PORTER, Don FS 1953? - 1978 01-19-05 03__Corrected 2 U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Region Five History Project

Interview with: Don Porter Interviewed by: Gerald Gause Location: Dana Point, California Date: January 19, 2005 Transcribed by: Christine Sinnott; February 2005 Corrected by: Linda Nunes

WRITTEN INSERT: I was born and raised in Southern California in the Glendale-La Canada area. La Canada is in the foothills and on the edge of the Angeles National Forest, and between

Pasadena and Glendale. In my youth with friends and Boy Scouts [I] camped and hiked over many trails. Went fishing for many, many years in the Inyo National Forest in the Eastern High

Sierra. The local mountains and the High Sierra were my early education to the Forest Service and its National Forests.

DON PORTER: I graduated from Glendale High School in 1944 and attended Glendale College and then attended the University of Montana Forestry School in 1946 and 1947. In 1942, I was fifteen years of age and worked in a fishing resort that my father and I used to go to up at Bishop

Creek on the Inyo National Forest. Kind of got my introduction to resource and so forth at that time. In 1943, the next year, I’m sixteen years old and started my career – not my career but my summer career – with the Forest Service on the Eldorado National Forest on the blister rust control (BRC) program during the summer. We were all teenaged high school students and spent our summers digging up Gooseberry bushes.

GERALD GAUSE: Oh, you were one of the grubbers.

PORTER: One of the BRCers.

GAUSE: BRCers, right. Don PORTER, page 2

PORTER: In 1944, the next year, I was out of the service. I had no military experience. I tried to get in all services, but an athletic heart – that’s how they talked about it at the time – prevented me from going in, so I fought forest fires instead! In 1944, I was seventeen years old, I was a patrolman on the Angeles Forest at Charlton Flats and Chilao.

GAUSE: You were a patrolman and your duties were to…?

PORTER: Mainly working with the public. We had a kiosk or a center station at Charlton and we issued fire permits there, also served as lookout at our peak in the Chilao area. Then went back to school again. In 1945, Tanker Foreman at Clear Creek. That’s in the Angeles N.F.

Then they were called tankers, they are fire trucks today. Captains now instead of tanker foremen, but that’s what we were in 1945.

The war, the summer of that year, the Japanese war was over and we celebrated the war being over by blowing the siren so much at the fire station that we wore our battery down. And the lookout up above us wanted to know what was going on and we told her. The war was over.

That was Josephine Lookout Tower.

The next summer I continued going back to school. In 1946 I [was] a tanker foreman at

Tie Summit. That’s still on the Angeles Forest. At that time Arroyo District was on the Angeles

Forest Highway, just up from Palmdale. Next year, I’m going to school in the winter, then working again in summer when I got a job as a tanker foreman again at Big Tujunga Canyon on the Angeles Forest. And that was the year of the Bryant Fire, which burned up Mount Lukens.

And it was the first use of a helicopter on a forest fire by the Forest Service. It was an open cockpit and I forget who operated it, but it was a well-known guy that was in the helicopter business.

GAUSE: Did he have a bucket underneath?

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PORTER: No buckets, no dropping water. It was just transportation and scouting. We had camp crews, so they told me to be a crew leader. I was the one who got a helicopter ride up to the top of Mount Lukens. At that time the helicopter could not land, or did not land, so you threw out your tools and then he’d move over a little bit so you wouldn’t jump on your tools, then you’d jump out of the helicopter about five feet off the ground. The crew would then hike up and work our way down the fire line.

GAUSE: You had to walk your way out of the fire.

PORTER: We walked downhill, working the fire line all the way down. But that was the first use, I believe, of helicopters on a fire.

GAUSE: That was . . .?

PORTER: 1947. In Big Tujunga Canyon. But then I could not continue on with the Forest

Service. Had to go back to work because I didn’t have the money to continue at the University of

Montana Forestry School. Worked with engineering for a while on the Angeles and one of my jobs was to read rain gauges after every storm. I hiked by myself through different canyons, and then read the rain gauge and then record it and empty it, set it up for the next rain storm.

