henry, dick 12-06-06 - digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu

HENRY, Dick12-06-0603__Corrected

U.S. Department of AgricultureForest Service

Region Five History Project

Interview with: [Richard] “Dick” HenryInterviewed by: Janet BuzziniLocation: Chico, CaliforniaDate: December 6, 2006Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; January 2007

[Begin CD Track 1.]

JANET BUZZONI: This interview is taking place in Chico, California, at the home of Dick and

Nancy Henry, H-e-n-r-y. Today’s date is Wednesday, December 6, 2006. My name is Janet

Buzzini, B-u-z-z-i-n-i, and I will be conducting today’s interview with Dick Henry.

Hi, Dick, how are you?

DICK HENRY: Fine, thank you.

BUZZINI: Dick, I would like to begin by asking where you were born and where you grew up.

HENRY: I was born in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, a small town right on the ocean, in

1938. I grew up in that town. My father lived in that town his entire life, and when I went off to

school, why, some of the teachers I had had also taught my father, so it was kind of a noticeably

small town.

BUZZINI: Where did you attend school, and what was your major?

HENRY: I went to Penn State, and my major was forestry. I attended Penn State because New

Jersey only offered a two-year program at Rutgers [University], followed by three years in North

Carolina, so I went to Penn State as the closest place to get a degree in forestry.

Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 2

BUZZINI: Dick, I’d like you to tell us a little about your family, how many children you have,

and about your wife.

HENRY: Our family is a total of five. My wife, Nancy, and three children: Becky, Chris, and

Scott. Becky is now forty-two years of age, and Chris and Scott are thirty-seven. They are not

twins. We wanted to have a family, and we had some problems with miscarriages after our

daughter was born, so we decided to adopt, so our middle child is adopted. And then Scott, our

youngest, was born to us. So their birthdays are nine months and three days apart in age. I

sometimes—if people look at me when I mention that it was nine months and three days apart in

age, I sometimes forget to tell them that one of them was adopted. If they are really kind of

snooty, I don’t say anything else, just let them go off with that.

BUZZINI: You just let them think—yes.

HENRY: Nancy, I met in college, in Penn State forestry school. In those days, you went to

southern Pennsylvania, to the second forest academy in the nation, founded in 1906. Nancy was

in Chambersburg, about fifteen miles away, at an all-girls’ college. They were going to have a

dance one evening, and another college couldn’t make it, so Wilson College, where she went,

called over to the forestry school to see if any of the foresters would come. I got on the truck we

went to church in and went to the field in, and went over to the college. I wondered why I was

there.

There were girls on the far side of the room, and some of the boys on my side of the room

were just standing there, wondering why they were there, when I noticed a very tall young lady

and a short young lady were heading across to the boys’ side. They stopped in the middle of the

floor. There was a slight discussion. The short lady went back to the girls’ side of the room, and

the tall one kept walking towards me. And so we danced the first dance, and it’s always easier to


ask somebody you’ve already danced with to dance, so we had the second dance, and then she

said [sic; asked] where did I go to church, and I said, “The Methodist Church in Chambersburg,”

and she went to the Presbyterian. And I said, Oh, well, no difference between those two, so I got

off the truck at the Presbyterian church, and we’d see each other on Sunday.

That was in October 1956, and we’ve been married now forty-five years this past April

Fool’s Day. Yes, I was married on April first, because—the reason I was married on April first

was because the men were expected to pay for all the flowers in the church, and Nancy went to a

very large Presbyterian church, and if I had enough money to buy all the flowers, I would have

had another semester’s worth of money at school, so we decided to get married on the Saturday

before Easter because the church would be decorated with lilies, and there was a big lily cross up

in the front of the church, on scaffolding. It was beautiful, and so we decided to get married on

that date.

BUZZINI: Good for you.

HENRY: We told her mother and father, “Well, we’ve decided to get married next spring, the

Saturday before Easter.” Her father thought that was great, and he shook my hand and hugged

Nancy, and her mother came running into the living room. “You can’t get married that day. It’s

April Fool’s Day. You can’t get married on April Fool’s Day.” And I said, “Well, look at it this

way: I’ll never forget an anniversary.” I’ve never forgotten an anniversary, and it’s been going

great for forty-five years.


Dick, let’s get into now the kind of summer jobs you held, positions that better qualified

you for your lifelong dream with the Forest Service.


HENRY: Well, most of the summer jobs I had were to make money to get back in college and

were on the Atlantic coast, so I didn’t get into forestry work until 1960. In my previous years,

I’d worked in a soda factory. I had delivered soda. I worked on the boardwalk selling French

fries and hamburgers. I cut the lawn at the library. I did those kinds of jobs.

But in 1960 another classmate and I took the big leap and went to California, and we

went to the Willows District on the Mendocino National Forest—there was a Willows Ranger

District on the Mendocino at the time, where Dean Lloyd, L-l-o-y-d, was the district ranger. We

got assigned as foremen of a San Quentin inmate prison crew. Back in those days, there were

four federally-operated state prison camps. Two were on the Tahoe [National Forest], one on the

Mendocino and one on the Lassen [National Forest]. And so I spent the summer months with

that crew. Nineteen sixty was a bad fire year. From July third until I quit work in October, I had

only one day off. We just fought fire and fought fire and fought fire.

And it was back in the days of the good old 25 percent differential, and so your sixth day,

you only got 25 percent of your pay for thirteen hours. And then on Sunday you actually got

straight pay. In those days, there was no such thing as time and a half or that kind of thing. So I

did that job, and that helped me considerably because I kept in contact with the Mendocino,

specifically the Willows District, and I let them know when I was going to graduate, which was

December 1962.

So in October ’62, I got a telegram at ten o’clock one night, and it was from Region Five

saying, “Will you accept if offered GS-5 job? Mendocino National Forest, Willows, California.”

Which I immediately sent back a telegram saying yes. And that’s how I got on, and I believe

that working for the district in that job with the inmates is what had the district be comfortable

with me returning.


BUZZINI: Dick, what made you decide to pursue a career with the Forest Service? You said

you went to forestry school, so obviously you were thinking about it for a long time.

HENRY: Actually, I was thinking about it for just a short time. I had all my life wanted to be a

[sic; an] engineer, a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer. And I went off to interview at

several colleges. I went to Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is a

very famous engineering school, but they looked over my grades. And, for instance, my grades

in history were 100. For three years, I got 100 in civics and history, and for four years I got 100

in English, and I did extremely well in other subjects, except in math I only had an 87 average

for four years in high school. Now, a lot of folks would think an 87 average was pretty good,

because it included solid geometry and trigonometry, but what the college person recommended

was that my interest really wasn’t in engineering, because I didn’t do as well in mathematics, and

suggested that I look for another field of endeavor.

So I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was devastated after that. I sent off for a

catalog from Penn State, just kind of on a whim, and I started leafing through the Penn State

catalog, and I found this course called Forestry, and I read up on it, and you built bridges, you

did surveying, you did a whole bunch of things that I really wanted to do as an engineer, so I

thought, Well, this is a back way into the engineering business, and I’ll go to forestry school. So

I signed up to go to forestry, and the more I was involved in it—

And back in those days, you actually did forestry things. In my freshman year, we

managed the Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, watershed, and we cut trees for pulp and paper

companies, for printing purposes, and we had our own sawmill on campus, and we made ties for

the Pennsylvania Railroad, and as we made those, we put them on a flatcar on the siding right

next to our sawmill on campus, and off they went.


So I really got turned onto the forestry business, and then, as I said, in 1960 I went out to

California, heading up an inmate crew, and really got turned on, and so it was not a lifelong

dream, it was a change in direction based on a counselor, who [sic; whom] I don’t know and I’ve

never seen again, telling me not to do that.

Following my interview with that counselor, I went to my high school guidance

counselor and asked her what she knew about forestry and what she could tell me. So she went

to her catalog in her file cabinet, and in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, no one ever wanted to

become a forester. There was no interest in forestry. She didn’t have the slightest idea what it

was about and couldn’t find any literature on it. So I was on my own, and so on my own I

became a forester, and I believe had a fairly successful career with the United States Forest

Service, enjoyed it immensely and enjoyed all the challenges, and I’m very happy that I decided

that’s what I was going to do.

BUZZINI: Good for you. So you signed on the dotted line in 1962?

HENRY: In 1962 I signed on the dotted line. I was administered the oath by Coco Kiuttu, K-i-

u-t-t-u. Secoro del Roso Kiuttu is her name. Coco went on from being the district clerk at the

Willows District to administrative officer on I believe the Sequoia or the Sierra National Forest.

Became a GS-13, one of the first women in the outfit to go that high. So a really neat person

swore me into the outfit.

A really interesting district ranger was my first ranger, Dean Lloyd. He once came out to

where I was doing some thinning with the inmates, and we did our own marking, and then the

inmates cut to our markings, so we had a paint gun in our hand while they were working. So I

see Dean Lloyd pull up in his pickup truck, and it was a very dark green. We were in the process

of changing from very dark green to the, quote, “Forest Service safety green.” And on the roof


of this truck was about a ten-foot-long antennae [sic; antenna], which we had for years until we

got into the new radio business.

And he walked up the hill from his truck and said, “Well, Dick, why did you mark that

tree right here?” And I said, “Well, I marked it for these reasons.” He said, “Well, it was good

that you marked it. All of your reasons were wrong, and this is why you should have marked it,

and I’m glad that you marked it. But in the future, these are the reasons you should mark these

trees.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Well, good talking with you,” and he walked down

off the hill and got in his truck and drove off, and I didn’t see him again for several months.

That was Dean.

BUZZINI: Good.

Tell us which national forests you’ve worked on during your Forest Service career, and

then we’ll get into the different positions you held.

HENRY: Okay. Well, the forests I worked on was [sic; were] the Willows District of the

Mendocino—

BUZZINI: Yes, and you can do some dates.

HENRY: Do you want me to do the dates now?

BUZZINI: Yes, that’s good.

HENRY: I started on the Mendocino as a professional in January 1963, and I was a forester.

After sixty days on the district, I became the timber stand improvement forester. I then went to

work as a timber sale officer. Following that, I transferred to the Upper Lake District on the

Mendocino, where I was the assistant district ranger. Back in those days, the assistant district

ranger had the same authority as the district ranger. In other words, we were a line officer [sic;

were line officers], and when he was absent we could make line decisions.


I held that job for four years, when I went to the Sierra National Forest in 1969. While I

was there, I was the STET timber management officer on the Minarets Ranger District, which

had just been combined. Excuse me, that’s not correct. You need to back up to where I moved

to the Sierra. I went to the Sierra as a GS-11 district timber management officer on the

combined districts. And while I was on the forest, my last few months on the forest, I became

the director of the largest Youth Conservation Corps camp in the nation at Minarets. It was up in

the forest at the Minarets work center, where I had sixty-five young men in the Youth

Conservation Corps program.

It was really interesting being in that program in its first year, since they were writing the

manual on how to manage that program during the summer that I was running the program, and

they got all of the manual put together on how to run the program in the late fall, after all of the

programs had shut down on the forests for the winter months.

From that position, I went to the Eldorado National Forest, on the Pacific District, where

I was the district resource officer in charge of recreation, wildlife, range management, et cetera,

on the district—everything except timber. And I swapped positions with another fellow. Both

rangers felt that we needed experience in the other field, so we actually transferred the same day

and moved into each other’s former house on the ranger district the same day.

Following that, in 1972, I went to be the ranger at Happy Camp [Ranger District] on the

Klamath National Forest. The forest had interviewed me several months earlier to be the district

ranger down on the Salmon River District, and they would not allow you to say whether you

were okay with accepting that job or not until you and your wife had traveled to Salmon River,

and then when you came back from Salmon River you could tell them whether you wished to be

considered or not considered.


So we went down to Salmon River, and we got to the pass out of Fort Jones and looked

down the Salmon River. It was a gravel road for many a mile, and we decided to plunge off the

pass and head for the district office. And we’re going around this huge curve on the side of the

hill, and there’s the Forest Service name sign on the hill that says: Joltass Joe Curve,” and we felt

we were stepping back in history a little bit with the use of that name.

We continued on downriver, and a telephone company truck passed us, and the fellow in

the truck waved to us, and we waved back, and we got to the bottom of the hill, and there was

another telephone truck, and there was a person on the ground and a lineman on spurs up on the

top of the telephone pole, and the guy on the ground waved to us, and the guy up on top of the

pole waved to us. And I said to Nancy, “Well, maybe it’s not that they are so friendly, it’s that

they’re lonely.”

BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]

HENRY: So we kept going, and we got to the district office, which was considerably small. We

saw Betty Lou Kessler, who had lived with us on the Upper Lake District. Her husband [was]

[Richard] “Dick” Kessler, K-e-s-s-l-e-r, who was in Timber management. She was there, and

she had created this beautiful quilt, and Nancy saw this beautiful quilt, and she responded, “Yes,

that was my project for last winter. I don’t know what I’m going to do this winter.”


HENRY: And she said, “Oh, we’ve got to go. I’ve got to get to the post office.” And I said,

“Well, what’s the hurry?” She said, “It’s only open one hour a day, and you can go get your

mail and buy stamps, but the rest of the time it’s open, and you can go to your mailbox and get

your mail out, but you don’t have anybody you can talk to.” I found out that the zip code for the


post office down there was the same as for Fort Jones. They shared it because apparently

Salmon River wasn’t big enough to deserve its own zip code.

Well, after looking at all the things there, we were also going to have to farm out our

children to grammar school up at Fort Jones and just see them on Saturdays and Sundays during

the school year. The county didn’t plow the road except during daylight hours after the storm

was over, so we had gone through a lot of trouble to have a family, and we decided that we

weren’t going to put us through that.

At the time, I then said, “No, I do not wish to be considered for this job.” I had the

terrible gut feeling that I was never going to be a district ranger, that I had gotten myself off of

that list, and I wanted to be a district ranger so badly, because I felt you had to be a district

ranger to get to be a forest supervisor, and I wanted to be a forest supervisor.

So it was a long, quiet drive home from the Klamath, and a few months later we got

called and offered the Happy Camp job. In later years, I kind of thought maybe they wanted me

to go see the Salmon River job just kind of for effect and that when I heard about the Happy

Camp job I’d be thrilled and take it.


