University of California Berkeley
University of California General Library /Bancroft
Regional Oral History Office
Leo A. Isaac
Douglas Fir Research in the Pacific Northwest,
1920-1956
An interview conducted by
Amelia R. Pry
Berkeley
1967
Produced under the auspices of
Forest History Society
and
Hill Family Foundation
All uses of this manuscript are covered by an
agreement between Leo A. Isaac and the Regents
of the University of California and the Forest
History Society, dated November 30, 1968. The
manuscript is thereby made available for research
purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript,
including the right to publish, are reserved to
the Bancroft Library of the University of California
at Berkeley and the Forest History Society. No
part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication
without the written permission of the Director of
the Bancroft Library of the University of California
at Berkeley or the Director of the Forest History
Society .
Requests for permission to quote for publication
should include Identification of the specific
passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the
passages, and identification of the user. The
legal agreement with Leo A. Isaac requires that
he be notified of the request and allowed thirty
days in which to respond.
CONTENTS
Foreword i
Introduction ii
Bibliography for Leo A. Isaac viii
Nomination for Superior Service Award xii
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION I
Living on the Farm
In the Wilderness for a Brother s Health
Choosing Forestry 11
World War One Interlude : The Tenth Engineers
(Forestry)
Experiences at Weyerhaeuser Lumber Camp
EARLY CAREER IN THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE 22
Junior Forester on the Okanagan Chelan
Social Life on the Okanagan National Forest
Investigating Homestead Claims 34
Timber Sales 37
Range Management 41
PACIFIC NORTHWEST FOREST EXPERIMENT STATION EARLY WORK 49
Arrival at Wind River Experimental Forest 49
Robert Marshall, Forest Assistant
Isaac s First Douglas Fir Work: Seed Flight 61
Anecdotes: Adventures with Occupational Hazards 75
LATER STUDIES AT THE STATION 84
Space Testing 84
Partial Cutting Controversy 86
Species Improvement Studies 101
Attempts to Start Genetics Projects 108
Second Growth Committee 114
Problems Updating Genetics Book 117
CONSULTING WORK ABROAD 121
Trouble Shooting in Europe 121
To Turkey with FAO 128
Private Consulting for Manning Seed Company 143
Ireland 148
Index 151
Interviewer s Biography 153
FOREWORD
This interview is part of a series produced by the
Regional Oral History Office of Bancroft Library, University of
California at Berkeley, under a grant from the Forest History
Society, whose funding was made possible by the Hill Family
Foundation .
Transcripts in the series consist of interviews with:
DeWitt Nelson, retired head of the Department of Natural Resources,
California; William R. Schofield, lobbyist for timber owners, Cal
ifornia Legislature; Rex Black, also lobbyist for timber owners,
California Legislature; Walter F. McCulIoch, retired Dean of the
School of Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon;
Thornton Munger, retired head of U.S. Forest Service Experiment
Station, Pacific Northwest Region; Leo Isaac, ret i red, si I vi culture
research in the Forest Service Experiment Station, Pacific North
west Region; and Walter Lund, retired chief, Division of Timber
Management, Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service;
Richard Colgan, retired forester for Diamond Match Lumber Company;
Myron Krueger, professor of forestry, emeritus, U.C. Berkeley; and
Woodbridge Metcalf, retired extension forester, U.C. Berkeley.
Copies of the manuscripts are on deposit in the Bancroft Library,
University of California at Los Angeles; and the Forest History
Society, University of California at Santa Cruz.
Interviews done for the Forest History Society under other
auspices include: Emanue! Fritz, professor of forestry, Univer
sity of California, Berkeley, with funding from the California Red
wood Association; and a forest genetics series on the Eddy Tree
Breeding Station with tapes by W.C. Gumming, A.R. Liddicoet, N.T.
Mirov, Mrs. Lloyd Austin, Jack Carpender, and F.I. Righter, cur
rently funded by the Forest History Society Oral History Program.
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape
record autobiographical interviews with persons prominent in the
history of the West. The Office is under the administrative
supervision of the Director of the Bancroft Library.
Wi I la Klug Baum, Head
Regional Oral History Office
Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California
INTRODUCTION
Leo Isaac probably has enjoyed more recognition
as an expert on Douglas fir silviculture than anyone
else around, and this account of his life shows why, for
all the environments and events circumstances
of his life seemed designed to produce one of the
nation s most outstanding silviculturists . If one sat
down at a typewriter to write How to Create a Research
Forester, one could not do much better than to plagiarize
the life of Leo.
First, one should choose a woodland setting for
his childhood, like the farm in Wisconsin with a twelve-
acre woodlot where Leo grew up. Give him time to walk
home from school and, before chores, regularly take a
side-trip through a forest so he will learn "every plant ,
every bird and animal ... like a mother knows her kids."
For high school, send him to a nearby town, make him
live there, preferably performing menial and boring
tasks in a ladles apparel store to Increase his appre
ciation of the forest environment he had left.
Of course, this won t be enough really to commit him
to forestry: perhaps two years in the wilderness should
be added, Just at the threshold of adulthood. Usually
such an interlude is difficult to bring about in our
society, in Leo s life it happened because the only cure
for an injured brother was complete quiet, relaxation,
and good care such as he could get in the Wisconsin
wilderness with Leo.
After such a sojourn, the young man will return to
society with a realization that he has an affinity for
work with men and trees, but that he will need a formal
degree to prepare himself for such a place in the working
world. Be sure that at this point there is a good
school of forestry waiting nearby, the University of
Minnesota served well for Leo. Have the young man
waylaid by a vsalty dean, like E. G. Cheney, who tells
him that the only way a clothing store fugitive could
definitely remove hlrnnelf from ladle*; apparel would be
to take either forestry or chloroform. This should
clinch it.
11
His years in the forestry school will be good ones,
for he has a first-hand knowledge of what academicians
call "ecology ," and a natural woodsmanship far beyond
anyone on the campus. Ills enthusiasm produces the sort
of academic achievement which, at graduation, lines him
up for those Forest Service positions usually held
open for top students.
At this point, he should be aimed at a more
specialized goal, say Douglas fir silviculture research,
which also requires the selection of a specific region
of the United States. Better have him meet a native
from the selected vicinity female and attractive.
A war may be required to arrange such Minnesota-to-
Oregon dislocation; Leo s work as wood products inspector
in the Northwest during World War I left him helplessly
addicted to the quiet ways and beautiful eyes of Oregonlan
Alberta Sherman, as well as to the giant scenery that
cradled the Douglas fir.
However, in a career, as in love, the way to produce
a definite commitment is to see that satisfaction is
withheld for a time. He should not be sent to an
experiment station right away; transfer him first to
a forest, in the chosen region, and expose him to tasks
that point up the need for more basic data on which forest
management decisions can be based. (But be sure that
the pretty girl is still living near the Research
Station and waiting.) The interlude on a forest can
also provide experiences in getting along with variegated
samples of homo sapien old-time woodsmen types, well-
educated Easterners, and overprotective wives. The
Okanagan Forest in northeastern Washington served this
purpose well for Leo.
Now the subject is at last ready to be placed in
the Experiment Station. He can now marry the girl, for
the aspirations of his heart as well as his career
have been his major concerns up to this time, and now,
on the threshold of fulfillment, he needs to have his
mind free for research. If the proscribed training has
indeed done its Job, he will hardly need a nudge to see
that something is askew in the methods and results of
past research. Leo s earliest one-upsman-ship will long
be the envy of anyone in any field of experimentation,
for he :
(1) reversed the conclusions in a report written
iii
In 1916 by no less than the head of the Wind River
Experiment Station (J. V. Ilofmann), who had reported
that Douglas fir seed lives for many years stored in
soil and duff of the forest floor, then finally
germinates. Not so, said young Leo, in the more cautious
studies under his direction: a seed usually dies after
being left in the soil for more than a year. Corollary
experimentation with his now-famous kite proved that
the main factor in Douglas fir restocking was the
tremendous distance a seed can be carried on air currents.
(2) The next dragon that the young researcher
slew was the partial (or "selective") cutting theory
for Douglas fir management, born during the Depression
days and adopted for official procedure in national
forests. With the Station Director, Thornton T. Munger,
Leo examined the plots selectively cut and showed that
because of tremendous wind-throw propensities, the
Douglas fir that are left standing after a cutting
operation should be a block for protection from winds.
Also, the selection of only the marketable fir for
cutting left a forest made up of a higher proportion
for sustaining a superior Douglas fir forest. In spite
of stiff resistance from the Washington, D.C. Office,
the Forest Service policy for selective cutting of Douglas
fir was changed back to its previous process of block-
cutting and remains that way to this day.
His studies in Douglas fir silviculture resulted
in a book financed by the Pack Foundation in 19^3 >
Reproductive Habits of Douglas Fir, which was a
milestone in its field. Concurrent with his studies on
partial cutting and other problems, he had also put
in plots to study the effect of climate and soil
conditions on Douglas fir seed from various sources
the results of which became his next book, Better Douglas
Fir Forests from Better Seed, although that book was
not written until he was granted a nine-month leave to
go to the University of Washington under an Agnes Healy
Anderson grant in
Several years later Leo tried without success to
put out a revised and up-dated book. That problems of
financing and of Joint authorship have prevented a
later edition is a major disappointment in his otherwise
successful career.
In his so-called retirement, Leo s crackling
personality occasionally has to be bridled by his doctor
iv
The Leo Isaac home in Portland, Oregon
nO , briBlJtroy fix -j\j<ji\ oBJ^al oyj >jt\ \
lest his Intense activity exceed his horsepower as a
diabetic novitiate. This means that at the time of
the interview he was limited to:
taking care of a sizable tract of forest land
outside Portland on which he has planted Christmas
trees for his grandchildren s college education;
adding to, maintaining, and enjoying a seaside
spread where there are "no telephones, no television,
and lots of room for grandchildren" who probably
have learned that they can impose on Grandfather for
anything from a tour of the Oregon coves on his motor
launch to a walk in the nearby forest to learn how
the trees grow;
running the Columbia River-Puget Sound Joint
section of SAF, a part-time executive secretary Job
from which, months after the interview, his retirement
came as a grudging concession to his health.
His home nestles among trees in one of Portland s
newer and more beautiful sections, where low, ranch-
style homes ramble across broad expanses of grass and
gardens. One can look through sliding glass doors
to a prolific garden, where he and his wife have set
out a variety of plants, from gladioli for her to a
metasequoia for him. Next door in an adjacent garden
one sees the blue of a swimming pool. Many of Leo s
trees exhibit a wide array of grafts enough to be
confusing to a layman attempting to discern which
species Leo began with. He points out more than a
dozen wild seedlings of fir, Juniper, and hemlock that
have cropped up uninvited, "although the nearest seed
trees are more than a thousand feet away " -- a constant
reminder of his earliest study that documented the
tremendous flights taken by seeds on air currents.
In his front lawn stands a young weeping peach tree
which is the source of a neighborhood Joke: Leo went
to the nursery to buy a weeping cherry tree one day, a
Joint selection by him and his wife. However, the
nursery had no weeping cherry trees, so Leo, ever the
one to improvise, quietly substituted a weeping peach
sapling and set it out in the designated place. Come
spring, the tree burst forth with peach blossoms, and
Leo waited for the prank to hit the neighborhood radar --
including that of retired Experiment Station head
j. Alfred Hall next door. But at this point Leo s little
Joke turned on him unexpectedly. His so-called friends,
and even his wife, gleefully alledged that the great
silviculturist had confused a peach tree with a cherry
tree. To this day, Leo remonstrates that he was
precipitously Judged innocent when he can Indeed prove
his premeditated guilt because the tree was wearing
its name tag all along; but it is too good a Joke for
his admirers to relinquish to the realm of truth and
Justification.
It was in the atmosphere of his spacious ranch-style
home, rich with the glow of brasswear and Persian rugs,
that we tape-recorded his memoirs during an intensive
two days and the evening between. His wife, busy with
community club work, was the ideal hostess who quietly
materialized when it was time for a break or a well-
prepared meal. We had chosen July 31 and August 1 for
our marathon, never suspecting that those days were to
add Portland s name to the rapidly lenthening list of
American cities torn by racial strife. The riot erupted
across town in a section named "Albino," but rumors
persisted that the rioters were planning an invasion of
the better, all-white neighborhood where Leo lived. Our
evening interview was held in his study, while near
the front door stood Leo s shotgun, ready to protect
his home ("All I ve worked for you see right here in
this house") if rumors proved true. The rumors were
not true, the gun was not used, and our interview was
taped without interruption that night, although neither
of us were ever entirely unaware of outside noises.
For the recording sessions we had agreed on an out
line beforehand, but it became much expanded in the flow
of Leo the master raconteur. A few of his collection
of anecdotes are included in the transcript, but even
when we shut off the machine and went into the dining
room to eat, his stories continued to tumble out in a
Niagara even though there was no tape to catch them.
Leo has instructions to record or write more on his
O . l \ .
His work at the Experiment Station was covered
in the interviews, and he further added to it with
inserts here and there when the rough-edited transcript
was sent to him for review. His main apprehension
about the interview is that we did not dwell long
enough or comprehensively enough on the work at the
Station; I would suggest that readers supplement Leo s
account with another oral history, that of Station
vi
Errata Sheet
Leo Isaacs Interview
Page 13
Page 40, mid -page
Page 44
Page 75, 1.4 from bottom
Page 77
Page 125
24 instead of 44
N and F omitted
N and F omitted
see should be seed
now should be snow
Douglas fir
Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 - Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR LEO A. ISAAC *
Trade Journals
1925 Proper spacing for douglas-fir forests. Timberman. October.
1926 Flight of fir seed recorded., Four L Lumber News. March.
1930 Northwest scene of active planting. West Coast Lumberman,
1932 Broadcast seeding. Service Bulletin. November.
1933 Vertical air currents may explain occasional long distance
seeding from forest fires. Service Bulletin. December.
1944 Decay of western hemlock following logging injury.
Timberman 45 (8)s 34-5 v 56, June. (In collaboration with
G. H. Englerth.)
1947 Decay losses foil owing logging injury in partially cut stands
of western hemlock and Sitka spruce, Timberman 48 (10) ; 52, 54,
72, 74, ?6. August, (In cqllaboration with E. R. Wright and
A. S. Rhoads )
Research rlotes
. 1929 Seedling survival on burned anc! unburned surfaces. Research Note
I J o. 3. P. 3-4. October.
1929 Survival of one-year-old douglas-fir seedlings. Research Note
No. 2, P. 5-6. March.
1930 Survival of douglas-fir seed trees. Research Note No, 4.
?. 1-2. June,
1931 . Destiny of douglas-fir seeds that fall in the virgin forest.
Research Note No. 5 P. 4 January,
1931 Concerning the reburning of Douglas-fir cut-over land.
Research Note No. 7. P. 3 a August.
1933 Reforestation by broadcast seeding in the spruce hemlock type.
. Research Note No. 11, May, / f % i
1936 Reproduction on the Tillamook burn. Research Note No, 18, P. 5.
March . (In collaboration vath G. S. Meagher.)
1937 Ten years growth of Douglas~fir spacing-test plantations.
Research Note No. 23. P. 6. November.
1938 Plant succession on a cut-over, burned, and grazed douglas-fir
area. Research Note No, 26. March, (In collaboration with
E. H. Reid and G. D. Pickford.)
viii
* Many of these titles are filed with the interview in the Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, California.
Research Notes (Cont d)
1945 Results of pruning to different heights in young Douglas-fir,,
Research Note No. 33, P 16-17. January
1945 Sustained yield of swordfern, Research Note No. 33. P. 8-9 e
January.
19^6 Fog drip and rain interception in coastal forests. Research
Note No, 34y"Po 15-16. August
1949 Can we save. the seed crop? Research Note No, $6. 2 pp
September.
1950. Seed crop prospects for 1951, Research Note No. 73 2 pp.
December, :
1952 Advantages of selecting tree seeds with care e 5 PP. August
Profesaional Journals,
192? Seed flight measured to aid reforestation. Department of
Agriculture Yearbook
1927 Douglas-fir has long seasonal seeding period. Annual Cruise 8:
20-21. Oregon State College, May,
1929 Cold storage prolongs the life of noble fir seed. Journal of
. Forestry 28 (4): 571. April.
1929 Reproduction in. the fog belt Cooperative forest study of
. Grays Harbor County, P. 37~38.
1930 Seedling survival on burned and unburned surfaces. Journal of
Forestry 28 (4): 569-571. April,
1930 Seed flight in the Douglas-fir region. Journal of Forestry
,28 (4): 492-499. April,
1930 Seedling mortality and the restocking of Douglas-fir logged-off
land^ Annual Cruise, V, 11, Oregon State College.
1934 The ecological aspects of natural regeneration of Douglas-fir
in the Pacific Northwest. Pacific Science Congress. Proceed
ings 5th. Vol. 5, PP 6 4C09-4015. 1933. (in collaboration
vdth R, licn.rdle.)
1934 Life of noble fir seed prolonged by cold storage. U.S.F.S.
Planting Quarterly $
1934 Cold storage prolongs the life of noble fir seed and apparently
increases germinative power B Ecology 15 (2): 216-217. April.
ix
Professional Journals (Cont d)
1935 Life of Douglas-fir seed in the forest floor. Journal of Forestry
33 (l)s 6l-66 January.
1936 Highlights of Douglas-fir natural regeneration, Anaual GraJ.se 17:
. fc-25, 47, Oregon State College,,
1937 The forest soil of the Douglas-fir region, and changes wrought
upon it by logging and slash burning. Ecology 18 j 264-279.
April. (In collaboration with H. G. Hopkins.)
1939 A s.ign that tells a story, Journal of Forestry 37 (5): 423-424.
May,
1940 Vegetative succession following logging in the Douglas-fir region
with special reference to fire. Journal of Forestry 38 (9):
716-721 September
1945 Rehabilitation of large burned-over areas, with particular
reference to the Douglas-fir region,, Western Forestry Cons.
ASSOC, Proc. 36th, pp. 30-31.
1949 Recent development In silviculture! practices in the Douglas fir
region. Journal of .Forestry 47s 957-960. December ft
1949 The Wind River Experimental Forest U.S.D.A. Yearbook 1949:
169-172. (In collaboration with W. E, Bullard.)
1951 Observations on litter fall and foliage nutrient content of some
Pacific Northwest tree species. Journal of Forestry 49 (12):
914-915 o December,, (In collaboration with R. F. Tarrant,
R, F. Chandler, Jr.)
1952 Experimental thinnings in young Douglas-fir, Reprinted from
Northwest Science 26 (l) 9 pp. February. (In collaboration
with Norman P. Worthington. )
1952 Biological aspects of forest, conservation in Washington and
Oregon,, Biological Colloquium, pp. 12-15. Oregon State College,
April,
1952 Forest practice based on facts, not fancy. Journal of Forestry
nf view 50 (7): 562, 563. July.
Bulletins
1938 Factors affecting establishment of Douglas-fir seedlings,
U.S D A. Circular 486,
1943 Reproductive Habits of Douglas-fir. Published by the Charles
Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation, Washington, D. C. 10? PP
1949 Better Douglas-fir forests from better seed. University of
Washington Press, Seattle,, 64 pp a
1956 Decay Following Injury to Western Hemlock, Sitka Spruce and
True Firs. IK S. Department of Agriculture, Technical
Bulletin, No. 1148. 38 pp.
xi
Leo A. Isaac
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
Living on the Farm
Fry: You were born September 12, 1892?
Isaac: That s right, on a farm near Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
It means "bottom-of-the-lake it s right on Lake
Winnebago. I lived my early life on a farm there a
short distance from town. At age eleven I left
home to go to town to the city school. We had only a
grade school near the farm.
Fry: How many brothers and sisters did you have?
Isaac: I had six brothers and two sisters.
Fry: What kind of farm was this?
Isaac: We had a dairy farm with a twelve acre wood lot of
hardwoods. We raised cattle, hogs, and a few sheep
and horses. To feed them we raised hay, grain, corn,
potatoes, beets, and so forth. We also had chickens ,
ducks, geese, and turkeys. Also had an apple and
cherry orchard.
Fry: What were your duties on the farm?
Isaac: I milked cows; it was one of the regular duties. Then
as I grew older, I did all of the things that a normal
farm boy would do, like cultivating corn and plowing;
taking care of the cattle and the sheep and horses;
seeding, planting potatoes; cutting wood, cutting
grain arid corn, also marketing milk and other products.
All the ordinary work that s done on a small farm In
Wisconsin. And I got a hand in all of it.
Fry: How far down on the family line-up were you?
Isaac: I was third from the bottom. I had a brother and a
Isaac: sister younger than I. My two sisters and one brother
are all I ve got left alive.
Pry: Did any of these brothers and sisters grow up to be
interested in forestry or research?
Isaac: No, none of them ever went away to school. I was
the only one.
Fry: Did any of them finish high school?
Isaac: They all finished high school, I think. But no one
ever went on to higher education but me.
Fry: Had your ancestors been in this country quite a while?
Isaac: My parents were born in this country. There were about
three generations born in this country. I think their
father and mother were born in this country also, but
I m not sure. My father s people came from the
Darmstadt region of Germany and my mother s people
were Hessians. My father was about three-quarters
French and my mother s people were pure Hessian
German.
Fry: You don t have any family trees lying around?
Isaac: No. (Laughter) I tried to look up some of my relatives
when I got over there in 1953. I had the names of a
couple of them, but I couldn t find them the war had
come in the meantime and the country was all ripped
apart and everybody thrown from hell to breakfast.
Families were torn apart and everything else. People
had gone into different lines of work, and I didn t
find anybody. I couldn t get any connection with my
father s people.
Fry: Well, three generations back is difficult to trace
anyway .
Isaac: I think that my grandfather was born in this country,
Isaac: in New York. And his people came from the Darmstadt
neighborhood, that much I knew. And I know they spoke
German in their home when they were little. And when
we were little my parents would talk to us in German
and we d answer them in English. I got so I could
understand most of their German. That stood me in
good stead when I went back to Germany. I remembered
more of that spoken German from my childhood than I
did of the technical German that I learned in college.
Fry: It just came back to you?
Isaac: Yes. In the month that I was over there at the Forestry
Congress of Western European nations in Germany I was
speaking German Just like the rest of them on the
street. But when I struck anything technical I would
have to return to my German-English dictionary for
terms, to know what I was talking about.
Fry: Had you spoken German in between times?
Isaac: No, not for thirty-five years. When we landed there
I Just felt like well, everything was blank to me,
I couldn t understand what anybody was saying, Just
an occasional word. But in Just a week or two I was
speaking German like all the rest of them.
Fry: What kind of town was Fond du Lac around the turn of
the centry?
Isaac: It was a town of about 30,000 people, probably like
Salem.
Fry: What kind of courses did you get in high school?
Isaac: I had arithmetic, and algebra, and I think trig, either
there or in college. And history and botany. I know
I had lots of English.
Fry: Was this considered a college prep course?
Isaac: Well, yes. I was taking a "classical" course in high
school that would prepare me for college.
The last year my brother and sister thought I
should take some business courses. (Even until my
brother died, they still hoped I d come back there
and go in business with them in their store.) They
persuaded me to drop one of my classical English
courses and take a course in business English, which
I did the last year I was in high school. When I
presented those credentials to the University of
Minnesota, they wouldn t accept that fourth year of
English because it was business English. They told
me (that was about six weeks before I entered) that
there wasn t time enough to get credit in English
through any source. My answer was that there were
twenty-four hours in a day and eighteen of them I
could use to study, and that I d come with the credit,
and I did, with a 91 grade. I had to take a special
examination to get credit, so I had to go out and get
a private tutor. I got the English teacher out of
the high school to outline this course for me. I had
the tutor two hours a day for five or six weeks, paid
her for it, took my examination (it was given by the
school principal) and got my credit in English to
present to Minnesota.
Fry: That might have been better than you would have done
in ordinary high school.
Isaac: It might have been better than high school, because
English was a little hard for me in school.
Fry: What subjects did you find easy and interesting?
Isaac: History. And the preliminary math I liked, the earlier
math, ordinary arithmetic and stuff.
Fry: Did you like botany especially?
Isaac: I liked some phases of it. But the highly technical
Isaac: phases of It and the Latin names were too difficult
for me. But I knew every plant that grew In our
neighborhood. I might not know its technical name,
but I could recognize a plant, and know that I knew
it, like a mother knows her kids by their first
names. And I knew every bird and every animal
every bird as far as I could see it flip a wing, or
hear a note, I d know what that bird was. But I
didn t know their scientific names.
Fry: When you lived on the farm, did you go hiking a lot
in the woods?
Isaac: Always. On the way home I d cut off of the road and
go out the fence row and through a big woods or some
thing. I was always getting home a little late
because I took a side trip somewhere. And we had
mill ponds there where I d go down to fish and trap
muskrats. That s how I earned some of my spending
money when I was a boy.
Pry: Oh, really?
Isaac: I trapped minks and muskrats, coons and foxes. And
skunks. On a hunting trip to northern Michigan I
caught a beaver and shot a timber wolf.
Fry: Who would you sell them to?
Isaac: Local fur dealers. Local fur buyers would come around.
They were worse than the auctioneers. They were all
skinflints. They d beat you down to nothing If
they could do it. They were that kind of buyer.
Fry: You had to know how much It was worth, then.
Isaac: You had to know how much your hide was worth if you
got any money for it. The first thing they d do
would be pick it up and say, "Where d you pick up
this old rat?" That kind of stuff. But I soon learned
Isaac: what my skins were worth. They d better make me a
pretty good offer or I d forget them right quick.
Fry: So even though you were a little boy you learned to
talk up to them?
Isaac: I learned. And that s how I got interested in furs
and my brother s store.
Pry: You had to work in your brother s store to work your
way through several of the upper grades and high school?
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: Was this because they charged tuition at high school,
or because you were living away from home?
Isaac: I was living away from home. It was three miles out
to our farm and in Wisconsin you don t walk three
miles in the winter. The snow is two, three, or
even four feet deep and temperatures get down to
twenty-five below zero. So in the fall I moved into
town and stayed with my brother and sister.
Fry: This was one of your oldest brothers?
Isaac: Yes. He was a bachelor, and my older sister was an
old maid. They kept house there in town and had this
store. I first opened the store in the morning and
swept out, and after school I delivered bundles, and
then a year or two later I got to working in the fur
department. Occasionally I d wait on a customer,
that sort of thing.
Fry: So that started your career in the department store
business. This lasted you through high school?
Isaac: Through high school, yes. But almost two years
after high school I stayed there in the store.
Fry: Did you say you went when you were eleven years old?
Isaac: I moved to town in 1903 and attended grade school
there for a few years, then high school it had
grades eight through twelve. I graduated from high
school in 1912.
In the Wilderness for a Brother s Health
Isaac: After I got through with high school I lost two years
in the store and two additional years in northern
Michigan, between high school and college. My brother
got smashed up in a railroad wreck outside of Buffalo.
