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IRA AND CLARA GABRIELSON MAY 31, 1974 BY DAVE MARSHALL MR. MARSHALL: It’s about 6:20pm and we’re out here at Gabe and Clara’s and having a few libations before supper. I’m just doing a little recording here. Sitting here right next to me is one of my favorite girlfriends, Clara Gabrielson! It’s been too long since we’ve been out here Clara. MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, I know it has! And it’s worried me; I’ve been wanting to see you for so long! Finally the other day Ira was in there working away and I said to myself, “well, I’m not going to say a thing to him, I’m just go call them and they come!” MR. MARSHALL: Good, I’m glad you did! Well, I’ve been out here two or three times you know while you were down in Texas and I sat and talking with Cash. He’s awful lonesome you know. MRS. GABRIELSON: I know he is. Yes, and it is too bad. You know he hasn’t been well. He’s only worked one or two days since we’ve been home. We came home about the first of May. He hasn’t been at all well, and we’ve been dragging around you know. So I don’t know. Ira says maybe we’d better go and have our water tested. He was concerned that there might be some kind of infection we were getting. Because since our well was put down, there have been houses built all around us everywhere. And they all have to have septic tanks. So it could be infected. MR. MARSHALL: Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have it checked. MRS. GABRIELSON: I think we should do that, but we still haven’t though. I don’t know. I’m afraid Ira worries because he thinks Cash isn’t going to be able to do anything very long. And really, we need somebody here. If Cash can’t be here, why, somebody else will have to be. MR. MARSHALL: And it’s going to hard to find somebody to replace him; for reliability and everything else. MRS. GABRIELSON: Impossible, I think, because he has come here for twenty years and worked for a few hours a day. As long as his mother was alive, and then she died he came and borrowed a spade, a shovel to dig her grave. His brother was here, and he was killed when the house burned. There are so many other things. Also, Cash was 67 or 68 and he commented one day that he hadn’t been able to get any Social Security. Ira asked him why. He said he didn’t know. He just couldn’t get it, and neither could Pearl, his daughter. A lawyer that he’d gotten couldn’t get it. Ira said, “You bring me the papers!” He did have an Uncle near here. He was born here near where Dulles Airport is now. He did have an old Uncle who knew the names of his parents. He knew that Cash had been born there. Ira wrote to the Census Bureau and Records office, that James Cash Brooks was seven years old in 1910. Ira took that and Cash and went down to the Social Security Office and got him his Social Security! MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that nice! MRS. GABRIELSON: So he just worships the ground that Ira walks on. Do you know that one year back he gave Ira the check and asked him to go and open a savings account for him? He has almost $4,000.00 in his savings account now! MR. MARSHALL: Oh, isn’t that nice! He’s a delightful person isn’t he? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, he is, and he’d just do anything for Ira. MR. MARSHALL: Tell me about your place down in Texas. You know we’ve talked about it in the past. MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Jean went down there in about 1947. She has finished that school downtown on L Street. [Washington, D.C.] It was an accounting school. She graduated with honors. She was the Valedictorian I guess. Then she found that she couldn’t be a CPA, and couldn’t take the test even, until she had worked a year in a CPA office. Well, she couldn’t get a job in a CPA office because they would not have a woman. During the war she had met his boy who’d been up here. He was an engineer over in Asia Minor. He’d been here in Washington later. He said that if she went down to the Valley she could get a job in a CPA office. So she went down there. Of course, she married him and did get a job in a CPA office. But after she got it, and worked there a while, she discovered she could make more money keeping books than as a CPA. So she switched and went to keeping books. She married this boy in 1948 I think. Two years ago, at just about this time of year he died. But before that Jean began to have trouble with her left leg. She couldn’t manage it. It was just hard to manage. She went to the doctor and they sent her to Houston and everywhere else, from one person to another. Finally, they said that there were no two ways about it, she had Multiple Sclerosis. It’s never changed a single bit since then. But the doctor said that she was unemployable. She cannot keep books any longer. So she went to work to raise Wire Haired Terriers. And, as a result, she moved out of town so the dogs wouldn’t bother the neighbors so much. They had rented a place there. Ira had gone down there for various reasons. When he was in the FWS he as down there buying land for Uncle Sam. He bought two refuges down there in the Valley. Then, after he left the FWS he went into the World Wildlife Fund and they wanted some land down there. So much of the brush land in the valley was being cleared. It was the habit for so many of the birds that come in from Mexico. It is just across the river you see. Anyway, he knew this place where Jean lived. Of course, we all visited them when they were down there. He’d go over there because it was brush land and watch the birds. There were Lichtenstein’s Orioles and Chatchalaca’s and other things that came in from Mexico only in a very limited area there. One day, we got a telephone call. They said ‘that land is for sale. There’s nine and third acres’. There had been a divorce in the family and the wife got that land. She wanted her money out of it. Ira asked how much they wanted for it. When David told him he says, “Okay, we’ll but it!” Ira called up the lawyer who had been buying WWF land for him. He asked him to buy that land for him. He did that. So that’s they way we happened to get nine and a half acres. It’s largely native brush that grows there naturally. There are trees they call Brazil. There are Texas Ebony and Texas Persimmon and many others. There lots of Mesquite. MR. MARSHALL: Describe where it is. You said it’s near Mexico. What’s the town I mail things to? MRS. GABRIELSON: It’s La Feria. It’s about 30 miles up the river from Brownsville. I presume that our place may be 5 for 6 miles from the river. But of course, the river isn’t very wide there, and the other side is Mexico. MR. MARSHALL: Well now, you put a trailer down there didn’t you, a mobile home? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, after we bought that land, Jean and David both began to say ‘Why on earth do you stay up there and shovel snow in the winter?’ They said we should come down and spend the winter here. I said it would cost a lot of money to fix a place for us. David said we should rent a mobile home for a while. But you can’t do that until you get a septic tank and until you get gas in and some way of heating. You have to have to have electricity and this, that and the other thing. Of course I was always finding a reason why we shouldn’t do it. Then, we got a letter [unintelligible]. Then I told him to find us a mobile home that we could rent. Well, he had a little problem there. They had had one hurricane through there and people didn’t rent mobile homes. But he finally found one. He liked them so much that he took Jean with him. The house they were renting was a big old stone house that a man built. He had no idea of building. He was not an architect, nor a builder. He built it with wetback Mexican labor that didn’t know any more than he did. It was built on a slab. All of the pipes and wiring was in that slab. It was just trouble, trouble; always. Well Jean got tired of that. It was a great big house too. They didn’t need a big house. She went with him to look at some of these mobile homes. After they found one for us, they said that they found that they could buy one and pay for it with less money than they paid in rent every month if they put it our lot. So we said “sure, why not!” So it was just right up next to a section of the irrigation canal. It has not been filled. All of the irrigation pipe for the valley is underground. They say they get too much evaporation and so forth. But that little bit had been let. So they set theirs right here, and ours just across the driveway. Ours is sixty feet long and twelve feet wide. We have three bedrooms and a full bath. It’s just all linoleum. Not a lot of work to take care of. MR. MARSHALL: Well, that’s great isn’t it? MRS. GABRIELSON: I think so, really. MR. MARSHALL: And you don’t have to shovel any snow either do you? MRS. GABRIELSON: No, we don’t have to shovel snow, but we did have three freezes. One freeze and two frosts. That’s the most they’ve ever had I guess. MR. MARSHALL: That’s the winter of ’73 and ’74. I think maybe I remember Gabe said something. He wrote me one letter and mentioned something about that. MR. GABIELSON: He may have. I think it was in December when we had the coldest weather but it didn’t last but just a very little while. And it didn’t kill all of the semi-tropical stuff. I’ll bet you everything is ready. [Referring to the evening meal.] MR. MARSHALL: [to Ira] We’ve been having a great visit here. We’ve been talking about your place down in Texas. She’s been telling me all about how it came to be. MR. GABRIELSON: Don’t believe everything she says, it might not be true! [Tape skips forward.] MR. GABIELSON: We’ve had more fun in life than any two people I know. MR. MARSHALL: That’s great. It sure sounds like it. And you know, there’s so many things that I want to talk to you about. We started talking about Kodiak Browns, about that bear. I was thinking, and Jill and I were talking about it the other day. And we’ve had some conversations about Model Ts. I’d like to talk to you about Model Ts and what Clara’s told us about her problems with Model Ts. MR. GABRIELSON: We had plenty of Model Ts. One of the things that always amused me was that another fellow and I [tape skips] we had a chow box and where ever night overtook us well, that was where we stayed. MR. MARSHALL: What period of time are we talking about? MR. GABRIELSON: This was about 1918 to about 1930. MR. MARSHALL: That’s magnificent! If you see a color green, it’s true, only because I am green with envy. MR. GABRIELSON: We had this thing, and one day we were out near Pineville, Oregon. We had a crew working up on top of Blue Mountains, which aren’t rugged, but they’re steep. Jim and I decided that instead of getting pack horses, we’d see if we couldn’t get up there in the Model T. We had what they called a ruckstel [sic] axle. MR. MARSHALL: I’ve heard of them but I didn’t know what it was. MR. GABRIELSON: It’s a very low gear. You could put a Ford up against a stone wall and it would turn the wheels until it wore the tires out. Couldn’t choke it down. So started up there and wove our way through the tall yellow pine forest. It was an open, park like forest. We wiggled our way around those downed logs and up the hill. We got up on top. There was a big flat, prairie like area and we knew our men were camped there. We started to hunt for them. We can around a corner of little yellow pines and we came across a Ranger. He said, “How in the hell did you get this thing up here?” He was on a horse! We said, “We drove it up here”. He told us he didn’t believe it. I told him, “Well, we’re hear and we sure as hell didn’t carry it up!” MR. MARSHALL: I think that probably in the history of the United States, one of the more colorful things, like how cowboys were colorful, in the settlement of the west. But the Model T had a great part on that same vein. MR. GABRIELSON: It did. I remember once, I was in North Dakota. Another fellow and I were driving an old Model T without a top on it. I don’t know whether you know how they were built or not. They had a cylinder with bands around it with two headers that pulled together. MR. MARSHALL: It had three pedals on the floor. MR. GABRIELSON: We pulled a pedal loose. We broke the pedal on one of those headers. It was the low gear and we were in some sand. We were trying to cross the Missouri River up near Sanish [?], North Dakota. We didn’t have many tools. I don’t know why, but we didn’t. So we finally took the crank case off of that thing. We found a nail and repaired it. We put it back together and we were camped there for about twenty-four hours. We put it back together and we made it into Sanish. MR. MARSHALL: There was something about the Model T. And mind you, I don’t know much about it. I’ve only worked on a few of them. But there was something about the Model T that if you could solve the secret of it, you fix it with darn near anything! MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. We used to say that we could fix it with anything; a hair pin or a piece of chewing gum. It was a very simple piece of mechanism, but it was sturdy. It had about over a foot of clearance. You could go anywhere with it. We drove it all over the desert. There were no roads. We’d get into a piece of rocky ground and one of us would walk ahead of the car and throw the big rocks out of the way. MR. MARSHALL: Not knowing much, as I say, but having a great love affair with the Model T; I think probably one of the greatest drawbacks would have been the tires. Because the tires, and this is my own opinion, but the tires were not as good as the car. MR. GABRIELSON: They weren’t. We thought we’d do awfully well if we got two to three thousand miles out of a set of tires. Back in those days, you paid about as much for tires as you do now. MR. MARSHALL: The state of the art was way behind. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, if we got two or three thousand miles we thought we were doing awfully well for the kind of driving we did. MR. MARSHALL: Of course the roads were bad but even so…. MR. GABRIELSON: Hell, there weren’t any roads where we went! MR. MARSHALL: My Dad told me about driving a Model back from California to Minnesota. I made have told you this story before, but at the risk of repeating…Something happened one night. They were driving along and something happened. They were stalled and couldn’t fix it. In the desert as you know, it gets cold as the dickens at night. So they took the kerosene lamps of the side and put the glass curtains on. The only warmth they had was these lamps. Finally, they got a little fitful sleep. Then, much to their chagrin, the next morning when the sun came up they walked up on top of a dune and about three hundred yards away there was a town, which they didn’t know was there! MR. GABRIELSON: Once, another fellow and I, Jewitt, were driving our old Ford and we got stuck. MR. MARSHALL: Where was this? MR. GABRIELSON: In eastern Oregon; Klamath Marsh. We got stuck. It was raining like hell and we just got our blankets out and slept under the car! It was darker than pitch. The next morning we got up and cut some old jack pines and pried that car out. We then got in to Silver Lake. We were cold and hungry. And this is one of the funniest things I ever saw. We were cold and hungry and tired. Silver Lake is a ghost town. It had been quite a town back in about 1912. There had been some wet years. A lot of people had gone up there and homesteaded. But this town was pretty much of a ghost town. There was an old hotel there and they still had rooms. They has a sort of a snack back for a restaurant. That’s all there was. So Jewitt and I went in there and ordered some ham and eggs. There was a cowboy there. He was sitting there and finally the waiter brought him out a great big steak. He took his knife and fork and whittled and whittled and whittled on it. He turned the thing around and whittled some more. Finally, he got mad. He got up and picked up that steak and through it on the floor behind the counter and said, “Goddammit, bring me some ham and eggs! This is the third morning I’ve had that steak and I haven’t gotten a bite off it yet!” MR. MARSHALL: Gab, it’s good to see you. It’s been too long since we’ve had the chance to sit down and talk. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we had a lot of adventures with that old Model T. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. You know, there was a story in the Reader’s Digest about, oh gosh, it’s got to be back around 1939 or 1940. It was entitled, “Farewell My Lovely”. I don’t know who wrote it. But it was really a kind of love story about a Model T. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. Well I went out to Oregon in 1918. Jewitt was there. He was already there. He was working on a dam, and I was working on roads. In that country, we traveled together as much as we could. It was really rough to travel alone. We had some wild times, and a lot of fun. We used to do something that you couldn’t do with any modern car. MR. MARSHALL: What was that? MR. GABRIELSON: There were no roads down the Oregon coast when you got below, oh the lower third of the Oregon coast. We used to travel it. We’d drive that Model T on the beaches at low tide. And there were some old wood roads over the mountains. This was mountainous country where the mountain would stick way out over the ocean. We’d get on an old wood road and get over that hump and get down on the beach again. We used to travel from [sounds like] Kokeel clear to California with an old Model T like that. You couldn’t do that with any modern car in the world. Of course you don’t need to now. They’ve got a good highway down there now. MR. MARSHALL: What did you do about getting gasoline? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh there were little towns where you could get gas. But we always brought extra too. MR. MARSHALL: That brings up a point that I’d like to ask. We’ve had our shortage of gas now but say there wasn’t the organized gasoline facilities around. You really had to plan ahead. MR. GABRIELSON: There were always gas stations, even then, in the towns. There weren’t any in the open spaces. We always carried gas and extra oil and extra water. MR. MARSHALL: If you were to guess, or if you can remember, what kind of miles per gallon did you get? You couldn’t really….. MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know. MR. MARSHALL: No, you could really. Because the miles that you traveled were really arduous, up and down and around. MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t know what we got. We were in places where it was hard going. You ran in low gear all of the time. MR. MARSHALL: There was no way in the world you could tell. MR. GABRIELSON: One of the funny things about it was if you got on a real steep area; these old Fords had nothing but a gravity feed into the carburetor. We used to turn around and back up the hill! MR. MARSHALL: That’s right, because that front main bearing was a splash system as I recall. You’d burn that front bearing out if you didn’t get the oil to it. