Interview With Eugene D. Vacher

Posted on 11/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Eugene D. Vacher of El Cajon, CA conducted by Patience Rogge by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on November 17, 2009. Mr. Vacher served at Fort Worden after World War II as the leader of the post band. He composed the Port Townsend Centennial March while stationed here. Much later in his career, Mr. Vacher was assigned to Europe, where he was able to take advantage of the French language skills he had acquired as a child:

“When I first got to Orleans, they told me that the band didn’t go outside the post. Within two weeks, we had the festival of the Maid of Orleans (Jeanne d’Arc) and the French Army had to request the use of the band. The general sent me to attend the briefing session. It was in an upstairs room where all the Frenchmen were gabbling, and I was very interested in what was going on. Some I could understand and some I couldn’t, I remember that a lot of people in Orleans were speaking with a very African accent, they were murdering the French language. I was sitting there watching and listening to what was going on and knowing exactly within a few minutes exactly what I was going to have to find out from them. The major who had accompanied me as a translator turned to me and said,’Do you know what they’re talking about?’ I said, ‘Sure, I do.’ I made all the arrangements for the band to play. The next day the colonel called and said that he wouldn’t have to send anybody to translate for me after this. He said, ’You go and make the arrangements and see that everything is right for the band no matter where you have to go.’

That was my assignment and I took advantage of it. I drove to every one of those places that we were going to play, as soon as I got the information. Every time I got there it was either the mayor’s office or whoever was the head of the state or province, and I was the welcome guy with the wine and cookies at the beginning of the conference. I made all the arrangements. For some of the conferences, we had to arrange for meals and accommodations and everything. That was my business from then on for three and a half years, and I had a ball!

It was a wonderful duty for me at a time when duty became a privilege for me. We dedicated a cemetery in London, England. We dedicated the cemeteries in Brittany and Normandy, and one in southern France and northern France. I found out the real story of the southern invasion, which was almost more of a bloody invasion than the northern one. We lost more men in southern France in the invasion than we did in Normandy. It was an eye opener. Then we went down to Anzio in Italy and dedicated a cemetery there.

I think that was probably one of the outstanding military duties that I enjoyed other than Fort Worden. Mary (whom he later married) would go in a store shopping for clothes and I would sit on a bench in the park. Inevitably somebody would sit beside me and start a conversation. I had innumerable conversations with very intelligent people. We went over reasons why we had difficulties in France and why they thought one way and we thought another….I could never be like the major we had who went into his quarters in Orleans and never left them, not even to go out visiting anybody.”

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Interview With Noris H. Christensen

Posted on 11/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Noris H. Christensen of Lakeview, OR conducted by John Clise by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on December 14,2004. Mr. Christensen served in the 369th EBSR Company C from December 1950 to December 1952 at Fort Worden and Rochefort, France. Here he recalls some of the people he knew at Fort Worden:

“Colonel Applegate was a little short pudgy fellow. Colonel Spaur was small too. Both of them were fairly short, but they were very good, great guys. We usually went out to the parade ground right in front of the barracks to do these calisthenics by company. One evening there was a notice on the bulletin board that all the companies were to fall out on the parade ground at 6:00 o’clock in the morning for exercise. Well, we all fell out and Colonel Applegate, who must have been in his 60’s then, said, ‘Now look, fellows, we’re going to run laps around this parade ground until the last man is going. I’m going to lead you.’ We all laughed. He was the last man to drop out.

He was in good shape, but he laughed about that. They were the type of people, Colonel Spaur and Colonel Applegate both, that if you’d be walking down the sidewalk after reveille or retreat and go into the buildings, they would come up and shake your hand.

…One fellow who was put in my platoon was an Indian from Montana named BJC. In just a few days I noticed he was having problems, so I tried to talk to him. It seemed like everybody in Montana knew he was in the Army. They were writing him letters and calling him, wanting him to send them money because they thought that since he was a soldier he had all kinds of money. That worked on him so bad that he just finally lost it. We had to send him down to Madigan Army Hospital in Tacoma and the last I heard was that they had him in the psychiatric ward. That’s the only sad thing that I can remember of any of the men I had under me.”

