OREGON'S HIGHWAY PARK SYSTEM: 1921-1989 An Administrative History

I. Working relations in the State Highway Department

Mr. Talbot, you came to the State Parks organization holding a degree in what was then a new academic discipline: parks administration. You had headed a local parks and recreation program for the city of Grants Pass for four years. During the two years you served as state recreation director, you acquired a master's degree in the field from your alma mater, the University of Oregon. Then, on December 16, 1964, you succeeded Harold Schick as State Parks superintendent. What was it like, as a young professional and a comparative outsider, to take the reins of a branch of the Oregon State Highway Department at that time?

When our organization was formed in the Highway Department in the 1920s, the emphasis, naturally enough, was on preserving scenic assets adjacent to the highway system. Under Superintendent Boardman, the acquisition of a park land base continued as the primary objective through the 1930s and '40s. Then, in 1950, Sam Boardman retired and Chester Armstrong took over as superintendent. America was home from the war. People had leisure time and wanted to enjoy the out-of-doors. Chet Armstrong deserves to come out of the shadow of the founding superintendent in our thinking because it was he who developed the system for park users. His tenure extended throughout the 1950s, and in that period the campgrounds and facilities for recreational use were built. Before that, the only significant developments had been accomplished in the Depression era under New Deal programs supervised by the National Park Service and carried out by the Civilian Conservation Corps at such places as Silver Falls and Jessie M. Honeyman state parks.

Mark Astrup, who had an excellent background in landscape architecture and traditional National Park values, served briefly as superintendent in 1961 and 1962. He was succeeded by Harold Schick, the first academically-trained parks administrator to be hired from outside the ranks of the Highway Department. Hal served two and a half years. I held my first job with the organization under him. He had to break the ice on a lot of things, and it was tough to gain acceptance. Here was a professional administrator from Michigan creating park management assistant positions, hiring college graduates who came in at a pretty high salary level, rather than working their way up from the bottom. It raised holy heck, but it laid the foundation for a professional organization.

I entered the picture in 1962 just as the whole thing was about to explode and grow. During the two years I served as state recreation director, I was a consultant to local governments for the most part. It was the responsibility of that office, with direction from the Parks Advisory Committee and the Highway Commission, to get Oregon counties into the park business. It was in a similar spirit that the National Park Service created the National Conference on State Parks in the 1920s to foster development of state parks. The National Park Service had been spending a lot of time fending off proposals to create National Parks in areas Park Service officials did not consider nationally significant, Politically, it was tough to say no. If the states could be persuaded to dive in and start having their own programs, that would relieve the problem. Of course, the more fundamental, altruistic goal of the conference was to develop an outdoor recreation delivery system that would better serve the people of America. When the Oregon state recreation director's job was created, in a sense it was forced on the Highway Commission. The local park people finally had persuaded the legislature to pass the enabling legislation in 1959. From that point forward, our organization carried the combination "Parks and Recreation" in its title.

Not long afterward, Mark Hatfield's administration began putting together the statutory framework for all state agencies responsible for outdoor recreation resources, including State Parks. During the 1965 legislative session the decision was made at the recommendation of Governor Hatfield and his assistant, Dan Allen, to reclassify the wet sand beaches seaward of the ordinary high tide line as state recreation areas, as opposed to "highways." The issue of vehicular traffic and the proper use of the beaches was bubbling even then, and the idea was to begin managing what was in reality a major recreational resource.

I took over as superintendent in the middle of December, 1964. The first thing I did was to take a thorough look at the organization and how it operated. What was happening in terms of facilities development and promotion of a service ethic? I discovered the people who were mowing lawns, cleaning buildings and taking care of the public had a special personality. They had a love, not only for their work and their parks, but for Oregon. They could have been Chamber of Commerce representatives, in a way. They were real salesmen. It rubbed off on everybody. As they made decisions about who they hired, they would perpetuate those values. There were a lot of interesting people. I concluded the product was so good, I ought to take my time. The things I thought I had to adjust, like educational requirements, I would do slowly. I knew intuitively that I ought not try to change the institutional personality overnight. The staff and crew would make the transition themselves.