HENRY: And I was thrilled, and I did take it. And Happy Camp was bigger than Salmon River,

but it had a lot of the quaint things going on there that Salmon River did. So I was ranger in

Happy Camp until 1977, when I went to the chief’s office to become the new national fuels

management officer. I held that job for a while, and then Hank deBruin, little d-e big B-r-u-i-n,

was the director. I have to tell you that probably one of the best people I ever worked for in the

Forest Service was Hank deBruin. And folks had funny thoughts of Hank. He had been the

director of public information and then got moved over to be the fire director. There were a lot


of people thought how can a guy in public information become the fire director? Well, in

Washington you have to know how to play the politics and know who’s on first and who [sic;

whom] you should talk to and who [sic; whom] you shouldn’t talk to and who [sic; whom] you

should say what to and who [sic; whom] you shouldn’t say not what to. And Hank de Bruin was

the best person I ever saw operating in the Washington office.

And so I was his fuels management officer, and he thought I was doing a pretty fair job at

that. He didn’t like his budget officer. In fact, he transferred him to a forest in Utah, and he

thought the budget job was just kind of a part-time job, and so I became the budget officer for the

national fire budget as well, which really was a full-time job.

And then I got put on the planning team that developed the national fire management

analysis system called NFMAS [pronounced NIFF-mas], and went around the country training

people in how to handle that program.

Following that, they asked me to go to—by that time, we had changed fire directors. The

assistant director was still—in the Washington office, yes.

BUZZINI: Okay.

HENRY: Just a second. Why am I going to tell you that?

BUZZINI: You were trying to get names and places and dates and all that in here.

HENRY: Okay, yes, okay.

BUZZINI: Go.

HENRY: I worked in the Washington office, where my boss was [Lawrence A.] “Mic”

Amicarella. Mic had been a forest supervisor in Colorado, and he didn’t really have any

experience in fire, so it was kind of a challenge to deal with Mic. He also was great at leaping to

conclusions, and so you had to make sure the first verb and noun out of your mouth was on the


subject, because if you started off with pleasantries, he wanted you to get to the subject and that

was it, so he was a different style boss.

BUZZINI: Could you spell his name?

HENRY: Mick, M-i-c. Last name, A-m-i-c-a-r-e-l-l-a.

BUZZINI: Thank you.

HENRY: Are you interested in neat things I did while I was in the Washington office, or—

BUZZINI: Why don’t we wait and do that—

HENRY: —do you want to save that till later?

BUZZINI: —at the end of our time.

HENRY: Okay.

BUZZINI: And just continue with the dates and places of your different assignments.

HENRY: Okay. Then in 1969, the—no, that’s the wrong date. In 1970, Gary Cargill, last name

C-a-r-g-i-l-l, was the fire director. And he and Mic Amicarella asked me to consider three

different jobs, because they felt that I needed a change. One of the jobs would be to be promoted

from the Washington office, where I was a GS-13, and become a -14 as a national forest

supervisor. Another job would be to lateral out as a -13 and become a deputy forest supervisor,

and another job would be to go to Marana, Arizona, and become the director of the National

Advanced Resource Technology Center, which taught mainly upper-level, graduate student-level

fire courses but also did training in mining and lands activities.

A correction to my dates. I moved to the Washington office in ’77 and then to Tucson in

1980.

Oh, Nancy, something’s wrong here.


[Recording interruption.]

BUZZINI: —three jobs, and you chose that one.

HENRY: Okay.

BUZZINI: Okay.

HENRY: So they asked me to consider three jobs, and so I said, “I’ll talk it over with Nancy

tonight and let you know tomorrow.” So I talked it over with Nancy, and we felt it would be

great to get promoted from the Washington office and go out as a forest supervisor. So the next

morning, I went back to Mic and said, “We’d prefer to take the -14 forest supervisor job and

make the move wherever, if you want me to be forest supervisor.” And Mic said, “Well, that’s

not really the job we wanted you to take.” And I said, “Oh.” He said, “We’d like you to

consider the other two jobs.” And so I said, “Well, I will, but I’ll talk with Nancy, and I’ll let

you know tomorrow.”

So I came back the next day and said, “We’d prefer to stay in Washington and take a

promotion in place.” And Mic said, “That’s not really the job we wanted you to take.” I said,

“You want me to go to Marana?” I said, “I don’t want to go to Marana. Nobody has ever left

Marana and become a forest supervisor. The people that leave Marana go off to be staff

assistants someplace, but there’s never been a forest supervisor come out of Marana.”

And he said, “That’s not a rule.” I said, “Well, it looks like it, because,” I said, “Marana

has been around for a long time, and nobody has ever come out of Marana and become a forest

supervisor. Even coming out of Marana and going to another job and then to forest supervisor.

Nobody’s ever done that, so I don’t want to go to Marana because I want to be a forest

supervisor.” And he said, “Well, we really want you to take that job.”


So Gary Cargill said, “Dick, I will support you for becoming a forest supervisor after

you’ve gone to Marana.” He said, “We have problems at Marana. We feel it’s being run too

much like a country club, and we want it to be run as an educational facility, and we think you’re

the person to go out and make that happen, and that’s why we want you to go to Marana, and I

promise you that I will support you to be a forest supervisor following that.”

BUZZINI: Why didn’t they tell you that in the beginning?

HENRY: Yes. But they were hoping I’d pick Marana, for some reason. Anyway, off I went to

Marana, where I enjoyed changing things around. When I arrived at Marana we had nine staff—

BUZZINI: When did you begin there?

HENRY: I began Marana in 19—[Pause.] Stop the tape.


BUZZINI: Okay.

HENRY: So in 1980 I went off to Marana, and I decided I was going to be the best director that

had ever been at Marana and that I was going to cause problems for Amicarella and Cargill not

knowing what to do with me because I would be so good at running the Marana operation that I

could be a forest supervisor, I could be virtually anything, but I wasn’t going to let them send me

off as some assistant staff someplace.

So off I went to Marana. I arrived. There were nine staff, and they taught four courses a

year. When I left Marana, we had eight staff, and we did fourteen courses a year, including an

international course in fire training for three weeks conducted solely in the Spanish language.

And we taught courses in minerals management and several other areas, lands area. So I started


watching who was going off to become forest supervisors, and I called Gary Cargill, and I said,

“You know, I’ve been here five years. I really think it’s time for me to move on, and are you

still going to support me as a forest supervisor?” He said, “Yes, I am, Dick.”

So the next thing I see is that the Eldorado has been filled by a guy out of Region Six,

and I thought, I want to go to Region Five because that’s where all the action is, and I’m hoping

I get a Region Five national forest, and I hope Gary thinks I can get a Region Five national

forest. Well, after I see who’s going there and I’m doing all this thinking, I get a call from Gary

Cargill, who said, “You’ve probably seen who’s gotten the Eldorado. You are going to get a

Region Five forest, but that’s not the one. Don’t panic.”


HENRY: And about two weeks later, I was offered the job of forest supervisor on the Lassen

National Forest. I really enjoyed that tour. I got to do a whole bunch of things, which we’ll talk

about later.

BUZZINI: When did you begin there?

HENRY: I began there in 1984, and I was forest supervisor for six years, the longest I was in

any position, and was there until 1990. In 1990 I was looking around for jobs, and the regional

fire director’s job in Region Six was open, so I applied for that but was not accepted. Then I

went off on detail to the regional office as deputy regional forester for six months and got to

work with Paul Barker a lot and had some really neat experiences in the regional office. When

the forest supervisor’s position was coming towards an end, six years having been the longest

time I’d been in any position, Paul said that I should apply for the fire director’s job in the

regional office. There was another fellow that wanted the job, and Mic Amicarella and the

deputy chief of—[Pause.]. West.


BUZZINI: [Allan] “Al” West?

HENRY: Al West was the deputy chief, who promised him the job. And so there was a period

of time for people to take the acting job of fire director, and Paul Barker told me not to apply for

that. And so the other fellow applied for that, and I had a good feeling that he would be getting

that job. Paul had an agreement with Al West and Mic Amicarella that they would not propose

anybody else, that they will let him select his fire director.

Well, on the Friday night before the Monday that the selection was to be made, David

Jay, deputy regional forester, was in the Washington office, and he heard that Mic and Al were

going to nominate this other fellow for the job come Monday morning, so Paul said, “Well, I’ll

take care of that.” So Paul called George Leonard. George Leonard was the associate chief.

George also had been in Region Five and knew me when I was in timber management because

he was the timber director at one time. And Paul said he wanted Dick Henry because 1) he liked

working with him and we had a good rapport, and he felt that the regional forester’s office

needed a forest supervisor on staff because that’s where the reality was, people who had recently

worked on forests, needed to understand how things went on forests, and he wanted a forest

supervisor in the job.

So come Monday morning, recommendations were made by Al West and Mic

Amicarella, and George Leonard made a recommendation that Dick Henry become the director,

and so moved, I became the director. So it was under some tense days, weeks and months that I

was the director, since the favorite of the Washington office fire director and the deputy chief

was for a different person. I had to deal with—

BUZZINI: You had to prove yourself.

HENRY: —that. Yes, I had to, yes, more than prove myself, because it was really a bad taste.


BUZZINI: When did you begin your assignment as director?

HENRY: I began in 1990 as the director and retired from that job in 1994, on doctor’s orders. I

really loved that job, and I wanted to become a regional forester. I had applied to Harvard

[University] for their advanced school where you went so that you could get into the group that

would be considered for regional forester and above jobs. And the same day that I was offered

the job as fire director, I received a letter from Harvard accepting me into that program. I really

wanted to be the fire director, because I just enjoyed the heck out of fire, so I sent back a “I’m

sorry, but I can’t take the Harvard position,” and I became the fire director.

Following that, then, I planned to go to Harvard so I could come out and become a

regional forester. There were some folks in the Washington office, plus Paul Barker, that felt

they should groom me to become the regional forester for Region Five, and so I was looking

forward to that. However, I have diabetes, and it became very active. While I was in the

regional office, I had to go on shots and see my hematologist several times a year, and I was told

that if I wished to live much longer that I needed to get out of a stressful job. And I said, “Well,

I’m not in a stressful job.”

And he said, “What have you done in the past month?” And so in the past month I’d

dealt with a typhoon in Guam and gotten relief out to them, and Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii, which

was a bit of a tough job. I sent two women out there to handle that job of running it, Alice

Forbes from North Zone and Karen Barnette, who was in Sacramento office, working in the fire

business. I sent those two out with full authority to act for me and the regional forester because

decisions needed to be made quickly, on the ground, to get on with dealing with the island of

Hawaii, which had lost one-third of its standing timber and it effect [had] become a rather large

pile of dead stuff.


I shipped a task force of engines—a task force being five engines—out to Hawaii and

two Hotshot crews to Hawaii to help them in case they had fires with all of that downed material.

It was rather interesting. Alice would be in the room with a bunch of admirals and colonels and

generals and folks making decisions from the military bases, and they would announce at the end

of the day they would have to go back and talk to their boss, and they would have their decision

tomorrow, and Alice and Karen would say, “Well, this is our decision. We don’t have to check

with anybody, and it stands now.” These admirals and generals are wondering how these two

females from the Forest Service were able to make these decisions without having to check with

somebody from further up because obviously women couldn’t possibly have that much authority.


HENRY: But they did, because I gave it to them.


HENRY: So I had to retire, and I did on May 3rd, 1994, and two days later I went hypoglycemic

from having too much insulin in my system, so my doctor started lowering my insulin shots, and

six days after I retired, I was off of insulin. So apparently the regional fire director’s job has

stress involved in it. But I had spent my career in the Forest Service, most of it in California,

where stress—

BUZZINI: Was business as usual.

HENRY: Was business as usual, and you got used to it, and you just made decisions, because

they needed to be made and you didn’t think about all the stress. But apparently it was stressful

for me, so I retired, and I’m now being interviewed in 2006, and I’ve lived past the time they

said I would live if I stayed in the job.



HENRY: So I have some regrets about not—I would have loved to have been a regional

forester, but that’s the way it is in life, and I’m retired, and enjoying life as a retiree and still

dealing with diabetes.

BUZZINI: Let me ask you these, and then we’ll quit.


BUZZINI: Dick, thank you for the rundown on your career. It sounds like you had a very

colorful one. Your name was selected because we feel that you can contribute valuable

information about timber management in the fire program as they relate to your tenure with the

U.S. Forest Service, and we have a few questions that we would like to ask you regarding each

one.


BUZZINI: We’re ready.

Dick, now I wanted to ask you about some of the timber management programs during

your career. How did working in timber management help or hurt your opportunities for

advancement?

HENRY: From my perspective, working in timber management helped my advancement. I got

into timber management when I started on the Mendocino. I was a timber sale officer and a

timber stand improvement forester on the Willows District. When I moved to the Upper Lake

District—I moved there in December of ’65, and the following summer we had the Round Fire


on the Upper Lake District where I was, and it burned 25,000 acres, mostly in timber, and some

of it was in Type 1A. If somebody doesn’t know what Type 1A is, that’s the best ground, the

soil conditions, et cetera, for growing timber. It burned over some lands of the Fiberboard

Corporation, which they had been managing extensively on the Upper Lake Ranger District.

Following the burn, which was devastating—there wasn’t much left standing—we

decided to clear the land and plant it, so we put out contracts for D-8 and larger Cats [Caterpillar

tractors]. We wanted rakes on them, and we went in and piled all the downed, dead material

from the fire, and we hired fallers to fell anything standing taller than ten foot [sic; feet]. This

was accomplished. We burned the large piles, and we then planted.

In 2005, I took my granddaughter, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, an area where

cutting trees is thought of as being horrendous—and I wanted to show her what the world looked

like if you let foresters manage the land the way it ought to be managed, and I took her to the

Round Fire, and she couldn’t believe that there had been a big fire there, and I showed her the

pictures of the fire and showed her where she was standing and where all the naked ridges were.

They are now covered with 60- to 80-foot-tall ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.

BUZZINI: Wow.

HENRY: And the average civilian driving through the forest would probably complain about the

trees that are growing close to the road and their branches hitting their car. I doubt that we

would ever get somebody who complained about us, quote, “clear-cutting” back up there again,

because there would be no reason for them to accept what had happened; they would still think

clear-cutting was bad, and I could prove to them that it was good, but their mind would be made

up.

BUZZINI: Yes.


HENRY: So I think that being in charge of that reforestation effort for three and a half years,

getting all the land planted and that particular amount of management and success in the timber

program helped me be viewed as a person who could get things done and who could therefore

handle other jobs where things needed to get done. I believe that timber management was a big

help in my career.

When I went to the Happy Camp Ranger District, I was there during the years of

President [Richard M.] Nixon’s Super Sell Program. He wanted timber to get on the market so

that lumber would be less expensive for the folks coming home from Vietnam, so they could get

houses that were less expensive.

At Happy Camp, the five years I was there, we never cut less than 100 million board feet

a year. If there are any readers of this book, 100 million board feet is equivalent to 10,000 three-

bedroom homes framed in wood and with mostly wood products. One year we did 125 million

board feet. That year, we were the biggest timber district in the nation.