Fry: Right after you graduated from high school?
Isaac: Just about at that time. And that was an economically
severe time. There was a pre-war depression, pre-
World War I. My brother was having pretty tough going
in his store and then he got smashed up in this
wreck. He got bumped on the back of the head. He
had what has since been diagnosed as brain shock, but
they didn t know what to call it. Nobody knew about
it until the days of airplane and auto wrecks and
that sort of thing. He would stand up and if he
closed his eyes he d tip right over. He would get
terrific headaches, to the point of being unconscious
almost. When he got into this wreck he had a slight
concussion of the brain. He got bumped in the back
of his head. He was in a berth, and felt the brakes
setting or something, and he raised up, and then his
head hit the back of the bunk when it crashed. And
when I found him two days later, in a hospital, he
was in a darkened room. He couldn t stand the light
and he couldn t see. It was three weeks before I
could bring him home, from Cleveland to Fond du Lac.
He had friends in Cleveland so they took him there
instead of to Buffalo.
Fry: Why were you the brother who went after him?
Isaac: I don t know. We were very close. He was sort of
like a second father to me. When something happened
he always sent for me. That was the size of it.
Fry: You had a chance to repay him for all he had done
for you, then. What was his name?
Isaac: Albert E. Isaac. Just yesterday I found a letter here
with his letterhead on it. He had a garment and fur
shop. When I first moved to town he was working
for another store and then finally went in business
for himself in this garment and fur shop. He burned
out once and built a new store and started again.
Then he went broke once but went back at it again,
and it ended up with him and my sister in a smaller
store with Just high-grade ladies furs and clothing
in it. That s where they were when they wanted me
to come in and Join them and handle the furs. But I
couldn t see it.
Fry: Tell us now how you took care of him. You got him
back home?
Isaac: I brought him home in a sleeper, in the train. The
specialists in Chicago told me that if my brother
was to live (he had with this slight concussion a
complete nervous breakdown, and he got thinner and
weaker all the time), he d have to get away from his
business and get off where it was quiet, and where he
would have care and good food.
So we went to northern Michigan, to a friend. We
rented a cabin across the lake from the town of Mlchigame,
Michigan. The only way you could get to the cabin was
by boat. So we went in by boat and stayed there two
years .
Fry: According to a letter that you wrote to Dean Walter
Fry: McCulloch when he was writing up your biographical
sketch, you said you had an Old Town canoe. And
that was your means of transportation for getting
food and everything else?
Isaac: Yes, except that we had a small motor boat part of
the time and in the late fall and early spring we
crossed the lake on the ice and brought supplies in
on a sled. I still had the canoe when I came out
here to the Northwest. I had it up on the Okanogan
River and on Lake Chelan in northern Washington, and
I brought it down here on the Columbia and on the
Tualatan River out here. Then I took it down to my
cabin at Devil s Lake, and three years ago somebody
stole it .
Fry: What exactly is an "Old Town" canoe?
Isaac: Old Town was one of the famous early-day cedar
canoes. This was a beautiful canoe. It had mahogany
decks and gun Is and it was a select grade, and a
special one. My brother and I Just lived in it. It
was like it was Just part of us.
Fry: Did you buy it especially for this?
Isaac: Yes. And had it shipped from Old Town, Maine, to
Fond du Lac. Then we took it north with us. That
was the famous canoe of the early days, the Old Town
canoe. Then Morris was another good early-day canoe.
The Old Town is still made, but the Morris factory
burned and went out of business when the motors came
in. Old Town was the famous old American canoe; the
Peterborough was the famous Canadian canoe. They re
built of cedar, very thin cedar with a canvas cover,
and enameled and smooth, Just like an eggshell.
Fry: Were you far enough back in the woods that you had
to supply your own food?
Isaac: We were three miles from town by lake, and about
10
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac :
Pry:
Isaac
Pry:
Isaac
Pry:
Isaac
eight miles to walk if you went around the end of
the lake by trail. But no one ever came in there
any other way but by boat. We stayed the first summer
and into the fall until the lake was frozen enough so
we could go to town on the ice. We went home over
winter. I had an operation for appendicitis and
in the spring as quick as I could manipulate again
(about 3 months) we went back. We went back in on
the ice before the ice left the lake in the spring
and stayed there that following summer. My brother
went in weighing 116 pounds and came out weighing
160.
So you came out again, then, at the end of the summer?
At the end of the second summer. And I went right
from there to the University of Minnesota to school
at St. Paul.
This is interesting,
is that right?
It really did cure your brother,
Oh, yes. As soon as he left the woods he went back
into business. He lived twenty-five of the most
vigorous years of his life after he got out of there.
How old was he when this happened?
I was about twenty and he was about thirty-six or
eight.
What did he do in the forest? Was he able to pitch
in and help?
At first he was quite feeble and had to take it
easy, but later he became almost as strong as me. We
used to hunt together and fish together. He d help
clean the fish. I d have some trouble getting him
to wipe dishes, but we managed. (Laughter) Cooking
and getting the food and the wood and the fuel and
11
Isaac: doing the repairs on the boats, cabin and boathouse,
and that sort of stuff kept us quite busy. The
second year we bought this cabin and lot on the lake.
It was in the center of a vast area of eastern white
pine cutover land that belonged mostly to the
Cleveland Cliff Iron Company. The young white pine
was Just beginning to come out through the aspen,
birch and maple. Then in the fall I did some trapping,
too. I got quite a few furs up there. I caught the
only beaver that I ever caught in my life and also a
few minks . That was some of the money that I used to
pay my tuition when I started school.
Choosing Forestry
Isaac: It was a toss-up as to whether I should go to Michigan s
or to Minnesota s forestry college ; I had both of the
catalogues. Wisconsin had no forestry college. (They
did have one, but gave it up about that time and they
never have had one since.)
I went over to see Dean E. G. Cheyney at Minnesota.
He was a real character. He could speak French as
well as he could speak English, and he had a flair
for dramatics. He also had a real sense of humor.
I talked to him a little while and he said, "Well,
my boy, what are you looking for, anyway?"
And I said, "Well, I m trying to find something
that ll take me as far from ladies furnishings as
I can get . "
He said, "You have two choices: you can take
forestry or chloroform." (Laughter)
And I said, "I ll take forestry."
He said, "All right. Sign up."
12
Fry: This experience in the woods had left you feeling
pretty well qualified for forestry?
Isaac: Yes. I had a tremendous advantage over the other
kids that came to school. We d never start a project
or anything but what they d push me up as chief of
it. I knew how to handle myself and what to do.
It was a tremendous advantage.
Fry: Was there a lot of work out in the woods in the School
of Forestry?
Isaac: We had one of two summers in the woods at Itasca
Park. Then we had to do what they called senior
woods work that we took at the Cloquet Experimental
Forest, where we had to go to work for a firm or
logging company in the woods during the fall. Inciden
tally, you might have met Hubert Persons at Berkeley.
Fry: No, I haven t.
Isaac: He lives over in the Walnut Creek area now. He s
retired from the Forest Service. He and I took our
woods work together. And we got credit for the
quarter for woods work. We had to come out and write
the story of the operation and all about it, and how
it was done and the different parts of it and what
our particular work there was that sort of thing.
We surveyed and cut out a swamp road to be iced for
team and sleigh hauling. They d lay out this road
and then ice it and haul out the big loads of logs
on the ice. We ran the line and swamped out that
road with water; that was our work for the camp during
the quarter that Persons and I were there together.
Professors at the University of Minnesota
Fry: What professors do you especially remember as contributing
13
Fry: to your career?
Isaac: J. H. Allison is still alive and still back there with
Dean Prank Kaufert in Minnesota. Allison s retired
now, though, but he has an office up there in the
forestry building.
Fry: What did he teach?
Isaac: He handled that work in the woods: forest surveying
and cruising, and forest surveying.
E. G. Cheyney was Dean of Forestry College and
taught "General Forestry."
J. P. Wentling was the silviculture professor.
What was it about these two men that you liked?
Was it their courses or their personalities?
Mostly their personalities. I don t remember too
much about their courses. But Wentling was a very
definitely an outdoor man. He was a big man, and
when he went out with students he would take the
rough going, the bad Just the same as any of the rest
of us .
Allison was pretty much the same type. When we
finished work at this camp on the St. Louis River above
Cloquet , we hiked from the St. Louis on the railroad
Junction over to I think it was to Virginia City.
It was forty-four miles on the Vermillion Highway,
across the northern part of Minnesota, and it was
below zero when we hiked there. As I remember it
was a long, cold day.
Fry: This was the Weyerhaeuser camp near Cloquet?
Isaac: Yes! After we left the camp (number twenty-seven),
Fry:
Isaac
Isaac: we wanted to visit a big mill at Virginia City. It
was a famous mill up there. We hiked that distance and
Prof. Allison hiked that with us. We were getting
within sight of the place when I looked at him and I
saw white spots coming on his face. His cheeks were
freezing. I had a pair (that dates back to my fur
business) of otter-skin mitts that were Just like
magic. Your face could be freezing, and you d run
that fur over your face and your face d be warm in a
minute. It was Just like magic; that fur on your
face would Just cut the cold, it seemed it d take it
right away. I told Allison he d have to stop and
thaw out his face and he said, "I d rather freeze my
face than my hands."
I said, "You trade mitts with me and we ll get
in a huddle and thaw you out." We got close together,
the three of us, and he held this fur up to his face
until the color came back in his cheeks. Then he
put on my mittens and I put on his.
Fry: And he didn t experience any damage?
Isaac: No, none at all. He held those mitts up to his face
until we got to town.
Pry: I was wondering about the curriculum at Minnesota at
that time and what you now think of it.
Isaac: Well, it was surprisingly good, I thought. We had one
course in wood technology, and a special wood tech
nology prof, J. P. Wentling. We had courses in ento
mology under Prof. Sam Graham, and we had a course in
forest pathology (that was the pathological diseases)
which provided my first Job in forestry fighting
white pine blister rust. Then we had our silviculture
classes, general forestry, mathematics, and as I look
back at it now it seemed like that was a pretty well-
rounded-out course. We had all of the vital elements
15
Isaac: that you bump into in technical forestry in the field.
It worked out pretty well. When I came out here and
started on a national forest I didn t find a Job
that I was afraid to tackle. So it was good for me,
I think.
Fry: Did you have a lot of humanities or social studies?
Isaac: No, not that I recall, at least they were not iden
tified by those names.
Pry: You didn t get to follow up your interest in history?
Isaac: No. I recall we had a division of forest products,
where they specialized in wood pulp and paper making.
I didn t take that course, but they had a special
prof for that. They taught the various phases of
paper making and pulping.
Fry: Did you start right in, then, in forestry when you
were a freshman?
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: And went right through the whole four years, then?
Isaac: Right through the whole four years, plus a year in
the U.S. Army Air Corps. It started in the middle
of my Junior year (third). And I took the three
summer camps that were required, also.
World War One Interlude: The Tenth Engineers (Forestry)
Fry: Somewhere along in here you might tell about your
interlude.
Isaac: That was in the middle of my Junior year of college.
Everybody in my class in the forestry college enlisted.
And by the end of the year we were all gone, there was
16
Isaac: nobody left. I tried for the Tenth Engineers, the
Forestry regiment, but I got down there too late.
They weren t taking any more enlistments until the
Twentieth, and that would be eight or ten months, they
said. But they said they had another place for me
since I had studies in timber structure and wood
technology.
They were having difficulty with timber inspection
out here in the West. They were having trouble with
the "Wobblies." The IWW s in the camps were sabotaging
airplane wingbeam production. They sent me out here,
alone, to Fort Vancouver barracks Washington . I was
later Joined by twenty-four other students from forestry
colleges all over the United States. We went to a
school of wingbeam inspection for five or six weeks.
And then they made a wingbeam inspector out of me.
And I didn t see a gun or an airplane until after the
war. I was right over here at Fort Vancouver barracks.
Fry: You were inspecting the beams after they had been
produced?
Isaac: They would send in the big cants, the half-logs or the
full-logs; and they d cut them up in the cut-up plant
and cut them down to size and then they d send that
big long timber back to us and we d inspect it and
mark it for sizes. Whatever was to be cut out of it
we d mark on it and send it back to the resaws, and
they d cut it and send it back to us and we d inspect
it again and chuck it into the cars for shipment. I
had to sign sixteen carbons for every carload that
went out. I never will forget it. I had to sign for
the various agencies in the government. Most of it
was shipped to Italy and to France. Some to England
that s the time they were making the planes over there.
But I remember signing all of those seventeen Inspec
tion certificates for every carload I inspected.
Fry: This was about 1918?
17
Isaac: That was 1918. I got out of there Just in time to go
back for the 1919 spring quarter in Minnesota.
Fry: In the World War I work, were you there with any friends,
or were you kind of alone?
Isaac: I started alone but soon found myself with a whole
bunch of forestry college students from all over
America. Whenever they got hold of a forester that
had training in wood technology or timber structure,
they sent him in for this airplane wingbeam inspection.
My army pal was a Syracuse University graduate. His
name was Carl Morressey. He still lives back there
in New York at Shinneatlis Lake. He and I, when we
got out of the Army (we got our discharge here in
Portland) took one suitcase and a handbag and started
around the United States. We took a boat down to San
Francisco. Then took an automobile trip with a paving
inspector all over California visiting forest areas.
Then we went right on south. We visited every forest
area wherever we went .
Fry: Were you thinking in terms of jobs after you got out?
Or were you just interested?
Isaac: Both. And getting information, getting experience.
We d read about these forests and the other places
(forest regions) but I had a year and a half of school
left to finish, and I thought this was a good chance
to see them. We still had our uniforms on and I had
a brother Frank living in Shreveport, Louisiana, so
we went down into Texas and on across to my brother
Frank s place. Carl had a brother in Atlanta and we
went on over to his place. Then he went from there
back to New York and I went on to Fond du lac, Wisconsin.
Fry: So you saw all the forests, then, except maybe the New
England ones?
Isaac: I visited all the forests on my way home. I already
18
Isaac: knew the New England forests pretty well; they were
very similar to the forests of Wisconsin, the same
species and everything else, so I didn t worry any
about that. And I d been down there before, with my
brother Albert. I saw those forests when I went to
get him when he was hurt .
Experiences at Weyerhaeuser Lumber Camp
Pry: Now, on the chronology I have that in the fall of
1919 you went to Weyerhaeuser.
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: Was that before or after you went to the Army?
Isaac: That was after the Army.
Pry: Was that the beginning of your senior year?
Isaac: I had half of my junior year left and all of my
senior year to finish. And it isn t exactly clear
whether it was the last quarter of my Junior year or
the first quarter of my senior year that I spent there
at the Weyerhaeuser camp. I spent two summers at
Itasca Park and at the Cloquet Experimental Pcrest .
That s the Minnesota summer camp of the Forestry School
Pry: What do you think about the camps as an education, now
as you look back on it?
Isaac: Well, it was a great experience. And I had the time
of my life up there. I was Just happy and at home;
I liked the fellows I was with and there were lots of
animals around and fish and everything else. I liked
all that sort of thing.
Fry: Were you able to continue your trapping there, too?
19
Isaac: Oh, no, no.
Fry: You were too busy.
Isaac: I did shoot three deer at the Weyerhaeuser camp and
surprised everybody around me. The lumberjacks, they
used to kid us a little bit. Persons and I, we were
college kids, and lumberjacks those days were real
old hill-billy lumberjacks. They d come in in the fall
and stay there til Christmas with one change of clothes,
and lived in the bunkhouse with two hundred men and
double-deck bunks two feet apart. And a little
room or space on one end of the building that the
grindstones were in, and the big stove where they d
sit around at night a little while. The rest of the
time they were in bed. They used to kid us a little
because we were college kids.
They said to us when we started out hunting (we
took a weekend off to hunt over Thanksgiving) , "Now
be careful you don t get lost. It s pretty damn cold
for us to come out there and hunt for you."
I said, "We won t need you to help hunt for us,
but we might need you to help carry in the game." Oh,
they got a big bang out of that, they Just about died
laughing.
Well, I d spent those two years hunting in the
north with my brother. We got out there and the first
day I got a big deer, not too far from camp. We
got that out all right, got it up to the railroad
and got a little hand car out there and got it in.
The next day we went way over into a cutover area and
it was full of these little potholes that would be
willow and cedar swamp, and a ridge around one side.
It was almost noon and we hadn t seen anything.
Finally I noticed a lot of tracks along the bottom
of this ridge and I told Persons to get over on the
ridge on the other side. I went a little ways and a
20
Isaac: bunch of deer Jumped up and started going off through
those willows and I started shooting from the top of
the hill. I was standing in the snow right up to
here knee-level . I couldn t tell if I was hitting
them or not , but I kept on shooting everytime I saw
a deer. Persons came running around on the ridge
and he began hollering and says, "You got one over
here." And he said, "You got any more?"
I said ,"I don t know if I have or not." I went
on down into the swamp and got on the tracks and
followed them and found I had two more of them dead
down in the swamp. We had to go back to camp and
get two lumberjacks that had a hunting license to
come out and take one of our deer in.
But that shut the lumberjacks up. in a hurry.
They were pretty good fellows after that.
Fry: Respectful after that?
Isaac: Yes. And they found out that we weren t Just city
kids, or ivory tower botanists.
But, this Persons, I never will forget him.
His brother had inherited a gun from his father, and
he didn t know how to work it. We sat up a whole
night trying to put it together. It was taken apart
and the pieces were all pulled out of it . I finally
got it figured out about four o clock in the morning.
We started off and the second day he was over on a
ridge. I saw a track go In the swamp and followed it
and I run a deer right out in front of him. The darn
deer turned around a big buck and Just stood
right there and looked at him, and I said, "For God s
sake, shoot, Persons!"
He was standing there aiming and the deer finally
trotted off.
matter?"
I ran over there and said, "What s the
21
Isaac: He said, "This damn gun wouldn t fire."
I grabbed it and pulled it open and threw the
shell out. The shell had misfired, and instead of
pulling it out he Just kept pulling the trigger. He
never did get a deer. He took one of mine and we
went down to school and took the deer to the fraternity
house. They had big venison feeds down there for a
few days. But it was quite an experience.
Pry: Did you belong to a fraternity there?
Isaac: Yes, the name was Tau Phi Delta, the professional
forestry society at Minnesota. And there s also a
chapter of the same fraternity at the University of
Washington at Seattle, Washington and at Oregon State
University at Corvallis, Oregon. At the time we
brought the deer to the house, the house was being
run by the Forestry Club but it was Just in the process
of being converted into the forestry fraternity the
Tau Phi Delta.
22
EARLY CAREER IN THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE
Junior Forester on the Okanagan [Chelan]
Isaac: When I graduated I got an appointment on the Okanagan
National Forest as what they called a Junior forester
at that time. It had been called "forest assistant."
Fry: Did you ask to come west?
Isaac: Oh, yes. I took my Civil Service Examination for Junior
Forester. When they said, "Will you work in your home
state? Will you work in Alaska? Where do you prefer
to work?" I Just wrote diagonally across the paper,
"Northwest or nothing," and sent it in. And I got
about three offers here in the Northwest. Two in the
Indian Service.
Fry: What were your reasons for this?
Isaac: My chief reasons were that I had seen the Northwest
forests. I knew what the fir region was like. I
had worked here in the spruce mill during World War
I and run around in the forest a little and I wanted
to get back into that kind of a forest country. And
the other reason is now here in the kitchen. I had
met Alberta out here, when I was out here in the army.
Fry: Oh, here in Oregon?
Isaac: Yes. We became very good friends when I had a year and
a half of school left. I didn t want to Jeopardize
anybody s life until I got through with that, so when
I got through, she was still single and out here
waiting. And I was hearing from her right along. I
came out as fast as I could get out here. We were
married 2^ years later, in November of 1922, and she
came with me to Okanagan to live.
23
Pry: You didn t really rush into marriage, even then.
Isaac: No, I didn t. I wouldn t get married until I had a
solid Job and could take care of a wife. After I
finished school I worked six months and had all my
debts paid. You may guess that I had to borrow some
money before I finished school. After I had my
school debts paid off, I worked another year and had
$1000. Then I went out and I bought a ring and a car
and I was broke again. I worked another year and I
had another $1000, and I got married and I haven t had
$1000 since. (Laughter) That was my procedure. I
wouldn t ask a girl to share my life until I could take
care of her. That was the way I felt about it. Every
body did in those days. It s different now. Times
have changed.
Fry: There was a lot more insecurity in the world, then,
I guess.
Isaac: Yes, there was. You either had a Job or you didn t.
And if you didn t have a Job you didn t eat. I
didn t want somebody dependent on me that I couldn t
support, so I waited until I got my feet on the ground.
When I first went there it was the Okanagan
National Forest. While I was there it was renamed
the Chelan National Forest. And about the time I
left they got tired of that name and renamed it back
to Okanagan National Forest as it is today.
Fry: There was a lot of protest over renaming it Chelan?
Isaac: Very vigorous protest. Because that s a romantic
country, that Okanagan country. It was back off of
the railroad and the river back in the back country.
There were a lot of miners, timbermen, stockmen and
such, barons in that country and the livestock
barons started their herds from stock that was
obtained in various questionable ways.
Fry: Questionable?
Isaac: A lot of them got their beginning with stolen stock,
there was no doubt about that. It was pretty rough
and wild country in there in the early days up in
there. Then the railroad came in. It came about
the year or two before I got there. Until that time
there was no transportation into that country except
a wagon road. And it s a hundred miles north of
Wenatchee. When the water was high they went up the
Columbia and Okanagan River by boat.
Fry: What were your duties as the young assistant forester?
Isaac: In the early days in the Forest Service, the rangers
and the men in charge were all local non-technically-
trained foresters. They had grown up on the Job, you
might say, and were cowboys, most of them cowpunchers
and ranchers. The only technical man on the forest
was the Forest Supervisor, P. T. Harris. He was a
well-known character. Everybody knew him.
Fry: What was his position?
Isaac: He was the Forest Supervisor of the Okanagan National
Forest. He was a Yale graduate from Maine originally.
A very high type of New Englander. Very fine man,
but very slow and very deliberate. I d go in to ask
him a simple question he could answer yes or no, but
I d stand there until the perspiration ran from my
armpits down to my belt before he d say yes or no.
Fry: You mean there d be a complete silence?
Isaac: Yes. Lots of people would call up and ask him a
question and hang up the receiver thinking he was
gone.
He was Just like Abraham Lincoln in many ways,
great long face and mop of sandy hair sticking up on
25
Isaac: his head. And he was the soul of honor and he was
well technically trained, too. He had a good cultural
background, a really high-grade man, but very peculiar.
Most people couldn t get along with him and had a
heck of a time up there because they d get nervous
waiting for him to say yes or no. He always had to
fill his pipe before he d answer you for anything, no
matter what it was. He d take out a plug of Edgeworth
and carve off a little with his jacknife, and hold it
a while and look at you, then he d grind it up with
his thumb and pack it down in his pipe and he wouldn t
say one word. That s the way he operated. There were
many fellows who would Jump right up in his office
and run out. They wouldn t wait for him, they d get
tired of waiting. They get nervous, you know.
When I came it was a strange situation. I d
used about my last dollar to get up there. I had
gotten a letter saying that I had an appointment.
Alberta was out here, as I told you, so I came on to
Portland first and went up to the Regional U.S. Forest
Service office and visited with the men there and got
acquainted. I sent a letter on to Harris saying that
I d be a couple of days late. When I got to Wenatchee
it was 110 in the shade, but no shade. Then I went
up on that shortline railroad, with coal heat and the
windows all open, on the fifth of July. The train was
full of Fourth of July celebraters going back home
kids, families, food and flies all over the train.
And the further I went up the valley the hotter it
got and there was not a tree in sight nothing but
sand and sagebrush and desert. I got into this little
town about 6:30 or 7:00 on the train, and the sidewalks
were paths with four inches of dust and sand on them.
And the streets were dirt with six inches of dust. I
talked to a fellow there, I think in front o f one of
the cigar stores. (He looked like he was quite an
important individual, later turned out to be the mayor.)
I said, "Why the hell don t you fellows sprinkle these
streets?"
26
Isaac: He said, "We can t, we sold our sprinkler to
Omak." (That s the next town.) (Laughter) I never
will forget that. But that s what he actually told
me. He said, "We haven t got a new sprinkler yet."
I first got a room in a hotel. All they had was
an inside room and it was so hot that the wall was
hot to your hand if you d feel of it.
Pry: Just absorbed all the sun s heat.
Isaac: Yes.
I found out where the Supervisor lived and I went
up to this Supervisor s house. It was a low sprawling
cabin all run over with vine. The porch in front had
a gravel floor, no wood on the floor, Just gravel
floor in front of his door. He had an ordinary door
with a great big brass knocker on it that looked like
something entirely foreign. It was so heavy I was
afraid to let go of it for fear it would knock the
door down. (Laughter) I let it flop a time or
two, and this great big man came to the door, stood
there and looked down at me. Never said a word.
I said, "Are you Phil Harris?"
"Yip," he says. Well I about Jumped out of my
skin at the "Yip."
I said, "Supervisor of the forest here?"
And he said, "Yes."
I said, "Well, I m Isaac and I m signed up here
as your forest assistant."
"Well, if I hadn t got your letter saying you
were going to be three days late I wouldn t have known
you were comin . "
27
Isaac: I said, "My God, that s a hot situation. I
about spent my last dollar to come up here. It s
no Joke to me. If you got nothing for me to do up
here, what the hell did they send me up here for?"
"Well," he says, "we got lots of work to do up
here, but nothing very technical that might interest
a technical forester."
I said, "Have you got anything for me to do?"
"Yes, we got lots of ordinary work to do," he
said.
I said, "Well where are your trees? I haven t
seen one for the last hundred miles."
"Oh, out yonder back of the hills there s lots
of them."
So I said, "All right, that s all I want to
know. If you ve got some trees and something to do
why I ll be happy."
He said, "Come up to the office in the morning."
I went up to the office in the morning. Here
was a brand new stenographer, a Swedish girl, Just out
of business college, bashful and clumsy. They had a
forest clerk there that was a complete introvert. He
never talked about anything or said anything he didn t
have to say. I came in and told them who I was. They
said "Harris 11 be down pretty soon, have a chair."
Pretty soon, Harris came in and he said, "This
is Willard Steiner, the clerk, and this is Esther
Johnson our new stenographer. These are the files."
He said, "You can start looking at them and get
familiar with things." And he went in his room and
I didn t see him again for a whole day. I walked
28
Isaac: around there. I d pull open one file and I d see
"Special Use Permits." Special Use Permit didn t
mean anything to me. I d pull it out and I d take a
look at it and I d try to understand it.
I d pull open another drawer: "S-22 sales."
An S-22 sale happened to be the classification of a
sale where you sold small lots of timber to ranchers
for their own use. It was a special classification at
a low price. But I didn t know that. I didn t know
an S-22 sale from an S-66 sale.