Sometimes with the elevation the water would be frozen and I’d have to build a fire and thaw out the water in the rain gauge before I could read it. That was all part-time work. And I thought, well, I can’t get anywhere in the Forest Service without a forestry degree. So I went to work for the county, L.A. County road department, found myself back in the forest though, as a rodman and chainman on a survey crew for a mountain crew.

GAUSE: What do rodmen and chainmen do?

PORTER: They hold up the rod so the transit person can read the elevation, and the chainman is you pull the chain, which is the same as a steel measuring tape, it was a hundred feet long. But it

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was a big job. It was for the Upper Big Tujunga Canyon Road, which is very steep, and they were building a road at that time.

WRITTEN INSERT: I always wanted to get back in resource management work so I took a state test for State Park Ranger. I passed the test and received appointment to Cuyamaca State

Park in the mountains of San Diego County of California. Moved my wife, Gloria, to a small one-bedroom ranch house nearby the state park in the town of Descanso. Lloyd Britton was

District Ranger there and Ed Heilman was Assistant Ranger. It was later in my career [that] we all would pass again up the career ladder in the Forest Service. After one year as State Park

Ranger at Cuyamaca State Park [I] was transferred to a permanent position at a state beach at

Dana Point, California, still in Southern California; after three years was transferred to a State

Park at Lake Tahoe. One winter, I get a call from the Angeles Forest in Pasadena [asking] if I would be interested in a new position as Fire Prevention Officer back on my “home Forest.”

Since I had been shoveling snow and battling 20-foot drifts that winter, and wife Gloria, 2-year- old daughter Ann and I were living in a 1930’s 1-bedroom “A” frame cabin. I said, “I will take the job and be there next week!” I credit Ranger Ed Corpe and Forest Supervisor Dick Droege for my return to the Angeles NF in 1958. This was the beginning of a 25-year career with the

USFS!

I was 10 years in the Information position on the Angeles National Forest. We started the

Fire Information position on fires, served as FS liaison to the Smokey Bear campaign advertising agency, Foot, Cone, & Belding. [We} helped promote forest fire prevention and “Smokey Bear” via Pasadena Rose Parade to all national TV networks for many years.

Dick Johnson was on the San Bernardino NF doing the Fire Prevention work also. We worked together on the Fire Information program in the country, wrote the first Handbook on the

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subject in the Forest Service and established the service-wide interagency fire information center on forest fires.

Another person that affected my career in the FS was local Pasadena newspaper columnist Russ Leadabrand. He gave me much advice and counsel in the news media business.

We became lifelong friends over many years.

PORTER: [Being in the] Los Angeles area, the television industry would call if they were having a problem about a forest fire or a ranger in the script where they would ask for help to get it correct. So in addition to the “Lassie” shows, we did two or three other shows that included teaching an actor on how to be a Forest Service lookout and teach him how to use the Osborne fire finder or maybe even how to drive a fire truck in a mountain area. Dick Johnson and I were sent all over Region 5 and other states to do fire information and set up fire information centers to do teaching on the fire prevention program.

GAUSE: So your two efforts caught on and you ended up expanding this program.

PORTER: We did, really, and not only fire information, which other regions and so forth decided to do too; we did training sessions and ran them at the training center in northern California and other states, to train people on how to be fire information officers, what to look for, what to do.

We did that in Region Six, Region Three and Region One, and other Regions also. After we did the handbook, it became a model for other handbooks.

GAUSE: I guess you look on back at your career and you think about the tough times and so forth. I guess one of the tough ones I think was the fire north of San Fernando, where 12 hotshot crewmen were killed.

PORTER: They were all from the same hotshot crew on the Cleveland Forest. I happened to be on the fire line gathering information for Jerry Gause and Dave Waite who were in the fire information center at fire camp right in San Fernando at the federal building in the area. I went

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to the hospital and served as information officer as the injured were being brought in. That was

[the] “Loop Fire.” So it was tough to do. One of the things we learned in past deals was the protecting names until next of kin were notified – the media immediately wanted to know whose names, who’s injured, who’s the fatality and so forth, and of course we couldn’t release that at all.

GAUSE: Notification process.

