GROSCH, Ed 03-09-04 03__Corrected U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Region Five History Project

Interview with: Ed Grosch Interviewed by: Bob Smart Location: Placerville, California Date: March 9, 2004 Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; March 2004 Corrected by: Linda Nunes

ED GROSCH: You ready?

BOB SMART: Yes, you came on there real strong, so I think we’re just fine, Ed. Well, good morning. I’m Bob Smart and I’m interviewing Ed Grosch, and we’re in his home in Placerville.

We’re going to go through some of the history that Ed recalls about the Forest Service as he was coming along.

Ed, how would you describe your perspective in the Forest Service? When you look back, how do you see yourself in that?

GROSCH: How was I at that time? I was a technician that would do anything a ranger said I was supposed to do. He said, “So long as it was honest.” We did a lot of different jobs, from not only trail maintenance, counting cattle, checking range conditions, keeping roads open. We only had two roads. One was a county road, and one was a Forest Service road. My job was to do the outside work for the ranger, primarily.

SMART: Maybe I’m jumping a little farther ahead there. Let me start again. Tell me a little bit about your background, where you grew up, where you went to school.

GROSCH: I grew up in the Bay Area. I was born in Fairfax, California, and then just before the war, my dad’s job—he had to move into San Francisco because they knew that there was going Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 2 to be difficulties getting transportation in and out of San Francisco. He was a printer. So I went to high school in San Francisco and worked as an errand boy and sales clerk in photo stores for two years. And then I moved to—just quit, and I went to work for the California Department of

Forestry in Sonoma County. I worked that season and I thought, well, I’d try and see if I was smart enough to go to school, so I tried the school. Then I went up to Fortuna, worked a season up there for the CDF. I tried some more schooling and found out how dumb I was, so I moved.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: I worked on the ranches in Sonoma County, mostly poultry ranches, for the year.

SMART: About what year is this?

GROSCH: That would have been 1948, but in the fall of ’48, there was nothing around there, and so I went to middle fork of Eel River to a ranch called the Ham’s Pack Station. The old man had hurt hisself badly, and his wife and him were running a cow ranch and a hog ranch, and I asked for a job, and I got a job barndogging for them. I spent the winter there, and in the meantime—I didn’t know it—Mr. Ham went over and saw the district ranger and asked him if there was any work that I could get that coming summer. So the district ranger was Harold B.

Miller or Dusty Miller, and he called me over and asked me if I’d take an isolated-position job, and I said yes. That was 1949, in the spring.

In ’49 in the spring, he got me on as an SP-4 firefighter lookout. The first three weeks I worked, starting in late May, I worked on a trail crew, as we opened the trail all the way to Water

Spout and down to the Flying A Ranch on the Mad River. The reason we worked that is because in the middle—I forget what days it was; I think it was the third week in June—S. B. Thompson, who was the regional forester, had a congressional delegation and a bunch of other politicos that he was going to take on a fishing trip on the Eel River. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 3

SMART: [Laughs.] So you started on the Six Rivers.

GROSCH: No, I started at Covelo Ranger District..

SMART: At Covelo.

GROSCH: Yes, the Eel River. See, there’s a divide between the Eel River and the Mad River.

SMART: Okay.

GROSCH: In fact, right now they’re trying to make a wilderness out of this river that’s got roads on both sides. Actually, I started on the Eel River Ranger District, based in Covelo,

California. The ranger office actually was fourteen miles east of town, right at the base of the mountains. The Ham’s ranch was across the river from the office, on the other ridge. It was a

5,500-acre cattle ranch. And he had—what do you call it? Not a dude ranch, a hunting camp there. Took hunters out to hunt deer and stuff, bear.

SMART: So that was your first exposure to horses?

GROSCH: No, no, I’d been exposed to them for many years, as a kid and stuff, and young person. Do you want me to tell you one of the first? I was about nine years old when my uncle took me to Government Flat there on the Mendocino National Forest, where there was a pack station. There was a man packing materials to a summer lodge by an oil magnate from Southern

California. I can remember this little man. He was a small man. He’s only five-foot-six. He had a great big 1,600-pound mule, and he stood the slates for a full-sized pool table up in a tepee, on boxes, and he had an Indian boy helping him, and he walked that mule under those two slates and then he lashed them on. He handed the boy the lead rope, and he says, “Start walking and don’t let that mule stop until you get to Slane’s Flat,” which was a seventeen-mile haul. I think it was about 900 pounds worth of slate on top of this great big mule, and that boy walked it to

Slane’s Flat. In 1951, I went to Slane’s Flat, and that pool table was still there. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 4

SMART: [Laughs.] Was it in a lodge?

GROSCH: Yes, a beautiful lodge. Had a beautiful big kitchen, had refrigerators, stoves. Had small isolated bedrooms down a long hall. It was a beautiful place.

SMART: This was a private in-holding?

GROSCH: Yes, it was a private section of land that had been bought by this oil magnate from

Southern California, when the sheep industry went belly up in the twenties.

SMART: Do you remember what his name was?

GROSCH: Peters.

SMART: Peters?

GROSCH: Yes, Elwood Peters from Southern California, mm-hm.

SMART: It sounds like a pretty nice lodge.

GROSCH: Oh, it was. There was another one that was built just under Black Butte Mountain off in the middle of the forest, Keller’s Lake. He’d built the lake, actually, in a swamp, and then he ran his powerhouse from it and stuff, and he had a beautiful, big lodge. I’m trying to think where I’ve got a photograph of it. It was a log lodge, and it was built around a central, big, open living room, with a second story with all the bedrooms upstairs. And it had everything: refrigeration, stoves, the whole works, lights—because it had a Pelton water wheel electric generator system.

SMART: These places were inside the national forest?

GROSCH: Yes, in private in-holdings within the national forest. Those in-holdings were all taken up at one time, before the turn of the [twentieth] century, for the livestock industry, primarily for either cattle or sheep. Then, of course, when the sheep industry went belly up there Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 5 right after World War I, along in the early twenties, why, that’s when several of those properties traded hands.

The Keller place, their lodge is now owned by the Forest Service. The property was traded out. Slane’s Flat is still owned privately. I do have a map. I’ve got old maps here from those places, and I’ve got a new one, too. [Chuckles.]

SMART: So when you think about the back country of the Mendocino, it actually turned out we have a couple of very wealthy people living back there in pretty high style, it sounds like.

GROSCH: Oh, yes, very high style. When men were working for thirty-five dollars a month and the supervisors were fifty-five dollars a month, and they were working ten hours a day, hey, you know, that was pretty high living for a lot of guys. It was better than nothing. What’s kind of interesting to me is when I went in ’49, we came out of Covelo, and you went to the Eel River ranger station. The tiny road went over the mountain through Black Butte Mountain and down through Alder Springs, which at that time was the forest supervisor’s headquarters, into Willows.

It had been built by Forest Service forest accounts on different projects. Took them several years to do it. And that was the only road on the middle fork of the Eel River all the way into the headwaters of the Mad River. If you rode a horse out of the Eel River ranger station, it took you nine hours to get to Indian Dick Guard Station, which was twenty-four miles. It took you another seven hours to get over to Mad River, just riding along. And you better hope the river was low or the trail was open so you can get through.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: Because if you went early in the spring, there was two ways to get across the northern part of the middle fork. One was on a bridge that’s not there anymore, and the other was to ford the river. Well, if the river was high, you couldn’t ford, and—the bridge went into a Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 6 bluff and if the bluff had sloughed off during the winter, you had to dig your way through that, so that’s what we did that year, I said in ’49, when I helped the trail crew before I went on the lookout. Why, we had to dig that bridge out so that they could go through there. It was a suspension bridge for mules and horses. It was built in 1939, ’38 and ’39. They set the piers and stuff in ’38, and then they built the bridge, itself, in ’39. I wasn’t around there. I had never seen it, but I remember one of the packers that I helped that spring telling me what the dates were on the bridge and stuff, because he had carried the stuff in there.

SMART: It was all brought in by stock.

GROSCH: Oh, yes, all by livestock, mm-hm, yes. Do you want to know how they got those long cables into those kind of places?

SMART: Sure.

GROSCH: I think it was a one-and-an-eighth-inch cable, and they would throw loops in it, like half hitches? And it was—I forget the length of it now. I think the total length of the bridge was just ninety feet, so you had whatever extra cable you needed to tie in on the ends and what have you and to make the loop. They threw the loops and, as I remember him telling me, I think he said there were seven mules that were broke to stay together and follow a certain way, and they had two of those loops laid out on either side, and they walked the line of mules in between them, and then they lifted the cables up and tied them on the top over their pack saddle, and then after they got them all loaded, they stepped off with the lead mare, and they walked it all the way to the bridge site.

SMART: So I understand, you have this one big long coil of cable.

GROSCH: Mm-hm.

SMART: And then you’ve got it draped on four or five different mules? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 7

GROSCH: Seven, they took.

SMART: Seven?

GROSCH: Let me turn this over here. [Pause as he looks for a photograph.] The mules came down that way, and each one of these laid up over a mule.

SMART: Okay, so you have a series of coils, and each one is [unintelligible]. Wow, that’s really something to see. That’s better than a lead rope holding them together.

GROSCH: You know how they got the long steel in there?

SMART: No.

GROSCH: They had a fifth wheel on top of the first pack mule, and the second mule, they tied them in a bunch on the first and then spread them in a wide, like a travois, and the other mule was in the back here this way [demonstrates]. Now, they had to use a certain trail because if they had any switchbacks, they couldn’t make the switchbacks.

SMART: How long was that steel?

GROSCH: The longest one was twenty-three feet. I think there was thirteen or fourteen of those in that, pieces of steel.

SMART: You said the bridge was build in?

GROSCH: Thirty-eight and ’39, as I remember him telling me, mm-hm.

SMART: So in 1949 you found yourself working with packers?

GROSCH: Yes, that spring, yes. And I learned an awful lot about putting loads on, because we used kind of an adaption of a sawbuck saddle with some of the Spanish systems on it. In other words, it had the boards and stuff to keep it out from the animal.

Then I went to fire school at that time, when—I actually helped them pack that—Mr.

Thompson’s group—that morning, and they went off up the river. I and the assistant ranger then Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 8 went over to Alder Springs to the fire school, which was a Sunday. We were there until Friday morning. We finished up our wildland fire training, and we had lookout training first. Gave me radio communications, and then tools and then fire behavior and then an actual fire to put out.

And that was what we did Friday morning. We wrastled that out and cleaned up our stuff and went back to our various places.

On Friday afternoon, the assistant ranger and the two other Forest Service fire guards—one was the Indian Dick’s fire guard and one was the Poison Rock fire guard—we drove some sedans around through Highway 101 to Fortuna or just south of Fortuna, and into the

Mad River so that when the party came out with the bunch—the political party came out, they’d have vehicles to get home with.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: We came back by horse. I remember I had nine animals behind me, and I was in the middle, and we rode from Mad River to Eel River in one sixteen-hour-and-a-half day.

SMART: Wow. That’s a lot of riding.

GROSCH: We never stopped.

SMART: Do you know who the politicals were that were on that trip?

GROSCH: Let’s see, I know there was two county supervisors, but I can’t remember their names. One of them, I believe, was Broddous, but I wouldn’t want to swear to that. He was a

Mendocino County man.

SMART: They were county. And?

GROSCH: Yes, and there were two congressional people, or three. I forget exactly how many.

There was one heck of a crowd of fellows. There was two Sierra Club people involved also that got invited to go. I think there was a Washington office timber officer. I can’t remember now. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 9

Because I wasn’t intimately connected—the only reason I remember Mr. Thompson is because I remember him sitting up on that saddle horse, and he looked just like old Gen. Armstrong or something on his horse.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: You know what I mean? He was riding an officer’s saddle, and he was sitting up there just as straight as a ramrod. Have you seen the pictures of Elmer Kock, the Montana ranger? K-o-c-k, out of Missoula?

SMART: Probably have. I didn’t recognize it at the time.

GROSCH: Just a minute. I’ll get his picture.

