We were the first non-Mormons that ever lived in Tropic, I’m quite sure. And we made enough friends down there so that the man who lived next door who was the Bishop down there, called me up the night before we left to go back to Sequoia/Kings, and thanked me for everything that I had done for him. So I thought that was pretty good. But it was an experience and we took our message a little bit to school, and we worked very closely there, the rangers and the naturalists, there was such a small crew altogether that we all had to work together. And we would take turns going out to viewpoints, staying there talking to people as they came out. Of course, this would be in the same “road patrol” so you’d just stop and wait and talk to people as they came and talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. It was a good experience, a real good experience.
Then I got a chance to go back to Sequoia/Kings as assistant chief ranger under Lou Hallock again. And he’s the one that selected me for the forestry and fire control position there. And so we spent a little over two years, June of ’58 until September of ’60 there in that job. Fortunately for Lou, but unfortunately for the rest of us, he moved on to superintendent at Bryce Canyon, and we inherited a chief ranger by the name of Pete Shuft who I could call an s.o.b. again, but he’s dead now. And he was also an alcoholic, and this does not mix too well. We had troubles the first day he was there. He didn’t like the way somebody had been doing something, and I told him that was the way it worked and so we disagreed. So we disagreed more and more. Well, that was the summer of the big fire, well the biggest fire that we had in a long, long time anyway. Was called the Tunnel Rock Fire, which was along the road that goes up from Ash Mountain to Giant Forest. And in the course of that fire he laid off of us pretty well, but the situation was getting worse and worse and worse but anyway I became noticed by the chief ranger at Yosemite and about August sometime, he called me up and asked me if I wanted to be his assistant at Yosemite. Yosemite was one of the finest places we’ve ever worked. Nice and easy in convenience, a wonderful place to work, beside getting to work for the park. But our oldest son was in high school by this time and he traveled 40 miles down to school and 40 miles back every day. And he graduated from high school from there (25).
Jean: Well it was more that just the 40 miles, it took two hours one way and an hour and forty-five minutes the other way. You had to go up and over two mountains to get there.
Well, Yosemite is a wonderful place, was a wonderful place to work at. I don’t think that I would want to work there now.
