University of California • Berkeley

University of California General Library/Berkele-

Regional Oral History Office

THORNTON T. HUNGER: FOREST RESEARCH IN THE NORTHWEST

An Interview Conducted by
Amelia R. Fry

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 Thornton T. Hunger and the Regents of the
University of California and the Forest History Society,
dated 30 December 1967. 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.

WORLD WAR I AND THE SPRUCE INVENTORY 94

PART II: DIRECTOR, PACIFIC NORTHWEST FOREST AND RANGE

EXPERIMENT STATION, 1924-1938 98

STAFF 102

R. E. McArdle 102

A. G. Simson 105

R. H. Westvelt 107

Ernest Kolbe 109

Walter Meyer 110

Leo Isaac 111

William G. Morris 114

GROWTH AND YIELD STUDIES 117

Pine 117

Douglas Fir; The Selective Cutting Controversy 123

THE FOREST SURVEY, 1929 133

FOREST PRODUCTS STUDIES 140

TAXATION STUDIES 143

INDUSTRIAL FORESTRY COMMITTEE OF THE SOCIETY OF

AMERICAN FORESTERS 148

THE REX BLACK INQUIRY, S. A. F. 150

INSURANCE STUDY 154

NEW DEAL PROGRAMS 157

National Industrial Recovery Act Lumber Code

(Article Ten) 157

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: DeWltt Nelson,
retired head of the Department of Natural Resources, California;
William R. Schofield, lobbyist for timber owners, California
Legislature; Rex Black, also lobbyist for timber owners, California
Legislature; Walter F. McCulloch, retired Dean of the School of
Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon; Thornton
Hunger, retired head of U.S. Forest Service Experiment Station,
Pacific Northwest Region; Leo Isaac, retired, genetics research
in the U.S. Forest Service Experiment Station, Pacific Northwest
Region; and Walter Lund, retired chief, Division of Timber
Management, Pacific Northwest Region. Copies of the manuscripts
are on deposit in the Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley; The Department of Special Collections, University of
California at Los Angeles; and the Forest History Society, Yale
University.

Interviews done for the Forest History Society under other
auspices include: Emanuel Fritz, professor of forestry, University
of California, Berkeley, with funding from the California Redwood
Association; and a forest genetics series on the Eddy Tree Breeding

-2-

Station with tapes by W. C. Cumming, A. R. Liddicoet, and N. T.
Mirov, currently 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.

Willa Klug Baum, Head
Regional Oral History Office

Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California

INTRODUCTION

Much of the forest research now being conducted in the
Pacific Northwest has its roots in some of the early, albeit
primitive, investigations that began in the decade before World
War I. One man in particular has the continuity of experience
to comment on the development of this phase of natural resource
research: Thornton T. Hunger, who came in 1908 to the "Division
of Silvics" of the United States Forest Service in Portland,
Oregon, as a greenhorn from Yale. In 1924 he became the Director
of the Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment Station, then returned
to full-time research in 1938 as Chief of Forest Management
Research at the Station, a position he kept until retirement in
1943. The following interview was conducted to supplement the
two existing sources of documentation of his career: his diaries,
now deposited at the Forest History Society, Yale University,
and his memoirs that were mimeographed in TIMBERLINES of the
Thirty-year Club of the Region Six Forest Service in December,
1962.

From the beginning of the research efforts in the Northwest,
the response of timbermen outside the Forest Service was little
more than "a respectful hearing" for Munger and his associates
as they spoke at logging congresses and industrial association

ii

meetings. In fact, in those first decades, forestry research
results had been used mainly by the timber managers within the
Forest Service itself, although occasionally even there a lag
developed between what research indicated and what the actual
practices were. However, it must have been reassuring that,
in Hunger's words, "The bulletins and Research Notes issued by
the Station were used as text books at the forest schools,
[thereby spreading] the fruits of research to new generations
of practicing foresters."

In addition, other factors later evolved which proved that
the early investigations had begun at a propitious time in a
field where research results depend on years and even decades
of tree growth. It was after thirty years of silvicultural
research when forest technology led to less destructive logging,
and, coincidentally , forest owners began consolidating their
lands into holdings large enough to allow planned cutting cycles.
Then when the building boom got underway in the 1940 "s, the
timber industry suddenly found that the practice of good forestry
had become economically feasible. Forest managers in the North
west began looking for the information provided by the growth
studies, the regeneration research, the fire protection and
control techniques, and the land management economic studies,
all of which fortunately had begun long since at the Experiment
Station.

iii

What goes into the making of a leader in forest research?
Thornton Hunger grew up in New Haven in a house facing Hillhouse
Woods, which he roamed at will. His nature interests were evi
dent in his attraction to the "out-of-door poetry" of Wordsworth
and Emerson, which began with his stepmother, who "could quote
it by the yard." In school, he leaned toward "out-of-door things
and science...! kept lists of flowers that I found and that sort
of thing. . ."

His father, who was the subject of Benjamin W. Bacon's
biography, Theodore Thornton Munger , was the minister of the
Congregational Church in New Haven. As such, he earned recog
nition as a leader in the growing edge of religious and social
thought. (He surprised staid New England by inviting both a
rabbi and a Catholic priest to speak.) He was also a member of
the Yale Corporation board and author of several books on general
literature. Family letters, now deposited at Yale, show that
many of the significant people of that time were in contact with
Reverend Munger and often visited his home. It is probably true
that young Thornton "didn't take much interest in what old theo
logians [were] talking about..." However, his career reveals
the same awareness of societal needs and the integrity of com
mitment that probably filtered out through the table talk between
his father and his distinguished guests.

Before Thornton Munger finished high school, he transferred

iv

to Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, then — not sur
prisingly—entered Yale College in 1901. It was his college
summers at Milford , the old Gifford Pinchot estate, working at
and discussing forestry, that led him into the field. While he
did not have forestry per se in his undergraduate curriculum,
and while he mentions that he was intrigued by English as a
study during these years, it was forestry that focused his
post-graduate trip to Europe. With a "sheaf of letters of
introduction" from none other than the Yale forestry school
dean, Henry S. Graves, he contacted foresters in Germany,
Switzerland, and Austria and studied their intensive management
which over several generations had come to exceed anything
being done or perhaps even needed in this country.

So it was that when he enrolled in the Yale School of
Forestry (a graduate school) in 1906, he was probably less a
novice than many of the entering aspirants. He describes the
faculty as "young and vigorous," and well he might, for at that
time in the new field of forestry most of the instructors on
any faculty were themselves recent graduates.

Passing the test for the U.S. Forest Service upon gradu
ation from Yale, he expected to go to the romantic West and run
boundary lines, but instead was plucked as one of the chosen
few to go to Washington, D.C. and work for Raphael Zon's
"Division of Silvics," the research arm of the agency. But he

did not stay in the capitol long. Soon the Service detailed
their two -month employee to Oregon to study the encroachment of
lodgepole pine on western yellow (ponderosa) pine. Because just
at that time Chief Gifford Pinchot was forming the six adminis
trative districts of the Forest Service, Munger was assigned to
the new Portland district office, and there he stayed through
his entire career.

His tenure at the Station produced significant studies and
also leading figures in forestry. A new college graduate named
Richard E. McArdle "with boundless enthusiasm and inventiveness"
tackled growth and yield studies; he was to become the Forest
Service's Chief almost thirty years later. Walter H. Meyer,
later a professor at Yale University, worked on mensurationist
problems at the Station. And there are others, most of whom he
comments on during the interview.

Before his promotion to Director, he worked on the genetic
studies, the planting of growth plots, reconnaisance, and plantings
at the Wind River nursery. There were also short-term investi
gations, such as an avalanche study in Washington and the
experimental plantings on the Oregon Dunes to stabilize the
shifting sands.

As Director, he was both administrator and researcher at
first, but gradually the administrative duties kept him office-
bound. His writing continued. The growth and yield studies

vi

continued. Genetic studies continued. New studies were added.
There was controversy over whether clear cutting or selective
cutting should be used in timber management of Douglas fir, the
selective method appearing more feasible to the forest economists,
the clear cutting (or block cutting) urged by Hunger and others
for its more long-range silvicultural superiority. The contro
versial paper of Axel Brandstrom and Hurt Kirkland was published,
recommending selective cutting, and for a short time the Regional
Forester's management policy was at odds with the Experiment
Station's official recommendation. There was also the national
Forest Survey of 1929, and insurance and taxation studies in
which the Station participated as part of nation-wide projects.
Through it all, Hunger says he was "not interested in research
for research's sake, but wanted to see research put into use,
and so far as I had any influence, we did all we could to get
the results before the public."

Outside his life as Director, Hunger was deeply involved
in conservation issues, such as the establishment of the Forest
Huseum and the creation of a large forest park north of Portland.
As one might expect, these efforts are marked by the same perse
verance and organizational ability that his directorship shows.

To conduct the interview, which was made possible by a
grant from The Hill Family Foundation to the Forest History

vii

Society, the interviewer flew from the Regional Oral History
Office in Berkeley to Portland. There, according to previous
agreement, Munger was interviewed intensively for four days.
The interviewer had been armed beforehand with a sheaf of notes
and questions which had been gleaned from Hunger's diaries in
the Forest History Society at Yale and sent to her in Berkeley.

His- tall house of yellow shingles is one of a spiraling
row of homes which, with stone retaining walls, wrap around a
hill overlooking, on one side, the city of Portland with Mt.
Hood in the distance, and on the other side a canyon with hills
beyond. When he met the interviewer at his front door one
overcast January morning in 1966, his cordial greeting was
followed by a polite protest that an interview was probably
unnecessary because he had said it all in TIMBERLINES. His
New England sense of propriety was probably what caused him to
acquiesce to at least a first session designed to supplement
his previous memoirs.

Inside, the Persian rug, overstuffed furniture, and
landscape paintings warm the living room. Tables, a desk, and
bookshelves are enriched by family photographs and memorabilia.
Although it was January there were sprays of early-budding shrubs
in vases atop the grand piano, and potted flowers bloomed pro
fusely in the windows. A tall copper ewer brightened a corner
behind a large chair, and nearby a grandfather clock stood ready

viii

to clang out the change of hours. From the windows of the
dining room, Munger pointed out the next hill where sits the

city zoo and the museum complex which will eventually include

iNdurG-hru

the site of the new forest history museum, his long-time project.

With tape recorder plugged in, the interview began with
questions on his childhood, an area included in neither his
diary nor TIMBERLINES. His answers, as can be noted in this
transcript, are at first efficient, even cryptic — a reflection
of his doubt that anyone would be interested in that topic.
However, as the interviews progressed through the remaining
four sessions, Hunger's efforts became a serious attempt to
portray the growth of Northwest research activities in as real
istic a picture as possible. When events had faded from memory,
he resisted any urge to answer with educated guesses such
questions as those about his part in the Rexford Black hearing
for the Society of American Foresters.

Munger carried on the conversations in a well-pressed
business suit that included a vest adorned with a gold watch
and chain. The rocking chair in which he always sat rocked
gently, its squeaks lending a certain air of authenticity to
the tapes. Each day the interview was closed off at four o'clock
to allow him to visit his wife, who was very ill in a Portland
rest home.

The efficiency that has enabled Munger to lead a productive

ix

*

life in both the Station and in his civic responsibilities
appeared also in his judicious way of operating during the
interviews: he rarely indulged in the luxury of lost motion;
he resisted any topics that might prove to be repetitious of
previous efforts; he carried a clock-like sense of time in his
head.

In general, each session followed an outline to which he

*

agreed beforehand. One eye-witness story cropped up that had
not been mentioned in the notes on his diaries and was only
briefly included in TIMBERLINES: Gifford Pinchot's reaction
the evening President Taft fired him as the Chief of the Forest
Service. This was the climax of the Ballinger-Pinchot affair,
a turning point because it dramatically brought into question
Taft's image as a devoted follower of the Theodore Roosevelt
policies. This episode paved the way for the new breed of
Democrat, in the form of Woodrow Wilson, to take over the
Executive Branch two years later. Hunger, a young forester on
a brief detail to Washington, D.C. in early 1910, happened to
be a guest for a "family dinner" at the home of his brother-
in-law, Philip P. Wells, when the other guest, Gifford Pinchot,
arrived with Taft's terse message in his hand. Now, fifty-three
years later, Hunger has cautiously recorded all he could re
construct about that dramatic evening.

Five months after these sessions were completed, the

*See appendix II for sample of proposed outline for entire
interview.

interviewer had a chance to return to Portland, and Hunger
agreed to a final recording session on miscellaneous topics
that had not been touched before. Later when he received the
first draft of the transcript, rough-edited into chapters by
the interviewer, he gave it the careful attention of his de
tailed mind, filling in uncertain passages, adding sentences
here and there, and pointing out one or two accidental repeats

of subject matter that had crept in because the sixth session

*
had been held so long after the fifth. The pictures that are

in the primary copies of the final transcript are also the
results of his efforts.

This interview is part of an on-going series conducted by
The Regional Oral History Office, Berkeley, with people prominent
in natural resource conservation.

Amelia R. Fry

*See appendix II for sample of questions used in final
editing.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Thornton Hunger at his desk in 1924 Frontispiece

Driving to Diamond Lake from Brown's Cabin 41

over the "John Day Trail" in 1911, the
first wagon over it since the old miners'
trail had been made passable.

Three foresters, including Thornton Munger, 43

starting out from the West Boundary Ranger
Station, Cascade (now Willamette) National
Forest, 1910.

Thornton Munger putting in Permanent Plots 43

for growth study in a 54-year old Douglas
Fir stand, the first of the kind established
in the West. Umpqua (now Willamette) National
Forest, 1910.

Looking over an Intensive Reconnaissance 66

project June 3, 1914, Crater (now Winema)
National Forest.

Raphael Zon (right) and Thornton T. Munger 66

near the Wind River Experiment Station,
September 23, 1914.

A Munger family foursome in 1941. 79

Personnel of the Pacific Northwest Forest and 102

Range Experiment Station, including "emergency"

office employees, 1934. In front row beginning

at sixth from left, R. E. McArdle, Elton Loderwick,

Thornton Munger, H. J. Andrews, Axel Brandstrom,

Harold Shepard and Walter Meyers.

Thornton Munger (left) and Leo Isaac measuring a 112

giant Douglas Fir in the Coast Range of Oregon,
March, 1965.

Some photographs in primary copies only.

PART I

EDUCATION AND EARLY RESEARCH

CHILDHOOD

Fry: To begin with, when were you born?

Hunger: I was born in western Massachusetts on October 3, 1883.

Fry: Was this in a town?

Hunger: Yes, in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Fry: What did your father do?

Hunger: My father was a minister of the Congregational Church, and we

moved to New Haven when I was quite small and lived there until

I came west.

Fry: Then you were in New Haven before the turn of the century.
Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Do you remember very much about it?
Hunger: Quite a bit.

Fry: Where did you live in New Haven?
Hunger: I lived on Prospect Street, which is the same street on which

Yale forest school was later established, and where it still is.
Fry: It might be interesting to have a description of your house.

Do you remember that? Sometimes it's hard to remember the

interiors.
Hunger: I remember every detail of it. Hy father built the house in

1890, in a residential district which was, at that time,

fronting what was called the Hillhouse Woods, eighteen acres

in the heart of the residential district belonging to the

2 a

Hunger: Hillhouse estate. There I had an opportunity to roam over those
acres, collecting chestnuts and flowers and coasting downhill
as a boy. That has all been acquired by the college and has
largely been covered by college buildings since then. That
was quite a unique feature of my youth. I do laugh some
times when thinking that our house had six bedrooms on the
second floor and one bathroom, which was considered ample.
The maids occupied the third floor, with no bathroom except
in the basement for their use, a condition that seems very
strange now for what was considered quite a comfortable house.

Fry: It does seem a comfortable house. Was it a parsonage?

Hunger : No .

Fry: He built his own private house?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: How many maids were there?

Hunger: There were always two.

Fry: Did you have a cook?

Hunger: A cook and an upstairs girl, yes.

Fry: One of the two girls cooked, then.

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: You must have some interesting memories about these maids and
cooks. Could you give us an anecdote to give us a picture of
what relationship they had to the family?

Hunger: They were largely Irish girls, paid then just a pittance, and
they stayed years and years and years with us. I had contact
with relatively few, because each remained so long with us.

Hunger: They were exceedingly contented and happy, I think, on their
very small wage and very slight needs in comparison to modern
demands .

Fry: I guess they did what we call babysitting today, and house-
cleaning and washing. Were you much aware of their duties?

Hunger: I was past the babysitting stage then, of course. They did
everything except washing, because a washerwoman came in for
the washing one day a week.

Fry: Did your dad do a lot of writing, besides his sermons, I
mean?

Hunger: Yes. He was an indefatigable worker and accomplished a great
deal besides his pastoral duties, and he produced about half
a dozen books.

Fry: It would be good to have a bibliography, if you have one.

*

Hunger: Yes, I do.

Fry: These were largely on theology?

Hunger: No, on general literature. Some were volumes of sermons,

but some were on general literature, like The Life of Horace

Bushnel, which was one of them.
Fry: He sounds like a very literate man.
Hunger: Yes, he was. I have his biography here that after his death

was written by Benjamin Wlsner Bacon. [The book is entitled

Theodore Thornton Hunger, published by Yale Press.]
Fry: Was he active in the community at all?

*
See appendix IV

Hunger: Yes. Our church was a downtown church, as he used to speak of
it as a municipal church and wanted it to have a place in the
life of the community. He organized a Sunday evening service
that became tremendously popular by getting distinguished
lecturers there—not sermons but lectures on Sunday evening.
They became quite an institution. He surprised staid New
Haven by having a Catholic priest there at one time in the
Congregational Church and at another time a Jewish rabbi as
speakers, which was something a little progressive for New
Haven at that time. But now nothing would be thought of it.

Fry: In all, did he have pretty good community support, or was he
considered slightly dangerous?

Hunger: He had a very strong following and was one of the most

influential people on the Yale Corporation for many years.
He devoted a good deal of time to Yale University affairs.

Fry: He was not in any way employed by the University; he had no
connection with the chapel officially?

Hunger: No, he didn't.

Fry: Is there any particular issue or Yale University activity with
which he was associated?

Hunger: He served on the Yale Corporation, which is like a board of

overseers, for many years, and he gave a good deal of attention
to that.

Fry: Was his interest rather broad, then? Did it extend over the
whole institution, or did he have a specialized role to play?

Hunger: It was a broad interest. He did a little money raising for
the college. I remember on one occasion he went to New York
to see a classmate of his and came back and said, "Well, I got

Hunger: a gift that will build a new law school building." I think
the amount was about $150,000, which then built a very
respectable building which became the headquarters of the
Yale Law School. My father got the money to finance it on a
one-day trip to New York.

Fry: Was he equally successful in raising money for his church?

Munger: I don't remember that as an issue at all. I don't think he

took a part in that; that was up to the deacons and the officers
of the church.

Fry: I guess that you attended public schools in New Haven then.

Munger: Yes, until the third year in high school, when I went to

Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. From there I went
to Yale College, where I graduated in 1905.

Fry: Can you tell us anything about your school instruction that
might be interesting for historians to know?

Munger: Well, my interest was toward out-of-door things and science,
but the prescribed curriculum at that time didn't allow for
very much of that until the late years in college. I kept
lists of flowers that I found and that sort of thing.

Fry: Did you go hiking much?

Munger: Yes, a great deal, and bicycling.

Fry: What other activities did you use to satisfy this interest in
the out-of-doors?

Munger: At that time, as I said, New Haven was quite close to woodsy

areas, and in college days my classmates and I did a good deal

Hunger: of hiking and snowshoeing in the park land and wild woods

of the environs of New Haven.
Fry: Were you the sort of boy who always brought home various

samples of wildlife from these hikes?
Hunger: Yes, I collected everything, as boys do.

Fry: Were you encouraged in this by your father or your mother?
Hunger: Yes, particularly by my mother, ( actually my stepmother, for
my mother died on my third birthday ) who had a great interest
in flowers and out-of-door things.

Fry: Did you plant a garden or anything like that at home?
Hunger: In a small way, yes.

Fry: Nothing that would be significant in your growing up?
Hunger: No.

Fry: Well, what other interests and hobbies did you have as a boy?
Hunger: I think that that really sums it up--a general interest in
the out-of-doors, flowers and animals, pets of all kinds,
which I had.

Fry: Did you have any unusual pets?
Hunger: No, I don't think so, nothing other than what the ordinary

boy that loves the country picks up and collects.
Fry: Snakes, lizards, frogs, and so forth?

Hunger: Yes. We always had about two months in New Hampshire in the
summer, and that was where I had the pleasantest outdoor days
of my youth, in the lake country of New Hampshire every summer.
Fry: Did you have a cabin up there?
Hunger: No, we just stayed in farmhouses, as was done in those days,

Hunger: for seven dollars a week.

Fry: And the farmers put you up?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: At this time, were you around any of the small tree lots that

some of the farmers kept for timber cutting?

Hunger: Yes, but they had no thought of practicing forestry on them.
It was in those days that I got quite familiar with Eastern
hardwood forests in that way.

Fry: Being a minister's son, were you interested in philosophy?
Hunger: I wouldn't say so, no.
Fry: Did you have much of this in your home, such as discussions

of theology?

Hunger: We had many distinguished men as guests in our house. In
those days it was the custom to entertain the visiting
lecturers and preachers at the college chapel, so around our
table I heard a great deal of stimulating talk that probably
I didn't appreciate at the time.

Fry: Did this give you any particular outlook on social issues?
Hunger: No, I don't believe so, other than the fact that my father was

very progressive in his thinking for those times, which probably
helped broaden my outlook on social action matters.
Fry: Would he have been a single taxer?
Hunger: No.

Fry: I'm not quite sure what you mean by progressive.
Hunger: Well, it's totally different from what we think of as being
progressive now. As a theologian, he was exceeding liberal,

Hunger: and in his attitudes towards social reforms he was a forward
thinker.

Fry: Do you remember any specific issue, such as labor and its
attempts to get organized around that time?

Munger: I remember one of my older sisters mentioning that one of his

parishioners came to my father and complained about parcel post,
saying that that was a move towards socialism and they ought
to do something about stopping it. That perhaps is just a
little indication of the attitude of the times.

Fry: So progressivism then was quite different from what it would
be today. This is really one of the difficulties in under
standing this in terms of the times in which it happened.

VISITORS AND CORRESPONDENCE

Fry: Who were some of the visitors to your house?

Hunger: [Perusing old letters] Mother kept some letters that she

thought were interesting, most of them in regard to being at

our house. That bunch came to me.
Fry: It might be a good idea to identify some of these people who

corresponded with your parents and who were visitors in your

home.

Hunger: Here are two from Lyman Abott. He was editor of The Outlook.
Fry: He visited your house frequently while you were a boy living

at home?
Hunger: Not frequently, but now and then. I don't know if some of

these people were at the house or not.

Mrs. Ballington Booth Clibbon, Salvation Army, was a

speaker in the church. She signs her name here Catherine

Booth Clibbon. That was the split, you know, in the Salvation

Army. Would people know who Emory Bradford was?
Fry: Some would. Do you remember much about him?
Hunger: Somewhat, yes, but some of this was while I was in college,

and I wasn't eating at home all the time.

10

Fry: I would like you to talk about those whom you had contact
with.

Hunger: Here's one from John Graham Brooks; he was a well known
person. Samuel Capin was the head of Smith College, I
believe. There are some letters here from John Greenleaf
Whittier, but he never visited at our house. I never saw him,
but he and my father exchanged letters. My father went to his
house. Here is Samuel Crothers, quite a well known author.

Fry: Did you meet Crothers?

Hunger: Yes, I remember him.

Fry: How did you meet him?

Hunger: Just as a youngster would, at the table. I suppose I heard
him when he preached at the church.

Here's somebody—the president of Williams College, but
I can't read the signature. And George W. Cable, editor of
the Century.

Fry: Do you remember anything about him?

Hunger: No, I can't say I do. Some of these--! don't know who they
are, and I don't believe your readers would be interested.
Here's a letter from President Eliot of Harvard, but I don't
think he came to our house. I had seen him and met him.

Fry: Most of these were men whom your family entertained because
they came to New Haven to give speeches at "the chapel, is
that right?

Hunger: Yes, or at my father's Sunday evening services. But some of

11

Munger: these letters aren't in regard to the house guests. Isn't

it remarkable how these busy people wrote longhand letters?
Fry: Yes, it is.
Munger: No secretaries. I think they worked harder at it than they

do nowadays when the men get their secretaries to do all the

work.

Fry: You mean you think they really sent out more letters?
Munger: Well, they made more effort themselves than they do now when

they just tell a secretary to go and answer this and tell them

I can't come or I will come.
Fry: Yes, I can see they are more a reflection of their true

personalities.
Munger: Then they wrote nice longhand letters, friendly letters. It

established a kind of relationship. There are a lot from

Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century magazine. This

particular letter is, I think, probably one of his earlier ones

when I was still pretty small.
Fry: I hope we can file some of these letters along with this

interview. You have quite a collection of them.
Munger: These are partly in regard to some articles that my father

was writing for the magazine. Daniel Oilman, head of John

Hopkins .

Fry: Do you remember anything about Oilman?
Munger : No .
Fry: He's a pretty important Western figure too, I think, as first

12

Fry; president of the University of California.

Hunger: Here are several from Edward Everett Hale, who wrote "A Man

Without a Country." I don't think he came to our house. The
three or four letters are mostly about a statue of Nathan Hale
being made for the Yale campus. Cuthbert Hall--I don't think he
came to the house.

Fry: We have quite a list here. Do you remember any of these men in
particular?

Hunger: I have only my recollections of them as a small boy. You know
that teenagers don't take much interest in what old theologians
are talking about.

Fry: You just have a vague memory of this period then?

Hunger: Yes. I do remember that George A. Gordon was a marvelous story
teller, and he used to have the table in gales of laughter, ex
changing more or less ministerial jokes. He was quite a frequent
visitor and admirer of my father.

Fry: Could you identify George A. Gordon for me?

Hunger: He was the pastor for a long time of the Old South Church in
Boston. He was a Scotchman and came to this country as a
stonemason. That is the most swanky church in Boston. He was a
big, burly, genial Scotchman with a good deal of a brogue, but
he certainly had Boston at his knees.

Have you ever heard of Sheldon Jackson?

Fry: I'm afraid not. Who was he?

Hunger: He was in charge of Alaska education and was general agent. He's

13

Hunger: the one that introduced the reindeer to Alaska as a food

supply for the Indians, and it was considered quite a stunt.
He went to Finland and got the European reindeer, which is
different from caribou, and brought them to Alaska.

Fry: This is right up the alley of your interests. Did you get to
talk with him?

Hunger: Well, not at that time. This was in 1903. I was in college,
but I do remember that he was quite short, and he said that
it was a great convenience because when he was travelling in
stagecoaches he could lie down the length of the seat.
[Laughter] That little incident stuck in my mind as a joke
on himself.

Here's William James, of January 11, 1899. It says, "I'm
obliged to say 'no,' for I have found it necessary on grounds
of health to forswear all lecturing outside of the college
classrooms, and this resolve is likely to be permanent, to my
great regret. But for this, I might gladly accept your
flattering invitation." You know he was the brother of the
novelist.

Fry: The main thing I wanted to get down here was a picture of the
very enriched environment in which you lived.

Hunger: Well, I don't think that these had a great effect on my interests.

I gave you the name of Hamilton Habie, didn't I? He was
editor of the Christian Union. These letters were in the late
1880 's and '90's. He was quite a well known writer and editor.
I don't know what to do with these letters. I don't know if

14

Munger: autograph collectors care for this kind of stuff.
Fry: Well, I think some of those ought to go into archives,

because they are from people who probably have correspondence

placed in archives already.
Munger: Archives where?

Fry: It could be either at California or on the east coast at Yale.
Munger: Yale grabs on to everything, of course. They've got lots of

room there.
Fry: I'm sure they would be very interested in those if you're

ready to give them up, or see that they get deposited in a

safe place.
Munger: Some of them are rather interesting—the ones that discuss

their reading, and so on.
Fry: I think that all those would fit into collections at Yale

and the local literary and theological scene there at the

turn of the century.
Munger: Yes. Maybe in culling them over they might find some that are

worth preserving. My children I don't think are particularly

interested in them, and they don't know who any of these people

are. They are entirely detached from that environment.
Fry: People working in that field would find these letters very

valuable, and they should be made accessible to them and also

properly catalogued and kept in a safe place.

Do you have anything you would like to add to this picture

of social life in your family, these people who came and went

15

Fry: and how it affected you?

Hunger: Booker T. Washington was one that occurs to me that was

significant.

Fry: Did you get to talk to him? How did he impress you?
Hunger: Yes. Well, as a very brilliant man, a gentleman that was at

home and at ease in any group, any group, any company. Of

course I knew little about him at the time, because that was

before I had read his Up From Slavery and he had become more

of a national character.

Fry: Did he stay overnight at your house?
Hunger: Yes.
Fry: Why was this?
Hunger: He had lectured in New Haven.
Fry: I just wondered if he had trouble getting hotel accomodations,

since he was a negro.
Hunger: Well, I think my father anticipated that by inviting him to the

house, yes; but he probably would have had trouble--at the

leading hotel, anyway.
Fry: What about your mother and sisters and brothers? What were

they like?
Hunger: Hy mother was so interested in encouraging my interests in

out-of-door things that I think it was quite a stimulus to me.
Fry: Was she the typical busy minister's wife?
Hunger: Yes, I think so. She did a great deal of his pastoral work

with him.
Fry: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

16

Hunger: I had three sisters, no brothers, all older.

Fry: That sounds like a pretty lethal situation. [Laughter]

Hunger: Yep.

Fry: All those big sisters bossing you around. What kind of

interests did they have which you remember, I mean something

that would be relevant to your own life. Do you remember

participating in anything with them?
Hunger: No. They were considerably older, so that I didn't join in

the things that they were doing particularly.
Fry: There was quite an age gap, you mean.

•'

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: What sort of periodicals do you remember seeing and reading in

your home?
Hunger: There was one that made quite an impression on me, "Dumb

Animals," I think. It was in regard to protecting animals.

Otherwise, we had the usual line of magazines that were prevalent

in those days, mostly non-illustrated, as they were in those days.
Fry: Did you like to read?
Hunger: Not particularly, no.

Fry: But you did have quite a flow of material coming in?
Hunger: Yes.
Fry: And I guess you had a library in your home available to you,

didn't you?
Hunger: Yes. Sets of all the classics. The remants of it are still

here.
Fry: Do you remember browsing in any particular books before you

17

Fry: went to college?

Hunger: I mentioned that I enjoyed Shakespeare, and I enjoyed the

out-of-door poetry, like Wordsworth and Emerson, especially
through the influence of my mother, who could quote it by the
yard.

18

YALE COLLEGE

Fry: You went through your last two years of high school at the

Hotchkiss School and entered Yale College. Did you know when
you entered Yale that you were going to be a forester?

Munger: No, but I early took an interest in it because of the prox
imity of the recently established forest school. Pinchot
was quite in the limelight then as a pioneer in the forestry
movement, and I thought that was something that I would like.
So all my summer vacations while I was in Yale College were

I

spent more or less in forestry activities. In 1902 I went
to the short summer course in forestry at Milford, and the
next year I worked in the Maine woods on a party studying the
growth of white birch. The next year I was manager of the
Yale forest school summer camp, so that gave me quite an intro
duction to the subject of forestry.

Fry: You were "manager" of the summer camp?

Munger: For lack of a better term, that is what I called it. It was
sort of a roustabout too. I would do the buying and see that
the cooks did their work.

Fry: I see. This study of growth of white birch in the Maine woods-
how did you go about studying that? What methods were used then?

Munger: That was what was called stem analysis. We cut down sample trees
and then counted their rings, which is quite difficult to do,

19

Hunger: because white birch rings are very obscure. In that way, we
determined the rate of growth of individual trees and stands.

Fry: Did you use any special statistical methods?

Munger: I had nothing to do with working up the data. All I did was
chop down the trees and count the rings, and others did the
work in Washington later on. That was a summer that I have
long remembered, traveling entirely by canoe and having as
our woodsman a French Canadian who used to argue about whether
the world was flat or round. He scoffed at the idea that it
was round.

Fry: What did he do as woodsman?

Munger: He was camp-tender and chopper.

Fry: What did you do at the summer camp at Milford?

Munger: The first summer Yale conducted a short course (and I think

that year, 1902, was the first year of it) to acquaint people
with what forestry was all about. We studied dendrology and
the rudiments Of forestry and forest mensuration. It was a
short course to acquaint people with forestry to see whether
they were interested in going on with it or not, and I found
out there that I was.

Fry: Did they bring in professors to give lectures?

Munger: Yes. All foresters were young then, but they had a group of
young men, most of whom became distinguished leaders in
forestry later.

Fry: Who were some of them?

Munger: Walter Mulford, who later became dean of the Univesity of

20

Hunger: California, James Tourney, who was a full-time professor and at
one time dean of the Yale forest school, and others whose names
I've forgotten.