Anyhow, when I helped those packers putting that stuff together the night before they took off—we did it all in the evening—come on [he says to himself, as he looks for the photograph]—why, one of the mules carried nothing but two kayaks full of hard liquor.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: Which was kind of interesting to me.

SMART: And you say Thompson’s job was what?

GROSCH: Regional forester.

SMART: Regional forester.

GROSCH: See that man? [Shows photograph.]

SMART: Oh, yes. Dave Kock. Elmer Kock.

GROSCH: There’s a book—yes, Elmer. I should have said Elmer.

SMART: Oh, yes. Well, you said an officer’s saddle. What was the difference between the officer’s saddle and— Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 10

GROSCH: It had a horn on a military saddle for an officer, and it had a slightly different cantle in the back. And also the stirrups were easier to ride in than the regular trooper’s saddle.

SMART: [unintelligible].

GROSCH: Oh, yes, lots of different...

But anyhow, after fire school and we got those cars jamming around, it was getting close then to the end of the month, and I think it was the thirtieth or so of June. We packed up the radio technician, the assistant ranger and the packer and myself, and we went to Beaver Glade that first day. Of course, you always did all your arranging your packs the night before because you started loading before daylight so you could get out of the canyon in the heat. You didn’t want to be down in that canyon there.

We went to Beaver Glade, which had a fenced-in little pasture where we could stay the night. It also had the telephone. Then the next day we went up to Hammer Horn. I know it was before the Fourth of July, so it was around the first, I thought, the thirtieth of June or first of July

I went to Hammer Horn. The radio technician was Roy Pogue, and he hooked up the radios for us because they had taken the telephone out the year before. In 1948 they did away with the telephone system at that point.

SMART: Describe the radios. What were the radios like?

GROSCH: They were a big square—they called them T sets, and they hung on the side of your mounting or your pedestal for your fire finder, and underneath they had two banks of batteries.

There was two or four of those 45-volt batteries and [counts to himself] one, two, three, four—I think there was four cases of one-and-a-half-volt—they were telephone cell—hooked up in a certain way, and the two banks were set up so that there was a throw switch. One was for night, and one was for day. And so in other words, you’d throw for the night switch when you went to Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 11 bed, and then you’d throw it to the day switch in the morning, when you got up. It had a speaker mounted in it with a hand microphone that you could talk over. It reached the dispatchers in

Alder Springs and Willows very readily. It was an older—it wasn’t this newer FM stuff.

Then they left me another radio in a little box, or portable radio, called an S set. It had a

45-volt battery, small one, and four flashlight batteries, I believe, were in it. It was a tubes radio, crystal controlled. Did you ever see one?

SMART: I don’t think so.

GROSCH: Never have? Anyhow, it had a wire antenna with a weight and string. You threw it up in the air there, threw it over a limb or something, the string, and then you stretched the wire up in the air for your antenna, and then you could turn the crystal until you could get your station that you wanted to call. And you had little earphones that you’d put on, and you could talk on the thing by pressing a switch on the box.

The nice part about the little S set that the radio technician—he gave me an extra set of batteries. He says, “Well, now you can listen to the ballgames here while you’re here alone,” and he showed me how to twist that crystal so that I could listen to KGO and listen to the ballgames.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: [Laughs.] Because I didn’t have a portable radio or anything at that time, and that was a way. But I really didn’t need a portable radio because there were so many things to do around there and watch nature. I was very fortunate to watch a pair of bald eagles nest within three miles of me.

SMART: Now, which tower were you in? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 12

GROSCH: Called Hammer Horn Lookout. It’s now gone. There’s a picture on the wall around here we can show you later. I’ve got pictures if you ever want them. It was Hammer Horn. It had been built in I think it was 1920, 1921, something like that. But there were so many other things going on around there. You know, like, I had to carry my water from a spring which was about a quarter mile away or so. It was a rocked-up dugout. We dug a hole and rocked up the edges, and we put a wooden lid over the top of it, and that was my drinking water and whatever water I was to use. In fact, I hauled—they had an old washtub there that I could haul down there, and I’d build a fire under it and get some warm water and sit myself in it to get a sponge bath once a week or so. [Laughs.]

SMART: What was the living accommodations at Hammer Horn?

GROSCH: Well, they had a wood stove, an old wood heater in one corner. They had a couple of cabinets around under the windows. The stove consisted of a kerosene stove. It was a two- burner kerosene stove, and there was a tin oven that you could put on top of one of the burners to bake biscuits or bread or something of that nature. There was a dishpan to wash your few dishes in, and you had some pots. Nothing fancy about the cooking gear, but it was serviceable.

SMART: Was there a cabin on the ground, in the tower?

GROSCH: No, you slept in the tower. There was an old military bunk bed with a mattress on it, and you had your blankets. It was in one corner. Everything had to be below the window level, and the window level, as I remember, was just about twenty-one inches off the floor, something like that. I can’t remember exactly now.

And then outside, there was a box that I had fire tools in, like a shovel, a Pulaski, brush hook, ax, cross-cut saw, some other things I can’t remember—oh, wedges and what have you, hammer. Then the water cans, yes. They had two five-gallon cans, or actually had four, four Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 13 five-gallon cans that were square. They were built to go in a rack that hung on a pack saddle.

Maybe you’ve seen them. I don’t know. When a packer would come by, you maybe could finagle him to go down and get you a bunch of water in them. But usually I went every morning just before sunup and I’d go down to the spring with five canteens and fill those up and then bring them up for the day, and so that usually would suffice me for most of the days.

When I went from Covelo or left the ranger station, I had been told that I had to be prepared to have at least thirty days’ worth of groceries with me, so I had to go into town to arrange credit [chuckles] with the local grocery store to buy my groceries ahead of time.

Fortunately, the Ham ranch had put up hams and bacon and turkey that winter, and so I had a big ham and a big slab of bacon that they gave me to save me buying that, but I had to buy my flour and the beans and whatever dried products that I could take. I forget how much I had on the food bill, but I was very fortunate because Mr. Ham and his wife had cosigned for me at the grocery store to get my groceries. [Laughs.] Because I just didn’t have that much cash.

SMART: Oh, yes.

GROSCH: You know. And from the time you’re hired and the time you get your first check is four or five weeks or more. By that time, I was already out in the woods. But then after they left me, Roy Pogue and them went back down to the Eel River, and I guess they spent a day down there fishing for Roy, before they went back to Eel River. And I stayed at the Hammer Horn

Lookout through the summer, until October sometimes. I forget exactly. I think it was around the tenth or twelfth of October we got a storm come in off the coast, and they declared the fire season over for the Mendocino. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 14

Then the packer come and took me out. In fact, I got three days of deer hunting just before the hunting season closed, free, gratis. No pay, of course, but I got three days off down there at Indian Dick’s, and we got to kill some bucks, him and I, to go out with.

During that time, like I say, at Hammer Horn it was very interesting because I was able to study lots of things about what was going on in nature. I had very good outdoor lessons about chipmunks, squirrels, birds, deer, you name them, bear, all kinds of things. I had no company. I didn’t see a human until about the fourth or fifth day of August. I forget what it was now. It was the first weekend in August because that’s when the deer-hunting season opened just to the south of the lookout. And several people camped down a ways from the lookout, in a place called

French Cove, and then they went over into Mendocino County to hunt. That’s when I got my first visitors.

So, like I say, it was a kind of interesting job. Then in the middle of August we got a thunderstorm come through and I was able to spot some fires. One of them was right just near the lookout, and finally the dispatcher said, “Well, you can go down there and see if you can put it out,” and that was about dark, so I wandered down there with my Pulaski and shovel, flashlight. It was about, oh, I guess a half a mile from the house. And I got to the little fire, and it was just smoldering around a little piece of stump and stuff. Well, it was more than a stump; it was probably thirty feet up in the air, the piece of wood that had gotten on fire. By a place we called Powell Cabin. I put the ring around it, and then I started crawling around, digging out the duff that was on fire, because it had been wet with that particular lightning storm, and you just didn’t have that kind of flaming front. You know what I mean? And so I worked pretty much most of the night and got it pretty well hooked up and out. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 15

So the next morning I wandered back up to the lookout, and I guess I got there about nine or ten o’clock and called in. The dispatcher was Ripley, Ripley—what was his name? Ripley.

He went to the Plumas a little later. And I told him. He says [imitating nasal, high-pitched voice]: “Well, fine,” he says, “make out your fire report.” Didn’t say anything about a time report, just “make out your fire report.” [Laughs.]

SMART: What kind of personal protective gear did you have at the time?

GROSCH: I had a pair of boots that I had paid fifty bucks for, my jeans, ordinary Levi jeans, a cotton shirt, khaki type shirt, because that’s what they wanted. I had a hat, a felt hat. I had gloves, but I don’t think I took them with me. The only reason I had gloves is because I thought maybe I’d be involved with some kind of barbed wire or something at some point or another, or handling a lot of rock or something.

SMART: You said you had gone through fire school, so that would be the approved gear for anybody fighting a fire at that time.

GROSCH: At that time, yes. Oh, yes, the approved gear was just cotton clothes and a hat, usually a brimmed hat of some sort. Caps were frowned on. Hardhats weren’t available to us in any way, shape or forms. Gloves, if you weren’t used to working hard—and, of course, I had hardened my hands up to the point where I really didn’t need them except when I handled barbed wire or something of that nature. You got calluses on your hands pretty much when you worked with tools to the point you didn’t need them, but that was the only safety equipment we had.

They taught us, like, you know, don’t carry the ax over your shoulder, carry it down; the

Pulaski the same thing. Shovels, don’t put them on your shoulder. They did provide scabbards for the Pulaski and the ax. You used those. The cross-cut saw—yes, we used to take the single- jacket fire hose, when it had been broken enough, and we would cut it lengthwise and then we’d Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 16 put that over the teeth of the saw and then wrap it with a cord of some kind. If we could get it, we would make rubber bands out of inner tubes out of truck tires. The old rubber bands out of those were nice and stretchy and very strong compared to today’s rubber. You would keep your guard on that way.

So I worked till November there, and then—let’s see, we killed our deer, and we went back to the Eel River. I was there. I took my meat into the meat market, and I settled up my bill the next day. The ranger asked me to stay a couple days more, another week’s more, and I helped him with some roadwork. One of the road works was we had—I believe it was Diston

—it might have been a Mercury, but it was a Diston twin-cylinder chainsaw. The motor alone, without the transmission and bar on it, weighed eighty-five pounds.

SMART: [Chuckles.]

GROSCH: And old Roy, who was the packer, and myself and Arnie Hanson and the district ranger—we worked on this road, and we also bucked up this big pine tree for firewood that the ranger hauled in on his time off. That’s the first real chainsaw I saw and worked with, that big old thing. It weighed a total of a hundred-and-some-thirty pounds or more when it was fully rigged together.

SMART: So it had to be a two-person saw.

GROSCH: Oh, yes. It had a stinger on the end, yes. Oh, yes, though I saw a falling team the next spring on the west side of Covelo, up in the hills there. One of them was falling with a similar saw. I think it was the Mercury. It was a twin-cylinder, and he was working it alone, on falling. But he had dogs on it that would kill a goat. And he stuck that in there, and that’s how he held that saw engine so that he could work, and he worked alone. How he bucked it, I’ll be damned if I know. I didn’t stay around that long. Yes. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 17

So then in 1950—well, that winter I went to work again on the Ham Ranch and worked with those people, but I also helped on the San Luis Ranch, which was up on the mountain to the east. Then I helped over on the Newhall Land and Cattle Company a couple of times, which was in the south side of Covelo in the Round Valley. And that was related to the Newhall Land and

Cattle Company in Southern California.

Then that spring, the ranger hired me again to go on the trail jobs and do some other things around there. Oh, I painted the office and one of the residence. That was the spring that

Roy Holke, Assistant Ranger, had to quit because his wife landed in an iron lung. He quit and went back to Southern California with his wife so she could be in the iron lung and cared for.

She had contracted polio.

So anyhow, then—let’s see, we got a fellow—I believe it was Les Clark that summer.

He came on after I had gone up to the lookout, and that year, also that winter the radio tech had changed. Roy Pogue had gone to the Los Padres, and a fellow by the name of Kenneth Greene had come on as the technician for the radios on the Mendocino. He spent his career there.

