John Gottschalk oral history transcript

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Interview With

John Gottschalk

Former FWS Director

Interviewed by Steve Chase

June 28, 1998

Steve Chase: Well welcome.

John Gottschalk: Well I am certainly glad to be here if, were on the tape and

doing things.

SC: So I’ll just start up here. You got your Bachelors Degree in 1934, and a

Graduate Degree in Fisheries Biology in 1943. Can you tell us a bit about

your school years and learning about Biology?

JG: Well, I will go to back before my school years. There was a very

famous nature writer by the name of Jean Stratton Porter, who wrote “ Girl

of the Limber Lost” and some other famous stories back in the Teens and

Twenties, who lived five miles from where I was born, Bern, Indiana. The

Limber Lost was a large swamp on the tributary of the Wabash River. She

became a nature fan and expert. Photographed butterflies and birds and a lot

of things like that. Organized a group of women to come and participate, go

on field trips and what not, those were the horse and buggy days ya know.

She had a big camera that she took along, and my Grandmother got

interested. Then out of that my Grandmother used to take an interest in

educating kids in our little one horse town of Bern, Indiana, a small Swiss

Community, and in the spring she would take us out, and identify the wild

flowers and allow us to pick wild flowers, Trout Lilies, and Spring Beauties

and Trilliums, and all that sort of thing. And, The birds she knew quite a

few of the birds, the common ones that everybody knows. So I think my

roots go back to when I was just a small child. Nothing came of that,

however, until I got a job right out of high school, at Indiana Dunes State

Park, as a life guard and “Ranger”, put that in quotation marks, because

when I arrived on the job, the first morning the Superintendent of the Park,

this is Indiana Dunes State Park, up on Lake Michigan. Turned me over to

the foreman, who handed me a bucket, a bottle of Lysol, a scrub brush and a

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broom. My first job in conservation was scrubbing and cleaning the toilets at

the Indiana Dunes State Park, and I have always said I started at the absolute

bottom. However I was lucky that the second summer I was there that I was

able to be placed as an assistant to a graduate forester from Purdue, who was

studying animal depredation on willow plantations. I realized that you can

make a living, out in the woods, as it were, and so I got interested, and when

I entered Earlom College, it was a easy choice to make to, get a major in

Biology and I got a minor in Geology. The day after I graduated I went to

work again for the Indiana Conservation Department, as a nature guide, in

the Turkey Run State Park. Where I was an assistant to the principle guide

who was Dr. Frederick Test who later became the professor of Ecology at

the University of Michigan. I won’t pursue that anymore your getting more

than you needed. But that led to a job with the Indiana Conservation Dept.

and ultimately I became Superintendent of Fisheries, having the distinction

of having the only degree in biology of anybody in the Conservation Dept.,

except the State Forester, and the State Entomologist. They were trained but

everybody else in those days were just hired off the street, as it were.

Usually based on their political affiliations. I was interested in the fisheries

aspects, had done a little of that work at Earlom, with one of the professors,

that’s the fish business, and I decided that a job in a state like Indiana, as it

was at that time, when many other states were operating on a strictly

political basis. That the only way that I could pursue what I really wanted

was to get into civil service, and get a job with the federal government,

that’s why I quit my job. Unfortunately it was poor timing because I left the

Conservation Dept, in 1941, not realizing that the war was going to break

out in December of that same year. So things were under a kind of strain,

and after two and a half years, at the University I took a job with

Shceindly(?) who had discovered a very potent brand of, strain I should say,

of penicillium notatum (?), that produced literally a thousand times more

powerful strain of penicillin than any pennicillium, that had been discovered

at that time. And they were desperate for someone who could come in with a

little scientific basis, and so I became the analytical laboratory director for

Scheindly Laboratories and worked there until the war was over. I had a lot

of connections with the Fish and Wildlife Service, in my previous job, so it

was very easy to get a job with the Service right after the war and I went to

work at Billings as a member of the old River Basins Studies Organization,

as a fisheries biologist. Then, from then on, at least within the Service, the

history of what happened is pretty well known I guess. Or maybe not…

S.C. : Who were some of the folks you worked with in Billings.

