Paul Dayton Oral History

PB: Today is January 18, 2013, I'm Peter Brueggeman with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives, and I'm interviewing Paul Dayton of Scripps Institution of Oceanography about his career. Paul, how did you get interested in nature, the ocean, and all that. It starts with so many people from a very early age, what led to your interests and career? PD: My grade school years were fairly different, it's interesting. I was born just at the beginning of World War II. My father was working on a ranch and teaching school in Tucson. When the war started, he became a gold miner, deep hard rock gold-mining in the Tiger Mine in Oracle, Arizona. I grew up my first four, five years, in Oracle while he worked in the mine. After the war, the mine closed. He was in and out of work, looking for work. We moved to Oregon eventually, where he was looking for work in the logging camps. His background before World War II, before I was born, was working on ranches and as a miner in southern Arizona. PB: You said he was teaching? PD: My father had a college degree from Stanford, and he put himself through Stanford working in Grass Valley in gold mines in the summer and some mines in the San Pedro Valley, in Arizona. He went to Stanford during the school year. When he came home to Tucson, he found work at a small private school, a dude ranch sort of thing for rich kids from the East. This was going on when I was born, so I don't remember it very well. I remember the era when we lived in Oracle and he was a gold miner. That was about the age of four or five for me. Finally in desperation, the family moved to southern Oregon. He worked for a little while in Dunsmuir on the railroad and got fired because he wasn't in the union. Then we ended up in small logging camps around Crater Lake mostly between Trail and Umpqua, and we lived there until I was 9. We lived in crude temporary shacks and a couple summer tents and never had a flush toilet or electricity. We lived outdoors completely. In the summers, he couldn't work because of the fire hazard in southern Oregon. The Tillamook burn in the late 1930s was a huge thing in that part of the state. Everybody was uptight about working in the summer, and he couldn't work in the winter because of the snow. Oregon in those days had a huge amount of snow that they don't have now. Crater Lake froze one year, and we had something like 10 or 15 feet of snow in the logging camp. We were snowed in for months at a time down in that part of Oregon. It was a really different era. Logging in those days was a dangerous business, and our camp had a guy killed, and several men badly hurt. Usually it was the chokers, the choke setters, that were hurt. My father had a log roll over him, but he was in deep soft mud and only got bruised and very dirty, but it still took two guys to pull him out. John Isaacs, who was one of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography great scientists, was doing environmental safety for the state of Oregon at that time. He and I talked about it once. He had come up and visited our camp after somebody was killed, and he remembered it, pretty much described our camp. PB: Do you remember John Isaacs visit to the logging camp? PD: No, not him, I was six, but I remember the event, I remember the guy, he was laid in the back of the pick up and went by in front of our house. I had been playing on the ledge above the road and looked down at him in the back of the pickup. Logs roll over people, and they're heavy. So we lived outdoors, and we had little food when my father was not working, … there was no welfare in those days. You could get World War II leftovers, and we got big barrels of kidney beans that they would give you, and big barrels of really bad dried milk that we used. We spent summers hiking and backpacking in the mountains to get fish. We would go in and fish out of little streams and lakes in the Wallowa wilderness areas. And I still remember the Wallowas because we went everywhere, and it was our favorite place. We would fish out one lake and go to another lake. PB: So you were out in nature constantly? PD: Yes, nature really is a part of me. I was having a terrible time in school. It was just very recently that I learned that I have a dyslexia learning disorder. I didn't learn to read until I was 10, well into the third grade, really. I still can't do math or languages. I had always thought I was just stupid. I just had to struggle really hard, working a lot harder to get by being stupid. Now I think well, I have an excuse, but the fact is I was still stupid. I can't do algebra or calculus or anything -- PB: That's why you collaborate on data. PD: That's exactly why I collaborate, absolutely. I've always thought that the sword would fall at this establishment and they would discover my secret about being so inept, so I am always hustling trying to stay a little bit ahead of it. It started back there when I had a bad time in the Drew school near the town of Umpqua. But otherwise, it was a dream life for a little kid, imagine being 6-7 years old wandering in woods watching loggers fall trees with old cross cut saws, watching the huge trees fall and the buckers buck them up with hand saws and axes. Chain saws came to our camp the next year but the loggers would not use them at first. But for me maybe the trucks were the best. I sat on my little ledge above a road cut and watched some of the most wonderful trucks go slowly by with logs or lumber. There were old chain drive Whites and Macks, Reos, Diamond T’s, Stirlings, Auto Car and even an ancient half track truck used in the woods for awhile. I could recognize them from their sounds. This is an important part of Americana and these trucks built our country and now they are all but forgotten except in the memories of old farts like me and at the Campo Truck Museum! Eventually the camps closed, and we moved to some real towns, Cherry Grove and Forest Grove, in northern Oregon where my father got work in a mill. We lived there for a few years through 1956, at which point we packed up our old truck and our car and drove to Tucson, went back home where my mother was able to get a job teaching first grade in Tucson. We started going to the Gulf of California over Christmas break when we lived in Oregon. We would drive down to the Gulf of California in Mexico, to San Carlos Bay near Guaymas. PB: This happened when you were living in Oregon before you moved to Tucson? PD: Yes, we would drive all the way to San Carlos Bay from Forest Grove and spend ten days camping on the beach in San Carlos. I have some pictures of San Carlos Bay before anybody was there. I went to high school in Tucson. The tradition continued through high school and college in which we would drive down to the Gulf of California in Mexico, to Guaymas, to San Carlos Bay in the early 1950s, 1952 or 1953, and spend Christmas vacation there. Driving, if you are unemployed, wasn't that big a deal because gas was so cheap. PB: So that was really your first extensive interaction with the marine environment? PD: It was my first interaction, and it was through the early 1950s, I was snorkeling and trying to kill fish. PB: When you are on these trips from Oregon, you were snorkeling? Using what mask and fins? PD: They had these funny old masks with ping-pong balls in the snorkels, they were held in. I don’t remember using fins in the beginning. Real divers weren't using those silly masks, they were swimming pool snorkels, but that's what I had. PB: And the mask, it was an inexpensive swimming pool mask? PD: Yes, it had to be inexpensive for us to have it. Everything I saw seemed so scary because it was so different underwater than in the woods. I remember the first conch I saw, a Strombus, I thought my God, it's going to reach out and bite me. I was afraid to pick it up. It was all really exciting and different. There were a lot of Strombus there then; I wonder if there are any now? PB: Did you use a Hawaiian sling spear? PD: No, there were spear guns on the market from Italy, and they were real spear guns and quite powerful. PB: So you got a spear gun early in your snorkeling? PD: We got one fairly early. PB: Because you were producing food, so it was worthwhile? PD: Yeah, well -- I'm ashamed of all the things I killed in those days.

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