Oral History Office Regional Oral History Office
Forest History Society >ne Bancroft Library
Santa Cruz, California University of California, Berkeley
Emanuel Fritz Teacher, Editor, and Forestry Consultant
An Interview Conducted by Elwood R. Maunder
and Amelia R. Fry
(5) 1972 by The Forest History Society and the Regents of the University of California
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Directors of the Forest History Society and the Regents of the University of California and Emanuel Fritz, dated 16 September 1969. The manu script 1s thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to Emanuel Fritz during his lifetime and to the Forest History Society and the University of California thereafter. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Executive Director of the Forest History Society or the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to Forest History Society, P.O. Box 1581, Santa Cruz, California 95060, or the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California 97420, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identifica tion of the user. The legal agreement with Emanuel Fritz requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
FOREWORD
This interview is part of a series produced by the Regional Oral History Office of Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, under a grant from the Forest History Society, whose funding was made possible by the Hill Family Foundation .
Transcripts in the series consist of interviews with: DeWitt Nelson, retired head of the Department of Natural Resources, California; William R. Schofield, lobbyist for timber owners, Cal ifornia Legislature; Rex Black, also lobbyist for timber owners, California Legislature; Walter F. McCuIloch, retired Dean of the School of Forestry, Oregon State University, Con/all is, Oregon; Thornton Munger, retired head of U.S. Forest Service Experiment Station, Pacific Northwest Region; Leo Isaac, reti red, si I viculture research in the Forest Service Experiment Station, Pacific North west Region; and Walter Lund, retired chief, Division of Timber Management, Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service; Richard Colgan, retired forester for Diamond Match Lumber Company; Myron Krueger, professor of forestry, emeritus, U.C. Berkeley; and Woodbridge Metcalf, retired extension forester, U.C. Berkeley. Copies of the manuscripts are on deposit in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Los Angeles; and the Forest History Society, University of California at Santa Cruz.
Interviews done for the Forest History Society under other auspices include: Emanuel Fritz, professor of forestry, Univer sity of California, Berkeley, with funding from the California Red wood Association; and a forest genetics series on the Eddy Tree Breeding Station with tapes by W.C. Gumming, A.R. Liddicoet, N.T. Mirov, Mrs. Lloyd Austin, Jack Carpender, and F.I. Righter, cur rently funded by the Forest History Society Oral History Program.
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons prominent in the history of the West. The Office is under the administrative supervision of the Director of the Bancroft Library.
Wi I la Klug Baum, Head Regional Oral History Office
Regional Oral History Office Room 486 The Bancroft Library University of California Berkeley, California
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE by Henry J. Vaux v
INTRODUCTION by Elwood R. Maunder vii
I EARLY LIFE 1
The Fritz Family in Baltimore 1 Baltimore Polytechnic
Cornell University 11 Teaching at Baltimore Polytechnic
Botany in Cornell Summer School 18
II YALE SCHOOL OF FORESTRY 20
Classes, Professors, and Field Work 20
Gifford Pinchot 27
Contrasts in Forestry Education 32
III BEGINNING A FORESTRY CAREER 36
The Context of Government and Industry 36
In the New Hampshire Forestry Department 40
In Montana and Idaho With the U.S. Forest Service 47
Fort Valley Experiment Station, Arizona 59
IV WORLD WAR ONE AIR SERVICE 68
V PINCHOT AND FEDERAL REGULATION 74
VI TEACHING AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN THE TWENTIES 79
Courses 79
Faculty 90
German vs. American Forestry in Early 1900's 97
A School of Forestry at Stanford? 103
VII THE REDWOODS 107
Second Growth Investigation 107
Projects With the U.S. Forest Service 117
Industry Cooperation and Forestry Attempts 127
The Union Lumber Company 127
Consulting in the Redwoods 130
The Tree Farm Movement 138
CRA forester for the NIRA Lumber Code (Article X) 141
Logging Conferences 145
VIII SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS 151
Role of the Society 151
Journal of Forestry Work 157
The "UnhoTy Twelve Apostles" 173
Reed's Dismissal 189
Protection of Members 202
The Cox Case 202
The Black Case 208
iv
H.H. Chapman 221
IX THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR 234
S.A.F. Revolt: Chapman vs. Interior Foresters 236 Pinchot's Tour in the West During the Transfer Controversy 238
X THE CALIFORNIA FOREST PRACTICE ACT 242
Legislation Attempts for Acquisition of Cutover Lands 242 Consultant to the Legislative Forestry Study Committee
(The Biggar Committee) 250
The Legislation 257
The Douglas Fir Region 265
The Redwood Region 270
XI THE FOREST PRODUCTS LABORATORY 274
XII FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (FARM) 281
XIII GENERAL COMMENTS 291
APPENDICES 299
INDEX 318
PREFACE
If one were to characterize in one word tne personality and impact of Emanuel Fritz — whether as professional forester or as teacher — no doubt the word should be independence. Fritz's career included work in a wide variety of professional contexts: in forestry education at the University of California; in government programs in the Forest Service and Department of the Interior; in organized industry with the California Redwood Association; in the organized profession as editor of the Journal of Forestry; and in a considerable array of private relationships as a highly respected consultant. But within each and every one of these varied contexts, Fritz was always Fritz.
I knew him first as one of his students. It was in the mid-1950s when forestry seemed, in the eyes of most, to have become largely a government enterprise and when industrial forestry seemed impotent, if not actually dead. But Fritz confidently offered his students a different view, a vision of commercial forestry on a sound financial base imbued with the vitality inherent in an important sector of modern industry. This was truly only a vision in the 1930s, but it was due in no small measure to men like Fritz, and the students intrigued by his ideas, that the vision of the Thirties became the reality of the Sixties.
Fritz has never been reluctant to speak his views plainly, even bluntly. He has no hesitation in challenging the "conventional wisdom" and does so in any gathering where he can arouse interest in forestry. As a result, to many within the profession he has often appeared as a dissenter. But these same qualities have given him the interested atten tion of people outside of forestry. Not only did this earn him the cognomen of "Mr. Redwood" among many Ca I ifornians, but, more importantly, it introduced basic ideas of forest management among many land owners and public officials who simply were not hearing the forestry message being preached in other quarters. Foresters have often been self-critical of their tendency to talk only to themselves. Fritz has been a model exception to this generalization. Hence, his influence on forestry develop ment in California has been profound. His work with redwood forest landowners led to many constructive improvements in the management of large redwood landhol dings. As a member of the California Forestry Study Committee, he influenced strongly and constructively the landmark forestry legislation adopted by the state at the end of World War II. And in later years he was among the first voices to point to needed revision and strengthening of several features of the state's forestry policies.
Fritz's strong and independent voice lent balance to discussion of many forestry issues. Many students learned from him the importance of considering all sides of controversial policies. His practical approach to forestry, reinforced by a lifetime of astute observation in the woods, has helped innumerable people to think of forestry as a practice rather than as a theory. His unbounded interest and enthusiasm for redwood have been transmitted to a host of his listeners both within and outside the forestry profession.
V?
Fritz's profound Influence on forestry in California and elsewhere has recently been recognized with the award to him of the Gifford Pinchot Medal, This may have surprised Fritz, whose evenhanded criticism has at times fallen even on the "Father of the Profession," Gifford Pinchot. But to those who have seen Fritz's own contributions at close range, the award was fitting recognition to an outstanding figure in the profession.
Henry S. Vaux Professor of Forestry
4 July 1972
217 Mulford Hall
University of California, Berkeley
VI
INTRODUCTION
In the developing history of forestry in America certain men and women emerge as major figures in the arena of conservation and forest policy. Emanuel Fritz of Berkeley, California, is one of these. Professor Fritz has long been a familiar figure in forestry affairs. Widely known as Mr. Redwood, he wears this appellation with considerable discomfort. "It is a questionable moniker to hang on anyone," he scoffs. "Whenever I hear it, it makes me feel as if I am being identified as some kind of character and without realization that my life as been spent in work on many species besides Sequo i a semperv i rens . "
But to a considerable company of foresters who have studied under the strong-minded professor of lumbering and forest products at the world- renowned School of Forestry and Conservation on the University of California's Berkeley campus, Fritz is Mr. Redwood, and their number is considerably bolstered by a large contingent of laymen whose concern for the forests of America has brought them into frequent touch with the feisty professor in public meetings or through his extensive writings.
Emanuel Fritz was born October 29, 1886, in Baltimore, Maryland, to German immigrant parents, John George* Fritz and Rosa Barbara Trautwein Fritz. The family enjoyed the fruits of a prosperous new business and gave major consideration to the education of Its offspring. Young Emanuel grew up speaking German, learning English from his friends in the streets of Baltimore. He was sent to school at the Polytechnic Institute of Baltimore along with his younger brother, Theodore. Another younger brother, Gustave, attended the City College. Both brothers are deceased.
The Fritz family was devoutly religious in the evangelical tradition of the Lutheran faith. Daily Bible reading was part of family life. Young Emanuel 's early interest in nature derived, perhaps, from his father's active attention to birds, animals, and plants. When city neighbors objected to a swarm of bees brought home in a gunnysack from the country, the elder Fritz packed up his family and moved to a suburb.
After graduation from the Polytechnic Institute, Emanuel went to Cornell University following a major interest in engineering. Fritz took a generous variety of nonengineering courses through his years at Cornell, economics, corporate finance, contracts, and music. He sang regularly in the Cornell Chapel Choir, and, as he likes to recall, "received credit for it." In retrospect he now regrets not having pursued a degree in the arts as well as the mechanical engineering degree that he earned. Athletic skill was demonstrated by rowing stroke on the Engineering College crew. In intermural competition he came to know Fritz Fernow, stroke of the Arts Col lege crew. Fernow was the youngest son^ of the first professional forester in America, Bernhard Eduard Fernow.
Fritz turned to forestry some years after teaching a stint at his old alma mater, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. He went to Yale University's highly-touted School of Forestry and in 1914 was awarded the master's
V I I I
degree in Forestry. Franklin Hough's Trees of North America sparked an interest in wood technology that led him into a life-long study of uses of the redwoods and other western species.
In 1914 he resumed a summer job he had previously landed as a student at Yale, working for the New Hampshire State Department of Forestry. The following year he joined the growing ranks of the United States Forest Service. This Involved him from 1915 to 1917, first, in fire suppression and prevention work and, secondly, in si I vicultural research. His exper ience with the Service ended with America's entry into World War I.
Immediately after the war, Fritz moved into the ranks of academic forestry. From 1919 to 1954 he rose from Assistant Professor to full Professor in forestry at the University of California. During these years he taught wood technology and timber utilization. He emphasized with his students that forestry must be brought out into the woods.
In line with this philosophy, from 1934 on, he served as consultant forester to the lumber industry, particularly in pine and redwood. Among his numerous positions and honors can be listed that of wood technologist for the California Pine Association and the West Coast Lumbermen's Association; forestry advisor and V ice-President of the Foundation of American Resource Management; Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Forestry; and Founder and Secretary of the Redwood Region Logging Conference.
Fritz was not one to ignore the role of federal and state government. Though advocating minimum public regulation of private forestry, he served, from 1938 to 1940, as consultant to the United States Department of the Interior and, from 1943 to 1945, as forestry consultant to the California Legislative Interim Committee.
His work thrust him into contact with a bustling lumber industry which was already showing signs of the sickness that was to provoke the critical analyses of William B. Greeley, David T. Mason, and, later, Wilson Compton. Fritz felt a sympathy for loggers and lumbermen and defended them against critics both within his profession and in the muckraker press. It was this attitude, maintained throughout a long career, which has brought upon his head the frequent accusation that he is a stalking-horse of industrial interests. The bitter battle over management of the nation's forest resources in this century, continuing with heightened fury today, creates fertile ground for such accusations. Historians of the future will appraise Fritz's role from the careful examination of his personal papers, preserved in the University of California's Bancroft Library, as well as his voluminous published record of American forestry.
That Fritz took up the cudgels frequently in the great battles of recent forest history, often opposing one of his leading mentors at Yale, H.H. Chapman, is a part of this work which will draw special attention from scholars. Whatever future analyses of Fritz may produce, it is
*ln the course of these interviews with Emanuel Fritz the Forest History Society also obtained funding from the California Redwood Associa tion for the inventorying and indexing of the Fritz papers in The Bancroft Library. This was done by Marion Stuart of the Forestry Library, University of California, Berkeley.
ix
without doubt that he made a clear and unequivocal impact upon the record of American forestry.
The Fritz interviews were made over a period of nine years. I made the f 1 rst, interview .in San Francisco. on January 2, 1958. This
was followed by another Interview of mine made in Berkeley on November 5, 1958. Mrs. Fry conducted separate interviews on November 12, 1965, and August 28, 1967, in Berkeley. Working from rough drafts of these initial interviews, Mrs. Fry and I made further interviews with Professor Fritz in Berkeley on February 27, 1967, and on March I, 2, 3, and 4, 1967. The volume is composed of major portions of all the various interviews.
This volume of oral history interviews with Professor Fritz is one of a series of works focusing upon Western American forest history and made possible by grants from the Louis W. and Maud Hill Family Foundation and the Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation. The Hill and Weyerhaeuser grants were made to the Forest History Society during the 1960s to permit the making of selected in-depth interviews with westerners who had been either major participants in or keen observers of developing patterns of western forest land use.
A considerable list of desirable interviews was compiled with the aid and assistance of colleagues in the major western universities and colleges with which the Forest History Society has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for nearly two decades. Interviews were planned with a final high-priority list. Preparatory research for the interviews included searching published sources as well as examining available documentary materials relating to the men and women to be interviewed. To conserve funds, interviews were planned to take advantage of the attendance of respondents at regional or national meetings held on the West Coast.* Experts in the oral history method in western universities were employed to assist in the program, particularly from the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley.** Professor William H. Hutchinson of the History Department at Chico State University was also recruited to make interviews which explored the folk lore of the western woodlands.***
*George L. Drake, tape-recorded interview in 1967, and David T. Mason, tape-recorded interview in 1965, 1966 and 1967, by Elwood R. Maunder, Forest History Society, Santa Cruz, California. In process.
**Among these interviews were, C. Raymond Clar, tape-recorded interview in 1966 by Amelia R. Fry, in process; Leo A. Isaac, "Douglas Fir Research in the Pacific Northwest, 1920-1956," typed transcript of tape-recorded interview by Amelia R. Fry, 1967; Woodbridge Metcalf, "Extension Forester, 1926-1956," typed transcript of tape-recorded interview by Evelyn Bonnie Fairburn, '1969, University of Ca I iforni a Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office, Berkeley.
: ***W.B. Laughead, typed transcript of tape-recorded interview by William H. Hutchinson, Forest History Society, Santa Cruz, California. 1957.
As the principal investigator I was privileged to make approximately half of the interviews. Amelia Roberts Fry of the Regional Oral History Office, Berkeley, is co-author of this work and the author of other interviews In this series. Wi I la K. Baum, Director of the Regional Oral History Office of Berkeley, assisted In directing the processing of
Interviews. The preparatory research on the large Fritz connection, which 1s a comprehensive documentary resource for all areas of his professional life, was done by Amelia Fry; my Yale University colleagues Joseph A. Miller, Judith C. Rudnicki, and Margaret G. -Davidson did much of the research from related deposits in the Forest History Society and the Yale Historical Manu scripts Collection. Susan R. Schrepfer and Barbara D. Holman did the final editing of the manuscript, created its index, and saw the volume through the last steps of publication.
Acknowledgment of advice of many others who aided in the arrangements for interviews would require several pages to record here. Of particular noteworthy assistance were Carwin Wool ley, Executive Vice-President of the Pacific Logging Congress; Bernard L. Orel I and Irving Luiten of the Weyerhaeuser Company; Dave James of Simpson Timber Company; Foresters Thornton T. Munger, David T. Mason, Henry J. Vaux, Henry E. Clepper, Frank H. Kaufert, George A. Garratt, and Paul M. Dunn. Hardin C. Glascock of the Western Forestry and Conservation Association, now Executive Vice- President of the Society of American Foresters, was a most helpful consultant and critic.
Special appreciation is expressed for the encouragement and patience of the sponsors, in particular A. A. Heckman and John D. Taylor of the Hill Family Foundation, Frank B. Rarig and Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser of the Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation, and Philip Farnsworth and Kramer Adams of the California Redwood Association.
Oral history is a new and demanding discipline. The great volume of work involved in designing, planning, and carrying out the processing of all the many interviews was done without intrusion of any kind upon the team of scholars who labored so long and hard upon it. Many of the men and women who were interviewed have since died. That their vivid memories of the history of western forestry and conservation have been preserved in the interviews of this series is a tribute to all who have been associated with the project.
It is our hope that more interviews in this series may be published and that excerpts from other unpublished interviews can be submitted as articles to scholarly and popular journals. Funds are now being sought fror the National Endowment for the Humanities and other sources cf philanthropy to assist us toward these goals. A significant number of articles from oral interviews have already been published in Forest History and American Forests.
The potential of oral history has only begun to be realized. Much progress has been made since Professor A I Ian Nevins began to develop the method at Columbia University in 1950. It is a matter of pride to the Forest History Society that its first exploration of the method was made only two years later, the result of conversations I had with Professor
xi
Nevins. Today the ranks of oral historians are growing at a rate that amazes even those optimistic advocates who championed the method in the face of considerable criticism during the early fifties. The Oral History Association now stands on sturdy feet, counts numerous members on its rolls, and gains prestige with the counting number of fine books and articles published. The Forest History Society is proud to add this volume to the library of American oral history.
Copies of this manuscript, either in manuscript or microfiche form, can be purchased from the Forest History Society.
Elwood R. Maunder, Interviewer Executive Director Forest History Society
30 November 1972 Forest History Society 733 River Street Santa Cruz, California
xi i
LI wood l\. Mjuridor was cjrodudtotJ from I ho llnl ver^i ly of Minno-joKi in 1939 wi rh a B.A. in journalism. He was a reporter and editor of Hie Minnesota Dai I y and an officer of his class. From 1939 to December, 1941, he was a reporter and feature writer for the Minneapolis Ti mes-Tri bune and the Minneapolis Star-Journa I . He enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard December 21, 1941, and served as a combat correspondent in both the European and Mediterranean theaters of war on landing craft for infantry and combat transports. He was editor of the Ninth Naval District's magazine, Sound! nqs, at the conclusion of the war. He was graduated from Washington University at St. Louis in 1947 with an M. A. in history. He attended the London School of Economics and Political Science for one year and worked as a freelance foreign correspondent and British Gallup Pollster. He was a member of the staff of the U.S. Department of State during the Meeting of Foreign Ministers in London in 1947 and 1948. Returning to the United States he was named director of Public Relations for the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church, later director of public relations for the Ohio area of the Methodist Church. In 1952 he was appointed executive director of the Forest History Society. He is the author of many articles, has produced more than one hundred oral history interviews, and edited with Margaret G. Davidson A Hi story of the Forest Products Industries: Proceedings of the First National Col loqu i urn, sponsored by the Forest History Society and the Business History Group of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He is the publisher and long-time editor of Forest History, quarterly journal of the Forest History Society. He is an Honorary Member of the Society of American Foresters and a Fellow of the Forest History Society.
