Judy M. Grover oral history transcript

              O R A L H I S T O R Y

JUDY M. GROVER

U. S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTORATE

Interview

by

Dr. Mark Madison

April 21, 2001

Shepherdstown, West Virginia

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ORAL HISTORY

with

JUDY M. GROVER

by

Dr. Mark Madison

APRIL 21, 2001

ABSTRACT: From a ‘fish wife’ to the highest graded field position in her job series, Judy M. Grover

moved 14 times literally covering the four corners of the U.S. with her husband in pursuit of his

Fisheries career with the Fish & Wildlife Service. While raising a family of 3 boys, she still found

time to pick dead trout eggs from the hatching baskets and to fin clip salmon, permanently marking

them for later identification. Her Fish & Wildlife Service career began as a part-time clerk/typist at a

National Fish Hatchery and ended as the Pacific Region Regional Directors personal administrative

assistant upon retirement. In between, she had duty posts as the secretary to the Service’s Personnel

Officer in Washington, D.C., and as the personal assistant to the Department’s Regional Solicitor. Her

experiences brought her into direct contact with numerous people and some of the Service’s most

contentious and adversarial issues at the time – Endangered Species Act implementation, declining

Pacific salmon runs issues, litigating water issues and a fractured political climate.

National Conservation Training Center

Shepherdstown, West Virginia

April 21, 2001

Dr. MADISON: This is Mark Madison,

doing an oral history interview with Judy

Grover at the National Conservation Training

Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It is

April 21, 2001. We usually start out Judy

asking where and when you were born?

MRS. GROVER: I was born in Upland,

California, July 16, 1940.

DR. MADISON What was your schooling?

MRS. GROVER: I went through grammar and

high school there in public schools, except for

first grade when I was sent to parochial school.

It was a boarding school because I was an only

child and my folks thought that I needed to be

around other children. I was so homesick that I

came home after 1 year. I skipped second grade

because I got too much of an education in first

grade. So when I graduated from high school at

sixteen, I was kind of ahead of myself. I did go to

junior college and I met Jerry. Then we went to

Utah State University, and he finished up. I never

did get my Bachelor’s degree, but I had enough

biology classes and secretarial classes that I was

able to do O.K.

DR. MADISON: What years were you at Utah

State?

MRS. GROVER: 1958-60. I graduated from High

School in 1957. Then I went to Chaffey Junior

College for 1 year and on to Utah State in 1958-9.

We were married in 1959 and then I went to work. I

got my “putting hubby through” degree at Utah

State. That’s my “PhT.”!

DR. MADISON: What type of work were you

doing?

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MRS. GROVER: I was a Secretary. I worked

for a defense plant, Thiokol. There was an

explosion of the Discovery [Space Shuttle] that

blew up a few years ago. That was the

Minuteman Missiles that we worked on in 1960

that blew up. It was the “O” rings that we had

worked on. I worked in the Instrumentation and

Testing section and they would literally blow

up these engines every night. I would get to

type up the lists that they would follow. There

were numbers, fifty digits long and one would

change. These were called Instrumentation and

Test Lists, so that’s what I typed for the

engineers.

DR. MADISON: That’s interesting work.

MRS. GROVER: It was interesting and then, to

see it evolve as time went on was nice.

DR. MADISON: Did Jerry [Grover, her

husband] take a job with FWS shortly

thereafter, or did you work for us first?

MRS. GROVER: No, he did. Basically, he was

working for the State of California, seasonally,

until he got his degree. Then he went back to

work for California and sent applications

everywhere, to every state. He finally got some

offers, I think the first one was Galveston,

Texas, and another one was Sandy Hook, New

Jersey. Finally, he got one from the Boston

office in Region 5. Then, he went to work. I

gave up my working for a while because when

he graduated and went back to work for the

State, I worked for Convair, Division of

General Dynamics, which was another big

defense plant. That

was basically secretarial work again.

DR. MADISON: So then, you guys moved to

Boston?

MRS. GROVER: Well, actually, we went to

White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. We were

at National Fish Hatcheries within Region 5.

