Robert Benton

I know it was pretty successful, in my case, when region kicked some money loose for projects rather than a situation where there was no money and I was picking up those duties.

That’s right. It worked well. Oregon Caves, after the group office broke up, had to have some real bad problems. And we had nothing to do with it. It created a little heartache for us, occasionally, because we were often thought as the Park Service in southern Oregon and some of the things that went on over there used to give us a little bit of trouble.

Was Frank Whittaker already here [at Crater Lake]?

Yes, Frank was there. I don’t know how long he’d been there. Frank was one of those really good individuals that had absolutely everything that he needed as far as attitude and stuff to make just an absolutely excellent chief of maintenance. He didn’t have as thorough a background as he would have liked to have had, and he had nothing around him to help him. He was it. Kathleen Conlon was a big help, but he just simply didn’t have any horses at all. That probably was the sorriest maintenance crew in the National Park Service, and that made it awfully, awfully difficult for Frank. That wasn’t his fault, you know. He inherited all that stuff.

On the theme of external relations, I came across the Klamath Indian hunting case of 1984. Were you directly involved in that? That seemed like it had a lot of pretty big-time implications if it had gone the other way?

It never was probably nearly as serious a threat to Crater Lake as a lot of people thought (20). e Indians did not want to take on Crater Lake in the court case. The one that they took on and lost, they felt they had a lot better chance to win. It was pretty obvious that didn’t want to get arrested.