Have you known any of the Crater Lake superintendents? Did you know Don Fisher as a teacher and NPS employee?
I know Don Fisher very well. And I have known others. Borgman is a good friend of mine. He’s still around here (4). He was in the Rotary Club. Then there was a rather small guy, very friendly man named Jim Rouse (5). He’d come to our meetings of our committee. Fisher was a hands-on sort of an administrator, kind of into everything. I think he was involved in establishing the antelope herd at the Modoc Lava Beds National Monument. I believe he was active at that time. He was a guy that was a very good friend of mine.
Don Fisher was a teacher at the Klamath Union High School, a teacher of history. He was vitally interested in national monument. He wrote some things, and I have never read them. I don’t know where they are, but he wrote quite a bit. He was head of the Lava Beds and I applied for a summer job there in 1934. I wanted a job and gave references, but I never did hear anything of it. I didn’t get the job and I went back to school. I took a master’s degree during the summer session. Then, about the time I was packed and ready to leave for Eugene, he said I’d been hired. But I didn’t know it and I had gone too far down the road. I might have ended up as a park district employee because I was very, very intrigued with Lava Beds Monument, wanted to work there, and need the money.
That was before there was much development there?
Very little development. There were some roads, but no guide service or anything. Judd Howard was the old boy that built his life around the Lave Beds. There, that’s him. That’s his camera. I gave the park service down there a lot of his pictures.
He promoted the monument?
He did everything that he could. He took pictures. He lived down there. The rates were eating his food. He made this map. I gave to them, too. This tells all about Judd Howard and gives a lot of his dates that he went there- his journals. These are pictures from the Judd Howard collection and gives a lot of his correspondence.
I noticed his address was in Klamath Falls.
Yes. He had an Indian that would go down there with him. This is not on Crater Lake and you may not want this on your tape.
