National Park
Foundation
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One other topic that we haven’t
gotten to is the creation of the National Park Foundation in 1967. Could you
tell me a little about your role in that?
Sure can. There was an existing board called
the National Park Trust Fund Board which consisted of the secretary of the
treasury, the attorney general, and the secretary of the interior to solicit
donations for the National Park Service. It never really amounted to very much
for two reasons. One was that the secretary of the treasury managed it and any
donation received immediately had to be converted to cash and invested in
government bonds. Well, people had the first inclination of not wanting to give
to the government after they had just paid their taxes. Secondly, they could see
the asset losing value as it was converted to government bonds, so it [the
National Trust Fund Board’s effort] was not going anywhere.
Connie Wirth hired a young man named Donald
Thurber, who was a very wonderful bright guy, and I believe he was from Detroit,
if I’m not mistaken, as a financial consultant, to have a look at this and
decide what to do. He came up with the idea that the trust fund board ought to
be abolished and in lieu of it we ought to establish a regular foundation that
would be managed by private trustees, and that would be the National Park
Foundation. We didn’t have any such thing as that.
T hat legislation was pending as a proposal,
not as an introduced piece of legislation, but simply as a proposal in the
Interior Department when I became director. It finally came to my attention, and
I thought it was a brilliant idea. I talked with the committees and the
committees agreed, so we introduced it and we passed it, and we were the first
ones who had one of these National Park Foundations and it was the genesis, the
groundbreaker, for seven more that followed for the Fish and Wildlife and Forest
Service. All of the land-management agencies, the Bureau of Land Management,
wound up getting these foundations to support their programs. So that’s the
background on how we got the National Park Foundation.
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