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we didn’t get any gas either. The gas tank was on the back end of the car. The carburetor was on the front end. If you got onto a steep grade you didn’t get any gas in the carburetor. So we used to turn around and back up the hill! MR. MARSHALL: Well, these were the days when this country was just expanding with automobiles and where you drove, as you said, you made your own roads! MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right. There were old sheep wagon trails where the camp tenders hauled grub to the sheep herders. We’d follow those where we could. When there wasn’t any road we just struck off cross country in the direction we wanted to go! MR. MARSHALL: You didn’t drive any at night did you? MR. GABRIELSON: No. We camped at night. [tape paused] ….a big part of it is sage brush desert. It’s great flat areas with most of the high country is between four and five thousand feet. The desert is up that high. Then there are higher mountain ranges. MR. MARSHALL: I know very little about Oregon. I’ve been to Portland, and I’ve flown over it but I’ve never been on the ground there. MR. GABRIELSON: I spent seventeen years there. You’ll find my foot prints all over the state. MR. MARSHALL: When was it when you first went to Oregon? MR. GABRIELSON: 1918. MR. MARSHALL: Where did you go to Oregon from? MR. GABRIELSON: I was stationed in North Dakota in Fargo. MR. MARSHALL: What were you doing in Fargo? MR. GABRIELSON: My headquarters were there, but I wasn’t in Fargo much. I was working you see. This was during World War I. Mostly I was working…they were trying to make the Indians grow some corn and wheat and grain on their reservations. MR. MARSHALL: Now who were you working for? MR. GABRIELSON: I was working for the Biological Survey, in the Department of Agriculture. They sent us out there and told us to clean out the Prairie Dogs on those Indian reservations so they could raise some grain. The Indians did want it. Some of the smart old Indians would take the grain they were sent and put right around the Prairie Dog holes. The Prairie Dogs would harvest it! MR. MARSHALL: What Indians were out there around Fargo? MR. GABRIELSON: Well they weren’t at Fargo. I was out farther west, but that was the headquarters. They had an office there which I wasn’t in very often. I was working with another man who was in charge of the district. I was sent out there to help him. I was a new biologist. MR. MARSHALL: Were you married at that time? MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. MR. MARSHALL: Was Clara living in Fargo? MR. GABRIELSON: No, Clara was here in Washington. We came to Washington in 1915 from Iowa. I graduated as a biologist and taught high school for three years at Marshalltown, Iowa. And I taught agriculture too. I got a fellowship at Iowa State University to work for my Doctors degree, and we had moved down to Iowa State in Iowa City. Clara’s folks lived there at that time. After I got down there, I got a wire from a fellow by the name of McItee. I had taken the Civil Service Examination for a biologist and had never heard from them. That wire wanted to know if I’d take a job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month, and live in Washington. So I took it to my major professor and showed it to him. He asked me about it and I told him that I had taken the exam when I first got out of college, and had never heard from it. He said, “Well, this is probably it.” I asked him what I should do. He studied it for a while and said, “I’m going to tell you something. You’ll learn more about the things you are interested in if you take this job, than you will if you stay here with me.” He was an invertebrate biologist. He advised me to take it even thought I wouldn’t get a degree out of it. So, I wired back that I would accept it. And on October 1, 1915 Clara and I landed in Washington with one baby. $75.00 a month from Uncle Sam Houston, in cash paid on every 1st and 15th of the month. They brought around an envelope with $37.50 cents in it. It was beautiful. We rented a room in one of those old houses on G Street wasn’t it first? [Asking Clara] MRS. GABRIELSON: Well…. MR. GABRIELSON: And were in a little room over a grocery store part of the time, and right next to the old slate war and navy building there. MRS. GABRIELSON: The one over the grocery store was on 20th and H Streets. It was over a Sanitary Grocery. That was a year or two later. MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember if the old house was on G or H Street. MRS. GABRIELSON: It was right behind the YMCA. There was that YMCA building right out of the window. And we had a back room which had been built as a butler’s pantry or kitchen. The butler’s pantry was rearranged to be our kitchen. It has a dumb waiter in it. The rats used to come in that way. MR. MARSHALL: The one child you had then was June? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, that was June. MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed there that winter. In the spring of 1916 I was sent up to Connecticut to study starlings. So this was when they first really began to spread. They spread out from Central Park, clear up to the northern limit of Massachusetts. There were little colonies in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. Most of them were in Connecticut along the shore and up the river valley. Clara took the baby and went back to Iowa and stayed with her folks who lived in Iowa City. And she spent part of the time with my folks who lived in northern Iowa. I was there from April to October. That was one of the most interesting experiences. I went up there with a whole list of people who had written in the Bureau complaining about starlings doing various things. I was supposed to go see all of these people and check on it. When I got up there the first man I got acquainted with was the Game Warden. He was quite an outdoor man, and quite an outdoor man. He took me one night to a bird club meeting in Norwalk, CT. I told him about what I was doing, or trying to do. After the meeting an elderly couple came up to me and said, “Young man, where are you staying?” I told them I was staying in an old flea bitten hotel down there. They said, “That no fit place for a young man like you to stay!” The woman told me she would send her husband down the next morning to pick me up. The next morning he was there to pick me up. He took me home and they gave me a room and I lived in that room all summer! MR. MARSHALL: Is that right!? Do you remember their name? MR. GABRIELSON: Their name was Merrill. I used that room while I was there; I worked all along the Connecticut shore, but that room was my headquarters. One Sunday morning this Warden came and wanted me to go out with him and do something. Under the Connecticut blue laws I could fire a gun and collect anything. I was collecting starlings to get their stomachs. So I went out with him. When I came back my suitcase was all packed. He gave me a ticket to Iowa City and $100.00 in cash. This was Mr. Merrill. He went out and collected it from all the neighbors. The bank was closed because it was Sunday. MRS. GABRIELSON: Two telegrams had come. Mr. Merrill knew that I was in Iowa with the baby. He was confident that there was something wrong or we wouldn’t have sent two telegrams. One said that June was very ill and might have to have an operation. The next one said that she had to have the operation and was not expected to live. What did he do, but go out among all of his relatives and friends and gather all of the money they had. It was Sunday you see. He bought a ticket and got the reservation for him. His wife packed the suitcase. When he came in they just handed it to him and took him to the station. It was remarkable. MR. MARSHALL: That’s remarkable. MR. GABRIELSON: I spent the whole summer up there working on those starlings. MR. MARSHALL: Have starlings changed any since that time? MR. GABRIELSON: Not much. One of the interesting recollections that I have about it is that starling form summer roosts after the young are hatched. There was an island called Belle Island. It was really a little island in the Long Island Sound. They put a bridge over to it and there was a circular drive around the island. Everybody was a millionaire who had a house there facing the Sound. I remember that they wanted to break up that starling roost. I had all of the millionaires at Belle Island out there with their shotguns and fireworks and everything, chasing starlings. We broke it up. Are they in the Midwest? MR. GABRIELSON: They are all over the United States. BETTY MARSHALL: But they weren’t at that time? MR. GABRIELSON: No. They were started like this. They were brought in to Central Park by an old German who liked them and released them in New York City. They stayed there. This was in about 1890, I think. I’d have to check my notes. MR. MARSHALL: Did they come from Germany? MR. GABRIELSON: They came from Europe. They are European birds. He released them in Central Park. They stayed there for years. And then they began to spread. By 1916 when we… Ed Conbeck [?] and I were the team that worked on them. He worked New Jersey and Pennsylvania and the lower part of New York. I worked Long Island and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and into the edge of Vermont. I once got as far as Brattleboro, Vermont. Every two weeks we’d meet in New York City and compare notes. These people I was staying with; they thought it was terrible for me to get on a train and go to New York without a suitcase. It was all of an hour or an hour and a half ride maybe. I was supposed to take my suitcase. I was making a trip! MR. MARSHALL: They sound like great people. MR. GABRIELSON: They were wonderful people. I went back to see them every time I went to Connecticut for as long as they lived. BETTY MARSHALL: What did they do? What was his business? MR. GABRIELSON: They were a family that had…part or some of the land that that family owned was still in the family from the old English land grant. The family had logged it several times. They had a mill not far from where Merle lived. Of course they were old and retired by the time I knew them. I suppose he was in his late sixties. They looked after me just like I was one of their kids. She’d scold me if I got my clothes dirty. And she raised hell if I came in with my feet wet. One day she got after me. I had been out fishing with him, and came back with a whole washtub of fish. She didn’t approve of some of things he did. He used to go fishing on Sunday and she didn’t approve of that. So she got after me for going along. Then, he announced that he was going to vote the Democratic ticket. She got after me and said, “Now, you talk to St. John!” He name was St. John Merle. She said, “You’ve got a lot of influence with him. You see if you can’t [change his mind]. It would be horrible if he voted Democratic!” MR. MARSHALL: What election was this? MR. GABRIELSON: This was 1916 when Woodrow Wilson was running. MR. MARSHALL: You know, we were talking at dinner and speaking of Woodrow Wilson. You talked about how you went to see the inauguration parade for Wilson’s second term, is that right? Tell us about that again. MR. GABRIELSON: We lived right close to Pennsylvania Avenue. The parades always started down by the Capital on Pennsylvania Avenue pass the reviewing stand at the White House. We were living just off of 18th Street. It was a cold, windy March day in 1917. We bundling June up. She was just a baby. This parade came by finally after it had passed the White House and it would go several blocks beyond that and disperse. One of the funniest shows I ever saw was the Tammany delegation that came along, from Tammany Hall in New York. There was this great big heavyset fellow. He had a lot of meat on him. He was carrying great big velvet banner with a rope on each side with a man holding it out. He had the banner pole stuck into his belt. When he got around the corner of 18th Street a big gust of wind came up and he took off down 18th Street going south! I don’t think he hit the ground once in fifty feet! These two guys were struggling to pull him down. It was really funny. MR. MARSHALL: A runaway blimp! That brings to mind something. Did Mr. Wilson ride in that parade? MR. GABRIELSON: No, well, he did to the White House. No, no he didn’t. Don’t any of them ride in those parades. They had the reviewing stand with all of the notables; the Senators and Congressmen. MR MARSHALL: Well, has Washington changed much in the time you’ve seen it? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, it has changed a lot, I’m not sure for the better. When we lived here Washington was kind of sleepy southern town. The farmer’s market was where the [sounds like Enterprise] Building is now. MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the cars the old ladies used to ride around in. MR. GABRIELSON: They had those electric cars. They were around here for years. There was one here when we came back from Oregon. MRS. GABRIELSON: They just had this one rod that they would steer it with. MR. MARSHALL: It seems to me that in one of our earlier conversations you talked about having built a house out somewhere like Arlington. Where was it? MR. GABRIELSON: It was in east Falls Church. It was just off of where West Street is now. I haven’t been by there recently, but somebody built on to that old house. MR. MARHSALL: What year did you build it? MR. GABRIELSON: That was in 1917. When June recovered we brought her back here and were living in the same place that we had been. The Doctor said we had to get her out of doors. So I knew two fellows in the Dept. of Agriculture, Biological Survey. I bought an acre of land out there. I promised to pay for it. I bought if for $100.00. I borrowed a little money and bought lumber. I built the house myself. I went to my boss who was Waldo Lee Macatee, and asked him if I could have ten days leave. He asked me what I was going to do. I told him I was going to. I told him I was going to build a house. I had already cleared a little place for it. It was mostly a grove of Virginia pine. I cut some blocks out of the bigger Virginia pine and set it up on blocks. On the tenth day we moved what few belongings we had out there. MR. MARSHALL: In ten days! Wow! MR. GABRIELSON: Now, I didn’t work union hours. I’d get up and take the first car. We had an interurban car [train] system then that went way out to Bl… [tape skips] One of the neighbors helped me a little bit. And Clara would stand around and hand me things. She’d look after the baby and run errands for me. MR. MARSHALL: Now let me ask this; you mentioned a car. What kind of a car are you talking about? MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Streetcar. Nobody had cars in those days. And there weren’t any roads to put them on. MR. MARSHALL: Now, when we need that sort of interurban transportation we don’t have it! MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after the tenth day, I went back to work. The house wasn’t quite finished but we had moved in. I had three rooms; a kitchen, bedroom and living room. MRS. GABRIELSON: One section of the living room was not floored. Do you remember? There were two or three feet of it that didn’t have any floor. MR. GABRIELSON: The neighbors came by that first night and helped me lay the rest of it. MRS. GABRIELSON: I was afraid the baby would fall. MR. GABRIELSON: After we had moved out there I dug the basement out under the house and built a foundation under it. MR. MARSHALL: This house it still standing isn’t it? MR. GABRIELSON: The last time I went by there it was. MR. MARSHALL: It’d be fun to go by and take a look at it. BETTY MARSHALL: Was it like a log cabin? MR. GABRIELSON: It was a frame house. In those days lumber wasn’t as strict as it is now. MR. MARSHALL: How did you light it? Did you have electricity? MR. GABRIELSON: We lighted it with kerosene lamps. MRS. GABRIELSON: We had a pump and well out in the side yard and [unintelligible]. We’d go out and pump out own water. MR. MARSHALL: Let me ask you. Could you remember how deep you had to go to get good water? MR. GABRIELSON: I had to dig the well about thirty feet deep. MR. MARSHALL: Did you do it yourself? MR. GABRIELSON: I got some help from somebody. Can’t remember who. MR. MARSHALL: So it was driven, you had a tool to drill down in the ground? MR. GABRIELSON: No, it was dug by hand. MR. MARSHALL: So the water level was really quite close to the surface. So to clarify in my mind; this was in east Falls Church. And it’s near Peacock Buick? MR. GABRIELSON: West Street wasn’t there then. We got off at the second station after the East Falls Church Station. It was called it Green Gables. You had to walk through the woods to get to where we were building our house. MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wild! MR. GABRIELSON: I can’t remember his name but there was a Doctor who had a house right where we got off the train. East Falls Church then consisted of a grocery store, a railroad station and a lumber yard. MR. MARSHALL: You know, actually, if this is the same railroad station that I am thinking of, there is still a kind of a railroad station there… MR. GABRIELSON: There was one there the last time I’ve been by there. MR. MARSHALL: And there’s a lumberyard not too far from there. It’s quite possible that it could have been an offshoot of that original lumberyard. MR. GABRIELSON: That big old railroad station had been there for a long time. I don’t know if it’s there or not. I don’t travel that way much anymore. BETTY MARSHALL: Isn’t Dunlauren farther out? MR. GABRIELSON: Dunlauren wasn’t there then. We did get on the trolley once and go out to Bluemont. MR. MARSHALL: Where is that? The name rings a bell. MR. GABRIELSON: It’s up on the edge of the Blue Ridge. It was a sort of a resort. MRS. GABRIELSON: There was an old, old, railroad. MR. GABRIELSON: The old railroad went first through Falls Church and then Vienna. There was a little station here in Vienna for years. I don’t know whether it’s gone now or not. The building is still there, but they don’t use it anymore. MR. MARSHALL: Now, you’ve talked about using this transportation out from Washington to where you were building the house, and then you’re talking about taking the same transportation out to Bluemont. The thing that has concerned me for quite a long time; and we’ve only been here since 1960 but that’s fourteen years. Here they had facility and that capability way back then. And the even had it, as I understand it, during the Civil War. They had this sort of capability. And now, when we need it they took it out! This doesn’t…I can understand it. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ll tell ya. There’s a lot of stories, and I don’t know how true they are; but I do know that around New England where they had an interurban system that covered all of Connecticut. When I was working up there in 1916, and stayed in Hartford or Norwalk, I could get on an interurban car and go out into the country and start walking and collecting and catch another interurban car after I’d walked five or ten miles, and go back into Norwalk. The whole country was a network of them. The stories up there were that the railroad bought them up and closed them down. Some of the big banks did too. Morgan and Company was one of them that was blamed the most for it. MR. MARSHALL: They just eliminated the competition. MR. GABRIELSON: The stories I heard up there, and I have no verification, is that these bankers would go out and buy these interurban roads for a song and then they’d sell, at a big price, to the New Haven Railroad. They busted the New Haven Railroad. MR. MARSHALL: Earlier you and I were talking about Model Ts. It strikes me that in previous conversations, Clara has been telling us about some experiences she’s had with Model Ts. I’d like you to think back and if you can remember some of those things you told us. There was one time when you had a problem with a ground plug on a Model T. Can you remember that? Tell me a little about your experiences with it will you? MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, there isn’t much to tell. I learned to drive a Model T in about 1917. It was the first car I ever drove. MR. GABRIELSON: It wasn’t that early I don’t think. MRS. GABRIELSON: It was that summer that I was back with the baby and you were in New England. Rush taught me to drive. MR. GABRIELSON: That was 1916. MRS. GABRIELSON: I never drove very much. In later years Ira got a car, but it had no started on it. You had to crank it. If it was a cold morning I’d take a tea kettle full of boiling water out and lifted the hood and poured the boiling water over this manifold. Then, I’d go round front you see, and pull the choke out and crank it. BETTY MARSHALL: Well, wouldn’t the water crack the engine? MR. GABRIELSON: No the water would heat the engine up enough so the gas would vaporize. BETTY MARSHALL: I was thinking that it would crack the metal. MR. GABRIELSON: Well cars nowadays don’t have manifolds. They are much more complicated. MRS. GABRIELSON: One time, when I went out to crank, somehow the crank was loose from the rod that would turn the motor. I lifted the hood and looked in. I saw the holes that corresponded with this rod, and there was a pin that held it in there. Well, the pin wasn’t there. So I put a nail in there and away I went. When I parked downtown, the fellows noticed that and laughed about it. They thought it was funny. MR. MARSHALL: A minute ago you were talking about the ground plug, and I am reminded about something that you and I talked about a number of years ago. There was something about how if you didn’t have a connection you couldn’t get the darned thing to fire. MR. GABRIELSON: There was a magneto post. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, that’s what I was talking about. MR. GABIELSON: It was set into the top of the crank case. I remember the first time I learned about that was when I was driving in North Dakota. It wouldn’t start. So I carried my suitcase in to Pierre, South Dakota. MR. MARSHALL: How far? MR. GABRIELSON: It was ten or fifteen miles. I got a guy to go back out there with me and get the damned thing started again. Before he tried to start it again he took off this thing and took a cutter pin off of the end of it and then it cranked all right. So after that, if anything went wrong with the car I always took the magneto post out first to see if it was all right. MR. MARSHALL: Let’s get on with where you two met. Did this take place down in Iowa? MRS. GABIELSON: Well, I was in Church and I was the music. I played the organ and led the singing. MR. MARSHALL: What church was this and what town? MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Methodist Church in Webb, Iowa. I think it was 1907. MRS. GABRIELSON: We courted for quite a few years before we were married. I tell you, I was about 18 at the time. It was very small town, and a little Church. For a time, they weren’t able to support a Minister. For a time the minister from Sioux Rapids where he lived, came over there on Sunday and conducted the Service in the afternoon. My parents were pillars of the church and he always came to our place for a meal afterwards. He told us that there was a family by the name of Gabrielson who were moving up there. They were going to be a mile and a half out of town. They had three boys and they were fine people. BETTY MARSHALL: You can just hear the girls say, “Fine boys, whoopee!” MRS. GABRIELSON: Eventually I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Gabrielson. They were seated in the back seat of the church. I knew who they were because I knew they were coming. Then one Sunday there was a young man sitting between them. After the service, his mother introduced Ira to me. And the first topic of conversation was about a picture that I had taken of the editor’s daughter’s school. She was teaching at a one room country school and she asked me to go out and take a picture of her children. That was the first topic of conversation! MR. MARSHALL: Can you remember what kind of camera you used? MRS. GABRIELSON: It was a box camera I guess. Sears Roebuck had advertised a whole outfit. You got the camera and the plate holders and extra plates. You also got the equipment to develop and dry and fix and print your own pictures. That’s what I used. BETTY MARSHALL: You never had to the powder flash did you? MR. GABRIELSON: No, no flash powder. That was available, but not for the general public. MR. MARSHALL: So after his mother introduced you, what happened then? MRS. GABRIELSON: I don’t know. My father decided that there was some sort of feeling between us and he says, “Now listen daughter, I want you to understand, your mother doesn’t want any young men hanging around!” Mother was pregnant. It was just two weeks after my 16th birthday that my brother arrived. The first Sunday after that, Ira asked he if might walk me home. Now, bless you, we had little narrow sidewalks you know. We’d come to an alley, and there were just two boards about that wide. Eventually he put an arm around me. MR. MARSHALL: To keep you from falling on that narrow board! MRS. GABRIELSON: The first time he ever asked me to go anywhere he asked me to go to Merrison which was about ten miles away, to go to the 4th of July celebration. Well, there were no cars you know. So that meant we had to go with the old horse and buggy; Old Buck was the horse. He’d plod along. It takes time to travel that way. I asked my mother if I might go and she said, “Well, yes, you may go if Cora goes too.” Cora is my sister. Ira has insisted for many years that he made Guy take Cora. Guy is Ira’s brother. MR. MARSHALL: Now let’s have Gabe pick up the story from here. MR. GABRIELSON: I reasoned with Guy and the four of us went. MR. MARSHALL: A double date! And this was in what kind of a rig? MR. GABRIELSON: It was an old surrey type buggy. It was my dad’s. MR. MARSHALL: Did you have to con him into letting you take it? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh no, we drove it most any time we wanted to. MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell how you used to come down and see us at night. MR. GABRIELSON: Old Buck learned the way down there pretty quick! We’d work all day on the farm and were pretty tired. We’d fall asleep coming into town and Old Buck would go through town and pull up in front of their house and stop! MR. MARSHALL: So actually, this double date thing started pretty early in the game didn’t it? MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh yes. BETTY MARSHALL: How many years did you court before you got married? MR. GABRIELSON: We didn’t get married until after I got through college. I had just graduated from high school when I came up there. I stayed out of school for a year to help dad on the farm. MR. MARSHALL: Where was the farm? MR. GABRIELSON: It was just a mile and a half outside of Webb. It was 160 acres. It was a general Iowa farm. We raised corn and oats and hay. We fed the oats and hay to the horses and used to corn to fed the hogs. It was a general farm. MR. MARSHALL: What county was this in? MR. GABRIELSON: It was Clay County, Iowa. Sioux City is about 100 miles north. It’s right up close to the Minnesota line. There was only one county north of Clay county before the Minnesota line. MR. MARSHALL: What town in Minnesota would be familiar? Would in be Worthington? No, that would be pretty far. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, there were no big towns in Minnesota then. You’d have to get up quite a ways before you’d find anything. I remember there was a little place, but I can’t think of the name of it. We were right south of the Okoboji Lakes. MRS. GABIELSON: When we were married we spent our honeymoon at Okoboji Lakes. MR. MARSHALL: Here we are in May of 1974 and we are getting to the period of the year when we have a lot of thunderstorms; can you remember if there were any violent storms then? MR. GABRIELSON: Lot’s of them. MR. MARSHALL: This has pretty much a characteristic of that area hasn’t it? MR. GABRIELSON: Always, every since I knew anything about it, and I grew up there. We had lots of thunderstorms. And we had a lot of hail storms, and the occasional tornado. MRS. GABRIELSON: I can remember sitting in the schoolroom and seeing a tornado going around. MR.GABRIELSON: I can remember as a small boy being at Church one Sunday afternoon for a meeting and one of those hail storms came up. There were chunks of hail as big as my fist. They busted every window on that side of the church that the storm was coming from. MR. MARSHALL: Now, you were courting Clara, and your brother was courting her sister. Then, you left to go to college. Where did you go? MR. GABRIELSON: Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. Its south and west. It’s right at the junction of the Missouri and the Big Sioux Rivers. MR. MARSHALL: We used to go through all of the time going from Ardmore, OK to Minneapolis. One thing we always thought interesting was a bridge there that had iron railings and it made a special noise when you went over it. MR. GABRIELSON: It goes across to a little town in Nebraska. MR. MARSHALL: What did you take in college? What did you major in? MR. GABRIELSON: I majored in Zoology. MR. MARSHALL: What year did you graduate? MR. GABRIELSON: I graduated in June of 1912. After I graduated I got a job teaching Biology as Marshalltown, Iowa High School. I taught there for three years. Clara and I were married that summer of 1912. I had worked my way through college, and as soon as I finished and got a job, why, Clara and I got married on August 7th of 1912. The teaching job started in September of 1912. We moved to Marshalltown, Iowa and we lived there for three years while I taught high school. MRS. GABRIELSON: Here’s where Ira finally decided that if God had intended for him to be a teacher, He would have built him different. MR. GABRIELSON: I applied for a fellowship down at the University of Iowa and got it. After we had moved down there, I got a telegram from the Biological Survey wanting to know if I would accept the job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month and come to Washington. MR. MARSHALL: What kind of place did you live in while you were in Marshalltown for those three years? MR. GABRIELSON: For the first year we lived in a single room in a private home. Well, it was a two room apartment in a private home. MRS. GABRIELSON: They fixed it up. MR. GABRIELSON: The last year we were there we rented a furnished house. It was Old Man Manning’s place. MRS. GABRIELSON: That was the year that June was born. MR. GABRIELSON: She was five months old when we came to Washington. MR. MARSHALL: Let’s go back now to 1916. MR. GABRIELSON: I spent most of 1916 working in Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode Island on the Starlings. We built the house in Washington in 1917. MR. MARSHALL: So let’s pick it up from there. After you got the house built… MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the scientists. They laughed so much. They couldn’t believe that he could build a house. They were scientists strictly. Every weekend some of them would come out. They wanted to come and see where we were living. MR. MARSHALL: There men were from the Biological Survey? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, from the Survey. They wanted to see what kind of a place he had built. They never failed to be shocked by the things that June would say. I remember one time we were walking along and the editor was with us. He said, “There June, what’s that bird?” And he thought she’d just tell him it was a “birdy”. She said, “That’s a [scientific name in Latin]! MR. MARSHALL: That must have really floored him! MRS. GABRIELSON: Each one of the scientists was specialized on a different kind of species or bug or animal. Ira had found a big scarab beetle. There was a big hatch that that year. Finally one day when someone was out, June called out, “Hey Daddy, there’s another [scientific name].” She was only two and a half! MR. GABRIELSON: I collected all, or most of the [bugs] in America were collected on our screen door! This species had been described and were very scarce. All of a sudden there was a big hatch right there. BETTY MARSHALL: How many times did this happen? MR. GABRIELSON: Never again, it happened just that one year. BETTY MARSHALL: I was wondering about that because we do have the seventeen year cicadas. That was really something to experience. I enjoyed it. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, it comes every seventeen years. There are some of those bugs every year, but the big hatch is every seventeen years. I’ve seen it twice since we’ve lived on this place. MRS. GABRIELSON: The scientist soon learned that I had chickens. I’d fix chicken for dinner. I remember one time when Ira was gone. We were living out in the woods really and there were raccoons and opossums around. My chickens were young. It was the season of the year when I had some young ones around. They didn’t go into the chicken house and roost where they should have. They’d stay out in the brush. I used to have to go out and pick them up and throw them in you know. One time I did that and accidentally broke the leg of a chicken. Well, I just thought that’s too bad to let that chicken live that way. So I took and cut its head off and cleaned it and dressed it and cooked it. After that, June used to beg me to break another chicken’s leg. BETTY MARSHALL: What happened to your third brother? Weren’t there three boys in the family? MRS. GABRIELSON: There was Gabe and Guy and the younger one was Rush. He still lives in northern Iowa. He became cashier and then President of a bank. He now has retired. He sells insurance. MR. MARSHALL: Guy eventually married your sister didn’t he? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, they have always lived in New Jersey. They were married in 1918. They lived there until she died last fall. Guy is still there. MR. MARSHALL: Oh that’s right. I had forgotten that she has passed away. BETTY MARSHALL: How many children did they have? MRS. GABRIELSON: They had two; a son and a daughter. The son is now President of Nicolette Asbestos Company. They do a lot of traveling. They own property in Columbia. Guy had two or three companies. He had Nicolette and they made this water heater down here. I can’t remember the name of the company. After Guy met Cora, he went to the University of Iowa and finished there. Then he went to Boston and went to Harvard, and finished Harvard Law and School of Oratory. He also went through the Business Administration studies. MR. GABRIELSON: Dad sold the farm. My younger brother was there but he wasn’t very strong. He was more like mother’s folks. He wasn’t big and hulky like Guy and I were. MRS. GABRIELSON: Dad Gabrielson went and bought that bank in Crystal Lake. BETTY MARSHALL: Is that where Rush went? MR. GABRIELSON: That’s where Rush is now. He’s not in the bank any more. He sold his interest in it. He still lives in it. MRS. GABRIELSON: He still owns the bank building. MR. MARSHALL: He’s married. And he’s got a boy and two girls. The boy has never been right. He’s had some sort of mental trouble ever since he was a baby. He died some years ago. He had to be in an institution for years. MRS. GABRIELSON: The two daughters now live in New Jersey. MR. GABRIELSON: One daughter does. The other daughter lives in Minnesota. She went to New Jersey but she didn’t stay. Dorothy is married to a fellow who is a football coach in Wells, Minnesota. Its a little school, but they’ve won the state championship every once in a while. MR. MARSHALL: I think that name rings a bell. Now, let’s go back a little bit. You had gone back to school again, but left and came to Washington. Then you went to Portland for a number of years? MR. GABRIELSON: No, we were here in Washington for three years, from October of 1915 to the summer of 1918. Then, because of the war, I was to go out and fill a vacancy they had in the Dakotas, trying to control prairie dogs. I went out there, and then I got ordered to take over South Dakota. I was in the Black Hills in Rapid City I think it was, looking for a place to live. Clara was at my Dad’s in Crystal Lake. I got a telegram from E. W. Nelson, who was Chief of the Bureau, wanting to know if I would go to Oregon instead of setting up an office in South Dakota. They had some trouble out there. I didn’t know anything about Oregon except where it was on the map. So I called Clara and asked her if she was willing to go out there and take a stab at it. She said yes, so I called Nelson, or sent him a telegram. I told him, “I don’t know anything about Oregon, but it can’t be any worse than South Dakota. I’ll take a chance at it.” We landed in Oregon about three days before Christmas. I went up to Fargo and checked out my stuff to [unintelligible] and then they told me to stop in Boise and get some information about the rodents that I was supposed to work on. I stopped there, and while I was there Clara and June both came down with the flu in that 1918 epidemic. We were staying in a hotel. I couldn’t get them into a hospital. The hotel people tried to throw me out. I wouldn’t go. They finally agreed to let me stay if the doctor would come up the back elevator. They finally got so that they could travel and we got on the train and went to Corvallis, Oregon. We got to Portland. It was snowing like hell when we passed over the Blue Mountains near LeGrand, Oregon. When we got to Portland it was raining. I got them into a hotel right close to the station. They had these interurban trains all over western Oregon, and the next morning we got on the interurban. It was just three or four days before Christmas. It was a very short time, I don’t really remember. We got out of that car downtown, and the roses were in bloom all along the street. We had left Fargo when in was about forty below. We decided right then that Oregon was okay. We went down to Corvallis and lived there. I worked out of the Extension Service office for about six months. Then we moved up to Portland and moved into the Service office. There were two people there besides myself. Stanley Jewitt who was working on predator animals, and the Game Warden. There were three of us. We had a little office in the Post Office building. We stayed there for seventeen years. During that time, I worked mostly as rodent control problems, finding out how to control rodents. We did an awful lot of research work. MRS. GABRIELSON: They didn’t know what rodents were there. And nobody knew. And they didn’t know how to control them. MR. GABRIELSON: We used poisoning and trapping to try and control them. We tried everything. We developed a lot of the methods that were used for years before they developed some of these modern ways. One of the things that we stopped was this; all of the grain farmers up there were using phosphorus on wheat. They were killing all of the songbirds. They were killing everything. This was being done by the farmers. We got a combination of strychnine and oats. The small birds won’t eat oats very much, and strychnine doesn’t kill birds very much. Any bird that’s got a crop is pretty near immune to strychnine. Chickens are immune. You can hardly stuff enough strychnine into a chicken to kill him. So we got the farmers to change. My biggest job was to get the farmers to use that. We used to go out and do demonstrations. We used to tricks. One of the funny things was that we found two ground squirrels that had different feeding habits. One of them would pick up a grain of oats and take the shell off before he put it in his mouth. The other one would pick up a dozen of them and stick them in his cheek pouches. The paste that we put it on with would dissolve and kill him before he ever swallowed it. So, we devised a brittle flour paste for the one that shelled it. He shelled off enough. I used to go out and tell the farmers that I’ll kill the big squirrels, but I won’t bother the little ones. Or, kill the little ones and not the big ones. I’d use the oats with the starch paste on. The big ones would pick it up and you’d see them eating it. They’d run around and have a good time. The little ones would die. They were two different sizes. Then I’d say, “Now, we’ll kill them both.” I’d put out the flower paste and get both of them. The farmers were very much impressed. BETTY MARSHALL: Are squirrels rodents? They don’t go up in the trees? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, they are rodents. They don’t go up in the trees at all. They burrow in the ground. There were enormous numbers of them. We couldn’t find a grain field in Oregon that didn’t have a big swath eaten into it by the ground squirrels that had their nests along the fence rows. BETTY MARSHALL: Do they vary much from a chipmunk? MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they are much bigger. They have many, many species. Some of them are very pretty animals. Some are not, but they have dozens of species of them. BETTY MARSHALL: They’re not blind like a mole? MR. GABRIELSON: No, they burrow and have their nests in the ground, but they do they’re feeding and all of their running around on top of the ground. They feed during the day. They are not nocturnal; most of them. There are some that are, but most of them are not. MR. MARSHALL: How long did you stay in Oregon? MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed until 1935. MR. MARSHALL: Then what happened? MR. GABRIELSON: I got a telegram from Ding Darling who was the Chief of the Bureau. He said that he had completed his reorganization of the Bureau and it meant a new assignment in Washington for me, and that he hoped I liked it. MR. MARSHALL: What did you tell him? MR. GABRIELSON: I came damn near telling him to go to hell and quitting the Bureau! I liked it in Oregon! MRS. GABRIELSON: By that time he had become Regional Director. He was in charge of the all of the work of the Bureau in Washington, California, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. He had a little empire of his own. They didn’t have money enough to go out and check on him. MR. GABRIELSON: I was running the show all by my lonesome. I came near telling him to forget it. Sometimes I thought the worst decision I ever made in my life was to come back east. MR. MARSHALL: Well, I don’t know. If you hadn’t of come back east, we wouldn’t have got to know you probably. MR. GABRIELSON: I came back here in 1935 in February as assistant chief of the Research Division. I don’t think I ever worked at it. I had an office there. Darling would come and say to me every once in a while, “Here, I want you to do this.” It has nothing to do with my work. He sent me on all kinds of crazy stunts. He called me up one morning about nine o’clock and said that he was in trouble. “I’ve got a conflict.” I’m supposed to be at the White House at ten o’clock and I’m supposed to be in front of some damned House Committee. He said, “You’ll have to go before the Committee. I asked him, “Well what Committee is it?” He said, “I don’t know, you’ll have to find out!” I asked him what they were talking about, he said he didn’t know that either. So, I had to find out, and finally did. I couldn’t think of what I was going to say in the taxi on the way up there. But I got by because I knew more about it than the Committee did. BETTY MARSHALL: Would you know what year Mount Rushmore was carved out? MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember. I remember when it was built. I was in the Black Hills in 1916. They hadn’t started working on it then. It was in the 1930’s sometime. MR. MARSHALL: When you came back to Washington and were working for Ding Darling, where did you live then? MR. GABRIELSON: I rented a room for a little while from one of the fellows in the Bureau because Clara and the kids were still out in Oregon. MRS. GABRIELSON: I stayed there until the girls were out of school. MR. GABRIELSON: She drove east by herself. MR. MARSHALL: In a Model T? MR. GABRIELSON: No, in a Model A. BETTY MARSHALL: How many kids did you have then? MRS. GABRIELSON: I had four. [End of tape 1] MR. GABRIELSON: I had been given another job. Ding called me in one day and said, “I got $35,000.00 from the American Wildlife Institute and $30,000.00 from Congress. I want you do go out and set up some cooperative wildlife research units. I asked him, “what’s a cooperative wildlife research unit?’ He says, “I don’t know, you’ll have to do find out!” Then only think I knew about that was going on anything like it was out in [unintelligible]. So I went out there and talked to those fellows and found out what they were doing. I also found out the kind of courses you have to have to train wildlife people. I started out. First, I tried to put the nine units we had money to finance in different ecological areas so we could take full advantage of it. The original idea was that we’d get several states to contribute money to it. That never worked out. The state laws won’t let them. I found out ways to beat it, but that was much later. I started out to set up these units, and I was up at Oreno, Maine setting up a unit up there when Clara was driving east. I met her at Guy’s house in New Jersey after I had finished setting up the unit in Oreno. What I had to do, it seems now that it would be impossible, but it worked. I had to get the State Agricultural College and the Game Department to join the old Biological Survey, and the American Wildlife Institute which was the predecessor of the Wildlife Management Institute to meet together and agree on a program to finance it jointly. [tape skips] MR. MARSHALL: This is May 31, 1974. On Side two we had just begun talking about how Ding Darling had told Gabe to go out and establish a cooperative wildlife unit. We’re going to pick up at that point. MR. GABRIELSON: I had to set up nine of them. I had seven up them set up and Virginia was one of them; out at Blacksburg. I had packed my suitcase and bought a ticket. I had all of the arrangements for the Game Departments in Oregon and Utah, and the college people to meet me. I had gone downtown. I was going to take the afternoon B&O train to Chicago. I said goodbye to the family. Along about noon, the telephone rang. It was Ding. He asked when I was going on the western trip. I told him I was leaving that afternoon. He said, “You’ll have to cancel it.” I told him I’d only be gone ten days and asked him if whatever he had wouldn’t keep until I got back. I had all of the arrangements made. “No,” he said, “You can’t”. I told him it was going to cost him a lot of money in telegrams and telephone calls. But I canceled it. I asked him what he wanted me to do. He said, “You just stay there until I come in.” I asked him where he was and he said, “I’m out I the sticks.” In ten days or so, he came in. He called me and asked me to come up to his office. “I want to talk to you”. It was a hot day in early October. I had no necktie on. If I did, it was hanging down, but I started for his office. MR. MARSHALL: What year was this? MR. GABRIELSON: It was 1935. I got part way up to his office and he came out waved his arms and said, “Go get your coat on, we’ve got to go up to the Secretaries Office”. Well that didn’t surprise me because any time anything from the west came up he took me along because I knew more about it than anybody in the Washington office. I had spent a lot of years out there. Usually, he’d tell me about it. But he began to ask me about Clara and the kids and how I felt. He never said a word about what we were going to talk about. Finally, I said, “Say Ding, what’s the row about this time?” He said, “Oh there’s no row this time. We’re just changing Chiefs of the Bureau and you’re the new Chief.” BETTY MARSHALL: Wow, can you imagine? MR. GABRIELSON: I said, “Jesus Christ!” BETTY MARSHALL: So now were you taking his place? MR. GABIELSON: Yeah! He was just stepping out. MR. MARSHALL: Who was the Secretary? MR. GABRIELSON: Henry Wallace. So what Ding was trying to do; I’ve always accused him of it, and he always denied it; but he had arranged this all with Wallace. He tried to get me to walk in there, and have Wallace congratulate me or say something to me and me in total ignorance of it. If I hadn’t of asked a straight question that would have happened. I got in there and Wallace stuck out his hand and said, “Congratulations on your new job!” BETTY MARSHALL: Now is he the one who ran…..? MRS. GABIELSON: He ran for President. MR. GABIELSON: He was the Secretary of Agriculture. He ran for President on a liberal party ticket. He ran at the time that Roosevelt was running for reelection, and Landen from Kansas was running too. MR. MARSHALL: So, this was October 1935, and Wallace congratulated you as being the new… MR. GABRIELSON: Then he asked me what my new policies were going to be in my new job. MR. MARSHALL: What was your new title going to be? MR. GABRIELSON: Chief of the Biological Survey. I said, “Mr. Secretary, I don’t know. Mr. Darling just told me outside the door!” He said, “Well, I’m going to tell you; I don’t know anything about this wildlife work. Ding says you do. You take it and run it and if there is any time I can help you, why you call on me.” MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that great? BETTY MARSHALL: Was he pretty knowledgeable about the subject? MR. GABRIELSON: He didn’t know anything about it! MRS. GABRIELSON: But he knew he didn’t. MR. MARSHALL: That’s the point see. What did you think about this Clara? MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was very, very pleased of course. It meant recognition for Ira. He’d always been away from home. I knew that would go on. But he just visited once in a while. So that’s the way it went. BETTY MARSHALL: So you set up nine or ten of these cooperative units. How many of them are there today? MR. GABRIELSON: There are eighteen. BETTY MARSHALL: But they are regional things still? MR. GABRIELSON: They still try to keep them in different ecological areas. MR. MARSHALL: You might explain how these things are funded. If I’m not mistaken it’s funding not only by the Wildlife Management Institute…. MR. GABIELSON: ….by the Biological Survey, the Agricultural College and the State Game Department. MR. MARSHALL: So in other words in Virginia, at Blacksburg, the Game Commission funds it, the WMI funds it, and so does the college. MR. GABRIELSON: The FWS does too. MR. MARSHALL: So four groups fund it. Can you describe a little bit about what they do? MR. GABRIELSON: They were set up to do three things. One was to train people for work in the wildlife field. That was one objective. Another was to do a lot of the fact finding that the states had not been equipped to do. The other was to do practical research; not just purely theoretical. Another objective was to set up demonstration areas to show how it as down. None have them have ever done very much in the demonstration department. MR. MARSHALL: But they do quite a bit. MR. GABRIELSON: They do a lot of research work. MR. MARSHALL: Sometimes, if we have a problem, we can go to them and say that ‘something is happening with the pheasant, could you do a study’? So it works out. MR. GABRIELSON: The programs have always been oriented towards local problems of that Game Department, where ever it is. But the fund of knowledge that they have provided and the number of men that they’ve trained; I don’t know how many now; but about the time I left the Bureau in 1946 there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 trained men who had come out of these units. BETTY MARSHALL: Did you say once that you have trained some men from Canada? MR. GABRIELSON: We brought a lot of them down here. They’d get their training. I got mixed up in a Canadian outfit. There was an outfit called CIL, Canadian International Company. According to them they were always being badgered. The man I first talked to has been dead for many years, but he came to me and said, “Isn’t there something we can do with our money that will help wildlife more than provide beer for Christmas parties?” I told me that there were a lot of things, and he asked me to write up two or three for him. I wrote two or three outlines of things and sent them to him. One of them was setting up training schools. There was no school in Canada where they could get any training. One of them was patterned on this Wildlife school. They fooled around with it for several years, because they were in some law suits. But one day they called me and said that they were ready to talk business and they wanted me to come up and talk to the Board of Directors. I went up to Montreal and talked to them. After several weeks, my telephone rang one day. This was after I was with the WMI. They said that they had decided to take this training thing that I outlined. Canadian students all had to come down here to get their education. We’re going to go with it on two conditions. The first is that if you will be Chairman of the Committee that handles it. I told them they were crazy and that they didn’t want an American for that job. This was when the anti-American stuff was getting started. I said that there would be some resentment among Canadians. They said that they had thought of that and they wouldn’t put any money into it unless I was the Chairman. I asked them what the other condition was. They said I was supposed to pick a Canadian to work with me. They said that they would give me some time to find someone. I told them that I already know someone in Canada that I could work very well with if they could get him. It was Orris [?] Lloyd. I gave them his address and he agreed to it. He and I spent one hell of a lot of that money. We had 15 schools now in Canada, giving training to wildlife people. This went on until the cut out the program last year. BETTY MARSHALL: They just cut it out? MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they had accomplished their objective. They’ve got the colleges, and the Canadian government, and the Provinces are giving fellowships. It’s an automatic thing now. We had a little money to give fellowships and to get started. They are using their money to promote progress. MR. MARSHALL: So now, let’s go back a moment. You stayed on as Chief of the Bureau until 1946. Then you went with the Institute? What promoted this now? MR. GABRIELSON: Largely, it was my doctor. From the outbreak of the war in 1941, and in 1940 they combined the wildlife service and the fisheries service into the Fish and Wildlife Service. They moved both of them into Interior and I was Chief of the outfit. When we got involved in the European war, they moved the Park Service and us, and the Bureau of Animal Industry out to Chicago and put us in the old Merchandise Mart. Just after we moved out there, we had sold our house. Just after we got out there, why, they set up under the War Powers Act the Fisheries Commission. They made Ickes the head of it, and me the Deputy and I did all of the work. So I commuted from Chicago to Washington and a lot of other places. I hardly slept in the same bed twice. I had always had some gall bladder trouble. And it got so bad that my doctor told me, “Now listen, you either quit that damned job or get a new doctor because you are wasting my time and your money. I can’t do anything to help you, living the way you do.” So I went to talk to old man Ickes, who was my boss then. I arranged to step down and do some writing. I was to be a senior biologist. About that time, these guys started to pester me to take that job. I turned them down time and time again. They kept offering me more money. I told them it wasn’t a question of money. I told them that I had my plans all laid out. They offered me so much money that I couldn’t turn it down. I finally agreed to go in 1946. Then I found out afterwards that the reason that they kept after me was that I was the only one that all of the contributors could agree on. BETTY MARSHALL: Was Rockefeller into the Institute when it was still the American Wildlife Institute? MR. GABRIELSON: No, he’s never been involved with it. This was a different thing. It goes back to 1911 when a group of people were distressed at what was happening to wildlife in America. They formed an organization called the American Game Protective Association. It was mostly a bunch of wealthy people. I don’t know who they hired first, but they had Seth Gordon. They had Paul Miller, and Locke, and several people. They changed their name once to the American Game Association. Then there got to be a fight between some of the supporters. It split into two. One bunch which was mostly DuPont supporters and their allies like Remington Arms and Eastman Kodak and two or three railroads called it the American Wildlife Institute. The other group set up a separate program based mostly on the propagation of game. It was out in southern Illinois, and mostly financed by the Ollin [?] people and some others. I don’t know too much about the history of that one because I never had too much to do with it. In 1945, they commenced to want to get together again. There was one man in Ollin and one man in Remington that worked on it until they finally got everybody to agree to unite the two programs. They set up a new joint program and I was the guy who was picked to run it. MR. MARSHALL: Something that I know only vaguely about is that the field people like Larry Young who was out at Horicon Marsh for a long time before you brought him in here. And I know guys like Phil Barsky who were the field men ….. MR. GABRIELSON: ….of the Wildlife Management Institute. MR. MARSHALL: Those are the regional guys. There are from four to six or seven of them. BETTY MARSHALL: What was Rockefeller tied into? MR. MARSHALL: Was it the World Wildlife Fund? MR. GABRIELSON: Lawrence has never been in that except that he contributed. He took several little park organizations and combined them in to the present Parks and Recreation Association. He set it up. Dwight Redding was chairman of that for a long time. MR. MARSHALL: That’s what Rusty Groh worked at for a long while before he left. So you stayed with the Wildlife Management Institute, but in the mean time you were also involved with the World Wildlife Fund and with Lindbergh and Fritz Phillips and all of that. Are you still involved with them? MR. GABRIELSON: I’m still a member of the Board. I’ve gotten out working at any office, but I’m still a member of the Board. And, I’m honorary President of the American Wildlife Fund. MR. MARSHALL: So you were President at the Wildlife Management Institute until when? MR. GABRIELSON: Until 1970. MR. MARSHALL: That was when Dan Poole came in right? MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. MR. MARSHALL: When you were in there Pink Guteruss was the Vice President right? