David B. Marshall oral history transcript

              THE U.S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE

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ORAL HISTORY

of

David B. Marshall

Portland, Oregon

November 30, 2000

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID B. MARSHALL

BY JERRY C. GROVER

and Judy M. Grover

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Retired

PORTLAND, OREGON

MR. GROVER: I am with David B. Marshall, a long time

employee of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Can you give us

a little of your background and history? When were you born?

MR. MARSHALL: I was born on March 7, 1926 in Portland,

Oregon into a pioneer Oregon family, at least on my father’s

side and to some extent on my mother’s side. I had an early

interest in birds; no doubt through my family. My family was

composed of a number of naturalists including my great

grandmother who was a close friend of William L. Finley, the

famous Oregon conservationist, wildlife photographer, writer

and naturalist. So I developed an interest in birds. Some of my

earliest memories are identifying birds in the backyard at the

feeder. I learned their names from my mother and father. My

father and his family were very active in what was then called

the Oregon Audubon Society, now Audubon Society of

Portland. As a result of exposure to activities and members of

this group, I had further exposure to things in the natural history

world. My parents were particularly interested in wildflowers.

But that didn’t interest me at the time. It was just birds.

MR. GROVER: What did your father do?

MR. MARSHALL: My father was a Civil Engineer and a

Surveyor. He and his brother had an engineering firm here in

Portland and did a good part of the lot survey work and

subdivision work in Portland, starting in the teens up until the

mid 1950s. Also they conducted engineering work during

World War II designing the docks at the shipyards and laying

out housing projects. During the depression my dad was County

Surveyor for a short time when business slacked off. This was

an elected position. I also had the opportunity to get in the out

of doors on numerous family outings and camping trips.

Camping wasn’t popular then, but we did a lot of it over

various parts of the state.

MR. GROVER: That would have been in the 1930s?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, the 1930s and early 1940s. We really

got around, particularly in southeast Oregon including Steens

Mountain. Then it was tough getting around. Many a time we

were delayed for a day or two because storm flooded the roads.

Those family trips meant a lot. Then there was the exposure to

things like the Audubon Society lectures, which were weekly.

My dad was the chairman of the programs.

MR. GROVER: Was this the Oregon Audubon Society?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, it was then called the Oregon

Audubon Society. It was the only one in the state. There were

the Christmas bird counts, which were important to me.

Audubon activities brought me into contact with William L.

Finley and Stanley G. Jewett and a number of other famous

people like Ed Averill. So I had this contact as a boy,

particularly with Finley and Jewett, which meant a lot to me. I

was impressed with the things they were doing from a

conservation standpoint. I would overhear them talking over

conservation problems and their strategies and what they should

do about various issues. Finley and his wife, Irene, came to

some family Christmas celebrations. I got to listen to Finley’s

lectures. One that I can most vividly remember was on the

California condor. That inspired me in terms of the need to

protect endangered species. Another event that got me

interested in endangered species was this; in 1937 we were at

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Borax Lake east of Steens Mountain, OR. We looked down at

the fish in the lake and my father told me, “That fish does not

have a name, and this is the only place that it is found in the

world”. Somehow, that really got to me. I picked up a lot of

interest then. This fish didn’t have a name and this was the only

place in the world where it was found. The only way my father

knew about that was through his association with Carl Hubbs.

MR. GROVER: Was that Carl Hubbs of Hubbs and Lagler

fame?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes! Hubbs had told him about it. He told

him that the fish hadn’t been described at that point.

Incidentally, the fish did not get described until the late 1960s or

early 1970s and is now referred to as the Borax Lake chub. I

made sure it got listed under the ESA when I was with that

program. So, I had an association with natural history in

boyhood. Then I met two boys, Tom McAllister and William

Telfer, who were about my age. We became close friends. I

had a bicycle and saw to it that they got bicycles and we

bicycled all over the Portland area on bird watching trips. And

we contributed to work that was done to document birds of the

Portland area, what seasons they were there and where. We

contributed a lot to that. Our adventures just came out in print

in Wild in the City by Houck and Cody published by Oregon

Historical Society Press. In it is a story titled “Home Town”

which Tom McAllister and I wrote. The story was also

published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in the Fall 2000

issue. That tells a little bit about our adventures. We rode our

bikes to Mount Hood. At one point we even bicycled to Olallie

Lake, OR. This was in the early 1940s. We also bicycled out

towards Maupin about 100 miles from home to see birds of

eastern Oregon. These were bicycle/camping trips. At that time

you could bicycle from here to Government Camp and you’d

have to get off of the road maybe every fifteen or twenty

minutes to let a car by; nothing like the traffic of today. The

pavement wasn’t really wide enough to accommodate a car and

a bicycle too. These experiences gave us a lot of self confidence

and independence.

MR. GROVER: Did you have any jobs at this time? I know it

takes a little money to go out to Olallie Lake. Did you ever

work for pay?

MR. MARSHALL: No, I didn’t until I was 16. Well, I had a

family allowance if I cut the lawn and did little chores like that.

But I remember that to get my bicycle, I had to pay half of it. If

I could save up enough money for half of it, my father would

pay for the other half. These bicycle trips added a lot to my life.

In 1939, when I was 13 years old, Oregon Audubon conducted a

week’s auto trip to Malheur Refuge. My dad’s brother, C. L.

Marshall, set up the logistics for it. But the real leader from a

technical standpoint was Stanley G. Jewett, who was called the

Regional Biologist for what was then the U.S. Biological

Survey. Jewett was co-author with Ira Gabrielson of Birds of

Oregon, which was published in 1940. Jewett took quite an

interest in me as a boy. He would go over our bird notes from

our various trips. We would call him with questions about

birds. We didn’t really have good field guides then. He would

usually say, “You come down to my office.” We’d do down

there and we’d discuss things that we had seen. But the trip to

Malheur really told me that I wanted to be like Jewett, a wildlife

biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. I was kind of

headed that way. He advised Tom McAllister and me to get

summer jobs outdoors just as soon as we could even if it was

building trails; this would help lead to careers. When we were

still in our last year of high school the Forest Service recruited

youth for fire control and work crews as well as forest fire

lookouts. Physically fit older young men were in the military.

This was in 1943. Tom McAllister and I both applied and we

got put on the Fremont National Forest. About July 1, at the

beginning of the fire season, both of us were put on fire lookout

stations on peaks. We were seventeen years old. At that point

there were no tourists, and no pleasure travel because of the war.

There was gas rationing. We were put up there alone with no

contact with the outside world except by telephone connected to

the nearest ranger station. Tom was put on Hager Mountain

near Silver Lake and I was on one called Colman Point near

Bly. We kept bird notes of course and that led to an article in

The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union,

titled “Summer Birds of the Fremont National Forest, Oregon.”

We thus published in a professional journal before we’d ever

gone to college. Jewett encouraged us to do this and went over

it before we sent it in. He said that it was fine. It was published

in the April 1945 edition.

In 1944, after high school graduation, the war wasn’t over. I

went into the army air forces. I became an aerial gunner on a B-

17. My position was as the “belly” gunner otherwise known as

the ball turret. I flew four combat missions over Germany and

the war in Europe ended. Then in 1946, I was out of the

military and entered Oregon State College where I majored in

what was then called Fish and Game Management. Tom

McAllister did likewise. We were right away pegged as being

‘different’ because the class, which was all war veterans but

one, and all men of course, enrolled in the major because of an

interest in hunting and fishing. We were the first post-war class

at Oregon State in Fish and Game Management. Tom and I

picked Oregon State because it was one of only two or three

schools that offered a major in that field on the west coast. It

was a really good curriculum. We turned out to be well

prepared for professional positions, even though not one of our

major instructors had a Ph.D. They really worked hard on a

curriculum that would fit what was needed for us. Some of the

classes such as ornithology and mammalogy, I see most people

taking now as graduate students. The agencies at that point

badly needed trained people. It was a case of just getting them

out just as fast as they could. We really weren’t encouraged to

go to graduate school at all.

The summer after I got out of the military, I worked again for

the Forest Service on the Fremont National Forest as a fire

lookout. The summer between my freshman and sophomore

year at OSU I did likewise. Between my sophomore and junior

year, I worked for the National Park Service at Crater Lake

National Park. I wanted to vary my experience, but I was

simply one of those rangers at the gate who pulled in the fees. I

wanted to be a ranger/naturalist, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

They said I didn’t have enough college yet. But I ended up on

the side helping Don Farner, who wrote The Birds of Crater

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Lake National Park. I wanted to get into the FWS and saw that

I had better head that way. So in about January of 1949 I went

to see Stan Jewett and asked him, “How do I get in to the

FWS”? It was the usual answer, “You come down to my

office”. That was when I was junior at Oregon State. He told

me I should apply for a Student Assistant position and

introduced me to Kenneth F. MacDonald (known as “Mac”),

the regional refuge supervisor (The Portland Regional Office at

that time had the states of WA, OR, CA, ID, NV and MT

assigned to it). They had Student Assistant positions at the Tule

Lake and Malheur Refuges and were going to establish one on

the Stillwater Wildlife Management Area. So I applied and

nothing happened. So I called Jewett again and said, “What do I

do?” He said, “You come down to my office.” I went down

there and he marched me back to see Kenneth McDonald again.

Jewett, I found out, wasn’t too well liked by some of his peers

because of his bluntness. He said, “Mac, do you have this boy a

job or don’t you have a job for him?” Mac kind of chewed

away on his cigar, and grumbled like he did. Finally he said he

did have a job for me. Then Jewett, who was not with refuges

but served as the flyway biologist at that point, told Mac that he

wanted him to put me at Stillwater. Of course, that didn’t set to

good with Mac either.

MR. GROVER: Who was Mac again?

MR. MARSHALL: Mac was the Refuge Supervisor in

Portland. He was a Scotsman who had no biological training

whatsoever. He came to the service from Montana where he

had been in charge of state hatcheries, but he had no formal

training in fish and wildlife. But in many ways he was a good

administrator. Anyway, this was all kind of innocent on my

part. It was all because of who I knew that I got into the FWS.

There was no good formal review of applicants or advertising. I

don’t think it was proper, but that’s what happened. I wanted to

know how I could get in, and Jewett told me to come down to

his office! He was determined that I go to Stillwater. He said it

was a new area. He told Mac that we had virtually no

information on it - no real idea of what the bird or plant life

there. Jewett told Mac, “This is the man who can do it!” This

probably happened in April. In June upon termination of spring

term, I drove to Fallon, Nevada, the headquarters of the

Stillwater Wildlife Management Area, and met Tom Horn, the

Refuge Manager, at his home on an afternoon in early June of

1949. He had arrived on the site with his family several weeks

previously. I believe there might have been one maintenance

man. I drove down there in a surplus World War II jeep that I

had. Tom Horn must have taken a liking to me because I just

talked to him for an hour or two, and he said, “Well, do you see

that jeep over there?” It was a new jeep pickup truck. He said,

“That’s yours for the summer. I want you to inventory

everything that’s here. All the bird and mammal life, plants and

so forth.”

I became very fond of Tom’s family. In fact, I wasn’t there but

for an hour or two when he sent me with his daughter, Nancy,

who was about eight and knew the way to the refuge. She

guided me out there and showed me a piece of it and we came

back to town. The summer turned into a great experience

because I was given a free hand and wrote a report on the area at

the end of the summer. I still have a copy of that report.

During the course of the summer, J. Clark Salyer showed up

with Mac. Salyer was national Chief of the Wildlife Refuge

System. He was an extremely colorful and competent character.

Salyer came to determine what part of this refuge was going to

left open to public hunting. It was a 205,000-acre area of which

we had jurisdiction over about 155,000 acres through an

agreement with the Nevada Fish and Game Commission, the

Truckee-Carson Irrigation District and the FWS. Most of it was

to become open to public hunting. Salyer came to talk to the

local people about what part of the area would be open to public

hunting and what wouldn’t. This is a really interesting piece of

history. He and Mac went on a tour of the refuge with Tom

Horn. They borrowed my jeep pickup that day. It was the only

vehicle with 4-wheel drive, which was essential. There were

almost no roads. Mac was a very fastidious man who didn’t like

a bit of dust or dirt. In the front of the pickup there was just

room for Tom Horn and Salyer. I didn’t get to go because there

wasn’t enough room. But Mac had to sit on a box in the back of

the pickup in all of the dust. Of course, Salyer outranked him

and Tom Horn had to drive! Besides, Salyer delighted in

teasing Mac about his not wanting to get dirty. They had a

meeting that night with the local sportsmen. Salyer drew a line

across the map. He said, “Okay boys, which side do you want?”

This was in reference to which side of the line they wanted for

hunting and which side did they wanted to be closed to hunting.

They were furious because they had been sold on the idea that

they could break it all up into little units and have a little piece

here and a little piece there for refuge and so forth. That didn’t

go over at all. But the map they had of the refuge didn’t have

half of the wetlands delineated at the north end of the area.