Fry: Did Pinchot drop in?

Hunger: This was on the Pinchot estate, and he visited the camp at

times. In that way we got the personal contact and inspiration
from his magnetic character and his enthusiasm for forestry.

Fry: Did this impress you and the rest of the boys at the time?

Hunger: Yes, his magnetism was what attracted many people in those
days to the profession.

Fry: Of the people on the staff, who impressed you most?

Hunger: It's hard to say. It was between Hulford and Tourney; they were
both, to us youngsters, very stimulating teachers. There were
ideal out-of-door conditions, living and eating together in
camp.

Fry: Did you do any work in the woods?

Hunger: Oh yes. Well, not work, but a great deal of the curriculum
was in the woods of the Pinchot estate.

Fry: There was no research that you helped out at Hilford?

Hunger: No.

Fry: What was your curriculum like at Yale College?

Hunger: At Yale in the freshman year you had no choicej Latin, Greek,
mathematics, English, and a language were required. The sopho
more year you had a choice of five subjects out of ten. By
senior year there was considerable latitude in the choice of
subjects. I chose a good deal of science then- -geology,

21

Hunger: minerology, forest physiography, and botany.

Fry: Did you have any great loves in these other areas, such as
languages, math, or English?

Munger: I had a very great dislike of Greek, which I had to repeat one
term of in my sophomore year. I had no great capacity for
mathematics, so that was kind of hard work. But I enjoyed
English and took a good deal of English, which stood me in good
stead since then.

Fry: Was this writing or the study of literature?

Munger: Both composition and the literature. That was my minor during
senior year.

Fry: Did you have any f&ven+e. authors or poets at that time?

Munger: Well, that's a pretty hard question. I read all the plays of
Shakespeare, partly for my own pleasure rather than in course
work; also most of George Eliot, J.F. Cooper, Scott, Thackery,
Hawthorne, etc. I think I read everything that John Burroughs
wrote.

Fry: What about history?

Munger: I had the usual modicum of history, from classical to modern,
but most of that I took in prep school.

Fry: In your life as a student at Yale College, did you live on the
campus in a dormitory, or did you stay at home?

Munger: I lived in a dormitory most of the time but took some of my
meals at home, which was within walking distance.

Fry: We've gone over the curriculum; what were some of the extra
curricular activities that you were interested in besides the

22

Fry: summers in forestry?

Hunger: Nothing was outstanding. I wasn't an athlete particularly. I

sang in the chorus for the bicentennial celebration and partici
pated in small group activities like Snowshoe Club.

Fry: Was that a hiking and camping group?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: What about student political life? Was that very evident when
you were there on campus?

Hunger: No, it wasn't active in my day.

Fry: What did you boys do for recreation?

Hunger: In those days, relatively few were actively engaged in sports.
It was a situation that has been overcome now. Hundreds of us
used to walk out to the athletic field to watch the others play,
and it was about a three mile walk out there and back. There
was quite a proportion of the college community that walked
out to the Yale playing fields to watch the others practice or
play games.

Fry: This wasn't football, was it?

Hunger: Both football and baseball.

Fry: What about student ale houses? Were any of these around Yale
at that time?

Hunger: Oh yes, and they were patronized by some, over-patronized by a
few, but they didn't form a very important part of my life.

Fry: Was there very much contact with your professors outside of class?

Hunger: No, I think very little. That is a situation that is now much

23

Munger: better at Yale. Some of the classes were very large for those
days--just lecture courses where the professor didn't know the
names of the students. They were inspiring teachers, but there
was no very direct contact outside the classroom.

Fry: Did you have any favorite professors in your undergraduate days
whom you would want to comment on?

Munger: Well, Herbert Gregory in geology was a very inspiring teacher;
Kryder in physics was another. Professor Sumner was the inter
nationally known economist whose lectures were very significant.

Fry: Have you ever been able to trace anything in your career back
to some special class or course that you had at Yale that was
quite significant for your later career?

Munger: No, I wouldn't say so, except for the course in forest physiography,
which I was able to take in my senior year and which was given
by Isaiah Bowman, who had just written a book on the subject,
which we used as a textbook. That has been a very useful
source of knowledge for me since then.

Fry: When did you get your Bachelor of Arts degree?

Munger: 1905.

Fry: Did you go right to Europe after that?

Munger: When I graduated in 1905, I had an opportunity to travel. I

wanted to go directly to the forest school, but Dean Graves of
the forest school recommended that if I had a chance for travel
in Europe, particularly studying European forestry, to take it
then rather than later. So I went to Europe then for about
nine months, three of which I spent in observing and studying

24

Hunger: forestry in Germany and a little in Switzerland and Austria.
That was a rich experience, and I've never regretted that I
lost a year from my career in that way. Dean Graves gave me
a sheaf of letters of introduction to German foresters that I
used with good success in seeing significant forests, parti
cularly where there were English-speaking foresters. Although
I had had four years of German in college, I had no speaking
knowledge of it when I got to Germany, but I learned awfully
fast then.

Fry: How did this trip materialize for you? Did you go with your
family?

Hunger: No, I went with a bunch of classmates, and we bicycled in
England for awhile and then walked in Switzerland. Then,
after they had gone back home , I went to southern Germany and
was by myself for three months, visiting different forests. I
was six weeks in one forest, where I took German lessons from
the Frau Oberforster and forestry lessons from the Oberforster.

Fry: What was it that you really got out of this and took away with
you?

Hunger: Well, I saw many of the typical methods of forest management

in southwestern Europe. I had enough background in forestry so
that I could comprehend what they were doing then, and it has
stood me in very good stead since then- -understand ing the
European methods of selection cutting and clear cutting, in
spite of the wholly different economic bases that they had
there from what we've had in this country.

25

Munger: The cheap labor and the high values were so different
from conditions in this country, and that was what made
European forestry so difficult to introduce in this country.
It didn't fit our economic limitations. But now in this
country we have developed our own systems of forest manage
ment and silviculture.

Fry: What can you tell us that would indicate some of their forestry
practices which you observed?

Munger: The German foresters then were, as I presume they are now,
highly educated, technical men who are both good silvi-
culturalists and good managers, because they have to manage in
a business way the forests in their charge. In southern
Germany, nearly all the forests were communal forests, that is,
they belonged to a village. And some oberforsters had several
of these communal forests to manage.

Fry: They were hired by the village, then, to manage these?

Munger: Yes, I think so, although there was some connection with the
province --Baden or Bavaria as the case might be.

Fry: Where was the one you spent six weeks in?

Munger: That was in Saltzberg, in Baden, which is on the edge of the
Rhine Valley and the edge of the very large Schwartzwald , or
Black Forest.

Fry: This intensive management, then, was an experience which really
stood you in good stead later on when you were working?

Munger: Yes. It was something so far beyond what was being done in

this country by our wasteful methods that it was an inspiration

26

Hunger: to see how the systems of Germany had worked out.

27

YALE SCHOOL OF FORESTRY

Fry: So when you came back and started at the Yale School of
Forestry, you really had a pretty good educational head
start.

Hunger: I had a little head start that helped me out.

Fry: Were there some Germany-forestry-oriented professors at that
time on the Yale school of forestry faculty?

Hunger: Yes. Dean Graves had got his forest education mostly in

France, as had Gifford Pinchot, because there was no forest
school in this country at that time. Graves was thoroughly
conversant with European forestry.

Fry: Did you have Graves in any courses?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: How was he as a professor?

in3p"~/l3
Hunger: He was a very live wire, dynamic, and I would say, inopring.

Everybody at the forest school worked hard, and they all en
joyed their work and all enjoyed their professors. There was
quite a different attitude from what there had been in under
graduate days.

Fry: You mean in undergraduate days it was a little bit less serious?

Hunger: Well, yes. Perhaps in my case some of the courses were taken
because I had to take them. It was partly that the youth of
the undergraduate made his attitude different from the post
graduate student.

Fry: You really felt that other students were just as serious as you

28

.Fry: were about forestry?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: I'd like to know more about your reactions to other faculty
members in the school of forestry there. You must have met
men there with whom you had contact a great deal later on in
your life.

Hunger: Yes. The faculty was all quite young except for Professor
James Tourney, who taught dendrology. But the others--H. H.
Chapman and Ralph Hawley--were graduates of the forest school
just three or four years ahead of me, and they were young and
vigorous and very capable and have since then earned the repu
tation of being very competent, outstanding professors.

Fry: What about fellow students? Who was in your class who has
become outstanding or with whom you have kept in contact?

Hunger: Well, we had quite a cosmopolitan group that had come from all
over the country, all of whom went there because they were
thoroughly interested in the subject and took their work seri
ously. Hany of them in that class have become quite out
standing in their profession. Notable among them is H. R.
HacMillan, who later became Chief Forester of British Columbia
and then had a serious breakdown with tuberculosis but bounded
back from that. After he recovered from tuberculosis, he
formed the H. R. Macmillan Export, Shipping, and Lumber
Companies and became the largest and most successful lumber
man in British Columbia. He was the youngest member of the
class and also, 1 think, valedictorian.

29

Fry: Are there any others whom you remember especially as out
standing?
Hunger: Several went into teaching, including Nelson C. Brown, who

became the author of many textbooks on forestry. Do you want

a recital of the other classmates?
Fry: Just the ones with whom you had a lot to do, perhaps your

special friends".
Hunger: Julian Rothery was one of the most picturesque characters, a

great raconteur, and he became a forester for the Great Northern

Paper Company.
Fry: Right away?
Hunger: After a few years of consulting forestry, which followed a few

years in the Forest Service.
Fry: I guess that most of you were being trained to enter the Forest

Service, is that correct?
Hunger: At that time, there was practically no other employment except

the Forest Service and a few forest schools that were starting

up, so that most of our class took the civil service examination

for Forest Assistant with the expectation of going into the

Forest Service in spite of the fact that the salary was not

tempting.
Fry: In such a new field, do you remember any unusual uses of

materials which were more or less in lieu of textbooks that

had not yet been written?
Hunger: Well, we used a good deal of the German literature that had

been translated, such as Schlich's five volume Manual of Forestry,

30

Hunger: and certain textbooks that had just been written. Then, of
course, in matters of surveying and mensuration and so on,
there were existing texts.

Fry: What do you think now of some of the subject matter that you
had then, particularly the technical?

Munger: I think that it was rather remarkable that we got such a good
course when the profession was so new and the professors were
so new and there was a dearth of texts and experience to go
by. I think the Yale school did a remarkable job of preparing
us for a really professional career. It wasn't the idea of a
vocational career. Some of the forest schools that started
about that time had a course in cooking and a course in packing
pack-horses, but Yale never went in for that sort of thing.
It was held on a strictly post-graduate, technical basis.

Fry: And it was kept as broad as possible, I guess?

Munger: Yes. It was set up for a national basis, not provincial as

some of the schools that have since become quite provincial in
their teaching.

Fry: Didn't you go down to the South some time while you were in
forest school?

Munger: The last term of the forest school was always held in the South,
on the property of some large timber holder. We had our own
camp and cook, and we then did field work out from the camp
and learned practical experience in cruising and evaluating
timber and studying some mill practices. In fact, we made

31

Hunger: production studies in the sawmills. That has been continued
ever since. Our class studied and camped in central Alabama
for about ten weeks, and I was convinced at that time that I
was not suited for living in the South.

Fry: Why?

Hunger: The heat and the discomforst of the insects, and the nature
of the people was so different from the New Englanders I was
used to.

Fry: What was it that seemed most different to you in the people
of the South, a general lack of education?

Hunger: At that time, the standards of living and food and general

education was so low, at least in the rural South, which was
all that I saw, that it was quite astonishing to a northerner.

Fry: Do you remember what lumber company this was on whose grounds
you were carrying on your studies?

Hunger: It was fteei Lumber Company in Coosa County, Alabama.

Fry: That sounds like a good Alabama name.

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Was this your first experience at doing the production studies

in the sawmills?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Did you think that this was helpful to you?

Hunger: Yes, although I didn't follow up particularly on the manu
facturing end of forestry, it helped us learn our way around
sawmills.
Fry: Then after this was over, you went back to Yale and received

32

Fry: your diploma, is that right?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Did you have to write a paper for your degree?

Hunger: No, I don't think so. We did that as we went along. But

no final exams --no.
Fry: At Yale did you find any specialized interests within the

general field of forestry?
Hunger: No, I hadn't really narrowed it down to any particular field.

33

DIVISION OF SILVICS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Fry: Maybe we can move on to what you did when you first got out.
Did you take the civil service examination too?

Hunger: While we were in the South, the Yale forest school crew was

given a special civil service examination. That was two days
of seven hours each. I remember that I wrote just as fast as
I could for seven hours each day, and subsequently I felt
sorry for the person that had to read all of that to grade the
papers. But that was a thoroughgoing test of what you really
knew. I got through the examination, as most of our class did,
which assured us of appointments as Forest Assistants at one
thousand dollars a year.

Fry: Did you have to buy your own uniforms?

Munger: No. They didn't have any uniforms in those days. That came
later.

Fry: Did you hear right away about the results of the exam, and
were you assigned a post right away?

Munger: Quite soon, yes, so that I got an appointment to go to

Washington July first, 1908. I reported there expecting to be
sent west to engage in what to us seemed the rather romantic
life of boundary examination or administering these frontier
forests. But instead, Raphael Zon wanted me to go into research.
He was in charge of the Division of Silvics, which is research.

Hunger: In fact he ordered me to, but said if I did't like it I could
get out and transfer to administration. So I started out in
Washington working under an electric fan on a variety of office
jobs for nearly two months. Then a request came from the West
for somebody to study the encroachment of lodgepole pine on
ponderosa pine. Well, I had never seen either species in the
forest, so it seemed rather presumptuous to assign a forester
who had hardly graduated from forest school to study this
complicated subject, which nowadays would be assigned only to
somebody with a couple of Ph.D. 's. But I went west for this
three -month study and have been in the West ever since.

Fry: I'd like to ask you what was going on in Zon's office for

those two months while you were there. Do you remember much
about that?

Hunger: Yes. As I look back upon it, it rather amuses me. I was

asked to write some instructions on phenological observations,
and I didn't know what phenological observations were until I
looked it up. Then I was asked to revise a silvical leaflet
on two or three different species. There was a big file of
miscellaneous material, and they were condensing it into
silvical leaflets on the various species of the country. I
did two or three of those purely as an editorial or a com
pilation job. Then I was supposed to make a study of ash in
the southern states, and I did some preliminary work on that.
And then came this call for somebody to come to Oregon to make

35

Hunger: that study of the encroachment of lodgepole pine on ponderosa
pine.

Fry: Did you volunteer for this, or were you just assigned it?

Hunger: I was just assigned to it.

Fry: What did you think of Raphael Zon?

Hunger: Well, he was a very brilliant and highly intellectual, well-
educated man, and a very pleasant person to work with. I
saw a good deal of him in later years. He has been one of
the outstanding names in the forestry profession.

Fry: He certainly has. Did he pretty much delegate everything to
you and let you carry the ball?

Hunger: I would think that was his general tactic—not dictating the
details of how you did anything but turning you loose on a
project and expecting you to deliver the results. His right-
hand man was Samuel Dana.

Fry: Were you there when Dana was there?

Hunger: Yes. He was Zon's right-hand man at the time and did a good
deal of the field inspection work on the silvical studies.

Fry: Did you do any work for or with Dana when you were there?

Hunger: Not that first summer but on many occasions since then, yes.

Fry: Dana seems to have been quite close to Zon through all this.
Is this the way it seemed to you?

Hunger: Yes. Dana was Zon's understudy in those days.

Fry: Did they get along quite well?

Hunger: Yes, I think perfectly. Dana was in the Haine woods when I

36

Hunger: was there in 1903, also on this study of white birch and

poplar, and he wrote it up afterward. But I was in another
crew, so I was not in the woods with him except for a very few
days in 1903. However our acquaintanceship goes back to that
time.

Fry: You and Dana both have a lot in common in your love for writing.

Hunger: Yes. He's very distinguished in his enormous production on all
sorts of subjects, and he's still at it.

Fry: Zon must have had a way of choosing people who could not only
do research in forestry but who could handle the English lan
guage .

Hunger: I think he partly did that, and partly they were picking re
search material from those near the top of the civil service
list.

Fry: So this assignment was really kind of a plum, wasn't it?

Hunger: Yes, depending on how you looked at it. Some people looked
down on research in those days and would have considered it
a lemon.

Fry: Was this point of view widely held among your classmates?

Hunger: Yes, I would say so; in general the more romantic administrative
frontier work appealed to them more than what they considered
the ring-counting work of a researcher.

Fry: And you really preferred at that time to go to Oregon and run
your boundary lines?

Hunger: Yes. I supposed that would be my assignment.

37

Fry: So you finally did get to Oregon. By the way, how did you
travel to Oregon?

Hunger: Train, the only way to come in those days, to Portland, and

then by horse stage all night to Prineville, and then seventy
miles more to Bend and Rosland.

Fry: So you started out then on the problem of encroachment of
lodgepole pine on ponderosa pine. Can you tell me how you
educated yourself sufficiently to proceed with this?

Hunger: Well, the forest school education had trained me in obser
vation, so that I just kept my eyes open and used some of the
techniques of making counts of seedlings and of trees under
various conditions. I rode hundreds of miles horseback in
central Oregon in this territory, where there is a competition
between ponderosa pine, which used to be called western yellow
pine, and lodgepole pine. I wrote a lengthy report at the
conclusion of it, which I think is still sound, but others
have other theories as to what is happening in this conflict
between the two species.

Fry: What techniques did you use for this study? Could you explain
them a little bit more? In other words, how did they differ
from the way it might be d-one ' tx>day , which would be very com
plex?

Hunger: Well, in an empirical way I studied the composition of the

forest, which had both lodgepole pine and ponderosa, by obser
vational methods and some counts. I found many places where

38

Hunger: there had been a ponderosa pine forest which had been killed
by repeated fires and had been replaced by lodgepole pine.
In other places where the lodgepole pine seedlings and the
ponderosa pine seedlings were in competition, the lodgepole
pine were getting the best of it. There was what I called a
tension zone, which was suitable for both species, and there
the lodgepole pine seemed to be gaining ground, I thought as a
result of repeated fires which are disastrous to the ponderosa
pine but not to the lodgepole, because it is such a prolific
reproducer after fires. There was also a zone that was confined
wholly to lodgepole pine, but there was the tension zone in
between where the two species were in competition. .And that
worried W. H. B. Kent, a western forest inspector, who had his
eyes open for problems that were going on, and who had suggested
that this study be made.

Fry: In your recommendations, what was this controversial recom
mendation that you mentioned? You said that there is still
some debate on the question today.

Munger: Since then there has been some study made in the same territory,
and they thought that the problem was one of soil temperature,
whereas I thought the condition was due to the presence of
frequent forest fires.

Fry: Were you able to complete the study in just the few months
that you were on it, or did you carry this on?

Munger: No. I wrote the report when I came back to Portland after

39

Hunger: three months in central Oregon. The subject was dropped then.

40

DIVISION OF SILVICS, PORTLAND, OREGON

Fry: From there, where did you go? Was it Portland, or did you
go back to Washington first?

Hunger: Well, I expected to return to Washington after this assignment,
but late in the fall I got word to report to Portland, December
first, 1908, because Gifford Pinchot was reorganizing the
Forest Service into six western districts with headquarters
at various western cities, each of which was to be a little
miniature Washington office. I was designated to go to the
Portland office, which covered the territory of Washington,
Oregon, and Alaska at that time.

Fry: Was this in research?

Munger: Yes. The set-up provided for a Section of Silvics, as it was
called, which was really research. I have since thought how
wise it was that, in spite of the tremendous job the Forest
Service had in getting these national forests under adminis
tration and adjusting the boundaries and building up a personnel
and putting in the developments (the ranger stations and trails),
they still allowed for space for research, small though it was.
So I was in charge of the one-man Section of Silvics in the
Regional Office, which was then called the District Office,
in Portland.

Fry: Do you think that this policy of continuing a certain amount

41

Fry: of research was the result of Zon's influence, or was this
mainly a Pinchot idea?

Hunger: Of course the old Bureau of Forestry was really entirely an
investigative or research organization. Not until 1905 did
it take over the administration of the national forests. So
the Forest Service inherited the concept of research and con
tinued it on in the new Forest Service even after it had the
national forests to administer, which became its major en
deavor after 1905. That spirit of giving a place for re
search has persisted ever since with an increasing volume and
better acceptance.

Fry: You went in under Fred Ames, didn't you?

Hunger: Yes. Fred Ames was the chief of the Office of Silviculture

and this was a section under Fred Ames, who graduated from the
Yale forest school two years ahead of me, so he was quite an
old man in the profession then.

Fry: Tell me how you first settled down in Portland. Where did
you live?

Hunger: Half a dozen of us went together in what you would call a

boarding house and lived there on our meager salaries. Shortly
after that we rented a house in a good residential neighborhood
and employed a cook and maintained a bachelors' hall there for
a number of years, until, one by one, we got married and broke
up the group. That was headquarters for visiting foresters
and for the Society of Foresters' meetings for many years.

42

Fry: What did you think about the people in the West as contrasted
to those in New England?

Munger: Well, I enjoyed the western frontiersmen as I contacted them
and got to know them well. They were, at heart, very unsym
pathetic with the Forest Service, most of them, and very
critical of the Pinchot policies, as they called them, because
they'd tread on the toes of many of them—stopping their land-
grabbing and charging for grazing and doing away with the Land
Office graft. But personally they were very fine to get along
with. I was very fortunate when I went into this central Oregon
country that I could ride horseback, because if you didn't know
how to handle a horse, you didn't get any respect from the
westerners in those days. I was able to hold up my end of it
in that and was fortunate because I had ridden from boyhood.

Fry: But there were some foresters who couldn't ride?

Munger: A great many of these eastern forest school boys came out and
didn't know which end of a horse to get onto.

Fry: It's interesting that as violently as the Forest Service

policies were opposed, that in your personal relationships
you had a rather warm spirit between you and the frontiersmen.

Munger: That was my experience. I don't think it was universally so,
because some of the forest supervisors had a pretty tough time
with the people that they were trying to put off who were
trespassing, and with those charged for uses that they didn't
want to pay for. But by and large, we greenhorn foresters

43

Hunger: from the eastern forest schools got accepted quite quickly.

Growth Studies: Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine

Fry: What were some of your first duties as head of the Section
of Silvics?

Hunger: Well, I was sort of a roustabout there. When inquiries would
come in from the public wanting to know about this or that,
asking technical questions, I'd handle them. There were re
ports of diseases or insect pests, and I, although not a
pathologist or an entymologist , ran them down and reported on
them in several cases. In the first year, I thought the most
important thing we could do was to make a study of the growth
of Douglas fir, because that was the key to forest management
in this region. So I started in 1909 a study of the growth
and management of Douglas fir, and that was my principal
activity that year and again in 1911, when the study was com
pleted .

Fry: These were growth and yield studies, weren't they?

Hunger: Yes. That first one was called The Growth and Hanagement of

*
Douglas Fir. It opened the eyes of foresters to the great

potentialities of the Douglas fir forest as being profitable

Forest Circular 175, published in 1911.

44

Hunger: for management, but it didn't open the eyes of the lumbermen
very much until a number of years later, when they began to
realize the potentialities of growing Douglas fir as a crop.

Fry: How did you go about organizing your team, if you had a team,

and preparing your growth tables? Did you use some of the same
processes that you used in your studies in Maine?

Hunger: In part, yes. We visited even-aged stands, of which there were
a great many second growth stands, and laid out sample acres
and made a tally of all the trees on the sample acre. We
studied stands all the way from thirty years old up to a
hundred and twenty-five, and they weren't very hard to find,
because there was a great deal of second growth Douglas fir
on old burns. So we got a sequence showing the volume of wood
at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old and built our yield
table in that way for different qualities of land — good, medium,
and poor .

Fry: Is it true that up to this time it had never really been docu
mented that Douglas fir had this rapid growth?

Hunger: Yes. Ten years before, E. T. Allen, who was then an inspector
in the old Bureau of Forestry (although that wasn't his title;
he was a special agent, I think), made some study which was
never published but was available in manuscript form. Our work
did not hinge on that study at all; this was an independent
study.

Fry: Can you tell me the difference between yours and Allen's?

45

Hunger: No, I don't think I could. I've forgotten what the nature of
his report was.

Fry: ] Was there a concerted effort to show your results to forest
owners?

Hunger: From the start, I was not interested in research for research's
sake but wanted to see research put into use, and so far as I
had any influence, we did all we could to get the results before
the public. That came much greater into being a little bit
later. Our initial studies were directed more toward the
application by the private owner than by the Forest Service.
We knew the Forest Service would not employ a cut out and get
out policy, but we were concerned about private owners. So
we did direct our studies toward application by the private
owners. The results were presented in various ways at the
annual meetings of the Western Forestry and Conservation
Association, the Logging Congress, and so on. Well, we got
respectful hearing but not much follow-up application.

Fry: Your Douglas fir growth studies were in Oregon, and there was
another one simultaneously in Washington, is that right?

Hunger: No, it was all one. Washington and Oregon were both in this
district.

Fry: Didn't you also have Dean Frank Hiller working on this in
Washington?

Hunger: We had two different crews, and while we started working

together after we got our techniques worked out, he took the

46

Hunger: north and I took the south, mostly.

Fry: So you used the same techniques then?

Munger: Yes. It was all one study, and I did all the office work.
He went back to teaching at the University of Washington;
he was on for only a couple of months .

Fry: When you were with your crew, did you do a great deal of the
field work, or were you relegated to the office?

Munger: No. In those days, I was in the field always with the

workers, but that was usually during a short seasou. Then
in the wintertime I was engaged in the office work.

Fry: Do you remember enough about your research methods, such as
measurement of height and things like this, that you could
look at that now, from the standpoint of having come a long
way in research, and evaluate the accuracy you were able to
get out of the study?

Munger: Well, general as were the studies that were made in those
days, I think subsequent studies have substantiated their
dependability and reliability. The Douglas fir growth study
was made in 1909 and continued in 1911, and the results were
published subsequently. In 1910, we started a similar study
on the growth of Ponderosa pine. There again there were two
crews in the field, and I divided my time between them—one in

the Blue Mountains, and one in southern Oregon. That subse-

*
quently resulted in a publication.

* "Western Yellow Pine in Oregon," U.S. Department of Agriculture
professional paper 418, 1917.

47

Fry: Did you use roughly the same methods in both the pine and
Douglas fir studies?

Munger: No, the technique was quite different, because one grows
in even-aged stands and one in uneven-aged stands. So in
the case of ponderosa pine, we were studying the individual
tree, supplemented by stand studies rather than plot studies
of the volume of an even-aged stand on an acre.

Fry: Oh, I see. In this study, were permanent plots established?

Munger: No, not then. But speaking of permanent plots, that is some
thing that we started then that I have been very grateful for
and I think others have ever since. In 1910 I put in a series
of permanent sample plots in even-aged stands of Douglas fir.
They were the first permanent growth plots west of the
Mississippi, I'm quite sure. The trees were all tagged, and
they were remeasured periodically and are still being remeasured,

Fry: Where were these?

Munger: They were scattered over the Douglas fir region. We started
in 1910 putting in those plots, and they have been added to
from year to year for some time.

Fry: And they're not abandoned even now?

Munger: No. They are still being measured periodically, and I hope
will continue to be. They have been the most convincing
evidence that lumbermen needed to show that those stands do

47a

Hunger: grow, because we could show that the stand had so much in
1910 and so much more in 1915 and 1920 and so on. We
pioneered in this field of permanent growth plots in the
West.

Fry: How did you get permission to put in this permanent growth
plot? Was this your idea, or did it come down to you?

Hunger: Well, they were nearly all put on national forest land;
the trees were all tagged and nails were put in them,
so it was just taken for granted that that was all right.

Fry: From whom did you have to get permission for this? Do
you remember how all this came about?

Hunger: It was all in the Forest Service, so we from the Regional
Office could go in and do what we wanted.

48

Direct Seeding Efforts

Fry: Didn't you try some direct seeding quite early on the
national forests?

Munger: Yes. About 1909, when James Wilson was Secretary of

Agriculture, he felt the Forest Service was not acting
fast enough in doing reforestation work--seeding and plant
ing. He was a farmer, and his concept of forestry was chiefly
that of seeding and planting. The Forest Service had no
nurseries and no supply of seed, but Secretary Wilson said,
"That doesn't make any difference. Get some seed from Europe,
or get some seed from the trees from the East." So the Forest
Service, somewhat against its best judgment, was compelled to
do some direct seeding before it was really ready for it.

I had very slight connection with that program. I
remember one instance in which there was an area in the Mt.
Hood National Forest that seemed appropriate for direct seeding.
We had a supply of eastern seed and European seed. In November,
"Bush" Qsborne and I with the local ranger rode into this place
and established camp. I think we had five horses with us, and
in the night our tents began to sag and , we found when we got
up, there was about six or eight inches of snow on the ground
and it was snowing hard. So we thought that we didn't want to
get caught up there for the winter, so we went out and very

49

Munger: hastily disposed of our seed on the snow and got out of there
to a lower altitude before we got snowed in. The horses had
no feed, of 'course. That was perhaps an unusual example of
the attempts at direct seeding. People who have gone through
that area since then have been surprised to discover once in
awhile an eastern oak or a European pine of some kind and have
wondered how in the world it got there. Well, it got there
because "Bush" Osborne and I scattered the seed on eight or
ten inches of snow in a great hurry.

Fry: Did you make periodic checks of this to see what happened?

Munger: I've never been back to the area, but I've heard of it; others
have.

Fry: The results of this directive then just lasted for a little
while, is that right?

Munger: No. Very shortly after that the Wind River Nursery got into
production, and the Forest Service built a seed kiln and was
able to get seed in large quantities, so we were able to do our
sowing and our planting with our own local-grown stock, which
was much superior .

Sand Dune Planting

Fry: You did some sand dune planting around 1910, didn't you?
Munger: Yes. Some complaint came to the office that the sand dunes on

50

Hunger: the Oregon coast were encroaching on private lands and covering
up cranberry bogs, roads, and so on, so I went down and made a
hasty reconnaissance of the situation and, in the course of
that, tried planting various things in sheltered locations. I
didn't attempt to plant them where the sand was in full drift,
but I did plant things like Scotch broom, blackberry, pine that
showed some prospects of being able to maintain themselves on
sand. It was quite amateurish, but at least it was a beginning.
At that time, there were complaints that too many cattle were
allowed to graze on these dunes, and I recommended very strongly
about discouraging permitted cattle on the sand dunes, to which,
I think, after awhile some attention was paid. Particularly,
damage was being done by grazing on the spit at the mouth of
the Umpqua River, where the sand was blowing across the spit
and filling the bay. Then the U.S. engineers were digging out
the sand and dumping it in the sea. It was thirty-five years
later that the U.S. engineers made an effort to stop the sand
from blowing into the bay.

Fry: By planting?

Munger: By sand dune planting, yes, by grass planting.

Fry: Did you more or less just go out and plant this on your own, or
were you sent out? Was this on national forest property?

Munger: Yes, that sand dune country is mostly national forest, and when
it wasn't, nobody cared what it was in those days. Some of it
was public domain. But I worked usually, when we did this small

51

Hunger: scale amateurish planting, with the local ranger accompanying
me .

Fry: There was some direct seeding done apparently on the Siuslaw
National Forest this same year, and you went out to inspect
that. Do you remember anything about that? It was seeding
in deforested fern patches.

Hunger: No. I , in rather a casual way, inspected some of the early
plantations' seeding; in general the direct seeding was not
successful, but the planting was very successful at that time.

Fry: This same year was the year of that avalanche, which you write

*
about in your Timber-Lines account, and this seems to me to

almost get into the field of geology when you had to go out
and check on sources of avalanches.

Hunger: Well, foresters were supposed to be jacks-of-all-trades, and
when there wasn't anybody else to study such problems, they
turned to the Forest Service. This avalanche, which swept a
couple of stalled trains off the track and buried about a
hundred people, roused the Forest Service to thinking that they
would like to run down the cause of that avalanche. So I
spent I think several weeks up there later in the spring climb
ing over the slopes and trying to figure out what happened.
I found there that there were two kinds of avalanches: one I
called canyon slides, where there was a slide every year down

*

Thornton T. Hunger, "Recollections..." Timber-Lines, Thirty-
year Club, Region Six, Supplement to Vol. XVI, Dec. 1962.

52

Hunger: in a well-marked path. Another kind I called a slope

slide, where a whole slope slid off like the snow off the
roof of a church after it's been heated. I ascribed that
largely to the deforestation that had taken place on that
slope, which emphasized the importance of keeping those slopes
well forested.

Fry: When you had travelled in Europe, had you found out anything
casually about this business of protecting the slopes from
avalanches by planting?

Hunger: Well, I saw in Austria the elaborate work that they had done
there on the control of wild brooks. They called it wild
bachverbauung. But I don't recall that I looked into the
subject of avalanches at all, so I was quite a novice at the
subject until I got on the ground there.

