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.