SMART: Were these radios just direct, line-of-sight kind of radios?

GROSCH: No, no, they were the old AM broadcast kind. Like I say, they were crystal controlled. The T set—when the radio tech put it in, that was one of his things. He had to make sure that crystal was correct in there and wouldn’t move.

SMART: But there were no repeaters.

GROSCH: Yes, there was repeaters at the various lookouts to turn it down into the canyons and stuff because, as you probably know, on the old radios, when you were in a canyon, you couldn’t get out. Well, my lookout didn’t have a repeater, but the lookout south of me on Anthony Peak had a repeater, and to get it, you had to call him, and then he would turn it on for you. We used Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 18 to have to—he’d not only turn it on; then you’d do your communications, and if I talked to you,

I’d say, “Bob Smart, duh, duh, duh. Over.” He would have to throw the switch to the other side, and then the other person would make his comments, and then say, “Over,” and then he threw the switch again, so he had to be there. They were man-and-wife teams, and they were never out of that lookout together. That was twenty-four hours a day there for those people. They weren’t like I was that I could walk off in the morning to go get my water and stuff like that. There was three of those. One was there at Anthony Peak, one was at Hull Mountain, and one was at Goat

Mountain.

SMART: So by 1949 the Mendocino no longer used ground lines at all.

GROSCH: No, no, they still had ground lines, but they were limited, very limited. On the

Covelo District, the ground lines were one to Anthony Peak up the ridge from the ranger station, which was, what, six or seven miles. Then the other one was to Indian Dick’s and out to Mad

River. They had severed the one at Mad River up by what they call Water Spout, so we couldn’t communicate all the way through. But the line was still there, and I could use it to communicate from up the line.

But then the other line went up to Poison Rock, which was to the southeast of the ranger station. That only lasted that summer, and then it was out. We took it down. Well, in fact, that was when I said we were cutting wood. That was part of our job: rolling the wire up and taking it out, pulling that wire out of their way.

Then in ’50, I believe in 1950 Jim Kaiser, the supervisor, ordered that the telephone lines had to be taken out at Hull Mountain, Goat Mountain, Anthony Peak, and Alder Springs, I believe, too. And Alder Springs had had full development of switchboards and all kinds of stuff Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 19 there. But he ordered it all out. He said, “We’re either going to be radios or we’re going to be telephones.”

Well, Dusty Miller—he didn’t like the idea of not having a phone up to his two primary firefighters [chuckles], which was kind of interesting. When I got to Indian Dick’s, that was even funnier. But...let’s see, in the fall of ’50, I went—after Durcey had changed.

Oh, they had another one of those fishing expeditions that fall in 1950 also, but there was a new regional forester, and I can’t remember right now his name, but he moved—hmm. It doesn’t matter. Anyhow, they had another one of those political things. See, at that time, there was still a push to develop timber and resources, recreation and so forth into these kind of areas.

Like I say, there was no roads north of Highway 7, which bisected the Mendocino National

Forest. The nearest ones were over on the east side, out of Paskenta and they only came into the forest a few miles. So it was a big chunk of land. I’ll get out the old maps, and you can take a look at them after a while.

SMART: So the purpose of the trips, as you understand, was try to probably build up some thoughts about “let’s utilize this national forest”?

GROSCH: Right, yes, yes, utilization of it properly and stuff. To me, I could not see anything wrong with it. I kind of liked the idea of wilderness to a certain extent, but I could also understand that our next generation of people or second generation of people are going to need more than what I got. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with all the big houses we’re building, but

I also say, hey, we need housing and we need timber and what have you, and we need cattle, w need sheep, and we need recreation, and we need fish and so forth. But that’s where I was.

SMART: When you think back about the era of 1958, ’59 and ’60—of ’40 and ’49 and

’50—when you look out at the forest, what does the vegetation look like? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 20

GROSCH: The east side of the country drained into the Sacramento River. It was called Tom’s

Creek, which is a big canyon runs out there by Corning into the Sacramento River. That was timbered with glades, as they called them in that part of the world. There were open areas of usually flats with water that had been homesteaded at one time and another. Not all of them, but some of them. The west side was more open and broken, more brush but bigger trees where there was good soil in areas, though on the east side there was some hellacious—at one time the largest-diameter fir tree ever cut on the Mendocino was a fourteen-foot something on the

Paskenta Ranger District.

SMART: When you hear—

GROSCH: It was more open. We—

[CD change]

GROCH: I was just on the back edge of the light burner situation on the Mendocino. The year before I got there, they had moved in two people, one from the regional office and one from

Southern California on the lake district, Upper Lake District. One was Red Anderson and one was Doc Davis. They were to try and stop the Mendocino light burners of Lake and Mendocino

County. And I was on the back end of that. In other words, it had declined quite a bit.

SMART: Tell me some more about the light burners.

GROSCH: A light burner was usually some kind of a stockman type or maybe a poacher, deer poacher. In the fall, they would go along with a five-cent box of matches and drop matches in whatever they thought would catch fire, and ride out. Usually they would do it late in the day, knowing that maybe no lookout would see it until the next day and they would get a burn of some kind. Usually you had your north winds in October, November on the coast country. They would burn a lot of the lighter brush. Yes, there would be trees killed, yes. But the ones I knew Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 21 about—very seldom did it actually kill all the timber. It was mostly brush things gone. Some of the old-timers I can remember telling me, when they were, like, over by Keller’s Lodge, “God, we should have had a burn in here. When I was a boy, I used to be able to see from here down to old Carpenter’s place,” and that was just a half a mile away. Now there was big manzanita bushes and stuff. They told me those kinds of stories. Now, whether they were true or not...I kind of suspect they were, from what little actual experience I had of firefighting or lighting fires at that time of the year.

SMART: But it sounds like two people came out to try to get the light burners from doing their thing.

GROSCH: Mm-hm, one of them was Doc Davis, who was a very famous FMO [fire management officer] from the Cleveland Forest. He transferred there. And the other one was

Red Anderson, who had been in the regional office but he had also very extensive fire background, and he came to Upper Lake.

SMART: Were they actually law enforcement officers?

GROSCH: No, one was a district ranger and one was the FMO or what they called the assistant fire control officer. And that’s all they were. They lived amongst the people, and they would just stalk them in and grab them when they could. They were out there in the middle of the night, finding them and stuff like that. See, the last band of sheep kept on the Mendocino

National Forest was in 1952, on a permit. Now, he had private land holdings that he kept his sheep on at night—you know, a bed ground. But he grazed into the national forest. That was the last band of sheep that were there. But on the Covelo District, on the area I worked primarily in the middle fork of the Eel River, there were five cow permits, which entailed something like 450 to 500 cattle. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 22

SMART: When they decided to go after these light burners, was there any sense inside the organization that maybe the light burning should be allowed to go on?

GROSCH: No, it was considered Piaute forestry. I’m sure you’ve heard that term, Piaute forestry, before.

SMART: Give me your description of it.

GROSCH: Piaute forestry (the name of an Indian tribe) was where you let the fires burn so that your game and your grazing, animals could get through and what have you. They weren’t necessarily involved that they had to save trees. Trees were nice, yes, but they didn’t need great big pumpkins. But that was Piaute forestry, was using a match. And I think there was a certain amount of use by the Native American people of fire, very definitely. They knew what the consequences of it was, and they knew enough to get out of the way of it when it came naturally, and it was something not to be abused in that sense, but they also knew that it did create certain other things for them, especially in the meadow burning, where the rushes grow and the cattails and things of that nature. Those were where they got their roots for certain things, and they also—well, cattails you can eat the biggest parts of them.

SMART: When there was a fire in the forest, was there ever a question raised at guard school or anytime saying, “How come we’re fighting fires?”

GROSCH: Yes, a couple of times, yes.

SMART: What was the answer?

GROSCH: Preserve our timber and our water, preserve the water primarily. First, preserve the water and then preserve the trees, timber for future generations. The water—seemed like that was the first primary things that came out. Then also it was the livestock food, because you created a certain amount of new growth that was good for livestock, especially sheep. You burn Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 23 a stand of leather oak or that kind of oaks, and you get a dandy crop next year that the sheep just get fatter than a pig on. [Chuckles.] They really do. But that was what the primary response was: water and trees, or timber.

Of course, timber didn’t have a big dollar value in those days, either. Cripes, if I remember right, over there in Paskenta, they were talking about getting a dollar and a half a thousand for pine timber and twenty-five cents for cedar, something like that. It wasn’t very much. That was Crane’s Mills.

SMART: Did you participate in any major fires on the Mendocino during that time?

GROSCH: Oh, yes, later on, but not that first two years or so. In ’51 I was involved in a couple of good fires. One was the first time I saw a smoke jumper. Actually worked with him. We’d had a lightning storm go through on the very north end of the district and the southern end of the

Six Rivers over into the Trinity country, and it left a couple of fires on the district. I got the dispatch at seven o’clock at night or something to go to them, and I went with my livestock and my equipment. I got to the first one, and it wasn’t much, and I just kind of kicked the line around it and went to the other one, because I knew it was down in a timber stand with some nice trees on it and also it as by a watershed that was very valuable.

And so I got to it. It was about one acre. And so I tied my stock up and took care of things, and I got to hammering on it. By nine o’clock in the morning, I had it pretty well surrounded, but I didn’t have the snags down or have any of the fire on the ground out, but it was contained within the hand lines. And here come a Nordine aircraft over. He circled and circled, and so I went and got my SX set. I had a modern SX radio, which was still a tube type, but it had a different kind of antenna. So I set it up, and I tried to call somebody, but I didn’t get anybody. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 24

Pretty soon a little yellow parachute come floating out of the airplane, and I watched it come down. I said, What the hell is gonna happen now? And then here come—it come around again, and two parachutes come out with bundles on them. Now, what the hell? I don’t need anything, but I’ll go watch where they go. They landed just a little ways from where we were, or

I was.

And so then I had to go take care of my animals because one of those packages landed pretty close to them and it kind of scared them a little bit. And so I was standing there amongst them, and here it come again, and I saw these guys standing on the edge of the door of this

Nordine. And all of a sudden, two bodies come out of there, and I heard the words,

“Geronimo.” So let out a war whoop to them. And, of course, their chutes opened and they come floating in. And the Nordine come around again, and while these two guys were gathering their chutes, why, here come two more out. And so they got down okay.

So there was four of them and me, and we looked at the fire. They were out of Cave City

Junction, Oregon, which was the nearest smoke jumpers. They said, “Nobody was supposed to be on this fire. You damn near scared us back into the airplane—

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: —“when you let out that war whoop.” They were a wild bunch. One of them was training to be a doctor. One of them, the Oriental fellow, was training to be a biologist-botanist.

He was an Oriental. I can’t think of any of their names. I never wrote them down, of course.

And they’re the ones that had—the first time I’d ever seen a ribbon saw, which was a six-foot- long piece of very flexible saw blade, only probably the backing was very thin. I would imagine between where the gullets were and the back edge of this blade was maybe four inches. And Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 25 then you had your teeth, which were another two or three inches, and they were six feet long, and they were smoke jumper designed and used.

So anyhow, we dropped the snag and cut it up and fooled around and got it pretty well taken care of that day. That’s where I got my first introduction to a C-ration. I’d never seen one before. I’d always supplied my own groceries. I still did. But they showed me these C-rations, and they were cussing them and so forth, and I thought, Gee, that was quite a turkey dinner.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: So the next day, we’re finishing up, and they were going to walk out to Mad River, which was the closest road. We’re fooling around there, and I found out they all carried .22- caliber pistols, little what they called high-standard automatics, which had a two- or three-inch barrel on them. And they had a box of cartridges with them, on each one. [Chuckles.]

SMART: Was this government issue?

GROSCH: No, no! This was something they—

SMART: Smoke jumper’s special.

GROSCH: Yes, smoke jumper’s special, right. And so anyhow, we lined up some of the tin cans down there on this log where we put the fire out on, and we didn’t pay attention, and they started banging away at them. [Laughs.] They went to gather up their tools because, see, they had to bring all their tools back, along with their parachute, unless they...And they found three of their canteens with bullet holes in them.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: Oh, what were we going to do now? So I treated them to two canteens I had, and then I let the mule step on the other so they could really say that the mule had busted them up.