Fry: I'd like to get an idea from you of how you look back upon
these reconnaissance projects.

Hunger: Well, in comparison to the way things are done nowadays with a
large crew and endless money and plenty of Ph.D.'s, the pio
neering work of this kind in studies of sand dunes and avalanches
and so on seems rather crude. But viewed from the point of view
of the times, it was very helpful and constructive, although
the modern technician would possibly sniff at the technique
employed, which was observation, largely, and empirical.
These studies of avalanches and other analogous studies were
made simply by ocular study of the ground, using such geological

53

Hunger: knowledge as you had and such knowledge of forest influences

as we had then.
Fry: What about insect control? Did you make many field trips out

to check on insect infestation of trees?
Hunger: Well, once in awhile there would come into the office a report

of damage, and they didn't know what the cause was. I recall

going out on three or four trips of that kind to try to diagnose

the trouble. But soon after the days which I'm speaking about

the Bureau of Entymology took over with men that would do that

kind of thing.
Fry: I see. I notice that you made one field trip with the bureau

men in 1910 with also a few lumbermen along. Was this just to

inventory the bugs, so to speak?
Hunger: Well, there was a serious outbreak of the western pine beetle,

that brought the Washington office of the Bureau of Entymology

out to look at it, and we joined them there.
Fry: So this was mostly in pines. I notice that lumbermen went

along too.

Hunger: It may have affected their timber too.
Fry: What could you do for insect control in those days?
Hunger: I had nothing to do with that at all, but the practice was

felling and barking the infected trees while the insects were

active inside. But there are modern techniques now that are

being experimented with.

54

Eye-Witness of Pinchot 's Receipt of President Taft's
Letter of Dismissal

Fry: You had a rather astonishing brush with a high point in

history, when you happened to be having dinner with Forest
Service Chief Gifford Pinchot the night that he received his
letter from President Taft which informed him he was no longer
an employee of the federal government. Could you recount that

and tell us your reactions as you remember them at that time?

*

Hunger: I don't think I can add anything to what I wrote, and I wonder
if I remember it all.

When I was back in Washington on a detail and was visiting
my sister, whose husband was a classmate of Gifford Pinchot, Mr.

Pinchot was invited to just a family dinner there.
*

Fry: This says that her husband was Philip P. Wells, a Yale class
mate and close friend of Gifford Pinchot, and that this was the
evening of January 7, 1910.

Hunger: Mr. Pinchot came a little bit late and, apologizing for his

tardiness, said that as he left his house he was given a letter
by a White House messenger. He'd opened it and read hurriedly,
saw what it was about, the contents of which he was anticipating.
As we sat down to dinner, he read those letters. It was a most
dramatic moment, hearing him read his letters from President

*
Munger, Thornton T. , ibid, p. 13.

55

Hunger: Taft and from Secretary Wilson dismissing him from the Forest
Service—the Forest Service that he'd created and made an im
portant national institution. But, as he explained and as is
well known, he had courted such action by going over the head
of his superior, really to the public, to call attention to
the scandal that was going on in Alaska in regard to the coal
lands. That was the so-called Ballinger-Pinchot controversy.
He did a good deal of telephoning during the dinner hour
and showed a marvelous composure and courage in the face of
such a reprimand and didn't evidence his disappointment, which
he must have felt in the attitude of the President and of the

Secretary in failing to appreciate his concern for protecting

*
the public's interest in these Alaska coal fields.

*

Gifford Pinchot's own account reads: "On the evening... of
January 7, 1910, I was going out to dinner--! have forgotten
where . As I was about to leave the house I ran into General
Crozier, who had just come in to dine with my mother [sic].
While we were greeting each other the doorbell rang. I opened
the door, and a messenger from the White House handed me an
envelope. I looked into the envelope, found the letter I half
expected, walked upstairs with the General, waved the letter at
my mother as we entered the dining room, and said, "I'm fired."

My mother's eyes flashed, she threw back her head, flung
one hand high above it, and answered with one word: "Hurrah!"

That was the stuff my mother was made of. We talked for a
few moments, and then I went on to my dinner." Then follows a
section entitled "The Morning After." Pinchot, Gifford: Breaking
New Ground, Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., New York, 1947,
p. 451.

56

Hunger: So he said he'd have a meeting of the Forest Service the
next day and announce it to all of them, as he did, and then
advised everyone—and I was there — to stay by the Forest Service.
It was a sorry day for all the Forest Service fellows to see him
be lost as its leader. They were very apprehensive about what
the future would be. Mr. Pinchot had said at this dinner that
he was particularly apprehensive of whether the axe would also
fall on others who were his right-hand men, but it didn't.

Fry: Maybe we can go back a minute: can you explain Philip Wells'
relationship to Pinchot? What was Philip Wells' occupation?

Munger: He was an attorney, but at that period he was an assistant
attorney in the Forest Service in Washington.

Fry: Had he had any part in the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy?

Munger: Mr. Pinchot had attracted to him a number of his classmates whom
he knew and trusted. George Woodruff was the Chief Law Officer,
and Phil Wells was his understudy, and Herbert Smith, another
classmate, was editor of the Forest Service. There may have
been others that were of that Yale group that were associated
with Pinchot during his activity there.

Fry: Do you think that these Yale classmates of Pinchot more or less
offered him support and that he could talk this over with them
at mealtimes all during this controversy?

Munger: I have no doubt that he conferred with them as to what action
to take on this Pinchot-Ballinger controversy.

Fry: So they were all more or less expecting this, then?

57

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Was there anyone else at the dinner?

Hunger: Besides my sister's children, I think there was somebody else

whose name I've forgotten, a friend of the family. It was just

a family affair.
Fry: I wonder if you can remember it enough to describe the kind of

house .and where it was in Washington and what the dining room

looked like.
Hunger: Well, Washington is notable for these block houses, in which

they have no side windows. They called them gunbarrel houses

with the rooms in a string.

Fry: You mean common walls between the houses?
Hunger: Yes, and that was common even in the rather good residential

districts. This was quite close to Rock Creek Park, and these

houses were usually three stories with a basement, as this one

was. Brick and dreary looking on the outside, but rather pleasant

inside.
Fry: And on the first floor I guess you had the living room and dining

room arrangement.
Hunger: Yes, on the ground floor, the dining room having windows onto

the garden, and then the living room on the street, and the

kitchen was tucked in at the side somewhere.
Fry: Was this a very informal dinner?
Hunger: Yes, entirely so.
Fry: Was it served by Hrs. Wells, by your sister?

58

Hunger: No, they had a colored maid, yes, I'm sure they did.

Fry: But the children were at the table with you?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: That makes it informal. [Laughter] What were the ages of the
children? You mentioned that Lewis was a thirteen year old.

Hunger: Elizabeth was seven.

Fry: I gather even the children were caught up in this and knew

what was going on, because you wrote that the thirteen year old
took time to cry about it.

Hunger: Yes, the children knew it, because Gifford Pinchot was quite
at home in their household, and they saw him off and on.

Fry: What was your reaction to this? Do you remember your own
personal reaction when Pinchot read this letter?

Hunger: Well, it was a terrible shock to think that our leader and

really our hero was gone. The youngsters there in the Forest
Service quite worshipped Pinchot and had the highest admiration
and respect for his leadership, and it was an awful blow to
think of losing that. They were very obviously worried about
the future of the whole Pinchot policies, so-called.

Fry: You count yourself in that group?

Hunger: Yes. As I say, I had only been in the Service a year and a
half.

Fry: You had met Pinchot before this, hadn't you?

Hunger: Well, I used to meet him in the summers at Gray Towers. When
the Yale forest school was at Hilford, he was an occasional

59

Hunger: visitor and lecturer in the summer school there.

Fry: So you and he had this acquaintance.

Hunger: Yes. I had seen him there since 1902 or so.

Fry: Then he knew you also that night.

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Could you describe this farewell meeting the next morning at
the Forest Service? Were you there?

Hunger: Yes, but I don't remember it well, except, as I say in there,
that his final word was, 'Stick by the Forest Service.' I
don't recall any further details of the meeting.

Fry: The write-up here by you is on page 13 of the Thirty Year Club's
Timber-Lines , Volume 16 of December, 1962. It kind of left me
with the feeling that Pinchot was really quite cheerful and had
already brought himself to accept this and might even be looking
forward to carrying on a fight outside the Forest Service. Did
you get that impression there that night?

Hunger: Well, in a long afterward analysis of the situation, I think

that he'd made up his mind that was the thing, to sharply call
this to the public attention, and that he was willing to sacri
fice himself and his leadership of the Forest Service for the
sake of accomplishing that purpose, which it did, I think.
The Forest Service went on. He passed it down to other hands
that he felt were capable of carrying on. But of course he did
not give up by any means his activities in conservation, because
shortly after that he organized this conservation association,

60

Hunger: which carried on outside the Forest Service things he couldn't
do as a member of the Forest Service. But without speaking
for him, I think he was terribly disgusted with President Taft's
lack of support of the Theodore Roosevelt policies and unwilling
ness to probe the Ballinger Alaska land scandals.

Fry: Is it your understanding that these Cunningham coal claims were
really illegal?

Hunger: I think so, yes.

Fry: That was an interesting bit of history. You were fortunate to
have been there.

Hunger: Yes, it was a dramatic period to be in on — quite by accident.

Wind River Nursery-Established 1910

Fry: Well, the very same year, 1910, was when the Wind River Nursery
was established on the Columbia Forest, now the Gifford Pinchot
Forest. Were you in on the origin of Wind River Nursery?

Hunger: Yes, in a secondary way, because the Section of Planting and
Hr. Julius Kummel and I worked very closely together. About
simultaneously with the establishment of the Wind River Nursery,
we established the Wind River Experimental Forest there. The
movement to establish experimental forests was just beginning.
A couple of the other districts already had experimental forests,

. t ' *

and we placed it there thinking that most of the research would

-61

Munger: be in connection with planting techniques and nursery practice,
of course a concept that was wholly outgrown very soon. So the
early work at the Wind River Experimental Forest was largely in
developing nursery and planting techniques for Douglas fir, a
species that had never been worked in before, and it was a
brand-new field.

Fry: Why did you choose Douglas fir?

Munger: It was the major species. At the nursery that's all they grew,
practically.

Fry: Did Julius Kutnmel come here specifically for that assignment, or
was he already there at that time?

Munger: No. He came to the Regional Office on December 1, 1908, the
same time that I did. He had had a year of experience in
planting work in another region and was put in charge of the
planting here and continued in that role until his retirement.

Fry: So he was in charge of Wind River Nursery and you were still in
the experiment station primarily?

Munger: No, I was in the Section of Silvics, the research section; we
were both in the Regional Office. He was chief of the Section
of Planting, but not the immediate supervisor of the nursery.
There was a resident supervisor there at the nursery. Kiimmel
was in the Regional Office in charge of the overall planting
program.

Fry: Do I understand it correctly then that in 1913 the research
field headquarters were moved to the Wind River Experiment

62

Fry: Station, and this was a new experiment station in 1913, is that
right?

Hunger: Not exactly. There had been research there for a couple of
years before that, largely engaged upon planting techniques.
But it formally had the status of an experiment station, I
guess from 1913 or 1914 on. Wind River had very much to
commend it for a center for research studies of all kinds.

Fry: How was it selected to be an experiment station?

Hunger: It had in the neighborhood some virgin forest, a great deal of
burn, a great deal of second growth, and considerable recent
cut-over land (some on private land) as well as the big nursery
there. So there was a great opportunity for study of all sorts
of things from there, and that's why it was selected. It has
still been maintained as a very important research center. At
one time it was considered the most visited forest center in the
United States, except possibly for Biltmore, North Carolina.

Fry: That was because of its diversity?

Hunger: So much was going on, and the diversity of forest that could be
seen there.

Fry: So you needed a head administrator for this, someone to live at
Wind River. I have here in my notes that you interviewed J. V.
Hoffman for this position.

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Where did he come from?

Hunger: He was a Hinnesota graduate who was working up at the Priest

63

Munger: River Experimental Forest. Coming west from Washington I

stopped o£f at Newport and hired a sleigh and drove out ten
or fifteen miles to where he was headquartered on what was then
the Priest River Experimental Forest. I thought his qualifi
cations were good, and he was interested in the job, so he was
put in charge of Wind River and was there for a dozen years.

Fry: He worked out rather well then, I take it.

Munger: Yes, fine. Not quite a dozen years.

Fry: Did you officially have some connection with Wind River in your
position there?

Munger: Well, Wind River at the start was under the Regional Office, and
I , as a member of the Regional Office, had jurisdiction over it.
A few years later these experimental forests were all put directly
under the Washington office for reasons that are not clear to me.
It didn't change the relationship very much, but technically
for a period there they were under the Washington office
directly, sidestepping the Regional Office.

Fry: Who was chief then? What period was this?

Munger: This was in the late 1910 's.

Fry: After the experimental forests were put under the Washington
office, did you still visit Wind River and keep in touch with
what was going on?

Munger: Yes. It didn't change its relationship very much with us in
the Regional Office except in details of direction.

Fry: In your diaries you mention an arboretum there.

64

Hunger: When we built our first building and our little greenhouse
there it seemed appropriate to plant some exotic trees, and
there were some growing in the nursery. So we started in a
very small way plantations, of such exotic trees as we got
hold of. That was subsequently very greatly expanded, more
land cleared, ultimately resulting in a very large collection
of mostly conifers. And it's still maintained as one of the
interesting arboretums in the region, devoted mostly to conifers
and on a rather difficult site, so it was a chance to test what
some exotic trees could do in that climate and soil.

Fry: Do you know of any instances in which planting of exotic trees
was adopted in larger planting projects on the part of private
industry or the Forest Service then?

Hunger: Well really, in spite of testing all these exotic trees, we
couldn't find anything better than our own Douglas fir for
general forest use here. That arboretum is still maintained
and there are progress reports written every five or ten years
on it .

Fry: You kept some sort of file cards on each of these trees, I
gather, for growth studies and things like that?

Hunger: Yes. The trees are measured periodically.

Fry: Well, you did some other studies before Wind River became the

Regional Forest Experiment Station. Some of these, such as the
white fir decay study, might have been rather significant.

Hunger: That was a minor study primarily conducted by a pathologist,
but we co-operated on it.

65

Fry: Was this Dr. Meinecke?

Munger: Yes, Dr. Meinecke, now of San Francisco. We co-operated on it,
because the prevalence of rot in white fir was troubling people,
and we wanted to know how to detect it and what caused it and
what methods of management might be used with the species. But
in 1915 my work was broadened out somewhat and I became the
Assistant Chief of the Division of Silviculture. There I worked
on timber sales, reconnaissance and other things, with much less
time devoted to research than I had in the Section of Silvics.
The research was left largely to the Wind River people with a
certain amount of supervision from the Regional Office, which
I principally gave. From 1915 to 1924 my work was largely
administrative in the Division of Silviculture, as it was
called then; later it was the Division of Forest Management.
I think they changed it again; I think it's now the Division of
Timber Management .

Fry: Was Silvics a parallel division?

Munger: No, it was a sub-section under that. The Section of Silvics
sort of dissolved about the time that Wind River was estab
lished .

Fry: Where was Fred Ames in all this?

Munger: He was Chief of the Division of Silviculture, as it was then
called .

Fry: So the working relationship between you and Ames was still
roughly the same then.

66

Hunger: Yes, I was his understudy but doing the timber sale, cruising
and reconnaissance work rather than the silvics work.

Fry: What men were doing this research then, at that time?

Hunger: It was Hoffman and his assistants, of which he had a very scant
number .

Fry: Did you manage to visit Wind River often?

Hunger: Quite often, yes. I continued to visit there.

Douglas Fir Seed Study

Fry: Your diary also mentions a Douglas fir seed study going on in
1914. Was that part of this planting program at Wind River?

Hunger: No, that was quite separate. When the Forest Service began to
make timber sales in the Douglas fir region, the idea was of
leaving two or three seed trees per acre. Since in most
Douglas fir forests there are what are called "conky" trees,
those that have considerable rot, it was the practice to leave
those for seed. Some people objected to the thought of leaving
"conky" trees as parents for the next generation, saying it was
like using the milk of tuberculous cows--I remember that ex
pression. Some of us didn't subscribe to that, but in order
to prove the point, we instituted a study of the progeny of
"conky" trees and sound trees. But it was very greatly ex
panded, and it covered not only "conky" trees but trees at

67

Hunger: high altitude and low altitude and young trees and old trees.
We gathered the seed from some 125 parent trees and grew the
progeny from them, and then they were all planted in six or
eight plantations scattered over the region. That was called
the Douglas fir seed study, or the Douglas fir heredity study,
and it was a pioneering endeavor in genetics, which now is
being pursued so vigorously and intensively by forestry agencies
for many species. Those plantations were the subject of meti
culous examination measurement for years, and still are being
examined, although the trees are good-sized now. The seed was
collected in 1912, and the outplanting was done in '14 and '15.

Fry: So you were studying more than just susceptibility to rot as a
genetic factor.

Hunger: The great value of the study has been discovering the hereditary
traits from parents at different altitudes and different lati
tudes in the region. That overshadowed the study of "conky"
versus sound trees, which had no significance. Several progress
reports have been made and published on that study, but it was
a pioneering study really of genetics but done by a technique
that to modern researchers seems a little crude, but it was the
best we could do then.

Fry": You mean in your seed selection, your original methods of
getting seed were crude, or your measurements?

Hunger: Instead of very systematically getting a perfectly logical

sequence in altitude and latitude and age, we had to get seed

68

Munger: where we could, because in those days it was a matter of

going in on foot and gathering the seed. It had to be done
in a very short time with a very small personnel, so that
there was a little hit-or-miss in our seed sources. It wasn't
a scientifically perfect sampling according to modern stand
ards.

Fry: So you started this as a genetic study of rot but it enlarged.
Were you free to just enlarge studies like this if you saw
that this was feasible?

Munger: Yes, I wrote the working plan for it, including whatever I
thought necessary.

Fry: Did you get to have any dissemination of this information
through the industry?

Munger: Yes. The study has had already considerable practical appli
cation in deciding where seed collecting is done for reforest
ation purposes. We found out, for example, that there is a
district in northwestern Washington where the progeny is
superior to that grown anywhere else, and we found that age of
the parent tree apparently hasn't much to do with it. We
were testing both young trees and old trees. So there's been
a good deal of practical application in reforestation from the
lessons we learned from that study.

Fry: In other words, this northwestern Washington district, then,
is the one they would go to to get seed for planting Douglas
fir down here in Oregon.

69

Hunger: Yes, so long as it isn't moved too far from its native haunts.
That was another point, that it isn't good to use seed of too
great a contrast between the site of its parents and where it's
to be used.

Methods of Cutting Study

Fry: I'd like to ask you about your Methods of Cutting study.
This study occurred around 1912 or 1913.

Hunger: Yes. The management of the western yellow pine forests, now
ponderosa pine, was entirely experimental. There had been no
experience to see what methods of cutting would work the best,
so some of us thought it would be a good idea to make a large-
scale test of different degrees of cutting. With the help of
T. J. Starker and one or two others, I put in a forty-five acre
plot, which was divided into thirds. One third was to be cut
leaving 15 per cent of the stand, one leaving 25 per cent, and
one leaving 35, as I recall'. That was a regular timber sale,
and cutting proceeded on that basis. Then careful measurements
were kept thereafter of the growth of the surviving trees and
of the reproduction that came in. That study was examined
periodically for a good many years and yielded rather interesting
data. However, in later years the Forest Service was able to
employ a much lighter cutting than was involved in any of those

70

Hunger: plots and, as a present practice, leaves about 50 per cent
of the volume of the stand in the first cut. But we were
ahead of our time in preaching that in 1913.

Fry: What kinds of reactions did you get if you talked to timber
operators?

Hunger: Well, with the stumpage so low and the margin of profit so

slight in those days, the loggers thought they couldn't afford
to go into a stand unless they were going to be able to cut
nearly all of it. So the Forest Service was under pressure
to cut as heavily as possible. For that economic reason we
had to sacrifice some silvicultural advantages in those early
days.

Fry: Did you have any results of that study that were unexpected?
Did you find out some things that you didn't expect to find
out when you first designed the study?

Hunger: Well, yes. Everything was new to us then. In those days we
didn't know whether the seedlings that came in before the
forest was cut, that is, the "advance reproduction," would
respond to the added light and make good growth. We found that
they did, which was an unknown fact before.

Re c onna issance, Extensive and Intensive

Fry: There was a long reconnaissance survey begun about 1912. I

71

Fry: think it lasted about ten years. Would this have come under
your jurisdiction?

Hunger: I think beginning about 1909 or 1910 each national forest was
supposed to make an inventory of its resources, and that was
called the ^xtensive reconnaissance. That consisted in one
or two men estimating the timber and type mapping it in a
rough sort of way. The maps were then quite crude, but it
was an attempt to get a general inventory of the nation's
resources, in this region anyway. That occupied the technical
assistants, some of them a year, some took two or three years
to do it. I personally did only a small area in which we
happened to have a special inquiry, and I covered 100,000
acres or so, mostly horseback on the Malheur National Forest,
as a part of the extensive reconnaissance.

But shortly after that, the Forest Service embarked upon
making what was called ^intensive reconnaissance, which maps on
a scale of four inches to the mile with a detailed cruise
forty acres by forty acres. Selected areas, particularly those
that had potential possibilities for timber sales, were cruised
in that way, usually with a crew of ten or so men. I for several
years gave overhead direction to that and spent considerable
time in the field with each of the crews, laying out the project
and instructing the student assistants in their techniques and
making a general inspection of what was being done. That occupied
a lot of my time from 1915 until 1924.

72

Fry: Could you give us a picture of the sort of personnel you had
on your crews and how well trained they were for this job?

Hunger: We had in the regional office two or three men who were parti
cularly qualified for that kind of work and devoted all of
their time to that. They were sent out from the Regional Office.
Some of the time there was a surveyor or engineer with them to
do the topographic work, sometimes not. Then these men were
supported by usually about eight or ten students, who were
called student assistants or field assistants, who did the
routine line running and tree measurements. The most important
one of the crew was the cook--and the hardest to get—because
this was nearly always tent work, often pretty well in the back
country.

Fry: Was this your job to find those cooks?

Hunger: No. We relied upon the local supervisors to get that type of
help or axemen if they needed them—the day-labor type. They
usually provided the packhorses and so on for the moving,
although later we had a couple of automobiles for the use of
these parties. In that connection I recall that I bought the
first automobile that was bought by the Forest Service in
this Region, with many raising eyebrows as to whether it was
practical. Up to that time they had been paying mileage
wholly for privately owned automobiles; but I thought we should
buy, and we did, and of course after that It spread very
rapidly, and the Forest Service went in a big way to get

73

Hunger: automobiles.

Fry: Was Ames a conservative one on that?

Hunger: Very, yes. On everything.

Fry: But you managed to get it through anyway.

Hunger: Some of these helpers, the field assistants, stayed the year
through, not just during their college vacation, but went on
a much longer period, because we often had crews in the woods
six months. Then they came in and did the office work, mostly
in the Regional Office, in the winters.

Fry: You described a moment ago some of the cruder techniques used
in the extensive reconnaissance. Now on this reconnaissance
I gather that you would have used more specific measurements.

Hunger: Well, they used a high degree of control in making a good map,
and it was drawn on a scale of four inches to the mile. Then
the crew of two men--compassman and a cruiser--gridironed the
country, usually twice through each forty, double run they
call it, measuring the trees on a strip a chain wide, which
gave 10 per cent sample. Those are the maps and the cruises
on which timber sales were made. This was largely in antici
pation of making timber sales.
Fry: I noticed that you had two kinds of crews, a strip crew and

a transit crew.

Hunger: Some of these crews had a surveyor to do the primary topo
graphic work, and of course he was a transit man. The skeleton
of the map was sometimes made by a surveyor from the Regional

74

Hunger: Office working with the foresters. But the major part of the

work was done by these student assistants in cruising on the

strip.

Fry: Has this been published anywhere?
Hunger: Well, of course the maps are used currently, but it wasn't

anything to be published.

Fry: Nothing on the timber inventory or the type map?
Hunger: No, it was simply used currently as working maps. But we'll

discuss later the forest survey, which is quite a different

proposition altogether.
Fry: When you visited the crews in the field, what was the object

of your visit? What were you looking for?
Hunger: I tried to join them at the start to see what area we should

cover, realizing that many of these watersheds were known only

from the distance. The local rangers knew there was a big body

of timber, but they hadn't any idea of the composition by

species, volume, quality, loggability, etc.

Inspection and Fire Control

Fry: I asked you in a conference off the tape yesterday if there

was much to discuss in terms of fire control, fire prevention,
and fire fighting in these days before World War I, and you
felt that there wasn't. But I do want to ask you some related

75

Fry: questions about that. For instance, in your inspection trips,

I thought maybe the issue of controlled burning or brush burning
would have come up. Did it?

Hunger: Yes. That was a perennial problem both in the Douglas fir and
in the ponderosa pine region. The Forest Service started very
early in the ponderosa pine region piling and burning brush, and
that was just taken for granted as a desirable practice for a
number of years. But some people had doubts as to whether it
was necessary or desirable, so we started quite early some
experiments in leaving the slash and seeing what happened. But
the forest [fire] protectionists were so leary of leaving any
unburned brush around that the pressure was great to pile and
burn all of it — that's in the ponderosa pine region. Likewise
in the Douglas fir region there were many arguments as to the
desirability of leaving the slashings—giving fertility to the
soil and keeping the soil cooler—which seemed to offset the
desirability of burning it to reduce the fire hazard. But the
Forest Service, under the pressure of the forest protectionists,
usually insisted on broadcast burning of the cut-over on clear-
cut areas. That practice has been by this time considerably
modified.

Fry: Who were the protectionists?

Hunger: One branch of the Forest Service was devoted to forest pro
tection; it was a branch of each Regional Office. And people
were wont to sdy then that fire protection is 90 per cent of

76

Munger: forestry, and in some people's minds the emphasis was given to
putting protection ahead of everything else—the welfare of
the seedlings, or the success of the reserved stand, of the
seed trees and seed supply.

Fry: Was there any external pressure from public-spirited groups
who felt that this shouldn't be done?

Munger: Quite early both Washington and Oregon passed legislation

making it compulsory to burn slashings, and so that set the
pattern in a way for what was done on the national forests.

Fry: You had some incendiarism on the part of the backwoods settlers
that was kind of a problem, particularly on the Siskiyou
National Forest. Do you remember that?

Munger: Yes. That was in southwestern Oregon. Particularly the

national forest administration was plagued by incendiarism,
becuase it was a brushy country and the settlers were wont to
set fire, for various motives.. Partly they liked to explore
for minerals and they liked to expose the ground, and partly
they liked to hunt and could do better if the brush was out
of the way, and partly just for plain cussedness, to spite
the Forest Service. It was a difficult administrative problem
for a number of years, but one that I had very little to do with.

Fry: In forest fires themselves, what do you think about the organi
zation for fighting fires at that time?

Munger: Well, the Forest Service gave great emphasis to the matter of [fire]
protection, because there was no public consciousness as to

77

Hunger: the necessity for putting out fires and even the necessity
for not setting them. Then there was lightning to contend
with, so that the Forest Service pioneered in a splendid
protection system, centered about lookouts, with a man during
the summer season to detect fires, and building the telephone
lines to connect the lookouts with the nearest ranger station
or guard station. Forest protection had pre-eminence among
Forest Service activities for a number of years, as it
properly should have in those days. Meanwhile, there was a
public consciousness built up to regard forest fires as a
bad thing.

Fry: Was there any kind of in-service training for the rangers on
f iref ighting and detection? :

Hunger: I don't remember just when that began, but fairly early the

Forest Service had a training school at the beginning of each
fire season for the temporary employees. During fire season
a great many extra people were put on--smoke chasers, lookouts,
forest guards, and so on, many of them college students, and
they were given ten days to two weeks training at the beginning
of the season. I forget just when that commenced, but quite
early.

Fry: Were there any manuals written at this time?

Hunger: Yes. Quite early there was a manual. There was one set gotten

fl/Yd
out by the Western Forestry Conservation/\Association as well

as one by the Forest Service with very full instructions. That

79

Fry: So when you married her, you had to move out of this bachelor's
quarters that you had. Where did you live then?

Hunger: We were in the same house. We put the others out and we lived
there for awhile.

Land Policies

Fry: Can we talk a minute about land policies? There was the

Forest Homestead Act on June 11, 1906, and I wonder if, even
though you were in the Section of Silvics, if you didn't have
to make some decisions and have some first-hand contact with
decisions to allow certain areas to be homesteaded.

Hunger: Well, in the period from 1910 to probably 1925, there was a

great land hunger—to get possession of any land that had any
possibilities of being homesteaded. Under the Forest Homestead
Act, there were a great many people applying for little scraps
of land in the national forests. At one time, the Siuslaw
National Forest had 1,100 claims that had to be examined, and
there was considerable difference of opinion in the Forest
Service as to the policy of allowing these homestead entries.
There was a sentiment that the Forest Service was in a pre
carious position, and after Pinchot's dismissal from the
Service, the next administration was, I think, rather fearful

80

Hunger: that the whole Forest Service national forest system might be
jeopardized if they weren't rather liberal in granting land
of possible agricultural value. So that was reflected in the
administration in the Regional Office. However, Ames and I
and the Office of Silviculture were not sympathetic with that
at all. We thought it was entirely unnecessary to grant these
little fragments of land for homesteads, and we habitually
disapproved these reports that favored granting these home
steads, because those had to go across our desk. That caused
a considerable feud between the Division of Silviculture and
the Division of Lands, that was much more open-handed than we
were.

Fry: Were you overruled on this, so that most of these did go
through?

Munger: Generally, yes. Our remonstrance was of no avail, and the
policy went through of being very liberal in granting these
homesteads.

The hotbed of them was in the Siuslaw National Forest
with the little, narrow strips of good soil along the creeks.
I think a homestead could be a mile long, so that it meant
just little ribbons of land that had the effect of cutting
the national forest to pieces as a suitable unit for manage
ment.

Time, however, has proven, I think, that the Office of
Silviculture was right, because many of the homesteads granted

81

Hunger: at that time have been abandoned and have since been bought
back or have gone tax delinquent and come back to public
ownership. That was only one phase of the disagreement in
land policy.

I remember in the administration of Graves,1 when he
was Chief Forester, the question came up of eliminating a
good deal of land in central Oregon of rather low forest
value, but some land speculators were claiming it had agri
cultural value and were putting the pressure on the Forest
Service to open these lands to homestead entry. There was
a considerable area that constituted then the Paulina National
Forest of lodgepole pine and juniper and some nice ponderosa
pine. I remember when the matter was being considered; Dean
Graves was there, and I remonstrated against the elimination,
which was rather a bold thing for a youngster to do to his
superior. Graves' eyes flashed, and he said, '"It isn't a
question as to whether this land's going to be eliminated or
not, it's only a question of where the line shall be." He was
drawing a blue pencil line around what the elimination should
include, and it went through. Since then the land has nearly
all come back into public ownership.

Fry : How?

P/~Oi//A/W

Hunger: By forfeiture or lack of moving 'up. It was not agricultural
and was low-grade forest land. It was another one of the un
fortunate mistakes made when the Forest Service was afraid that

82

Hunger: if it didn't throw out the golden apple they'd lose the race
altogether.

Timber Sales

Fry: Could we go on with some more on timber sales? We had been
talking about your activities in reconnaissance and so forth,
and I wonder if you could give us an idea of how the demand
on the part of industry was for timber sales at that time?

Hunger: During the 1910' s and perhaps later, there was some pressure
on the Forest Service to sell more timber. Some of the
Congressmen were saying, "We're spending money administering
these areas, and we're getting nothing back." At that same
time, most lumbermen didn't want the Forest Service to sell
timber, because they didn't want their timber to be put in
competition with their own private timber that they were
paying taxes on and getting land-poor from lack of disposing
of it.

However, the Forest Service did make quite a number of
sales beginning as early as 1907 or so, but in rather restricted
spots where there happened to be accessibility to a railroad.
One of those was in the Blue Hountains, where the Sumpter
Valley Railroad penetrated a lot of nice national forest
ponderosa pine. There were some mills near there that were

83

Hunger: eager to buy national forest timber. But on the west side it
was only in a few localities that timber was being sold, and
then not in very large quantities, and then only at what now
seems absurdly low prices but was all the traffic would bear
then, more too in some cases.

Fry: Why wasn't more sold on the west side?

Hunger: Well, because most of the national forests were not penetrated
by accessible railroads and because there was such a wealth of
private timber outside the national forest that logically should
be cut first. On the Umpqua National Forest I remember there
was not a timber sale made of any consequence until probably
1930.

Fry: Was this because of the advent of trucks about that time or
because the private timber was petering out around it?

Hunger: It was because of the absence of transportation, both highways
and railroads.