BUZZINI: Wow. And what year was that?

HENRY: That was in 1975.

BUZZINI: Wow.

HENRY: So when you got the biggest cut in the nation and you successfully pull it off and you

have people coming out to view how you’re cutting, because that 125 million board feet came

off in a variety of ways—we actually had one timber sale that we used horses. So that the

watershed people would be happy, there were diapers on the horses.


HENRY: When the horse raised its tail, the strap attached to its tail opened a bag that was hung

below its anal port, and the horse droppings went into the canvas bag.


BUZZINI: Wow.

HENRY: The man who ran the horses thought it was somewhat ridiculous, but the watershed

people were just enthralled. We always wanted to keep them happy, and so that’s how we

logged. But we also logged with helicopters, with Cats. We had the largest skyline tower. We

had a 110-foot-tall tower that “Benny” Vincent, a logger in Happy Camp, had. And we had a

main line, which was 2-7/8 inches in diameter and 6,000 feet long. Remembering that 5,280 feet

is a mile, this cable was over a mile long, stretching from one ridge top to another. On the far

ridge top, the cable was anchored to three large stumps in the ground, and a D-8 Cat that had dug

a hole for itself and was tied to, and the carriage went out on this large cable, and the cable went

down and picked up logs and brought them back to the landing.

The cable was so high in the air and so long that for the first time in my career or

anybody’s career in the Forest Service, we had to file a flight plan for a stationary cable because

it was high enough out of the canyon, above 4,000 feet, that there was concern by the FAA

[Federal Aviation Authority] that planes could hit the cable, so they requested that we put those

big orange balls on the cable, like you see on transmission lines. However, there’s a carriage that

rides along that cable coming out from the landing, and as soon as we operated the carriage the

first time, there would be a large number of balls in the center of the cable and some to the far

end, but nothing on one-half of it coming towards the landing, so they said then we would issue

NOTAMS, which is a notice to airmen, that that cable was there.

Having the largest cut in the nation makes you noticeable. Using all of the various ways

of logging—horses and Cats and skylines, et cetera—gets you noticed, and getting out the cut.

In the days that I was in timber, getting out the cut was a big deal.


BUZZINI: Yes, I was going to ask you about the importance of the timber targets, and

obviously that’s what you’re touching on right now.

HENRY: Yes, it was extremely important. Each ranger district was expected to get out its cut,

and each of the districts’ cut—when those were totaled up, was the forest’s cut, and the forest

was expected by the regional forester to get its cut out. And then the chief had an expectation

that each region was going to get out its cut, which was a collection of all the forests in that

region. And so at the bottom level, where the cut started, at the ranger district, the pressure was

fairly high to get out the cut. It was high in the regional office and the Washington office as

well. However, there weren’t any chain saws near any of those offices; it was at the district level

that the pressure was fairly extreme, and you knew that if you got out the cut and were successful

in that, you might move on to bigger and better things and that if you didn’t get out the cut and

that happened probably more than one time, you needed to accept the fact that you probably

were not going on to higher places in the outfit, because success was rewarded with promotion,

and if you were smart, you knew that. And so I always got out the cut and in several years

exceeded the cut.

BUZZINI: Were you always comfortable with the levels, of the targets that you had to meet?

HENRY: I was comfortable with the levels from a forestry standpoint. I had no problem. Our

forest timber plan and our growth was [sic; were] equaling our cut, and so I had no problems that

we were over-cutting, which was, of course, the cries of the Sierra Club. I did not believe we

were over-cutting on the Happy Camp District. My biggest problem with getting out the cut was

the budget necessary to get out the cut. We had to fill positions. For instance, at Happy Camp, it

was a tough place to get people to come. The nearest doctor was seventy-five miles away in


Yreka, and also the location—the nearest small hospital, the nearest reasonably-sized hospital

was in Medford, Oregon, 110 miles away.

One time, I went around the region advertising the Happy Camp District to people who

wanted to move up in timber, and say, “Hey, this is the place” and showing them pictures of the

horse logging and the skyline equipment, trying to entice them to come to the district. At one

point, I had seventeen vacancies in the permanent, full-time positions because I couldn’t get

people to come to the district, and it’s hard to get out the cut when you don’t have people

available to make that “get out the cut” happen. So it wasn’t a professional forestry problem, it

was a budget problem and it was a personnel problem. Young couples wanted to move to a

place where they could start a family and the wife could go to the doctor’s office, and if there

were any problems, the doctor’s office was close by or the hospital was close by, and so young

married couples were not interested at all in coming to a place like Happy Camp.

I don’t know whether this is where you want me to talk about the Happy Camp clinic or

not. We could do that later.

BUZZINI: Maybe towards the end of this one?

HENRY: Okay.

BUZZINI: Tell me, were there major changes that you saw or experienced in the different

timber harvesting methods on your units?

HENRY: There were some. There were people that were just totally against clear-cutting. I

used to like to explain to them that I believed that they really did enjoy clear-cutting, and they

would looked shocked at me, and I would say, “How many of you in this room ski?” And there

would be people that would raise their hands that they skied. And I said, “Well, you ski, for the

most part, in large clear-cuts.” I said, “All of those ski facilities that are on national forest


system lands and on private lands—to accommodate the skiing, there have been clear-cuts, and

so you really do enjoy the effects of clear-cuts if you’re skiing.” “Well, that’s okay, but we’re

not okay with those other clear-cuts that you do.”

And so during my time, we attempted to not clear-cut, and at Happy Camp I let the

planning forester, Keith Crummer—K-e-i-t-h, last name C-r-u-m-m-e-r, later the district ranger

on the Corning RD, Mendocino NF, and then on the Almanor District on the Lassen National

Forest. Keith wanted to try a less-than-clear-cut operation in a Douglas fir stand on one of the

ridges, and so he went in and came up with small openings. Some of it looked like the old unit

area control cuts, and he wanted to do these partial cuts. The year following that timber sale, we

had extensive blow-down in those areas because folks don’t understand that when Douglas fir

grows, one tree supports the other, and when there is a big group of them growing together, they

usually don’t blow down, but when it’s been changed so you’re taking out some of the trees and

leaving other ones, that they then stand as single trees or groups of two or three trees, they are

really subject to wind-blow damage, and Northern California gets its winds every so often and

proves that point. So we attempted to not clear-cut but went back to it as a way to manage the

stands and not have as much dead and down material as a result of our logging operations.

Yes, go ahead.

BUZZINI: Dick, now I’d like to ask you which laws or other Forest Service policy changes

caused the greatest changes to the timber program during your career, and why.

HENRY: Most of the major changes occurred about the time I was leaving the Happy Camp

Ranger District, very big in timber, and going to the Washington office and the fuels job, so the

ranger that followed me at Happy Camp got caught up in all of the great new rules and


regulations and laws that affected timber management. His name is George Harper, last name H-

a-r-p-e-r.

BUZZINI: And what period of time are we talking about?

HENRY: This would be from the mid to late seventies. I got caught in the National

Environmental Quality. I got caught up with the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers believing that

any drainage which flowed into, in my case, the Klamath River should be administered by the

Corps of Engineers if it had water even one day a year running down the little creek, and so they

came up with a program where we had to get a permit from the Corps of Engineers to put in an

eighteen-inch culvert on a rather minor road, a proposition where, in my past as a forester, I was

allowed to determine that an eighteen-inch culvert was good enough and could go in the road and

didn’t even need to be engineered, that engineers needed to be involved in the bigger pipes. And

now we were saying that we had to take that decision to the Corps of Engineers. It limited us for

a while until we finally got the Corps to agree to a more standard policy of responding to that.

But my years in the “get out the cut” was—we were successful in getting out the cut. We

did not have a lot of problems in doing that. And we—I think I’ll talk about the public meetings

in the next part of this.

BUZZINI: Okay. You touched earlier on the budget as regards the timber management

program. Is there anything else you’d like to add about how the budget affected the program?

HENRY: Basically, as most of the folks know who probably will be reading this, it takes two

actions of Congress to make something happen. They have to first pass a bill called the enabling

act, which says such-and-such is going to happen; every person in the country is going to get a

24-inch color television set paid by the feds. That is a neat act. It allows them to say that’s what

they’re going to do.


However, they can’t do it until they pass a bill funding that. And so Congress can say

we’re going to cut this much and we’re going to do this and that, but what gets done is

accomplished by the amount of money that makes it to the ground to make those things happen.

And so as the money trickles to the ground with a portion being taken by the Washington office

to run the timber operation in Washington and a portion by the regional office to run the timber

operation in the regional office, a portion by the supervisor’s office to run the supervisor’s office,

then there’s that money left for the ranger district to get out the timber program.

In a place like Happy Camp, where the timber program is the largest thing going on, you

take some of the timber funds to help pay for the clerical staff, to help pay the light bills and the

utility bills, and then you get down to what you have left to actually pay foresters to get out on

the ground to do the work. And in some years, that becomes a task possibly for Noah to

handle—

BUZZINI: [Laughs.]

HENRY: —because of the amount that starts out, which is smaller than you needed in the first

place and gets smaller as it comes down the line. So, yes, budgets do affect you, and it becomes

tougher to get out the cut with less money than you know it takes to get out the cut. But you

work your folks as best you can to get out the cut, and that becomes the goal, to get out the cut.

Your question here, Were there any significant changes in the degrees of control? At

Happy Camp, I enjoyed having an extremely competent staff that reported to me. In charge of

planning of the timber sales was Keith Crummer. I’ve already mentioned him. In charge of

administration of the timber sales was Chris Carr—Chris spelled C-h-r-i-s, and the last name

Carr, spelled C-a-r-r. Chris was a mountain of a man, for those who don’t know him.

BUZZINI: Oh, I know him.


HENRY: Chris used to weigh about 285 when he was in great shape in the summer and about

three and a quarter [325 pounds] in the winter, just a big guy, and so when he walked up and

talked to somebody, they usually agreed with what he said, and so he was very effective in the

administration of timber sales. If the timber sale officer was having a problem with a logger,

why, we then sent Chris in.


HENRY: We basically got done what needed to be done.


BUZZINI: We’re on pause.

HENRY: Okay, you can take it off pause.

BUZZINI: Okay.

HENRY: Because Happy Camp was able to get out the cut every year and to manage its timber

sales so that the folks in the supervisor’s office, when they came out and inspected the

sales—they agreed with what we had done on the ground, how we had handled the road

construction, what we were doing about slash piling and recreation for after timber sale

activities, and at one point [Daniel] “Dan” Abraham, A-b-r-a-h-a-m, was the forest supervisor on

the Klamath for a few years while I was there, called me up one time and told me that he and

Dale Heigh, last name H-e-i-g-h, who was the forest timber staff officer, were not going to be

coming to Happy Camp because things were well in hand and they were quite happy with how

we were doing things, and they needed to spend extra time on two other districts and try to get

their attention.


And so for almost two years, we did what we had always done, was [sic; which was] get

out the cut and do things in the right and proper way, and the supervisor’s office was fine with

that, and so when you talk about were there significant changes in the degrees of control, control

was left up to me as the district ranger. I was proud of that, and because they had done that, I

think, you know, you work hard to please the boss, and when the boss gives you all that

authority, you really work extra hard to make sure that you deserve his good thoughts about how

you manage the district. And so at that time, I was very lucky to have an excellent staff. We

worked together extremely well, and we got out the cut.


I want to ask you now about the relationship between the timber, quote-unquote, beast

and the other specialists. How would you characterize the relationship between timber

management people and other specialists on your unit?

HENRY: In my young days on the Mendocino, we had two groups of specialists. We had

timber management and we had engineering, and engineering designed all of the roads so that

timber management could get out all of the cut. And we worked together quite closely,

extremely closely. We would get on the ground and walk on the ground with the engineers about

getting a road out to where we could harvest this unit that had been marked, and we came to

agreement fairly well. The engineer might tell us at some point that we had to put in a large

culvert and that the timber sale was going to have to pay for that, and so we would deal with the

timber sale appraisal to take care of that kind of thing, but it was basically timber and

engineering folks, and they knew their jobs quite well.

And then all of a sudden the Mendocino hired a landscape architect, and the timber guys

talked to themselves and said, “What do we need a landscape architect for?” “I don’t know.”


And the engineering guys talked to themselves and said, “What do we need a landscape architect

for?” And then the engineering guys said, “I don’t know. Maybe the timber guys know.” And

so the timber guys and the engineering guys talked about what do we need a landscape architect

for, and we came to the collective conclusion that neither group knew why we needed a

landscape architect. “We don’t know why we want one. We’re not sure what to do with one.

And I sure hope they don’t mess up with what [sic; mess up what] we’ve got going really well,

between the engineers and timber beasts.

Well, sure enough, they messed up what was going well between the engineers and the

timber beasts. The landscape architect said, “You need to take a tree down over there. It’s not

marked, but you need to take it down because if you do that on this curve of the road, it will

provide a vista for the public to see a long distance.” And the timber beast said, “Well, we left

that tree there on purpose, to provide seed down into the area below, to grow new trees in the

forest.” And the landscape architect said, “Well, you can go plant trees there. That’s not a

problem. But you need to take the tree down so the public has a vista to see the rest of the

forest.”

And so it became a thing of, “What’s a landscape architect know about growing trees and

what we have to do to grow trees and to get out the cut? They’re an impediment to us getting out

the cut, and so we don’t like landscape architects.” And so whenever we know that a landscape

architect is coming out, we work really hard to be someplace else on the district than where they

are.

As we went along, other specialists showed up, and they were called specialists because

they were different; they weren’t engineers, and they weren’t timber beasts, they were

specialists. And for us, that was a term like being a third sex.


BUZZINI: [Laughs.]

HENRY: “Specialists.” Before long, the Mendocino had a watershed specialist, and they had a

soils engineer, and, you know, it went on like that. , Well, you wondered what the heck all these

people were going to, and they apparently were sent to foul up getting out the cut, and that’s the

way we viewed them.

Well, as I moved on to being a line officer, district ranger at Happy Camp, I in fact

decided that I needed a soil scientist at the district, because there were soils problems and as the

line officer responsible for that piece of real estate, I did not need to be the reason the Klamath

River became brown. So here I am, going from a timber beast in my younger days, wondering

what the heck we were doing with those “specialists,” to where now I am telling the forest

supervisor, “I know he has all of those specialists, but they cannot devote enough time to my

district to make sure I get out the best timber in the best way to deal with all of the other

resources on the district, and so I want my own specialists.” And now I’m talking to myself

about how, in my younger days, I couldn’t understand why we had those “specialists,” and now

I’m requesting from the forest supervisor that I have my own corps of “specialists” on the Happy

Camp Ranger District. So you can see that—

BUZZINI: So in the beginning there was a little bit of tension, right?