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Interview With Patricia A. Kelley

Posted on 11/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Patricia A. Kelley of Columbus, OH conducted by Hazel Hatfield at the Fort Worden History Center on May 30, 2003. Ms. Kelley, the wife of Captain Samuel C. “Cliff” Kelley, lived in House 9W on Officers Row at Fort Worden from November 1944 to January 1946. Here she relates how the post reacted to the news of VE Day:

“ I used to go to Aldrich’s market to shop, and a woman who was working there was carrying out my groceries for me when they got the news of VE Day. She was putting them in the car and she said,’I don’t know what I’m doing this for. I quit. My husband’s coming home. I’m not going to work here anymore.’ I thought she was going to leave me stranded at the grocery.

But we had a VE Day. We had a party. We hadn’t known it was coming, so we just told everybody, we just passed the word along to our friends to bring whatever they had in the house to eat and drink and come to our house because I had the most dishes, and we’d have a party. It lasted until 5:00 o’clock or 6:00 o’clock the next morning. It was fun. I guess we had about 25 there and we had pork chops and hamburgers and steaks. They were all cooking these various things and everybody was happy.”

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Interview With Frank A. Kraft

Posted on 11/10/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Frank A. Kraft of Mobridge, SD conducted by Henry West by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on May 20, 2004. Mr. Kraft served at Fort Worden and Fort Flagler as a member of the US Army 369th Engineer Amphibious Support Regiment Shore Battalion during the Korean War Era. He was with the unit transferred to Camp Desert Rock, NV to build the base there when he received overseas orders. In Japan, he was trained as a tank mechanic and sent to Korea. Here he relates his experiences:

“We had M4 tanks to start with, after I was there for a while, we traded them in for M46’s that came from Japan. They were reconditioned but they were in very poor shape. We had 21 tanks and out of the 21, only three of them didn’t have to be worked on. …There was a lot of little stuff that went wrong with them.

We were north of Seoul, and about Fall they transferred the whole company up on lines to the Punchbowl area. It was cold. The winter was pretty cold, not much snow. Our camp area was only three miles from the front line. So, we went back and forth. We used the tanks there for artillery, had them dug in on the line, and we’d take a platoon or a company up at a time. They were all dug in and after a certain length of time, they brought them back and put different tanks up again. We had to perform maintenance on them right up there on the front line.

We were right at the action. One day when I was working on the tanks, I’d crawled inside to work on one and I heard a noise outside, a lot of dirt flying and I heard a North Korean mortar round land right where I had been standing a minute ago.

There was a lot of rifle fire but you couldn’t tell how close they got unless they hit you. Once in a while some (enemy) broke through, but then they (UN forces) always got them before they got too far away. We never got to see any that came through but some of the other companies took some prisoners.”

When asked about casualties:

“We had one man get hit with sniper fire and that was about it. We never lost any personnel. We did lose one tank. It had run off the edge of a bridge when we had our night march and tipped over the top and it caught fire. That was the only one we lost. All the crew got out safely but the tank was completely destroyed.  There were five men in there. It was fully loaded with ammunition, so there was quite a fireworks show until it burned out.”

Talking about living conditions:

“It was pretty nice right up on the line. We had bunkers that we slept in, so it was nice and warm there, but in the daytime it got a little cold when you were working on the tanks. Then, when we moved off the line, it took several days to get back again and we were sleeping in little nine man squad tents and it got down to 12ºF below in December and January. The last night we were there we ran out of fuel–nobody had any fuel for the stoves. (We had) no heat, just our sleeping bags, so it got a little chilly….

I thought the food was pretty good, even up on the line. It was real good when I was going to school in Japan. …They had quite a few USO shows everybody went to and enjoyed, Bob Hope was over there…Most of the officers overseas were pretty good.

…I even went pheasant hunting over there. Once in a great while we’d sneak off on a Sunday and hunt pheasants. We only had to go about a half mile up in the hills where the pheasants were, but they were pretty scarce. Once in a while someone would shoot one. The deer over there were a lot smaller than they are here in the United States. That was about the only other thing that we saw that we could have hunted.”