I pulled open another drawer and I d find
Grazing Allotments. That didn t mean anything to me
either. I Just went around there from day to day like
that until I pretty near went crazy, until one after
noon an assistant supervisor came in, Glen Mitchell,
he was a regular fellow. He took me by the arm and
showed me a map of the forest and told me what was
going on.
Two or three days later they sent me out to
put a new telephone instrument in a lookout station
and I was off. And everything went from there on.
I spent four of the best years of my life on that
forest, I think. I never struck a Job that I wasn t
able to handle with reasonable satisfaction. I was
the only technical man on the forest outside of the
supervisor.
I had to rerun all the homestead entry surveys.
I also had to make the timber sale reconnaissance
maps and make the topographic maps and the timber
surveys and then write up the timber sale reports.
One of the Jobs assigned to me was to go in and set all
the fire-finders on the lookout stations on a true
north, by the North Star Observation, you know. I
really had to move some of those mountains a mile to
get them to line up. There were six lookout stations
on the forest at that time. That first Job I had was
30
Isaac: was her duty to do it because of her superior
intelligence. About the first month I was there they
invited me up to the house for dinner one night. I
had Just had a battle with a little fire, where I
worked all night and wore the skin all off my hands.
Phil (the Supervisor) laughed at me a little and he
said, "You ve got to learn that you can t do all
these things yourself. You ve got to get somebody to
help you . "
She turned around to me and she said, "Leo, have
you had any fire fighting experience?"
And I said, "No , not a lot; I fought some fires
in Minnesota, and some fires on the farm where we
cleared land and that sort of thing."
She said, "Which means not any?"
And I said, "No. Which means very little, Just
exactly as I told you." But she was that kind of an
individual. She didn t know what to say without
hurting somebody. But she figured that she had this
superior mind and she had to tell everybody Just how
things ought to be.
Fry: Did she run the forest, too?
Isaac: When she could, but he kept her out, pretty much. He
kept her out as much as he could. Wherever she could
get a hand in she did, she did run it. And it didn t
work too well because right next door to where I
lived there was this Deputy Supervisor Mitchell
living. He had grown up with the forest and had been
there all this time, and this technical man was brought
in, as Supervisor, over him. Mitchell s wife wouldn t
accept that at all. She said, "My husband s supposed
to be Supervisor. He knows the ropes around here. And
not Harris. My husband should be the Supervisor."
That s the attitude she took and she was very vocal
31
Isaac: about it. She didn t hesitate at all to say it.
So toward fall we had the annual forest ranger
meeting. The rangers would all come in to Okanagan
and usually bring their wives along. This ranger
meeting was to go on for a week, and Mrs. Harris
decided it would be nice to have a big party for the
rangers on the last night. So she went down and
engaged a little parish hall in the Episcopal church
there. She came to our house to see Alberta about
helping out with the party. Alberta said, "Well,
I ll do whatever you have for me. Just let me know.
She said, "Mrs. Mitchell is right next door. In
a couple of days come over with her and we ll talk it
over. "
So in a couple of days Alberta went over to offer
her services, but they couldn t get Mrs. Mitchell to
help. That night her husband, the Deputy Supervisor,
walked over to our house and he said, "God, I don t
know, the women are in an awful tussle here. Emma
won t touch it. She won t take any hand in this party
at all."
So, on the day for the big party I saw Glenn
Mitchell and he said, "You know, I d give anything if
I could get Emma down to that dinner tonight."
I said, "Well, I ll try." So, I had this Buick
roadster. I drove up in front of the house with the
car pointing in the opposite direction, away from
town. I raced the motor a little and honked the horn,
and Emma came out. She said, "What do you want?"
I said, "I d like to show you something." I
was fooling around under the dash and I said, "Get in
here. I want to show you something." She got up in
the seat and I Just reached across and I took ahold
of the door and shut it, let in the clutch and started
32
Isaac: off.
She said, "Where are you going?"
I said, "Just for a little ride." I drove up
around two blocks and turned right around and headed
back to town, downtown. And I said, "I m going to the
party and you re going along." She wanted to Jump
out of the car and I wouldn t let her. And I drove
right up to the front of the door and stopped at this
little parish hall. Here was the Supervisor s wife
and everybody. They greeted her with open arms. She
got out of that car with the most sour face that you
ever saw on a human individual. But she went in and
she stayed around.
The rangers started coming over to the dinner
toward four or five o clock. Mrs. Mitchell would
meet them at the door and she d say, "You ought to
have better sense than to come on time for a dinner
if Mrs. Harris is getting it." So they turned around
and left, two or three of them turned around and went
back to the hotel. Mrs. Harris came down. She d
roasted the fish at home and brought it from home,
beautiful big salmon all roasted and stuffed. She
said, "Where are the people?"
I said, "They were here, but they went back over
to the hotel."
She said, "We will send Ranger Frank Burge over
after them." Her husband (Harris) was over there at
the hotel, too. Burge left but he didn t come back.
Finally she came to me and said, "Can you go over and
round up those people?"
So I went over there, and I found one of the
rangers sitting there in the lobby dead drunk. He
was a renegade anyway, recognized as such. I said,
"Where s Harris?"
33
Isaac: "He s upstairs, talkin 1 to Ranger Pierpont.
He s in bed sick with the flu." And he really was
sick. Upstairs I found Harris talking to Pierpont
about bridges instead of coming home to supper. I
said, "Phil, your wife s waiting dinner for you."
He (the Supervisor) comes downstairs and he says,
"You ride with me; and Burge (another ranger), you
take Tyler over." (Tyler was the drunk fellow.)
So Burge got Tyler in his car and went. Harris had
an old, open Dodge touring car with the top down.
(He d had it several years and it was quite a relic.)
We had piled in the back of that car a whole lot of
forest equipment, packsacks, bedrolls, record books,
camp kits and everything else in the back of this car.
We had a song written, a verse written for each ranger.
We were going to pile on that stuff and come in and
sing this verse for each ranger.
We started down the main street, Harris driving,
Just a-steppin on it in that old Dodge. Right down
in the main corner of the town there was a boulder
(marker) in the center of the street: a huge
granite boulder. There was another fellow right ahead
of us in another car driving up the street. He swung
right around in front of Harris without signalling.
And Harris tried to dodge him and he hit that big
center rock. Both doors of that old Dodge flew open
and Just spewed all that equipment out into the street.
I remember it like it was yesterday. There was one of
those Kellogg portable telephones that we had inherited
from the army, a square box about one foot square.
And it turned over four or five rolls over and over
and hit against the curbing and rang, "Ting-a-ling."
(Laughter) I got up and shut the doors and started
loading the stuff back in the Dodge. Harris went
around and took a look and pulled the fender up out
of the tire and said, "The old Dodge is Just about
where you can t hurt her much." We loaded the stuff
on and went on over to the party. By that time all
the rangers were there and we sat down to dinner.
Isaac: Oh, a few more things happened. We had sung our
song to the rangers and all that, and Harris got up
and said, "Now, the boys have sung a song for you
fellows and you haven t had a chance to prepare anything.
Each one of you can tell us a story, a funny story
from your district. So one after another they got
up and they told something funny. Most of us had
heard their stories before but that made it Just as
good. Then it came this Tyler s time to get up and
tell his story. (The Forest Supervisor s wife was
very straight-laced and stiff-necked and Just very
proper.) This Tyler got up and told a darn rotten
story .
Fry: You mean slightly obscene?
Isaac: Oh, yes. And it Just broke up the whole party.
Everybody folded up and started picking up the stuff
and went home. (Laughter)
Fry: Did you have any more annual ranger parties after
that?
Isaac: Not that year. But they were more carefully guarded
after that. But gee whiz, that was the limit.
Fry: It sounds like you had some real problems with what
modern business would call interpersonal relations.
Isaac: Oh, yes, we had plenty of them.
Investigating Homestead Claims
Fry: Did you have to check out homestead claims as part of
your Job?
Isaac: Homestead entry surveys. A man could file on a forest
homestead inside of the forest boundary on any piece
of land that he claimed was capable of making a
35
Isaac: living for him. There was some land that could be
cleared .
Fry: For farming?
Isaac: Yes, and another purpose that clearing could be done
for was for a pasture. Then they were required to
move on that land and build a cabin and to live at
least six months of the year for three years in that
cabin on the land. Then somebody had to come back
and run the boundaries and see if the house was on
the land and if they had the required amount of
the land cleared (they had to clear such a percentage
of it). And you had to inquire if they had lived
on it the right length of time and all that.
I remember one particular incident that was
just really one for the story books. This old
bachelor Frenchman named Armadus Ritchey there s
a lot of stories about him up there. He lived in
this little cabin on Loup Loup Creek. He was about
to prove up on his claim, so I came in and I found
a section corner, to start with and started rerunning
his line. There was a notch in the Canyon Wall and
his house was in that little nick and Just outside of
his line. So here this poor old fellow had been living
Just off of his land; his cabin wasn t on the land.
I knew that he, of course, couldn t prove up on it.
I also knew that the old fellow probably wouldn t
live another three years (the required time) because
he was that far gone. And I knew it d Just kill him
if I told him that land wasn t going to be his, now,
until he d live on it.
So I stopped at this corner and I said, "I ve
got a telephone in my car that I ve got to take up
to the lookout station." (This was on a Monday.) And
I said, "It will take me about till Thursday to get
through with the telephone Job. Then I will come
up here on Thursday to finish running this survey.
I m awful sorry your house isn t on your own land
36
Isaac: because I ve got to mark the house where I find it
when I get here Thursday.
Well, he said, "What I do?"
I said, "Joe Coleman down at the mill has got a
good chain block. " I took him down to the mill and
said to Joe, "This fellow needs the use of a chain
block and a rope for a few days. " Then I took the old
fellow and the chain block back to his cabin. I came
back there on Friday morning and set my compass over
on the corner and looked down the line and his cabin
(it was on runners anyway) was Just barely inside the
line. The line would Just go by the house. And I said,
" For God sakes, Ritchie, while you re at it, why didn t
you give it a good pull and be sure you re inside the
line?"
He straightened up and he says, "The goddamn
rope, she break."
I didn t say a word. I Just marked the house on
the map where it was when I returned and said nothing
about it and Ritchey got his homestead.
Pry: Did you run into any of those now-classic examples of
homesteads which were really taken out for the timber
on them and which sometimes were not actually operated
by the homesteader?
Isaac: No, on the Chelan I didn t. There were several homesteads
there where all of us thought the timber on it wasn t
worth much more than the land. But there was usually
a little place where they could at least have a garden
and maybe enough to raise a little grain or hay and a
place to pasture some stock. They had the privilege
of running a limited number of stock on the forest
under a free use permit. (I think it was seven head
or something like that.) Usually there was a show that
a man could make a skimpy living there on those northern
37
Isaac: Washington homesteads. Up there the timber was light,
ten to twelve thousand board feet to the acre; down
here northern Oregon there s ten to twelve thousand
board feet in one tree. But the stands up there were
not dense and the trees were not too large. I don t
think there were many crooked deals like that on the
Chelan or Okanagan Forest. I didn t come across any
in my work.
I came across several where the timber was worth
more than the land. But you couldn t say that they
took it for the timber itself, because timber wasn t
very valuable up there at the time. It was two or
three dollars a thousand at most.
Timber Sales
Isaac: I recall very definitely about the first four or
five timber sale agreements that I worked up, surveyed
the land and calculated the amount of timber on it and
got hauling costs to see how much it d take to get the
stuff out, and what the average mill-run price was,
and then subtract it out and see what balance was
left for stumpage. Every darn one I figured up,
always came out with a minus value for the stumpage.
I d send in my report and they d send up a contract
with a minimum stumpage price written on it and the
fellow would buy it anyway, $2.50 a thousand, regardless
of what my report showed. I Just couldn t understand
it and it made me awful damn mad to go through all
that agony to write up that timber sale report and
appraisal and then have them Just stick on the minimum
price and the fellow would buy it and go ahead.
They had a timber sale meeting in the fall and
they had a few bigshots from the Portland office up
there. They were goin over one after another of
these sales. They d look at my report and they d say,
"Isaac didn t find a value on that." I sat there
38
Isaac: listening until about the last sale discussion and
I finally exploded. I said, "You fellows have got a
queer system up here. I don t see what the hell you
send me up here for anyway . I went out there and
made an honest appraisal on everyone of those sales,
and all you do is stick down the minimum price and
pay no attention to my appraisal.
"Well ," they said, "these men want that timber
and they ll buy it. We can t sell it for any less
than the minimum price. And if we don t sell it to
them they ll contact every damned politician in
this whole northern part of the state and write clear
to Washington. So all we can do is let them buy it."
Fry: In other words, Leo, you worked up and figured out the
appraised value, which was lower than the Forest
Service could sell the timber for?
Isaac: Yes; I always came out with less than the minimum.
They had a minimum price set.
Fry: Yes, and by the time that you subtracted the costs of
logging from the stumpage value, the price came out to
less than the minimum.
Isaac: It was less than the minimum every time.
Fry: But the Forest Service sold it at minimum price set by
regulation.
Isaac: Just stuck the minimum price on the contract and the
fellow bought it. About seven out of nine operators
went broke on it.
Fry: It was your duty, wasn t it, to talk to the men who
bought this?
Isaac: Sure, I told them.
Fry: You tried to talk them out of this?
39
Isaac: Yes. I told them that s the least the Service can
sell it for. "Well we can make a go of it, we ll
give it a try," they would say, and they would buy
it anyway and go on Just the uame. I suppose they
made a little money off of it, but not very much.
They made a living while they were going broke.
Fry: But you weren t swamped with timber sales, either, I
gather.
Isaac: No, no. We only had about siic or seven on the forest,
and they wore all small twD or three million board
feet each.
Fry: For the whole time you were there?
Isaac: Yes, four years. No, I guess we had a little more
than that. We had about three a year, or four. And
then they would continue on into the next year. It d
take one about three or four years to wind up a sale.
Fry: I see. What use was being made of these?
Isaac: All of the lumber went for box shocks and irrigation
(905) flume lumber. That was the big tragedy. They
cut the prime logs out of the forest, a clear pine
log and chop it up into box shocks. Clear lumber
and all. About the time I left the forest, Byles
Coleman Company, of Omak, Washington came in and started
a sash and door factory, and for the first time that
high grade pine began to come in for a better type of
use. They made doors and framing and interior finish
and really good high grade useful lumber and they used
it. Since that time, better use has been made of the
good lumber, and they re now cutting the lower grades
of the lumber to make their tox shocks out of. A
box end isn t hurt if it has two or three knots in it.
But this beautiful clear pine, selected logs, would
all go right into the box shook mill before the sash
and door factory came in.
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Was this western yellow pine?
Then called western yellow. The name changed since
I was there to Ponderosa pine.
Can you give us any of your observations about what
private companies were doing on their own lands , or
private timber operators were doing outside the
national forests?
There were practically none up there on the Chelan
forest at the time.
f
Or around it on private land?
The land outside the v ational "forest boundary consisted
of stock farms, and some apple orchards where they
could get water for irrigation. There was one, Gamble s
Mill, down at Chelan that had some private land, and
he was virtually clearcutting on it. He had a local
market for building material, flume lumber, box shocks,
and such stuff. He got along pretty well there. Then
he bought some more from the Forest and kept his mill
going. But on the national forests we did a selective
cutting in pine, because it lends itself to kind
of cutting. You can cut your biggest and your ripest
trees, and there s always new ones coming. There s
always young growth right in the forest. But on the
private land then they usually clear cut it, cutting
everything that they can they make a log out of and
they they burn the slash. They didn t pay much attention
to reforestation. They didn t value their lands too
highly.
What did this do to the land?
erosion?
Did you notice a lot of
No, there was very little erosion up there. Once
in a while there d be a kind of a soil breakout, and
a kind of a ditch would come out through a canyon.
Isaac: But there was so little rain In there that there was
very little erosion in that dry country east of the
Cascades. Once in a while when they d have a cloud
burst and get heavy rain it happens once in a while
in that eastern country and it would wash out a
canyon and rip things up a bit . But on the whole there
was not a lot of erosion on the areas. They piled
the brush and we usually burned it in the fall or
winter, so there wasn t much slash around when we
got through with a timber sale. It worked pretty
well.
Range Management
Fry: I guess you must ve had some duties in range management.
Isaac: I did. The entire area, clear to the summit of the
Cascades, that is now proposed for a national park,
was at that time all allotted to cattle, sheep and
horse grazing. We had a regular map prepared and
each owner had his grazing allotment. They had every
acre of that country above the river bottoms taken
up with cattle and sheep allotments. The national
forest committees, and all the fellows that are now
writing the big reports on the area never once mentioned
that use that once was made of that land, or that
might come again. You may live to see a future demand
for that land as population increases.
Pry: For cattle and sheep?
Isaac: Yes, for cattle and sheep, but I hope not. All the
high country, the back country, was sheep range. Next
down the line (in elevation) was the cattle range,
and the lower end of the cattle range and the low land
was the horse range. That s the way they divided it
up, roughly. But sometimes they overlapped and fought
over it, and then they got into trouble.
Fry: And they were raising horses?
Isaac: Yes: they had horses for themselves, their own pack
strings and stuff. And some of them raised horses to
sell, saddle horses mostly. There was some team
farming over there. But there were mostly saddle
horses in that country. When I was there a few
small bands of wild horses still roamed the hills.
They had a time living over winter but managed
somehow. Early settlers Just moved away and left
them they were usually poor quality stock. One
Englishman left some high grade riding stock, but it
was soon picked up by the cowboys.
Pry: Did you have the usual problems about protests that
grazing allotments were too small?
Isaac: Oh, my God, they fought like mad up there if you
tried to cut down their grazing allotment. If a man
had an allotment for, say, 2,000 sheep, two bands of
1,000 each, and his range showed he was overgrazing
it and couldn t support that much, and you d try to
get him to cut down to a band and a half, he would
contact every legislator and every Judge in that part
of the country and clear to Washington, D.C., and
swear that we were discriminating against him. If he
could show us that that land would support his flock,
he d rent it for ten years in advance if we wanted
him to. But not if our records showed that each
year the range was being more depleted, and more
depleted, and more depleted with the good grazing
species of grass disappearing from the forage and
being replaced by annual weeds. But it made no differ
ence, they d fight for it anyhow. They hung on until
grazing no longer paid, then they d quit. When they
had to pay $400 a month for a sheepherder and had to
haul out canned peaches and fresh eggs, for him to
eat and have an air bed for him to sleep on, why it
didn t pay to run sheep in the high country. It was
cheaper for them to stay down in the valley and feed
Isaac: them on irrigated pastures and crops.
Fry: Did this change happen while you were there?
Isaac: No, it was beginning to happen as I left there, and
it has happened since. There s only a few bands left
on that whole Okanpgan forest now, and they re on
the better ranges, where the rancher is living right
below at the lower elevations and he can reach them
easily. But they used to come in there, ship their
sheep in from way down in Yakima, ship them in by
train and then drive them up over the sheep driveway,
forty to seventy-five miles back into the mountains
to their range, to the summer range. But that s
pretty well a thing of the past now.
Fry: Who were the sheepherders ?
Isaac: Local ranchers that lived out in the flat country and
such help as they could hire. There was a whole
ring of ranchers right around Okanagan. Around River
side there was two or three big ranchers. Down at
Waterville there was another one and several in the
Methow (River) Valley. And around Yakima there was a
big circle of ranchers that had what they called "home
ranches" there. They d bring the sheep out of the
mountains and market half of them. They would market
the lambs and take the ewe back to the home ranch to
keep them over the winter. In the spring they came
out with their new herd again.
Fry: So they did their own herding, the owners did?
Isaac: Yes. Well, they hired herders if they could get them.
But it got so toward the last they couldn t get them
anymore. They couldn t get men to stay and camp with
the herd and live out there. But when I was there
they had mostly Basque sheepherders from Spain or
Portugal. They would go into the mountains with the
sheep in the spring and stay there until fall. A
Isaac: packer would bring food into them. They d live in
there with two or three dogs and follow the sheep
right along.
Fry: Were the ranchers people who had migrated west recently?
Isaac: Oh, some of them were brand new, some of them were the
second generation of old-timers that came in with
their stolen flocks, as I told you, in the early days,
and got established, and all ages in between.
Pry: Long before your time?
Isaac: Yes, got a homestead and were old-timers in there.
But some were brand new and started on new places.
They come in with a little money and buy a little
place and put in an application for a range on the
ational orest and start out.
Frank Lenzie, a Grazing Examiner in the U.S.
Forest Service at Wenatchee, Washington quit the
Service and went into the sheep business over at
Yakima. At the time he got a fairly good salary in
the Forest Service, and his wife worked also. She
was a clerk in the Forest Service office at Wenatchee.
Then the Depression came on and he went broke and
lost everything. The next thing I heard, he was feeding
pigs in Alaska at one of the army camps, getting the
table food. He said it was the best pig food any
pigs ever got. He worked there a year or two and made
a little stake and came back and bought another "spread"
in eastern Washington. (A "spread" is an established
stock ranch.) His wife continued to work in the
office in Wenatchee for the Forest office, then he
got an appointment back in the Forest Service as
E. N. Kavanagh s assistant in grazing. From that he
went into the Indian Service, as Chief Forester for
the Indian Service and he worked several years as
Chief Forester for the Indian Service traveling all
over the United States. But his wife kept working,
Isaac: and she kept buying this used up, overgrazed, tax-
delinquent land around Patterson, Washington. As
fast as they got that land they fenced it they
finally had fifty miles of fence. They rotated
their grazing on it, and would let the grass go to
seed every four or five years so that the range
would have a chance to reseed and get the good grazing
grass back on the ground. We were trying to do it
that way in the Forest Service but everybody was
fighting us. Frank Lenzie goes out on his own and
does it, and in just a little while he had a beautiful
ranch up there at Patterson, Washington. He quit
the Service entirely and went to ranching. He con
verted half of his land to wheat land, and devoted
the other half to sheep and cattle. But he got rid
of the sheep entirely when it got so hard to get
herders and went all to cattle and wheat and did very
well at it. One day about three years ago he came to
see me and he had a suitcase full of money, hundred
dollar bills, twenty dollar bills, five dollar bills,
everything. I said, "My God did you rob a bank or
something?"
He said, "No. I sold some of my cattle." And
he added, "This will strike you funny, but I want to
give this money away. I want to give most of it to
some charitable organizations." He had some hospital
he was going to give it to and some Eskimos he was
helping to educate and some orphanage his wife Ethel
was going to give to. He gave a thousand dollars
to some Camp Fire Girls near Spokane. Then he left
and said he d get in touch with me again and talk
some more about it .
They don t know how much money he sold the cattle
for. He got paid in cash and he was giving that money
away in cash. Maybe he d record it after he gave it
away. Last summer when we went to Canada we stopped
to see him at Spokane ; we went up to the golf club
to dinner with him and his wife.
Isaac: I said to Frank, "Why don t you give the money
to your kids and get them set up? They ve got some
children to educate."
"Aw, God, they re all taken care of already,"
he said "They got more money than they know what to
do with." He had 36,000 acres blocked up in a sold
block over there at Patterson, Washington of this
one-time tax-delinquent land that they said was
used up, and no good, and worn out. The next thing
I knew I got a check for $500. He said, "Put this to
some good cause. I d like to see it go to some college
or somewhere to help worthy forestry or range students."
So I got in touch with McCullogh at Corvallis, and
Nagle at Washington State, at Pullman, Washington
and Marckworth at the University of Washington at
Seattle. I got their propositions for endowment and
so forth. They could set it up in an endowment to
help worthy students in range management, who would
know where their money was coming from, and would
have a chance to see what someone else had done on
grazing land. It would keep his name (Frank Lenzie)
before the people who are interested. Then I wrote
Nagle at Pullman and told him to get in touch with
this fellow directly. I told Frank the way to get
rid of some of his money was to set up an endowment
over at Washington State College at Pullman, as
"the Frank and Ethel Lenzie Endowment" to aid worthy
students in forest and range management. I got a
little note from Frank, that said, "Looks like the
arrangement is working; out and everything is going
to be all right. I m grateful to you," and so forth.
He said, "I sold the lower half of my ranch to the
Irrigation Service. It s under or below the ditch,
and I got $890,000 for it. They ve Just paid me
$250,000 of it."
He got $890,000 for the lower half of this so-
called worthless range land that he had bought up!
It was amusing to me; it s an interesting but true
story, because here he was on a forest in the beginning
Isaac: trying his level best to get the stockmen to treat
land that way. But no, they Just couldn t do it.
They had to get the last bite of grass off it right
now, and t hell with tomorrow. That was the attitude.
But this man walks right out and demonstrates it on
his own land and gets crazy rich on it . I don t
know what he s going to do now. He s eighty-one
years old now. And his wife is pretty near as old
as he is, but she s frisky. I think she s huskier
than he is; he s pretty frail.
Fry: When you were handling some grazing management on the
Okanagan, did you find that one of the big obstacles
to this was that the political pressure was Just too
enormous?
Isaac: It was terrific. These grazing men had plenty of
money as a rule, and they would fight any reduction of
stock that we tried to put over to improve the range,
or any closing of an area to allow it to reseed.
But that corrected itself all at once, when the cost
of running sheep in the back country got too expensive,
it corrected itself right now. They don t have that
problem any more. But the grazing pressure has pretty
much disappeared. They are raising their stock now
in the valleys and feeding them with irrigated
pastures, where they can raise ten times as much on
an acre as they could under normal dryland conditions.
I think there are Just about as many sheep produced
now as there were then, but they re raising them all
on their valley ranches and on irrigated pastures.
Fry: Smaller areas?
Isaac: Smaller areas, higher production.
Now we have the problem with the timber operators.
They want to cut the timber faster than we think it
ought to be cut. And they re working every kind of
shennanigan, with great lobbyists going back to
Washington. They re trying to force us to put this
Isaac: remaining national forest timber on the market faster
than we think it ought to go, and faster than It needs
to go.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST FOREST EXPERIMENT STATION EARLY WORK
Arrival at the Wind River Experimental Forest
Fry: How did your Job evolve at the Experiment Station?
Isaac: Before I came west, the Director of the Wind River
Experimental Forest was a Minnesota graduate, and
he had come back there to get his doctor s degree
while I was at Minnesota, and I got to know him
there at Minnesota. His name was J. V. Hofmann.
He was the fellow who had done the "Seed Storage
in the Duff"* thing. Right from the beginning he
insisted that I should come out and go into forest
research. He arranged to have me come out as his
assistant at Wind River. But a week or two before I
got to come out here I got a telegram from him that
his appropriation had been taken away and that he
wouldn t have an assistant and I d have to accept
one of the offers from the national forests. That s
when I went to the Chelan Forest. I accepted that
because it was in the Northwest, where I wanted to
go. I was scheduled to go into research to start
with.