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, he was. Dan Poole was the Secretary. MR. MARSHALL: So when you stepped out Dan came in as President. Larry Yahn came in from Wisconsin to take Dan’s place. Lonnie Williamson came in as editor of the newsletter. You’ve seen a lot haven’t you Gabe? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, I have. I’ve built the Wildlife Management Institute. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, I know you did. MR. GABRIELSON: I think that we’ve been talking for about an hour and a half or two hours, and we’ve covered a lot of things. But there are so many things I’d like to talk about, and questions I can’t even begin to think of right now. One of the things that we’ve touched on many times in our talks is your back pack experiences around the country. I never cease to be amazed when we might be talking about a certain place and you immediately come out with how you know the place intimately having been there. You can describe the flora and fauna. I think that’s just great. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I covered North America pretty well in the field work that I’ve done. I enjoy it. That’s the thing that I enjoyed more than anything else; being outdoors. I’ve got a pretty good working knowledge of plants. MR. MARHSALL: I think you have! MR. GABRIELSON: I know bugs and things like that. There used to be a lot of fellows like that. We called them ‘all around naturalists’. But there’s darn few of them now. MR. MARSHALL: That’s right. One of the questions that is bugging so many people nowadays especially in the business that we’re in; and that is people like us and people that hunt and fish talk to each other and we agree. But the thing that concerns us is that there is such a movement for anti-hunting. How do we combat this? MR. GABRIELSON: I think that this is the inevitable result of the movement of people into cities. In my boyhood days, this was an agricultural country. The majority of people lived on the land and knew something about wildlife. They might not very much, but they knew the animals that were around them. They were mostly farmers or people in small towns who dealt with farmers all of the time. They knew something about the life cycles of animals. These people in the city don’t know a banana from a potato. This is the basic problem. Then, you’ve got a lot of emotional people who get very excited and emotional. You have to get emotional about something and a lot of them get emotional about wildlife. They get to the point where they….I’ve known people who thought it was terrible to kill anything. They wouldn’t even kill a mosquito. If one landed on their arm, they’d brush it off. They carry it to an extreme. MR. MARSHALL: But they are great steak eaters. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, when they start in on me, I say ‘well, how much meat do you eat?’ And then I tell them that they are not very consistent because something had to die to provide that meat. MR. MARSHALL: It just never occurred to them. MR. GABRIELSON: They don’t want to think about it. There is only one man I’ve ever met; and I’m not going to use his name because I have a lot of respect for his consistence; he won’t wear leather shoes because that’s the hide of an animal. He’ll wear sneakers or canvas shoes or some synthetics. He won’t eat meat of any kind. He won’t eat anything where something had to die to provide it to him. Henry Wallace was one of them. He was a complete vegetarian. He would eat eggs, and drink milk and he would eat cheese. I had lunch with him many times and I never saw him eat anything other than vegetables and fruit. BETTY MARSHALL: Wasn’t he a big man? MR. GABRIELSON: He was a tall gangly man. I had a lot of respect for Henry Wallace. I didn’t agree with his philosophy a lot but I’ve never known a man who lived up to his basic philosophy better than he did. He never swore. He was a fine human being. [Mrs. G. reminds Mr. G of something having to do with Mr. Wallace-unintelligible] MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, that was just a freak thing. I was always interested in those plants. I’d always try to bring them home and try to grow them. I had quite a collection of them. MRS. GABRIELSON: We happened to have a place where the soil was well drained. It was in an old river valley. Those mountain plants would grow there. MR. GABRIELSON: I was growing them and playing with them all of the time we were there. I had an uncle came out there. He had lost his business. He had been married to a woman who divorced him and pretty well cleaned him out. He came out to Portland and saw my plants at just about the time that the rock garden craze started in Portland. He came out with people who wanted to buy these plants. I wasn’t in the business. Finally, John said, “Why don’t we start a nursery? I’ll do the work; you just show me the plants.” So, we started a nursery. I showed him what to do with them and how to propagate them. I had five acres of ground so we started a nursery. We began to sell those plants. The wealthy women in town commenced to come out there prowl all over the place. We got one contract to build a gigantic rock garden for a very wealthy man. I think we sold him nearly everything we had that was ready to sell. I went to other nurseries and bought more. I think we did about $20,000.00 worth of work for him. One of the women who came kept wanting to out in the field with me. Well, I was working and I didn’t have time to drag a woman around with me. She was a married woman too. And I was married too. One day I was down in Grants Pass, Oregon working. I came in from the field all tired and dirty and Kirk says, “You wife is up in your room.” I said, “You’re crazy! My wife was in Portland with the kids.” He said, “Well, she said she was your wife, and I gave her a key.” So, I took another key and sure enough Clara was there! I said, “What in the hell are you doing here?” She said, “Mrs. Berry somehow found out that you were down here in southern Oregon.” The Siskew Mountains are a very old mountain range. And they’d got a whole flora of plants that are not found anywhere else in the world. I was working there. She had gone and found Clara and got a babysitter and brought her down to be there, so she could go out in the field with me. MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that beautiful! MR. GABRIELSON: So I took her out with me and showed her all of these plants and she went ape! Just nuts! The next day was Sunday so I took her out and showed her these plants. She went to England where there was a fellow running a very fancy English garden magazine that she was acquainted with. She started telling him about this trip and what she had seen. He asked her to write an article about it. She told she couldn’t do it, but she gave him my name. I got a letter from this guy wanting to know if I would do an article about the alpine plants in this area of Oregon. So I wrote the article, and sent some photos of the area I had taken. He sent me a thing that looked thing that looked like a horse blanket. So I began to write a lot of articles for this magazine. I don’t know how it started, but there was a fellow who ran a printing office in Harrisburg, and he was the father of the American Rose Society. I can’t remember his name. He wrote to me and told me that he had corresponded with the guy Cox, over in England. He wanted a piece on Alpine plants in North America. And he had asked this fellow in England to write something. He told me that the fellow in England wrote him back and told him that I was the only man in North America that could do it. I expect that there were lots of people, but I happened to be the only one that Cox knew. So this fellow wrote to me and said that he wanted me to do a monograph on American Alpine plants. He said he’d publish it if I would write it. I said, “Hell no!” I didn’t have any time to do a monograph. Finally I got a letter from his assistant, wanting to know if I ever came east. I had orders to go to Washington then. I said, “Yes, I’ll be back there in a few months.” And he said that he thought there was a misunderstanding. So I stopped in Harrisburg at this outfit’s headquarters. I talked to them and decided to write that book. That book was written on the train between Washington and Portland, Oregon mostly. MR. MARSHALL: This is called, Western American Alpines, by Ira Gabrielson; published in 1932 by MacMillan and Company. There is a forward by H. M. Cox of London. MR. GABRIELSON: That’s the fellow! MR. MARSHALL: [reading] … “He never hesitates from stating his opinion of a plants beauty and possibilities for the garden. And I for one am perfectly content to abide by his judgment.” I think this pretty well sums up what a lot of people think about Gabe and Clara! Yes indeed. MR. GABRIELSON: And I wrote most of it on the train! MR. MARSHALL: And speaking of writing, you know I asked you a number of years ago if you had any extra copies of your book on game management. You didn’t have any. But I found an old weather beaten copy down in Virginia somewhere. I meant to bring it over tonight so you could autograph it for me, but I’m going to bring it some other time. It’s not in very good shape but it’s a good book anyway. MRS. GABRIELSON: Have you got a copy of “A Little Bird Book”? MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ve got a copy in there unless the kids have carried it off. I’ve got a copy and it has Ira Gabrielson in it. It’s one of those little…. MR. GABRIELSON: It’s in that Golden Nature Series. I wrote the first one. MR. MARSHALL: We ought to bring that one out too. MRS. GABRIELSON: That little book has made him more money than anything else. MR. GABRIELSON: They’ve sold over 5 million copies of that. It called “Birds”. I’ve got a note from one of the people in the office from about a year ago saying, “You’ll be interested to know that this check covers the five millionth copy of your book that has been printed.” MR. MARSHALL: Incredible! When did you first write it? MR. GABRIELSON: It was published in about 1950 or 1951; after the end of the World War. MR. MARSHALL: How many books have you written, roughly? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know. There were three MacMillan books, the little bird book, and a book which was not published by MacMillan; they sold it to MacMillan. I can’t think of the name of it. Old Horace McFarland. There was Birds of Alaska, and Birds of Oregon. I edited the Fisherman’s Encyclopedia, and I wrote most of it. MR. MARSHALL: I remember you told me about that one. MR. GABRIELSON: I wrote part of the Taylor’s Garden Encyclopedia. BETTY MARSHALL: Would you say that you had awful good science teachers when you were in college? MR. GABRIELSON: I never took any botany in school. I knew more about birds than my boss the zoologist. BETTY MARSHALL: Well, where did you learn it from? MR. GABRIELSON: I just learned it. When I was a kid, I had names for the birds. I had no books. BETTY MARSHALL: Well where did you get the names? MR. GABRIELSON: I made them out of my head! MR. MARSHALL: He had a way to classify them in his own way. MR. GABRIELSON: I got to know the birds that were around where I was living. There were no bird books like you have now. I had names of my own for them. The first book I got my mother bought for me. It wasn’t a very good bird book, but I thought it was wonderful. It was Apgar’s Birds of the Eastern United States. Mother found it somewhere and got it for me. MR. MARSHALL: How old were you then? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was about 14 of 15. MR. MARSHALL: Back in Iowa. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. And I can’t remember when I didn’t know about plants. Mother was a gardener and a damned good one. She gave me a little patch of land out behind the house and I had all of the wildflowers growing that I liked from along the Little Sioux River. BETTY MARSHALL: I’ve tried, but never been too successful in our yard. I know that the daisies do better in the sun. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, most of the daisies like the sunlight. There is one that will grow in the shade but it’s not a very pretty one. MRS. GABRIELSON: [unintelligible]….they’ve sent some people, some botanists to learn all about these plants that he has put in. One of them said, “Oh, what a botanist you are!” And Ira says, “I’m not a botanist at all!” BETTY MARSHALL: Just by nature you turned out to be. MR. GABRIELSON: I just know plants. MR. MARSHALL: I’d like to get some holly from you some time. MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve got lots of little seedlings. MR. MARSHALL: Have you? MR. GABRIELSON: Sure. They come up all over the place. If you want some, I’ll take a spade and fix it so you could move them in the fall. I don’t think you’d better move them move them now it’s late. I filled Larry’s yard. MR. MARSHALL: I know. He’s very proud of the stuff that you have given him. He’s got a lot of things coming on now. MR.GABRIELSON: I’ve given a lot of people holly, but you’ve got to root trim them a year before. MRS. GABRIELSON: And you’ve got to prune the tops as well. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after you dig them you do. The leaves are there to stimulate growth of the new feeder roots until you have a ball of them. Tomorrow, I’ll go and dig some holes around them. MR. MARSHALL: Speaking of tomorrow, it’s getting late and maybe we ought to be moving along here. MR. GABIELSON: You don’t have to go. My bedtime is midnight! BETTY MARSHALL: Do you have a favorite TV show? MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t ever watch television. We don’t have a TV that’s any good. BETTY MARSHALL: We don’t either! The best one we had was one that the neighbors were going to throw in the garbage. MRS. GABRIELSON: We have one that June had here. But I don’t know how to turn in on. MR. GABRIELSON: I tell you, all of the writing I’ve ever done, I’ve done at night. MR. MARSHALL: Me too. MR. GABRIELSON: Listening to that damn stuff interferes with my work habits. I’ve gotten more fun out of life than any individual is entitled to. MRS. GABRIELSON: He always says that throughout his life he’s done everything he would have been doing if he were independently wealthy. MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wonderful! That’s a great thing to be able to say! We talked about going back and forth to Richmond. I am enjoying what I am doing down there. But I am not enjoying the commute and so forth. I’m kind of torn between two desires. We like it up here, and …. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, you just move the Game Department up here! MR. MARSHALL: That’s a good idea. Except I think they’d all commit suicide if they had to come up here! MR. GABRIELSON: Tell them to come to Northern Virginia; they don’t have to go to work! BETTY MARSHALL: Northern Virginia is an awful word! It’s Northern Virginia versus Richmond like the north and south again! MR. GABRIELSON: Northern Virginia is a foreign country as far and the southern half of Virginia is concerned. MR. MARSHALL: You’re right! South of Fredericksburg is a no mans land. So I have a passport so I can go between! BETTY MARSHALL: In the winter, spring, fall, you name it, they can have ten inches of snow in Richmond, and would any local station talk about it? We won’t have any, but we’d never know that they did because the radio stations won’t talk about it. MR. GABRIELSON: Richmond gets more snow that we do because they are closer to the mountains. MR. MARSHALL: It’s amazing. It’s called the fall line. MR. GABRIELSON: We sometimes get the effects of the storms that come from the west. Generally those storms come this way and go out the St. Lawrence Valley. We get the southern edge of them. The storms that produce the most snow come up the coast. And as they come, they swing east of here. Sometimes they get more snow in Norfolk than we get here. MR. MARSHALL: I am looking now at a picture that Clara just showed me. It’s their wedding picture. This was in Iowa in August of 1912. This is beautiful. And this one is 50 years later! MRS. GABRIELSON: It was taken right here. MR. MARSHALL: Well that is just beautiful. MRS. GABRIELSON: You can’t imagine we are the same people! MR. MARSHALL: You’ve had a very interesting time haven’t you? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, all our lives. This summer it will be 62 years that we’ve been married. MR. MARSHALL: Good heavens! You know one thing I wanted to ask you was about how you got started going up to that place in Canada. It’s in Quebec isn’t it? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, it is. Messine is the Post Office. When we first went there, it was Messine, but if you sent a telegram the railroad had to go to Burbedge. It was right in the same place. MR. MARSHALL: When did you get that place? MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Ira was Director of the old Biological Survey. And they had some kind of international meeting. It was in January I believe. He and the Canadian representative got along beautifully. They settled their problem right away. But the State Department people and the Canadian Department of External Affairs had to worry about the wording of these things. It meant that they were going to have to stay over a weekend. Ira had no one. But there was a man who graduated from the University of Iowa and whose thesis was written about the birds of Iowa. It had been Ira’s bible for years. He called Dr. Anderson up and asked if there wasn’t some place we could go and get out of this town for the weekend? Dr. Anderson took him up the Gatineau River. He couldn’t get up to their place which is on the same island that we later built on. He had a friend who had a cottage up in that area. Ira liked the looks of the country. Because of that, and through the Andersons, we were able to rent a place which was right next to their place on Big Island on Blue Sea Lakes. ….Ira had promised the girls that he would take them on a trip in the summer so they could learn the eastern part of the country. But that didn’t appeal to them. They didn’t want to go anywhere but up to Blue Sea Lake. We found that the lot next to it was for sale, so we bought that in 1938. In 1939 we built our house. We’ve been up there every year except the year I almost died and the year I broke my ankle. MR. MARSHALL: I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s beautiful. MRS. GABRIELSON: We have about four acres up there. And the island was divided so that everyone had lake shore. And the lots go up to a peak. MR. GABRIELSON: Our part of the island has never been logged. It’s got virgin timber on it. MR. MARSHALL: When do you go? MR. GABRIELSON: About the first of July. The ice doesn’t go out of the lake until some time in May. Last year they told me it was May 15th. MR. MARSHALL: Did those folks up there have a big party for you up there didn’t they? MR. GABRIELSON: It was our 60th wedding anniversary. MRS. GABRIELSON: It was just remarkable. The things that people would go to so much trouble to do for you. MR. GABRIELSON: It was all of the people on the island; all of the people we knew. They had the wing-ding in the biggest house there was which was on the main land. All of the people on the main land could drive. All of the people on the island had to take a boat. MRS. GABRIELSON: There wasn’t enough dock space for everybody. Some came by car, and we divided up the boats and commuted together. They shipped lobster in and had a lobster dinner for us. Of course we had plenty to drink. After the dinner was over they had fireworks! They had all of the youngsters coming by lighting them! MR. MARSHALL: Here’s a picture of the house on Blue Sea Lake up in Quebec. And here’s a book on Wildlife Refuges. It was done in 1943. There’s this other one on Wildlife Conservation which was done in 1941. MR GABRIELSON: There’s another one on wildlife management that I did for the Service. MR. MARSHALL: Oh and here’s Birds of Oregon. I haven’t seen this one. That was done in 1940. MR. GABRIELSON: I worked on that one for years. Look at the picture. It’s a painting that Murie did that up on the Boukshe River on the Olympic Mounds long before it was a Park. He made a sketch while we were out together. I had collected one. He told me that when I finished the book, he would do the frontispiece and put that owl on it. MR. MARSHALL: And here we have it right here. It’s a Northern Spotted Owl, “a rare inhabitant of the dense spruce and fur forest”. It’s from a painting by O. J. Murie. Gee wiz, this is beautiful. I’m looking through here and seeing so many nice things. Here’s a bird that has always intrigued me, the Loon. MR. GABRIELSON: We have them up at the lake and we like them. MR. MARSHALL: I think they are my favorite bird. MR. GABRIELSON: We have them on the lake all of the time. MR. MARSHALL: They are aptly named aren’t they? MR. GABRIELSON: They have that laugh that sounds like a maniac almost. At dawn and sometimes at night they’ll get in the air and fly around the island and call. It’s a different kind of call. MR. MARSHALL: It’s a different call. Not a giggle. It is kind of haunting. MR. GABRIELSON: There are several pair that breed each year up at the lake. MR. MARSHALL: We haven’t talked about the subject of firearms. What would you say was your favorite kind of shooting? MR. GABRIELSON: I grew up with a waterfowl loader. It’s the only real game we had. I did get a few Prairie Chickens in the last end of them. We still had a few nesting on our place long after we quit shooting them. We didn’t have any other upland game birds in the country where I grew up, but we had lots of waterfowl. We were down at the south end of a little chain of lakes and marshes that came from the Ocabogue Lake. It came right down through the country and we had lots of geese and lots of ducks. MR. MARSHALL: I grew up in Minneapolis and around Minnesota as you know. I guess my favorite kind of hunting was pheasant hunting. MR. GABRIELSON: There were no pheasants when I was growing up. MR. MARSHALL: I used to go waterfowl hunting but for some reason my Dad never was much of a waterfowl hunter. He did like to hunt pheasants. You know, you go along with what your Dad did. I can remember that in the fall when the season was in, we’d go every weekend. Then he’d come and get me after school sometimes and we’d go ‘til dark. I guess that’s why I am so intrigued with the pheasants here in Virginia. One of the things that interests me from when I’ve hunted with these people from Virginia. Now they are getting accustomed to the pheasants because we’ve have four seasons. Both of the guys; some of the people from the Game Commission and others had never hunted pheasants. They reacted so strangely; as did their dogs! The dogs couldn’t believe what was happening with these pheasants. They were so used to hunting quail. You know what a pheasant will do! Sometimes if you don’t hit him square and when he might be wounding but he’s running 45 miles an hour before he hits the ground! This just threw the dogs all off. They didn’t know what to make of that! It’s quite a bird! MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve done some pheasant hunting, but I didn’t do it growing up out west. They had lots of pheasants in Oregon. That’s where they started in about 1890. MR. MARSHALL: I’m trying to remember now. Our first year we had a two day season. We killed about 225 here in Virginia. Since then we’ve had a one week season. We’ve been averaging about 400 a year. MR. GABRIELSON: Is that mostly in the Shenandoah Valley? MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. But strangely enough, the second highest county was Loudoun. Page County was the highest and then Loudoun. That’s going to change I think. MR. GABRIELSON: There’s got to be grain fields before they’ll do too good. MR. MARSHALL: The thing that intrigued me out in Page County was that it was very reminiscent of Iowa and the Dakotas and Minnesota. There were little grain fields and plowed fields and brushy ditches and some woods. It was also near some water. It was good habitat for pheasant. It looked like pheasant habitat. MR. GABRIELSON: That’s why I asked if it was the Shenandoah Valley earlier. It looks like pheasant country. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, and there was some corn too. MR. GABRIELSON: We see one here once in a while but I think they are escapes from some of these feeding farms. There was for a long time a shooting place up here, you know, one of those controlled shoots? They brought in birds and turned them loose. I’ve seen some turkey down there. MR. MARSHALL: You know, I’ve never killed a wild turkey. That’s something I want to do. MR. GABRIELSON: I have. MR. MARSHALL: I know, darn it! I don’t begrudge you that, I’d just like to do it myself! This last spring gobbler season I took my daughter Nancy, whom you’ve met. She goes to school out in Harrisonburg. I arranged for her to be able to go along. I also brought Eric who is the youngest. We went out and spent the night in Harrisonburg and met with a couple of the people from the Game Commission who had taken the day off and we went hunting. My daughter went with those two guys. My son went with me. My son and I didn’t hear anything. But Max Carpenter who was with Nancy got a 21 ½ pounder with a nine inch beard! It was really a beautiful bird. What was so thrilling to me was that Nancy was with him when he got it. She heard him gobble and called. She was a little bit dismayed to see this bird shot, but I think she was still kind of proud that she was long. MR. GABRIELSON: I had a funny experience once when we had started home from south Texas. A friend of mine in Kingsville, which is only about 100 miles, wanted me to stop and go fishing with him. I had my fishing tackle in the car. He wanted me to take my fly rod. I went out to a little bit of a pond they had on this little place. There might have been two or three acres of it. He fished with bait. I said, “I want to see you catch something with that fly rod.” There are brim and black bass in here. There might have been brim, but I never had one of them strike it. He was fishing with shrimp. I took a look at that shrimp and picked the nearest colored fly that I could find. I started to fish and you know, I got three beautiful large mouthed Bass with a fly. He just didn’t believe it! He said, “What are you using!?” I told him, “Just a dirty little bunch of feathers!” MR. MARSHALL: You know what of the hottest fishing lakes in the state right now is called Lake Anna, which is down here about two hours south west of here. It is the VEPCO [Virginia Electric Power Company] impoundment for the cooling of their water from the towers. So far it’s terrific for bass. It slacked off a couple of weeks ago because the bass were on the beds, but it picking up again. There is a lot of controversy about this because VEPCO says that it’s going to continue to be good fishing. Our biologists and the Atomic Energy Commission say that this isn’t going to be the case. When they put those reactors on line the water is going to heat up and it’s going to destroy all of the microorganisms that the young bass eat. And consequently if they don’t have anything to eat they aren’t going to make it. MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right. MR. MARSHALL: So we heard two sides of the coin. We had an outdoors writers meeting, and one night we heard our biologist and the next night we heard the VEPCO people. Of course they painted it all in glowing colors. But the inevitable…. [end of tape 2]
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Rating | |
Title | Ira and Clara Gabrielson oral history transcript |
Alternative Title | Interview with Ira and Clara Gabrielson by Dave Marshall |
Contact |
Mailto:history@fws.gov |
Description | Oral history interview with Ira Gabrielson and Clara Gabrielson was also present. Dave Marshall was the interviewer. Nickname: "Gabe" |
Subject |
History Biography Agriculture Biologists (USFWS) Automobiles Birds Historic sites Indigenous populations Photography Relocation Transportation Native Americans Directors (USFWS) Work of the Service |
Publisher | U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service |
Contributors | Marshall, Dave; |
Date of Original | 1974-05-31 |
Type | Text |
Format | |
Item ID | Gabrielson.ira.051774 |
Source | NCTC Archives Museum |
Language | English |
Rights | Public domain |
Audience | General |
File Size | 469 KB |
Original Format | Digital |
Length | 45 p. |
Transcript | IRA AND CLARA GABRIELSON MAY 31, 1974 BY DAVE MARSHALL MR. MARSHALL: It’s about 6:20pm and we’re out here at Gabe and Clara’s and having a few libations before supper. I’m just doing a little recording here. Sitting here right next to me is one of my favorite girlfriends, Clara Gabrielson! It’s been too long since we’ve been out here Clara. MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, I know it has! And it’s worried me; I’ve been wanting to see you for so long! Finally the other day Ira was in there working away and I said to myself, “well, I’m not going to say a thing to him, I’m just go call them and they come!” MR. MARSHALL: Good, I’m glad you did! Well, I’ve been out here two or three times you know while you were down in Texas and I sat and talking with Cash. He’s awful lonesome you know. MRS. GABRIELSON: I know he is. Yes, and it is too bad. You know he hasn’t been well. He’s only worked one or two days since we’ve been home. We came home about the first of May. He hasn’t been at all well, and we’ve been dragging around you know. So I don’t know. Ira says maybe we’d better go and have our water tested. He was concerned that there might be some kind of infection we were getting. Because since our well was put down, there have been houses built all around us everywhere. And they all have to have septic tanks. So it could be infected. MR. MARSHALL: Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have it checked. MRS. GABRIELSON: I think we should do that, but we still haven’t though. I don’t know. I’m afraid Ira worries because he thinks Cash isn’t going to be able to do anything very long. And really, we need somebody here. If Cash can’t be here, why, somebody else will have to be. MR. MARSHALL: And it’s going to hard to find somebody to replace him; for reliability and everything else. MRS. GABRIELSON: Impossible, I think, because he has come here for twenty years and worked for a few hours a day. As long as his mother was alive, and then she died he came and borrowed a spade, a shovel to dig her grave. His brother was here, and he was killed when the house burned. There are so many other things. Also, Cash was 67 or 68 and he commented one day that he hadn’t been able to get any Social Security. Ira asked him why. He said he didn’t know. He just couldn’t get it, and neither could Pearl, his daughter. A lawyer that he’d gotten couldn’t get it. Ira said, “You bring me the papers!” He did have an Uncle near here. He was born here near where Dulles Airport is now. He did have an old Uncle who knew the names of his parents. He knew that Cash had been born there. Ira wrote to the Census Bureau and Records office, that James Cash Brooks was seven years old in 1910. Ira took that and Cash and went down to the Social Security Office and got him his Social Security! MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that nice! MRS. GABRIELSON: So he just worships the ground that Ira walks on. Do you know that one year back he gave Ira the check and asked him to go and open a savings account for him? He has almost $4,000.00 in his savings account now! MR. MARSHALL: Oh, isn’t that nice! He’s a delightful person isn’t he? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, he is, and he’d just do anything for Ira. MR. MARSHALL: Tell me about your place down in Texas. You know we’ve talked about it in the past. MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Jean went down there in about 1947. She has finished that school downtown on L Street. [Washington, D.C.] It was an accounting school. She graduated with honors. She was the Valedictorian I guess. Then she found that she couldn’t be a CPA, and couldn’t take the test even, until she had worked a year in a CPA office. Well, she couldn’t get a job in a CPA office because they would not have a woman. During the war she had met his boy who’d been up here. He was an engineer over in Asia Minor. He’d been here in Washington later. He said that if she went down to the Valley she could get a job in a CPA office. So she went down there. Of course, she married him and did get a job in a CPA office. But after she got it, and worked there a while, she discovered she could make more money keeping books than as a CPA. So she switched and went to keeping books. She married this boy in 1948 I think. Two years ago, at just about this time of year he died. But before that Jean began to have trouble with her left leg. She couldn’t manage it. It was just hard to manage. She went to the doctor and they sent her to Houston and everywhere else, from one person to another. Finally, they said that there were no two ways about it, she had Multiple Sclerosis. It’s never changed a single bit since then. But the doctor said that she was unemployable. She cannot keep books any longer. So she went to work to raise Wire Haired Terriers. And, as a result, she moved out of town so the dogs wouldn’t bother the neighbors so much. They had rented a place there. Ira had gone down there for various reasons. When he was in the FWS he as down there buying land for Uncle Sam. He bought two refuges down there in the Valley. Then, after he left the FWS he went into the World Wildlife Fund and they wanted some land down there. So much of the brush land in the valley was being cleared. It was the habit for so many of the birds that come in from Mexico. It is just across the river you see. Anyway, he knew this place where Jean lived. Of course, we all visited them when they were down there. He’d go over there because it was brush land and watch the birds. There were Lichtenstein’s Orioles and Chatchalaca’s and other things that came in from Mexico only in a very limited area there. One day, we got a telephone call. They said ‘that land is for sale. There’s nine and third acres’. There had been a divorce in the family and the wife got that land. She wanted her money out of it. Ira asked how much they wanted for it. When David told him he says, “Okay, we’ll but it!” Ira called up the lawyer who had been buying WWF land for him. He asked him to buy that land for him. He did that. So that’s they way we happened to get nine and a half acres. It’s largely native brush that grows there naturally. There are trees they call Brazil. There are Texas Ebony and Texas Persimmon and many others. There lots of Mesquite. MR. MARSHALL: Describe where it is. You said it’s near Mexico. What’s the town I mail things to? MRS. GABRIELSON: It’s La Feria. It’s about 30 miles up the river from Brownsville. I presume that our place may be 5 for 6 miles from the river. But of course, the river isn’t very wide there, and the other side is Mexico. MR. MARSHALL: Well now, you put a trailer down there didn’t you, a mobile home? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, after we bought that land, Jean and David both began to say ‘Why on earth do you stay up there and shovel snow in the winter?’ They said we should come down and spend the winter here. I said it would cost a lot of money to fix a place for us. David said we should rent a mobile home for a while. But you can’t do that until you get a septic tank and until you get gas in and some way of heating. You have to have to have electricity and this, that and the other thing. Of course I was always finding a reason why we shouldn’t do it. Then, we got a letter [unintelligible]. Then I told him to find us a mobile home that we could rent. Well, he had a little problem there. They had had one hurricane through there and people didn’t rent mobile homes. But he finally found one. He liked them so much that he took Jean with him. The house they were renting was a big old stone house that a man built. He had no idea of building. He was not an architect, nor a builder. He built it with wetback Mexican labor that didn’t know any more than he did. It was built on a slab. All of the pipes and wiring was in that slab. It was just trouble, trouble; always. Well Jean got tired of that. It was a great big house too. They didn’t need a big house. She went with him to look at some of these mobile homes. After they found one for us, they said that they found that they could buy one and pay for it with less money than they paid in rent every month if they put it our lot. So we said “sure, why not!” So it was just right up next to a section of the irrigation canal. It has not been filled. All of the irrigation pipe for the valley is underground. They say they get too much evaporation and so forth. But that little bit had been let. So they set theirs right here, and ours just across the driveway. Ours is sixty feet long and twelve feet wide. We have three bedrooms and a full bath. It’s just all linoleum. Not a lot of work to take care of. MR. MARSHALL: Well, that’s great isn’t it? MRS. GABRIELSON: I think so, really. MR. MARSHALL: And you don’t have to shovel any snow either do you? MRS. GABRIELSON: No, we don’t have to shovel snow, but we did have three freezes. One freeze and two frosts. That’s the most they’ve ever had I guess. MR. MARSHALL: That’s the winter of ’73 and ’74. I think maybe I remember Gabe said something. He wrote me one letter and mentioned something about that. MR. GABIELSON: He may have. I think it was in December when we had the coldest weather but it didn’t last but just a very little while. And it didn’t kill all of the semi-tropical stuff. I’ll bet you everything is ready. [Referring to the evening meal.] MR. MARSHALL: [to Ira] We’ve been having a great visit here. We’ve been talking about your place down in Texas. She’s been telling me all about how it came to be. MR. GABRIELSON: Don’t believe everything she says, it might not be true! [Tape skips forward.] MR. GABIELSON: We’ve had more fun in life than any two people I know. MR. MARSHALL: That’s great. It sure sounds like it. And you know, there’s so many things that I want to talk to you about. We started talking about Kodiak Browns, about that bear. I was thinking, and Jill and I were talking about it the other day. And we’ve had some conversations about Model Ts. I’d like to talk to you about Model Ts and what Clara’s told us about her problems with Model Ts. MR. GABRIELSON: We had plenty of Model Ts. One of the things that always amused me was that another fellow and I [tape skips] we had a chow box and where ever night overtook us well, that was where we stayed. MR. MARSHALL: What period of time are we talking about? MR. GABRIELSON: This was about 1918 to about 1930. MR. MARSHALL: That’s magnificent! If you see a color green, it’s true, only because I am green with envy. MR. GABRIELSON: We had this thing, and one day we were out near Pineville, Oregon. We had a crew working up on top of Blue Mountains, which aren’t rugged, but they’re steep. Jim and I decided that instead of getting pack horses, we’d see if we couldn’t get up there in the Model T. We had what they called a ruckstel [sic] axle. MR. MARSHALL: I’ve heard of them but I didn’t know what it was. MR. GABRIELSON: It’s a very low gear. You could put a Ford up against a stone wall and it would turn the wheels until it wore the tires out. Couldn’t choke it down. So started up there and wove our way through the tall yellow pine forest. It was an open, park like forest. We wiggled our way around those downed logs and up the hill. We got up on top. There was a big flat, prairie like area and we knew our men were camped there. We started to hunt for them. We can around a corner of little yellow pines and we came across a Ranger. He said, “How in the hell did you get this thing up here?” He was on a horse! We said, “We drove it up here”. He told us he didn’t believe it. I told him, “Well, we’re hear and we sure as hell didn’t carry it up!” MR. MARSHALL: I think that probably in the history of the United States, one of the more colorful things, like how cowboys were colorful, in the settlement of the west. But the Model T had a great part on that same vein. MR. GABRIELSON: It did. I remember once, I was in North Dakota. Another fellow and I were driving an old Model T without a top on it. I don’t know whether you know how they were built or not. They had a cylinder with bands around it with two headers that pulled together. MR. MARSHALL: It had three pedals on the floor. MR. GABRIELSON: We pulled a pedal loose. We broke the pedal on one of those headers. It was the low gear and we were in some sand. We were trying to cross the Missouri River up near Sanish [?], North Dakota. We didn’t have many tools. I don’t know why, but we didn’t. So we finally took the crank case off of that thing. We found a nail and repaired it. We put it back together and we were camped there for about twenty-four hours. We put it back together and we made it into Sanish. MR. MARSHALL: There was something about the Model T. And mind you, I don’t know much about it. I’ve only worked on a few of them. But there was something about the Model T that if you could solve the secret of it, you fix it with darn near anything! MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. We used to say that we could fix it with anything; a hair pin or a piece of chewing gum. It was a very simple piece of mechanism, but it was sturdy. It had about over a foot of clearance. You could go anywhere with it. We drove it all over the desert. There were no roads. We’d get into a piece of rocky ground and one of us would walk ahead of the car and throw the big rocks out of the way. MR. MARSHALL: Not knowing much, as I say, but having a great love affair with the Model T; I think probably one of the greatest drawbacks would have been the tires. Because the tires, and this is my own opinion, but the tires were not as good as the car. MR. GABRIELSON: They weren’t. We thought we’d do awfully well if we got two to three thousand miles out of a set of tires. Back in those days, you paid about as much for tires as you do now. MR. MARSHALL: The state of the art was way behind. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, if we got two or three thousand miles we thought we were doing awfully well for the kind of driving we did. MR. MARSHALL: Of course the roads were bad but even so…. MR. GABRIELSON: Hell, there weren’t any roads where we went! MR. MARSHALL: My Dad told me about driving a Model back from California to Minnesota. I made have told you this story before, but at the risk of repeating…Something happened one night. They were driving along and something happened. They were stalled and couldn’t fix it. In the desert as you know, it gets cold as the dickens at night. So they took the kerosene lamps of the side and put the glass curtains on. The only warmth they had was these lamps. Finally, they got a little fitful sleep. Then, much to their chagrin, the next morning when the sun came up they walked up on top of a dune and about three hundred yards away there was a town, which they didn’t know was there! MR. GABRIELSON: Once, another fellow and I, Jewitt, were driving our old Ford and we got stuck. MR. MARSHALL: Where was this? MR. GABRIELSON: In eastern Oregon; Klamath Marsh. We got stuck. It was raining like hell and we just got our blankets out and slept under the car! It was darker than pitch. The next morning we got up and cut some old jack pines and pried that car out. We then got in to Silver Lake. We were cold and hungry. And this is one of the funniest things I ever saw. We were cold and hungry and tired. Silver Lake is a ghost town. It had been quite a town back in about 1912. There had been some wet years. A lot of people had gone up there and homesteaded. But this town was pretty much of a ghost town. There was an old hotel there and they still had rooms. They has a sort of a snack back for a restaurant. That’s all there was. So Jewitt and I went in there and ordered some ham and eggs. There was a cowboy there. He was sitting there and finally the waiter brought him out a great big steak. He took his knife and fork and whittled and whittled and whittled on it. He turned the thing around and whittled some more. Finally, he got mad. He got up and picked up that steak and through it on the floor behind the counter and said, “Goddammit, bring me some ham and eggs! This is the third morning I’ve had that steak and I haven’t gotten a bite off it yet!” MR. MARSHALL: Gab, it’s good to see you. It’s been too long since we’ve had the chance to sit down and talk. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we had a lot of adventures with that old Model T. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. You know, there was a story in the Reader’s Digest about, oh gosh, it’s got to be back around 1939 or 1940. It was entitled, “Farewell My Lovely”. I don’t know who wrote it. But it was really a kind of love story about a Model T. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. Well I went out to Oregon in 1918. Jewitt was there. He was already there. He was working on a dam, and I was working on roads. In that country, we traveled together as much as we could. It was really rough to travel alone. We had some wild times, and a lot of fun. We used to do something that you couldn’t do with any modern car. MR. MARSHALL: What was that? MR. GABRIELSON: There were no roads down the Oregon coast when you got below, oh the lower third of the Oregon coast. We used to travel it. We’d drive that Model T on the beaches at low tide. And there were some old wood roads over the mountains. This was mountainous country where the mountain would stick way out over the ocean. We’d get on an old wood road and get over that hump and get down on the beach again. We used to travel from [sounds like] Kokeel clear to California with an old Model T like that. You couldn’t do that with any modern car in the world. Of course you don’t need to now. They’ve got a good highway down there now. MR. MARSHALL: What did you do about getting gasoline? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh there were little towns where you could get gas. But we always brought extra too. MR. MARSHALL: That brings up a point that I’d like to ask. We’ve had our shortage of gas now but say there wasn’t the organized gasoline facilities around. You really had to plan ahead. MR. GABRIELSON: There were always gas stations, even then, in the towns. There weren’t any in the open spaces. We always carried gas and extra oil and extra water. MR. MARSHALL: If you were to guess, or if you can remember, what kind of miles per gallon did you get? You couldn’t really….. MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know. MR. MARSHALL: No, you could really. Because the miles that you traveled were really arduous, up and down and around. MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t know what we got. We were in places where it was hard going. You ran in low gear all of the time. MR. MARSHALL: There was no way in the world you could tell. MR. GABRIELSON: One of the funny things about it was if you got on a real steep area; these old Fords had nothing but a gravity feed into the carburetor. We used to turn around and back up the hill! MR. MARSHALL: That’s right, because that front main bearing was a splash system as I recall. You’d burn that front bearing out if you didn’t get the oil to it. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we didn’t get any gas either. The gas tank was on the back end of the car. The carburetor was on the front end. If you got onto a steep grade you didn’t get any gas in the carburetor. So we used to turn around and back up the hill! MR. MARSHALL: Well, these were the days when this country was just expanding with automobiles and where you drove, as you said, you made your own roads! MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right. There were old sheep wagon trails where the camp tenders hauled grub to the sheep herders. We’d follow those where we could. When there wasn’t any road we just struck off cross country in the direction we wanted to go! MR. MARSHALL: You didn’t drive any at night did you? MR. GABRIELSON: No. We camped at night. [tape paused] ….a big part of it is sage brush desert. It’s great flat areas with most of the high country is between four and five thousand feet. The desert is up that high. Then there are higher mountain ranges. MR. MARSHALL: I know very little about Oregon. I’ve been to Portland, and I’ve flown over it but I’ve never been on the ground there. MR. GABRIELSON: I spent seventeen years there. You’ll find my foot prints all over the state. MR. MARSHALL: When was it when you first went to Oregon? MR. GABRIELSON: 1918. MR. MARSHALL: Where did you go to Oregon from? MR. GABRIELSON: I was stationed in North Dakota in Fargo. MR. MARSHALL: What were you doing in Fargo? MR. GABRIELSON: My headquarters were there, but I wasn’t in Fargo much. I was working you see. This was during World War I. Mostly I was working…they were trying to make the Indians grow some corn and wheat and grain on their reservations. MR. MARSHALL: Now who were you working for? MR. GABRIELSON: I was working for the Biological Survey, in the Department of Agriculture. They sent us out there and told us to clean out the Prairie Dogs on those Indian reservations so they could raise some grain. The Indians did want it. Some of the smart old Indians would take the grain they were sent and put right around the Prairie Dog holes. The Prairie Dogs would harvest it! MR. MARSHALL: What Indians were out there around Fargo? MR. GABRIELSON: Well they weren’t at Fargo. I was out farther west, but that was the headquarters. They had an office there which I wasn’t in very often. I was working with another man who was in charge of the district. I was sent out there to help him. I was a new biologist. MR. MARSHALL: Were you married at that time? MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. MR. MARSHALL: Was Clara living in Fargo? MR. GABRIELSON: No, Clara was here in Washington. We came to Washington in 1915 from Iowa. I graduated as a biologist and taught high school for three years at Marshalltown, Iowa. And I taught agriculture too. I got a fellowship at Iowa State University to work for my Doctors degree, and we had moved down to Iowa State in Iowa City. Clara’s folks lived there at that time. After I got down there, I got a wire from a fellow by the name of McItee. I had taken the Civil Service Examination for a biologist and had never heard from them. That wire wanted to know if I’d take a job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month, and live in Washington. So I took it to my major professor and showed it to him. He asked me about it and I told him that I had taken the exam when I first got out of college, and had never heard from it. He said, “Well, this is probably it.” I asked him what I should do. He studied it for a while and said, “I’m going to tell you something. You’ll learn more about the things you are interested in if you take this job, than you will if you stay here with me.” He was an invertebrate biologist. He advised me to take it even thought I wouldn’t get a degree out of it. So, I wired back that I would accept it. And on October 1, 1915 Clara and I landed in Washington with one baby. $75.00 a month from Uncle Sam Houston, in cash paid on every 1st and 15th of the month. They brought around an envelope with $37.50 cents in it. It was beautiful. We rented a room in one of those old houses on G Street wasn’t it first? [Asking Clara] MRS. GABRIELSON: Well…. MR. GABRIELSON: And were in a little room over a grocery store part of the time, and right next to the old slate war and navy building there. MRS. GABRIELSON: The one over the grocery store was on 20th and H Streets. It was over a Sanitary Grocery. That was a year or two later. MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember if the old house was on G or H Street. MRS. GABRIELSON: It was right behind the YMCA. There was that YMCA building right out of the window. And we had a back room which had been built as a butler’s pantry or kitchen. The butler’s pantry was rearranged to be our kitchen. It has a dumb waiter in it. The rats used to come in that way. MR. MARSHALL: The one child you had then was June? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, that was June. MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed there that winter. In the spring of 1916 I was sent up to Connecticut to study starlings. So this was when they first really began to spread. They spread out from Central Park, clear up to the northern limit of Massachusetts. There were little colonies in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. Most of them were in Connecticut along the shore and up the river valley. Clara took the baby and went back to Iowa and stayed with her folks who lived in Iowa City. And she spent part of the time with my folks who lived in northern Iowa. I was there from April to October. That was one of the most interesting experiences. I went up there with a whole list of people who had written in the Bureau complaining about starlings doing various things. I was supposed to go see all of these people and check on it. When I got up there the first man I got acquainted with was the Game Warden. He was quite an outdoor man, and quite an outdoor man. He took me one night to a bird club meeting in Norwalk, CT. I told him about what I was doing, or trying to do. After the meeting an elderly couple came up to me and said, “Young man, where are you staying?” I told them I was staying in an old flea bitten hotel down there. They said, “That no fit place for a young man like you to stay!” The woman told me she would send her husband down the next morning to pick me up. The next morning he was there to pick me up. He took me home and they gave me a room and I lived in that room all summer! MR. MARSHALL: Is that right!? Do you remember their name? MR. GABRIELSON: Their name was Merrill. I used that room while I was there; I worked all along the Connecticut shore, but that room was my headquarters. One Sunday morning this Warden came and wanted me to go out with him and do something. Under the Connecticut blue laws I could fire a gun and collect anything. I was collecting starlings to get their stomachs. So I went out with him. When I came back my suitcase was all packed. He gave me a ticket to Iowa City and $100.00 in cash. This was Mr. Merrill. He went out and collected it from all the neighbors. The bank was closed because it was Sunday. MRS. GABRIELSON: Two telegrams had come. Mr. Merrill knew that I was in Iowa with the baby. He was confident that there was something wrong or we wouldn’t have sent two telegrams. One said that June was very ill and might have to have an operation. The next one said that she had to have the operation and was not expected to live. What did he do, but go out among all of his relatives and friends and gather all of the money they had. It was Sunday you see. He bought a ticket and got the reservation for him. His wife packed the suitcase. When he came in they just handed it to him and took him to the station. It was remarkable. MR. MARSHALL: That’s remarkable. MR. GABRIELSON: I spent the whole summer up there working on those starlings. MR. MARSHALL: Have starlings changed any since that time? MR. GABRIELSON: Not much. One of the interesting recollections that I have about it is that starling form summer roosts after the young are hatched. There was an island called Belle Island. It was really a little island in the Long Island Sound. They put a bridge over to it and there was a circular drive around the island. Everybody was a millionaire who had a house there facing the Sound. I remember that they wanted to break up that starling roost. I had all of the millionaires at Belle Island out there with their shotguns and fireworks and everything, chasing starlings. We broke it up. Are they in the Midwest? MR. GABRIELSON: They are all over the United States. BETTY MARSHALL: But they weren’t at that time? MR. GABRIELSON: No. They were started like this. They were brought in to Central Park by an old German who liked them and released them in New York City. They stayed there. This was in about 1890, I think. I’d have to