Fry: Wasn't there quite an industry in railroad ties and shingle
bolts about 1910? How did this affect your timber sales?

Hunger: There was quite an active timber sale business in shingle

bolts in northern Washington, the shingle bolts being driven
down the rivers. That was small business, but it was very
important business in northern Washington at that time. It
was a good deal of a headache to the U.S. Forest Offices,
because these were difficult to administer; it was difficult
to measure the volume and keep track of the utilization in

84

Hunger: the scattered areas along these western Washington rivers.

Fry: This was because of the distances involved?

Munger: They were often back from roads, and because the shingle

bolts are driven; down the streams, they used that means of
getting them out.

Fry: What about the railroad ties? Were they equally difficult
to administer?

Munger: Well, there was another rather active seat of timber sales
in northeastern Washington, particularly in the cutting of
hewed railroad ties for the Great Northern Railroad that
penetrated that area. That was small timber sales that
meant a good deal of supervision and not much return.

Fry: This was all under your supervision at that time, is that
right?

Munger: The forest supervisors made the timber sales up to a certain
amount; their authorization varied with the national forest.
Over that amount, the sale contract was drafted and approved
by the Regional Office, that often had made an examination of
the area in advance. But then the inspection of both the
large and the small sales was done by men from the Regional
Office in Portland to see that the contracts were being com
plied with, and I did some of that.

Fry: Did you take any particular area, or did you jtsst work this

out between you?
Munger: Well no, but it so happened that I did more in Oregon and Ames

85

Hunger: did more in Washington, I think just by happenstance.

Fry: What were some of the main difficulties in supervising the
cutting under the terms of contract?

Hunger: The loggers were on such a narrow margin at that time, the
product was so very cheap, that they were very reluctant to
spend anything extra and wanted to cut the corners wherever
they could. But the Forest Service contracts were rather
rigorous as to demanding complete utilization; that is, low
stumps, using the trees well into the tops, and using even the
semi-defective logs. That became some bone of contention—to
secure thrifty, close utilization of the trees that are supposed
to be cut--and also in fire protection. The timber sale con
tracts were very meticulous in requiring fire precautionary
measures, which were, in those days, almost unheard of by
lumbermen. They didn't think of having fire-fighting tools
at their camp or water pumps for fire protection. The Forest
Service introduced a demand for those precautions, and it was
somewhat of a job to see that they were complied with.

Fry: Did you actually have the authority to stop their operations
if they didn't comply?

Hunger: Yes, if they didn't comply. But of course as inspectors we
simply called attention to the delinquencies, and the local
forest officer (the forest supervisor and the ranger) was the
one that dealt in an administrative way with the operators.

86

OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES

Fry: This might bring us to a discussion of your activities in

this period with the world outside of the Regional Office and
the national forests. I think you went to the University of
Washington and taught there. Then you were granted, in 1916,
a five-week leave of absence to give a lecture course at Yale.
What did you talk about on your forays into the academic world?

Lectures

Hunger: The Forest Service very early discovered that it needed to

train men for rangers. Heretofore, before the Forest Service
took over the forest reserves, the rangers had been just woods
men and in some cases politicians with no particular aptitude
for forest management. So the Forest Service encouraged the
University of Washington to give a short course in forestry
for rangers and others that wanted to enlist. It was a short
course through the winter, and I think the Forest Service paid
the salaries of the rangers who went there. Several of us
in the Regional Office did much of the teaching at this
University of Washington short course through two or three
winters and in that way developed and trained some of the men

87

Hunger: that had the best potentialities for being rangers but who

at that time didn't need a college education as they do now.

Fry: Your participation in this is a little unclear to me. Were
you sent there to educate them about research?

Hunger: No, it was on the rudiments of forestry, just basic principles
of silviculture and planting and forest protection and so on.
It was just a simplified short course in forestry.

Fry: All built around a lecture format, is that right, because they
had the woods experience, I guess?

Hunger: Yes.

You asked about my going to Yale. The Yale Forest School,
for a number of years, gave a course to its students on national
forest administration, and I was asked to go back there in the
winter of 1916 and give that course. I got a leave of absence
from the Forest Service to give that course. They had a
different visiting lecturer each year.

Fry: This course was open only to the students in their forestry
school?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Was it a credit course?

Hunger: Oh yes, a required course. During that period, in addition to
this short course at the University of Washington, the Forest
Service was very liberal in having its men give lectures at
the other forest schools. Oregon State was eager to have the
experience of the Forest Service men, and I did my share of

88

Hunger: lecturing there too.

Fry: This was the same type of lecture that you would give at
Washington?

Hunger: Yes, general talks on forestry.

Fry: What about speeches around to civic groups? Did you do much
of that?

Hunger: Well, there was the Logging Congress and the Western Forestry
and Conservation Association and a few civic groups that were
interested to hear what the Forest Service was doing, what
forestry was all about. I did a certain amount of that, more
probably in the later years, after I was the director of the
Experiment Station.

Preservation of the Oregon Caves

Fry: Would you like to add anything to your story about getting
the Oregon Caves set aside? I understand that before your
visit they were poorly protected and undeveloped.

Hunger: About 1917, the people in Grant's Pass, Oregon, thought that
something ought to be done to protect and develop the Oregon
Caves, or, as they were called at the time, the Marble Halls
of Oregon. They were within the Siskiyou National Forest;
they had been discovered a number of years before, but no
particular development done there. There was a woodsman who

89

Hunger: lived near there, Dick Rowley; and he guided people into the
caves. There was considerable vandalism going on, picking
off stalactites and so on. So District Forester Cecil, having
heard that I had been in two or three other caves, in England
and the East, thought that I must be an expert on caves, so he
sent me down there.

Fry: What do you mean, you had been in other caves? Were you a
spelunker, a person who liked to explore caves?

Hunger: No, but in my college days I just happened to go in two or

three in England and the East, and he knew of it. So I went
down there and joined Ranger Helvin Lewis; we rode horseback
to the caves, the last part of the way through fairly deep
snow. This was in Hay, I think. We tied our horses to a tree,
and with this local man, Dick Rowley, went into the caves,
using torches and flashlights, which are not very effective.
I was very much impressed and thought they certainly needed
protection and development. I think as a result of that and
the opinion of others, the Forest Service began considerable
development, building a road in there, and giving permits for
building a lodge, etc. The Forest Service didn't build the
lodge. It built a very good road in there. Soon after that
time, several thousand acres were transferred to the Department
of the Interior as a national monument and has since then been
so administered.

Fry: Were any difficulties involved in getting this change in the

90

Fry: land use classification of this area of the forest?

Hunger: You mean getting it transferred to the Department of the
Interior?

Fry: No, I mean before that. Getting it under more protection

would take manpower. I guess you had to have a ranger around
there, didn't you, to afford more protection for the cave?

\

Hunger: I think that was arranged for, apparently after that. I don't
remember the details; those were all handled locally. There
is one little incident that I'm pretty sure of. Forest Super
visor H. J. Anderson, long prior to my visit, heard that some
body was going to file a limestone mineral claim on the area,
and, being aware of it, he wired Washington to have the area
withdrawn from entry. That saved the area, probably, from
private exploitation, because he was quite alert to what was
going on.

Fry: Was this when it was made into a national monument?

Hunger: No, before that, before the time I was there he'd staved off
the attempt to get it under private ownership as a mining
claim.

Establishment of Natural Areas

Fry: How did you first get interested in establishing Natural
Areas in the Region?

91

Hunger: This Region rather pioneered in that field. About 1917, I
became interested through the activities of Professor V. E.
Shelf o^ of Urbana, who was representing the Ecological Society.
He was compiling a list of Natural Areas, and he asked me to
be Oregon representative of a committee of the Ecological
Society. Shortly thereafter, we proposed creating Natural
Areas. Just to illustrate the great change in attitude on
such subjects, the first Area proposed was of 280 acres, and
it met with considerable opposition.

Fry: i By whom?

Munger: By the local forest officers, because they thought it was a
quite unnecessary tying-up of timber that could be sold, and
we had lots of wild Natural Areas anyway. But from that very
small beginning, this Region, I think, rather led the other
regions in its activity in establishing a series of Natural
Areas.

Fry: Do you mean that this 280 acres was finally approved in the
Region?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: How did you get it approved over the oppostion?

Munger: Well, we appealed to the Washington office.

Fry: Whom did you get support from there?

Munger: The branch of research.

Fry: Earl«Clapp?

Munger: Yes.

92

Fry: What did he do, just write a letter?

Hunger: Well, it got the approval of the Washington office for

setting aside this area for that purpose. From that small
beginning, we developed quite a series of Natural Areas
typical of the major types. Most of them are of a thousand
acres or so. While I was director of the Experiment Station
some years later, we had set up about fifteen Natural Areas,
and that isn't half enough, really, for this Region, but it
assures preservation of some of the primeval forest in its
natural condition.

Fry: Exactly what type of uses are allowed in these Areas, or were
at that time?

Munger: There are supposed to be no roads and no camping and, theo
retically, no grazing of livestock. They are to be left, so
far as possible, in their virgin condition.

Fry: But apparently you do have some grazing then that goes on?

Munger: It's pretty hard to control where Natural Areas are close

to cattle ranges and anyway we have grazing of deer and elk;
they are a part of the natural condition.

Fry: Mining and hunting are not allowed, right, and never have
been?

Munger: Theoretically, no.

Fry: Were you a party to setting up the administration of these
Areas?

Munger: Well, they are integral parts of the national forest, and are

93

Hunger: administered by the forest supervisor, who is supposed to
protect them from improper intrusion. However, on each of
the experimental forests, which were set up at a later date,
beginning in 1924, a part of each experimental forest was set
up as a Natural Area and, as such, was under the jurisdiction
of the Experiment Station.

Fry: But these are administered approximately the same way, is
that right?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Although for different purposes, I gather. Do you use these
Natural Areas which you just spoke of also for research?

Hunger: Yes. They served as sample plots of the virgin forest con
dition as far as the cycle of vegetation and the life history
of the forest are concerned. Some of those have been studied
quite intensively.

94

WORLD WAR I AND THE SPRUCE INVENTORY

Fry: Was your spruce inventory started when Ames left for France
in World War I with the 20th Engineers and you became the
Acting Chief of Silviculture?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Can you explain this changeover in duties, if it involved
any for you, and then go into the account of the spruce
inventory?

Hunger: When this country got into World War I, and perhaps before
that, there developed a great need for spruce for airplane
wings, that being considered at that time the most desirable
material for airplane wings. So the Forest Service, to help
the cause along, started on a very intensive scouring of the
region to find spruce of the quality that would make these
airplane wings, which have to be absolutely straight grain
and free of knots; it took the choicest of logs. About that
time, the Army had what was called a Spruce Production
Division, and they built a mill in Vancouver, Washington,
to cut up these spruce logs that were delivered to them for
their wing beams and maybe other purposes. So there was a
busy period then both in finding the suitable spruce and
finding purchasers that would log it and get it out > sometimes

95

Hunger: from very remote areas under very difficult conditions. A
great deal was got from Alaska, with which I had nothing to
do, but much came from the Olympic National Forest, where
we had quite a number of sales of this very high quality
spruce.

The logging, as with most war enterprises, was exceed
ingly wasteful, because these choicest of trees were cut and
only the very choicest parts, perhaps just the butt log, was
taken out and the rest left to lie because it was too far to
remove it for ordinary uses.

Fry: You mean it was economically unfeasible to remove the rest?

Munger: Yes, and that went on for some time. It was a very busy

time in timber sales for me, because I had sort of a double
job of Ames1 and my own work to do. But we had quite a large
crew scouring the country to find suitable spruce.

Fry: Would you say this was a good time for the industry, or
did the industry not profit too much from this?

Munger: Well, the industry prospered, because there was great demand
for timber of all kinds, so the lumber industry was very
active during that period.

Fry: What did the Vancouver effort have to do, if anything, with
the Four L's [Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen]? And
also how did your efforts relate to the other efforts to
supply enough lumber for the war effort?

Munger: The principal contribution that our office was making at the

96

Hunger: time was in the spruce effort, which seemed to be the critical
war commodity that forests might supply. We assisted the
Spruce Production Division in its technical problems and, as
I said, we had made a canvass of western Oregon and Washington
to find out where this high quality spruce could be had and
then made sales there, and also in Alaska, with which I had
a very remote and secondary connection. But we did have a
busy time negotiating these sales and getting the timber out
under very difficult conditions of transportation.

Fry: Did you arrange for lumber companies to transport the material?

Hunger: Yes. We sold the stumpage, and the companies that logged then
transported it out, sometimes forty miles or so by dirt roads.

Fry: You say here [Timber-Lines] that it had to be hauled by horses
thirty miles to the shipping point.

Hunger: Yes, well perhaps thirty's far enough. [Laughter]

Fry: Then you do make the statement that your office was looked to
for all sorts of information that might speed up the war
effort. Was this a sort of information service that you
carried on?

Hunger: Yes. When the Army wanted to know about the availability of
certain classes of things that would be needed, particularly
for loggers' needs, we made some census of those.

Fry: This was the census of available timber, or of equipment?

Hunger: No, available materials that might be used. Because there
was a slack in the manufacturing of equipment, the Army had

97

Hunger: to make those that were available go as far as possible-
things like logging equipment, even down to woodsmen's
boots.

98

PART II

DIRECTOR,
PACIFIC NORTHWEST FOREST AND RANGE EXPERIMENT STATION

1924-1938

99

THE BEGINNING

Fry: To start the story of the research station, we'd like to
get a picture of the very beginning of it. How did the
idea for a regional experiment station first evolve for
this Region? Did it come from Washington?

Hunger: Yes. There was an act passed about that time [the McSweeney-
McNary Act] authorizing the creation of regional experiment
stations and supplying the money for them. Two or three,
I think, had been started before we were established here,
and while this—what was called the Pacific Northwest Forest
Experiment Station—was a successor of the Wind River, it
was on quite a different basis from the Wind River Experiment
Station. The first money became available July 1, 1924,
and, as a surprise to me, District Forester Cecil wanted to
know if I would care for the job as Director and I thought
I would. So we started with a very small crew, making our —
I think it was $30,000 — go as far as we could, with a staff
of about six including the stenographic and computing force.

Fry: What connection did you have with the McSweeney-McNary Act?
Did you help at all in the formation of it?

Hunger: No. It had been brewing for quite awhile, and I guess it
was about 1929 that it was passed, and it very definitely

100

Hunger: recognized research in the creation of the experimental
forests, which were given statutory authority at that
time, and liberalized appropriations for forest research.

Fry: You were able then to increase your staff after HcSweeney-
McNary came through?

Hunger: Yes, I think that is what precipitated that.

Fry: That was when the expansion in the thirties was able to
get underway, from 1929-1930 on.

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Before we get into a discussion on staff, how did you
decide on the location of the station?

Hunger: Earle Clapp, who was in charge of research in the Washington
office, rather favored the idea of establishing the experi
ment stations in conjunction with a university, as had been
done for the Hadison laboratory with the University of
Wisconsin and with the California Forest Experiment Station,
which is in conjunction with the University of California.
We explored to some extent the possibility of doing that
here but didn't find any takers because the local universi
ties and forest schools seemed to prefer to paddle their
own canoe. That suited me very well, because I preferred
close affiliation with the Regional Forester's office
rather than being more remotely detached from that and
connected with an academic atmosphere.

Fry: Did you think that you might have more freedom of choice

102

STAFF

R. E. McArdle

Fry: You began to build up your staff. Who was the first
person hired after you? Was it McArdle?

Hunger: Well, we already had at Wind River Leo Isaac, and he just
continued on. Then the first one who came fresh was R. E.
McArdle, who came picked directly from the Civil Service
register as a high stand man, and who later became Chief of
the Forest Service.

Fry: Does that mean this was his first job? He was fresh out
of college?

Hunger: Yes, he came directly out of college. He'd had Army experi
ence interrupting his college course, but he came directly
from forest school at the University of Michigan. He was
immediately put on the study of the growth and yield of
Douglas fir, which he pursued with other things for two
years, and the results were subsequently published in a
bulletin which is still considered the standard text on that
subject. It's been reprinted and is used as a textbook in
forest schools.

Fry: What kind of a worker was he?

Hunger: He was a very intellectually hard worker, with boundless

103

Hunger: enthusiasm and inventiveness and a very delightful person
to work with, because he was so full of good ideas and
accomplished so much.

Fry: Did he come up with a number of ideas for studies and
projects?

Hunger: Two or three years later, he switched largely to fire

studies, in which he was very ingenious in developing new
equipment for fire research and new ideas of discovering
things. He engaged in such things as testing the cause
of smokers' fires, whether they came from the match or the
cigarette or discarded pipe heels, and what kind of material
they would most readily ignite in.

Fry: You mean he had to actually burn the cigarettes and so forth
to do this?

Hunger: Yes. Then later he was suspicious that the lookouts were
straining their eyes and not doing too good a job of dis
covering smokes in using the dark eye glasses that they did.
So he made some study of dark glasses, the outcome of which
was that one was made standard, one which was of the color
that would show up smoke the best and also not be fatiguing
to the eyes as some of these drugstore glasses were.

Fry: So this was primarily a study of the color of the glass?

Hunger: Yes, and some of these glasses that are made of molded glass
have great distortion, so they are very tiresome for the eyes.
He very ingeniously demonstrated that, and we adopted these

104

Munger: standard goggles, which were supplied at cost to the look
outs. Another thing I remember he rather ingeniously worked
out was wanting to detect the effectiveness of lookouts. He
used smoke bombs, which were quite harmless, and he'd ignite
one some place and then gee how long it took for the lookout

to discover the smoke. In that way, we discovered what were

3*\
called "blind spots," spots that the lookouts couldn't see

into.

Fry: I suppose this resulted then in either the addition or
moving of lookouts.

Munger: Yes, better arrangement of the lookouts in some cases, and
also a test of the alertness of the lookouts.

Fry: I guess once this got underway the lookouts never knew
whether it would be a test on them or a real fire.

Munger: Yes.

Fry: Did he do the fire studies at the same time he was continuing
the growth and yield studies?

Munger: No. The growth and yield project was pretty well finished
then.

The latter part of that study was carried on by Walter
H. Meyer, who came to the station in 1926; he was a very
competent mensurationist. He augmented McArdle's study by
applying the normal yield tables to actual stands. That
sounds a little technical, but that made a part of the
bulletin that was subsequently published. He resumed and

105

Hunger: concluded the study that McArdle had largely dropped in

favor of fire studies. We were such a small organization
that everybody worked on all sorts of things and helped
each other out.

Fry: I was wondering how strictly the lines and duties divided
up the employees.

Hunger: No, not too sharply, because we all shared things together
in the field and in the office.

Fry: So some of you could provide field help for the others if
you happened to be going out that day, you mean.

Hunger: Yes.

A. G. Sims on

Fry: Also on your staff right in this first year or two was A.
G. Simson. Hadn't he been on the Experimental Forest?

Hunger: Before the days of the Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment
Station, A. G. Simson, who was not a forester but was a
c^ood deal of a genius, was assigned as a clerk and radio fair
to the Wind River Experiment Station. Hofmann had underway
a study of radio static as a means of predicting lightning

storms and changes in humidity. A good deal of equipment

he.

was acquired to study atmospheric static and thenAcorrelated

it with the weather. That was made a major undertaking at

106

Munger: Wind River for several years. Simson was a pretty good

meteorologist, although not trained in that field, and he
became more and more interested and engrossed in the causes
of forest fires, and the relation of forest fires and
weather, and did a good deal in those pioneering days when
we were just beginning to get conscious that there was a
good deal that research could do in understanding the causes
and prevention of forest fires.

Fry: In other words, he contributed this concept of the impor
tance of weather in predicting high fire probability?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: And he used static on the xadio as one indication of this?

Munger: Yes. Since the lightning was one of the major causes of

forest fires in the national forests, it was very important
to be able to predict the coming of lightning storms so that
everybody could be alerted. He developed a much better know
ledge of the meteorology and also the possibilities — in fact,
probabilities — of static as being an indication of the
approach of lightning storms.

Fry: How did he get his equipment, and what equipment did he use?

Munger: Well, we bought some elaborate equipment "(I forget the name
of it now) that was used up there as a very sensitive de
tector of static.

Fry: Did he work this out mathematically at all?

Munger: No, I don't think so—empirically, I think. Then he worked

107

Hunger: that into working with McArdle on other types of causative

agencies in forest fires.
Fry: What were the results of his lightning study? Were you

able to detect storms?
Hunger: I think it helped, yes. There was a correlation there, and

I think it helped. Simson did much in building very portable

radios .
Fry: Were these portables that he started just battery-powered

radio units?
Hunger: Yes. The ones that he had a part in devising were very

compact. They were the forerunners of the walkie-talkie.

I think he went on with that same kind of work as a civilian

with the Army after he left us.
Fry: Were these portables adopted by the Regional Office at that

time for use in firefighting?
Hunger: I don't think they were commercially manufactured, no; not

until later.

R. H. Westvelt

Fry: In 1925 Westvelt came to your staff. What was his function?

Hunger: R. H. Westvelt came to us directly from Hichigan Agricultural
College as a very promising young forester and was assigned
largely to studies of ponderosa pine, in central and eastern

108

Munger: Oregon and Washington, largely to study the role of repro
duction, both the advance reproduction and the subsequent
reproduction following cutting, and particularly in its
relation to the disposal of slashings. He did a lot of
very creditable research, much of it on his hands and knees
counting seedlings and measuring them following logging
operations --both private cuttings and national forest cut
tings. That resulted in a notable bulletin. Then, much to
my regret, he left to take up a teaching job. I think he
left partly because he got tired of the boiled beef, potatoes,
and greasy gravy that one got then in those days at the eastern
Oregon lumber camps, where he had to live much of the time. He
decided that he would prefer a life of a professor in a more
urban setting. We missed him very much. In western Oregon
the food in the logging camps was good enough for anybody.

Fry: I don't quite understand why there was that difference.

Munger: Well, maybe it was a matter of supply and demand, I don't
know. Probably there was some competition.

Fry: What sort of a man was Westvelt?

Munger: He was a very serious-minded, alert student, interested in
research aspects of forestry, the theoretical phases of
forestry, and did for those days notable work, pioneering
in ponderosa pine regeneration following selective cutting.
He was thorough and understanding, observant and accurate,
not as ingenious in his techniques perhaps as Leo Isaac,
but able in his own way, and a good writer, which is very

109

Hunger: important in forestry.

Fry: Did you use his writing talents in helping shape up other
reports too, besides his own?

Hunger: Possibly. He was the author of a major bulletin, in which

I joined as joint author on slash disposal in western yellow
pine, now ponderosa pine. He did detailed work in studying
the reproduction following selective cutting and the effect
of slash, or the burning of slash, on regeneration. This
resulted in the joint publication on that subject. He had
to live, in those years, at the logging camps, where the food
was not of the best, and I think that's one of the reasons
that he decided that he would prefer a life of a professor
in a more urban setting than the logging camps of central
Oregon. We missed him very much.

Fry: The name Westvelt sounds like he was maybe German.

Ernest Kolbe

Hunger: Ernest Kolbe took Westvelt1 s place when Westvelt left to

do teaching, and he continued similar studies in ponderosa
pine for several years; they were largely centered at the
Pringle Falls Experimental Forest, which was established
about that time.

/

Fry: So the ponderosa pine reproduction studies then were

110

Fry: continued until you were able to get some fairly valid
conclusions out of this?

Hunger: Yes. Kolbe also worked mostly in the pine region. Kolbe,
after a few years, joined the Western Pine Association and
became their Chief Forester. That organization has now
merged with the Western Wood Products Association.

Walter Meyer

Hunger: In tho-mid thirties, Dr. Walter Meyer joined the station as
a mensurationist. He had some European training and came to
us highly trained in forest mensuration and mathematics, and
contributed a great deal to raising the technical standards
of our research. I used to accuse him sometimes of thinking
of trees in terms of curves and norms rather than as living
organisms, but he was a good field man. He supplemented
the studies that McArdle had made in Douglas fir growth and
yield.

Fry: Did he come to you as a very young man?

Hunger: He had been working elsewhere after graduating from the

Yale forest school in 1922 , then taking some European training
in forest mensuration and then came to us and worked largely
on mensuration problems for the several years that he was
there. The latter part of the period he made major studies

Ill

Hunger: in ponderosa pine growth and yield, and in spruce and
hemlock forests.

After a few years, Walter Meyer felt the urge to teach,
and joined the faculty of the University of Washington; and,
a few years after that, Yale called him, and he was a pro
fessor there until his retirement a few years ago.

Leo Isaac

Fry: We need to know something about one more staff member of
the Research Station — Leo Isaac, who did much Douglas fir
work.

Hunger: Leo Isaac was brought into the Wind River Experimental Forest
before the Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment Station was
started, because he was a young forester who showed promise
for research. He worked on natural reproduction studies,
mostly in the Douglas fir region, with me for many years,
and we were in the field a great deal together. He was an
extraordinarily close observer and had good eyes for seeing
seedlings and unusual things in the forest. We worked very
harmoniously together for many years.

Fry: Was Leo Isaac the sort of person that could figure out

ingenious ways to get at the information he was trying to
research?

112

Hunger: Yes. Leo Isaac had an ingenious turn of mind that helped
him devise the means of getting information in those days
of rather crude, primitive research. For example, when
studying the dispersal of seed, because we were interested
in finding out how far individual seed trees might be
effective, he thought up the idea of dropping seed from a
kite on a snow field. He went over into eastern Oregon,
put up a kite, and, noting the wind velocity, got a very
accurate pattern on the snow of the dissemination of the
seed under certain wind conditions. That's just one illus
tration of the kind of thing that he worked out.

Fry: Did you help him on that?

Hunger: Oh, I encouraged him but that was his project.

Hunger: There were other direct experimental methods of testing

seed scattering which had quite a bearing on our recommen
dations as to how frequently blocks of seed trees should be
left. He made a notable contribution to the subject of
natural regeneration of Douglas fir.

Fry: How did his work in Douglas fir relate to HcArdle's?

Hunger: Isaac's work was primarily during those years, and for a long
time afterward, on the reproduction of Douglas fir, including
matters of seed supply, and of seed dissemination. It was
analogous to what Westvelt was doing in the pine region. He
also took part in such things as the Douglas fir heredity
study and published some planting studies too.

113

Fry: How would you characterize him as a worker?

Hunger: He was an exceedingly sharp observer. He could see little
one year old seedlings when the ordinary person would pass
them by and not discover them. He was an excellent woods
man and outdoorsman and a close observer.

Fry: How do you evaluate Isaac's work? Has it held up pretty
well in time, or have some of his conclusions had to be
revised?

Hunger: Well, he did valuable pioneering work in determining the

habits of Douglas fir reproduction, and it formed the basis
for our silvicultural knowledge of the species. I think he
made a great contribution in his accurately conducted field
work on that score.

Fry: In other words, are you saying that he really found out

basic information that has served as a foundation in this
particular area?

Hunger: Yes. Our detailed work was carried on over several years
by him and others working with him. We worked out the
principles of seed production and dissemination, and germi
nation and survival of seedlings under various kinds of
conditions — information that now everybody takes for granted—
but in those days in the 1920' s the principles weren't well
understood at all.

114

William G. Morris

Fry: Can you tell us something about William G. Morris?

Munger: Morris was one of the early crew on the Pacific Northwest
Experiment Station. He came to us in 1931 directly from
the University of Washington Forestry School; he had a
splendid mind, very much slanted toward research, and did
valuable work for a number of years on a variety of subjects,
particularly in the field of fire, which has been his pro
fessional interest since then. He is still with the Station.
But he was one of the well qualified, enthusiastic workers
in the early days.

Fry: Was Simson, who did the work in meteorology and fire, gone
by the time Morris came?

Munger: Yes. I don't think they overlapped. Morris, I think, was
primarily on fire studies. He was concerned with fire pre
vention techniques, causes of fire, lightning storm mapping,
and fire suppression research.

Morris also devoted considerable time to the follow-up
of the Douglas fir heredity study that was started in 1913
of the progeny of about 125 Ddmglas firs. He re-examined
those plantations a number of times and authored reports
on them.

Fry: These are reports published by the Experiment Station and
the Forest Service?

115

Mtr.iger: Yes, and as a Department of Agriculture publication.

Fry: In all of these studies that you started in this first
four or five years of the Research Station, were any of
these continuations of some of the studies done before
under the old Section of Silvics?

Munger: Yes. We kept up such plots as had been put in in the
early days, and a good many more permanent plots were
established in Westvelt's and Kolbe's day--tagging the
trees to study their growth, mortality, and the instance
of reproduction. Kolbe did a lot of that permanent plot
establishment.

Fry: You had some heredity studies back there in the nineteen-
teens; were any of those continued?

Munger: Yes. I have already spoken of the Douglas fir heredity

study begun in 191ST and continued to this day. We wanted
to investigate also the regional races of ponderosa pine,
knowing that there was a great difference in the behavior
of the progeny from the Black Hills, we'll say, and from
California or from Arizona. So we got batches of seed from
about a dozen localities, and they were outplanted in half
a dozen places and have been followed ever since. They
show striking differences in the growth and form of the
young trees according to the seed source. That was a kind
of sister study to one that was made in the northern Rocky
Mountains with the same ends in view. We called this the

116

Hunger: "Regional Races of Western Yellow Pine," and it has yielded
rather significant information as to what races are superior
in growth rate, etc. These outplantings were made partly
in co-operation with the Oregon State School of Forestry,
with the University of Washington School of Forestry, and
the Washington Agricultural College School of Forestry, as
well as plantations on the Whitman, Deschutes, and Columbia
National Forests.

Fry: In what way did the educational institutions co-operate?

Hunger: They made the periodic examinations for us.

Fry: With their forestry students, you mean?

Hunger: I presume so, yes. One of them made it a subject of a
graduation thesis.

Fry: When you have a sister study like this, a research project

that's going on in another region, how do you co-ordinate the
two and exchange information?

Hunger: I'm afraid we didn't do much in this particular instance
except compare results after we were through.

117

GROWTH AND YIELD STUDIES

Pine

Fry: You had some substantial Douglas fir studies in growth and
yield, I understand. Also some in pine and spruce.

Hunger: Yes, in addition to the Growth and Yield Study of Douglas

fir conducted by McArdle and finished up by Dr. Walter Meyer
over a period of about four years, there were growth and
yield studies made by Walter Meyer of ponderosa pine, Sitka
spruce, and hemlock--all of which resulted in publications
by him that were very creditable to the station. At that
same time, silvicultural studies were underway in the eastern
part of Oregon and Washington, at first conducted by Westvelt
and later by Kolbe, consisting in detailed studies of both
virgin forests and cutover land, partly by means of temporary
transects and later by permanent plots, which were established
for repeated observation. Those studies in ponderosa pine
also resulted in publications on silvicultural management and
slash disposal.

Fry: This got into the problem of whether or not to burn for slash
disposal?

Munger: Yes. The problem of slash disposal has been a live issue

118

Hunger: both in the pine region and in the Douglas fir region for

many years, and the station made it a matter of major study
through a term of years. Many of us realized that burning
the debris in ponderosa pine was destroying valuable nutrient
material, but the fire protectionists thought it was necessary
to stave off the possibility of a great conflagration. So
under the pressure of the forest protection people, the
complete burning of logging debris was practiced for quite a
number of years — broadcast burning in the Douglas fir region,
and piling and burning in the pine region.

Fry: Was it a state law at this time that this had to be burned?

Hunger: Yes. The state law in both Oregon and Washington almost made
burning compulsory, in other words made the party that didn't
dispose of its slashings liable if a fire spread and did damage
to others, so that the law was an encouragement. But we
silviculturalists still didn't think that it was the ideal
forest management and made studies to indicate what the effects,
good and bad, were of burning and not burning.

Fry: What effect did this have, Mr. Hunger, on legislation and on
forest practice on the part of private owners?

Hunger: The idea of not burning gained increasing acceptance, partly
because of better protection methods, better utilization of
the tree, and concomitant with the easing up of the state
laws on burning. So now the preachments of the experiment
station many years ago are in practice — preachments of quite

119

Munger: limited burning in both the Douglas fir and the pine region.

Fry: I suppose along with this the increased methods of fire pro
tection and so forth has...

Munger: Made it much safer to leave slashings unburned, yes.

Fry: These growth and yield tables, I understand, are still the
basis for many running inventories and projections from in
ventories on the part of large timber companies and the
Forest Service today. All that you can give us about how
these were made and your evaluation of the way they were
made at that time would be quite valuable.

Munger: Well, the techniques of making growth and yield tables are
somewhat different in even-age stands from what they are
in uneven-age stands. But in the Douglas fir region the
principal system was to measure stands of different ages
on different site qualities of land and so prepare a table
showing what normally should be produced. Those tables
made in those days are still standard, except for more in
tensive utilization at the present time. In the pine region,
the studies were largely based on the analysis of individual
trees, and putting those together to see what the growth
would be in a stand.

Fry: Was this done through the study of the rings?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: Did they take borings or cut the trees down?

