California, though the economic hurdles continue to this day. Classes must be charged fees to cover the program costs, though several parks have obtained grants or other support that allows them to offer scholarships to a few schools every year. Despite this hand-to-mouth existence, the interpreters involved in the ELPs take pride in their program, and interpreters at additional parks are interested in starting new ELPs—if they
117 can find ways to handle the challenges
In addition to formal educational programs, California State Parks developed
informal interpretation for children in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Again inspired by
116. Kassy Fatooh, “The Roots of ELPs in State Parks: an Interview with Glenn Burch,” The Catalyst: the Newsletter for Interpretation in California State Parks, Spring/Summer 2006, 10-11. 117. Baldi, The Environmental Living Program, 2-5. The seven current ELPs are at Angel Island, Fort Ross, Fort Tejon, Petaluma Adobe, Sutter’s Fort, Malakoff Diggins, and Tomales Bay. 92
the National Parks, the department developed and tested Junior Ranger programs in the early 1970s. The official statewide program was rolled out in 1973. It carries on today, with some refinements and improvements. Junior Ranger programs are for children 7-12 years old. They offer hands-on experience in a variety of subject areas including cultural and natural history, park careers, and resource stewardship. Each program focuses on one subject area. The programs are designed to foster an appreciation in children of park resources. Participants take a pledge at each program to help protect the parks, and receive awards for completing a certain number of programs. From the first they have been free for participants, to make them available to all children.118
The Junior Ranger program has undergone two major overhauls. The first was in
1991-1992. The major change made was the addition of a log book in which children could record their experiences in Junior Rangers, and program leaders could mark off activities the children had completed. Awards were also revamped. An upgrading of the program content occurred in 1993 when a new Junior Ranger handbook for program leaders came out to replace the old brief program guidelines. It was much more extensive, with more information on best practices for working with children, and background material plus sample programs for each unit of study: animal life, California Indians, ecology, energy, geology, history, park careers, plant life, safety, water, and weather. A grant from the California Department of Conservation funded the addition of a recycling unit in 1998.
118. “Grant Terms Between the California State Parks Foundation and the California Department of Parks and Recreation,” n.d., California Department of Parks and Recreation Interpretation and Education Division Junior Ranger/Litter-Getter files. 93
The second major overhaul started in 2000, with a survey distributed to Junior
Rangers as they received awards. In February 2001 a Junior Ranger Advisory Committee
started meeting to “update, improve and expand the Junior Ranger program.” This group
initiated major changes in the materials and how Junior Ranger programs were
conducted, based on the 2000 survey of Junior Ranger participants and additional surveys
of state park interpreters. Changes included a new logo, a webpage and a statewide self-
guided “Adventure Guide.” Based on the survey results, the committee set up a new
award structure with more appealing awards, including special Junior Ranger metal
badges and patches to attract more children and make a more lasting impression on them.
Thanks to grants from the T.J. Long Foundation and the California State Parks
Foundation, the materials were again updated in 2005-2006. The logbook was
redesigned, handbooks updated, and both logbook and Adventure Guide translated into
Spanish. The Junior Ranger programs will continue to be provided at no cost to
participants, though funding for supplies has been a challenge. Junior Rangers is one of
the most important tools that the department has to reach young park visitors with
resource protection messages.119
A second statewide program for children is Litter-Getters. It is a self-guided interpretive activity that encourages children to protect park resources by cleaning up trash and recycling, and provides them with information about the importance to the
119. “Agenda of the Junior Ranger Program Advisory Committee,” 1 February 2001, California Department of Parks and Recreation Interpretation and Education Division Junior Ranger/Litter-Getter files; “Jr. Ranger Advisory Committee Meeting 6/22/01,” n.d., California Department of Parks and Recreation Interpretation and Education Division Junior Ranger/Litter-Getter files; “Grant Terms Between the California State Parks Foundation and the California Department of Parks and Recreation.” 94
natural environment of recycling and reducing litter. The program has been in existence since the early1970s, probably inspired by the first Earth Day celebration, in 1970.
Awards have changed through the years. In the beginning, participants received posters with anti-litter messages. While the posters were popular, they proved to be too expensive and bulky, and didn’t encourage repeating the program at other parks.
Participants at one point also received park-specific patches. The Litter-Getters program had to be discontinued in the early 1990s as a result of budget cuts.120
The Interpretation and Education Division received a grant in 1997 from the State
Department of Conservation to revamp the Litter-Getters program. A new brochure and awards resulted, with an increased emphasis on recycling—a requirement of the grant.
Focus groups were conducted in 1997 to determine what awards would most motivate a target audience of children ranging from five to twelve years old, and which their parents thought were the most appropriate. The award with the most universal appeal to this broad range of ages was a temporary tattoo, but it rated low with parents. A pencil made of recycled materials scored high with the children, too, and also had parental approval.
The pencils, made of either recycled paper money or recycled blue jeans, have remained a popular award to this day, but they may soon be phased out due to their cost. Locating sufficient funds for Litter-Getter supplies has been an ongoing concern. Some years there has been enough in the Park Operations budget to cover the total cost, but the
Interpretation and Education Division has often needed to seek outside funding to pay for
120. Donna Pozzi, personal communication to author, June 27, 2014; Donna Pozzi to Tricia Broddrick, memorandum, 24 June 1975, California Department of Parks and Recreation Interpretation and Education Division Junior Ranger/Litter-Getter files. 95
at least part of the program. The California State Parks Foundation and the Save the
Redwoods League have both been instrumental in providing funds.121
One of the department’s biggest interpretive accomplishments in the 1970s and
1980s was the planning and opening of the California State Railroad Museum. The railroad museum is a world-class facility located in Sacramento, the original western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. It is the most ambitious museum facility that
California State Parks has built to date. Its planning, construction, object acquisition, and exhibit installation were complex and involved working with multiple partners. These partners included the Old Sacramento Redevelopment Agency and the Pacific Coast
Chapter of the Railroad and Locomotive Historical Society. The latter donated over forty rare locomotives and cars that the group had collected since 1937 with hopes that they would one day be displayed at a railroad museum. The group had done an impressive job of selectively acquiring and caring for the equipment in the collection. In 1970, John H.
White, Jr., the curator of the Smithsonian Institution Division of Transportation,
Department of Science and Technology, Museum of History and Technology, called it one of the great railroad equipment collections in the United States. Since White was a well-known expert in railroad history, this was significant praise.122
The planning for California State Parks to acquire and exhibit this collection
began in the 1950s. The initial plan called for establishment of a Museum of Western
121. Sandy Hyson to Donna Pozzi, 15 May 1997, Interpretation and Education Division Junior Ranger/Litter-Getter files. 122. News and Views, November 1959, 12; News and Views, April 1969, 6; California Department of Parks and Recreation, California State Railroad Museum Interpretive Plan (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1975), 1. 96
Transportation at San Francisco Maritime State Historic Monument in San Francisco.
The railroad collection was to be housed in the historic Haslett Warehouse near Hyde
Street Pier. But the warehouse proved to be too small for the purpose. Despite San
Francisco’s desire to keep the collection in that city, plans were changed to build a new
Railroad History Museum in Old Sacramento State Historic Park—a location that had the advantage not only of its strong historical connection as the terminus of the transcontinental railroad, but also the support of the Old Sacramento Redevelopment
Agency. The railroad museum received this first large donation of rolling stock in March
1969, including the famous Governor Stanford engine. In September of 1976 the first section of the railroad museum opened—the Central Pacific Passenger Depot. The depot is a reconstruction furnished as a house museum. Groundbreaking for the Railroad
History Museum took place on April 21, 1979. The museum was opened to the public in
May of 1981. A 1983 review of the museum, entitled “The California State Railroad
Museum: A Louvre for Locomotives,” praised its elegance and use of the latest interpretive techniques to make the history of rail transportation interesting and relevant to all—not just train buffs. The reviewer was John H. White, Jr., the Smithsonian curator and railroad history expert who had praised the founding collection of the railroad museum a decade earlier. His review held up California’s rail museum as an example of what United States railroad interpretation should be. To quote:
There is none of the weed-grown dilapidation normally associated with museums operated by railroad enthusiasts. At long last one has a feeling that America is beginning to catch up with Western Europe: We now have a railway museum that can serve as a model for what can and should be done elsewhere in the nation—a nation whose history is everywhere intertwined with rail transportation. 97
The museum’s interpretive and educational opportunities began to provide an even more
memorable connection between visitors and the history of railroads in the United States
with the addition of service on the Sacramento Southern Railroad in spring of 1984. The
service has continued since that time. Passengers travel on historic trains on which
docents provide both interpretation over a loudspeaker system and roving interpretation
throughout the train cars, answering individual questions and providing additional
information.123
The railroad museum plans have included a separate railroad technology museum from early in the planning process. The initial proposed site was adjacent to the abandoned PG&E powerhouse about a half-mile north of Old Sacramento, but this site was eventually dismissed. In the 1980s, the technology museum almost became a reality at a location about a half-mile south of the Railroad History Museum. That effort was also eventually abandoned, due to an economic downturn. The department currently is working to rehabilitate two shop buildings and a turntable in the now-closed Southern
Pacific Sacramento Railyards to become the Railroad Technology Museum. When
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the agreement between the state and the property owner to transfer the buildings and turntable to California State Parks, he said
123. News and Views, November 1959, 12; Engbeck, State Parks of California, 126; California State Railroad Museum Foundation, “About the Museum,” California State Railroad Museum Foundation, http://www.csrmf.org/visitor-information/about-the- museum (accessed November 30, 2013); John H. White, Jr., “California State Railroad Museum: A Louvre for Locomotives,” Technology and Culture 24 no. 4 (October, 1983), 644, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3104252 (accessed November 11, 2014); California State Railroad Museum Foundation, “History of the Sacramento Southern Railroad,” California State Railroad Museum Foundation, http://www.csrmf.org/explore-and- learn/history-of-the-sacramento-southern-railroad (accessed November 30, 2013). 98
that the deal would allow “the development of an internationally-renowned museum on a truly historic piece of property.” The museum plans call for it to interpret the latest technology in rail transit, on the site of the western terminus of the historic transcontinental railroad and the historically significant (and innovative, in their time) railyards. The project has received nationwide attention. The California State Railroad
Museum Foundation’s brochure on the Railroad Technology Museum quotes William L.
Withuhn, the Smithsonian Institution’s Curator of Work & Industry:
These…are among the most historically significant buildings in all of California…For more than a century, the thousands of people [who worked in the Railyards]—of every cultural background—crafted the locomotives [and] rail cars…from which rose the modern West. There is no better way to commemorate and to learn first-hand… than to adaptively preserve these buildings and use them as a public education center for the 21st century. When the Railroad Technology Museum is completed, it will be another major milestone in department interpretation, and, like the Railroad History Museum, a milestone in railroad interpretation worldwide.124
Written interpretation for the state parks improved again in 2000, with the start of a new free brochure program. The goal of the program was to produce a brochure for each park. The Interpretation and Education Division’s Publications Section was put in
124. Gretchen Schneider, “Facilities Analysis Report: California State Railroad Museum,” October 1975, California State Parks Archives, Sacramento, CA; Paul Hammond, “The Southern Pacific Railyards” (lecture, California State Railroad History Museum, Sacramento, CA, March 15, 2014); News and Views, Spring 2008, 3, http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/23071/files/nv_spring2008.pdf (accessed November 11, 2014); California State Railroad Museum Foundation, Railroad Technology Museum: Located in the Historic Sacramento Railyards (Sacramento, CA: California State Railroad Museum Foundation, 2011) under “Cathedrals of Labor,” http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/24393/files/2011RTMbrochureDC_06_29_11.pdf (accessed November 11, 2014). 99
charge, after decades in which other state park headquarters offices, local districts or cooperating associations handled the production of brochures—often not offered for free.
Brochures have a uniform format, with different colors on the cover to distinguish different park classifications—State Park, State Historic Park, or State Recreation Area.
Each includes a park map, a general description of the park, resource protection messages, and interpretation of cultural history, natural history, and recreation opportunities. The free brochures are one of the main vehicles of presenting a unified statewide interpretive message for California State Parks. As of 2014, the Publications
Section is approximately 90 parks away from the goal of a free brochure for each park.
The department has dipped a toe into the new arena of self-guided tours using visitors’ own electronic devices. The National Park Service and other state park systems have done much more with this new medium. Self-guided tours took a high-tech turn at
Allensworth State Historic Park in 2010, with the start of the first cellphone tour in
California State Parks. The Monterey District soon followed suit, with tours at Monterey
State Historic Park, San Juan Bautista State Historic Park, and Fort Ord Dunes State
Park. While tours using smartphone apps and mobile websites are now available, the high cost has kept any California state parks from pursuing this promising new format.
Tight budgets are a major constraint on the production of new interpretive media, especially since the state budget crisis of the late 2000s. Even before that, interpretation in virtually all parks was dependent on the support of cooperating associations. There is no longer an annual budget for interpretation in each district, and, other than some one- time deferred maintenance and bond funding for some interpretation projects, the 100
Interpretation and Education Division only provides materials for the Junior Ranger and
Litter-Getter programs.
The PORTS program is one innovative program that California State Parks
Interpretation and Education Division has successfully pursued, initially due to the vision of a few department employees who saw opportunity in technological advances to meet the department’s mission. Due to continued hard work and executive support (especially the support of Interpretation and Education Division Chief Donna Pozzi), the program grew. Economically, its continuation has been made possible by an ongoing effort to obtain grant funding and equipment donations. PORTS, an acronym for Parks Online
Resources for Teachers and Students, provides distance learning opportunities for kindergarten through 12th grade classes. Students, including many who have never had the opportunity to visit a state park, are able to interact with interpreters via videoconference over California’s K-12 High-Speed Network (K12HSN). The interpreters videoconference in some cases from studios, using chroma key technology
(also known as green screen) to appear in front of live feed, video or slide presentations of state park resources—the same technology that creates the impression that a weather reporter on television is standing in front of images of approaching storm fronts. In other cases, the PORTS interpreter connects directly from a park, using mobile videoconferencing equipment to show park resources firsthand. Unlike a straight video feed, videoconferencing allows for true two-way communication. Students can ask and answer questions, and the interpreters can spontaneously tailor their presentations to meet the needs and interests of each group. All PORTS units of study are designed to meet 101
California’s academic content standards. Park interpreters and educators have worked together to produce a curriculum for each unit of study. Teachers and students are able to access lesson plans and activities on the web to reinforce concepts before and after the
PORTS presentation. With PORTS, California State Parks pioneered high-quality distance learning via videoconference, and it is still the only park agency in the United
States—state or national—to have a system-wide organized program of distance learning via videoconference.125
The conceptualization of the innovative PORTS program developed from another innovation, the videoconference system. California State Parks was searching for new ways to reach kindergarten through 12th grade students with little or no opportunity to visit state parks, either because of distance or socioeconomic barriers. Information
Technology Division Chief Alan Friedman approached Donna Pozzi about the possibility of developing interpretive programs using videoconferencing technology. Pozzi enthusiastically agreed. State Park Interpreter Joe von Herrmann, whom Pozzi had hired in large part due to his ability to use new technology in interpretation, became involved soon after this. He was a major force in ensuring its success. When the PORTS program grew to a point where it needed more individual attention, von Herrmann became the
PORTS program manager and skillfully guided it until his retirement in 2013.126
125. California State Parks, “PORTS,” California State Parks, http://www.ports.parks.ca.gov/ (accessed October 1, 2014); Heather Holm, personal communication to author, October 16, 2014; Heather Holm, personal communication to author, October 28, 2014. 126. Donna Pozzi, personal communication to author, November 4, 2014; Joe von Herrmann, personal communication to author, November 9, 2014. 102
Figure 8: PORTS program in progress, June 2012. (Photo by Brian Baer. © California State Parks, 2012. California State Parks Photographic Archives, Sacramento, CA, catalog number 090-P77783.)
The organized PORTS program with integrated curriculum evolved from early experiments in videoconferencing with schools that began around 2000. The PORTS acronym was coined at an Interpretation and Education Division brainstorming session in late 2001. The first experimental interpretive videoconferencing presentation was fairly elaborate. A diver offshore from Crystal Cove State Park videoconferenced from underwater, showing participants the many life forms that live there. Each of the 103
underwater presentations involved not only the presenting diver, but a second diver to operate the camera, a boat and boat operator, and another person to monitor the divers’ safety. After a few presentations, this program was abandoned as untenable, though impressive.127
Another implementation was an interactive gold-panning demonstration at
Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in Coloma. While the park interpreter demonstrated how to pan for gold, the children in the classroom were able to try their hand at it, too. The interpreter could watch and comment on the students’ technique. This was the first experiment with using a wireless connection to transmit a distance learning presentation. It had potential, but lack of commitment from the district—both financial and otherwise—were its demise (as would happen at several potential PORTS sites later on). Meanwhile, the cooperating association for Año Nuevo State Reserve had purchased a video camera that was installed on Año Nuevo Island, which is home to an important elephant seal colony, and restricted to access by scientists studying the colony. The camera, referred to as the “Sealcam,” was connected so that its video could be viewed remotely. The Santa Cruz District of California State Parks, working with Joe von
Herrmann and California State Parks IT division, constructed a studio at Seacliff State
Beach where state park staff could videoconference with classrooms, using the Sealcam live feed as part of the presentation. The project was done in partnership with California
State University, Monterey Bay. By 2004, the Año Nuevo presentation had become the
127. Von Herrmann, personal communication to author, November 9, 2014; Pozzi, personal communication to author, November 4, 2014. 104
first PORTS unit of study, though when it started the PORTS program standards and structure had not yet been fully developed.128
The official PORTS program started offering a full schedule of presentations in the 2005/2006 school year. The growth of the program was made possible by new technology for schools, and by the forging of a strong partnership. When the California
K12HSN first came online, there was a need for high-quality content that took advantage of the network’s capabilities. Worthwhile network utilization also helped justify its expense to the public, and especially to the legislators who voted on that funding.
California State Parks partnered with K12HSN, which gave the PORTS program the ability to connect parks to classrooms all over the state with better video and audio quality and less delay than over regular internet connections. In June 2005, when it was nearing the end of its trial stage, PORTS was featured in the June 2005 K12HSN report
Connecting California’s Children as one of three examples of robust network use, which concluded that “high-bandwidth solutions like PORTS . . . help meet the needs of students in all areas of California regardless of size, location, or socio-economic conditions.”129
128. Pozzi, personal communication to author, November 4, 2014; von Herrmann, personal communication to author, November 9, 2014. 129. Holm, personal communication to author, October 16, 2014; von Herrmann, personal communication to author, November 9, 2014; Dave Johnston, Connecting California’s Children: A Status of Connectivity to California Schools (El Centro, CA: Imperial County Office of Education, 2005), 5-6, http://www.k12hsn.org/files/publications/ccc2005.pdf (accessed November 1, 2014). The K-12 High Speed Network is operated by a consortium of county offices of education: Imperial, Butte, and Mendocino; with Imperial County Office of Education in the lead role. 105
PORTS started modestly in its trial phase, but even in the first school year it was fully implemented it reached the impressive number of 12,500 students. Units of study that year were the Año Nuevo elephant seal presentations, tide pools at Crystal Cove
State Park, and paleontology at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The numbers of presentations, participating schools, and students served increased dramatically up to
2011/2012, the peak year to date, with 51,900 students. In 2013/2014, 38,085 students participated. As of the 2014/2015 school year, there are ten PORTS units of study, featuring eleven parks (see Table 3). The diverse topics include cultural history, natural history, and civics. Two more units of study are in development. The featured parks, like the classrooms they connect with and the units of study they illustrate, virtually stretch from one end of the state to the other.130
Schools outside of California also participate in PORTS. Over two thousand students from nine states outside of California experienced PORTS presentations in the
2013/2014 school year. The 2009 Connecting California’s Children report listed “the well-known Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students (PORTS) project” along with NASA’s Jason project as examples of quality videoconferencing experiences for classrooms, an indication of PORTS’ stature nationwide.131
130. California State Parks, PORTS Annual Report: 2013/2014 School Year (Sacramento: California State Parks, 2014), 1, http://ports.parks.ca.gov/pages/22922/files/portsfullannualreport2013-14.pdf (accessed September 29, 2014); California State Parks, “Units of Study,” California State Parks, http://www.ports.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23007 (accessed November 1, 2014). 131. California State Parks, PORTS Annual Report: 2013/2014 School Year, 4; Ric Barline, Connecting California’s Children: A Status of Connectivity to California Schools (El Centro, CA: Imperial County Office of Education, 2009), 18, http://www.k12hsn.org/files/publications/ccc2009.pdf (accessed November 2, 2014). 106
From the dawn of the program, PORTS personnel have focused their outreach on inner-city and disadvantaged rural schools, working with partners to provide equipment where needed. The department made a commitment from the beginning to provide
PORTS programs at no cost to schools, a commitment that has continued to this day.
Besides growing in number of students reached and number programs offered, the
PORTS programs have become more sophisticated and incorporated other new technology. The Anza-Borrego program was enhanced with the acquisition of an all- wheel drive vehicle that was fitted with a satellite dish and mobile videoconferencing equipment, so the PORTS interpreter could present directly from the park resources instead of using the green screen in the studio. After this, PORTS staff obtained and outfitted a John Deere Gator utility vehicle (promptly dubbed the “Edu-Gator”) for the
Crystal Cove program. Instead of using satellite technology to connect the Edu-Gator to the internet, a wireless internet network was set up in the cove. Transmitters were concealed on the outside of the historic beach houses that overlook the cove. The Edu-
Gator not only had a standard videocamera, it had a handheld waterproof camera that the interpreter could immerse in a tidepool and give students a close look at the creatures underwater.
In both of these cases, the innovative videoconferencing was only possible because of the hard work of the PORTS staff in writing grant applications and soliciting monetary and equipment donations. The innovation and outreach has continued, with
PORTS now facilitating the use of videoconferencing with tablets using free videoconferencing applications—another way to make the program more feasible for 107
schools with limited funds. As well as reinforcing classroom learning and reaching underserved students, PORTS accomplishes a major goal of all park interpretation: inspiring the participants to care about park resources.
PORTS is a successful example of the ways that California State Parks endeavors to serve the public and the parks with high-quality interpretation. While the department has been a few steps behind but on the same track with most of the developments in interpretive media used elsewhere in the United States (and has been ahead of the pack in some—including PORTS), there is so much more that could be done. Park interpreters continue to hope and work for more stable sources of funding to maintain and increase the amount and quality of interpretation in the system.
Table 3: PORTS Program Locations, Units of Study, and Targeted Grades, 2014/2015 School Year Park(s) Unit(s) of Study Targeted Grade(s) Humboldt Redwoods State Park/ Redwood Ecology 6th Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park Del Norte Redwoods State Park Salmon Life Cycle 3rd, 6th Año Nuevo State Park Elephant Seals 7th Columbia State Historic Park The Gold Rush 4th Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Earth Science/ 4th, 6th Paleontology Hearst Castle State Historic Monument Ancient Civilizations 6th Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook (subunit of Weather and Climate 5th Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area) Studies California State Capitol Museum Your Voice in 8th (adaptable for Government other grades) Angel Island State Park Immigration 11th Crystal Cove State Park Tide Pool Ecology 4th, 5th Source: California State Parks, “Units of Study,” California State Parks, http://www.ports.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23007 (accessed November 1, 2014). 108
Chapter 4: Conclusions
The history of interpretation in California State Parks has paralleled that of interpretation nationwide. The professionalization of interpretation, and growth of the profession, is mirrored in the growth of interpretation in our state’s park system.
California State Parks has developed more sophisticated interpretive media and techniques as these have been refined worldwide, though funding and staffing constraints have often hindered the department in keeping up with the latest trends. The National
Park Service has almost always been a decade or more ahead of California State Parks in the adoption of new interpretive techniques, but other park agencies around the nation also look to the NPS as a leader and lag behind, usually farther behind than California
State Parks. California’s system has been nearly in step with NPS in a few areas, most notably with its Environmental Living Programs. California State Parks has been ahead of NPS and the rest of the nation’s park systems in developing an organized system-wide distance learning program.
The organization of interpretation also followed the same path of development as in the NPS, though again farther behind. Interpretation became more of a specialty as the
California parks department evolved. First nature guides or naturalists conducted park natural history research as part of their duties, then natural resources specialists were included in the Interpretive Services Section, and finally the Natural Resources Division was formed. Similarly, history was moved from being the responsibility of individual 109
park curators to the Interpretive Services Section and, later, the Cultural Resources
Division (now the Archaeology, History and Museums Division) was formed.
The path of professionalism for interpreters in the state system has not been a uniformly increasing slope, and there have been controversies along the way. One of the most controversial changes, after a long period of expansion in the number of interpreters and an increase in their training, was William Penn Mott, Jr.’s abolishment of the seasonal naturalist positions and their replacement with interpretation by “generalist rangers” who give interpretive programs along with continuing law enforcement and administrative duties. Mott intended this to improve interpretation by moving responsibility to permanent employees, but others decried the loss of the seasonal naturalists who had scientific backgrounds and the dedicated time to give programs during the busy summers. The establishment of the State Park Interpreter series of permanent employee classifications a decade later, an acknowledgment of the importance and professional status of interpreters, was a significant improvement in department interpretation. Fifteen years later, in 1992, another controversial move occurred as the result of a budget crisis, when the Phoenix reorganization eliminated the Office of
Interpretive Services (OIS) and dispersed its duties. While some field personnel had seen the OIS as difficult to work with, and welcomed the change, the staff of that office, in particular, were greatly concerned that many of their functions would not be properly carried out once they were delegated to other parts of the organization.
