Then Newton Drury had been assigned as the new director for the state park system after being the director of the National Park Service. I talked with him and he had a job for me to come over as the landscape architect in charge of master planning for the state parks, which I did. That was a very delightful job because I traveled throughout the state, and being my native state, I knew a lot of it. I’d take horseback trips in Mount San Jacinto and looked over the area where the tramway from Palm Springs goes up to the summit and selected generally the site where the upper terminals should be. We were in the Redwoods one week and down in the desert the next. A lot of projects were along the Colorado River. What I liked most were some of the major projects in the Sierra.
I got involved in the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley. The legislature appropriated funds for the Olympic development and as part of that several million of it came from state park funds. So we were involved, but the idea was I was to work with the Olympic Commission to determine what private lands we should acquire at Squaw Valley. Once we started talking with the people involved in the Olympic Commission planning, they told us to bug off. They had an Olympics to put on and they weren’t going to be worried about whether they bought any land for the future state park or not. So we had to take what we could get when the Olympics were over. All we took was a lot of litigation. We had everybody that was supposed to sue the Olympic Commission suing the state. Paulson and Cushing were the two principal landowners. Paulson was suing the state because of the fact that the meadow that he owned had been covered with sawdust and had to be used as the parking area during the Olympics, with the idea that the sawdust would freeze and form the base. Well, all the sawdust did was enhance the meadow sod, but the state had to pay out several million dollars for so-called deterioration for the meadow. There were several instances where that happened.
I was then appointed to supervise all planning and development for the state parks from Yosemite to the Oregon boundary, including all the Sierra, all the Redwoods, the valley parks, and the like. We had projects at Lake Tahoe, where we did a great deal of land acquisition and development. We had substantial appropriations from the legislature to do both design and construction. So I was supervising all of that work.