There was no good map. I discovered all kinds of marvelous

habitat that wasn’t on the map at all. In fact the map showed

about a third of the wetlands on the area. The local sportsmen

could see that. When Salyer drew that line which looked like an

even split to him, they naturally picked the good half, which had

all of these marvelous wetlands for waterfowl habitat that were

not on the map.

MR. GROVER: They wanted this part as their hunting area?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, it was to be the hunting area. So they

came out way, way ahead in terms of the hunting area. That

was an interesting experience in how things came about at that

time. But that’s also how I got to come into the service on a

permanent basis. Before that meeting, and after Salyer’s tour of

the area, I walked into the office. It was around 5:30 in the

evening. I came to town for some reason, probably to pick up

the jeep truck. Tom Horn was in the office along with Salyer.

Salyer was standing there in his under shorts. He was changing

his clothes for the meeting. Tom said, “Dave, meet J. Clark

Salyer”! Well I shook hands with Salyer standing there in his

under shorts! Then, Salyer said…he had kind of a funny way of

talking: “How about coming to work for us permanently?”

What brought that on I have no idea. Tom insisted he did not

say anything about me. But I still wonder! But that’s what he

said. I told him, “Yes, I’d like to”. He then said, “Okay, do you

have a girlfriend?” I told him that I did and we were planning

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on getting married at the end of the summer. Salyer told me to

get Tom to give me three days of leave to go up to Oregon, get

my girlfriend, marry her and bring her back here. He said, “I

want to see what she thinks of this place”. At that time I later

learned, they were very concerned that employees be married

because they were in isolated places and unmarried men didn’t

seem to stay in one place or work long hours, as was customary

then. So in August, I did go home for several days. Betty and I

got married and we drove back down there. We stayed at the

Canvasback Gun Club where I was housed. That took care of

that necessary requirement I guess, in Salyer’s eyes. But like I

said, I guess he really did want to see what Betty thought of the

place because Fallon, Nevada was a pretty isolated area for a lot

of women, I can assure you. So I was back at Stillwater as an

Assistant Refuge Manager beginning in March of 1950 after I

completed the necessary requirements for my B.S. degree from

Oregon State College.

MR. GROVER: So Dave, this was in a permanent position?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, this was my first permanent

assignment.

MR. GROVER: So you arrived back there with a wife and….

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and a pregnant wife at that, by then!

But as soon as I had enough credits at Oregon State, which was

in March, I just left. The last courses in the last term didn’t look

too interesting to me. One of them was in big game

management and I wasn’t too interested in that particularly. So

we moved down there in March. The paper said I was Assistant

Refuge Manager, GS-5. But there was also a biologist assigned

there at that time. Tom Horn was not too crazy about him and

he wanted me to be the biologist, so he put the fellow that was

the biologist who had quite a bit of experience, on

administrative duties and I was really the biologist. I felt bad

about that. He was LeRoy Giles. He was really a very

competent guy. We got along great despite what Tom did.

I’d like to back up to one point.

MR. MARSHALL: MacDonald was Supervisor of Refuges in

Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana.

And he had one Assistant who was good at administrative work.

He name was Wilfred Anderson. He went from being a clerk at

Malheur to being an assistant to MacDonald. The Regional

office staff was two people, plus secretarial help. That’s all

there was. And MacDonald was supervisor then for the Refuge

Managers in those various states. You can see how many

people he had to supervise. You can also see what freedom they

must have had because Mac couldn’t watch over them that

closely.

MR. GROVER: Do you recollect how many refuges there

were, staffed refuges, in this area?

MR. MARSHALL: Well, I would judge about 30 that were

manned plus satellites.

MR. GROVER: How were they typically manned?

MR. MARSHALL: Typically, they were manned by a Refuge

Manager. On the big ones, also by an Assistant Refuge

Manager and several maintenance men and a clerk. That was

the typical staffing. Some of them only had one man on them.

Some of them had two. The big ones like Malheur would have

maybe ten. They were mostly maintenance people.

MR. GROVER: Okay, back to Stillwater. Here you are with a

pregnant wife back at Stillwater. What was your first

assignment there as a permanent employee, living the good life

as a GS-5?

MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, my salary was $3,200.00 a year!

That was gross! But my rent was only $40.00 a month. One of

the things they wanted me to do was to work up a grazing plan

for the refuge. The understanding was that with the FWS taking

this over we would regulate the grazing and the money from the

grazing would go to the Truckee Carson Irrigation District. As

it was, there were a dozen or so cattle operators who were

getting free grazing on 155,000 acres. They weren’t paying a

dime for it and of course they were pretty bitter that suddenly

they were going to have to be charged for their grazing. In fact,

the Pelican Island area of the refuge had about a hundred horses

on it, loose. Nobody claimed them of course until they were

impounded. We had a real PR problem. I remember one of my

interesting experiences was going out towards the Pelican Island

area on a very sandy road, which required everything my truck

had. The sand had clay put on it that was just wide enough for a

vehicle to get over the sand dunes. I got about half way down

this a one-way road and met a rancher named Francis Erb

coming the other way. I was blocked from going anywhere. I

had to spend about two hours there with him being lectured on

the ills of the government and how terrible the government was

and how we had no right to come in there and charge him

grazing fees. So I began to get the flavor of the ranchers at that

point, as a very young person. Eventually we did get a grazing

plan but it took a long, long time to bring those people around to

the idea that they would have to pay, get their cattle counted and

so forth.

I continued with waterfowl inventory work on the weekly

censuses we were required to do then. Then, we started making

periodic trips to Anaho Island Refuge in Pyramid Lake to

inventory the pelican, tern and gull colonies there. I remember

my first trip out there; LeRoy Giles went along. I was very

nervous. We had to take off from Sutcliff to go to the island.

Pyramid Lake is very subject to high winds suddenly coming up

and creating high waves. We had a twelve-foot aluminum boat

with a ten-horse power motor. There was no spare motor. I

never felt very comfortable about it, if the motor went out or the

wind came up. I eventually found I could launch the boat from

a point on the mainland that was much closer to the island.

Anaho trips constituted great experiences. I did a lot of bird

photography out there. Giles and I ended up writing an article

on the birds of Anaho Island which was published in the Auk,

the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

The engineering people were very strong and had a lot of

influence at that time - more influence than biologists. They

wanted to build extensive systems of dikes and water control

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structures on refuges. Their big pitch was that they could make

these impoundments permanent water so ducks could have

water year round. What they did not understand, which I got to

understand so well, was that permanent water areas were not

good waterfowl habitat. It was seasonal water areas that were. I

had a very difficult time putting this across. It was so obvious at

Stillwater. Food plants grew in areas that were subject to

periodic drying. That was a reality… I was not popular for my

position on that at all! Mac and the Regional Director were very

influenced by the engineers; and did not put much stake in a

“youngster” like me. This was most unfortunate. It was a

frustrating thing to me.

MR. GROVER: Were the engineers here in Portland, or were

you using Reclamation engineers?

MR. MARSHALL: No, they were here in Portland. They

would come to the refuges periodically and all they could think

about was establishing permanent water. I’d write my reports

that said, no, this wasn’t going to work. Permanent water is the

poorest waterfowl habitat. That was a big thing with me; trying

to overcome that.

One of my most interesting assignments there was in the

anthropology field. There were Paiute Indians around, and a

Paiute Indian Reservation. An amateur archeologist/

anthropologist named Margaret Wheat lived in the area. She

realized that we had in the area an elderly Paiute Indian lady

named Wuzzie George who had lived in the Stillwater marsh in

her childhood under primitive, original conditions. Her father

and her parents wanted nothing to do with white people and they

lived out there under pre-Euro-American settlement conditions.

Wuzzie was a “gold mine” of information on how those people

lived. I was brought onto this scene by Margaret Wheat.

Wuzzie had a friend named Alice Steve who did live with white

people as a little girl. Alice was important in that she convinced

Wuzzie to tell us about how they lived. Wuzzie, through a

number of interviews that were taped, eventually spilled out

how she and her family lived and how they used the fisheries,

wildlife and plants of the marsh. We made fieldtrips out there

with her and went to her original home areas. It was real

revelation to me and one of the most exciting things in my life

because I realized that Wuzzie George knew far more about

plants and animals of the area than I did. She was a remarkable

woman and enjoyed watching birds. All of this was taped for

the Nevada State Museum. It was summarized and published by

the Univ. of Nevada Press under the title of Survival Arts of the

Primitive Paiutes by Margaret M. Wheat. Part of her work was

used later by anthropologists in the archeological surveys at

Stillwater, which they called me back for because of my

knowledge of Wuzzie George.

MR. GROVER: There was a book that was written a couple of

years ago which ended up on the market that the Stillwater

Refuge was a central part to. Did you have a part in developing

that?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, you are thinking of Catherine S.

Fowler’s book titled In the Shadow of Fox Peak, published in

1992 by the Service. Before its publication, the refuge had me

come down to discuss with Fowler my experiences with Wuzzie

George. It is an excellent book which, incidentally, contains a

number of my photographs. Other books resulting from this

work included People of the Marsh: A Cultural and Natural

History of Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge by Kendal Morris

and Anan W. Raymond or Who Were the Ancient People of

Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, Nevada? by Raymond and

Morris. Both were published by FWS. I did not contribute to

the writing of these books, but some of the photographs in them

were taken by me.

MR. MARSHALL: I was somewhat disappointed with

Margaret M. Wheat’s book. The publisher popularized it and

took out all of the scientific names of the plants, which was too

bad. One of my roles in this was to identify the plants the

Paiutes used. They would give their name and use for a plant

and I would give the Latin name so we’d be sure which plant we

were taking about. They took that out of the book. As far as I

know all of the tapes are in the Nevada State Museum. It was a

marvelous experience for me because I just couldn’t get over the

way those people lived and the knowledge they had of natural

history and even geology. It was just a great thing to learn

about. That was one of my most interesting of my life’s

assignments.

Another thing that went on, which I think was a terrible mistake

in some ways, was …the local people were very interested in

goose hunting. We had a population of Canada geese, which

was only about twenty-five or so birds. Salyer said that he’d

take care of that. He’d get some muskrats in there to build

houses. The local muskrat subspecies was a bank dweller.

They didn’t build houses. LeRoy Giles transplanted

approximately a thousand muskrats from the Tule Lake Refuge

to Stillwater. I think those muskrats originally came from the

Great Lakes. The Tule Lake muskrats reproduced like crazy

and built large houses all over the place, using the dense stands

of cattail and bulrush for material. And yes, we did build the

goose population way up. And in so doing, I suspect we

eliminated a subspecies of muskrat, which I assume is extinct.

This was the burrowing muskrat, which had been native to

central Nevada. Unless there is some isolated marsh in Nevada

that has some, I don’t know of it. The FWS eliminated a

muskrat taxon at that point. This did get Ray Alcorn, a local

mammalogist/ornitologist somewhat upset. That’s something

that has not been adequately documented or written up.

Backing up a little bit; I forgot to mention during my first

summer at Stillwater I was detailed to Tule Lake for about 10

days. They had hundreds of thousands of ducks die there from

botulism in 1949 on the adjoining Lower Klamath Refuge. I

was detailed there with Leroy Giles to work on that botulism

situation by picking sick ducks up and running them through a

hospital. They were given an antitoxin and fresh water. The

Refuge Manager at Tule Lake in 1949 was a man named

Howard Sergeant. Howard pulled me off the botulism detail

part of the time. I got to go around the Klamath Basin refuges

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with him and observe. He seemed interested in teaching me all

he could about management of this large refuge complex.

Going back to my permanent assignment…let’s see, I

mentioned the Indians. Oh yeah, I wanted to mention that at the

best I can figure at this point, we had five refuge biologists in

the field on the refuges in the Region at that time. I can tell you

how many refuges there were if I look at the list and check those

off. But there were only five field biologists on the refuges

themselves that I can recall.

MR. GROVER: The definition of a field biologist was one with

a college degree?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and supposedly was doing biological

work rather than building fences or something like that.

MR. GROVER: Were the Refuge Managers and Assistant

Refuge Managers degreed people?

MR. MARSHALL: Generally not in the 1950s. I wanted to

mention that. I think I’ve got it written down for a little later in

my list of frustrations.

MR. GROVER: Okay, we can wait and get to it. Let’s go on to

your next career stage and transfer.

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, my transfer to Sacramento NWR.

That was in November of 1953. At that time the State of

California’s Department of Fish and Game was very strong.