PORTER: Notification by the Cleveland Forest and the Forest Supervisor there, who was Stan

Stevenson, headed up the notification of the next of kin and the fatalities and those that were injured. So that was really a true test. One of the things that we did afterwards: we felt a need to recognize those Forest Service hotshot crewmen – they were young men – that died, and so we got together with all the forest officers on the Angeles and assigned men and women to go to the funerals in uniform. And Fred Tyler, who was Assistant Fire Control Officer on the Angeles then and was an assistant on the fire, he and I did three or four funerals in San Diego in uniform. We had a good reception from the parents and they said they understood, and we just wanted to be sure that the Forest Service was represented and that they weren’t forgotten for what they did.

There’s a of other things that, you know, during fires you kind of take them as they go, and I learned one thing too, that when you have an injury that goes to the county hospital, I had one fire above Azusa, I had two men that were injured, not necessarily burned, but injured – well, they were burned a little bit too – they were sent to County Hospital in downtown Los

Angeles. And one of the things that I learned, “This is a federal case,” I said to the media.

“We’re not going to release any names until we know what’s going on,” and so forth. An hour later I found out the doctors had their own press releases going – and press conference. They were burn specialists and they held their own press conference, and gave the names of the fire fighters and what was happening to them and how the doctor was taking care, and so I learned

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there right away that you have to cover all bases if you want to keep these confidential for a while, especially in a hospital. I didn’t realize that doctors had their own P.R. firms too.

I had some great Forest Supervisors. One of the first was Dick Droege, who was supervisor of the Angeles. Following Dick Droege was Sim Jarvi, a real great guy who came out of Washington and had a lot of experience as forest supervisor in Region Six and also in Region

Four – Region Five in the San Bernardino area. He became supervisor when Droege moved to

Washington. Sim was a great guy. He was Finnish by background and he’d been Supervisor in many forests in the west. He liked to be on the ground and he said it took him longer to work his way away from Washington and get back to the ground work than it did to get to Washington.

He was one that would give you an assignment and let you do it and if it was wrong give you hell and if it’s right, congratulate you and pat you on the back. Sim and I did a lot of hiking together and took pictures of the Limber pine on Mount Baden Powell.

GAUSE: Real old trees.

PORTER: Thousands of years old, yeah. And so we did a lot of work there. One of the things, one day I got a call that Forest Supervisor, Jarvi was missing. And this was I guess in the evening. So I went to dispatcher’s office and he had been out on an inspection trip by himself up in the mountains, near Mount Waterman and different areas, and hadn’t come back home. We spent all night at the dispatcher office in Arcadia, had trucks out looking for “berm cuts,” where the car might have gone over the road or something. The next morning [we had] a helicopter up out of Chilao and then there was a call from a worker at Mount Waterman ski area that said they’d found the car and that Sim died on the trail from a heart attack. That was the toughest thing I guess, to handle the news media, that your best friend and Supervisor has died. They wanted reports and so forth and I tried to give most of them, but a couple of them I broke down in the middle of the report. That was the toughest thing I guess I had done.

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GAUSE: Well, you did a lot, like I remember seeing a picture [that] you had to provide and story and background for the L.A. Times. He was a well-thought-of man.

PORTER: Yeah, you know what, it’s tough when it’s a good friend like that

[In the late 1960’s], the Job Corps came into effect, which was a youth program nationally within the national forests, the Forest Service was in charge. But these were camps where young people who couldn’t find jobs and so forth were put to work in the forest and did resource work. So I got the job of doing the public information liaison for two job corps camps in southern California, one on the Angeles called Fenner Canyon on the desert side of the

Angeles Forest, and then Mount Pinos camp, which is on the Cleveland Forest out of Lake