HENRY: I would say there was a lot of tension, not a little bit. The engineers and the foresters

got really uptight about what these “specialists” were going to do and how they were going to

foul up what was working very successfully for the engineers and the timber beasts. But it took

a few years to where I became a line officer responsible for more than just “getting out the cut,”

and I needed my own. I thought it was kind of ironic. One day I was just by myself, driving up

the mountain, thinking back to my younger days, not wanting any of these “specialists” to foul


things up, and now I’m asking for them on the ranger district because the supervisor’s office

can’t give me enough specialist time to get out the cut.

I did get, in my later years, deeply concerned about the numbers of “specialists” that were

in the Forest Service and the lack of foresters that were in the Forest Service. It really concerned

me. But I’ve also taken a look at what the forestry schools, colleges are teaching. For instance,

at Penn State, my alma mater, you go into the forestry program, and you don’t do anything in

forestry until your junior year, and that’s when they say, “This is a tree compared to a cow.”

BUZZINI: [Chuckles softly.]

HENRY: I had to learn 1,200 species of trees and be able to identify them and write their name,

their family, genus and species in Latin. Now when they graduate from college, they know a

dozen trees and that’s about it. And so in my younger days, I believe foresters were taught a lot

more. We were taught range management; we were taught wildlife management; we were taught

soils management, things in college, so when we got on the ground we felt comfortable with all

of those things. And then when they moved the specialists in, we felt they were impinging on

our abilities to manage the lands with the things we already knew. But today’s foresters come

out of college with a whole lot less knowledge in the forestry game as used to come out of

college, and so they need all those specialists.

Plus today they’re not really getting out any sort of cut. The Klamath, when I was on it,

cut over 300 million board feet a year, and the last year I was in the Forest Service they cut 4

million feet. I had a small sales officer at Happy Camp that I charged with getting out 40 million

feet a year in just small sales on the district, and now the entire forest gets out 4 million feet. It’s

ridiculous, and it has gotten to that level by all of the laws and rules passed, laws by Congress

but mostly laws by judges. And I haven’t quite figured this out yet.


I would love to ask a Ninth Circuit Court judge [sic; ask Ninth Circuit Court judges] what

forestry college they went to to enable them to make these forestry decisions, where they got

their master’s degree in forestry, their doctorate in forest management, how they can make

forestry decisions in laws that really don’t fit what’s needed on the ground. They are making

decisions based on what they heard at the last cocktail party they were at by somebody from the

Sierra Club, and the forests are being managed now by people with no knowledge of forestry;

namely, judges and lobbyist groups. And forestry management of specifically federal lands in

this country has gone to heck and gone.

I would not want to be in the Forest Service today.

BUZZINI: As a timber beast especially, right?

HENRY: Especially as a timber beast or as a fire person, even. The roads on the Lassen

National Forest that were built by timber sales provided easy access for hunters, for

recreationists, for people who want to go to a campground and not go to a pristine—you know,

like, state-run campground, where there’s electricity, sewers, et cetera. They want to go

someplace and camp. It doesn’t have a picnic table. They just want to go camp and rough it.

Those are the roads those people drove on to do that. Those same roads are the roads fire

engines drove on to take people out to fight forest fires.

Well, they’ve since decided that those roads shouldn’t exist, and they haven’t just

blocked off those roads, they’ve gone in and taken the drainage structures out of those roads, so

if you want to open that road again for a fire, you just don’t take a tractor and bulldoze down the

big berm at the start of the road and knock down some of the water bars in the road so it’s easier

to drive over, the road doesn’t exist. You’d have to do a complete engineering job and go in and

spend months to put culverts in to open the road. And so access for fire suppression has gone


down considerably, so it’s not just a timber beast thing, it’s the management of the national

forest. It’s the fact that forest fires get much bigger today than they did in my career, because of

access, access which has been eliminated by cries from the Sierra Club and decisions by federal

judges who have no knowledge of land management.

I had to deal with my doctor. We have agreement that I will not tell my doctor how to

treat my various illnesses if my doctor won’t tell me how to manage national forest system lands.

And every doctor that I have, and I have many, say that they have a good agreement with that.

They like that, me [sic; my] not telling them how to be a doctor. The Forest Service puts up with

judges, who know absolutely nothing about managing the land, making political decisions about

things that should be decided upon a scientific basis, and we have lost that in this country. I

quite frankly feel very sorry for line officers in the Forest Service today, and I’m glad I’m not in

the Forest Service.

And I never thought I would say that. I looked forward to retiring and going around

bragging that I retired from the United States Forest Service, a right and honorable organization

that’s done great things, and people would say, “Oh, you were in Forest Service! Well, you

know, that’s really neat. I enjoy going up and doing this and that in the national forest.” Well, a

lot of folks can’t go up and enjoy doing that in the national forest because it’s been taken away

from them by people who are just dumb. I feel sorry for the folks running the forests, and I

would not want to be in their position today.

BUZZINI: I think a lot of people feel that way, Dick.

To sum up the timber management portion, during your career there were probably some

controversies that you had to deal with regarding the timber management program. Would you

tell us some of them, like, for instance, the clear-cutting issue?


HENRY: Well, clear-cutting was an issue, because the Sierra Club was getting its feet under

itself and starting to take hold, and were putting out calendars and three-color printed things that

were mailed off to unknowing folks. So clear-cutting became a big issue, and as I said earlier, in

managing various timber stands, in some cases you have to clear-cut. Now, you can clear-cut ten

acres and do some clear-cuts in an area over time so it’s not as noticeable to the public, but the

fact remains, you still need to manage the timber on that particular ridge based on that timber

type that’s there, by clear-cutting. And there are places where you can leave standing trees and

you can go in and pick about and take trees off and you’re doing fine with timber management,

but clear-cutting has always been an issue with the Sierra Club.

In fact, when I got to the Washington office, I found out there was an organization in one

of the Southeastern states; I can’t remember—South Carolina, North Carolina—but they asked

school kids to go out into the forests near them and take pictures of the worst-looking clear-cuts

that they had seen, and so they would get all these pictures of new clear-cuts in, and then they

would make up a calendar of all these terrible pictures of clear-cuts. Of course, they did that

each year. They never went back to a clear-cut twenty years later and saw how the trees that had

been planted there were growing.

I’d love to take a flock of folks to the Upper Lake District on the Mendocino and show

them the pictures of the bare land after the Round Fire, and how we knocked everything down

and piled it up and burned it, and then planted and now how the Sierra Club can drive through

and be amazed at this forest that was growing. They would think it was an old-growth forest,

whatever an old-growth forest is. I’ve always wondered if God planted trees millions of years

ago and they’re still around? So clear-cutting was an issue.


Even-aged management was an issue because, as I said before, some timber needs to

grow in multi-storied stands, and some can be clear-cut and done in even-aged management, but

not all of it. There was a reforestation backlog in the sixties and seventies because we couldn’t

plant as much as we had cleared. Some of that was due to nursery production, some of that in

the mid seventies was due extensively to Sierra Club types uptight about the use of herbicides.

Believe it or not, the nurseries in California, the nursery in Northern California, was not allowed

to spray in the nursery chemicals to prevent grass from growing because the grass took the water

from the little seedling that was trying to come out of the ground and the grass grew faster than

the seedling. And so it was sprayed with herbicides that took out the grass but not the seedling.

Well, some folks got it passed that the nursery could not use herbicides, so they had to go

to hand weeding. They actually had people who had to go down each row of trees that were

planted and pick grass blades that were growing, and the costs of weeding went up from just

spraying an herbicide to hand picking little grass blades—went up tremendously. The cost was

so high that the nurseries’ production went way down because they didn’t have enough money to

do all of that hand weeding and still get out their seedlings.

And then, of course, there was the controversy over salvage sales. Whenever we had a

fire, the Forest Service would want to go in and salvage that material because, while the fire has

killed the tree, you can still get lumber out of that tree and provide it to the public at a reasonable

price and keep prices of timber down so people can afford to build homes. However, there is a

part of the community that thinks that salvage sales is just an excuse to sneak in and ravage and

pillage the forest, and so when a forest supervisor puts up some salvage sales on a forest fire,

why, he’s immediately brought before the Sierra Club, and someone files a lawsuit, and it gets


hung up in court, and by the time it makes it through the courts, whatever was out there has

decided to rot, and that’s the end of the salvage sale.

Use of herbicides has been controversial. It was made controversial, I believe, by

hippies, young people living out in the forest who did not like the forest being sprayed with

herbicides. The reason they were living in the forest [unintelligible], you know, to live in nature

and commune with nature, and part of the nature they were living with was their marijuana

plantations. One of the best places to plant marijuana is in a fairly recent Forest Service tree

planting site because there is the right amount of sun and shade, there is the right amount of

indistinguishment, if that’s a word, from the air. When you look down from the air, you see the

plantation and you see young trees growing and you see brush growing, and it’s hard to pick out

the leaves of the marijuana plants, and so they love to see that.

One time on the Happy Camp District, I was standing on a landing where a helicopter

was working, and being loaded with herbicide to go out and spray the plantations, and within

about five feet of me was this young hippie gal with two children, and as the helicopter took off

and went out to spray, she turned to the two children and said, “Well, there goes your college

fund.”

BUZZINI: Oh!

HENRY: I thought that was a rather interesting statement. And then another time, my office

was being picketed by several young women with babies. They said that their babies were being

killed by the herbicide being sprayed where they lived. In reality, their young babies weren’t

being hurt by the herbicide because it wasn’t being sprayed where they lived, but it was being

sprayed on their marijuana plantations, and that’s why they were being hurt.


And so when you see a picture in the paper of a young mother and her baby and she says

that they’re spraying herbicide where she lives, why, then the American public takes up her

cause and rallies to the courts to stop those terrible, evil acts by the United States Forest Service

in spraying young mothers and their babies with herbicides, which of course never happens, but

that was presumed.

And you note: Developing lack of trust in the Forest Service timber harvesting by state

and some local entities. One of the big problems that happened as the cut went down—most

folks don’t know, but the counties receive monies from the feds based on the cut that has

occurred in their counties. For instance, the Lassen National Forest. Portions of the Lassen

National Forest lie in nine counties in Northern California. The Lassen enjoys being in more

counties than any other forest in the region. And so each of those counties, based on a pro rata

share of the forest, of the acreage of the forest, gets a pro rata share of 25 percent of the monies

that the forest generates. The Lassen National Forest one year generated $40 million in receipts,

the most receipts in the nation from any national forest.

BUZZINI: Wow.

HENRY: And that was mainly generated because the forest grew a lot of sugar pine, and sugar

pine is really great for making clear moulding stock, and there are big prices paid for trees out of

which you can get clear moulding [unintelligible] and some finished boards. So the Lassen was

taking in big bucks, and 25 percent was going to these nine counties based on their pro rata share

of the Lassen National Forest. And those monies were being used for—the money can only be

used for schools and roads, so they were enjoying paid teachers’ assistants and additional courses

in other subjects being paid for by these monies.


Well, the cut started going down as the public decided that they wanted the National

Forests to become national parks. And as the cut went down, the receipts to the counties went

down, and as the receipts to the counties went down, they got really uptight with the local forest

supervisor because they were getting less of a share of the 25 percent funds. So as forest

supervisor of the Lassen, I would be working at home and I’d need to go get a part at the local

hardware store, and I’d walk into the local hardware store Saturday afternoon, and I would be

happily greeted by the superintendent of Lassen County School District. And there would be

small talk, like “How are you doin’, Dick?” and “What are you here for?” And quickly the

conversation would go to, “The cut doesn’t look too good this year, Dick, and we’re not gonna

get enough money to run the schools, and what are you going to do about that?”


HENRY: “Well, I can’t do much about it because our cut’s been reduced because of these

reasons.” “Well, the public’s not going to be happy with you when I tell them that you’re cutting

our funds to our school districts.” And I said, “Well, maybe we should have the school districts

reported in the paper as being okay with the Sierra Club and other people coming up with

reasons why the timber shouldn’t be cut in the first place.” “Well, no, you’re not going to tie that

one to us, Dick, but we’re going to be able to tie the reduction in budget to you.”

And so that went on on a regular basis. I got my hair cut at the local barbershop, and

most people can go to the barbershop and talk about whatever they want to to the barber. The

forest supervisor has to be extremely guarded in his conversation to the barber. If he says one

thing wrong to the barber, by Wednesday half of the town will know what he said at the

barbershop.


So, yes, the local government and ultimately the state government come [sic; came] up

with a lack of trust because they don’t see the reason you are cutting the funds coming to them,

and they have a hard time relating that to the lack of cut and relating that back to, as I call them,

the “greenies,” who don’t want the forest cut in the first place. They only see the reduction in

dollars.

BUZZINI: And some of them probably are greenies.

HENRY: Yes.

BUZZINI: Yes, yes.

HENRY: And they don’t see all the other parts of that. It’s sort of like when I went to the

regional office I learned a fact, that the largest county north of San Francisco has the largest per

capita membership in the Save the Redwoods League, and the largest county north of San

Francisco has the largest per capita use of redwood. So I can just picture Bill and Martha.

Martha is in the redwood hot tub, on the redwood deck,—


HENRY: —and Bill is seated in a redwood lounge chair, and Bill says to Martha, “Don’t forget,

tomorrow we want to write a letter to Senator [Dianne] Feinstein about reducing that cut of

redwood up in Northern California. We know there’s no cutting on federal lands, but we’ve got

to stop the cutting on private lands of those landowners who own that redwood, because we

don’t want them to cut any more of those redwood trees. Those are beautiful trees, and we need

to keep them.”

BUZZINI: Hah! [Laughs.] What a contradiction, huh?

HENRY: Yes.

BUZZINI: Yes.


HENRY: So, yes, there’s all kinds of lack of trust, and that’s the way it goes.

BUZZINI: And that continues today.

HENRY: Yes, it continues today by people not understanding—I have a saying that other people

have said, that milk comes from a 7-11 store and lumber comes from a lumberyard.

BUZZINI: Hah!

HENRY: And no one ever understands that lumber comes from a tree stump in the forest and

that milk comes from a cow. They have been separated from the land and the purpose of the

land and what grows upon the land, and this generation doesn’t accept that fact at all. They have

no understanding of the cow or the stump.

BUZZINI: Okay, Dick, in a few minutes we’ll start talking about fire, but let’s take a break.

HENRY: Okay.


HENRY: Okay.

BUZZINI: Dick, I’d like to ask you now some fire type questions. I understand that you were a

district ranger at the Happy Camp Ranger District on the Klamath when the concept of

FIRESCOPE [FIrefighting RESources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies] was

evolving in the early seventies, and even though you weren’t directly related with the

FIRESCOPE aspect, I know that you did have an extensive background in your career in

different fire capacities. Would you tell us some of those, please?