They were unhappy because no part of the 10,000 acre

Sacramento NWR was open to public hunting. They were

really putting pressure on for the FWS to open 40% of that

refuge to public hunting, which would have been a mistake

because it would have concentrated the birds even more in

closed areas. But J. Clark Salyer got the idea that maybe we

could find Ross’s geese there. Ross’s geese at that point were

considered very rare. If Ross’s geese were wintering there, then

there would be every reason not to open any of it to hunting. So

they sent me to Sacramento. I was the first full-time biologist

there. My first priority was of course to find Ross’s geese on

the Sacramento Refuge. I didn’t find them there!

MR. GROVER: What grade were you then?

MR. MARSHALL: I had become a GS-7 after my first year of

permanent employment at Stillwater. The Sacramento Refuge

Manager had no college training and he was very sensitive

about that. His name was Vernon Ekedahl. He was Montana

farmer who became a maintenance man and later Manager of

Bowdoin Refuge. He was a very competent farmer and

manager. But he felt very inadequate, especially around me. I

did convince him I was okay, I guess. I couldn’t tell him what

to do, but I could show him! I got along with Vernon fine, and

he left me alone on the Ross’s goose thing. That was way

beyond him. I couldn’t even get as much as a spotting scope out

of him, which I desperately needed to try and tell Ross’s geese

from snow geese in the field. This went on for months before I

finally got a spotting scope. Ray Erickson, Biologist for

Malheur, helped with this project. We managed to get a couple

of Ross’s geese that were winged by hunters. It was against

regulations to shoot Ross’s geese. But hunters couldn’t tell

them from snow geese. We put the crippled Ross’s geese in a

pen with crippled snow geese. In that way we figured out how

to separate them at a distance. I didn’t find any Ross geese on

the refuge, but I’d go around to the picking plants. The duck

hunters then would take their birds to processing plants that

would pick them. I would go around to the picking plants and

try and get an idea of how many Ross’s geese there were as

opposed to snow geese. Of course the picking plant operators

first thought I was law enforcement and was going to arrest

people for shooting Ross’s geese. I managed to convince them

that I wasn’t interested in that. I would find Ross’s geese at the

picking plants but I wouldn’t say anything. I started to get an

idea of how many there were, and then I befriended a big duck

club in the Butte Sink. They understood that I was okay. So I

began to get an idea of the number of Ross geese that were

taken. I didn’t find many initially. Eventually, I got into the

San Joaquin Valley and discovered that this is where most of

them wintered. I managed to figure out how to inventory them

there by air.

MR. GROVER: Was this on the Merced Refuge?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, Merced is in that general area; the

grasslands. It was partly the way they flew, and partly the way

they associated with cackling geese rather than other snow geese

that I managed to inventory them. Gene Kridler, who replaced

me, and I wrote all the Ross’s geese stuff up. I wanted to put it

in a scientific journal, but the Regional office grabbed a hold of

the report and they didn’t want it published. That made Gene

and me kind of bitter.

MR. GROVER: Why didn’t they want it published?

MR. MARSHALL: We were critical of some things that were

going on, as for example the meaningless closure on Ross’s

geese hunting. I think that’s part of the reason. Richard Griffith

was the one. He said he’d straighten it out, but he never did.

MR. GROVER: He was RD at the time?

MR. MARSHALL: He was Assistant RD for Wildlife. Rice

growing then was a big thing on those refuges. There were

three federal refuges; Sacramento, Colusa and Sutter. The

number of birds there was tremendous. There was also a State

area, Gray Lodge. I wish we could put this on the tape but these

pictures will give you an idea of the concentrations of waterfowl

that were involved at that time, which were confined to very

small areas that were closed to hunting. The reason we didn’t

want to see more areas opened to hunting was because they

were just packed in there in poultry pen-like conditions. Rice

was grown on the refuges by the FWS and Vernon Ekedahl was,

like I said, a great farmer. The birds completely consumed the

rice crops, but I was concerned that Vernon didn’t want to

recognize ducks as eating anything but rice. So I started a study

by going around to hunters and offering to clean their ducks if I

could have the crops and the gizzards. Eventually, I did get

quite an assemblage showing that the ducks were eating a lot of

things besides rice. Vernon would come by my desk and see the

7

contents of the gizzards and then he began to get the picture that

it was important to grow some of the wild food plants too.

Since then, the refuges have quit growing rice, and there is more

refuge area now. When we did have the ducks concentrated like

that you had to have as big a volume of feed as you could

produce, and at that point in time it involved rice.

MR. GROVER: Where they using the statistic that about

seventy percent of the Pacific Flyway birds funneled through the

Sacramento Refuge?

MR. MARSHALL: The Sacramento Valley, but not all were

there at the same time; many went on to the San Joaquin Valley.

MR. GROVER: The Sacramento Valley had a sizable portion

of them. That was a hell of a lot of birds!

MR. MARSHALL: That’s right! It was seventy percent of ten

million or more birds! I know for a while there we were

completely underestimating how many birds there were. I did

surveys mostly by air with Ray Glahn, a pilot biologist with the

Service. He had a FWS plane at that time, a Piper Super Cub. I

found I was grossly underestimating waterfowl numbers. I

discovered this by taking pictures with my own camera, and

then sample counting the ducks and geese on the pictures.

California Fish and Game had at that point a two-engine

Beachcraft aircraft with a big mounted surplus aerial camera in

the plane’s belly. They started sampling by air during the

winter inventory and we really got a much better handle on what

the populations were.

MR. GROVER: Was your relationship with the State at that

time good? Were they sharing the pictures with you?

MR. MARSHALL: Our relationship in the biological field was

good. Our relationship at the administrative level was terrible.

It was frightfully bad. And that brings up a real good point in

that there was tremendous rivalry between the state and the feds

then, which was most unfortunate. Salyer was a part of that.

MacDonald was a part of that. It was things like; if you’re

looking at an area for a new refuge, well, don’t tell the state,

they might want it too. It was terrible and it irritated me

because there were so many things to be done that we could

work together on. John Chattin who was the flyway biologist

had a good relationship with California; he worked for them at

one time. In the biological field we had no problems and

assisted each other. But at the administrative level it was really

bad. And it wasn’t just California and Nevada, it was with other

states. It was uncalled for, and I blame a lot of our own people

for that.

Another aspect of this thing was refuge visitors. People like

Ekedahl just didn’t like the public coming on the refuge. He

discouraged any kind of public use. A number of Refuge

Managers were like that. They thought that people would

disturb the birds and we should just keep them out. I was

against that policy and wanted to bring people in. There were

groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club that

wanted to tour and observe birds on the refuge. The answer

from Ekedahl was a reluctant, ‘well, yeah, if you go along, you

can take them out there.’ I did some of that. Then we had a

meeting in Portland with all of the managers and biologists. J.

Clark Salyer was there. Salyer got up and made a speech about

that ‘you’ve got to open these areas to the public and let them

know what’s there. It’s the only way we’re going to have public

support’. Of course that was a great welcoming bit of words for

me. I was very happy over that.

MR. GROVER: You were separating the public visitor from the

hunter visitor?

MR. MARSHALL: The hunter visitor was okay on a hunting

area. But I’m talking about public visitors or hunters coming in

to see the birds in areas closed to hunting. Setting up a tour

route on a refuge just wasn’t done then. I wanted to, but most of

the old time managers were against it. Salyer helped change

that policy. I felt that the policy on refuge visitors needed to

change badly and it did get changed. Now in visiting the

Sacramento Refuge I take great pleasure in seeing a tour route

and visitor center.

Ekedahl would turn most important visitors over to me to

handle. This included Sir Peter Scott, Jean Delacour and Lady

Scott. Peter Scott and Delacour were two world known

waterfowl specialists, and Scott was also an artist. They came

to see Ross’ geese. I took them on a tour of the Grasslands in

the San Joaquin Valley, corresponded with Scott and wrote a

paper on the Pacific Flyway for the Wildfowl Trust’s

publication.

I never felt like I finished my work at Sacramento before the

transfer to Malheur came up, which I didn’t want to do. But

Ray Erickson was the biologist at Malheur. This was in 1955.

He was being transferred to the Washington Office. He was

bypassing the Regional Office and going straight to

Washington. He obviously picked me as his successor for

Malheur. John Scharff had a lot of faith in Ray. And Ray said

that I was the one. So I got transferred to Malheur.

MR. GROVER: Was this with a promotion?

MR. MARSHALL: I can’t remember. I knew you were going

to ask me that! I can’t remember if I got up to a GS-9 at that

point or not. I think I did maybe get to be a GS-9. I know that I

left Malheur as a GS-11.

MRS. GROVER: How big was your family by then?

MR. MARSHALL: We had two kids. Both children were born

in the hospital at Fallon, NV. They were fourteen months apart.

We had a boy and a girl.

Upon my transfer to Malheur one of the first things that came up

was a movement by a number of the merchants in the town of

Burns to try to get the Blitzen Valley portion of the refuge

turned back to private ownership. They threatened a bill in

Congress, and the local politicians were behind this. They were

determined that the Blitzen Valley would be much more

valuable by being turned back into private ranches. They had a

lot of power and support in Congress. I don’t think people

8

today realize how threatened some of these refuges were at that

point. There wasn’t the public support for them. Ray Erickson

had started a film on the refuge. And not being a bad

photographer myself, I worked some further on that film. But

then to try to put out a film on the refuge, strictly by amateurs in

this case, and try to explain the value of the refuge and what we

did was difficult. The camera equipment was also inadequate.

Fortunately, the issue died. That was one of my first jobs there.

Also at that point, Malheur Lake was down to 10,000 acres

because of a drought. We had a terrible problem with

introduced carp in the lake. The idea was to completely

eliminate carp from the Malheur Basin. It was a tremendously

big effort with an ex-Navy torpedo bomber being hired to spray

rotenone over the lake. All of the streams that lead to the lake

were rotenoned with drip stations. But about two hundred carp

could still be seen in the lake after it cleared up by the fall.

They were the survivors which made the operation only

temporarily successful. It didn’t matter what we did. We could

spray and spray and those carp remained alive. Of course it had

gotten cold by that time and the rotenone was not at as effective.

I don’t know if they had their nose stuck in a spring or what, but

I suspect that. So the carp project was highly successful to start

with. Then in the end it was a failure. You might have some

thoughts on that. But it was highly touted amongst the fishery

people what a great job they had done. And they showed

pictures of it at public gatherings. They had a fisheries

biologist/ photographer on the spot. But John Scharff, the

Refuge Manager, said, “You take pictures too”! Fortunately, I

did. I still see those photos being used. It did work for several

years and we had a tremendous return of sago pondweed, the

important duck food plant, to Malheur Lake once the water

came back and most of the carp were gone. A couple of years

later we had a real influx of terns and grebes which fed on carp

reproduction.

Malheur was another big experience for me. I loved the refuge,

but working with John Scharff was a challenge. Malheur was a

real one-man operation is the sense of ‘who was boss.’ And one

thing he would do with every new staff member was to take him

into his office and inform him that nobody was going to tell him

how to run the Malheur Refuge either from below or from

above. He would say, “If they don’t like it, they can fire me”!

But I had tremendous respect for John. He was the most skilled

administrator I ever worked for. He had been at the refuge….I

first met him there as a boy in 1939! He stayed there until he

retired at 70 in 1971.

Scharff was in many ways great to work for, but on the other

hand, you couldn’t recommend to him anything. You had to

kind of sit back and demonstrate things. He was frustrating to

me because he firmly believed in managing Malheur for

multiple uses like it was a national forest or BLM district,

including lots of grazing and haying. That was his thing. That

was his experience in the Forest Service. He was successful in

part because in part of the people he knew in Washington, D.C.

I can remember seeing him write a letter by hand one day that

started out with, “Dear Rufus”. He was writing to Rufus

Holman who was the Congressman for that area. And Chief

Justice Douglas of the Supreme Court would periodically show

up at the refuge without publicity, and was a guest at the Scharff

house. So were other Congressmen. The Regional office

couldn’t touch him! They could come out and make inspections

and say, ‘Do this, and do that and do the other thing.’ He’d say,

“Oh yes, yes”. But he’d never do them unless he wanted to.

The other thing he’d do when Washington office people came

out was to take them on a tour. Instead of going on the roads

he’d drive across the fields and meadows and through this gate

and that gate and around this circle and that circle and pretty

soon they had no idea where they were. He was very clever.

They would see a lot of wildlife and come back and say what a

great refuge Malheur is before departing. But seeing the money

and improvements going to projects like cattle watering troughs

was very frustrating to me. But now when I look back on it,

here was a refuge that could have been lost; but for Scharff

placating the cattle industry. I don’t know where we’d

otherwise be today. I think he was the right man in the right

place at the right time. Salyer sort of summed it up one day

when, upon arrival, he said, “well Scharff, you still running a

cattle ranch.”

I also need to credit John Scharff’s wife, Florence. She was a

great host. House guests were common place. Florence along

with John were gardeners. Refuge headquarters was a show-place

of flowers in the summer.

MR. GROVER: Was Scharff a biologist too?