He knew the profs back there and he thought
that would be better for me. Then at the first
opportunity for expanded research work they brought
me down as field officer there at Wind River. It
was then a sad affair. Hofmann was one of these
dashing, plunging sort of fellows. If he wanted to
do something, he d go ahead and do it whether he
had money enough in his appropriation or not.
"Hofmann, J.V.; "Natural Reproduction From Seed
Stored in the Forest Floor," Journal of Agricultural
Research, Vol. XI, No. 1, Washington, D.C., Oct. 1, 1917
50
Isaac: Even if he built a house, he d build it so-and-so
and pay for it out of his own pocket if he had to,
or get the money from somewhere else.
He figured the government owed him a lot for
both time and money spent in that manner. He got into
some kind of a Jangle over an expense account. They
had told him that it d have to be corrected. He had
been charged with something on the order of taking
his wife on a trip with him and charging the full cost
of the room to the government instead of one-half of
the cost as required. He claimed he had made up
the difference on the meals. But they told him to
correct it and he refused to do it, he was that
stubborn. He thought he drew enough water to get
away with it which of course can t be done. When
you violate a regulation and it s called to your
attention and they give you a chance to correct it,
you better do it quick because they can t back
water once it s reported. So he was given a six
months disciplinary furlough. And he resigned.
While all of this was going on they were trying
to get the Clarke-McNary bill passed (to increase
research appropriations) and Hofmann was working hard
on it. No action was taken about the charges
against Hofmann for more than a year and he thought
it was dropped or forgotten. But strangely enough
immediately after the bill passed the charge against
Hofmann came back to life and Hofmann was given the
six month disciplinary furlough by Bill Greeley, who
was then the U.S. Chief Forester.
I was called down from Okanagan as a field
assistant to gather up the loose ends of what Hofmann
was leaving at Wind River. And Munger was then chief
of Silviculture at the U.S. Forest Service in Portland,
Oregon and automatically in charge of Wind River
Station. I was between two fires because there was
very bitter feeling between Munger and Hofmann.
51
Fry: I see. Kofmann was still there whe.n you arrived?
Isaac: Yes, he was still there, and we lived for six weeks
with him in the same house. We told him not to hurry,
but we didn t know it was going to last that long.
They stayed from May until the third of July, his
wife and his boy (Julian George). This was after
he was out of the Service.
Fry: And you had how many children?
Isaac: One, at that time. That whole move was an amusing
incident. Hofmann resigned May 1, 192*1, and I
arrived about May 7. Hofmann was still living in the
house I was supposed to move into. He wanted to stay
a little while until he heard about his new Job, but
he didn t hear and he didn t move out. Well, he
moved out and left on July third and the next morning,
Munger and his family arrived for a visit and to see
how things were going. It may have been an accident
but it seemed like awfully good timing.
Fry: Hofmann finally went east. Were you still good
friends?
Isaac: Yes, to start with. He went east and he became a
forestry professor at Mount Alto forestry school,
but I forget the exact name of the school. It was
run by Pennsylvania State Forest Service.
Mr. Munger was made director of the new enlarged
experiment station about the same time. But it
was in 192^4, when the enlarged experiment stations
were formed.
Fry: Up to that time, it s my understanding that research
hadn t been very secure in the Forest Service.
Isaac: No, it wasn t. It was Just a kind of an orphan all
the way along. That was why Hofmann s money got cut
off on him. Hofmann got into some battles with
52
Isaac: Munger and some of the other foresters and they
punished him by pinching his spare cash off.
Fry: When Hofmann wanted to have you as his assistant?
Isaac: Yes.
Pry: I see.
Isaac: They pinched off his spare money for expenses, for
assistants and that sort of thing. So Hofmann was
working alone when I came, except for a clerk. Then
Hofmann left about eight weeks later.
Pry: He was at the nursery?
Isaac: No. The nursery and the Experiment Station were
separate institutions but worked together. Hofmann
was at the Experiment Station. It was located right
there at the nursery, right there in that immediate
vicinity. Coming Into the Station, the first three
houses along the street were ours (Experiment Station),
then the office, and then the next two houses were
nursery houses.
Fry: It would be good to know who in the Northwest Region
was pushing research, trying to get it more securely
established.
Isaac: Dave Mason, Bill Greeley, the deans of the three
forestry schools, West Coast Lumbermans Association,
Western Forestry and Conservation Association and
men from the big timber companies were the men who
got behind the research movement. Senator McNary was
the one big man; he put the bill in and got it passed.
Pry: We might add that he was the Senator from Oregon then.
Isaac: Yes, there s a whole record of that in Dave Mason s
diary that you have deposited somewhere back there
in the Forest History Society. They published part
53
Isaac: of it.
Fry: What about the people around you? For Instance, when
you were on the Chelan Forest, did you get any ideas
there about how research was looked upon?
Isaac: We did some. Now and then you d find a fellow with a
technical bent that would be interested in research,
James G. Eddy, Munger, Hanzlick, George Drake and
several others in the Forest Service. And we on
National Forests were all asked to do some little
research project on the National Forest where we
worked. I was going to plant pine on the Chelan, but
I got taken away before the planting ever got started.
We were each asked to take on some projects and work
at them. "Minor projects," we used to call them in
the big research program, and it was getting a little
attention right along the line. There were always one
or two fellows that were technically trained and inter
ested in forest research. But the administration as
such wasn t too enthusiastic about research. They
seemed to think they were smart enough to get along
without it and blocked it at every opportunity.
A lot of lumbermen out here were interested in
research. They were Senator McNary s backers. They
were active in it. George L. Drake, who became
Simpson s general manager, was a former Horest Service
man. He was interested in research. Several of the
men of his caliber were drifting around the country
here. (Incidentally, he s living at Rancho Bernardo
now, outside San Diego. Had a letter from him not
too long ago. )
Fry: So you went to Wind River. What were your first
impressions ?
Isaac: Well, my first impressions: the records were in very
bad shape for they were not organized. The projects
were not set up and filed properly. In fact most of
the stuff was piled two feet high on one big open table.
Isaac: My first Job was to sort out that material by projects
as well as I could, and get some order out of the
chaos .
Fry: These were records of what?
Isaac: Records of sample plots, correspondence and records of
studies that had been made of various kinds, and
arboretum records, records of seed studies, planting
studies, thinning studies, fire studies all records
of work done. Hofmann Just piled stuff up and then
dug it out when he got ready to use it. Most of the
projects had a name and a place to put them, and they
had file space. (They weren t limited like I am
here.) That was one of my first Jobs. I of course was
interested in studies. I was interested in learning
more about the forest about me, and how it grew, what
made it tick, and why it wouldn t in some Instances.
Fry: And you had wanted to get into research, then, ever
since you got out of college?
Isaac: Ever since I got out of college and even before. I
was scheduled to go into research when I first came
west. It was an answer to a long-felt dream. And I
got into it at the first opportunity. Actually, I
had really enjoyed my work in forest administration.
As I said, the first four years on the forest I never
found a Job I couldn t do well, or at least in a
satisfactory manner. Then I got out of that and went
into research and haven t done anything satisfactory
since.
Fry: (Laughter) You can t say that because I see all of
these awards on your walls to disprove it.
Isaac: It isn t good enough to satisfy me. There s always
more that could ve been done if I was a better man
and had had more help. That s the feeling I have.
Fry:
What was the first Job that you had to tackle when
55
Fry: you entered research and came to Wind River Experimental
Forest?
Isaac: The first Job that I had to tackle was to put the
arboretum in shape.
Fry: The Wind River Arboretum?
Isaac: Yes. The Wind River Arboretum was set up to test, in
the Wind River climate, trees from other parts of
the world. This man Hofmann got the wild idea, In
spite of the opposition of everybody else around him,
to move the arboretum out into the open, cutover land.
And he proceeded to do Just that.
Fry: All the trees in it?
Isaac: He took part of each group and moved them out in this
pasture lot of cutover land and planted them out there
in widely spread groups or spots. His reasoning was
that they should be out there and compete with the other
native vegetation in order to show what they would
do. But that wasn t the purpose of the arboretum
at all: they had been put in at Wind River where they
should get some care. And being species from other
places, they wouldn t grow as well as the native
species and about everybody knew it. Those that he
had put out there in the pasture were rapidly dying
and being choked out. My first Job was to move them
back into the arboretum as best I could.
Fry: Were you fairly successful at that?
Isaac: Only so-so. We got some of all of the species moved
back, and in some of the groups we got all of the
living trees moved back. If some trees were too large
to move, we had to leave them. Or if they were dead
or too far gone we had to leave them. But those that
we could move we did move. It was an interesting
experience to me; I learned quite a little about tree
moving. I remember the sickly spruce we moved in;
56
Isaac: some of them made hardly any growth at all for ten or
twelve years, just struggling along and staying alive,
and finally they caught on and went. And some of
the trees never did, never got over the shock of that
late moving. Some of the groups we practically
destroyed by that moving. But we moved them anyway.
Robert Marshall, Forest Assistant
Isaac: On that first job I had an assistant up there
the famous Robert Marshall, the one who pioneered
in Forest Service recreation. He s the son of
Marshall from the law firm of Guggenheim, Untermeyer,
and Marshall, in New York. Marshall Hall at Syracuse
is dedicated to his father. He came out and he worked
the first summer for me. And he always referred to
that as his one glorious summer, I suppose because
I was very patient with him. He was a very odd chap.
Fry: Why was he there for Just a summer?
Isaac: He wasn t through school. He was Just working for
the summer. That was the summer of 1924.
He had lots of political influence. That had a
lot to do with why he was there (laughter) and why
he got any other job he wanted later.
When Munger and Clapp and Munns came up there to
visit Wind River and Marshall was around there, why
he spent most of his time running backwards in front
of them snapping their pictures, and picking stuff
up out of their hands and carrying it for them, and
that sort of thing. And all they talked about was
this great boy Marshall.
When they got ready to go I said, "Are any of
you going to ask me what kind of work he does, and
do you want to see some of his records?" They said,
57
Isaac: no, they didn t think so. But they were Just very
greatly interested in him because of his political
influence. I said that was the case. There wasn t
any doubt about it. His father was a very good
friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Bob worked the summer here and had a good time,
he did a lot of work. But he was very queer, very
odd. He broke practically every instrument and tool
that I gave him to work with. He told me that he Just
couldn t handle tools or anything. He said that he
chopped wood one whole summer to learn to use an
ax , chopped wood without pay Just to learn to use an
ax. You ll find in his writings, in his book that
he wrote about Alaska, that he grabbed an ax and
accidentally cut a runner half in two on his dog
sled when they were way back in the mountains. The
guide was ready to shoot him. But he Just couldn t
handle tools. It was a natural failure of his. He
was a very strange individual.
I recall that I had a little Damascus ax, it was
a beautiful little tool that I d had since boyhood.
It was an expensive ax. I kept the blade Just s_o
(I ve still got the ax, by the way). We d come to
these thickets of vine maple that d be crowding out a
little Douglas fir seedling, and Bob Marshall would
take an ax and walk up to the little vine maple
and hit it at right angles and his ax would bound
off. He would about belt his head off but he d
never chop the tree off. I d walk right in and put a
little tension on the tree and give it a clip with
my little ax and cut it off with a single blow. I
could flop those vine maples over one after another.
He d say, "Now you gotta show me how to do that."
I d put the ax in his hand and show him how to bend a
vine maple over and get a little tension on it and chop
it off with one little clip from his ax. He wanted to
learn, he was a good fellow, really, but he didn t
know how to do it naturally. And it d tickle him to
Isaac: death if I d be happy with him and tell him how to
do it. He d do it then as well as he could. But
you d die to see him, a forester, hitting at right
angles at a round, hardwood stick, instead of making
an angle slash cut into it.
Fry: We are mixed up here on my chronology, because my
impression is that Robert Marshall came to you during
the Roosevelt administration. Was it before that?
Isaac: This was when Roosevelt was not yet in the national
administration as I recall. It was the summer of
192*1. Just before Roosevelt became governor of New
York, and when he was a power in Democratic politics.
Later when Roosevelt was President, Marshall was a
very good friend of Tugwell, you know, who was
one of the "brain-trusters . " He didn t call him
Tugwell; his name was just "Tug" to Marshall.
Fry: That makes sense then.
Isaac: Later in the summer of 192*4 we were examining a line
of sample plots stretched across the Wind River Valley;
that was cutover and burned over land from green
timber to green timber. We were recording the repro
duction that came in there after the fire. There were
three parallel lines of plots across the valley.
This beautiful (Wind River) stream went right down
through the middle of the valley. Down at the lower
end of the area was the Camp Eight dam. A beautiful
curtain of water came out over chute logs and dropped
down into a great pool. About every five minutes a
powerful steelhead trout as long as your arm would
come right up out of that pool of white water, and
Jump through the air and land on that curtain of
water, trying to get up over. Sometimes they would
make it and sometimes they wouldn t. We were working
there and it was midsummer and hot one hundred-
degree August temperature. The brakefern was in the
fruiting stage and shedding a brown pollen. Just choke
you to death working in it. I used to work this
Isaac: trip out so we d go up one side and come down the
other line of plots to make it to the creek for lunch
at noon. And I d always run him over by car to this
Camp Eight bridge and we d sit there in the shade
of the bridge and watch that beautiful waterfall,
and the fish Jumping out, and also feel the spray. A
delightful spot to eat lunch. About the third day
he looked over at me and he said, "And why do we come
down here to eat?"
And I said, "My God, man, doesn t this mean any
thing to you, that beautiful waterfall there and the
powerful fish coming up out of that white water and
landing on that curtain of water struggling to
get up to the spawning ground? Doesn t this coolness
refresh you?" I said, "Where would you eat?"
"Oh, out there on the sample plots, I suppose."
I said, "Out there in the fern and dust and dirt
and sun? No shade even?"
"Well, I hadn t given it much thought," he said.
"I guess I like it here."
Well, after he left here and went to the Priest
River Experimental Forest in Montana (where he worked
for a while) he wrote back to me a month or two later
and said, "And what were those fish, again, that we
saw up there at the dam on Wind River? I ve been thinking
more about those things since you talked to me about
them."
But that was how much interest he had in wildlife
at that stage in his life. He d leave the station and
he would walk, on a Saturday or a Sunday, forty miles
or more in a day, up these mountain trails, back over,
around, through the hills and back out. And he d
come down at night and he d say, "I went up here and
over there and then I crossed around here to that
60
Isaac
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
point (on a map) and I came through this area and then
I came down through this creek and on home."
I used to look at him in amazement and say, "Either
you re Just an awful damn liar or you ran half of the
say," because I knew he couldn t make it walking.
"Well," he said, and laughed a little, "I
always run down hill."
And then I
and he wouldn t
that s all. He
Just interested
forty miles that
walk up and down
miles walked in
with it an awful
willing fellow,
an awful lot of
d ask him what he saw on the way,
remember anything; Just "trees," and
didn t know what he saw. He was
in walking. And if he hadn t walked
day he d come out after supper and
the road until he got his forty
the day. He was a fanatic, but along
nice fellow, and a good fellow, a
But awfully queer, and you had to have
patience to work with him.
Did you have very many political appointees foisted
off on you?
No, only now and then. But you would never dare
mention that a Job was a politically-motivated
appointment. You d have been canned without any
ceremony if the word got back to Washington. He
was a nice fellow and he was very much interested in
all phases of forestry but particularly in forest
recreation. Later on he did walk out and demand a Job
wherever he wanted it, and he d usually get it. He
went back there to Washington where this man
Kenney (he s still alive back there) was in charge of
the Indian Service. He was one of the great men in
the early days of forestry. (Kenney is past ninety
years old, is retired and early in 1968 remarried.)
Well, Marshall Just pushed old Kenney right out of his
Job, and took his place as head of the Indian Service.
And old Kenney went off on the sidelines on some CCC
61
Isaac: work or something, and Marshall was put in charge.
Isaac s First Douglas Fir Work; Seed Flight
Isaac: The next Job was to examine six groups of sample
plots that were known as the Douglas fir heredity
study.
Fry : This had been begun by whom?
Isaac: This had been started in 1912 by Hunger and Charles J.
Kraebel and Bob H. Weidmann, and Ed Hanzlick, and
Harry Gisburn. I think Kraebel is still alive, down
in Berkeley, California. They dreamed up this study,
and wherever these different fellows were working
they collected seed and sent it in to Wind River from
thirteen different locations in the Douglas fir
region. J. V. Hofmann came to Wind River about 191^
and took charge of the station and this study.
Hofmann thrashed the seed out, kept the lots separate
and planted them in separate nursery beds, tested
them in the nursery, and then when they were a year
or two years old they were taken out and put into
nine different parts of the Douglas fir region.
Fry: Not necessarily related to the region from which they
came?
Isaac: No. The purpose was to test out seeds from different
sources in one location and climate. So the tests
at Wind River would have seeds from all different
locations and the tests at Mt . Hood would have the same
seeds. And also, the tests up on the Stillaguamish
River (Snoqualimie National Forest) would have the
same, and Hebo Mountain (on the Siuslaw National Forest)
would have the same seed. Well, it was the four year
period instead of the five year period for those trees
to be examined. But we found those plantations so
62
Isaac: badly overgrown with native wild stock that several
of them had to have the native volunteer trees cut
out at once to save the planted stock. So that first
year Marshall and I visited three of these plantations
and cut out the competing vegetation. That s one of
the Jobs that Bob helped me to do.
Fry: This was your first contact, then, with Douglas fir?
Isaac: Yes, the first season s work. I had Just visited
before. I used to come over here to the Douglas fir
region from Okanagan a couple of times a year. This
is a story they like to tell on me: When I first
came to the Northwest I d come over here about every
six months or so and spend my vacation here in
Portland. I d hang around the Regional Office or go
up to Wind River and get acquainted with the forests
and people during the day. My girl friend (now my
wife) worked with the telephone company and she was
busy during the day. Nights I d go to see her, and
then stay around here and visit in the daytime.
And they thought it was real good of me to be enough
interested in forestry to come over and spend my
vacation over here, and get acquainted with the work
and the people. They didn t know anything about
this other business (my girl friend) at all. (Laughter)
Pry: Your wife-to-be.
Isaac: Yes. And I didn t bother to tell them. But a lot
of them thought that was quite good for me to have that
much interest. I thought it was pretty good, too.
Fry: But you also rubbed up against Douglas fir management
problems, things like that, in the daytime.
Isaac: Yes, yes. And around the Regional Office and elsewhere
I learned a lot. I learned about the men and the
office and the operation and how things went in the
Forest Service and how people felt, and incidentally,
I met some of the industry people. I d get to a few
63
Isaac: of the Society of American Foresters meetings and so
forth. It worked out Just right all the way around.
Fry: You got the girl and also a little education in what
later became your specialty.
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: What did you do following the examination of the sample
plots in the Douglas fir teredlty study?
Isaac: Following that, I was given the assignment to test
the validity of the seed storage in the duff theory,
by Hofmann.
Fry: As I understand it, Hofmann s theory had been that
seed lived for several years in the duff before it
began sprouting. Is that right?
Isaac: Yes. He arrived at that conclusion because he could
not determine what the source of seed was when he
found these seedlings long distances from green timber,
out on an open burn. He did not know the distance
of seed flight and nobody else knew the extreme flight
of seed either at that time. That s how he arrived at
that conclusion, by determining the age of seedlings
on the burn. It was then nine or ten years old, the
Yacolt burn near the Experimental Station. It burned
in 1902 and he made his studies in 1911 and 12.
Fry: These studies were made for the Forest Service, is
that right?
Isaac: Yes, at Wind River, and the adjacent burns. (Poor
fellow died last year in Florida.)
Fry: Leo, before you got started on your study on this life
of seed, how did it come about that they wanted the
study redone?
Isaac
It came about because the areas cutover were not
Isaac: reforesting. There were vast areas that were prac
tically treeless in the Douglas fir region. And
the foresters said, "If there s seed storage in the
duff, new growth ought to come up and it isn t
coming." The volume of nonstocked land was building
up fast, faster than they were cutting almost. It
was not all restocking. It only restocked after
good seed years, and then in a more or less limited
manner and too slow. That s why they questioned
the theory. There were a lot of people who questioned
it right in the beginning.
Fry: Who questioned it?
Isaac: Munger was one of them. He was one of the most careful
of the early observers. And Weldmann (he was then
moved to the Northern Rocky Mountain states)
questioned it. And some of the college professors in
the forestry schools questioned the seed storage
in the duff theory. Ed Hanzlick, I think, also.
You ll find his name mentioned frequently in connection
with Northwest early forest history. Simultaneously
with my check of this seed storage in the duff, I
proceeded with a test of the distance of natural seed
flight from either seed trees or standing timber
or seed released from a kite. I tested that seed
flight in three ways.
First I collected the seed carefully, dried it in
the sun and hand thrashed it to keep the wings
attached to the seed. Then I raised the seed with a
kite over flat snow fields and released it at given
heights. I had my fish line (string) tied to the lid
of the oatmeal carton that I used to carry the seed up
with. And when the one hundred fifty foot marker
showed up on the string I would pull the string and
trip it (or if I wanted a height of two hundred feet
I got it that way) and the wind would carry that seed
off and deposit it on the snow. I would follow with
my measuring frame and measure the density of
fall and the pattern. I made any number of these
65
Isaac: tests for several days on the juniper flats in
eastern Oregon.
Fry: You were measuring wind velocity, too, I guess.
Isaac: Yes, I measured wind velocity on the ground surface
with an anemometer and aloft with an air meter
attached to the kite. So I got both the surface and
high up wind velocity. Then I went another step,
and the next year located bodies of green timber and
set seed traps out from the edge of timber at one
hundred foot intervals for a half mile. In the fall
when seed fall began I collected seed every two weeks
from those traps to get a record of the amount and
distance of the natural seed fall from a native
stand. After that, we checked the amount of reproduc
tion that we got from that seedfall on that cutover
land. I had a measure of the seedfall and a
measure of the reproduction that resulted from it,
you see. There was none of that information available
for any of these species at that time anywhere in
the world.
Pry: How did this method of research and your research
design differ from those used by Hofmann?
Isaac: Hofmann didn t make any conclusive study; he Just
assumed that these seedlings coming in on that 1902
burn eleven years after the fire came from seeds
stored in the duff. He got that idea from some
viable wheat seeds that had been taken out of a tomb
somewhere in Germany several hundred years after
they were stored there. That s where he got the
idea that seed lived several years In the soil. He
attempted to test it, and about 191^ put seed in the
soil the same as I did in later years. You ll find
that study mentioned In this book, Natural Reproduction
of Douglas Fir, by J . V. Hofmann (USDA Bulletin 1200).*
*J.V." Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction from Seed
Stored in the Forest Floor, 1 Journal of Agricultural
Research, Volume 11, number 1, Washington D.C.,
October 1, 1917.
66
Isaac: He got practically no germination after the first
season, then gave up his test. He explains the
results away because he said the seed cages were
disturbed by rodents and air was let in, and
consequently the seeds didn t germinate. There
was no basis for that conclusion, but he Just
explained away his failure in that manner. And that
duff storage theory was used as his thesis for his
doctor s degree at the University of Minnesota
which is an interesting story in itself.
Pry: He carried this on where? At Wind River?
Isaac: Yes, at Wind River he made the field studies and then
took the data and went back to school in Minnesota
and presented it for his doctor s thesis.
Pry: So when you set about, then, to check Hofmann s
thesis, you did it in two ways. First by conducting
the seed germination tests, then by measuring the
seed flight patterns?
Isaac: Yes. For the germination tests I put the seed in
the forest soil, and took a portion of it up at yearly
intervals for germination tests, one, two, and three
years in succession. We had a rodent-proof container
that kept squirrels out, too. There was a coarse
screen on the top and a fine screen inside, from
which the little containers were made and in which
the seed itself was buried. I placed the seed
Just at the surface, or Just under the surface, at
one inch below the surface, and at two inches below
the surface.
Each year I took one of those containers up
and tested the seed for germination in the greenhouse.
And when, after the second year, I got no more germi
nation I continued the germination tests and I repeated
the whole study. But this time I included not only
Douglas fir but all our Northwest species (western
red cedar, western hemlock, western white pine,
67
Isaac: ponderosa pine, sitka spruce, noble fir and Portor-
ford cedar), which I was not expected to work on.
(I was expected to work in Just fir.) But I took the
whole slate and tested them all. I repeated the
germination tests three times before I published
anything on it, to be doubly sure, because I didn t
want to hurt Hofmann, for one thing. And I didn t
want to destroy an established theory if it had any
foundation of fact in it. So I was doubly careful
in holding off until I made the test three successive
times over a period of about eight or nine years.
Fry: And the seeds never did germinate from duff storage?
Isaac: They germinated normally the first season after seed
fall, as you would expect a seed to do. But I got
almost nothing beyond that. Oh, a little scattering
here and there. A seed would fall into a place
where it would get extra protection in some manner.
But I did find that seeds would live more than
one year in the ripe cones, on a tree, if the tree
was killed by a flash fire and the cone was scorched,
but did not get hot enough for the heat to penetrate
that green cone and kill the seed. They still ripened
in the cone and fell later, like happened on the
Tillamook burn that occured in August 1933.
Pry: So on a burn you could have regeneration from seed
in the green cones --
Isaac: that were on the tree at the time and ripened
later and shed their seed the season after or
rather the fall after the burn. But that does not
occur often and not much reproduction comes from it.
I also found that western white pine seed did live
over more than one year. We found it first in the
nursery that the white pine seedbeds would get
germination the second year and even some in the third
year. This is because the white pine seed has a hard
68
Isaac: shell. There are lots of seeds that have a very
hard shell, like the berry seeds and the cherry seeds.
They often have to go through the digestive tract
of a bird before they ll germinate, or get a similar
treatment in handling with roughing. But most tree
seed is not that rugged. At least our common tree
seeds are not that rugged. One year is about all
they can stand of exposure to the elements in the
forest floor. They either have an abortive germina
tion (sprout and die), or they decay right in place.
I found decayed or spoiled seed right in those
containers that I took out for germination tests.
There was no doubting it whatever.
Fry: So that statistically, then, most of them went ahead
and germinated in the first year or decayed in place.
Isaac: You ll find all of those records in that bulletin of
mine, The Reproductive Habits of Douglas Fir, you know,
that big brown one.
Fry: Let s note that your article appeared in the Journal
of Forestry.*
Isaac: It was when I started making these seed studies that
Hofmann cut me off the list . I never heard from him
again, he never answered my mail or never even called
me when he came out here to visit.
Fry: What was the response from others when you published
your report on the life of the Douglas fir seed in
the forest floor?**
*Leo A. Isaac, "Life of the Douglas Fir Seed in -
the Forest Floor," Journal of Forestry, Vol. 33, No. 1,
January, 1935.
**Life of Douglas Fir Seed when Stored in Soil or
Duff," Progress Report Number Three, summarizing to
date the seed storage in the soil studies started in
1925, 1928 and 1930. U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Forest Service . Typed manuscript .