Munger: Mostly on cuttings, yes.

120

Fry: What were some of the other factors besides slash disposal
that emerged as guidelines for people interested in re
forestation?

Hunger: Well, the density of stocking had considerable bearing on
the rate of growth in pine stands, where there is limited
soil moisture; that was a consideration in determining at
what point you reached maximum growth. For that purpose,
some thinnings were made in dense thickets to see what would
happen if you thinned these thickets, whether they would
grow faster — as they did.

Fry: This did lead to the practice of thinning pine stands?

Hunger: Yes. That was proven to be a desirable practice, but the
economic problems of doing it were rather difficult. How
ever, in the CCC days of cheap labor there was some of that
done .

Another factor that was given a good deal of consider
ation, with the co-operation of the entomologists of the
Bureau of Entomology, was the susceptibility to bark beetle
depredations. It was found that trees could be classified
according to their likelihood of being attacked by bark
beetles; and there was developed thereby what was called the
Keen tree classification, which was adopted as a guide in
marking trees for a selection cutting.

Fry: Is this in a publication?

Hunger: Yes, it is in various forms.

121

Fry: Who carried on this work in entomology?

Munger: Well, F. Paul Keen was assigned to this region for a number
of years and did the major amount of the work in that field.
This tree classification is named for him.

Fry: What were some of the methods used to determine suscepti
bility?

Munger: Well, it was observational methods partly, but also by

permanent plots. He had some large areas marked in which
he watched the incidence of bark beetle attack, but I'm
not too familiar with the details of his pioneering work.

Fry: Mr. Clarence Richen, who is head of Crown Zellerbach's

Northwest Timber, told me that this is something that's

*
still used a great deal too— -

Munger: Yes, I think so.

Fry: --That it was really a landmark type of study.

There were some studies done on selective cutting
technique and selection of trees in Douglas fir, the
Brandstrom and Kirkland studies,

Munger: First, while we're speaking about ponderosa pine, let's

continue that. Coincident with Keen's work on the suscepti
bility of trees to bark beetle attack, the station carried
on, largely under the direction of Axel Brandstrom, studies
of the eonomics of selection cutting in ponderosa pine. He
rated trees according to the quality of lumber that they

cf. Richen, Clarence, Interview with Amelia Fry, Regional
Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of
California at Berkeley, 1966, manuscript.

122

hunger: would produce, their cost to manufacture, their probable
growth rate, and their susceptibility to insect damage.
Putting those factors together, he arrived at guidelines
for deciding what trees ought to be cut in the first
rotation and what could profitably be left to grow for
another twenty, thirty, forty years. That was given the
name of the Maturity Selection System, and it has practi
cally become standard practice on the national forests as
well as on private lands. It marked a notable progress in
the more intelligent selection cutting of ponderosa pine.
That is a brief summary of a long and complicated study.
It was accompanied by mill production studies conducted by
the Section of Products to show what the cost of manufacturing
logs of different sizes and grades was and the value of the
product therefrom. It was quite an eye-opener to people to
discover that many lumbermen were cutting trees or utilizing
logs that would have brought them much more return if they'd
waited another twenty, thirty years before harvesting them.

Fry: This took place over quite a few years, didn't it?

Munger: Yes. In the thirties.

Fry: This was also part of Kirkland's work too?

Munger: No. Kirkland's work was entirely in Douglas fir.

123

Douglas 7ir: The Selective Cutting Controversy

Fry: Tt isn't clear to me how they divided this up.

Munger: Well, the two studies are entirely separate — the ponderosa

pine and the Douglas fir studies--but they were more or less
concurrent. Brands trom had a part in each, and also the
Section of Products had a part in each in making the mill
production studies that were a necessary part of it. One
important factor in those studies was the beginning of the
use of tractors in logging in the Douglas fir region, so
the fir study started by making studies of the cost of
logging by tractors versus donkey engines and railroads.

Fry: I believe that the bulletin on selective cutting in Douglas
fir came out in 1936. How much of an impact did this have
at the time?

Munger: The study started with a logging cost study, and it pointed
toward the possibilities of doing certain selective cutting
in the Douglas fir region as a profitable, economic pro
cedure. Under the methods of donkey engine logging, nothing
had been really possible except clear-cutting of considerable
areas, but the use of tractors opened up the possibility of
doing some selection.

'• So Kirkland and Brands trom made studies of the relative

value of different sizes and kinds of trees, not only species

124

Hunger: but age and size.

Fry: Was there also some study about the selection of trees which
were more susceptible to insect infestation?

Hunger: The hazard of insects didn't have much part in the Douglas
fir region; that wasn't much of a factor. It was a more
important factor in the ponderosa pine region.

Fry: So they had a rather definite conclusion as to the type of
cutting practice that their study seemed to indicate?

Hunger: Yes, Brandstrom and Kirkland then came out with the rather
strong recommendation that a certain degree of selection
could be practiced with great immediate profit to the
operator. A bulletin to that end was finally published.
Also as the result of the recommendations of the Brandstrom-
Kirkland report, for a few years considerable selective
cutting was practiced in the Douglas fir region on the
national forests. But it was soon found to be undesirable
and unworkable and was discarded.

Fry: In a case like this, how important was it for the Station
staff to back a study which was done by two people on the
staff?

Hunger: It made considerable controversy between those who saw the
silvicultural objections to selective cutting and those who
saw the economic advantages, and the result was that the
manuscript was very materially modified before publication
from the way it was originally written.

125

Fry: In your position, I guess you were ultimately responsible
for the papers that were published that came out of your
Station, so that you had a role as a sort of editor.

Hunger- Yes, and I wouldn't approve the publication of the report.
But the Washington office rather went over my head on that
matter and decided it was to be published. However, as a
result of a trip back to Washington, B.C., and long confer
ences, the report was much modified before publication.

Fry: So you had Brandstrom and Kirkland , the former of whom was
under you in the Station, influencing the Regional Forester
in his cutting practices and you were left holding the clear
cutting bag alone?

Hunger: Hardly alone. There was general, but not very vocal, favoring
of clear cutting as the soundest method of silviculture in
Douglas fir, and also muffled disapproval on the National
Forests of the orders to practice selective cutting. The
"experiment" on the National Forests lasted only about two
years. I recall that Ferd Silcox, then Chief Forester, on
a visit to Portland complimented me on the stand I had taken.

Fry: How did Leo Isaac stand on this?

Hunger: Well, he was kind of neutral for awhile.

Fry: He hadn't written anything at this time on this type of thing?

Hunger: No. The economic principles of selective timber management
are theoretically sound, but the practical, silvicultural
objections to partial cutting in this type are paramount.
Isaac later conducted silvicultural studies in areas of
Douglas fir that had been selectively cut which resulted in
observational proof of the superiority of clear cutting.

126

Fry: How did the Regional Office fit into something like this?
Did it take sides?

Munger: The Regional Forester was very much impressed with the

possibilities of tractor logging and doing selective cutting
in Douglas fir, and he wanted it practiced on the national
forests in spite of the remonstrance of us in the Experiment
Station.

For awhile it was a matter of the Experiment Station
pitted against the Regional Office that was strongly advo
cating selective cutting in Douglas fir.

The Experiment Station's later study, run by Leo Isaac,
showed the unwisdom of it for various reasons. We put in a
lot of plots in these so-called selectively cut areas to see
just what had happened--how the trees had been scarred, how
much windfall there was, what the value of the residual stand
was in comparison to the material that was taken off. Even
though there is very little formally published, there was a
great deal informally published and passed around liberally,
you might say, so that it was convincing evidence that it
wasn't a practical procedure in most of the Douglas fir
region. I wouldn't say all the Douglas fir region; there are
certain types of Douglas fir forest, particularly in southern
Oregon, where selective cutting is a practical procedure and
is still practiced somewhat. In southwestern Oregon they have
a little different stand structure from what we have up north.
Fry: When they finally came around then to changing back to clear

127

Fry: cutting, was this because of any influence of the Experiment
Station, or was it because of their own experience on their
forests?

Munger: It came about partly because of a change in administration

in the Regional Office, and partly because of the acceptance
of the Experiment Station's ideas on the subject, coupled
with the experience of those on the timber sales who had
seen the disadvantages of the selective cuttings.

Fry: Had you been able to talk against the idea of selective
cutting while it was the official policy of the Region?

Munger: I think I told you before (off-tape) of a speech I gave to
the University of Washington. This was given before the
Puget Sound Section of the Society of American Foresters.
It was my summation of the subject of selective cutting in
Douglas fir. The Regional Forester (I don't want to put
this on the record, but you can't stop it, I guess) tried
to block the publication of it, and the matter was appealed
to Washington, and Washington approved publication of it.
That had a considerable impact at the time.

Fry: You mean the pamphlet did, or the controversy?

Munger: The pamphlet, yes, this article.

Fry: Did it appear as a separate pamphlet?

Munger: I could get it if you wanted a citation of it. I think I
can find it in a minute.

Fry: I would like to have the reference...

128

Munger: [Bringing out scrapbook of publications] "The Silviculture
of Tree Selection Cutting in the Douglas Fir Region,"
University of Washington, Forest Club Quarterly, March,
1939.

Fry: That is certainly a well-kept collection of papers and
articles.

Munger: [Looking over scrapbook? Here is "Basic Considerations in
the Management of Ponderosa Pine Forests by the Maturity
Selection System," a manuscript for which I didn't have a
printed copy.

Fry: That is one of your papers in the controversy you had with
Pearson in the Southwestern Region?

Munger: Yes. About the time we were developing in the Pacific North
west a new approach to selective cutting in ponderosa pine,

which we called the "maturity selection system," Director

rea-fSon

Pierson in the Southwest was advocating a somewhat different

technique which he called "improvement selection cutting.."
Both methods were described in Journal of Forestry articles
in 1941-2 by their respective proponents, followed by
comments in rebuttal in later Journals.

Here is "Handbook of Forest Practice for the West Coast
Logging and Lumber Division," a very important publication
at the time of the Lumber Code in 1934.

Fry: And that came out of your Experiment Station here?

Munger: Yes, anonymously. I wrote here, "Written chiefly by Thornton

129

Munger: T. Hunger and Richard E. McArdle, and drawings by Anita
Kellogg," who was a WPA worker in the depression years.
She made these rather clever drawings; she had never been
in the woods, but we showed the different methods of logging
by these pictures— single seed tree, block cutting, and so
on.

Fry: I hope these scrapbooks can be put in with your diaries at
Yale's Forest History Society.

Munger: I think that might be the ultimate place for them, especially
if they've got any way of cataloging them, because some of
these things will not be found in regular publications that
are easily available. One of the things that we tried to do
at the Station was to turn out material currently, and even
in provisional form.

Fry: That S.A.F. section, before which you read your Douglas fir
paper, included the whole state of Washington, didn't it, or
was it just that area around Puget Sound?

Munger: Everything except the Columbia River counties; they're in the
Columbia River Section of the S.A.F.

Fry: How long did the selective cutting policy hold sway in the
national forests?

Munger: It was practiced for only a few years and then abandoned,

and clear-cutting ever since the late thirties has been the
universal practice in Douglas fir stands on the national
forests, except in rare cases where the stand's structure

130

Hunger: was such as would allow some selectivity. Selective cutting
was proven undesirable from various points of view, diffi
culty of slash disposal, damage to the residual trees, wind
fall, and the economic disadvantage of removing the high-grade

and leaving the low-grade material.

it

Fry: Did Walter Lund have anything to do with it?

Hunger: No, that was before his day. He would know about it though.

C. J Buck was the Regional Forester at the time, and he was

the great proponent of selective cutting--at the instigation,

largely, of Brandstrom and Kirkland.
Fry: Were they still at the Station then when the Region reverted

to a policy of block cutting?
Hunger: Brandstrom was; Kirkland was in the Washington office by that

time, theoretically, but working here.
Fry: How did this rejection of selective cutting affect the careers

of Brandstrom and Kirkland? What did they go on to do?
Hunger: It didn't affect their careers or our friendship. Brandstrom,

before the publication of his results in the ponderosa pine

region, which came shortly after that, resigned to join the

staff of the Crown Zellerbach Company Corporation as a forester.
Fry: This is a company with considerable Douglas fir lands, so

he was well accepted as a figure in the field?
Hunger: Yes, a very competent logging engineer and forest economist.

And Kirkland continued in the Washington Office of Research.

*
Assistant to Regional chief of timber management; later in

charge of timber management for the Region.

131

Fry: How did all this selective cutting talk affect the timber
management practices in private Douglas fir lands?

Hunger: Well, the practicability of using tractors instead of
steam donkeys made it physically possible to pick up a
tree here and there, and not clear cut. The tendency was
to high-grade, take the high value trees and leave the lower
grade ones or the lower grade species, take the Douglas fir
and leave the hemlock, which was a high-grading practice;
that's what this selective cutting was inclined to degenerate
into. It had the immediate economic advantage of harvesting
much of the value but leaving a forest in a rather deplorable
condition, if practiced in the extreme. There was a phrase
that was used at that time which, translated, means, "A
selection forest must not become a plunder forest1.' Per
plenterwald muss nicht ein plunderwald werden. It was the
experience in Germany that that was the danger — that se
lection cutting would become a plunderwald, a plunder
forest.

Fry: Was this primarily something that was practiced by the
smaller companies?

Hunger: No.

Fry: It was all over industry?

Hunger: Yes. But not very many of them, because it was not every
where that tractor logging was practicable.

Fry: Because of the terrain?

132

Hunger: Yes, and soil and the climate --mud.

*
I saw Bill Hagenstein the other day, and he said,

"Do you remember, 'Per plenterwald muss nicht ein plunderwald
werden'? You told me that back in the early 1940' s."

7 ; :.'-- . •"':"•:•• '.'.•.' -

Have you had an interview with him?

Fry: No.

Hunger: Well you should. He's president of the Society of American
Foresters now.

Fry: Yes, I know. I almost got to see him when I was here last
time, but I'm going to have to make another effort.

Hunger: He's quite a person.

Did you have down on your list (I don't know why I
thought of it) a thought of interviewing Walter McCulloch?

Fry: No, I don't have his name down.

Hunger: Well, he's having a serious operation today. He's the

beloved dean of Oregon State College who, because of ill
health, dropped out a couple of years ago. He is vocal and
exceedingly well informed, but of course his experience lias

been in Oregon state forestry and as a teacher, so he couldn't

**

be a part of a Forest Service series.

Hagenstein, Executive Secretary of Industrial Forestry Ass'n.
**McCulloch, Walter, Interview with Amelia Fry, Regional Oral
History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley, manuscript, Forest History Society, Yale University,
1967.

133

THE FOREST SURVEY, 1929

Fry: Is my view correct, that these were your most important
studies, or are there others? Of course there was the
timber survey, but that's not silvicultural research.

Hunger: The major study, beginning in 1929, was the Forest Survey.
In 1929 there was an authorization for a national study of
forest resources, of growth and demands, and this station
got the first allotment for that study and began work on
July 1, 1929, with the assembling of a very small crew.
We had, in anticipation of the need for this study, already
started in a small way assembling information on the forest
resources of all lands in Oregon and Washington but had not
got very far before this large project came to us with a
small allotment. H. J. Andrews, who had done notable work
in making a land economic survey of Michigan, was persuaded
to come out here to take charge of the forest survey. Before
he got here, three or four others, Philip Briegleb, R. W.
Cowlin, and Floyd Moravets were making a beginning on the
study. It was the largest project in point of manpower and
money available for several years at the station.

One interesting, rather technical aspect of that study
was our proposal here to make a complete coverage of the

134

Hunger: ground so that a type map would be possible showing the
various age classes and species of timber, as well as a

*

statistical assembly of the volume of timber of all
species and age classes.

We went ahead on that basis, and one of our methods
was to compile existing cruises. The states had county
cruises; many of the companies had cruises of their lands;
all agencies were very co-operative in giving us their
cruise data. However, some of the cruises were very con
servative, so that they needed to be brought up to a common
standard. We had some very competent cruisers check sample
areas of these existing cruises to determine a correction
factor. It might be that these private cruises or county
cruises were low 20 per cent on hemlock and low 10 per cent
on Douglas fir, and we adjusted their cruises accordingly.
The results were not issued except compiled in units of 100
or 160 acres or so, so that it did not disclose the stand
of timber on any small, particular area, but it did result in
very good type maps.

We had made considerable progress by that method when
the Washington office became much impressed by the success
of a sampling method that was used in Sweden, by which strips
were run every few miles across the country, making an abso
lutely mechanical sampling of the forest volume. It gave
probably very accurate results for a very large area, but

135

Munger: did not give specific information for type maps, because

the strips would be perhaps ten miles apart. The Washington
office thought that there was much to be said in favor of
that strip method of making our inventory. We wanted to
continue our complete coverage by the compilation method
that we were using. So they said, "Well, let's try out
and see which is the best method." So in the dead of
winter we put quite a competent crew out to cover an area
by the strip method, I think running strips ten miles apart
east and west, up and downhill, on an area that had already
been covered by the 100 per cent compilation method.

When the results were compared, the Washington office
was satisfied that our method was as good and had many
superior advantages, so we proceeded from then on doing a
compilation of existing cruises and filling out where we
needed to, adjusting them to a common standard. The result
was a type map that showed, as I recall, about thirty-five
different types or age classes of timber in colors. That,
I think, was the largest area that had ever been type mapped.
I think some thirty-three million acres were covered that
way. The maps were printed by the United States Geological
Survey, which did a superb job of lithographing in colors to
show these thirty-five or so different types and age classes.

Fry: What sort of co-operation did you get in getting cruise data
from the companies for this project?

136

Munger: Nearly all of them were very co-operative just so long as
we didn't disclose the volume of timber in any small area,
because that information, in case they were selling timber,
they didn't want to have available to everybody. So we were
very careful not to disclose the volume in any small area
but got from their maps the type classification and the
volume estimates. Some were very accurate and very de
tailed; some were very general, and we tried to reduce
those to a common standard of accuracy.

Fry: Couldn't this information affect the tax assessments
levied on the timber owners?

Munger: If we had disclosed the volume on any specific area, yes,
so we didn't do that.

The statistical results were published by counties as
fast as a county was completed. Concurrent with that, a
sampling was made of growth, so that there was a possibility
of making a prediction as to what the potential growth was
and what the actual growth was by counties.

Fry: This was both in old growth and second growth?

Munger: Yes, putting all together. It's rather interesting that at
that time, in the mid-thirties, we classified the country
as to its economic availability in three categories. The
lowest category was that which was probably uneconomic to
operate. Now, thirty years later, there is eager demand to
buy that class of timber — the higher mountain, more remote
timber. Thirty years ago we thought it had no value; now

137

Munger: it's very valuable.

Fry: Because of terrain and remoteness, is that what you mean?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: I was wondering what sort of co-operation or use you made
of the departments and schools of forestry such as Oregon
State and the University of Washington.

Munger: Well, of course they furnished the students for summer

employment in quite a large way. The students from both
schools were used on all kinds of projects every summer.
Some took a year out of school and stayed on through the
year, which we always liked.

Fry: I would like to ask you to tell how you added land to your
to your experimental forests. There was some expansion in
this, beginning in the early thirties.

Munger: Soon after the creation of the Pacific Northwest Forest

Experiment Station in 1924, we followed what had become a
national policy of concentrating research on definite ex
perimental forests, which would be provided with office
and housing facilities and so on. In addition to Wind River,
which had been set up as a little experimental station with
a certain amount of land designated for it way back in 1915,
a series of experimental forests was established along in
the late twenties, representative of the several forest types.
They are the Cascade Head Experimental Forest in spruce and
hemlock on the Oregon coast, Pringle Falls on the Deschites

138

Hunger: National Forest in central Oregon, the Blue Mountain

Experimental Forest in the Blue Mountain ponderosa pine
country, and the Port Orford Cedar Experimental Forest in
southwestern Oregon, where that species was conspicuous.
So we had a series of five experimental forests, each I
think containing about ten thousand acres.

Fry: This was acquired largely through the Regional Office?

Hunger: Well, all these areas were part of the national forests,
and with the acquiescence of the Regional Office these
areas were set apart for research, in which the timber
resources would be under the jurisdiction of the Experiment
Station. However, the national forest continued to do the
protection, road building and so on. In the Civilian
Conservation Corps days we had a side camp, as it was
called, of twenty- five men at several of these areas. They
did a lot of development work, including building residences
and office buildings at several places. On each of these
five experimental forests they did a substantial amount of
building.

Fry: Was there any concern at this time on the part of the

staff at the Regional Office that this area might be needed
for timber sales, or were timber sales not emphasized very
much at this time?

Hunger: Well, they were, but among the higher-ups anyway there was

a general acceptance that research was important and that it

139

Hunger: could well give way to administrative needs, although that
wasn't universally the case <iovn the line. However, the
theory of the management of the experimental forests was
that there would be experimental cutting on them, so that
the timber would ultimately contribute toward the economy
of the region, and that has been the case. Material timber
cutting has been done on each of them, I think.

Fry: So there is utilization of the timber that's cut.

Hunger: Yes, although in each of the experimental forests a section
was set up as a natural area to make a comparison of the
original virgin forest with young forest or cut over land,
hoping that it would be left in its primitive condition as
a museum piece. I mentioned that in the discussion of
natural areas.

140

FOREST PRODUCTS STUDIES

Fry: Is there more to say about your research into forest
products? You had mentioned the mill studies in con
junction with the Growth and Yield Study, and I understand
that the Regional Office has a Section of Forest Products
that was transferred to your station in 1931.

Hunger: Yes, that's so, with a personnel of three at the time —

Allen Hodgson, and later Dr. J. Elton Lodewick, and Herman
Johnson. They continued under the Experiment Station practi
cally the same line of work that they had been conducting in
the Regional Office, and that included making mill production
studies, carrying on the annual lumber production census for
the Bureau of the Census, and other work, some of it in
liaison with the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison.
The Section of Forest Products worked very closely with
Brandstrom in his studies of economics of timber cutting.

Fry: Did they go into any other utilization inquiries besides
the ordinary sawmill, such things as pulp?

Hunger: It became quite an important information office, because

they were the clearing house for information on new methods
and products that partly had been worked out in the Madison
laboratory. So they served as a service agency for the local
industry on such matters.

141

Fry: This sounds like they might have been one of your depart
ments that had closer touch with industry than any other.
Is this true?

Hunger: Yes. They did have points of touch that others of us
didn't have. Shortly after that, the Station was en
larged by a very small branch studying range and grazing
in 1937. A couple of men started making range utilization
studies, and subsequently a very large range experimental
area was created in eastern Oregon where the studies were
concentrated, but that was mostly after ray day.

Fry: Did this come primarily from the concern of Forest Service
management of range lands, or was it also a shared concern
of forest industry owners?

Hunger: No, I don't think the forest industries took much interest

in the range studies. But the national forest administration
was very eager to learn more about the care of ranges, because
many of the ranges were so badly over-grazed, and deterio
rating, that it took a careful study to find out just how
to bring them back. That included the introduction of new
grasses. The stockmen were also interested in seeing how
they could get the maximum growth of their animals without
damaging the range, and that was part of the studies. The
range men naturally were concerned with one important
factor — the effect of grazing on soil movement, soil
erosion.

142

Fry: What about erosion in relation to forest lands, and tax
delinquent forest lands in particular?

143

TAXATION STUDIES

Hunger: Well, you speak of tax delinquency. We conducted for some
time a study of the tax delinquency problem. In the mid-
thirties, the depression years, there was a very large area
that was going back to the counties for failure to pay
taxes. The Washington office called it the New Public
Domain Study, I think, because so much private land was
going into public ownership. Sinclair A. Wilson, who was
both a forester and trained in business, devoted his time
for a couple of years to just this land problem of how much
of it there was, and what could be done about it, and what
were the remedies. That resulted in a manuscript which I
think was never published.

In the late 1920' s and thirties there was a national
study being made under Professor Fred R. Fairchild of Yale
on forest taxation. One of the study areas that they wanted
to probe into was the Pacific Northwest, so R. C. Hall
of their forest taxation staff was quartered -here at the
Experiment Station for the best part of a year, I think,
and was with some help studying the local problems of forest

cf. Hall, R.C., typed manuscript on the forest taxation
study, Regional Oral History Office, University of California,
Berkeley, 1965.

144

Hunger: taxation. He was followed by Wade deVries, who continued
the taxation studies. It became a part of the national
publication by Fairchild and others.

At about that time, though it was not part of the
national forest taxation study, the Experiment Station had
considerable to do with drafting a forest taxation law to
apply to reforestation lands in Oregon, which was subse
quently passed. I, at about that time, sat on a forest
taxation committee appointed by the governor in 1936, which
had a good many meetings digging into the problem.

Fry: I'd like to know a great deal about that, because this is
one of the really important influences that contributed to
the adoption of better forestry practices in Oregon by
making them economically feasible from the tax standpoint.
Could you tell me some of the major concerns of the timber
owners in considering the various alternatives of taxation
here?
Munger: Well, it's a long story, much of which has faded from my

mind, but all of those who were interested in the perpetu
ation of the forests knew that something ought to be done,
because the method of taxation was driving people to cut
faster than they really wanted to or than the market justified.
There were all sorts of proposals of deferred taxes and yield
taxes and so on, but Oregon finally adopted what was a very
sensible compromise, in which reforestation land — that is,

145

Hunger: land that was not economically ready for cutting — had a
nominal land tax, then when the timber was cut, a yield
tax, which at the start was 12 1/2 per cent of valuation.
That became the Oregon law, and a similar law was passed
about the same time in Washington, and it has had fair
acceptance and been modified somewhat since then.

Fry: Could you tell me who was on the Special Committee on
Forest Taxation, besides yourself?

Munger: Charles Galloway was chairman. Others were R. D. Moore

of the Shevlin Hixdn Lumber Company and Aubrey Watzck and
Earl B. Day. Its report, "Oregon's Timber Taxation Problems,"
was published by the state in 1937.

Fry: What other types of taxation were considered at the time?
Was there much talk of putting this on a straight income
tax basis, for instance, as the timber was harvested?

Munger: That was one of the proposals on the yield tax, but then the
people that had been paying these high taxes for years and
years didn't want to have a superimposed yield tax. There
was a proposal that the yield tax be graduated--! per cent
for the first year and increasing gradually until it got
up to a reasonable amount, a sufficient amount, but that
didn't gain acceptance. In some counties the tax was even
lower than the amount fixed by this new bill and that natur
ally drew the disapproval of the landowners in that county.
One of the difficulties in getting tax reform was caused by

146

Hunger: the tremendous variation from county to county and the
fickleness and vagaries of the tax assessors in the
several counties, their treatment particularly of immature
forest land and the unreliability of the cruises on which
they depended for older growth.

Fry: How did you go about, if you did, gaining acceptance for
this in the state legislature? Did you participate in
that at all?

Hunger: Well, the Forest Experiment Station, being a federal agency,
did not attempt to influence state legislation; it never has.
All it did was give technical advice on the form such pro
posed legislation might take and the effects it might have;
simply technical advice was our only part in it.

Fry: Would any of this be in the form of testimony before legis
lative committees?

Hunger: No, because we didn't take part in that.

Fry: Were there any other points of resistance besides this one,
that is, from landowners whose tax rates would have in
creased if this had passed?

Hunger: I don't think so, although many of the county officials
didn't welcome any change, fearing the effect on their
revenues. Of course, the purpose of it was to lighten the
burden of the landowner who wanted to practice forestry but
couldn't afford to because he was taxed annually on the
crop; agriculturalists don't pay for a crop but once, and

147

Munger: usually the assessment is made when there isn't any crop
on the ground.

Fry: What sort of backing were the agriculturalists able to give
this? Were they for it generally?

Munger: I really don't recollect that, but of course since the

Oregon legislature was then controlled a good deal by agri
culturalists, I think they must have accepted it because
the bill passed.

Fry: Was any large part of your staff connected with the study
of this?

Munger: No. The taxation group was at most a couple of people.

Fry: Did your part in this include talking with forest landowners
in the primary investigation?

Munger: Yes. I recall I did some writing for the newspapers on the
subject and gave our technical views on the need for tax
reform and the proposed methods that might relieve the burden
and make possible the holding of land for future crops.

148

INDUSTRIAL FORESTRY COMMITTEE OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS

Fry: I want to ask you now about your work with the Industrial

Forestry Committee of the Society of American Foresters. I
believe that C. S. Chapman of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company
was chairman of a committee of the local S. A. F. section to
investigate and report on private and industrial forestry
in the Region, and that the man whom you already mentioned as
being later on your staff, Allen Hodgson, was secretary of
the north Pacific section of S. A. F. at that time. Do you
remember this?

Munger: No, not as a Society of American Foresters committee.

Fry: This was part of a survey in 1928 to see what type of timber
land management was being used, if any at all, on such things
as fire prevention, slash disposal, and utilization. Hodgson
said that the outlook was encouraging; but there really wasn't
a great deal reported on the Olympic Peninsula at that time.
There was some problem between another committee appointed by
Ovid Butler which was headed up by Shirley Allen. It was on
this committee headed by Allen that you did most of your work,
I believe.

Munger: I am very vague as to just what my part was in that study at
that time.

149

Hunger: This might be called a sort of follow-up of the "Minimum
Requirements Study." That study, begun in the early 1920' s,
was aimed at defining the minimum requirements expected of
lumbermen to keep land productive after logging. I was
assigned to write up the Douglas Fir Region. Robert Weidman
(then in the Northern Rocky Mountain Station, formerly in
Region 6) was given the ponderosa pine type to write up. The
resulting reports for the several forest types were printed
as a series, with an introduction by Col. Greeley. Mine for
the Douglas Fir region was published in 1927 as U.S. Department
of Agriculture Bulletin 1493. This project also embraced
"desirable forest practices," that is, measures necessary to
produce full timber crops. This aspect was treated in the
same bulletin.

Fry: I understand from your diary that in the report there was a
question about whether to mention by name the companies that
had actually incorporated some forestry practices into their
land management operations and whether this would serve to
stimulate the industry or whether it might create some hurt
feelings on the part of those who were not mentioned.

Munger: Yes, I have some memory of the discussion of the wisdom of
disclosing the identity of the different companies and
rating them by name, but working with that committee is quite
vague in my mind.

150

THE REX BLACK INQUIRY, S. A. F.

Fry: I'd like to ask you about the Rex Black affair--the

California forester whose membership in the Society of

American Foresters was cancelled because of his activities

*
in trying to oust the state forester. This action took

place in 1935 and 1936. I believe you told me that you
were on the local committee, in the Columbia River Section
of the S. A. F., which was appointed to investigate Black's
activities. Do you remember who else was on this committee?

Hunger: Only that W. £. Greeley was chairman.

It was picked as an impartial committee away from the
center of the trouble and was acting for the national interest.
The conclusion was that there was nothing too reprehensible in
Black's behavior but that he should be reprimanded at least,
which was done, I think.

Fry: In the central committee which was under the national S. A. F.,
there was Ed Kotok, and there was Emmanuel Fritz.

Hunger: They were members of the Board of the S. A. F. , weren't they?

Fry: Yes. And they voted to take away Black's membership. I
wonder where we could pick up information on the earlier
proceedings of the local committee. Do you think that the
local Society of American Foresters chapter might have this?

See Appendix: Notes from Society of American Foresters
Affairs, February and Harch, 1936.

151

'/

Munger: I'm sure I don't have it. I didn't retain anything. It
would be among Greeley's papers probably, and it may have
been considered so confidential that it was destroyed and
not available for release with the rest of his papers.

Fry: This was not made available to the press at the time?

Munger: I think not; it was handled as quietly as possible, here
at least.

Fry: Do you remember whether there was an important question
involved here of what role the S. A. F. should play as a
matter of policy in cases where the state forester's job
was threatened by political changes in the state?

Munger: Well, I think it was considered that this involved a matter
of principle on what was professional ethics. In that case,
it was more than simply the involvement of Black; it had
probably a wholesome effect on the Society as warning people
against using political activity to replace a professional
appointee.

Fry: But as you remember, this committee didn't feel then that

Black should lose his membership, but that he should be re
primanded.

Munger: That is my memory of it now. I'd be sorry to have to take
an oath on the accuracy of it, but that's my thirty-year
memory.

Fry: And Greeley was the chairman of this committee?

Munger: Yes.

152

Fry: Was its membership primarily made up of Northwestern people

just in this chapter?
Munger: Yes. But I can't recall now specifically who the other

members were.
Fry: Well, when you're digging through your old papers, do you

think you might come up with some notes about this?
Munger: I don't believe so. It might have been mentioned in my

diary, but they're back in New Haven. That's the only place

that I probably would have had it recorded.
Fry: I'll check on this and see; it may be in there somewhere.

Do you remember the procedure that the committee used?

I was just wondering if, for instance, you heard from Black

directly in any way. Do you remember talking to him?
Munger: No. He didn't appear before the committee at all; I'm quite

sure of that. I don't remember any particular reaction from

him that the committee got in any way.
Fry: Do you remember anything from anyone in California? There

were a couple of people, like Swift Berry for instance, who

were active in this on Black's behalf. Do you remember

anything of this?