MR. MARHSALL: No. He had a two-year degree in animal

husbandry from Oregon Agricultural College, which is now

Oregon State University. I do not mean to infer he did not know

wildlife. He did, and liked to play a game with me on which

one of us saw the first spring arrivals of various summer

resident birds.

MR. GROVER: They now have the bird festival out there in the

spring and it’s the John Scharff Festival.

MR. MARSHALL: Yep, it’s the John Scharff Waterfowl

Festival.

Well, the refuge is still there, and it’s not private land. Yes, and

in later years I began to appreciate Scharff more. When he

neared retirement I wrote a nomination for him to receive

Interior’s Distinguished Service Award. This was against the

advice of his regional office supervisor; but I did it anyway and

Scharff went back to Washington to receive the award in 1971.

He had the longest tenure of any refuge manager in the National

Wildlife Refuge System. His government service began with

the U.S. Forest Service in 1923.

MR. MARSHALL: I didn’t see the political side of it at all

when I was there. I was no politician and it was frustrating to

me when I could see that things could be done a lot better from

the wildlife perspective. Going back and looking at it now, I

saw the pendulum swing completely the other way with great

expanses of solid cattail and bulrushes, which in part the

livestock controlled. The pendulum swung too much the other

way after he left. So Scharff was a pro and a con as far as

9

working with him. I did a lot of photography while I was there

which he was very interested in having me do along with the

wildlife inventory work. He was afraid of the water. He

wouldn’t go out on Malheur Lake in the boat. The airboat on

the lake was really my domain. He had some kind of fear of the

water.

During my time at Malheur, public use of the refuge expanded;

yet there were no public use specialists. During the spring and

that thatearly summer months we were deluged with birders,

naturalists and photographers. Scharff liked to see influential

people personally conducted over the refuge – quite the opposite

of my experience at Sacramento. Scharff did a lot of that

himself, but much of it fell on me. Each weekend from March

through June, we hosted classes from colleges and universities

throughout the northwest. They stayed in the old CCC mess

hall, since torn down. I would conduct the classes on a tour of

the refuge on Saturdays and give them a slide presentation on

Friday or Saturday nights. There were no weekends off during

this period. I wanted to set up a tour route with numbered

stations that referred to a brochure, but Scharff would not have

any part of that. The public was free to roam the refuge at will,

although we often mapped out routes for them.

Eleanor Pruitt, the co-manager of the Frenchglen Hotel saw a

demand for an ornithology course for the local people. She

arranged for this through the state extension service. I

conducted the course which was for college credit and well

attended by some Harney County citizens, including school

teachers.

Another thing that came up at that point was that the local

people and the Corps of Engineers wanted to put a dam on the

Upper Silvies River. They wanted to dam the water behind the

Silvies River so in short water years, they’d have a more

dependable supply. Malheur Lake’s watershed alternates

between series of high and low water years. There was a lot of

push for this dam. Our division known at that time as River

Basin Studies came into the picture. They had me document the

heavy waterfowl use in the spring in the lower Silvies River

valley in the Burns area. We really showed its value to the

spring migration for waterfowl. I feel like that was quite an

accomplishment. The dam never got built. I was at Malheur for

five years. It was difficult from a family standpoint, very

difficult. I wanted to be transferred to the Regional Office and I

got that, finally.

MR. GROVER: Are you talking about being transferred to the

Portland office?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes. It was real important for the sake of

my family, and I want to tell you why. The one room school

was inadequate and it was difficult to hire a qualified teacher.

Refuge housing was inadequate. Scharff wanted his biologist to

live on the refuge to be available when needed and to assist with

the visitor load. Even if we had moved to Burns, the road

between the refuge and Burns was unpaved and sometimes in

winter nearly impassable. The house had only two small

bedrooms and our boy and girl had grown old enough to need

separate rooms.

By the time I had moved to the Regional office, the refuge staff

there had grown somewhat. It was still Kenneth McDonald as

Refuge Supervisor plus several assistants who each took a

couple of states.

MR. GROVER: Are we talking about a promotion then? What

year was this?

MR. MARSHALL: This was in 1960. I think I was a GS-11.

There, I ran up against the same old problem of working with

somebody who wasn’t a biologist and really wasn’t oriented in

that way. I will just throw out one example that is here in my

notes. We had on the Red Rocks Lake Refuge of Montana,

graylings, which is a fish that there was some concern about.

They spawned there. Ken (Mac) McDonald was such a guy for

having everything just so neat and orderly and clean that he

insisted on turning a stream that had the Grayling into a straight

line ditch, because he wanted everything laid out in straight

lines. Those were the kinds of frustrations I had. Of course,

that was extremely detrimental to the grayling. He got into a big

hassle with the state fisheries biologist over it, too. But it was

very frustrating for me because at that time I really didn’t feel

like I was accomplishing a lot; others just didn’t think like I did.

At that time there was no public affairs officer in the regional

office. A lot of the public questions having anything to do with

wildlife continually got referred to me. Mac thought I should

become a Public Affairs Officer. That didn’t happen because

Montana Senator Mike Mansfield wanted to fill the job with a

man named Nick Mariana. Nick knew nothing about wildlife

and was a disaster for that position. I kept having to answer

many of his calls about wildlife.

I was in the Regional Office for probably two or three years and

was detailed to the Washington Office on an assignment. Mac

pulled me aside and said, “you know why you’re going there?”

I said I didn’t. He said, “They want to look at you relative to a

position there.” I told him I was glad he tipped me off. The

Washington Office was last place I wanted to go. I handled the

detail okay. But right from the start I let it be known that I was

not the least bit interested in a job in the Washington Office.

This made my friend Ray Erickson very unhappy with me. He

took me aside and he said, “Dave, you’re selfish! You’re just

thinking about yourself!” It made me feel bad, but I just didn’t

want to go to the Washington Office. Besides, we just had built

our first real home and inherited a cabin at Mt. Hood. My

present wife says that I really missed a bet. I don’t know if I did

or not. This would have been in the early 1960’s.

We got the loan on the Duck Stamp money and suddenly we

had a lot of money to buy new refuge lands with. This was a

very rewarding subject to me. We pulled in Leo Couch, who

had retired after serving as Chief of Research. He helped select

lands in the region for refuges. Leo and I worked together on

this. I particularly knew the Willamette Valley. In fact, this

subject came up while I was still at Malheur. A memo came out

from the Washington Office asking for recommendations for

new refuges that could be purchased with duck stamp funds. I

nominated sites which now constitute the William L. Finley and

Baskett Slough refuges in the Willamette Valley.

10

MR. GROVER: Was this part of your detail? Or was this after

the detail?

MR. MARSHALL: I don’t recall whether before or after.

MR. GROVER: So you’re back in Portland now.

MR. MARSHALL: I was only on detail for a couple of weeks

or three weeks. I can’t even remember what it was for. It must

have been not real important. So I was back and we had funds

to purchase new refuges. Even before the funds became

available, J.Clark Salyer came to the regional office.

Unbeknown to any of us, as a result of my recommendation, he

had looked over the Muddy Creek area which eventually got

incorporated into the William L. Finley Refuge. He would

travel the country and inspect areas and refuges by day and

travel at night. He was afraid to fly. He went into the Failing

Estate property at Muddy Creek one day, passing all of the

private land and no trespassing signs, and looked that area over.

He apparently got back out without being seen. When I saw

him in Portland, he said something to the effect of, “Dave, that’s

a great area, buy it!” Mac was sitting there. And of course Mac

thought the world of Salyer. Salyer’s word was god, so that

cinched the William L. Finley Refuge, at least the approval part

for the Service.

But Mac said we had to go see the principal owner who was

Henry Cabell. He was a grandson of Henry Failing, for which

the Failing building in downtown was named. Cabell had the

biggest key piece of area that would be part of the refuge. His

grandfather started it as a hunting reserve, and it was still used

for such. They had a house there that they used for hunting; he

and his friends. So we went to see Henry Cabell. Cabell was

very cordial and invited Mac and I into his office. We explained

to him what we wanted. He said, “No”. It had been in his

family for years and he just couldn’t give it up. I was very

discouraged and walked back out with Mac. Mac said, “No,

you just wait. I’ve seen this happen time and time again. We

want a new area, so we’ll go back and see him in another year or

two. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

Sure enough, we went back. He invited us in again and we sat

down with him. This time we had the Realty Specialist with us.

His name was Don Kistner. Henry Cabell said, “This land has

been in my family for years and my children don’t have any

interest in it. I want to see it remain a wildlife area. I think you

gentlemen have the only answer”. Then he said, “I know how

you people operate. I know you have a low price and a high

price. I don’t want either one. I want it to be right in the

middle”. He was a very public spirited man. We did our review

of the area’s value. He did his independently and they came out

the same in terms of overall value. I will always remember that.

There was no argument over price. After that we were able to

acquire McFadden’s Marsh and some other pieces.

There was a big public outcry against the acquisition of that

refuge and a big public meeting at Corvallis. The farmers were

all against it. The county agricultural extension agent led the

opposition. They were concerned about loss of tax money and

farm land in Benton County. That led to a bill in the State

Legislature which would make state approval for a refuge

conditional upon county approval. That would have killed these

refuges in the Willamette Valley.

MR. GROVER: That’s the same strategy that was used in the

Dakota wetlands, the prairie potholes. They had to have local

approval.

MR. MARSHALL: It passed the Legislature. Mark Hatfield

was then Governor and he vetoed it. He said he did not think it

was good government for local government to have veto power

over something that was favorable to the state as a whole. My

wife at the time was quite active in working to defeat that on

behalf of Portland Audubon. The Oregon Duck Hunters

Association also participated. They did lobby Hatfield after

loosing in the Legislature.

Three refuges eventually immerged in the Willamette Valley. I

scoured the Valley for other potential refuge areas. They

wanted to have five sites. That was part of the condition for

State approval. I had also recommended Baskett Slough. I’d

done a lot of work in college on the William L. Finley refuge

area. At Baskett Slough I used to drive by and see the geese

there. I recommended that and they wanted more areas so I

scoured the valley. One of the candidates I came up with

Ankeny. It was on the bottom of my list. But the engineering

people, because of the water at Ankeny, and a ditch going

through it; recommended Ankeny. So did the Realty people

because they thought the land would be cheaper there. I really

wanted to see a piece of land acquired along the Tualatin along

with Wapato Lake. That was my first choice after Baskett

Slough. It never came to pass. There wasn’t any goose use at

Ankeny, which was the main thrust for these areas. But I did

see the potential and I thought there could be significant goose

use. Maybe I was gambling but I felt with minimum wetland

development geese would use that area and it’s turned out to be

very successful. So I am happy about all three of those areas.

But along comes the General Accounting Office just after the

acquisition of these areas. And they said, “You’ve bought lands

that are not wetlands with Duck Stamp money. The testimony

before Congress by your Director was that you were going to

spend this money on wetlands.” We bought the Finley refuge,

which had a lot of upland with it. It was a marvelous, good,

varied type of habitat. And Baskett Slough had a butte on it.

They wanted to know why we didn’t exclude those. We

explained that the landowners said they would to sell all or

nothing. That was one of the questions we put to Henry Cabell

too. “Would you sell just the wetlands parts?” He had quite a

gleam in his eye and said, “I’ll sell all or nothing”! This pleased

me extremely. He was very public spirited and he saw the value

of the William Finley Refuge as kind of an outdoor laboratory

for students at Oregon State. I know that’s a lot of what was

behind it. Anyway, GAO came in and they had the big

investigation. Of course, I was the first line of defense on this

thing. I selected the areas and RD wasn’t happy with me

because of what I had done. Obviously he didn’t want a GAO

investigation. The irony of that is that the GAO head

investigator was a former buckaroo from the Roaring Springs

Ranch which had grazing/haying permits at Malheur. I knew

11

him there, after which he left the buckaroo business and went to

college and into the GAO. He was one of those people who

wanted the Blitzen Valley at Malheur to go back into private

ownership. I can’t remember his name. But the GAO had their

investigation and there was a big headline on the Oregonian that

FWS had misappropriated funds or something like that. Then,

Ira Gabrielson showed up. He wanted to look at this situation.

So Ray Glahn and I put him in our airplane, a Cessna 180 by

that time.

MR. GROVER: What position was Ira Gabrielson by this time?

MR. MARSHALL: He was President, or President Emeritus of

the Wildlife Management Institute. He had a lot of say, I can

assure you. I learned that quickly, after it got to Washington.

He didn’t really retire! Anyway, he showed up at the regional

office. We took him to the airport and strapped him into the

Cessna. We had heavy duty agricultural type shoulder and

seatbelts. He said he felt like we were putting him into a horse

collar. He didn’t have much time. We made an aerial tour of

the refuges in the Willamette Valley. I complained about the

GAO investigation. He kept saying, “To hell with ‘em! To hell

with ‘em!” I could tell he was very pleased with the three areas.

