A. E. DEMARAY

Like all big business organizations, the Federal Government recognizes and rewards merit in its employes. A. E. Demaray, Associate Director of the National Park Service, is an example. He entered the government service in 1903 as a messenger in the Department of the Interior. Two years later he was a draftsman in the Bureau of Reclamation. With the exception of an assignment as a civilian draftsman in the U. S. Army of Pacification, in Havana, Cuba, from March 1907 to December, 1908, his entire career in the government has been in the Department of the Interior.

Mr. Demaray "grew up" with the National Park Service, to which he was transferred as a draftsman from the Geological Survey when the Service was being organized in 1917. He has been in the National Park Service ever since, holding such positions as Editor, Assistant in Operations and Public Relations, Administrative Officer, Assistant Director, and Executive Officer. He was appointed Associate Director in August, 1933.

Mr. Demaray has been described as "a tireless workhorse." Only a man of his compact physical build, endowed apparently with inexhaustible reservoirs of energy, could have carried the burden of national park expansion as he has done. Today his hair is silvery iron grey, while his face shows signs of the unremitting toil of building up the National Park Service; but his touch is as firm as ever and his clear mind resolves the multifarious problems which now beset the vastly expanded Service. While he has an exhaustive knowledge of all phases of National Park and cooperative recreational work, his special field has been in fiscal and budgetary matters, in which he is a recognized expert. It is not too much to say that the comparatively generous attitude of the Bureau of the Budget and of the House and Senate Committees, toward National Park appropriations, has been due to the confidence inspired by him. He has also had principal charge of the many millions of dollars of road construction programs in the national parks, undertaken in cooperation with the Public Roads Administration of the Federal Works Agency. The details of these extensive road construction programs in all the national parks, as well as the two great parkway projects in the East - the Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace Parkways - were worked out largely by him.

Particularly outstanding among Mr. Demaray's park achievements was his suggestion which led to creation of the Southern Appalachian National Park Commission. This resulted in establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in Tennessee and North Carolina; and in the approval of projects that later became the Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia; and the Mammoth Cave National Park, in Kentucky.

A. E. DEMARY
Associate Director.