Elsinore, between Lake Elsinore and Orange County. And it was interesting because you kind of had to prepare the community for about thirty or forty young people of different racial backgrounds and so forth, coming near their community, and it wasn’t a prison camp but the first thing they thought about was prisoners. And so you had to educate the local community that these were not prisoners; they were just young people who needed a job and were getting a job in the outdoors. So we did that with the communities not only around the Fenner Canyon area, which was the Lancaster-Palmdale area of Los Angeles County, and then also Orange County and Lake Elsinore area of Orange and Riverside County. That was interesting; it was kind of different and you had to represent the Forest Service and so forth on those two camps. About that time – in fact, I was actually taking pictures on a hillside above the Fenner Canyon Camp because the young people wanted something made into a postcard that they could send their families, and I was on the hillside taking pictures of Fenner Canyon Camp when I got a call on the radio that the Forest Supervisor wanted to see me. This time it was Supervisor Bill Dresser, who had followed Sim Jarvi as supervisor on the Angeles. So Bill asked me to come in to the office. When I came in and I found out that the Regional Forester (at this time was Jack

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Deinema;. I never met him before he came to visit at the Angeles one time) wanted to know if I wanted to come up and be Assistant Director of I&E – Information and Education – for the assistant regional forester Grant Morris. I thought, well, I had ten years on the Angeles and it was really a job that Bill Dresser had had at one time before, maybe “it’s a good time to move on” and do things region-wide. So in 1968, I moved to the R.O. as assistant director of I & E,

Information and Education, under Grant Morris in the Regional Office. I moved my family to

Moraga, which was in the east bay. From San Francisco I learned to commute by bus. I never did the commuting before1

GAUSE: From horseback to bus.

PORTER: That’s right. It was interesting because I had a staff of 22. There were people on the staff of the I&E program in San Francisco that covered conservation education, media, dealing with the newspapers and radio and TV. There was an editorial department that did newsletters and brochures and so forth. There was an editor, an assistant editor, a writer. There were women’s activities that were dealing with Women’s Clubs, a staff person for that, and there was also an art department. We established an art department in Fort Mason, which was right out of downtown San Francisco on the Bay.

GAUSE: And they developed and made exhibits?

PORTER: One of the things that we were thinking about is that the Forest Service at that time hadn’t really done anything with Forest Supervisor offices or Ranger stations. If we wanted to make an exhibit we had to call Washington and it may take them three or four years to decide whether it’s good or not, then it would take them longer to build an exhibit and it would cost probably ten times as much as we could do it locally. So we were able to set up an art department under the guidance of John Jenott. He was an art student and art director, worked the job corps in the Eldorado Forest and then came in the Regional Office and hired an exhibit specialist. What

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we tried to do was do an education job in the ranger station offices and forest supervisor entryways. For example, [at] the Sequoia National Forest in Porterville, the Art Department actually built an artificial redwood tree out of different materials in the shop in Fort Mason and then took it and installed it in the entranceway in the Supervisor’s office in Porterville. The exhibit did an education job about what the Forest Service is about. So we did that in other forests all around the region and did all the art work for our publications and things like that. So it was actually during that time also that Visitor Information Service (VIS) started coming in, and

I started this with the Angeles NF at Crystal Lake. Hired a person by the name of Jerry Gause as our first full-time interpreter of information person for a campfire program and so forth at

Crystal Lake. We started expanding that throughout the region, and one of the first people that came in and did that was a person named Nord Whited. He’d been teacher at Lake Tahoe and a television producer in Hollywood. He wanted to get back in the small towns and so he worked summers at Lake Tahoe at our interpretive program there at the amphitheater. He came in our

Regional Office to head up what we called VIS, Visitor Information Service, for the region. With his background in Hollywood, he and the art director Jenott produced a film called “Pinchot,

You’re Fired.” It was a slide program, but done to music and very interesting, 15 minutes!

I guess I worked under quite a few Regional Foresters. On the Angeles I worked for the

Forest Supervisor but [also for] Charlie Connaughton as regional forester -- who had been there for a long time. Really from the old school, but he was the one who didn’t want to make my job in the Angeles a “public relations” or “public information” job. After we started doing things he would actually ask me about exhibits and displays, which at one time he didn’t believe in it. So he was moving with the times.

After that it was Jack Deinema. He came from Washington, D.C. He was head of the Job

Corps for the Forest Service in Washington, was a ranger and supervisor in Idaho before. I never

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met Jack Deinema before, but he came into town to the Angeles one time and said, “I heard about you,” and he said, “What’s your grade level?” and I said, “GS-11.” I had started at GS-7 back when I first came on the Angeles in 1958 and then I went to GS-9 and then I was GS-11, and I never could get higher than -11, and then Deinema said, “Well, we’ll see about that.”