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J.G.: Well our Supervisor was a man named Harold Mosebought, my

roommate with whom I shared an office with, another fisheries Biologist,

who had been with the Illinois Natural History Survey. He was named

Bruno Von Limbauch, Bruno later became interested in promoting the

studies of the genetics of fisheries and organized the fish genetics laboratory

at Spearfish, South Dakota. Without going into a lot of detail that program

was canceled at some point so he transferred, and was a staff person in the

Division of Fishery Research, until he retired. Bob Bruel who became the

Regional Director, in Minneapolis. Followed me in Billings, I had a very

brief span as Supervisor of that office in Billings, between the time that I left

there to take over the Dingell Johnson Program in Washington. Bob Bruel

was a good friend, and a person that I got to know very well when he, I

became the Director, he was still the Regional Director in Minneapolis. This

could go on indefinitely, and I think it this is sort of boring.

But thinking more in terms of some of the principles, we were a part of the

Interior Department’s staff working on the so called Pick Sloan Plan, which

was the great plan to develop refuge, not refuge, reservoir possibilities in the

West. The Corp. of Engineers was working on the flood control, navigation

and power installations, and the Bureau of Reclamation obviously was

working on irrigation and power. Many of these projects were multi-purpose.

The Interior Department insisted on the establishment of a

biological component in that program. That’s what our job was in Billings,

to represent Fish and Wildlife interest in the development of water resources

in the Missouri River Basin. It was a fascinating job, we had a lot of

opportunities and lots of frustrations. But I think, looking back on it , it was

a real fine opportunity to get started in the Fish and Wildlife Service because

in the process we worked with all the States very closely. So I made the

acquaintance of all of the Missouri River Basin States, and other wise got

aquatinted with a lot of other people. So it was a very good way, I think, to

start in the Service.

When I became the Assistant Chief of Federal Aid for the DJ Program, that

development, of contacts continued. And I at one time knew almost every

fisheries biologist of any consequence and all the state fishery chiefs through

out the whole country. It was my job and it was a wonderful opportunity

and I think made my later activities as chief of the Division of Sport

Fisheries which came about in 1956 with the reorganization of the Bureau

one of the best jobs I ever had. And when I was asked to go to Boston as

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Regional Director I did so really with great reluctance because I had just a

wonderful job as really the principle fisheries person in the Federal

Government, outside of Commercial Fisheries of course. I feel I have been

extremely fortunate in respect to the kinds of assignments I have had that

permitted me to explore new fields, and to develop new programs, and to

work with a bunch of wonderful people, both in the Service and outside the

Service.

S.C.: What new challenges did you find when you became the regional

Director in Boston.

J.G.: Well, it was a challenge to take over all of the responsibilities of the

Service, Wildlife and Administration, after having been a specialist in

fisheries. There were a lot of people who had their fingers crossed at the

idea that a fisheries man would even be a Regional Director, because to be

honest about it the wildlife responsibilities of the Division of the Wildlife

Service substantially outweighed those that related to sport fishing. When

the Service still contained the commercial fishing element, that was a little

different. Commercial people were very important at the high levels of the

Fish and Wildlife Service and the Regions and in the Washington office, but

when we split off, and became just the Bureau of Sport Fishing and Wildlife,

the fisheries part of the organization was relatively minor part. We had fish

hatcheries a small research program and that is about all. So we had a long

way to go to develop the fishery side and I concentrated on that almost to the

exclusion of everything else. I knew very little about refuges, or the

enforcement program or wildlife research, that is the details of what they

were doing in wildlife research. The work in Boston soon put me in a

position where I had to learn the Wildlife program in a hurry, or I was going

to sink. There was no doubt about that. The New England States were

extremely unhappy with the way we were handling the Black Duck

situation, and in New England the Black Duck is the most important sporting

bird, the Wood Duck population hadn’t come back, the Scotpot population

was not available to many sportsmen because it required a type of hunting

that many just didn’t participate in. The Black Duck was the bread and

butter bird. The population had been dwindling and we had some very strict

regulations to attempt to stem that decline, getting down to a two bird limit

for Black Ducks, and a forty-five day season. It became necessary for me to

become a duck expert in a hurry.