Other challenges have faced department interpretation since Phoenix and its aftermath, especially budgetary challenges. Interpretation seems to be the first program 110
affected when budgets are lean, and never quite rebounds to where it was previously. The
Mott-era concept of the generalist ranger has faded as law enforcement duties have
expanded over the years. While California State Parks rangers are still called generalists,
and are still trained in interpretation, in reality few have enough time to interpret once
they reach the field. Recently, the number of permanent interpreters has declined, with
seasonals being hired to perform duties previously performed by permanent staff.132
California State Parks and most other smaller park agencies face economic challenges never experienced to the same degree by the National Park Service, which has much more stable funding. The theme of “not enough funds to do what we think we should do with interpretation” has surfaced again and again. To quote Doug Bryce, longtime California State Parks interpretation staff member (now retired), “I think that has been the story of interpretation in the state park system. It’s never been properly funded.” But through it all, department interpretive staff members have often seen their jobs more as a vocation than a profession. The department’s mission is “to provide for the health, inspiration and education of the people of California by helping to preserve the state's extraordinary biological diversity, protecting its most valued natural and cultural resources, and creating opportunities for high-quality outdoor recreation.” California
State Parks interpreters and interpretation support staff believe in that mission, and support it by giving it a twist: they work to inspire and educate the people of California
(and visitors) in order to preserve the state’s natural and cultural resources and assist the people in enjoying outdoor recreation. Despite current perception in the department of a
132. Bryce, interview, 12-15. 111
need to adapt to lower funding and adjust interpretive offerings accordingly, the interpreters will continue as professionals to provide that vital mission support.133
133. Bryce, interview, 14; California State Parks, “About Us,” California State Parks, http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=91 (accessed November 22, 2014). 112
APPENDIX A
Elmer Aldrich Interview 113
The History of Interpretation in California State Parks
M.A. Thesis California State University, Sacramento
Oral History Interview
with
Elmer Aldrich
February 19, 2010 Sacramento, California
By Carolyn Schimandle
California State University, Sacramento 114
Interview History for Oral History of Elmer Aldrich
Interviewer’s Name: Carolyn Schimandle
Interview Date and Location: The interview was conducted on February 19, 2010, in Mr. Aldrich’s home in Sacramento, California.
Context Notes: The interview was conducted in Mr. Aldrich’s home office. Mr. Aldrich had gathered together several planning documents he thought would interest the interviewer. Audio file begins before the start of the formal interview. Mr. Aldrich was already talking about his career as the interviewer was setting up and testing the recorder. Because this information was pertinent, the interviewer included it in the final master recording and transcript. Mr. Aldrich was recovering from a fractured leg at the time of the interview, which he mentioned at one point during the session.
Audio File and Interview Records: The master digital recording of the interview and a full transcript are deposited with the Department Archives at the California Department of Parks and Recreation, North Highlands, California. 115
[Session 1 of 1, February 19, 2010]
[Begin audio file]
ALDRICH: . . . . that meeting that you attended with the planning department.
SCHIMANDLE: Well, in that meeting you didn’t talk about your time in
interpretation and education so much. I know most of your time in state
parks was in planning, and you did some incredible things with state
park plans that have set the foundation for a lot of . . .
ALDRICH: I dragged out a few ancient ones here, that . . . part of my back history
that has relevance to me, I have done interpretive plans. After leaving
state parks I did some in Arizona, and I promoted one in the legislature
of Oregon, and I’ve been working on county plans, before I quit doing
consulting work.
And so a lot of the stuff may be repetitious of what I mentioned.
But I have developed, getting to interpretation and the meat of
interpretation, to me it’s a very simple approach to determining
interpretive plans for two bases: one, human history, the other one is
natural history. Two different approaches, and to me there is only two
ways, one for each, to do these. And I have tested them many, many
times. So I can concentrate maybe today and emphasize some of those
aspects that might be of help to you. So please let me know; ask
questions, how you think I might be helpful. 116
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, well, what I would like to do is start out with my interview
format and see where it goes, and I’m hoping that I can do kind of a
basic interview to fill in some information today, and then maybe talk
to you one or two more times on other dates to follow up on some
things.
ALDRICH: My charges are very cheap these days.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay. Alright, well. [Laughing.] Hopefully I can pay them. I’m on a
state salary. You’ve got to remember that.
ALDRICH: I used to do exceedingly well when I was in consulting work. That’s one
of the main reasons I left State Parks is because I had so many offers
from big companies for employment. It was a great life.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. A lot of good outside time, too. So. I . . .
ALDRICH: You want to start with a couple of good questions.
SCHIMANDLE: I’m supposed to start with an introduction with the date and where I am
and who I’m interviewing and so forth.
So this is February 19, 2010, and I am at the home of Elmer C.
Aldrich and I’m interviewing him about his time in state parks as head
of the conservation education section from 1949 to 1957, and my name
is Carolyn Schimandle.
And I’m going to start with the basics: when and where were you
born? 117
ALDRICH: I was born in Eureka, California, that’s Humboldt County, and that was
June 13, 1914, and that’s when and where. Other questions?
SCHIMANDLE: So you were born up in the redwoods. Do you think that influenced
your feelings about nature and your connecting to it?
[Audio File 04:37]
ALDRICH: Redwoods? As a young kid I hiked all over a lot of the redwoods up
there, and in state parks, well, one of my jobs as supervisor of
conservation was managing the--at that time called the naturalist
program of the state park system. That’s a little bit different than it is
now because every summer I would hire thirty to thirty-five naturalists
and assign them to various state parks to perform regular naturalist
functions. One of the things I insisted with every person I hired was to
question the extent to which they are willing to do a good little piece of
research during the summer that would benefit the knowledge of the
particular park in which they served. So a lot of these created
interviews with them during the summertime and helping and guiding
them into various pieces of research they were doing. So I felt this was,
in addition to dealing with the public, it was an advantage to the park
system.
SCHIMANDLE: So their job was not just to be giving programs and hikes, campfires,
they were actually . . .
ALDRICH: That was part of it, of course. 118
SCHIMANDLE: But they were doing research also.
ALDRICH: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Now were they all, they were called naturalists, but were there any
historic units that had guides at a certain time?
ALDRICH: Well, there were a number of historians that had acquired a tremendous
natural history background. I must have interviewed a hundred people
every summer, every year, spring, before hiring these people. It was a
great experience. Most of them, a lot of them were professors at various
institutions, others had temporary jobs with government like Fish and
Game, or Fish and Wildlife Service, National Parks. I of course worked
for National Parks and got a lot of my ideas in my jobs in National
Parks. So . . .
SCHIMANDLE: And that was during your summers during college, right?
ALDRICH: Right, when doing my graduate work. I can’t tell you enough and inform
you enough of what depressions are. They talked about this depression
recently; this is nothing like what we went through beginning in 1929
with the crash of the stock market and for—lasted for ten or twelve
years. All the time that I was in college, and trying to do graduate work
and live off of anything I could scrounge, and my family, my father was
a photographer. And it was especially bad for him. If people were
starving and didn’t have money, why should they have portraits taken 119
of them, you know. Photography was a tough deal, but I learned a lot: I
worked for my father in his lab and did a lot of his work.
SCHIMANDLE: And you took photographs later on, working for state parks, didn’t you?
ALDRICH: A lot of them.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s a great background to have for your . . .
ALDRICH: I ended up in the Navy with a specialty in photography and research and
aerial and intelligence photography during the war. Four years of that.
SCHIMANDLE: And were you stationed in . . .
ALDRICH: Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz. That’s a long story.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. You have so many stories you could tell, it’s hard for me to keep
focused on what I’m supposed to be doing for my thesis.
ALDRICH: And I was married six months before I went into the navy, and was gone
almost four years before I got back with my wife, here. [Points to
photographs and memorabilia displayed on wall rack.] This is a little
memorial for my wife, up here, if you’ve noticed. She died recently, of
Alzheimer’s. She was a biologist and I met her in an embryology class
at UC Berkeley. She had a dual major in biology and art. She was an
artist, and had major exhibits throughout the state of her landscapes. So
it was a tremendous loss for me.
SCHIMANDLE: I can imagine, with those many years together. She was a beautiful
woman.
[Audio File 09:46] 120
ALDRICH: So I did a few little extra prints and put them on the wall. This little rack
where you see all these pictures didn’t have these pictures in them. I
had an exhibit in there, you wouldn’t guess what it is, until my wife
died and I replaced it. But they were Ansel Adams pictures; I was a
personal friend of Ansel Adams for many, many years.
SCHIMANDLE: You must have had a lot in common.
ALDRICH: I got to know Ansel so well. And in fact, some of the publications, even
this one here is an Ansel Adams that I did as part of the outdoor
recreation plan for the state. And there’s . . . Ansel would never charge
me for any of these, and uh, we can maybe later could get into
something that’s a lot more important for your interests in some of
these.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. Yeah. I’d like to follow up maybe at a future date on the
planning time.
ALDRICH: There’s a lot of interpretation potential in just what I selected right here.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. I remember you went through some of what you did during that
talk to the planning division. I found a few of these in our planning
library, but I don’t think all of them, so I definitely want to follow up
and go through those.
ALDRICH: Okay, next question. I’ve gotten you off track.
SCHIMANDLE: Yes. I’m so sorry to have to keep to these because it’s . . . 121
ALDRICH: First, another question. I know you have a thousand other things to do.
How long . . .what time do you gather for this today. I am available all
morning, whatever, so . . .
SCHIMANDLE: I have an 11 o’clock appointment; it’s probably about a twenty-minute
bike ride from here. Although if I go as fast as I did coming over here
this morning it’s going to be only a 15 minute ride. I think I beat my
time record.
ALDRICH: Don’t argue with any automobiles.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, no. No. I ride to work regularly, so I’ve gotten really good at
looking both ways and looking again, and thinking, is that guy going to
pull in front of me . . .
ALDRICH: Just what little I know about you, and I didn’t know much from the
meeting earlier I had that you were there, but I wish you had been on
my staff.
SCHIMANDLE: I would have loved to be.
ALDRICH: … with your background, interests.
SCHIMANDLE: It looked like you had a fantastic staff. Leonard Penhale; I did some
work on the general plan for Big Basin and read quite a bit about him,
going through what he did on the nature lodge [exhibits at Big Basin]
and what he did there . . .
ALDRICH: Len was a great guy, a nice guy, yeah. 122
SCHIMANDLE: And he was on your staff that whole time that you were in
Interpretation and Education.
ALDRICH: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: I think actually I have some photos I pulled from . . . I went down to
look at the News and Views in our archives yesterday, and found great
stuff. More than I thought I would. I just thought I would verify what
dates you worked for the conservation education section, and . . .
ALDRICH: My dates are vague now.
SCHIMANDLE: And that part, like I said, the dates are easy to find. What’s not easy to
find are the experiences, and what happened during that time. So that
was the Christmas issue, I believe 1951. [Shows copy of photo page
from News and Views.] And the top picture there, there is you and Len
Penhale, and I forget the woman’s name; I’ve got the second page here,
somewhere. Joan Norman.
ALDRICH: Some of these old pictures like this ended up in Sports Illustrated.
SCHIMANDLE: Really!
ALDRICH: We had a major article in Sports Illustrated when were doing this
outdoor recreation plan.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh! [pause] That was back when they had more sports in Sports
Illustrated, and less swimsuits, right? [Laughing.]
SCHIMANDLE: This picture is from 1956 [Shows another copy of photo page from
News and Views], and obviously the section had grown quite a bit, 123
because there is Len Penhale, you, and, 1, 2, 3, 4 other people. John
Michael took over the News and Views after you . . .
ALDRICH: What’s the latest? I haven’t heard about John Michael lately. Is he still
alive?
SCHIMANDLE: I don’t know. The first I had heard of him, I have to admit, was when I
found his name in the News and Views.
ALDRICH: Ah, these are fond memories.
SCHIMANDLE: So did the section grow quite a bit while you were in charge, because
obviously you had more staff.
ALDRICH: Yeah, it expanded, and we drew some other knowledges [sic] and other
fields that we used temporarily in our, with our staff.
[Audio File 15:04]
Some of them were landscape architects and the other part of the
planning division and so forth, who had a real bent towards
interpretation and the research we were doing and so forth.
SCHIMANDLE: So what was the research you were doing?
ALDRICH: Well, a lot of it was devising lists of plants and animals in individual
parks for which we had naturalist service in the summertime, that I
would wrap up the information that they did, under my guidance, and
others that came in on it and then have written stuff for the next year to
the benefit of the new naturalists and so forth. It was a lot of little
things that we did in this research, gathering together information, some 124
of it out of other books and other studies that [brief pause]; or some that
people that I knew in National Parks. I was three summers in National
Parks—Crater Lake and Lava Beds National Monument. Great
experience.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. There’s nothing like leading people out in the field and talking to
them.
ALDRICH: Well my Lava Beds was mainly research for the National Park Service.
Having had some mountaineering experience, rock climbing etc. along
with backpacking and so forth, well it’s an interesting story, that I spent
all summer living in a 3C camp and climbing cliffs and large trees and
checking on nests, uh, food habits of raptorial birds—eagles, hawks,
owls; and scrambling all over the cliffs of the Lava Beds, and
publishing a report. The cause for this study was that the hunters in the
Tule Lake area, if you’re familiar with that area . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
ALDRICH: . . . gathered political strength and issued and signed documents to get
the National Park Service to abolish and eliminate all the raptorial birds
in the Lava Beds National Monument.
SCHIMANDLE: They thought they were interfering with their game?
ALDRICH: With their hunting quality. Waterfowl. So one day I had a call from
Doctor Grinnell. I don’t know if you know of Doctor Grinnell.
SCHIMANDLE: I know of him. 125
ALDRICH: He was a tremendous, worldwide known zoologist.
SCHIMANDLE: And you studied under him . . .
ALDRICH: Yes.
SCHIMANDLE: . . . and the wonderful Internet again, I found one photo that
unfortunately I could only blow it up this big before it wasn’t really
clear anymore. This is a camp with you and some other people and Dr.
Grinnell and, oh, gosh, was this, it was down south. It was the
Providence Mountains. And you took the photo.
ALDRICH: I’ve got an 8 by 10 of this one in this office here somewhere. This is Dr.
Grinnell, on the right, this is me. The reason I’m smiling, I was the
photographer on this trip as well as the collector for the museum. And
so Grinnell was famous for not liking impromptu pictures of him. I
didn’t ask him the question. He asked me to be the photographer for the
expedition. So, without asking him, and this was right after lunch, well
I set up my tripod with my camera with a self timer. And the others
knew what I was going to do and they cooperated. Grinnell looks a
little on the sad side and I got his picture. But the reason I’m laughing
is that I stumbled over rocks getting to my place for this picture before I
got down before it went off.
SCHIMANDLE: And he didn’t even know that the timer was set and you were taking the
photo?
ALDRICH: Well, he actually did, after I got it going. 126
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, that’s wonderful he’s very . . .
ALDRICH: Oh, I have a good shot of that one.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, this obviously was not the best shot.
[Audio File 20:01]
ALDRICH: There’s a publication that came out as a result of this expedition. Maybe
you’re familiar with what’s being done in global warming in Yosemite.
Are you familiar with what’s going on there?
SCHIMANDLE: I know they’re doing studies and I’m afraid I don’t know the details.
ALDRICH: Well, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, where I did my work, is now,
after almost 100 years, when they went back into the, well it was the
early teens, they did this first draft of the Animal Life in the Yosemite by
Grinnell. And so now what they’re doing, this is a world-famous study
that they did, the museum did, in Yosemite way before my time, to go
back and take the same photographs where the same footprints would
be of the same view as to what the ecosystem is like.
So some of the work that Grinnell did in the museum where I did
my graduate work, has become world famous in global warming
because they have gotten an idea they need censuses of the animals that
they did originally, and a lot of these animals have migrated up in the
mountains, higher levels, where it’s cooler.
SCHIMANDLE: Like the poor little pikas, who are getting isolated on their little islands
now . . . 127
ALDRICH: Yeah. So this has become, if you read much in this, in the ecology work
around the world, which I do get, has become a famous example, and
they had a hundredth centennial anniversary. I’m a little off track on
you here, and this was in 2008. The centennial of Museum of
Vertebrate Zoology and the department of biology for UC Berkeley. So
one day I got a phone call from MVZ—the Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology—wanting me to be a part of a centennial celebration. So I
became one of the prime speakers, which is quite an honor for this
100th centennial. And I happened to be the last student that was with
Grinnell before he died, on a major study, which was comparable to the
study that was done in Yosemite, in the Mojave Desert.
SCHIMANDLE: And that was this one, wasn’t it, the one around the Providence
Mountains?
ALDRICH: Yes. And I had the honor, of . . . I went down on this study, I had to
leave a couple weeks early from the expedition because I had a job
waiting for me in Crater Lake, 1938, and so I had the honor of driving
Grinnell back to Berkeley from Mojave, and I learned more about
ecology and his background on that brief trip from Mojave back to
Berkeley. He had a brand shiny new zippy Ford V-8 which; I hadn’t
owned a car at that time, but I had a license and so forth, and drove him
back. 128
SCHIMANDLE: So you got to have the famous man talking with you, and drive a zippy
car.
ALDRICH: On his last expedition, and less than one year later he was dead. He died
early. But at the end of that little trip he said, “Aldrich, “—he referred
to all of us by last name—“Aldrich,” he said, you’re an excellent driver,
but you went around some of the curves a little too fast.” I told this
story when I gave the speech to MVZ, with all these new students, that,
they knew a lot about Grinnell, but none of them, I was the only
surviving student of Dr. Grinnell’s alive for the centennial.
SCHIMANDLE: So that must have been a wonderful treat for them to be able to hear
you.
ALDRICH: It was one of my great experiences.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. Oh, that expedition, that must have been fabulous. Oh. So I guess
I’d better get back to my questions.
ALDRICH: I’m sorry.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, no. I want to follow up on the . . .
[Audio File 24:99]
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, no, that’s fine. I want to follow up on . . .
ALDRICH: It’s easy to get me to get you off track.
SCHIMANDLE: And it’s easy for me to go off on side tracks. And that’s an unfortunate
combination, I guess here. [Laughing] Oh. I thought I had a second
sheet of questions, but I think I . . . Did I leave it on the printer? I must 129
have left on there. I’ll have to just wing it. I think I can remember that .
. .
ALDRICH: If you want to, you could consider this kind of a start, if you have
further, why, give me a call or something, you know.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. I’ d like to do that. Because first of all I have to make sure my
working correctly, and I’m sure once I transcribe I’ll have more
questions to fill in. So—you have your master’s degree in wildlife
biology, and when you started at the Division of Parks you were head
of the Conservation Education section. Was that the kind, the sort of
career you had in mind when you were going through school?
ALDRICH: Well . . . before the war, and I was married in 1941 for 6 months, but
prior to that, why I had a job with Fish and Game as a junior biologist,
Fish and Game. And there, some money became available, and what
I’m leading into is how I ended up in State Parks instead of Fish and
Game and so forth. But things were bad. That was the Depression. To
get through college, I worked for the anatomy department, med school
in Berkeley, working on cadavers and dissections and general lab work
for that director. And that’s where I got some money during the
wintertime. Summertime I worked three summers for National Park
Service in Lava Beds and Crater Lake. So that’s where I survived
financially, on those two things. 130
So, but what happened was that, and then after I got my degree,
why, I had an offer by Fish and Game as a biologist to work—there
were two of us available: another one was a good friend of mine,
Howard Twining, a biologist at MVZ also.
There were two openings, and both of us got a job. Mine was a job
working in the backcountry of Santa Barbara on a study that was started
by the federal government, Fish and Wildlife, which was a study to
determine the effect of predation on deer populations. So I had on my
staff a lion hunter, and a . . .Have you heard of Jones & Stokes?
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yes.
ALDRICH: Well, Jim Stokes was on my staff.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh! Huh!
ALDRICH: And he was a hunter/trapper.
SCHIMANDLE: Really! Huh!
ALDRICH: And he and Bob Jones started Jones and Stokes as consultants here. And
of course they’re out of that now and they’re gone, but it’s still going.
SCHIMANDLE: Right. It’s a huge enterprise in planning and . . .
ALDRICH: In the local county we hired them a lot for various studies. But anyway, I
got this job, my friend got the other job on beavers, and I worked on
that until the war came around and the draft board was hot on my tail.
And so I got a reprieve from the draft board because they were
searching to find a better job for me than a foot soldier, which I am so 131
grateful for. And they asked me what I could do, well I was either
medical briefly because of the biological background, or photography.
And they ended up with a commission for me in Pearl Harbor on
photography and I became part of a new research, high-tech bunch of
guys, 15 of us, that started in Pensacola, Florida, and then Virginia,
trained just before we went over to Pearl Harbor, which was, and I can’t
talk a lot about what that was, it was top secret stuff that we committed
to, and this gave me the job, out of the 15 of us, all but two of us were
on carriers. About half of them never came back. And two of us had
land-base, and I was one of them. Talk about luck. And how does the
cookie crumble.
And so I was involved in some research work there, which was
fascinating, which was of great help to the war effort on the attacks in
the Pacific.
[Audio File 30:29]
SCHIMANDLE: Hmm. Yeah. With aerial photography . . .
ALDRICH: You’re bringing back things I haven’t thought about in years. It almost
brings tears.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. To know so many people and have so many not come back,
that’s hard.
ALDRICH: I was so lucky, so lucky. And I feel that I made a contribution to the war
quite a bit. Quite a bit. 132
SCHIMANDLE: That’s wonderful. You saved a lot of lives.
ALDRICH: I had up to a hundred people on my staff.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s where you got a lot of your leadership experience, then, too, it
sounds like.
ALDRICH: I learned a lot, I learned a lot. When you’re in the military, the first thing
you have to do if you’re in charge of anything is learn how to handle
people. And I had a few bumps here and there, but it all worked out real
good, so . . .
SCHIMANDLE: You obviously got the hang of it,
ALDRICH: Oh, terrific.
SCHIMANDLE: Because you spent so many years with state parks running programs
and running sections and divisions . . .
ALDRICH: Well, I got back to what I preferred to do.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. So you got back from the war, and then what happened then?
ALDRICH: I had an offer to go in Fish and Game, and then having a park
background with Nationals, why, I approached State Parks and so forth,
and there was a guy by the name of Ed Dolder who preceded me. You
may have heard of him, he’s in the files a lot.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, I’ve seen his name, yeah.
ALDRICH: Yeah. I took over his job, and then . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. He got promoted on to head of conservation education for the
whole conservation . . . was it department, division? I forget . . . 133
ALDRICH: Education. He got heavily involved later on in the department of
education.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay.
ALDRICH: Ed Dolder was a nice guy. We were great friends. Yeah. So anyway, I
had this offer, and I didn’t really like the job they gave me in Fish and
Game. It was poorly organized, it was started with the federal
government, and the objective was to eliminate all the predators in an
experimental area, and census the effect on the deer population. But the
stupid people, I had enough science savvy to know that if you’re going
to do an experiment, you have an experimental, and a control. But you
have to make sure there’s no interaction of those two bases. But the
stupid federal government didn’t have any natural barriers between
eliminating the predators and censusing the deer. Now we developed
some new census methods which are still used for deer. But I didn’t
love the job of eliminating all the predators.
SCHIMANDLE: I can imagine.
ALDRICH: That’s not my bag.
SCHIMANDLE: Uh-huh.
ALDRICH: I’m an ecologist, basically, and that’s not what you want to do.
SCHIMANDLE: Right. So you could see that they had their place, and . . .
ALDRICH: I knew it from the beginning. Well, what they did, though, was that I
requested to get off of this project. I was on it for a year and a half, 134
about, so they put me in charge of doing a set of disease studies of
quail, in which there was an outbreak of quail malaria at the time, that
was diminishing the quail population statewide. So I stayed with Fish
and Game until the Navy, trapping hundreds of quail, taking blood
samples for microscope, and determining the incidence of quail
malaria. So that was an experience before going into the Navy.
SCHIMANDLE: Hmm. Yeah, that sounds a little more . . .
ALDRICH: And so when the war was over, I really thought that parks was kind of
my baby.
[Audio File 35:00]
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, it seems that . . .
ALDRICH: And I had offers to go into National Parks, which I came close to doing,
but some of the jobs I was offered in National Parks was pretty
primitive living, too, so I went next to State Parks and had this offer. I
had to wait a little while before the job opened up. I got you off track
again.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, no, no, no, no. That’s fine, because you’re telling me how you got
into the job, so that’s totally appropriate for what I was trying to keep
myself focused on today. [Laughing.] So you had the offer, but you had
to, you knew you had the job once it opened up, and . . .
ALDRICH: I knew it was coming, I mentioned one little interlude in there: I worked
for state personnel board writing examinations for biologists, all the 135
Fish and Game, for park people, veterinarians I wrote exams for, I had
some experience in that, and forestry, and Fish and Game jobs and for
biologists. I did that until this job opened up, Supervisor of
Conservation in Parks.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s very, very much a natural for you, it seems.
ALDRICH: I’ve been lucky all along, just so lucky
SCHIMANDLE: Well you certainly had a lot of wonderful experiences and worked with
a lot of great people . . .
ALDRICH: And then in consulting work, I really enjoyed it because I could accept
the jobs I thought I could do well. I did very little on my own as a
complete contract. I came pretty close to it, but I worked with other
major firms, subcontracts, and produced segments of major plans.
Although I did do major plans on my own—county master plans.
County plans.
SCHIMANDLE: You really got involved in a lot more elements of planning beyond
interpretation and ecology and so forth to the more general and master
plan level. That’s really interesting. It seems like your experience in
planning . . .
ALDRICH: I’m not over with it now, I’ve been heavily involved with the plan for
the county here, the parkway plan and so forth, I’m still involved. I
wrote one master plan in 1985 for the parkway. I’ve got copies of that,
and I have been on, since the 1985 plan for the parkway, I’ve been on 136
the department’s advisory committee for the parkway. And I as part of
that have done further planning for the county, and so forth, filled in.
So I’ve still got my paws in it a little bit, but . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. Well you’ve certainly still got the expertise, and it’s great you
can still share it.
ALDRICH: It’s really nothing great to brag about, really, because a lot of this came
naturally, and my background in education led me into it and it wasn’t
my fault that I got into that, you know. But that’s the way it came out.
SCHIMANDLE: You have, I saw also in the News and Views that you have a secondary
teaching credential and junior college. Were you planning to teach, or
was it just to expand your education theory?
ALDRICH: Oh. You ready for a little story again?
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yeah!
[Audio File 39:06]
ALDRICH: Okay. Well, I go back to the mention of the depression. My family and I
at times really had hardly enough to eat. Things were extremely serious.
So when I, my natural bent was in biology; Natural History. And I
examined, when I first entered college, the lack of employment in that
field was just negligible. Hardly anything. So Elmer old boy, what’s
your secondary option? Well, I had some leanings towards teaching,
and I decided to study especially hard along with my graduate work in
biology to get a teaching credential. So with a master’s I still have, and 137
by a fluke, it’s still eligible to be used, my certificate for teaching junior
college, city college, and high school. Second—general secondary. So
as part of that training I taught Zoology 1A for San Francisco City
College to get my teaching credential in science, that’s what it was
called then, and part of that, when I didn’t have anything else to get
money on, I did substitute teaching at Piedmont High School, teaching
science, and a wonderful, wealthy bunch of kids—if you know
Piedmont above Oakland.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. That’s a pretty wealthy community.