And there had been an old policy; they didn’t

have college graduates at fish hatcheries and

this is how they were going to get them. They

brought them back east, clear across the country.

We weren’t the only ones. They hired us, and we

came at our own expense, across country. All of a

sudden, “Well, you’ve got a job, but this is what it

is”?

DR. MADISON: Was it a culture shock moving to

West Virginia from California?

MRS. GROVER: It was. It was also a long ways

away from home. It was just Jerry and I, and we

didn’t have a whole lot of family back here, in fact,

there was none. We were young, and he had a job.

$4,040.00 a year was the salary. This was in 1961. I

stayed home, and got pregnant and started having

little boys. That’s what I did; I was a Fish and

Wildlife wife. We moved quite frequently in those

years.

DR. MADISON: How often did you move? That’s

changed a little bit recently. It would be interesting

to look at.

MRS. GROVER: Basically they said, “You’re a

GS-5, you started out and if you want a GS-7, you

have to move to another Hatchery.” And this is

what they did; they’d just pick everybody up and

just move you. And the moving was different then.

We didn’t have to buy and sell a house because we

were in a hatchery house. That was another

interesting thing; you just kind of drove into the

hatchery and, “O.K. where’s our house?” And it

was over there, and you were happy that you had a

roof over your head.

Our oldest, Jeff, was born in West Virginia. We

were there for about a year and a half, and they

moved us to Leetown, WV, just down the road from

here, and Jerry got his “7.” He was the Assistant

Manager, but they needed an Assistant Manager in

about 4 months, at Craig Brook NFH, East Orland,

Maine. So they picked us up, and moved us again.

That was a winter move. And it was a difficult one

because my father had just died. My mother was

living with us, and she was a basket case, and I was

a half of a basket case. Our little boy, Jeff, was a

year old. It was the first move, of any distance, with

a baby. It was the middle of winter.

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And we were going to Maine! I mean, it can

snow there too. It was kind of like this, the

moving van would say that they were going to

be there at 8 o’clock on Tuesday morning. So

you clean out the refrigerator, you eat all of the

food or throw it away. You pack all of the

bedding in the boxes and you sit, and wait for

the moving men to come. The van driver did

that to us for 3 days; saying that he was going

to be there the next morning, and it was

difficult. The third morning we didn’t totally

believe him, so we didn’t do anything. It was

snowing so hard that we couldn’t even see the

moving van in front of the house.

We took off for Maine, and it was snowing

hard all through Pennsylvania. We went up

through New York, and I remember it was

snowing hard in Massachusetts. When we got

to Maine, it was so cold. I mean it was like 25

degrees below zero. There was no furniture yet.

We had to stay in a hotel. In those years, when

you moved and you got to your duty station, all

of your per diem stopped. It didn’t matter if

you had furniture in your house or not. So we

had to put ourselves up in a hotel; which was

Jed Prouty’s Lodge. It was a lovely place to

stay, but too expensive for our blood.

Eventually the furniture got there, and we had

two nickels, maybe. I can remember spending

an old silver dollar that I had in my wallet to

buy groceries. I didn’t have enough

greenbacks, and so I spent my silver dollar.

DR. MADISON: Those times were rough.

MRS. GROVER: Yes they were!

DR. MADISON: What was it like living in the

hatchery houses? Were they usually nice

houses?

MRS. GROVER: Yes they were nice. They

were basic. You usually only had one

bathroom. The kids grew up, and all of a

sudden all five of you were using one bathroom

and it got a little crowded. Sometimes it was an

upstairs and downstairs bedroom situation and

when you had little kids, you didn’t want to

separate Mom and Dad from the kids, but we had to

do the best we could. They were basic housing.

There weren’t any dishwashers or microwaves in

those days. The houses would be clean and freshly

painted and you could count on a decent

refrigerator, range, and heating system.

DR. MADISON: Was it isolated living on the

Hatcheries?

MRS. GROVER: Yes, it was isolated. I chose not to

work when I had little children, and that was fine.