“To hell with ‘em. Don’t worry about it!” Then he returned to

Washington. I never heard a thing more about this issue. Years

later, I asked John Gottschalk about it. My close friend Fred

Evenden and I used to go birding with John on Sunday

mornings when I worked in Washington, D. C. I asked John

whatever happened to the GAO investigation of the Willamette

Valley refuges. He said that he was at a congressional hearing

headed by Julia Butler Hansen, who chaired the Interior

Appropriations Committee. She was from southern

Washington. She brought up the GAO investigation.

According to John Gottschalk, she said, “Mr. Gottschalk, what

are you going to do about this?” John said, “I told her;

absolutely nothing”! She looked kind of startled and said,

“Well, I guess that’s that”! I learned this years later. I don’t

know what role Gabe had in that thing but he obviously came

out for a reason.

Another thing that happened: I’d periodically go to the Willapa

Refuge with Ray Glahn. One day we flew down over the

islands in the lower Columbia River area. They are marshy

islands, which I didn’t know were there until the flight. You

couldn’t see them from the ground. I wondered who these

islands belonged to. Jim Shaw, who was the Realty Specialist,

then looked into it and found out that they belonged to the

county for back taxes. So Jim went to the County

Commissioners. They said the islands were of no value to them

and we could have them. That’s how easy you could do things

in those days! Yeah! So we acquired the Lewis and Clark

Refuge just as simple as that! The only stipulation was that they

remain open to hunting. We weren’t buying them, so we

weren’t under this restriction to have part of it closed to hunting.

Another thing that happened was that Bob Twist, who was

Manager at Willapa had flown the Oregon coast and taken a

number of good photographs showing the seabird colonies there.

Then, Ray Glahn and I started flying it. We saw that there was

a lot more to the offshore bird rocks than the existing Three

Arch Rocks and Goat Island refuges. So we inventoried the sea

birds on the offshore rocks and determined that they were still

public lands under BLM. We went to BLM and asked if we

could withdraw them. They said, “Fine, have at ‘em!” There

were no environmental impact statements; no public hearings

and they were transferred to FWS.

This is what frustrates me today with what the people have to go

through and put up with. That’s how we added all the larger

rocks to the Oregon Islands Refuge. There was nothing to that.

I learned about Ledbetter Point, now a part of the Willapa

Refuge; Ledbetter is an extension of the Long Beach peninsula.

It constituted accreted land. Sand had built up in that area over

the years so it was government, BLM land. From some of my

Audubon friends in Seattle, Washington, I learned about this

area and what a great area it was for brant and shore birds. So I

thought that we ought to get that into the Refuge System. We

ran into a roadblock, which was the State Parks Department.

They had their eyes on it. The RD and I went up and saw the

Parks Director. He had a grandiose plan to put a hotel on

Ledbetter Point plus campgrounds, riding stables and all kinds

of great things for public use. The Audubon Society in Seattle

got wind of that. And the Portland Audubon Society did too. I

led a joint field trip for the two Audubon groups to Ledbetter

Point. By working together we managed to beat the state out on

acquiring that area. But in so doing, I got virtually a reprimand

from the Regional Director. He was very, very unhappy with

me because he was going by a letter from the Secretary that said

we ought to get along with our sister State agencies. He wanted

to make things peaceful and let the state have the area, so they

could do what they wanted to with it.

MR. GROVER: Who was the RD at that time?

MR. MARSHALL: It was John Findlay.

MR. MARSHALL: That’s another story. There’s a lot of good

things about John Findlay. But he was very unhappy that I

created this stir by encouraging the Audubon groups to work the

political ropes to get that area into the Refuge System.

MR. GROVER: Were relations between the FWS and the State

generally good at this time?

MR. MARSHALL: They were better by that time. When John

Findlay and I went to see the State Parks Director, we also went

to see John Biggs the Director of the Washington [State] Game

Department. John Biggs said that he was with us, but he

couldn’t say anything [publicly].

MR. GROVER: Did you have good relations with Oregon too?

MR. MARSHALL: Fair, but it got better as time went on. So

anyway, we got Ledbetter Point. I got into trouble and then a

letter came from John Gottschalk complementing us on what

we’d accomplished. He also said, in effect, that sometimes

things work out fine when there is controversy. So I was, I felt,

exonerated at that point. Nothing more was said. Ledbetter

Point became part of the Williapa Refuge.

12

Alaska became part of the region at that point. I was sent to

Alaska a number of different times, more so than anybody else

in the Regional Office. It was kind of rough duty up there.

There was a lot of camping and most of the people in the office

didn’t want to do that. Two of the trips were to look at the

situation with Musk Ox in Alaska. That’s a long story, I don’t

know if I want to go into it. But it ended up with Musk Ox

being transplanted back to the wild in Alaska. It was very

interesting to be on the Artic Slope in the middle of winter. It

was a great experience.

Hawaii was a forgotten place. We had nobody in Hawaii. Dick

Griffith, in the 1960’s, finally got a contract with Hawaii Fish

and Game to oversee the Hawaiian Islands Refuge. It hadn’t

been visited by anybody in the FWS since 1923. So I was sent

out to review the situation in about 1963. The military was out

there tracking some of the first satellites and they had four of

five men camped on various islands in the Refuge. The state

was rightfully concerned because they were bringing in plant

propagules such as seeds in their gear which could get started

on the fragile islands . Examples included dandelions, potatoes,

onions, and who knows what else. The state had no influence

over the military so they said we should send somebody out to

look at the situation. Any type of duty like this seemed to go to

me, which made me happy. The Navy took us out to the refuge

with a LST and helicopter aboard. The Navy was servicing the

military people there too. I’ve got a lot of great pictures from

that trip. With two state biologists, I inventoried the wildlife on

a number of the islands. We camped out on Laysan Island for

five days. It was quite an adventure. I came back and

recommended that we put a FWS employee in Hawaii. We

selected Gene Kridler, who succeeded me a Malheur. He went

out there then as chief law enforcement officer, Refuge Manager

and everything else. Kridler did a tremendous job starting FWS

activities in Hawaii. Eventually more refuges in Hawaii came

about.

One thing that I know my bosses did not always appreciate was

my working with some of the conservation groups like the

Audubon Society. It was okay if they thought I was doing the

right thing, but sometimes they didn’t appreciate it, like on the

Willapa issue. As now, I worked a lot with Portland Audubon’s

board and conservation committee, which sought my biological

expertise. In fact I was on their Board during all of this time in

Portland. We got some things done by just going around the

FWS. Some of my bosses were not too happy about that. I

suppose some of that goes on now, I don’t know, but it got

things done. In 1972 I authored a small book published by the

Audubon Society of Portland. It was titled Familiar Birds of

Northwest Forests, Fields and Gardens, and came out in 1973.

At least 20,000 copies of the book were sold.

In the early 1960s, Fred Evenden, Executive Director of The

Wildlife Society, came to John McKeen, Director of the then

Oregon Game Commission. Dean Marriage of the Soil

Conservation Service and me were urging the formation of a

state chapter of The Wildlife Society. It hinged on the state

since they had by far the greatest number of members. John

turned the idea down, saying the state legislature would not go

for paying for meeting attendance. A few months later John

came up with the idea of classifying an annual state meeting of

the society a training conference for his biologists and

managers. A chapter was formed. John was the first President

and I was the second. This state chapter is now one of the most

active in the country. It helped bring state and federal biologists

together. I subsequently served as President of the Northwest

section of the Society.

During this period, the Forest Service proposed an interagency

committee to designate research natural areas on federal lands in

OR and WA. I was designated to represent FWS. We set up

several such areas on national wildlife refuges in the region,

including three at Finley Refuge. The National Park Service

declined to participate.

In the fall of 1971, I was invited to substitute for one term for

Stan Harris, a wildlife professor at Humboldt State College.

Stan was going on sabbatical and it was the policy of the college

to find someone who was active in our field to serve as a

replacement. The fact that I did not have a graduate degree did

not matter. I received permission to take leave from the FWS

during the spring term of 1972 to teach at Humboldt. I taught a

class in waterfowl management, conducted field trips for an

ornithology class and handled a seminar. It turned out to be a

very rewarding assignment.

I was of course in the regional office during the height of the

Job Corps program. When the Malheur job corps station closed,

Bob Russell, Ass’t Refuge Supervisor in charge of Oregon and

Washington refuges, was anxious to see it declared surplus so

properties used by the station could be declared surplus and

distributed as needed to other refuges. He also looked at the

facility as administrative “headache” and should be demolished.

I disputed that, having been well aware of the need for housing

and eating facilities for the numerous school and conservation

groups which visited Malheur. The lack of such facilities other

than the old CCC mess hall was a problem while I was there. I

gained support for my position from Eleanor Pruitt, former

manager of the Frenchglen Hotel, who fed many univerisity

groups their evening meals at virtually no cost. Eleanor had

since become librarian for Mt. Hood College. I went around my

good friend Bob Russell to the regional administrative officer,

Henry Beatkey. Henry was very education oriented and when

he found we could not turn the facility over to a university by

one manual, he looked in another which said it would be OK.

Thus the Malheur Field Station was born. It was managed by a

consortium of colleges and universities. But the station director

appointed by the consortium was a disaster for Malheur. He

was an extreme environmentalist who wrote Scared Cows at the

Public Trough. Locally we still have not overcome the public

relations problems he brought on. However, we can be proud of

the station’s role overall.

Also during this assignment, the Endangered Species

Preservation Act of 1966 and the subsequent Endangered

Species Conservation Act of 1969 were passed. John Aldrich, a

Service employee at the U.S. National Museum and world

famous ornithologist headed up the preparation of the

endangered bird species lists for these Acts. When it came to

western birds he relied in part on me so I had a part with the first

13

endangered species lists. What I am proud of is the fact that no

bird got listed which should not have been, despite a fact we did

not have all the information that would have been desirable

MR. MARSHALL: The next thing is my transfer to the

Washington office. I was getting to feeling like dead wood in

Refuges in the Regional Office. Apparently I wasn’t that

popular. I felt like the Regional Refuge Supervisor at that time

pushed me aside. I was told later he was jealous of my

knowledge of the region. So I had to do something. My

children were long out of high school by then and I did finally

agree to go to the Washington Office to work in the Office of

Endangered Species, a topic, which very much interested me. I

went to work under a man named Gene Ruhr whose boss was

Keith Schreiner. I thought a lot of both of them and. got along

very well. I started out as being responsible for listing birds and

mammals.

MR. GROVER: Had you been promoted again by this time?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, I got promoted to a GS-13. So I was

in the Office of Endangered Species. It was officially called the

Office of Endangered Species and Foreign Activities. There

was about a half a dozen of us. The pitch then was that the

Regional Offices weren’t competent to handle endangered

species. Endangered Species programs should be handled

strictly by Washington, which I disagreed with very much,

having come from a Regional Office. We were overwhelmed

with work. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed at

the beginning of my assignment. I tell you, the workload was

just way too much. All kinds of things didn’t get done that

should have been done. We just didn’t have the necessary

staffing.

MR. GROVER: Did you supervise staff?

MR. MARSHALL: No, Keith Schreiner was there to start with.

Gene Ruhr was in charge of domestic stuff. Then there was a

foreign activities chief. We had just about half a dozen

professionals in the office – all very capable people.

MR. GROVER: You weren’t divided organizationally with a

branch of listing and a branch of recovery for example?

MR. MARSHALL: Well, yes in a sense. I was in charge of

listing domestic birds and mammals at the Washington office to

start with. A representative of the timber industry visited me

about every week over the spotted owl. At this point I was in a

quandary over the owl. I felt that if preventative measures were

not taken it was going to have to be listed. Schreiner sent me

out to talk to BLM and Forest Service people in Portland. I

couldn’t get those people to listen at all. It was just like, “You

mean the spotted owl could stop the timber industry? To hell

with you”! That was the attitude. The Forest Service and BLM

biologists could see the light, but they couldn’t get through to

their bosses.

MR. GROVER: When was that Dave?

MR. MARSHALL: That would have been in 1974. I had this

dilemma. I really felt that this owl should be listed. But it was a

political decision partly. I knew that if we listed it, it would

probably mean the end of the Endangered Species Act at that

point. The timber industry was so strong. The other concern

was that I was afraid they could beat it because we still really

didn’t have enough biological information on the owl to make a

really ironclad case. So that disturbed me as much as anything.

I knew we just didn’t have the demographic information that we

needed to make a really good case. We also did not have data

on home range size. The spotted owl was an issue that I really

lost sleep over. What was the right thing to do?

They reorganized the Office of Endangered Species and then I

headed up the recovery operations. I became the staff officer

responsible for recovery. Schreiner and Ruhr came up with the

idea of recovery teams and recovery plans. So this meant

writing up guidelines for both. I subsequently went around the

country conducting workshops for federal, state and academic

people on how to prepare Recovery Plans. By that time the

office had grown with some very capable biologists.