XI I I
Amelia R. Fry was graduated from the University of Oklahoma In 1947 with a B.A. in psychology. She wrote for the campus magazine. She received her Master of Arts in educational psychology from the University of Illinois in 1952, with heavy minors in English for both degrees. She taught freshman English at the University of Illinois from 1947 to 1948 and at Hiram College in Ohio from 1954 to 1955. Mrs. Fry also taught English as a foreign language in Chicago from 1950 to 1953. She writes feature articles for various newspapers and was reporter for a suburban daily from 1966 to 1967 and writes professional articles for journals and historical magazines. She joined the staff of Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, in 1959, first specializing in the field of conservation and forest history, then public administration and politics. She is currently director of the Earl Warren Oral History Project at the university and secretary of the Oral History Association.
Of tlV
•o the wood R.
:.sor
This photograph was taken on the occasion of the presentation of the Emanuel Fritz papers to the Bancroft Library. From left to right, Elwood R. Maunder, Donald Coney, former University of California, Berkeley, Librarian, and Professor Fritz.
S.F. CHRONICLE Thursday, December 15, 1988
OBITUARIES
UC Forestry Expert Emmanuel Fritz
Emmanuel Fritz, a forestry ex pert nicknamed "Mr. Redwood" and the oldest faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, died last Thursday in his Berkeley home at the age of 102.
Mr. Fritz was involved in nearly every aspect of the redwood indus try and was considered a forestry and conservation authority for 70 years.
He advised elected and appoint ed officials on the need to balance demands for lumber in a rapidly growing state with the need to pre serve old-growth groves, replant logged areas and set aside areas for protection.
"He encouraged reforestation and cooperation between the log ging industry and conservation groups," said John DeWitt, execu tive director of the Save the Red woods League, of which Mr. Fritz was a longtime member.
Mr. Fritz wrote a pamphlet in 1932 entitled "The Story Told by the Fallen Redwood" which is still dis tributed by the Save The Redwoods League to schools across the coun try. DeWitt said.
Millions of people who do not recognize Mr. Fritz's name probably remember reading the book at some point during their childhood, DeWitt said. The book describes1 how tree rings, fire scars and other markings can provide a detailed chronology of an ancient redwood's history.
When Mr. Fritz turned 102, he earned the distinction of becoming the oldest faculty member in UC Berkeley history. Cal's previously oldest professor, chemist Joel Hiide- brand, was 101 when he died in 1963.
Mr. Fritz helped create Califor nia's State Forest program and ad-
» vised Governor Earl Warren on for est and logging matters. And he was the founder of the Redwood Region
^Logging Conference, which honor ed him on its 50th anniversary earli er this year for his prominence and his influence on forestry practices.
His personal papers are at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, noted for its collection documenting the "history of the Western United "States.
Mr. Fritz was a member of the Commonwealth Club and of the Bo hemian Club. At the Bohemian Club he established a museum to depict the life, history and ecology of the trees on the club grounds along the Russian River.
Mr. Fritz was born in Baltimore ] on Oct. 29, 1886. He received a bach elor 's degree fromjCorneU in 1908 " and a master's from Yale in 1914.
He was a forester for the New npshire State Forestry Depart- • ment before moving West to work ' for the VS. Forest Service and serv ing as an Air Service captain in ! World War I.
Mr. Fritz joined UC Berkeley's ' Division of Forestry in 1919 and re tired in 1954, retaining the title pro- » f essor emeritus.
fc. He is survived by two daugh- ; ters, Barbara Fritz of Berkeley and . Roberta Fair of Eugene, Ore. At his ' request, no services were planned.
Donations ire preferred to Save the Redwoods League, Alta .Bates Hospice, S232 Claremont Ave- , nue, Oakland, 94618 or to the Soci- L«y of American Foresters' building •Jund, 5400 Grosvenor Lane, Bethes- JOa,Md., 20814-2188.
I EARLY LIFE
The Fritz Fami ly in Baltimore
Maunder: Emanuel, can you start out by telling us something about your
family origins and where you were born and something perhaps of your early childhood?
Fritz: I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, October 29, 1886. My father was born in Ebersberg, Wurttemberg, on February 14, 1855. My mother was born in Stuttgart, Wurttemberg, on February 2, 1856. Father was nearly eighty-three when he passed away and mother was just past eighty-two.
Father was a tailor, learning the trade in Switzerland to which he went before he was twenty. He came to the United States in about 1880. Mother came to the United States about the same time and they were married in Baltimore on April 15, 1884.
When they came to this country, they went to night school at once to learn the language, and in my father's case, he also learned bookkeeping so that he could set up his own business. While he finished his apprenticeship In Switzerland, where he spent most of his youth although born in Germany, he decided that the thing to do in the United States was to have his own business. He set up one shortly after he was married and the business prospered. The only tough times we knew as boys were those of the 1892-1893 period in the very severe depression of those years. My parents often spoke of those days, but they pulled themselves out of the slump without help, as did the rest of the country.
Maunder: Your father's name was what?
Fritz: John George Fritz. And my mother's maiden name was Rosa Barbara
Trautwein. Her parents and ancestors were all soldiers. My father's were soldiers and farmers. My father was exempted from military service because of a bad leg.
Maunder: What brought him to this country? Was it the economic opportunity?
Fritz: Well, in those days of course many young men in Europe felt that the streets of the United States were paved with gold, and they thought they'd come over here and pick up some of it. My father often told me that in this country one is compensated in accordance with how hard he works and what he knows, while in Europe, one's station in life, as to birth, pretty much determined how far you could get.
Maunder: When did he come to this country?
Aunt Carrie Trautwein Muth with Emanuel Fritz, ca. 1890
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz: Maunder: Fritz:
Maunder:
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
It must have been about 1880. I was born in 1886, October 29th. Mother and father, as I said, met in this country and they were both nearly thirty when they married.
Was there any particular reason for their settling in Baltimore?
No, unless it was the church. My father was a very devout church man. He joined the church while he was a young man in Switzerland. He was somewhat of an orator — at least he liked to speak before groups — and I have an idea the church gave him an opportunity to express himself.
This was one of the evangelical churches? That's right, a Lutheran offshoot. Which one?
It was called merely the Evangelical Church. That's my recollec tion. 1 should remember it more clearly but frankly we boys (three of us in the fami ly and I was the oldest) had to go to church and Sunday school so much in the course of a week that we, you might say, got a little too much of it. There was a lot of dogma and fear of the hereafter. But my father insisted on it and as long as he was the boss, we went.
Has that persisted through your life? churchman as a result of this?
Have you not been an active
I really did enjoy going to church while in college, both at Cornell and at Yale. Attendance was purely voluntary. They had invited preachers, a different one nearly every Sunday, and they were really great men and good speakers. They spoke with good sense and I en joyed attending those sermons, but since then I haven't been very active in any church. As youngsters, we would occasionally go to a synagogue or a Catholic church to see what it was like.
Was this a German community that you lived in as a boy in Baltimore?
In part. It was changing. Baltimore had a large number of Germans and Irish. Italians, largely from Naples and Sicily, were beginning to arrive in large numbers.
The Germans had Turnvereins (gymnasium clubs). I belonged to one. And they had a lot of societies and singing groups (Saenger verein). They would go during the summer to their Schuetzenpark for their Schuetzenfest, as they called it. "Schuetz," of course, would be a guard.
I don't know what the origin of those organizations was and why they were set up but as a result of the First World War and the strong feeling against the Germans, all those organizations came to a quick end. It was rather unfortunate because they were very
Fritz:
M.-iunder: Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
good social organizations and very loyal to America. The Germans we came In contact with were mostly from south Germany, kind, fun- loving, religious and not militaristic as were the Prussians. They became citizens as soon as they could and prized their new status.
Did you grow up speaking both t'ruiIKh ,in<1 Herman?
I spoke German until I was eight, and when I was about eight, 1 picked up English on the street and to some extent in school.
I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your family life and your growing up as a young man in the eastern United States. What do you recall most about your boyhood?
Well, it was a very happy boyhood. Our parents took a great deal
of interest in us and gave us every opportunity. Of course, trans
portation in those days wasn't what it is today. We had to ride
streetcars or we walked or rode our bicycles.
Even though we lived right in the city I had to walk to school as far as Abraham Lincoln was reported to have walked and mine was always on hard city streets — but no mud. The Polytechnic Institute was about two miles from home but we enjoyed walking. When 1 say "we," I mean my younger brother Theodore and I. There were a lot of Interesting windows en route, especially Schwartz's Toy Store, which was always fascinating.
Where did your middle brother gc to school?
He went to the Polytechnic as I did, but did not finish. Theodore thought it was very foolish to stay in school so long when you could go out and make money right away, so he quit the Polytechnic early and entered business college. He was one of the first to operate what is today a "stenotype" machine.
As soon as he graduated from this business college — I think it was Strayer's — he got excellent jobs and he worked himself up very rapidly in business. His principal employer at the time, as I recall, was Armour and Company. Later he had a large steel dis tributing business, everything from chain link fencing to tool steels.
Maunder: But your younger brother went along with you through the Polytechnic?
Fritz: That was Theodore. The other brother, Gustave, was four years
younger and went to the City College. Baltimore in those days had no high schools for boys under that name. It had only the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and they had the Baltimore City College, both for boys only.
My youngest brother Gus had decided to become a doctor so that meant that he would go to the City College where he would be prepared to enter either Hopkins or the University of Maryland. He chose the
Fritz: University of Maryland and developed an excellent medical practice. Both brothers are deceased, Gus at fifty, Ted at sixty-eight. Both were hard workers.
Maunder: Your parents were in a position to give you all the very best of education as you were growing up?
Fritz: Yes, they insisted upon it. They were not always in comfortable
circumstances but they generally had enough. They were very frugal and they made a dollar go a long way. They taught us the same principle. They encouraged us to do some work on the outside with the result that when 1 went to college 1 financed my first two years myself and made nearly enough money in the summertime and at odd times to help me through the third year, although my father and mother contributed a considerable share.
They were very independent people, especially my mother. They felt that one appreciated more what he had to work for. Mother was very practical. Father, on the other hand, was pretty much of an ideal ist.
My father was a diligent student of the Bible and he read very widely on biological subjects, medical and zoological. Living in the city, we had little opportunity to have any biological interests except that father raised Newfoundland dogs and fancy pigeons for show purposes and others for racing. Since the birds didn't need the floor of the cage, I was permitted to have some guinea pigs and a squirrel, but that was the extent of that. How ever, we bicycled often to the country and particularly to the fine Druid Hill Park to see something green.
Even though the back yard was small, as in all those city houses, we built some boxes on the porch in which we had flowers and vines.
My father's interest in birds and animals and plants, which he couldn't really develop in the city, led him finally to quit the city and move to the country. He had been on a Sunday walk in the country with my mother, beyond the end of the car line. He found a swarm of bees and he told mother that swarm was going to belong to him. So he went to a nearby farm house for a gunny sack, slipped the sack over the swarm and took it home. Although it meant being absent from church that Sunday night, he stayed home and made him self a beehive out of, I believe, a cracker box, and the next morn ing we were amateur apiarists.
Those bees were very active and had to forage pretty far and wide in the city to get what they needed. Some of the neighbors com plained, so my father said, "If the neighbors don't like my bees, I'm going to move where nobody can be bothered by them." So he bought himself a little place of about seven acres about a mile from the end of the Belair Road car line at a place called Kenwood Park. There was a newly completed house on the property which was up for sale because the owner had lost his wife. It was a large
Fritz: house, very well built, and the grounds gave father a chance to have not only bees and pigeons but chickens and everything else. As a result of that Interest, a few years later 1 built him an aviary about twenty by twenty, in which he raised pheasants of five or six different kinds.
The chicken house, as I remember it, was pretty much like a modern four-room house. On the second floor he had pigeons and on the first floor there were chickens—fancy chickens, by the way. Mother, being rather practical, couldn't see the sense — being generally badly bent financially—of raising show birds, so she insisted on birds that would lay eggs and cause no tears if they were laid on a block and decapitated. So she had her own flock of Plymouth Rocks and Leghorns for eggs and the big Orpingtons for meat, so we were on a chicken diet at least once a week and we had more eggs than we knew what to do with.
An interesting sidelight on that was this: they moved to the country while 1 was a junior at Cornell but I didn't spend the following summer with them. That summer I spent in Steelton, Pennsylvania, working for the Pennsylvania Steel Company.
After college graduation, I became a teacher at the Baltimore Poly technic Institute. (This is jumping ahead a little, on this chicken business.) Our chickens were doing so well laying eggs that we thought it deserved some attention as a business. It happened that in the summer of 1910, I think it was, 1 worked as a drafts man for the Cambria Steel Company in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Two other draftsmen also liked the outdoors so we three used to take walks Saturday afternoons and all day Sundays in the woods and talked over our future as young fellows will.
I noticed that one of them could identify grasses. He apparently was a farm-bred boy and could distinguish one grass from another merely by the fruit. I thought that was very interesting. The other one knew some trees while 1 didn't know any of those things. We decided it would be interesting to have a little hobby, or a little sideline, so two of us enrol led in Pennsylvania State Col lege extension courses, correspondence courses in fact.
I recall my first course was the propagation of plants in which we learned how plants live and grow and how they are propagated. That opened an entirely new world to me and it came to be very fascinat ing. I couldn't wait for the next exercise to come in the ma i I . Then I took courses in poultry husbandry and in fertilizers and so on, but the poultry husbandry course was the one I look back upon with real amusement.
The courses told us that chickens will lay well if treated well, what chickens needed in the way of treatment was this and that. So when 1 got back to Maryland for the winter term of teaching I decided to put some of these principles into operation. First of all, I learned that our chicken house, which was a pretty fancy
Fritz: affair, faced the wrong way, according to the book. It should have faced south whereas it faced west to the residence. 1 turned the house ninety degrees with the help of some of my husky cousins one Easter Monday. I had everything ready: the new foundation had been poured earlier and the hor^e had been raised up on skids, properly greased. So when the youngsters were asked to heave and they did heave, the house spun right around ninety degrees. Then it was easy to lower it on the new foundation blocks. That was possibly my first use of my engineering training by actually build ing something.
Well, we put in all the appurtenances required by the book and as a result the chickens laid at a great rate, and we had eggs coming out of our ears — we didn't know what to do with them. It happened that one of our neighbors, who were all farmers, thought it rather amusing for city people to come to the country and even attempt to run a little kitchen garden and to have some chickens, but he asked all kinds of questions as to why our chickens laid eggs and his did not. So we told him that as long as he hadn't eggs to supply his trade, we'd sell him our excess.
My brother Theodore and I got excited over that and we thought that if we could raise eggs by that simple procedure it ought to be a good business to get into. Being a businessman working for Armour and Company, he went to the hotels in Baltimore and at each one was told that if he could guarantee a certain number of dozen eggs every morning he could have all of their business.
He came home all steamed up and soon we had it all planned out as to where the new chicken houses were to be, and even had a delivery truck all picked out. It would have been one of the first motor trucks in that locality. Things were going very well and we were on the verge of going into the chicken business when Armour and Company transferred him to Cuba.
That settled that venture, and I'm very glad it did because a man who raises chickens is really a slave to them. He has to be there morning and night. In fact, it was a good thing because I was weakening on engineering anyway.
The experience of being out in the country and having so much free time — all of Saturday and Sunday and all the vacation days were spent out there — was a real education. Father had some excellent men working for him; one was an avid reader of every document that was ever published by the U. S. Department of Agriculture up to that time. It was from him that I learned the difference between hay and straw and what humus is, and so on. He was a very well- read man although he had no formal education. I learned later that he worked for us in the off-season only, because his major interest was following the races; and he was with us only waiting for the Piml ico race track season to open. I learned a great deal from him and also from the other men and I got interested in grow ing things.
Fritz: My father, of course, was always playing with his bees and birds and animals. We had to have a horse to drive us to the streetcar line a mile away, and we thought we ought to have a cow to have fresh milk, although it probably would have been a great deal cheaper to buy It from the locr i farmers. He also experimented with grafting and I used to watch him, and as the thing went along, after a few years I got to feeling that engineering was not nearly as exciting as the biological fields like growing things and watch ing bees at work and so on. Incidentally, father had an "observation hive" from which one could take off a cover and see what went on in side. I recommend it to others. It's an eye-opener.
As a result of this experience in the country, engineering eventually and study forestry. I'l little separate story of that because that goes farther. Do you have a question at this point?
decided to quit have to make a back a I i ttle
Baltimore Polytechnic
Maunder:
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
Can you tel I us of the progress entered forestry school?
of your education up unti I you
The early years of education I spent in a Lutheran parochial school where the language was practically all German for the first two years; and then shortly after that I went to the F. Knapp's Institute Baltimore which was also a private school but run by an American-
in
born man of German descent,
father before the Civil War
a school that had been in the same buildings.
started by his
I recall there was quite a wing at the back of the school in which the slaves had been kept before the war. This wing had the same number of floors on the same levels as the floors in the main build ing and each floor had its own slave. It was a very thorough school. They taught pretty much with the stick. The teachers were first- class people, men and women. They knew how to teach and they made us feel that we wanted to learn.
Incidentally, this was the same school that H. L. Mencken attended. Later on, I attended another school which was also Mencken's school.
nstitute. That school, by the way.
the Baltimore Polytechnic
in his
set up
would work out. Baltimore was always, as I remember it
mental area for schooling, possibly brought about by the presence
of Johns Hopkins University in the same city.
was
time known as the Baltimore Manual Training School. It was as an experimental school to see how vocational training
an experi-
You got a stern type of discipline and education in this school?
There was discipline from morning until you were released in the afternoon. There was no monkey business about giving one extra hours to study. We were expected to study at home. There was no
Fritz: choice of courses; all were prescribed, and if your grade average wasn't up to a certain point you were canned. This had the pre dictable results.
From Knapp's Institute I went to the Polytechnic, entering the sixth grade and staying seven years. "Poly" was being elevated from a purely vocational school with three lower grades, sixth, seventh and eighth, and three high school grades. The grammar school grades were to be phased out and the three high school years were to be raised to four. It developed into a very highly rated school, really a secondary engineering school from which its graduates could enter Lehigh or Cornell as sophomores. Some of the engineering textbooks were the same used at the U. S. Naval Academy. There were no biological courses whatever. Dr. J. B. Conant, who made a study of secondary schools in the I940's, con sidered It a top school.
I was graduated twice, first at the end of three years and then again at the end of four years in 1905. The school was always headed by a retired naval officer who insisted on good discipline. The curriculum was all prescribed; there was no choice.
The school was really remarkable and I'm happy to say that the man who followed the last naval officer was a close friend of mine and a near classmate. He retires, I believe, this month, in Janu ary of 1958. He's a Cornell graduate, as I am, and he maintained the same policy that was carried on by Lieutenant William R. King, who was principal for about twenty years.
Incidentally, going to a school like that makes one think back as to who had the greatest influence on him in later life, and It's pretty hard to say which one of the teachers had the greatest in fluence on me. There were all men — no women teachers — and no girls in the school. It was quite different than it would have been in an ordinary high school. All those men were primarily teachers. They loved teaching; they loved being among the boys; they loved talking with the boys in off hours; and they insisted on fairness, scholarship and good behavior. The only thing that they were weak on, as I think back, was penmanship. They never made us learn to write a really legible hand as the kids were taught in those days in the parochial schools. 1 wasn't in the parochial school long enough to really learn to write a good hand.