About six months later I got the upgrade to GS-12. Jack Deinema, I think, recognized what

Public Information could do; he’s actually the one that got me to come to San Francisco and be a part of the Regional Office. Doug Leisz followed Deinema as Regional Forester and gave us a lot of support up there also.

I guess all the years in the Regional Office I felt that we had a good, professional staff.

We had some changes in conservation education that started with Jane Westenberger, who then got transferred to Washington, D.C. in a similar job in an office in Washington, D.C., followed by Betty Bruckner. Betty Bruckner was a teacher that came out of Montana and then was a teacher in California, so she headed up the conservation education for teachers and did a great job in environmental education. We changed the name to environmental education because it kind of fit the times better. But a good, professional staff like I said, with the art department, the conservation education and the V.I.S. program. Our media person there again was Jerry Gause, who came out of the Angeles and did a great job with radio and television and newspapers. He had a weekly radio report on KCBS in the Bay Area, about recreational opportunities in the

National Forests. They [the public] may not be planning camping but they could at least hear that there is a National Forest in Lake Tahoe or there is a National Forest in Mount Shasta or wherever. So that was kind of a first, I think.

I’m very proud of what we did in that Regional Office in San Francisco. I was there about six years. Nord Whited and myself, he lived in the east bay and I did too. We did some videotaping of what’s going on in the Forest live and then put on cable TV, when cable TV was first coming

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about. We did regular National Forest TV, cable grade. Beginning in those days was we didn’t have any battery-operated cameras. We had a 300-foot extension cord and it would hook into a restroom somewhere, and run that extension cord out and do the taping of the operation or interview of a timber management person. I remember one on the Stanislaus, about a timber management plan and so forth. We did run about 300-foot extension cords to the camera. We did the same thing in lookout towers. At Lake Tahoe we had a visitor amphitheater there and we were taping the V.I.S. program in the amphitheater and the power kept going off

Doug Leisz, the Regional Forester, lived in the east bay like we did. So I said, “We’re showing this on cable T.V. and I’d like to have you see one.” So he said, “All right, look on that night that we’re showing.” Unfortunately that was the night that they were showing the V.I.S. program at the amphitheater at Lake Tahoe where the lights kept going out all the time. So he said, “That wasn’t too good, was it?” So I said, “That was one of our worst ones.” He was very supportive of the whole program there. So anyway, I think we had a lot of training sessions throughout California where we trained public information officers on forests. By this time the position of Public Information Officer [PIO] had become a common one on a national forest. We had our first woman assigned to a National Forest, the Plumas National Forest, Janet Lambert, who had worked on two national forests before and in the Regional Office. Lloyd Britton, Forest

Supervisor, as I mentioned before, was a friend of mine, and he said he needed a PIO because they were having problems with media people in the Chico area, so he said Janet would be good, so Janet was the first woman PIO on the forest level that I can recall in the Forest Service, and she did an excellent job. So those types of things, we probably forgot a lot of people. But what is important in my career at least, is the six years that I was in the Regional Office in San

Francisco.

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From there I was reassigned to a position that was for the Washington office but it was in

Pasadena, California. It was called the National Media office. A fellow by the name of Glenn

Kovar had started it while I was on the forest in Pasadena. He got transferred to Washington, and

I then moved from my job in San Francisco. I was always wanting to be a forest supervisor but I didn’t have a forest degree so that was out. [So I applied for and got the job as Director of the

National Media Office in Pasadena.] The office was originally under the Region and then later on it became strictly under the Washington office Division of Information and Education. The

National Media Office was a division of the Washington office, and Bob Lake was the Director in Washington and very supportive. The job was strictly one of being Forest Service liaison to network television and the motion picture industry, and also national media, national newspapers, but mainly motion picture and network television. This was not unusual. It was unusual for the Forest Service, but it was not unusual [for the] military. The military had offices in Hollywood, both Army, Navy, Marines, even Coast Guard, had offices in Hollywood to deal with the news media and motion pictures full time for a long time. This was the first time the

Forest Service had one. So we got called on again to not only be liaison to “Lassie” on TV, this time in color, but also different motion pictures that were being made. The first working with me was a long-time friend, Betty Hite. She started with Dick Johnson in the San Bernardino

Forest and then came in and worked under Glenn Kovar in this position and now with me. A very excellent woman who knew the Forest Service and knew the media well.