MR. GROVER: Was there a focus at that time on a particular

species?

MR. MARSHALL: Of course we had trouble with what we

called the ‘glamour species’. Everybody wanted to spend our

money on bald eagles, wolves, the condor, the peregrine falcon

and the like. That was a constant problem. Bald eagles and

wolves in a way saved the Act as we got ridiculed for wanting to

list non game fishes, amphibians and some plants like the

furbish lousewort.

MRS. GROVER: And whooping cranes?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, whooping cranes were a big thing too.

We called them all ‘glamour species’. But wolves and the bald

eagle “saved the day.” The timber industry sponsored a bill in

Congress to exclude subspecies. That way we’d have to drop

the spotted owl because the listing of it would have been for

only the northern subspecies. Then it was pointed out that the

bald eagle, wolves and peregrine falcons at the time were listed

as subspecies. For example, the gray wolf was listed only in the

U.S. outside Alaska. I had frustrations with the Secretary’s

office. There was a guy in that office named Amos Eno. Have

you ever heard of him?

MR. GROVER: Oh yes.

MR. MARSHALL: He worked for Nat Reed , Interior’s

Assistant. Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. He was

Nat Reed’s right hand wildlife guy. Nat Reed and Dillon

Ripley, who was head of the Smithsonian, had lunch

periodically. I always knew when they had lunch because I’d

get a call from Amos. He’d say to put so and so, and so and so,

on a recovery team. They were usually people we knew. Some

of them were trouble makers and we knew they couldn’t work

with people. He would also say to get this or that species listed.

I’d get all of these instructions from Amos. Then I’d go to

Keith and ask him, “What am I going to do”? Keith would say,

14

“Just forget about it, it will die”! That’s exactly what would

happen…the next thing you know Amos was on to something

else. But it was kind of frustrating.

MRS. GROVER: When Amos was heading up the Fish &

Wildlife Foundation, when it began, I didn’t have good feelings

about the Foundation. I do now. But it took a long time to

make it feel good. I just felt that they were against us rather

than with us. They were supposed to be helping us.

.

MR. MARSHALL: I just didn’t get along with Amos. I was

also disappointed with a decision by Assistant Secretary Nat

Reed who reversed a decision by our office to list the California

sea otter. I maintained the population was stable and we had

higher priorities. When asked why he took this action, his

response was the he promised Margaret Owings we would list it.

Ms. Owings was a strong proponent for the California sea otter.

I also opposed the listing of the grizzly bear, feeling that the

states had it in hand.

When I went to the Washington Office, Keith Schreiner told me

that if I couldn’t take the Washington Office, eventually he

would try to get me back to Portland, assuming he still had a

position to do so. That was part of the condition of my

employment there. When I told him that I had had enough, he

would see if he could get me a job back in Portland. Well after

four or five years, I went to him and said that I had had enough.

He said, “Okay”. And he contacted Kahler Martinson. Kahler

by that time had become the Regional Director in Portland. He

had been Assistant Director for Migratory Bird Management in

Washington. I don’t know what went on there, but they said I

could go back to be in charge of Endangered Species in

Portland. I don’t know if the job was even advertised. I don’t

know how it was arranged. But I had the Washington office

experience that was required. Kahler wanted me, and Keith

wanted to see me in that job and that’s what happened. The

person who was handling it was Phil Lehenbauer. Phil was a

good friend of mine. In fact, he was the first Refuge Manager

for Finley NWR. I helped put him there. He worked under me

as a student trainee at Malheur. I thought the world of Phil, and

here I was kind of taking his job. But he knew that he wasn’t

going to get that job permanently because he didn’t have

Washington office experience. Phil accepted the situation, and

was really a deputy to me in a way. He handled all of the

administrative and budgetary stuff that I didn’t like handling. I

liked handling the policy stuff and the Section 7 consultations

and so forth. Phil and I were a real team and I had an excellent

working relationship with him. I also felt highly of the Regional

Director, Kahler Martinson and his deputy, Bill Meyer.

MR. GROVER: Can you clarify the layout of the organization

at this point?

MR. MARSHALL: The organization was that Endangered

Species was a separate entity. It was under the Assistant

Regional Director for Federal Aid, who was Ed Chamberlain.

So an Assistant Director had Federal Aid and Endangered

Species at that time. I’m glad you asked that because I know

it’s different now. We built up a staff comprised of Phil

Lehenbauer, a botanist, a recovery plan person, a section 7

person plus secretarial help. We had a good organization there

with Endangered Species. We probably had more Section 7

consultations than all of the other regions combined. I know we

did. We probably had as many listed species as all of the other

regions combined and yet we couldn’t get much relief from the

budget standpoint to do what needed to be done. Each RD was

interested in getting his share of the pie when it came to

dividing it up. There’s not a lot to say about that. There was no

such thing as HCPs at that point. We were mostly involved with

listings, recovery plans and Section 7 consultations.

MR. GROVER: Was the spotted owl listed by this time?

MR. MARSHALL: No, we looked at that again with the same

dilemma. It became pretty evident by the time I left that we

were going to have to list it, but then the Service turned it down.

I retired in 1981 from the FWS.

MR. GROVER: What about the condor? They had been listed

by that time.

MR. MARSHALL: Oh yes. It was brought in under the 1973

act.

MR. GROVER: And you were working on the recovery plan?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and I did a lot with the condor in fact,

way before the Endangered Species Act. I went down and

looked at the condor situation because there was a proposed

dam that would affect the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. That was

way before the 1973 Act. When you really look back on it, we

were involved with endangered species issues from the time of

the National Bison Range early in the last century. People don’t

realize that. The Red Rocks Lake Refuge for trumpeter swans

too. J. Clark Salyer always used to say, “If it ever looks like

there is a species in danger, that’s our first priority.”

MR. GROVER: This was before the Act defined what an

endangered or threatened species was.

MR. MARSHALL: Yes! We realized our responsibility there.

There’s not a lot to say about my last few years in the Regional

Office. By that time, we had this complicated thing for

evaluating performance ratings that really bothered me. Setting

performance standards and performance ratings you’d sit down

with the most dedicated person and they would want to put more

things down to do for their year than they could possibly do.

Then you had to turn around and rate them on how much they

got done. I thought it was very unfair. I had to really pull some

people back on what expectations for themselves were, or they

would come out with a poor rating. That took so much

paperwork that it really bothered me. I was 55, and I had well

over thirty years of Federal service considering my time with

the Forest Service, Park Service and military.

So that’s when I quit…and I could see the Reagan

administration coming along so that’s the time I decided to bow

out, on my birthday. It was March 7, 1981. That was the end of

my FWS career. I was handicapped through a number of these

years in that my wife turned into a mental case, and refused

15

treatment. It was a terrible personal situation. I thought that

maybe things would be better if I was home with her, which

they weren’t. That was another factor.

MRS. GROVER: This was Betty?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes. It was really sad when you’ve got a

loved one who just won’t admit that there is anything wrong. It

was really difficult. It was hard on me all of the time that I was

in Washington because of that. And it was hard on my children.

I didn’t realize how hard it was on them.

MRS. GROVER: So your family accompanied you when you

went to Washington?

MR. MARSHALL: Not the children, but she did. She actually

loved it. She really did. But she had a period where she

couldn’t do anything but sit in the bedroom. She maintained

there was nothing wrong with her. She has passed away now.

MRS. GROVER: Let’s talk about your two children for a

minute. You had a boy and a girl, born in Fallon, NV. What are

they doing now?

MR. MARSHALL: The boy is a professional outdoor

photographer. He is very successful in knowing what people

want in outdoor pictures and what he can sell. He’s also put out

four coffee table books. One is lying over there. They are state

books like the one that Ray Atkinson did for Oregon with the

same publisher. He’s done three Washington ones and an Idaho

one. He married in later years to a lady who had three teenage

sons. With my son, she had triplets that are two and a half years

old. So I have my first grandchildren, who are triplets! They

are a handful! They live in Wenatchee, Washington. He got

interested in photography at Malheur when he was a little boy.

And I got him a camera; a complicated one. He right away

learned how to use it and started taking pictures. Of course

there was a world of opportunity of things to photograph. He’s

quite a naturalist. He majored in Fisheries at OSU, but he ended

up as a professional photographer. He got a master’s at the

University of Idaho.

My daughter is a businessperson. By the time she was twenty,

she was co-owner of a bicycle shop in downtown Portland, right

at SW 12th and Morrison Streets. Now, she is in the

international banking business and lives just out of Hanover,

New Hampshire. She does consulting work on international

banking for big international banking firms where they want to

review practices of various foreign banks, particularly in third

world countries. She goes to those banks and sees what their

practices are and how they have to change in order to be loaned

money by the big banks. She also buys houses, fixes them up

and sells them.

Raising children at Sacramento and Malheur Refuges was a

mixed bag. This was when they were between 2 and 10 years

old. I already mentioned the sub-standard housing, school

problems and lack of other children for playmates; but there

were positives. FWS was at that time very family oriented. I

have reason to believe it came from the Gabrielson era. I was

free to take my family with me on field trips so long as it did not

mean extra government expense. Son John liked to go out on

Malheur Lake with me in the airboat, and daughter Janet

especially liked to go with me when I conducted field trips for

visitors, especially college classes. She got to be pretty good at

bird identification, and as soon as a group in a car caravan

recognized this she would be invited to ride in a car with some

of the students. When Ray Glahn flew in for aerial waterfowl

surveys, one or both of them would go along. It got to be such

common place with them that when asked if they wanted to go

on a flight, sometimes it would be yes and other times no. I

can’t imagine such occurrences now. Being at Malheur also

allowed us to have a horse for the children.

MRS. GROVER: Don’t you have a new wife now?

MR. MARSHALL: Oh yes. My wife, Georgia, is a former high

school sweetheart. She and I went together in high school.

After the death of my first wife, and the loss of Georgia’s

husband; we got married a year ago last August, 1999. I was

very close to her parents. Her maiden name is Leupold.

Leupold and Stevens Instruments in Beaverton is owned by her

family. They are still the owners of it. The company is well

known by hunters for the rifle scopes it manufactures.

I think I’ve pointed out that we had some top biologists in the

FWS at the upper levels; Ira Gabrielson and J. Clark Salyer are

two examples. But many of the people I was working under

early in my career were not trained professional biologists.

They were kind of jealous of people with college degrees. They

were more interested in seeing facility upkeep on refuges. They

were very interested in animal damage control. That was a big

thing along with law enforcement and eventually hatcheries.

But with the people I worked for in refuges, it was a lot more

important how a station looked…your performance rating was

based on whether you had the buildings painted and whether the

lawn was cut and the garden hose was coiled up. That’s how

your performance was rated in Kenneth MacDonald’s eyes. The

cleanliness of the windshields on the trucks was important too;

not how much you attracted in terms of wildlife. This was a

frustration to me at an early time. Engineering, as I said, was

very strong. The pitch was that if you got money to build more

dikes and water control structures you could stabilize water

levels. Non-professional people then were really the ones in

charge. The last thing they wanted was people with Ph.D.s it

seemed like, although Ray Erickson was an exception. They

were afraid Ph.D.s wouldn’t want to get out there and work at

all. So graduate degrees were not encouraged at all.

I mentioned the problems in getting anything in the way of

equipment that the biologists needed. All they thought we

needed was a pickup, a notebook and some binoculars. On the

plus side, I am so happy with the funding today, in the FWS.

People don’t realize how tough it was then. For example, the

Refuge Manager in Sacramento, who preceded Vernon Ekedahl,

wouldn’t let the employees use the refuge shop. He wouldn’t

even let them pump up the air in their car tires because he said

that was air pumped at government expense. They were

extremely tight in Refuges with money in those days. To go on

a trip, your per diem was looked at very closely. A lot of people

16

went on their own. The housing was horrible on Refuges. I see

a lot that has changed to the good, including salaries.

I remember when I was at the Sacramento Refuge some Civil

Service auditors came in. They went over my job and audited it.

I think I was a GS-7 then. According to their audit, I should

have been an “11”, because I was working in a field without any

immediate supervision. That was common. You’d have

Managers that were in charge of small refuges who were GS 5s.

We didn’t really see a change in this until the 1960s. J. Clark

Salyer, said one day, “Hold salaries down. That way we’ll only

get the most dedicated people!” That was his policy. In a way,

he had a point. He did get dedicated people. They helped make

up for low salaries some by charging very little for housing on

refuges, but this later caught up with the FWS when GSA

discovered housing was not being charged for at going rates.

MR. GROVER: What grade would a GS-5 then, be

comparable to today in your mind? Do you think it would be a

GS-11?

MR. MARSHALL: Sometimes, yes.

MR. GROVER: GS-11 is defined as the full professional level,

in other words, with a Bachelor’s degree.