Maunder: By parochial school, what do you mean? Is this one that was carried on by your father's church?
Fritz: It wasn't my father's church; it was a Lutheran church in our neigh borhood. Our own church did not have a school. I call it a paro chial school, although it was Lutheran. Generally the parochial schools are looked upon as Catholic schools but that is not neces- sari ly true.
Fritz: The principal of the Polytechnic was a most understanding man. He was not only firm but he was also fair and he knew his stuff. He had an idea that the time for a boy to learn was when he was very young, so, this being a polytechnic institute, he was naturally charged with the duty of turning OUT men who would go into the en gineering or manufacturing fields.
The school was strong on mechanical and electrical subjects, of course, but at the expense of such subjects or fields as history, literature and English. What history and English and literature we had was excellent, but I wish there had been a great deal more. The men we had for teachers were wonderful and I can sti I I remem ber to this day much of the poetry that we had to learn by heart. In fact, these men imbued us in the short time that we were with them with an interest in English and literature and history, and in my own case it has never left me.
The school was possibly a little more advanced than it should have been for boys of our age. We had to take mathematics every day the entire time we were in the school — for me, it was seven years. We started out with arithmetic and we wound up with ten units of calculus, both integral and differential, after ten units of ana lytical geometry. In both cases, it was twice as much as was required to enter Cornell University's engineering department.
I recall the instructor in calculus, a man more than six feet high, well built, a former oarsman, but not a college graduate. His name was Uhrbrock. (I think only one teacher in that school at that time was a college graduate.) He got us so excited about calculus that most of us ended the course with an average of more than ninety percent, and I recall in my case, prior to the examination, I worked out each problem in the book just for the fun of it, not necessarily for the examination. That helped a great deal when we went to college. Some of the boys went to Lehigh and once in a while one went to M.I.T. Having a good grounding in mathematics, our courses at Cornel I were much easier.
I might say also that the steam engineering we got at the Poly technic Institute and the course in mechanics were in many respects superior to that which we got at Cornell. Cornell permitted us to enter as sophomores but refused to give us credit for the mechanics course because they thought that was so important they wanted to be sure we got mechanics the way they wanted it taught. But as a result of having to take mechanics all over again, five units a week for an entire year, every boy who came from our Polytechnic to enter Cornell finished the mechanics course with a grade of ninety percent or more. I think I got ninety-six or ninety-seven, and one of my classmates got ninety-eight or ninety-nine. We were always the top in the class, not because we were any better but be cause we were merely repeating the course.
That was one of the most interesting courses I ever took. The book
10
Fritz: was written by Irving P. Church. I remember him very well. He
was a typical teacher type and all tied up with his mechanics. If he were alive today, he would probably be working out some of the mechanics involved in space vehicles. He was a very short man; he could write with both hands. In one hand he would have a piece of white chalk and in the other a piece of colored chalk. He'd draw his diagrams and present the problem and then show how it would be worked out. By the time he got through, his black swallow-tailed coat was pretty well covered with chalk dust. He was a great teacher.
The steam engineering we didn't have to take until we were juniors at Cornell, and that course was so simple, and merely a lecture course, that I would take along my other courses for study because, although the man giving the lectures — the dean of the College of Engineering, "Uncle Pete," as we called him, Professor A. W. Smith — knew his stuff, but we Polytechnic graduates were way ahead of him.
The Polytechnic principals had all come from Annapolis and were in the Navy's engineering department before their retirement. I must admit though that at the Polytechnic, my brother and I were team mates in some of the difficulties we got into.
Maunder: You make it sound as if you were a real juvenile delinquent.
Fritz: Oh no. Nothing like that. [Laughter] Not with the kind of parents I had. As I said earlier, the teachers we had were excellent, but we did have one or two that were rather weak and couldn't handle the classes, and of course the students took charge. Word would get to the principal once in a while that the classes were running away with the teachers and that the Fritz brothers were leaders.
They were innocent pranks, but when you get into difficulty once, then you're accjsed of every other prank that is committed. For example, I was accused once of having stolen a skeleton from one of the laboratories, putting a rope around it and hanging it in the flies of the theater stage, and of being about to lower it on the stage during commencement of the class before mine, to excite the audience; but the janitor found the skeleton in time and cut it down. Well, I suppose they still think, if they're still living, that I swiped that skeleton. I knew nothing about it until after the ceremony.
Maunder: That skeleton really doesn't belong in your closet, is that right?
[Laughter] Fritz: Nope, not that one.
II
Cornel 1 Un i versify
M.iunder: You attended Cornell how many years, Fmanuel?
Fritz: Three years. I could have gotten my mechanical engineering degree in two years by attending one summer session, but I preferred to stay a year longer because in those days there was a nation-wide feeling that engineers were not being educated, just like today we talk about the lacks of engineering education. Feeling that I could benefit by more liberal education, I took the extra time that I had available at Cornell to take courses in economics, cor poration finance, contracts, and so forth. I even took music. I sang in the Sage Chapel choir and received credit for it. I also enjoyed some of the sermons at the chapel .
Maunder: Do you remember some of those men, who they were?
Fritz: The man I think who had the most impact on me was old Dr. Lyman
Abbott. He was the editor and publisher of the old Outlook maga zine. He had a very, very long beard and I understand that he had never shaved. He not only preached in the beautiful and inspiring Sage Chapel but he also held informal gatherings Sunday night which I enjoyed attending. He also preached in Woolsey Chapel at Yale, and I never missed qoinq to hear him.
3 3
Dr. Henry Van Dyke also appealed strongly to me. I believe E. E. Hale also preached there. He was a venerable man at the time. A rabbi preached once and made an excellent impression. These men all showed great learning and good philosophy. I don't recall that a Catholic priest ever appeared, and that was a loss. I sang in the choir at Cornell. It added much to the pleasure of attend- i ng chapel .
I must add that my father retired from business rather early, got even more active in the church, and became a pinch-hitter for preachers (in the Methodist church this time) who were either ill or on vacation. Father enjoyed substituting for them and he could preach in English as well as in German — one of the old-fashioned hell-fire and brimstone sermons.
I had almost enough credits for an A.B. got the M.E., but engineers looked down it wasn't practical. As I look back on
degree at the same time I on the A.B. degree because it now, I feel that I should
have taken less engineering and more of the letters and science courses. An odd thing about that whole educational program was that I had not one single unit of any biological subject, and later on when I decided to enter forestry school, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to handle it because all my previous training had been in the physical sciences. Going later into forestry, a biological field with strange scientific terms and names — but that's another story.
12
Maunder: It's interesting that you should say you feel
Fritz:
Maunder:
Fritz:
Maunder:
education Would you training and
in the fields of say that this is why?
that you lacked the humanities.
social science and
a very important part of an engineer's
I think an engineer should have a better general education because he deals not only with machines and bridges but also with people. For example, when a bridge is first proposed, you might go to an engineer and ask him if it's feasible. The engineer might say, after some computation, "Yes, it is feasible from an engineering standpoint, but is it feasible from an economic standpoint? Will the bridge be used enough to pay it off? Should beauty of design be considered?"
So many engineers don't have an understanding of economics even to this day, or of dealing with people, so that they are looked upon as being merely slide rule operators and designers or opera tors of engineering plants. I found in my own case that the art of speaking English and writing It and conversing with others is possibly even more valuable or more important than knowing a lot of formulae.
This seems now to be borne out in what top management in industry is doing in some of its recruitment of new leadership. They re quire not only people who are well trained in a specialized field, but they want people of rather broad education.
Yes. I think that business in the past fifteen years has been so extraordinarily good that many men reached the top in industry, engineering, banking and business because they couldn't help it. The market came to their doors. But now that there's a little recession, I Ions because
think you'll see heavy mortality among the top eche- of poor background.
Yes. I was going to ask what was the real beginning of your in terest in forestry and how do you trace that development in your life?
Fritz: I've often thought about that and wondered about it, but I think I can pinpoint it fairly clearly. My mother's father had been a soldier all his life, and when he was retired to the Civil Service, as often happened in Germany, he was made what in this country would be called a ranger in the Wurttemberg Forest Service. The King owned the forests. Grandfather was probably in charge of a smal I district.
Now it would appear that having a grandfather and also an uncle who were in the Forestry Service in Germany, that would have been an influence, but it had none whatever. In fact, it rarely oc curred to me that grandfather was a forester at one time.
The real start, I think, came while I was a junior in engineering
13
Fritz: at Cornell. I had made a Sunday trip, or a hike, with some of my classmates, although they were civil engineers while I was a me chanical engineer. On this walk (and of course, the country around Cornell campus was wooded and beautiful) they got to arguing about the identification of certain trees. I couldn't contribute any thing because a tree was just a tree to me. They were arguing as to whether a certain tree was a hemlock or a spruce. To me they were both evergreens and looked pretty much alike. But the fact that there was some point of difference made an impression and I looked up some Information on trees in the library.
Now at this time also — that was 1906, 1907 — it was the era of preachment by Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt in behalf of conservation, and the two men were in the newspapers a great deal. T. R. , of course, had the big platform. Pinchot fed him the ma terial although he himself was an excellent speaker and an excel lent writer. I read everything that the newspapers published about these two men and also read some of their articles.
It happens that at that time I was enrolled in a public speaking course, and one week we were asked to prepare a speech, to be given the week following. We were permitted to copy a speech from someone else or write our own. So I thought it would be a good idea to make a speech on conservation. I took some of Pin- chot's stuff and some of Fernow's, and some of Roosevelt's and some of the others, and fitted them together and had my own speech. I still have that speech at home, written in lead pencil on yellow paper. I must look it up and preserve It.
One question, Emanuel . Was all of this reading and acquaintance with the controversy over conservation derived from reading what we might call the popular press, the newspapers and popular maga zines, or did you delve into the more specialized periodical 1 iterature?
Yes, it was, most of it, general stuff for popular consumption, and as I look back on it, it was a strong pitch to get the public inter ested in conservation. There was very little specialized material
Maunder:
Fritz:
Maunder; Fritz:
available. But I did get My copy carries the date copy of Fi I ibert Roth' 1895.
a copy of Pinchot's Primer of Forestry.
got it—January 20, 1907. s Bulletin Number Ten, on wood,
I a I so got a pub I i shed i n
How about the American Forestry magazine?
Well, at that time it was published in a different form, and I saw very little of it. But in the engineering magazines that I read, there were occasional articles on wood and the likelihood of a timber famine. Of course, that would be of interest to an engi neer because wood in those days was an important engineering mate rial.
14
Fritz: Well, the reading and contact with the wonderful outdoors at Cor nell, which was quite a thing for a boy coming from a large city, I think was what sparked an interest in my surroundings — the trees, plants, geology, and so on. Pinchot, being a forester, spoke and wrote mostly on forestry.
While I was at Cornell, I learned that it had had a forestry school but that it had been closed a year or two before I entered. I made some inquiries about it and learned about its fate. Incidentally, one of my classmates, who was majoring in Liberal Arts, was the youngest son of Dr. Bernhard E. Fernow. The son was named Fritz, his first name. It happened later in my senior year, he was the stroke of the Arts College crew and I was the stroke and captain of the engineers' crew. Although the engineers had the best crew, of course, we had a little hard luck with our number two man catch ing a "crab," and then another one, and letting the Arts College crew get ahead of us and beat us; but it was nice to be beaten by a fel low I i ke Fernow.
Come to think of it, Fernow may not have been the stroke; it might have been LeRoy Goodrich who later became an attorney and is still living in Oakland, California. Rowing was my principal interest in athletics in college except for some cross-country running, but rowing better fitted my physical dimensions which weren't too ample anyway. I got off the track somewhere, didn't I?
Maunder: Were you ever influenced at this time directly by anyone in for estry? Were there any holdovers there at the university from the School of Forestry who influenced you in any way?
Fritz: Not that I know of. I had no contact with them whatever. Of course, the Engineering College was at one end of the campus and the Agri culture College was at the other, and engineers in those days looked upon the agricultural students as "hayseeds" and didn't mix very much. We rather looked down upon them; and furthermore, the Agri culture College was a state-supported college while Sib ley College at Cornell was private, and as youngsters we probably considered ourselves a little superior.
I remember one day at the boarding house — I was not a fraternity man — one of the waiters, who was a short-course student in agri culture during the winter, was asked by one of the boys at the table, "Are you going to the fencing match tonight?" And he replied, "Fencing match tonight? We do our fencing in the spring." So that, 1 think, shows the gap between the agriculture students and the engineering students in those days.
No, no individual had anything to do with it at Cornell, only the
reading; and if any individuals had an influence I would say they
were Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, but only in a vicar ious way and because of their writing.
15
Fritz: 1 might add that in 191 I while I was back on the Cornell campus for summer school to study botany, I met the dean of the Col lege of Engineering. He remembered me and asked what 1 was doing. I told him I was going to study 'orestry and lumbering, and he said, "Why do that? There's no future in it. Wood Is an obsolete mate rial, not only because It Is belnq cut too fast but also because metals will supersede It."
In other words, lumbering was a dying industry and therefore for estry would have no future. That was Dean Dexter S. Kimball, a fine man, and a classmate of Herbert Hoover. He was reared in the Seattle area and he apparently had no use for the lumber industry because of its destructive nature in those days. But like most people at that time, he saw only the destruction rather than the reasons for it, nor did he do anything to find an explanation of the situation. Pinchot was in the same category.
At Cornell, I had a lot of spare time because, although engineer ing was a pretty tough course, my advance credits gave me consider able leeway. So I spent a great deal of time in reading magazines and books. You may remember possibly the old World's Work maga zine and the old Munsey's and the old magazine that carried the articles by the woman who castigated Standard Oil. What was her name?
Maunder: I know who you mean — Ida M. Tarbell.
Fritz: They were classed as "muckrakers." They saw only the dark side of the cloud. My favorite magazines were Iron Trade Review, Atlantic Month I y , Outlook and Literary Digest.
Actually my interest in forestry didn't develop and didn't really come to a head until I had graduated and moved back to Maryland with my folks in Kenwood Park outside of Baltimore, and I was ex posed to the outdoors more than I ever before had been. While there, I had a chance to do a lot of building. The house had not been finished when we bought it. Only the six rooms on the first floor were finished. The second floor was a huge open area and there was an attic above that, or could have been, so I laid out the six rooms for upstairs and had a carpenter put up the studs and so on. I helped him.
We had only kerosene lamps, so we had power brought a mile from the main line to our house, and I wired the entire twelve rooms with concealed wiring. This was quite a job in a house that's already partly completed. I put in a pressure water system, a sewer system, and built a driveway with concrete curbing, and stuff of that kind.
All the time I was interested in what the men were doing in the garden, and once in a while I'd help them and when they'd help me we'd talk about plants. So being in a locality where there was
16
Fritz: considerable farming and plenty of opportunity to hike, I got in terested in knowing one tree from another and also one flower from another. I bought myself a copy of Franklin Hough's Trees of North America. It pictured and described not only the tree but a Tib its wood. this was a lucky selection. I still have the book. It was an excellent job and just a few years ago I recommended to Double- day that they get the plates and republish it, only to find out that another publisher was on the way to doing it.
From this book I learned the trees on our own place. We had about three acres of woodland, mostly oaks, and then the neighbors' lots had many other species. There must have been twenty species of trees in that locality and I identified them all from that book, or I thought I did.
I also collected wood specimens from some of these trees, and when I entered forestry school several years later, I had a good collec tion of wood samples. That is, the samples were good, but many labels proved later to be incorrect. I had those samples until the year I was retired from the University of California, when I gave them to one of my students — after I corrected the labels!
It was a lot of fun collecting wood and finding out some of the differences. Of course, while I was at the Polytechnic as a stu dent I got an excellent training in wood working as well as metal working. So wood collecting became somewhat of a hobby, and it stHI is. When I returned as a teacher in engineering, I used the school's excellent facilities for preparing specimens.
As I look back on it, I can understand why laymen know so little about wood. I knew nothing about wood. Wood was something that was easy to saw and easy to plane and easy to nail and put to gether. We could tell walnut from oak and soft pine from hard pine, but beyond that we knew nothing. I sympathize today with people when they can't identify woods because their eyes have just not been opened up to its distinguishing characteristics. As I said, that Hough book was the starting point of my interest in wood technology as well as an interest in the identification of trees.
So, in answer to your question, you might say my interest in for estry began while an engineering student at Cornell, and that my interest in wood began while a student and teacher at the coJy- technic in Baltimore. The interest was whetted by my parents hav ing moved to the country. When my brother Ted was transferred to Cuba and thus scotched our joint poultry idea, I started thinking of forestry. Perhaps the crusading spirit of the times also had an effect. Like many young men, I had more than a little of it. Perhaps too, 1 inherited some of my father's idealism but my mother's practicality probably helped toward a sounder balance. Years later that spirit received some hard jolts when I noticed that crusaders for conservation were, like some religionists,
Fritz: not without a selfish interest and hypocrisy.
It seemed such a natural thing in those days for a man to go Into conservation work because it was certainly a good movement. Just the definition of the word — wise uso — would get a young man inter ested, especially one who had some altruism and also a desire to get into some kind of public service.
Teach i ng at Ba I timore Polytechnic
Fritz: I might say that I would never have been a teacher in the engineer ing department if it hadn't been for the depression of the years 1907 and '08. I was headed for the Pennsylvania Steel Company at Steel ton, Pennsylvania, now a subsidiary of Bethlehem, in the chief engineer's department. I worked there the summer of 1907. Appar ently he liked my work because he invited me to come back, and told me he had a very fine job for me, and asked me to write to him.
I did write to him in February of 1908 but industries at that time were laying off men rather than employing them. Although this was a large company, they laid off hundreds, but I had a very wonderful
letter from Mr. Hawkins, the chief engineer — Elmer Hawkins, I think his name was — who said he regretted very much that conditions were such that he couldn't give me the Job he had promised me. So I was out on my ear and I had to look for something else.
So I took a job with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad as a special apprentice, a two-year apprentice class. In order to get into that class one had to have a mechanical engineer's degree or a civil engineer's degree. I worked in the Mont Clare shops helping take down and reassemble a locomotive.
Just prior to that, the Polytechnic Institute principal, Lieutenant King, asked me i f I would consider going to the Polytechnic as a teacher. Naturally I jumped at the chance because the B & 0 em ployed us for not much more than twenty-five hours a week, and at fourteen cents an hour, I was hardly making much more than carfare and certainly not board and room. Possibly the time I had off in the teaching years gave me a chance for more reading and more think ing than I would have had if I had gone into an eight, nine or ten- hour day job. Otherwise, I might have remained in engineering.
I taught at the Polytechnic Institute for four years after my gradu ation from Cornell. During the week I had a room at the YMCA with my brother Ted and on Friday afternoon I would go home and spend Saturday and Sunday. A I I the vacation days were spent out there except the long summer vacation.