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S.C. asks: Who helped you do that.

J.G.: The people at Patuxent more than anybody else, as well as some of the

co-operative unit people. Particularly Dr. Howard Mendall, Howard, was

the leader of the co-operative Wildlife Research Unit at the University of

Maine. Howard was a specialist in Ring Neck Ducks, and ducks in general.

He was a very compassionate sort of a person in the sense that he was

willing to spend a lot of time doing what he loved to do… teach… as well

as take you with him on his research projects. I depended a great deal on

Howard as one of the principle sources of information on water fowl in that

region. So that was extremely important.

The refuge program I think its fair to say, was somewhat lagging in that

region, and I wont go into why I think so but, the fact is after I was there for

two years, the man who was the supervisor of refuges decided to retire. I had

met Tom Horn who was the manager of the Fort Peck Game Range, while I

was stationed in Billings. I came to learn that he was a man who had very

broad interests and had a much broader out look than many of the people I

had run into in the refuge business, and it was very fortuitous that he was

available to become the Refuge Supervisor. So we had some differences of

opinion about how the refuge program ought to be run, Tom was a manager,

he believed manipulating habitat to increase the utilization of refuges by

birds, and to give you an example of how that can sometimes work, he

planted one of the large pools, that what used to be called the Brigantine

Refuge in New Jersey, to millet. That year according to the waterfall counts

we had about 100,000 Black Ducks in the state of New Jersey. 90,000 of

them were in the Brigantine Refuge where they could not be hunted. I got a

call along about the first week of the waterfowl season from the Director of

the New Jersey Department.

You want to ask a question?

S.C.: Oh, yes tell us how you went on to become the Director of Fish and

Wildlife Service.

J.G.: In 1964, in the spring we had successfully established the Great

Swamp New Jersey, National Wildlife Refuge. This was a very co-operative

program that involved a tremendous effort by the citizens up there. Because

the New York Port Authority had decided to build another large

International Airport at a place called Great Swamp in New Jersey. This

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part of New Jersey, not the swamp itself, which was only partly swamp

much of it was just moist deciduous forest land, but around there were a lot

of expensive homes and a lot of rich people, and a lot of people who didn’t

want a lot of noisy airplanes flying over their property all the time. So the

citizens there started a program to try to find some other alternative for this

area, than a airport. It wasn’t long before they came up with the idea that

maybe they could get a wildlife refuge there. Well we already had a small

refuge that we managed called Troy Meadows, in one of those pothole areas

of North Jersey. I knew a little bit about that part of the country, having

spent a quite a bit of time down there learning about the Wildlife situation in

New Jersey. A delegation from down in New Jersey came up one day and

we worked out a deal. They agreed that they would try to raise money to

purchase the land and I said when you get enough money for 3,000 acres, I

will be willing to commit enough money out of the migratory bird fund, to

buy 3,000 acres making a 6,000 acre parcel, and we all agreed on that. We

still had to sell it a lot of people including the Secretary but it worked.