A lot of the fundamental changes had been initiated by Harold Schick and his assistant, Bill Beckert, and I didn't have to burn myself up on those. Just before I assumed responsibility, we had started to change position titles from foreman to park manager, for example. Because such things already were moving forward, I figured I would see how far they would go on their own steam before I picked the ones I wanted to push. I knew there was little appetite for certain kinds of change within the organization at that time.

I had to build a foundation, politically, in the Highway Department. It was crucial that I had the confidence of the assistant state Highway engineer, to whom I reported, and others in the organization as well as the Highway Commission. I already had a good rapport with Highway Commission Chairman Glenn Jackson. I focused on convincing Assistant Highway Engineer P. M. "Steve" Stephenson, a very knowledgeable man, that he could trust me.

It was clear to me that the money was there to further park objectives if I could get hold of it. I set out to do that as best I could by making the organization function well; being responsive, getting reports in on time, making the budget balance, having a good budget presentation so they could let me start to make more decisions. At this point, too, I was spending a lot of time on the road finding out about the parks. I left the field operation to Deputy Superintendent Lynn Koons. I can remember gathering the executive staff together and telling them, frankly, I didn't know anything about running a state parks system, but if they would help me, I would learn. That seemed to start me off on the right foot. Lynn took care of things while I got a chance to find out about the state of Oregon and its parks.

Things really were happening fast. The beach access and Willamette River park system legislation was enacted in 1967, and agitation for the scenic waterways and recreation trails programs came soon afterward. I was spending a lot of time dealing with Commissioner Jackson and the Parks Advisory Committee trying to convince then that we knew what we were doing. The expenditures were starting to climb. It must have caused some nervousness on the part of Highway officials because we were starting to spend money in big chunks, particularly on acquisitions for what cane to be known as the Willamette Greenway.

It was at that point when Lloyd Shaw came into the picture. P. M. Stephenson had retired not long after I became superintendent. As assistant Highway engineer and my immediate supervisor, Lloyd played an important role in my personal development. He was brilliant. I would package a given problem with all kinds of alternatives and race downstairs to lay it in front of Lloyd to get a decision made. I would get through only about two of the alternatives before he jumped ahead to a totally new one that obviously was right. He did that time and time again. His knowledge of Oregon was immense. l loved to travel with P. M. Stephenson because he knew every bridge. He could tell you who built it and when, and had anecdotes about every one of them. You couldn't catch a nap in the car because he'd have so much to tell. Lloyd was the same way on construction. The stories he told of the achievements of the Highway Department were awe-inspiring.

Getting myself in a position to work effectively for the organization was a matter of earning the trust of these tough, bright, single-minded people who had almost a religious feeling about the Highway Fund and their responsibility to protect it. Any illegal use of the Highway Fund was, of course, forbidden. It was fundamental. The money goes for roads. All the collateral things, rest areas, parks, lighting, fencing and so on, were considered nearly extraneous. As I tried to edge to the table and get my share for parks, I could see they had a tremendous will.

State Highway Engineer Forrest Cooper was a strong executive. He taught me a lesson one time. At Detroit Lake, where we have a campground, we paid rates to a local phone company. Once, apparently, we were late in paying our phone bill. The clerk of the phone company in Detroit got tired of writing us, and she found out who was in charge of the whole program. She called Forrest Cooper, and he went on the phone. In those days we had "squawk" boxes on our desks, and you could be in the middle of the most sensitive meeting in the world and anybody could come on and say, "Talbot, would you come down here a minute? I want to talk to you about this or that," which is exactly what Mr. Cooper did. So I found myself in front of the state Highway engineer. "Why don't you pay your phone bill?" "What phone? And where? I don't know anything about it." He said, 'Well, you go find out and tell me." As it turned out, the park manager's home phone and the park phone were together on the same line. A lot of those hook-ups were in place at the time. Mr. Cooper would not let me hand it to anybody. l had to do it myself. He worked with me, down to the woman at the phone company, and the bill, and who owed what, and how the process worked. I have never forgotten that because I have done the same thing many times myself since. Something will come across my desk that causes me to wonder, "Why do we do that?" Then I work my way back through it. In the process I learn so much that I would never find out otherwise, because bureaucracies, whether by design or not, tend to keep certain information from management people. It just works that way. You can be insulated.

