In the fall after my graduation from Massachusetts Agricultural College, I went to San Francisco to work for the firm of MacGrory & McLaren, Nurserymen and Landscape-Gardeners. I was the first and only professional landscape architect in the firm. The other members were interested primarily in selling nursery stock. They planned and developed some very fine estates, however, and it was a great experience for me. Donald McLaren, the only partner living at the time, was the only son of John McLaren, superintendent of the San Francisco park system and the creator of Golden Gate Park.

The elder McLaren was a close friend of my father's, and so the Donald McLaren family and I had dinner practically every Sunday at Golden Gate Lodge, the home of the superintendent. John McLaren was a canny Scotsman with the greenest thumb I have ever encountered. From the sand dunes of Golden Gate Park he created one of the finest large city parks in this country. He was a gentleman with a deep understanding of people and much political know-how, and he had a great knowledge of plants. He was so well thought of that the people of San Francisco passed a city ordinance making him superintendent of their park system for life or as long as he wanted to hold the office. He was in his nineties when he died, still superintendent of parks and very active to the end. To be treated as part of his family, as I was, was one of the finest experiences and lessons I could have had. I didn't fully realize at the time that he was getting from me the younger generation's attitude and thinking and at the same time letting me in on certain basic principles that he had learned the hard way through the years.

In the early spring of 1924, I had gotten jobs in the firm for two classmates of mine, Effy Buckley, a landscape architect of Natick, Massachusetts, and Willie Marshman, a pomologist of Springfield, Massachusetts. When Donald McLaren died in the spring of 1925, his widow and Mrs. MacGrory decided to dispose of their properties, and the nurseries in San Mateo were subdivided and sold. Buckley, Marshman, and I then decided to get a car and see the West, not knowing whether we would be there again. We wanted to see as much of it as we could and visit many of the national parks.

We got a canvas-top, four-door, secondhand Studebaker, put three folding canvas cots (World War I salvage) in the back of the car along with some cases of canned goods, and started out. We headed north to Seattle via Lassen Volcanic and Crater Lake national parks and crossed the states of Washington and Idaho, entering Montana and then Yellowstone National Park. We visited Mount Rainier and Glacier national parks en route. In Idaho we camped one night in a national forest. It was getting dark as we went into camp, and when we built our camp fire we saw the reflection of several pairs of eyes in the surrounding forest looking at us. We figured that those animals were interested in our supplies and that our fire was the best means of keeping them away. We took two-hour shifts staying awake to put wood on the fire.

We learned that the bears in Yellowstone will eat anything not locked up and that there is no way of locking an old canvas-top car. We camped one day at Madison Junction and set our three canvas cots in a row alongside the car, with the heads placed next to the running board. That night Willie was in the cot toward the front of the car, I was in the one toward the rear, and Effy was in the middle. It was a dark night. A little after midnight Willie was awakened by something tickling his face. He soon realized a bear was standing over him, its back feet on the ground and its forefeet on the running board. Willie didn't dare move and could hardly breathe. The bear stepped down and went around to the other side of the car. The park rangers had told us that if the bears bothered us at night we should turn on the car lights because these big animals don't like lights. Willie was too weak to get up, so he yelled, "Connie, turn on the lights!" I woke out of a sound sleep, climbed into the car, and reached over to turn on the lights. I felt something close by. When the lights came on, I found myself eyeball to eyeball with a black bear. Fortunately, he jumped out the far side of the car and ran off into the woods. I fell out of my side onto Effy and Willie. We lost only a loaf of bread and most of our night's sleep and were very glad to see the sun come up in the morning.