The more my interest was excited in plants, the more books I got hold of and read on the subject. We also subscribed to a beautiful
Fritz: magazine called Country Life in Ame r i ca . It was a very fancy maga zine — about the format of Fortune today. From the reading of course we learned more and more — or I did; I was the only one interested. My youngest brother was living »t home while he was a student in medical school, so we talked about biological things once in a wh i le.
Botany j_n_ Cornel I Summer School
Fritz: Anyway, I kept on reading about forestry and began to ask my uncle, my mother's brother, about what forestry was like in Germany; and mother told me something of her father's life in the woods and the activities. Then I made inquiries about forestry schools. I learned that Cornell was going to have one again, Yale had one, Michigan, and there was one at Biltmore.
I also learned, to my dismay, from the literature they sent me that in order to enter, one must have botany. Well, I had no botany nor any other biology except what I had read on my own, so I thought if I have to have botany to enter, then I'd better study it in sum mer school .
So In the summer of 1911, I went to Cornell summer school to study it. That was a very happy experience. We had excellent profes sors. One was W. W. Rowlee; another was Harry P. Brown who later became professor of wood technology at Syracuse and was a close friend until he died. The third was Dr. Anderson who gave physi ology; Brown taught morphology and Rowlee gave trees and other sub jects. Anyway, they were excellent teachers and my classmates were in part students who needed some extra credits or some makeup work, and a very large number of them were school teachers.
I say it was happy because of the close relationship between stu dents and faculty and also the thrill I got out of studying botany. I discovered that the Latin and Greek names were not so difficult and also that botanical science followed natural rules like physical sciences and wasn't so difficult, but if anything is interesting, it simplifies itself from the start.
We made a number of field trips in addition to having the labora tory sessions, and at the close of that six weeks' concentrated botanical course, I determined in another year to enter forestry school; so I returned to the Polytechnic for my fourth year of teaching and gave notice that next spring I would quit. In cidentally, the classic names helped improve my interest in Eng lish, so much of which stems from Latin and Greek.
In the same year, in Baltimore, I enrolled in an afternoon course in botany given by a Baltimore City College teacher. The inside lab work and the field trips were very helpful in spite of the
19
Fritz: distraction of the women, mostly natural science teachers, I be ing the only male!
Maunder: You were teaching at the same Polytechnic Institute from which you had been graduated?
Fritz: The same school. The principal was the same principal when I was a student at the Polytechnic. He knew that I had a great respect for him, and he liked my family and even though I was the usual hell-raising kid, he forgave a lot of that. He bailed me out a number of times when I got into trouble, thinking that maybe I'd settle down after I graduated from college and got a real job.
In the teaching I had mostly shop work, the machine shop and the pattern shop, and believe it or not, I also had a class in black- smithing which was very, very interesting. Blacksmith ing in those days was a part of engineering. A man had to know how to make a weld that would stick and would be as strong as the component pieces, A blacksmith in those days was called upon for a lot of work that a machinist couldn't do on his machines. Of course, it was also a good experience to know what the metals were capable of doing, es pecially In heat treatment.
Gradually I was given more and more responsibility, and when I de cided to quit teaching, I was told by the principal that he re gretted it because he had me lined up to head the engineering de partment in the year that was to follow. I had previously turned down a chance to go to Purdue as instructor in engineering and get a master's degree in engineering at the same time, but that came when I was weakening on engineering, and I decided that I'd better stay where I was and make up my mind about what I wanted to do.
It's a pretty good example about how a lot of boys go to college not knowing exactly what they want. In my case all my background had been engineering, seven years of it in the Polytechnic, so it seemed only natural to elect engineering in college. But it turned out to be the wrong thing — for a time, as you'll learn when you query me about what I taught at the University of California.
20
I I YALE FORESTRY SCHOOL
Classes, Professors, and Field Work
Fritz: I had learned, as I said before, that Cornell was going to reopen
its forestry school after a lapse of some years, and it had already appointed a dean; so while I was on the campus in 1911 for the sum mer school, I went up to the College of Agriculture and called on this dean, or the man who was to be dean. It turned out to be Wal ter Mulford. I told him if there was to be a forestry school there, I'd like to be considered for entrance because Cornell was my under graduate university and I'd like to go there; but I was treated so coldly and Mulford had his watch in front of him and kept touching it every few moments, indicating that I was a very unwelcome in truder, so I quickly grabbed my straw hat and walked out.
(As a strange coincidence, Mulford was the head of the Forestry School when I came to the University of California to teach, and he was my boss for about thirty-two of the thirty-five years I was on the faculty. So I was right back in engineering because ! was to teach sawmi I I ing and wood products. )
Then I decided to enter the Yale Forestry School. It was a toss-up between Michigan and Biltmore and Yale, but I decided as long as I had to pay my own way, I might as well go first class and so I selected the Yale Forestry School. Biltmore closed the year fol lowing so it was fortunate I didn't enter there. Perhaps I should have gone to Michigan because the Michigan professors, at least some of them, were more practical than the ones at Yale.
Maunder: Who was at Michigan at that time?
Fritz: Filibert Roth, a German forester, was the dean.
Maunder: Then you went to Yale in 1911, is that right?
Fritz: Nineteen-twel ve, the following year. The course at Yale at that time was wholly prescribed. There were no electives. The course began in June, or was it July, on the estate of Gifford Pinchot near Mi I ford, Pennsylvania. He called his place "Grey Tcwe'-s." We were in the summer school there in tents for twelve weeks.
It was a wonderful locality, very similar to the one in Ithaca, and had the same land formations and the same origin apparently — a number of deep gorges in slate and shale, beautiful waterfalls and very interesting woods, mostly hardwood. The school in earlier years had done some planting so there were some plantations avail able for study.
21
Fritz: That summer of twelve weeks on the Plnchot estate was a clincher, and I was more determined than ever to complete forestry. It wasn't so difficult after all, learning the botanical names, bio logical terms and so on. But I was disappointed over some parts of It. For example, we had a course called mensuration, that is, tree measurements, and they used some statistical methods which were very, very crude, and they applied statistical analysis to an object which seemed to me was not too well suited to statistical analysis because it was so extremely variable. I still feel that way about it today. Some bad crimes have been committed in publi cations by applying statistics blindly without a good enough know ledge of tree physiology.
The teachers in the summer session were Ralph C. Haw ley and Sam Record, Sam J. Record was pretty much of a humorist and made a game out of identifying the trees. Hawley was a serious fellow, a very practi cal, no-nonsense man. In my opinion he was the best, as to real istic forestry, of the entire faculty, as I met them later on in New Haven. He knew his stuff and he knew the limitations of the knowledge of the day. He had an objective in management. He had actual trees and forests to manage whereas the others were more academic.
This was a few years after Henry Solon Graves had left to become, in 1910, Chief of the U. S. Forest Service. Pinchot, as you will recall, was thrown out by President Taft. We forestry students, of course, were being inoculated with the philosophy of the day that Pinchot was a sort of messiah in forestry and that everything he did was correct, so we swallowed it all. Later I had to change my mind about some of it. As I look back, I think Pinchot deserved being discharged from his Chief Forestership. He was certainly insubordinate and 1 believe also he got to the point where he had about run his course anyway.
Pinchot did a magnificent job in the basic legislation and in or ganizing the U. S. Forest Service. It was organized on the basis of railroad organization with departments and branches and a chain of command and so on, but the odd thing was that nobody in the Forest Service knew much about the subject. They were mostly fel lows with the same education I was getting and without very much experience. Pinchot, of course, had gone to a forestry school in France — Nancy. Henry S. Graves, who followed him as Forest Service Chief and the first Dean of the Yale Forestry School, was also a graduate of a forestry school — this time, in Germany. Although they both wrote books, they were pretty much on the German pattern.
I must say this: Pinchot's principal contribution to forestry un derstanding was, in my opinion, his Primer of Forestry, which came out in two volumes in hard covers. In those days one could get Department of Agriculture publications free. I got the Pinchot Primer of Forestry while I was still at Cornell, in 1907. I still have these books and the date is still in them. At the same time
22
Fritz: I got a copy of old Bureau of Forestry Bulletin 10, of 1895. The title was Timber by Flllbert Roth. That was an exciting thing; that was more nearly In my field. That was wood, an engineering and building material, and I leaned some basic facts about wood from It to help me in my collection of wood samples.
I stl I I look upon the Primer of_ Forestry as the best book for an American forester to read first". It has all the framework of for estry within a very few pages, and excellent illustrations. Much of the material, of course, is based upon European experience and practice. The books on silviculture of today can't teach a man any more than those two volumes of Pinchot's.
The silviculture books of today are written too much from the of fice desk and chair by men who have had very little experience in the woods. They jump in and out of the woods from the highway, pick up a few scattered thoughts and come back and put them into print. The only way to learn silviculture, I believe, is to get the basic facts out of a book like Pinchot's, and then spend a lot of time deep in the woods really observing and trying to interpret what he sees — at least, try to piece together the story as the forest develops.
Well, Henry S. Graves was the Chief Forester in my student days, and the Dean of the Forestry School at Yale was James W. Tourney. Professor Tourney was a delightful and gentlemanly person. He was a botanist, very heavily interested in trees, and he had had some experience, I believe, in the old Bureau of Forestry trying to set up some nurseries. Tourney was, in my opinion, a good teacher. Some of my classmates didn't think so. Though he read the same lecture notes every year, he had an inflection and he expressed himself in such a clear manner that It was a pleasure to hear him speak. He made dendrology a very intriguing subject.
At Yale we had a lot of field work, an excellent idea for any for estry school. We were out once or twice a week with Jim Tourney and once or twice a week with Ralph Haw ley. These field trips were eye-openers. They began to make the whole story of the forests un fold. Knowing something about trees made ordinary hikes for pleas ure much more entertaining and satisfying.
Some of the geology and soils lore that the professors spoke about in teaching us about silviculture rubbed off on me and added to the value of the field trips. (I had never had a course in geology.) It happened also that one of my classmates, Temple Tweedy, had been a major in geology as a Yale undergraduate. His father was in the U. S. Coast and Geological Survey. He and I used to take hikes on which he would tell me a good deal about land forms and the glaciated country in the New England states. I recall one time he pointed out some scratches which he claimed were made by the glaciers on some of the rocks around New Haven. Then on East Rock, on another hike, he pointed out the pentagonal, or was it hexagonal, pattern of lava
23
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
Maunder ;
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
"crystals." I'd never seen them before. In fact, rocks were just rocks to me before that and soil was just dirt. One learns as much from his fellow students as he does from his professor, especially In graduate school where the sti'dents come from a number of other universities and from many different major subjects. That was cer tainly true at the Yale Forest School.
Who were some of the other professors at Yale?
Jim Tourney gave the course in dendrology and silviculture, that is, the lectures on silviculture. I think it was called "Si Ivies" the first semester. H. H. Chapman gave forest management, as it was called, and he gave another course too. I think it was forest economics. Then Sam Record gave the course on wood, its properties and uses, its anatomy and so on.
Ralph C. Bryant taught us logging and lumbering. He was a most likable man. I learned early that he was the first forestry gradu ate of an American forestry school — Cornell. Cornell, of course, had the first forestry school and he was the first one to graduate. Being four years or more older than most of my classmates, Bryant and I became very close friends. I was also very close to Sam Re cord and when he wrote his book on the mechanical properties of wood, I helped him on it and got credit for it in the preface. Of course, that was very simple because I had had so much of that kind of material at the Polytechnic and also at Cornell.
What else can you do to school and its faculty?
fill us in on the history of this important
Of the men I have mentioned, I would say that Haw ley and Bryant had the most practical approach to forestry. They believed that forestry had to pay before it would ever be practiced. Thev were also decidedly not socialistic in their viewpoints. In fact, I don't think any of those five men (Hawley, Bryant, Record, Chap man and Tourney) had a socialistic viewpoint.
On the other hand, Chapman, for one, was very anti-industry; and in his lectures, which were extremely involved and very difficult to follow, he would frequently resort to castigating certain in dividuals in the lumber industry, and not only in that industry but in forestry itself. He would even lay out Gifford Pinchot for some things that he did. In fact, we got the impression that no one was right but Chapman.
To what do you attribute this quality?
I would say that he was just naturally a pugnacious person and he comes apparently from a line of square-jawed people. I understand that his grandfather, Haupt, for whom he was named, was a general. I think he was the Quartermaster General of the Union armies in the War Between the States. I believe that in the past few years Her man Chapman has been writing a sort of a biography on the old
24
Fritz: gentleman. He probably was a good Quartermaster General. I under stand from those who heard more about the biography locally that Herman Chapman himself felt that the old man was a little too h igh-handed.
Maunder: Well, Chapman has had a rather influential part or role in Ameri can forestry circles over the years, hasn't he?
Fritz: He had a very great influence. He gave the impression of sincerity, and I believe the man really believed what he said, but he was very, very suspicious. He was very much like Theodore Roosevelt. He was easily led into quarrels by some who had ulterior motives and used Chapman as their hatchet man. He loved a fight.
Maunder: Did you ever go on any of the field trips in the South with H. H. Chapman?
Fritz: Yes. As I said before, Yale had a great deal of field work, and
that was in my opinion the lifesaver. If they had taught forestry only from lectures and from books, it wouldn't have been worth a damn. You must remember that most of the students were reared in an urban environment. The field work is what made it a training. In the field, a man could see for himself and draw his own conclu sions.
Maunder:
Fritz:
We started with twelve weeks on the Pinchot estate in New Haven. We had field trips several times during the week, and then at the end of the first year — it was a two-year course — we spent two weeks in the Adirondacks with Ralph Hawley at Ne-ha-sa-nee Park. It was a private estate, a wild, beautiful area.
Most of us took jobs in the woods during the summer of 1913. The second year, the senior year, closed a few weeks after Christmas and we were all ordered to the South for three months. Chapman was in charge and handled the forest management instruction while Bryant handled the work in logging and milling.
My class had its field work on the property of the Great Southern Lumber Company in Mississippi, a few miles from Columbia in Marion County. That was on the Pearl River, all virgin long-leaf pine timber except for some second growth which occupied farm lands abandoned after the Civi I War. Two weeks of those three months were spent in Bogalusa, Louisiana, at the company's great sawmill.
What would you have to say about the pioneering that some southern companies were doing in conserving the natural resources?
Not so much conserving, but everywhere the doors were open to the professors, especially Bryant who was teaching lumbering. They were open to Chapman also. Chapman claims to have initiated the idea of burning longleaf pine lands to aid the seedlings overcome a needle disease.
25
Fritz: Anyway, these lumber people felt that if there was anything in
forestry they'd better find out what it is, and they gave the school permission to hold its senior field work on their property. Both Chapman and Bryant did consulting work for several companies.
For example, I recall we had to do not only forestry work but also logging work. We were ordered by Ralph C. Bryant to make a study of log lengths. Logs in those days were mostly sixteen feet long. With a tape, we measured each log to the nearest inch, p I us a trim ming allowance. Then we made a report on how the log lengths varied and what effect this had on the financial status of the company.
(Of course, if a log was one inch too short then the log really was two feet less and would have to be knocked down from a sixteen to a fourteen-foot log because the lumber lengths were all in increments of equal two-foot lengths, but if the log was an inch over, it didn't make so much difference, although that inch might have made it pos sible to add two feet to the top log, depending on imperfections.)
Well, we made a report and that report found its way through Pro fessor Bryant to the office of the manager of the company in Boga- lusa, Mr. Sullivan, quite a character and a big man in that region. Apparently, we hit the Jackpot. He had us in his office one day — the class was small, only about twenty, and we went down there in halves, so my half of ten students was in the office — and Mr. Sul livan said, "Well, boys, I'm glad this season is coming to an end. You've been an awful lot of trouble to us. You've been in the way of my logging crews, you've been riding our log trains against our safety rules, and I've seen some of you ride the tongs at the load ing machines, and we've spent a lot of money building a camp for you," and he went on in that vein for a little while.
We were getting a little nervous and we thought, well, maybe we weren't so welcome after all, when very suddenly he changed his attitude entirely and developed a broad smile and grin, and he said, "But boys, I want you to know we've made money on you. Do you re member that report that you wrote about the log lengths? Well, I didn't know that that was going on in the woods. My foreman didn't tell me about it so I had it checked by one of my own engineers, and sure enough, the log lengths were not as correct as they should have been.
"So all the expense that you boys have put us to has been more than compensated for by the saving we have made in watching our log lengths a little more closely. I want you to know also we were actually very happy to have you here and we hope that some of you will want a job with our company when you graduate." Then we felt better about it.
Incidentally, that sawmill was the biggest sawmill in the world at the time. As I recall, it had four sides, four band headsaws, two gangs, several resaws, and while we were there they were adding a
26
Fritz:
Fritz:
Maunder;
Fritz:
twin band headrlg for slabbing a small log on two sides and then running the cant to a gang mill. The plant had a huge burner which was about thirty-five feet In diameter and more than a hun dred feet high. The refuse conveyer to the burner was chocka- block full with refuse all day long. The sawmill was really a wonder from an engineering standpoint and for me it was a lot of fun. It was the only big sawmill I had ever visited, the sawmills I had visited before being very small in New England and in Mary land, but this mill was really something big.
When Bryant asked us to prepare a report on the entire operation at Bogalusa, I really had a field day. My mechanical drafting and my knowledge of engineering, steam engineering in particular, and moving parts, came in very handy and I had a lot of fun writing the report. I spent my Saturdays and Sundays doing it and was com plimented by Bryant when he said that he'd I i ke to have that report
to copy for the Yale Forestry Library, not, I don't know.
Whether it's there now or
Maunder: You don't have a copy?
I had my one over
own copy for many years, to the Yale Forest Schoo
and I be I leve that I Library. I don't
I turned that recal I , but I
think it's there. It had something like 120 pages and was very well illustrated with pencil drawings of the plant. I was able to help my classmates a good deal on that study because none of them had any mechanical training, and I recall several of them standing at the log deck wondering what made the carriage go back and forth when one of them said, "I know how it works. That boy riding the car riage presses a lever and the steam goes into that pipe under the carriage."
Well, actually the pipe under the carriage was the pipe that led steam to the setwords and the carriage rider had nothing to do with the forward and back motion of the carriage, but that was to be ex pected when young fellows were thrown into a big plant like that without any engineering background. Of course, as a teacher later on, I felt it was not good practice to take a student to the very large sawmills but to take them to a one-side mill where they could study every step more thoroughly at the same time.
Did you study field trips?
the use of fire in the woods in the South on these
Oh yes. Of course, we had fire protection courses in New Haven, and one of the professors would frequently blow his top because of the carelessness of the American public with fire, and particularly the lumber people, and more particularly, the woods natives who fired the woods each spring "to kill ticks" and invite more grass.
As I said earlier, Chapman gave the use of fire, as a si I vicul tural tool, considerable study. There is a classic set of editorials in
27
Fritz: the local paper of Crossett, Arkansas, in about 1930, berating the Yankees for trying to stop the wild fires set annually by the na tives. Chapman's Idea was to stop all burning except an occasional one under strict control to remove the high grnss around longlenf pine seedlings. The seedlings were not permanently Injured. Chap man had a running feud with public foresters and extension agricul turists on the subject.