I want to go back to Lloyd Shaw for a minute. Lloyd was a member of a distinguished Washington County pioneer family who had his early training in the Bureau of Public Roads and the Highway Department. He had been with the Highway Department for 30 years and had built or designed most of the metropolitan expressway and freeway system. When "Steve" Stephenson retired in 1963, they looked around to see who was going to be assistant Highway engineer in charge of Parks. They picked Lloyd. Over the course of the next eight years he became as strong a Parks advocate as you could find anywhere. In fact, the Highway organization came to feel he had "sold out" to Parks. If there was anybody in the Highway Department other than Sam Boardman who had an impact on this organization, it was Lloyd Shaw. He caused things to happen that couldn't possibly have happened without him. He respected and admired Highway Commission Chairman Glenn Jackson and usually was willing to do what Glenn wanted, whether it was buying beach access or a headland, or protecting the Columbia Gorge.

The Highway people were very cautious about the type of person they would allow in the position I held. There were those who always were afraid the park people were going to start spending a lot of money and doing crazy things. It could be very competitive at times. Chairman Jackson was thoroughly in our court, as was the State Parks Advisory Committee under Chairman L. L. "Stub" Stewart. Stub was talking to the governor and Glenn, so I felt secure, but I believed that if we were to reach the vision of a more traditional state parks system, not one of just waysides and forest preserves along the roads, but one that had the full range of services, the first step would be to get out of the Highway building, physically. The pressure on the Highway program in those days was enormous. There wasn't enough room in the building on the Capitol Mall. When they would start trying to jam people together, normally we would be good soldiers and cooperate, but finally, one day, I resisted, knowing, ultimately, they would ask us to find other quarters. That is exactly what happened and how we find ourselves downtown, leasing space at the corner of High and Trade Streets.

When the Department of Transportation was created by the legislature in 1969 to coordinate the activities of Highway, Motor Vehicles, Aeronautics, Parks and Mass Transit divisions, the first director was John Fulton, Governor McCall's appointee. Eventually, the Highway engineers said, "Talbot, from now on you report to the Director of Transportation." We got along well with the administrators of the umbrella agency. Fulton and his successors, beginning with George Baldwin, treated us as professionals and we developed organizationally inside the larger department.

As it happened, however, we were on a collision course with the recession of 1973-1975 when, after the OPEC embargo, there was less gas tax revenue coming into the Highway Fund because of oil shortages. The demand on the limited Highway Fund for state and local highway purposes was extreme. People were saying, "What are we going to do?" They couldn't get gasoline tax increases through the legislature in those years. So, when oil prices skyrocketed, the decision was made to take Parks and the State Police out. Our 1977 budget was the first to show an infusion of General Fund money. After we were barred from the Highway Fund in 1980, many people questioned my good sense for standing by and letting it happen. They knew the organization could be damaged. Glenn Jackson had left as head of the Transportation Commission in 1979 and had gone over to Economic Development, so my protection was getting slim. I concluded that if we were taken out of the Highway Fund, it would be in our best interest in the long run. Risking the loss of revenue to strike out for independence was worth it. Of course I didn't know an international recession was just around the corner. My timing couldn't have been worse. But I took that gamble. When Glenn or Stub Stewart asked, "Do you think it will be okay?" I said yes, even though in my heart, I knew it could be difficult. And so it was for a time.