[Laughs.] But I did two good ones, and they had to take the other one. What’s kind of Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 26 interesting: Most of the firefighters don’t realize that at that time up until I guess about—yes, it was about 1955—we had to bring our broken tools home. If you didn’t come back in with them, you could find them on your paycheck. Somehow or another, I conned those smoke jumpers out of that saw.

SMART: The ribbon saw.

GROSCH: The ribbon saw, because I had a Simmons full-size falling saw, seven feet long, that

I had been carrying and could use, but it was heavy, and I conned them out of that ribbon saw, and I used that for all the time I was around that part of the world. Plus I had a regular falling ax and stuff.

SMART: You had stock.

GROSCH: Yes, a horse and two mules.

SMART: Were you the packer for the district?

GROSCH: No, no, there was a packer all the time that I was at that part of the world, but I did help pack and move stuff, depending on what was needed, and continued doing some of that even after they laid off the packer in 1955.

SMART: So how many head were on the district at that time?

GROSCH: The first year, I think there was thirteen mules and seven saddle horses plus the district ranger’s horse. Then, of course, Paskenta had three or four mules and several saddle horses. I never did know how many of those. Upper Lake had a couple of mules. No, they had more than that. They had five mules, I believe, and three or four horses. And Stonyford had several mules and a horse. I didn’t know their number at first. I never did really figure those numbers out. I know when they had those big pack trips in the spring that way, they brought all Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 27 that stock to Eel River to use for the trips. They also rented stock from the local packers if they needed it.

SMART: You were up there doing packing activities, but you weren’t a packer.

GROSCH: No.

SMART: Was everybody expected to be kind of—

GROSCH: Oh, yes, yes, pretty much. Well, maybe not the Poison Rock firemen or the Anthony

Peak Lookout, but the rest of the people had to pretty much know their way around livestock, mm-hm. They may not know the packing of, say, the 23-foot long poles or any of that kind of stuff, but they had to know how to balance a load of groceries and put their bedding on and so forth.

I want to tell you a funny one. When I first went there in ’49, the ranger asked me if I had my own sleeping bag or bedding, and I said yes, because I did. And he says, “Well, if you didn’t, I could supply you with a government-issued sleeping bag, a kapok sleeping bag,” he says, “but it’ll cost you fifty cents a night.” “Fifty cents a night? Hmm! Wow! I’m getting seven dollars and eighty cents a day?” Then he says, “Yeah, and when you sleep out there in the tent where it’s got the platform and a bed, that’ll be another fifty cents a night.” “Huh? Okay.”

So when we were on the trail job, I found out because we had those folding cots under us and the goddamn tent, we were again fifty cents a night.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: [Laughs.] And that’s the truth. You can go look in the records of that, because when they issued our—like, they gave me a badge, a silver badge and a key, a Forest Service standard key. [Transcriber’s note: According to Mr. Smart’s memo, technicians were called sub- professionals until about 1951 and wore silver badges, while the professionals wore bronze Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 28 badges.] You signed a property slip for those. After fire school, we got our briefcase, which carried your map and your fire reports and your pencils and things, and that was on your property record. Then when you got your fire tools, they put down Pulaski, ax. Whatever tools you took out of the warehouse were on your property list, and if you came back without them, well, that’ll be a dollar and this’ll be fifty cents and so forth. Now if you tried that on our modern-day firefighters, they’d say, “Go hike.” [Laughs.]

SMART: How did you keep track of your daily activities? Did you have a diary?

GROSCH: Oh, yes, that was one of the things at the fire school. Well, I knew about them beforehand because of the foreman on the trail job, but at fire school they instructed us on how to keep a diary. At the lookout, you had a regular book that was called The Daily Log and Diary.

You logged all your radio calls and visitors and kept track of the weather and stuff on it. But once I went on to the smoke chaser bit, you carried your little pocket notebook and a pencil, and every night you wrote in it that you started whatever and you finished whatever and so forth, and you kept that. Then every once in a while—it wasn’t on a regular basis—they’d call up and ask for that notebook. And the administrative officer then I guess checked the daily record against what was on your payroll, because you didn’t see your payroll

SMART: How did you turn your payroll in?

GROSCH: They’d just send it in. You got so much a day, and that was it.

SMART: That was it.

GROSCH: Yes. Overtime didn’t come in, I think, until ’52; ’52 or ’53, overtime came in. Then in ’55 is when differential set in.

SMART: So if you worked eight hours or you worked six hours or if you worked twelve hours, it didn’t make any difference, you got paid the same? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 29

GROSCH: I did, yes. SPF poor.

SMART: [Chuckles.] Those of you had to work with livestock, I guess your days were pretty long.

GROSCH: Yes. Oh, you bet. You got up at four o’clock in the morning or earlier to start...When I was helping, like, down from the Eel River ranger station with that old packer, he used to take—maybe it would be eight-thirty at night. He’d say, “I’ll drink one glass of water.

We’ll get up about three.” And you’d hear him at three o’clock rattling the stove lids on the little stove we had, building a fire. He said, “Okay, hit it, Ed. You go out there and fork the hay down to those mules and stuff, and I’ll get the breakfast started.” And we’d eat. I’d come back in, and by the time we finished eating and cleaned our dishes and stuff—we didn’t have any refrigeration or anything—why, it was time to go out and start saddling animals. Of course, like

I said, we always had our loads all made up the night before.

Another thing I had to do was go get the mail and get it to him. He’d be gone by five- thirty, six, and so was I if I was going with him. Like I say, we’d reach Osborne, which was the first guard station, which was ten miles. We’d reach it at about nine o’clock, something like that, ten maybe. Then we’d let them drink there and rest while we changed loads around, depending on what was to be left at Osborne. And then we’d load up again and go on up the road. Maybe we’d detour to a trail crew if it was near us. Then we’d get to Indian Dick’s maybe four or five o’clock, unload there and take care of our animals and then turn them out. There was a 100-acre pasture there at Indian Dick’s, and then there was another eighty acres fenced in at another place above it. We’d turn the livestock out, and we’d take care of ourselves.

There was a nice cabin there. You can see it on the wall there. That’s the house.

SMART: [unintelligible]. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 30

GROSCH: Yes. And then the next day we’d do it all over again. Maybe he’d be taking the trail crew stuff to them and I might be taking the stuff up to Hammer Horn, depending on what was needed. See, from ’51 to ’55 I serviced the Hammer Horn Lookout as it needed its service, but after ’54 there was no actual packer hired because the budget just wouldn’t cover that kind of work. Also in ’55 they started getting air support and stuff like that.

SMART: Here you guys are wandering around the forest. There’s no telephones. It sounds like the radios don’t work very good. How did people have a clue where you were?

GROSCH: You’d leave—like, as a smoke [unintelligible] from Indian Dick’s, I’d tell them—I’d call them in the morning or the night before usually, and I’d say, “I’m going to Frying Pan to work the fence over, and I’ll be there two nights at least, and then I’ll try to get over to Sulfur

Camp and look around, and then I’ll be back by the end of the week.” Next morning, you just load up. You’d pull the switch on the telephone so it wouldn’t ring, because if it rang sometimes an old bear would come up and swat it. You’d load up your stock. When you were, like, going to Frying Pan, just before I dipped over to go down into the hole, I’d get on the radio and try to contact the lookout at Hammer Horn and tell him I was okay, and then I’d see him the next day or try and talk to him the next day.

Then I’d get there and I’d work my fence or do whatever I had to do, fix the spring in the water trough and what have you, maybe work some of the trail around there, and then next morning or next day I’d go up on the ridge and call again. When the fire season really got on, along in August and stuff, if you were out on a patrol they would say, “Make a call every hour or every two hours.” Well, if it was one hour, I’d say, The hell with it. I ain’t goin’. I’ll stay around the telephone. If it was a couple hours, I’d say okay. But then I would get up on the ridges, and I could look at Hammer Horn Lookout, and I’d call in and check in. If he had a Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 31 message for me, he’d tell me what to do. Most of the time it was just routine stuff, nothing major.

There was only three man-caused fires in the five years that I knew of in that particular area, that I had anything to do with. The rest of them were lightning fires. You’d get three or four lightning fires go through there. Actually, on the ranger district there might be a dozen lightning fires from one storm, but I only went maybe to two or three of them. He would round up—the Osborne fire guard would go to some; they’d get some of the cow ranchers to go to some; the sheep men would go and maybe corral one and then wait for a Forest Service officer to come by and finish it off or something like that.

We didn’t have that kind of communications that you have to talk to your boss every day.

SMART: How were you told what the work would be?

GROSCH: The assistant ranger and the ranger made up a work list in the wintertime or something, and they had it all typed up or whatever, written up, and that was in your case when you came along in the spring. Like, when I was at the lookout, there was this work list like:

“Scrape the paint on the west and south side, and if you have time, paint parts of it. Paint will be brought up to you in July” or whatever. Never did get there till August, but...

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: But anyhow. And so you had your wire brushes and your putty knives and stuff like that that you’d do your painting with and things of that nature. Oh, I remember there was—yes, when I got to Hammer Horn, I had to fix the stairs so you could get into the darn joint.

[Chuckles.] The original stairs, when I first got there with the packer, Roy, they were made out of fir poles nailed together, old red fir poles, and they’d been in the weather quite a while. I was supposed to replace those. Well, the packer brought me up some fir poles, all right, and some Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 32 other firs, and I sawed them up and made a ladder to get back up over the rock into the lookout.

[Laughs.]

Then in 1951—there’s a picture around on the other wall of me, where we—the forest engineer had been there in ’49, and he measured it up, and he had the forest carpenter cut and make up all of the lumber for a new catwalk, new ladder, and new banisters for the lookout.

Then what they did, they had it all broke down so that the Nordine, which had moved, was brought down to Willows from Cave Junction in the spring. It was right after the Fourth of July,

I guess. They flew in all of the stuff and dropped it on the ridge, right south of the lookout. The only thing they didn’t fly in was the long timbers—there were several of those; I forget how many. Let’s see, I think there were six 12-foot-long timbers that had to come in by mule. The old packer brought them up.

SMART: The Nordine was a [microphone noise; unintelligible] or a single engine high wing.

GROSCH: Single-engine. It was a Canadian-made aircraft at that time. In fact, did you get the

National Forest Museum paper?

SMART: Sometimes.

GROSCH: You don’t belong to that organization?

SMART: No.

GROSCH: Okay. Well, it’s a single-engine unit, not very fast. I think the cruising speed was around 65 miles an hour, but I think it slowed down to something like 35 or 40 miles an hour.

That’s why they had it. But it was built strictly for cargo hauling. It wasn’t a passenger type aircraft, though they used it for smoke jumping because it was slow, but they could haul quite a crew with it. I forget how many guys and their gears you’d put in it. I think they could put eight Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 33 or something like that in there. The fellow that was the pilot was named Hank Jori. He flew helicopters his last few years out of Ukiah with a company from there.

SMART: Well, Ed, do you want to take a little break here?

GROSCH: Sure, if you want to. Maybe my missus might have something we can put our nose bag in. [Microphone noise.]

[Tape interruption for break]

GROSCH: I hope I’m telling what you want me to tell you.

SMART: Oh, you’re doing great.

GROSCH: Let’s see if I can [unintelligible] my missus while you’re doing that [apparently fiddling with the recorder controls]. You ready?

SMART: Ready.

GROSCH: All right. Check your volume. Am I talking about right?

SMART: Yep, you’re doing just fine.

Okay, well, Ed and I have just taken a break for a real nice lunch that Karen, his wife, provided for us and got a chance to meet the granddaughter, Ellery. She didn’t have much to say to us, but she’s certainly a charming [unintelligible].

Ed, one of the things I wanted to do was just go back and do a little bit of transition. You were hired on as a firefighter you said about the early fifties, then it was kind of like “we don’t have a big role for mules”?