Gifford Pinchot
Maunder: Could you give us a little bit of the picture of the controversy
over conservation as it was going on at the time you were a student in college? Surely you must have been on the inside of a great deal of discussion there at Yale, because it was the seat of the Pinchot-Graves forestry group, and there must have been a good deal of discussion within the ranks of forestry students and faculty about all this at the time.
Fritz: Well, of course I was only a student but I was four or five years older than most of my classmates. I heard the professors talk about the matter, and I read a great deal about it. I think there should never have been a controversy over conservation. The con notation of conservation, if one does make his own definition, is something everyone would endorse. But men like Pinchot made an issue of it.
By constantly feeding information to the general public of a kind designed to frighten, conservationists made a lot of enemies; and I feel to this day that if Gifford Pinchot had then taken a dif ferent attitude, forestry would be much farther along today that it is, and there would not have developed that schism between for esters and the timber owners that held it back.
It was quite a shock to me, coming from the engineering field where controversies were pretty well limited to technical matters. Con troversies in conservation were too much like those in religion of which I had heard enough as a boy. The whole conservation movement, which was all forestry in those days, was pretty much slanted. There were certain people who were determined to get their views adopted by the general public. Even to this day, conservation is a wonderful platform for a politician.
I never knew Pinchot as intimately as those associated with him in the Forest Service, but I saw a good deal of him. I first met him while I was a student in the summer camp of my junior year at the Yale Forest School. As I told you earlier, we started our Yale training in camp on the Pinchot property near Milford, Pennsylvania. The house looked to me like a baronial castle.
We students one day were invited to Grey Towers for what you might
28
Fritz: call "tea" — Plnchot at that time was a bachelor. We were all de ll qhted to meet the great man. Until that 1iiw, I had novor mnl a man of such captivating personality as 01 f ford Plnrhot. Me hofl a magnificent bearing; he was trjl and straight, above six feet; he looked distinguished with his wonderful mustache; and he spoke with such fervor about politics, conservation and forestry that I was captivated by the man.
I regret that, in later years, I felt justified in looking at the man in an entirely different way. He was canned by President Taft, in 1910, for insubordination. When I entered the forestry school in 1912, the matter was still fresh. Pinchot, of course, being a man of tremendous energy, had to have something to do. He was wealthy, and he had so much experience with politics in Washington that the natural thing for him to do was to go into politics. Politics ruined the man as far as I'm concerned because then he exhibited qualities that no one suspected before — an uncontrollable selfishness and vi ndictiveness.
Maunder: In what ways did these qualities manifest themselves in your observation?
Fritz: By the way he talked and acted. The vi ndicti veness first showed up in his helping to form the third party. His friend, Theodore Roosevelt, was not above some vi ndicti veness himself. Pinchot, standing on the lawn of Grey Towers, gave us a talk about what happened at the Bull Moose Convention in Chicago in 1912; how im portant it was to put T. R. back into the White House because he was the real strong man. He was fervid but not too convincing. Though I was captivated by his personality, he spoke too much like a he I I -fire and brimstone Sunday preacher.
I was later soured on Pinchot by his injecting politics into his own department of forestry when he became governor of Pennsylvania; his determined effort to socialize the forest industries; his wear ing two hats, one for political speeches and one for Sunday: and his downgrading of county and state governments without doing any thing to improve them. He seemed to regard the federal government as the only form of purity and the only one to wield a stick. He craved power.
Taft was no weakling. I've since met some people who were very close to him from whom I learned much that is not in print. I think Taft's place in history will grow as the years go by, pretty much like Herbert Hoover has grown in stature after he was sepa rated from the White House by the voters.
Theodore Roosevelt's suspicions were easily aroused, and I think it was this quality in T. R. that was played upon by Gifford Pin chot, especially while T. R. was in Africa, that brought about the formation of the third party, the so-called "Bull Moose," or Pro gressive Party. Of course, that was just Gifford Pinchot's meat.
29
Fritz: Men like Harold Ickes who joined with Pinchot in promoting T. R.'s candidacy were of a similar order — idealistic, dedicated, aggres sive, egoistic, and over-zealous.
Maunder: Do you think that the Bull Moose Parry might never have come into being if it hadn't been for Gifford Pinchot?
Fritz: I do, indeed. I think also that T. R. would never have been so
violently turned against President Taft if it hadn't been for Gif ford Pinchot's needling. Pinchot, of course, was somewhat vindic tive and he was going to get even in some way, and he did so by setting up a third party. It killed William Howard Taft politically and made it possible for the Democrats to win. The election of Woodrow Wilson pleased me because it seemed to be time for a change, and Wilson was a man of great learning and distinction in the field of government. I would have voted for him, but living in New Haven, Connecticut, at the time and absentee ballots having not then been permitted, I lost my vote in that year.
Maunder: Would you rate Taft as strong a personality and as great a presi dent as either Teddy Roosevelt or Wilson?
Fritz: He accomplished a great deal in a quiet way, and possibly more
within the lines of legality. Theodore Roosevelt acted and asked questions afterwards. A good example was his deal for the Panama Canal Zone. Taft didn't seem to care so much about preaching to the public. Woodrow Wilson, of course, was an excellent president but his idealism had the better of his practical side. I'm speak ing as one who knows nothing about politics except that it stinks. The opponent is always wrong if he is of the other party and if his proposals would strengthen his party. It's a case of party before country.
Maunder: Well, now, what was the row from where you observed it?
between Pinchot and Ba I linger all about How do you interpret that fight?
Fritz: I was then only a student. One of the professors harangued us
against Ba I linger, but I knew too little about it to judge. How ever, I felt that his accusers were making a mountain out of a molehill and were out to get somebody for some reason I didn't understand. I believe that Harold Ickes was quite sincere when, in later years, he said that he was wrong about Bal linger. Ba I lin ger was probably a scapegoat. Pinchot, of course, found the con troversy just wonderful to get himself before the public as its champion. Pinchot loved publicity. He was quite an actor.
Would you be interested in a story told me by George M. Cornwall, founder and editor of The Timberman, published in Portland, Oregon?
Maunder: I would.
Fritz: | knew George Cornwall very well. For a number of years we lived
30
Fritz: in adjoining blocks in Berkeley, and he often came to our house. He knew the situation as well as Plnchot, how the forests were be ing handled, and did a great deal to improve it through his maga zine and the Pacific Logging Congress, which he founded.
I asked whether he ever met Pinchot, and he said, "Yes. I must tell you about the first time 1 ever met him. It was at the Daven port Hotel in Spokane, Washington. Pinchot was out there for some kind of a meeting, and being a publisher of a trade magazine, I felt that I should interview him."
So Cornwall went to Pinchot and said, "Well, I'll be glad to be
asked for an i nterviewed,
interview. Pinchot but let's go up to my
room
where it i
it will be quiet." When they got to his room Pinchot said, "I can think a lot better if I lie flat on my back on the floor," and Cornwall, being very guick-witted said, "Well, I'll lie down right alongside of you with my notebook and you go right ahead."
Maunder:
So he put a pillow under his head, and Pinchot started off giving some of his background, about his father, how he happened to go to France to study forestry and how he got Into forestry work in this country. In short, it was something like this, as I recall it: Pinchot, feeling that, as a wealthy man's son and a Yale graduate, he had an obligation to improve the world, discussed it with his father. His father asked, "What do you want to do?"
Gifford replied, "I'd like to be useful and I think this conserva tion movement which is being talked about so much nowadays should be a good thing," and the father said, "Okay, what do you want to do about it?" The reply was, "I want to go to France and study forestry." This shows Pinchot's fervor for conservation came early and undoubtedly was sincere.
Did George Timberman?
M. Cornwall's account of this interview appear in the
Fritz: That I can't tell you. The interview took place possibly in 1910, maybe earlier. I understand the Timberman has developed an index for all its back issues so you might be able to find it there.
Pinchot's Breaking New Ground has got to be read with some under standing of the times, of the man himself, and of the man who is thought to have prepared the material for publication, Raphael Zon. The book is one-sided in glorifying Pinchot. It is silent on other points. For example, you won't find Hetch Hetchy Valley mentioned, and certainly not his part in turning Hetch Hetchy over to San Francisco to be flooded for a reservoir. Another example is the sketchy and down-grading mention of Dr. C. A. Schenck, the stiff- necked German forester Pinchot had imported.
Maunder: Of course, isn't that typical of almost all books as memoirs, that
31
Maunder: they hold forth the things that people like to remember about them selves rather than being very critical of their past?
Fritz: Yes, that may be true, but Zon -orshipped Plnchot and was himself a vindictive type of person and not above plagiarism.
Maunder: Could you spell that out, the fact that Zon was, as you say, a plagiarist? In what area did he plagiarize?
Fritz: I recall Zon coming to Fort Valley, Arizona, where I was in the
Forest Experiment Station. In my presence at least, he said nothing that was helpful. When he left, my boss, Gus Pearson, a wonderful boss for anybody to have, was quite disturbed. He didn't trust Zon because Zon would go through our data and when he found something he could use, it came out for his own use.
Several years after I resigned as editor of the Journal of Forestry, I got the Russian professor, Vyzsotzky, to prepare an article on shelter belts. He was then about eighty years old. He was des cribed to me as being the leader in Russia of shelter belt science, and even though it was in Stalinist Russia, a letter went through. I suggested that he write an article on shelter belts because that was a big issue of the day when President Franklin Roosevelt was asked to crisscross the whole continent with shelter belts, to ameliorate the climate even in distant cities.
Maunder: Wasn't the major reason for the shelter belts to alleviate the dust bowl problem?
Fritz: The dust bowl focused attention on the benefits of windbreaks.- But a government employee thinks expansively, and simple windbreaks became border- to- border belts of trees. Windbreaks are an old story in the United States — on the plains, in the California citrus area, and elsewhere, long before the invention of the equally expansive New Deal of F. D. R.
Maunder: Where did Zon get involved with this Russian scientist?
Fritz: Well, he wasn't involved with him directly. I wrote to the pro fessor for an article on shelter belts, and I told him in my let ter, as I recall the letter, that there was so much controversy about shelter belts, ! think the Journal o_f_ Forestry should carry an article by someone who knows about shelter belts, how they oper ate, and how good they are for ameliorating climate in the immediate vici n ity .
I told him also that much of our data on windbreaks seems to have come from Russia. Professor Vyzsotzky came back very promptly with an article that was published in the Journal of Forestry when Franklin Reed was the editor. In the last paragraph, the author accused Zon of using his material without credit. The Vyzsotzky article was really excellent and gave us a better
32
Fritz: understanding of shelter belts and how they operate.
Maunder: Is tho correspondence you had with the Russian author sill I In ex I stence?
Fritz: It's in my files in Berkeley.*
Maunder: That would be very interesting documentation to back up this oral history interview.
Fritz: I hope some day to go through my correspondence files and winnow out the letters that might have some value in the future. I must have several thousand or more — much more than that — to go through. I started on it several years ago and got as far as the letter D or E. It thinned the files considerably, but even then they contain some stuff that isn't worth saving.
Maunder: May I make a suggestion to you in that regard? Don't do too much winnowing because the person who is a skilled manuscripts expert would find things of historical interest which you might think very trivial or minor in interest.
Fritz: Before we go on to another topic, please let me say a little more on Pinchot. I have been critical of him so far in this interview. Others, too, have been equally critical, for example, Wallace Stegner in his book, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (Houghton- Mifflin Company, Boston, 1954). Nevertheless, Pinchot's lasting merits outweigh his demerits. He was an excellent organizer and administrator.
The U. S. Forest Service is his monument. It has sturdily con tinued the high standard of public service inculcated by Pinchot. His charm and general charisma drew a large coterie of enthusiastc supporters. He had enormous energy and drive and inspired his colleagues to work as hard as he drove himself. He must be recognized forever as the leader in a great cause.
Contrasts i n Forestry Education
Maunder: I'd like to throw out one more question before we leave the
discussion of your education. How would you contrast engineering and forestry education in those days?
Fritz: There's no comparison. Even in those days, engineering was really
The Papers of Emanuel Fritz are deposited in Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California.
33
Fritz: a tough subject. It was about as tough as medicine. I saw what medicine is like because my younger brother was a medical student, and while he had thicker books than I had, he didn't have to work any harder than I did. It meant sitting up late at night and do ing mathematical problems and laboratory reports, engineering test reports and so on. Two, three, or four of us who worked to gether would often sit up until one and two o'clock, working up the data. Of course, it could have been done in much less time, but my party happened to be interested and wanted to turn out re ports that we could use ourselves later on in engineering practice,
Maunder: Do you mean that this kind of hard work was not necessary in for estry education? There was no burning of the midnight oil?
Fritz: Not at all. I probably had to work harder than the other stu dents in my forestry class because I had no background of biology, and it was rather tough having shifted from a physical science to a biological science, but at the same time it was a fascinating subject.
I think our forestry professors did the very best they could with the equipment they had. By equipment, ( mean the knowledge of forestry. What they taught us Is what they learned only a few years earlier from their own professors, and they In turn got it from the Germans or the French. So there wasn't too good a basis for forestry in America. It was mostly forestry by the book.
Of course, in a course like dendrology given by Jim Tourney, that was different. That was merely applied botany and Tourney did have a great background in biology and botany, and he made the course in dendrology extremely Interesting. He actually made the trees live for us, and although we had never seen many of those trees except from his word pictures, we could get pretty good mental pictures of the trees he was talking about, and we had to learn about five hundred. Nowadays I think they teach only about fifty or seventy-five, picking out the most important commercial species.
Well, as to the contrast between the two, there couldn't have been the thoroughness when I was a student that is possible today. Most of the teachers at that time didn't have a biological back ground and no background in economics, or a very thin one, and no background in engineering. It's amazing that they did as good a job as they did. In contrasting the two, I would say that in en gineering, we had such a broad background for engineering in mathe matics and physics, a little bit of chemistry, a world of theoreti cal mechanics, and laboratory work, and actual work on machines that could not have been duplicated at that time in forestry.
The forestry teachers of today are equipped far better than we were in my own teaching career, and the students we have today are those who will become the teachers of the future and, in turn, will be far better equipped than the present teachers. Of course,
34
Fritz:
Maunder:
Fritz:
that's true of the entire teaching profession, somewhat the idea?
Does that give you
Maunder:
Fritz:
I think so. Do you think there Is ^uch difference in teaching techniques today, in comparing them with earlier methods?
There was an awful lot of crusading that crept into teaching then. We don't get much of that today. For example, I think I said earlier that in one course, the professor would stop and in very strong terms, condemn this or that individual or industry. I'd never heard anything like that in engineering school, but it seemed to be the thing to do in forestry, and it seemed also that it was the purpose of some of the teachers to make zealots or crusaders out of their students. That's something I didn't like.
Do you think that could be explained by the fact that forestry was a new profession emerging on the American scene, and it was striving mightily for recognition by the dramatic method of tak ing up a holy crusade? Do you think that entered in, or is that not a valid interpretation?
Quite so. American forestry teaching was new. There was almost no practice of forestry in the woods. The first teachers had to write the textbooks. There was almost no research. Basic principles were derived from the Germans and French.
The conservation movement goes .back many years. It had its formal beginning, I should say, in 1875 when the American Forestry Asso ciation was founded, and it had articulate proponents all the years since, beginning with a man by the name of John A. Warder and running all the way down into and through the Pinchot days. Some of the men who were in the top echelons of the Forest Service following the Pinchot days, and I would say a few even up to the present, also had that crusader idea. For a long time, I think some of the top Forest Service men tried to emulate or imitate Gifford Pinchot.
Some were socialistic and felt that forests should be publicly owned and managed. Socialism is only one step removed from a dic tatorial and wasteful bureaucracy. For one who was brought up in the private enterprise atmosphere, as I was at home, socialism is anathema. We felt that one should work for everything he gets and ze compensated accordingly. If he gets something for nothing, he has less respect for it.
I still think this theory is right. I couldn't stomach some of the propaganda that was handed out in the early days of my forestry career, that everybody, under pain of ostracism, should run for the banner of those who are arguing for federal ownership, or at least federal control. I do believe, however, that forestry teachers soon developed a strong independence of Pinchotism and helped halt the trend toward socialism.
35
Fritz: The lack of forestry was due to the abundance of timber which, in turn, begat too many sawmills and invited instability and a migra tory industry. The owners were burdened with holding charges, taxa tion, interest, protection, adrl nlstration and so on. A few of them made a lot of money and became weal Thy men as a result of their own ership. But It was just like mining — It isn't every hole you dig that is going to bring up pay dirt. A lot of lumbermen went broke.
36
II! BEGINNING A FORESTRY CAREER
The Context of Government and I ndus'i ry
Maunder: Let's go back to your career again and start you off as a practic ing forester. When did that actually begin and where?
Fritz: First of all, you're making it appear that my career was really of some importance. It is a fact that during my lifetime, I saw the conservation movement really get underway, the national forest system set up, the philosophy of liquidation changing over to a philosophy of holding and tree farming, also a change in the atti tude of the federal government, and of course, a big change in the national forest system in that the public lands are now actually in the timber selling business in a big way. But my own part was that of an i ndi vidual .
Maunder: There have been some big changes in industry, too. It has often
been characterized as being a sick Industry in those days, Emanuel. How would you characterize the industry as you recall it in the years just preceding World War I?
Fritz: As I said earlier, there was too much timber available for cutting. It would have been better if more of it had been kept on ice in the public domain and sold only as the market needed it. By "sold," I mean "in fee." Before World War I, the wail was, "What's wrong with the lumber industry?" Whatever was wrong was the result of too many land owners forced into building mills to earn funds for taxes and interest. The consequence was too many mills, overpro duction, and no, or too little, profit.
Maunder: You mean a really sick industry?
Fritz: It was sick in the same sense that farming has always been sick. Too many men were trying to produce a product that too few people were ready to buy. In lumbering, the very fact that certain people owned timber was an impelling motive to operate that timber, to get it off the stump, through the mill and into a salable product before the bond holders would foreclose. The result is that the producing capacity of the sawmill industry was far above what the market re- qui red.
You still have the same thing in farming today except that in farm ing you are actually paying a man to create a surplus whereas in the lumber business, those who created a surplus suffered from it themselves, and of course made the rest of the industry suffer also. That has now changed because the economic situation is different, the preponderance of old growth is now a thing of the past, and those who own what old growth is left — what's in private hands — know that they've got to husband it and handle it more carefully
37
Fritz: than they ever did. They're now making money, making money as
industrialists rather than merely as timber holders, and they have set up the successlul troo farm system at no cost to the public.
Maunder: You recall Thomas B. Walker, the lumberman who came out here from Minnesota and became a big pine land owner in northern California? He wrote an article for the editor of Sunset magazine in January, 1910, entitled "Forests for the Future?" TrTthis article, he evi denced a serious concern for conservation of forest resources and he recognized some of the main reasons why the harvest of wood up to that time had left approximately two-thirds of the product to waste and took only one-third for use.
He cites as the main reasons for this rather terrible waste: I) excessive local taxes on standing timber, 2) competition of more cheaply produced Canadian lumber (and this reason Walker said was very much overlooked, yet in his estimation it was perhaps the greatest factor responsible for waste in the woods), and 3) need for conservation and reforesting was fully expressed at the time, but no definite plan was suggested by anyone or outlined by anyone, whereby and through which provisions for future supply could be provided either by the Forestry Commission or the Forestry Depart ment or any other group of the community.