Reprinted in Journal of Forestry, Vol. 33, No. 1,
January, 1935.
69
Isaac: There were many that suspected it. The proof was In
the land that was not really coming back to forest.
It had been cut and burned as Hofmann prescribed, and
often reburned. But the reproduction didn t spontan
eously come in over these larger areas, where they
were beyond the flight of seed.
Sometimes seed is carried great distances by
the wind. When you strike a rising air current, a
convection, over a warm slope in a fall afternoon,
the rising air current will be faster than the rate
of seed fall. Seeds fall around three miles an hour.
Often these rising air currents are going up I
had the record of one at eleven miles an hour, an
upward draft. (It s the theory that gliders glide
into what they call "air fountains" and they carry
them up.) Sometimes seed is released under those
conditions. It isn t often, but it is, and then that
seed will go phenomenal long distances, but the
further it goes the thinner it spreads, and the less
effective it Is. We found in our work in the Service
that a quarter mile, under average conditions, was
the greatest distance that you could expect seed in
effective amounts to disseminate from a stand of
green timber. That s what we used as our standard
in the Forest Service timber sale policy. In a forty-
acre tract, a quarter mile (1200 feet to 1350 feet
distance) was the distance of natural seedfall that
was effective from seed trees. Some went unbelievable
distances, but not great quantities of it.
Pry: I wondered If you had any response from industry men
or other people inside the Forest Service that indicated
that either they felt your study had been a great
contribution or that Hofmann was still right.
Isaac: Some of them still think that Hofmann is right. They
see seedlings coming in two to ten years after the
burn and they don t know the distance of seed flight.
And they still think that Hofmann s theory of seed
70
Isaac: storage in the duff is right.
Fry: Who still buys this?
Isaac: Loggers and the small timber operators. But the
older men that know the country, and that look at
these cutover lands that were idle for a generation
or more and are not restocking, are well aware that
seed wasn t in the soil.
Fry: Did you encounter any opposition or doubt on the
part of anyone else in the Experiment Station?
Isaac: Not in the Experiment Station proper. Every fellow
is too busy in his own work to dabble very much in
the other fellow s field. Phil Briegleb was in
growth studies and Dick McArdle was in fire studies.
Simpson was in fire studies. Kolbe was in ponderosa
pine studies. It s true I was always joshing Kolbe,
like a funny letter I wrote back to the girl in
Kolbe s office. Kolbe and I were very close friends
and worked in adjoining offices; I used to kid
him about his small trees over in the pine region.
I said in that letter that I woke up the next morning
on the train riding- through Kolbe s forest and from
the train window I could look out over the top of
the trees, they were so small. I wondered how he
could find the logs when they got lost in the tall
grass. I was Just having some fun with Kolbe; we were
very close friends and still are.
Fry: Leo, I m curious about how you people within the
Experiment Station set up methods of investigation
and research design. For instance, your use of a
seed-bearing kite to measure how far seed could
blow seemed pretty ingenious to me, and I wondered
how you arrived at that plan.
Isaac: First, to select our studies, we had an industry-wide
and service-wide committee that would meet once a
year and determine what should be studied. The industry
71
Isaac: people would tell us what they thought needed study
and other foresters would tell us what they thought
needed study, and our own chiefs from Washington
would put in their word. We would then boil down these
suggestions and certain projects would get assigned to
certain people that could handle them.
Then it was pretty much up to the men out on
the job to work out the designs of their experiment,
which they would do: make an outline or a working
plan and then have it approved by the chiefs higher
up. As a rule the men in the field knew better how
to do it than those higher up that were running the
show. And they d usually give the men in the field
quite a bit of liberty and freedom to go ahead and
work out their own designs.
We did lots of that stuff that was original on
the part of the investigators. I couldn t find a
kite anywhere and I couldn t buy one so I had to
make one. Well, I had worked in sitka spruce in
the air corps of World War I and I knew about the
strength and lightness of the sitka spruce wood.
I got a piece of spruce and I made my struts and frame
for my kite with that. Then I Just built the whole
thing. It s literally a box kite with wings. I
haven t seen a kite like it before or since.
Fry: It sounds marvelous. You don t still have it, do you?
Isaac: It is somewhere around Wind River. I went to find it
two weeks ago Sunday at Wind River. I had stored
it in the attic of the office up there, that six-
foot kite. .There are lots of pictures of it in
the file at the Experiment Station. It had black
wings. It stood as tall as I did.
Fry: What did you cover it with, newspaper?
Isaac: No, no. God no. (Laughter) Newspaper! I got light
72
Isaac: balloon silk sailcloth and stablized and covered it.
I tested it out of course before I made the tests
with seed. For a flight, I attached an oatmeal
carton (I saved them from the kitchen) bottom-side-
up and tied the cover on with a thin, light thread.
I then tied my fish line onto that (because the flshline
was stronger) , then suspended the carton bottom-side-
up under the kite. When it got to the required
height I would pull the trip line and it would pull
the cover off the carton and release its payload of
seed. The seed would drift like a little cloud across
the sky and gradually come to the ground (snow field).
As the seed began dropping, the heaviest ones d drop
first, then the lighter ones, and the chaff d go
way out to the end of the line. I recorded the
distance as far as I could find some seed by putting
a frame down on the snow and counting the number of
seed inside the frame. I knew the size of the
frame. It checked out with amazing accuracy, the
density of seed fall in the frame in comparison to the
total number of seed that was released. I got a
regular survey, a pattern of seed fall on the snow.
Pry: And the density checked out with the total amount
of seed released?
Isaac: Yes, with the total amount of seed released in
comparison to the area. If I took four feet out of
one hundred, it would give me a four percent sample.
Every hundred feet I would stop and measure a four-
foot strip across the line of seed flight with this
frame. I d go another hundred feet out from the
point of release and measure another four-foot strip
across to get another four percent sample. I d count
up those seeds picked up. I had the seeds all
counted in the boxes, and four percent of the seed
in a box would just figure out to be about the total
number of seeds picked up in the squares in the snow.
It checked with surprising accuracy because I could
see all the seed on the fresh snow.
73
Fry: . Where was this?
Isaac: Most of it was done on Maupin Flats, up in eastern
Oregon, near the town of Maupin. It s Just on the
east side of the mountains; it s pine country.
Fry: East side of the Cascades.
Isaac: Yes. It s Just over the hump beyond Mount Hood. You
go on up over Mount Hood and on into that eastern
Oregon country.
Fry: Sounds like you had to learn how to wear snowshoes
or did you know how?
Isaac: We had both skis and snow shoes and we knew how to
use them, but we didn t have to use them, because
snow wasn t that deep. That s a low rainfall country
over there. As a friendly gesture we invited a
British Columbia forester to come down there and
help, but the going was too tough. He couldn t take
it; he caved in on us and we had to bring him
out and put him in the hospital here in Portland R.
H. West veld took him out; his name was Pickford. He
went to pieces.
Fry: Did you have to camp out in the snow?
Isaac: No, we went to live at a ranch house where one of our
fellows knew the rancher. The second day after we
got there the snow came and we couldn t get out. This
young rancher had a beast of a wife and some small kids
(He invited us to stay because she wanted the money
for our room and board.) He had built a new house
and didn t have it finished. It was lathed on the
inside but they hadn t gotten it plastered. And the
only stove he had was a coal stove.
We had to cut the Juniper wood into small blocks
to get it in the stove, little chunks of wood. And
Isaac: one of us had to sit up all night to keep the fire
going to keep from freezing to death. The teakettle
used to freeze solid on the cookstove in the kitchen
and the milk cans d freeze up on us in the living
room. About the second day a real eastern Oregon
blizzard hit us and it got down to about thirty-six
degrees below zero while we were there. About the
second week the Canadian couldn t take it. He was
older than the rest of us and had some sort of
nervous disorders. It was wise for him not to stay.
We had to send a man out with him and bring him down
to Portland and put him in the hospital. It was a
couple of months or more before he could go back to
Canada. It was a little tough, all right. You hit a
lot of that in the early days, but you got used to it.
Fry: Were you flying your kite, then, under pretty rough
conditions?
Isaac: We stayed inside when it was extremely cold. But
yes, it was a little rough, but that was part of the
game in those early days. We didn t mind going on
a trip alone. You didn t have to have a second man
with you, and that sort of thing, as they do on
every Job now. When you had something to do you went
and did it. Didn t matter what it was or where it
was. And nobody looked after you or asked any questions,
Pry: Do you think you had a selective factor in the personnel
of the Forest Service that men who Joined it knew
it was going to be rough?
Isaac: I wouldn t say men were asked to do unreasonable or
particularly dangerous Jobs, but occasionally some
turned out that way. It was up to them to decide;
they knew what they were expected to do. They never
asked any questions, they Just lived that way. Often
when I was young in the Forest Service I wouldn t
hunt or fish with anybody because I couldn t ask
them to go where I wanted to go or stay where I
75
Isaac: wanted to stay. And I wouldn t shy at staying where
I wanted to be to start the next morning, and that
sort of thing. So I used to work and hunt alone a
lot for that reason. It was risky and it was kind
of foolish, particularly after I was married and had
some obligations, but I soon got over it and got
more careful. When you re young you don t think too
much about the risks, you know. (Laughter) You ve
got a Job to do, you do it. We lived that way on
a Job. And all those first years of examining those
sample plots in the back country and on the cutover
areas, I went alone and nobody knew where I was or
what I was doing until I would come out at night.
Ancecdotes: Adventures with Occupational Hazards
Fry: Did you ever have any dangerous scrapes?
Isaac: Yes, a few times. Once an embankment gave with me
and I slid down a railroad bank about eighty or
ninety feet and landed on a pile of rocks. It was
an hour before I could move. I was Just like
paralyzed. I couldn t get my pack and various things
I had with me. Finally I got turned over and crawled
out to the railroad track where I had parked the
speeder. I had caution enough to turn that speeder
around before I went in there and put a stick under
the wheel so when I pulled the stick out it would
start by coasting. I managed to crawl back to that
speeder and got on the speeder and coasted nine miles
down into town, Brinnon, Washington.
Another time at Wind River I got caught in a
blizzard. I went up in December to see sample plots
on the snow. I had planned to walk in four miles,
sow some sample plots, then stay there overnight in
an old logging camp, then go on four miles further
the next day and seed some more sample plots. I was
76
Isaac: testing seeding by placing the seed on the snow to
see what it would bring. I got to this old camp
the first night and got my plot seeded, and went to
look for a place to stay in the old buildings. To
my surprise I found the Forest Service had cleaned
up that camp in the fall and burned all the buildings,
All I could find was one or two half-burned shacks
left there, with the windows out of them, and
everything else gone. And I was wet to my hips. It
had been snowing since noon and now it had started
snowing again and I was already wading in three feet
of snow. I couldn t wear the snowshoes or skis I
had because I just had toestraps on them and they
wouldn t stay on my feet. So I ended up by carrying
them on my back and wallowing through the snow. I
tried to build a fire in one of the half-burned
shacks, but the minute I stopped moving, my legs
tied up in knots with cramps. So I decided to keep
going and strike out for help. I was frightened. I
thought. "If my legs tie up here with cramps, I ll
never get out." So I headed out what we called
the Summer Homesite Road along Trapper Creek that
went over to Government Mineral Springs Hotel,
about two miles, a mile through the cutover
and about a mile and a quarter through heavy timber,
in this deep snow. I started at dusk, Just four
o clock to go over to that camp. I could either get
to the hotel where there was a winter watchman, or
I could break into a summer home and stay until
morning. It took me until eleven o clock to go those
two miles and get to that hotel. When I got there I
was so exhausted that my throat was swollen shut and
I couldn t talk or eat when I arrived. What did me
up more than anything else was the timber and brush
Just covered with heavy, heavy wet snow like it often
is in this west side. The vine maples that were
fifteen, twenty feet high were all mashed right down
over the road. Their trunks and limbs are Just like
spring steel; the vine maple is hard and tough and
you crawl under and over and Just fight your way
77
Isaac: through. The small trees and brush were right across
the road, and a one-half ton of snow would shake off
and come down onto me. It d sometimes take me a
half hour to get my skis out and to get my packsack
out, and get out on top and start again, from Just
the snow falling off the trees. I suddenly spied
the light of the hotel over across the creek. The
creek was a roaring torrent of snow and ice water,
Just a roaring torrent. I knew it was too deep
and too swift to wade; I knew I Just couldn t make
it. So I followed the creek and I found an eighteen-
inch tree that had fallen across the creek with
the top about twenty feet in the air on the other side,
a hundred feet away. With my packsack and my two skis
I inched my way out on that tree over the roaring
creek to the far side, dropped my skis one at a time
in the snow but off to one side, then my packsack,
and then let myself down and dropped in the snowbank.
And I was then Just a few hundred yards from the
hotel. I got in there and found the old keeper,
got warm and dry and later got some food. The next
morning, I put on my skis and hiked out. But I
never did get to the farther plots until spring,
because the area was closed by now.
And again, nobody knew I was in there. I was
on my own.
We went over the same road two weeks ago Sunday
with my family. The same road and the same summer
homes. It was a seventy-five room summer hotel,
but it apparently burned down and never was replaced.
Everything else is there. The forest is still there
and the road, but now it has some memories added.
Pry: You never had any scrapes with wildlife?
Isaac: No. The only thing that ever attacked me in the
forest was a field mouse.
78
Fry: (Laughter) Oh!
Isaac: That s really true. I was coming in off from a small
fire In the high country and I got to an abandoned
trappers cabin. It got dark on me, so I decided
to stop. Some hunters had put some boughs down on
the floor for a place to sleep and for a shelter.
I got in there and lay down to sleep but I hardly
got to sleep before a darn field mouse started burrowing
into my hair; that darn thing woke me about five
times between dark and midnight. Couple of times
I shot at him with a pistol by flashlight. Dlrt d
fly and the mouse d fly with it and he d scamper
off someplace for a half hour, and then the little
son-of-a-guri d be back again. He was trying to make
a nest in my hair. I suppose he had never seen a
human being before. I finally got to sleep. Then
suddenly, I had a sharp pain in my shoulder; I
woke up and lit the flashlight and the mouse went
scampering. My arms were bare I was sleeping
with just an undershirt on and he had taken a bite
right out of my shoulder. I suppose he thought it was
a ham or something. That was the only thing that s
ever attacked me in the wild. I ve had cougars
follow my trail for weeks at a time in the mountain
back country. I d go back over the trail the next
day and see their footprints right there in the
dust. I tried, but never even got to see one in
all that time. That was up in the north country.
Fry: You mean up In northeastern Washington?
Isaac: Yes, near the Canadian border, when I was on the
big fires on the national forests.
Fry: Was there any problem from cougars attacking anybody?
Isaac: Not for human danger. The only time a cougar really
attacks a human being is when he s old and driven by
hunger and can t catch wild game, or he s cornered
or wounded.
79
Isaac: We have only one record of a cougar attacking
a boy, that I know about personally. A boy came
along walking down this road in the evening and the
cougar was lying on an outcropping of rocks above
the boy. He didn t Jump on the boy from up there on
the rocks, instead he jumped down in the road ahead
of the boy and was running away from the boy. But
the boy stopped, you could see by his tracks in the
snow where he stopped with his legs wide apart, and
turned around and started to run. And when he turned
around and started to run, the cougar s tracks showed
that the cat turned around and took after the boy
from the rear. The cougar caught up to him and Jumped
him. He must ve hit the boy with one paw on the back
of the head and took a part of his scalp off the back
of his head. It was lying there on the snow. Then
he carried the boy off. They found him about five-
hundred feet away on a rockslide where the cougar
scratched leaves and rock down over the body. He d
eaten the insides out of the boy pretty much, part of
one hip was gone. They got the cougar a few days
later. He was so old his teeth were worn way down
and most of his toenails were worn off. He apparently
couldn t catch deer anymore, his natural food, and
so he attacked the boy.
Fry: Where did this happen?
Isaac: The incident happened about 1925 at Oleama, Washington,
The boy was an orphan about eleven years old and
lived with an older sister who taught school nearby.
I knew them both well.
I had another experience when I first landed there
in Okanogan that Just turned my stomach inside out.
I m kind of squeamish anyhow when anything concerns
a child. I was boarding with the garage man in
Okanogan. His name was Burt Thayer. He had a
sister and a brother-in-law. He was a garage man
and the other fellow was a rancher. He and his
80
Isaac: brother-in-law had an apple orchard and a packing
shed on a bench Just above Okanogan that they managed
between them. The brother-in-law s little six-year
old girl had been up at the apple orchard playing
around. When I came home from the office she was
crying bloody murder and yelling with pain. I said,
"What s the matter?"
They said, "She says she s bitten by a rattle
snake, up in the apple orchard. She was running down
on the field and came running and said she was
bitten by a rattle snake, but it doesn t look like
a typical snake bite."
We took her to the doctor (Dr. Dewey) and he
said it wasn t, that she d run into a barbed wire
or something like that. Just a kind of small torn
gash in the side of her leg. And they told us to
bring her home and put hot applications on it. (The
very worst thing they could do.) By eight o clock
the girl was lapsing into unconsciousness from time
to time, and then yelling bloody murder when she was
awake. Dark spots began to show up on her. We
called the doctor back. He treated her for snakebite
then, but it was too late and she died that night,
squealed half the night and finally died.
That nearly drove me crazy. I developed a holy
horror and bitterness against all snakes. But I
didn t find them dangerous.
The country was full of rattlesnakes, too.
Well, to tell you the truth, I felt sorry for those
rattlesnakes because the darn fool things d always
rattle and tell you where they were and then you d
go and kill them.
Fry: But on the whole, there wasn t any special danger that
people felt from wildlife in the woods?
Isaac: No. I spent months in the woods sleeping out, in
81
Isaac: way out-of-the-way places. A bear is a little
dangerous -- if an old bear has cubs and she thinks
she s protecting her young, or if she s wounded. I
think sometimes grizzly bears get nasty, Just like
a bull that will turn on its master in the pasture
lot. I think those wild animals get the same crazy
urge now and then.
I only saw one that turned on me. This was when
Ranger Fred Weymeyer was with me. That was a big,
black diamond back rattler. He was forty-eight and a
half inches long and as thick as my arm. He was
along the rocky hillsides on Lake Chelan. When I
closed up on him a little he turned and coiled right
up and ready to strike. After I had tapped him on
the head (I wanted to take him for his skin so I didn t
want to bust his head or his hide), I took the leather
thong off my briefcase and put it on a stick and put
it on the snake s neck and carried him over my shoulder,
I held it at an upward angle so that his tail wouldn t
touch the ground, he was that long. When I got to
the spring at the ditch camp I took this stick and
I held it, or rather stuck it in the creek with the
snake s head under water, thinking he d drown there.
Fry: Oh, he wasn t dead yet?
Isaac: No, he wasn t dead yet. And I thought he would drown
there in a little while. I had him in there for
twenty or thirty minutes while we ate our lunch. Then
I took him out and threw him to one side. I was
going to skin him later.
He was still on the stick with the thong on his
neck. The camp cat spotted us down there and came
running from the cabin down to where we were eating
by the spring.
She jumped right onto that smake without seeing
it and that snake had come to life in the meantime.
82
Isaac: The snake gave one twist and the rattles started to
go and that cat just went crazy. It bounded up In
the air just like a rubber ball about three times and
took off over the hills and out of sight and didn t
come back until nearly evening. (Laughter)
I put the snake down in the creek and left him
there for another three hours until he was dead,
then I skinned him out. I filled the hide with
sawdust, so it wouldn t mat and get baked together,
and took it in and I threw it on an old army cot that
was there under the window in the cabin where we
were staying. The cat came back and Just sat down and
ate and then stretched himself out like that [stretch
and yawn] , went over toward that cot and hopped up
on that cot to take a snooze (it had been in the habit
of sleeping there in camp with the ditch men) and
it landed again on that snake.
That cat acted Just like you d set off a bomb
under it. It made one j-ump and landed right in the
middle of this camp table, with all the stuff on it,
and the second Jump she went through the door into
the storeroom in the back and started around that
storeroom. It was filled with canned goods and all
kinds of tinware, lanterns, etc. stacked up high.
She was yelling bloody murder and going ninety miles
an hour, half the time right around the wall on
these things and tipping them over one after another.
We finally got in and headed her off and steered
her out the door. She went on up the hill and we
never did see her again. I don t know whether she
came back or not. But that cat was Just deathly
afraid of that big snake.
Fry: What did you do with that skin, Leo?
Isaac: I was going to make a belt out of it, but I never got
to do it . I took it home and I put it out on the
windowsill to dry in the sun and I got called to a fire
83
Isaac: When you re called to a f3re, everything drops and
you po . About five days later, I came into my office
and I smelled something, and here I found my snake
all decayed out there on the windowsill, so I lost
it.
LATER STUDIES AT THE STATION
Space Testing
Isaac: My work, since I Joined the Experiment Station in
192*1, covered all phases of Douglas fir silviculture,
but the bulk of my work was done in reforestation. I
was sent to find out why regeneration occurred in
some places and refused to occur in others and
how to correct the situation. It went from seed
studies to broadcast seeding and into planting.
We had several planting studies underway.
Among the planting studies was this spacing test in
Douglas fir, begun in 1925. [Showing report]*
It has become one of the most important showplaces
we now have. This plantation from four-by-four to
twelve-by-twelve foot spacing is now forty-two years
old.
Fry: This is a study that started in 1925 at the Wind
River Experiment Station?
Isaac: Yes. I managed the establishment of the plantation
and planted many of the trees myself, and did the
Initial work on it for several years including
replacement of dead trees, early remeasurement and
preparation of early reports.
Fry: To see how trees would grow when spaced all the way
from four-by-four feet to twelve-by-twelve feet
apart?
Isaac: Yes. A logger can look at this record and tell at
*Eversole, Kenneth R., "Spacing Tests in a Douglas
Fir Plantation," Forest Science, Volume 1, No. 1,
March 1955.
85
Isaac: every five-year interval what he would have on
similar land, in twenty years after planting
how many six-inch trees and how many eight-inch
trees, etc., etc. Also, what he would have in
thirty years after planting and so on. It was
planted in 25, so it is forty-two years old now.
Fry: This thing you Just handed me is written by Kenneth
R. Eversole.
Isaac: Well, his name is on it. He was one of our field
assistants at Wind River at the time. Incidentally,
Eversole and I took the field measurement and blocked
out the report together, then he wrote it up and I
completely rewrote it for publication. Meager took
my name off and left Eversole s name on it. Eversole
objected to taking my name off.
Fry: Eversole did?
Isaac: Yes, Eversole did. And he sort of corrected it later
in the report: I think he mentions that I had
charge of the project from its beginning.
Fry: Yes, he does, in a footnote.
Isaac: That was one of the first incidents in which George
Meager deliberately took my name off from something
that was going in to be printed, because, I suppose,
he thought I had enough notoriety, and that too
many people were calling for me around the Station as
it was. He wanted to stop it if he could, I
suppose, as he was in charge of Forest Management at
the Station.
Fry: You mean that you actually wrote this, or it was Just
compiled from your records?
Isaac: It was compiled from all records available (mine
and others) including the current remeasurement Just
taken. Than we blocked the report out together, he
86
Isaac: wrote it up and I rewrote the whole thing for
publication. Eversole was Just a temporary field
assistant that had just come to work in the
Service. Eversole was a very fine fellow, but he
was the field assistant, and up to that time had
prepared nothing for publication and had nothing
printed .
Partial Cutting Controversy
Fry: Chronologically, Leo, I have here that after your
studies on seed flight and seed germination in the
ground, the next ones you began were on partial
cutting, in 1935 and 1936.
Isaac: Yes. I had this series of sample plots on partial
cutting "selective logging," you would call it.
That cutting was being done by the Forest Service
under the policy established by Bert Kirkland in the
Washington office, and by C. J. Buck, Regional
Forester at Portland. All I did was to put in the
plots and at five-year intervals measure the trees.
Fry: And these plots were cuttings that had not necessarily
been done for research purposes?
Isaac: No, the cuttings were on timber sales on national
forests, a] so some on private land where they were
doing this kind of partial cutting.
Fry: Regular timber management cuttings.
Isaac: Yes. Regular timber management, but for my own
information I would go in, in advance of cutting and
tag several acres on a plot, tag every tree, and
record its size, diameter, condition and everything
else, and make a complete record of each individual
tree. Then I would come back after cutting and record
87
Isaac: the amount of damage done by cutting and falling.
Then I would come back again after the logging operation
was complete and record the windfall loss and the
damage and that sort of thing.
Pry: Maybe you d better give us the background of Brand-
strom and Kirkland and their work, since your studies
on partial cutting eventually refuted their conclusions
that this method was a good thing.
Isaac: Cutting In Douglas fir became a pretty difficult
thing to make pay during the beginning of the Depres
sion. Loggers were going broke one after another.
They were reaching out for some means of making their
operations more profitable. And Brandstrom and
Kirkland hit on the idea of harvesting only the best
trees out of the crop and let the rest stand.
Pry: They came to the research station with this project
in mind?
Isaac: Yes, they came with that in mind. They d dreamed
it up in smoke-filled offices at the University of
Washington where they were both professors. They
were hired from their Jobs there and assigned to our
station.
Pry: By T. T. Munger, the Director of the Station?
Isaac: No, they were hired by Ray Marsh in the Washington
ffice, I am quite sure.
Fry: He was head of Research in Washington at that time?
Isaac: No, he was assistant to Earl Clapp, who was in charge
of Research at the time. As a matter of fact,
Munger opposed their coming, but they were assigned
anyway and given more or less of a free hand. Then,
of course, we took them in and worked with them.
They put over the idea of individual tree selection
in Douglas fir harvesting, and published those
8b
Isaac: books.*
Pry: We might add, too, that this was before hemlock became
commercially valuable.
Isaac: Yes, they weren t using it much except for pulp
now and then.
Fry: So these forests had Douglas fir, and that was all
from the loggers viewpoint.
Isaac: Sometimes all the cruisers recorded was the Douglas
fir. They d walk right through the hemlock and list
only the Douglas firs. Hemlock was selling for
fifty cents a thousand board feet and Douglas fir
for three and a half dollars which is like giving
it away now; it s fifty dollars or more per thousand
board feet.
To get back to Kirkland and Brandstrom, they
came out with this idea of taking out the high-value
trees now and leaving the rest. That took on among
the timber operators; they liked it because they d
end up with more money in their pocket right now.
Particularly if they could put the practice over and
also cut the national or state forests that way.
We in silviculture opposed it, and a good many
of the men in the field opposed it. Walt Lund, as
much as he dared to, working under Regional Forester
C. J. Buck, opposed it, but there was bad blood between
Munger and C. J. Buck because of their differences.
And C. J. Buck used this opportunity to thwart
Munger by putting selective logging into effect on
*Kirkland, Burt P., and Brandstrom, Axel J.F.,
Selective Timber Management in the Douglas Fir Region,
published by the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Founda
tion for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, forest
Service, January, 1936.