GAUSE: Working with Hollywood industry, the motion picture industry, did they have to apply to come and use the National Forest? How did that system work?

PORTER: Well, they applied for a permit to use any National Forest land. But they didn’t have to apply to have their script okay’d or anything like that. That was a service that we provided, that got our office well-known throughout the motion picture and television industry, where they

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knew we were there to help. Both Betty Hite and I would review scripts, comment on scripts.

[Sometimes they had] rangers in crazy-looking uniforms that were not anything like it, so we would supply uniforms and the patches and the badges and so forth. We maintained control that way, and then if they started filming on a National Forest or anywhere with this so-called ranger, then I’d be there to advise the director and so forth and the proper thing. I taught many an actor how to act like a ranger, or act like a supervisor or a fire dispatcher.

GAUSE: Did you charge on the permit a certain fee to do the filming on the public land?

PORTER: Yeah, they were charged a fee for working on the land. It wasn’t that very expensive, it was just the permit fee. I would be on location telling them yes, you can cut that tree down, no, you can’t, you can’t drive down this road, use a green pickup. We supplied the pickup but they provided the liability for it and so forth. One particular case was one where it was filmed at

Mount Hood, Oregon, on both sides of Mount Hood, and I was there on location for about three weeks. They would have a script and the director would maybe change the script or change the dialogue, so you had to be there to make sure it was correct. And I’d look over the director’s shoulder and say, “Hey, that’s not right.” They wanted to do what was right, mostly. The director of the National Media office territory, that I had, was [from] Colorado West, including Alaska, and had about sixty percent travel. Dick Johnson, he and I started together, he was on the San

Bernardino and I was on the Angeles. He then rose up in the organization to be assistant Smokey

Bear director in Washington, and then went to Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and he served as

National Media Office East. So Dick Johnson covered everything east of the Colorado, including

New York City, and he did the same thing that I did with television, motion picture and news media work in those areas. So it seemed funny that both of us started out with no forestry degree, but each of had knowledge on the forest level, and we wound up with the same jobs, only one east coast and one west coast.

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GAUSE: Yeah, interesting.

PORTER: But I think that particular item was important to the Forest Service. They don’t have the office going on now, but I think it was important to have the Forest Service represented. We weren’t pushing Forest Service programs like that, we were just trying to make them correct, not only with media but also with TV and so forth. I think it was interesting. I forgot to mention when I left the Forest to go to San Francisco, the news media knew my name so much that CBS gave a reception at the Press Club in Los Angeles. Media people would come in the press club at the reception and say, “Where’s my good buddy Don Porter? I never saw him before but I talked to him on the phone a hundred times.” So that was real good when I left LA, and later came back to the National Media Office. My last assignment was not necessarily tied in with media, but there was a RARE program; that’s Roadless Area Review Evaluation, RARE II.

I was involved in RARE I, which was not very successful. It was all done in house with no public input, and then in the Regional Office in San Francisco and it died a fast death. This was RARE II, the second evaluation. There was public involvement. This was 1978.

GAUSE: These were areas that were evaluated that would either go into National Forest wilderness and preservation or into multiple use?

PORTER: That’s right. But it was the first time that we did a real concerted effort and analyzed public opinion, which was public input down my line. So we formed a group in Salt Lake City.