ALDRICH: Yeah. Millionaires on every block, you know. Wonderful kids. And I
came close, I had an offer to be considered, but I didn’t apply in
Washington’s, excuse me, Oregon State University, to teach, with the
idea of course I go in for a doctorate, which I never got around to doing
and had other work. So I almost became a teacher, and, but ended up in
park work. And I still had a bent for research and what I learned in the
military. I liked working with a lot of people.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. So you got more of that variety.
Do you think your education experience helped when you were
working in the conservation education section?
ALDRICH: Oh immensely, sure. I remember having to go to a nursery where there
were little tots, you know, and having to take notes, you know, like a
researcher like Grinnell would write when he was researching what a 138
Swainson’s hawk was doing at every moment, what it did and
everything, but it was kids!
SCHIMANDLE: (Laughs.) Slightly more wild animals!
ALDRICH: Yeah! Some of them were pretty wild.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah! That’s great.
ALDRICH: That was a help, you bet it was. The education was a big help.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. And how people learn, and how people think. Now, um,
nowadays there’s a lot of talk about informal education . . .
ALDRICH: Oh, I know . . .
SCHIMANDLE: . . . and interpretation as opposed to education, . . .
ALDRICH: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: . . . now back in the 40s and 50s did, was there that much theorizing
about how it’s different to learn in a park than it is in a classroom?
ALDRICH: Yeah. I’m sure it’s different; grossly different. But I never regretted
doing that. It was a horrible labor for me with everything else I was
trying to do, to study and burn the midnight oil, and they had a lot of
textbooks you had to read, and all that stuff, and had to write papers,
and . . . But, anyway . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. In the parks did you see conservation education and what the
naturalists were doing as education for the visitors, or entertainment, or
. . . what was the goal, I guess is what I’m trying to say. What was the
goal with the conservation education? 139
ALDRICH: Well, first of all, well, this goes back a long ways, when we were doing
studies for this outdoor recreation plan. I know your time is very
limited.
SCHIMANDLE: I’ve got about twenty more minutes.
ALDRICH: How much?
SCHIMANDLE: I’ve got about twenty more minutes, if I’m not irritating you too much.
ALDRICH: Education was a big help, and the thing I always told my naturalists to
do was to put themselves in the shoes of the person that was enjoying
interpretation. What really was the basis, the base line of their
enjoyment of a park?
[Audio File 44:54]
Now this created a lot of discussion. We had a five-day naturalist
training session before all these guys went out into the parks. And those
were wonderful that we had, high, intense, meetings with our naturalists
before sending them out to the parks. So my first question to them was,
be extremely alert, to understand psychologically what you are teaching
them in the way of natural history or history, and what was in the parks.
Exactly what they were getting from it—what was their psychological
reaction to this—was it good or bad? Were there gaps in it that you feel
they should understand that you didn’t do with them, and so forth? I
went strongly into the psychology of a naturalist. 140
As to what they understood the pupils they were teaching were
getting from it, we spent a lot of time on that. And I know I’ve been
involved in some studies, surveys and so forth, in my consulting work,
that there are ways of defining that. Because if you do a survey of a
segment of the public in the field of natural history or history, to weave
out of them, really what they were getting out of what you were saying.
So we tried with the naturalists to develop techniques for them to self-
analyze how they were meeting what they ended up through—call it a
little research—psychological research, what those people needed.
Long on psychology in interpretation.
SCHIMANDLE: Did you do actual follow-up studies to see if people were getting the
message?
ALDRICH: Yes, I sure did. Every summer I was in the field all of the time. I
traveled around with every one of these guys. I went on hikes with
them and made notes. We’d have meetings after they finished work and
discuss it with them, and I’d ask them how they felt about it
themselves, their analysis of the people that they were teaching, and so
forth. Wonderful sessions afterwards. And we did that a number of
times with each naturalist, and towards the end of the season for each
one we had wrap-ups. 141
SCHIMANDLE: Now I know in the early days the naturalists always submitted a written
report at the end of the season, I saw a couple of those. Did they do that
during your time, too?
ALDRICH: Yeah. Yeah. I insisted on reports. I don’t know what’s happened to
those, they probably disappeared.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, unfortunately probably some have. One of my coworkers
actually saved some things literally from a dumpster one day. I don’t
know if he got any of those reports, but he was able to save some other
of the old interpretation and education records. Somebody just said,
“this is just old,“ and luckily, he’s got a bent for old things and . . .
[laughs].
ALDRICH: Well, the thing I liked to do with my naturalist staff was to have them
comment at the end of the summer what kind of guidance they received
and what kind of additional guidance they would like to have. And this
helped me a great deal in the next season’s training sessions of our
naturalists, to change the scope of the meetings, and so forth.
SCHIMANDLE: And then you could improve your own performance, too.
ALDRICH: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Now, did your naturalist group grow over those years that you were in
charge?
ALDRICH: Oh, it did, since I was in there, and, it about doubled, I would say. I
ended up, from my best recollections, I would say, with about 35 142
temporary naturalists. And probably out of that I interviewed maybe 50
people. The word got around, and, by God, here’s a little money
available to do; to go on a vacation, you know! [Laughs.]
[Audio File 50:11]
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. And for . . .
ALDRICH: I had to dispel that, then, you know. It was more than a vacation for
them. It had to be.
SCHIMANDLE: And did a lot of them return to work multiple summers?
ALDRICH: Oh, yeah, I had them over and over, yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Don Meadows, up at Big Basin, did he . . .
ALDRICH: Who?
SCHIMANDLE: Don Meadows. Was he there during your time?
ALDRICH: Oh, Don Meadows, yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: I did find one of his reports. I think they still had it in the archives at
Big Basin. They were really good about keep stuff up there. They’ve
got a whole room full of things that . . .
ALDRICH: Sometimes we held our training session in Big Basin. I learned all about
Big Basin because sometimes, when I was a kid, our family went there
for camping; that was our favorite campground.
SCHIMANDLE: Huh. Now were you still living up in the Eureka area at the time when
you camped in Big Basin?
ALDRICH: Eureka? 143
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, you were born up there, were you still living . . .
ALDRICH: I was born in Eureka, but I left when I was about 6 years old.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah, okay.
ALDRICH: And my family moved to Martinez.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah.
ALDRICH: Another little sideline. I just finished a big fat book on John Muir. His
home was in Martinez. My family became very familiar with John
Muir’s daughter; [pause] daughters, Wanda and Helen. My mother and
at least one of John Muir’s daughters became very familiar, acquainted
through church, and they exchanged recipes for jelly and a number of
things, so I sort of grew up with an inherent interest in John Muir, and I
just finished another major book on him.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh. Huh. That’s another great anecdote
ALDRICH: And of course I got really acquainted with John Muir, though I never
met the guy, because I became active in the Sierra Club. I was on the
national board for seven years, and I was pegged to be president, but I
had to turn it down. Conflict of interest.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh. Was this during your time in parks?
ALDRICH: Yes, it was.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. So that would be . . .
ALDRICH: That’s an interesting little story in itself. That’s where I became very
well acquainted with Ansel Adams, worked with him in his lab and 144
everything else, and he was on the Sierra Club board at the same time I
was. And another guy by the name of, um, of um . . . God. I draw a
mental blank on it. But anyway, . . . Starker Leopold, son of Aldo
Leopold . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yeah!
ALDRICH: . . . who was a professor until he died at UC Berkeley. Personal friend of
mine, and on the board of the Sierra Club with me. Ansel Adams and
Starker Leopold and I provided a triumvirate block to require all kinds
of research before making judgments by the Sierra Club. We
represented the scientific basis of the board for the first seven years,
and I think we got a lot of research involved in our judgment, which is
a big benefit, but one day I got a phone call from Newton Drury, whom
you know of, as director. He said “Elmer,” I was at the time a--what do
you call it—the, well I was due to be president, I was nominated vice
president, I was vice president. Sierra Club got involved in redwood
controversies with the lumber people. So one day I got a call from
Newton Drury, he said, “Elmer ,“. . . I loved Newton. I think he was
one of the best directors we ever had. He had 11 years experience as
director of national parks, you know.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. And all his years’ experience as . . .
[Audio File 54:43] 145
ALDRICH: But he called me in, and I was afraid of what he was going to say
because I was involved in the natural history of the redwoods, too, and
the lumber company. He said “Aldrich,” he said, “I don’t want to put
words in your mouth,” he says, “because you’ve done a great job and so
forth working in the redwoods and other things, and . . . “ I didn’t have
to ask him what he was thinking. His words were, he said, “As you
know, Elmer, there’s some things we have to be careful of.” I said,
“Newton, I know what you’re saying.” So I resigned.
SCHIMANDLE: Hmm.
ALDRICH: Another little odd story for you.
SCHIMANDLE: Hmm. Yeah, sometimes just the appearance of conflict of interest,
yeah, you’ve just got to watch out . . .
ALDRICH: I was afraid of that when I got involved with it, I knew what he was
saying, very careful. Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, yeah. Now we have this whole thing going on with the, uh,
proposition that the State Parks Foundation wants to put on the ballot to
add the fee on to the car registration that would go to state parks, and
one of the people in my office is John Mott; he’s Will, uh, Bill Mott’s
son, and he wants to be very involved in that, and our boss has to keep
reminding him, John, that’s great, that’s great, you’ve just got to
remember that you’re at work right now, and it gives people the wrong
impression; do it on your off-work time. 146
ALDRICH: Well, I learned my lesson, of course. But I got out of that little scrape
pretty well; it didn’t affect my future work with parks, and I had great
respect for Newton Drury. Tremendous respect. His wife and my wife
were very close friends too, and [pause]
SCHIMANDLE: Now, is, so you worked with him in parks when you were conservation
education supervisor. Was he the one that then got you appointed to
your next position, or; How did you end up leaving conservation
education and …
ALDRICH: Well, that’s how I got involved in this volume here, Outdoor Recreation.
You’ve probably looked at this thing.
SCHIMANDLE: I haven’t yet, no.
ALDRICH: There’s an awful lot of stuff in there that you should be concerned with.
In these two. These are my only copies of them, they’re pretty ragged.
SCHIMANDLE: I’ll have to see if they have them in the planning library.
ALDRICH: But I’m sure you must have them.
SCHIMANDLE: I hope so.
ALDRICH: I was executive officer on this plan.
SCHIMANDLE: And that’s the Outdoor Recreation Plan, right?
ALDRICH: I had about six directors of, state directors as my committee that I
worked under to produce this, and they helped guide me through the
politics of the production of this plan. But the story behind that is that
we’d, I had worked on developing a bond issue in the late fifties, and 147
we were moving ahead very rapidly on that, and we had a lot of
conservation groups behind us, and everything; but then the legislature
got involved and it became a pork barrel. Terrible pork barrel.
So what happened is we opposed a lot of them on this, but what
they did was, certain directors, including Newton Drury, got together
with the legislature and settled for doing a study to try to compensate
for all the pork barreling that we knew we couldn’t fight. And we didn’t
want the bond issue to go ahead with all these crazy damn things that
they were going to force us into!
SCHIMANDLE: Things that had nothing to do with the parks that they were putting on
there?
ALDRICH: Well, they were, somebody were friends of the family of the legislator or
something that wanted to do something. It was terrible. So, anyway,
Newton Drury agreed that they’d go on with the study and postpone the
bond issue. And that’s what these two documents are. So, I got another
phone call from Newton and with him was—who’s the second in
command—deputy director?
[Audio File 1:00:07]
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, was it still, oh, gosh. Was it still the one . . .
ALDRICH: I’m terrible for remembering, forgetting that.
SCHIMANDLE: Earl Hansen? Oh, gosh. Let me see if I’ve . . .
ALDRICH: Well, anyway, 148
SCHIMANDLE: Probably . . .
ALDRICH: So anyway, I got this call from Newton Drury in the office and he was
there with this deputy director—what the heck’s his name? Long time
State Park guy.
SCHIMANDLE: Wasn’t Hansen, huh? I have a photo somewhere here of a group . . .
ALDRICH: So they put to me the question: They said, “Elmer, we have a
proposition for you.” I said, “Well, what is it?” He said, “You’ve been
working on the bond issue, you know the problems and everything. The
legislature has come to agreement to do a major study producing an
outdoor recreation plan to cope, to control the park system. How’d you
like to head up the study for that?” I said, “I’ll have to talk it over with
[pause] I’d like to talk to my wife about it.” So I did, and I finally
agreed to take the job and stepped down from the other job, got a lot
more money, and I became executive officer of this for, what was it, a
couple of years. And I weathered through this thing. Ended up in
presentation of this with Swede Nelson, who was director of Resources
at the time, who was my key mentor among the state directors guiding
me on this whole thing. And with him I went before meetings of the
legislature to justify our conclusions on this. And there was one so-
called bastard that—what was his name, in the legislature—that gave us
a bad time on this whole study. He didn’t like the recommendations, a
lot of stuff he didn’t like. I spent two days before the legislature with 149
Swede Nelson, responding to their inquiries. That was the hardest job I
had in the whole thing.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, boy. Yeah, facing the . . .
ALDRICH: And then Swede Nelson after the first day, said, “Elmer, okay , just keep
on doing what you’re doing on answering the questions.” That’s what
gave me the stamina to go ahead with it. I was ready to dump the whole
thing, you know. It was politics at its worst.
SCHIMANDLE: Ugh. After all that work. That he had the faith in you. . .
ALDRICH: Okay, well, the time is up, I won’t go into these with you now, but . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, let’s have a follow-up meeting at some point, if that would be
alright with you. I would love that.
ALDRICH: Okay.
SCHIMANDLE: I’d like to talk with you about any facilities that, interpretation
facilities, museums and so forth, that were developed in your time . . .
ALDRICH: There’s a lot of interpretation potential in these studies here. And out of
this study here came the scenic highway system of the state of
California.
SCHIMANDLE: Yes! I remember you talking about that in the . . . during the planning
meeting. Yeah. And now you see the little signs all over now.
ALDRICH: The basis is in these plans here. 150
SCHIMANDLE: And those plans there, that’s . . .I’m trying to remember from that
meeting. You were talking about going through and looking at the
different, um,
ALDRICH: Ecosystems?
SCHIMANDLE: Ecosystems in the state, and where there had, you know, where there
needed to be more public lands that they represented.
Audio File 1:04:35]
ALDRICH: Well, part of that study I did on this was because I hired my professors I
had at Berkeley, five of them, that produced this document. And this is
the basis of a type of recreation category we developed in this called
sight-seeing and study of the natural landscape of California. So that’s a
recreation category in this, the basis of which was done this, with Ansel
Adams photographs throughout, and we, I had them divide the state
into ecosystems, planning regions, where the heck is that. Well, it’s in
this one too. Oh, you don’t have time to go through all of . . . here it is
here. So based on this ecosystem study, these are the scenic routes that
we proposed and that have been established, the idea being that
anybody out of state or in state that wanted to see all the natural
features of the state would take these scenic routes which went through
all of the ecosystems of the state of California. So that’s the basis for
this.
SCHIMANDLE: Wow. That’s a wonderful idea. 151
ALDRICH: But this wouldn’t have come about if I didn’t hire my professors, at no
cost.
SCHIMANDLE: At no cost!
ALDRICH: I offered them money and they thought it was so great that they wanted
to do it. I had a lot of meetings with them, and they published it. I
wrote a preface for this whole thing, a foreword by Elmer Aldrich.
So, well, you get me excited about my background a little bit, and I
promise I won’t bother you anymore.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, you haven’t been bothering me at all. I was concerned I was
perhaps bothering you, but and taking up too much of your time.
ALDRICH: I still feel if some of the things I did accomplish, if they can be of further
benefit, that’s fine with me.
SCHIMANDLE: Uh-huh, well, in State Parks, you know, Donna Pozzi whois my boss
now and has what essentially was your job. She’s the head of, chief of
interpretation and education now. We were talking yesterday and she
said, “One of the things State Parks has never done well is keep track
of what we’ve done before.” We’re not good at hanging on to
documents, cataloging things, learning from what we knew before; you
know, with, things get lost and then we reinvent the wheel all over
again.
ALDRICH: It always happens, in government . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Yah. And so . . . 152
ALDRICH: Somebody reviews something and says this is unimportant and throws it
out. Well, you know, I could go on and on about the method of your
doing a plan of interpretation for the parks of the state of California. If
this . . .there are two kinds of plan: individual plans for each park, or
what is the long-range plan for interpretation for the whole system?
Now we didn’t get into that, but that was one of the questions I was
going to ask you—to what extent individual plans participated in the
demand for a perfect statewide plan of objectives and goals. That sort
of thing.
SCHIMANDLE: Yah, and that. . .
ALDRICH: And we could get into that. I’m deep into that. I have been.
SCHIMANDLE: I would love to come back and talk to you again about that. I think now
with like about five minutes to go is not a good time to start because I
can keep going on that for a long time, too.
ALDRICH: Well, it’s easy for me to get off track. I can tell you that. Because I’ve
been so involved in so many interesting things.
SCHIMANDLE: You have. And then that leads me right along with you. I think, “Oh, I
want to hear about that. I don’t want to go back to my questions on my
sheet.”
ALDRICH: Do you have a friend that’s working with you on this?
SCHIMANDLE: I don’t right now, I’m doing this on my own, for my thesis. I would
love to have you talk with some of us who are involved in interpretation 153
planning with state parks right now, if we could just have an informal
chat with you sometime.
ALDRICH: Let’s see. Who’s the head of state planning these days?
SCHIMANDLE: Planning is Dan Ray.
ALDRICH: What?
SCHIMANDLE: Dan Ray is in charge of planning.
ALDRICH: Yeah, Yeah. Dan Ray.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. He’s a good guy. Unfortunately, Interpretation and Education
does not interact with planning that much. I’m kind of the go-between,
and then there’s a woman named Eileen Hook who’s down in planning
who is currently in charge of recreation planning, and she’s an
interpreter. She used to work for Interpretation and Education.
[Audio File 1:10:10]
ALDRICH: Is she a landscape architect?
SCHIMANDLE: No, she’s not. She’s a; I’m not sure what her background was, but she
was a long-time planner in Interpretation and Education, in general
plans, and now recreation planning. So the two of us are kind of the
overlap between the two.
ALDRICH: Well, maybe you can create some influence through your thesis to
enhance the planning division of state parks. 154
SCHIMANDLE: That would be great. Well, we’re kind of reinventing interpretation
planning yet again right now, it got kind of fuzzy for a while and we’re
trying to nail down what our plans are.
ALDRICH: Well on our next meeting, if you like, I have some very definite
suggestions on those two kinds of planning, and where I can
recommend—you don’t have to take any of this—where you should
start , and I would define it in two types of planning: one is the general
goals and objectives based on the needs for the public for interpretation
in the State Parks as a whole, and the other is drafting some of
individual planning in a park situation to lead to the goals. I look on it
as a division in those two approaches, and I have very definite
[inaudible] ideas on how to start if you’re starting from scratch on those
two approaches.
That would be really excellent to get. Now the last thing I need
today, is I need a, if you don’t mind, a release form signed so that I can
transcribe the recording and then put the recording and transcript in to
our state park archives, and other people can use it for research then.
ALDRICH: I’m a little shaky with the medicine I’m taking for this fracture I have.
SCHIMANDLE: I’m sure glad to see that you’re mending up okay. Getting back on the
bike—that must have felt really good.
ALDRICH: I did two and a half miles, a couple days ago, so I’m gaining on it. I ride
with a senior group, and there was a lot of help there. 155
SCHIMANDLE: Plus that peer pressure to get back on the bike, too. You know they
expect you to get back out there, which is good.
ALDRICH: Well, look. I’ll leave these in a little stack here [indicating planning
documents stacked on desk].
SCHIMANDLE: Great. I wouldn’t trust myself with borrowing them, I don’t think.
ALDRICH: Well they’re single copies.
SCHIMANDLE: Yah. I’m going to go back down to the planning division library,
though, and look again, and see which of those we have.
ALDRICH: I think one of my greatest things was getting this published. [Indicating
statewide recreation plan.] And Bill Mott kind of complained that I
went ahead on my own and with Ansel Adams and I tapped the parks
funds to get it published and everything else, and didn’t discuss it with
the director.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh. [Laughing.] Oh, gee. Whoops. Well, that sounds like one of those
“Ask permission later” kind of things to do.
ALDRICH: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Because it’s just it just seems such a valuable tool to have. I’m writing
down the full title to make sure I find the right document.
ALDRICH: Well thank you again, Carolyn, It’s been an enjoyable experience.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, good.
[End audio file] 156
APPENDIX B
Wesley and Celeste Cater Interview 157
The History of Interpretation in California State Parks
M.A. Thesis California State University, Sacramento
Oral History Interview
with
Wesley (Wes) and Celeste Cater
October 16, 2010 Morro Bay, California
By Carolyn Schimandle
California State University, Sacramento 158
Interview History for Oral History of Wesley (Wes) and Celeste Cater
Interviewer’s Name: Carolyn Schimandle
Interview Date and Location: The interview was conducted on October 16, 2010, in Wes and Celeste Cater’s home in Morro Bay, California.
Context Notes: The interview was conducted in the living room of the narrators’ home. The interview was originally going to be just with Wes Cater, but Celeste Cater joined in with relevant information.
Approximately two-thirds of the way through the interview the telephone rang, and Wes Cater took the call. While he was on the phone, the interviewer initially turned off the digital recorder, but then turned it back on because Celeste Cater was providing more information. Wes Cater’s voice is louder than Celeste Cater’s in this part of the audio file, even though she was closer to the recorder, resulting in some inaudible sections. Mr. Cater rejoined the interview after completing the telephone conversation. The interview otherwise proceeded smoothly with no additional interruptions and no technical difficulties.
Audio File and Interview Records: The master digital recording of the interview and a full transcript are deposited with the Department Archives at the California Department of Parks and Recreation, North Highlands, California. 159
[Begin Audio File 1]
SCHIMANDLE: I’m interviewing Wesley Cater at his home in Morro Bay, California, and it is October 16th, 2010.
I remember where that [inaudible] recording. Let’s see if I can find it.
W. CATER: Now what is this for, exactly?
SCHIMANDLE: Well, two purposes. First of all, State Parks hasn’t always been the best at keeping track of institutional history, not reinventing the wheel over and over again. So adding to State Parks history archives a little bit, and then also I’m doing my thesis on History of Interpretation in State Parks. And since the rangers have been involved in interpretation and worked around nature guides and interpreters and seen, and you’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. I wanted to get that angle, too. So in talking to you I have a couple of goals—to get some of your personal history in State Parks, and also what you were involved in as far as, you know, doing any interpretation, campfires, guided hikes, working with nature guides and other interpreters out in the field, seeing changes in the department, you know, how the philosophy changed over the years with different directors and locally with different superintendents and so forth, so . . . Does that make sense to you?
W. CATER: Well yes, I’m sure it does.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, okay. Great. So, for starters, how did you get into parks work?
W. CATER: Well, it was a, probably more of an accident than a purpose. It was in 1948, I was, Celeste and I were searching for a more permanent work than I was doing in Redlands, California, where we lived at the time, where I was born and raised, and where Celeste went to school there too, as I did, and we were married and had one child at that time, and I was looking at Fish and Game or Highway Patrol. I’d actually never even thought about State Parks. And one day I was down at the post office, and there was a bulletin about a state park exam. So we came home and we filled out the application, mailed it in, and took the examination, and passed that, took the oral, and went to work in early 1949 at Will Rogers State Park. 160
SCHIMANDLE: Ah!
W. CATER: On February 1st, 1949. At that time working in State Parks required more of a background in maintenance and construction than in forestry or park interpretation or things of that type. It was a, we as a ranger at that time were it. We did all the construction, we did all the maintenance, we did all the janitorial, we did all the visitor services, we did the interpretation, we did the fire fighting, we did whatever it was, and “other jobs as required”, whatever that meant. It meant, you were it.
So we started out, I started out as a Ranger I in 1949, worked at Will Rogers State Park. We had at that time at Will Rogers the interpretation of Will Rogers’ home and his life. We did have a curator at Will Rogers, which mostly handled the interpretation of the house. But on her days off, at times we got the replacement from, well, I guess we had a seasonal interpreter. I forget his name at the moment. He also worked part-time at Will Rogers. And then we’d bring one, a curator over from Pio Pico [State Historic Park] would come over on certain days of the week and replace the curator at the house, or that not available, the rangers would do that. She did inside the house only, the curator was only inside the house. The rangers were on the grounds, up at the stables and on Saturdays and Sundays patrol on foot walking the area and doing interpretation. There was a lot of interpretation of Will Rogers’ life. He was a philosopher, a newspaper writer, a humorist, a movie star, and a world traveler. And a cowboy.
[Audio file 0:05:29]
SCHIMANDLE: And according to him a bad polo player, from some of his stuff in print.
W. CATER: He had the horses, he had the stables, and he had polo grounds. So he was in charge of the polo group.
So that was who our, if this is where we’re going and that type of thing you want to know?
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting. Now did you get any training in how to talk to the public, how to interpret history, you know . . .
W. CATER: Not in those days. It was just “You will,” and meet this bus tour and show them the grounds and show them the flowers, we had a garden 161
and we had a fairly formal grounds-keeping program at that time, flowers; Will Rogers had a small golf course on the property, it wasn’t used, in use at that time, but we worked with school children, we worked with adults that came on the bus tours.
Back in those days—I don’t know what it is today down there—but back in the early ‘40s and the ‘50s movie stars’ homes were the great thing to tour. So you had Gray Line tours and several other bus lines and private tours that took people to see the movie stars’ homes, and Will Rogers’ was one of the homes they went to see. And at that time they could go in to the home and on to the grounds and visit. So that was our introduction to, my introduction to visitor services interpretation. But as far as training, no. It was all on your own, read your own books, read the brochures, read about State Parks, study State Parks, and we had no school at that time. We didn’t go to an Asilomar program. So that’s what we did at Will Rogers type of, in addition to maintenance work. And we lived on the grounds, so it was a actually seven day a week job, so even though we did have days off we were right there every day. And there was always a visitor. We lived right there. So the visitors were in your front yard, they tried to get in your house at times. Some of them even did at times.