Walker in this article purported to present a practical plan which he thought might deal with this problem, and the plan which he proceeded to outline involved a pattern of government control and regulation, both of prices and of labor and of the tariff and all the rest, which would seem rather far down the road to socialism by many businessmen today. Yet here was one of the biggest business men in the lumber industry of his day suggesting a plan of this kind. Th is was in 1910.
Fritz: Do you recall the month in which that appeared?
Maunder: That was in January, 1910, pages 59 to 65, Sunset magazi ne.
Fritz: I must look that up. I didn't know about that article until you
mentioned it, but I must say that it certainly was not in character for T. B. Walker to ask for public regulation because he was first of all an individualist.
Maunder: I think you'll find the reading of that article quite a surprise.
It certainly was to me, to see this coming from the pen of a prominent bus! nessman.
Fritz: He was a very large owner, and he spent a great deal of money as sembling that big property from the small separate ownerships, but I can understand in a way why he should have felt that way at that time. I recall that in 1915 when I was in the Forest Service in Montana, I was one of the younger assistants on a study of the lum ber industry in the Inland Empire, and some of the lumbermen I
38
Fritz:
Maunder:
Fritz:
Maunder:
talked to had somewhat the same idea, that the timber should never have been allowed to get out of government hands on such a large scale. Of course, that sounded all right at that time, but look- Ing back, I don't think It wou'd have solved anything because the government is not better than private industry in managing a business,
Now Walker, like some of the others, understood that the producing capacity of the sawmills was far greater than was required by the market, and by having some kind of control, I think he felt that it would prevent the construction of some sawmills which made it im possible for a reasonable number to operate at a profit.
He also indicated that he would be in favor of curtailing the pro duction of those sawmills which were already in production. In other words, they could only produce a certain percentage each year. This was part of his plan.
That sounds almost like the crop-control probably would have been a good thing if
schemes of today. It
it could have been run by
the industry itself, of federal policing.
I'm much more in favor of self-policing than
think it was Walker's idea that this thing should be tried first of all on a voluntary basis and that if this failed, then the federal government should step in and lower the boom on those who wouldn't abide by the regulations.
Fritz:" I want to digress for a moment because I feel that the federal
government is basically responsible for that situation. The fed eral government, beginning in the early 1860's when Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, started the breakdown of the timbered domain into small ownerships. The philosophy was to get the land into the hands of the public in 160-acre parcels. The law was designed primarily for homesteading prospective farm land, but it was absolutely bad and self-defeating when it was applied to tim ber I and.
I think that was brought out very, very well by an early director of the U. S. Geological Survey, Major J. W. Powell. He got himself into a lot of unpleasantness because he protested the application of the Homestead Law to the timbered areas of the West. That has been brought out again in more recent books bearing on Major Powell's life and his philosophy, and also books on the winning of the West.
Maunder: In other words, the western lands, forested lands, were not sus ceptible of development in the same way as the prairie farm land?
Fritz: Correct.
Maunder: Would you explain a little bit how you feel it would have been
better, how the land policy of our government might have been more wisely carried out?
39
Fritz: First of all, let's see how it actually worked out. The Homestead Act made it possible for a citizen to obtain title to 160 acres of valuable timber. Later the Timber and Stone Act was passed to pro vide for a similar breakdown. One hundred and sixty acres might make a good farm, but it can't support a sawmill. It takes a large area of timber to operate a sawmill economically and certainly a great area to do it on a sustained-yield basis.
By breaking the land down into I60's, Congress practically invited the patentee to cash in at once by sel ling to a sawmi I I man. Be ing mountainous and rough, the land couldn't be farmed anyway. Many of these 160-acre "claims" were settled on with full knowledge that the timber was easy to sell. Fraud was invited. Timberland locators took train loads of "homesteaders" west, went through the simple formality of filing each on a 160, paid each one maybe $150, and sent them all back home. This is only a slight oversimplification of the situation.
In other cases, the timber agent would file fraudulent claims for nonexi sting people. Thus large blocks were reassembled. The agent was actually representing a timberland investor who financed him. It caused a scandal and some agents, along with several con gressmen, were jailed. The U. S. was paid the full price per acre, but the intent of the law was clearly violated, even though the intent was an error. What Uncle Sam had fragmented, the timber in vestors reassembled.
Unfortunately, the process of reassembling the quarter sections into manageable blocks stopped too soon. As a result, we suffered the consequences up to and through the I940's. Northwestern Cali fornia presents a good example. There, many of the "homesteaded" or Timber and Stone Act quarter sections remained in the hands of the original patentees or their heirs. This was in a region of Douglas fir forests, east of and adjoining the redwood forest belt and considered inaccessible.
Came World War II with its tremendous lumber requirements. It hap pened that many of the small loggers of Oregon and Washington, finding themselves out of timber and hearing about the large area of "inaccessible" Douglas fir in northern California, looked it over and liked it. Much of it was owned by ranchers who had tried for years to get rid of it by burning to create more grass. Some sold their stumpage for as little as one dollar per M board feet, at which price even a small logger could afford to build roads into it.
The result was a multitude of small logging operators each laying out his own road system, independent of his neighbor. Small loggers generally are heavily in debt for equipment and working capital. So they had to economize and did so by doing horrible jobs of high- grading. The lands still show the effect. They and the owners took unfair advantage of the state's Forest Practice Act, passed in 1945. Now some areas are a shambles, even unfit for grazing.
40
Fritz: As I said earlier, it was a mistake to throw the timbered parts of the public domain into the laps of the general public just by signing the two land laws I mentioned. The eventual owners, most of them, had to be able to buy solid blocks cheap and hold them until the market Justified another fully integrated lumbering op eration. Much of this land has been, held thirty to forty years to give the eventual sawmill another twenty years of life. The last acre of some of it wi I I not be reached until the year 1990 or 2000. All the while, it is being taxed but returns no dollars.
Maunder: This is one of those things where we can look back very easily with the advantage of hindsight and say that this was a bad law from a certain point of view. Of course, it wasn't as easy to see it in those days as it is now.
Fritz: There were people who saw it. Major Powell saw it. The lumber people saw it. Otherwise they would not have undertaken the re- assemblage of the fragments into large efficiently operable blocks.
Maunder: But that didn't come until considerably later than the I860's, am I not right?
Fritz: Major Powell was a contemporary of the early founders of the con servation movement that jelled in 1875 with the formation of the American Forestry Association. They were still for reconstituting solid large tracts in the I930's when land was cheap. Uncle Sam should have done better.
But such things move slowly — take, for example, the wasteful mix ture of public lands in the Oregon and California Railroad land grant areas. Here, 2,500,000 acres of Douglas fir, administered by the Bureau of Land Management of the Department of the Interior, intermingle with National Forests of the Department of Agriculture in a checkerboard pattern. Many people have recommended that trades be undertaken between the two bureaus, the state of Oregon and private owners to eliminate the checkerboarding. While in the Interior Department on a three-month writing assignment in 1938, I tried to stir up some active interest in the realignment of the lands for more economical administration and operation but got nowhere. Federal bureaus cherish their status quo.
In the New Hampshi re Forestry Department
Maunder: Suppose we go back again to your early days after leaving Yale. You had worked in New Hampshire for a while. What was your job?
Fritz: I was in New Hampshire on three jobs: the summer of 1913, two weeks at Christmas, 1913, and seven months after graduation in 1914.
The summer of 1913, with the help of two boys, I made a forest
41
Fritz:
survey of two properties, of about five hundred acres each. One was on Sunapee Lake and the other was on Thorndike Pond. They were small properties owned by wealthy people who had heard a lot about forestry and wanted to give It P. fling to see what was in it. I might say that an awful lot of people In those days heard about forestry and thought they'd look into It, but generally were dis appointed because it just didn't make sense when there wasn't a
market to buy cost money.
their forest product. Also, good forest practices
However, I still think that there are a lot of things that an owner could have done that wouldn't have cost him much but which would have left his land in a more viable condition after logging. You can see that a I I over the West where some good practices were followed merely by chance.
Maunder: Were you making up these management plans as a private consultant or as a member of the Forest Service?
Fritz: I was employed as an assistant in the Forestry Department of the state of New Hampshire. Edgar C. Hirst was the State Forester, a very fine man. It was a great pleasure to work for him. In fact, all the immediate bosses I had in state and government service in forestry were top men.
Maunder: Is this the same Edgar Hirst who is now a banker?
Fritz: President of the First National Bank of Concord, and still a fac tor in New Hampshire conservation, and particularly forestry. I think he's president this year of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
That was an interesting experience, that summer in New Hampshire. Here was I, a graduate student at the Yale Forestry School, sent out to make two management plans, and frankly, I was confused as to the application of the theory I had learned in the classroom. Perhaps too, I had some skepticism of its practicality. When I was a junior at Cornell in engineering, I could have gone out and done a more responsible job in sawmill ing. But I think that the lack of competency in forestry was largely due to the newness of the art, and perhaps it was still as new to the teachers. However, I think I learned a great deal on these jobs that was of inesti- mab le va I ue later.
Maunder: Forestry was just beginning to get its feet under it in this country and had nobody of real experience on which to draw.
Fritz: That's right. I don't lay it to the teachers. Perhaps being city bred made the forestry management phase a mystery. I still have the maps I made for those two plans and they look pretty much like Joseph's coat because of the many colors.
Maunder: Were your plans followed?
42
Fritz: On Thorndike Pond, when the word got around that there were so- called timber cruisers on this property, a wealthy man who owned property on the other side of the lake — a wealthy Boston I an who had a summer house there — thought, "That property is going to be logged off. I'd better buy it before it's logged to preserve my scenic view."
My report was instrumental in his buying the property in one block. The owner was a woman from New Jersey who inherited it and had no particular use for it as far as I could see. It was all volunteer growth, second growth pine and hardwoods.
My other area I think was cut somewhat according to my plan, but if I was correctly informed by the source, the owners were talked into cutting it more heavily than was recommended, probably talked into it by a logger. Too often a land owner thinks the logger knows more about values than the forester, and he falls for the logger's pitch. We've had a lot of that in California in the last fifteen or twenty years. When the owner discovers that he was over! nf I uenced by the logger, he gets pretty mad. Then he calls on foresters to help bail him out.
Maunder: After your summer's experience in New Hampshire, where did you go?
Fritz: I had to go back for my senior year at Yale. The senior year ended in June, 1914, but in March, the class went to Mississippi for three months of field work. I had no desire or intention of going back to New Haven to get my Master's diploma handed to me from the platform, so several of us took passage on a boat from New Orleans to New York, a five-day trip, and while we were at sea they were holding the commencement exercises in New Haven.
I had thought I might get a job with the U. S. Forest Service. I had my Forest Service examination behind me in which I didn't think I did too well. I had a good passing grade, and I should have done much better but, during the two seven-hour exam days, I had a very severe and painful attack of lumbago which made it impossible for me to move in the seat, not even to go out to the toi let.*
So one part of the examination (Forest Management) I never reached, but I got a passing grade; and I understand I would have been given an appointment but Congress was slow in passing the appropriation bill and I figured that any Congress that is so slow in passing an appropriation pay bill wouldn't have much interest in its employees, so I thought, "To hell with it," and took the first job that came my way and returned to New Hampshire.
*The lumbago is a souvenir of two weeks on the Yale Forest at Keene, New Hampshire, during the 1913 Christmas vacation, where I was employed with two classmates to cut gray birch to release the white pine seedlings it was choking. The souvenir is still with me.
43
Fritz: The State Forester of New Hampshire had asked me to come up there
to make a number of what he called "panoramic lookout maps" for use on lookout stations for aiding the lookout man in identifying the location of fires. The map was twenty-six inches in diameter; there was a three-inch wide ring on the outside and twenty inches inside the ring. To the twenty- Inch area was fastened a planometric map and in the three-inch annular area, I drew in the panorama, the en tire view from the lookout station.
It was done with a very clever special type of alidade. It was very crude. It started as a two-foot carpenter's folding rule at first, with the six-inch ends turned up with a piece of stiff paper on one end which could be moved up and down with the line of sight. It was developed by Professor F. B. Knapp, of the Eric Forest School at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and the New Hampshire State Forester took it up. A man by the name of Falconer, who was then employed by the State Forester, made a better instrument of brass, and I used the one he developed. Before I quit I had a still better one developed. I changed the rack and pinion to a screw thread to give it a finer adjustment.*
I made fifteen of those maps, from Pawtackaway Mountain in southern New Hampshire all the way up to Deer Mountain in northernmost New Hampshire, including several mountains in the White Mountain area. I had to climb so many mountains — not only the lookout mountains but other mountains to get the terrain — that it never occurred to me that it would be of any interest to climb Mount Washington. I saw this fine mountain from all sides and I didn't see anything could be gained by getting on top of it.
That was an interesting experience too. It taught me an awful lot about at least one state and one state's forest fire organization and the growing pains of state forestry. This is a good time to give Ed Hirst credit for being one of the top men among state for esters of his day. He was a good organizer; he was a fine man to work with and for, and he gave his assistants a lot of authority, a lot of responsibility and a lot of time to do a good job. New Hampshire, I think, was the first to use a circular lookout map board.
Maunder: You hear a great deal about the contributions which the U. S. For est Service made, especially in such areas as the fighting of for est fires in the early days. What about the state forestry agencies? Were they also in the front rank of this movement?
*The New Hampshire circular fire locating map and the alidade are described in the Timberman, 1915 (Portland, Oregon). Also in the Sib ley Journal of Engineering of December, 1917, and The Geographical Re v i ew 6 : 6 : 50 1 -503 . The lead paragraph of the Timberman artlc'le was prepared by the Forest Service District Office, and Fritz ' by-line was replaced with the District Forester's name to make it an "offi cial" contribution.
Fritz:
44
I think they were about on a par. Of course, the Forest Service wasn't set up until 1905 while some states were in the fire pro tection business before the federal government. The state of Cali fornia, for example, set up a Board of Forestry way back in the
Most of the need
It didn't days amounted the effort was directed to the public to
I880's and fire protection was one of its objectives, amount to much, but no fire protection effort in those to a great dea I . educate it as to
for protection.
Maunder: But did they pioneer the field?
Fritz: Both state and federal foresters did. They cooperate now more than ever. New York and Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire and California I would say led the parade. I was quite surprised to learn when I came to California that California was so early in setting up a Board of Forestry.
The U.S.F.S. was set up in 1905. In 1910, it had the great 2,000,000-acre fire in the Inland Empire. This fire I think came at a good time. It brought more attention by Congress and more money. Looking back, all fire protection efforts seem pitifully feeble. But improvements came rapidly. Not only was it necessary to learn how to fight fires, study causes and invent equipment, but the biggest obstacle was public apathy — really worse than that be cause many locals believed fires a good thing! From these small beginnings, we now have forest fire organization and equipment similar to a military campaign.
Maunder: Do you recall anything more about your experience in New Hampshire that would be of value in regard to the history of fire fighting or any other aspect of forestry?
Fritz: Well, it was cut and try. We tried this and tried that. It was felt that when you have a fire, in order to put it out, you can't go to the city fire department and get a hook and ladder truck or a steamer to go out there and put it out. It had to be fought by hand, and that called for hand tools: shovel, mattock, pick, and so on, and a little later, hand pumps for spraying water on little f i res.
The State Forester in New Hampshire had one of his men design a tool box in which he would keep fire fighting tools, and these boxes of tools were distributed here and there in critical areas. I recall one day one of the men — I think it was Falconer — set up the box outside the State House and brought along all the tools to see how they would fit in the box. Being interested in photography at the time, I asked him to arrange all the tools in such a way that the box would show open and the tools would be displayed to show what goes in. I took the photograph which the State Forester later used in his annual report, one of the first photographs taken of a box of fire fighting tools.
45
Fritz: Fire fighting was hard work, of course, especially with hand tools, and more often than not the fire got the upper hand, that is, dur ing periods of real fire weather.
Well, the experiences In New Hampshire were especially valuable, I think, in teaching me a little more of woodsmanship. I was alone most of the time on the mapping Job. I didn't know the country although the maps were easy to follow.
Maunder: What was your base of operations?
Fritz: Concord was the headquarters, but I was there very little until the winter.
Maunder: You were in the field most of the time?
Fritz: Yes. I would come in to Concord once in a while to make a fresh
start. Travel was by railroad, horse and wagon, and afoot. I would go by railroad to the nearest station to my next mapping mountain, and would then get the local fire warden, who was a part-time man, to drive me to the foot of the trail, or I would hire a horse and buggy and have somebody drive me over. Once in a while there was an automobile available.
•I recall one time I was in a stagecoach, one of the last of the old Concord coaches left. It was a coach that oscillated back and forth between the railroad station and the famous Agasslz House at Bethlehem, New Hampshire, the only stagecoach of that type I ever rode in.
The job gave me a pretty good idea of mountain forms and of forests, and being alone, I had a lot of opportunity to size things up. i think that was the best education in forestry so soon after leav ing school. Being out in the woods on my own made it possible to really see what has happened after logging and try to figure out why.
Of course, there was still some virgin timber in some areas in New Hampshire — in the neighborhood of Waterville, for example, and In Coos County, the northernmost county in New Hampshire, and on McGalloway Mountain — that was all virgin — and on some of the others. And the lookout men told me a great deal. They were mostly woods men, trappers and hunters and so on. They were a great source of woods lore and woods knowledge, which has been very valuable.
It's regrettable that we can't have in our forestry profession today men of that type. They were really good. They knew the woods and how to get around. They didn't bitch about the weather and worked long hours. They enjoyed every minute of it. They knew how to swing an axe; they knew how to find a corner; they knew how to follow through the woods on a straight line; and they were men to watch because you could learn from them. Sometimes
Fritz:
46
they played some pretty mean tricks on city boys like myself but we had to take them in good humor. It was all part of the training,
Maunder: Do you recall any of those trices?
Fritz: I remember one old ranger — that was in the Forest Service after I came West. He made me believe he had no more saddles. Of course, he's going to have a saddle for himself, and the supervisor must have a saddle, and the timber salesman must have a saddle, but this new guy over here, Fritz, he's going to have to ride this old flea-bitten mare bareback. Well, I'd never ridden a horse before but this horse had such a broad back that I couldn't fall off of it, so I made it all right.
They also played tricks on one another. They were a good lot and I enjoyed those fellows. They even played tricks on the supervi sors. The supervisors, as woodsmen, were as green as some of the assistants.
Maunder:
Fritz:
They used the experiment of the observation tower for the first time in New Hampshire, didn't they?
I don't know where the forest fire lookout stations started. At first, there were no towers. Observation was from a cleared moun tain top. New Hampshire had plenty of mountain tops; it also had some crude towers. Some of the towers were merely poles set up like a frustum of a pyramid with a platform on top. I have an article, "Recollections of Forest Fire Detection of Fifty Years Ago," that appeared in Volume 22 (1962) of the Log ge rs ' Ha nd boo k .
I had some interesting experiences on those towers; some were not safe to climb. I recall the one on Deer Mountain in New Hampshire. That was only a platform of peeled poles slung between the tops of two spruce trees, right on top of the mountain. When the wind blew, those trees swayed and the platform, of course, aggravated the swing. When I arrived on that mountain to make my panoramic map, I was told that there was my tower, and that if I had to make a map from it, I'd better get up there and start before the wind blows.