From Yellowstone we headed for Salt Lake City and then across Utah and Nevada and over Tioga Pass into Yosemite National Park. We did stop in Reno to try to replenish our supply of cash but finally had to wire home for a loan. It was late in the afternoon as we left Reno, and we did not go into camp until after dark. We found a good place near a stream among some rather large trees. When we woke up the next morning, we saw a sign stating that Kit Carson had camped there too. After a stay in Yosemite we went south to General Grant and Sequoia national parks. We decided to head home by way of Los Angeles, Mexicali, and the Grand Canyon. Going through Arizona on crushed stone roads, we had thirteen flat tires in one day, and those were the days of inner tubes! We then went east to Kansas and north to my home in Minneapolis. After a few days of rest Effy and Willie took the car back to their home in Massachusetts.

Back in Minneapolis I found two opportunities available to me: one to go to work with a firm in Chicago that manufactured architectural equipment, the other to enter into a partnership with Harold J. Neale in New Orleans. Harold Neale was also a landscape gardener from the Massachusetts Agricultural College, about ten years my senior, and, at that time, superintendent of Audubon Park in New Orleans. The plan was that we would form a partnership called Neale and Wirth, Landscape Architects and Town Planners, and he would stay on as superintendent of Audubon Park until we got our business going. Harold was a married man with three children, and he couldn't take too much of a chance. I decided to go to New Orleans.

We got off to a fine start. Harold learned that the Jonas Land Company had plans for development of a fairly large piece of land on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Jefferson Parish. We asked if we could lay out the subdivision for them. They answered that they had their own engineers, but after some discussion they did agree to let us submit a plan and to let their salesmen choose between our plan and the one their engineers worked out. The land was flat, but we put in some curved roads anyway. We also set aside land that would be donated by the company for parks and playgrounds, schools and churches. The Jonas salesmen decided the developers could make more on our layout than on the engineers' rigid gridiron layout of fifty-foot by one-hundred-foot lots. We got all the company's work from then on.

We covered a territory from New Orleans to eastern Texas, plus eastern Oklahoma, parts of Tennessee, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In fact, we did so well that when I went home for Christmas of 1925, I proposed to Helen Olson, who was home for the holidays from Vassar College. Her father, Olaf J. Olson, was a good friend of my father. He was a partner in Holm and Olson, a florist and landscape firm in Saint Paul that had extensive greenhouses and nurseries. Because of my father's horticultural background, he and Mr. Olson had much in common, and as they became close so did the two families. The idea of an interfamily marriage made everyone happy. The wedding was set for June 30, which would be after Helen graduated. Business got better and better; we were happily married; and we were blessed with a son in the summer of 1927.

But soon the Great Depression began to be sorely felt all along the Gulf Coast, and by late fall of 1927 the partnership of Neale and Wirth was out of business. Harold was fortunate, for he had not given up his job as superintendent of Audubon Park. I worked long hours trying to earn a living, but our debts grew and grew.

One day in early March, 1928, I got a letter from my godfather, Gus Amrhyn, who was superintendent of parks in New Haven, Connecticut. He wrote that Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., was wondering whether I would be interested in a job as landscape architect with the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. If so, I was to go to Washington and see Lieutenant Colonel U.S. Grant III, who was then the engineer officer in charge of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds and executive officer of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. My bank agreed to one more loan to finance the trip, and I went to Washington and landed the job. Then I went back to New Orleans and drove my family to Minneapolis, leaving them with my parents until I could provide suitable quarters in Washington. I entered on duty in Washington on May 11, 1928, and thus started a new career that was to extend over some thirty-six years.

My experiences in private business in San Francisco and New Orleans had lasting influence on me, short though they were. They helped give me insight into private enterprise and developed in me a better understanding of people's capabilities, their problems, and especially the feeling of helplessness that accompanies unemployment. Later in the thirties, when I helped administer the Civilian Conservation Corps program for the National Park Service, I remembered that feeling. If a person was out of work and really wanted a job, I would try my best to find a place for him. We built a very fine staff by putting well-qualified unemployed people into the low-level positions we had available and then promoting them as jobs more in keeping with their qualifications opened up. This group grew with the expanding National Park Service, and many of those hired in the depression were in the top positions that made Mission 66, in the fifties and sixties, a real success. This group of professionals furnished many of the plans and ideas and much of the administrative ability I shall describe in subsequent chapters.