SCHIMANDLE: So was one of the workers’ houses from when the Rogers’ family was there?
W. CATER: Originally it was one of the cowboys’, where the cowboys lived. It was a very old, old, old piece of the property, extremely old house.
SCHIMANDLE: Interesting. How long were you there?
W. CATER: We were there from 1949 to 1951. Just a little over two years. And then we, then I transferred to Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. Again, a whole new different type of program. We were the rangers in the mountains. We did the interpretation, we did the visitor services, we had the campfire program in the evenings.
We did have a seasonal interpreter who came in in the summer months only for maybe 90 days. And he ran the, opened up the what-you-call- the interpretive visitor center, interpretive center, and he’d go out and collect snakes and rats and rodents and all kinds of things there, and set up a little museum there for people to go visit, and he would conduct afternoon walks and morning walks with the children. But the rangers at Picacho, that, he was mainly assigned to the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park but his work was mainly at the north end, at 162
Picacho, Paso Picacho campground, where we had a little museum area we opened up for him, we had a campfire center. And occasionally he would go to Green Valley Falls [campground] and put on programs down there.
[Audio file 0:10:09]
There again we worked with the Girl Scouts. We had a Girl Scout camp in the park at that time, we had a Boy Scout camp in the park, a city/county camp in the park, and we worked with them giving programs; and we would go over to their part and give an evening program, or they would come to the—summer, they’d come over to the camp, they’d hike over to the park and we would interpret the park to them, the trails, we had a horse camp at that time, just starting, and riding and hiking trails went through Cuyamaca and we were again involved not only in maintenance, but we were starting to get involved in being rangers in the – Will Rogers was not really a ranger as quote a “ranger assignment,” as most redwood people kind of looked down their noses at the historical areas at that time, and they looked down their noses at Southern California, even at that time.
C. CATER: And we lived there.
W. CATER: And we lived, again, in the park. It was a . . . We were there almost, let’s see, we left there in 1953, so we were there a little over two years, spent two summers there, summer of ’51 and ’52. And we left February of ’53 and went to Doheny Beach.
SCHIMANDLE: When you say ranger work, it was more ranger work there, do you mean law enforcement, keeping the peace kind of work?
W. CATER: Yes. Uh-huh. Yeah, we had poachers, we had deer hunting around and in the park going on, so we were involved in enforcement with our limited enforcement powers we had at that time. We had state park peace officer authority, but that only meant enforcing state park rules, nothing else.
SCHIMANDLE: Then you had to call in reinforcements from outside if there was something more serious, right?
W. CATER: Right. If anything, highway patrol or sheriff was called in. We called the game warden often on problems, but we were the initial, initially involved in enforcement of deer hunting, things of that type. Early 163
morning and late night; most of the poaching took place at night, and the early morning.
C. CATER: We had one telephone.
W. CATER: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: One telephone in the whole park?
W. CATER: Yeah. We didn’t have telephones, we didn’t have radios. And INS and those other agencies were a little ways away.
W. CATER: Yeah. We had a game warden in Julian, sheriff came out of San Diego. They were good. They responded the best they could. But the only telephone was the pay phone at Paso Picacho and a payphone at Green Valley Falls, and there was a phone in the Chief Ranger’s house. So that was the only line besides a one-line, hand-crank telephone between the rangers’ houses. But we had no way to get hold of outside help at all unless we went to, got the chief ranger up, or we went to the payphone and used it.
SCHIMANDLE: So you had to keep a supply of nickels in your vehicle.
W. CATER: Yeah.
C. CATER: And we used to have the deer come and visit us.
W. CATER: The deer were in the yards all the time.
C. CATER: And in the garage, and in the front room window.
W. CATER: In the front yard. But there again, we were, it was pretty remote, and you were the . . . in Cuyamaca in 1953, you were the eastern portion of San Diego County, and your authority was your Stetson. And people looked at that time to the ranger as being authority in or out of the park. It didn’t make much difference to people. People then, you were a ranger. And it was a different lifestyle than there is today.
C. CATER: I never left there all winter long. Never left there.
SCHIMANDLE: Really! Never got down to town to shop or anything?
C. CATER: Never. 164
W. CATER: Well, we would be snowed in.
C. CATER: When the rangers had to go to town they’d take the grocery list with them.
[Audio file 0:15:02]
W. CATER: We’d do the shopping on state time because we’d go to town because it was an hour to, Closest town was El Cajon and there were no freeways in those days, it was all mountain roads, so it was an hour to town. And we’d go into town occasionally on state business and take advantage of the opportunity to go shopping.
SCHIMANDLE: [To C. Cater] Did you have any other company besides Wes and your children? Or was that . . .
C. CATER: Nope. That was it.
W. CATER: Once in a while somebody would come to visit, but mostly it was other rangers’ families; we would visit back and forth. We were very close with the Allisons at that time. That was our . . . and the game warden in Julian became a very good friend of ours, and his wife. So our outside activities were very limited.
C. CATER: Tell her about “Where Hoolian.”
W. CATER: About what?
C. CATER: About “Where Hoolian.”
W. CATER: Oh, yeah. [chuckles]. We used to get the Mexicans coming up, the wetbacks; they’d come up to the house in the middle of the night, or the day, they were good people . . .
C. CATER: Walking! And with children!
W. CATER: They’d have their families . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, my God! And they just walked over the border, and . . .
C. CATER: They would come up to our house.
W. CATER: They would come up and knock on the door and ask for directions, “Where Hoolian”—Julian, of course. 165
C. CATER: Julian.
W. CATER: As we know it. “Hoolian” it was to them. We were there one night and it was cold and rainy and snowy, and there was a knock at the door, and of course in those days you never took the uniform off because there was nowhere to go; so we were up in Bill and Jackie’s house up at the campground, in another part of the park, and opened the door, Bill went to the door and opened the door, and there was about five or six Mexican men, cold and hungry and tired, and their eyes popped open when they saw the badge—in those days it wasn’t a star, it was a badge—but they wanted help. They needed help. They were cold and wet and hungry.
C. CATER: It was at night.
W. CATER: It was about 9 o’clock at night. So Bill and I took them down to the shop area, and took blankets down there, and turned the heater on in the shop. They had to sleep on the benches or the floor, but there was no tears. And we got some food out of the houses, and Jackie and my wife fixed soup or something and brought it down to them. So they spent the night in the shop, and the next morning they went on their way to Julian. We gave them some hot coffee and toast, or whatever we had. And we ran into them occasionally in Julian and they would come, “Oh, amigo!” you know, they thought we were great.
SCHIMANDLE: I bet, yeah!
W. CATER: First people they’d met in California, you know, we saved their lives. I wouldn’t say we saved their lives, but we kept them from spending a very miserable night.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. They must have been happy to see you.
W. CATER: They weren’t at first, but they got happier as the evening went on. But those are the things we got into in Julian, and we had the Laguna Mountains north of us, or actually east of us. There was a radar station over there and the Air Force was over there. They ran their big truck off the road one night going over to Lagunas to deliver supplies. From San Bernardino they were going, and so I don’t know how they wound up at our house, but they’d hiked several miles around and wound up at our house. So we went over and helped them get their truck out of the snow bank and turned around, and they had to go clear around through the park and down and up the other way to get to the radar 166
station. They couldn’t go in from that end. So they wound up thirty miles out of their trip around to get to the radar station.
So we were involved in that, we were involved in automobile accidents and along the highway day and night. The Highway Patrol was an hour away or more, once we found a pay phone and could get hold of them. And same with the . . . we had a Forestry [California Department of Forestry] station in the park, seasonally, just in the summer months. So we worked closely with Forestry, we worked closely with the U.S. Forest Service out of Descanso, they had a lookout on the mountain, Mt. Cuyamaca, fire lookout up there in the summer months, and so we worked with U.S. Forest Service and the Forestry.
There wasn’t much involvement with, or any, with Border Patrol. We rarely if ever saw the Border Patrol. There weren’t that many intruders from Mexico at that time, and those who were just came as far as Julian and settled down there. So I don’t remember much about the Border Patrol involvement. But we did have, that was our program in the Cuyamacas.
[Audio file 0:20:28]
C. CATER: And the families would come up, and spend all week and then their husbands would come up.
W. CATER: Well, the camping, the use of the park was totally different than it is today. House trailers were a rarity in those days. People would, in the summer months they would bring their families from the valley, from the Imperial Valley up to Cuyamaca, and they’d just spend thirty days at Cuyamaca. So they’d leave their family and go back to work, the men would. And they’d leave their kids up there, and year after year they had done that. So we got to know them quite well, and we’d leave them brooms and rakes, and they’d clean the restrooms and they’d clean the campsites, and then the man of the family would come up on the weekends.
The Indians would come in, in the acorn season and gather acorns, the local Miwok. No, they weren’t Miwok. They were the Diegueños [now more commonly called the Kumeyaay] down there.
C. CATER: And they would gather underneath the trees. 167
W. CATER: They would get underneath the oak trees and gather the acorns, the women would, and take them home with them, they lived in over around Julian, and down in the Descanso area, they lived down in that area too.
SCHIMANDLE: Just like they had for centuries. Wow.
W. CATER: Yeah. It was a totally different lifestyle, different life than we have today.
C. CATER: And we had two little kids during that time.
W. CATER: Yeah, we had two children at that time. But our social life was within the park, and very rare if any . . . Oh, we’d go to Julian for the Apple Parades and a few things. We had one ranger there from, his mother lived in Julian, she’d come across from Texas in a covered wagon, and that’s how long she’d been in Julian. And her father, her father was a mining engineer. And he came to Julian because of the Gold Rush, the gold in Julian. And then they stayed. So they had family. Then Mama Juch married, and she had Ranger Louie Juch, he became a state park ranger. He died in Julian, he lived in around Julian all of his life, and he worked at Cuyamaca and he worked at Doheny and he worked at Will Rogers. He worked Southern California parks, mainly.
SCHIMANDLE: Just one more question about Cuyamaca that I can think of right now. I’ve seen that there used to be, uh, like a ski run there in the wintertime, . . .
W. CATER: Yes.
SCHIMANDLE: Was there still skiing there at the time. . .
W. CATER: No. That [skiing for the general public] went out early on.
SCHIMANDLE: That was already gone.
W. CATER: Yeah. The San Diego Ski Club had a rope tow up on the mountain that they had built in the park and they had a ski run they had cleared; and there was skiing up there, yes. There was skiing there in the winter months, a few months of the year, and as I said, they had a rope tow there with a big gasoline engine on it. They’d come up in the winter months and operate that. But it wasn’t open to the public, per se. It was just for the membership of the ski club. It generally was not even known there was one up there. 168
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, I guess earlier on there had been a public one and the CCC had built that little winter shelter over in Paso Picacho campground. I found some stuff in old California Conservationists from the 1930s and I was surprised they had skiing there.
W. CATER: Yeah. That didn’t last much after we left, in 1953. I suppose by ’55 it was probably gone. Things started to change.
Then from there we went . . . I don’t know if you want my life history in parks, or are we just talking about . . .
SCHIMANDLE: I think that’s really interesting and then I’ll ask some questions about interpretation as we go on. One thing I’m curious about at that time, you said you were two years at Will Rogers and then a couple of years up at Cuyamaca. Were the rangers encouraged to transfer around a lot back then?
[Audio file 0:25:10]
W. CATER: Yes. That was expected. You were expected to promote.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah, Okay.
W. CATER: Today that is not part of the program. We have rangers now that spend 25, 26 years in one park, never leave it, never promote. But in those days you were expected to promote. You were expected to transfer. We took advantage of the opportunities and moved from, like, it was a promotion from, in-grade promotion from Cuyamaca to Doheny. I went to a Ranger II there. Doheny, I was only there five months.
SCHIMANDLE: Wow.
W. CATER: Then I went to Anza-Borrego Desert as the assistant supervisor there. So it was a, well not a promotion in grade, but it was a promotion opportunity for, to become . . .
C. CATER: He didn’t qualify to be eligible for a raise or for a different position. And what did he say to you?
W. CATER: Well, I was on probation. Bill Kenyon and I, Bill was the superintendent of the District Six, and Bill and I became very good friends and he liked the way I worked and what I did, and I had a special assignment at one time from Will Rogers at the district office 169
because that’s when we’d come into, the state had come into a vast amount of money. We got the windfall back from the oil money; in 1949 it was returned. It was all frozen during the war, and then in 1949 it was released and we got the money back. I think Truman released it, I believe it was Truman at that time. So the state received a huge amount of money. And we, statewide, not just Southern California but the whole state, we started; a huge expansion program was started at that time. We started building campgrounds and houses and other facilities, and it had turned out that I could type.
SCHIMANDLE: [Laughing] Okay, and that was your big break . . .
W. CATER: They were looking for someone to come into the district office, which was in Los Angeles at that time, and Will Rogers was, oh, about , oh, 45 minutes away from the district office. But they found out that I could type. So I went down to the district office for special assignment, and I became one of the clerks in the office for, ohI don’t know, I was there probably five or six weeks, or maybe two months. I don’t remember. But I was typing service contracts, I was typing bid proposals, I was opening bids, I was awarding bids, I was like a senior engineer, practically, in the district office. But I was doing all that type of work. So that gave me an in with Mr. Kenyon
C. CATER: He was the superintendent.
W. CATER: Because he was superintendent and he and I worked together. And then following that assignment, one day he called me at Will Rogers and he says, “Can you meet me over on the Sepulveda Boulevard, I’m going to Sacramento and want to talk to you.” So I went over and met him there. And he wanted me to go to Anza-Borrego on another special assignment to relieve this Chief Ranger who was put on basically a disciplinary leave. So I packed up Celeste and one baby and took them to her mother’s house, and I went to Anza-Borrego Desert, never having been there in my life, and arrived at that, and that was in August I think, and quite warm.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, my.
C. CATER: And just remember that this was Will Rogers days. I mean he went back [in the narration] to our first park.
W. CATER: I went back to 1949. I just finished probation, and he sent me to the desert for a special assignment to relieve the Chief Ranger, and I had 170
to tell the Chief Ranger he was relieved! Again, no telephones, no radios, he didn’t know I was coming.
[Audio file 0:30:00]
C. CATER: He didn’t know. He said, “What are you doing here?”
W. CATER: And Mr. Kenyon said, you’re in the new house—they’d just built the one house at Borrego with the oil money that we’d received—so the new house was there, it had never been lived in, it wasn’t even hooked up to electricity. So I went out there; and the Chief Ranger was gone, so I moved in the—I broke in the house, climbed the pole outside . . .
C. CATER: I want to make sure you understand. This is an empty, new house.
W. CATER: Climbed the pole, hooked up the electricity and got electricity in the house, and got the cooler going and got the house cooled down, and waited for the Chief Ranger to come home,
C. CATER: He only had a sleeping bag.
W. CATER: Yeah, I had a sleeping bag and a cot, and there was no furniture, no nothing. There was a stove in the house, a gas stove, propane.
SCHIMANDLE: And Celeste and your one child at the time were still back at, uh . . .
W. CATER: She was at her mother’s.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, okay.
W. CATER: So that was another special assignment I was sent on. And again we had no telephone. There was a pay phone, I believe, at that time in the campground. Now if I had to get a hold of Mr. Kenyon I either . . .
C. CATER: Didn’t you have an appointment to call him every Wednesday?
W. CATER: That was later on. That was in ’53 when we had that arrangement.
So I stayed out there for several, two months, roughly, and then came back to Will Rogers. And then when I was at Doheny, I’m digressing, I’m jumping here, I know. When I was at Doheny, the assistant ranger position at Borrego came open. So Mr. Kenyon called me down to meet him at his home in San Clemente—he lived in the park down 171
there—oh, he called me down at the office and I went in and he said, “Well, how’d you like to go to Borrego?”
I said, “I’d love to go to Borrego. He says, “Well, when?” And I says, Tomorrow’s fine!” He says, “Well, can’t you just wait through the fourth of July weekend?” “I said, Yeah, I could go Monday or Tuesday.” So we went that Tuesday, right after 4th of July, after five months at Doheny; moved to Borrego. But then again, that was a . . . we spent three years there, from ’53 to ’56. There were only three rangers in the park at that time. There was Chief Ranger, Assistant Ranger, and a Deputy Ranger. And we’d bring in rangers during the winter months from Idyllwild and Cuyamaca and Silver Strand would come out and work during the winter seasons. Because those parks during that time basically died, you know. No visitors.
We did not have a true interpretive program at that time, in fact it was all more or less a one to one interpretive program. We had again no telephones, no radios, one jeep—one desert, one jeep, you know, what more do you need? [Laughs.]
C. CATER: But we lived in the middle of the park, in a park house.
W. CATER: We lived in the park. And if you wanted to talk to the district office, we’d stand by the telephone in the morning. We had an extension from the pay phone into the office. We could answer it, but we couldn’t call out on it. So we’d spend one hour every morning waiting, in case the district wanted to talk to us. Otherwise, it was all done by mail, or they would drive out to talk to you.
SCHIMANDLE: Was there just the one campground in Palm Canyon at that time?
W. CATER: Yes. We didn’t have campgrounds elsewhere. And that was at the beginning when they split the park [into Anza Desert State Park and Borrego State Park]. They built a campground at Tamarisk Grove, and a house down there. And Carl Whitefield was the ranger in the southern portion, and I was the assistant ranger in the northern portion. And again we were the enforcers. Of everything. We assumed the role of highway patrol, of game warden, of sheriff. Whatever happened in the valley, we were involved in it. It wasn’t unusual to call the sheriff and maybe he’d get there the next day. Yeah, that was how it mostly was at that time.
[Audio file 0:35:07] 172
SCHIMANDLE: Were there very many visitors back then? Did it get busy?
W. CATER: In the winter we had quite a few visitors, yes. The campground would fill up on certain weekends, on major weekends. And the flower season was very, very busy.
We didn’t have the masses of people, we didn’t have the highway system we have today. There was only one road into Borrego, well, actually, two—one came in more or less from Brawley area, up, and the other one came down from Julian in. And out of Yaki Pass, from Tamarisk, from Highway 78 over into the valley. There was no road in from Salton Sea, there was no road up the back side of Ranchita, and so we were pretty isolated out there. And again, there was maybe six telephones in the whole valley. Di Giorgio had a phone [Robert Di Giorgio, chairman and president of DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation, which focused on land development at this time], and there was a phone at the two resorts in town, and Copley had a phone out at the resort, and in Borrego, I don’t even remember the names of the resorts anymore, there were a couple of phones there. There was a phone down at the drug store.
SCHIMANDLE: So there was a little community at Borrego Springs then.
W. CATER: There was a service station, a drug store, and a grocery store and post office, a little clothing—a yarn shop, I guess, it was just something for the lady to do. There was no hardware store or anything like that at that time.
SCHIMANDLE: Jumping back a little bit, you said when you started for Parks you were thinking of either forestry or CHP. Had you had experience or education that led to think of one or the other?
W. CATER: No.
SCHIMANDLE: It just sounded like something interesting?
W. CATER: It was an interest I had. I spent a lot of time in the mountains, in the San Bernardino mountains and out in the desert, as a child, with my father. My father didn’t work very much during the Depression, so we spent a lot of time going up into the mountains. And I always went him. And he was a great fisherman so I was always with him. So I spent a lot of my childhood in the mountains, and out in the desert area. 173
C. CATER: The decision at the time, you just came home from the service.
W. CATER: Yes, I’d just come home from the war.
C. CATER: I don’t know if he told you that. He was unemployed, and he hadn’t decided exactly what he wanted to do. And coincidentally I just graduated from the University of Redlands. And I too, I was going to go to Europe and do something like that, but I hadn’t decided yet. And so we were both ripe and ready.
W. CATER: There was no work in Redlands. If your father didn’t own a business, or you didn’t want to work in the orange groves, there was very, very limited opportunity in Redlands to work. I did work as a glazier at one of the . . . my uncle had a glass shop so I learned a little basic glazing and I worked as a glazier. That was the only . . . Very, very little work. And that was 1940. I came back home in 1946 after the war. And at that time, California only had a little over 7 million people. It was smaller than New York City. All of California had less people than New York City had. And so things hadn’t started yet, the boom hadn’t started after the war, and so there was maybe an opportunity to be a policeman in Redlands, or a fireman in Redlands, but the Highway Patrol or Game Warden sounded more exciting, you know.
But that [the civil service exam for highway patrol or game warden] wasn’t being given at that time, and they weren’t hiring. But then, as I said, the State Park Ranger notice showed up, and then, “Oh! That looks interesting!” And that’s how it happened. [Chuckles.]
SCHIMANDLE: That’s interesting. It’s like all those things combined into one job— including glazing—the maintenance you had to do.
W. CATER: Yeah. You have to. I worked that work in construction with my father, so I knew all that kind of thing. So I met the minimum background.
But anyway, Mr. Kenyon asked me if I wanted to go to the desert, and yes, we wanted to, so we moved to the desert for three years. And that was before patrol rangers or, as I say, we had one chief, and that’s all we had in all the desert. So there was not much patrolling. We did patrol almost every day. We saw a lot of the desert. We were trying to establish boundary lines and property ownership and strictly using a hand compass, and trying to figure out, well, that’s north, and the declination point is twelve degrees in this part of the desert, and that must be the line. And we’d find the markers. 174
[Audio file 0:40:34]
C. CATER: You understand, don’t you?
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
C. CATER: Do you understand what he’s saying? They found the lines!
W. CATER: We found the Imperial County line, between San Diego and Imperial counties, all by hand measurement, almost. There were a few old- timers out there that could remember where some of the corners were that they’d found when they were working; they’d take us out and show us where the USGS markers were; we could find those and relate that to the map, but we didn’t have the sophisticated things they have today. Compared to what they have today, they found that we were a mile-and-a-half, two miles off from where we thought we were.
SCHIMANDLE: However many miles . . .
C. CATER: That’s not bad.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, even at the start that was a huge park compared to the other ones.
W. CATER: Yeah. Well, we spent three years there, and then we moved from there to Carrillo Beach [Leo Carrillo State Beach], LA County—Los Angeles County—line, and Ventura County line. I was the first ranger in there. The park hadn’t been open to the public before that. LA County had been operating it, but they had it closed. So I went there for a year and a half. I took that as a promotion from assistant supervisor to park supervisor, even though it was a lateral transfer. So I became park supervisor there.
C. CATER: And we had a house on the beach.
W. CATER: No, no we did not. We lived in Oxnard.
C. CATER: Oh, that’s before that.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah.
W. CATER: So then it was open. We opened it up for day use only, again trying to establish the boundary. And I was the only ranger there. So five days a week was all they had a ranger there. I did hire a park aid. Then after a 175
year and a half of that I became a Ranger III and was promoted to Sutter’s Fort and the State Indian Museum.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, that’s a big change.
W. CATER: It was a total change. And so I became involved in interpretation of California history. Oh, while at Borrego I did get involved in some interpretation. We had a family living out there by the name of Bancroft. Nina Bancroft. Very nice lady, and she had a tremendous library in her house. So I started reading about Borrego and I discovered, with her help, the Anza diaries by Eugene Bolton [Juan Bautista de Anza’s diaries from 1774 and 1776 California expeditions, translated by Herbert Eugene Bolton]. So I became, quote, as well- versed as I could in Anza’s, Juan Bautista de Anza’s, trek through Borrego. [This was in 1954-55 when he was stationed at Borrego.]
And as it turned out at that time, and I didn’t know it, Newton Dru—. . No, Newton, darn I keep saying Newton Drury [California Division of Beaches and Parks director, 1951-1959].
C. CATER: Newton Beane?
W. CATER: No, our State Historian at that time: Dr. Neasham.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah, yes. Aubrey Neasham. [Vernon Aubrey Neasham, State Historian for the Division of Beaches and Parks, 1953-1960]
W. CATER: Newton Drury’s brother was Aubrey also, that’s where the confusion was.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s true. Which is funny. Because even back then it wasn’t that common of a name.
W. CATER: No. But Aubrey Neasham was a student at U.C. Berkeley, and he had done the Anza trail and trekked with Dr. Bolton back in the early thirties, which I didn’t know. And so he thought that was just marvelous that I had taken that up. So that’s how the markers were established in Anza-Borrego Desert, the State Historical Landmark markers. Four of them were put in just as I left. So that was kind of the beginning of the history of California for me, too.
It turned out Nina Bancroft’s husband, Phil, was H.H. Bancroft’s son.
[Audio file 0:45:07] 176
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, I wondered if there was a connection.
W. CATER: Yeah. Very much so.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s a big name.
[45:10] W. CATER: Yeah. They were out of Walnut Creek. They were walnut growers up there. But H.H. Bancroft was his father. And so she had access to books galore, and she’d order books for me through the State Library and they’d come in the mail.
C. CATER: She just welcomed him.
W. CATER: So she thought it was great somebody was reading books. [Laughs.] That was quite a shock to discover who she was, and who he was. And then after that as I said, I went to Carrillo Beach and then up to Will Rogers—excuse me—then to Sutter’s Fort and the State Indian Museum. So there again I got involved in early California histories, which Sutter’s Fort was, supposedly, we were trying to depict the era of 1839 to 1849, about the period before, up to the Gold Rush. Because with the Gold Rush Sutter’s Fort more or less collapsed, as I remember. So I got involved in that. I was very fortunate one day we were out, and I found a sump in the ground, or a sinking in the ground, and, “I wonder what that is.” So we got an archaeology student out of American River College, and he dug the well. It turned out to be Sutter’s well that I’d found. And so I was fortunate there to my own, my brief fifteen minutes to fame, you know? [Laughs.]
And we were involved, we had curators there, and I was probably the first one to get them out of sitting in the office. They helped open up in the morning and put the flag up, and then they’d disappear all day. And the public would wander through, and never see anybody. And I’d say, “Wait a minute! You guys are, you’re here to do interpretation.” Henry Collins was his name, contrary old booger. He and I turned out to be the best of friends. It was just amazing. It was strange. When I went to Sutter’s Fort I was quite young. I was 31, I think, when I went up there as a Ranger III. I was the youngest Ranger III in the state. I was also the youngest Ranger II in the state at one time. The average age when they were putting every one together and throwing my 31 in there turned out to be 62 years old. And here I am the head of it, and . . . But I was able to get some interpretive work going. I got them to put some exhibits in, and change some exhibits 177
and move things around, and started making it a little more alive than it was.