I couldn't work except in the early and late hours of daylight, when the sun was coming up and going down and would silhouette the ridges. I couldn't do very much at midday. I guess I was about a week making that map. Generally, it took anywhere from five days to two weeks. I lost a lot of time on account of fog and clouds.
When I got to the end of my panorama mapping, I yelled down to the about half an hour, I'll be finished drawing, and come up and give me the names of some of these valleys
lookout man, "In
I want you to
and ridges." And his answer was, "Young feller,
that platform, either alone or with you up there with me
I'm not
never been safe."
going up
I've up there and I'm never going to go up there. It isn't
on
47
In Montana and Idaho With the U. S. Forest Service
Maunder:
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
Emanuel, you told us about your first experience as a practicing forester up In New Hampshire. You went on from that point to what other work?
The New Hampshire job was a temporary one. It involved the prepa ration of about fifteen of these panoramic maps, and after I had completed the office work during the winter in Concord, I was through. About a month prior to that I was offered a position in the U. S. Forest Service by David T. Mason. I had already turned down two offers from the U.S.F.S., and the third was to be the last; and since my New Hampshire job was to come to an end, I took the Forest Service job which would assign me to Missoula, Montana, under D. T. Mason. I had met Mason a few months earlier when he lectured at the Yale Forest School.
Incidentally, I had never had any expectation of moving west be cause New Hampshire looked good to me, and even though the job in the state Forest Service was not permanent, I thought New Hampshire would offer an excellent opportunity to invest savings in abandoned farms and bring them back into timber production. Land was cheap. One could buy an abandoned farm for two or three dollars an acre, which would be a good investment for tree planting.
The job in the west turned out to be part of a study of the lumber
industry. It was to be nation-wide, and, as I recall it, William
B. Greeley was to head it in Washington, and Mason had charge of
the Inland Empire division, and I was merely an assistant to ob tain data in the field.
What was the year that you moved to Montana?
That was January, 1915. My work on that project was to visit lum ber company offices in northern Idaho, and also in eastern Oregon and Washington, to obtain data on price fluctuations, production, shipments, and so on. I was in the offices of the Humbird Lumber Company, the Pot latch Lumber Company, the Palmer Lumber Company in eastern Washington, the Spirit Lake Lumber Company, and several others, taking data from their old invoices. The lumber industry received the field men very cordially and was very friendly.
Apparently, the study was undertaken by the Forest Service because it wanted to ease off some of the criticism the Bureau of Corpora tions had provoked by its very unfriendly report of several years earlier. It seems that the Bureau of Corporations, without any understanding of the lumber industry's situation, made some state ments which the industry resented and which the Forest Service men felt were not justified or correct.
The new study was undertaken to get facts from the standpoint of
48
Fritz: men who knew something about the Industry. It was a very pleasant assignment. The treatment I received In the lumber company offices was, as I said, friendly, and I met many new people and found out what the lumber industry is in various parts of the west and had an opportunity to visit some forests and some forestry offices, all of which added up to some additional experience.
Maunder: Specifically what data were you collecting?
Fritz: Data on prices, shipments, production ....
Maunder: Over a period of years starting with the origin of the company?
Fritz: As far back as the records would permit.
Maunder: What did you encounter in the way of record resources?
Fritz: Some companies had preserved their records very carefully in
specially made boxes for their storage. Apparently after storage, they were not again touched because I noticed the dust on the tops was undisturbed.
Maunder: Which of the companies that you visited had the most complete records?
Fritz: Potlatch at Potlatch, Idaho. They had perfect records. The man ager at Potlatch was A. W. Laird. Mr. Laird was a wonderful type of man, a real gentleman, and apparently a good manager. He was very friendly. One day he passed my desk, and he put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Young man, how are you getting along?"
I said, "Very well, sir, and I want to thank you for the courtesies shown me and the cooperation of your staff," which got him to con versing, and he said, "We like you men from the regional forestry offices but we are never sure what will happen to the data when
it reaches Washington where it might be twisted around to serve somebody's own purpose." That comment has never escaped me and many things that have happened since have convinced me that Mr. Laird was correct in his suspicions.
Maunder: Can you point out any Instances in which data that you collected and which subsequently was forwarded to Washington was treated in that way?
Fritz: Not in the lumber industry study. I think that was a very honest job, possibly because Greeley was a man of a very high standard of professional ethics. But in the 1930's, I think, a report was pre pared in Washington, a rather extensive one, known as the Cope I and Report. Some of the chapters were signed by members of the Forest Service, but several told me that their statements were revised in such a way as to slant them in favor of the Forest Service's con tention that the lumber industry must be controlled.
49
Maunder: And was this a violation of the original report that they had
written, a violation of the spirit and the facts of what thoy had orlql nal ly c>1;ilod?
Fritz: The spirit was completely different In the Thirties than what it
was before World War I, the short time I was in the Forest Service,
Maunder: No. I mean these field reports were twisted, you say, in the I930's in Washington so that they said something different than what the field man had intended them to say. Is that your interpretation of this?
Fritz: No, these were not field men; they were office men. One in particu lar was on the Washington staff. Most of that report was prepared right in Washington — at least, assembled — and one of the authors was very unhappy over the fact that what he wrote was changed con- si derab ly .
Maunder: Do you remember the name of that author, the man who was unhappy about the change?
Fritz: I don't want to mention his name right now. He's no longer in the Forest Service and he's still living. I don't want to involve him.
Maunder: Well, you went from Montana to Idaho and Arizona. Can you tell us something about that experience?
Fritz: The field work on this lumber industry study was completed in a
few months and then I was transferred to the Coeur d'Alene National Forest at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The supervisor of that forest was Meyer H. Wolff, a Yale forestry graduate, 1909, and a native of Russia, but educated in New York City and Connecticut. In the office also was R. C. Eggelston, a Yale 1910 forestry graduate. Later on there arrived Charles K. McHarg, also a Yale forester, 1913, and since I was 1914, we had a nice age distribution and four Yale men on the same forest. This didn't sit very well with some of the young foresters from other schools, but I don't think there was any real resentment. We got along very well.
The supervisor, M. H. Wolff, was Jewish, and some men didn't take very kindly to him, especially some of the rangers, but he and I got along famously. When I was transferred a year later from his forest to Arizona, we parted as very good friends and kept up a correspondence for all the years until his death. He was typical of the early foresters. He was very zealous; he saw to it that the Forest Service got all the breaks in his dealings with others; and he was very close in spending money on the ranger districts but he gave all of us considerable leeway to carry on our work without I nterruption.
Some men were constantly at loggerheads with him, but I never had any difficulty with him. In fact, I enjoyed working with him. For
50
Fritz: example, it was the first year that the Forest Service was to have a man on each forest detailed to specialize in fire protection, so I was to be the fire chief of the forest, in effect. I was hope lessly incompetent for that job. coming from the East as a city boy and only recently graduated in forestry, whereas the local rangers, all of them old-timer woodsmen, very competent and very experienced, knew more about fire fighting and fire protection than I would learn in ten years. They knew how to get around, they knew the timber, and they were very clever in their personal relations.
Maunder: These were all men recruited right from the neighborhood?
Fritz: That's right, yes. Most of them started in the Lake States pine
forests. The Inland Empire, being a pine region, attracted a large number of loggers and lumber people and others, woodsmen, from the Lake States. Incidentally, when it was said that the pine forests of the Lake States would soon give out, some people moved to Idaho to take up a forest "homestead."
Maunder: What would you have to say about the early efforts to fight and con trol fire in the Idaho area, the Inland Empire ?
Fritz: It was a tough job, and even though the rangers knew their way
around, they were not able to cope with some of the fires because the only equipment we had were hand tools — shovels, mattocks and rakes. Trailing a fire was all hand work and we never had enough manpower. So even though the rangers were good woodsmen, they didn't find fire fighting in that forest type too easy.
But fortunately for me as a newcomer, the year 1915 was a very easy fire year. We had just one fire of any consequence and that was on Big Creek. It was rather important because Big Creek con tained some green white pine timber of considerable value. Most of the Coeur d'Alene Forest was burned over in the great 1910 fires. You know as much about the 1910 fires as I do. They have been written up a number of times. The Coeur d'Alene Forest took an awful beating.
Maunder: Well, what about this fire you dealt with in 1915? What was the extent of the fire and what was your role in the fighting of it?
Fritz: What do you want — a sort of blow-by-blow account? Maunder: That's right.
Fritz: Well, it happens that I was on Downey Peak lookout station, on a lookout inspection trip to see how the lookout was operating and what his equipment was like, what was needed, and so on. While on that mountain, I saw a thunder storm come up, what we called a dry storm. We could see it coming; those storms always carried con siderable lightning. The lookout tower was a wooden structure only about fifteen feet high, and I thought that here was a good oppor tunity to see how the lookout man works when there was a lightning
51
Fritz: storm brewing. I saw plenty! As soon as the storm approached
the lookout point and lightning began to strike close by, he lit out for his cabin down near a spring on the slope of the mountain. Knowing altogether too little about the playfulness of lightning, I stayed on the tower and recorded iwenty-two or twenty-three strikes, several of which smoked up but then died down. One, how ever, remained large and was actually growing.
While each one was reported, no one could do anything about them because there wasn't enough manpower. The ranger would merely say, "Well, keep your eye on it," which I did. But the one fire at the head of Big Creek was booming up, and I called Meyer Wolff, the supervisor, on the field telephone. He was elsewhere in the woods, and I told him that the fire seemed to be mostly outside of our forest but on the Cabinet National Forest side, which was the Montana side.
He instructed me to go to the fire myself and represent the Coeur d'Alene Forest interests. This was the next morning, and I started off about five o'clock in the morning. I couldn't walk in a straight line to the fire because of the terrain, and I figured I could make better time by staying on the trails, which meant going back down off Downey Peak in the opposite direction to the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River and then down to the mouth of Big Creek and then up Big Creek. It was about ten o'clock or later that night that I arrived at the fire.
Maunder: How many miles had you walked?
Fritz: Oh, possibly twenty. There was a trail but not too good. When I ar rived at the fire, which was near the top of the divide, I found a Montana ranger in charge doing a good job and I felt that things were going all right. When I had a chance, I made whatever report could be made over the temporary telephone system we established with wires stretched out over the brush.
That same evening the ranger asked if I would go down to Big Creek and head off and direct a pack train which was expected to come in from the Coeur d'Alene side and give it directions. When I left, some of the men who had been on day duty for a number of hours were ordered to sleep, and as they always did and still do, they pitched their beds right on the ground.
I trailed off the mountain in the dark down to the creek and awaited the arrival of the pack train. I waited a long time and I was very tired from the long hike, so I decided to lie down and rest and I fell asleep. Very soon the pounding of the hoofs of many horses woke me up and a fire guard came in with his pack train — the one I'd been waiting for. I had a warming fire going so he was attracted by it.
He was pretty angry. He had had bad luck on the trai I. One of his
52
Fritz: animals stepped off the trail and rolled off the slope into the creek and broke a leg and he had to shoot it. He also fired his pistol for help (we had pistol shot signals) but I didn't hear them — the creek was making too much noise. The animal that went off the trail, incidentally, was loaded with prunes and beans, so some men probably were happy over that, and others probably would have preferred to have the beans to what they actually got.
I prepared something hot for the packer, and while he was eating, there was a commotion in the woods and flickering lights, very small lights, so I rushed out into the woods and followed the trail for some distance when I met a number of fire fighters coming out of the woods with matches and candles and with quite a scare on their faces. They yelled out, "Run for your life, young fellow. The fire's following us."
I couldn't see how that could be possible so I found a tree with some low branches and climbed up as high as I could to get a better view of the slope. It was all black as night, so I decided that they were panicked by some very local disturbance, which proved to be the case, as I found out when I went to the top of the mountain with the packer a few minutes later. The fire apparently crept along on the ground and set fire to some low-hanging branches of a spruce tree. The spruce flamed up very quickly and as quickly went out. But the sleeping fire fighters were awakened, and when the sky was lighted up by several of these torches, they didn't stop to make any inquiries. Some ran down off the Montana slope, and some came down on the Idaho side.
One of them later sued, or threatened to sue, the Forest Service for a rupture which he claimed to have obtained on the fire. I remember the man real well. He was a first-class loafer and was one of the men we picked up along the railroad to fight fires. While he was found to have a rupture, it was an old one which he just figured he could use to get some money from the government.
After the fire a day or so later, when I went back to the railroad near Wallace, I met dear old ranger Ed Pulaski. He had come up on a speeder, or "hand car." By that time, some of the men were about to hold me up because I refused to pay them for the time they were asleep. Ranger Pulaski was an old-timer, a man who knew the char acteristics of local people and loggers and drifters, and he sug gested I add a few hours to the hours of actual work to give them some compensation for going and coming, but I still declined to pay them for the time they had been in bed. Anyway, Pulaski in his quiet knowledgeable way probably prevented me from taking quite a beating from these ex-fire fighters. Pulaski really deserves some comment at this point.
Maunder: He was a hero of the 1910 fires?
Fritz: Yes, he was a real hero of the 1910 fires and a modest man. He is
53
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
credited with having saved the lives of a fighters who, when they were overtaken by ordered into a prospect tunnel — mine tunnel — with guard at the entrance.
dozen or more fire
a rush of flames, were
Pulaski standing
That's all very well documented.
There's no told him I
Yes, that's all well documented.
I asked Pulaski about it once and
to know some of the story, and he says, "Well
many times, every time I hear it,
I'd better let you pick it up
use going into that, was new and would like it's been told so
it has gotten bigger, so maybe from somewhere else."
I learned a great deal from Ed Pulaski. He was said to have been a descendant of the famous Revolutionary War Pulaski. I had a num ber of experiences with Ed Pulaski which added to my respect for these old-timers who spent so much of their lives in the woods and knew more about the woods and the behavior of forest growth than we young fellows fresh from school. Although they perhaps didn't know some of the basic principles, they did know some of the more Important things when it came to managing a forest. These old-timers were a very honest, hard-working lot.
Among these old-timers were fellows like Gus Yager, and then there was Jack Winnington. He was more of a miner than a woodsman, how ever. And Phil Neff. They were very interesting men. They were very clever in handling the young technical personnel from the eastern forestry schools.
Maunder: Are these stories part of the written literature?
Fritz: Some. Here's one, for example. Ranger Neff was in charge of the Nelson Ranger Station. It was the finest house in the forest, a two-or three-story building, and when I arrived there, I inquired how come he has such a fine home when the other rangers do not. Then I found out that he had been a contractor and builder, and being a type of woodsman who knew how to "work the angles," and knowing that he was allowed only $650 for putting up the ranger station, he found ways to cut corners or to juggle labor so that he was able to build himself a very fine home. It was a home which this year would cost him $20,000 to build. At that time possibly $3,500 could have built it, but on the books it was only $650. He did it by taking some of the fire guards when they were not needed on fire fighting, and he would go out and collect stones or saw lumber and fit it and erect it and so on.
Another time was my first trip to Nelson Ranger Station with a party which included Supervisor Wolff, the timber sale man, Calvin A. Dahlgren, an entomologist, Jim Evenden, Gus Yager and several others. We all rode out on a gas speeder from the end of the main line of the railroad, and apparently without too much warning to Phil Neff's wife for lunch. Of course, we couldn't carry lunches
54
Fritz: and there were no lunch rooms. It was the custom In those days to
have the ranger or his wife prepare the meals and bed us down. Neff had four or five children, and his wife was a very courageous and competent woman. She had very 'Ittle time to prepare lunch and other meals for this big party. She had expected a smaller group. Fortunately, one of the station men shot a good brace of grouse the day before. It was my first taste of the deliciously meaty blue grouse.
We were allowed to pay fifty cents, or was it thirty-five, per meal to a ranger's wife when she prepared our meals. It was precious little for the hard work, and I developed a wholesome respect for the wife of the ranger because of the work they were expected to do to help out their husbands without any additional compensation ex cept for meals. They would have to handle the telephone calls while the ranger was away and even rustle labor and get equipment ready to ship out to them by pack train in emergencies. For none of this did they receive any compensation at that time. I mention this because 1 want to record the sizable contribution of ranger wives.
Another incident at the same ranger station: On one visit there was some delay in getting me off by horse to the top of Grizzly Peak from which I was to make a panoramic map, the first one to have been made in the West. To use the time, I took pictures of trees and of the ranger station in general. In the background of one picture was a partially completed structure which was part of the general scene.
Some weeks later when I returned to Coeur d'Alene and the supervisor, knowing I had photographs, asked to see them, he came rushing to my desk and said, "What's this building in the background in this pic ture of the Nelson Ranger Station?" I answered that I was told that it was to be a new barn. The new barn had been completed only up as far as the eaves, so Wolff, the supervisor, called in Gus Yager, another ranger who was headquartered in Coeur d'Alene but who had been helping Neff in building some of the structures.
Wolff asked Yager, "What is this building in the background?" Yager, straight-faced, told him that was the new barn. Wolff said, "Well, I thought I allowed only enough money to put up the foundation." Yager said, "That's right. All we've got there is the foundation."
Wolff caught on right away and saw that the rangers had stretched it a point, so he asked Yager, "How high is the foundation of a barn?" And Yager said, "Well, sometimes a foundation goes up to the eaves, just enough to hold up the roof." So Neff and Yager, by finagling equipment and labor and time and putting in unquestionably a lot of overtime, were able to put up the sldewalls on top of the completed foundation and got by by calling it the "foundation." The next year they were to get a little more money to put on the roof.
I mention that incident because it shows how difficult it was to get quarters and money for buildings and how little the rangers had
55
Fritz: to work on. From my own observation, the rangers got the small
end of the stick when It came to providing the means for carrying on their work. Yet they were the ones who did the field work.
Fry: The U.S.F.S. had much trouble with fraudulent homesteading on the Coeur d'Alene. Did you see any of this?
Fritz: Yes, just one really small thing, but to me it was very big at the moment: to face a gun is not a pleasant experience. I met a man on horseback armed with a shotgun. I was afoot and had just exited from a side trail when he sighted me. It suddenly dawned on me that he was one of the last homesteaders to defy the government and he threatened to shoot any trespasser. It ties in with the application of the Homestead Act to lands that are not truly of agricultural character and should have been kept In a timber classification.
The northern Idaho country was well covered with valuable western white pines. A number of people moved out from the white pine region of the Lake States to the West to take up some of this land. A man might take up 160 acres and his girl friend would pick up another 160 acres. They would get married and have 320. The cost was small — $2.50 an acre— which would make 320 acres of prime tim ber land cost only $800. Most of the land was mountainous and not suited for farming. Lumber companies were willing to pay anywhere from ten to twenty thousand dollars for It, so If one could get patent he would sell Immediately to a lumber operator.
When the Forest Service was organized, it examined a lot of these claims which were still in the hands of the settlers. For itself, it claimed that they were fraudulent, that the land was impossible to farm. It was fraudulent in the sense that it could not be farmed, but it was quite legal for homesteaders to take it up.