Little did I know when I went to Washington that some day I would become a part of the National Park Service. It was Director Horace M. Albright who asked me in 1931 to transfer from the National Capital Park and Planning Commission to the National Park Service as assistant director in charge of the Branch of Land Planning. No one can really hope to do justice in describing Horace Albright. To know him, to say nothing of working for him, is an honor. Thinking back over the years to 1930, when I began to get well acquainted with Albright, I can't remember ever hearing anything but praise and admiration for him. Everyone still looks to him on national park matters.

Stephen T. Mather, first director of the National Park Service, served in that office from May 16, 1917, to January 8, 1929.

Albright was a young lawyer working in the Department of the Interior when in 1914 he was assigned to help Stephen T. Mather manage the national parks and get legislation through Congress to establish the National Park Service. Mather, an influential and wealthy Chicago industrial leader, was dissatisfied with the way the parks were run and expressed that opinion to Secretary Franklin K. Lane. The secretary, a friend of Mather's, told him that if he didn't like the way they were run, he should come to Washington and run them yourself." Mather did just that, giving up his business to come to Washington and lead the drive to establish the National Park Service and formulate the policy and organization to manage the national park system. The act establishing the National Park Service was passed by Congress and became law in August, 1916. Mather became the National Park Service's first director in 1917, and Albright became his assistant.

In 1919, Albright became superintendent of Yellowstone National Park while also serving as assistant to the director in the field. He was the first civilian superintendent of Yellowstone after the National Park Service took over administration of the park from the army. It is very possible that Albright was in Yellowstone when those three "upstate farmers," as we were called at Mass Aggie, went through the park in 1925.

Stephen T. Mather is considered the founder of the National Park Service and its basic policy, but the records of Mather and Albright and the relationship between these two stalwarts often cause them to be called co-founders. Shortly after Mather died in 1930, his friends and co-workers had bronze tablets made and placed in all the national parks. The tablets bear his profile in relief against a scenic mountain background and contain the following inscription:

He laid the foundation of the National Park Service defining and establishing the policies under which its areas shall be developed and conserved unimpaired for future generations. There will never come an end to the good that he has done.

Any organization that had Mather and Albright could not help but get started in the right direction, and to have them as directors for the first seventeen years really gave the National Park Service a family feeling.

From 1872, when Yellowstone was established, until 1916, when the National Park Service was created, responsibility for the management and protection of national parks resided in the office of the Secretary of the Interior. Arrangements had been made with the army for the Corps of Engineers to handle the construction of roads and necessary park facilities and for the calvary to provide general administration and protection. When the National Park Service was established, there were twenty national monuments under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior and fourteen national parks, and together they constituted the National Park System. The parks had been established by separate acts of Congress, and the monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The Antiquities Act authorized the president to set aside, by public proclamation, lands owned by the federal government containing "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest As lands in these categories were set aside as national monuments, they remained under the respective jurisdictions of the Departments of War, Agriculture, and the Interior. It is interesting to note that in 1916 all areas administered by the Interior Department were situated west of the Mississippi River.

The act of August 25, 1916, which established the National Park Service, states,

...That there is hereby created in the Department of the Interior a service to be called the National Park Service, which shall be under the charge of a director, who shall be appointed by the Secretary, and who shall receive a salary of $4,500 per annum. There shall also be appointed by the Secretary the following assistants and other employees at the salaries designated: One assistant director, at $2,500 per annum; one chief clerk, at $2,000 per annum; one draftsman, at $1,800 per annum; one messenger, at $600 per annum; and, in addition thereto, such other employees as the Secretary of the Interior shall deem necessary: Provided, that not more than $8,100 annually shall be expended for salaries of experts, assistants, and employees within the District of Columbia not herein specifically enumerated unless previously authorized by law.