Munger: No, nothing I'd be sure of.
Fry: Or E. T. Allen?
Munger: I don't remember just what his role was in it.

153

Fry: Do you remember where the initiation came from — the point

of initiation for this committee to do this?
Munger: I think it was the national S. A. F.
Fry: Do you think that it was Dana or Chapman who suggested that

this local committee go into this?
Munger: Quite possibly Chapman, who of course was the mainspring

of the investigation. He was the watchdog of the Society's

ethics, and quite active and quite militant.
Fry: Perhaps some of the papers relating to this committee can

be found in the old S. A. F. files either locally or in

Washington.
Munger: I doubt if it got into the local S. A. F. files that would

be preserved, because the files were not well kept thirty

years ago.
Fry: This just may be one of those chapters that's disappeared

in history, and we'll never really know.

154

INSURANCE STUDY

Fry: I wanted to ask you about Shepard's forest insurance study

and if you had anything to contribute to that. I understand
that the Northwest had already done some studies on state
insurance.

Hunger: In the 1930 's, there was a strong tendency at the Experiment
Stations to recognize the importance of research in the
economics of insurance as well as the economics of land
management, timber cutting, reforestation, and so on, so that
the Station was, I think, rather in the lead in instituting
such studies. I've already spoken of logging economics and

forest taxation, and the next thing that was taken up was

in^ijrt-nc.c-.
forest taxation, because the only major class of property

in the country that couldn't be insured at that time was
forests. We thought it would greatly stabilize and accele
rate interest in permanent forest management if the forests

which were so susceptible to fire could be insured.

*
So this study was started which was largely a one

man study. Harold B. Shepard , who had some training in that
field as well as being a forester, was assigned to this

cf. Harold B. Shepard, "The Forest Insurance Study...,"
a typed transcript of a written report submitted by Harold
B. Shepard, included in R. Clifford Hall, "Forest Taxation
Study',1 typed transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted
by Fern Ingersoll, University of California Bancroft Library
Regional Oral History Office. (Berkeley, 1967)

155

Hunger: region and spent some years in determining the hazards,
classifying the hazards, and trying to rate them on an
actuarial basis. He of course had the help of the men on
the Forest Survey and those that were studying the causes
of fires and methods of forest protection, but he put to
gether a very fat and technically sound report, which was
published in due course.

I think it had a respectful acceptance but has had
practically no application up to the present time in actual
insuring of forest properties. It was a good study, and it
showed that forest properties could afford to pay a reasonable
insurance fee. The one great scare was these terrific holo
causts, such as the Tillamook Burn, which occurred about
that time, and which I think scared out the insurance compa
nies and perhaps delayed the application of insurance to
forest properties. And also the very largest companies con
sidered themselves self-insured, as many public bodies are;
that is, they have such a wide distribution of their property
that they couldn't expect a major loss because of not having
all their eggs in one basket.

Fry: A little bit before that, there had been a forest insurance
study by the Western Forestry and Conservation Association.
Do you know what relationship that had to Shepard's study?

Hunger: I don't think it had any. It was just, as I recall, exploring
the subject somewhat. Insurance had been talked of for a

156

Hunger: number of years and the interest in it was crystallized by

the Forest Service employing Harold Shepard for this purpose.

157

NEW DEAL PROGRAMS

National Industrial Recovery Act Lumber Code (Article Ten)

Fry: You just mentioned the minimum requirements study. Was
this in relation to Article Ten of the Lumber Code?

Hunger: No, the Minimum Requirements Study was made a decade before.
The Forest Service thought that the National Industrial
Recovery Act, which was passed as a Depression measure, made
a possibility of getting some good forestry injected into
woods practices, because the Recovery Act put some limitations
on production. So it was the hope that those who were pro
ducing during the depression would be obliged to employ
certain good forestry measures. There were committees of
lumbermen and public officials for both the fir and pine
regions appointed. They had many meetings to discuss what
practices might be reasonable and enforceable. It was quite
an educative process, because it was a case where foresters
were telling the lumbermen what they thought should be done.
There was naturally some resistance to being obligated to do
more than they thought they could economically afford to do •
Finally some practices were drawn up which the industry
agreed to abide by.

158

Hunger: There was a little book that McArdle and I at the

Station had considerably to do with preparing, which was

*
published by the West Coast Lumbermen's Association. The

validity of the N.I.R.A. was questioned, and the entire act
was declared unconstitutional, so all these forest practices
that had been considered to be legally enforceable became
optional. But the whole upshot was, I think, of high edu
cational value to the industry as to what practices they
might employ with benefit to the lands and probably to
themselves. But these N.I.R.A. requirements were legally
enforceable for a very short time.

Fry: Were the N.I.R.A. requirements what you went back to Washington
to work on with EarleClapp?

Hunger: I think so, yes.

Fry: According to your diaries, you arrived in the Washington
office just a few minutes after the Chief Forester, R.
Y. Stewart, had unexpectedly died.

Hunger: Yes. That was a tragic day. I was there on detail for

several days and I imagine that's one of the matters we took
up.

Fry: I could quote an entry from your diary here that on October
24th, 1933, the conference on Article Ten of the Lumber Code

JM

Published in November, 1934, it was titled "Handbook for

Forest Practices for the West Coast Logging and Lumber
Division. "

159

Fry: assembled in the Department of Commerce and continued all
day and was opened by Secretary Wallace. They were nearly
all formal papers. This went on for a number of days like
that. You noted that you were secretary of committee six,
which was the salvage committee.

Hunger: What was the date of that?

Fry: This was in October of 1933.

Hunger: One of my purposes in that was to try to get the commission
that was regulating lumber production to relax or expand
their quota so as to permit the salvage of the Tillamook
Burn timber. The Tillamook fire had taken place in August
of '33, and there was a great hope that the timber could be
salvaged, but the quota that was allowed in those depression
years for the cut wouldn't permit it.

Fry: Were you successful in gaining this permission?

Hunger: Yes. The regulations were relaxed so that salvage could go
ahead and did go ahead in quite a large way on the Tillamook
Burn. But of course that was all off after a very short
period anyway, when the depression was over they relaxed
their restrictions. I think we partly accomplished our pur
pose.

Fry: When you returned to the Pacific Northwest then, were you a
part of the regional committees, which included industry
representatives, to- work out a lumber code for good timber
management?

160

Hunger: Yes, T was. The details of that have quite faded from my
memory, the details of those meetings thirty years ago.

Fry: After N.I.R.A. was declared unconstitutional, did you take
part in those activities as various committees met and drew
up their own measures for a voluntary code, "Article Ten?"

Hunger: Well, we did constant preaching and writing to explain the

forest practices that were desirable, and they were gradually
seeping into the consciousness of the industry. And economic
conditions were changing so as to make possible better forestry,
although the depression years made quite a setback to that.

Fry: Did the West Coast Lumbermen's Association's manual, which

ij^Z-d

you and McArdle wrote, continue to be oued-?
Hunger: I think so. It had quite a large acceptance.
Fry: The manual reports on the work of monthly meetings of this

"woods practices committee." At the same time, did the

Western Pine Association aid and contribute to these efforts

too?
Hunger: Some of the N.I.R.A. meetings were in the pine region, yes,

and the forest practices for that region were discussed and

drawn up, but I don't think they were ever published in such

form as they were for the Douglas fir region.
Fry: Was David Hason active in that part of it?
Hunger: Yes. I'm quite sure he was on the pine committee.
Fry: What about Hr. Wilson Compton's role in this?
Hunger: He was head of the National Lumbermen Manufacturers'

161

Hunger: Association at the time. I suppose he was giving national
leadership.

Fry: How do you feel — just as general evaluation — about the

impact of this committee on forest practices in general?
Do you see this as a turning point?

Hunger: Yes, I think it perhaps was the beginning of a general

awakening to the necessity for better forest practices. It
had been gradually coming with many individuals, but economic
conditions had been such that there didn't seem to be any
prospect of growing timber forever with the present taxes,
low returns, and overproduction. But it was quite a help in
educating people.

Fry: Do you think that it also contributed a lot to communication
between the three groups — industrial forestry, government
forestry, research?

Hunger: Well, this committee activity made another point of contact
between industry and researchers and government officials.
There had always been a good relationship, but this promoted
better mutual understanding, I think.

Fry: Could you mention any particular members of industry who

were especially active in this, some perhaps who were at a
point in their own economic development where they could take
part more actively in promoting forestry on their land?

Hunger: Shortly after this period but not directly an outcome of
these N.I.R.A. committees, a number of people in the

162

Hunger: industry took increasing interest in the work of the

Experiment Station and its results. I think notably of
Dave Weyerhauser, who spent a good many hours at the Station,
even going into copying some of the records on growth and
yield to increase and confirm his own knowledge of what we
were finding out about the potentialities for better timber
management. I forget just what date that was, but he was
one of the forerunners of progress in that field.

Fry: I gather that they had already been doing some of their own
work on this too at that time.

Hunger: Oh yes.

Fry: So this fits in with the general stream of their development.
Do any others stand out?

Hunger: Of course our liaison with Crown Zellerbach was always quite
close, and they had, through their chief forester and through
Ed Statnm, a great interest in better forest management. They
absorbed the results of our studies and were particularly
impressed with the proven rapid growth of some of our perma
nent sample plots.

Emergency Work Programs; CCC, ERA- and Others

Fry: Would you like to give us an idea of how the advent of the
Civilian Conservation Corps and the Emergency Relief

163

Fry: Administration and other government programs in the de
pression helped your research station?

Hunger: Yes. In the early days of the CCC, there was a good deal
of latitude in the type of men that could be employed with
CCC funds. We employed several very competent timber
cruisers who were out of work, and they made detailed exami
nations of the proposed experimental forests and other
cruising jobs where technical men were required. After
that, the CCC money was not available for that kind of em-
ployee--only for men that were at the camps. But we got
an assignment of a side camp at several of the experimental
forests, and the boys did some very creditable house building
and trail and road construction for us on the experimental
forests.

We also had a large number of the other emergency em
ployees in the depression years, other than CCC. The N.I.E.A. ,
EGA and other funds were made available to us, and I think
at one time we had twenty- five or so in the office working
as computers, draftsmen and field men on the Forest Survey.
That was under the emergency money which went by various
names. That was during the depression years, and that went
up almost to the time of the war period in the beginning of
the forties.

Fry: So that the highest level of employment that you were able
to use under these programs were your map men and other

164

Fry: technical people?

Hunger: Yes, also stenographers and computers and helpers in the
field.

Then, during the war years, we had the assignment of
some conscientious objectors who were made available to us.
We were able to pick some of those who were particularly
capable of doing the work that we had. They gave very loyal
service for several years, partly on the experimental forests
and partly as computers in the office. They were paid a mere
pittance, which didn't really support them, but in spite of
that they gave enthusiastic and intelligent service. We had
six or eight during those two or three war years.

Fry: How did you get to select these men?

Hunger: Well, there were in the Region one or more conscientious

objector camps, one fairly near Portland. The superintendent
at this camp saw the type of people that might be helpful to
us and made them available. They were detached from the
camp and lived in town or lived on the experimental forest,
as the case might be.

Fry: Then you had some choice in their selection.

Hunger: Yes, we got some very competent help that way.

Fry: Under CCC, were you able to have a pretty high degree of
choice in hiring the CCC boys as the program progressed?

Hunger: Only at the very start we were able to employ some experi
enced timber cruisers or foresters to do really technical

165

Hunger: work, but later the regulations shut down on that, and we
had available only the boys that were in the camps. But
these conscientious objectors I speak of worked in the
office and lived in town here.

Fry: I've gathered from other sources that as CCC progressed
there was no political influence used in appointments of
the supervisory personnel. Did you find this to be true?

Hunger: There was an agreement that the CCC superintendents and

foremen were to be selected from a list that was supplied
by Congressmen. I forget the name of the list, but in
this Region our Congressmen were exceedingly liberal in
allowing us to name people that would be put on their list
and be acceptable for appointment. So that insofar as this
Region is concerned, in my experience, we were getting the
kind of people that we wanted, although they were nominally
coming from this political list. But it wasn't so in other
Regions and was one of the very dark spots in the history
of the CCC in some Regions.

Fry: As the unemployable list began to diminish, through the

thirties, what sort of help was it that you had most diffi
culty in obtaining?

Hunger: Well, the CCC help that we used were just the boys for

manual labor, but from these other emergency funds, like
N.I.R.A. , C.W.A., and EGA, considerable latitude was allowed
in selecting personnel, so that we were able to pick people

166

Hunger: with drafting experience, and stenographers, and men with
some forestry training.

Fry: This was a real shot in the arm then.

Hunger: Yes. The Forest Survey here operated quite largely on these
emergency funds for several years in the thirties.

Fry: About this time what sort of response were you getting in
use of your results by industry? I gather that there was
a big improvement over the really early years.

Hunger: The effects of the depression had set back progress in
forestry, I think. Then came the war years, which were
quite upsetting, so that the real awakening of the industry
to the possibilities of tree farming and sustained yield
production didn't come until the mid-forties, when there
was a very rapid rise in the value of stumpage, which changed
the picture very much as to the economic possibilities of
sustained yield forestry. But the principles that we had
been preaching for years were gradually seeping in and gain
ing acceptance, although not in general application I might
say until the mid- forties, with few notable exceptions.

167

EVOLUTION OF THE DIRECTOR'S DUTIES

Fry: Most of the men in your research station came to forestry

research, then, as a new field, and they themselves probably
didn't bring any particular slant, because the field was new,
and I guess most of their training had been rather general,
hadn't it, or in a strict academic discipline like botany?

Hunger: Yes. The Experiment Station personnel was built up quite

largely by the Washington office, which picked out men from
the Civil Service register or from their experience record
that showed ability or taste for research, so that most of
these men came to us at the instigation of the Washington
office.

Fry: As a group, how would their training and preparation differ
from the people who do this sort of thing now?

Hunger: Well, most of them had post-graduate training, and as in
the case of Walter Heyer, he came to us already a Ph.D. ,
and McArdle soon acquired a Ph.D. Lodewick, who joined the
station in forest products, had his Ph.D. before coming
to us.

Fry: That doesn't sound too different from today.

Hunger: No, except nowadays the Ph.D.'s are very much more common
in forestry than they were in those days; then it was a
novelty.

168

Fry: Do you think you had more than your share — a rather high
proportion?

Munger: I think we did for those days. Yes, I think we had a very
highly trained crew in the early days.

Fry: You didn't have anything to do with the initial selection
of these men?

Munger: No. Of those that I mentioned, I think they nearly all

were assigned to us by the Washington office, probably with
some consultation or nominal approval by myself maybe. In
those days there was some latitude between administration and
research, I think more than there is nowadays, and men that
could be shifted from research back to administration if
that seemed to be their primary forte, or vice versa.

Fry: Then some of these men came to you from administration, you
mean?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: So you didn't get locked in one or the other as easily as
you do today, is that what you mean?

Munger: No, not in those days.

Fry: There was more switching back and forth?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: Was there a bothersome move to centralize a lot of the ser
vices? Leo Isaac told me about the Research Station library
that was ordered to be put into the Regional Office in
Portland, which was very inconvenient for the people working

169

Fry: in the Experiment Station. Then from Portland it was put
clear down in San Francisco, and you had to write by mail
for the books you wanted. I wondered if you found that
this was typical of a certain period in the U.S. Forest
Service, when there was a move to centralize such services.

Hunger: Well, [puzzled] in Earle Clapp's administration as Chief of
Forest Research [twenties and thirties] he wanted a rather
distinct line between the administration and the experiment
stations. He wanted each to be integral units; he wanted to
keep separate the functions of research and the functions of
administration.

Fry: Do you think then, in reference to such things as libraries,
he would have wanted the libraries to stay in the research
stations?

Hunger: Well, when we were just a little station and the Regional
Office was quite large, it was natural that the library
should be maintained in the Regional Office and not be
duplicated at the Experiment Station. Of course we had our
own reference books. Now I think the library is in the
Experiment Station.

Fry: You're not sure then at what period it was sent down to
San Francisco?

Hunger: No. That was a very short period, I think.

Fry: Could you give us a picture of your own method of operating,
your activities, maybe for instance what you actually did

170

Fry: in a day in the research station?

Hunger: In the early days?

Fry: In the early days, and perhaps you could contrast that with
the later days.

Hunger: When we were such a small organization, the administrative
responsibility was quite slight. So I, as director, was
engaged in active research much of the time. I was in the
field with the others doing the actual field examinations
and measurements and did a great deal of the writing of the
incidental progress reports and major writing, and the
editing of the reports of others for publication, which
was quite important. So in the early days the director
could be a real researcher.

Latterly, the administrative jobs, the necessity for
public appearances and attending meetings and going back to
Washington for conferences, and red tape, you might say,
took up more and more of the director's time and kept me
away from the actual field work and on-the-ground studies,
which I enjoyed particularly.

Fry: In the early days, when you could participate so much in

the actual research, how did you handle these different types
of activities in your office? Did you do your writing in
your office?

Hunger: I did quite a lot in the evenings at home in those days.

But it was an alternation—the field work was often only a

1/1

Hunger: part of a week or so, enabling one to keep in touch with

what was going on in the office in the interim, especially
in the times when we had a very efficient chief clerk and
office manager, Miss June Wertz. When so much of the work
was concentrated at Wind River, I often went up there a
couple of times a month and had a day or so there working
with the men on their projects and keeping in touch that
way.

Fry: When you went to Wind River, did you have to take a lot of
notes there which you brought back to your own headquarters
to keep a running record?

Hunger: Well, the project leader was the one who did that. My

capacity was supervisory and as a participant rather than
a taking over of the job.

Fry: In other words, they turned in regular reports to you?

Hunger: Well, it might not be until the next winter that their work
was worked up. Most of the summers were spent in those days
in acquisition of data in the field, and then the winters in
working it up. The working up of data and writing it up
really takes more time than the field work in many kinds of
projects.

Fry: So you needed more winters than summers. [Laughter]

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: How did you keep up with your writing and working up of
the data then?

172

Hunger: We did pretty well. That was one of the things I emphasized
a good deal and tried to instill the idea in the others that
research for itself was no good. It was only good if it was
available for consumption by others, so that we tried to put
a good deal of emphasis on getting out our material in vari
ous forms. The associations were quite willing to have
progress reports given, so that at the Logging Congress and
the Western Forestry and Conservation Association meetings
we gave the results of our studies in popular form. We also
got out a set of very informal publications called "Forest
Research Notes," which digested in simplified form what we
were doing. The two local lumber trade journals were glad
t;o print whatever we sent them.

Fry: I was just trying to get an idea of the way you managed to
handle a diversity of tasks and work in your research and
your administration duties. I think this takes a particular
kind of talent and was wondering how you did it.

Munger: Well, I liked to keep closely in touch with what everybody

was doing, and some people thought that I was too inquisitive
about what everybody was doing; but in the early days that
was the kind of administration that we needed when we were
a small family and working closely together. I watched the
nuts and the bolts, as somebody expressed it, so I think the
organization ran rather effectively and smoothly. But I know
I spent much more time in attention to details, like field

Hunger: details, good "housekeeping" on the Experimental Forests,
and the expenditure of money, than some of the other di
rectors did.

Fry: Later on, did you notice that you had an increase in the
flow of paper work and things like this?

Hunger: Yes. Following Parkinson's Law, it multiplied more and more,
and it became less possible for the director to really keep
his fingers on the field or be a real outdoor researcher.
In the latter years, we went into so many other fields — the
Forest Survey, forest insurance, forest taxation, products,
range research—that spread my time much thinner than it
had been heretofore, when we were largely engaged in silvi-
cultural and forest protection research.

Fry: In this business of keeping up outside contacts, was some

of this to groups through which you hoped you could dissemi
nate information of results found in the Research Station?

Hunger: Well, we had an Advisory Council — which met from one to
three times a year. Then there were other meetings and
conferences of one kind or another, and lectures at forest
schools, that took time.

Fry: What was the make-up of this Council?

Hunger: It had a representative of each of the three forest schools

in the Region, the state foresters, a number of representative
lumbermen of both Washington and Oregon, and a forester from
the B.C. Forest Service. The chairman for a number of years
was C. S. Chapman of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company.

174

Fry: Did you feel that this did help in disseminating your
research information?

Hunger: Yes. It was not just a rubber-stamp group, but they dis
cussed ordinarily our proposed program and advised as to
the most important things that we should undertake. They
were an avenue for disseminating the information, because
at each of the meetings we had the project leader usually
explain what was going on in his field. That was quite
effective, having them take back to their people what was
going on in forest research, which was then a sort of
closed book to most people.

Fry: In working with this advisory group, did you find yourself
sometimes in a dilemma in wanting to pursue more pure re
search on the one hand, which might not have immediate
practical application, but also wanting to make your station
a vital center of information which was needed by the lumber
industry and the timber owners at that time?

Manger: I think that the Advisory Council's feeling, as well as my

own, was to go for those projects that had immediate practical
application, both on private lands and on national forests.
I think there was unanimity on programming along that line.

Fry: Did this help in allowing you to use private lands sometimes
in your projects?

Hunger: Yes, a great deal of our work was on private lands.

Fry: And this was just through your own arrangement with these
men, right?

175

Hunger: Yes. Much of the sample plot studies were on private lands,
probably much more than on national forest lands.

Fry: Was this typical of research stations?

Munger: I don't really know. I rather presume it was. Partly here
we had in private ownership great acreages of cutover land
of all shapes and conditions and ages to study, and it was
in the most productive part of the Region, at the lower
altitudes, so it offered the best opportunities for studies
of such things as natural regeneration, seed disseminations,
and so on.

Fry: Did you feel that you always had co-operation in using
these lands?

Hunger: Yes. We had no trouble in that regard.

176

CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE STATION: COMMENTS

Fry: We've talked about the major contributions of these other
members of your staff. What do you see now as your major
contribution?

Munger: My major contribution?

Fry: Yes. Do you have any feelings about any one particular

thing that you think contributed more than anything else,
or do you feel that the research in general that emanated
from the Experiment Station is your monument for posterity?

Munger: Well, it's pretty hard to pin it down, but I think that in
a very broad way what we did was build a foundation for the
silviculture of Douglas fir and for the silviculture of
ponderosa pine against a mass of prejudices and misinformation.
Then of course later the contribution to the Forest Survey
was very great to a basic understanding of the economics of
forestry.

Fry: I don't think we have talked about what changes were made in
the body of conventional knowledge about Douglas fir silvi-
culture--all of the misapprehensions that had grown up.
Could you give some examples of preconceived ideas that you
had to work against?

Munger: Well, in certain circles, particularly in the lumber industry,

177

Hunger: there was a feeling that Douglas fir was just bound to come
back regardless of what you did to the ground in the way of
providing seed trees or disposal of the slash. They thought
it was a self-perpetuating type that would stand all kinds
of abuse, which wasn't true.

Then for a while there was an over-emphasis on the idea
of seed being stored in the ground for several years and
coming up even when there was no living seed supply in sight.
That idea had to be dispelled by more thorough research.

Fry: Hadn't there been a paper written on that idea?

Hunger: Yes, quite a little...

Fry: ...based on seedlings appearing seven or eight years after
a burn. . .

Hunger: Yes. J. V. Hofmann had written a bulletin on the subject.

Then in the thirties with the advent of tractor logging,
an interest developed in selective logging in Douglas fir,
and that became a very controversial issue, in which the
Experiment Station found it necessary to do a good deal of
work to appraise the pros and cons of this so-called selective
cutting in Douglas fir.

Fry: Was there anything else that you had especially to combat,
misconceptions that occurred now and then?

Hunger: Well, of course there was the apathy of the industry that
we were preaching against for years, and our preachments
gradually sunk in. With a great change in economics the

178

Hunger: industry changed radically in its appreciation of the
subject—the big companies earlier, but everybody now
practically.

Fry: It became feasible to practice more intelligent forestry.

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: But in the twenties and thirties I guess you had a pretty
rough time, didn't you?

Hunger: Yes. Research was in rather low regard, and they thought

it was a nice theory — all right for Europe—but our forests
here were inexhaustible and we needn't worry, and they'd
reproduce themselves anyway; we didn't need to bother.

Fry: Can you name anybody in industry who you feel was particu
larly progressive in the early days?

Hunger: Yes. I think that the relationship was very friendly with
many lumbermen, even those who were not prepared to accept
our recommendations. I think those that were especially
favorable were R. D. Herrill of Merrill Ring and Company;
Dave Weyerhaeuser was very progressive (C. Davis Weyerhaeuser,
that is), and E. P. Stamm of Crown Zellerbach. The Watzcks,
Paul Neils and Tom Murray of the West Fork Timber Company
I think you'd have to list. Murray was a great proponent
of selective logging however; but he was a progressive
lumberman, a pioneer in tractor logging. In his particular
case, it was quite workable. There are many others in the
early days who don't come to mind right now that were
progressive.

179

Fry: Did Murray, and others like him who really did something,
pick up their information from others, since they had not
acquired any technical background themselves in formal
training?

Hunger: Yes. But they were friendly and sympathetic and wanted to
encourage their companies to do what they could. There are
probably a good many others I should name, but I can't think
now of any other outstanding ones in this early period.

You might add to those names Frank H. Lamb. He's not
a forester, but he knew more than most foresters.

Fry: Who was he with?

Hunger: He was a Grays Harbor logging machinery man, and he's written
a very readable book, The Story and the Economic. Social, and
Cultural Contributions of the Evergreen Trees and Forests of
the World, and the short title is Sagas of the Evergreens.
He's a good writer. He was a good friend of foresters way
back. He lived in Hoquiem, Washington. He should be mentioned
as one of the progressive thinkers and workers. He wrote a
very clever parody regarding the unwisdom of burning slashings
in the coastal forests, that he delivered at a Logging
Congress, on "To burn or not to burn, that is the question.
Whether to endure the outrageous damage of forest fires or..."
and so on--a clever parody on Hamlet.

Fry: Was he primarily a writer, or did he work as a lumberman?

Hunger: He was an industrialist.

180

Fry: In other words, he owned a machinery company?

Hunger: Yes, I think so, logging machinery as I recall. This goes
quite a way back.

Fry: Is he still alive?

Munger: No, I don't believe so.

Fry: Let me get the publication date on his book — 1938.

Munger: I happened to have that book out. I was reading something in
it the other day, and I was impressed again with how well
informed he was as a dendrologist.

Fry: That's very unusual.

Munger: Yes, he was an unusual man.

Fry: Is there anything else then that was a special problem

besides these misconceptions and the apathy of industry?

Munger: Well, no, I can't think of anything. Of course there was

the perennial problem of slash disposal, on which the Station
published bulletins both for the Douglas fir region and for
the pine region in which there is a good deal of difference
of opinion--to> burn or not to burn. That was a highly con
troversial subject in which the Experiment Station, with
sound scientific data, made its pronouncements in these
bulletins for each type of forest, pronouncements which have
more or less been the guideposts for practice on the national
forests anyway.

Fry: Did this slash disposal question roll on for years?

Munger: It still is on. It's a perennial problem.

181

Fry: Is there a difference between what you recommended in the
pine region and what you recommended in the fir region?

Munger: Oh yes, quite a good deal.

Fry: Did you have more opposition in the pine or fir regions?

Munger: Well, in fir I would say, because we recommended less

burning in fir than they were doing, and people had about
concluded to do less burning in pine anyway than they used
to do. But our work, no doubt, had an effect on the think
ing and practice of the administrative men. We like to
think so anyway.

Fry: At least you've seen a difference in timber practices come
about. What was the viewpoint of the Regional Office on
this? Did it match yours?

Munger: They went along with us pretty well, yes.

Fry: So at least on this you had a united front?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: Is there anything else?

Munger: We covered the taxation study and insurance study, and the
Forest Survey?

Fry: Yes, we did. You may want to put in more details. I guess
we have just one or two anecdotes through the whole thing.

Munger: Yes. Well, I'm not good at thinking of those. 'I'm afraid
this is terribly flat.

Fry: Material that seems flat to you doesn't seem flat to other
people at all, especially when they're going through it for

182

Fry: information- The colorful yarns and things are woven in

for a different purpose. I think if researchers use these
interviews in an attempt to reconstruct forest policy and
forest practices, they want hard information; the funny
little anecdotes are amusing, but they can't really use that.
What they're really after is —

Hunger: ...is history — yes.

Fry: Yes, that's right.

PART III

RETURN TO RESEARCH
1938-1946

184

STUDIES UNDERTAKEN

Fry: You stepped down from the directorship in 1937 or 1938,
is that right?

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: But you were still with the station all during World War
II?

Hunger: Yes. In 1937 the doctor put me on a shelf, where I stayed
several months, and in that period I decided that I was
tired of doing the administrative work that meant so many
meetings, so much travel and so much red tape, so I asked
to be relieved of the directorship. They very generously
gave me, with practically no reduction in salary, the
position of Chief of the Division of Forest Management in
the Experiment Station. Horace J. Andrews, who had been in
charge of the Forest Survey, took my place for a few months
as director. Then Steven Wyckoff in 1938 was appointed
director. In that new position, I had a chance to do what
was my real love — real research — with a minimum of admini
strative and contact work. However, as soon as the war
broke out a couple of years later, we had a period of very
slim allotments.

Fry: Before we get into that, give us an idea of the research

185

Fry: that you participated in before World War II got underway
and the Station had its cutback. I have listed here a
number of your independent studies: the sword fern, the
knot study, a rodent study, a study in alder, a Lady Island
cottonwood plantation, a planting test using Dowax-treated
Douglas fir seed, blister rust studies, and a precipitation
study. Was all of this under you?

Hunger: Yes, most of those you mentioned. We had quite a program

going, and of course many of the plots that had been put in
years before were becoming ripe to give results. I took
part in the re-examinations of these plots, both methods of
cutting and growth plots, plantations and so on, and wrote
up quite a lot of them. It was rather a pleasant period of
reaping the fruits of our early work, some of it done — in the
case of the Douglas fir heredity study — thirty years before.

Fry: Would you comment on this 1938 rodent study?

Hunger: Well, at that time we had assigned to the Station someone

from the Biological Survey who was making a special study of
the relation of rodents to regeneration, seeing about their
seed consumption, their population and the methods of deterring
them from eating seed and for poisoning them, but that was
largely under the auspices of the Biological Survey but affi
liated with us in the Experiment Station.

Fry: Was it partly under your directorship?

Hunger: No. It was really just a co-operative relation. Al Moore

186

Munger: of the Biological Survey was quartered with us and shared
our office for a while and advised us what he wanted done,
but he was directly under the Biological Survey.

Fry: There was another study called the "Live Limb Freeing
Experiment."

Munger: Yes. As part of our study of thinning and pruning, we

wanted to decide how much of the live crown of a tree could
be taken off without affecting its growth. Both in pine and
fir some experiments were put in cutting off a quarter of the
live crown, a half and three-quarters of the live crown, to
see what effect it had on the growth of the tree. That study
was continued for a few years with examining these trees that
were so treated.

In that connection, I got interested in trying to find
a means of pruning these trees without making scars on the
wood which would degrade the lumber and cause pitch pockets
and so on. So I, with the help of the Forest Service engineer,
Ted Flynn, developed what was called the multiple spur tree
climber. So instead of using what the ordinary telegraph pole
climber uses with one long spike, this had small spikes that
wouldn't penetrate the wood but would just penetrate the
bark. That was patented and used some by the CCC boys with
some success. The only trouble is there hasn't been enough
high pruning to feel the need for it, so, as far as I know,
they have not been used very much. Instead, the pruning

187

Hunger: that has been done by the Forest Service has been done by

long poles with a little saw on the end of it.
Fry: Was this engineer, with whom you worked, on the Forest

Service staff?
Hunger: Yes. Ted Flynn was in charge of an engineering laboratory

that the Forest Service then maintained, in which they were

devising and building specialized equipment for one purpose

and another. This was one of the minor things that they

helped design and build.
Fry: What were some of the other things that came out of that

laboratory?
Hunger: Well, one of them was a type of bulldozer in which the

Forest Service took a conspicuous part in developing — the

bulldozer blade on tractors.
Fry: Do you know what changes they made in this blade? Was it

in its position or its curvature?
Hunger: I don't remember that.

Fry: Do you remember any other equipment they developed?
Hunger: I can't think offhand what else they did do, but they carried

on for several years in developing tools that are very useful

in Forest Service national forest administration.
Fry: Did this have any direct connection with the Experiment

Station?
Hunger: No, it was entirely under the Regional Forester, as an

equipment laboratory.

188

REGULATION OF INDUSTRY

Fry: In the late thirties and early forties there was a great
deal of talk about possible federal regulation of cutting
on private timberlands. Were you able to see how this
affected general practices on the part of industry?