GROSCH: Yes, it was along ’54 that the district ranger approached me with the idea. He had already gotten me a permanent appointment the year before, and there had been some engineers running around on the district, and they were talking with me, and I was moving them around from job to job in the spring. He told me—he says, “Ed, you got a choice.” He says, “Either Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 34 you’re going to be a packer or a mule fighter or you can be a firefighter. Which do you want?”

And I thought a little bit, and I then I says, “Well, I’ll take the firefighter job” because I knew that was would be a continuous employment. That’s how I came to be a firefighter more than anything with the mules and horses, though I didn’t give it up right away; I stayed with it to a certain extent.

But in ’55 the ranger asked me—that winter he asked me—on my performance time, he asked me to take on the Eel River patrolman’s job, which would be more or less like a foreman of a bunch of other people scattered across the district. So there would be a new person go to

Indian Dick’s and a new person at Osborne. Well, actually, in ’55 in Osborne they had an engineering group staying there, surveying for this road business, and they had built a Jeep road into Osborne. Then the other—Anthony Peak Lookout was there, Hammer Horn. Poison Rock was kept as a lookout building, but it was more of a fireman’s setup. A man and his wife stayed there for firefighting purposes. Only for a couple of months, they were only there. He was a schoolteacher, and they were only there two months or three months. And then there was a firefighter station at Low Gap, which was the Mendocino Pass is the proper name for it. And I had to kind of make sure the guys did their work properly, the Poison Rock and the Low Gap man and Anthony Peak. And then I checked on the Osborne, Indian Dick’s guy. Because the assistant ranger, who at that time, in ’55, was—hmm. Dang. Just had [unintelligible]. Rod

Riley. And he was tied up with the fire team from the forest quite a bit, so that he didn’t get around too much. He was always running off one place and another with the team. That’s why I got into the actual—being into more civilization, you might call it. [Laughs.]

SMART: One of the places you mentioned before is Indian Dick’s. Can you tell me how Indian

Dick’s got its name? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 35

GROSCH: Its name was after Richard Bell. He was a half-breed man hired by the White

Cattleman Company out of Covelo. He and two or three others took up homesteads around these spring areas or watered areas for the livestock industry. They were not supposed to be paid by

White Cattle Company, but they were employees of it at one point or another. But they took these up in their name. Let’s see, there was—I’d have to look on the map now. There was about five of them scattered across that part of the world.

But anyhow, he took it up, and then, shortly thereafter, the forest was laid around 1909,

1912, somewhere around in there, maybe a little later, the Forest Service declared them invalid homesteads because they weren’t true agricultural land, or they weren’t true timber claims, at least in the way the regulations were written at that time, so they invalidated them. Well, the name Indian Dick’s stuck, of that particular station. His nickname amongst the people around

Round Valley and out to the north of Round Valley was Deef Dick, because he couldn’t hear.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: That was his nickname. How I found out about the invalidation of various claims or homesteads, whatever you want to call them, was through the Brown brothers, who had a cattle permit to the north of Indian Dick’s. It ran up on Shell Mountain and up on the Water Spout,

Mad River country. They had a cow permit there. The Browns had bought some properties that they kept somehow or another, because they were under other permits before they got a hold of them. That’s when I found out about those—let’s see, there was Deer Lick Creek; there was one there. There was another one at—oh, shoot. I guess I ought to get that map out so I can look at those names.

SMART: Well, it’s— Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 36

GROSCH: But anyhow, that’s how...Now, the actual year that that was declared—I know there’s something in this latest Stephen J. [which he pronounces as Stefan] Pyne book about that invalidation of claims. I’d have to look and see if maybe...Let’s see. [Pause as he looks through book.] Yes, it starts on page fifty-nine of April—do, do, do, do, do—this would have been 1910.

SMART: The book is?

GROSCH: The Year of the Fires by Stephen J. Pyne, The Story of the Great Fires of 1910.

SMART: Okay. It gives us a good reference for that.

GROSCH: Mm-hm.

SMART: One of the things you’ve also told me at one time is that you’d given a lot of materials to Missoula. Can you describe what those materials are?

GROSCH: I got a list of them if you want to take them along.

SMART: So the historian at Missoula has a list of the different—

GROSCH: I’ve got a copy of it.

SMART: And you’ve got a list also.

GROSCH: Mm-hm. There was six or seven enamel signs said “California National Forest.”

Most people don’t know where the California National Forest is.

SMART: That was the Mendocino. Is that right?

GROSCH: That’s right.

SMART: Okay. [Laughs.]

GROSCH: It was changed sometime in either 1929 or ’30 because a lot of correspondence—you know, the mail from the public addressed to the California region was ending up in Willows, which was the winter headquarters for the California National Forest. And so anyhow, they changed the name to the Mendocino, and that is confusing because many people, when you tell Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 37 them the Mendocino National Forest, the first thing they think of is the redwoods of Mendocino coast country. They don’t think of the inland part of the county and that it covers seven counties.

There’s Trinity County, Mendocino County, Lake County, Colusa County, Glenn County,

Tehama County. So you got six counties or seven counties that are covered with the Mendocino

National Forest.

SMART: Let me go back and pick up on the firefighting part of your career. You end up being this guard on the Eel River.

GROSCH: Mm-hm.

SMART: And then what happens?

GROSCH: I spent the four summers out of Indian Dick’s, and in the wintertime I did whatever projects were available—you know, TSI [timber stand improvement] and the Christmas-tree work in the fall maybe, road work, maintenance. The road up Edsel Ridge, as they called it, was government road, and I had to maintain that or did maintain it. Also I had to feed the mules and horses on their winter pasture, which is just down the hill, and stuff.

Let’s see, one winter, I remember, I think I made fifty-seven campground tables. They brought in the lumber from someplace on a contract, and I hand-built them. I didn’t have a radial arm saw or table saw. I drilled all the holes by hand and the rest of it. We didn’t have electricity at Eel River. Eel River got its electricity in 1957. Well, it had a generator plant, but the generator plant only ran for a couple hours of a day or a night, whenever the ranger wanted it, but other than that, we didn’t have electricity.

SMART: Speaking about no electricity, when you were up at the lookout, you said you had a kind of day switch and a night switch in the battery boxes?

GROSCH: Mm-hm. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 38

SMART: What was the purpose of that?

GROSCH: That was to let the dry cells recuperate over a twelve-hour period or so. Also if you did leave one bank on too long, why, it could draw it down, especially if there was a lot of traffic on the radio. If the radio was receiving a lot of messages from other places and you were just listening, not necessarily talking, it would draw energy down out of that bank of batteries, so you had to switch it to “save” so they didn’t all go dead on one bank.

SMART: So you could still hear when you were down in this lower setting?

GROSCH: Oh, yes, you could talk and everything on it. On the night setting, you could do anything you wanted on it, the same as the day setting. It was just a way of distributing the load so that you didn’t run out of batteries. Does that make sense?

SMART: There was a hole—

GROSCH: Yes, well, if you never worked with it, you wouldn’t know. You know what I mean?

I understand that part. But my firefighting. And then I went in ’55, like I said, I was a patrolman. That was when I really got taken. We got a new ranger. Had Bill Herbelscheimer for assistant ranger, that’s right. Bill was assistant ranger. In August, the weekend after the hunting season started there in the Mendocino Forest, we got a fire on the very far end of the district, down what we called Mendenhall Canyon. Was almost on the Upper Lake Ranger

District. I was at the Eel River ranger station, and to get there you went up this road on Edsel

Ridge, a dirt road. Beyond Poison Rock it dumped into a four-wheel drive that had been built in

World War II by the military.

Well, I got out there, and that fire was cooking. The Poison Rock fireman had been ahead of me, and he’d gotten off someplace where I didn’t know where he was. I couldn’t figure out where he was, so I just forgot about him. I was standing there looking, Now, where in the Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 39 hell am I going to start on this? Here was these goddamn limbs flying off the pine trees.

[Laughs.] That’s how hot it was. I don’t think it was about eighty acres, maybe less than that maybe, maybe sixty acres. But it was really cooking. I was looking there, and then I heard this little airplane motor, and I knew what it was. It was a Stearman [PT-17] aircraft. When it got around where I could see it, I says, Oh, here it comes. It was a Nolte Brothers Stearman that had been equipped with a water-dropping gate. And he come around over that thing, and he opened his trap, and of course I could see the water come out of it, and then he flew away. I thought,

Well, I could spit on it and get as much.

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: That was my first actual experience of seeing a firefighting job by an aircraft. The next day, there was four of them in the air over that fire, that had come out of Willows, and they were getting water down by Lake Pillsbury, which was south of us there. They got there water there from Lake Pillsbury. That was the year that differentials had been set in on the firefighters,

25 percent, and we had to be on duty from seven in the morning till nine at night, and yet no overtime or anything else. Now, if there was no fires or anything, you of course got a day off, but on your sixth day you had to be at your station. You couldn’t go away. Had to be there the whole thirteen [sic; fourteen] hours.

SMART: Were you expected to work all the time?

GROSCH: Not necessarily, unless there was a going fire or the district [unintelligible] was vacated by other fire crews and you were the only one around; then you might have to work. But you didn’t have to work necessarily.

SMART: So eight hours would be—

GROSCH: On the sixth day? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 40

SMART: No, the regular.

GROSCH: Oh, yes, you worked your regular shift, but you had to be with your boots on and your hardhat at the door from ’55 at seven o’clock, and you couldn’t take your boots off until after nine o’clock.

SMART: So when did you first get exposed to hardhats?

GROSCH: [Sighs.] Was either ’53 or ‘4, and I think it was ’54, but I wouldn’t want to swear.

What they were were the ones that the miners had been—the Bureau of Mines and federal government had told the miners in the coal mines they had to wear those Bakelite ones that had the light thing on the top, and that’s what they issued to us, and the darn things weighed several pounds. I never wore mine. I carried it up on the pack saddle so in case the assistant ranger showed up, I could have it on, which he never did. But all of my timber falling had been taught to me by a Serbian in the fall of ’48 and again in the winter of ’49. He showed me how to fall timber by yourself with a handsaw.

SMART: That’s quite a feat.

So by ’52, ’53, somewhere in there, you end up with a hardhat. Is there anything else that the government is issuing you?

GROSCH: No, just the hardhat. You still had to have your cotton clothing and your boots. You had to buy your own boots and your own clothes. They weren’t issuing goggles. No, nothing like that. We used to always carry those big bandanas so we could put them around our face if we wanted to. And I always wore felt hats with a good-sized brim on them on the basis that I could duck my head to protect my ears when I got close to the flame front as I worked. If it got too hot, you could protect yourself on your neck and ears by a floppy hat. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 41

In ’55 we didn’t have anything extra. That was the year we got the differential, but the other thing we got: I joined what they used to call a short team. There was a sector boss and three crew bosses and sometimes a crew trainee boss. We would be taken from the Mendocino

Forest to other forests to work with either the farm laborers or the inmates that they brought out from various penitentiaries and what have you, or logging camp or lumber crews we would work with. We always carried our drip torches. We never went anyplace without much use of drip torches because we figured those were the best tool. We always had our fusees with us, too, but that was only so you could light it and throw it way down in the ditch. You never used it by hand. You always had your drip torch.

Anyhow, that August I got stuck all the way—I had been on two fires in late June and

July, and I can’t remember—one of them was in San Diego because I remember we went to

Julian, and we were there at Julian a few days. I can’t remember just how many days we were on a fire in there. We got home from that, and we were home just a short time, and in July we were quite a while down on this Los Padres. Must have been there almost two weeks. It was quite a while. I know that, because I remember—because they bused us home. That’s when I went through Hunter-Legget. They bused us home from someplace there.

Anyhow, we got off at Willows, but then it was just a short time later I got on this

Mendenhall fire, and I was there until Labor Day. Well, actually, what Herbelscheimer did, he made me stay and patrol the fire by myself. I had a horse and a mule, and I had to pull all that stuff that they had dropped by air and whatever scattered down the mountain. I picked up tools and hoes. I think I picked up something like seven miles of fire hose off that fire.