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Interview With Susan S. Thomas

Posted on 11/09/2012 by fwohp4481

From the Interview with Susan Thomas of Port Townsend conducted by Wendy Los at the Fort Worden History Center on October 9, 2012. Ms. Thomas is Reservation Operations Supervisor at Fort Worden State Park Conference Center. She has been employed by Washington State Parks since 1998. Here she describes one of the more unusual conferences she has worked with:

“I will start off by saying that I have the best job in the world. I really truly do. I do. I have met every type of person you can imagine. We host everything as I was saying from weddings to family reunions. We have government groups come in. We have speakers, we have religious groups. Back in, I think it was, 2003 we hosted this group called the Prophets Conference.

This is probably one of the biggest conferences we ever hosted. It probably had 500 or 600 people. They were people from all over the world. They were from all walks of life. We had doctors and lawyers and teachers and hippies and students and athletic people and you name it, they were here. Just normal everyday people and some people who had very high paying jobs. The whole central thread of this conference was that all of these people believed in aliens. They all believed in life outside of the planet Earth. They believed that they could contact them and or try to communicate with them, not necessarily contact but communicate, send out communications. For three or four days we had all these different people all over the park, some of them, and I’m not lying, I’m not kidding, were wearing tinfoil hats. Some of them, they would walk around with these big antennas on their heads and they had antennas planted in different places They had all kinds of signs trying to connect with something outside of the planet Earth.

I’m not aware they managed to connect. I think some did believe that they did. They weren’t all walking around in tinfoil hats. Like with any group you have your extremes. But everybody did have a very genuine belief that this could potentially happen. That was one of the wilder, more different conferences that I got to be involved in. I’m so grateful I got to see it because it was really different.

That was the only time they did that here. I believe that they do do it every year in different areas They go to different areas of the world to try to find their optimum place where they can connect with extraterrestrials. So that was really fun. Some people brought their families and some people came by themselves. There were bus drivers and cab drivers and surgeons and professors. There were so many of them that they stayed here and they stayed in hotels in town. But they basically had the entire park reserved.

When they first booked with us, made the reservations, we were not aware that this is what the conference was about. We were not aware of that until they actually got here and we started seeing these things happening. We would never have discriminated and said they couldn’t come. But they were into something else. I mean the reality of it was that that’s what they were here to do. They didn’t necessarily frame it like that though. They had some other way of framing it. I should have probably looked into that. I didn’t realize I was going to talk about this today, it was really interesting.”

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Interview With Alfred Simonette

Posted on 10/16/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Alfred Simonette of Carmichael, CA conducted by phone from the Fort  Worden History Center by Patience Rogge  in 2009.  Mr. Simonette served in the 360th US Army Band from 1947 through 1949. When McCormick General Hospital in Pasadena closed, the band was transferred to Fort Worden, where Mr. Simonette was stationed for six months.  Here he describes his time on the Olympic peninsula:

“I was a clarinet player in the 360th.  We occupied one of those old two story barracks, our back yard was up in the trees.  The band rehearsed downstairs and those fellows who were single and lived on the post were upstairs.  About half of the band members were married, so they lived in the quarters on base.  The band was 28 pieces. …

We marched up and down the parade field out in front of those permanent barracks; the wind coming off that water there was pretty cold and would come whistling up through, he’d give you an earache….

We had a little combination band, only five or six pieces.  We played the Officers Club on Friday or Saturday and the NCO Club on either Friday or Saturday, one or the other, played the Service club once a week and then there was a little bar or restaurant downtown where we played once a week.  Once in a while we had to go over to Whidbey Island to play formation.  They took us over as a unit on M-boats, they’re big landing craft that can haul a couple of trucks. If the water was too rough, they’d use crash boats sort of like a PT boat.

I remember we played in a parade in Port Angeles and we had our white leggings and all that kind of stuff and white gloves.  But the clarinet players had to cut the ends off the gloves because you have to finger, you have to cover up the holes.  That was cold.  When it was raining we didn’t play… It was a nice part of my life and I’ll always cherish it. “

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Interview With GEW

Posted on 10/04/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with GEW of Issaquah, WA conducted by Hazel Hatfield on May 11, 2002 at the Fort Worden History Center. GEW was a resident of the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center here as well as several other juvenile facilities as a child and adolescent.  In this interview, he recalled scattered memories:

“When I stopped at the Fort Worden Visitor Information Center, I was excited about being in the building that had been the pokey.  We didn’t call it a jail.  If you got in a fight with somebody or if you got in some sort of trouble here, they would lock you in there for a couple days.  They had some in the barracks too, isolation areas. They’d lock you up there too.  I was in them too, but when you were more of a trouble maker or they were too full, you got put in the pokey.”