We didn’t have a whole lot of money, but then we

didn’t have a whole lot of wants either. It was just

usually that we’d get ready to move again. In

Maine, our second little boy was born. The year that

he was born was a pretty good weather year. We

didn’t have a blizzard on January 3rd, when he was

due. The year before, no one could get out of the

hatchery for 2 weeks. My Doctor said, “You will

come to

Bangor, and we will make an appointment to have

this baby. We are not going to wait”. There were no

complications or anything. But then, the next

summer, we moved again.

DR. MADISON: Where did you go after this?

MRS. GROVER: We went to the Cortland In-

Service Training School in New York. We opted to

move ourselves, because in those days, when you

went to the In-Service Training School, you just

basically were detailed. Sometimes for 6, 9 or 10

months and you didn’t really leave your permanent

duty station. At that point, we were trying to get

back west again. Grandmas and Grandpas were

back west. So we decided that we would move to

Cortland and we’ll hope that we can get out to

Region 1 after the course work.

DR. MADISON: With you guys in Maine, you

went away about as far as you could.

MRS. GROVER: Oh, I know. We couldn’t go any

further! I really wish I could have appreciated it

more. I wish that I had been older, and wiser, and

maybe that we hadn’t been quite so poor. But we

didn’t know any different. After that year in

Cortland, Jerry did get a job out in Region 1. We

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went to Winthrop, Washington, which was

about as far north as you could get in

Washington State. It was just 30 miles from the

Canadian border.

DR. MADISON: Was Jerry a Hatchery

Manager at this point?

MRS. GROVER: No, he was still basically an

Assistant. He was still a GS-7 and he was a “7”

at three Hatcheries. Then Region 1 gave him

his “9” and the next spring we went on to

Ennis, Montana, again as the Assistant

Hatchery Manager. This was long before

Region 6 was developed, and Montana was part

of the Portland Region. So we went to

Montana. That was a nice cold place, too!

DR. MADISON: They never wanted to move

you south!

MRS. GROVER: Winthrop was a very snowy

place too. That was an interesting and very

pretty place. All along we were meeting nice

people. When we got to Montana, that was in

the Madison Valley and it’s beautiful place. We

had a third little boy there – born in a snow

storm on June 29th.

DR. MADISON: Was it hard on the kids, the

moving?

MRS. GROVER: No, our kids were real good

about it. Even when they got older, they just

threw their toys in the back of the car, and off

we’d go!

DR. MADISON: Where did you go from

Montana?

MRS. GROVER: We went back to California.

This was funny, because I cried when we left

California and went to While Sulfur Springs.

And Jerry said, “I can’t believe it, you are

crying and I am moving you back to

California!” But it was hard. Every time I

moved, I had kind of gotten my roots down

there. But we went to Coleman NFH, in

Anderson, California with a promotion to

GS-11. It was interesting. We were only a day’s

drive from where my mother lived. The kids got to

see a little more of Grandma. That was a neat

hatchery. Jerry ended up supervising that whole

complex from Portland many years later. When he

retired, he had a real soft spot in his heart for

Coleman. It was at Coleman NFH that I began fin

clipping salmon and steelhead. I job shared _ days

with another hatchery wife for a little extra pocket

money. They were marking 100’s of thousands of

fish in those days and a good fin clipper could mark

about 4,000 per day. Even with a crew, it provided

quite a bit of work

DR. MADISON: Did you go to the Regional Office

then?

MRS. GROVER: No. Then we went to Washington,

D.C. So we went back across the country again.

This was kind of interesting because we had

acquired a Siamese cat when we were in Cortland,

New York. So we moved him across country. We

moved him back across country to Washington,

D.C. That was the Departmental Management

Training Program, so we basically did like we did

with Cortland where we moved ourselves. But this

one we took just temporary stuff. You didn’t take

your furniture. You rented a house and furniture.

You had your dishes, your pots and pans, and your

clothes and that was about it. We moved to D.C.

and lived in Alexandria in a rented house. Jerry

worked and went to school there at Departmental

Training. Our kids had started school by then, so

that was interesting; being literally in the city,

where we had been out in the suburban woods,

basically.

The next year we moved back West, but not to

Coleman! We went to Carson National Fish

Hatchery on the Columbia River in Washington

State. There Jerry was the Hatchery Manager. He

had gotten his “11” when he went to Coleman, and

then he became an “11” Hatchery Manager at

Carson. Five years we were there, so that was a long

time for us!