SMART: Wow. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 42

GROSCH: Because there was a lake down there, a little pond, and they put a Pacific Marine pump down there with these hoses, and I pulled it all up to the Jeep road so they could get it out of there. Labor Day, the Haystack fire was going good on the Klamath. And Herbelscheimer send a fellow that was a local man that had been working seasonal for the forest out to relieve me, and I was to come back to the ranger station because he and I were to go to the Haystack fire, and I stayed on the Haystack fire until when it rained the twenty-first or –second of

September.

Came home from that, and then in October sometime I got sent to Southern California for a couple of weeks on a fire on the Angeles. Well, actually, I was on the fire just a few days; then they had me on a patrol basis down there, working around. So I came back from there. It was close to the first of November. I can’t remember exactly when. I never wrote—see, all those dairies that I kept, they always pulled them every month or whatever, and they never gave them back to us. Like, some of the district rangers, the older rangers, they have their diaries, or did have, because they went and took them back out of the system. But I never got mine. I’d have liked to had them. Because we kept the diaries up until 1960, I think, if I remember right, because I remember I was an FMO, and every evening I’d come in with my pickup, and one of the things—after I filled out the logbook, I’d have to sit down and say what I did that day and give it to the clerk once a month or whatever, whenever she asked for them.

But ’55, I took about a $3,000 break because in ’54 we’d had overtime on our fires, but after that, we didn’t have overtime. I know I thought it was almost $3,000 I lost that year, just in overtime.

SMART: Wow. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 43

GROSCH: Because of the differential. And I stayed on differential until—when did they stop it? In 1969?

[Change CD.]

GROSCH: I know there was only two or three years that I was off differential, and then I got back on differential when I became a dispatcher, and that was for a couple of years, and then they stopped it on dispatchers. But I don’t remember the exact days.

Safety equipment. Okay, it was in the mid-sixties—I forget, ’64 or ’65 was when they first come with a Nomex shirt. We had hardhats. In fact, I’ve still got my Old MacDonald out in the garage. It was in the mid sixties we got the first Nomex shirt, because our uniform shirts were polyester cotton, and they told us we were supposed to take those off and put this on over.

And they were just a shirt. And we were still wearing green cotton jeans made by either Dickie’s or Lee. Yes, that was the only one that made the green one. Levi’s didn’t make them.

SMART: Do you remember the color?

GROSCH: Yellow. Bright yellow. Yes, bright yellow. No, pardon me. Excuse me, that was a bright orange. It was an orange, like your cones, you know, on the side of the road? Something like that, an orange-red. That was the first color, yes. Then they changed to yellow later. The

Nomex pants didn’t come in—I’d been out here in the dispatch office when we first got those.

SMART: Help me out now. From 1955 you’re still on the Mendocino.

GROSCH: Right.

SMART: And then?

GROSCH: I stayed on the Mendocino until 1972.

SMART: What were you doing during that period? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 44

GROSCH: Well, I was a patrolman there. In ’56 I went to Paskenta to run that crew for Doug

Leisz that summer; then I came back to Eel River.

SMART: Tell me again, what was that crew doing?

GROSCH: TSI work, timber stand improvement work on some government land that was there by Bald Mountain, just to the west of Paskenta. Also fighting fire whenever we were sent to them.

SMART: Was that a burned-over area?

GROSCH: No, it was a timbered area, all beautiful area, beautiful stocking. The lands that the government had were beautiful stocking. I mean, that’s why we were in there, doing the thinning of the doghair thickets [dwarf Ponderosa pines] and then pruning them to whatever, taking 25 percent of the green out of the pole-size trees.

SMART: And your crew was what kind of crew?

GROSCH: It was mostly school, young college type, over eighteen. The oldest one I had was—I think he was twenty-four, the oldest one. They were all either in college or—yes, mostly in college, right. One of the fellows was a referral from a Washington, DC, office, some senator or congressman. I don’t know who; I never found that out. But the ranger told me, “He’s a referral, so you’ll have to work with him.” He became kind of a sore in the back of the crew.

[Chuckles.] Unfortunately.

SMART: What was the major source of agitation?

GROSCH: Well, he didn’t like that we had a regimen of what hours we ate. In other words, if you wanted breakfast, you had to be there for the cook to have it ready at a certain hours, seven o’clock I think it was or something like that. I forget now. He wanted to eat at eight o’clock in the morning or whatever time he got up. Then when suppertime came, why, that was—we got in Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 45 from the field at I think it was about five-thirty, quarter of six. We always had dinner at six o’clock. He wanted to eat at maybe eight o’clock at night or nine. That was one agitation.

And towards the last, I found out he was a gay person, and he was just agitating bad amongst the troops. Somehow or another, he made himself miserable to us, one way or the other. Of course, then came the end of the unit and he was going back home, so we didn’t have any problem after that. It was a week later that all the rest of them left, too. They were all mostly Californians. He was the only one from out of state.

SMART: How about women in the workforce?

GROSCH: Never got those until just before I moved out of Stonyford. I think it was—let’s see, most of the women I knew were either in the clerk’s units or lookouts, that type of work. At least on the Mendocino it was that way, and I think it was 1969—maybe it was 1970—that a couple of the fire crews—I didn’t get saddled with any of them, but a couple—there was one over on Upper Lake, and I forget where there was another one. Then up on the Trinity, there was a fire crew organized there out of Weaverville, of women, but I think it was a contract crew, as far as I know. I can’t remember that exactly. But I didn’t get any women on any of my fire crews until after I left there. That is, the other guys put them on.

I experienced it after I became a dispatcher, to a certain extent, but it didn’t really actually affect me, other than my partner, and that was a lady. She had been a dispatcher with the other one before me. But the actual crew work, where they were in the field and stuff, I didn’t have that problem. Like I say, I had lookouts for ladies or clerks, but that was it.

SMART: [unintelligible] workforce.

GROSCH: No, no.

SMART: Okay. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 46

GROSCH: No.

SMART: Somewhere in that era, direction, policy, things began to change in the Forest Service.

Were you aware of some things that happened that was different than the way it had been in the earlier part of your career?

GROSCH: Yes. Right around—it occurred in the seventies, early seventies more so. Well, wait a minute, the biggest change came when the Job Corps system came on. That was really a change in the Forest Service, because up to that time, there was a lot of the safety things that we presently accepted or did accept after, that they imposed on us. For instance, travel time. Up until that time, travel was on your own time to the job. You were measured for your eight hours of work or whatever from the time you were on the stump until you got off the stump. Your travel time was on your own, unless it was “arduous” travel time, and arduous travel time was where you were walking to your job more than one hour. If you walked up to an hour to your job, that was not considered pay time. Over one hour, you got paid. [Chuckles.] Try and impose that on fellows today, huh? [Laughs.] Yeah, that was one of the big changes, was the travel time.

Food and stuff. There was quite a way in the way they fed us and stuff. Up until that time, you could bank on the first twenty-four hours at a minimum and maybe even two days, nothing but C-rations if you were lucky. After that, then you might get a fire camp, and you never saw some of the fire camps I saw, I’ll tell you! Where they put the garbage can on one end of the table and the stove on the other end of the table. [Chuckles.]

Or like the one I saw down in Arizona. There was two cowboys doing the cooking, and they had two open campfires, with a couple of steel rods laying across them and big kettles on them, and [chuckles] they were cooking for a crew of about a hundred of us down there. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 47

[Laughs.] And they had a big tarp spread out on the ground, where the food was piled up, and they’d go over there and slice off the meat and what have you and put it in the kettle or in the frying pan or what for the guys as they’d go by. [Laughs.] They had an open boiler, and old clothes boiler for the coffee. [Laughs.] Poor guys. And they were trying to feed us. [Laughs.]

So if you had a fire camp like that today, wouldn’t OSHA [Occupational Safety and

Health Administration] have fun and games? [Chuckles.] Yes, I can remember on that Haystack fire, I was in Stan Stevenson’s fire camp. He was the forest division boss or fire line boss, fire boss in the south side of the river on McKinney Creek, I think it was. Joe Flynn was up on the north side, at Dutch Creek or Oven Creek or whatever.

And I can remember this inmate crew they had running the kitchen. They had one of those old copper boilers that you used for clothes on the fire, and that was the coffeepot. And I can remember this blue skim kind of floating on it, and they had a dipper hanging in it, and you could get your paper cup and dip out your coffee. [Chuckles.]

SMART: All the extra vitamins you might have wanted.

GROSCH: Yes, that was your coffee. [Chuckles.] Some of the things were kind of rough. Like

I say, it could be forty-eight hours before you ever got a true fire camp going, which I couldn’t blame them. I mean, it was understandable.

On that Mendenhall fire, I can remember when they set up the kitchen, they flew it in. It was those disposable kitchens. You ever see one of those disposable kitchens?

SMART: [No audible reply.]

GROSCH: They flew one of those in from—I guess Redding was in place, yes. Fifty-five?

Yes, Redding was in place in ’55, yes. It hadn’t gotten fully up, but it was there, the warehouse and stuff, but I don’t think the smoke jumpers had moved in yet. The reason I remember Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 48 that—see, when they took me that Labor Day to go to Klamath, they flew us out of Willows in the old Nordine—not the Nordine, the Northstar or whatever the thing was, a twin-engine. And we got up there where they were going to land us, at—not Yreka; there’s a place to the east of

Yreka.

SMART: Oh, the old Air Force base?

GROSCH: Yeah. They were going to land us, but it was smoked in so they had to bring us back to Redding, and then they put us on a bus and took us back up there. [Chuckles.] At the

Redding airport, I remember the big warehouse because they had it open or part of it open, and they gave us some coffee and a sandwich and some things there to eat, but I don’t remember many people running around there; I just remember that big building and seeing a lot of stuff in it. And then they bused us up to Klamath. But that was kind of interesting.

Then, let’s see, in ’55 I was there. Fifty-six, I worked that summer over at Paskenta, but I remember in the fall I went with the inmates from off the Willows district—no, not the Willows district—anyhow, we had that inmate camp there, and I went with that foreman. We had a stakeside truck that the crews used to ride in. They had benches in there, and they had a canvas cover over it. And we went down there to Fresno to get to some fire to the east there. I can’t remember just which canyon it was in.

But I remember we left along about three or four o’clock in the afternoon, and we got down there to Fresno, and the foreman wanted to check in with the super’s office. It was nighttime, and he told the crew, “Why don’t you get out and stretch your legs?” So they all jumped off, and I remember several of them run out onto this lawn area, and all of a sudden they started hollering and bawling like mad. Come to find out there was puncture vine [Tribulus terrestris] all through the lawn. [Laughs.] Oh, boy! Those poor guys. [Laughs.] Man! Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 49

[Laughs.] Most of them still had their shoes on, but a couple of these guys that hollered, they didn’t. That was my first experience with puncture vine. [Chuckles.]

SMART: The puncture vine I’m thinking of, that’s the one that has the five—

GROSCH: Yes, yes, and it grows real low along the ground, and it’s got a little yellow flower here in July and August, yes. Yes, that’s the one, yes.

SMART: So?

GROSCH: In ’57 I was back in Eel River, working. I got several good fires that year, too, and I was on a short sector team again. I think that’s the year I went with Howard Hooper to San

Diego, and Doug Leisz was the leader. I remember we set off a whole side of a mountain one afternoon or one morning, I guess, and that afternoon we sat on our butts in the shade and watched it burn. And it ran up against and did what they wanted it to do. [Laughs.] But we set it afire.

And then ’58, that’s when I actually went on a helicopter. I only got a fire assignments off Forest that year. Most of the time I was on Forest. But then I go from Clear Lake all the way into the Trinity, so...Yes, I went to [unintelligible].

SMART: What kind of helicopter was it?

GROSCH: A little Bell B-2 with—hmm, darn! Bob Reese. He was from Southern California.

During World War II he had been a TBM [“Avenger” torpedo] bomber, a pilot for the Navy.

After that, he went into the Air Force and became a helicopter pilot. And then he bought his own machine, and he contracted to the Forest Service. Yes, he was very good, very good pilot. I enjoyed working with him very much.