“We used to take a walk to go play in the bunkers.  We had beach parties down at the beach just as you go down the trail towards the lighthouse on the right hand side, we used to play down there and have bonfires and marshmallow roasts.”

“One of the staff members I remember was a Dick Roberts from the cottage I was in.  He was there when my dad wasn’t.  I’d be waiting for my dad to come and visit and my dad wouldn’t show up.  Dick Roberts would let me take my frustrations out on him.  The staff here had to be very tolerant.  I don’t know how they did it. Like Miss Vineyard, she had the first Renault I had ever seen, a little Dauphine, she used to drive. I would put her through the wringer.  She would tell me to do something and I’d say, ‘Yes, Your Highness’.  Some of the stuff we used to do!  You figure, you’ve got a dorm full of 20 kids that are mouthing off to you—I don’t know how you could tolerate it.  …When you’ve got a variety of different kids, there will be fights.  I got in a fight with this one kid.  I don’t remember what it was even about, but he was banging my head on the pool table in the dorm.”

“One of my favorite memories was every Christmas, and I spent several Christmases here, is down by the flagpole they’d bring in about a 20 or 30 foot Christmas tree and put it up with the big light bulbs on it every year and it would stay out there for almost a month.  We had gifts.  One of the gifts we got was those three foot long candy canes and a box of  a variety of Lifesavers.  I think we got some other stuff like clothes. We had some toys, because I know we all had something to play with.  There is this fake fireplace brick stuff that we used to tape on the walls and pretend we had a fireplace in our dorm.”

“We didn’t just sit around.  They had things for us to do, like make sure we got up every morning, took a shower, brushed our teeth, made our beds, made breakfast, cleaned up afterwards.  We had a structured lifestyle that we had to do.  We went to school at certain times.  Once a month we got to go downtown to go shopping, I don’t know if that was a thing we were all supposed to do, or just a special thing.  Roberts took a few of us to his own home one time when he lived in Port Ludlow.  He had the neatest A frame house, the first A frame I had ever seen, in the woods, it was beautiful.  He had a Siamese cat at the time.”

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Interview With Joseph D. Benson, Sr.

Posted on 09/28/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Joseph De Villo Benson, Sr. of Port Townsend conducted by Rae Tennyson at the Fort Worden History Center on July 7, 2002.  Mr. Benson worked at Fort Worden from 1959 to 1981.  His career spanned the years from the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center era to Washington State Parks era.  He died recently.  In this segment of the interview, he described how his family arrived in Port Townsend from North Dakota:

“In 1927 during the drought, my dad said, ’Well, are you going down with the farmers?  Are we going to stay here and go down with the farmers?’ He was in the garage business, he had two garages and we’re going to move out.  The farmers didn’t like that because he was the only garage to help them out, but he didn’t want to go down with (them).

He had a wagon maker build a house, seven feet by fourteen feet, and he had it put on a Model T truck and we headed out of town.  We started moving west in June and it took us three months to come west.  There were seven of us, five kids and Ma and Pa.  That was an RV.  We had running water in the bathroom, a honey bucket, but still it was a bathroom.  We had running water in the kitchen.  We had a tank over top of the house that caught rain water.  We had a bird and a dog.  They lived until ’34.  We stopped in Yellowstone Park.  Grandma came with us in Yellowstone and stayed with us for two weeks.  …We came to the Oregon coast, Seaside, Oregon, and then we came to Seattle.  My mother’s sister lived in Seattle.  We stayed there for a short time and then Dad came around 101 and came into Port Townsend and asked if anything was going on here.

They said, ‘Well, they’re talking about voting the paper mill in.’  They voted it in and he said, ‘This is the place where I’m going to go.’  So we came here with the house car.  It involved the whole family.  The first night in Port Townsend we stopped at a spot down near close to the beach, and the next night we stopped at Chetzemoka Park.  That was when we heard the fog horns blowing and it sounded like cows—why don’t the farmer let the cows out of the barn?  We didn’t know it was a fog horn!  Then we moved to a spot on Landes Street and lived there a year.  My dad worked the house over and sold it to a man.  He was the head man at the mill.  Then, the next year, in ’28, Dad bought the building downtown, the N.D. Hill Building, the hotel.  He named it the DeVillo Hotel after me.  He bought that in ’28 and we lived there for eight years.”