There were 45 what we called detailers, Forest Service employees from every region in the country, assigned. It was a three-month project in the summer of 1978 and I volunteered to be assistant director because during the summer the motion picture industry is pretty slow, not much going on. So I thought that would be a good way because it would include public opinion. So what happened was we had 45 detailers from different forests around the United States, from different regions, and hired about a hundred or so local people to come in and work with us. We

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set up headquarters at the old public courthouse on Main Street in Salt Lake City. We recorded all the letters, all the postcards and so forth, each region got on a particular area of proposed wilderness in their region. People would comment, and instead of just reading them and putting them aside, they sent them all to us and we would put them on computer cards. We could analyze or record 99 different reasons why people wanted wilderness or didn’t want wilderness in a particular area. But they could read the letter, actually record 99 reasons on computer cards, why they wanted wilderness for the roadless area or not. So each region sent their letters to us -- and petitions sometimes -- and we recorded, and that night they were run on computer and the next day we had a full printout of each wilderness area, each region, what the people wanted. We had about 300,000 responses from Regions. The director of the program there was Assistant

Supervisor of the Wasatch National Forest in Salt Lake City by the name of Steve Harper. When

I knew Steve he was the head of the Woodsy Owl program in Washington. So he was director of the project and I was assistant director and we had another assistant director who was a computer guy. I did all the personnel, training, and things like that. It was real work. We worked 12 hour days just like we were on a fire. We had Sundays off and the people from out of town, from different regions, we stayed in a hotel for a while. I didn’t really care for hotels that much so I found an apartment complex in Salt Lake City, south side of town, that had short-term residents.

They were only requesting $100 a week for a room that had a kitchen, living area, bedroom and changed linens twice a week, and it worked out real good. So about 30 of us had separate apartments in town. And then I rented a car on my own there to take people back and forth to work. But I’m saying it was a three-month job and a lot of people from all different regions came and stayed a couple of weeks, some stayed a couple of months, some stayed longer. It was a real good program!

Don PORTER, page 17

After that, all the projects were put into a computer and sent to Washington. The results of the RARE-II project were then presented to Congress. I don’t know what happened to it then, but I think it was the first time a government agency has done a kind of public involvement program, in this case for Forest Service areas. After that, it was time for me to retire after 25 years, so I came back to Pasadena and retired in October of 1978 after 25 years with the Forest

Service. Looking at issues over those 25 years, I think public involvement is important. In the beginning, as a lot of us in the Forest Service know, there were land managers and they went to college and they learned all about land management and they really didn’t care much about public involvement. They had made good decisions and then said, okay, public, this is it. Then public involvement came its own, people were critical of Forest Service just because they weren’t involved in the decision. So while I was in the Regional Office I made it a point to give training sessions to managers, forest supervisors, assistant supervisors, district rangers and so forth, on how to do public involvement. And the main theme was that “If the public has a part in the decision, the land-management decision, they’ll be better informed and will better support the decision!” It’s the tradition of the Forest Service to make a decision and make timber cut in a certain area and whatever and not consult the local people or the people a long ways away. So the theme we had at that time was get the public to be a part of the decision and let them participate, actually take a model and have them make decisions on it. And when they’re better informed they’re more likely to support the decision. Now, that doesn’t mean that somebody far away in some town isn’t going to complain about a Forest Service decision, but at least you’ve done your best. So [I] conducted public involvement and decision-making training and I think it had a lot of effects today, although I see some mistakes being made where that hadn’t been done, but that’s the way it goes. Again, if the public is left out of the decision they’ll think we have something left to hide. So I think they need to be a part of it.

Don PORTER, page 18

GAUSE: You know, National Forest Management Act required a considerable amount of public involvement on decision-making on future land uses.

PORTER: It did.

GAUSE: But you know, we, because of the work you did and many others, that kind of language was written into the draft of the act by the Forest Service.

PORTER: That’s good.

GAUSE: It paid off.