C. CATER: And the people would ask them questions.
W. CATER: Oh, yeah. The visitors were there, of course. Sutter’s Fort was very popular. All the fourth graders in Sacramento came once a year to Sutter’s Fort, and we had a big program there, and I would help with the interpretation of the fort with them.
SCHIMANDLE: So they did actually have formal school programs at the time, talk, tour, something.
W. CATER: Yes. And we had that, and following . . . I was only there 11 months. Mr. Drury [Newton Drury, State Parks director] came out one day and said, “I want to meet with you and your wife.” And I thought, “Oh, boy, what have I done now?” I was working as the tenurist at the State Fair at that time. We worked two weeks at the State Fair, and I was the ranger at the State Park exhibit at the State Fair. So I called Celeste, and said, “Come down here. I don’t know what Mr. Drury wants, but we’ll meet him.”
So we went out behind the exhibit, sat down at a table, and he said, “I would like you to go to Columbia [State Historic Park].”
“Oh?”
He said, “Yeah, we’ve got some problems up there and I think maybe you can work with them, handle them.”
Well, Columbia had a bad name at that time. The chief ranger up there was not well liked at all, and I really didn’t want to go. He says, “Well, would you try it for a year?”
Yeah, “Would you and your wife go up there for a year. and if it doesn’t work out, if you don’t like it, I’ll move you to Plumas-Eureka [State Park], because that’s coming on line.”
[Audio file 0:50:01]
I said, “All right, we’ll go, we’ll try it.” So we moved to Columbia, and it turned out to be a fantastic experience. The people accepted us.
C. CATER: After this awful association before, and we come in. 178
W. CATER: So we moved into Columbia, and the museum was pretty static at that time, or stagnant, whichever word you want to use, and so one of the first things I wanted to do was revamp the museum, and then we opened a lot of other storefront exhibits, working with Jack Dyson at that time, who was in Sacramento, he was a historian. And we did have a Ranger I that was a real good historian, also.
And so we started opening things up, things that were locked, instead of locked buildings, and closed buildings, we opened them up, cleaned up the front of them, and made storefront exhibits out of quite a number of the buildings. The one in the old City Hotel, they had a hearse, an old horse-drawn hearse in the lobby, and I upset a lot of people in Sacramento, I don’t know why, but I moved the hearse out of there, and put in, a little . . . Moon Desto [phonetic spelling] had just given me a lot of horsehair furniture. So with Jack Dyson’s help we papered the wall with red wallpaper, and made it real fancy, put big hanging lamps and things and put the furniture in there, and made a little bit of a lobby out of it. And it looked pretty nice, I thought. A couple of people in Sacramento didn’t, but they got over it. Yes.
And we got involved in refurbishing the old hand-pumper [fire engine], Papeete.
C. CATER: Pictures. [Gestures toward framed drawings on adjacent dining room wall.] What the pumper looked [unintelligible]. And then that’s Columbia. There are six pictures of Columbia here.
You want to take a break?
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
C. CATER: You’ve been sitting there an hour.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, my. Has it been that long? And I would love to see the pictures, too.
[Crunchy noises on recording as we walk over to pictures on dining room wall]
C. CATER: He’s talking about Papeete. This is the pumper right here.
W. CATER: That’s what it looked like when we started.
SCHIMANDLE: I’ve seen it, but . . . 179
W. CATER: And we cleaned it all up, and refurbished it and repainted it, and then the Masonic Hall was restored while I was there. We restored, these buildings, through here.
C. CATER: This is the fronts, Main Street.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh. And that’s before restoration.
W. CATER: The old firehouse, we restored that. And that’s part of Main Street over there, we restored that building, and opened it, made it up, it was a courthouse. It was actually a courthouse. And the old church [St. Anne’s} that was privately owned by the [Catholic] Church. But we had . . . restoration was . . .
C. CATER: Here.
W. CATER: That’s the back of the Fallon House
C. CATER: Fallon Theater.
W. CATER: The Fallon Theater, and . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yes. And then you have the gulch behind it.
W. CATER: Yes, the gulch behind it, and now it’s the parking lot back down there.
C. CATER: We could just do no wrong. Everybody just loved us and accepted us. This is the what, look, Charlie Surendorf, isn’t it? [ Charles Frederick Surendorf II (1906-1979). Artist who lived in Columbia.]
W. CATER: Yes
C. CATER: And he’s the artist here. And he just loved us, and everything. And he said, “Now I want you to have a watercolor.” And he showed us [inaudible] . . .
W. CATER: Well, we bought it.
C. CATER: And then he helped us choose it!
W. CATER: He chose it for us.
C. CATER: And he’s, well he’s a salesman; and he did all these. 180
SCHIMANDLE: Those are really nice. Wow. Now did you replace the Chief Ranger who was up there?
W. CATER: Yes. I went in as Chief Ranger and . . .
SCHIMANDLE: So he was gone and it sounds like you were quite a relief after this guy.
W. CATER: Yeah, it was a interesting five years we were there, and a lot of major restoration took place in that time, probably THE major restoration of the State Park system for those five years. We had a, the Division of Architecture had a crew in there doing the restoration but I was involved in all of it also. We redid the schoolhouse.
[Audio file 0:55:00]
C. CATER: Would you like some instant coffee, or a glass of water?
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, a glass of water would be nice.
[0:55:06]
C. CATER: You want some coffee? You want a glass of water?
W. CATER: No, thank you.
SCHIMANDLE: I don’t know why my throat is getting dry when Wes is doing all the talking.
W. CATER: And so we spent our five years there deeply involved with the local historical societies and putting exhibits in the county fair and things, which had never been done before. So I was involved in interpretation in those kinds of ways that hadn’t been done before, and I was the principal speaker at most of the service clubs in the county.
SCHIMANDLE: It sounds like you really made the connection with the local people there that was necessary.
W. CATER: It worked out very well, It was just fantastic.
C. CATER: It was fantastic, wasn’t it?
W. CATER: It was. Unbelievable. 181
And then from there, . . .
C. CATER: That’s when I started teaching.
W. CATER: Yeah, you started teaching, too.
C. CATER: I didn’t have any kind of a, I only had my degree. But I had a, I loved the title. It was an emergency . . .
W. CATER: Temporary . . .
C. CATER: Temporary substitute. [All laugh.]
SCHIMANDLE: How many qualifiers could they put on there?
W. CATER: That’s what they had to do to hire her as a teacher.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah. Okay. Oh, without the credential?
W. CATER: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah, okay. So you taught in Columbia?
W. CATER: Yeah.
C. CATER: That’s where I first started, in kindergarten.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh.
C. CATER: But then again, I went and got my credential. Finally.
SCHIMANDLE: And now, what year was it you started in Columbia, then?
W. CATER: We went to Columbia in 1958, and stayed in Columbia until 1963, and then moved to Huntington State Beach.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, another big change.
W. CATER: Bolsa Chica and Huntington State Beaches. There wasn’t a great deal of interpretation there, it was just a beach park.
SCHIMANDLE: Just recreation, mainly? 182
W. CATER: Yeah, a million people in a hundred days, and then the season was over.
SCHIMANDLE: [Laughing] And you probably collapsed.
W. CATER: Yah. Wooh!
We spent a little over two years there, 1953 to 56, and then in 50 . . . 56-57, [Mr. Cater meant 63-66, etc.] anyway, I went back to Anza- Borrego Desert as the manager 4, Ranger 4. I promoted from Huntington down there, and spent three more years at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. But by then we had patrol rangers, we had jeeps, we had telephones, we had radios, we had a full-blown program, we had a naturalist, we had men at the visitor center, we had a campfire center we operated almost nightly through the winter months, and we did all kinds of jeep tours and various things of that type.
I budgeted for a museum at Anza-Borrego when I was there in 1953 and 54, and it was approved, we got the money, but then Mr. Drury, who had been National Parks director before becoming State Parks division chief, moved the money to Death Valley visitor center. And if you look at Death Valley’s main visitor center, it mentions California State Parks there as helping with the funding. So Anza-Borrego’s museum went to Death Valley.
SCHIMANDLE: Well, same desert, uh, kind of. [Laughs]. Huh. Interesting. And then there wasn’t a museum built until gosh, what was it 70s or something . . .
W. CATER: Oh, I’m trying to think when it was. We went down there when they dedicated it. Bud Getty was there when they did it. 1970s . . . I was at Sutter’s Fort then, I was at Columbia, no, I was at Hearst Castle . I’m getting all mixed up now.
But that next three years there as a manager . . .
C. CATER: Where?
W. CATER: Borrego. In 1966-68, I was involved in all types of interpretation and enforcement and the whole, the big ranger program then. Borrego had come back together, so Anza-Borrego was all one big unit again, it was back up. And I was the founder of the Anza-Borrego Foundation, including obtaining money to buy inholdings, which now has 183
approximately, almost a thousand members, and almost an unlimited budget. And they bought thousands and thousands of acres of land.
[Audio file 1:00:29]
A very successful program, it’s called the Anza-Borrego Committee [since renamed the Anza Borrego Foundation, Inc.], was founded in our front room—at the dining room table.
C. CATER: Yes.
W. CATER: With Horace Parker [Dr. Horace Parker who wrote first guidebook for Anza-Borrego and subsequent editions] and Jim Whitehead and myself, and a couple other people, I don’t remember who they were. Jane Pinheiro [Artist, instrumental in founding of Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve], I think it was, from Antelope Valley with them. And we sat around our table and we decided . . . We had the executive director of the Desert Protective Council, DPC, Bob Baer [phonetic spelling] was there. And we didn’t really know how to set up a foundation, or a corporation even. We had no money, no knowledge or anything. So Bob Baer who of DPC says, “Well, we’re all incorporated, already, we’ll just make you a committee of DPC. So we think, we started out as the Anza-Borrego Committee, under a wing of DPC. They had no powers over us or anything, but they just let us work under their umbrella, legally. At least that’s when we first started the acquisition program in Anza-Borrego of buying inholdings. And it’s still [inaudible]. Some years later they pulled out of DPC and became the Anza-Borrego Foundation. Now they’re the Anza-Borrego Foundation, Inc. But they built the labs and things that are in Borrego. I don’t know if you’ve been there or not.
SCHIMANDLE: I’ve been there, but just in the visitor center museum that’s near Palm Canyon, and walked down Palm Canyon . . .
W. CATER: Yeah. Since then they’ve expanded greatly, and they have a paleontology lab, and they have all kinds of things now out there that are all part of the Anza-Borrego Foundation. They put up the money and . . . So that’s part of what I was involved in while I was at Anza- Borrego. And then one day the phone rang and they wanted me to go to Hearst Castle! I was almost set to spend basically the rest of my career at Anza-Borrego!
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, my, you had such contrasts between the units. You had to go from one extreme to another every transfer, it seems like. 184
C. CATER: Yes. You can understand that.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s really interesting.
W. CATER: So I changed my hat and moved to Hearst Castle as a Manager V [Five], or an Assistant Superintendent. Another promotion. So I spent my seven years there, and, again, doing Hearst Castle type work. We had the visitor program, we had the interpretive guides, and working closely with the Hearst Corporation, accepting the gift deeds from them; every year they’d give us . . . They never knew until late December how much money they could give, because of the tax laws and things, so along about, right at the end of December we would be notified that they were going to give us X number of items. So they gave it to us item by item, not a lump sum.
So we’d have the Auditor General’s office, Hearst Corporation, myself, our curator, and we had to go around and identify each and every single item by a tag on it, and do the paperwork involved, and accept that as a gift. So maybe we’d get ten million dollars worth of items at one time!
SCHIMANDLE: So everything in the house, other than . . . it was like all on loan, and bit by bit every year they gave different pieces of it. Huh!
W. CATER: Yeah. They used the system. And it took over ten years to get all of it deeded to us. First they deeded the property, then they deeded the houses, then they started in with the artifacts. And every year we’d get X number more, until finally we got all of the items.
[Audio file 1:05:04]
C. CATER: But what you’re telling her, you had to do that in two days.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, my gosh!
W. CATER: Oh we only got a three or four day period, it was intensive.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, dealing with these almost priceless things. [Laughs]
C. CATER: And you were all set! You were all Set!
W. CATER: Climbing, you know, all over Hearst Castle, behind everything, and pulling out, showing, and proving this is actually the number, and this 185
is the item you’re giving, and this is the number of it, and the Auditor General’s office is there, and the Hearst Corporation representative is there, and we’re there, and getting all that done. So that was an interesting program once a year!
C. CATER: Oh, honey, you have to tell her too how the Hearst family accepted us, and invited us up, and we had evenings together, and . . .
[1:05:50] W. CATER: Yeah, they did invite us up for dinner, and Bill Hearst, Bill Hearst Jr., would come out with Austine, his wife, and they had two boys. At that time they were both teenagers. And they would come out at Christmas time and then a couple of times during the year, summertime, for a while, and they had the they could stay in C house. That was part of the arrangement.
C. CATER: On the hill. [One of the guest houses at San Simeon.]
W. CATER: Yes, on the hill. So they would stay up on the hill. And we became very good friends with the Hearsts, and with Bill Hearst and all the rest of the family, too.
C. CATER: Just because we could just relax and talk. About employer and clothing or money, or anything.
W. CATER: And we’d take the girls with us, Carolyn went with us,
C. CATER: Carolyn, who you just met.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, okay.
W. CATER: Yeah, she was in high school, then. And she was the same age as their boys.
C. CATER: And he took her out for a walk .
W. CATER: And he’d walk around the promenade at night and he’d hold Carolyn and talk to her. He gave her books and various things, and . . .
C. CATER: That’s right. He did give her lots of . . .
W. CATER: So we had a good time there, a great experience. And I stayed there for seven years, then transferred my . . . it was a very trying park to work in. The employees were . . . Well, that’s when governor Jerry Brown 186
introduced the unions, started unionizing things. And I didn’t want . . . Hearst Castle was going to have something like six different unions involved. And I thought, well I don’t want this. I’ve never been a union man. So I transferred from there to San Luis coast area. And I didn’t have to move. That’s one of the stipulations I had in my mind. I didn’t want to move.
C. CATER: I’d started teaching [in 1966].
W. CATER: She was teaching. I was offered Deputy Director in Los Angeles, for the department . . .
C. CATER: Did you know that?
SCHIMANDLE: No!
W. CATER: Yeah, I was offered Deputy Director and I went down and looked at the position, but at that time we had two teenage girls and I’d have to live in the LA area because my office would have been Olvera Street. And I decided, we did, we went down and looked at it, we didn’t want to move. So I turned down the promotion and stayed here and transferred to the San Luis Coast area and stayed here seven more years. And was involved with the greater Pismo, the off-road vehicles, the museum [at Morro Bay State Park], and I established the docent program here, and I established the Natural History Association, which now basically runs the museum and all of that—which had never been established before, and they didn’t have docents or any of that. So I established that based upon what I’d done at Borrego and I introduced docents at Hearst Castle. I had the senior volunteers and we had a big program there. They’d only work the visitor center, but it made a big difference down at the visitor center, with people to answer questions and talk to people. So I have introduced a number of programs in the State Park system.
C. CATER: You got that from the castle?
W. CATER: Yeah.
C. CATER: When he left they just loved him so much they had to give him something from the castle.
W. CATER: That’s, you’re, uh, digressing. That’s a shield from the Hearst collection, it dates back to the 11-1200 era. It’s a Persian Hindu shield from the medieval wars. 187
SCHIMANDLE: Huh. [Laughs.] That’s . . . Wow.
[Audio file 1:10:02]
W. CATER: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s an impressive memento.
W. CATER: It is. So I’m very fortunate with that.
So then we stayed here and I retired in 1982, the first of ’82, after 33 years. I went out early, I went out at 56 and I decided I’d have enough of working, and Celeste was teaching, and that gave me an opportunity to go fishing.
SCHIMANDLE: Well you sure promoted fast through the park system, and you worked awfully hard.
W. CATER: I did. I was very fortunate. I had some good assignments and I had great supervisors. Mr. Kenyon, Bill Kenyon was very, very good to work for. And Mel Whittaker in District Three, Mel Whittaker was a genius when it came to using people. He could make you do things that you didn’t even know you could do.
SCHIMANDLE: But he knew that you could do them.
W. CATER: Yeah. He’d use you like a puppet. He’d open doors. And Bill, uh, [pause] the director under Reagan.
SCHIMANDLE: Bill Mott? [William Penn Mott, Jr., California State Parks director from 1967-1975)
W. CATER: Bill Mott! Bill Mott was a fabulous director. Probably the best director I worked under the 33 years. Mr. Drury had the name, but Bill Mott had the knowledge. And he was a motivator. He could open doors, make you open doors you didn’t even know existed. You could get in more trouble for not doing something than you could for doing it and failing. At Hearst Castle, as an example, he’d hired a curator out of Williamsburg to come out and evaluate some State Park programs in California, and Hearst Castle was one of the ones she evaluated. And she and I had some pretty good discussions, about how Williamsburg worked, and how we were doing at Hearst Castle. And, using her suggestions, I attempted stationing of guides rather than conducted 188
tours. That is, you would get on a bus, you’d go to the top of the hill, the guide would meet you, you’d go through this room, another guide, another guide, another guide would be there to talk to you rather than leading you through as they do today. And you’d stay as long as you wanted on the hilltop, or as little as you wanted. And we did it on Labor Day weekend, and it was a complete bust.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, no. On one of the busiest weekends, I imagine.
W. CATER: We had so many people, and they just got jammed up, and it became dangerous, almost. The stairways were full of people. So after three days I canceled it out. I told Bill Mott what I had done, and he said, “Oh, great. Great! At least you tried.” And I had a terrible time trying to get the guides to do it. It was resistance from Day 1. And I said, “Well if you don’t do it, if we don’t try it, Mr. Mott is going to tell us we are going to do it. So let’s try it and see what happens. And it might work!” It didn’t.
But those are the things you could do with Bill Mott. You could try things. And I just think he was a marvelous, marvelous innovator. And he’s really the one who brought interpretation to its height in the State Park system. Throughout California.
SCHIMANDLE: What did he do to really emphasize interpretation?
W. CATER: Uh, mainly telling you, you were going to do it! You will interpret. I don’t know if he put any money with it or not, but he encouraged you to use interpretation as a tool to accomplish things.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, so like for park management kind of a . . .
W. CATER: Interpretive tool?
SCHIMANDLE: Resource, also.
W. CATER: So I thought Bill Mott was just fantastic director. Then Jerry Brown started hiring directors off the street, and things went to pot.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, I’ve heard some grumbling about a few of the people in those years.
W. CATER: We had some bad directors for a while. Ruth Coleman seems to be doing a very adequate job. 189
[Audio file 1:15:03]
SCHIMANDLE: She’s pretty well-liked in the department.
W. CATER: I’ve met her a number of times, in fact she’s in Morro Bay right now, down at the museum [The Morro Bay Museum of Natural History, in Morro Bay State Park]. She’s done a very good job. But Bill Mott was THE director, as far as I am concerned. As much as I liked Newton Drury, he was really good.
SCHIMANDLE: He started the whole generalist ranger idea, someone told me, Bill Mott did. But it sounds ike you guys were much more generalist when you started at State Parks, as far as doing everything.
W. CATER: Oh, yes!
SCHIMANDLE: By generalist ranger, did they mean more that you did interpretation and law enforcement?
W. CATER: Yeah, we did everything. We did typing, we did enforcement, we did construction. We did everything. There were no specialists in those days.
C. CATER: You had to change your uniform three or four times a day.
W. CATER: Oh, yeah. You were the garbage man, you were the sewage treatment manager, you ran the water plant.
C. CATER: Then you had campfire programs. [Laughs]
W. CATER: But after Bill Mott, he did start specializing. The rangers became more enforcement, rather than interpretive . . . They hired interpreters to replace that, good or bad.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, I see.
W. CATER: It changed the program. We didn’t have, when I was working, we didn’t have specialists.
[Phone rings nearby.]
W. CATER: We didn’t have carpenters, we didn’t have truck drivers, we were it.
SCHIMANDLE: At Hearst Castle, were you directly in charge of the guides? 190
[Celeste Cater answers phone.]
W. CATER: Yes.
SCHIMANDLE: There wasn’t a guide supervisor position.
W. CATER: I wasn’t the guide supervisor; the supervisor worked for me.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, I see. Huh. Interesting. So, to round things out, I’m wondering, what do you thing the change was in the attitude about interpretation in general over the years you were in State Parks?
W. CATER: I think the . . . I’m trying to listen to the phone and you too, here.
SCHIMANDLE: Do you want to wait until she’s done?
W. CATER: [To Celeste] You want me to take that, hon?
C. CATER: Huh?
W. CATER: You want me to do that?
C. CATER: Is it all right?
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yeah! Please, take it.
C. CATER: What is it, your computer?
W. CATER: Probably.
[End Audio File 1] 191
[Interviewer switches off recorder. Interviewer turns recorder back on when Celeste begins to relate interesting information about their time in parks while Wes is still on phone.]
[Begin Audio File 2]
[At beginning of this section, Celeste is talking about her children’s experience moving around the state.]
SCHIMANDLE: It must have been fascinating but kind of exasperating to move around that much.
C. CATER: And then not to have a home town. “Where’s your home town?” “We moved around.”
SCHIMANDLE: Sounds like they moved around more than, you know, the Army brats.
C. CATER: Uh-huh, they didn’t have; you know, it still is part of what it is, it ends up the whole life, yeah, the whole life.
Like our daughter right now. And you know what else, the children’s life too. They don’t have something that I grew up with. Nobody has the same teachers in the elementary school; and it’s different for the kids’ lives too. And another thing I think lately is that they wouldn’t be as mature as they are. We’re a real tight family. Because of our lifestyle and our life experiences, you know?
And I don’t really, I don’t really remember who else was around at the time, and it’s really different.
SCHIMANDLE: You were pretty much it for company and entertainment for each other a lot of the time, it sounds like.
C. CATER: Yeah. Self-contained.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. Yeah.
C. CATER: Something like when I think about transferring and then the different styles, too, from the mountains to the beach to the desert, to Hearst Castle, and reporting at some of the places downtown, like living in Sacramento. 192
SCHIMANDLE: That must have been kind of a shocker, moving, was that, from Anza- Borrego to Sacramento, I think, if I remember the order. Again, just extremes.
C. CATER: And then to go to a small town, like Columbia. And what a wonderful experience that was. Then I finally got to teach because I couldn’t apply knowing that we’re going to move in two years.
SCHIMANDLE: Right, right.
. CATER: And that’s why I chose the elementary school rather than high school because wherever we went there were elementary schools and high school was some place else.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, that’s true, especially in the rural areas a lot of times it’s tens of— or more—miles away. Yeah.
C. CATER: And then we’ve lived here forty-two years.
SCHIMANDLE: My. After all that moving around. So did you move into this house back when Wes first started working at Hearst Castle?
C. CATER: [Inaudible]
SCHIMANDLE: Did you move here when Wes was working at Hearst Castle, then?
C. CATER: Yes, that’s right. That’s when we knew that he was going to be here a several years. Then we settled and we had two girls in high school.
SCHIMANDLE: Uh-huh, and this was a nice place for them to grow up in those high school years, I bet.
C. CATER: Yes. And then, again a lot of the [inaudible] he talked about the offer to be second in charge of the state park system and move to LA?
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. That must have been . . .
C. CATER: That was a hard decision to make. [Pauses] But he kind of knew he wasn’t going to be lasting, you know, working at just something I guess he didn’t want to do, really. But anyway, the reason we did we couldn’t get two high school girls down there.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, I bet. 193
C. CATER: Not when we lived in Morro Bay.
SCHIMANDLE: I saw your license plate frame on the way in and thought, “These are people who really like where they are.”
[Celeste laughs]
SCHIMANDLE: So you have four children, you have two younger girls then, and a couple of older children?
[Wes ends phone call and sits back down.]
C. CATER: Our oldest Kathy lives in Los Osos and she’s worked in the office at Cuesta College now for about twenty years.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, okay.
C. CATER: So she’s got a lot of things going at Cuesta. And then our son, who was a police officer—[to Wes] what is Ken’s title up there?
W. CATER: He was Commissioner of Prison Terms.
C. CATER: About violators. He was in charge of violation of probation
W. CATER: Probation violation.
C. CATER: For the State of California.
W. CATER: There is a state park, uh, sorry. There is a state commission on prison terms and he is basically a deputy commissioner to that.
C. CATER: To the violation.
W. CATER: The state parole department, parole commission, they set, they talk about death sentences and whether or not to parole life termers and things like that. He basically at that time was, if you violated parole, he was involved. And he could send you directly to prison as a parole violator, he could put you on hold, or he could do almost anything he wanted with you. And I don’t think, he never did really explain all of it. It’s like being with the CIA, I think.
[Audio file 2 0:05:31]
SCHIMANDLE: What a lot of responsibility. 194
W. CATER: So he was involved in that.
C. CATER: Then our youngest daughter is a psychotherapist with family problems, and she is another one that doesn’t share the stories. I know that she just goes “phew!”
W. CATER: But so anyway that was my state park career in round figures. I hoped it helped you some, and gave you some insight, or confused you totally. [Laughs.]
C. CATER: She’s going to ask you, now.
W. CATER: Now you have some things?
SCHIMANDLE: No; I had a few questions just in case things lagged. And you were pretty much, you gave me all the information I was interested in. I’m just curious, it sounds like the philosophy on interpretation kind of changed—it became more of a formal program over the years that you were with State Parks
W. CATER: Yes. Well under Bill Mott, he established the training center at Asilomar, and the rangers then went through a formal—I don’t know how long a period of time they go through—but they go through interpretation, they go through enforcement, they go through every phase of park work now. I don’t know whether it’s six months or not, but it’s a long time they spend there, many, several hundreds of hours. I think law enforcement alone is something like 800 hours.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, I know they do something like six months there, and Visitor Services, which includes interpretation I think is three months? Maybe two . . .
W. CATER: But that all came about as a result of Bill Mott’s thinking of where the department should be going.
SCHIMANDLE: Hmmm. Interesting.
W. CATER: Of course I’ve been out 29 years, so I don’t really know a lot of things that happened. [Laughs]
SCHIMANDLE: You know more about the early days than the guys now. 195
So are you involved in volunteering at the local state parks or anything, still?