Hunger: Earle Clapp, who was chief of research for the Forest

Service, shared the feeling with Gifford Pinchot, who had
long been out of the Forest Service, that the only way to
bring about continuous production on private forest lands
was by federal law. Various means of attaining that were
proposed. That doctrine was advanced very vigorously by
Earle Clapp, but it was as vigorously opposed by many
foresters within and without the Forest Service, as well as
by industry. Colonel Greeley rather took the leadership in
advocating co-operative arrangements, and that was the
principle of the Clark-McNary Act, where the federal govern
ment would do things to subsidize fire protection, encourage
planting and so on.

So there was a heavy rift in the Forest Service itself,
that is, between those that believed in compulsory forestry,
regulating the industry by law, and those that believed in
bringing it about by co-operative and educational effort.

189

Munger: It created rather sharp feeling in this Region, when the

matter came to a head. Both the Regional Forester, who was
then Horace Andrews, and myself, were not sympathetic with
the idea of compulsory regulation. The Society of American
Foresters was sharply split, of course, on the matter. It
was not only between Forest Service and industry, but it was
also within the Forest Service that there was great variance
of judgment. Since then, the matter has subsided, and great
progress is being made under the idea of co-operation and
some subsidies from the federal government.

Fry: What about regulation by the states themselves? Was this
even a seriously considered issue?

Munger: At the time that this controversy was raging, some of the

states, notably both Oregon and Washington, passed legislation
requiring that some provision be made for reforestation,
leaving seed trees in the case of the Douglas fir region, or
in lieu of that making a deposit to guarantee the artificial
reforestation of an area if natural regeneration didn't
succeed, or, in the pine region, leaving a certain percentage
of the stand intact. That has been rather effective, I think,
in both states in promoting continuous production.

Fry: How were these criteria in the Oregon Forest Conservation Act
arrived at for this type of production control? Were you
on any of the committees which tried to work up these criteria
of cutting?

190

Munger: Yes. They were talked over at meetings and, as usually
happens, what was arrived at was sort of a compromise
measure with minimum outlay of capital or sacrifice, yet that
would accomplish the purpose after a fashion. I think
that's about the size of it.

Fry: Did you have a definite role in this?

Munger: I think not. No, not in drafting the legislation, because
we didn't meddle in state legislation.

Fry: What about after the legislation was passed? Was this when
some of the finer points of the cutting criteria had to be
worked out?

Munger: Well, in deciding how much timber should be left, they of
course benefited by our studies as to the distance that
seed trees would distribute their seed and what percentage
of the stand ought to be left in order to assure a second
crop. So I think that those who finally agitated the
legislation did benefit by the results of Experiment Station
studies.

Fry: Yes, they did have to use your information there. I didn't

mean to get us too far off of this federal regulations story.
Nationally, who were some of the foresters within the Forest
Service who were anti-regulation people?

Munger: I'm not sure enough to say. I remember in this Region it

was Andrews and I who didn't believe that that was the answer.

Fry: This must have put you in kind of an awkward spot.

191

Hunger: It did, yes. We were in the doghouse for a while.

Fry: Though not director of the Station at this time, you still

had a great deal of status in this area, along with Mr.

Andrews. You didn't have to take any action for or against,

did you?
Hunger: No, axcept that Mr. Clapp wanted to have the endorsement

of the staff of all the experiment stations in this policy

to pomote it locally among their correspondents and clientele,

and that's what we didn't want to do here.

192

ATTEMPTS TO TRANSFER THE FOREST SERVICE TO DEPARTMENT
OF INTERIOR

Fry: What about the other controversy, the transfer of the
Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture to
Harold Ickes' Department of Interior?

Munger: Well, all I know is what I read in the papers, and the

question has been quiescent for a number of years but per
haps is not settled yet to everybody's satisfaction.

Fry: Yes, it's still rolling around. I wondered, for instance,
if you remember having any preferences for the advancement
of research and its chances for advancement under the
Department of Agriculture or the Department of Interior in
the thirties.

Munger: No, I don't recall that that particularly came up, except,

of course, one of the arguments was that forests were a crop
of the land and as a crop they belonged in the Agricultural
Department and not in a department which was then engaged
largely in the disposal of the public lands and was not en
gaged in the matter of land management up to that time.

Fry: Here again the Society of American Foresters came in.

Munger: I think the SAF was always strong for keeping it in the
Department of Agriculture.

193

Fry: There wasn't the big split in this question that there was
during the federal regulations controversy then?

Hunger: No.

Fry: Did your work in the Chamber of Commerce during this time
touch on this transfer controversy? I think the Chamber
of Commerce in California was rather active in this, or
some of their men were.

Hunger: I don't recall that this Portland Forestry Committee was
active or took part in that, but it may have.

194

WORLD WAR II

Fry: As you moved into the war years, what became the major

concerns in research as you had to cut back on your progress?

Hunger: Our appropriation was very drastically reduced for current

work. For example, Isaac and I each had an expense allowance
of one hundred dollars for the year. We were given certain
special funds for carrying on projects that might help the
war effort. Various people at the Station devoted almost
all their time to those war projects.

Personally, the bulk of my time was trying to keep up
the examination and record of these permanent plots where
we didn't want the record to lapse. But the Station under
took all sorts of studies, from those that took just a day
or two to several weeks, largely keeping track of the lumber
production and the supplies of forest products that were of
strategic value, all the way from the availability of machinery
to the stocks of lumber.

Fry: At first I believe there was also pressure for more Sitka
spruce, just as there had been in World War I.

Hunger: Yes. We inventoried the available spruce and the production
of spruce and I think of Port Orford cedar also, which was
considered desirable for airplane construction. But about

195

Hunger: that time the demand for spruce was not so insistent, because
they were going more and more into metal construction.

Fry: Up to that time, was there really a shortage of Sitka spruce
until they converted to aluminum?

Hunger: Yes. The very high quality, such as would make wing beams,
was scarce, and much of the very good had been combed out of
the forest in World War I.

Fry: You hear a lot in the Pacific Northwest about fire hazards
during the war, incendiarism. Was there any step-up in re
search on more adequate fire protection?

Hunger: Not in research, so far as I recall. Of course there was a
problem with the shortage of personnel. The men that would
have been available on the fire line, or smoke chasers, and
lookouts were in short supply, so that that was a problem.
I think that ' s when they began to have lady lookouts on
some of the lookout points.

Fry: You must have worked rather closely then with these War
Production Board people. Were you a part of that by any
chance as a regional advisor?

Hunger: No. The assignment of these studies came out from Washington
largely at the request of the Army, which wanted to know this
and that. They would send out to us to do the leg work, to
supply the information to the war staff.

Fry: All through this you were able to keep up your own plot
studies and so forth?

196

Hunger: Well, in some cases plots that should have been examined
every five years--we extended that to six or seven years,
because we simply didn't have the personnel or the travel
money to keep it up. But we lost very little by dint of
making our dollars go as far as possible and our hours go
as far as possible in keeping up the necesaary current work
on the plots. The experimental forests were neglected; in
three cases they were staffed by Conscientious Objectors,
who maintained the records there and kept up the buildings.

Fry: I suppose that roads and road maintenance also had to take
a back seat.

Hunger: Yes. Improvements of that kind had to be neglected.

Fry: Before you retired, did you see an upswing in this general
grim situation?

Hunger: Yes. Appropriations for the Experiment Station went up

rapidly. Immediately after the war there was a rapid rise
in the demand for lumber, and prices went up. There was
increasing interest in permanent forest management, sustained
yield forest management, which has been accelerating ever
since until in this Region it is well nigh universal among
the larger owners and operators.

Fry: The "tree farm" idea was given a big push around 1940 to

1941 by the organization of the tree farms as a certification
agency and a public information agency. What did you notice
from your vantage point as the major impetus in the

197

Fry: establishment of tree farms?

Hunger: Well, I think it was the rise in stumpage values, which
meant the increased assurance that there was going to be
an increasing and constant demand for timber, coupled
with the know-how to bring about reforestation, and coupled
also with the fact that protection was getting more in
tensive and more successful. So there wasn't the fatalistic
attitude that the timber had to be cut to keep it from
burning down or the tax collector getting it that prevailed
in the early days, and also the attitude that prevailed in
the early days that the timber resources were inexhaustible,
that there was enough forever in the Northwest. By the late
thirties they were beginning to realize that the private
timber at least was not inexhaustible.

Fry: Do you feel that the changes in the taxation structure were
a major factor here, or would you downgrade that just a
little?

Hunger: I think they probably were a major factor, because it gave
timberland owners some confidence that until the timber got
to be of merchantable size, they would only pay a nominal
amount. But still, the tax burden on old growth timber was
rather oppressive and was one of the factors that hastened
rapid logging.

198

OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES

Fry: There are several outside organizations which I have listed.
Would you look them over and give what you know of the con
tributions of those you worked with?

Western Forestry and Conservation Association

Hunger: The Experiment Station had very pleasant relationships

through the years with the Western Forestry and Conservation
Association, often being on the programs at their annual
meetings. A little before I retired, they set up a West
Coast Forestry Procedures Committee, which was quite unique
in that it was attempting to define some of these procedures
and terms that were loosely used. We had a committee composed
mostly of technical foresters in private employ and repre
sentatives of the forest school. We met at intervals from
1945 to 1950 and came out with recommendations as to various
procedures that should be employed, and defined some of the
terms that were at that time misused or used loosely. That
resulted in informal project reports and finally a printed
publication of the Western Forestry and Conservation

199

Hunger: Association; and the committee was then discontinued.
Fry: Would this be a publication called "Forest Procedures?"
Hunger: It was called "Recommended Forest Practices and Techniques"

containing eleven reports of sub-committees, published in

1950.
Fry: Would you give an example of what sort of procedure was

ambiguous from the standpoint of the academicians and the

practical or technical men?
Hunger: One of the things that took a good deal of consideration

was determining the means of computing the allowable annual

cut.

Chamber of Commerce, Portland

Fry: What about the Chamber of Commerce there? Do you remember
having any connection with their special committee?

Hunger: I sat for a number of years as the representative of the

Forest Service on the Portland Chamber of Commerce Forestry
Committee and later on the Recreational and Natural Resources
Committee. The committee there had a good deal to do in help
ing shape forest policy recommendations, and that committee
still continues in a similar function.

Fry: Where was this influence on policy felt?

Hunger: Well, the national Chamber of Commerce—the U.S. Chamber

of Commerce—had a Conservation Committee that was attempting

200

Hunger: to guide policy of management, particularly of public

lands, in a way that would be favorable to members of the
Chamber of Commerce. The Portland Chamber had a part in
considering those policies that went to the national, as
I recall. I wouldn't say that I had any particular in
fluence on that one way or another.

Fry: Can you think of any other organizations, perhaps one that
I didn't include?

Hunger: I think we've touched on most of these. I said that the
Station was commonly invited to present papers at the
meetings of the Pacific Logging Congress and the Western
Forestry and Conservation Association, and of course it had
its part in the local section of the Society of American
Foresters .

West Coast Lumbermen's Association and William Greeley

Fry: It might be valuable to get an idea of the evolution of

something like the Pacific Logging Congress. If they had
a certain set of major concerns in the earlier days which
gradually evolved into something else, this would be inte
resting to know.

Hunger: Well, the lumber associations, including the Logging

Congress, took an increasingly sympathetic attitude toward

201

Hunger: the fruits of forest research and were increasingly helpful
in putting them into effect.

Fry: Were they ahead of industry on this, or was this a reflection
of industry?

Hunger: It was a reflection of the major leaders in industry. How
ever, the West Coast Lumbermen's Association was headed from
1928 by William B. Greeley, who was the ex- Chief Forester
of the Forest Service. He was a leader in introducing his
association to advanced methods and was most receptive and
helpful in promoting the work of the Experiment Station, in
cluding the Forest Survey, and other projects, and he en
couraged his members to do likewise.

Fry: Through Greeley 's leadership and the fact that he had a sort
of dual capacity—to relate to the Forest Service and to
industry—did you feel that here was one of your most valu
able links to industry and its needs?

Hunger: Yes. He was so understanding and with such a background as
Chief Forester that he was naturally very intelligently
sympathetic with what we were doing, and he would do what
he could to advance its application.

Fry: Do you have any specific stories to tell about how you and
Greeley were able to work together on such things?

Hunger: No, I don't think of anything particularly specific, except

I know when we instituted the Forest Survey and were exploring
the possibilities of using the cruises of private companies,

202

Munger: he was very co-operative in giving us the entre to companies
to make that possible. His support naturally was helpful in
making many of the industrial companies more willing to give
us their cruises.

Fry: Did Greeley and his group enter into your work on taxation
very much?

Munger: No.

Fry: Could you give a capsule version of how Greeley operated
and what this man was like to work with, what he was like
in a meeting, how he handled the more obstreperous members
of his association?

Munger: Well, Greeley had an enviable method of working, in which he
went at a problem—whether he was giving a talk or whether it
was at a conference-- in a deliberate way, not voicing his own
opinions, but making his ideas perfectly clear. Then, when
a decision was reached, that was that, and he didn't wish
to re-open the matter otherwise. He had an enviable faculty
of doing his day's work and then dropping it from his mind
and being quite relaxed in his home or elsewhere after his
day's problems were solved. In that way I think he had
prodigious capacity for work without worry. But it was a
very troublous time the first years he was with the West
Coast Lumbermen's Association, when the industry was so
depressed and when a great many of the major operators in the
region were not members of the Association. His job was to

203

Hunger: try to bring them in, in which I think he was fairly
successful.

Fry: I wonder how he got them to actually sign on. He must have
had to make a great many speeches and a great many personal
contacts .

Hunger: Yes.

Fry: Do you think that his background as Chief of the Forest

Service was a disadvantage to him during those first years
as head of the organization?

Hunger: He had such great personal ability and such acceptance for his

wisdom and integrity that I don't think even those lumbermen that
didn't like the Forest Service too well had any misgivings
as to his loyalty to the industry nor concern fibout his showing
any favortism toward the Forest Service. He was an excellent
liaison between the Forest Service and the industry.

Fry: I guess the backside of that coin is any feeling that

Greeley might have had (or had reflected to him from the
point of view of people in the Forest Service) that maybe he
had deserted the ship. Was this even mentioned to you? I
heard that Greeley was hurt because some of his pals in the
Forest Service felt he shouldn't have gone to work for industry.

Hunger: A small group of Forest Service foresters at that time were

out of patience with the industry because they didn't do what
the Forest Service recommended or were critical of Forest
Service policies. Some of them, I think, did use the

204

Hunger: expression that Greeley was deserting the ship, going over
to industry; but that was quite unjust, and I think it was
very local and very temporary.

Fry: He certainly finished his career with a brilliant record.

Hunger: Yes — admired and loved by everybody.

Fry: I'm wondering about some of the other leaders outside

particular industries. What about Dave Hason? Would you
like to tell us about his contributions? Were you a pretty
close friend of his here in Portland?

Hunger: In later years, yes, not so much in the early years, but

largely on a personal basis and not officially, although he
always has been very friendly with the Forest Service and its
research, and we were on committees together.

Fry: But this was not a particularly important link during the years
you were developing the Station?

Hunger: No.

Fry: What about Bill Hagenstein? Could you evaluate him?

Hunger: I don't like to give offhand thumbnail sketches of people.

Forest Park Committee of Fifty

Fry: I'd like to go on to the Forest Park Committee of Fifty, of

which you were chairman from 1947 to 1960. There is a very

large acreage of forest right here at the edge of Portland,

205

Fry: which I was told the other day is the result of some of
your efforts. This does belong to the city of Portland
as a forest park now.

Hunger: Well, a little before I retired in 1946, a City Club

committee made a study of the hillside north of Portland,
a considerable part of which was in city or county ownership,
and recommended that it be given park status. A group was
gotten together as a result of that City Club report to try
to implement it.

Fry: Was the City Club report part of your activity too?

Hunger: Indirectly. A group of people got together to try to carry
out a program of setting up this area as a city park. I
happened to be in the East at the time, so they made me
chairman, to organize a working committee. I organized the
"Committee of Fifty," which embraced representatives of all
sorts of agencies that might be interested in a city forest
park. The area was outlined by the City Planning Commission
to embrace over six thousand acres, of which one thousand
acres or so was county land, one thousand acres or so was city
land, and the rest privately owned.

That "Committee of Fifty" met quite often, and it got
action in a number of ways. The county was persuaded to
transfer its land to the city, and that required an act of
the legislature. A program of acquiring tax delinquent land
was initiated; the area was put under the administration of

206

Munger: the City Park Bureau, where it has since been. It is an

area seven miles long and over a mile wide, stretching from
near the Willamette River to the skyline; it's pretty rough
forest land, most of it having been very much abused by
logging and fire. But by good protection it's coming back
to a beautiful forest. It's now been dissected by quite a
number of trails and a road or two.

Fry: What about the acquisition of privately owned land?

Munger: I continued as chairman of that committee for about fourteen
years, and the committee still has an annual meeting and
usually a field trip over the area to see new developments.
The acquisition lately has progressed rather slowly, because
very little of the land is going tax delinquent, but the city
has been able to buy a few pieces of land and still is doing
that.

Fry: The acquisition of privately owned land was based on voluntary
acquisition, I guess.

Munger: Well, in one case we condemned 120 acres, I think, but the
city has had little money for acquisition each year.

Fry: So actually your acquisition is still going on.

Munger: Yes, to consolidate the city ownership.

Fry: Did you go to the Legislature to help push through the

legislation that was necessary for the establishment of the
forest park?

Munger: No, that was handled by a member of our committee.

Fry: Who handled that?

207

Hunger: Allen Smith, an attorney here who was interested and was on
the original City Club committee. He put that through.

Forest Museum

Fry: There was another activity of yours which I just happen to
know about, the Forest Museum Building and some of the old
machinery and things which were inside it — the one that
burned down. Could you tell us about this struggle?

Munger: For the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905, a log cabin was
built, like which there was none other in the world. It
was of solid logs of Douglas fir and inside had fifty-two
columns, which were fifty- four feet tall and from four to
five and a half feet in diameter. It was a very impressive
building—cathedral-like in its interior—and it was on city
park property. All the other Lewis and Clark Exposition
buildings were long ago taken down, but it stood there and
was open to the public and had some dust-catching exhibits,
holdovers from the 1905 Fair.

This committee of the Chamber of Commerce, about 1952
I think, thought that something ought to be done to rejuvenate
the building, and it was cleaned out of the undesirable exhibits
and the best ones kept, and a systematic series of educational
exhibits were installed. About that time the mayor appointed

208

Hunger: a committee, which was called the "Gallery of Trees

Committee," and I was elected chairman of that committee,
and I've still stuck to it ever since. It had frequent
meetings for several years, until in August, 1964, the
building was burnt down.

Meanwhile, the exhibits had been very greatly expanded,
It-was my particular interest to assemble interesting things,
like out-of-date donkey engines, sets of high wheels, types
of tools that were used in the past, one of the earliest
sawmills built in the Northwest that had been stored for
many years and was reassembled and erected there, a pioneer
shay locomotive with a load of logs. It all went up in
smoke in this unfortunate fire of August, 1964. Only a few
of these outdoor exhibits were saved.

Fry: How did you go about getting the material for these exhibits?
Were these things that you just ran across in your ordinary
activities, or did you go out and search them out?

Hunger: We didn't have any money, so we were entirely dependent upon
the generosity of public-spirited people. I, through corre
spondence, searched from British Columbia to California to
get a Dolbeer donkey engine and finally found one in Portland;
there are only two or three of them in existence, and that
one was saved from the fire. That was the first type of
donkey engine used in logging in the West.

Likewise, we heard of a four-wheel logging truck, which

209

Hunger: was donated to us. It had a long and interesting history,
and a set of high wheels that were used in logging in the
pine region. Georgia Pacific donated a large donkey engine;
Weyerhaeuser donated some disconnected logging trucks; and
Harold Miller donated the shay locomotive; Crown Zellerbach
donated one of the first grindstones used in a pulp mill in
the Northwest and also donated a cross-section of the giant
Douglas fir, the largest known to exist until it blew down.
Most all of that went up in smoke. But a new building is
being projected which will not be a log cabin but will have
some of the same type of exhibits , we hope .

Fry: You're on that committee too, aren't you?

Munger: Yes.

Fry: You might bring us up to date and tell us how you're coming.
Are you pursuing subscriptions to finance this?

Munger: A committee was appointed by the mayor right after the fire,
and that has been somewhat reorganized into a better working
group. A prominent retired pulp mill executive, Charles Fox,
has been appointed president of this corporation that's been
formed. It's called Western Forestry Center. Then they
shortly thereafter employed an executive secretary, John
Forrest, and that is going to be adjoining the Oregon
Museum of Science and Industry and the Arboretum and the
Zoo on the West Hills. But it would be public land, and
the City Council hasn't given the final approval to its
location.

210

Hunger: An architect has been employed and is considering plans.
As soon as there are some preliminary sketches of the build
ing, a brochure will be prepared and the solicitation will
start, hoping that largely the industry in the four states
will contribute toward it. It will not be just a Portland
project, but it will be a region-wide project to feature the
forest products, their care and manufacture, and their uses.

Fry: In the plans for this building, what sort of guidelines did

the committee give the architect? What particular things did
you want?

Hunger: Well, we've been very much impressed by a forestry museum

&atV//
in Sweden, of which we have brochures. It s at GovoH, near

Stockholm, and was built by the industry. It has in it a
great deal of the kind of things that we hope to have, which
will be the educational exhibits showing the growth and
management of forests and then their utilization, and the
various types of forest products. The building will be of
wood, using the most modern techniques of wood utilization;
it will display the uses of wood.

Fry: Are there any other civic accomplishments that I've left out?
You seem to have been a busy man outside the Experiment
Station.

211

Arboretum

Hunger: Well, I take some satisfaction in having had a part with

Sinclair Wilson, before he was with the Experiment Station,
in getting the city to set up an arboretum, which has since
been maintained on one hundred acres or so on the West Hills,
where there is now a very notable collection of mostly
conifers. I've kept in rather intimate touch with that ever
since it was first set up.

Fry: When was this?

Hunger: '27.

Fry: This one hundred acres originally belonged to the county?

Hunger: It was part of the County Poor Farm that was turned over to
the city, so it was city property and on the same tract as
the Zoo, which adjoins it.

Roadside Protection

Fry: Do you want to tell something about roadside protection
efforts, one of your hobbies?

Hunger: Well, many years ago, Hrs. Jesse H. Honeyman, who was then

well on in years but was a vigorous crusader, helped organize
the Oregon Roadside Council, which had a small membership
and a board of governors. I was asked, as the representative
of the Forest Service, to sit with them, and there began my

212

Hunger: interest in roadside protection, a subject that very much

&
needed friends. Ever sinfe then I have been active on the

Oregon Roadside Council and for some years had some part in
trying to get legislation through the Oregon legislature.
The Roadside Council is still active, as are other councils
over the country, trying to control billboards.

Fry: Has this been its major concern over the years?

Hunger: Yes, the major concern is that, but it's also been interested
in the promotion of parks and the promotion of the recre
ational use of forests and conservation in general. The
battle is still on and not won yet.

Fry: Have you found that the support by Hrs. Johnson in the
White House has helped these local organizations any?

Hunger: I don't want to get into that. No.

Fry: I gather this hasn't been a big boon to you then.

Hunger : No .

Fry: Have you been able to limit billboards on any roads and
highways around here?

Hunger: Oregon has probably made as much progress as any other state
except Washington in direct regulation. Oregon has a unique
law which was passed in 1961. It creates a Scenic Area
Board that has the power to declare a certain road a "scenic
area," along which no new billboards can be erected, and
existing ones must be taken down in seven years, with certain
exceptions--commerical areas and on-premise signs are allowed.

213

Hunger: I was initially appointed by the Governor to that Scenic
Area Board and served for four years. Up to the present
time, over a thousand miles have been set up as scenic
areas in Oregon.

In that same legislature, a bill was passed which
gives, I would say, lukewarm protection from advertising
on the federal interstate system and to a lesser degree on
other throughways. The Roadside Council was also instru
mental in freeing the Portland arteries and the bridge
approaches from billboard advertising — but it acted a little
too late in some cases, for existing billboards could not be
taken down.

Fry: Was there organized opposition to these efforts?

Munger: Yes. One step in this crusade was that a Highway Protection
Committee was created to put over an initiative petition in
Oregon to rather drastically control billboards on all pri
mary highways, and I worked very hard on that in '59 and '60.
We raised and spent about $11,000, I think, in our campaign,
and as near as we can find out the industry spent $200,000 to
defeat it, and they were successful in so doing. So organized,
heavily financed opposition to roadside protection is still
rampant over the country and was particularly so at the White
House when this recent so-called Highway Beautif ication Bill
was passed.

Fry: You've had a lot of experience with that.

214

Hunger: Yes. It's been an interesting battle of ideologies — the
same thing that's taking place in all of the conservation
efforts, whether it be conservation of scenery, conservation
of wildlife, or conservation of forests; it's the aesthetic
or the cultural versus the "economic."

Fry: Has your work in the Experiment Station really kept you

out of active political activity or identification with any
political party?

Hunger: Well, as long as you're a federal employee, you're not

supposed to engage in political activity, but my own pre
ferences have kept me from indulging in any partisan politics
or partisanship or political activity other than in a small
way, going to the legislature on several occasions and, you
might call it, lobbying for the roadside protection legis
lation—in which I was very much of a novice, an amateur.

Fry: By "by your own preferences," do you mean that you weren't

able to line up your interests with the party line of either
party?

Hunger: Well, I simply haven't cared particularly to be a partisan
politician, to engage in partisan political activity, but
I would take part in these causes where legislation is
necessary.

Fry: I think we've had a very good series of interviews. Thank you
for going through such an intensive series of questions with
us. This will be a good addition to those diaries.

Hunger: Well, that's all--yes.

215

APPENDIX I
CORRESPONDENCE REGARDING INTERVIEW

216

nroiciiAL QTtAL TiisToicr O^PICE ROOM

August 2£, 196?

Dear I-Cr. I-Sunger:

In our last interview we discussed the Rex Black oas«
briefly, and it developed that your part in that apparently
concerned the deliberations of the J.nfcial committee of the
Northwest Section of S.A.F., which in turn made recommendations
to the national councillors*

At the tine, there was little Information available on
this while I had She tape recorder onj I don't believe that
I had shown you the notes on the case which I now attach to
t-iis letter. Perhaps these few sketchy facts can pulsate a
while in that very active brain of yours and trigger the
storage place -where the goings-on of the coi/jnittee are re
tained.

If you can dredge up any nenories of how the ooitatiittee
operated, who the key nembers were, what the context of the
issue was, and what your feelings x-rere at tho time, then maybe
you can write out a statement—a page or two or three— to that
effect and we can insert it in the interview.

In the meafctiiae, please be thinking of pictures that we
can use in the finished product. It woujd, be interesting to
have photos of you in school, as a young forester in the wilds
of Oregon, as the head of the Station, and perhaps others of
you with pertinent poople who were also active and on the
forestry scene* In addition, you nay be able to supply shots
of Wind River, of the Station, of various experimental plots,
of the Portland Forest Park, the Museum, and anything else that
you talk about. We will want to put photos in at least three
copies of the final manuscript, and if we don't have the budget
to cover reproduction expenses, we will need enough different
i-ictures of each period of your life to distribute among the
various copies. Do you think you can supply all these?

I'm working hard to get the rough-editing to the copy-
editor (who will prepare a clean, wore readable copy for you)
before I go on vacation September 1.

Dean McCulloch is passing through the San Francisco airport
tomorrow; I ara going to try to visit a little with him then.
Do you ever travel down this way?

Sincerely,
Amelia R. Pry

217

THORNTON T. MONGER

275S S.W BUENA VISTA DR.

PORTLAND 1. OREGON September of Iy67

CA 3-897O

iv.rs. Amelia ft. Fry

Regional ural History office, Univ. of California
Berkeley, Gal.

Dear Mrs. Fry:

Your letter of August 25 should have had a prompter reply, BUT —
Now you are probably on vacation, and not missing my reply.
The enclosures you sent about the Black case don't "dredge up any memories"
about the local SAF's committee handling of the matter. All I recall, as I
told your machine, was a meeting in ureeley's house in Seattle. I can't recall
who else was there if anybody. One reason why I am so blank on the subject,
( aside from the fact that it was 32 years ago ) is perhaps that I was not
at all emotionally worked up over Black's conduct. 1 guess I didn't take
Ghapinan' s char&es very seriously.

About pictures: 1 never was much of a collector of pictures of myself; I
have more of horses in the early days. I enclose three poor reproductions

used in my "Recollections" ( mimeographed by the F.S. Thirty Year Club ).

could
Would any of these be such as you want? I/probably by some research get

glossy prints of these.

I had the pleasure recently of an over-night visit from the Sam Dana's,
who were just back from Alaska, escaping from the Fairbanks flood. Dave
Mason, his, Yale classmate, was here to dinner one night, but we didn't
discuss forest history, but remini scented a lot.

Sincerely yours,

f/vwisfrbin

9

218

RTHIOHAL ORAL TIISTOIX1 OI-'VTCE ROOM I;86

September 1$, 196?

iir. Thornton T. 1-iunger

27?£ £. ". Duena Vista Drive

Portland,

Dear ijp. Hunger:

Your letter was awaiting me, along with its enclosures
or sai^le pictures, when I returned this week from vacation,
0-Te did not get up to Oregon; our tine was so short that
we spent it all on the Eel ^iver in the redwoods.)

The pictures will be good one to use, and if you can
sniff out tiie glosses that td.ll be a big help. Incidentally,
if the i''orot;t Service will make reprints for you, don't
discourage it, because we need pictures at least for (1)
Bancroft's ccr>y, (2) Yale's copy. (3) your copy, and (li)
our office copy. As much as I like horses, in this case
I prefor your o\m nortrait; do you think you have a por
trait—one of those forest Service office portraits, per
haps—that i-re can use as a sort of frontispiece?

I am sending first class special delivery a rough-
edited copy of the transcript for you to check over, A list
of specific questions on x^ords I am not sure of is attached.
Please add anything you want to,

The next thins is the contract: Do you want the agreement
that gives all publishing rights to the University (with the
provision that any such arrangement has to have your approval
and any royalties involved go to you or your heirs), or" the
ont> that provides for all rights going to you for as long as
you wish to specify? In either case, no one can qi ote from
your manuscript without first getting your permission. Let
me know about your choice and we can get the five copies
typed up and sent to you for your signatures.

I hope that you are not swamped with some big project
right now, because Yale is writing me nearly every week afck-
inc if your manuscript is in the bindery yet and when will
they get their copy. It roust give you a comfortable fed ing
to realize your memoirs are the subject for such eagerness.
It gives ne an uncomfortable feeling/ because it means wa
nustn't stop to pick daisies along the way but must rush
the thing to its conclusion.

I'd like to have been int he corner with my trust re
corder when you and Sam Dana were reminiscencing.

THORNTON T. MUNGER

2755 S. W BUENA VISTA DR
PORTLAND I. OREGON

CA 3-B970

219

September 18, 1967

jJear Mrs. Fry:

Refering to your letter of September 13*

The packet came special delivery this AM at 7»30. I havent OPENED IT IET.
1 clred to do so; x will find it so flat and prosy and egotistical. But if
lale is in such a hurry for it I will try to get at it soon. I will feel
inclined to blue-pencil the whole thing,

About the publishing rights* O.K. for the University to have all, without
any reservation.

1 have spent hours and hours looking for the negatives or good prints of
appropriate pictures, both in my personal collection and in the Forest
Service collections in the R. 0 and in the Exp. Sta., without much luck.
The catagogusing system is such that they can't find what J- want, or the
negatives have been destroyed.

I shall be able to get U prints of some pictures, but for others I have
only a single print which I assume the FHS can have duplicated.
I have a single copy of a pretty good "portrait" of me at my desk in the
1930' s which you say you want for a frontispiece.

Would you want something like the enclosed? Or don't you want to show
your subject at play with his family? 1 have the film of this.

Sincerely yours,

c\

C

'mwwtl

220

THORNTON T. MUNC3ER

2755 S. W BUENA VISTA DR.
PORTLAND I. OREGON

CA 3-897O

- . . — September 21, 1967

Dear Mrs. Fry*

I have read hurridly about half of the 280 pages, and will
finish the rest today. It reads better than I expected, but 1 will not
recommend it for past- time reading, except perhaps to my sons.
You speat of my "approval" an<f£checking it over", but £ am puzzled as to
how far I should go in red-pencilling it with editorial changes.
I will of course correct spelling, insert missing dates and facts and
correct grammatical errors.

But should I cut out phrases or questions and answers that seem to me
irrelevant or duplicative. ( One instance of this is how to make growth
studies, the different methods in clear cut and selective cut stands,
which is discussed in detail in two places.)

1 don't want to do any more "fcdi ting" Xk**xitE8J»A*ECLx2W.>*tAlCS <,XHIS than
necessary to make this readable. You don't want it polished or lacking in
spontaniety.

I think there is too much in the pre-coliege, home-life chapter about
visitors at our home and autographs of my father's friends. This is
remote from forest history, and I would like to see it shortened OEK and
clarified, iiut I -.rill not touch it with my red pencil until I hear from
you.

