Otis “Pete” Foiles Oral History Interview

Interviewer and Date: John Morrison, Crater Lake National Park Historian, August 4, 1987

Transcription: Transcribed by Cheryl Ryan, September 1997

Biographical Summary (from interview introduction)

Otis “Pete” Foiles, park ranger 1939 – 1942. My predecessor, John Morrison, conducted a total of seven interviews during the four months he served as historian in 1987.  Pete Foiles was among the former park employees he interviewed, but a backlog of tapes and no funds for transcription meant that processing did not take place until a decade later. Fortunately Mr. Foiles remained at the same address all this time so that I could locate him for help with the editing process and release of the transcription.

Materials Associated with this interview on file at the Dick Brown library at Crater Lake National Park’s Steel Visitor Center: taped interview

To the reader:

My predecessor, John Morrison, conducted a total of seven interviews during the four months he served as historian in 1987.  Pete Foiles was among the former park employees he interviewed, but a backlog of tapes and no funds for transcription meant that processing did not take place until a decade later.  Fortunately Mr. Foiles remained at the same address all this time so that I could locate him for help with the editing process and release of the transcription.

The follows is a short account of life at Crater Lake over a three year period, from December 1939 to October 1942.  Some related information is in another interview with Hazel Frost (since deceased) that Morrison conducted on the same day in 1987, and one by Jeff LaLande with Arch Work in 1981.  The later appeared as part of the third volume in a series called “Recollections: People and the Forest,” printed by the Rogue River National Forest in 1990.

Stephen R. Mark

(Crater Lake National Park Historian)

November 1997