W. CATER: Not anymore. I am involved somewhat with them; Anza-Borrego as much as anything. I go out there but not on a formal basis, it’s just to visit and to discuss kind of what it, just what it used to be . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
W. CATER: . . . and things like that. I worked for a while, when I first retired I worked a bit with the [Morro Bay State Park] Natural History Association in revamping and redoing the museum, totally revamped it and opened up the bottom area. And I got involved in, [laughs] after I retired, building cabinets and things, using some of my other expertise as a cabinetmaker. I spent several hundred hours down there. But then they redid the museum a few years ago and I didn’t care for what they did at all—it’s a totally different program, more like a Punch and Judy show.
SCHIMANDLE: They’re working on redoing it again. Nobody liked that much. One of the parts of my job is, I’ve got kind of a weird job, but . . . Donna Pozzi, who is in charge of Interpretation now, says she gives me everything with acronyms. And one part of it is running this bond- funded program to fund interpretive projects around the state, you know, I do a lot of the bureaucratic paperwork so they can actually spend the money, you know. And they’re starting to do a plan and some upgrades on some displays with some money from us, and then hoping to get a big grant that’s being done through the Office of Grants and Local Services that they just put in for, because nobody likes those displays much, and all the electronic stuff has been breaking down.
W. CATER: Well it was a joke, really, we went the first, when they first opened. The kids would rush in and start spinning everything as fast as it would go.
C. CATER: Oh, I couldn’t take it.
W. CATER: It was a toy rather rather than a learning experience.
SCHIMANDLE: Being a parent you can just that that’s going to happen, and then a lot of parents these days, they’re just clueless you know, the kids are doing that and they’re just . . . 196
[Audio file 2 0:10:06]
C. CATER: Right.
W. CATER: Well, it was mainly funded by the Natural History Association. They put up the money to redo it. And they hired a contractor, I don’t know where they got him, but he built a museum that was totally out of touch with reality. And it just turned us off completely. And Len Penhale who was the museum director years ago, who was out at the Burke Museum, he was appalled as were we. We just couldn’t believe it.
When I first came in to Morro Bay we made some pretty good changes in the museum. We put in the peregrine falcon exhibit, and changed a few other exhibits around. And then of course we started the docent program and we got the museum volunteers involved, and so it started from there and it started growing. It grew great, I thought. And we were able to put one ranger full time at the museum. So we had a good program going. And, but somehow it got out of hand and blew up and the Natural History Association became probably too powerful, which has happened throughout California in more than one instance.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
W. CATER: The tail starts wagging the dog. And that museum they spent a fortune revamping it, but it was like a penny arcade.
You do work for the Department then?
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. I do. I work as an Interpreter III up in the Office of Interpretation and Education. My card’s out in the car, I didn’t think to bring my purse in. My interest, I’ve got some natural science background in my education, and history background, and I’m working on my master’s in history now. History’s maybe my main interest, but I’m mainly doing bureaucratic stuff now, but somebody’s gotta do it so these projects get done, so . . .
W. CATER: Sure.
SCHIMANDLE: But, you know those Len Penhale dioramas that he did for there, are still, they’re saved up in the Museum Resource Center, so . . .
I of course have this vision of having a nice display again, and some stuff about the interpretation and how it’s been done through the years, 197
but that’s my own idea, and I don’t have my two cents to put in there, but it’s neat to see those; I’ve been able to go out to the warehouse and look at them . . .
W. CATER: I’m glad they are.
SCHIMANDLE: . . . and it’s a shame they’re not out where the public can see them. He did some great work.
W. CATER: He spent a lot of work on the museum and some of it was needed to be corrected, yes, and he didn’t disagree with it. We changed some of the exhibits and he was not in disagreement at all. But the penny arcade wasn’t the way to go. A free penny arcade. [Wes and Carolyn laugh.]
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. I took my 20—I guess she was already 21—21 year old daughter out there, the one who lives over in San Luis Obispo now, and even she didn’t think much of the exhibits, and she’s the one who’s always on her little smartphone, and, you know, that’s how she connects with the world, and she loved just talking to one of the docents who had the table of examples of the bird life . . .
W. CATER: Yeah, those are great, aren’t they?
SCHIMANDLE: . . . and the spotting scope, and all that
W. CATER: Yeah, those are great. You can touch this, and feel that. Yeah, those are a great exhibit. But almost like Playschool, or whatever games they are.
SCHIMANDLE: Like the Busy Box, you know, the one you get the baby.
W. CATER: They did something like that at Joshua Tree [National Park] years ago and one of these new type of exhibits, and it was terrible. It didn’t go over at all either. [Pause] So the tried and true is not all bad.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, Yeah. Still talking to a real person and being able to see real things has a lot of value.
Well, this has been wonderful.
W. CATER: I hope I was able to answer some of your questions and . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Absolutely. I got some great info. 198
W. CATER: [Laughing] I had a rag-tag career, I mean I went all over. I went from from beaches, to deserts, to historical monuments, . . . Actually, I enjoyed historical monuments very much. You hit a different . . . It may even be the same person you’re getting, but it’s a different approach, and a different class of people.
[Audio File 2 0:15:20]
SCHIMANDLE: Hmmm. That’s interesting.
W. CATER: Well, historically, people go to the beach to raise hell. I had the same people, I found this at the desert when I went to Borrego. I ran into the same people at Doheny we had all kinds of problems with, and they’d go to the desert, a total different experience with them.
SCHIMANDLE: Interesting. So they were just going in with that different attitude. Huh. Interesting. It sounds like Borrego kind of got your heart as far as all the different places you worked in the system.
W. CATER: Oh, yeah. It’s, of all the places.
W. CATER: Yeah. I was there as a Ranger I, a Ranger II, and as a manager. Yes. Borrego is my favorite of all. And again, you can’t compare, because Hearst Castle was an outstanding assignment, but it’s a totally different assignment. You can’t compare apples and oranges. They just, they’re both fruit, but they’re not the same.
SCHIMANDLE: Right and they both have their good qualities, but you can’t substitute one for the other.
W. CATER: The same with Columbia. We both dearly loved Columbia. And again, it’s a total different park than a mountain park. I refused to go to the redwoods.
SCHIMANDLE: I was going to say, the one thing, you never worked in any of the redwood parks.
W. CATER: I did two things. I refused to go to Sacramento, and I refused to go to the redwoods. The redwoods are great to visit, but I want to see where I’m at. You get in the redwoods, that’s all you can see is trees! [Laughs.] 199
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, talk about you can’t see the forest for the trees that’s the redwoods, huh?
W. CATER: Celeste’s mother lived up in the redwoods, and we’d go visit her. It was great to go up there for a weekend or a week, but great to get out of there. But I like it open. I like it like here, you know.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s as open as you can get, seeing out to the horizon.
W. CATER: Borrego was that way.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. Great career. Celeste was saying that people have bugged you to write a book, and I bet you could just put down some great detail on a lot of these experiences that you can’t get in an interview.
W. CATER: Diana Lindsay, I don’t know if you know Diana Lindsay or not, she’s in Anza-Borrego Desert. She’s a private person, but she writes books. She has a publishing company and they’ve done all kinds of books on Borrego and the desert. She just did one on Marshall South, who was an early pioneer in the desert. But she interviewed me here a, was it last year, or the year before? And they did a full-page spread in the Borrego Sun on me. It was, four, at least eight columns in their little paper.
C. CATER: You know and the way she the editor edited something about it and she got so much involved in our lives that we had our daughter down there, and what did Chris do?
W. CATER: She won a contest on what Borrego would be like in the year 2000 and they put all the things in a time capsule. This was back in the early, when Chris was in the third, fourth grade, fifth grade. They lost the time capsule. They don’t know where it is.
C. CATER: They built it in a building and can’t find it. Before the building was built.
W. CATER: But she won a war bond and a few other things.
C. CATER: She was interviewing about that and then she got into what Wes did, and took pictures and everything else. Of him.
W. CATER: But Diana and I have known each other for years; and then Ernie Cowan who’s a photographer out there, he was with LA, or with San Diego papers, I introduced Ernie to the desert and he’s become, now 200
he’s on the desert, he’s on the Anza-Borrego committee board of directors or foundation board of directors. He’s published a book. I even got my name in it.
SCHIMANDLE: All right!
W. CATER: But it’s been a lot of fun over the years. And the historians, Aubrey Neasham, Aubrey and I had our disagreements, but he was a good historian, and Hero Rensch, I don’t know if you’ve heard that name or not.
[Audio file 2 0:20:08]
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yeah. I can’t remember the context, now.
W. CATER: He was a curator and he put one book together on historical monuments of California back in the forties, and it was a good program he had. He was one of my curators at Sutter’s Fort for a short while before he retired. And, so I have had involvement with these people over the years. I was involved with The Westerners, which is a historical society group of people. There are chapters, no they’re corrals, they’re not chapters, they’re called corrals. I think they’re out of Chicago, but I got involved with the chapter out of University of the Pacific. Coke Wood [Richard Coke Wood]: Is that a name that you’re familiar with?
SCHIMANDLE: No, I don’t know that.
W. CATER: He was involved in early California. He had a museum in Angels Camp and he owned the building there, and the former publisher of the Stockton Record was part of the corral group. And there were, Doc Parker had a corral down south. I forget all the people I was involved with there. But it was very interesting, and you were, each corral was expected to publish and put out articles on various things. So I have . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Did you write articles over the years?
W. CATER: I helped write some, but I don’t remember what they were, anymore. I don’t even have copies of them. They published, I don’t remember how they even published. I think each chapter published a small paper and it was sent to all the other chapters.
But there was all kinds of involvement in years gone by. 201
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. And you didn’t even know you were a historian before you started work for State Parks.
W. CATER: No. I didn’t even know history existed. [Laughs.] Now I’m part of it.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s life, huh.
W. CATER: But I, I guess my first involve, really involvement in, was the Anza- Borrego, Juan Bautista de Anza.
SCHIMANDLE: Which is a fascinating story. What a leader. He didn’t, he lost one person and then they had births so they ended up with more people at the end.
W. CATER: More people at the end, yeah. The greatest trek of mankind without losing anyone. And the country they came through! Very harsh!
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, yeah! Fascinating story.
C. CATER: Did you know that there is a state park rendezvous every October?
W. CATER: She was there!
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, yeah. And I’m going to come back next year if I can, and keep coming back, because I had a great time.
C. CATER: It’s going to be different with a new leader.
W. CATER: Yes, a new leader, which is good.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, it sounds like there’s a lot of good ideas.
W. CATER: Yeah, we’ve been doing it all these years, and it’s kind of; it started out as a takeoff from a program we used to have at Borrego many years ago. Ken Smith was the chief ranger down there, and he had an annual barbecue of all Borrego people. And we all met down there once a year. And it was amazing how many people in the state park system had worked at Anza-Borrego at one time.
So we would have the rendezvous, we’d have at least seventy people, originally, at the rendezvous. And most of them had worked at Borrego. So it was a reunion of Borregoites, and Clyde Strickler 202
[longtime State Parks Ranger] was alive at that time and we had a lot of fun.
But unfortunately we’ve lost quite a few, they’ve passed on.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, and the younger rangers aren’t getting involved so much. So it was nice to hear they want to do more outreach to . . .
W. CATER: Yes.
C. CATER: That was so important about the rendezvous. Are they going to quit it, or not? That’s the only time; I tell Wes, that’s the only time we see these people. And if we don’t have the rendezvous, we won’t see them any more.
W. CATER: We’ll never see them. Go to their funerals, and that’s all we’ll see of them.
Is that the moving van? Yeah, there’s a moving van, we got to . . . New neighbors coming.
C. CATER: Moving in next door.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh. A piano mover! Or is that just a fancy moving van?
W. CATER: Wow, two truckloads.
[Audio file 2 0:25:01]
C. CATER: At three o’clock in the afternoon.
W. CATER: I guess their cars must be across the street. Yeah, they’re over across the street.
SCHIMANDLE: Well, I won’t take any more of your time, thank you so much. I just realized as I sat down here I was supposed to print up a release for you to sign so that this could be put in the State Parks Archives and that people could use it for research. Um, so I’ll send that to you, if you don’t mind, and . . .
W. CATER: All right, sure.
SCHIMANDLE: Great. And Celeste, since you were talking too, you’ll be on there too. 203
C. CATER: I didn’t mean to, but . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, no, that was fine. That was great.
W. CATER: In years gone by, the wives were deeply involved.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s what it sounds like, like you have to be.
W. CATER: It wasn’t unusual in the parks years ago, [doorbell rings and Celeste can be heard answering door and conversing with new neighbor] where the wives would be the, almost the secretaries of the park. Because the offices were in the, part of the house. And they answered the phones. All the phones were in the . . .[Wes stops to listen to question from new neighbor.] They must need something. I’ll walk out with you to get your card.
C. SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Let’s do that. That would be great.
[END AUDIO FILE 2] 204
APPENDIX C Douglas Bryce Interview 205
The History of Interpretation in California State Parks
M.A. Thesis California State University, Sacramento
Oral History Interview
with
Douglas Bryce
January 22, 2011 Sacramento, California
By Carolyn Schimandle
California State University, Sacramento 206
Interview History for Oral History of Douglas Bryce
Interviewer’s Name: Carolyn Schimandle
Interview Date and Location: The interview was conducted on January 22, 2011, in Mr. Bryce’s home in Sacramento, California.
Context Notes: The interview was conducted in the living room of the narrator’s home. Mr. Bryce began talking while the interviewer was testing the digital recorder. Since some relevant information was included in this conversation, this section of the recording has been included in the transcript.
Toward the end of the interview, the interviewer was first going to end the recording session, but then left the recorder running because Mr. Bryce was supplying more information on the interview topic. During this final part of the interview Mr. Bryce discussed some topics that were not relevant to the interview, so this section of the recording has not been included in the transcript. The interview otherwise proceeded smoothly with no additional interruptions and no technical difficulties.
Audio File and Interview Records: The master digital recording of the interview and a full transcript are deposited with the Department Archives at the California Department of Parks and Recreation, North Highlands, California. 207
[Session 1, January 22, 2011]
[Begin Audio File]
BRYCE: Things grew, and he was telling me about how well he was getting along with this guy. I said, “Joe, you know, there’s one thing about him. You gotta be careful. The worst thing you can do is get to know him. Because he knows he has shortcomings. And once you get to know him, he’s not gonna have anything to do with you anymore. Because he’s afraid of you. Because ‘now he knows me.’” And you know, it wasn’t six weeks later it was all over, the honeymoon was over. And he was, well, the director would walk right past him, without even acknowledging he could see him in the hallway and stuff, you know what I mean.
And he did that to other people, too. But I told Joe early enough that Joe could have saved himself. But Joe didn’t believe me. Well I’ve always been pretty good at figuring out people. I pay more attention to their motives and their ways of doing things than most people do, you know. I’m not suspicious, particularly, I’m just interested. And I like people but I get to know a lot more about their philosophy and their motives than I do about, necessarily, their educational background or their current workload and stuff.
That’s always the way I’ve been. I wanted to be a psychiatrist. My parents were quite religious, and the religion didn’t have anything to do with it other than somebody in their church told them that psychiatry and psychology was of the devil. So I thought well, what the heck, it’s not that important to me so I decided to do something else. [Laughs.] Ended up being a state park ranger. But I changed several times before I got to that point.
SCHIMANDLE: Well now we’ve already gotten a little bit into a couple of the questions that I was supposed to ask, so I think I’d better start with my formal introduction on the tape—well, tape in quotes, because it’s all digital now—and then we’ll get started. So:
It is the 22nd of January, 2011, a little past 11 o’clock, and I am at the home of Douglas Bryce. This is Carolyn Schimandle, and we are going to be speaking about his time in State Parks, and interpretation, and a little about his life in general.
Okay, so first question is, a little background on you. When and where were you born? 208
BRYCE: I was born in Indio, California, 1934. During the Depression.
SCHIMANDLE: During the Depression, yeah. And did you grow up down there, too?
BRYCE: Well, when I was . . . I lived near there, I didn’t actually live in, I lived about 20 miles away out in a little service station and grocery store, you know, on the road. Just a roadside spot, more or less. My father worked for California Division of Highways and was the maintenance foreman in that area. Then we moved to Westmorland, which is near Brawley or El Centro, that area. And we lived there until I was eight, and then we moved to the mountains near Cuyamaca, in San Diego County when I was eight years old. And I went to grammar school and high school from that location. And I went through four years of San Diego State College, and graduated from San Diego State. And so that was my childhood I guess.
SCHIMANDLE: Uh, huh. Now you said before the formal introduction on the interview that you’d been interested in studying psychology and possibly psychiatry. What did you end up studying?
[Audio file 05:01]
BRYCE: [Laughing] Well then when I figured I wasn’t going to do that, I decided I wanted to be an engineer. The day before, the night before I went to sign up for classes, I decided, “I don’t want to be an engineer.” And “I want to be a school teacher and I want to major in social science.” So I, you know, in social science I had to pick three of the social sciences and take six units from each; and I had political science, history, and geography. And then in upper division I had to do basically the same, except that I had to have one different. Wow. You had to have the basics of even the one that was different in order to take the upper division classes, you had to take . . . So I had to take six units of four different. And so the fourth one was sociology. And then when I got into upper division I went back to those other three. Basically, political science and history was my main thing.
But then, before I was to enter education, I decided I didn’t want to go into education, and I was working at that time as a park aid at Cuyamaca State Park. My father, being in with Highways, he took care of the roads through the park and the roads within the park, so I got to know a lot of rangers from 1943 on. Oh, even though I only not quite 9 years old when I first started. So I knew a lot of the . . . When State . . . At that point, in State Parks you didn’t promote unless you worked at 209
Humboldt Redwoods, Prairie Creek, Big Basin, Big Sur, Point Lobos, Calaveras, or Cuyamaca [State Parks]. And so the ones that went to Cuyamaca I knew most of all of them. And so . . . And, you know, several of those, . . . Well. Bud Heacox [Ranger who eventually worked in headquarters Conservation Education section] was one of the ones that I met there. He was a Ranger I, and then he went away as a Ranger II. I don’t know whether he made Ranger II or not, or whether he went out as a Ranger I out to Mitchell Caverns. And then he came back to Borrego [Anza-Borrego Desert State Park] and he left, he was my boss when I went to Borrego, and I went there the first of October and he left sometime the first part of December, so we didn’t work together very long. I think I maybe only saw him even on the job maybe four or five times, because, although I was working for him, theoretically he was my supervisor, I was just working in the campground helping out, because they didn’t have the patrol system ready to go; they didn’t have our vehicles or anything else, so we just were sort of grunts for a few months, doing whatever needed to be done.
SCHIMANDLE: Now before you became a park aid had you been interested in parks, in the outdoors, or was it just . . .
BRYCE: Yeah. All. Well, Yeah, yeah. Because I lived just five miles from Cuyamaca, and my dad . . . Well, they had a big fire in Cuyamaca in 1952 or something like that. My dad and I . . .they closed the highway through Cuyamaca. But then in the evening, after the fire had gone through, oh, say, between 3 and 6, we went up there about 7 or 7:30 and it was dark. Just dark enough that they had split rail fence all the way through the park along the highway and that rail fence was still burning. And, you know, I mean it wasn’t flaming up, but it was smoldering. And just like a bunch of charcoal in the barbecue after you finished eating, you know. And oh, it was beautiful! It was tragic, but good Lord, if it had to be, I’m glad I got to see it because it was one of the most beautiful things I think I ever saw!
[00:10:01]
You know, there’s always fire around you, I mean little bits of fire around you; not anything that’s going to threaten you at all, unless you went and sat in it or something, but it was just really beautiful. In the dark and stuff it was fascinating.
SCHIMANDLE: Just glowing and that fence along the road, that must have been, really, really pretty. Yeah. 210
BRYCE: Yeah. Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Was that fire really destructive, like the Cedar Fire that went through just a few years ago, or . . .
BRYCE: Well, it was on the backcountry. On the western side of the park, I guess it burned some pretty bad there, but I think I only went into that area of the park once or twice after the fire; never before. But no, it wasn’t really destructive at all compared with what this [the Cedar Fire] was. This last one was just terrible.
SCHIMANDLE: Especially the loss of the Dyer House. That’s tragic.
BRYCE: That was stupid. That was unnecessary.
SCHIMANDLE: You think so?
BRYCE: Oh, yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: How so?
BRYCE: Have you been there?
SCHIMANDLE: I’ve been there but not until after the fire, about two years ago.
BRYCE: But you know where the location was.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
BRYCE: Well you know the fire came up through that big meadow. Well, a meadow slows things down quite a bit. I mean, it may go like crazy. But it’s a good chance to put it out because it doesn’t take much to draw a line; you can run some bulldozers through it, you can wet it down, you can borate bomb it, whatever. You can stop that forward motion of the fire quite easy in the meadow. But they, the Division of Forestry, were, their prime thing was to save their headquarters up at Paso Picacho, but next to that, the City/County Camp [San Diego County Outdoor Environmental Education Camp], which was just behind the Dyer house. They let the Dyer house go, and saved the camp. These were all nice new buildings, and there was money there, and they were needed, they were being used, but they were replaceable. The Dyer house is not replaceable. And I hope they don’t 211
try to. I mean, there was talk about trying to rebuild it and stuff. I hope they don’t. It will never be the same, anyway.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. The latest that I heard on it, there’s actually a grant proposal that’s been put in to use it for fire education—do fire education exhibits based around the Dyer house and leave it as it is. [State did not receive grant, but this is still the current plan when funding can be found.]
BRYCE: Yeah. That I definitely would be happy to see them do. I won’t say I support it, because who cares if I support it or not. But, you know, I’m just some nut that lives up in Sacramento County. I wouldn’t have any influence. But yeah, that would be a good . . . I hate to see them try to rebuild it, because what, when, what do they try to rebuild it to? They don’t know what that house, you know, looked like as a house.
SCHIMANDLE: Right.
BRYCE: Uh, I remember part of it being used as a house, because there was a ranger living in it, downstairs. And I used to go visit him and his wife and little boy. This boy was a genius. He became a drug addict and I think he just threw his life away. He was just a total genius, that kid. It was real sad.
SCHIMANDLE: So, at Cuyamaca you were working there as a park aid, and then you decided when you were working there to go into, you know . . .
BRYCE: To stay.
SCHIMANDLE: . . . being a ranger. So at that time was there a ranger academy?
BRYCE: No, no. At that time, well, when I went to work, I went to work as a park attendant. That was the name for the seasonal employee at that time. The next year when I went back, during the winter they had changed things around. They had added a full-time park attendant position. That was the first full-time position that wasn’t a ranger. And yet they wore the same uniform. Theoretically, the Ranger I’s were supposed to do no more than 49% of their time on housekeeping and maintenance from that day forward. The park attendants were just the opposite. They were not to spend more than 49% of their time doing public contact ranger-type work. Well. But the state park system just doesn’t lay out that well. There were people like myself; well, of course, I wasn’t a good example. I just worked for a few months during the summer season. But I worked 100% of the time on public 212
contact as a park attendant. But then there was people up here in the northern part of the state where you got a Ranger II and a Ranger I, and then a park attendant. That was the full staff, other than seasonal employees. [Audio file 0:16:05]
Well, the Ranger I worked probably just as much maintenance as the park attendant did, and the park attendant worked just as much public contact as the ranger did. They were two bodies, and four days a week one of them was off. And so you know, it was, and they were working in historic units like Shasta, Weaverville Joss House, Ide Adobe, Fort Humboldt, those places like . . . I supervised all those as assistant superintendent. So I was very familiar with those. But there was a lot of parks where the park attendants were, did exactly the same thing as the rangers were doing. The only thing different was “What season is it,” you know. Not what classification you are.
So then the park attendant position then was called park aid, the second year when I went back. And then, since then of course, they, well I don’t know what it is now, of course, but they took the park e and split that into the park aide and the maintenance aide when they created the maintenance series. They didn’t create the maintenance series for, you know, another five years or so after that.
So if you were in the field, you were a ranger, or a ranger. The secretarial work was done all by rangers except maybe just a handful of parks—less then half a dozen parks—had a clerical position. Most of them didn’t have clerical positions. They hired a clerical person. The OA2 at the time was mostly the position they hired. Office Assistant II level, which doesn’t even exist anymore, but they were hired as seasonals. And they could only work nine months a year. And there was maybe three or four, maybe a half a dozen female park aids [laughs], so that they could clean restrooms, when the . . . clean the women’s restroom when there were women trying to use it. It’s not a very efficient thing. You can go in and check it, but you can’t clean it with people running in and out.
At Huntington Beach, I went there, and I worked at Bolsa Chica, which was right next door to Huntington Beach, and they had a lady that was probably about forty years old that was a park aid. They had her work with like, all the other park aids, from six in the morning until about 10 or 11. The park didn’t open until 10. She went, she cleaned; they just all, you know, two or three people would go to each building, there were 15 restrooms at Huntington Beach, she would go 213
in and clean the men’s room and the women’s room, and they’d all be there together. There was no public around, so why they had to have a woman, or why they all couldn’t have been women, I don’t know. It didn’t hardly make any sense.
But that was the biggest complaint of mine, was the misuse of people, whether it was a park aid or a district superintendent. It seemed like they never really tried to fit the individual and their talents to the specific job at all. Even where they can. I mean certainly you can’t always do it, but I just never saw, I never felt they utilized people to the best advantage, uh, whether it was an interpreter, or whatever, you know.
[Audio file 00:20:29]
SCHIMANDLE: So the people ended up in positions they really weren’t suited for.
BRYCE: That’s right. Yeah
SCHIMANDLE: A lot of the time.
BRYCE: The Ouija Board says you’re going here. They thought that was . . .
SCHIMANDLE: [Laughing.] The Ouija Board promotion.
BRYCE: Yeah.
[0: 20:44]
SCHIMANDLE: Gee. So when you were at Cuyamaca, trying to put this in sense of time; about what year would that have been when you started at Cuyamaca?
BRYCE: 1955 was my first year as a park aid there. So there were ‘55, ’56; ‘57 I started as a park aid, but before the summer was over I went to Silver Strand [State Beach] as a park attendant.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay.
BRYCE: And I was there until the first of October and then I went to Anza- Borrego as a Ranger I. And from then on I was some sort of Ranger or upper-level. When I got to Ranger V—it used to be Ranger I-VI.
SCHIMANDLE: Wow. That was different. 214
BRYCE: The VI was the superintendent. That was when we had only six districts. They were actually big districts.