HENRY: A little quick history on Dick Henry. My father was the local fire chief in my

hometown for a while. The first time I ever fought fire, I was nine years of age, and I helped my


dad run a 1929 Hale pumper. When the fire was over, I got to learn how to rack 2-1/2-inch hose

in a horseshoe lay in the back of the pumper. I always had an interest in fire.

In my hometown, because most of the men were out of town during the day, we had

juniors in the fire department, and if you had good grades in school and belonged to the fire

department, when the fire whistle went off, you were allowed to get up out of your class and

leave quietly and run to the firehouse and get on the fire engine. There were three folks in town

that worked in town that were checked out on the engines, and so you had to wait till one of them

arrived to drive the engine, but you could do everything else. You could wear a breathing

apparatus and go into a house with a hose. You could do whatever any of the other firemen

could do; you just couldn’t drive the engine. This was at the age of fourteen.

So I was very active in the local fire department at the age of fourteen, as a junior, and as

I grew up, I went on to become a regular member of that fire department, and to this day I’m an

honorary member of that fire department, even though I’m in California and the fire department

is on the coast of New Jersey. So I always had a desire to be in the fire organization.

When I started in the outfit, timber was what I worked in, but whenever there was a fire, I

tried to get on the fire, and I always volunteered to go on lightning fire assignments so I could

get on fires, and on weekends I always volunteered to work somehow for the fire folks and be

available to chase off to a fire. A bunch of the foresters—they didn’t like fire, but I loved it, so I

enjoyed being picked up on overtime on the weekends and doing whatever the drudge work was

that you had to do: paint a roof or put in a fence, waiting for the fire whistle to go off so you

could dash off to a fire.

Early in my career, I worked my way up the line, and I can remember getting my red

cards. I was a sector boss in Northern California, but crew boss in Southern California.


Somehow Southern California thought that it had all of the knowledge of fires and it was the

only place in the world where fires occurred, so if you were a northern person in fire, when you

came south, you had to drop a grade in what you could do, and so I could be a sector boss in

Northern California, but if I went south, the highest I could be was a crew boss. That always

kind of ticked me off.

And I worked my way up to being a service chief on a Type 2 team, and a fire boss on a

Type 2 team, and then ultimately I became a service chief on a Type 1 national team and really

enjoyed that.

When I was at Happy Camp, I was a service chief on the Type 1 team and handled a

bunch of fires, the Hog Fire on the Klamath was a big fire, but my team was actually called to a

smaller fire that later just joined in with the Hog Fire and became part of that. I enjoyed that part

of my career, and following my assignment at Happy Camp, I went to the Washington office. I

still wanted to stay on a Type 1 team, and I asked Hank deBruin if I could be on a team on one of

the national forests near the chief’s office, that [sic; whether] we could work that out. And Hank

said no, they didn’t like Washington office people being on the teams because if something

occurred on the fire that folks didn’t like, they did not want to have to deal with the answer that

“well, a Washington office person from the Division of Fire was on the team, so it couldn’t

possibly have been a bad decision,” et cetera.

So I had to give up being on a fire team, and the rest of my career, I was not on a fire

team. But I loved fire dearly, and wanted to become involved in it and wanted to become a

regional fire director. I say a regional fire director. I only wanted to become the fire director in

Region Five because that’s where all the action is. In some ways, my view of Region Five and

fire was similar to Southern California saying you had to drop a grade when you came south,


because Region Five folks think that nobody else has fires or that none of them are tough.

Having been raised in New Jersey, I fought fires in the pine barrens, and I’ll put up a fire racing

through the pine barrens to any fire in Southern California racing through the manzanita and

brush, as a tough fire.

So I wanted to do everything there was to do in fire. I became a heli-jumper. We didn’t

have a long period of heli-jumping because we had more injuries in heli-jumping than we had in

smoke jumping in forty years, but I became a heli-jumper on the Upper Lake Ranger District and

jumped from a helicopter and wore all the gear that smoke jumpers wore except the parachute.

Jack Lee and several of us got certified as heli-jumpers at the same time. But that program

quickly died, and we went on to bigger and better things.

But for a whole year, we used to practice jumping off the tailgate of a pickup truck going

five miles an hour up the Elk Mountain Road, because the rules for the helicopter were no more

than five miles an hour forward speed and no more than fifteen feet above the ground. Of

course, the helicopter pilot felt that the ground was the top of the manzanita. Now, in the Upper

Lake District, it grows twenty feet high, so the helicopter pilot is fifteen feet above the twenty-

foot-high manzanita. That’s thirty-five feet. And you’re eyeballs are six feet above that, so your

first look of where you’re jumping is forty feet, which was always kind of surprising.

Anyhow, I just enjoyed the heck out of fire. And I worked hard to become the regional

fire director in Region Five and enjoyed my time in that position before I had to retire due to

health reasons.

I had some interesting times in the fire organization because things were changing. The

rules were changing, and women were coming out to fight fires. Of course, all of us men knew

they couldn’t fight fire because they never had and therefore they never could. My first big fire


that I went on was in 1960, and it was the Big Flat Fire on the Gasquet Ranger District of the Six

Rivers National Forest, and the only thing flat was the camp where the fire camp was. After that,

it was straight uphill or downhill. Word was there was a lady in the fire camp, and it turned out

that she was a nurse, and she had a tent, and she wore black slacks and a black sweater; I’ll never

forget. She had very gray hair, and she had a Red Cross on her sleeve.

And it turned out that this lady was one of the Seven Angels of Bataan. For those reading

this that aren’t old enough to know about Bataan, there was the Bataan death march at the start of

WW II, and there were seven nurses that survived the death march and lived in the camp with the

survivors of that death march, administered to the medical needs of those soldiers, and this lady

was one of those heroes. That was the first lady in fire camp. Even the clerks were males. They

were called general district assistants, and males came out to fire camp; women didn’t come to

fire camp.

Well, in 1976 I was the service chief on a Type 1 team, and we had a fire on the Shasta-

Trinity and Mendocino, along the boundary. And we got a group of folks, a fire crew from

Chico, and they were the Hot Flames of the whatever—I can’t remember the name of their

crews. But they were all women. So it was quite the talk of the camp. We now had this all-

women crew in camp, which made a change because before women were allowed in camp, you

slept in your sleeping bag, and when you got out in the morning, you put your clothes on

standing on top of your sleeping bag, and then you sat down and put your boots on, and then you

went and got breakfast.

Well, now with women in fire camp, standing on top of your sleeping bag, maybe naked

or with your jockey shorts on, it wasn’t the thing you could do, so now you had to scrunch your


clothes on while lying in your sleeping bag, and so these women were making things rough in

fire camp.

As the service chief, it provided me with an interesting new problem. The head of the

women’s crew came to me and said that they needed some feminine hygiene supplies that

normally we hadn’t maintained in fire camp. And so I was told that I needed to get some

tampons and napkins in fire camp, because some of the women had brought some of those

supplies, but some hadn’t, and supplies were running short. So I went to my supply officer and

asked her to order a case of each, and she did. But nothing came in that evening. The lady from

the fire crew talked to me the next morning and said, “Hey, they really need to have these,” and I

went to my supply officer and said we needed to make sure they got to fire camp.

Well, they didn’t, and this went on and off for four days. On the fourth day, I said, “You

need to tell them to send that stuff out here, and make sure they don’t double up our orders and

think each order of every day should be coming out here, but we need one case of each at this

fire camp today, period.” So my fire boss, [James] “Jim” McLean, and I had to go out and check

out some roads that the district ranger said needed to be oiled, and we needed to make a

determination whether the fire was going to pay to oil those roads or not, so we’re out looking at

roads, and as we come back towards fire camp, we get on this switchback overlooking fire camp,

and we see a building that had not been there before.

It had a yellow roof. And we drove down, and as we got closer to that building, we found

it to be the Kotex building. It had a yellow roof because BIFC (Boise Interagency Fire Center)

[pronounced BIFF-see] had now—this was the first year they started sending out these big

yellow tarps. Well, when you drove around and looked at the other wall of this building, it was

the Tampax building. What had happened was a semi-trailer—I went and checked with the


supply officer. She said a semi-trailer came up, and it was loaded, and they asked where to put

the stuff, and people weren’t sure, and then they said, “Well, why don’t you put it down by the

aid station?” So they took it down there, and as the people were unloading these cases—these

were cases of cartons of boxes—they decided to stack them up. Well, they stacked them up and

sure enough, they had a nice high wall of cardboard boxes. So they stacked all the other boxes

on the other side, they put the tarp across, and now they had a shaded area and they had three

cots under there. People could come rest and get salt pills or get whatever was necessary, and

depending on whether you were east or west of the building, you were sent to the Kotex building

or the Tampax building.

That was a first for me, and it was a first for a whole flock of other folks. Obviously, this

twenty-five-women crew did not need that much in the way of supplies, and so when the fire was

over, they were shipped back to Redding, to the fire warehouse, where [Sidney L.] “Sid” Nobles,

who ran that operation and was just thrilled completely with me taking up this much space in his

fire facility—and in later years he told me that every time there was a fire and anyone wanted

anything out of the North Zone cache, they got a case of each shipped out to them, and he hoped

it would never come back.

BUZZINI: [Laughs.]

HENRY: Actually, there was still a bunch of that stuff there when the plane crashed into the

cache, and the cases were burned up, and they finally got some of their floor space back from

being occupied by “that stuff,” as Sid called it. I don’t know whether you want this in the book.

I don’t know whether you want this published or not, but as a guy growing up in fire, [I thought]

it was an interesting thing to have occurred in my fire career.


Another thing I’m really proud of is the women I’ve helped get into the fire side of the

business or just into the Forest Service. When I was district ranger, we had several women

moved up on the district, and that was about the start of the women’s movement was when I was

district ranger at Happy Camp.

BUZZINI: Tell me the years again.

HENRY: I was at Happy Camp from ’72 to ’77. When I was on the Lassen as forest supervisor,

which was 1984 to ’90, we had three ranger districts. One of the district ranger’s job became

empty, and I decided it was high time the Lassen had a woman ranger, so I made a conscious

decision that I was going to pick a woman ranger. Now, I know that’s not too good, to not be

picking males, but it was time the Lassen had a female ranger, and the only way they were going

to get it was for me to select one.

So I sent out the advertisement, and we got four women who applied. I read what the

women’s backgrounds were. Quite frankly, I couldn’t picture any of these folks being a district

ranger, so I actually went to the best of the worst, in my view, of what was needed to be a ranger,

and it was a person in the planning shop on the Los Padres [National Forest]. Now, I didn’t like

planners, because I had been on a forest where there was a ranger that didn’t perform very well,

so they created a planning shop. They got rid of the ranger district, combined it with another

ranger district so they could lose that ranger district job and take the ranger, who was not doing

well as a ranger, and put him in the planning shop, because planning was a good place to store

people who couldn’t do things right, except in later years we found out planning ran the outfit,

but we didn’t discover that in time to know that we shouldn’t be putting clods in the planning

shop.


So this ranger is moved to planning. Well, planning had kind of a bad name, so here’s

this young lady in planning. I read what she’s doing, and it’s all planning type stuff. But she’s

the best of the lot, and I’m going to have a woman ranger come heck or high water, so I select

her. And she comes to the district, and she’s on the district about three weeks when we have a

problem. This is on Hat Creek District. The ranger’s name is Karen Barnette, B-a-r-n-e-t-t-e.

Karen gets to the ranger district and gets to know her staff, and we have a problem on the

district. Eskimo Hill was a snow play area. And we were having accidents at Eskimo Hill. We

have—people would slide down the hill on a rubber tube. We didn’t supply the rubber tube; all

we had was the hill out there. Well, they would crash into a tree. Well, they shouldn’t have

done that, but they did.

They would then sue the Forest Service for the injuries they received from crashing into

the Forest Service tree on their snow play hill. Somebody would come down on a toboggan and

crash into something, and they would sue the Forest Service. So I decided the way to cut out

these suits against the Forest Service was to say there’s no more Eskimo Hill snow play area.

We’ll just take down the signs. It’s not a snow play area. If somebody wants to stop by the side

of the road and go up and play on the hill, have at it, but we haven’t invited them there as a snow

play area, and we will get out of the lawsuits.

Well, I’d pretty much gone to that decision, and the staff had agreed with it, and I get a

call [that] Karen Barnette would like to come visit with me about Eskimo Hill, okay? So my

secretary makes a date with her to come over and talk to me, and Karen comes over, and she’s

very well organized. She comes over, and she puts up flip charts, and she describes what the

problem is as I perceive it, and what the solution is as I perceive it, and then what the problem is


as she perceives it and what the solution is as she perceives it. And by the time she gets down

with her presentation, I agree with her that Eskimo Hill should stay open.

And I am thoroughly impressed with the young lady district ranger from Hat Creek, who

has only been there three weeks, [and who] comes over and meets with the lion in the lion’s den

and deals with the lion, and the next thing you know, the lion’s agreeing with her.


HENRY: She really impressed me. And so as time went on, I got to know Karen better. I had a

policy on the Lassen that the forest supervisor would go out one day a month on each of the three

ranger districts, and that was to be with the district ranger. And if the supervisor had something

he wanted to make sure the district ranger knew or understood, he would tell him, but the rest of

the time was the district ranger’s, to go show them projects that they had going and were proud

of or talk about problems or talk about personnel moves that might need to be made, but it was

the ranger’s day with the supervisor.

I did that with each of the three rangers, and I was always impressed with the problems

and discussion and the solutions that I had with Karen. I got a call from a forest supervisor in

Region Six. They had a vacancy at I believe the Sweet Home District—I can’t remember the

forest it’s on. [Transcriber’s note: the Willamette National Forest.] Anyway, they were looking

at Karen as getting promoted to a -13 district ranger. I talked her up to that forest supervisor, and

I said, “I’m not thrilled about losing her, but she is sharp, and she needs to move up.” And so

she went up to be the -13 ranger on that forest.

Her husband worked up there as well. Well, her husband got offered a job to work with

CDF [California Division of Forestry] in Sacramento, and notice went out around the region: Did

anybody have a job near the Sacramento area that they could provide for Karen Barnette so that


she could be with her husband, who was taking a job with CDF? Well, I saw the name Karen

Barnette, and I didn’t have a vacant job in the Sacramento area for Karen, so I called Alice

Forbes, and I said, “You have twenty-four hours to create a job, write a job description, get it

approved so I can select Karen Barnette from Region Six to move to Region Five, because she’s

one sharp lady, and I know we can use her in the Sacramento area; we just don’t know what the

job is yet.”