So in the fall of 64 my predecessor Dan Jantzen had come up to spend a few

days with me in the region, and on the way back we stopped at Great Swamp

for the dedication of that refuge. Stuart Udall flew up, with some other

people from Washington, we had the congressman Freilinghousen, there and

a nice turn out at the very posh estate of one of the descendents of the Dodge

fortune, Hartley Dodge was his name, and he had married one of the

Rockefeller Daughters, they had all kinds of money, and when it came to

raising funds to acquire the 3,000, acres that the local people were going to

get. Hartly Dodge and his wife put in over a million dollars to foster this

project. So we had this celebration at his country estate, the main building

of which was a replica of a Alpine hunting lodge. After Udall arrived in a

helicopter from the Newark Airport, he came over and said hello to Director

Jantzen and myself, and got me off to one side and said John where is the

men’s room. I said I will take you there, it is up on the second floor at the

other end of this Swiss Chalet so we went up to the men’s room, and while

he had his back turned relieving himself, I was standing over by the door or

by the window looking out just waiting. He said by the way John did you

know that Dan has indicated that he would like to retire. I said no as a

matter of fact I didn’t know that. He said yes and I am looking around and I

wonder if you would be interested in the position. I can still remember what

I said, which was well we are having a great time in Boston. It has been a

big challenge but things are going very well, I have no particular desire to

leave, but I must confess that I spend a lot of time in my career criticizing

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the way the Service has been run and if I have an opportunity to take it over

and be the Director I can’t turn it down. So he said good, when you get back

call my secretary and set up a date I’d like you to come down so we can

have a little chat. So I have always said I was the only Director appointed as

a result of a privy… a privy… What did I used to say… a privy counsel.

<laughter> I have used that several times including when Udall retired, he

did not know whether to laugh or not, everyone else did.

To be honest about it the man who proceeded me in Boston, was a

sportsman, he had been a Game Management Agent, but he just was totally

uninterested in managing anything and the Regional Office was a shambles.

I wont go in all the detail but it was a terrible problem, we had something

like 3,000 vouchers in arrears when I arrived there that hadn’t been

processed. He simply had paid no attention to that aspect, and had nobody

there to run it. And was not willing to make the fight to get more staff

people on the job to take care of that kind of a problem and you can see what

that would do to the field personnel who could not buy anything because

people, the purveyors of what ever they needed were not getting paid for

things they had bought a year ago. That was only a part of it. The morale

was just terrible, and it was a challenge but a wonderful opportunity. I

remember that one of the men told me afterward, John when you left we

were approching greatness. Which was about as high a complement that

anyone could get. We just turned that whole situation around, had

developed a great Esprit D’corps, had a good staff I had a wonderful letter

from my Secretary when I left to go to Washington, which said I was the

only person in her thirty year career who made her feel like she was a

integral part of the organization. Because I depended on her to do the things

that a secretary ought to do. Before that she was just a stenographer or

something like that, ya know. But it was a good training ground to have to

go to Washington.

Although I didn’t run into the same kind of a problem at all in Washington.

What I did encounter of course, shortly after we got there was the strictures

enforced upon many agencies, civilian agencies, by the escalation of the

Vietnam War. I have always said that President Johnson assured the country

that we could have both guns and butter. But that was not true in the Fish

and Wildlife Service our budgets were cut, along with the fact that we had to

pick up our part of the “Great Society” program that he was espousing and

this put a tremendous burden on us in the sense that we had to pick up a lot

of the cost. At the same time our budgets were not going up at all. Without

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going into detail as to how it happened, we had received a 20 million dollar

construction appropriation to plan the development of a national aquarium.

This was as a result of the work of a very powerful Congressman who was

very much interested in seeing an aquarium in Washington. We hired a very

outstanding designer, planer, and had a beautiful concept, all this before the

war started, before we really got deeply involved in the Vietnam War. Had a

detailed plan worked out, and a staff working on promoting a national

aquarium in Washington down on Hanes Point. The only way we survived

was to use that money that we got, the 20 million dollar construction

appropriation for operational cost. Other wise I think it would have been a

very, very difficult time we would have had to lay off a lot of people, as it

was we were under terrible stricture to reduce our costs. Probably nobody in

recent years has ever heard of a program which got the nickname of

“Ratchet One”, the very first staff meeting that I had at our annual meeting,

which we had in those days. With thirty or forty of our top people in a

conference room with a call from the Assistant Secretaries office to come

over immediately. I was dragged out of that very first day of that meeting to

go over and see what was happening, and what was happening was that,

McNamara then Secretary of Defense, had convinced President Johnson that

every agency had a lot of useless activities that they could get along without.