The act provided for field responsibilities and did not limit the amount of funds or the number of people and their salaries. But the limitations put on the number of employees in Washington and on their salaries are an interesting commentary on the changing times. The total of $19,500 authorized in the 1916 act for the Washington office for all purposes is less than half the sum now set aside as salary for the director of the service and $500 less than I received as salary when I retired as director in 1964. The 1916 act set down the purpose of the service as follows:

. . . The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

Thus began the National Park Service. At the request of the director and the secretary, the calvary remained on duty in several of the large parks for several years until sufficient funds were appropriated by Congress to provide full management under civilian administration.

The young National Park Service struggled to become established during the First World War and began building up during the twenties, when it ran head on into the devastating depression. Fortunately, because of strong leadership in the Mather-Albright period, a sound policy had been formulated and basic principles established that were accepted by the administration, Congress, and the people in general. Just as the depression began to settle in, the service lost Mather, who was suffering poor health. Albright, young and vigorous, carried on through the greatest economic collapse this nation has experienced. He continued into the early part of the New Deal, a period of rehabilitation and adjustment to the economic and social changes that had been building over the years. The need and desire of the people to go to work in some cases resulted in needless make-work programs, which in turn threatened to uproot sound policies for the protection and preservation of our natural and historic resources.

Horace M. Albright, director of the National Park Service from January 12, 1929, to August 9, 1933.

After the first six months of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, with the National Park Service well adjusted to the New Deal, Albright felt that it was time for him to leave the government and follow through on plans that he had set aside in the urgency of establishing the National Park Service. He accepted the offer of the United States Potash Company to become its vice-president and general manager. Over a period of sixteen years he had served the Park Service as assistant director, as superintendent of Yellowstone, and as director. Before leaving, he made arrangements for Arno B. Cammerer to become director and for Arthur E. Demaray to become associate director. Cammerer had been associate director under Albright, and both Cammerer and Demaray had worked under Mather.

The Park Service was on a sound basis and had the backing of a very strong secretary, Harold L. Ickes. It was a boom period for park and recreation activities of great magnitude, and the service was successful in getting what was needed for the national parks, while at the same time helping the states build up their state park systems. Overwork caused Cammerer to ask in 1940 to be relieved of the directorship and to be appointed regional director in Richmond, Virginia. His request was granted, but, because of the strain he had been under, he was compelled to retire in 1941, and he died about a year later.

Secretary Ickes selected a well-known and highly respected conservationist, Newton B. Drury, to be director. Drury took office on August 20, 1940. Demaray, a sturdy and sound administrator, stayed on as associate director. Director Drury was just getting well settled in his position when the Second World War arrived.

Within a couple of years all emergency recovery funds of the thirties were diverted to prepare for war, and the yearly appropriation for the Park Service dropped from the 1940 high of nearly thirty-five million dollars to a low of under five million dollars in 1945. All construction, of course, was stopped, maintenance was cut to the bone, and deterioration of facilities set in. Be cause of gas rationing, travel through the parks was cut to a mere trickle. Government agencies and private industry, with the cry of "national emergency" on their lips, looked at national park resources as free game. Drury, however, stood firm. For a time it was Drury s guts and fortitude alone that held the park policy and its principles intact. His final argument to a stubborn government agent would go something like this: "All right, if you will bring me a signed statement from your Secretary that what you propose is essential for the survival of the nation, I'll step aside." Nobody ever did.

As the war worked itself to a finish, more attention began to be directed to needs at home. But then our nation found itself in the middle of the cold war. Many felt it was necessary not only to keep ourselves well armed but to help arm other nations in the interest of insuring peace throughout the world. It was a period of many international compacts and defense agreements, and these activities required a great amount of money. It was exceedingly difficult, almost impossible, for the service to obtain funding for the rebuilding and refurbishing of park roads, buildings, and other facilities that had deteriorated from years of disuse and lack of maintenance.