89
Isaac: the national forests. He called himself "one
hundred percent for selective logging."
Fry: Kirkland and Brandstrom Justified this, didn t
they, on the grounds that if you continuously went
into a section of a forest and cut Just the most
mature trees and those which were most valuable
at that time, others would grow up to take their
place and
Isaac: and in so many years you could go right back over
the same area
Fry: -- and cut again.
Isaac: Yes, but the fallacy in the contention was this:
that the biggest trees were all old Douglas firs.
In reality, three-fourths of the remaining stands
were hemlocks and the true firs and cedars, which
were small and scrubby . And in these stands where
the biggest Douglas firs were four, five and six
feet in diameter, the biggest hemlock in that stand
would be only equal to about the poorest Douglas fir.
So after a couple of cuts the firs would be gone, and
then you had nothing but these secondary trees coming
along. It s like using mares for milk stock on a
dairy farm. They are just not the right animal.
You couldn t produce good forests that way in the
Douglas fir region. The fallacy of Kirkland s
contention is that he shows so many trees moving up
into this larger age class every few years. And
all you had to do was to come back and cut them
off. But actually, three-fourths of the trees
left would never move up into that larger diameter
class if you kept them a million years, because they
are not that kind of a tree. Hemlock, cedar and
true firs don t get that large. And that was what
we pointed out to them, and they refused to recognize
it.
Fry: You and Munger already knew that silviculturally this
90
Fry: wouldn t work?
Isaac: Sure! And we put It out in those written memorandums,
You ve p;ot them In there somewhere*
Fry: Yes. As I understand it, the 1936 Kirkland and Brand-
strom report had a rather stormy path in petting out
to the litfht of day.
Isaac: It was a stormy procedure, but it was published in
spite of the opposition in January, 1936.
Fry: In other words, as I understand it, Dr. Munger didn t
want it published.
Isaac: Not at all. He wrote a seventeen-point memorandum,
showing where their bulletin had faulty conclusions,
like the one that these trees would all move up to
the larger diameter classes, when three-quarters of
them never would move up. Several of us helped in
the preparation of those opposition memos.
Fry: Apparently Ray Marsh in Washington went ahead and had
it published.
Isaac: Yes, I understood that was the case.
Fry: Do you know what Clapp s attitude toward this was?
Isaac: It appeared rather passive. He liked the notoriety
and the loggers liked it. And he went along with it.
But it s been my contention that Ray Marsh
hired every crackpot that showed up on the horizon
*See appendix: typewritten memoranda, 1935, regarding
manuscript on "Principles and Procedure of Forest
Property Management in the Douglas Fir Region."
91
Isaac: in the Forest Service. There was a time when I
could name about fifteen of them. But if a crackpot
with a wild idea came along Marsh would see that he
got hired somewhere and pushed along, regardless of
what came out of it it didn t seem to bother Marsh
at all. He was the champion of Bob Marshall and
pushed him ahead as much as he could In the Service.
Fry: Have there been other research results that have been
reversed by further studies, from these men that Marsh
hired?
Isaac: In other parts of the Region, yes.
Fry: Who are they?
Isaac: I don t recall them right now. About thirty years
have passed and a lot of that has faded from my
mind. In fact I tried to forget it. But it was
very vividly before me while this was going on. Here
in our midst were two fellows with crackpot ideas.
He got in touch with them and hired them in spite
of opposition from the rest of the Service. Then
C. J. Buck, the Regional Forester, got on the bandwagon
mostly to spite Munger, we thought, and that s where
a lot of information came out .
Munger was pretty sound in his silviculture.
You ve got to hand it to him, he has a good mind and
he s a great enthusiast for forestry. He s sustained
this interest. He hasn t dropped out of the picture
like the others have since retirement.
Fry: Yes, he s quite active in conservation around
Portland, too.
Isaac: I admire him a great deal for what he is, and what
he knows, and what he did, but I admire him even
more for the way he took care of his wife in her later
years. He just waited on her hand and foot when she
became an invalid.
92
Fry: To summarize, Ray Marsh in Washington was the one
pushing the Kirkland and Brandstrom study?
Isaac : Yes .
Fry: And it came out over the head of Director Hunger
at this research station?
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: You had already started your research which would
counter this, hadn t you, by the time their report
was published?
Isaac: My work was going on at that time on various phases
of Douglas fir silviculture and management under
Munger. Munger was my boss.
Fry: Even before Kirkland and Brandstrom came?
Isaac: I had studies going but none directly on selective
logging, because this practice didn t start on the
national forests until Brandstrom and Kirkland came
and advocated it .
Selective logging (as such) was done first by
Tom Murray at Rainier, Washington. He was a mill
man and Axel Brandstrom was his logging engineer.
That was before he came to the Forest Experiment
Station. Tom Murray called himself the father of
selective logging in this region. (That was his
title for himself.) Brandstrom went in and marked
his timber and told him what to take out. The
background of that is that Murray was going broke at
clear cutting and taking everything out. But leaving
the poorer valued stands and taking out only the
select trees put him back on his feet and paid more
money at the present moment but reduced the quality
of the stand. It had a little merit in that a lot
of this poorer stuff wasn t destroyed and could be
93
Isaac: used later. But it should not have been presetted
as a successful sllvicultural operation or system.
Fry: It would riot sustain a forest.
Isaac: No, It would not uustairi a high-value forest.
Fry: With continuous production.
Isaac: You would eventually and gradually eliminate the
Douglas fir from the stand entirely, and end up with
all the inferior species (hemlock and true firs).
And that s what the plots indicated when successive
cuts were made on the national forests. At the time,
the big trees were all old Douglas firs.
Fry: When were your cutting plots put in?
Isaac: From 1933 to 1937- I don t know the exact dates,
but this period will cover it. And they were put
In on national forest sales and on some private timber
operations. I had some plots on Crown Zellerbach
land and some on Weyerhaeuser, and at various other
places where they tried partial cutting. I carried
most of the plots on for a period of fifteen years,
with occasional five-year reports that showed losses
and growth and everything else. It indicated at the
end of ten years that at the current growth rate, if
there was no further loss, it would take at least
twenty years more to regain what had already been
lost and bring that forest back to the condition it
was in when they cut it, the losses were so great.
The losses were much greater than the growth rate
on these areas. That showed up on these sample
plots .
Fry: At the same time weren t you doing something to show
the value of seeds and seedlings which could grow
without heavy shade over them?
Isaac: Yes. The reproduction studies were going on simultaneously
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
during the same period of time, on other plots
where cutting was more complete.
So you took results from both of these sources to
draw your conclusions?
Yes.
There s one thing that you honestly shouldn t
forget in this discussion. That is this: the so-
called selective logging was a Depression measure.
And many of the existing mills couldn t afford to
operate if they were forced to take all of the
timber out, the poor grade stuff with the good.
That would close these mills down and put many more
men out of work. That *ras a big factor that put
selective logging over. But they carried it further
than that: they made it a policy and put it to work
on the national forests where they didn t have to
cut in that manner,
came in.
That s where the real harm
Along about this time there was also the National
Recovery Act in 193^ and Article Ten of the Lumber
Code. Did they also adopt partial cutting as a
practice?
No, they didn t. They were more in line with the
national forest clear-cutting. And they were
beginning to get into group selection. I forget
the details of Article Ten, but it was regulations
imposed on the timber operators b^ themselves. It
was a remarkable development.
Yes, the operators drew them up, and that was why
I thought it probably included partial cutting.
It may have some partial cutting in it . I don t
know. But in general, not, it was broader than that.
It was distinctive because it was regulations imposed
95
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
upon themselves, by the industry. It was distinctive
for that reason. I know George Drake had a big
hand in it. He was with Simpson Logging Company. And
also Clyde Martin, who was Weyerhaeuser s man at the
time.
Your study came out in 1956, titled "Place of
Partial Cutting in Old Growth Stands of the Douglas-
Fir Region.*
That
s right, the year I retired.
Two decades after you put in the plots. In other words,
at first you Just had memoranda which you wrote on
the Kirkland and Brandstrom study and on your own
studies of cutting made according to their plans.
Yes. And they used my preliminary studies in Clapp s
Annual Report of the U.S. Forester and in other early
decisions to stop this movement toward "selective
logging." They used my preliminary tables.
By 1956 then, the policy in the Forest Service for
partial cutting had been abandoned.
Practically. It was still used experimentally, still
used in the fringe types. When you get out near the
edge of the Douglas fir region, where the other
species like pine begin coming in quite commonly,
the forests are not so dense, and there are young
trees of Douglas fir and other species under the
stand. But in a stand of west coast Douglas fir
you can look for a whole solid summer and you can t
find one Douglas fir seedling over a year old in
an old growth stand. They Just can t get started
in this shady, wet site. But when you get east of
*Isaac, Leo, The Place of Partial Cutting in
Old Growth Stands of the Douglas-Fir Region, Research
Paper No. 16, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest
Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment
Station. Portland, Oregon, March, 1956, 48 pp. pamphlet
96
Isaac: the mountains and around the fringe types where the
stands are less dense, they are drier and the sun is
more intense; Douglas fir needs some shade and will
reproduce there. And you will find some small Douglas
firs in with the small ponderosa pines.
Pry: And that is why block cutting is good silvicultural
practice?
Isaac: Douglas fir stands on the west side of the Cascades
in Washington and Oregon, where it reaches its
maximum growth, are too dense to permit Douglas fir
to become established under the dense canopy. Out
in the fringes of the type, where stands are less
dense, some reproduction does become established
under the stand. These stands will permit some
measure of partial cutting, and some shade is desirable
in those conditions because of the heat and the
Intensity of the sun.
But in the Douglas fir region proper, the stands
should have complete exposure, or complete destruction
of the old forest in order to start good healthy
young stands. The seedling does enjoy some shade
in its first couple of years, like a little weed
or brush shade, or something of that sort.
Fry: The native shrubs?
Isaac: The native shrubs and the native weeds furnish some
shade, and the seedlings in most instances all die
if they don t have some shade, particularly on the
hot flats and on the south exposures. (On the north
exposures they can take it, but elsewhere they
can t.) But once established, Douglas fir makes
its best growth and development in full sunlight in
even-age stands .
Fry: When the hemlock starts coming up what happens
to the Douglas fir?
97
Isaac: In a so-called even-aged Douglas fir stand there is
often a spread of ten years or more in the age of
the trees. Most trees are likely to be about the
same age, but some may have come in early and some
continue to come in later to fill the openings or
thin places in the stand until you have a full
crown. It is sort of a filtering in process.
Douglas firs fall out of the stand gradually also,
but at a much slower rate than they come in. In
the average even-age stand of Douglas fir a little
hemlock sometimes comes in along with the Douglas
fir in the beginning, but more of it keeps coming
as time passes; it comes as an understory tree. In
a mature forest of Douglas fir, you will have some
hemlocks that are the same age as that fir forest.
Fry: And the hemlocks grow well in the shade of the Douglas
fir.
Isaac: Yes, fairly well. And you will have some hemlocks
in the lower age classes, clear down to year-old
seedlings, but you will have no seedlings of Douglas
fir in there. Then as the Douglas firs mature and
die and fall out of the stand, the hemlocks continue
to come in and to grow. But they never reach
the proportions of development that the fir forest
will on the same ground. I describe it this way,
roughly: the best hemlock in a mixed stand is about
equal to the poorest of the Douglas fir. That s the
best way to describe it . If the smallest Douglas
fir in a mixed stand is two feet, that will be about
the maximum size of the biggest hemlock in the stand.
Fry: When you say best, you mean
Isaac: biggest and best developed.
Fry: As this became known, how were you able to disseminate
the information? Did you make speeches?
Isaac: We made speeches. And it was published in the Journal
98
Isaac
Pry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
of Forestry and the West Coast Lumberman, and the
Timberman, and various other periodicals and news
papers. I had something over a hundred publications
of various kinds.
On this theme?
Yes, some on this theme but more on silviculture in
general. And a few major publications, such as those
bulletins there on my desk.
Aside from the small timber owners and loggers who
may not ever see the Journal of_ Forestry, or read
these things, did you have any people who felt that
these things weren t true?
Yes, there were always some draggers. They didn t want
to know differently, they wanted to log the other way
and no one is so blind as they who will not see.
They wanted to keep on with the method that would put
the most money in their pockets right now. And they
wanted to do that particularly when they were not
cutting on their own land, but when they were cutting
on national forest land. If we let them continue
selective cutting, we would be left holding the sack
with the inferior forests on public land. That s why
it was not opposed by big industry. They didn t mind
if they could selectively cut our national forests.
They liked to do that and they wanted to do that.
They did, however, in the process, save some of that
defective timber for posterity. But it was not enough
to be worth depleting vast areas of their better
trees .
How did the men in the research station like Munger?
I didn t feel that there was much love lost between
them. He was a pretty hard taskmaster. Anything
that wouldn t further his cause, he wouldn t push
ahead.
99
Pry: What was his cause? You mean his own professional
reputation and his position in the Service?
Isaac: Yes. McArdle worked for him, and he quit the Station.
Fry: McArdle did?
Isaac: Yes. And went to work as dean of the University of
Idaho forestry college. Walt Meyers, now at Yale,
quit the Station and went to the University of Washing
ton.
Fry: That is a step up
Isaac: Sure.
Fry: And professional advancement.
Isaac: But Munger wouldn t push for them to be advanced
at the Station. I ve seen letters that he s written
back to Munns and Marsh in Washington. They couldn t
promote me unless they cut down on some other project
because they wouldn t have money enough. But somehow
there was always money enough for his raise to go
through, and money for other stuff that he wanted to
promote. He did that with all of them. Many of the
other fellows quit. Walt Meyers quit and went to the
University of Washington to teach. Westfeld quit
and went back to Kansas or somewhere to teach. Kolbe
quit and went to work for Western Pine. Gael Simson,
Harold Rapraeger, George Flannigan, Roy Carlson and
many others transferred to other jobs.
Pry: Of course, the Thirties was a pretty rugged time.
Isaac: I know it was, but most of them felt he wouldn t do
what he could do for them.
Fry: You feel that he didn t push promotions?
Isaac: No, he didn t. He Just pushed getting out material
100
Isaac: and getting work done, regardless of how much the
men got paid for it. That doesn t go very well with
the men in the lower brackets.
Pry: He is not a talker, especially. I wondered if he
had any problems from not communicating with his men.
Isaac: He had a very big problem. He was rather bold
and ruthless in his actions, but he couldn t sit
down with his men and talk with them in a genial
manner. He had to dictate or nothing. He d go
off in a corner and make up his mind whether it was
right or wrong, and then push it through Just because
he was in the upper bracket where he could get away
with it. He was in pretty strong with Clapp. For
a time it seemed nobody but a Yale man could get
anywhere out in this country, in the Forest Service,
but that gradually disappeared before I arrived out
here. That had been true. He and Clapp were both
Yale men, in the same class I think. And Marsh, too,
I believe. And a whole lot of others.
Fry: So it formed a little fraternity?
Isaac: Yes. They had a name for it, the Robin Hoods, or
something like that. (Laughter) They had an ironclad
organization that specified that only the Yale men
should be pushed ahead.
Fry: Oh, you mean this was quite conscious and verbal?
Isaac: Yes. I suppose it would be hard to prove, but I
was told that the organization provided that only
the Yale men were to be put into the better Jobs,
and that sort of thing. Finally they had a meeting
and they themselves dissolved this organization. They
recognized that it was unfair and undemocratic and
destructive and was beginning to hurt the whole
organization. That s something that not very many
people know about .
101
Fry: Who else was involved In this?
Isaac: Purely Yale men, I understood.
Fry: And then who decided to dissolve it?
Isaac: The members themselves. They recognized that too
many people knew about it.
Fry: Along about when?
Isaac: That must have come in the middle Twenties or
earlier. But that s the real story. Bob Marshall
was the first one to discuss it with me, but many
others mentioned it later. But most of that
activity had ceased and disappeared by the time I
came into research work in 192^ .
Fry: Yes, I guess that I had heard from another forester
who was a Michigan graduate that this was a clique.
But I didn t realize that it was so formally organized
Isaac: It held sway for a number of years. The Yale men
held high posts all along the line, everywhere.
Species Improvement Studies
Fry: I have a note here that there was another study you
did, the study of seed source and climatic suitability
of trees.
Isaac: I think that would refer to a continuation of the
early (1912) Douglas -fir seed study, and later to
my study that resulted in Better Douglas Fir Forests
from Better Seed.* That book gives the complete
*Isaac, Leo A., Better Douglas Fir Forests From Better
Seed, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 19*19.
An Agnes H. Anderson Research Publication. 64 pp. Pamphlet
102
Isaac: climate of the region, and lists the factors that
are important to tree growth in a great table. That
was used all over Europe for selecting American tree
seed. The seed zones that Manning Seed Company and
others used were all based on that. I made their
early seed maps for them. This book was the result
of an effort to bring together all of the available
information on the importance of getting better seed
to produce better forests in our natural stands.
The significant things about this bulletin are,
first, a bringing together under one cover of the
various important bits of information that were
available, now, and the significance of this infor
mation in timber production in the Northwest.
The second thing is that the book contains a
weather chart for the different U.S. Weather Bureau
stations west of the Cascade summit in the two
states, listing the weather elements that are
significant to tree growth: temperature, frost free
period, precipitation during the growing season
and that sort of thing. Each weather station has a
number, and the number is shown on the attached
maps. These same maps have superimposed on them the
forest site maps of the region. So you can tell if
a given weather station is in a good site or a poor
site. And Europeans or anyone else can use this
chart to match their climate and tell where on these
maps seed for their plantations should be collected.
They can ask for seed from Olympla or from Mount
Rainier, or from a b,000 foot elevation, or 2,000
foot elevation. Whatever they need, they can find it
on these maps and in this table.
Fry: From whatever area matches
Isaac: Yes, matches their climate and other site conditions.
In the book I point out the necessity for getting
the best seed that we could find in wild stands, and
the necessity to get it from good stands. We had
good stands and we had poor stands, sometimes on
103
Isaac: similar sites.
Fry: Did this add information on how to distinguish better
seed, or was it a sort of plea for using better
seed?
Isaac: Both; it was a plea for using better seed, but it
pointed out how to Identify a better tree. I
believe the book itself has some pictures of the
better trees such as Figure Ten.
Fry: The trees which would make better parents?
Isaac: Yes. At a later date I had a publication that gave
the regular designs of the trees and told what
angles the limbs should have and all of that sort
of information.*
Fry: How did you know what tree would make a better parent,
unless you grew the seed from it and saw what was
produced?
Isaac: From what we could learn from foreign literature
on genetics and from what we could learn by watching
good and bad trees grow before our eyes, we did the
best we could. I knew what the climate and soil of
a locality should produce. And when I found a stand
that was far above what one normally would expect
to find there, I had reason to believe that it was
a very good strain, if not a superior strain.
For instance, in the Wind River Valley. (That s
called Wind River because In the afternoon the wind
"Research Note #122, "Tentative guides for the
selection of plus trees and superior stands in
Douglas-fir." Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment
Station, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest
Service, October, 1955.
Isaac: from the east side of the Cascade Mountains blows
down the stream and sucks down that canyon -- it s
as regular as the sun coming up.) Right around our
nursery the fir is not up to what we figure that
valley ought to produce in that climate in that
soil. We also find pockets in there that are
much better. Our conclusion is that that poor grade
stand migrated in from east of the mountains, where
growth is slower and the trees are shorter, and poor
grade forest gradually became established in that
valley with the passing of one tree generation after
generation, and century after century, for all time
past .
i
Fry: Natural selection favored the poorer grade.
Isaac: Natural selection in that valley appeared to produce
poorer stands. We have brought in seeds from good
stands not very far away and planted the seedlings
there in the valley, and they appear to be doing much
better than the seedlings from local seeds. It s
an example of what can happen.
You can go up near Olympia, Washington, and go
out on the sand plains toward Fort Lewis, and you can
find Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that look
like pincushions. They aren t the beautiful,
straight, boled, dense stands with small crowns
that make a beautiful forest. They are Just scrubby,
poor growth. It s because for generations on end
they have lived there in that more or less sterile
soil and become gradually replaced by slower growing
stock, until that becomes an inherent condition for
them. We took that seed of the ponderosa pine from
those sand plains and planted it down at Wind River
on a plantation. (We have seeds of Ponderosa pine
from all over the pine region from way east to
the Black Hills, north to Canada and south to Mexico.
We ve got them planted side by side in plots at
Wind River, right near that spacing test plantation.
I put that plantation in, by the way, also. We had
105
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
another one like that at Corvallis , two or three
of them east of the mountains, and in some other places.)
At Wind River, where we brought this seed from
the Olympia sand plains and planted it down here in
this better climate and better soil, the form of
these trees were Just like the parent trees up
near Olympia. They grew like a pincushion with limbs
clear to the ground and with rough, crooked boles.
And right beside them, trees from a better strain
in the Willamette Valley grew twice as fast in
height and had clean boles and straight trunks,
side by side in these sample areas. You can look
at them.
All of this was going on, then, at the same time
you were doing the sample plots on partial cutting
in Douglas fir.
Yes, I worked part of the year on one, and part
of the year on the other. We kept field diaries
so at the end of the year we could apportion our work
on the plots we d done our work on. We started
out with a working plan, with our projects listed,
and estimated how many days should go on each, and
tried to balance it in a way. That s why the two
linked together. And while the sample plots were
getting their ten and fifteen year examinations on
partial cutting, this other work was going on.
I have a note here that in 19^4 you were promoted
to "silviculturallst" from assistant silviculturalist
at the Research Station, then in 19^6 you went to the
University of Washington for a year to complete the
tree improvement work. Why did youggo to Washington
for this?
The need for tree improvement was apparent to thinking
foresters. We were still using general seed from
natural wild stands and not selecting our tree
seed like scientists were doing with oats
106
Isaac: and wheat and apples, and that sort of thing. And
it became apparent to many of us that we could improve
our stands by getting better seed. Along with that
came the war, and the after-war situation where
our regular appropriations had been reduced. When
we came to step back into line from war work,
the temporary funds that had been advanced for
recovery were cut off and it left us a bit short of
funds at our Station. We lost several of our
better men at that time. Don Matthews was one of
them that we didn t have money enough to keep,
and Ernest Kolbe was another one. (He was transferred
to California because our Station was short of
funds.) And I was offered this fellowship by the
University of Washington to come up there and choose
a subject and study it for a year and publish it. My
bulletin was Bulletin Number One for the University
of Washington in a program continued in some measure.
It relieved our tight money situation and gave me
a chance to get started on my "Better Seed" program.
Fry: Professors Gordon D. Marckworth and Bror Grondal
instigated your fellowship?
Isaac: Bror Grondal was a products man, also he was a good
friend of mine and he realized the importance of
this work. He had something to do with the handling
of Agnes Healy Anderson Fellowship money. Marckworth
was Dean of the School of Forestry at that time.
Fry: So you went there, then, on the Agnes Healy Anderson
funds?
Isaac: Yes. Marckworth and Grondal came down to the
Station in Portland. Hall called me into his
office and he said, "We got a couple of robbers
down here." (Like Hall talks, he s got a very good
line, you know.) He said, "Leo, these fellows want
to take you away from me."
I said, "I m never known to be a quitter, but
107
Isaac: I d like to hear the details."
He said, "Well, we are a little short of money.
We ve lost a couple of men now. We Just don t want
to lose you for future work."
I said, "Well, I ve never been a quitter on any
good cause. If I m really needed here I won t
consider anything else, because this has become
my lifetime work; I m involved in long-time studies.
But," I said, "we re short of funds, and my work is
not pressing now: the plots are established and
they ll be examined from year to year. And I think
I could be spared long enough to do this Job."
He said, "That s a deal. If you ll come back
here in six months, finish your work when you get
here, why that s all right with me."
I said, "It s got to be nine months, at least;
the full term. It ll take that long to gather up
what I can find and put it in shape for publication."
Then I used a month or two of my annual leave to
wind it up, and I got that in shape for publication
in that length of time.
Fry: Did you teach any classes there?
Isaac: No, no. Strictly research. Then I made a trip
around the United States and visited various
people in that field of work. The genetics station
at Placerville, California, was my first stop.
Bob Wideman was there and several others. I forget
who was at Berkeley at the time; as I recall Palmer,
Wrighter and Charles Kroebel were there. Duncan
Dunning was working in the pine silviculture at
Berkeley and he quit in a huff. He was a pine silvi-
culturalist. He wrote very little and left a great
mass of material unpublished. I visited Phil Wakely
at the Southern Forest Experiment Station at New
Orleans. I also visited someone at Tulane University,
108
Isaac: and then I went on to Washington, D.C. and spent
some time there with Schreiner and that bunch out
at Beltsville outside of Washington, D.C. Then I
went up to Yonkers, New York, to the Boyd Thompson
Institute and on to Yale and to Syracuse and met the
men that I knew there, and came on to Minnesota,
and then on back home.
I then went to work writing my book. I brought
a pack of references and things with me. My aim
was to gather together what information there was
on the possibility of improving our forest trees
and our forest stands, and what concrete evidence
there was now available for tree improvement.
That s now included in Better Douglas Fir Forests
from Better Seed. Here s a badly dilapidated copy
of it.
Fry: What did you find out about tree improvement in other
typ es over the United States? Were they able to
improve other types at that time?
Isaac: They were, they were starting at it. The genetics
station at Placerville was already established for
the improvement of pines . We also had improved
poplars. Later, in 1953, I visited Syrack C. Larsen
in Denmark and others in Europe who were improving
other species. A fellow by the name of Wright was
doing work in Minnesota, Mergen at Yale, and Schreiner
was working in Washington and various other places.
I forget the men at the moment, but there were
several of them at work everywhere. I was trying to
get them stirred up here in this Northwest country.
Attempts to Start Genetic Projects
Isaac: I was still smarting under the sting of Munger going
to California with Eddy and getting a genetic station
established down there in pine, using Douglas fir money
109
Fry: This was Mr. Eddy s money?
Isaac : Yes .
Fry: You mean Hunger traveled with Eddy?
Isaac: He went with James G. Eddy to California and they
together called on Luther Burbank. Luther Burbank
persuaded them at $25.00 a piece, for each 15
minute interview, to buy the land in the pine type
and put a study in ponderosa pine that Eddy himself
knew very little about. But Burbank was a fast
enough talker to do it . And they established the
Eddy Tree Breeding Station [Forest Genetics
Institute ] at Placerville, California.
Austin was his first man. He was a pomologist
or something like that a fruit or a berry
propagator. Then gradually they hired foresters,
and then gradually it was taken over by the U.S.
government during the Depression. Eddy s son,
Garrett Eddy, with the Port Blakeley Timber Company
up in Washington, has been one of our important
cooperators. He is still interested in forest
improvement .