He had demonstrated that he had cut out all of these useless activities in the

Defense Department. Johnson said if you can do it in Defense with all of

your problems and the war, every other agency ought be able to do the same

thing. The word came back that we were to eliminate 10 hatcheries and 10

refuges, and I had to provide the names by the end of business that day.

This was hard on morale you know, just to get an order like that, how can

you do it with out any kind of planning and thought, to decide what criteria

you’ll use in eliminating 10 refuges and 10 hatcheries. Fortunately all the

Regional Directors were there, and as soon as I got this order, and it was like

you do it, or else. I called those men out of the conference all five of the

Regional Directors course I had just come down from Boston, so I had a

pretty good idea what would be our lower priority facilities there. The next

morning at 8 o’clock I turned in a list of 10 refuges and 10 hatcheries, that

we would recommend be closed if any had to be closed. Well what

happened of course was that Congress refused to allow us to close them.

That meant that the money that we would have used was not appropriated

for those functions, on those 10 hatcheries and 10 refuges, so we had to

swallow the cuts. Another words further pressure budget wise. The next

year we had “ratchet two” it was the same thing all over again. 10 refuges

and 10 hatcheries to be closed. It was a hard thing to handle

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administratively, the fact is of course that many of those areas that we did try

to close were never closed. Some of them were actually turned over to the

States, several hatcheries as a matter of fact that I considered to be obsolete,

even though there were a lot of people that loved them and did not want to

see them go. We did transfer to the States and so we did reduce the

hatchieries program to some degree, the refuge division, the refuge system

however did not suffer. All the refuges that were proposed to be closed were

never closed, the effectiveness was reduced substancially because, again our

budget was reduced by the cost of operating those by now 20 refuges. That

was a very difficult time for everybody.

S.C.: At that same time you were facing budget restrictions, and as the war

was intensifying, there was still a fairly ambitious conservation agenda in

the Johnson administration wasn’t there? In Congress we had new laws like

the Wilderness Act and others coming into being<interjection… Land and

Water Conservation.> <speaker unknown>What was the mood like in

conservation at the time. Was the progressive spirit of the “great society”

rapidly eclipsed by the war or did you all feel like you were really able to

make some progress in conservation in the mid Sixties.

J.G.: I would say the later is true. Such things as the Wilderness Act for

example. I must give, and I can’t name, names right now, but the refuge

system responded to that call in a very dynamic way. Every region

appointed someone who knew the characteristics of the refuges within those

regions. We got a task force together, actually we were the first agency in

the Interior Dept. to complete its survey of potential wilderness areas. We

really worked on it. Nobel Buel <name unclear> was the assistant director

for wildlife he took a personal interest in it. Everyone of the Regional

Directors appointed a special wilderness coordinator. We had special teams

going out to evaluate the wilderness potential of every refuge, of course we

eliminated a lot of them because of the road situation , right off the bat. But

I would say that our performance was really outstanding <energy> <not

quite clear>, no body could hear us talking, it was a very confidential way to

do business. But we both thought it was the right way to do it at that time

because there was just a lot of back biting. Both on the part of the users

typically the forest industry, and others, and we had one of our worst

problems with the U.S. Forest Service, because they didn’t think that we had

any areas that we suitable for being classified as wilderness. I remember a 8

hour hearing before the House Committee on National Parks and what not,

not our Fisheries and Wildlife committee, but another subcommittee, went

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on for 8 hours. Most of the time I was being challenged as to why I thought

refuges, would have areas that would be suitable for inclusion in the

wilderness areas. There was a general opinion in the Forest Service and in

the minds of a lot of the Western Congressmen, that a wilderness area had to

be something like Yosemite Park, or something like that ya know. Filled

with beautiful trees and great scenery and all that sort of thing. I remember

the Senator From New Mexico called me up one day on the telephone. This

had to do with the Bosque del Apache Refuge down south of Albuquerque.