Some of the farmers fought it. To use the term, they were embattled farmers. They were never organized, though. They gave the Forest Service and all the men in it a bad time. I did not think It was quite fair to these farmers. They were practically invited out there to take up the 160-acre claim, and then they were kicked off.
Well, I was walking along a trail with my little pack and I saw a smaller trail turn off to the right. It was away from the Coeur d'Alene River. I just wondered where the trail went because I was trying to get thoroughly acquainted with the forest. I had every map imaginable and available with me. 1 was making notes on these maps to bring them up to date. I was adding trails that were not marked on the map because I was being trained to be a fire chief of that forest some day.
I got to the end of this trail, which went only about 150 feet. It
stopped at a spring and there was food in the spring to keep It cool.
I did not touch anything. I came right out again. I knew that there was a homestead close by, and I thought, "Well, this settler is
56
Fritz: taking advantage of the spring," which was very much his right and the smart thing to do.
When 1 came out to the main trpil, here was a man on horseback with his gun across his lap pointed right at me. With very few words he asked me, "What are you doing in there?" I told him that I was wondering where this trail was headed and that I dis covered the end at the spring, so I came out again.
Then he told me in no uncertain terms, "I don't want any Forest Service men on my land." I had a badge, of course, so I was easily identified. That badge could get you into a lot of trouble. It carries a lot of authority with It, but ....
Fry: But at that point your authority was pretty far away.
Fritz: Yes. I had no gun, probably would not have used it if I did have one. He told me that he did not want any Forest Service men on his land, and he said, "This is my land!" Actually, the Forest Service claimed it. I told him that I was on my way to some ranger station, went on my way, and that was all there was to it. It was a personal experience In how the thing worked. Every forester in those days had something like that and some had much worse experi ences.
Actually, it was not wholly fair. The Homestead Law practically invited f raudulent ^"settl i ng." This law was not adapted to the western mountain country because of its failure to regard terrain and other factors. The man I met on the trail claimed his right under the Homestead Law before the so-called "June llth" forest homestead law was passed.
This little experience reminded me of my student days when I was in a camp in Mississippi, where some of the backwoods farmers were very suspicious of strangers. Shortly before we set up our camp, a far mer shot and killed an agricultural agent who was dipping the scrawny cattle to rid the animals of ticks. The farmers feared dipping would "hex" the cattle. So they were not going to have their cattle hexed, ticks or no ticks.
Maunder: Were you becoming disillusioned in forestry about this time?
Fritz: No, not on the Coeur d'Alene. On the Coeur d'Alene I enjoyed
every minute. Wolff was so friendly, and I got along so well with the other men that I was very enthusiastic about the whole setup. And of course, Coeur d'Alene was a beautiful place for living. I thought it would make an excellent university town, and later on when I saw the University of Idaho at Moscow, I felt it was regret table that the University was not built at Coeur d'Alene.
There was a big lake and beautiful scenery. There was also a boat club equipped with two four-oar shells, two pairs and two singles, and having rowed at Cornell, I joined the boat club and was soon
57
Fritz: rowing in the fours and the pairs. But I never happened to be in a boat for the two seasons I rowed that won anything but a heat, but it was a lot of fun.
I also met my future wife there.
owned a canoe, and after
practice rowing in the morning before breakfast, and practice row-
ing between five o'clock and dinner, I would would go canoeing for the rest of the night. a youngster.
call on her and we Quite a workout for
Maunder: Were you married there?
Fritz: No. I had no intention of getting married, but you never can tell what an infatuation develops into. That came later.
The work on the Coeur d'Alene was extremely interesting. At first I was quite disappointed at having been transferred or assigned to fire work. Several times I thought about having spent two years at Yale to become a forester, with silviculture as my main interest at the time, and then to be made into a fire fighter on a national forest. It didn't look good. But I soon learned that the protec tion branch of the Forest Service was the only real job that the Forest Service had. The rest of it was pretty much going around in circles and marking time. There was some timber sale work, of course, but not very much.
While I was on the Coeur d'Alene — I think it was in the fall of the year — a request came in from the Regional Office to make the annual report on some plantations that were set out on the land burned in the 1910 fires. Wolff said, "This is your job. As soon as you can get out there, you go out and make an examination and make the report. I don't think it amounts to a great deal because in the past the plantations couldn't be found, and I believe that most of them are dead."
So I looked up the old reports, and sure enough, I found that my predecessors had not found some of the plantations and reported them as lost. But I had to go out anyway to go through the motions of preparing the report. Reports, of course, are very important in any government office.
But I was not prepared for what I found. I actually located the ex perimental plantations of various hardwoods — hickory, oak, walnut, basswood and others. The seedlings were only a foot high or slightly more, and although they had no leaves on them, I readily identified them; and when I looked up the old reports again, I noticed that all of my predecessors had been trained in western forestry schools where they didn't have an opportunity to become acquainted with the bud characteristics or winter characteristics in general of the eastern hardwoods, which were planted experimentally on the Coeur d'Alene burns. So it was no particular credit to me, but with the training I had acquired at Yale from Jim Tourney and Sam
58
Fritz: Record on tree identification in the winter condition, I should
not have missed them anyway. But there were some conifer planta tions that were still intact, especially Englemann spruce. They were doing pretty well. But In general the plantations weren't doing too well. Here and there there were some natural seedlings coming up, and they seemed to thrive somewhat better, which gave me my first experience in plantations from nursery-grown plants as against naturally seeded.
Well, an interesting thing happened as a result of that report. I had a lot of fun writing it and brought in a lot of details that I had noticed and observed and felt they were important for someone else who might follow me. But somebody in the Washington Office apparently thought that here was a si I viculturist that was being wasted on fire, so I was properly approached later the following spring about a transfer to a forest experiment station in Arizona.
I thought it was a good opportunity to get into si I vicultural work and also to see the forests in an entirely new Region, and so I talked it over with Wolff. He kidded me quite a bit for being asked to go to desert country, which I thought the country was my self. Although I had studied something about the pine forests it didn't make much Impression. But anyway he agreed to the transfer and wished me we I I .
Before I left the Coeur d'Alene, I prepared a number of memoranda, each one on a different item of forest protection. For example, one was on lookouts and the design of lookouts and the necessity for the type of glass to be used, the obstructions from corners and how they could be avoided, and water development, the height of the towers to get over the trees, and also the numbering of mile posts along trails and numbering these mile posts also on the maps so that a lookout man could report a fire apparently on so-and-so canyon along so-and-so trail near so-and-so mile post. I don't know if this was ever effective on the Coeur d'Alene Forest but I learned later it was adopted on the Nezperce.
Maunder: Was this an innovation in the Forest Service at the time?
Fritz: It was new, at least to me. Whether anybody else had thought of it and was responsible for its being adopted on one of the map systems, I don't know.
Maunder: You've never seen it written up anywhere?
Fritz: Only in my own memorandum. I also left, I think, a twenty-page or more memorandum on the preparation of panoramic lookout maps. A copy of that was sent to Bush Osborne, who apparently got the fire- finder map idea from the New Hampshire people, and as a result of my own memorandum he tried to work a panorama on his own fire-find ing map, which was about the same diameter as mine.
These panoramic maps apparently didn't work out too well. Later
59
Fritz: on they used cameras for the same thing, but it developed that the lookout men were so experienced in the terrain that they didn't use the panorama anyway. By developing a system of trlangu I atlon and better pinpointing of lookout rtatlons, the panorama wasn't actually necessary.
That panoramic map method was written up in the TJmberman, and also in the American Geographic Magazine, of which IsaVah Bowman was the director. Bowman had given a course to the Yale Forestry students. (He later became president of Johns Hopkins University. A very fine man, very able man.)
Fort Val ley Experiment Station, Arizona
Maunder: When did you go to Arizona?
Fritz: I arrived in Arizona in August, 1916.
Maunder: What was your new assignment?
Fritz: My new assignment was as assistant In the experiment station. The director was Gus Pearson, G. A. Pearson. I learned to love the old fellow. In fact, he wasn't much older than I was. He was of the class of 1907 or '08 of Nebraska, when Nebraska had a forestry school. Incidentally, Pearson was left at that one station until his retirement, and as far as I know, his is the only case where a researcher was left at one place long enough to really learn the local situation, and Pearson became an authority on ponderosa pine. He and I became very good friends and we kept in touch with one another until his retirement, and in fact, until his death. If his widow is still living, I expect to visit her this coming Feb ruary in Tucson.
The Fort Valley Experiment Station was about nine miles north of Flagstaff at an elevation of about 7,250 feet, and Flagstaff I be lieve was about 6,900. Above us loomed the San Francisco peaks, one peak of which was 12,611 feet. It was really a beautiful coun try and I loved it at once. It was like being stationed in a huge park, but the fact that it looked like a park made it appear to me that it was no place for forestry.
However, I had to change my mind on that because it was a very good place to learn silviculture, primarily because the site fac tors were not too good. The only good feature was that they had some rains in the summertime, a total of about twenty-two or twenty- three inches of precipitation for the entire year. But It was more of a park-like stand of ponderosa pine up to about 7,500 or 8,000 feet. There the type changed to Douglas fir mixture, and then higher up to spruce and white fir. The spruce forest was a very dense dark one and I always enjoyed going up to it. We found that
60
Fritz: at about ten thousand feet. The timber line was about eleven thousand feet.
It was a very interesting place for one to be stationed, especially one who, like myself, wanted to eke out some more training or know ledge of how vegetation develops. I recall going into the botany of the region and there was one little plant known by the generic name of Th I asp i a. The specific name was taken from the name of a botanist and begins with "f." I can't think of it at the moment. It sounds like "ferend." Anyway, I observed the plant at the sta tion, and then decided that as long as I had to climb the mountain once a week anyway, I would keep a record of the blooming of this plant at different elevations over this altitudinal range. But that was the following spring, so I 'm a little ahead of my story.
When I arrived in Flagstaff, I found Pearson very happy to have some help. Apparently my predecessor had been away several months before I was assigned. My predecessor was Clarence Korstian who later became a research station director himself, and still later, Dean of Forestry at Duke University.
The work at the station was largely working up data for the few years past of measurements of sample plots. Of course, we had a few sample plots to measure ourselves, but they were behind in working up the data, solely because of inadequate help, and ! could see that my entire winter would be spent in the office working up this data.
Pearson was a very helpful man; he recognized the fact that his assistants were dropping into something brand new and needed help. Whenever we were out on trips by auto or afoot or on horseback, he never missed a chance to point out something which had some sig nificance in learning the silviculture or the si Ivies or the botany of the region.
We lived in very nice little cottages. They were pretty thin-walled and not too windtlght but they were heated by hot water from the greenhouse. Having had some experience in pipe-fitting, I was able to change the piping in my own house so that the radiators were in better corners for heat distribution. I also had a chance to do some pipe-fitting for water lines and insulation and electric light systems and so on, and was very happy to be able to put into use some of my early training in engineering.
I had to share the cottage with another assistant, Lenthall Wyman, who later became a professor of forestry at North Carolina State University. We were together most of the winter. Unfortunately, in about February or March, he was transferred and thereafter, I had to make the field trips alone, although we were ordered never to go out alone on the snow.
Incidentally — I'm a little ahead there — when the winter approached,
61
Fritz: Pearson had received authority to make a study of climatic condi tions at various elevations. We started at an elevation of about five thousand feet, somewhere on the desert or in the area of juni per and pinion pine, and gradually worked up to about 10,500 feet. I had to build the stations at 8,500 and 10,500. The others had already been built. And it was my job then for the time during the winter and my entire stay at the station to visit these weather stations once every week to change the sheets on the recording machines, to take note of the maximum temperatures and so on, to refill the evaporation pans and whatnot.
It was a very interesting assignment and very illuminating. When Pearson wrote his final report on that study, I felt quite happy over the fact that he mentioned me as well as the other assistants for the help we gave him. It was a pretty good demonstration of personnel management: Pearson gave everybody credit whenever he received help, no matter how slight it was. It was quite in con trast to an article I had written for the Timberman magazine on the round panoramic lookout map idea which I brought to Idaho from New Hampshire. When the article actually appeared in the Timberman magazine — being a good soldier, I submitted it through the Regional Office — my name was cut off and the name of the Regional Forester was put on, by some subordinate, no doubt.
Maunder: Who was the Regional Forester there?
Fritz: That was F. A. Si Icox, a very fine man. Also a Yale forester. He was a very fine man indeed. He later quit the Forest Service for some years. He had a sort of a sociological streak and he worked for the typographers' union in New York City, and then later, being a friend of Rex Tugwel I during the New Deal days, he was returned to the Forest Service as Chief Forester. If I think of it, I'll make some comments about him a little later, which I think will cast some light on the New Deal days.
Work at Flagstaff, as I said, was interesting and also enjoyable. During Christmas week, the snows came. Of course, it was quite cold. At six o'clock in the morning sometimes in the winter, the temperature dropped below zero, and the crust on the snow was so thick that we could walk on it without snowshoes until about ten o'clock. The temperature rise from six o'clock to about ten o'clock was really phenomenal. I don't remember the exact figures but while at six o'clock in the morning, water would freeze very quickly in pans, by about ten o'clock we could sit out on the snow in our shirt sleeves.
It was an ideal climate. During the day in the winter, it was not only bearable but pleasant, while in the summertime, the temperature rarely rose above eighty-five degrees, and it was never humid. It was an ideal climate. And having been reported to have had a touch of tuberculosis as a young man, I felt that if the TB should ever return, I would make the Flagstaff area my permanent home, but that contingency never developed.
62
Fritz:
Maunder:
Fritz:
Maunder:
Fritz:
We spent the winter in the office working up the data. Ordinarily I would have gotten pretty tired and fed up working up somebody else's data, but the summation of every column gave enough informa tion which for comparative purposes was illuminating; and Pearson was on hand a big part of the time, until some time In January any way, to help me interpret the data.
Of course, we had other duties around the Station. Somebody had to go out about five o'clock and turn off all the water from the ele vated water tanks so they didn't freeze overnight, and we had to build a fire in the tankhouse so the tank itself didn't freeze up. We had other duties like that and of course, Pearson had a cow, a personal cow, which he had to milk.
That leads me to say something about the management of experiment stations in those days. Altogether too much time of the technical personnel had to be devoted to typing letters and ordinary main tenance work. I recall doing a lot of mechanical work myself around the grounds, pipe-fitting, carpentry work, and so on. Even tually, Pearson got a clerk who wasn't very good but nevertheless, he was a clerk and he kept the accounts. In fact, Pearson always had a clerk, I believe, to take care of the accounts. But we young fellows still had a little to do.
Was this just merely a matter of lack of budget? That's right. In other words, inadequate personnel.
In other words, they were trying to get the technical personnel to double in brass and so cut down the overhead?
Yes. We didn't even watch the clock. We worked as long as we could keep our eyes open sometimes to get the job done. On that Station, we had a pump pumping water from a well to the tankhouse, and that had to be operated. Pearson looked after that himself until some time later when he was able for the first time to get a range helper who was a sort of maintenance and operations man around the Station.
We also had a greenhouse, and the heating of the greenhouse was . always a problem. And starting fires in the tankhouse, and various jobs of that kind, took a lot of time. But they were probably a good thing too because it took the curse off of sitting at the desk for too many hours at a run just poring over figures.
When this ranger helper arrived, he turned out to be a man by the name of Porcher. I think his first name was Frank. He was a native of South Carolina, apparently from an old, old family, and he was a very bad TB case. His wife had been a nurse and married him to look after him. They were very much attached to one another.
He was transferred to the Experiment Station from somewhere in California. We did not know that he was tubercular until he tried
63
Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz:
Maunder: Fritz: Maunder: Fritz:
to do some of the work. He tried valiantly but he couldn't make It. From my office window, I would sometimes see him walk up a slope from the pump house to the upper level gasping for air, and when Pearson and I found out th»t he was tubercular, we were pretty sore at the smart cookie In California who transferred this man, knowing what kind of work he was to do.
Didn't they have physical examinations for personnel?
Well, this man was already in the Forest Service, and possibly if he had tuberculosis when he was employed, it wasn't detected.
Didn't they have periodic re-examinations?
Not that I remember.
What provisions were made for hospitalizing men in the Forest Service?
None whatever. Later on, I had to do Porcher's work and my own.
Pearson had been ordered to a detail in Washington, D.C., and was to be away about three months — It turned out to be nearly four months — and he left me in charge. There wasn't much responsibility attached to It, except to continue the work we had started, the com putations, and looking after the Station.
I had one of those experiences I i ke a lot of young men must have had in the early days in the Forest Service when we had to double in brass. The cow, of course, introduced some problems. Being a city-bred boy, 1 didn't know which end of the cow gave the milk, and I had assiduously stayed away from the milking job when we moved to the country. Porcher, the ranger, had to do the milking at the Station, and for doing It he got some of the milk. (I don't remember whether Mrs. Pearson remained at the Station at this time or moved to Flagstaff with their two children. She was the daugh ter of a local Judge and a very fine lady.)
When I arrived at the Station, the clerk, who was not too bright "anyway, came rushTng~ouT~ancf s a fdTrT broken English, "My God, Fritz, the cow has just had a calf. What' I I I do?" And I said, "Where is the cow?" He said, "I got her in the stable." "Where is the calf?" "The calf is in the stall next to the cow."
"Where did the cow have the calf?" He said, "Way down in the meadow. She didn't come in at the regular time, so I looked around and when I got down to the field, I found she had a calf. So I drove her and the calf In."
Of course, when Pearson left for Washington, he had told me that the cow was to have a calf on a certain day in April, but he expected to be back. Actually, his detail in Washington was extended and he didn't get back until late in April. So there was I with a sick cow and a young calf on my hands, and I'd never had that kind of
64
Fritz: an experience before. But I knew that the cow was a mammal and
that a calf would therefore suckle from Its own bag. I found out the clerk knew less about it than I did — he had separated the calf from the cow and put the calf in another stall with a bale of hay. I asked him what the hay was for, aiid he said, "Well, the calf has to eat, doesn't it?"
CLaughterU
I thought, "Hell's bells, I didn't eat meat when J_ was born, and I had to be fed on a bottle, so the calf must be in the same boat." So 1 put the calf with the mother, and although the cow was a big animal and had very large teats, she kicked that calf clear out of the stable because her teats had been very badly chapped. This was in the cold winter and April was still cold. (April 15th, we had thirty inches of snow, and on Decoration Day, I planted trees in a light snowstorm.)
I brought the cow out of the barn where I could get at her and started to work to find out how I could get some milk out of her. Her udder was tight as a drum, and I thought, "That can't be right." The cow was as hot as a firecracker all over and breathing heavily, so I thought she might be sick. She wouldn't let the calf anywhere near, so I started to try to milk her. Knowing nothing about it, she promptly heaved me out of the stable too with a quick push.
I thought, "Well, she's probably in pain. The teats are pretty badly chapped," so I got some lard and rubbed it over her teats, and after a little while they were quite soft and then she didn't kick up so much when I touched her. But to get some milk out was a different story.
Finally, I figured out there must be valves inside just like there would be in any pump system, so I figured out where the valves ought to be and pretty soon I had a stream of milk going and pretty well filled a pail. Then I let the calf go in with the cow and the mother accepted the ca I f .
There's a little part of humor to that. When Pearson got back, he had quite a laugh over