DR. MADISON: You must have gotten somewhat

settled.

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MRS. GROVER: Yes. Still we were in

hatchery housing though. People were

beginning to want to move off of hatcheries as

the rents kept increasing. But we really didn’t

have enough money to think about buying a

house. When the Hatchery was 14 miles from

town, down a very snowy road, it would be too

hard to commute back and forth. Our kids were

way into school by then. I went to work at

Carson. That was when the gasoline crisis

started.

DR. MADISON: So was this 1973 or 1972?

MRS. GROVER: Yes, from 1972 to 1977. All

of a sudden there wasn’t enough gasoline and

Jerry couldn’t get anybody to be the

Clerk/typist, at the hatchery. He had Forest

Service wives [as Clerks] because there were

Forest Service people living at the Hatchery. It

had far more housing than was needed. Now,

when you buy food for fish it comes all

prepared in a bag and you don’t need all of the

labor to work there preparing it. So we had

excess housing. But no Forest Service wives

were willing to work, so I went to work, 16

hours a week, 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. I

was his permanent Clerk, and it was funny. It

was kind of like he thought that I knew

everything that he did. I said, “No, I’m not

going to learn by osmosis.” But I learned, and it

was my first Government job. The Personnel

Officer in Portland literally had to get special

permission because of the laws; you don’t work

for your family, but I did. I worked for 1 year,

and then he found a Forest Service wife that

wanted to go to work. I had worked earlier as a

temporary again fin-clipping salmon. It was

before the wide use of coded wire tags (CWT)

and Jerry always complained at us for the

annual maiming program he had to go through.

By that time the Area Office concept was

beginning to come in. He wanted to go to the

Area Office as that was what the Washington,

D.C. training had prepared him for, and he

applied thinking that he could get Olympia or

Sacramento, or Boise. We got Jacksonville,

Florida.

So in 1977, that very same kitty cat that had already

been across the country three times went back. We

lived in Florida for 5 years, and bought our own

house. That was the first time that we were able to

do that. It was fun. We were able to live in a

neighborhood and could be a real family there. We

were there 5 years before they did away with Area

Offices. Our two older children were out of high

school by then and Jeff was in junior college. He

was a musician and his music teacher suggested that

he apply for the Military Band. He was going to

stay on the east coast. The second boy had

graduated from high school, and he was going to

stay on the east coast attending college in North

Carolina.

So we were thinking, “They’re closing our office,

we want a job on the east coast”. We thought,

“Good, Washington, D.C., get it out of the way”.

There were no jobs in Washington, D.C. mainly

because they were closing all of those offices and

there was an excess of managers. But salmon

hatcheries called so back to Portland we went. We

left the two older kids on the east coast. That was

hard. It was hard on our youngest son and on me

because all of a sudden our family went from five to

three. The younger one was coming into high

school.

I realized that I needed to go to work. There wasn’t

enough money. We couldn’t sell our house in

Florida. That was in the days when there were “due

on sale” clauses on regular commercial mortgages,

and it was a military town with all the much cheaper

V.A. loans available. So we had a house in Florida

and a job in Oregon, and a kid in College in North

Carolina.

DR. MADISON: Geez! So you went back to work?

MRS. GROVER: I went back to work. I went to

work in Personnel in the Portland Regional Office.

The same Personnel Officer that got me permission

to go to work at the Carson Hatchery; I went to

work for him. I started out as a GS-4 or 5. Then, the

next year wouldn’t you know, a good job in

Washington, D.C., opened up. Actually, it was just

a little less than 2 years. Because we finally sold the

house in Florida; it was kind of like we put the

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middle son on the plane to go back to college in

North Carolina on January 3rd. We gave him

the last dollar that we had because we were

paying for a house in Florida and renting a

house in Oregon. Jerry got a call that afternoon

that the house sold. Everything fell into place.