HENRY: So Alice wrote the job and had her doing the fire outreach with the other agencies in

Sacramento, of which—everybody else was in Sacramento except us and the Park Service. She

had her dealing with Jon Kennedy, who was the regional forester’s right arm in Sacramento, and

in fact Karen got office space in Jon Kennedy’s office, and she did a fantastic job there. We

created the job for her, but we created it for a fantastic person, and she went to that job.

When Jon Kennedy retired, the smartest thing the Forest Service could have done was to

put Karen in that job. However, there was [sic; were] some problems in San Francisco that the

folks in public information in San Francisco thought that Sacramento somehow was taking away

from their job, and they didn’t want the Sacramento job to be there, so it was killed. Karen then

accepted a job with the Bureau of Land Management, and she’s now the assistant state director

for the Bureau of Land Management, and it is the Bureau of Land Management’s great glee that

they have Karen, and the Forest Service should be extremely disappointed that they have lost

her. I’m really proud of Karen and how she’s moving up in the outfit, and I’d like to believe that

I had a part in that by selecting the “best of the worst” on the list for district rangers at Hat Creek.

Just an amazing woman. And I’ve told people this story I just have told you right now, I

was requested to do in Region Three. The regional forester in Region Three talked to Paul


Barker and wanted someone, preferably a deputy, to come from Region Five and explain to

Region Three how the women’s program was going, and the consent decree and those kinds of

things. So one of the deputy regional foresters was sent. He painted a very bad, bleak, dark

picture. The regional forester in Region Three couldn’t believe what was being said and called

Paul Barker and said, “This is what the guy said.” I won’t mention his name. He went to work

for another agency and has long since passed away.

But the regional forester in Three was looking for a positive image of what was going on,

not the story of all of the things that had gone badly. So I was sent off to Region Three to tell

them the story, and so I told them the story of Karen Barnette. I gave a copy of my speech to

Karen. I said, “You’ll want to see this so that you know, if you hear things coming back, what

I’ve been doing.” She got a kick out of the speech I gave. And I told all the folks in Region

Three, “You may not know Karen Barnette yet, but in your career you will hear her name or you

will work for her, because she’s moving up in the outfit, and you might all be working for her

one day.” So that’s Karen.

Now let’s pause a moment.


BUZZINI: Okay.

So, Dick, on another fire related note, after you left the Washington office, you were

reassigned to Marana, Arizona. Would you tell us what you did there and what that was all

about?


HENRY: Well, at Marana, at Pinal Air Park, outside of Marana, actually, is the National

Advanced Resource Technology Center, formerly known as the National Fire Training Center.

While I was in the Washington office, we changed the name of the facility because Hank

deBruin found out that the Department of Labor was going to take over all, quote, “fire training

centers” in the United States, and he did not want to lose Marana, so he told [Charles]

“Charlie” Harden, [Ernest] “Ernie” Anderson, who had been a previous director at Marana, and

me that before noontime we were to come up with a name for the Marana operation that did not

have the word “fire” in the title.

So we sat throwing words out, and the first one was “National” because obviously it was

a national facility, and we didn’t want to mention fire, so we thought we’d mention resources,

and you can always sneak fire under that because it had an impact on resources, and since it was

a national facility and one—the only kind, it was advanced, so it became the National Advanced

Resource Technology Center. So I was the director of the National Advanced Resource

Technology Center for five years, where we did a lot of fire training that originally had been

done in the National Fire Training Center.

We did other training as well. Probably the toughest one for me was the I-520 course,

which is the program that you go through to become a Type I fire team. It’s the highest fire

training course there is, and you go through that course to be the Type 1 IC [incident

commander] and finance chiefs, et cetera. The other courses that were not in fire that we taught

were minerals management and surveying and those kinds of things.

In I-520 you passed or failed that course. It was a three-week-long course, and we had

folks come from various regions and various states attending the training, and when it was all

done, there were usually a few folks who didn’t pass the course. I felt that when a person [sic;


people] didn’t pass the topmost fire course in the nation, that it was the director’s job to inform

them as to why they didn’t pass the course, that it wasn’t up to some instructor that was at

Marana for a short time, teaching the course, and they may have failed that person’s class, which

is why they were failing, but it wasn’t the instructor’s job to tell them why they failed.

And so I would sit down at night with each of the people who failed, explain to them why

they had failed, what they might need to do to come back to Marana another time, and how they

could improve themselves in the meantime in their fire career. I had grown men break out in

tears and just deeply sobbing that they had failed I-520. I had one man from the Los Padres

National Forest that I had known for years in fire, who came and was actually being pushed to be

in the wrong job, and that was adequately displayed when he attempted to do that job during the

training at Marana. I sat one evening and explained to him why he had failed, and [sic; delete

“and”] telling him how he could come back again. And he said, “But I only have two years left

in the outfit, and I won’t have time to come back again,” and he had wanted to retire on his name

tag, I guess, of life that he had passed that course. I of course was concerned why the forest had

sent somebody to that level of training who only had two years left in the outfit, and called the

forest to ask that question.

I did get called by the forest supervisors as to why some of the folks didn’t pass, and

when I told them, they understood. But when you’re sitting telling a grown man that he hasn’t

passed a course that he’s fought tooth and nail to get to, people—I’ve known people who applied

to go to Marana five, six, seven years in a row and didn’t make it. I mean, it was the course to

get to. And when they finally made it, they wanted to pass, and when they failed, it was

extremely disheartening for them.


But I felt it was my job to talk with them about that, and I did. But it was probably the

hardest time I had at Marana. I did it, though, on the basis that this is the highest training course,

these are the people we’re certifying as the best to be on an incident command team, and if they

don’t pass the course and I just kind of wave that by and let them be certified to be on a Type 1

team, I do not want to face the possibility that an action taken by that individual causes the death

of a firefighter, because ultimately it would be my fault because I had allowed them [sic; him or

her] to pass. And so I decided that I was the last place in the lifeline, so to speak, that had

control over saving lives in firefighting by failing folks who should not be placed in the position

of running incident command teams at that level. And so for that reason I did it, and I believed,

and I believe to this day, that I may have saved some lives by failing some people who wouldn’t

have cut it in the Type 1 position. But those types of decisions don’t come easy [sic; easily].

But, as I used to tell folks, “I checked your job description, and it only graded out GS-1. All the

rest was hazard pay.”


HENRY: So I took on that job.

I also was at Marana at the time when we were starting to get women into the fire

management program. We had something to do with the selection of folks coming to Marana.

The regions would send to Washington all of the people that they wanted to go to the [I-]520

course, and then Washington would send us all of the recommendations that the region had for

their people to take that course, and then we sat down at Marana with a Washington office staffer

there, and went over those lists to decide who was coming to I-520, and that decision was made

as to who from the states was coming, who from other federal agencies were coming, as well as

from the Forest Service.


And so as we started to get women in the fire service, we needed to provide women with

the opportunity to grow in the fire service, and those who had grown significantly and had

already proven themselves [sic; themselves] at the I-420 level needed to be considered for the I-

520 level, and so during my tenure at Marana we made a very conscious effort to select women

where we could from those various lists. I feel very good about having been able to do that and

be in the right place at the right time to provide that opportunity for women.

And that’s what I believe I did in the Forest Service, provide the opportunity. The

women had the guts and the get-up-and-go, like Karen Barnette, the willingness to come beard

[unintelligible] the lion in his den and tell him his decision about Eskimo Hill was wrong. But

they needed the opportunity to get through that male screen of just guys in I-520. You know,

that was never meant to have women in it; it’s too a high level for women, et cetera. And so my

job was to provide the opportunity, and their job was to prove that I had made the right choice in

providing that opportunity.

Some very sharp women moved up in the outfit, and I’m very proud of the little bit I had

to do with that. In my retirement, I look back upon having made those decisions and feel good

about having done them. Also having taken a whole bunch of flak for having done that, but

that’s part of your “hazard pay.”

BUZZINI: So from Marana then you went to be fire management director in San Francisco?

HENRY: No, from Marana I went to be the forest supervisor on the Lassen National Forest. On

the Lassen, I kind of changed things around. We had gotten all these—remember I talked earlier

about all these “specialists,” these people that weren’t timber beasts or engineers? And we now

had a whole flock of these people. And so I made a pronouncement that every individual on the


Lassen National Forest, no matter what their job was, was going to have a red card in the fire

organization.

So that announcement went out, that everybody was to take the step test because they

were going to get a red card. Well, the forest geologist came in and said he didn’t sign on to

work in fire, and he was going to fail the step test on purpose so he didn’t have to be red carded.

And I said, “Well, if you don’t want to fight fire and be a geologist, one of the things you could

do is go to work for the Smithsonian Institute. They don’t have a fire division. And you can be

a full-time geologist. But if you want to work for the Forest Service, you’re going to be in fire,

because in the Organic Act it says we’re going to fight fire, and so everybody’s going to fight

fire that works for the Forest Service. So you are going to take the step test.” “Well, I’m going

to fail the step test,” he said. “I don’t care, you’re still going to get a red card.” “Well, what am

I going to get a red card in?” I said, “I can give you a red card to help loading trucks at the fire

cache. I can give you a red card—you know the forest, and you can be a lead truck to lead

Caterpillar tractors on low-beds around to the fire camp. You can be a driver for the fire boss.

You can do a whole bunch of different things. You can assist in the budget office, handling the

fire time slips. But you’re going to be red carded in something. So if you want to pass the step

test, that’s fine. If you don’t want to pass the step test, that’s your decision, but you’re still going

to be red carded fire employee.”

Even my secretary was red carded. She had worked on the forest in her younger days,

and her husband was a tank truck operator up at one of the ranger stations, and she knew the

forest well, and so—Valerie Brown was her name. She was red carded to drive a lead pickup

truck. Everybody on the Lassen National Forest had a red card.


Well, that shook up some folks elsewhere in the region because no other forest supervisor

had said that that was going to happen. Some forest supervisors, I think, were just flat out afraid

to say that, and some just didn’t want to say that, but while I was on the Lassen for six years,

every employee had a red card. It was some way to assist the fire department, whether it was as

a sector boss, a line boss, on a fire crew or in that group of people who are supporting the fire

suppression organization that you don’t see out on the line; they’re back in the office running

paperwork or they’re loading trucks at the fire cache. But everybody had a red card.

I felt good about that, and some people got involved in fire who wouldn’t have normally

gotten involved in fire and found out that they actually liked their involvement in fire and

decided that they wanted to head down the path towards involvement in fire management. I

think we got those people because of that action of [sic; my decision that?] everybody’s going to

have a red card.

In this day, when we have people from all kinds of disciplines who have no fire

experience at all working for the Forest Service, I think we achieved [unintelligible] everybody

has a red card, but things have changed, and supervisors have changed, and the workforce has

changed, and I doubt that’s going to happen.

It’s similar to the time when I was district ranger at Happy Camp and we had to shut

down the planting contractors because we had snow in the upper elevations and they couldn’t get

up and get to some of the areas, and there were small areas that they weren’t going to be able to

get to, so I decided that everybody in the district ranger’s office was now a tree planter. And I

advised everybody that the next day they come to work with work clothes on and high boots

because they were going to get on the Hotshot bus and go up the hill, and they were going to

plant trees because the district folks were going to go to all those areas where the planting crews


were not going to get to, and they were going to chase the snow up the hill. As the sun melted

the snow off the hill each day, and you could get another two acres up this spot and another two

acres up that spot, the district office folks were going to be planting in those areas.

I got a call from the forest TMO [timber management officer] and [sic; who] said, “I

understand you’ve made your entire district office tree planters.” I said, “Yes, I have. We’re

having tree planting instructions this morning, and this afternoon we expect production from the

office tree planting crew.” He thought that was fantastic and suggested it to a couple of other

district rangers, who apparently didn’t have guts enough to tell their district clerk that she was

going to go up the hill and tree plant.

BUZZINI: I would have loved to have done that.

HENRY: Anyway, everybody in the district office were tree planters, and everybody on the

Lassen had a red card.


HENRY: That was how we operated.

BUZZINI: So from the Lassen, then, you went to San Francisco and fire.

HENRY: Right.

BUZZINI: So tell us some more fire stories. What happened in San Francisco?

HENRY: Okay. So from the Lassen I went to San Francisco in fire. I got there in time to be

deeply involved with the consent decree. The consent decree was a decree agreed to by Zane

Smith, then regional forester, with a court that said we did not have enough women in the Forest

Service and that we needed to have 43 percent of our workforce be women. This was based on

the fact that [for] the State of California, the workforce was 43 percent women, even though a


big chunk of that was women schoolteachers and nurses, and we didn’t have a lot of those in the

organization, but we had to get to 43 percent.

So the biggest number of employees in the region was in fire management. In the

summertime we had 8,000 employees in the region, 6,000 of which [sic; whom] were in fire. So

if you’re going to change the number of people that are women, the fire department better get on

with it because that’s where the biggest opportunity for change is. And so I met with Paul

Barker and decided we were going to take a bunch of actions, and put women into jobs, and we

were going to do it where they were capable and suited for those jobs, but we were not going to

do it where they were not.

And so we would get a list from some forest, and they’d have a woman that could have

been selected to be on an engine crew, and we would tell them, “You need to select that woman

to be on the engine crew,” and they’d say, “Well, she barely meets the qualifications.” And we’d

say, “Yeah, but what’s the rest of the engine crew?” “Well, it’s four folks that have been in the

outfit for at least ten years, and the TTO [tank truck operator] has been in the outfit twenty

years.” “Well, then you can have a young person on your crew that doesn’t know a lot about fire

and train them [sic; him or her] and still stay in fine shape from a safety standpoint.”

But there are some jobs where we just can’t do that. And so one day I got called to a

meeting, and there were only two men in the room, Paul Barker, the regional forester, and

myself, and the rest of the people in the room were a woman who was head of personnel, the

Pacific Islands woman’s [sic; women’s] program coordinator, the Native American women’s

program coordinator, and the Hispanic woman [sic; women’s] program coordinator

We had a job vacancy, and it was for a pilot, and pilots came under my purview. I was

the director of fire and aviation, and cooperative fire. And so we had three people on the list.


We had a male pilot with 10,000 hours of time in multi-engine ships, and we had another male

pilot with about 4,000 hours in multi-engine, and the ship that the person was going to be flying

was a twin-engine [Beech] Baron aircraft flying either for executive transportation or as a lead

plane, and we had one other person, a woman, with 1,000 hours.