Later, Mr. Benson recalled an exciting discovery at Fort Worden in February 1973:

“Bill Matheson, Gordon Trafton, Lance Cubley, and I were tearing a building down and we got to the main floor, we were taking the flooring off and we got down to the ground and Bill said, ‘I think we’ve found a Dinky.’ That was a little engine of the train that the Army had used to haul cement up the hills. I said, ‘Where, Bill?’ He said, ‘Right there.’ I felt and it was a wheel. We started digging it up.  It was buried down in the sand, underneath this building.  They (the Army) had knocked all the stuff off of it and then run the tracks out there so far, where they dug the hole that thing went into and it just rolled over.  That was back in 1911.  We dug it up and had a construction outfit come along and pick it up and set it down on the ground. …They picked it up and put it on this truck … I said, ’When they take that off there, just give it a push,’ and they did and it just went on the wheels.  It had been buried for 60-some years.  The 148th had come here every year to see if they could find that engine.

What we found was just the engine with the wheels, it didn’t have the steam stuff but my crew went down on the beach afterwards and they found the pipes that went in where there was sand. …When we dug it out I went up and got the park manager, Ang Taylor. I said, ‘Ang, I have something I want you to come down and see.’  He came down and he looked at it, we were shoveling then; and he goes back up and puts his work clothes on.  The power company and the newspaper were coming out then.  He puts his work clothes on and he goes down with a shovel to show that he helped find it.”

Note: The Dinky engine has been housed in the Motor Pool Building at Fort Worden, still awaiting restoration almost 40 years since it was unearthed.

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Interview With William A. Blaurock

Posted on 09/06/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with William A. Blaurock of Edgewood, WA conducted by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on August 19, 2008 by Patience Rogge.  Mr. Blaurock  grew up in Port Townsend, where his father worked at Fort Worden in 1941 and 42, first as a bookkeeper and then as post barber. Mr. Blaurock maintained his friendships with the children of soldiers at the Fort after his father left Army employ and often visited them on post.  Mr. Blaurock died recently.   Here he described coming to Fort Worden and some boyhood adventures:

“ In April 1941, my father was given a job at Fort Worden in the commissary as a bookkeeper.  We left our home in Port Angeles where he had been a barber from 1933 at different shops there, and had taken a home course in bookkeeping from La Salle College.  After he served as a bookkeeper for several months, the post exchange at Fort Worden needed a barber and my dad was given the shop at the PX.  This was a change for him.  As a barber in Port Angeles, he had only been making about 10 dollars a week or less through the Depression years.  In the Fort, he had a line up of several companies for haircuts at 25 cents apiece every week.  I remember that this was one of the first Christmases that my parents, Santa, had no trouble putting very nice gifts under the tree.  I got an electric train on that Christmas.  In the early days of World War II, Dad took a job at Crown Zellerbach (Paper Mill).  There were openings there because of the manpower shortage caused by the draft.

About 1942, a boy named Johnny Johnson started school in Port Townsend.  His father was a captain in the Army at Fort Worden, and his family lived on Officers Row.  I used to go to his house and we would go to the movies at the theater on the post.  Johnny ran around with Mike Fecho, whose dad was a sergeant and lived on NCO Row.  Johnny and Mike got a hold of a three or four inch artillery round.  They removed the projectile and emptied the powder into a paper bag.  They took this to the beach in the area close to the dock. They lit the bag but the powder didn’t explode as they thought it would.  It did however make a mushroom cloud of smoke as it burned.  The MPs were on them at once.  The punishment must not have been very severe. They had to go before their fathers. Later, they got a hold of a 30 caliber machine gun and a tripod.  They set it up on the hill overlooking the dock area.  Below in those days was a rifle range.  When the troops were there firing at the range, they would fire the machine gun covered by the noise of the shooting below.  They were never caught at this devilish prank. …