My bulletin, published in 19^9 began to stir
up interest here in forest genetics studies, and
eventually, I was negotiating with Jack Duf field
to come to Portland. He s probably the foremost
technical forest geneticist in the United States.
And he s a real student. He later went to North
Carolina.
Fry: Raleigh?
Isaac: I m not sure if he s at Raleigh or not, but he s
back there at one of the schools. I was planning
on getting him to come up here and head a genetics
station. About that time, Bill Greeley came down
here from Seattle and asked for a conference with me
110
Isaac: (He had been Chief of the Forest Service in the
Twenties and at this time was semi-retired from the
Executive Secretary position of the West Coast
Lumberman s Association.) I asked him to come to
the Station, and he said, "No, I want to talk to
you privately. I want you to come over to my hotel."
I went over to the Multnomah Hotel and spent
the better part of two days with him. He said,
"The industry is ready to back you on a tree
improvement program at the Station, and put up some
money ."
Greeley said that at that time he was on the
Board of Control of the Ford Foundation and he could
assure us assistance from the Pord Foundation if
we would set up this genetics unit in our Station
here, under the direction of a Board of Directors
that would be made up of the deans of the colleges
and some of the leading men in the timber industry
that were going to put up money. He said, "I
want to know what you think about it."
I said, "Well, I ll write a memorandum on it
and put it up to the management and see what
happens." I wrote the memorandum, but the Station
wouldn t go for it. They said, "We don t want the
industry telling us what to do." They were not in
a very cooperative mood at that time, and nothing
ever came of this offer.
Our director said, "We don t want timber interests
dictating to us."
Fry: Who was head of the station then?
Isaac: I think it was Steve Wycoff. Steve Wycoff came
here from Blister Rust Control in Montana; he was
Director of the Station here for a number of years
before he went to California as Director.
Ill
Isaac: The Industry was going to back this financially,
and they were going to support legislation here to
establish a Station. But nothing ever came out of
that interview of Greeley s with me. I prepared a
memorandum and turned it in, and they just looked
with a cold fishy eye on it and let it ride. Nothing
ever came out of it. V/hen I didn t make any further
moves to get Duf field moved up here, he quit the
genetics station at Placerville and went to teach
at the University of Washington.
That was a year or two after I finished my
report at the University of Washington. He taught
there one year around 19^7, and he developed a plan
for forest genetics research at the University of
Washington. Industry was going to provide the
physical plant, the field stations, and whatever
they needed in the way of support. And the University
was going to manage the administration of it. That
plan was presented to the meeting that was held at
the University. In the evening, after that meeting
was done, these timbermen went downtown and called
up Duf field and asked him to come down to the hotel.
Industry told him, "We want to do this Job ourselves."
(They had already established this Greeley Nursery
at Nisqually and were producing trees there.)
"We want to take your plan and put it into effect.
Fry: Without the University?
Isaac: Yes. They said, "If you ll come to work for us,
we ll put you in charge of this research program
and put you in charge of the nursery down at Nisqually,
and we will give you a free hand. That s the only
way we ll go ahead with this plan." And they
lifted that plan right out of the hands of the
University of Washington, and took him down there
to head up the nursery and the genetics program for
the Industrial Forestry and Conservation Association.
And for a couple of years, Marckworth, the Dean of
the College, and Duf field were not on friendly
speaking terms. There was bitter, bitter feeling
there. At the time, Bill Greeley himself had no
112
Isaac
Fry :
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
knowledge of what was going on. He was semi-
retired. I was kind of glad that I had stayed
completely out of it.
A genetics program like that was what I was
trying to get set up in our Station, and they
looked at it with a cold fishy eye down here, so
it got started up there.
Was there any particular reason why industry wanted
to do this without the University of Washington?
No , not that
I know of, except that everybody was
trying to make a showing for themselves, and they
figured that they would be bound by academic
restrictions of one kind and another under University
control, and they wouldn t have the same freedom
as if they were running the show themselves. There
was a lot of Jealousy among foresters and there were
a lot of real stubborn individualists in the upper
brackets in those days.
Of the industry?
Timber industry, yes.
Which companies were heading this up?
The Industrial Forestry Association, also Weyer
haeuser was a big mover in it. And St. Paul and
Tacoma Lumber Company was mixed up in it. I don t
know to what extent Simpson was. But I think
Garrett Eddy was in it, also. I don t know who
else. But that s the way the pot boiled.
They set up the genetics station at the
Nisqually Nursery, where it is still housed. They
are still carrying on some work in setting up
tree-seed orchards, from selected trees and that sort
of thing.
113
Fry: Are you familiar with their work?
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: What s your idea of it?
Isaac: I think they are making progress. They ve got
several seed orchards established; but they haven t
done too careful a job of it. For example, after
I came back from Turkey, I went down with Duf field
to plant a seed orchard for one of the big companies
down here out of Corvallis. They were planting
up an old ranch, right in a rather narrow canyon,
with the hills on both sides covered with fir of
questionable quality, and the pollen from those
hillsides would Just blow right across that seed
orchard. It was down in this little valley. They
had no control strips around it or anything else.
I said to him, "Aren t you going to put something
around here to shield this from the pollen drafting
in? A border of cottonwood, or of other species?"
Oh, no, they didn t think enough pollen would get
in to make any difference.
I don t know whatever happened to the seed
orchard, if it s still going or not. I think they
were putting the seed orchard in for the Willamette
Valley Lumber Company. I forget what it v/as for.
But I know I planted trees for a day there just for
the relaxation I got out if it.
Fry : Busman r> ho] iday .
Isaac: (Laughter) Hut they are making progress and they are
keeping going. That is now supported by the
Industrial Forestry Association under Hagensteln.
Duf field felt too restricted there. He wanted
to get back into the academic field. So he went
back to North Carolina as a teacher, and he has a
genetics program underway there. A lot of the
Isaac: spirit in the movement left with Duf field. He is,
I think, one of the really big men in forest genetics
in America. Mergen at Yale is another one, currently
Mermen is a foreigner, he s a Dane. He was trained
with Syrach Larssen in Denmark.
Fry: The general pattern and emphasis of your work has
been what?
Isaac: Reforestation in the Douglas fir region. I dipped
some into the other types and the other species
by making seed tests, life of seed in the soil and
that. But my general work was in the Douglas
fir regjon. By Douglas fir region, I mean the west
side of Washington and Oregon, where it reaches its
maximum growth and development. I started first
in nursery studies and seed studies, and then
drifted into natural regeneration why some areas
reforested and others refused to regenerate. And
from that we drifted into thinning and stand
improvements; then into individual tree improvement,
genetics and the selecting of the best of our native
stands. That s about where we were until we movea
into second growth cutting and the cutting methods
for old growth stands.
Second Growth Committee
Fry: Then that ended your work at Washington University.
Along about this time, second-growth forests began
to be a thing that all of the companies had to deal
with.
Isaac: They were gradually getting into it. Young trees
were getting big enough to cut, and the old forests
were getting cut back and back, and back, and all
companies had diminishing amounts of it left.
Fry: Questions of management began to come up.
115
Isaac: So we established what Hall called his second growth
committee, which is correct. And we had the
two colleges (Oregon State and Washington) .
Fry: This was when Hall was director of the Research
Station?
Isaac: Yes, this committee was made up of men from two
forestry colleges, the technical men from the big
companies, and the two states also had men on this
committee .
Fry: You mean the state division of forestry in both
states?
Isaac: Yes, In both states. We put the committee together
at the Experiment Station, but the industrial
foresters and some others objected to calling it
a Forest Experiment Station committee.
Colonel Greeley and others had conceived this
idea and came down here and agreed that that s the
way it should be done. But when the committee got
a hold of it, our friend McCulloch and some of the
Industrial foresters got in a little clique and they
decided they weren t going to permit us to have it
as an Experiment Station committee. It started
out exactly like the "pull out" on the University of
Washington at Seattle, but Hall got out this
agreement with Colonel Greeley, and It was settled
that it should be a second growth committee of the
Forest Experiment Station. Hagenstein could tell
you very well about both deals. We divided up the
work among the various experts that were available.
I had the part on reforestation and regeneration, and
I think it also included planting. I don t know.
Someone else h;-.d charge of growth and someone else
had charge of thinning studies. And someone else
had charge of other phases of it . I forget. And
we put out a large mimeographed bulletin on second
116
Isaac: growth management.* It told about managing for
poles and for piling and all this and that. It
came out as a book from the Experiment Station,
a rather large publication. I have a copy of it
here .
Fry: This was a kind of a Bible, then, for second growth
management?
Isaac: Yes, it was the beginning of the second growth
study. Then it was rewritten later in a more
simplified form in a little booklet called IT Your
Trees, a Crop." Your man V/alker from down at Berkeley
rewrote it for us. He was joint editor for our
Station and for the Berkeley station for a number
of years. This was for popular consumption.
Was it widely read and used?
Oh, yes, yes. It was reprinted and we ran out of
copies a dozen times, I think. It was widely used.
It gave simplified methods of making measurements
and doing things . It had a lot of cartoons in it
using a little humor along with the facts to carry it
along, and make the average timber operator read
it. It got over pretty good.
Fry: Did you get a lot of questions from timber owners
and operators?
Isaac: Yes, yes.
Fry: Were they usually calling you at the Station to ask
you things?
Fry:
Isaac
""Management of Second Growth Forests in the Douglas-
Fir Region." Pacific Northwest Forest and Range
Experiment Station, Portland, Oregon, Dec. 19^7.
117
Isaac: They would come in to see me, and we d sit down.
They d say, "We have some questions to ask."
My standard answer was, "I ll try. I ve been
fooling around here a long time and I ve
lot of information. I ll Just do the best I can,
but I won t promise anything." And I d usually be
able to satisfy them pretty well.
Problems Updating Genetics Book
Fry: Let s move on to dincuss your book, Reproductive
Habits o Douglas Fir,* which the Pack Foundation
backed in 19121
Isaac: The thing to remember is that most of the work that
I have done is, in a measure, summarized in that
publication.
Fry: That s your 19^3 publication?
Isaac: Yes. That s the one that s been out of print
for years and foresters have been calling for it.
I m trying to get some way to get it published,
and I will one of these days. This one is the one
that they wouldn t print the second time.
It war. my masterpiece, and it didn t get
printed the second time.
Fry: You rewrote it, you told me, arid then went on your
FAO assignment?
*Isaac, Leo A., Reproductive Habits of Douglas-Fir,
Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation, Washington,
D.C., 19^3, published for the U.S. Forest Service,
107 pp. Pamphlet.
118
Isaac: Yes, on my FAO assignment to Turkey for two and a
half years. And it has, in fact, never yet been
typed from my rough draft. My rough draft v/as
left there in the file untouched for over six months
after I left for Turkey. Then, when Meagher was
asked by Kyers from Washington to do something with
it he turned it over to this other young fellow
that didn t know much about the subject and had him
revise It. And he revised it until it didn t mean
anything. He was a young forester, assigned to the
Clympia office.
Fry: He did a pretty good job of writing, but didn t
have the experience to know exactly what you were
saying?
Isaac: He didn t know what it all meant and he didn t get
the meaning into his writing that was there in the
bulletin, and he cut out entirely some of the most
significant stuff in there. It wasn t satisfactory
to me or to any of the reviewers when it came back.
George Meagher, of our Experiment Station here, had
given him that assignment and had promised him a
Joint authorship without consulting me at all or
even telling me about it. The revision was nearly
completed and ready to go when I came back from
Turkey. V/hen nobody would accept the revision,
Meagher threw up his hands and he said, "We ll
reprint that just as it is."
Fry: Yo jr 19^3 edition, with footnotes, was what Keagher
wanted?
Isaac: Yes; I tried to put in some footnotes to bring it
up to date. But you couldn t begin to put in enough
footnotes to bring it up to date, the whole thing
had to be changed. You Just couldn t add thirteen
years of work and bring it up to date with footnotes,
I wrote a complete memorandum showing him what had
to be changed, and what it had to be changed to
page after page of it. And he wouldn t listen to
119
Isaac: it. He said, you ve drawn on the works of others
and so forth, and somebody else is going to want to
do this one of these days and half of it ll be
published, and that kind of stuff, you know. He
Just made all kinds of excuses, and just balked.
That s all, he just balked on it. And you couldn t
move him at all.
Fry: You said this whole thing was started, this revised
edition was started because of the demand from
industry for an updated version.
Isaac: Sure. And the revision was again brought up. Even
after I came back from Turkey they demanded it in
our Experiment Station advisory committee meetings.
And Briegleb came to me and he said, "Can t you
get this thing underway?"
I said, "Only if you can get some sense into
that Division Chief of yours, because he won t go
along with it."
Pry: This was when Briegleb was director?
Isaac: Yes. George said for me to come in and talk to
him. I came in and talked to him, but he was Just
the same as he was before, he wasn t changed at
all. I wouldn t agree to publish.it with twelve
years of additional work laying there not used.
Particularly since it was all written up. He wouldn t
go along with it, and there it sits. Briegleb
says, "What can I do? I can t fire him. And I
can t force him to do what he doesn t want to do
because it ll make an awful stink. So we ought to
try to see if we can t work it out some way."
And that s where it sits.
Meager has got a pull somewhere back in
Washington. I think it s Ostrum in the Silviculture
Office that he s a pet of, but I don t know.
Fry: That s why Briegleb said he couldn t fire him?
120
Isaac: T suppose so.
Fry: I wonder why Briegleb couldn t .Just have him trans
ferred .
Isaac: Well, he s transferred about everybody else out of
there, but Meagher sits rip;ht there. It p;ot to a
point where the people In the field Just wouldn t
work with him at all. Thpy Just told Briepleb out
and out that they Just wouldn t have anything to do
with Meapher.
Fry: When did Meagher come back to the Station?
Isaac: He came six months or so before I went to Turkey.
At Forest History Society luncheon in Portland, Oregon
Isaac chats with forester Dave Mason and interviewer
Fry, August 16, 1968.
121
CONSULTING WORK ABROAD
Pry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Trouble Shooting In Europe
When you were called to Germany, I understand you
attended the Forestry Congress of Western European
Nations In 1953-
I want to make it clear that I was not sent as the
American representative to the Congress, but rather,
I was invited as an observer, and was asked to
advise with the European Foresters there at the
Congress and in European countries after the
meeting, as to the use of American tree seed in
European forests.
So you must have used this:
Forests From Better Seed.
Better Douglas-Fir
I used this information, and I did have this map;
I had it all published and with me. It outlines a
system of collecting seed, and how near you must
get to the same climate in order to get successful
reforestation. It Is patterned mostly after the
Swedish system. Trees will survive in almost any
climate, but If you are going to produce a worth
while, paying forest, you ve got to get the best
seed for a given site to make a success of it.
Was it this book that provided the Incentive for
the German government to ask you to come over?
Yes. I suppose so, plus a little personal friendship
I was kind of elated over that because as near as
I could tell I was the first American forester
who was brought over by the European countries,
where the American taxpayer didn t have to pay
through the nose. They paid my_ way over there.
And I was kind of proud of that fact. And they
122
Isaac: also paid my way around Europe. They had a trip
all laid out for me in their trouble areas. I went
through all the European countries that way, clear
up into Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium,
France and Italy.
Fry: Wo have your report, don t we, on that trip?
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: I wonder if you could tell us where you were when
you first pot this invitation, how it all began.
Isaac: Just after World War- II to Just prior to 1953 there
was a very large number of foreign foresters visiting
this country students, professors, government
foresters, private foresters, etc. Many of them
came to see my work in tree seed and reforestation,
and many of them came to my home and I knew them well,
Among these were the foresters who were in charge
of tills Forest Congress at Stuttgart, Germany.
I received many letters inviting me to come over,
and some requests were sent to the Forest Service
requesting that I be sent over, but nothing happened
until Just before the meeting, when suddenly I got
an official notice from the Congress inviting rne and
stating that I could pjck up my transportation at
the United Air Lines office. Then there was a
grand scramble to get my clearance from the Forest
Service, the necessary shots, transportation for
my wife to match mine, and other last minute
preparations .
Then we were off, first to Washington, D.C.
(Forest Service), then to Stuttgart, Germany, and
the Forest Congress.
Fry: Did you ever confer with individual foresters?
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: In each country?
123
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: What kind of problems did you observe in your
reforestation work in Europe?
Isaac: Planting the trees too densely in the stands, and
it was a costly error because the seedlings were
expensive. They were planting them a meter and a
quarter apart, which is about four feet. And four-
foot planting with Douglas fir means that at
least half of these planted trees would die and
fall out of the stand before they would reach a size
suitable to use. That was a terrific waste because
the cost was carried from the very first day of the
planting, and the interest would accumulate on that
cost .
Before I left for home a good many of them in
Germany and elsewhere were planting at wider
spacing or at least considering it. In Just the one
trip I think I convinced them. I had my spacing
test plantation literature which would show them
what they would have in five years, in ten years,
in fifteen years, and in twenty years. And I handed
them these little folders where they could read right
off the paper what spacing they had to plant to
attain a growth that would at least be usable for
fuel. And that s what they aimed at, a good many
of them.
T thought that over-planting was the biggest
error that T came across in European forestry. They
took that attitude that they had to plant them thick
in order- to make the lower limbs fall off and clean
the boles and produce a better type of forest.
i
Fry: Higher grade wood.
Isaac: It was much cheaper to let them grow twenty years
and cut the bottom limbs off; their trees would be
twice as big in diameter. The wood would be
12k
Isaac: on a bigger bole all the way around, and in forty
years they d have twice as much as they would by
letting nature take its course.
Another misconception that a good many of them,
had was that you had to plant them thick in order
to get lots of height growth. That wasn t true
at all. A six-inch tree with an eight-by-eight
spacing would be taller than a tree on a four-by-
four spacing of the same age. Close planting didn t
make them grow taller. It made them grow taller
for a given diameter of tree. But that tree
if you took a four-inch tree in a thick plantation,
it might be thirty feet high. But that same tree
in an eight-by-eight-spacl ng would be eight inches
in diameter instead of four, and probably several
feet taller. Dense stands were not as tall in our
measured plantations.
Fry: Germany was the main country where they were
crowding?
Isaac: No, they were all crowding some. France and
Belgium also. Even in Holland and Denmark, but their
utilization was much closer there. They cut out
the little whips and used them for fodder, and for
firewood to cook their meals. Utilization was
closer. But they were gradually coming to the wider
spacing.
Fry: How long were you over there?
Tcnnc : I was there three months. I spent most of one
month in Germany , then I went to the other five
countries over there: Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
Holland, and Belgium. Then I cut back and went over
through) Switzerland, and down through Italy, and back
into France, and then over to the British Isles.
To some of those other countries I went pretty
much on my own Just to study the forests and see
what they were doing, and to meet the different people
125
Fry: Did France 1 riot participate in thin conference?
Isaac: They were there, yes. But England was not.
Fry: Oh?
Isaac: England did not participate. They had some observers
there but they did not participate.
Fry: For any special reason?
Isaac: Yes, it was bitterness over the war. They wouldn t
come to Germany and participate.
Fry: There weren t any Iron Curtain countries represented,
\vere there?
Isaac: All the Iron Curtain countries were represented.
Austria, East Germany , Czechoslovakia, all of those
countries had observers there.
Fry: What did you detect as their major problems with
American seed in forestry?
Isaac: It was the same difficulty, getting the wrong seed
for a given site. By the wrong seed, I meant seed
from the wrong climatic zone and the wrong atmos
pheric conditions. A humid coast climate tree
wouldn t grow in a high mountain dry climate; and
vice versa, a dry climate tree wouldn t grow good
down here. That s true in this country as well as
over there. The Douglas that we brought over
from eastern Oregon died in the Wind River experi
mental Arboretum; in fourteen years they were all
dead. Lodgepole pine was the same way. nut the
native Douglas fir just over the fence, and almost
touching them, were growing beautifully. The Lodgepole
pine that r.^ew there in the valley were growing
beautifully in the Arboretum. But the pines brought
over from Baker were dead and dying. The same way
with the western larch. And so in Europe, the
chief cause was not properly matching the climate
120
Isaac: and the soil of the seed source with that of the
planting site.
Fry: In all of this enormous amount of data that you
have amassed here, do you have conclusions that
represent work that you did on the ground by your
observations in plots and so forth?
Isaac: Primarily, yes.
Fry: Were you ever able to go into the biophysical or
biochemical properties of these different species
of Douglas-fir that cause them not to live?
Isaac: No, we just stopped at what you could observe in
the reaction of the plant itself on the ground.
Our new laboratory at Corvallis may go into that
phase .
Fry: So what you have done is pet up a lot of guidelines
here that will keep researchers busy for a long time.
Isaac: Probably. For example there is the wooly aphis,
which is a needle aphid that affects the new growth
on conifers, particularly on Douglas-fir. When we
brought the Douglas-fir over here from eastern
Oregon and planted it at our Wind River Arboretum,
that wooly aphid was three times as bad on those
imported trees that we brought over here as it was on
our native trees. It s present everywhere on our
native trees, but not enough to hurt them. They
grow in spite of it. But it was heavy enough on
these imported Douglas-firs to help a great deal
in killing them out. When these trees were brought
over here from the dry climate into this humid
climate, that aphid infestation grew a great deal
faster and was more deadly to these trees here than
it was over east of the mountains. Humans sometimes
react in a similar manner; take for example our
American Indians. When we took them out of the
teepee and put them into houses they died of
127
Isaac: tuberculosis.
Fry: Do you know if a lot of follow-up research is going
on in any of this, for more basic research?
Isaac: More basic research is being carried from this work
Into the big laboratories that are being built.
This big new lab we have at Oregon State in Corvallis
you should find out about that when you go down there.
I say they are Jumping too far ahead. They aren t
carrying it on and tying the two together, and they
are picking out these different things and studying
them by themselves. It s going to be an awful Job
to bring those back and put them together.
Fry: You have the comprehensive picture here in your
book which enables people to intelligently manage
forests .
Isaac : Yes .
Fry: And the why s and wherefore s of this phenomenon
that you laid out here are going to have to be
documented in lots of Ph.D. theses and (laughter)
Isaac: Bill Greeley summed it up for me. I believe he s
got it in a foreword in that bulletin or something
regarding it. He said, "Leo, In your studies, each
study is a building block in our silvicultural
system. When you get enough of the building
blocks we ll build a structure out of them, and that
structure will be our foundation for silviculture.
They ll be the building blocks in our silviculture
for the Douglas fir region. You Just keep right
on piling them up and we ll keep right on using them."
It was that kind of encouragement that kept me
going all through the years. Regional Forester
Watts used to say to me, "Leo, how do you keep up
your Interests?"
And I used to say, "How the hell can I lose it
128
Isaac: when every step I go I see more that there is, that
we don t know, and we need to learn." And I ve
been at It my whole lifetime.
Fry When you were in Germany in 1953 what did you leave
at the Station here for those three months? Or
was this your summer vacation?
Isaac: It was my vacation plus a leave of absence for
travel. I did this: I did the official work
primarily on my leave of absence. And when I took
a sashay with my wife to see something special, I
would take two or three days of annual leave. And
I sandwiched them right in.
To Turkey With FAQ
Fry: Then, in October of 1956, October 1, you retired.
Is your retirement at the average age , or did you
retire early?
Isaac: A little late. We could retire at sixty, tut I
retired at sixty-four.
Fry: You chose that particular time to retire because
of the additional retirement benefits that came
into effect October first.
Isaac: Yes.
Fry: And also, I guess, because of this FAO trip?
Isaac: That was the prime reason. They wanted me in June.
But this change wouldn t take effect until October,
and I needed that much time to finish my writing,
anyway. So I asked to stay on. FAO wouldn t
let me go. They said, "All right, if you ve got
to stay that long, we ll wait for you." And they
held my appointment open until October ?. T worked
129
Isaac
Fry :
Isaac
Fry :
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
here on the first and went to work for them on the
second of October. It was very nice, and they were
very considerate. It was a real bonanza for rne .
If you t r ,o to work for the government after you
retire they deduct your government salary frorr. your
pension. And they balance the two up. But If
you go to work for someone on the outside, you can
collect your pension as well as the outside pay.
And you see, going to work for the United Nations
I was working for a foreign corporation, so I got
my full "foreign" pay and my full retirement.
And that s how you brought back all these beautiful
Persian rugs.
That s part of it.
this possible.
Your house.
And not only that, it made
My full retirement stayed right here in the bank
all the while, into the bank every month. I let it
stay there. Mom and I didn t try to keep up with
the Joneses with cocktail parties and that sort of
thing in Turkey. We got a nice respectable apartment
and lived a normal life and had a lot of fun and caw
all of the European Mediterranean countries. V/e
did enough entertaining to repay obligations, get
to know a lot of people, and learn about the way of
life around us.
But you avoided "high living."
That s right.
I went first to Rome for a week for some
indoctrination, and then went from there on over
to Turkey.
How did you get this appointment?
FAO sent a notice to the Forest Service that they
130
Isaac : needed a Tor-ester to go to Turkey and some of the
other Mediterranean countries to assist in refores
tation. I saw the notice and I just wrote on the
sheet, "Interested, believe I can do the Job," and
signed my name and passed it on and forgot it.
It went around in the Service and pretty soon our
chief of personnel, Sandvig, came back from Washington,
D.C. and I met him in the hallway. He said, "Leo,
you re on top of the totem pole back there in
Washington. "
I said, "What are you talking about?"
He said, "You applied for that position in the
Mediterranean, didn t you? You re on the top of
the list of applicants. I don t see why you
shouldn t pet it."
I said, "Can t do any more than hope, but I
haven t heard." And I didn t hear anything. And
I still didn t hear anything, and it was getting
close to the time to go. Then they called Ion?
distance and said* ."I have your LA [ letter of
authorization] here to make the European trip."
I didn t know what an "LA 1 meant. They were talking
by letters back there instead of English.
So I said, "What the hell is an LA?"
And he said, "Your letter of authorization to
go to Europe."
I said, "Good, send it along."
He said, "Do you think you can still get in the
three weeks of irmoculations?"
I i-iaid, "We already have them."
Fry: This was Just like your florman trip?
131
Isaac: Yes, pretty much the same. This other one came
through more on schedule. But I went back there and
got my passport, and went on through. Then I got
an Mo pasr.port, which) is something quite different
than the other one.
They d told mo to pick up my passport when I
got to Washington. Rut I landed in Washington on
October 2 or 3, one of those blistering hot fall
days that they have once in a while in Washington,
and in the office was one man sitting behind
eleven desks, there for the afternoon. I said,
"I cane to ret my passport."
He said, I don t think I can hunt that out
for you because I m here alone, and everybody else
is gone."
I said, "What s the matter?"
Well, he said, "There s a ruling here that if
the temperature gets above ninety and the humidity
is above a certain point, tliey don t have to work,
and they have all gone home."
I said, "My plane leaves at nine in the
morning and I ve got to have that passport. I
don t care how I get it or where, but I can t
leave without a passport, and I can t get another
reservation at this late date." I said, "Who is
your chief?"