SMART: You were based where? Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 50

GROSCH: We were based at Alder Springs. They put us up there on the ridge above the old station. We didn’t have a fuel truck. We just had 55-gallon drums or barrels sitting there, with a barrel pump. [Chuckles.] Then we had two barrels of fuel at Upper Lake and two barrels of fuel at Eel River. That’s where I learned a couple of tricks in a helicopter. One of them was to put the skid into the top of a small red fir tree after you threw your tools off and then get out on the skid and then slide down the outside of the fir tree to get on the ground.

SMART: [Laughs.] An early version of rappelling.

GROSCH: Yes. [Laughs.] That’s right. That was one trick I learned. Yeah.

SMART: The air operations now begin to look a little more complex.

GROSCH: Yes, more so. Now they started having air tankers, even though they were the old

Stearmans and stuff. The Noltes changed over their Beechcraft twin-engine in 1957, I think it was, and it carried about twice what the Stearmans carried as far as—they also, in ’56, the oil company there or the chemical company developed bentonite to put in the water. Not bentonite, borax. They developed the borax to go in the mix so that the water wouldn’t evaporate before it got to the fire. It would go down and stick on the surface and help make a fire shield. Well, borax worked for a couple of years, and I forget—I think it was 1959 we first got the bentonite.

It might have been earlier, but I thought it was ’59, because we still had borax stored over by

Lake Pillsbury, because they had a mixing plant there by the lake. There was an airport there that they could use, the small aircraft, not a DC-7 or anything, but a small aircraft.

The bentonite was much better, but it still had problems. The problems with both of those was the corrosion factor on the aluminum and steel hidden parts of hinges and cables that they didn’t flush out properly or often enough, especially the borax because it’s quite corrosive to those steel pieces. That’s why a lot of those aircraft failed in later years, is because of that Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 51 stuff not being flushed out properly, especially in the hidden areas of air loins and interior parts of the tail section and wing and things of that nature, where the fine stuff could get sucked up into it, because when they dump those loads, there’s a certain amount of vortex that occurs off of the edge of the wings and tail units, which would suck that fine material back into the joints and stuff, and that’s what they found out.

SMART: Well, see, now you’re approaching getting married by this time, huh?

GROSCH: Yes, I started sparking the girl I guess in late ’59? No, early ’60, I guess it was, maybe, yeah. She was introduced to me by another Forest Service employee’s wife. In those days, I used to skip around and chase around a lot, but there was an old saying, coming out of the military. It says: “Officers and their ladies, enlisted men and their wives,” and I was considered an enlisted man, so therefore [laughs] the officers were looking down my throat because here I was, living in a government house by my lonely and had a housekeeper that came in once a week. [Laughter.]

So anyhow, he introduced me to her. She was living in San Francisco with her parents, or mother and sisters, and working at the Federal Reserve Bank. I got to meet her, and we communicated quite a bit by mail because I didn’t get to see her very often, but finally we hooked up in February of ’61.

SMART: So Karen’s your wife.

GROSCH: Yes. Oh, yes. And I got two daughters: Melinda, the older girl—she was born in

‘62, in summer; and the younger girl, Elizabeth. She was born in ‘64, I guess. Let’s see, it was two years after I was married, so it was ‘62 and ‘64, I guess. Huh! C’mon, Karen, you better come around the corner and tell me the dates! [Laughs.]

SMART: You’ll be in trouble. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 52

GROSCH: Yes, ’62 is Melinda’s birthday, that’s right, ’62. And then ’64 is Elizabeth’s birthday. That’s it! Because—yes, see, it took a while to sink in.

SMART: So now you’re married and?

GROSCH: I’m working for Toby Torvinen on the Stonyford Ranger District as his principal—well, his fire assistant. He had a timber assistant also, several of them. In the first couple or three years, we had—let’s see, the first one was a fellow by the name of Ron Friend, F- r-i...He went down to the Sequoia Forest from there. The next one was a guy by the name of Mel

Lieurance [pronouncing it law-RAWNTZ], who went to the Porterville area as a recreation office and stayed there and retired from there. The next one was a fellow by the name of

Underwood, John Underwood. He went down to Fresno for several years, and then he went to—I think it was—yes, Region One. John Underwood. I don’t know if you ever met him. He never stayed in fire. He moved out of fire as soon as he left California.

SMART: But you and Karen now—you moved from the Mendocino not much later than this, though, right?

GROSCH: Nineteen seventy-two.

SMART: Oh, it was that late.

GROSCH: Yes. The girls were—what? Melinda was going on ten, and Liz was going on eight when we moved over here.

SMART: So tell me a piece about what was going on between ’62 and ‘72.

GROSCH: Well, we were developing the safety units and stuff. Joe Ely retired in the middle of that time, and we got George Mendel as the fire manager for the forest. We had—well, let’s see,

I’d have to count them on my fingers now, but I said Toby [Torvinen], John Peterson, Don

Vaughan, Hal Ward, and Lynn Murray as the district rangers in that period of time. And, see, Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 53 when I was in Covelo, I had Dusty Miller, Jack Weddle; then I worked for Doug Leisz or Ken

Norman as his district ranger. Yes, three district rangers. And then I moved over there and had six, so that’s nine district rangers.

SMART: That’s pretty fast turnover.

GROSCH: In twenty-two years. You know what I mean? Twenty-three years. Well, we technicians like Hooper and Riley and Doc Harper and I—we used to always figure the

Mendocino National Forest was a training national forest. Every spring, we got some new junior foresters, anywhere from one to three on a district, and every fall we got a new set of them. And we had anywhere from six to nine months to either tell them he was going to be your future boss or he was going to be doing something else. Toby used to lay it on not just me but on his C&M foremen and stuff. “Write me what you think of this junior forester” after he’d been there three or four months, to see whether eventually we were going to have some kind of a true forester- ranger out of it.

I remember they washed out several of them; that is, as far as becoming a line officer type of person. They went into whatever, light recreation officer or something on the district or some other job. They didn’t become a district ranger or forest supervisor or anything like that.

We always considered the Mendocino as a training forest primarily. It was never a true destination area for tourism. It doesn’t have the fantastic redwoods. It doesn’t have the Lake

Tahoe vistas, that type of thing. Deer hunting was a big part of our time when I was there. All the years I was there, it was always a big deer hunting and fishing season. Fishing was quite a thing along those streams, especially on the Eel River.

The Eel River has a run of fish that’s now all closed for them. They called them summer steelhead. There were several other rivers—the Mad River had them, and the south fork of the Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 54

Trinity had them. They came up in the springtime, along in April, on the snowmelt, and then they laid in these big deep holes that were in the river, and they had no connection to the next hole above them. If they didn’t get to that one, that’s where they stayed.

When I first went to the Eel River, I remember the packer took me down there by one of the crossings, and he showed me this hole, and they were floating three layers deep. There must have been three hundred fish in that hole. And according to the fish biologist for the Fish &

Game, who at that time was studying them—he said they don’t eat during the summer months; they live strictly on the fat that they had laid on coming in off the ocean, which was true. When you caught them when the season opened the end of May, there was a layer of black fat under the skin. When you caught them in October, there was no black fat along the skin. So they didn’t really feed. How did we catch them? We caught them with lizards.

SMART: Not dynamite, huh? [Laughs.]

GROSCH: Oh, yes, there was not just dynamite. The best way was to make yourself a vinegar and baking soda and put it in a Mason jar and throw it in there.

SMART: [Laughs.] That would take oxygen out of the water?

GROSCH: No, it would blow up.

SMART: Oh, blow up.

GROSCH: You’ve put vinegar and baking soda together, haven’t you?

SMART: Oh, okay, okay. I get it, yes.

GROSCH: You’ve done that.

SMART: [unintelligible]. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 55

GROSCH: Yes. And in the sixties—let’s see, we were doing the safety thing. We got through—when the Job Corps came along, they changed a lot of things as far as our working conditions were concerned.

SMART: Would you say for the better?

GROSCH: I think they broke the camaraderie we had before. The morale was broken. That’s my opinion. Because people started to feel that they didn’t need to be on duty twenty-four hours.

Like, when we lived in the residences on the compound, you were there. You were called on at any time of day or night by the public in the neighborhood or whatever happened. Like, you’d take a rainy night and the door bangs. “Yeah?” “We need you! We need you!” And you’d open the door, and here’s a bloody mess sitting out there on the porch, where you had a wreck in the canyon, up the canyon someplace, you know. So you put them in the back of the pickup and try and get him into the hospital, because there was no ambulance or anything, you know.

Things of that nature or whatever.

SMART: What about the technicians? [unintelligible] these young foresters coming in and doing some training.

GROSCH: Well, they would be assigned—like, we were on a planting crew in the spring, maybe, planting trees on a burned area of some sort of another. These junior foresters or these young men would be assigned to us as a crew, part of the crew, and we’d have to show them how to plant trees and stuff. We’d supervise them. And hell, they wouldn’t know sickum about how to take care of themselves, really. In other words, when it come to batching, they’d give you a bad time about your groceries, maybe, or something like that. And you’d say, “Well, now, you can cook.” Well, that was a bad mistake many times. Things of that nature. “God, do we have to go to work this early?” “Well, there’s travel time, fella.” “Why are we going out in the rain to Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 56 prune trees?” “You want your pay?” Or you don’t have any annual leave. If you want to sit in the shade or the house, you’ got to have annual leave or no pay.

SMART: Over the years, you got a chance to observe a lot of different tensions between professionals and technicians.

GROSCH: Yes.

SMART: What would you say about that?

GROSCH: I noticed more tension between professionals and professionals, especially when they got into the command structure or line structure. Assistant rangers many times were very jealous of their supervisors. You would feel it one way or another, or something would be said out in the field when you were working with them or at some point in time. Or they would seem to be jealous of the district ranger because they weren’t a district ranger. I guess that was where it was.

I noticed it more between the professionals. Like, sometimes I noticed it, too, between the engineers (who were professional engineers) and the foresters on how something was to be done. A lot of your foresters, you learned how to do a certain amount of engineering so you knew where your roads were going to get set in to wherever you were going to work. And the engineers would disagree or something, or want to do something else, or wanted to move a whole mountain to get a road through or something like that.

I noticed those kinds of tensions. I haven’t got any real specific memories at this point in time. One that I do remember was there was a timber sale set up. This was in the late sixties.

The timber beasts had done most of their work, but the engineers came along and they designed this road or pea-lined it, I guess, at that time. They didn’t do a lot of the things they do on a computer now. They went out and they flagged it through. Then they went back to the office Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 57 that winter, and they did a lot of their paper shuffling. I’m not sure exactly all the steps. Then they came out the following spring, and they set the pea line with the stakes and grades and clearing lines and all this kind of stuff, the stakes where the clearing set up and so forth. And they had sold it right after that.

The next year, the company came along with their equipment and stuff, and they started working. They done a lot of their line clearing, and they got out on this point on this ridge where there was to be a big S-turn to go back into this next canyon. [Chuckles.] And the bulldozer, the

Pioneer catskinner was there. He’d jerk the logs out of the way, and he’d come around the corner, and he was trying to read the stakes and the seats like you’re supposed to. Of course, he didn’t have a shovel man with him because they couldn’t afford those. And he read the stake, and he put the brakes on, and he locked it up, and he jumped off, and he looked at the stake some more, and he ran down to the next stake and looked at that, ran back and looked at the stake; then he went back to where he started from. Said, Something ain’t right.

So he went and called his boss, and the boss come out there, the logging boss, and he walked the thing. “There’s something not right. We’re building this son of a bitch out in the air!”

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: So the logger boss told him, “Go back to doing whatever it was back along the other part of the world,” and he went up to his truck, and he got in his truck, and he drove out to where he could get in contact with the company, and told them they “better get the forest engineer out here pretty quick because we’ve got a problem.” So, of course, the Ranger had to go and say—oh, I know, the C&M foreman was there, checking on the goddamn pipes. He was up at the head of the job, off of the main-haul road. He was counting pipes because for the drains and Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 58 stuff, and see that they were all on the inventory list. And he’s the one that told me about—called the forest engineer, and he come up there with three or four of his staff unit in his car, and they walked out there to where the end of the job was with their big papers and stuff, and they got to saying, “Shit, this is going out in the air!”

