Paul Barker Oral History Transcript

U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Region Five History Project Interview with: Paul Barker Interviewed by: Phil Aune Location: Spokane, Washington Date: sometime in 2006 Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; October 2006 [Begin CD Track 18. (no Tracks 1-17)] PHIL AUNE: This is Track 18. This is the Paul Barker interview. This is Phil Aune [pronounced AW-nee]. The last name is spelled A-u-n-e. And I’m interviewing former regional forester Paul Barker. Paul, I’d like to start out the interview. Please tell us briefly what got you interested in forestry as a young man. PAUL BARKER: My interest in forestry began in scouting and was amplified through a biology class in high school. When I was in the ninth grade, my second grade teacher asked if I would help her by taking some tests. She was working on her master’s degree in counseling. The test results indicated I had a high aptitude for forestry. I was accepted at the University of Idaho, College of Forestry and began my professional education the fall of 1953. AUNE: Given that, if you went to University of Idaho, what were your school years like at Idaho, and did you have jobs with the Forest Service in the summertime, or how did that work? BARKER: I started working for the Forest Service right after high school graduation. Full time employees on the ranger district were the District Ranger, Alternate Ranger, Packer, and District Clerk. The district had just sold a couple of timber sales in an effort to salvage trees being killed by the spruce bark beetle. I was the only seasonal employee planning to take forestry in college and was assigned to the two timber sales. One sale was for 14 million board feet and the other was for 16 million board feet. An old log cabin remained on one of the sales from earlier white pine logging in the 1930’s. This became my home and headquarters for the next two summers. The Ranger spent a week with me on site, teaching me the different tree species, how to identify spruce trees not infected with the bark beetles, and to find section corners and run section lines. He taught me to use an abney and the criteria for locating roads and left me with a staff compass and abney, and I was on my own. I spent the summer running section lines and marking spruce leave trees. When I returned the next summer a new ranger was running the district. He said, “You worked on those timber sale last year didn’t you?” I indicated that I had. He said, “Take that pickup out there and go up there and do what has to be done and let me know when you’re through.” The timber purchaser, Ohio Match Company, indicated that they needed a couple of roads located, which I did. I went to scaling school so I could scale the logs when they started hauling logs off national forest system lands.. The Ranger came out one day a week to check on how things were going. Sometimes we would meet, but frequently he would just leave a note on my desk. At the end of the month, the Alternate Ranger call me and said I needed to come to town that weekend and make out a cutting report and to bring the scale books. I had no idea what a cutting report was, but fortunately the Supervisor’s Office was located above the Ranger’s office. The Forest Resource Clerk was working that Saturday and was kind enough to train me. In those days they did not know what overtime was, so making cutting reports on Saturday and Sunday was free education. AUNE: That was quite a bit of responsibility for a young man. What did you think about it in those days? BARKER: It just naturally happened and I assumed that was the way things were done. I worked fairly closely with Lawrence Glover the Alternate Ranger. Today we would call them Fire Management Officers. He had a very simple work philosophy, “when it got light you went to work, when it got dark you went to bed.” This worked out well when we got into Hoot Owl operations due to extreme fire danger. I was on the sales the same time the loggers were. AUNE: That’s pretty good for a kid from North Dakota, coming out to the wilds of Idaho and in less than a year, getting that kind of responsibility. As you got on in your career—you think about all the young people we hire today, with the kind of training they have to go through before we give them that responsibility—yours was a baptism by fire, though, wasn’t it? BARKER: It was, and to think of a ranger today spending a whole week in the field with a seasonal employee, teaching him how to recognize trees, how to use an Abney, I don’t think that could happen today. AUNE: I think you’re right, and it was a wonderful time to grow up in the Forest Service. There’s no doubt about that. As you went on—you graduated from the University of Idaho. Is that correct? BARKER: Yes AUNE: What kind of degrees did you get in your education? BARKER: I earned a bachelor of science degree in forest management from the College of Forestry at the University of Idaho. The Forest Service continually updated my education, sending me to various training courses at UCLA, University of Michigan, Colorado State, the University of Montana and Harvard University. Following a semester at Harvard University, I was appointed Regional Forester of the Pacific Southwest Region of the Forest Service. AUNE: We’ll get into that a little bit later, as far as that goes. You obviously went on and— right after you left Idaho, where did you go to work? What was your first professional assignment? BARKER: My first professional assignment was in 1957 on the Calder District of the St. Joe National Forest. This is the district where I had worked the previous four summers. A year later I was drafted into the Army. Following military service I returned to the Calder District. A year later in 1961, I was transfer to the East side of Region One to the Judith District of the Lewis and Clark National Forest as an Assistant Ranger at Stanford Montana. I became the District Ranger of the Clark Fork District on the Kaniksu National Forest in Idaho in 1966. I then moved into the Kaniksu Forest Supervisor’s Office in Sandpoint, Idaho, as the Recreation and Lands Staff Officer in 1969. Bob Lancaster selected me as his Deputy on Los Padres National Forest in 1972 and that was my first introduction to Region Five, other than previous fire assignments. AUNE: Before we get to your move to the Los Padres, what were some of your major accomplishments that you felt you had early in your career up in the forests of Idaho and Montana? BARKER: Learning the culture and history of the Forest Service and its economic impact locally was important. Lawrence Glover, the Alternate Ranger whom I mentioned previously taught me a lot about the Forest Service, how it operated and how to get things done within the organization. As an Assistant Ranger, I was in charge of fire, timber management and recreation on the district. One day I called the timber staff officer in the supervisor’s office, and I said, “I’m not going to make any timber sales next year. I’m going to take the timber money and do a Stage Two inventory of the entire district, and from that we’ll know how much commercial timber there really is on this district. A lot of what was being called commercial timber was 160 to 200 year old stagnated lodgepole pine that was 3-5 inches in diameter. Following the inventory I laid out five timber sales, which accounted for most of the commercial timber area on the district. There were a number of lodgepole stands fifty years or younger. Research indicated that lodgepole pine responds to thinning up to at least fifty years. I set up thinning contracts on those areas. For the balance of the area I told the Forest Fire Management Officer, “I’ll call you if we ever get a fire in the lodgepole and ask you two questions: one, do you want me to put it out, or two, do you want me to do some management?” [Chuckles.] AUNE: What do you mean by that? You’re kind of smiling about this. What was going on at that time? What were you thinking about? BARKER: This was 1963, and we needed somehow to convert that stagnated lodgepole pine into managed stands that provided better wildlife habitat and growth potential. There were no pulp mills in the area. One option, I thought, was selling post and poles. I contacted a couple of post and pole outfits in Lewiston, Montana, and they said, “What do you mean selling us post and poles? We’ve never been able to buy post and poles from the Forest Service. We’ve tried for years.” I said, “Well, I’ll sell them to you.” Annually they produced about 25,000 posts and 3,000 poles a year. I made a post sale for 75,000 posts, 8,000 poles, and it covered only twenty-five acres. [Chuckles.] Obviously that’s not going to get much stagnated lodgepole converted.

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