MR. MARSHALL: That’s what it was according to this audit.

But I was a GS-7.

MR. GROVER: But you hadn’t seen that yet?

MR. MARSHALL: I just learned that when the auditors

showed up. Of course, FWS didn’t do anything about it.

Money was so tight. I’ve seen tremendous change there.

Obviously, the downside of things I see going on today is all of

the regulatory hoops. As much as I like NEPA and the

principles behind it, I can’t help but see the insurmountable

amount of time involved with NEPA documents, public

hearings, and so forth. I gave the example of how easy it was to

acquire some of these refuges, like the Lewis and Clark Refuge,

when you didn’t have all of these roadblocks put in front of you.

I felt that morale was generally very high in the Refuge Division in

those early days, despite the low salaries and poor housing

conditions. We just had people who were really dedicated to what

we were doing. There was little thought given to the forty hour

week in the field. I mean, if you had to get up and run a waterfowl

brood count at five in the morning, you did. There wasn’t always

time off, and certainly no compensation for the extra time. There

was a lot of work to be done on weekends. On the other hand,

John Scharff’s philosophy was, ‘well, if you want to go fishing in

the middle of the day, go!’ He was always running into a problem

when the auditors would come down from Portland. He liked to

tell the story about one of his maintenance men. He and the

auditor went were out on the refuge around noon and found one of

the maintenance men fishing. The auditor said, “He shouldn’t be

here, he’s supposed to be working!” So John asked the man, “Joe

what time did you get up this morning?” Joe answered, “Five

o’clock.” Then he asked him what he did at that hour, and Joe ran

off a bunch of details involving taking care of refuge horses and

irrigating fields. The auditor got the point.

MR. GROVER: Earlier you said that you focused in on the

USFWS. Why not the Park Service, the Forest Service or the

state?

MR. MARSHALL: I had done work for the Forest Service in the

Fremont National Forest. They had maybe one biologist during

my last year. There just weren’t the opportunities there in terms of

jobs at that time. I didn’t see in the Forest Service where I’d have

much opportunity.

With respect to going into the Park Service’s Naturalist Program, I

had worked for Crater Lake NP one summer. I found that they

were a terrible bureaucracy next to the Forest Service. They were

very bureaucratic. I even had to sign my name to check a shovel

out of the supply house! That was clear back in 1948. I didn’t

like the looks of that at all. And really, the FWS was doing the

things that I was most interested in. With the state fish and

wildlife agencies; when I went to work at Stillwater, I got

acquainted with a number of state people in Nevada. I found out

that the Director of Nevada Fish and Game was going to hire me,

but the FWS offered me a position first. So that’s how I ended up,

but I could have gone with the State of Nevada at the time.

MRS. GROVER:. Don’t forget to tell about your musk ox story!

MR. GROVER: Lets change gears a bit. I would like to get some

of your career story’s and reminiscences. How about starting off

with some memories? What about the cranes?

MR. MARSHALL: When I was in Washington, the President at

the time was first Nixon and then Ford. During Ford’s service, the

Emperor of Japan paid a State visit to the U.S. Of course, I didn’t

get to see the Emperor but people in the National Aquarium did.

They were very impressed with him because he was a Marine

Biologist. He brought with him, as a State gift to the U. S., a

bunch of exotic carp that are popular in Japan. They were going

to be put at the National Aquarium. It was a big collection of all

kinds of exotic carp. So this meant that President Ford had to give

a gift in return. Knowing that cranes are revered in Japan, a

decision was made by the Washington office to donate to the

Emperor, a pair of sandhill cranes from North America.

Hal O’Connor was selected to do the honor of taking those cranes

to Japan. For some reason, he couldn’t go and I was picked at the

last minute to take the cranes to Japan. I got them from Ray

Erickson out at Patuxent. Ray gave me instructions. He said

they’ll be fine just as long as they don’t get overheated. We had to

get all of the government passports and other papers in just a

matter of hours. Wayne Bohl was in the Washington office and

did a lot of foreign activities. He knew how to go through

Customs and get me all of the stuff I needed instantly. Otherwise,

they said it would have taken several days. The next thing I knew

I was at the airport with two sandhill cranes in crates. I got on a

Northwest Airlines plane, and the cranes were in the hold. I made

sure that the temperature was right. They kept assuring me that it

was okay. We left Washington, D.C. The crew had been given

instructions about why I was along and what an important mission

17

I was on. They were told, ‘Whatever you do, don’t foul up again!’

It turned out that the airline had transported the carp and about

half of them died because they messed up by not giving them

proper oxygen or something. Anyway, when we got to Chicago

everything was fine. I checked on the cranes and went on to

Anchorage. The airline people kept saying, “Well, I hope you

make it okay.” I thought to myself that something was screwy.

When we got to Anchorage, they announced that we couldn’t fly

on to Tokyo. The aircraft didn’t have the duel radios for over-water

travel. One of them was broken. They knew that in

Washington, D. C. They knew it in Chicago. They were passing

the buck to Anchorage to fix it. So my thoughts of Northwest

went down right then. I thought, ‘what am I going to do? I’ve got

these cranes here!”

MR. GROVER: Rent a motel room!

MRS. GROVER: For two cranes!

MR. MARSHALL: The hotel rooms in Anchorage were nearly

filled up. I got stuck in a room with somebody that I didn’t even

know. I said, “What are we going to do with the cranes?! The

airline told me they could put them in the Pilot’s Lounge and give

me the key. About two in the morning, I woke up and wondered

what the temperature was in that Pilot’s Lounge. I neglected to

check it. Ray told me, “Whatever you do, don’t let them get too

warm”. So I got a taxi and went out to the Pilot’s Lounge and

found the cranes were fine. They knew me by then, and

everything looked good.

So twenty-four hours later we checked in on to the next flight in to

Tokyo. The Japanese were rather put out that we were twenty-four

hours late. But it was an interesting trip. Northwest put me

in first class, even though my ticket wasn’t for that. The ground

crew opened the door of the plane in Tokyo, and the guy says,

“We want man with cranes first!” I heard him say that because I

was in first class, right by the door. So they put me off on the

tarmac and they were supposed to leave those cranes alone until I

got there. But they had already moved them from the hold. This

was kind of worrisome to me. What if those cranes were to die?

But it turned out they were fine. And they put them in a police

paddy wagon. They had a police escort for the cranes.

The Ambassador’s representative met me in an American made

car and we went through the streets of Tokyo with this entourage

of police motorcycles and the cranes. We took them to the Zoo.

Then of course they said, “We know you must be tired, but we

want to have a press conference”. The Japanese being what they

are; the first thing they asked me was, “How old are you”? The

second question was, “How many years have you worked for the

FWS”? The State Department had given me a special title. It was

really a high title. It wasn’t real! It was an interesting experience.

The Public Affairs office in Washington made a real boo boo.

They named the cranes “Martha” and “George.” This just didn’t

go over with the Japanese at all!

It was kind of up to me as to how long I stayed because they

provided a guide for me, an assistant from the Zoo. They were

going to wine and dine me and take me sightseeing for just as long

as I stayed there. It was up to the Ambassador to formerly donate

the cranes to the Emperor. He was going to do that after they were

out of quarantine. It was a fun trip.

MR. GROVER: But the bottom line is; were they okay when you

left Japan? Good old, tough Sand Hills.

MR. MARSHALL: They were okay. I never heard anything

more about the cranes! I did my job!

MR. GROVER: Did you get to fly back first class?

MR. MARSHALL: I don’t remember. I think I did. It was

Christmas time and I flew back to Portland. The family came out

too.

MR. GROVER: Let’s talk about your photography. You were

showing me one of your books, Wild Sanctuaries. There are a

number of others like, Birds in Our Lives and what else?

MR. MARSHALL: And Waterfowl Tomorrow. The later two are

both USFWS publications.

MR. GROVER: And these are pictures that you took when you

were working for FWS?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes. Those books are around here. I

continually had a call for photographs. I never got any money for

them because the FWS manual said there were questions about

whose time were taken on – my time versus Service time.

Furthermore, they argued that the pictures were taken because of

my knowledge that I had gained out of the FWS. So, I never got a

dime for photographs.

MRS. GROVER: Tell us about the Musk Ox.

MR. MARSHALL: Okay, the Musk Ox in Alaska. Going back

into history; in the 1930s the FWS imported some Musk Oxen

from Greenland. They had become extirpated in Alaska. So they

picked some up in Greenland. They were transported all the way

to Fairbanks where they raised them on a kind of a farm. Well,

the money ran out and the musk oxen were barged over to

Nunivak Island. I asked Gabrielson about it years later and he said

that they just didn’t know what else to do. They didn’t have the

money to handle and take care of them so they dumped them off

on that island which is out in the Bering Sea.

Those musk oxen grew to a herd of about six or seven hundred.

Nunivak Island was not their natural habitat. Their natural habitat

is a dry, desert like Arctic climate with very little snow. This

island had heavy snowfall something like the Pacific Northwest

Cascades. The only forage the musk oxen had during the winter

was in a dune area where the snow would blow off and expose the

grass. The oxen were over eating their range. There were too

many of them for the amount of winter forage that was available.

The FWS proposed a hunting season on them. All hell broke

loose then about the idea that it would be just as easy as going out

and shooting a cow; which is about right. Governor Wally Hickel

was in on that too. He was totally against it because the public

was against it.

18

We had a real problem of how to handle the musk oxen. What we

wanted to do was to be able to move a bunch of them to the Arctic

Slope and other areas where they were originally present in Alaska

before extirpation. But moving animals of that weight would be

tremendously costly. There was no money to accomplish this and

it turned into a public relations issue. I think John Gottschalk and

I know John Findlay were involved; they contacted the Director of

the Canadian Wildlife Service, John Tenner, to advise us on the

situation. John Tenner, it turned out, did his thesis on the musk

ox. Even though he was the Director of the Canadian Wildlife

Service he wanted to go on this trip himself. There was an

entourage then of John Tenner, myself and the Refuge Staff. We

toured Nunivak Island, which is about fifty by sixty miles with an

Eskimo guide. We toured partly by boat. We looked at the range

conditions. John Tenner said that he wanted to look at it in the

winter. He also wanted to see the area that was proposed for them

to be transplanted to. We went back in the winter, and went up to

the Arctic Slope. We saw conditions there, which according to

John Tenner, were very favorable for musk oxen. There were

none there of course.

Then we went back to Nunivak Island and looked at it under

winter conditions. We went all over the island using snowmobiles

and camped out with an Eskimo guide. He was a tremendous

guide. He was wonderful. They are great people, those Eskimos.

They found out it was my birthday and they baked a cake for me!

By then the issue had gotten big enough that the money did come

forth to do a transplant. I don’t remember if it was a special

appropriation or if Hickel got it, but National Guard aircraft were

used. They got the money to transplant a bunch of the musk oxen

from Nunivak Island to the Arctic Slope up near Nome. It was a

successful endeavor although it could have been done a lot easier

without all of the PR expense. So that’s the musk ox story.

After I retired from FWS, I wanted to work with my hands for

about a year and rebuilt part of the house. But then, I started

doing contract work. I was disturbed by the non-game program of

the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODF&W). It was

aimless. Somebody could issue a proposal, get a positive

response, and there were no objectives. I complained about this

and said that I’d like to write up a plan. The proposal didn’t go

anywhere for awhile. Finally, I spoke to Phil Snyder about it. He

had been one of the Commissioners for a long time. I told him

about the problem as I saw it. The next thing I knew the ODFW

Deputy Director called me in and told me that they wanted to go

ahead with drawing up a non-game plan. This was months later.

They said, “We want to prepare a set of goals and objectives and a

strategic plan” for the non-game program of Oregon Department

of Fish and Wildlife.

I did this and it was presented as a paper at the North American

National Wildlife Conference as the first of it’s kind. Later, we

updated it. I did status reports on potentially endangered or

threatened species. I did these partly for the Audubon Society of

Portland. One of them was on the Marbled Murrelet. Audubon

used it as a basis for the petition to list the Marbled Murrelet as a

threatened species, which did come about. I was pretty much

responsible for ODFW’s Species at Risk and all of their write-ups

on endangered species. I also did some work for commercial

firms; writing part of EISs on some projects like highway

widening and so forth. But the satisfaction really came from

doing contract work for the Audubon Society of Portland and

ODFW. I also taught an introductory course in wildlife

management at Portland State University for two terms. It filled

each time offered and at least two of my students became

professionals in the field.

Subsequently, I had a major health problem, which is why I’m so

short now; or shorter than I was. When I saw that I was going to

be okay, I started to work on this, Birds of Oregon: A General

Reference. I have been working on it for a couple of years now.

MR. GROVER: Did you intend that this book be a kind of follow

up to what Gabrielson did back in 1940?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes. I kind of had it in the back of my mind,

starting back in 1940. I thought to myself, “This is going to have

to be redone some day”. I would have liked to have done it much

sooner, but there was never an opportunity where I could afford

the time and money to do it. This is a project that I have wanted to

do for a good part of my life.