As Highway Commission chairman, Glenn Jackson was privy to our campground attendance figures, and toward the end of the 1960s we were turning people away in droves. We are in that position again today, but it was reaching a peak at that point. I remember when Glenn made a decision. I think it's time to build some more campsites." In the conversation somebody said, "How many?" He said, "Well, how about a thousand?" Those were the last campgrounds we built, in 1970. A thousand campsites is an enormous number. At $10,000 apiece in today's money that represents a big commitment on the spot. I think Mr. Jackson's inner feelings were on the tourism side of the spectrum, as opposed to scenic conversation in the Sam Boardman style. He was an Oregon boy, raised in Albany. He had that frontier mentality about our natural resources. Trees were a crop to be cut. He didn't mind our saving them, but the primary objective was recreation and tourism rather than wilderness protection. He was a real supporter of expanding our program.

It took us a decade to recover from the recession of 1973-1975, the loss of gas tax revenue, limited support from the General Fund, and the game plan falling apart. We fell into hard times and learned how to live with less. If you go through the process of closing parks, and all the thought and political consideration involved in deciding which to close and why, you learn things. You start to wonder, "Why did we acquire that one? How do we decide which ones are good and which ones aren't?" We learned what our public could withstand in terms of fees and charges. We probed all those areas. We turned around and found volunteers. We found there were ways of providing services at reduced cost and doing our job with outside resources. That's been good for us. The crisis caused us to do a cost responsibility study, to look carefully at who benefits from and who pays for the services. It caused us to convene the Governor's Conference on State Parks in 1985. It resulted in our preparing a strategic 20-year plan known as the 2010 Plan. Completion of the 2010 Plan coincided with the term of Governor Neil Goldschmidt, Who concluded it was time for a new department. At that moment, the stars of the firmament had lined up just right. We were sitting in that room, and all of sudden, "Whamo," there it was on the table. I hadn't engineered that one. I was getting ready for it, but I was comfortable in ODOT with the Transportation Commission and staff.

Since legislative action in 1979, the organization had enjoyed full division status equal to the Highway Division and other divisions of the department. We were accountable to the Transportation Commission, but essentially independent. Now that Parks has become a department in its own right, I can say it's a lot harder at the moment than it was. Twice as hard. But that will resolve itself. We have a new Parks and Recreation Commission of seven citizens committed to helping us and wanting to know everything about the program. If they will give us the benefit of the doubt, we can go about the business of managing the parks system, and they can go about the business of setting policy. The funding issue is yet to be resolved. Game plan "A" is to find a permanent source of money dedicated to implementing the 2010 Plan. That could happen, but I am not counting on it. The alternate game plan is to organize more "Friends" organizations on a statewide basis to build the political constituency that is necessary to get General Fund money.

I don't like to operate that way. To locate, develop and manage parks through the political process is not a good way to run a park system. But, if that's what it's going to take, then I have to get ready to do it. As Neil Goldschmidt said when he joined our tour to look at the coastal parks, "Somebody around here has been making some darn good decisions." We all nodded. And he said, "Are they making them today?" We all shook our heads. Those decisions that were made in the 1930s and '40s and '50s that created the system we enjoy today have not happened much since. That's the problem. That is what we have to focus on. We have to get ready now to take care of those people 20 years out because park attendance has gone straight up. Since 1970, which was the last time we added parks or campgrounds, the supply system has remained constant, but those attendance figures continue to climb. People are willing to spend $7 a night to park their RV in a day-use parking lot with nothing there. I think issues such as tourism and what kind of an outdoor experience we want in Oregon will heat up very soon. How many people we want to have around and whether the Land Conservation and Development Commission is going to continue its work as presently authorized are open questions.