When I got to be Ranger V, the working title was Assistant District Superintendent. But the classification was Ranger V. About a year later they changed our name to Assistant District Superintendent—our classification to that. Our working title became our civil service title. Then about two years later we became Area Manager III. And then a couple of years later, this is all politics—they’ve been trying to play little games with the Personnel Board and stuff—then it became Superintendents, State Park Superintendent III. So I ended up a III. But it was still just a Ranger V. It was the same test, you know, same job, just a different title. They had four different titles for the same job.
SCHIMANDLE: [Laughing] Over the span of like, four years.
BRYCE: Four years, Yeah. Oh, maybe it was six, something like that.
SCHIMANDLE: Now how did you get involved with interpretation during that time?
BRYCE: Well, why don’t I tell you how interpretation evolved in the field.
SCHIMANDLE: That would be great.
BRYCE: That would help set the . . . When I first went to work, rangers didn’t do any interpretation. I mean, there was a few instances, I suppose, where a person was just in love with doing public presentations; and probably some of them did it. But by and large we hired about, I’d say, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five seasonal naturalists statewide. And those parks that I mentioned earlier were the ones that mostly had them; but Northern California had most of them, and then Cuyamaca. I don’t think the southern part of the state had any, other than Cuyamaca at that time.
Borrego as far as I know was the first place to have a permanent naturalist, and Mike Merkel was the State Park Naturalist II or III or something like that. And he was at Borrego. And then when he quit, they, well, he quit when they wanted to move him into the district, which would have been everything in Southern California south of Orange County—well, Orange County and south.
[Audio file 0:25:00] 215
SCHIMANDLE: That’s a lot.
BRYCE: And, but then they, at the same time they had a few—they didn’t call them historians. There’s another name for them: curators. They had curators, and we had a curator at Cuyamaca. And it was a woman, and it was the same woman each year; and I barely knew her name. So, I mean, she wasn’t part of the staff. And then the naturalists, though, were hired basically out of Sacramento. And some of them were pretty good hires, some of them were not so good, but the field was never trained to, the field supervisory people were never trained in how to work with these people.
They would go to a three- or four-day workshop, usually like at Big Basin or up at the Sierra District. And they would have a three- or four-day workshop teaching the new guys what they were going to be doing, and they would bring their supervisor along with them. Some of it, they were supposed to learn. But I worked for a supervisor at Cuyamaca who wouldn’t even let the seasonal naturalist drive a state vehicle. You know, if they wanted they would take a chainsaw and go work on trail work, well they’d put it in their own car and drive to the other end of the park. They didn’t want to use their car, they didn’t have to do that job! I mean it was just . . . you know, “You’re here, go ahead and do your job! We’re not gonna help you.”
Now that wasn’t the way it was everywhere, but it was that way too much, even if it was just Cuyamaca! But, and I know it wasn’t just Cuyamaca. But that was the interpretive program at that time.
In about 19—let’s see . . . [long pause] I don’t know, yeah, about 1966 or somewhere along mid-sixties; sixty-seven maybe; they decided not to hire seasonal naturalists anymore. They would hire a district interpretive specialist, and each district of the six districts would have one. And these people would be responsible for hiring, or not hiring, but training the existing staff, the rangers, the park attendants. It was supposed to be just the rangers, but some of the park attendants were, too. Some of the park attendants were great interpreters, and they just had better personalities, and/or maybe had a better education in the natural sciences or in history. And so then it changed dramatically. But . . . and maybe that was when things were just about as good as they ever were for interpretation.
The big problem is, we have never, ever as a department . . . interpretation has always been something that if the supervisor or the individual wanted to do it, it got done. And if they didn’t want to do it, 216
they might pay lip service to it; some places they didn’t even pay lip service to it. Smaller parks they could get by with not doing anything, almost. And some of them they basically didn’t have enough staff to do any interpretation. But nobody worried about that. Interpretation has never been of primary importance. And then when the ranger became more of a professional ranger, and they started with Asilomar [the Mott Training Center at Asilomar State Park], they gave them training, and there was quite a bit of emphasis on everybody that came out of the academy being able to do interpretive work.
[Audio file 0:30:10]
But then as the law enforcement emphasis grew, that diminished, and went down. And I would say that there’s an awful lot of rangers out there, or what was called a ranger, that have no use for being in interpretation at all. And that includes the supervisors and the superintendents as well. And so, you know, interpretation has just never been a big thing that really the department cared about.
Bill Mott [William Penn Mott, Jr., department director from 1967- 1974] was very good, and he supported interpretation an awful lot, and probably during his time, well that’s when a lot of this stuff, changes, came about. But since he left, there’s not been that much support from headquarters.
SCHIMANDLE: On the upper levels, any kind of a mandate . . .
BRYCE: And then as the law enforcement became a bigger professional thing . . . There’s more money in being a peace officer than there is about being an interpreter.
And you know it used to be that maybe 2/3 of the duties of a ranger on a statewide basis was interpretation. All right, well there’s the administrative thing, the registering campers, you know, and just taking care of the people, other than the law enforcement aspect of it. It’s a pretty big portion of the time. Especially used to be. Then, there was law enforcement and interpretation in addition. Well, law enforcement has grown from almost nothing to almost everything, especially in some places. And the staff hasn’t grown, it’s just been these people with their administrative duties off to the side, it went from a very small law enforcement to a very large law enforcement, and interpretation went from rather large down to very small. And so there’s never been any really strong support. 217
One of the things the field decided, some of the field people, well, we shouldn’t make rangers make reports about their interpretive work— because it takes time away from their . . . Well, it also changes the psychology of the thing. If you don’t have to write a report about your time spent doing interpretation, it’s hard for you to believe that it’s as important as law enforcement with all the multitude of reports that they do. When you tell a ranger, “You don’t even need to tell us how many interpretive walks you did during the month, or how many campfires you gave during the month, or how many whatevers, you don’t even have to tell us about it,” how important can it be? And you’re not giving the message to the employee, the first line employee, it’s just not important! If you don’t want me to write it down, it can’t be that important. And so you lose that. And people at headquarters, they lose. You know. There’s no reports coming in telling them about this and that and the other thing. So how important can it be. It just can’t be that important.
And so there’s a philosophy, and Donna Pozzi [head of the Interpretation and Education Division at the time of this interview] was one of the strongest advocates of, because she was a district interpretive specialist for a while, for a few years. She probably did a better job than nearly all of them, except that she fell into that, “Oh these poor rangers, they just don’t have enough time.” But she was . . . and she made a mistake. I mean, they talk a lot about, what is it, unintended consequences. Well, her idea was good. But the unintended consequence overwhelmed the idea, and I think it was hard to convince people that it was important anymore when they didn’t have to write it down that they even did it.
[Audio file 0:35:46]
But then the law enforcement and the labor union and, you know; those guys aren’t dumb. If they write down that they did law enforcement for ten hours a day or eight hours a day, it’s going to look a lot better than if they say they, you know, went out—what was it, posy picking? [laughs]—went out on nature walks. It’s just it doesn’t look that important to a legislator. And I wish that they would have taken, and this I fought against myself, I made the mistake of saying, “Everybody should be everything.” The generalist ranger. I think the problem—although I still very strongly feel that the generalist ranger is the way to go. Except, psychologically and the look at it from the state senators and and assemblymen. “Ah, this person is saving lives, this person is leading campfires.” It’s not as important to them. And so, there was where my unintended consequence went wrong, too. And 218
I don’t know that there’s much you can do to really . . . You’d have to have a real shakeup in the department. And it would have to be continuing. The one thing that is a real weakness in state government—and, then, sometimes it’s a strength—is that you throw out the director every four to eight years and you get a new one. And if the director is really strong on something, well, or really weak on something . . . I remember I used to think, “Well, I’m a permanent employee and he’s a PI. The director’s a PI. He’s a Permanent Intermittent. He can go like that.” [Snaps fingers.] And some governors have had three directors of State Parks in one four-year period. And others have been able to carry over from one governor to another. But that don’t happen too often.
And even if it does, even if a director’s intentions are really great, intentions be damned right now. You’re going to do what you can afford to do, you know. And it’s just easier to argue for a law enforcement person than it is for a . . . I think that has been the story of interpretation in the State Park system. It’s never been been properly funded, it’s never been properly . . . it’s never received the importance, either from the director’s office or from the park supervisor or the individual employee that’s doing it. You get an individual here and there at all levels that are just overflowing with enthusiasm for interpretation. But they’re just an individual, and they’re . . . never the system has ever been overflowing with enthusiasm for interpretation. And so the more that you can specialize, and get the employee, the only thing he does is interpretation; it’s not a good way go. If the interpreter doesn’t know what the ranger does, he’s not going to be supportive of the ranger, and the ranger is not going to be supportive of him. But at least his job will be done with some enthusiasm for what he’s hired for. And he certainly doesn’t have to be paid as much. [Laughs.]
[Audio file 0:40:21]
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, unfortunately.
BRYCE: Yeah, but you know, right now, if when they rehire they would figure out just, you know, give some, you know, create a new classification of non-law enforcement ranger type of a person to do interpretation and administrative details, and just hire policemen to do the amount of law enforcement you absolutely have to have. It’s not a good way to go, but I think it’s the only way you’re going to get the money to do it.
SCHIMANDLE: More like the National Parks? 219
BRYCE: Yeah. And they have a lot of problems. I remember when they had the big problems at Yosemite. They sent out law enforcement people from the Washington park police. They were National Park employees, but all they did was law enforcement. Well, they knew what they were doing when they got to Yosemite, and they cured the problem very, very quickly. But then what do you do with these 100% fantastically trained law enforcement people, once the problem has been controlled? It’s not gone away, but it’s been controlled. They caused more problem then than the hippies that were driving them crazy, because they needed something to do! And so they went out finding people and then they created as much problem as they cured. And so they were very glad to see them go back to Washington!
It’s a hard, you know . . . A generalist type position is really good if you have people with their head screwed on supervising them, who will really supervise them and see that the whole job is done. But generalist positions doesn’t fit in with the whole philosophy of life in this day and age. We want our specialists, and you need them sometimes, but they’re overkill and under-trained in many parts of the job. Because the job isn’t that big that you need that specialist every shift, every hour, every day. But when are you not going to need them? You don’t know!
SCHIMANDLE: Right. You never know when something’s going to happen.
BRYCE: Yeah. Maybe it only happens once a year, but it’s nice to have them around when the, you know . . . But you can’t just get those people that will work back and forth; the individual is not geared to that, in many cases, although some are very much geared to that. But then the supervision and the recognition and the—what do you call it—the, oh . . . [pause] the labor union aspect of it, just won’t allow you to do those things.
SCHIMANDLE: So you think that it takes like a more unusual kind of a person to be a generalist ranger and a generalist supervisor, as far as having a wide range of abilities and interests?
BRYCE: I would say that everyone’s born with the ability to be a generalist- type of employee. But they’re surrounded by a reward system that, “This job over here is going to pay me more than this job here.” Or, “I can get more support on this part of the job than I do on this.” They’re not going to pay you any differently, but they may decide you’re not needed at all if you’re doing mostly this over here. And, or, “We’ll 220
give you the equipment over here. We’ll buy you those guns, we’ll buy you the batons. We’ll buy your special uniform here.” I remember going to Borrego a year and a half ago, and here are all these rangers in camouflage uniforms. I couldn’t believe it.
[Audio file 0:45:26]
SCHIMANDLE: Really! Wow. I’ve never seen that.
BRYCE: They looked like they were fighting the war down in Iraq. And that’s probably what the military uniform looks like in Iraq. And why? I just don’t understand it. It didn’t make sense to me. I think they were probably well-trained, very good employees for what they were trained for, but how would you like to go to a campfire program with those people? Not at all. But I just couldn’t believe. That was just a year and a half, well just about two years ago this March, when I went down there.
I worked at Borrego twice, as a Ranger I and as a Ranger IV, and I was, well, what the district superintendent is now, but then I was a beginning ranger, right out of school practically; we didn’t have an academy. But I had just graduated from college in June. I went there the first of October as a ranger. So.
So it’s evolved over the years, but I don’t think it’s ever been strong. I think that there are people who probably are very, very happy to get rid of the strong headquarters interpretive services, because they can do what they want to do. But do they always know what should be done?
And one of the things I have noticed over the years is, nobody cares why the previous regime did what they did. I managed nonprofit organizations for many, many years, and every time you get a new president, once in a while they would really strive to carry on the programs that the previous president had initiated that seemed to be working. But others, they seemed to like, “Well, the best way for me to look good is to get rid of everything that the previous person did.” And you saw that more often than not.
Now some of them, I don’t think they even did it consciously. It’s just, “Oh! People like what I’m doing over here. I’ll do this, then.” And they just kind of let things drop from the previous. But, you know, nearly every president we ever had, in the different organizations, they had something to offer. And they did something really well. Now 221
some of them, it wasn’t very much, but they did something well, and it should have been recognized and maintained. But then there were others that did just magnificent things. But then it seemed that the person that followed them, the more magnificent they were, the more the guy that followed them wanted to get rid of it more. [Chuckles.] Just because they didn’t want to have to be living up to that previous image.
SCHIMANDLE: Ah. Be recognized for what they did instead of the . . .
BRYCE: So, you know, you can see that’s my psychology aspect of things. I think that people are psychological human beings. We do things for our own little reasons. And maybe they’re totally unknown to the people that are being supervised and/or serviced. But, you know, if they’re good, why not keep it? And if they’re bad, let’s try and improve it or get rid of it! We don’t do things that way. We tend to get rid of things because, are they hard to do? It doesn’t matter whether they’re hard to do if they’re really paying off. Or, are they a threat to my being someone important.
[Audio file 0:50:08]
I’ve been reading a book. You ever use one of these?
SCHIMANDLE: No!
BRYCE: This is a Nook.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. I’ve seen somebody use them, but I’ve just never used one.
BRYCE: It takes a minute or so to start up and then I’ll show you in a minute.
But anyway, so much has changed over the years and I think so many people don’t follow the change. Change is hard for people. I used to love change. I couldn’t understand that in other people. But one of the first things I recognized was I am not the average person.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, when it comes to that, for sure.
BRYCE: Not that I’m superior. But I’m not average, you know. You like what you like, and he likes what he likes, and I don’t know what that is.
I remember one time I was assistant supervisor and I made a schedule up for the Easter time, the week before, the week after Easter. And it 222
meant that all of us had schedules we, we didn’t have any seasonals working, so we had to staff 24 hours a day. And we worked 24 hours a day all year long to a certain extent, but not as great as during Easter time or summertime. And it was, I put up the schedule and everybody just, well, they were more interested in what somebody else was doing than what they were doing. And the way the state does their timekeeping, if you work Monday through Friday, 8-5, it don’t show hardly anything on the timesheet. Because you worked. And that’s what you’re supposed to have done. But if you work Saturday and Sunday, you get eight hours written down for that. And you get time off written for Tuesday and Wednesday, which is your substitute days off. Well, they look at the thing and they can just see that this one guy didn’t have hardly any time. Well, he worked Monday through Friday nearly all, but he was working at a different location and a different thing. But oh, “Glen’s not doing like the rest of us are,” and all that. And they called up my boss at home and complained after they had seen that, several of them called. And so he called me and asked me what I did and I told him. And he said, “Well you just go on into the office in the morning. I’ll go to the shop and greet everybody.” And we had, I don’t remember what it is, it’s probably the same form now, same number but different layout, maybe. I don’t know whether it was 605 or something like that; termination papers.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, I’ve never had to deal with that, thank heavens.
BRYCE: He went in with a big roll of termination papers in his pocket. He said, “I’ve got one of these made out for every one of you, if you feel like you’re being discriminated against; I mean here, you can quit, you know! But that’s the schedule. It’s fair, and it’s going to stand.” If he’d done that nowadays, the union would have had him by the, hung him, you know! [Laughs.]
SCHIMANDLE: No kidding!
BRYCE: And he was, well, he’s one of the ones that just died. They’ve been saying all these wonderful things about him. Well, he was wonderful, but he was mean as hell! And then the same time he didn’t care if it was politically correct or not, we didn’t have that kind of thing. And it wasn’t politically correct, but it was certainly effective don’t you think. They straightened up and flew right after that. But I felt very, very good that he supported me like that.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. 223
BRYCE: It was sad that he didn’t explain to them a little bit more about it, but . . .he got his point across, and I survived the storm. But, you know, that’s how I kind of feel that interpretation has gone. It been up and down and up and down; and it goes up and down by personalities. And it may be up here, and it may be down all over here. But it’s because there’s somebody there that likes interpretation, and they make it fun, and they do a good job. Or, in other cases, maybe that park is better staffed than these over here, and they’re just swimming to keep their head above water. But then the people up here don’t care enough to solve those problems, you know, and . . . Interpretation is just, I don’t know, it just seems like every time it takes two steps forward it takes six of them back. You know, with the next person that comes in.
[Audio file 0:56:00]
It’s sad. I just don’t see it, I think that, you know, Donna’s done a good job, as far as her part of it, and I’m sure she would say well, the field has taken so many cuts, which I’m sure they have. But still there is that up and down always of who’s in charge, and who has enthusiasm and who doesn’t. And so I’m disappointed when I think, “I don’t really know what’s going on in the last ten years,” but I’ve been retired for 21 years, and, but we did different things, and they all seemed to be a step forward, but they were always, um . . . [Pause] They were trying to improve something without spending any money, is all those steps were, you know.
They’d take, they’d rob Peter to pay Paul, and shuffle the deck a little bit, and oh boy, we’ve got this great new thing. Well yeah, but we lost the people that were doing it, you know? Because along when they stopped hiring the seasonal naturalists, and they hired these people to be the district moderators or something, well, some of them did really good jobs and some of them didn’t do such a good job, but it was a nice effort. But there was no money in it to hire honest-to-goodness people to do it. “We’ll just have everybody do it now.” Well, we were still working . . .
In those days, see, carpentry, you know; rangers used to be hired for their carpentry ability. And/or their plumbing ability or electricians. I started at the time when they finally decided, well, a ranger should have a college education. And so for two or three years we had nothing but college-educated brats coming in and being the rangers. But then with the park attendant was created at the same time. Well a park attendant, his promotion pattern was to become a ranger. But he didn’t have the four years college, normally. I did, I became a park attendant 224
and I had four years college; three months later I was a Ranger I. I passed the Ranger I exam before I took the park attendant exam. But there just wasn’t enough positions for me to get hired quickly. But anyway. There was no place for these park attendants to go except to become rangers, and so they said, well, we’ll let the park attendant, if a park attendant has two years college he can become a ranger in two years. Or, if he has no college, he can become a ranger in four years. And so it was just a few years there that we really got nothing but college educated people.
Well now, then it got so that they didn’t have the park attendant position anymore. And they got just maintenance and maintenance and maint . . . And very few people in the maintenance wanted to go into the ranger ranks. They didn’t want to carry a gun and do all that garbage, so they were happy and then they got a career pattern for the maintenance people, and, but, and that eventually came back around to where nearly all the rangers were college-educated people.
[Audio file 1:00:20]
And they were, for a while they were given as good a training in interpretation as they needed, anyway. But then as the labor union became stronger and stronger, and, it’s more of an observation from the outside, as far as I’m concerned now, just hearing what people are saying and seeing what things are being done, that I would say that they’ve lost the big push to be good interpreters. The opportunity is there for the ranger that wants to be an interpreter, in most places. But then there’s some places where either they just don’t have enough staff to do interpretation, or they have a supervisor that doesn’t want them to do interpretation, so, uh . . .As far as I’m concerned, that’s the story of interpretation in the state park system.
One of the things I think is really bad, is when they did away with, the interpretation at headquarters, we had a bunch of arrogant SOBs in interpretation for a good many years, who thought they were so superior to anybody in the field, that they lost the support of the field, and that’s why they took away a lot of the headquarters function in interpretation. And now, well at least the last I knew, they could, if they wanted a visitor center redone, they redid it. And they didn’t ask anybody at headquarters. And there was no conscience for interpretation that said, you know, you’re destroying this. You know.
I remember going to Borrego last year. They’ve got a nice interesting visitor center, but I think it was better the way it was before. The way 225
it was before, they did quite a bit about the history of the park. Now they have this archaeology group down there, and their knowledge of the archaeology is amazing. But the—what do you call it, the archaeology of long ago, instead of the archaeology of just recent things—anyway, that has really blossomed in there.
SCHIMANDLE: Like the paleontology?
BRYCE: Yeah. The paleontology and stuff like that! They know a hell of a lot about the paleontology of the park, and that’s fascinating to the person that really is interested. I think where you have also a history of the park, World War II they were bombing out in there. The bombing range is still, the big bombing range, is still closed to the public, although it’s probably the most natural-looking part of the park. The bombs didn’t do near as much damage to the park as the park visitor did! [Laughing.] Because they didn’t, the bombers didn’t go out there and take samples of the cactus and take it home and put it in their garden in San Diego, you know, or in LA, but the people do. You can see as you drive through Borrego Valley, there are no barrel cactus within a hundred yards of the highway, because they’ve all gone to somebody’s home in the city! And you know, you don’t see that until somebody tells you that, and then you get to looking around. At least I didn’t. Because, I’m not a naturalist. I was a, you know, I was more there for the visitor than I was for the natural features of the park. And I wanted the people that came to the park to enjoy and know what there was there from a natural standpoint, but I didn’t see what there was as well as somebody like a Bud Heacox who was immersed in the natural history. Or a Bud Getty. But I cared about the park visitor, and his experience or her experience.
[Audio file 1:05:40]
But it, you know, it’s amazing what there is at Borrego, in just Borrego Valley. The farming that came in there, and the grapes and stuff that were grown; and then the grapes stopped being grown at least as much as were. They used to have the first table grapes in New York City every year—from Borrego Valley. Because of just the weather that was down there. They had a patch of, I think it was 40 acres, maybe 80, of alfalfa down there in the Borrego Valley. The first year they planted it, they had I think it was seven cuttings in one year. Well, that’s crazy! One or two is maximum, normally. Well, that didn’t last too long, because of the soil didn’t support it. The weather and the water were there, but the soil couldn’t take it, so it dropped back to four or five cuttings. But still, that was amazing. And, but then the 226
dates are not as important as they once were, and the place has changed because, well the water table went down tremendously. They used to grow grapefruit down there and that was very big and then it kind of dropped out. But, what did people come to Borrego for, and why, you know? There’s a nice history there, and we used to tell that in the museum, and about the bombing, and there used to be a bombing range right there in Borrego Valley. But that’s not, nobody knows that. And it seems like to me, that the whole interpretive program, the whole volunteer program has centered around Borrego Valley and/or the prehistory, and not anything about the history of the park.
Like my father, where he was stationed over in Westmorland, which is towards El Centro. But he took care of the highway. It used to be—86 or whatever that is, the road that’s on through there now—it used to be 99. 99 went all the way to the Mexican border. And during World War II there was a calcite deposit in Borrego, on what used to be the Truckhaven Trail, and he and his crew rebuilt the road, Truckhaven Trail, from the highway, 86 or whatever it is now, out to where you would turn off to go to the calcite mine, and then it was two or three miles, maybe a mile and a half, two miles, from the Truckhaven Trail to the calcite mine. And inmate crews built the road from the Truckhaven Trail into the mine area. And I remember going out there as a kid, you know, at 7-8 years old, watching them build that road.
You come in on the Borrego-Salton Sea Parkway, which is basically the old Truckhaven Trail. There is nothing that tells you that there is a calcite mine up there, or that there is anything to do. There’s nothing and there’s no way to stop and walk in there even, anymore. And why? Why not? It’s an interesting place. And it was an interesting part of our history. And it was certainly more than fifty years ago. Which there’s no history ever happens less than fifty years ago, right? [Laughs.]
[Audio file 1:10:25]
SCHIMANDLE: Right. That’s true. Gosh. [Laughs.]
BRYCE: But I was amazed when I went down there. There’s not a sign hardly on the Borrego-Salton Sea Seaway that tells you anything about the park.
SCHIMANDLE: And it does have a very interesting history even of how the park was founded. 227
BRYCE: They do have a little place that you can turn off, and if you know what is there, there’s no sign telling you what’s there, there’s a little kind of orientation—some panels and maps and stuff. Very, very poorly done, amateurish, but it’s an attempt. But why didn’t they tell you that that’s what it is. They don’t even tell you it’s . . .
When I was at Borrego, I was area manager, I was making plans in my mind that every entrance to the park that you could drive in, on paved highway, would have a little visitor center, all outdoor, but with nice, good interpretive maps of the park that tell you where things are in the park, and all of them also what is in the immediate area that you should be aware of, and how to get to these different places. Nothing’s been done in all that time, except this one little place that, and they seem to have forgotten about all of the park except what you can see from Borrego Valley. And Borrego Valley is interesting, and they should tell about it, but they don’t even tell about the history of it. They just tell you about the stuff that you can’t see, that you can learn about in a visitor center when you’re in San Diego. They don’t send you out to look at where these spots are. They talk about the shells and stuff in the park, but they don’t tell you where to go to the shell reef out in Fish Creek. They don’t encourage you to go see anything. They just encourage you to look at the Visitor Center, and I think that’s a real shame.
SCHIMANDLE: Now do you think earlier in State Parks there was more of a tendency to do the visitor centers that encouraged people to go outside and find these things for themselves?
BRYCE: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Because the previous visitor center there was . . .
[Referring back to Nook] Anyway, it’s really kind of a neat thing. You can push a button down here that lights up, and it will take you back to the last page you read. And in the book that you were. I’ve got ten books in here right now. Six or seven of them are just freebies that they gave you along with the thing. But there are two that I bought and one that I selected of the freebies. And one of them is 580 pages, and I’ve got about thirty pages left to read. But the nice thing about it is, you don’t have to buy a special book for the hard-of-seeing [chuckles].
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, yeah! So you can magnify it? 228
BRYCE: And you can make it bigger, make it smaller, you can change the font, and it’s really neat. And I’m blind in the, practically blind, in the left eye. So it makes it really nice to have it . . .
SCHIMANDLE: I hadn’t even thought about that advantage.
BRYCE: I saw a cartoon the other day, this guy is showing this caller around his now home. And he says, “This is our library in here.” And this whole wall of bookcase floor to ceiling; three books down here on this lower shelf. It’s one of these, one of the—I can never think of the name, it starts with a K.
SCHIMANDLE: Kindle, the Amazon one?
[Audio file 1:15:01]
BRYCE: Oh. Kindle. And then there’s the Sony. There’s the three different types of things on the bottom shelf, and the whole rest of his library’s shelves, it’s just empty, there’s not a thing there. [Both laugh.]