I was told by the women in the room that I was going to hire the woman with 1,000

hours, and I said, “Well, she doesn’t really have a lot of experience doing that,” and they said,

“What are the minimum requirements for that job?” which they well knew was 1,000 hours. I

said, “A thousand hours.” They said, “Well, she meets the minimum requirement; then you’re

going to select her.” I said, “No, I’m not. I’m going to select the man with 10,000 hours

because I really would like gray-haired old folks that had had many an opportunity for a plane to

crash and had solved the problem and landed safely and are alive today to say, ‘Hi, I’m your

pilot.’ I really don’t like to see young pilots. They haven’t had the opportunity to crash as

much.”

“Well, this woman meets the needs, and you need to have more women in the fire

organization, and so you’re going to select her.” And I said, “Well, you may force me to select

this woman, but if she does [get the position], she is only going to provide executive travel.”

“Well, what do you mean?” “She is only going to fly the woman’s [sic; women’s] program

coordinator for the Hispanic program, the woman’s [sic; women’s] coordinator for the black

program, and the woman’s [sic; women’s] coordinator for the Hispanic [sic] program , and the

regional personnel officer.” And they looked at me. And I said, “You might tell me I have to

hire her, but I determine what work she does, and I’m not going to put her up flying lead plane in

front of a large air tanker going down some canyon with 1,000 hours. I’m just not going to do


that. That’s the minimum requirements. We’re looking for people with more than the minimum

requirements.”

So finally they agreed that I could hire the guy, and I said, “That’s what you need to do

when you’ve got that kind of—it’s not like being on a fire crew. I mean, it’s the person in a

plane determining whether it flies or crashes.” [Telephone rings.]


BUZZINI: So, Dick, you were telling us some of your outstanding memories, especially as it

relates to the hiring of women. You just were talking about you were able to select the male

pilot, but surely there were other opportunities where you could select the best-qualified female.

HENRY: Yes, there were several of those. When we had vacancies on my own staff, I worked

hard to place women in those positions, and when I went to the regional office as the fire

director, I had eighteen people on staff, of which [sic; whom] one was a woman. That’s not

counting the clerical staff. When I retired four years later, there were nine women on my staff.

(In other words – 50% of my principal staff were women.) They were excellent women. One of

them, Sue Husari who was my regional fuels specialist, went on to get a job with the Park

Service and is now the western fire director for the United States [National] Park Service for all

of the western states, including Hawaii and American Samoa and the western world. I feel good

about having gotten them into a position [sic; positions] where they could get those jobs.

I mentioned earlier Karen Barnette. I created the job for her when I was the regional fire

director, and she since has gone on to be the assistant state director for the Bureau of Land

Management. We selected a variety of women to head up training positions. Our regional fire


prevention officer [position] was filled by a woman, and because of her having to move to San

Francisco to have the job and having the kids in school near Placerville and her husband working

in the same area, we made her duty station Sacramento so that we could accommodate her family

needs and we could still get what we needed from her in the way of heading up the prevention

program with her office being in Sacramento, and she could travel from that location to the other

forests and was actually closer to more forests than the regional office was anyway. So I feel

good about having selected women for positions and tried to make the conditions under which

they accepted those positions easier for them to accommodate with their families.

I had folks talking about—you know, what do you do when you get a woman that doesn’t

cut it? I said, “Well, we just don’t have them [sic; her] do the job, or we move them [sic; her] to

a job they [sic; she] can do, or we counsel them [sic; her] that they need [sic; she needs] to find

another line of work.” I said, “All of you older males know of a whole bunch of white males that

did not do well in their jobs, and so they were put in some job in the supervisor’s office.” And I

said, “You’re perfectly willing to work in an organization where we took the culls and put them

in supervisors’ offices, but you get up-tight if there’s one woman [who] comes along [who]

doesn’t do her job. You need to give the women as much slack as you gave men in your earlier

days.”

And I said, “Quite frankly, the women that are coming along—it’s a smaller percentage

of them that are not making it, because we have top-notch women that are applying for the jobs,

whereas before, we had males applying for the jobs, some of which [sic; whom] were top-notch,

some of which [sic; whom] were not. And so don’t talk to me about women who won’t make it.

In my career, I only had one that needed to be counseled and [sic; to] go to work in another area,

and she was successful in that area.


BUZZINI: [unintelligible] just in the wrong place at the wrong time kind of thing, huh?

HENRY: Right, and she just needed counsel to get to her right area. All the other women I ever

hired were great. They had fought their way up through all those white males who thought they

were perfect, and through that Forest Service green glass ceiling that said only men could handle

these jobs, and done very well, and I’m proud of all of them.

When we got to the regional office, in dealing with the consent decree, I was there during

the time Paul Barker was told by the district court judge, “The next time I see you in this

courtroom, you better have your shaving kit with you and have all of your affairs at home taken

care of because if I get this same report, you’re going directly to jail from this courtroom.”

BUZZINI: Mmm! For not filling the quotas?

HENRY: For not meeting some part of the consent decree, whether it was the quotas or some

other conditions. The Forest Service was flat out going to meet all the conditions of the consent

decree, and the biggest one was 43 percent women within five years. So there were forests that

had vacancy announcements out, and I would call the appropriate staff on the forest and advise

them that they really wanted to select a woman for that job because we had to get to 43 percent.

And the safest place to get to it were on large crews, where you could have 5 percent or 10

percent of folks not really knowing what was going on but were trainable, and bunch of folks

who knew what was going on, as compared to one-person positions, where you really had to

have—

BUZZINI: They’d stand out like a sore thumb.

HENRY: Yes. So we worked hard to make that happen. I had forest supervisors who weren’t

happy with me, and I had fire staff that weren’t happy with me because they felt I was pushing

women too much, but they didn’t understand what the problems were on the regional office end


of the line. When the regional forester is told he’s going directly to jail, not pass Go, not collect

two hundred dollars, you place emphasis on a program.

BUZZINI: Yes.

HENRY: And you may make selections that you’re not thrilled with, but you make selections

that are okay and will meet the needs of the agency, and for the most part will take care of the

job that needs to be done on the ground, but the old idea that only males can do that job needs to

be gone, because we’re going to be 43 percent women. While that means that engineering needs

to pick up some, and some of the other disciplines, when you control—75 percent of the regional

budget was just the fire budget—and 6,000 out of the 8,000 employees, then you are the biggest

part of either the problem or the solution, and I’m here to tell you that you’re part of the solution

because Dick Henry doesn’t manage the problem, he manages the solution. That’s the way I’ve

done [sic; done it] my entire career, and that’s the way I continue to do it.


HENRY: Yes. So go ahead.

BUZZINI: So, Dick, you’ve given us a long, in-depth [discussion] of your career with the Forest

Service, how you’ve helped women and other people along, and so before we conclude our

interview today—I know that you’re proud with the role you’ve played in some of the special

projects in different places, so will you tell us what you’re most proud of with regard to the role

you played as a Forest Service employee?

HENRY: Well, thanks. While I was the district ranger at Happy Camp—for those of you

reading this, Happy Camp is seventy-five miles west of Interstate 5 from Yreka, which is the


town most northerly in California, just south of the Oregon border. You go down the Klamath

River seventy-five miles—a lot of people believe they’ve gone into the pure wilderness. And

when I was the ranger there, the nearest doctor from Happy Camp was in Yreka. There’s a small

hospital in Yreka, but if you needed anything major done, you had to go to Medford to the

hospital, which is 110 miles away.

And the town of Happy Camp had attempted to get a doctor to come to town, and they

even had put a billboard out on Interstate 5, advertising the fact that they wanted a doctor in

Happy Camp, and they had gotten no applications. So several of us got together, kind of the

town fathers. Happy Camp doesn’t have a mayor and council; it’s the largest unincorporated

town in Siskiyou County, and the folks in town decided several years ago and still maintain that

they do not want to become a town because then the county will make them get curbs and

sidewalks, and they don’t want curbs and sidewalks, and so they’re not a town!


HENRY: So, yes, that’s amazing. Janet just laughed, and rightly so, but the Forest Service was

a big part of that town, and so several of us got together and talked about how we might get a

doctor to town. I suggested that we build a medical facility, and then the doctor would come,

sort of like, you know, I’m building a baseball field and they will come. Because we had not

been able to get a doctor to Happy Camp by saying, “Please come,” what if we said, “We’ve got

a facility already built, and you can come, be the first doctor, get it up and running, and put that

on your list of things that you’ve wanted to get done in life.”

So eleven of us got together, and we formed a corporation called Happy Camp Health

Services, Incorporated, and I became the secretary of the corporation, and we proceeded to get to

work to build a clinic. I mentioned that there were these work projects that you could get a hold


of and get money for, and the Forest Service had gotten them over time, and many a ranger

station in Region Five had been built with some of these work projects. And I said, “There’s

[sic; There are] some open right now.” And I said, “What if we apply for those?” Well,

everybody said, “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Dick, but since you know so much

about it, you apply and let us know what happens.”

So we worked up an application for these monies, and we sent it off to the county, and

the county said it was too big a request for the county to handle, so they sent it to the state.

Governor [Jerry] Brown at the time looked at all of these requests that he had, and he approved

two, one in Southern California and one in Northern California. And the one he approved in

Northern California for $100,000 was the Happy Camp clinic.

And so we were able, with this $100,000, under this workforce training program, to go

out and hire a person to head up that program, and then hire twelve contract-type folks who

couldn’t get jobs in building trades, since we had people that could set forms and pour concrete

and frame houses and that kind of thing. And with that $100,000, we actually got all of the

concrete poured at the clinic. Our district clerk’s husband owned the only concrete plant in

town, and she talked with him, and so he supplied us the concrete for just the cost of the cement

that went into the concrete; he didn’t charge us for the rock or the sand or the use of his trucks,

because the clinic was right across the street from his yard, so whenever we needed concrete,

he’d come over and pour the concrete for us.

And we got the two lumber mills in town—we had a dimension stock mill in town and a

plywood mill in town, and they agreed to furnish all of the wood products at no cost, and so

before long, we had a clinic that had been framed out, had hand-split sugar pine shakes on the

roof—every one of them was a clear shake; there was not one knot on the roof; this was a 6,500-


square-foot building. We had designed it with the help of an architect in Medford who

specialized in medical buildings, and saw a need for our building and agreed to assist us at no

fee, so here we had this large building framed out. It was sided, and had a wood-shake roof, and

all the windows and doors in it, so it was buttoned up from the weather, and we ran out of

money.

So we said, How are we going to get the interior work done? We need to do the finish

wiring. We need to do the finish plumbing, and we need to do all the finish woodworking

around the doors, and we need to make all the cabinets for the doctors’ examining offices and all

the cabinetry for the office staff, et cetera.

Well, one of the members of the group was the local judge, and he was a lay judge. He

was only a judge when needed, and the rest of the time he had his own cabinet shop. It was a

2,300-square-foot building, and he made custom-made cabinets and doors and all kinds of

woodwork. So he volunteered to do all of that, and for years I had been doing electrical wiring

and plumbing, and we got agreement with the building inspector that the local building inspector

would inspect what I did, and if I wasn’t doing it right, he’d tell me and we’d make it right.

And so I would go home from work at five o’clock at night and have supper and then I

would go to work at the clinic, wiring, from seven o’clock till ten o’clock on weeknights. And

on Friday night I went down to the clinic after supper, and I worked until three o’clock Saturday

morning, and then I went home and got up and went down to the clinic at eight o’clock Saturday

morning and then worked till midnight Saturday night, and then went down Sunday morning at

eight o’clock and worked until ten o’clock Sunday night, and then went to work as district ranger

Monday morning.


In that way, I was able to finish wiring in all of the rooms. I even hooked up an X-ray

machine, which I had never done, but I got a wiring diagram from the company who [sic; which]

had built it. The machine had been given to us by a doctor going out of business in Medford.

The machine was about twenty years old. And I got the wiring diagram, and I hooked it up. The

targeting light—that’s the light that puts the little X on you so they know where they’re aiming

the X-ray machine—in it wouldn’t work, and I checked out, and the transformer wouldn’t work,

and I needed a twelve-volt transformer. And where does one get a twelve-volt transformer in

Happy Camp? Well, you go home and you get your kids’ trains out and you steal the train

transformer, and you set it on twelve volts and put it inside the housing of the X-ray machine,

and now the X-ray machine has a targeting light.

And to make sure the X-ray machine works, and since you’ve done the plumbing for the

developing machine and you’d built the darkroom, you go into the darkroom and you load the

bucky with a sheet of X-ray film, and you take it out and put it in, and you bring out the control

cord, and you measure the thickness of your arm with the calipers, and you check up and see

what the dosage should be, and you punch the button, and the X-ray machine goes whiz-bang,

and you take the X-ray into the darkroom and put it into the developing machine, and a few

minutes later it comes out, and you put it up on the light box, and sure enough, it’s an arm with a

radius and an ulna and wrist and fingers, and by golly, the X-ray machine works. And this is

thirty years later, and my right arm hasn’t fallen off, so I guess everything was okay.

And I did all the finish plumbing and hooked up all of the wash basins, twenty-three of

them, all of the toilets, thirteen of them—

BUZZINI: Oh, God!


HENRY: And did all the finish plumbing work in the building, and on July Fourth, 1976, we

were able to dedicate the Happy Camp Clinic. We got our first doctor from the Public Health

Service. You go to college, and you get the Public Health Service to pay your way through

college; then you owe them some years as a doctor where they need you. Well, Happy Camp

qualified for assistance by the Public Health Service, so we got a doctor and his young wife, who

were transferred to Happy Camp to be our doctor, and we now had a doctor and a hospital

facility at Happy Camp. We could deliver babies, we could do some minor operations, we had

an operating room, an X-ray room, a triage room. We had room for two doctors and three

examining rooms for each doctor and a large waiting room and an ambulance entrance to the

building, and everything was wheelchair accessible, and we had a clinic going in Happy Camp.

Probably the thing I think the most about is what I did to make that happen. My district

administrative officer was a retired major from the United States Army, and at the dedication day

he came up to me and he said, “Well, Dick, when you get to the Pearly Gates you tell them your

name is Dick Henry. If he says, ‘Are you the one that worked on the Happy Camp Clinic?’ you

say yes. He’ll say, ‘No more questions. Come on in.’”

BUZZINI: Ohh! [Chuckles.]

HENRY: So I really feel good about the Happy Camp Clinic, and to this day I’ve had

firefighters who have been on fires in the Happy Camp area that have needed some medical

assistance [and who] will tell me, “Hey, Dick, I was at your clinic.”

BUZZINI: That’s neat.

HENRY: Thirty years later, I still have ownership for the Happy Camp Clinic in my heart and

feel really good about what I was able to do there.