We sold a house, built a house, and lived in it a

year before we went to Washington, D.C. That

was in 1984. Jerry went back as the Chief of

Fish Hatcheries and I got a job as the

secretary/admin assistant to the Service’s

Personnel Officer back in Washington, D.C. I

also worked for Joe Piehuta. That’s why Joe is

such a good friend of mine.

Then there began all kinds of reorganization in

the Service, and Jerry didn’t have a job he

wanted in Washington, D.C. They were down-sizing

staffing, shifting people, and reducing

grades and putting the positions into the

Regions. I found a job with the Department’s

Regional Solicitor in Portland, Oregon, which I

thought was very interesting. You work for all

of the Department of the Interior -- the Park

Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the

Bureaus of Land Management, Mines as well

as the Fish & Wildlife Service. I worked for the

Regional Solicitor in Portland, Oregon for 3

years. Meanwhile, Jerry got a job after about 4

months, and back to Portland he went. Then we

were able to stay. We got into our house again.

DR. MADISON: So you hadn’t sold the house

there?

MRS. GROVER: No, we rented it. It wasn’t

even a year old. And it was just like the way we

wanted it. I think that Jerry got a three to five-year

assignment, so it looked like it wasn’t

going to be forever. They were having trouble

getting people into Washington. People did not

want to get in there, and feel like they couldn’t

get out again. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to

go, but we had moved so much that it was hard.

We still didn’t have any money. We were still

poor!

DR. MADISON: All of your money must have

gone to moving expenses!

MRS. GROVER: Yes, because basically, the

moving allowances weren’t as good as they are

now. Somehow it just never covered everything. It

was hard, not selling the house in Florida. You kept

it for months after you weren’t living in it anymore.

But by that time, I had worked my way up to a GS-

7. At least I was making a few more nickels. The

kids were getting older and going to college, and

having to pay those expenses, but I worked for the

Regional Solicitor. Then, after 3 years the Regional

Director’s

Secretary out in Region 1 retired. Jerry said that he

didn’t want me working in that job. He thought that

I was too close. Marv Plenert was the Regional

Director and he interviewed me, and I really wanted

that job, so I went for it. It was fun, I enjoyed that

job, I really did. I could see how everything worked.

I had lived it. I had worked at the field office, and I

had working at the Washington office and then I

worked at the Regional office too. I am still married

to the Service after all of these years, but then I got

to work, and this is an odd word that they use, but

they call the Regional Director’s Secretary the

“head bitch of the Region.” I’m not kidding, every

piece of mail that came to the Region came to my

desk. I had to decide which program would handle

all of these requests that came in and as the ‘gate

keeper,’ I had to decide whom could just walk into

the Regional Directors office. There were an awful

lot of decisions made by my desk. Of course by that

time, they had controlled correspondence in

Washington, D. C. That was the red folders. So I

started the red folders out there.

DR. MADISON: So you’re the one to blame.

MRS. GROVER: I am! They still have them out

there. If somebody was going to put a due date on it

in Washington, I was going to put a due date on it

out there. I started that out there, and made people

toe the mark! But that was fun.

DR. MADISON: And that’s where you spent the

rest of your time in the Service?

MRS. GROVER: Yes, that’s where I spent the rest

of my career.

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DR. MADISON: Is there anything interesting

that happened when you were there, that you

care to share?

MRS. GROVER: I was working for Marv

Plenert, he was a very good Regional Director.

This man made decisions. All of the people

who worked for him were happy to have him

there, because if you went up to him with a

problem and he made a decision, it was either,

“Hell yes, or hell no.” And he was fun to work

for. He lost his daughter, she got cancer and

died, and it was really hard to try and help him

to do his job of running the Region during this

time. We went through the Spotted Owls. That

was such a controversy out there, and I had

been in the middle of it in the Solicitor’s office.

The attorney that handled the Bureau of Land

Management was on one side of my desk. And

even though I worked for the Regional

Solicitor, I worked for all twenty-five

attorneys. And the attorney that represented the

Fish and Wildlife Service who was trying to

stop the BLM from cutting down the forest and

killing all of the Spotted Owls was on the other

side of my desk. So the Spotted Owl dilemma

ran our lives as did Klamath Basin and

California water issues, California’s Bay/Delta

controversy, the southern California gnat

catcher. The Pacific Region had the largest

funding, the most staff and was the busiest and

most involved Region of the Service on major

issues.