And he told me, and I went to the telephone
and I called him up and I said, "I m In a very tight
place and I couldn t think of anyone else to help
me. I ve got to have my passport by eight-thirty in
the morning [thumping table for emphasis] in order
to make this plane connection, I have my reservation
and my ticket bought and everything, and I ve got
to have it. I wonder what you can do for me."
132
Isaac: lie said, "You come to the office in the morning
at eight-thirty and you keep your taxi, don t
let it get away from you, right outside the door,
and I ll have somebody there with that passport to
rut in your hands." And he did. It was really
remarkable to get that sort of a connection.
Fry : Was your wife with you?
Isaac: Yes. Both times she was with me. We had a grand
time over there. I wouldn t have stayed the two
years in Turkey, I don t think, if it wasn t for
her .
Fry: Do you have anything written about your Turkey exper
ience?
Isaac: Oh, yen, there are several things. I got a whole
bulletin on it.* I wrote a complete field hand
book of Reforestation for Turkey, starting with
collection and handling of seed, nursery practice
for Turkey, and field planting for Turkey in
the simplest form that their people could use.
Here, these are the bulletins I was going to
give you.
Fry: This Corvallis bulletin is "Leo Isaac on Silviculture."
That s your lectures, which you did later after you
came back from Turkey.
Isaac: There s a nice foreword by McCulloch in there.
Now here is the bulletin T wrote for Turkey. By
a quick look at the table of contents you can
see what It consists of.
*Isaac, Leo A., Report to the Government of Turkey
on Reforestation, Bulletin #932, Food and Agriculture
Organization Administration, United Nations, Rome,
1958.
133
Fry: "Improved Reforestation Practice, Extension Work,
Large vs. Small Nurseries, Selection of Areas for
Reforestation, Forest Improvement from Better
Seed (you have to get that In), Conclusions, Nursery
arid Tree Planting Manual, and appendices on figures
and photographs . "
Isaac: I drew all the designs for the apparatus and every
thing else in the bulletin.
Pry: This is a one-man operation, you mean.
Isaac: Yes. Except for the editing and typing by my wife.
And I got the pictures, and the planting methods and
the tools. I thought that was a pretty good
contribution to make looking at the bulletin .
And here s the planting methods, and there s the
tools that I had for them. This is the packing of
the trees. Here s a little portable tree-packing
device, to pack the individual tree (with roots
in soil) in a case like a one-quart milk carton.
It s made out of building paper that disintegrates
in a year. The roots can go right out through
it and you could plant the tree right In the field
without disturbing the roots in severe sites. You
could make the little packing device out of an
apple crate arid tack it on a bench any place and
it d work. It was simple for them. You had to
make things simple for the Turks because they were
not scientifically or technically inclined.
Here s a more complicated planting device
[showing picture! . I drew all those things for
the bulletin.
Fry: Did you do your own photography, too?
Isaac: Yes. These apparatus I drew right up out of my
head, then made them. There s your portable cone
kilns. There are the seed beds and the whole thing.
I got all the bulletins from American forestry
134
Isaac: that I knew about that I could get my hands on,
and used them as guides for the preparation of this.
It s a complete field handbook on collection and
handling of seed, nursery practice for Turkey,
and field planting for Turkey. That s what I
did for them. This is the only copy that I have
left, and I can t give it up.
Fry: We ll refer to it here.
Isaac: I m sure you can get it.
Fry: Yes. Now, Leo, who were the people that you found
you could work most effectively with in Turkey?
Isaac: The young Turkish forestry students that had been
sent to this country and had spent a year or two
in the forestry colleges around the United States;
they had been picked out from college students and
sent to America. Once back in Turkey, they were the
most amiable group to work with. They were sent
over here a year or two before I went over there,
and my work was really half done when I got there
because these students were there and anxious to
get started and needed something to support their
contentions. Their bosses wouldn t believe them if
they told them a seed bed should be put in a certain
way unless they could show them something like
a book .
Their big bosses would say, "Shut up and go do
it like your father did. We don t want to disturb
the routine. We are getting our monthly stipend
and you are, too. Let s go on like that." That
was the attitude of the old Turk. The Moslem
religion teaches that the oldest member of the family
should be the boss and do the deciding, and they
still abide by it, particularly when they get in
power enough to put it over.
When these young fellows try to do something
13b
Isaac: different, in the modern way, if they agitated too
much they d send them out to dip- ditches. By the
time T .rot there they had run half of these young
fellow:-, out of the government service, by denying
them the privilege to put in effect what they had
learned. They were there arid anxious to learn. They
were very helpful, and made y work possible.
When I came there the Turks were celebrating
their hundredth anniversary of technical forestry,
and they had nine hundred forestry graduates from
their technical forestry school, and no forestry
practice under way at all, except a little semblance
in rare instances of it. I didn t find one written
paragraph of instructions for reforestation. Not
one written paragraph. So I immediately started
collecting material to get that Information together
and kept working right at it. When I didn t have
it done at the end of a year, they said, "You ve got
to stay another year. 1
Fry: The Turkish government requested it, you mean?
Isaac: Yes. And the head of silviculture there.
Fry: And FAO?
Isaac: Yes, and the FAO also requested it. And so I
stayed another year, and then they wanted me to stay
still another year, but I said I had enough:
"My Job is finished." And I arranged for them to
translate the FAO report into Turkish.
Fry: Did you feel that you ever got anywhere with the
older establishment? The men who were in power?
Isaac: Not too much with the old-timers. But they couldn t
stop the movement because these young fellows
now had something to back them up, and here and there
better practice was getting into effect. They had
one pine nursery (Dursenbey) that would be a credit
136
Isaac: to any nursery in this country it would be
acceptable -- and they were doin, , a good job. But
their biggest nursery, a hundred miles away, was
costing a hundred times as much to produce an
established seedling, and they paid no attention to
it whatever, no attention whatever. The seedlings
were dying, whole beds at a time so they d put
em in next year again, and go right on.
Fry: Why was it costing so much?
Isaac: The trees were all dying, and when transplanted,
they weren t growing. I found out that the land
had been cultivated for a thousand years and had
never been fertilized. They were watering with highly
alkaline water that I think contained potassium,
or something like that, and the trees were dying.
I came there and I found three graduate foresters
sitting in this stone block house in the center of
the nursery with store clothes on and low shoes
and a flower garden all around the nursery. Lots
of people taking care of the flowers, but nobody
working Jn the nursery. And I said, "They tell me
the trees are dying in your nursery."
They said, "Yes, the men say they are dying."
I said, "What are they dying from?"
"We don t know. We think damping off
a d sease of seedlings
I said, "Have you been out to look at it?"
They said, "No." Sitting right in the middle
of the nursery! They had a cup of tea on their
desks, and a few folders, blanks with places to
check off their names, this and that, and a newspaper.
And always a stooge sitting there at their
137
door walt.1nn on them. All day, .sitting there,
asleep half of the time, bring them a cup of coffee,
bring them a glass of water. If they didn t want
the water they d throw It out the window, or throw
it on the floor. "Go and get a form for me,"
for something. Just sitting there all the time.
But he was a political stooge that was being given
work and a little stipend. So it all went by the
board .
I said, "How about your nursery? You say you
think your trees are dying of damping off? 1
"Yes."
Well, I said, "Those trees are standing up
straight, dead, and brown. Damping off is a fungus
that works in the top layer of the soil. And It
cuts the seedling off right at the soil level and
the seedlings tumble over when they die of damping
off. This must be something on the roots." I
said Have you looked at the roots?"
"No, we haven t looked at the roots."
"Well," I said, "get me a shovel." They
blew a whistle like a referee at a ball game.
Stooges came crawling up out of the weeds from around
the place, and came strutting up there and standing
up stiff at attention. They barked something at
them in Turkish and one ran off and came back with
a shovel. I took ahold of the shovel to dig up a
seedling, and the Turk wouldn t let go of the
shovel. He hung on to it, and I pulled him all
over the seed bed. And I said, "What s the matter
with this man, why won t he let me have that
shovel?"
"Oh, you re not supposed to dig up the seedlings.
That Is the men s work; you re not supposed to do
that, Jn your position."
138
Isaac: And I said, "Hell, they don t know how to dig
up the seedlings. I m going to dig them up myself."
And I would get down and take up a spadeful of these
young seedlings, get my hand under it and shake
the dirt loose from the roots and lift them out
carefully so not to trip the root hairs off.
I said, " Now , let him dig up a bunch." He d dig
up a big chunk, take hold of a big tree and strip
it out of soil and he d have three or four streamers
for roots with all the bark and fine roots stripped
off, all the root hairs gone. You never could make
that kind of a seedling grow, you know. I showed
them how to lift those seedlings so they could
transplant them and they could grow. But they
thought it was terrible that I should get down there
on my knees in that dirt .
I brought them all into a school the third
or fourth week I was in Turkey. I got the planting
foremen and the reforestation foremen from all over
Turkey, eighteen of them, into this best nursery,
at Dursenbey, Turkey, to go through the motions of
nursery practice. After I worked an hour or so
with them through an interpreter, I called them
together and I said, "How many of you men have actually
planted a tree with your own hands?" And only
one man out of the eighteen had ever planted a tree
with his own hands. And he was a forester that had
been over here to the United States and the students
up at the University of Washington had taken him
over on the Easter vacation out on the Olympic
National Forest to plant trees for spending money.
He nearly died he had to work so hard over there,
but he had planted some trees with his own hands.
They were all very certain before I got through
that school that I could see that they weren t
afraid to get their hands dirty. (Laughter) I
thought I had accomplished something. (Laughter)
Fry: These were the foremen on the private forests around?
139
Isaac: No, official government foresters with a college
education, that had never planted a tree with their
own hands. I was talking to another fellow there in
the agricultural field, who was a livestock specialist
from Corvallls MacKenzie his name was, very fine
man. He said, "Why, I had young graduate foresters
from their veterinary institute here. They really
didn t know which end of an animal to tie the rope
on to. Had never touched an animal with their hands
in their lives." They thought it was degrading for
them to stoop down to do the actual work.
Fry: Did you get to do any work with the school of forestry
there?
Isaac: Not very much. The old chief of silviculture
was a member of the old school. He taught highly
technical stuff that never got into use out in the
field at all, never anywhere. At no place in Turkey
could you see anything that he taught that had been
put into practice. He was the lord high master, and
he didn t want anybody to come in and tell him how
to run their schools or anything else. He was a
distant relative, of some sort, to Menderez, who was
the prime minister. That chief was the opposition;
his word was law wherever he walked into the field.
But as quick as his back was turned they would turn
around and start doing stuff the way I taught them
how to do it .
He came out to me one time when I was out at
this good nursery and he said, "Do you mean to tell
me that you re coming over here and trying to tell
our boys how to plant trees?"
I said, "No, I don t. I mean to tell your boys
how we in America plant trees in the best manner that
we know how to do it, and for the least money. And
if that s better than yours, that s up to you and
them to decide, but that s what I m here for." But
Isaac: he was pretty hostile. And every chance he had to
block anything that I was doing he would do it.
I saw areas in Turkey where they had taken
crews of men and had gone out into the forest
where he was putting his brand of forestry into
effect. They would cut down trees, carry the logs
by hand and pile them up into nice little piles in
the forest, and cut off all the limbs and trim up
the tree, making everything pretty, with no real
benefit to the forest whatever, just a lot of work
for nothing. They were peeling all of the logs
when they were taking them out of the forest,
and measuring with a pair of calipers on the big
end and the small end of the log and figuring out
the total cubic contents. What they were getting
for it and using it for bore no relation to what
they were doing at all. But they had to go through
all this procedure wherever his influence touched.
That s the way they were running things over there.
Fry: Had you been forewarned about this man before you v/ent?
Isaac: Only just a little. PAO had hired a Swede to take on
this job, and he went over there and worked three
months and he threw up his hands. They had to let
him go; he Just walked off of the Job, said it was
Impossible .
Pry: And you knew about that?
Isaac: Yes. Hut I didn t know to what extent it had gone
on until after I got there. They didn t tell nie about
that. They couldn t do anything with the Swede at
all, and he gave up in despair and left. It was
from him that I got some of my first tips. I had
the report on this one big nursery where the trees
were dying, where they were producing, I think,
120 million trees a year according to the record.
And I said to them, "For heaven sakes, where are
you planting that many trees in Turkey?"
Ill
Isaac: "Oh, we aren t planting ;hat many. That is the
full capacity of that nursery." And that s what
they were reporting to the Grind National Assembly.
"But," they said, it is only half developed now."
And I said, "What happens to that developed
part of the nursery?"
"We re losing some of the trees."
And tnen I looked at this Sv/ede s report. He
said, "When I was there they probably had twenty
million seedlings coming up in the nursery, but It
looked as though they were all dying."
So I went out there and looked. I looked first
at their seed beds then at the transplant beds.
The seedlings in the seed bec.s were over half dead.
And in the transplant beds they were three-quarters
dead. I dug the trees up and from appearances they
never had started to grow at all. They had clipped
off the tips of the roots, and stripped the fine
roots off the rest of the root system.
Fry: Did you travel much in the Middle East?
Isaac: Earlier in the year we went on a vacation to visit
other Mediterranean countries. We went to Egypt
and Damascus, and flew over Lhe Suez Canal while the
trouble was going on.
Fry: I wanted to ask you if you wore in on that.
Isaac: We were to land in Damascus while that trouble was
going on, and they wouldn t let our plane come down.
We had to fly over and I photographed the streets
(the Damascus street called Straight") from the air,
and then we went on over to Jerusalem in Jordan.
But we couldn t land, we had to go on over to Jordan.
And everywhere we went in Jordan at that time we had
to be accompanied by tourist police. We would walk
up to this United Nations line that ran through
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry :
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
Jerusalem, and they d say, "Don t step over or that
fellow standing right over there, a hundred feet
away, will shoot you." And he was standing there
with a loaded rifle and a bayonette on it. Conditions
were that bitter when we were there.
We might explain, this was during the British-
Egyptian Suez Canal crisis in 1958.
Yes, and right after,
trouble. Yes. It was
traveling around there,
the Prince of Peace was
and died, and there see
to face a hundred feet
and bayonettes ready to
It was a really strange
Our trip was after the main
a strange feeling to be
walking in the land where
born and lived and taught
human beings standing face
apart with loaded rifles
rip each other s guts out.
senation .
When your two-year stint was over, you didn t come
straight home , did you?
No. When I wound things up in Turkey I went back
to Rome and spent a month in Rome to write up my
report and get it approved and corrected and in
shape for publication. After that I took a short
assignment with the Manning Seed Company, to again
visit places in France, Germany, and Belgium where
they were having unsatisfactory results with American
tree seed.
How long did this last?
Ten or twelve weeks. Over West Germany and the
British Isles.
I have "months" down here in my notes.
It was about four months before I got home and got
back to work because I went to Washington and
several other places in the United States. But
this particular assignment was about twelve
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
It was early October when I came to Rome, and It
was Christmas when I got back to America.
This must have been 19 jB, because you went to
Turkey in 1956.
Yes, it was Christmas of 19b8. And then in
did a lot of finishing up of my work after I got
home, my reports and all that stuff. I had the
reports to make out for the Manning Seed Company,
and the reports to make out for our Washington
office.
Private Consulting for Manning Seed Company
Fry: What about your work with Manning Seed Company? Is
there anything written on that?
Isaac: Not except the Manning Seed Company stuff; that s
their own private business. They have several
publications that I prepared for them.
Fry: You don t have copies of these?
Isaac: Not at hand. But I d have to look them up.
Fry: Why don t you outline for me here what your activities
were for Manning.
Isaac: I first set up a plan for them to lay out the
Douglas fir region in seed zones, based on the map
in my bulletin. And these zones varied roughly
two degrees difference in average annual temperature.
Fry: From zone to zone?
Isaac: From zone to zone. There was something like six
or eight degrees difference in average annual tem
peratures, from southern Oregon to Canada: that
Isaac: would make three zones. I divided them this way
(pointing to map) for temperature [from north to
south] and from coast inward [from east to west] for
humidity zones. There was the humid coast belt on
the coast slope of the coast mountains. The interior
valley, like the Willamette Valley, or from Olympia
east to Mount Rainier, was the second humid zone;
and then the Cascade Mountain slope: three general
humidity zones.
Fry: And you did this also for European areas?
Isaac: No, I did that only for American seed zones, prepared
the map that Manning wanted as his map of seed zones
and that he used in selling his seed to European
countries. He would say, "I will send you seed
from Handle, Washington, that is in Zone Seven,
collection area three on the Manning Map, or
U.S. Weather Station number 90 on the map in
Better Forests from Better Seed, or whatever it
happens to be. It meets your climatic specifications
and elevation. "
Manning bought a lot of rny Bulletins and sent
them to all his customers in Europe. I first got
that thing ready for him. Then I worked out his
bonded seed zones where he would seek out particularly
good native stands, would photograph them and have
growth determinations made for them, and was guaranteeing
to his purchasers that the seed would be collected
and handled by trained foresters. The Company put
out a whole book on it .
Fry: Wh ft was the purpose in that?
Isaac: To get the right seed from the right climatic zone
for similar climatic zones over there.
Fry: Having it collected and handled by trained foresters
was to insure that it would be collected properly.
Isaac: Yes. And handled properly and honestly.
Fry: And to enable him to hire these foresters to do
that .
Isaac: But the foreign countries wouldn t pay the price
that was necessary to get that kind of seed. They
were worth a hundred times that much in final returns,
but they couldn t see it. If they could get seed
for three and a half a pound, any kind of seed, as
against the right seed for six dollars, they d take
the three dollar and fifty cent seed.
In fact, Dr. Champion (Sir Champion now, he s
been knighted since) of Oxford Forestry College,
the head of the industrial forestry association in
England, spent a whole fall with me here going over
these seed zones, and then went back to England. In
about three months they write me the most heart
breaking letter you ever saw. They told me that in
spite of all they could do, the English high
commission that had to do with the purchase of
foreign seeds decided to take Douglas fir seed from
around Boulder, Colorado, for reforestation in
England, which by the farthest flight of imagination
would never produce a forest in England. They bought
3500 pounds of that seed at three dollars and fifty
cents a pound and the English foresters were obliged
to use it, whereas the coast seed that would match
their climate, that they should have had would
cost them six dollars a pound at that time.
My relations with the Manning Seed Company were
rather suddenly discontinued because I had written
in all of my statements that there was no place in
the entire economic structure of our reforestation
that absolute integrity was as essential as the
record of seed collection in the Douglas fir
region, because it spelled success or failure of your
forest project in Europe or any other place that you
planted it; and you couldn t detect an error or
Isaac: mistake until it was too late to change. If you
bought the wrong chicken you could fat him up the
next year and chop his head off and eat him. If
you pot the wrong wheat you could get another brand
next year. But if you planted the wrong forest
tree you re stuck with it for a lifetime, and then
stuck with a problem of petting the bad trees off
your land. Much of south Sweden was planted up with
a poor quality of Scotch pine that they purchased
cheaply in Germany, and it has never produced a
productive forest. Forests right alongside of
them or across a road, but from the right seed
were producing excellent forests. And they had
examples everywhere to prove it.
But that was the situation, and I had written
it into all my writings that absolute integrity was
necessary in the seed collection. I had Manning
all ready to shoot on that basis, but when his
bonded seed deal didn t go over he started reverting
to the old system of just selling seed. He wanted
to establish a seed certification, a private seed
certification agency that would be made up of a
few seed dealers and buyers here.
And he had it all set up so that he could
control it. He put the entrance fee so high
$250 a year for a little seed dealer so that only
he and his subsidiaries could afford to pay it, and
he could control the whole thing. He wanted me to
write that plan up for publication in the Journal
of Forestry so that he could put it over, and I
wouldn t do it. I had already written my plans for
seed certification and given the speech at the World
Forest Congress at Seattle in 1961. My recommendations
were on record and I wouldn t go back on them for
anything in the world. And when he came to me with
that for me to write up I wouldn t go along with
him and never wrote it up. And he just summarily
dropped me right there.
Isaac: I haven t had any word from him since.
I used to write something for him every year.
He d bring something down for me to work over and
to write up for him. But he dropped me like a hot
coal. He seemed to go berserk, spent most of his
time traveling around Europe. He made too much
money. He divorced his wife (who was a partner in
the business) and married another one and turned
his seed business more or less over to some hired
men. Last year his two top men quit the business
and I haven t seen or heard anything of him since.
He has given his address as Tacoma, Washington,
and seems to be carrying, on the business as before
by himself.
Fry: That sounds like it might even have been a case, later
on, that could have lead to an anti-trust suit or
something .
Isaac: It could have if it continued as planned.
Fry: In effect he would have had a monopoly.
Isaac: Yes, because he would have had it all tied up, but
his plan for certification didn t work out .
Fry: I wanted to ask you, Leo, about this seed that the
English bought. Is it too early yet to tell how
these trees are turning out?
Isaac: I wouldn t even need to ask.
Fry: You haven t heard?
Isaac: Not definitely; I have heard from various places that
it fizzled out and in later years they began buying
from another source. I suppose they got rid of it
as much as they could, planted it for Christmas
trees or something like that. But they said they
would never use any more of it than they had to.
148
Put now
can .
they are beglnnJ.w to do this as much as they
Isaac: Oh, yes, they re beginning again. They sent a young
fellow by the name of Woods over here, and he stayed
here a year. I worked a lot with him and he wrote
up seed requirements and sources, and that kind of
stuff. Another young fellow, in charge of their
nursery in Scotland what was his name -- Don
Fulkner or something like that. (I can t recall
for certain right now.) They are younger fellows
with new ideas and they are going ahead, aria they
are doing a good job of establishing new forests
in England.
Irelaric[
Isaac: Much to my preat surprise and satisfaction, I got
over to Ireland and I found the finest forest growing
conditions in Ireland that I found anywhere in the
European theater.
Fry: You mean natural conditions?
Isaac: Natural conditions. A moist climate through the
summer, with rain all through the summer growing season
That s why it s called the Emerald Isle, it s green
all year long, it doesn t dry out.
The Douglas fir that would stop grov/ing here
in August would keep on growing there right through
September. Their plantations -- they have a scale
the same as we do, of sites, one, two, three, four
and five. The yield on their site one --
Pry: Which is the prime site
Isaac: Which IK the best site grew clear off of the scale
149
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
of growth for site one in England.
Dublin.
I saw that near
Fry:
Isaac
Fry:
Isaac
You can t beat those Irish. (Laughter)
I never could make Douglas fir in this country grow
in heavy grass sod. But over there I found it growing
in sod with the grass growing up through the first
three or four limbs, the grass from the previous
year, hanging on the tree the next year, and the
seedling going right on out through the grass. I
never saw anything like it. And they showed me a
plantation twenty-seven years old of noble fir and
hemlock, that for thinnings for fuel and the
like, had already paid for the land and the planting
of the trees. And they had a beautiful forest
left.
So they ve been at forestry in Ireland for quite a
while, also.
Yes. They are not as far ahead, they haven t had
as much money to work with. But their chances for
growth are admirable. Arid they are doing pretty
good at it. The people are very poor.
This is what part of Ireland?
Right out from Dublin. The finest forest I saw in
all my travels was a plantation of our white
fir, our Abies grandls . In Washington and Oregon
we don t consider It a good forest tree at all.
Grand fir is the regular or common name for it.
It was forty miles out of Dublin in a plantation
fifty years old. The finest forest I saw in all
of my travels. Beautiful stems that had been thinned
four or five times. It was Just magnificent, and
I was surprised to see it there in Ireland. Here
at home in the forests of the Northwest, grand fir
is looked upon as a second rate tree, both from the
standpoint of form and growth rate.
150
Pry: Well, Leo, this has been an intensive series of
sessions for both of us. It s been fascinating for
me, and your hospitality is great.
Isaac: I hope this makes sense when it s typed off.
Pry: You ll get a copy to check over and make sure; so
your work isn t finished yet. But many thanks for
clearing the decks for me this week.
Isaac: Thanks for coming.
151
INDEX
Allison, J. II. , 13-1^
Austin, Lloyd, 10"
Frar.dstrom, Axc>l J.F., 87-95
13rlerlcl), Philip A., 119-120
Buck, C.J., 86, 88-89, 91
Cheyney, F..P, ., 11, 13
Clapp, Farle, 90, 100
Clarke-McNary Act, 50, 52, 53
Duffleld, Jack, 100-111, 113-114
Fddy , Janes 0. , 108-109
Faucation
school isi>T of Isaac, 3-5,. 7, 11-15, 18-21
F.versole, Kenneth H., 85-86
Fir areas. See Research, projects for
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) , 128-143
Forest practices, 28-29
r.razinp, 11-48
Greeley, William, 109-111, 115, 127
Hall,J- Alfred., 106-107, 115
Hanzllck, Ed. , 61, 61
liarris, P. T. , 21-2?
Hofrann, J. V., i9-52, 5^-55, 61, 63, 65-70
Industrial Forestry Assn., 112-113
Inter-nation influences & comparisons
Furope, 123-128, 1^2-1^9
Turkey, 128-142
Isaac, Albert E., 6-11
Isaac, Alberta, 22
Kirkland, Hurt P., 36, 87-95
Lenzie, Frank, 44-47
Lumber industry, 39-40
Lund, Walter, 88
152
McNary, Charles I,., 52-53
Manning, J .S. , 52, 53
Marckworth, Cordon I)., 106, 111
Marsh, Hay, 87, 90-91, 100
Marshall, Robert, 56-60, 62, 91, 101
Mason, Dave, 52
Meager, George, 85, 118-120
Munger, T. T., 50-52, 61, 64, 87-88, 90-92, 98-101, 108-109
NRA Lumber Code, article 10, 94-95
Persons, Hubert, 12, 19-21
Reforestation, 8*4-86, 114-117, 132-134, 143-145
Research
and Congress, 51-53
effects of, 68-70
methods, 53-54, 64-68, 70-75
projects for, 55-56, 61-64, 86-108
Timber management. See Research, projects for
United States Forest Service (USPS)
experiment stations
Wind River Experimental Forest, 49-105
field activity, experiences, 34-37, 75-83
private Industry relations, 108-114
timber sales, 37-41
Weidmann, Bob H., 61, 64
Wentling, J. P., 13, 14
Western Forestry & Conservation Assn., 52
Amelia R. Fry
Graduated from the University of Oklahoma
in 1947 with a B.A. in psychology, wrote for
campus magazine; Master of Arts in educational
psychology from the University of Illinois in
1952, with heavy minors in English for both
degrees.
Taught freshman English at the University of
Illinois 1947-48, and Hiram College (Ohio)
1954-55. Also taught English as a foreign
language in Chicago 1950-53.
Writes feature articles for various newspapers,
was reporter for a suburban daily 1966-67.
Writes professional articles for journals and
historical magazines.
Joined the staff of Regional Oral History
Office in February, 1959, specializing in the
field of conservation and forest history.
14 0417