The Forest Service officially or up the line never noticed it. I don’t know why, but after

the clinic was built I was able to get young married people to move to Happy Camp. I didn’t

have a problem filling jobs with young married couples who wanted to have children, and

recruitment at Happy Camp was far easier now that the clinic was there, so some folks could say

I got the clinic there to help fill vacancies on the district, and maybe so, but I also had three

children and a wife, and they were four other good reasons why we got the clinic going.

But it’s still operating to this day, and it’s operated by the Indian Health Service. The

largest number of people in Happy Camp are now Indian. They always were. In fact, our kids

came home one day and wanted to know what a minority was, and I said, “We are.”

BUZZINI: [Laughs.]

HENRY: Because Happy Camp was 55 percent Native American and 45 percent other folks. So

the Indian Health Service runs it, but everybody is welcome to the clinic. You don’t have to be

Indian to get into the clinic. Anyway, that’s probably the highest thing on my list of feeling-

good things.


HENRY: When I went to the Lassen, we had an old home up at the shore of the lake. It was the

first summer home on Eagle Lake. My thoughts originally were to just get rid of it and put some

more recreation area in on the lake. An employee of the Eagle Lake District said, “What if we

said that that could be used by, like, Ronald McDonald? You know, they have places in the

cities where could go and stay. What if we said people could come to this house that exists and

they could take their kids to the lake? And these would be people that had sick children.”

Well, we talked it over and thought there was a lot of merit to that idea, so we decided

we’d take on McDonald’s, that they had done some of that kind of work, not necessarily this


kind, but we would track down some McDonald’s folks and see what we could do. So I

contacted McDonald’s in [the] Sacramento area, and McDonald’s are all privately owned, but

most of the people who own them own at least three or four, and one man in Sacramento had

twelve of them.

I asked if I could come to—they have a board meeting once a month. I asked if I could

come to their board meeting and make a presentation, and he said yes, so I took the fellow from

the district, and we went down and made a presentation and told them that this was what we

would like to do and that we’d sure like to make an agreement with them. And so they all started

talking amongst themselves. “Well, Al, you know Senator So-and-so personally. Why don’t

you talk with that person about making this happen?” And, “Joe, you know this person and that

person, and make them happen [sic; talk to them and see if you can make it happen].”

I said, “Gentlemen, I’m the person that can make this happen. I can make the agreement

for the United States Forest Service. I’ve been authorized by the chief to make agreements

directly for this operation, and we don’t have to go through any other office, and you don’t have

to go turning on the United States senators or any of the congress folks. You are talking to the

person that can make this agreement today. And I would like to leave here with a tentative

agreement.”

So the mood in the meeting changed to, “Okay, how are we going to do this?” And one

guy said, “Don’t we have $400,000 in some fund that we use for such-and-such a thing?” “Well,

yeah, we got that $400,000.” “Well, what if we used it for this?” “Yeah, we could use it for this.

All those in favor of using that $400,000 for this, raise your [hands]. Okay, [unintelligible].

We’ll sign on for $400,000 to start this off.”


And I said, “That’s a great start to a really neat program.” And with that, we got started

with Ronald McDonald, and they said, “For $400,000, can we get to name the camp?” And I

said, “For $400,000, you get to name the camp.” And they said, “We want to name it Camp

Ronald McDonald at Eagle Lake.” I said, “That’s the name of the camp.”

And so we went on to get involved with the Telephone Pioneers [of America]. These are

people who have worked for the telephone company for more than twenty-five years, and they

go out and do projects that are needed by society. And the Telephone Pioneers we already had

working on the forest on the Hat Creek District. They had built several little docks out into Hat

Creek so that people in wheelchairs could go out with a fishing rod and drop a line off the pier

and catch fish that had been planted there by Fish and Game, and they made some boardwalks in

some campgrounds, and they had modified a couple of our toilet facilities so that wheelchairs

could get into them. And so we already knew those folks, and so we talked to them about getting

involved, and we got some plans drawn up.

The house that I originally was going to tear down—the house became the center for the

Camp Ronald McDonald at Eagle Lake. It was where the administrator would live and where

we would have meetings and [where] the office management people would be. And we built I

believe it was fifteen cabins, and we built a big mess hall facility that was multi-functional. I

remember working—one weekend I took my radial arm saw up there, and I spent the entire day

cutting two by sixes into six-foot lengths to have enough to make an 1,100-foot-long boardwalk

that was no steeper than a wheelchair could take, which meant we had to have landings every so

often and a switchback or two, and it took 1,100 feet of boardwalk to get down to the lake, even

though the distance to the lake was about 500 feet. But we made it so that it was wheelchair

accessible uphill and downhill, and we had boardwalks throughout the entire camp, and all of the


cabins were connected by boardwalk so the kids in wheelchairs could get from one place to

another.

The last time I saw the facility, I was fire director, and I was up on the Modoc [National

Forest] at a meeting, and I was flying in one of our Baron aircraft back to the Bay Area, and I

asked the pilot, since we were so close, if he could fly over Eagle Lake so I could see Camp

Ronald McDonald, and that was a really great feeling, looking down at the lake, seeing all the

cabins and seeing all of it still there and working fine.

And then in the regional office, as I’ve mentioned before, probably the thing I feel best

about—I feel good about doing a bunch of things: getting it so the Forest Service employees in

Region Five could wear turn-out gear. You know, down at Mormon Rocks there’s a station

on—what is it, the San Bernardino? I think it is. Anyway, it’s the Mormon Rocks station. They

go to 300 vehicle accidents a year on the road in front of their place. Burning vehicles are

dangerous. Ninety percent of the smoke from a burning vehicle is deadly poisonous because it’s

burning plastics and oils and all kinds of things.

So for them to safely fight those fires—now, somebody can say, “Well, we shouldn’t be

fighting vehicle fires.” No, but they’re going to set the forest on fire, so yes, we should be

fighting vehicle fires. The folks in the Washington office that still believe that we should only

fight fires that are burning inside the national forests, and if your house is next to the national

forest we fight the bushes behind it but don’t put any water on your house—hopefully most of

them have left the fire shop.


HENRY: And I feel good about saying, “We’re going to put Nomex on fire engines where that

is needed for a reasonable proportion of the fires that those people fight, and we’re going to put


breathing apparatus on Forest Service fire engines so that when you get to one of those fires, you

can have a b.a. on and your gear on and safely fight that fire.”

I also said that I could not put it in writing because the Washington office was having

enough time [sic; was having a hard enough time] dealing with my changes that I wanted to

make, but at a fire staff officers meeting in Sacramento, I said, “Any of the forests that wish to

get on with collar brass, feel free to do so. I will not say anything at all about it, but you will not

receive a letter from me authorizing it, because Washington will just tear me apart over that.

They believe that there’s no rank in the Forest Service and we shouldn’t be doing that. But I

well know that in Southern California, when someone from the L.A. County fire department

shows up, they want to know whom they’re talking to, and they want to know whether that

person is a captain of an engine company or whether that person is a fire chief. And it’s hard to

tell with us all in the same green suits. It’s reasonable—we’re dealing with other agencies—for

us to wear collar brass.”

And I was quite pleased here—not too long ago I went to the fiftieth anniversary of air

tankers over at Willows, and there were a bunch of Forest Service folks there, and they were all

wearing collar brass, and I thought, Aha! It happened. And it was the right thing to happen.

Should have happened years ago, but I feel good that that I let it happen on my watch.

And, as I’ve said before, I feel extremely proud of the fact that I changed the regional

office fire director’s staff from seventeen males and one female to nine males and nine females

during the time I was in the regional office. And I feel extremely proud of the fact that two of

those women have gone on to much higher positions in other agencies, and I feel extremely

proud of that.


I really feel good about my Forest Service career. I had great feelings about the people I

met. I have known a whole bunch of really great folks. I’ve known a few folks that didn’t thrill

me in life, but I worked around them or over them or made it work anyway. I had a great time.

It was thirty-two years of enjoying the challenges, and I like the fact that my bosses saw

somebody who—

BUZZINI: Gave you [cross talk; unintelligible].

HENRY: —could take on a challenge, and they gave me the chance to take that challenge on.

They gave me the chance to be the—

BUZZINI: They believed in you.

HENRY: Yes, they believed in me and let me be the first director of the largest YCC camp in

the nation and let me be a regional fire director, knowing that I was probably going to do this and

that, or had me become the director at Marana to take it out of being a country club atmosphere

to a more scholastic atmosphere. In fact, when I left Marana, all of the courses at Marana were

in the catalog of the University of Arizona in Tucson, in their postgraduate school, and they

would send one of their people out to register people in those courses. You had to pay for it, but

you could get three credits of graduate credits in a variety of fire courses and some of the other

courses. But every course at Marana was a postgraduate-level course in the University of

Arizona, where you could get college credit, which did not happen before I went there.

So I have a whole flock of things to feel good about. I have a whole flock of people that I

appreciate having given me the chance to do things, and I like to feel that I took a bunch of those

folks’ ways of management and put those into my management system. I admired [Douglas]

“Doug” Leisz, and I like to believe I picked up a few of his ways of dealing with people so that I

could successfully deal with people also.


I liked Sotero Muniz. You could go to a meeting with Sotero Muniz in the front of the

room, and when you left the room, you could ask everybody who left the room, “Who was he

looking at?” And you would swear he was looking only at you. The room had 500 people in it,

and 500 people could swear that Sotero Muniz was only looking at them. And he taught me to

look at the people in the room, not give a speech and stare at the back of the room, to have eye

contact with the people in the room and talk, in effect, with them and not over them or at them or

at the back wall.

And Hank deBruin and his standup staff meetings, where he kept people informed of

what was going on so that when they made decisions, they made it [sic; them] with the latest

information, which is why I felt comfortable sending Karen Barnette and Alice Forbes to Hawaii

to deal with the Hawaii hurricane, and why I felt comfortable sending folks to Guam and making

agreements. I said, “You”—I made everybody the assistant director of fire and aviation

management. Personnel said I couldn’t do that, and I said, “Well,”—they said you have to make

them—what was the title? What were you called if you were some kind of assistant? Group

leader. And I said, “Group leader. A group leader is a guy that goes out and gets in the first

biplane and flies across the English Channel to bomb the Huns.” “Group leader” is a nondescript

term telling you nothing. When I’ve got a guy out in Guam talking to the governor of Guam, the

governor of Guam needs to know he’s talking to somebody in the outfit that can make a

difference and he’s talking to the assistant director for fire and aviation management. So you can

call this person what you want to in personnel management, but I’m calling them [sic; him] the

assistant director, and I’m telling them [sic; him] all their business cards are to say, “Assistant

Director.”


And so you keep all of those folks well informed, and you feel comfortable with them

making decisions because they [sic; they have] got as much information as you have. And you

can get a lot more done when there’s eighteen more of you making decisions than when there’s

only one of you making decisions because everybody has to filter it through you. I learned that

from several people, that [that] was a way to operate, and I enjoyed doing that.

BUZZINI: Instead of micromanagement.

HENRY: Yes, instead of micromanagement. I told everybody on my staff, “You make the

decision with the information you have available. If, after I hear that decision, I disagree with it,

I will not change that decision. I will not go to people and say you were wrong. I will say, ‘For

these reasons, you should make the decision a different way in the future,’ but I will never go

back and shoot you down in front of anybody. Sometimes I may have just picked up some

political thing that changes what it’s about, and if I haven’t let you know that by the time you

made the decision, that’s my fault. You’re all smart people, and I’m the fire director, but one of

you might be the fire director next. You’re all smart. So you go make the decisions as the fire

director, and I will live with them, and we’ll get a whole flock more done than if you go out there

saying, ‘Well, okay, but I’ve got to’”—

BUZZINI: “Check with my boss.”

HENRY: —“‘check with the director.”

BUZZINI: [Chuckles.] Yes.

HENRY: “And then it all comes back through me. That is not a way to run an outfit.”


HENRY: So I think we were very successful as a regional fire management team, getting things

done in the expanded role of Region Five. Most folks don’t know that Region Five handles


Guam and Saipan and Tinian and Rota. If you go out to those islands, some of them have

painted the fire trucks red. If you scratch the red paint, green is underneath. I went to the island

of Rota, which is in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Rota is a small

island, and during the Second World War we didn’t even bother with it. It had Japanese on it,

but it was so small, we just went around it. We wanted the landing fields on Tinian, and some of

you are old enough, reading this, will know that Tinian is where the Enola Gay took off with the

atomic bomb, the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan and also the second atomic bomb dropped

on Japan. The Navy left them a fire engine in 1946, when the Navy pulled out of Tinian, and the

fire engine wore out. They were fighting fires on Tinian by throwing sand and beating on them

with palm fronds when we got a new Forest Service engine on Tinian in 1991.

But back to the island of Rota. I go down to the Quonset hut and there are two fire

engines in the Quonset hut, and that’s the fire equipment for the island of Rota. One of them is

an older piece of equipment that Guam shipped out to Rota. The other one is a four-wheel-drive

rig, and the side doors are still Forest Service green, and you can see where the Forest Service

emblem has peeled off of the door, and you can see the shadow of the numbers of the rig. And

this rig happens to be 2334. And 2334 was a three-quarter-ton, four-wheel-drive pickup with a

slip-on fire unit that I drove in the summer of 1960 from Plaskett Meadows [on the

Mendocino]—

BUZZINI: Wow.

HENRY: —as a summer fireman before the inmates showed up.



BUZZINI: You were talking about that you used to drive that at Plaskett Meadows.

HENRY: Yes. Here we are, I’m on the island of Rota in the Commonwealth of the Northern

Mariana Islands, in a location that’s across the International Date Line—it’s already tomorrow

there—and here is 2334, four-wheel-drive pickup with a slip-on unit in it that I had driven in

1960, when I was sent up to Plaskett Meadows for a couple of weeks to cover for the prevention

officer. And here the rig is, out 10,000 miles west of there, on the edge of the Sea of Japan. It

was a rather unique feeling at the time.

BUZZINI: I’ll bet it was.

Well, Dick, I just want to thank you for your time. Is there anything else that you would

like to add before we conclude our interview? We’ve just about covered every topic I can think

of, but maybe you’ve got one or two you haven’t covered.

HENRY: Oh, Janet, I’m fine with what we covered. I was surprised that I was one of the

interviewees. At one time, I was asked if I would be an interviewer, but I was going back East

and wasn’t going to be able to fit into that timeframe and just never thought of myself as one of

the interviewees, so I was surprised when your letter came and quite pleased to be given the

chance to be a piece of the history in whatever file cabinet this is going to end up in. Thanks.

BUZZINI: I want to thank you for your time today. It’s been most enjoyable for me, too.

Well, it was two hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

HENRY: [Laughs.] If I tell my wife it was two and a half hours, that would be fairly close.

[End of interview.

henry, dick 12-06-06 - digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu

Documents