DR. MADISON: I can imagine. [Dave]

Klinger still talks about it.

MRS. GROVER: It was difficult. I worked

with David Klinger in Washington, D. C.

because Public Affairs and Personnel shared a

corridor. I knew David, and when we all

worked together out in Portland, telephone calls

would come in; people were asking what was

going to happen. I had to give a lot of these

calls to David. We would be put on the hot seat

a lot. There were Judges telling us what to do,

by what day and of course all of the loggers

were starving to death because we wouldn’t let

them cut the trees down.

One of the most interesting things that happened,

and in this of course, politics got involved;

President Clinton said that if he was elected, he

would go out and mediate this situation. We had a

Forest Conference in April of 1993 when he was

first elected, and I got to sit in on that. That was

very interesting. Basically, I was a doorkeeper. I got

to stand inside the door and make sure that nobody

came in. We had the Secretaries of Labor and

Interior and Commerce who were all there trying to

represent, as well as the President and the Vice

President. People came from all over the northwest

appealing their cases. The loggers and the forest

products people were saying, “We’ve got to have

this, and we’ve got to keep these people working.”

We in the Fish and Wildlife Service realized that if

they kept cutting, in 10 years there would be no

more forest. We wondered how they couldn’t see

this. I remember President Clinton standing up and

saying that no one was going to be happy with him.

The environmentalists weren’t going to be happy

because they were going to let them cut a little bit.

The loggers weren’t going to be happy because they

couldn’t cut all they wanted. It was quite a day. It

was literally all day long. We, who were working in

there had to go and be cleared by Secret Service.

We arrived by bus at like 6:00 A.M., and the

meeting convened at maybe nine or ten. We had

Secret Service all over the place. It was very

interesting.

While I was working in the RD’s office something

that became apparent was the secretarial skills

needed to be upgraded if the secretary’s were

expected to be promoted. We started a Certified

Professional Secretary course for the secretaries in

the Regional office. The Deputy Regional

Director’s Secretary and I who had worked together

for many years were told that we would take it, and

we would pass. We had been taking this economics

course, which was hard. It was not an easy course.

We were taking accounting and more, and doing all

of this after hours. When we had the Forest

Conference out here and President Clinton started

talking about world economics I realized the reason

I was taking this course. It all kind of fell into place,

and he made it all very understandable. That was a

really exciting time, I thought, to be working for the

Service. And I felt very privileged to be in on that

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Conference. I thought that we were making a

difference in the world out there. It was fun.

DR. MADISON: It was an exciting time, and

you were.

MRS. GROVER: It really was. Of course, I can

remember Marv Plenert, the Regional Director

saying, “Now just wait until the salmon are

listed” (as an Endangered Species). Of course,

it happened. It wasn’t so much the Service,

because it is the National Marine Fisheries

Service that did the listing, but it does affect

everything of the Fish and Wildlife Service and

its National Fish Hatchery System so important

on the Columbia River and in the Northwest,

and of all the people that live there too. Those

were very interesting times. This training also

had the side benefit of qualifying me for

promotion. I was promoted to a GS-10, the

highest grade in the Service for my position

outside the Washington Office.

DR. MADISON: Judy, I have to break this off.

I have got to go and do the workshop. But this

was great! It was just fascinating!

MRS. GROVER: It’s an interesting life, Mark!

DR. MADISON: It is an interesting life. It must

have been a culture shock going from the

Hatcheries to the Regional Office to a certain

extent, wasn’t it?

MRS. GROVER: Yes, but I think we were

ready for it. We had grown. I thought that the 5

years that we spent in Florida were a growing

experience. All of us did. The kids did, too. We

were part of a neighborhood, after having only

been in this little government complex. You

really have kind of a narrow life out there, and

maybe that’s why people object to being

isolated now. We didn’t know any better when

we started out. The world has grown much in

those years, from the late 1950s and early

1960s to the new century.

DR. MADISON: I have to say that off the

record…

[tape ends]

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