In your letter of Sept. 13 you say "A list of specific questions on words
I am not sure of is attached", but I do not find such a list.

Sincerely yours,

221

REGIONAL OilAL HISTORST OFFICE ROOM 1|B6

September 22-, 1967

Dear Dr. linger: ^

/ -

Your tw letters — Sept. 18 and Sopt. 21— arrived simultaneously
today. It is c. delight to tflnd someone so oonsoienoious and oo-
operative, oven though ho lias reservations about the value of the
document. 1 an sure that historians will not share you reserva
tions.

Your present editing sounds as if it is Just what I would
order if 1. vrero standing ovor your shoulder (heaven forbid).
Correct the spelling, names and facts tliat are in error, and
cross graroatical errors that might belie the fact that you
are an educated aan. There are none of that kind in your transcript,
but often rpokon word converted to written word sounds less
tightly Icn&tr, ''e prefer to leave it loose and Informal, ac long
as it sounds as litorate as you really are and als> as long e.s
it is not ambiguous.

Duplications oan be shortened tne seoond time around (If
the second discxxssion is nooded for a bridge) or taken out.
If thoy are only a paragraph or two, might as w ell leave then in*
I fear that I missed the duplication in the discussion of the
different mefchoda einployod in growfch studies in cloar cut and
s elect iv e atanda .

loave in all tliat information on your pre~oolloget
home life* This gives you dimension, and for local historians
in Connecticut it iid.ll be like good vintage wine. Any clarification
you Ci-Ji ^ivv it ia, yf course, v»elcome«

In fact, add anything you think is remotely dosireable* I
fear that you may lot modesty guide you. Instead, think of ell
the future greedy Ph.D. thesis-seekers and froe-lanoe vrltors and
scholarly historians who may beat their heads against the table
because you left out something.

It baffle* me that the list of questions, with page numbers,
was not included in the MBS. It is not in our office, so I
suspect the mail room whore the packing occurred. I am sending
my carbon.

That is a marvelouo family picture. We need more of same,
or else the negative. I added up the libraries that might be—
(not might be"-4that already have expressed a desire to have
co >:ies of this series of interviews! Bancroft, UCIA. FH5, Denver,
ROHO, you, probably the uSPSi that means seven copies. So
we should plan on pictures that can be spread around between them.

222

THORNTON T. MUNGER

2755 S. W BUENA VISTA DR
PORTLAND 1. OREGON

CA 3-897O

October 20, 1$>67

Dear Mrs. Fry:

Supplementing my letter of October 7 to you*

At last I have gotten together a. few pictures which are more or less
appropriate. 1 leave it to you to cull those that are not.
There are eight pictures, titles for which are enclosed. Of a couple
of these I have only 6 prints. The package of prints is going under
separate cover, by letter mail. Hope they get to you OK.
I am waiting to hear from Washington about another rather appropriate
1911 picture, which will be sent you if I ever get it.

Sincerely yours,

0,

''4W

™l

223

IlIT-I 1I&1 ORAL iriS TOBY CF-:1UU

October 31, 1967

Dear !;r. ! lunger:

Your nicturea arrived safely, and we axe
so hap'Ty that wo can have enough prints to go
.-.round in r.ll the ncre inoort&nt co ioa of
manuncript. 'iliank you, from the "bottom of ny

I hope that picture frora 1911 arrives.
I'll "be at the forest Service in Ife-shington
Kovenber 16 and 17. Ie there any specific
person there I could see al3CJUt dispatching
it?

I leave next Wednesday for Bev York and am
making a mnful effort to got your mnnscript ready
co the typist own. "be fir-a3^typine it while I am

gone.

'i'h&nks again for your raarvelouu habit of
always coming throu^i just the way we need your
hoi;; and when we need it.

Sincerely,

Anelia Pry

224

APPENDIX II

PROPOSED OUTLINE FOR INTERVIEW
SAMPLE OF QUESTIONS USED IN FINAL EDITING

Y25

PROPOSED DOTM'm FOR ITTTEPVIEW

I. Childhood and Education

(Family backfrrcnmd, public schooling, and community)

Yale Forestry School

II. To the Forest Service

A. Your experiences working In the Section of Sllvlcs under
Fred Ames to 1918: reconnalsance projects, plot studies,
Inspection methods, any other sidles you want to coT^ent
on.

--The establishment of Wind River Experimental Forest (1911)

B. 1918: (Acting Chief of Silviculture while Ames was In
20th Engineers)

—The Douglas fir region study o f proposed minimum
requirements by the government on private land
owners--forest practices,

--The Spruce Inventory for airplane manufacture, World
War I, Olymolc National Forest

--Anything on land exchange methods? (Ycur diary shows
c conference In the Deschutes office In lend, 1932.)

--Atte-rots at fcosst Insect control?

--Your evaluation of the reorganization of the Section
of Sllvlcs

III. Director of the Paclflce Northwest Forest Experiment Station,
192U-1938

A. How you were appointed; your duties; the r elation of
the station to Industry, to colleges and universities,
to the Regional offlce| staff ms Tiber s.

B. Studies undertaken during this period! you might want
to select a few of the following to tell of methods
uc*.d and effee* of the results.

Douglas Fir Yield study ("Timber Growing and

Logging Practlt
glon.") 192?

disposal

Logging Practices In the Doufelas Fir Re-
».")

226

Lightning and static studfcs

Fire studies

Seed studies

Selective lodging Silviculture studies

Snaer felling

Mill scale studies

and others... land economics (erosion and soil),
delinquent lands/forest taxation

SECTION ON PARTICIPATION IN NATIONAL STODIE3
C. The Forest Survey

D. '."he ^Ictfary-McSweeney Act: your work with lumbermen In
ning provisions that might be Included In the bill.

® ©

E. National Study on Forest Taxation.*-The Station's role in
construction of Oregon Reforestation Land Tax Act of 1929.
^•-Also, your participation on Special Committee on
Forest Taxation, 1935-36— a Governor's Committee
I believe.

P. The Forest Insurance Studies, 1921* — A.B.Bveste of Seattle;
—Also, 1930-31;, Harold B, Shepard's.

0. The Lumber Code and Article Ten, 1933

i

H. State and Private forestry conferences in Washington around 1937

.••,

IV. OUTSIDrt AGENCIES: You may want to relate aorae of your activities
in the following, or a select number of these:

I

A. Western Forestry and Conservation Association

1

B. Forest Products Laboratory

C. U. S. Chamber of Commerce (Forest Policy Committee)

D. West Coast Lumberman's Association

E. Pacific Logging Congress

F. Society of American Foresters (Industrial Poresty Committee)

Sample of questions used in final editing.

PAGE

13 Satoue.. i;.apin .

15 later or earlier?

27 crew? 1908 correct date?

43 ca>.e by train. Accc-rulu^ to TiuLerliuet;, J.GU tool, a 4-horse stage from

Shamko to Prineville--64 miles; 2-horse stage from there to Bend and Rosland.

63 i^ill i;. Austfxan wild rivers.

94 Correct words?

72 Met Pinchot in summers at ? House.

74 I can'; iind aiiytbir^ in my notes or your ixcollections. . ." about the
Southwestern Oregon So. And I never gave you a chance to answer the
question. Could you insert the anecdote here?

36 age of what?

Hi went in caves l.-acl: Eact?

124 Go on and say it! (Did I guess right?)

156 What do you think this should be? (bottom)

11;5 J. Elton

190 top line— ? tax. Line 3— is insert correct? Copy of the handbook

or, forest put out iur Article Ten?

172 Selective cutting in Douglas fir was practiced in the national forests

i'ur >..-..:.i . t'icUi '. jjar, 1 Believe. iiay.-e you could say ''for only a few
years," if we can't establish the exact number of years.

WS Not clear what the citation are. Can you clear this up with material
at your fingertips there?

231 Also — title of payftr? Name ol: Murray's company?
190 Top blank. "Ad Valorem" tax? (same as above)

209 couple hundred conscientious objectors? or CCC boys? Is previous
sentence accurate?

228

APPENDIX III
NOTES FROM S. A. F. AFFAIRS —February , 1936

229

lou« from

1936 , pp. 3*12

lotet Board
members intent on
Pratt 's dismissal

were 8f Berry
and Hedges.

1) Letts* from E. H. MoDaniels, Chairman of Columbia
River Section, stating that a special oomstittee
Of the Motion will study Blaok oase with an eye)
to by-lavs— adequate pro too tl on of the individual
froa unfoundod or hasty aotion.

•

Chapman's answer MM in two part* an follows!

1) Procedure in Constitution and By-l&wsi

2) Procedure actually followed

Charges were signed by ••Ton people— Chapman aaya
names are withhold and all guaasos (ineluding
Blaok* •) havo boon wrong*

Charges prosontod to 3. A. F. January 28, 1935
1) Blaok seevrad a position on th« StaU Board of
Forestry by political a*ana, and «Jotod ohair-
man at request of Rolph for the purpose of
getting Pra-tt diaaissad.

Ho triad without tho sanction of tho Board to
got QoYornor Rolph to dismiss Pratt— "inoom-
petency and political activity. "—OoTornor
thought that ho had tho approval of tho Board.
Blaok has diaor*4iUd Pratt to his suporrlsora,
to Ue pubU*» «|Ml lo »ttbordl«atee .
Blaok ha« usurped tho authority of tho stats
for oat or*

About tho samo as numbs r four
Ho failed to call mooting* for tho Board of
Fores try— usur pod tho porogativos of tho
State Board*

When the initiative was won to put tho State
Forester under the protection of Civil Service,
Blaok tried to get the Board of Forestry to
dismiss him in the interim, which Blaok could
have done with the new Board member Fritz's
vote. But Frits oaught on and would not aooopt
the appointment*

2)

3)
4)

1}

7)

Chapman, with Black's okay, sent a copy of the
charges to CFFA directors. Swift Berry and Mr. Moir
accused Chapman of "broadcasting the charges ".
Chapman says that Blaok "gave me no names of persons
to write to corroborate hia statements made in his
reply [defense] of July 18." However, Swift Berry and
Richard Colgan sent in pro-Black statements.

230

Fag* Two
lotes from s. A. F. Affairs (*onti»aed)

The case was sent to council on September 20.. 100
pages single spaced. Each member read it, mailed
in his vote, and mailed the Case testimony to another
member (There were only four copies.). The verdict
on tfovember 20th was— expelled. Sight members out
of nine on the Council voting yes. (Kotok voted no. )
(Frits was on the Council at this UB».) Charges
number five, six, and one were thrown out because
they required proof of motives*

Black's answer to the charges! He had requested
that Chapman have charges published in the foYITmU
but that this could not be done because of Hack's
attack on Pratt in his own defense*

Chapman says that Black, Berry, and B. f. Allen
wtre the only ones who made attempt* to tie Black's
actions with his motives, to insist o* trying the
state forester as part of the Black

Chapman defends the countercharge that the 0. 8.
Forest Service men wanted Pratt retained, because
•lumbermen" wanted him fired} Chapman says that
Berry intimated the opposite point of view*

September, 1935 Investigation ended

231

SAT mffairs March, 1956 Vol. 2, lo. 3* PP» 19-20

•Petition in the Ca.e of 8. Rcxford Black*
From the California Section and the two Pacific
lorthwest sections. (December 12, 1935 Petition)
Council agreed on January 25 to grant a review

Charges against Chapman were signed by Swift Berry,
R. A. Colgon, Clyde S. Martin, T. K. Oliver* and
V. R. Sohofield. As a result of Chapman* » work in
the Black case, the following charges were presented
to Society vice-president S. 7* Dana on September 21,
1936i The undersigned herewith present* •• charges
that H. H. Chapman. ..acted with conduct unbecoming
a professional forester and in a manner deliberately
unethical for a member of the Society, in connection
with his handling of the S. Rexford Black charges
by oaeking public statements tending to reflect upon
the reputation of other foresters so as to prejudice
their means of earning a likelihood, without at the
same time giving equal publicity to defense state*
ments.* Specifically, the meet important charges
centered around a letter which Chapman had printed

in the SAF Affairs (February, 1936) in response to
a request for information concerning the Black ease.
Part of the charge involved Chapman's alleged unethi
cal mention of Swift Berry and S. T. Allen in this
letter.

Dana notified Chapman of the charges and the two
corresponded concerning how the matter should be
handled. Chapman, probably desiring to clear his
own name, wanted to have the charges investigated.
One opinion against investigation was oast by Col.
Oreeley, who was chairman of a Society lommittee
which was reviewing the Black case.

On ffovenber llth Dana submitted a memorandum to the
Council with a ballot concerning the Chapman ease.
This ballot determined that Dana would investigate
the ea^e, which was in line with the Society's by
laws. Various approaches to the case were offered
and it was suggested that discussion should be opeaefS
as to the general procedures which should be followed
in such oases.

From the beginning Dana attacked the case on two
levelss that of Chapman's guilt in this particular
case, and that of the general problem of how to
handle such cases in the future. Dana's report to
the Council and the ballot on March 19, 1937 illus
trated this division. The Council responded by

232

Page Two

unanimously voting Chapman not guilty and accepting
Dana's suggestion for changes la the by- law* to meet

such cases in the future.

Dana based his decision concerning Chapman's iano-
cence on several points. On* of the major issues
was the propriety of the letter which Chapman had
had printed in the SAT Affair si Dana justified this
act as follows »

•Opinions may well differ as to the extent to
which publicity should be carried in eases of this
sort, but that the President and the Council hare
the right to sake their findings , with the reasons
therefor, as generally known as the/ think wise
seems to me indisputable. In the present instance,
it seemed reasonable to assume that other sections
would share the Colunbla River Section's desire for
further information, and had an equal right thereto.*
Dana felt that Chapman had not acted unethically
in omitting Black's Defense because the letter had
merely contained the charges— with neither opposing
or agreeing arguments. Furthermore, the defense
oontained numerous unfavorable references to Pratt.

A further specific charge accused Chapman of making
derogatory remarks concerning two m«n,who had do*
fended Black* Dana termed the language used as
"unfortunate* and would hare preferred to see the
SUMS of people omitted from a discussion of prim*
oiples. However, he felt that the statement oould not
be termed unethical, since it did faithfully portray
the position which the two men took*

233

APPENDIX IV
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THORNTON T. HUNGER

234

ATIUfto ( other thar. articles in periodicals ) BY THORNTON T. Kl^

I'lie 'Jrevrth and management of Dou0las t^r -j_n the Pacific Northwest; forest
Jorviice CJirculor 175/: 1911

Avalanches and Fcr- rt Cover in the Northern Cascades: Forest Service Circular

173=

..•?starn Xellov rine in Oregon: U.S. Dept. Agri. Bull U.8; 1917

TSjnber Crowing raid Lo^in^ Fractic3 in the Douglas Fir ne^ion: U.S.Dept. Agri.
Jept. I. v.11. 1^93' 19^7

Slash Disposal in the Destern Yellow Pine Forests of Oregon and Washington,

( vith R. "-;. r.estvelrt ) U.S. Dept. A^. Technical Bull. 259: 1931

Grcn,'jth of pKKsx. Dcuglas Fir '^rees of Knovm Seed Source ( with Vim. G. Morris )
"U. S. Dept. Agr. Tech. Bull. 53?: 1936

Slash Disposal and Forest management after Clear-Cutting in the Douglas Fir

\. v;ith D. iv;. jviatthews ) U. S. Dept. Agri. Circular 586: 19)

Instructions for Planting DOUgias Fir on Logged-off Lands of Western Oregon
and \nashingtonj U. 3. Forest Service: 19U2

Forest P3.arting in the Douglas-fir ^egion ( with J. F. Kurranel and Chas. A.
Rindt ) U. 3. Forest "'ervice:

of Portland's Forest_Park ( Toth C» ?• ^syser ) Forest-Park Cormnittee
of Fifty;

/I/*

235

SH.riOTaD r^InTED ARTICLES JIN JTEGHINAL JOURNALS, ETC, BY THORNTON T. MUMGER_

Natural vs. Artificial >ieueneration nn the Douglas Fir Region of the Pacific
Coast. Free. Sec. Am. Foresters: N0v. 1912

Shall the Physical Conditions or the Dendrological Mixture be the Basis for
Forest T^pEn0. Proc. Scc. Am. Foresters: April, 1913

D3?',?ge oy Li^ht Surface Fibres in Western Yellow Pine Forests. Proc. Soc. Am.
Foresters: April, 191U

;lepj acement of Yellow Pine by Lodgepole Pine on the Fumice Soils of Central
Jregcn. iroc. Soc. Am. Foresters: July, 191U

A Formula fcr Normal Growing Stock in Selection System Forests. Proc. Soc> Am.
Foresters: °anu*ry, 1915

Five xe-virs Growth on Douglas Fir Sample Plots. Proc. Soc. Am. Foresters:
October, i?l>

Parch Blight on Douglas Fir in the Pacific Northwest. The Plant V<orld: Feb. 1916

Graphic method of Representing and Comparing Drought Intensities. Monthly leather
r: November, 1916

The Productive Capacity of the Douglas Fir L-y^s Uestern Oregon and DVashington.
Univ. nf California, Journal of Agriculture: November, 1916

Problem of Making Volumn Tables for Use on the National Forests. Journal

of Forestry: Nay, 1917

Planting Experiments on the Sand Dunes of the Oregon Coast. Journal of Forestry:

December, 191?

FiT-st Steps for Bringing into Use the Idle Hands of Oregon. Univ. of Oregon The
Commonwealth Review: July, 1912

The Casc?ra iiark Industry on the Siuslaw National Forest. Jour, of Forestry
i-ay, 1919

Forestry In the Douglas Fir Region. American Forestryj April, 1920

Second Measurement of Permanent Sample Plots of Douglas Fir. Jour, of Forestry
December, 1920

The National Forests of Washington as Investments. Univ. of Washington Forest
School Annual, 192!

Douglas Fir rteoc?upies 'waste Land. Cre. Agri. C0i. Annual Cruise; 1922

Lo-ging National Forest Timber in Douglas Fir Region. Lumber World Review;
June 10, 192?

Douglas Fir: POT; it Grows 1 ( vdth R. E. McArdle ) Vilest Coast Lumberman; May, 1925

3n;?gs ( Tn-th Geo. L. Drake ) The Timberman; December, 1926

The Lumber merger and Forestry. West Coast Lumberman; May, 192?

At the Forest Crossroads. Univ. of Oregon The Commonwealth Review; Oct. 1927

236

Articles <'f

T. Vunuer -2-

Some Forest rTobleras of the i\>ortlrwest. Northwest Science; June, 1928

3nss Jt-'p.Uing ( Tit,h A. 0. sirnson ). The Tiraberman; April - ikiay, 1929

Ecological Aspects of the Transition from old Forests to i\ew. 3cience; °ct. 3j 1930

Timber Tax. Destroying Great Oregon Industry. Portland Spectator; Jan. 21, 1933

Practical Application of Silviculture to Overmature Stands now Exiating on the
i-acific. jfroc. J^ifth Pacific Science Congress; June, 1933

Tongues in Trees, rarks and Recreation; July, 1936
;tea .Alder. ^srdwood Record; March, 1938

The Silviculture of Tree Selection Cutting in the Douglas Fir Region. Univ. of
Washington, The Forest Club Quarterly; March, 1939

Thirty Years Growth in Douglas Fir. The Timberman; June, 19UO

The Cycle from Douglas Fir to Hemlock. Ecology; October, 19UO

They Discuss the ^aturity Selection System. JOur. of Forestry; March, 19U1

Recent Developments in Pine Silviculture ( with P. A. Briegleb ) Northwest
Science; May, 19ii2

Forest Experiment Station and the "war. Ore. State Col. Annual Cruise, 19U3
Vital Statistics for Some Douglas Fir Plantations. Jour, of Forestry; Jan. 19U3
Out of the Ashes of westucca. American Forests; July 19UU

Oregon's Hare at and Most Distinctive Forest Type. The Living Wilderness; Sept. 19UU
Acres trove Point. The Timberman; March,

The iiind River Arboretum from 1912 to 19U7. Univ. of "Washington, Arboretum
Bulletin} Fall,

A Tree Classification for Douglas Fir. The Tiraberman; March,

kultiply-Spur Climbers for High Pruning ( v.ith Theo. Kachin ) Jour, of Forestry
i/?y, 19l;9

Fifty tears of Forest Research in the Pacific Northwest. Ore. Historical
Quarterly; Sspternber, 1953-

Uncle Sam Should Own Pins Land. ( r;j_th T. J. Starker ) The Timberman; Feb. I960
Portland! s Fabulous Foregtry Building. Parks and Recreation; August, I960

A Lock at Selectiv* Cutting in Douglas-fir.
Journal of Forestry; Feb. 1950

Trses in Hazard: Oregon's Kyrtls Groves. Ort. Historical .Qoart^rly; March, 1966

237

-3-

ed Article « x?
Thornton T. K

Hoccll-jstions of iv Thirby-«ifeht Years in th« Forsst 3arric«, 1908-19U6.
>im«o. 30 paaes. Issusd by Thirty-Tear Club; 19o2.

238

APPENDIX V

PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE PUBLISHED WRITINGS OF
THOEDORE THORNTON HUNGER D. D.

239

Partial Bibliography of th-s Pablishod Writings of
THOEDCRB T,HORNTOJ>, HUNGER D. D.
t.630 - 1910

1. On the Thrsshold Houghton, Mifflin & Go. 1580 and 1891

2. Hre*ioni of Faith " " " 1887
3. Appeal to Lif« " " " 1887
!;. Lamps and Paths " " " 1891

5. Plain Living and High Thinking Wilb«r B. K*tcham 1897

o. Ghiirsictsr through Inspiration James Clarko and Go. London 1897

7. 'ior»ce Bush.iell, Preacher and. Theologian Houghton, Mifflin & Go. 1899

8. Essays for the Jay, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1901;

PARTIAL INDEX

240

Abott, Lyman, 9

Advisory Council for Research Station, 173-174

Agriculture, Department of, 192-193

Alabama, 31

Alaska, 55, 60, 95, 96

Allen, E. T., 44, 152

Ames, Fred, 41, 65, 73, 80, 84, 94

Andrews, H. J., 133, 184

Background, personal, 1-17

Bacon, Benjamin W. , 3

Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, 55-56, 59-60

Berry, Swift, 153

Black, Rex, 150-153

Blue Mountains, 82, 138

Bowman, Isaiah, 23

Bradford, Emory, 9

Brandstrom, Axel, vi, 121-122, 123, 130, 140

Briegleb, Philip, 133

Brown, Nelson C. , 29

Bureau of Census, 140

Cable, George W. , 10

California Region, 100

Capin, Samuel, 10

Cascade Head Experimental Forest, 137

Chamber of Commerce, 199-200

Chapman, C. S., 148, 153, 173

Civic projects, 204-214

Civilian Conservation Corps, 120, 138, 162-166

Cecil, George H. , 89, 99

Claims, 90

Clapp, Earle, 91, 100, 158, 169, 188, 191

Clarke-McNary Act, 188

Clibbon, Catherine B. , 9

Compton, Wilson, 160

Connecticut, 2-6

Conscientious objectors, 164, 196

Conservation organizations, vi, 77, 88, 198-200

County government, 146, 205

Cowlin, R. W. , 133

Crothers, Samuel, 10

Cruising, 30, 65-66, 70-74, 134-135, 162-163, 202

Cutting Methods Study, 69-70

Dana, Samuel, 35-36

Day, Earl B. , 145

DeVries, Wade E. , 144

Disease, Timber, 43, 64

Douglas fir seed study, 66-69, 112-113, 114-115, 117

Education, 196-197

Education, conservation education, 19, 45, 161, 174

Education, professional schools, 18, 27-32, 86-88, 116

241

Education, professional schools, technical training, ii, 29-30, 42,

71, 77, 87, 110

Education, schooling of Hunger, ii-iv, 18-21, 31-32, 167-168
Emergency Relief Administration, 162-163
Equipment, 72, 96-97, 105-107, 186-187, 208-209
Equipment, tractors, 123, 126, 131, 177
Ethnic tolerance, 4, 15

Fairchild, Fred Rogers, 143-144

Fir areas, 43-47a, 61, 64, 66, 75, 102, 110, 111, 117, 119, 123-132,

134, 149, 160, 176, 180-181, 189

Fire, 38-39, 74-76, 105-107, 109, 155, 159, 179-180
Fire, protection, 77, 85, 103-104, 114, 117-118, 195
Flynn, Ted, 186-187
Forest Homestead Act, 79
Forest Insurance Study, 154-156

Forest inventories, 70-74, 110-111, 119, 133-136
Forest Museum, vii, 207
Forest Park, Port land, Oregon, 204-207
Forest practices, 25-26, 27, 45, 65, 59-70, 86-87, 118, 129, 144,

157-162, 199

Forest products, 122, 140-142, 194
Forest Survey, 133-139, 163, 166, 201
Forest Tax Study, 145
Fritz, Emmanuel, 150

Galloway, Charles, 145

Genetics, 66-69, 112, 114-116

Gilder, Richard , 11

Gilman, Daniel, 11-12

Gordon, George A., 12

Graves, Henry S., 27, 81

Grazing, 42, 50, 92, 141

Greeley, William B. , 149, 150-151, 188, 200-204

Growth and Yield Studies, 43-44, 102, 104, 110-111, 115, 117-132, 162

Hagenstein, William, 132, 204

Hale, Edward E. , 12

Hall, R. C., 143

Hardwood areas, 7

Hemlock, 117, 131, 134, 137

Highway Beautification Bill, federal, 213-214

Historical correspondence, 9-14

Hodgson, Allen, 140

Hoffman, J. V., 62, 66

Industrial forestry, 148

Insects, 43, 53, 120-122, 124

Insurance, 154-156

Inter^-natf.cn influences & comparisons, Austria, 52; France, 27;

Germany, 24-26, 29, 131; Sweden, 134-135
Isaac, Leo, 102, 111-113, 126, 168

242

Jackson, Sheldon, 12-13
James, William, 13
Johnson, Herman, 140
Johnson, Mrs. Lyndon B. , 212

Keen tree classification, 120-121
Kirkland, Burt, 122, 123-124, 130
Kolbe, Ernest, 109-110, 117
Kotok, Ed. I., 150
Kummel, Julius, 60-61

Labor-management relations, 151

Lamb, Frank H. , 179-180

Land use, general comment, 79-82

Legislatures, 76-77, 118, 146, 190, 205-206, 214

Lewis, Melvin, 89

Local government, 205

Lodewick, J. Elton, 140, 167

Lumber camps, food, 72, 108

Lumber Code, 157-160

Lumber industry, 44, 95-96, 119, 122, 123, 131, 135-136, 140-141,

157-162, 172, 177-178, 196, 201, 208
Lund, Walter, 130

MacMillan, H. R. , 28

Maine, 18, 35-36

Malheur National Fore-st, 71

Mapping, 71, 73-74, 134-136

Mason, David, 160, 204

Maturity Selection System, 122, 128

McArdle, Richard, v, 102-105, 110, 117, 158, 160, 167

McCulloch, Walter, 132

McSweeney-McNary Act, 99-100

Merrill, R. D. , 178

Meyer, Walter, v, 104, 110-111, 117, 167

Miller, Dean Frank, 45-46

Moore, R. D., 145

Moravets, Floyd, 133

Morris, William G. , 114-116

Mt. Hood National Forest, 48

Mulford, Walter, 19 -20

Munger, Mrs. Thornton, 78-79

Munger, Rev. Theodore T. , iii, 3-5

Murray, Tom, 178

National Lumber Manufacturing Assn, 160

Natural areas, 90-93, 139

Neils, Paul, 178

New Deal, 157-167

New Republic Domain Study, 143

Northern Region, passim

243

Olympic National Forest, 95

Oregon, 34-39, 40-47a, 76, 87-90, 96, 108, 117, 126, 132, 138, 141,

144, 189, 212
Oregon Caves, 88-90
Ornamental Trees, 64

Parkinson's Law, 173

Pearson, G. A. , 128

Pinchot, Gifford, iv, ix, 18, 20, 27, 40-41, 54-60

Pine areas, v, 34, 37-39, 43, 46-47, 53, 69-70, 75, 81, 82, 107,

109-110, 117-122, 138, 149, 160, 176, 180-181, 189
Policy, General comment, 42, 75, 79-82, 150-153, 191
Politics, 81-82, 150-153, 165, 214
Politics, lobbying, 214
Politics, Democratic party, 165
Port Orford Cedar Experimental Forest, 138
Pringle Falls Experimental Forest, 109, 137
Private investment in timber growing, 155
Progressivism, 7-8, 178-179
Public interest vs. special interest, 85, 91, 95, 127, 141, 145

Railroads, 82-83

Research, passim

Research, administration, 169-182

Research, and Congress, 165

Research, effects of, ii, 44, 68, 113, 119, 122, 126-127, 155, 166,

176-179, 196-197

Research, funding, 100, 133, 163, 184, 194
Research, methods, 37-39, 45-47a, 66-68, 69-70, 103-104, 109, 112,

119-122, 134, 170-172
Research, projects for, 34-36, 45-47a, 93, 101, 103, 105-107, 108,

118, 133, 143, 154, 174-175, 184-186

Research, role of, vi, 36, 40-41, 96, 100, 129,138, 146-147, 174, 178
Reforestation, 48-52, 68, 78, 108, 112, 117-132, 144, 154, 177, 189
"Regional Races of Western Yellow Pine, "115-116

Regulation, public, federal, of forest practices, 42, 85, 188-191
Regulation, public, state, of forest practices, 189-190
Reminiscences, personal, 9-17
Richen, Clarence, 121
Roadside protection, 211-214
Rothery, Julian, 29

Scenic Area Board, Oregon, 212-213

Selective cutting, 121, 123-132, 177

Selective cutting, controversy, 124, 127-128, 130-131, 177

Shelfer, V. E.,91

Shepard, H. B. , 154-156

Silviculture, passim

Simson, A. G. , 105-107

Siskiyou National Forest, 88

Siuslaw National Forest, 51,- 79, 80

Slash disposal, 109, 117-119, 130, 180

Smith, Allen, 207

Smith, Herbert A. , 56

Society of American Foresters, 41, 127, 132, 148, 150-153, 189, 192

244

Soil conservation, 49-52, 75, 141-142
Spruce, 94-96, 117, 137, 194-195
Stamm, Edward, 162, 178
Starker, T. J., 69
Stewart, R. Y. , 158
Sustained Yield, 43

Taft, William Howard, ix, 55, 60

Taxation, 154

Taxation, computation, 146-147

Taxation, property, 143-147

Taxation, yield, 144-147, 197

Tillamook Burn, 155, 159

Timber management, 7, 30-31, 43, 45, 65, 69-70, 73-74, 80, 82-85,

94-96, 108, 138-139, 148, 154, 159-162, 196
Timber owners, 143-147
Timber salvage, 130, 159
Timberlines. vii-ix, 51, 59, 96
Tourney, James W. , 19-20

Trade associations, 95, 150-153, 160, 200-201
Transfer attempts, USFS to Dept. of Interior, 192-193
Trespass, 42,92-93

I

Umpqua National Forest, 83

United States Forest Service, 40

USFS, Appropriations, 196

USFS, College relations, 99-100, 137

USFS, Department of Interior Relations, 89-90

USFS, Experiment Stations, 62, 92-93, 99-101, 137-138, 154, 162,

165, 167-169, 191

USFS, Experiment Station, California, 100
USFS, Experiment Station, Pacific Northwest, passim
USFS, Field activity, experiences, 37-39, 87
USFS, Field autonomy vs. central authority, 47a, 63, 84, 100-101,

127, 138, 159-160, 168-169, 191
USFS, Field reconnaisance, 70-74, 96

USFS, Land, acquisition & transfer, 79-82, 89-90, 137-138, 143
USFS, Private industry relations, 82, 85, 96, 127, 157-162, 174-175,

178, 201-204

USFS, Public relations, 43, 76-77, 88, 147, 161, 170-172, 198
USFS, Timber sales, 71, 82-85, 95-96
USFS, Training, 33, 72, 77, 86-88, 167

Wallace, Henry, 159

Washington, 45, 68, 76, 84, 86, 96, 108, 117, 189, 212

Washington, Booker T. 15

Watzck, Aubrey, 145, 178

Wells, Philip, 54, 56-58

Wertz, June, 171

West Coast Lumberman's Association, 158, 160, 200-204

Western Forestry & Conservation Association, 45, 155, 198-199

245

Western Forestry Center, Region 6, 209-210

Western Pine Association, 110, 160

Westvelt, R. H. , 107-109,112,117

Weyerhauser, Dave, 162, 178

Whittier, John Greenleaf , 10

Wilson, James, 48, 55

Wilson, Sinclair A., 143

Wind River Experiment Station, 49, 60-66, 99, 102, 105, 111,

137, 171
Wisconsin, 100
Woodruff, George, 56
World War I, 94-97
World War II, 164, 166, 194-197
Wyckoff, Steven, 184

Zon, Raphael, iv, 33, 41

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.

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