I remember being in Medford in 1989 for the retirement dinner honoring Ion Herring, who had been with the organization for 32 years. Ion epitomizes the long-time, up-from-the-ranks park manager who can do anything. He has the natural quality of being able to work successfully with people. He can train and develop employees as though he knew how when he was born. He's just wonderful, and they love him. As many as 150 people came out to honor this man. Today we are getting skilled people who are well-educated, but it would be regrettable if we were to lose the Ion Herring side of our nature, our humanity. The generation of Parks personnel long ago retired were self-made people, for the most part, who had risen in life through sheer determination. They had guts, native intelligence and a work ethic. We are one of the few state parks organizations that doesn't require a college degree to be a ranger. What I had hoped when I walked in as superintendent in 1964 is that we would get about half field-experienced and half professionally-trained crew and staff, and out of that group would come good people. I think it has worked very well.

Fig. 20. A most influential supporter of Oregon State Parks throughout the 1960s and '70s was Glenn L. Jackson, member of the original State Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee formed in 1957 who became chairman, consecutively, of the State Highway and Transportation commissions. He held the position of leadership from 1962 to 1979. An enthusiastic golfer, Mr. Jackson is pictured on the occasion of his 76th birthday with a "hole-in-one" cake provided by Florence Neavoll, executive assistant to the ODOT director. 1978. Oregon Department of Transportation Photo #V270-4A

Fig. 21. A strong advocate for Parks within the Highway organization was Assistant Highway Engineer Lloyd P. Shaw, under whose direct oversight the agency's emerging recreation and resource-protection programs flourished from 1964 to his retirement in 1972. 1972. Oregon Department of Transportation Photo.

Fig. 22. Loran L. "Stub" Stewart headed the State Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee from 1961 to 1984. No citizen adviser had a more enduring role in guiding policy of the Parks organization. Mr. Stewart continues his service to the state as a member of the Parks and Recreation Commission created by legislative act in 1989. 1982. Oregon Department of Transportation Photo #V978-28.

Fig. 23. The annual State Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee tour was inaugurated in the early 1960s for the purpose of inspecting park holdings in various regions of the state. Tours customarily included park and recreation officials and natural resource managers of cooperating federal, state and local agencies. In July of 1966, the inspection party pictured here traveled north from Klamath Falls en route to Bend, making a side trip via Burns to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and Steens Mountain area. The party was received by long-time refuge manager, John Scharff, who served as guide in the surrounding high desert country. Back row: Karl Onthank, president, County Parks Assoc.; Alfred D. "Cap" Collier, S.P. Adv. Comm.; Fred Overly, regional director, Bureau of Outdoor Recreation; Lloyd Shaw, asst. St. Hwy. engineer; P. M. Stephenson, S.P. Adv. Comm.; Ed Schroeder, state forester, Oregon State Forestry Dept.; William J. Talbott, US Army Corps of Engineers; Larry Espey, recreation specialist, Pacific Power and Light Company; Don McGregor, S.P. Adv. Comm.; Howard Lentz, Coos Co. commissioner, Assoc. of Oregon Counties; Ralph Millsap, vice president, Portland General Electric Company; Norm Howard, Oregon State House of Representatives; Richard Shaffer, S.P. planning supervisor; O. W. "Pete" Foiles, recreation supervisor, US Forest Service; Robert Moore, asst. reg. director, National Park Service. Front row: Eric W. Allen, S.P. Adv. Comm.; Forrest Rieke, Oregon Dept. of Finance and Administration; Lynn Koons, deputy S.P. superintendent; Irving Anderson, division chief, Bureau of Land Management; Al Zimmerman, S.P. Reg. IV supervisor; Joel Havemann, reporter, The Oregonian; Dave Talbot, S.P. superintendent; John Earley, information officer, State Hwy. Dept.; Loran L. "Stub" Stewart, chairman, S.P. Adv. Comm.; Lestle Sparks, S.P. Adv. Comm.; George Ruby, S.P. Adv. Comm.; A. J. Kissel, S.P. lands specialist; Bob Wilder, state recreation director. Not pictured: John McWilliams, Oregon Journal travel editor; Frank McKinney, legal counsel, State Hwy. Dept.; Robert Rittenhouse, director, Oregon State Marine Board; Frank Stiles, S.P. Reg. V supervisor. 1966. Lyle Winkle Photo, Oregon State Highway Department