MR. GROVER: The topic of Ira Gabrielson?

MR. MARSHALL: My contact with Ira Gabrielson started when I

was a baby in arms according to my father. I don’t remember him

as a child. But as history shows, he was Regional Director here,

for FWS or the Bureau of Biological Survey, I should say. At that

time most of the BBS work was devoted to predatory animal and

rodent control, refuges, and some research type activities. “Gabe”

was RD and prior to that he was in charge of rodent control.

Stanley Jewett was in charge of predatory animal control. Their

salaries weren’t much in those days, and Gabe was very much

interested in alpine plants. He put out a book, Alpine Flowers, and

he also had a nursery out near Powell Butte, which I have a

brochure for here somewhere. Here, he raised alpine plants for

gardens as kind of a sideline to supplement his meager salary. He

made his mark as being an excellent Regional Director. A lot of

this is in his memoirs. Ding Darling was of course the Director

appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. They brought Gabrielson back

to the Washington Office on a detail, so they said. But the detail

went on and on. Ding Darling called him in one day and

instructed him to report to his office. Gabe said he got there and

Ding Darling said, we’re going to see Harold Ickes”! Gabe said,

“I didn’t know what it was about!” He said that they went in there

and Ding Darling said that he wanted Gabe to be his successor.

“He knows all about this stuff, I don’t”. Gabe said that he was

speechless. He finally consented. Gabe told me how he regretted

the way things are done now. He said that Ickes told him that he

[Ickes] didn’t know anything about the fish and wildlife business

and that he wanted him to ‘just take care of it’. He said that if he

was to run into any problems to let him know, “but otherwise, it’s

yours”!

Gabe told me that there was no Assistant Secretary to deal with. If

he had to deal with anybody, he just went straight to Harold Ickes.

And he was free to deal with Congressmen. He said it was his to

run, and he just couldn’t get over the way it was when I was back

there. Our Director had to talk to the Assistant Secretary’s staff

19

and up through the Deputy Secretary and so forth. That’s what he

regretted most in terms of what has happened to FWS.

I really didn’t know Gabe as a child because he got transferred

out. He was active in the Audubon Society of Portland. I never

heard or saw much of him at all until he came to Malheur on some

kind of a visit. I told him who I was; Earl Marshall’s son. He

knew all about me, and he knew all about being friends with my

Dad. Then I didn’t run into him again until the GAO thing on the

Willamette Valley refuges. So again, I met him. Then when I got

accepted for the job in Washington, DC, he found out about it.

And like I said, I don’t know how he found out. That’s when he

made the phone call. But I remember one of my favorite things he

said to me when I got there; he was talking about the Presidential

election for Nixon. Maybe it’s out of turn to tell this because he

tried to be as non-partisan as possible. But he said, “It’s a hell of a

choice we had this time! We could vote for a crook, or a man that

didn’t have the executive ability to put together a wheel barrow

crew!” He was speaking of Nixon and McGovern.

He told me one day, “I knew all of the recent Presidents. I knew

Roosevelt real well. I knew Truman, and Eisenhower”. He went

on up the line to Nixon. He called him a ‘crook’ long before

Watergate. He said, “There’s only one of them that grew and that

was Truman. All of the rest of them just swelled”! Those are two

of the things I’ll always remember that Gabe told me. He seemed

to have a sense of what was going on all of the time. Watergate

was just starting to surface in the papers. He told me, “You just

wait! This is just the tip of the iceberg of what went on”! Sure

enough! I don’t know how he knew those things. He would go

into D.C. to the Cosmos Club, which he was a member of.

He gave me a lot of good advice. And living right near him for a

year and a half or so, I really got to know him. He didn’t want me

to knock on the door any more. It was too much trouble to get up.

But just hearing him tell about things in the political world and

how the Federal Aid Act got started and how they arrested Walter

P. Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation for a violation of the duck

hunting rules was interesting. Of course Chrysler appealed to

Roosevelt and Roosevelt backed Gabe up. He told me that this

was the beginning of game laws really meaning something. They

were no longer a joke. He sure kept up with things right up ‘til the

end.

MR. GROVER: Didn’t you tell me that he didn’t sleep much?

MR. MARSHALL: Oh yeah, that’s another part of the story. I

am glad you mentioned that, because he didn’t sleep much. He

was such a dynamic man and especially since he was heavy. He

was so energetic. But he liked to write. In his tours around the

country he only needed three or four hours of sleep a night, so

he’d write stories in hotel rooms. He had stories in all kinds of

sporting magazines that he wrote when he was Director, under a

pen name. The pen name was Spear, his wife’s maiden name. He

wrote hunting and fishing stories for magazines like Sports Afield

under this pen name. He also wrote a garden column for one of

the depression era magazines. He was a great gardener. He wrote

that under the pen name, “A. Amateur Farmer”. He had quite a

sense of humor and they were all humorous stories about what was

happening in his garden and how he got bit by the bees or one

thing and another. The bees got up his pants leg. Another one of

them was how a neighbor sold him some sting-less bees, and of

course how he found out that they weren’t sting-less. It was just

humor all of the time. When he was here in Portland he wrote for

the Oregon Motorist. One of the titles was “A Fat Man Climbs

Mount Hood”. He was a prolific writer, but so much of it wasn’t

under his real name. When he died, that stuff was in the house.

His nephew or grandson told me that this stuff had disappeared.

We don’t know what happened to it. His wife kept a scrapbook of

all of the things he wrote. These stories are not listed in his official

bibliography because he didn’t want it known that he wrote them.

MR. GROVER: But you have a copy of his diary?

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, his memoirs, which were taken from his

diary. He excerpted his diary to write these things. This is what it

looks like. [Marshall shows Mr. Grover the book].

MR. GROVER: It’s fairly thick and one of those legal sized….

MR. MARSHALL: Well, it’s legal sized with reduced type. Two

8.5x11 pages typed double spaced are reproduced on legal sized

paper as two columns. There is one of those on deposit at the

Gabrielson Library at Patuxent. So I made them aware of that.

MR. GROVER: You have the only other one?

MR. MARSHALL: Well, I think maybe his family has another.

The Wildlife Management Institute has one also, I suspect.

Milt Reeves and I wrote a piece on him that was in published in

The Auk. I think I have a copy it around here somewhere. But

that’s about all I have to say on Gabrielson. There’s no use

duplicating what’s in his memoirs. A lot of it is in there; except

for a description of his personality; he had a great sense of humor

and tremendous energy. Oh, there it is! Shrubs, Bulbs, Alpines,

and Rare Native Pants in Oregon Gardens. This is the flyer from

his business, from 1937.

MR. GROVER: That was his old sideline to supplement his

meager Regional Director’s pay.

MR. MARSHALL: Yes! I think Tom McAllister had the original

of that. That’s kind of a little interesting piece about him.

Ira Gabrielson told me one day that they wanted to have a chief of

the Wildlife Refuge System and they had picked the “best damned

aquatic biologist they could find”! It was J. Clark Salyer. Salyer

was shaped something like a pear. He was huge. And he always

ordered two meals at a restaurant; two helpings, not just one. But

he was also diabetic and ignored it. And he had tremendous

energy. He was a blonde, big guy, like I said. He didn’t like to

fly. So he would drive all over the country in his big black

government Buick. He would drive at night and visit refuges and

potential refuges during the day. They told me to do this too. I

could tell about that. That was his routine. He thought nothing of

testifying before Congress. He would completely bypass the

Director. They’d call him to testify on something, or he’d arrange

it so they’d call him. He was just a tremendous person in terms of

promoting refuges.

20

He was extremely knowledgeable and to me his mind was just like

a photograph. He wouldn’t forget where he had been and could

describe things in detail. He had this tremendous energy.

McDonald thought the world of him although Salyer didn’t think

that much of Mac. I know this because Mac was so fastidious. I

have to tell a story about the personalities of Kenneth McDonald

and Salyer. The Manager at the Charles M. Russell Wildlife

Range in Montana was a very fastidious guy too. This could be a

very dusty place. The Refuge Manager and Salyer were using

McDonald’s car. Salyer found out it was McDonald’s car and he

told the Refuge Manager, “That gives me an idea”! He hung

sagebrush from it and got it as dirty as he could possibly get it.

And the Refuge Manager kept saying, “I don’t think this is a good

idea, Mr. Salyer”! But it showed the personalities of the two. Of

course they took Mac’s car back all dirty and covered with dust.

Salyer was always kind of knocking him down for that.

Salyer just had such tremendous knowledge about the refuges and

a grasp of everything on them. He could remember the smallest of

details. He embarrassed me one day back in Washington. He

started asking me about whether or not the spike rush was still

growing on a certain unit on the Sutter Refuge in California. I

didn’t remember whether it was still there or not. It was

embarrassing, the things he would ask about; little details about

something on a given refuge.

One of my last experiences in the field with him was when he

wanted to look at Deer Island. It is on the lower Columbia here,

near St. Helen’s. He had always thought about it as a refuge. He

was here for a meeting and he said, “I want to go look at Deer

Island”. They sent me and Howard Sergeant, the head of the

Realty Division to go with him. We got to the road, it was a little

narrow road, that goes into the island across a dike. There was a

big sign, “No Trespassing-Private Property”. We went in there

anyway, being Salyer. We looked Deer Island over. And we ran

into a man who I found out later was the owner. I subsequently

got to know the owner’s son. When we ran into this guy, of

course he wanted to know what we were doing there. Salyer said,

“We’re looking at the dikes. We’re from the Corps of Engineers

and we’re checking the dikes down here!” That was fine with the

owner of course. Then Salyer said to the guy standing there,

“Well boys, we’d better get back to Astoria.”

We were no more going to Astoria than we were going to Berlin!

But he could lie himself out of the pickles that he’d get himself

into! He told me one day, “My personnel folder is full of

reprimands and it will hold a whole lot more!” He was quite a

character. It’s too bad that he died at quite an early age from not

taking care of his diabetes. He became blind. He’d go around the

Interior Building with a map tube for a cane because he didn’t like

to admit he was blind. It was kind of sad. I’m not sure what

happened, but one day, when I was back there on a detail,

something had happened in the Director’s office, which related to

a political decision. Salyer came marching into the office I was in

saying, “Isn’t this a pissy ass outfit? It doesn’t have the guts of a

drunken cockroach!” I really enjoyed that man, and knowing

him.

MR. GROVER: Whom else do you think we should be

interviewing?

MR. MARSHALL: Well certainly Ray Erickson, who lives in

Salem. And he’s in his eighties. He needs to be interviewed.

MR. GROVER: You mentioned Kahler.

MR. MARSHALL: Yes, Kahler Martinson. Erickson’s not in

Portland Retiree’s Directory. He left Region 1 in 1955. I didn’t

see his name in there.

MRS. GROVER: That’s not a name I remember. You were

talking about Vernon Ekedahl and Ray Glahn.

MR. GROVER: And there’s Gene Kridler.

MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, Gene is on your list. Here’s Ray

Erickson’s address and phone number. Ekedahl ended up as

Supervisor of Refuges here following Mac Donald’s retirement.

He was one of those guys who had no education beyond high

school. I worked under him on the Sacramento Refuge initially.

He’s in his nineties. His address is here. I correspond with him a

little. I do have his son’s email address too. I don’t know if it

would be worthwhile to talk to him. He’s getting forgetful…he

loves to talk about old times and he is so disapproving of anything

in the FWS now, because they are not doing it the way they did it

in ‘the good old days’. ‘They’ve got all of these people standing

around with nothing to do!’ He goes to Sacramento Refuge. He

stops there and lectures the guys on all of the things they’re doing

wrong, and about how they are not getting any rice planted or

doing any work. Every time I talk to Vernon, or he writes me a

letter, that’s what I hear. So I don’t know. He worked in refuges

in Montana in the late 1930’s and 1940’s in World War II. He has

moved to be with his son in Colorado.

There is also Phil Lahenbauer.

MR. GROVER: Was he a Refuge type?

MR. MARSHALL: He was in Endangered Species and Refuges.

Then there is friend, Dave Lenhart, who was in Pesticides.

MRS. GROVER: Yeah, Dave and Judy are pretty regular at the

luncheon things.

MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, at the last ones I went to. You might

consider Milt Reeves. He never worked in this region but he lives

out here now out at Amity.

MR. GROVER: Is he growing grapes or something?

MR. MARSHALL: No, he is making furniture out of chestnut.

Milt and his wife are very active in local political matters. He’s a

friend of Larry DeBates. He lives within a half a mile of Larry. I

think he would be worth talking to. Bob Russell is up there at

Sequim. I understand he is in poor health now. He went in to

refuges just before I did.

MR. GROVER: I want to thank you Dave, for y