S.C.: interjects. . . it’s a premier Refuge today…

J.G.: At that time the waterfowl potential had not been developed. There

were 40,000 acres back to the east of the Rio Grande, that was all dry land.

This Senator, can’t think of his name right now, maybe I mentioned it a

moment ago, can’t remember, called me up and said Mr. Gottschalk how can

you want to put Bosque in as a wilderness area, there is no wilderness area

there that’s just dry grass land. I said Senator do you remember the story

about Jesus Christ going to the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, and he

said “Yes”, and I said what kind of a place do you think that was in that dry

parched part of Palestine, where there wasn’t a plant practically alive it was

all desert. That was a wilderness Senator… He said” Is that how you feel

about this”, and I said a wilderness does not have anything on it at all, there

is nothing in the law that suggests that there needs to be a plant on a

wilderness, there might be, but it would be a desert plant, and that’s just as

good as a mammoth redwood tree in the Sierra Nevada. Well, he got to be a

good friend, Clinton Anderson, Senator Anderson he got to be a good friend,

and was a strong supporter.

It took a complete 180 degree turn of his mind to understand what the refuge

system, um, the wilderness system in the refuge system ought to look like.

I’ll put in one other little comment about the wilderness program, that little

refuge at Great Swamp in New Jersey. Was the first refuge, the first

wilderness area established by Congress they were able to put a lot of

muscle behind it. They got everything, the Regional Office, got every thing

put together and submitted the area for designation as a wilderness area,

before anybody else could get around to it, and it was passed and signed by

the President and that was the very first wilderness area. In which we took a

lot of pride.

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S.C.: Were going to have to keep you on schedule, so we have to wrap up, I

think we could go on all day

J.G.: interjects: Well you could.

S.C.: Let me ask you one more question. We are sitting here in the National

Conservation Training Center, in 1965 the first refuge manager training

program or training academy was established. What was your goal in that?

J.G.: Nothing…

S.C.: <Interjects> Nothing?

J.G.: As I told you I had very limited contacts with the Wildlife part of the

Fish and Wildlife Service and I was interested in Refuges, I am a bird lover

and a botany lover and all that sort of thing, so anytime I had an opportunity

either as Regional Director or subsequently, or even before, if I got near a

refuge, I would go visit a refuge, so I had some ideas about it. I didn’t, I

hadn’t been into it long enough to understand the value of a formal training

program. I had participated in a couple myself but they were just one week

short term things. I would have to say that the refuge people themselves

take the full credit for getting the training program going. I can’t remember

the name of the man who I appointed as Director for a long time, he was

Director for a long time, but he was enthused about it. After I went to a

couple of them I could see the benefit, and I began to look around for a pre

cursor, to this beautiful establishment here. We looked at several places on

refuges where we had managed to acquire a large building, a home or some

other kind of a building, with the idea that perhaps we could convert one of

those to a training center facility. It never really worked out so we continued

at Arden Hills then moved to the training center that the Bureau of Mines

had in West Virginia, and had the training center there.

About that time I was gone so I did not keep up with what was happening

after that. But it soon became apparent to me that the training program was

absolutely vital to the future of the organization. I think the fact the

everybody now realizes that you can’t just keep operating on the basis of the

knowledge that you had when you started, ignoring the progress that is made

by others in other fields and expect to make real progress at your own

agency. We soon learned that and I think this is a manifestation of the

validity of that whole idea. It is more than just a monument to Senator Byrd,

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it is a monument to the idea that people do need to be refreshed and

retrained, and stimulated to maintain the optimum intellectual output in their

careers.

S.C.: Well we will continue this discussion at another time. Thanks very

much……