From the interview with Roy E. Johnson of Camano Island, WA conducted by phone from 696 Woodland Drive in Port Townsend on January 16, 2007 by Patience Rogge. Mr. Johnson was employed by Washington State Parks in several capacities beginning in 1975 until his retirement as a Park Ranger in 2007. In his early career, he worked at Fort Worden and was here at the time of the filming of “An Officer and a Gentleman”. During the interview, he recalled that experience:

“I got Lou Gossett’s autograph, Richard Gere didn’t impress me too much. He kept calling me ‘Sir’ though, so I said ‘Thank you.’ I almost got David Keith’s and Debra Winger’s autographs on speeding tickets, but I let them go. Actually, Debra Winger got out of the park before I could get to her. David Keith said he would keep it down from then on. It was interesting, but I realized I didn’t want to be a movie star, though.

It didn’t seem to be a big disruption to me. There were times when they were filming down in the campground–there’s that one clip when Richard Gere’s doing leg lifts down on top of Battery Kinzie and you can see a couple campers in the background. But by and large, there wasn’t really any big interference with the public using the park. They’d have to go a different way down to the beach if they were filming over by the theater.

I only made $574.00 out of it. I just provided security to keep people from walking through where they were going to be filming. It really upset me because some of the city police and deputies got between $7,000.00 and $10,000.00. They had asked me if I wanted to make $3.25 an hour, and I said, ’No, my time’s worth more than $3.25 an hour,’ so they said, ‘Okay, we’ll find someone else.’ So, they were paying $10.00 an hour for the first eight and then $15.00 up to 12 hours and then anything over 12 hours was $20.00 an hour. The filming was in the area of about two and a half months. I could have made a little more money on them.”