SMART: [Laughs.]

GROSCH: So they had to call a crew back in and re-stake the whole damn thing again.

[Laughs.] For two or three miles to build it properly back into the canyon to where it was to go.

But it was sure funny. It caused three or four days’ worth of delay in their job for their road building and stuff, because they didn’t have the right places. But it was sure funny. That was one of them.

But I don’t know whether that was tension or not. I do know the forester—he was the assistant ranger at the time—he was pretty put out about it. He got transferred off to someplace in San Diego or something, and then shortly thereafter he ended up in Region Six. So...[Laughs.]

Man!

But if you want to talk about tensions, I noticed it more so in the—

SMART: Professionals.

GROSCH: —professional standards than I did...Maybe it was because I was too close to the technicians. I don’t know.

SMART: But compared to professionals, the technicians—you didn’t see much friction going on there?

GROSCH: Most of us didn’t because we were afraid of our jobs. We really were afraid we could be fired without a helluva lot of problems, like they have nowadays in some of these new civil rights things. Even though we had civil service standards and stuff, it didn’t take a heck of Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 59 a lot for the Ranger to let you go. I can remember it was when Toby was Ranger. It must have been about 1962, about the second fire crew I was to hire for—we call them fire crew, a three- man unit. I got one young man that was a local fellow. He was about twenty-two, twenty-one.

He was going to be one of the crew members. And he was very good. He was physically strong, fairly intelligent. He was from Chicago originally. His relatives lived there locally, and he had been working in the lumber mill a little bit, until they laid him off because they didn’t have any work for him. And he applied for a job, and I told him, “Yeah, I’ll see if I can hire you.” So I did.

He wasn’t on the job a month, and, of course, you take his fingerprints and so forth. It come back that apparently when he was a youth of twelve or fourteen—I forget; fourteen, I think—he got in trouble back in Chicago and ended up in the juvenile system, and that showed up on his FBI record. Well, the first thing I had heard was the Ranger come stomping, “What the hell you hiring a criminal for, Grosch?” “Huh?” “Here. Fire him.” So I had to go out and tell this young man, “I can’t keep you.” I didn’t show him the paper because I was told not to. He says, “What do you mean?” I says, “You were someplace when you were a kid. You got problems.” I says, “They can’t trust you.”

At that time, things were such, because we were still reeling from old McCarthyism and stuff, you couldn’t have a lot of the things that go on today in our society. For instance, if you were queer, Christ, they wouldn’t even look at you because of the fact they figured you could be bribed or blackmailed. And then up until in the seventies, I never really heard of any illicit things by forest officers or technicians except maybe screwing some other woman. That was about all, or the woman screwing the guy. You know what I mean? Which was, hey, all of society did in a certain sense. But as far as, like, criminal things, like this young man that I just Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 60 quoted you, being gay or of that type of nature, things of those kinds—that was not accepted as far as employment because there was always this fear of being blackmailed or that type of thing.

But as far as being a Ranger that was dishonest, say, with the scale tickets or something of that nature, I never heard of it.

Let me tell you. There’s a funny story about Dean Lloyd. Did you ever know Dean

Lloyd?

SMART: I met him, yes.

GROSCH: You knew him or met him? He was a district ranger when I moved to Stonyford in

’58. I’d worked for him the summer before and a little bit the fall before, under Johnny Yeager.

Anyhow, Dean had a very good way of handling his timber sales and stuff with the Setzer

Lumber Company. Every evening at five o’clock or a little before five, he jumped in his pickup down to Stonyford ranger station, or if he was up at whatever mountain he was on, and he went to Elk Creek, where the local bar was. He pulled up in front of the doors, parked the pickup, and went through by pushing open the doors. And the bar was in an L-shape, and the corner was right by the doors. The bartender would put a bottle of Overholt rye whiskey and two glasses by it on the corner of the bar for Dean to stand next to. And the loggers would come in. If they had a complaint, they would talk with Dean, and Dean would be drinking Overholt with them. Five days a week.

SMART: Amazing.

GROSCH: That’s how he managed his timber sales. [Laughs.] That’s how I think he got moved to Utah later on.

SMART: You finish up your time on the Mendocino, and then you move on to the Eldorado. Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 61

GROSCH: Mm-hm. Lynn Murray was the district ranger, and I had looked around the district.

I had been there, like I say, since 1959 and it was now ’72. I had, a couple of times, tried to get up to Redding or into that area to live and make my home at some future time, and hadn’t been successful. Well, this job came open over here, and I saw the announcement for it, and I told

Lynn, “Why don’t I apply for that?” And I knew that my legs were starting to get bad as far as running up and down those hills with those young bucks. I was forty-six years old then. I knew it wouldn’t be long that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them. I just thought, Well, I’ll try it.

So I applied for it. I don’t know how many others were in the list. They don’t tell you that. But they told me to go over and see Don Arundell for an interview. And so I did. Don didn’t say anything at that time whether he had selected me or not, but then about a week later, I found out I had been selected. Now, whether Dick Allured was being looked at as a dispatcher, I don’t really know. I think he was. I think he was in line for it as far as the Forest was concerned.

But at that time, they kind of looked at some of that keeping you moving. They were afraid of what do you call it, provincialism?

SMART: Homesteading?

GROSCH: Yes, that’s another word for it, provincialism, what I remember mostly. That was one of the words I learned very early from Jack Weddle and Ed Angwin. You don’t stay on a district too long because you get ingrown. And I have to agree with that. I think that’s part of the problem with the system today is it’s ingrown. The people have stayed in one area too long, or they didn’t get the breadth before they got there. I look at, like, Ed Angwin. He started out on the Los Padres before the war and went through World War II, and then he went through his Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 62 college career, got it out, and he worked on the Lassen, the Plumas, Mendocino, Trinity, and then back to the Plumas, as a district ranger.

Jack Weddle—he came out of Trinity Forest to the Modoc to the Lassen, back to the

Modoc and then to the Mendocino. I don’t see rangers getting that kind of breadth of experience they used to. Now, what they did as junior foresters, I don’t have a handle on.

You want to stop?

SMART: I was just checking my list to see if there was something in there that—I think we’ve covered most of the stuff that I had wanted to cover with you. Is there something in there that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t had a chance to talk about?

GROSCH: I don’t know. It’s kind of interesting to me how we over-man the fires to a certain extent in the initial phases today, but, then, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not there, so I don’t have any idea. But sometimes I think of the fifties, when I was chasing fires, how few us would actually be on a fire. When I was at Indian Dick’s, I can remember, those first four years—hey, every year there was three or four fires that I went to all...by...my...lonely, and spent whatever time it took to get the fire in control. Felled a snag, bucked it, put it out. Fed myself. You know? Didn’t have, like, six smoke jumpers—well, sure, I got the smoke jumpers, but they wasn’t that often.

And all the other work that you did. Like, they had that ground return line that came from Eel River to Indian Dick’s and over across the river there. Why, I had to maintain that.

And you worked alone a lot of times. You’d climb up the tree and hook it up again and test it and see how it worked.

You know, I didn’t carry it all the time, but we had a phone that used to be by—the Army had them. They were in a wooden box, the phone was, and it was the old ringer type. What you Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 63 would do is you’d throw a rope over your telephone wire and pull it down because it was a tree line, and you’d put your foot on it, and then you’d drive a spike into the ground with a wire, poured part of a canteen of water over it, clipped the other wire up on your telephone, number nine, and then you’d twist its tail and you could talk on the phone. [Laughs.]

The installed phones that they had on that wire from Eel River were Hell Hole (in the canyon there), Osborne, Beaver Glade, Foster Ranch, Indian Dick’s—oh, what the hell’s the name of that canyon there? Hoxie Crossing, and Fern Point Bridge. Those were installed in the old iron mine boxes. You probably remember those big iron box things they had. Those were the installed ones, but then you had the portable phone that you could use also. You didn’t carry that one around with you all the time. The only time you carried it is if you were going to be near that phone wire because once you got two miles away from it [laughs], you were out of business.

And the radios—like I say—well, they worked, but the radio technician always accused me of leaving the mules walk over the radio, so...

SMART: [Chuckles.]

GROSCH: I learned how to communicate with the aircraft, when that first group of smoke jumpers in ’51 came down. They put out panels, red panels, sheets of kind of a canvas, plastic canvas. They were about ten or twelve feet long, and they laid them in an L, in an opening there, two L’s. They put two L’s on. The pilot kept coming around until he saw those two L’s. That meant everybody was on the ground; everything was okay; the pilot could go home. They had a whole series—inside my hardhat is still—I got one of those patches that shows the symbols they had. Like, if you wanted food, you put your F out. If you had an injured smoke jumper, what Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 64 you’d put down is—you know, that type of thing. Or tools needed or whatever. I think there was fourteen different symbols you could lay out.

When they left, they left me those panels, and I always carried them on the mule so that I could communicate. I can remember several times, poor old Joe Ely—he didn’t know those, and he come flying back in his little Super Piper Cub, and he’d see those things down there: LL, what the hell is that all about? [Laughter.] Yeah, LL. That always told you that everything was okay.

And it was a way of communicating. Today they don’t really need it because of the way the radios and stuff work and all the other things you can talk now. Maybe it’s better. I don’t know.

I’m not there.

SMART: It’s foolproof, anyhow. That one was.

GROSCH: Yes, yes, it was very foolproof, you bet, especially when the other person knew what he was looking at.

The aircraft have changed tremendously. One of the things I fault the Forest Service for changing here just a few years back was when Regions Six and One said that firefighting aircraft will all be heavy-duty, big aircraft. You know, the DC-7 and what have you. I didn’t quite buy that for firefighting in California. Maybe it’s true in Oregon—I don’t know—but to me, when I look at these S-2s going by, I figure that’s the way to get it. You got to be there early. If you’re not getting there right away, you’re not doing the job. To me, that’s my...

And when they said they’re going to have aircraft in Redding and they’re going to have aircraft in—what is it, Fresno? Plus refill stations in Mather and Richfield and Stockton or something. That didn’t quite add up to me, because when you were going to call an aircraft from

Redding to come down here for a fire here when they could come from over here at Grass Valley within twenty minutes or so, that didn’t seem to make sense. To me. Now, I’m not no fire Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 65 planner, don’t get me wrong. [Chuckles.] But I do think that a couple of those S-2s in that first hour is really more important than in the second hour. That’s me.

Oh, you know, I was going to tell you about training. One of the things I remember after

I became an FMO, they sent me to Los Padres for a week with a bunch of other fellows. I’ve got a photograph somewhere around here of them. For a couple of weeks’ training on how to be an officer. Very good training. But later, about the next winter I guess it was, I remember Toby dropped a packet of papers on my table and says, “Okay, Ed, you can do this when you’re not employed.” In other words, on your day off or time off in the evening or something, you know?

I think it was about ten or twelve pages long, with questions. And what you had to do is you had to sit down and take—say, question number one would say, “Fire time slips.” And then you’d have to go get the manual, and you’d have to read that part of the manual. Or there’d be something else—I don’t know, whatever, the administrative part, like purchase orders, another question. Then you’d have to go and get the manual and quote the sections of the manual and write out two or three sentences from that page of the manual. It took me, I don’t know, a couple of months to fill it all out, to work it out, but it was a way to get through that manual to find out what the administrative side did with their human resources or monies, budgetings, things of that nature, what the rules were, what the rules were for the engineers in certain things and the foresters, the silviculture and whatever, things that—I was just a technician—that I would never have thought about without doing that.

Now, you were to lay that on a person today, he’d say, “I’ll do it on your time.” But in those days, the ranger would say, “Do it on your time, and I’ll see it next month” or whatever.

Now, try that today. Kind of interesting, isn’t it, that times have changed. So I don’t know.

That’s all I can think of right now, unless you have specific— Ed Grosch Interview, March 9, 2004, page 66

SMART: I think we pretty well covered the area, but I sure have enjoyed having a visit with you about it. And now the next thing I’ll get a transcript of it. I’ll send it out to you. You can take a look at it to see that it’s—you know.

GROSCH: Sure.

SMART: I’ll shut ‘er down, then.

GROSCH: Okay.

[End of interview.]