One day, my friend Norman Hartson and I went to the Fort to visit  Johnny.  He took us up on Artillery Hill.  This was during the war and we were in a secure area.  There were sentries guarding the area everywhere.  Johnny had no trouble getting past guards.  We sneaked across a road and up through the woods and came to one of the mortar pits. At that time, the guns were still  in place there.  The mortars were huge, as big as a small house.  We played on them and left, sneaking down the hill past the guards….The kids in our neighborhood used to play Army during the war.  This involved dressing up in as near to Army clothing as we could come.  The Bon Marche in Seattle used to sell Army jackets.  These were khaki colored windbreakers which came with a US pin on the collar. …To complete our uniforms, we found ways to get real Army chevrons.  I had a pair of sergeant stripes which my mother sewed on the sleeves.  We used to go to the dump at Fort Worden where we found discarded canteens, canteen cups, mess kits, and other metal items that were not damaged in the fires there.  We also went to the salvage building where the people in charge would give us cracked helmet liners and things like web belts, canteen covers, and even damaged ammunition belts.  One day at the dump, I saw a round hump in the fire.  I took a board and fished it out of the fire.  It was a real steel helmet.  I cleaned it up and painted it.  It was really heavy, causing my neck to bend from one side to the other when I put it on.  No matter. I owned a real steel helmet.

In the mid days of World War II, there was a war bond drive in Port Townsend to entice sales.  The motor pool at the Fort sent two jeeps that were assigned to them.  In those days, a soldier from the motor pool named the vehicles.  One was named Jive Buggy and the other Little Abner. To get a ride in one of the jeeps you had to buy at least two dollars and fifty cents worth of war stamps.  I paid my fare and got my ride in Jive Buggy.  What a thrill for a 10 or 11 year old boy!  (Another adventure) The post had dug a hole and covered it with planks and mounted an Army tank on it .  It was there for kids to play on.  One day my sister Evelyn and I went out to the Fort and we were playing on the turret.  I looked to see General Jim Cunningham coming down the sidewalk on the other side of the street where we were playing.  He was dressed in breeches in the Army pink of those days and high top boots.  His Class A jacket showed his ribbons and he carried a swagger stick as he walked on.  He spotted us on the turret and crossed the street to us.  I thought we were in deep trouble, we weren’t Army brats and I didn’t know if we had the right to play on post grounds or not.  He asked my name and I answered “Billy Blaurock.”  He replied, ‘Oh, your daddy used to give me haircuts,” and turned to go.  I breathed a sigh of relief.”Mik

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Interview With Rodger Schmitt

Posted on 08/30/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Rodger Schmitt of Port Townsend conducted at the Fort Worden History Center on March 18, 2011 by Patience Rogge.  Mr. Schmitt serves as vice chair of the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission.  Before he retired, Mr. Schmitt had a long career in parks and recreation with the federal government.  Here he discusses how he became a commissioner and the work of the commission:

“While I was serving on the Fort Worden Advisory Committee, we started the visioning of Fort Worden and ended up with the final Life Long Learning Center concept…I was active in that. When the whole question of what we were going to do with governance here came up, I was asked to represent the committee, along with George Randals, on a statewide task force that was put together by Director Rex Derr to look at the whole alternative governing structure. I served on that task force  with one member who was a Parks commissioner.  During that process we got to know each other pretty well and he indicated to me that there was an opening on the commission that I might be interested in applying for.  I did and got selected. …It is an unusual commission in the state because it has full authority to make decisions, whereas some commissions are just advisory, similar to what the advisory committee is here, but the Parks Commission makes decisions.  They hire the director and they fire the director.  They make land exchange and sales decisions, planning decisions.  They learn and have to approve all of the camp studies, the planning studies.  We have a lot of major decisions to make, with staff making recommendations.  We do just a little bit of everything—any rights of way on timber cuts—just everything that comes before the commission.  We have seven meetings a year, and there’s a whole bunch of background information they give you in advance and you spend time going through it, making phone calls and asking questions of staff and getting more familiar with it.  We make decisions on budgets—capital and operating.  The hiring and firing of staff is all done within Parks.  We don’t do any of that, we try to  stay out of the day to day stuff.  We implement policy and do major kinds of things.  I’m enjoying it.  I’m really pleased because I heard that previous commissions were mostly a good old boys network.  They’d sit around and shoot the bull and weren’t as committed to parks and recreation.  I found when I got there all the people who were on the commission were pre-committed to parks and very engaged and read all the material and came prepared.  That apparently wasn’t the case in the early days.”

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