SCHIMANDLE: And those three things could be holding a lot more than those shelves could hold.
BRYCE: Is it fifteen thousand books or fifteen hundred books you can put in here? It’s unbelievable.
SCHIMANDLE: Either way it’s quite a library.
BRYCE: And, you know, if you decide you just don’t really like something or want it, you can give it to somebody else. You can transfer it electronically to them. It’s crazy.
SCHIMANDLE: That’s really great.
BRYCE: My eyes are driving me nuts. I have allergies. And the hardest thing for me to read is when my eyes water, then I’ve got to take the glasses off, and wipe the tears out of my eyes. And it’s mostly my right eye that drools. And it’s my right eye that I can see with, so I am constantly wiping my eye. Drives me nuts.
SCHIMANDLE: Well, I want to follow up on a couple of the things that you were telling about. Now you did end up in the Office of Interpretive Services eventually, didn’t you? 229
BRYCE: Oh, yeah, you asked me how I did that. [Laughs.]
SCHIMANDLE: But it sounds like you got interested in interpretation out in the field before that.
BRYCE: Yeah, yeah. Well, I was only area manager for one year at Borrego, and I had come up with an idea of like maybe 200, you know how, you ever been to the National Parks, and as you drive through the park there’s these aluminum exhibit stands; pictures of the mountains in the background, whatever. And they’re permanent, maybe; they’re very strong, well built, designed to be permanent. I conceived of us doing something like that. Maybe not quite as expensive, initially anyway, but I hoped they would be eventually. And you know, well, I identified various things that should be interpreted on the roadsides. And so that’s where I sort of first got my idea. Plus, then, we had an interpreter there, and we had to give up a ranger in order to get an interpreter, because they had stole the interpreter position, took it into the district. And, but we had a ranger that they said was more than necessary, so they converted that to interpreter, but, you know, he could just do so much. It’s a huge, dang place. One interpreter in 500,000 acres, and two major campgrounds? Just ridiculous. And so I told every ranger down there he had to give an interpretive activity, at least one, every week. Whether it was a campfire out along the creek somewhere, in his patrol district, or a walk, or whatever, but he had to do something and it had to be reported so that we knew what he did.
Didn’t have any women rangers in those days. And that was just a few years later, um, ’69, yeah, ’69, was when they first started talking about hiring rangers. Some idiot from Sacramento wrote a letter for the division chief. And it was rather short, but basically the message was, and it was written in this stupid way, “What positions do you see women rangers assume?” God, that got some answers, and a lot of blushes! [Both laugh.] Oh, how stupid could the person be? This was a very well-educated person, I’m sure someone else wrote the letter for him, and he signed it. You’ve got to read those dang letters, that’s the problem.
One of our people, he was a law enforcement person, he was, he had been a cop in L.A., and he was very, very intelligent, and had a devious, clever mind. He wrote an answer to that, and I don’t know who, what he signed it as, but then he had it mailed from Sacramento or Lodi or somewhere, and you know he was in Eureka when he wrote it, but the answers to that letter stirred up a lot of discussion, too. But anyway, that was in 1969. In about 1969 or ’70 they hired the first 230
woman rangers of the modern era. There was a lady back in World War II time that was a ranger, Petey Weaver.
[Audio file 1:20:53]
SCHIMANDLE: Right, I’ve heard a little about her.
BRYCE: I even met her. She was from the area up around Fortuna. Fortuna’s where I lived when I worked in Eureka, and we didn’t have any women employees. There was headquarters, headquarters had 30 people in it, about 30 people, and most of them were women because most of them were clerical; one of them in accounting, and personnel, and just regular secretaries. But then the rest of them were some sort of rec. planner or maybe a few foresters and landscape architects, stuff like that at headquarters. But then in the field there was no women except maybe like a dozen seasonal clerical positions. And so it was all men to begin with. But once the women started being hired, it went for quite rapidly. And first they hired women into positions that were, you know, it was logical and they did things that were like clerical positions. We started getting real honest-to-goodness clerical positions, but then we started getting rangers and maintenance people, and maintenance supervisors even that were women. And some very good women maintenance people. And I remember meeting several really good rangers that were women.
But then I retired. Well, no, I didn’t retire. I came into headquarters. Interpretive Services was more women than it was men. Somebody said they were amazed that my retirement party was more women than men there, but you know, in the field, most retirement parties and/or going away parties were the people you worked with, and most of the people were men! But they always had their wives with them. But then as we started hiring more women, well, then the husbands didn’t come with their wives to retirement parties as much, you know. They had their own parties and stuff to go to, and their own jobs to worry about. And that family atmosphere went away with that, to a large extent; not totally.
But you were, uh, how did I get in there?
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
BRYCE: Well, I was always interested in interpretation, and not doing it, good Lord no! I was scared to talk in front of the public. And I never did until I was like about 50 years old, and after I had my heart attack, you 231
know, a little bit of “I don’t give a damn” attitude, anymore. I survived that, I can survive standing up in public.
But I had a supervisor who was just . . . He was great at talking. Great. He knew a lot, he knew what to say. But he would go down to Asilomar and do training. And he didn’t do such a good job. They didn’t like him. I went down there and I overwhelmed them. They just thought I was the greatest person on earth. But you know what the difference was? They believed, and they were right, that he was just telling the headquarters story; and they thought I was telling the truth.
[Audio file 1:25:15]
SCHIMANDLE: Hmm. You had more understanding of what was going on in the field?
BRYCE: Yeah. And I wouldn’t BS them.
SCHIMANDLE: That makes a difference, yeah.
BRYCE: Yeah. Yeah. And there was two women in that class that I had known a little bit. Not awfully well, but I had known them over the years. And they wrote him up as being failing. And they wrote me up as top of the class. And he got wind of that.
SCHIMANDLE: Uh-oh.
BRYCE: It made him feel kind of bad. I said, “I don’t know what the heck they did there.” I said I didn’t know them ahead of time, so that helped a little I’m sure. But it was hard to have to talk to him about our comparative scores.
But anyway. A position came open, of Supervisor of History Interpretation. And Bud Heacox was the Supervisor of Natural History Interpretation. And they advertised this position, I thought, well, I’ve supervised several historic units, and I, you know, I know a little bit about history—as much as most of the people that I had seen out in the field, anyway; and so I applied for the job and got it. I was very well prepared for it, in some respects, entirely unprepared for it otherwise. I wasn’t a person that was going to go do their research for them, and I didn’t want to do that; I didn’t have any experience in doing, really, historic research. But I knew what was needed in the historic parks, and I think I was able to do a lot of good. But that was where I got involved in interpretation, was that particular job. And then I ended up, I was acting supervisor of interpretive services for not quite six 232
months, maybe four months, something like that, when Norm Wilson got fired and I went in. And I’ve realized after a while that I was set up to fail, that no way was I ever going to get the job, but it was fun. It was fun in this way: very, very disheartening. But the day I got the job, it was amazing how many people who had not cared to say hello to me were now my friends. Ah! Man! I was the most wonderful thing that God ever created. Then at the end of that four months or whatever it was, word got out I was not the one selected. And there was people that had just been my bosom buddy for about four months, walk right on past me as though I didn’t exist.
SCHIMANDLE: Office politics?
BRYCE: These were people I saw everyday, and continued to see everyday, but in a different position. And it sure was a lesson in humanity, I guess. Humanity 101. [Laughs.] You know, everyone should get that. But, you know, it’s hard to put a position, a person in that position so they will learn that, but it’s amazing how there was people . . .And there was one person, I went to the Deputy Director, who was my supervisor then for that four months, and I said, okay, I will not supervise this one person. He kept saying he didn’t understand why. He understood why. Because he even told me. He said, “If there ever becomes a problem between him and I, I’m the one that’s going to get fired.” And he was the deputy director! He knew what the situation was. The guy was a politician, and he never . . . he was a very good person, but his personality made him worthless because you knew that you could not tell him anything. He was going to go to the politician, and his state senator would take care of things for him. And so I knew him well enough that I’m not going to be responsible for that guy’s work, and that’s all there is to it. I’m not going to be responsible because I can’t tell him anything that he has to do. If he don’t like what I tell him, he’s not even going to tell me he don’t like it. He’s just going to not do it, and he’s going to go to his senator friend, and it’s all going to be taken care of and the director will be fired before he is. And they knew it, but they wouldn’t admit it, you know.
[Audio file 1:31:34]
But it was a, that was, it was fascinating to know that it didn’t matter how good a job you did if certain people didn’t like you. Just you were gone, that’s all there was to it. So that’s how I got into it; it was more nobody wants the job, particularly, and I did. I really did want it. And I enjoyed it, but it sure taught me a few good lessons. I’m kind of glad I had that experience. I’m glad I didn’t become chief of the division, 233
because I didn’t like . . . I was good at playing politics with the public. I knew what we needed to do, what we needed to say. But I wouldn’t play it in house. In-house politics was just something I was not going to get involved with. And I didn’t. And it cost me any more promotions, but I had fun, I made enough money.
SCHIMANDLE: What kind of projects did you work on, or did your staff work on when you were in OIS [Office of Interpretive Services]?
BRYCE: Well see, I didn’t have staff to begin with, . . .
SCHIMANDLE: You were it!
BRYCE: Well, I was basically to coordinate with the field . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Oh!
BRYCE: To oversee the historic interpretation, and I tried to go to every historic unit at least once a year. And then they decided, well they still needed this history input for exhibits. So they had me hire these people. But they would tell me, well, one of the guys who wanted this information was head of the exhibit shop. Well, he went to a conference with this girl, back in the East Coast. And she came out, well, it was an extended love affair from the conference that he went to, and so it was obvious that I was just being used as a stooge. So I said, why don’t you supervise her; get me out of this. I don’t need to be involved. So I got rid of her.
But anyway, we did some interesting projects. We did the um, Benicia Capitol [State Historic Park]. All it was was a bunch of desks, and not a damn thing on them. There was no coats in there, nothing. And this lady did this, and she did a good job of it. She went back and she found invoices and stuff for when the capitol was actually being used as a capitol, and figured out what kinds of things, furnishings were in there. And she went out and bought pens and pen holders and books that were appropriate to have on their desks, and coats and hats and things like that, and made it look like it was a living history exhibit— not just a bunch of damned old desks sitting in a room. And it was just a cold nothing, and it came out really nice. That was one project we did.
[Audio file 1:35:37] 234
We did another project there with another young lady that worked with me. And she was really good. She, they had, I think they had about four little meeting rooms. The big assembly room, and then four little rooms as you went into the area. And they were maybe would hold twelve, fifteen people around a big table, and so, committee rooms. And we made up a text for the, one of these committee rooms, and it was the committee deciding on whether to move the capital, and where. And she went back and found the, that issue, and who was on the committee, and we had these different people talking back and forth. And you couldn’t go in there, just left the transom open. And you could here it out in the hallway, what they were talking about. So there was nothing to be seen, we just had this tape recorder going, and I don’t know whether they pushed a button to start it. I don’t think; I think it just went periodically, all day long. And that turned out very well.
We did three projects there at Benicia Capitol. We did then, there’s a house there, I think it’s called the Fischer-Hanlon House.
SCHIMANDLE: I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know anything about it.
BRYCE: And we did the furnishing plan for that place, as well. And so, but that was some of the projects we did. But generally I didn’t do so much projects as I would go out and just make suggestions as to how they could do a better job of interpreting the history of their different facilities, and then they would put in a request for an exhibit or something like that.
SCHIMANDLE: I see.
BRYCE: So it was more trying to keep them up to some sort of standard of quality.
SCHIMANDLE: Now did you also . . .
BRYCE: What I thought was the biggest thing lacking in interpretation, nobody really being the conscience and the idea behind improving things. I was the great creative person, but I could see that it was sterile and something needed to be done. And then we’d get somebody to come in and do it, and do something about it. That was basically how I was involved.
And then I became, you know, for a while I was head of interpretive services, and after that I became the head of the audiovisual unit. I had, 235
what was it, four Bobs and a Bobby. [Both laugh.] What we wanted to do, we wanted to get rid of the secretary because she had the wrong name. There was nothing wrong with her, otherwise. But we had four Bobs working for me. There was Bob Young, Bob Mortenson, Bob Dunne, and Bobby del Prite. And oh, and then we hired another seasonal Bob later on. But it was kind of weird. If we could have just got rid of her and just hired a Barbara, [laughing] we’d have had four, five Bobs and a Bobby. I remember it was kind of strange. But one was an audio-video specialist, one was a photographer, one was a something, it was some sort of technical name. What he was supposed to do is, oh God I can’t remember. That was what we used him for, but I don’t remember the name. Machine Operator III or something like that.
[Audio file 1:40:22]
SCHIMANDLE: One of those odd civil service things.
BRYCE: He was supposed to run some sort of a photographic machine of some sort, but we didn’t even have one of those things, I don’t think. But anyway, they were just all real good photographic, audiovisual type people, and then Bobby del Prite was a clerical person that just; and then there was the other clerical person that he kind of helped her. And they took care of the photo files.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, okay. And you were doing, then, like slide shows and, did you do films also?
BRYCE: Yeah, We did nine-projector slide shows, and six projector slide shows, and then a lot of just two-projector slide shows. And, but it was kind of fun. I didn’t know a damn thing about what they were doing, but I knew how it was going to be used, and what the public needed. But I had no expertise as far as how to do, I just knew what we needed to do.
SCHIMANDLE: You had that experience of being in the park.
BRYCE: Being in the field, and knowing what the public wanted. Knowing that people, well, they don’t particularly want to come back at 2:00 and see something. They want to see it now, you know. And sometimes that is impossible. Sometimes you do have to have them come back at different times. But the more you can make it now, and the more you can make it for the individual and the family, and not for fifty people at a time, you know. Some things you can’t do that. You need to have, 236
do it just for a large group of people. And sometimes you have such a large turnover of people that you can do it for fifty people every fifteen minutes all day long. But there’s other places that you might have to wait all day long to get fifty people. [Chuckles.]
SCHIMANDLE: Right. And if they’re there at ten in the morning they want to see it and then go out on the trail.
BRYCE: Yeah, they don’t want to wait until three in the afternoon to come back and see it. But we did interpretive plans for every natural history and every history place in the state while I was in that. That was my idea, because you’d go to these places and you’d ask, “What are you supposed to do? What are you really trying to accomplish here?” And they couldn’t tell you. Or if they had an idea, well, it sure didn’t fit my idea what should be done, so we did that. But, again, we even had the support of the state park commission behind those plans. But as soon as you’re gone, nobody follows them. That’s the thing. You knew that, you’d tell the people, yes we’re going to stand behind them, we’re going to believe in them, we’re going to follow them, but when I was gone, it was forgotten about I think, pretty much. I doubt that they still had those laying around. You know, there may be a few parks that still have theirs, may be a few parks they even pay attention to them, but you just knew, that the people in the field knew that this was a big waste of time. “Why are we doing this?” And all you could do was say, “yes we’ll follow it, we’ll do it,” but only as long as I’m here. You know some day I’m going to get fired, retired, or move on to happier hunting grounds, and somebody else is probably not going to do it. And if they do it, well, maybe they will for another few years. But eventually it’s going to be forgotten about. That’s the way most every damn thing is, that has to do with anything other than law enforcement.
The law enforcement is such a neat thing because most of the stuff has to be based in law, and you can’t just forget about what. And that’s one thing that they really have an advantage.
[Audio file 1:45:13]
SCHIMANDLE: That’s true.
BRYCE: Although I didn’t, never wanted to be part of it, but . . .
SCHIMANDLE: So there’s always got be that overseeing, and some kind of enforcing it. 237
BRYCE: There’s got to be an institutional conscience who will say, “We’re supposed to be doing this.” And sometimes you can be too strict, too rigid in following plans, rules, regulations, but you should always know when you shouldn’t follow them. Generally speaking, they should be either rewritten, or read in such a way that you do follow them.
SCHIMANDLE: Or if you’re not following it you know why, and you know that there is a plan.
BRYCE: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Now what were they being called then, the plans. Was that the interpretive prospectus, then?
BRYCE: Yeah. Interpretive plan and prospectus, both.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay.
BRYCE: I don’t remember which was which, but one was just a general statement of what should be done that was no more than a page, at most, and the other was more detailed.
SCHIMANDLE: And there might be more of those left down in the archives. They’ve gotten a lot of material together that . . . I’ll have to go down and look.
BRYCE: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: How are you doing? We’ve been talking for a couple of hours now, maybe it’s time to call it quits for now?
BRYCE: Okay, if you have any questions you can call me on the phone or come by again.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, that would be great. I’m thinking if I have questions or . . . then maybe we can do a follow-up talk sometime . . .
BRYCE: Or maybe if you’re getting input with other people, if it doesn’t fit with what I’ve said, you know, you don’t need to tell me who they are, just tell me that somebody says, this and this and this, just check with me and maybe I can tell you maybe, yeah, I said that a little bit wrong, or . . . 238
SCHIMANDLE: Or if I hear about something that I want to get more information on, from another perspective, I might . . .
BRYCE: Or maybe they said it wrong.
SCHIMANDLE: Right. [Laughs.] Give you a chance to defend your honor or something.
BRYCE: Yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, Well great. I’ll turn off this tape recorder.
BRYCE: When you get done, if I can see the thing, I’d like to see what you come up with.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, great. I would definitely like to provide it to you. I’d better get done, too.
BRYCE: When do you have to get it done by?
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, my. Well, Lee Simpson, who’s our graduate advisor for the program, is very good, I’ve heard . . .
BRYCE: This is UC Davis.
SCHIMANDLE: No, this is Sacramento State.
BRYCE: Sac State, okay.
SCHIMANDLE: From what I’ve heard, she’s really good at making sure that people are continuing to make progress, and pushing them to finish, which is good because I’ve heard of people letting these linger on for years and years.
BRYCE: Oh, gosh yes.
SCHIMANDLE: So hopefully by the end of next fall.
BRYCE: Oh!
SCHIMANDLE: So you know, I’m starting working on it seriously now.
BRYCE: About a year. 239
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, a little bit under a year now. So we’ll see. And I am going to transcribe the interview, and that will probably take me awhile. And when I have that done, I’ll send it off
BRYCE: I don’t think I’ve said hardly anything that really fit your . . . I think I gave you some idea of the overall setting of and the . . .
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah.
BRYCE: And the general problems that interpretation faces.
SCHIMANDLE: Right And that’s good, because some of the structure of how interpretive offices were structured through the years, I can find some of that by going through old News and Views and files and stuff. It’s the more of the philosophy sutff that I want.
BRYCE: One of the big changes, I think, is we went from the seasonal employee to the six interpretive specialists at the old six districts, with the rangers then supposedly being the ones that did the interpretation. But I knew area managers that said every employee has to be. I remember Plumas-Eureka, the supervisor who was up there, every employee, park attendant, park aid, every seasonal employee had to be involved in interpretation.
[Audio file 1:50:01]
SCHIMANDLE: Hmm.
BRYCE: Well, they don’t have a very large permanent staff, you know, because it’s snowed in for so long. You know, they don’t have a bunch of people standing around for months waiting to work, so you know, they did it that way. Others, they didn’t care if anybody did anything, almost. That was the weakness of it. And never been able to get the assistant superintendents in those days of that, and the superintendents, to really get out and make sure interpretation was being given a fair share. We’ve never been able to get management, whatever the organizational structure, to really care about it. And there’s always exceptions. There is some managers that were just fantastic. Bt they were the exception, not the rule.
But then, the next big change was, uh, [pause], well , I guess the biggest change was just the law enforcement aspect of things, just becoming stronger and stronger and stronger. Then the other thing was in 1990? [Actually 1992 reorganization.] When they had the Phoenix 240
Committee, the doing away with Interpretive Services, the old Interpretive Services. They kind of built it back up some, but when they did away with the . . . the thing that people in the field hated was that interpretive workshop, I mean the exhibit shop. Just because of their arrogance, and their cheating and lying. I remember one time they got $10,000; and this was, well I’ve been off for 21 years, so this was 30 years ago, 25-30 years ago. Money was worth a little bit then, you know, $10,000! They spent $10,000, the park got one panel. For $10,000! And that kind of attitude and just mismanagement really, really; and there we had a supervisor who was in many ways he was very good. He was very creative, but he resented the Operations Division being head of the people in the field, and he thought that he and his staff were superior to those people, and that hurt interpretation for many, many years, because people can remember that. And that’s why the interpretive exhibit shop was done away with.
And I thought the exhibit shop did more than anything else. Because people didn’t pay any attention to all the nice things we said about philosophy and . . . But they liked the . . . If they were able to get something from the exhibit shop, they liked what they got. Because I’ll admit they did good work; they did good work as far as the craftsmanship was concerned, and the artwork was concerned. Sometimes they didn’t do at all what the park had asked for. That’s all right sometimes, maybe what the park asked for was not right. But they should have been told why it was not right, instead of just being given something different. And, you know. If you’re screwed up from the word go, it’s all right if somebody tells you that you are, and can be nice about it, but when they just ignore what you say, and don’t even say that you were screwed up, that is not going to cut it in the long run. And they found out. They committed suicide, is what the exhibit shop did.
Because they would take the General Fund money, which was what they were supposed to use for maintaining the exhibits in the field, and they would use it for overruns on the Capital Outlay program. And, you know, they received maybe $50,000 in a year to do exhibits for Cap. Outlay; and they received maybe three or four thousand for General Fund maintenance. Well, that was just for, the three or four thousand was just expenses for paint and materials. They had funded positions to do the work. So when I say three or four thousand dollars, that’s just for the materials, that’s not for labor. They had four or five positions that were general-funded. But we were ending up subsidizing mismanagement of the, or just over-planning, yeah, over-planning the Cap. Outlay stuff. People were hired for their creative ability, their 241
artistic ability, but not for their management ability or even their planning ability.
[Audio file 1:56:04]
They might be able to . . . well, this one lady came to me and she’s still working for the department, very good historian, she works in the Office of Historic Preservation. And she said, “Well, they don’t give us enough money.” “Oh,” I said, “they do. They give you all the money you need. It’s just you need to know how big a project that you can do.” And she said, “Well, there’s all this information out there.” I said, “Well, then , you need to study the general history, of say, Old Town, and decide that you’re gonna do . . .just make a, spend a week getting acquainted with what the overall picture is, and then decide that you’re going to, that you’ve got enough money to do this part of it. And then you study that to death. You leave the rest of it alone, because you don’t have the money to do that. You’ve got to make that decision. That isn’t being done for you. Nobody said you had to do the last word on the San Diego Old Town. You maybe do just one building, or one house, or one period of a house. And you have to make that decision, then narrow down, and really do a A-number-one job on that little bit.”
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah. Live within your budget.
BRYCE: Well, she said, “Ahhh! I never thought of that!” That should have been the first thing you thought about. Instead of wasting all this money. Oh, you know, I mean she’d been around for several years. Look at all the projects she’d probably done! Just overspent them, doing research! Well, it’s nice to have good research when you go to build an exhibit. But if you don’t have that money to build the exhibit, then why did you do the research? You know, it just not going to do you a bit of good sitting in there on the shelf. You know, it may, but it probably won’t.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, it doesn’t get that exhibit out in the park.
BRYCE: Yeah, yeah.
SCHIMANDLE: Yeah, gee. Well, I think you gave me a lot of good information. I think I am probably going to want to follow up and do another interview with you. For one thing, I just ran across something that said you were involved in getting the Western Interpretive Association started. 242
BRYCE: Well, I didn’t have anything to do with starting it, but I did become a member, and I became the executive manager of the organization.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay.
BRYCE: . . . for the last, I guess it was the last seven or eight years that it was in existence.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, so that’s something I’ll love to talk to you about. I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome right now.
BRYCE: Oh, that’s okay, because I don’t have a damn thing to do. [Laughs.] Oh, I’ve got a ton of things to do. [Audio file 1:59:21] [For the next nine minutes, the recorder is still on, and Mr. Bryce chats about what he is doing, unrelated to interview topics.]
[Audio file 2:08:43] SCHIMANDLE: So I have the release form here I mentioned to you on the phone . And it says, “In consideration of the recording and preservation of my oral history interview, I hereby grant, assign and transfer to the archives of the California Department of Parks and Recreation all rights, including all literary and property rights, unless restricted as noted below . . . ” And there’s a place to write in if you have any restrictions you want on it. “ . . . to publish duplicate and otherwise use or dispose of the recording and/or transcribed interview conducted on January 22, 2011. This includes the rights of publication in electronic form, such as placement on the internet/web for access on that medium. I hereby give the above-mentioned department the write to distribute the recording and/or transcription to any other archives, libraries and educational institutions for scholarly and educational uses and purposes . . . “
BRYCE: Wow.
SCHIMANDLE: All this legaleze. Yeah. “I understand that I will have an opportunity to review and comment on the final transcript . . .” And I’ll do that. I’ll give you the final transcript, well, it will be a semi-final, because if you go through it and see anything I’ve gotten wrong . . .
[Audio file 2:10:04]
BRYCE: Yeah. Right. 243
SCHIMANDLE: . . . you know, you’ll correct it for me.
BRYCE: I’d rather you not use anyone else’s name.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay.
BRYCE: As much as possible, because that isn’t really important.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay.
BRYCE: I think I only said Donna Pozzi and Bud Heacox.
SCHIMANDLE: I think so, and Bud Getty is the other I can remember you said.
BRYCE: What I said about the two Buds, I don’t care. There was nothing really controversial.
SCHIMANDLE: Oh, and then there were all the Bobs.
BRYCE: Oh. And all the Bobs, yeah, the bobolinks. [Laughs.]
SCHIMANDLE: And then there was the, um head of interpretive services who was fired, you want me to take that out?
BRYCE: Oh, Norm Wilson. That’s all documented anyways, that’s nothing . . . But what I said about Donna Pozzi, that’s kind of embarrassing, but I said the same thing about me. So it should . . .Yeah, I don’t . . . say anything that you want.
SCHIMANDLE: Okay, well you could redact them if I put in any names that you don’t think should be in.
And it also says that “I understand that I will receive an audio file copy of this interview, and one printed copy of the final transcript.” And I will do that for you, and then I’ll give you the . . . I’ll put down here “Provide thesis.” Okay.
BRYCE: I can sum up your whole report: Interpretation in the Department of Parks and Recreation has been up and down, and mostly down; and has generally been unsupported by other than indiv . . . unsupported except by sporadic individuals, or something. [Both laugh.]
[END AUDIO FILE] 244
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