In these trying times there were many changes in the department. Drury gave more and more thought to going back to his native California and his beloved Save-the-Redwoods League, in which he and his brother had worked very hard for many years to preserve the coastal redwoods. The thousands of acres of these groves that the Drury brothers played such an important part in saving are a monument to them and their loyal associates in the league. In the spring of 1951, Drury decided to accept appointment as head of the State Parks of California. The redwood groves that the Save-the-Redwoods League had purchased were a part of the state park system. Governor Earl Warren, later chief justice of the United States, had asked Drury to take the job. It is interesting to note that Warren, Albright, Mrs. Albright, and Drury were all classmates in the class of 1912 at the University of California. Mather was an earlier graduate.

At about the same time that Drury decided to return to California, Arthur Demaray notified Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman that he was going to retire, having been associate director since 1933. The secretary asked Demaray to stay on as director of the service. Demaray accepted on the condition that he could retire by the end of the year. He had a long and very significant career with the Park Service. Horace Albright, while serving as acting director during Mather's illness in 1917, had brought Demaray into the service, and Demaray was the last Mather man to be director.

From the time the National Park Service was organized in 1917, through to December 9, 1951, there had been five directors: Mather, Albright, Cammerer, Drury, and Demaray. Though it is true that Drury was not considered a Mather man, not having been in the Park Service at the time Mather was organizing it or through the initial period of administration, he was nevertheless of that vintage and a conservationist with many years of experience. I was the sixth, the first to become director after the service ran out of Mather men. I held the position the longest of any, from December 9, 1951, to January 8, 1964.

Nobody will ever convince me that there is a better agency in government or in private business than the National Park Service. We are, I believe, more fortunate than most organizations in that our job of preserving and managing the natural and historic heritage of the nation for the use and enjoyment of the people is so inspiring and personally rewarding. To do it properly, however, as with any other job, requires not only special training and hard work but also a certain sensitivity and aptitude. I believe I can best express what I have in mind by quoting from a letter I received in February, 1949, shortly after my father's death, from one of the nation's great landscape architects, the late Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the son of an equally famous landscape architect and planner. It was about my father, written in longhand, and it said in part:

When we can get together for a quiet chat, I want to talk with you about him and about something difficult to describe, which I think he and my father had very much in common and which was, I believe, largely responsible for the great accomplish ment of both of them in park work. It is something to which my attention has been strongly drawn of late by reading certain old letters of my father's—and something of much more profound importance in park work than is generally recognized. At bottom, it depends on a deep-seated, constant and compelling interest in and sympathy with, the people using the parks—on finding one's chief satisfaction in appreciative friendly observation and study of the ways in which those people actually use, and derive pleasure and benefit from any given park, and in helping and guiding them by every available means to get the best values from their use of it, in the long run, that are made possible by the inherent characteristics of that particular park and by the widely various personal characteristics of the people themselves.

Unless a park man's interest in, and use of, the techniques of designing, constructing and operating parks are dominated and motivated by such a fundamental and absorbing interest in the people who use the parks and in all the details of how they use them and how they can be induced to use them with greater benefit to themselves in the long run—as was the case with my father and with yours—mere technical skill in any or all of those phases of park work tends to become academic and sterile, except so far as that man is used as a subordinate technician-assistant by a master-mind who has that broader human interest in the people as such, and can to some degree inspire his assistants with that same absorbing interest in them. Isn't that the most important thing that park-men ought to learn from your father's life work and that of my father?

Such sincere expressions of appreciation of my father's considerable contributions to his chosen field of endeavor have always served to substantiate what otherwise might seem an exaggerated estimate of his accomplishments on my own part.

As the sole surviving charter member, Dad attended the fiftieth anniversary of the American Institute of Park Executives in Boston in 1948. On his way there from San Diego, where he was living in retirement, he stopped in Minneapolis for a medical examination and learned that he had cancer. He went on to Boston, gave his scheduled address at the meeting, and on his return visited us in Washington as he had planned. He told us about his trouble and that he would undergo surgery when he got back to San Diego. He was 86, and seeing him off at the railroad station was a sad experience. He lived only a short time afterwards.