PORTER: That’s good. They recognize it then. I think Regional Foresters and Forest

Supervisors, when we were in the Regional Office in San Francisco, started recognizing this, and that’s when we did our training sessions on having managers know how to conduct a public hearing without talking down to the public and things like that, so I think it was important. But one of the things I think, looking at today, is that we sometimes forget that we need to emphasize

– we’re on the defensive all the time. I think we need to be on the offensive, not only in timber management, but other things the Forest Service does. I see everything on timber management because that’s being challenged by everybody. But let’s go on the offensive in promoting Forest

Service history in wilderness management. This is a good time to do that, on the 100th anniversary of the Forest Service. I don’t know all the details, but I think the Forest Service was one of the first ones who had a wilderness area in New Mexico. But – and, you know, people don’t – all the ones are not the ones who are going to hike the High Sierra trail. They’re going to take their RVs – I volunteer now in a state park, Dana Point, California, and you’d be surprised the number of people that come with RVs. And if you don’t have a road you can’t get an RV into a recreation area. That doesn’t mean you’re going to put an RV in a wilderness area, but there’s other people out there that need to get an experience other than hiking. So I think that’ important, too.

Don PORTER, page 19

Just to sum up, I think that some of my awards and [inaudible] – right now I’m involved in the National Museum of Forest Service History in Missoula, and I believe in that and wish I could spend more volunteer time on that. When I retired, I volunteered everything in my local community here in Dana Point. I was manager of Chamber of Commerce and had my own P.R. business for a while and then I became a professional volunteer, and what that is, is that a professional volunteer knows how to say “no” once in a while! I finally learned that! I’m active with my state park here and president of the Interpretive Association in the state park where we have a visitors’ center. I guess some of the awards I’m proud of, the fact that I was a Toastmaster for twelve years in Pasadena and San Francisco, the past president, I found out while doing the cream chicken circuit –

GAUSE: I didn’t understand you. Cream?

PORTER: Oh, cream chicken circuit, that’s the service club circuit. Cream because that seems like all you’d get was cream chicken. That’s the Rotary, chamber of commerce, women’s club and so forth.

In a big area like Los Angeles. The rangers would do it in their local area but I took over

Los Angeles. Anyway, they wouldn’t tell you you may be boring them or whatever, so I joined

Toastmasters and after twelve years, why, I felt pretty proud of that. Also the Public Relations

Society of America in San Francisco, why, I joined them, which is a professional group and I got a kick out of the public relations people in downtown San Francisco. They’d say, “Here comes

Smokey Bear,” PR person. But there you have to take a test, you’d have to do an oral exam, but I got my credential there. And of course in 1978 as I retired I got the national Smokey Bear silver award from the Smokey Bear committee, which I feel very proud of. I guess that’s about it.

GAUSE: In looking back in retrospect, what were your high points and low points during your career?

Don PORTER, page 20

PORTER: Oh, I don’t know. I guess getting the agency really involved in public involvement and decision-making, the public information on fires was one that I think we accomplished quite a bit, which is common now. I sit here at home watching a fire on TV and there’s a young lady who’s a fire prevention officer and she does quite well. There’s some areas in Montana here a few years ago we had big fires and one information officer – it was just someone they picked up and put in – made some mistakes and they had a local problem from that. But I think that overall, the public information on fires, the public information on forest levels, which most all forests have an information officer now, man or woman, it doesn’t make a difference, they do a great job. But I do think that we need to emphasize the positive, not only in forest management and timber management, but we need to emphasize recreation and there are other people than those that want to hike in the wilderness area. There’s a bunch of them out there, believe me.

GAUSE: Well, as far as leaders, do you figure Sim Jarvi was probably one of the biggest, best leaders that you –

PORTER: Sim Jarvi, you know, said, “here’s a job, go do it.” Jack Deinema, same way. As far as information work goes, I think they gave us that attitude to do things like San Francisco with the art department and the V.I.S., the TV work, the media work we did there, and the support led to public information people on the forest. One time, why, Regional Office said, you know, you’re doing publicity. No, we’re not doing publicity, we’re doing information work. If the people don’t know what you’re doing they’re going to think you aren’t doing anything or that you’re doing something wrong. So I think those are the highlights. We had some good chiefs of the Forest Service that looked on information as – I think John McGuire was one; [also] Max

Peterson. Max Peterson was a good one for – I knew him in San Francisco when he was there and went on to be Chief and another one that recognized the value of a good solid public information program.

Don PORTER, page 21

GAUSE: We’ve been talking with Don K. Porter, retired Forest Service, who brought about a lot of changes in the way we see and look at the public and the way the public sees us. So that’s all for now Don.

[End of interview.]