check my notes. MR. MARSHALL: Did they come from Germany? MR. GABRIELSON: They came from Europe. They are European birds. He released them in Central Park. They stayed there for years. And then they began to spread. By 1916 when we… Ed Conbeck [?] and I were the team that worked on them. He worked New Jersey and Pennsylvania and the lower part of New York. I worked Long Island and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and into the edge of Vermont. I once got as far as Brattleboro, Vermont. Every two weeks we’d meet in New York City and compare notes. These people I was staying with; they thought it was terrible for me to get on a train and go to New York without a suitcase. It was all of an hour or an hour and a half ride maybe. I was supposed to take my suitcase. I was making a trip! MR. MARSHALL: They sound like great people. MR. GABRIELSON: They were wonderful people. I went back to see them every time I went to Connecticut for as long as they lived. BETTY MARSHALL: What did they do? What was his business? MR. GABRIELSON: They were a family that had…part or some of the land that that family owned was still in the family from the old English land grant. The family had logged it several times. They had a mill not far from where Merle lived. Of course they were old and retired by the time I knew them. I suppose he was in his late sixties. They looked after me just like I was one of their kids. She’d scold me if I got my clothes dirty. And she raised hell if I came in with my feet wet. One day she got after me. I had been out fishing with him, and came back with a whole washtub of fish. She didn’t approve of some of things he did. He used to go fishing on Sunday and she didn’t approve of that. So she got after me for going along. Then, he announced that he was going to vote the Democratic ticket. She got after me and said, “Now, you talk to St. John!” He name was St. John Merle. She said, “You’ve got a lot of influence with him. You see if you can’t [change his mind]. It would be horrible if he voted Democratic!” MR. MARSHALL: What election was this? MR. GABRIELSON: This was 1916 when Woodrow Wilson was running. MR. MARSHALL: You know, we were talking at dinner and speaking of Woodrow Wilson. You talked about how you went to see the inauguration parade for Wilson’s second term, is that right? Tell us about that again. MR. GABRIELSON: We lived right close to Pennsylvania Avenue. The parades always started down by the Capital on Pennsylvania Avenue pass the reviewing stand at the White House. We were living just off of 18th Street. It was a cold, windy March day in 1917. We bundling June up. She was just a baby. This parade came by finally after it had passed the White House and it would go several blocks beyond that and disperse. One of the funniest shows I ever saw was the Tammany delegation that came along, from Tammany Hall in New York. There was this great big heavyset fellow. He had a lot of meat on him. He was carrying great big velvet banner with a rope on each side with a man holding it out. He had the banner pole stuck into his belt. When he got around the corner of 18th Street a big gust of wind came up and he took off down 18th Street going south! I don’t think he hit the ground once in fifty feet! These two guys were struggling to pull him down. It was really funny. MR. MARSHALL: A runaway blimp! That brings to mind something. Did Mr. Wilson ride in that parade? MR. GABRIELSON: No, well, he did to the White House. No, no he didn’t. Don’t any of them ride in those parades. They had the reviewing stand with all of the notables; the Senators and Congressmen. MR MARSHALL: Well, has Washington changed much in the time you’ve seen it? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, it has changed a lot, I’m not sure for the better. When we lived here Washington was kind of sleepy southern town. The farmer’s market was where the [sounds like Enterprise] Building is now. MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the cars the old ladies used to ride around in. MR. GABRIELSON: They had those electric cars. They were around here for years. There was one here when we came back from Oregon. MRS. GABRIELSON: They just had this one rod that they would steer it with. MR. MARSHALL: It seems to me that in one of our earlier conversations you talked about having built a house out somewhere like Arlington. Where was it? MR. GABRIELSON: It was in east Falls Church. It was just off of where West Street is now. I haven’t been by there recently, but somebody built on to that old house. MR. MARHSALL: What year did you build it? MR. GABRIELSON: That was in 1917. When June recovered we brought her back here and were living in the same place that we had been. The Doctor said we had to get her out of doors. So I knew two fellows in the Dept. of Agriculture, Biological Survey. I bought an acre of land out there. I promised to pay for it. I bought if for $100.00. I borrowed a little money and bought lumber. I built the house myself. I went to my boss who was Waldo Lee Macatee, and asked him if I could have ten days leave. He asked me what I was going to do. I told him I was going to. I told him I was going to build a house. I had already cleared a little place for it. It was mostly a grove of Virginia pine. I cut some blocks out of the bigger Virginia pine and set it up on blocks. On the tenth day we moved what few belongings we had out there. MR. MARSHALL: In ten days! Wow! MR. GABRIELSON: Now, I didn’t work union hours. I’d get up and take the first car. We had an interurban car [train] system then that went way out to Bl… [tape skips] One of the neighbors helped me a little bit. And Clara would stand around and hand me things. She’d look after the baby and run errands for me. MR. MARSHALL: Now let me ask this; you mentioned a car. What kind of a car are you talking about? MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Streetcar. Nobody had cars in those days. And there weren’t any roads to put them on. MR. MARSHALL: Now, when we need that sort of interurban transportation we don’t have it! MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after the tenth day, I went back to work. The house wasn’t quite finished but we had moved in. I had three rooms; a kitchen, bedroom and living room. MRS. GABRIELSON: One section of the living room was not floored. Do you remember? There were two or three feet of it that didn’t have any floor. MR. GABRIELSON: The neighbors came by that first night and helped me lay the rest of it. MRS. GABRIELSON: I was afraid the baby would fall. MR. GABRIELSON: After we had moved out there I dug the basement out under the house and built a foundation under it. MR. MARSHALL: This house it still standing isn’t it? MR. GABRIELSON: The last time I went by there it was. MR. MARSHALL: It’d be fun to go by and take a look at it. BETTY MARSHALL: Was it like a log cabin? MR. GABRIELSON: It was a frame house. In those days lumber wasn’t as strict as it is now. MR. MARSHALL: How did you light it? Did you have electricity? MR. GABRIELSON: We lighted it with kerosene lamps. MRS. GABRIELSON: We had a pump and well out in the side yard and [unintelligible]. We’d go out and pump out own water. MR. MARSHALL: Let me ask you. Could you remember how deep you had to go to get good water? MR. GABRIELSON: I had to dig the well about thirty feet deep. MR. MARSHALL: Did you do it yourself? MR. GABRIELSON: I got some help from somebody. Can’t remember who. MR. MARSHALL: So it was driven, you had a tool to drill down in the ground? MR. GABRIELSON: No, it was dug by hand. MR. MARSHALL: So the water level was really quite close to the surface. So to clarify in my mind; this was in east Falls Church. And it’s near Peacock Buick? MR. GABRIELSON: West Street wasn’t there then. We got off at the second station after the East Falls Church Station. It was called it Green Gables. You had to walk through the woods to get to where we were building our house. MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wild! MR. GABRIELSON: I can’t remember his name but there was a Doctor who had a house right where we got off the train. East Falls Church then consisted of a grocery store, a railroad station and a lumber yard. MR. MARSHALL: You know, actually, if this is the same railroad station that I am thinking of, there is still a kind of a railroad station there… MR. GABRIELSON: There was one there the last time I’ve been by there. MR. MARSHALL: And there’s a lumberyard not too far from there. It’s quite possible that it could have been an offshoot of that original lumberyard. MR. GABRIELSON: That big old railroad station had been there for a long time. I don’t know if it’s there or not. I don’t travel that way much anymore. BETTY MARSHALL: Isn’t Dunlauren farther out? MR. GABRIELSON: Dunlauren wasn’t there then. We did get on the trolley once and go out to Bluemont. MR. MARSHALL: Where is that? The name rings a bell. MR. GABRIELSON: It’s up on the edge of the Blue Ridge. It was a sort of a resort. MRS. GABRIELSON: There was an old, old, railroad. MR. GABRIELSON: The old railroad went first through Falls Church and then Vienna. There was a little station here in Vienna for years. I don’t know whether it’s gone now or not. The building is still there, but they don’t use it anymore. MR. MARSHALL: Now, you’ve talked about using this transportation out from Washington to where you were building the house, and then you’re talking about taking the same transportation out to Bluemont. The thing that has concerned me for quite a long time; and we’ve only been here since 1960 but that’s fourteen years. Here they had facility and that capability way back then. And the even had it, as I understand it, during the Civil War. They had this sort of capability. And now, when we need it they took it out! This doesn’t…I can understand it. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ll tell ya. There’s a lot of stories, and I don’t know how true they are; but I do know that around New England where they had an interurban system that covered all of Connecticut. When I was working up there in 1916, and stayed in Hartford or Norwalk, I could get on an interurban car and go out into the country and start walking and collecting and catch another interurban car after I’d walked five or ten miles, and go back into Norwalk. The whole country was a network of them. The stories up there were that the railroad bought them up and closed them down. Some of the big banks did too. Morgan and Company was one of them that was blamed the most for it. MR. MARSHALL: They just eliminated the competition. MR. GABRIELSON: The stories I heard up there, and I have no verification, is that these bankers would go out and buy these interurban roads for a song and then they’d sell, at a big price, to the New Haven Railroad. They busted the New Haven Railroad. MR. MARSHALL: Earlier you and I were talking about Model Ts. It strikes me that in previous conversations, Clara has been telling us about some experiences she’s had with Model Ts. I’d like you to think back and if you can remember some of those things you told us. There was one time when you had a problem with a ground plug on a Model T. Can you remember that? Tell me a little about your experiences with it will you? MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, there isn’t much to tell. I learned to drive a Model T in about 1917. It was the first car I ever drove. MR. GABRIELSON: It wasn’t that early I don’t think. MRS. GABRIELSON: It was that summer that I was back with the baby and you were in New England. Rush taught me to drive. MR. GABRIELSON: That was 1916. MRS. GABRIELSON: I never drove very much. In later years Ira got a car, but it had no started on it. You had to crank it. If it was a cold morning I’d take a tea kettle full of boiling water out and lifted the hood and poured the boiling water over this manifold. Then, I’d go round front you see, and pull the choke out and crank it. BETTY MARSHALL: Well, wouldn’t the water crack the engine? MR. GABRIELSON: No the water would heat the engine up enough so the gas would vaporize. BETTY MARSHALL: I was thinking that it would crack the metal. MR. GABRIELSON: Well cars nowadays don’t have manifolds. They are much more complicated. MRS. GABRIELSON: One time, when I went out to crank, somehow the crank was loose from the rod that would turn the motor. I lifted the hood and looked in. I saw the holes that corresponded with this rod, and there was a pin that held it in there. Well, the pin wasn’t there. So I put a nail in there and away I went. When I parked downtown, the fellows noticed that and laughed about it. They thought it was funny. MR. MARSHALL: A minute ago you were talking about the ground plug, and I am reminded about something that you and I talked about a number of years ago. There was something about how if you didn’t have a connection you couldn’t get the darned thing to fire. MR. GABRIELSON: There was a magneto post. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, that’s what I was talking about. MR. GABIELSON: It was set into the top of the crank case. I remember the first time I learned about that was when I was driving in North Dakota. It wouldn’t start. So I carried my suitcase in to Pierre, South Dakota. MR. MARSHALL: How far? MR. GABRIELSON: It was ten or fifteen miles. I got a guy to go back out there with me and get the damned thing started again. Before he tried to start it again he took off this thing and took a cutter pin off of the end of it and then it cranked all right. So after that, if anything went wrong with the car I always took the magneto post out first to see if it was all right. MR. MARSHALL: Let’s get on with where you two met. Did this take place down in Iowa? MRS. GABIELSON: Well, I was in Church and I was the music. I played the organ and led the singing. MR. MARSHALL: What church was this and what town? MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Methodist Church in Webb, Iowa. I think it was 1907. MRS. GABRIELSON: We courted for quite a few years before we were married. I tell you, I was about 18 at the time. It was very small town, and a little Church. For a time, they weren’t able to support a Minister. For a time the minister from Sioux Rapids where he lived, came over there on Sunday and conducted the Service in the afternoon. My parents were pillars of the church and he always came to our place for a meal afterwards. He told us that there was a family by the name of Gabrielson who were moving up there. They were going to be a mile and a half out of town. They had three boys and they were fine people. BETTY MARSHALL: You can just hear the girls say, “Fine boys, whoopee!” MRS. GABRIELSON: Eventually I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Gabrielson. They were seated in the back seat of the church. I knew who they were because I knew they were coming. Then one Sunday there was a young man sitting between them. After the service, his mother introduced Ira to me. And the first topic of conversation was about a picture that I had taken of the editor’s daughter’s school. She was teaching at a one room country school and she asked me to go out and take a picture of her children. That was the first topic of conversation! MR. MARSHALL: Can you remember what kind of camera you used? MRS. GABRIELSON: It was a box camera I guess. Sears Roebuck had advertised a whole outfit. You got the camera and the plate holders and extra plates. You also got the equipment to develop and dry and fix and print your own pictures. That’s what I used. BETTY MARSHALL: You never had to the powder flash did you? MR. GABRIELSON: No, no flash powder. That was available, but not for the general public. MR. MARSHALL: So after his mother introduced you, what happened then? MRS. GABRIELSON: I don’t know. My father decided that there was some sort of feeling between us and he says, “Now listen daughter, I want you to understand, your mother doesn’t want any young men hanging around!” Mother was pregnant. It was just two weeks after my 16th birthday that my brother arrived. The first Sunday after that, Ira asked he if might walk me home. Now, bless you, we had little narrow sidewalks you know. We’d come to an alley, and there were just two boards about that wide. Eventually he put an arm around me. MR. MARSHALL: To keep you from falling on that narrow board! MRS. GABRIELSON: The first time he ever asked me to go anywhere he asked me to go to Merrison which was about ten miles away, to go to the 4th of July celebration. Well, there were no cars you know. So that meant we had to go with the old horse and buggy; Old Buck was the horse. He’d plod along. It takes time to travel that way. I asked my mother if I might go and she said, “Well, yes, you may go if Cora goes too.” Cora is my sister. Ira has insisted for many years that he made Guy take Cora. Guy is Ira’s brother. MR. MARSHALL: Now let’s have Gabe pick up the story from here. MR. GABRIELSON: I reasoned with Guy and the four of us went. MR. MARSHALL: A double date! And this was in what kind of a rig? MR. GABRIELSON: It was an old surrey type buggy. It was my dad’s. MR. MARSHALL: Did you have to con him into letting you take it? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh no, we drove it most any time we wanted to. MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell how you used to come down and see us at night. MR. GABRIELSON: Old Buck learned the way down there pretty quick! We’d work all day on the farm and were pretty tired. We’d fall asleep coming into town and Old Buck would go through town and pull up in front of their house and stop! MR. MARSHALL: So actually, this double date thing started pretty early in the game didn’t it? MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh yes. BETTY MARSHALL: How many years did you court before you got married? MR. GABRIELSON: We didn’t get married until after I got through college. I had just graduated from high school when I came up there. I stayed out of school for a year to help dad on the farm. MR. MARSHALL: Where was the farm? MR. GABRIELSON: It was just a mile and a half outside of Webb. It was 160 acres. It was a general Iowa farm. We raised corn and oats and hay. We fed the oats and hay to the horses and used to corn to fed the hogs. It was a general farm. MR. MARSHALL: What county was this in? MR. GABRIELSON: It was Clay County, Iowa. Sioux City is about 100 miles north. It’s right up close to the Minnesota line. There was only one county north of Clay county before the Minnesota line. MR. MARSHALL: What town in Minnesota would be familiar? Would in be Worthington? No, that would be pretty far. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, there were no big towns in Minnesota then. You’d have to get up quite a ways before you’d find anything. I remember there was a little place, but I can’t think of the name of it. We were right south of the Okoboji Lakes. MRS. GABIELSON: When we were married we spent our honeymoon at Okoboji Lakes. MR. MARSHALL: Here we are in May of 1974 and we are getting to the period of the year when we have a lot of thunderstorms; can you remember if there were any violent storms then? MR. GABRIELSON: Lot’s of them. MR. MARSHALL: This has pretty much a characteristic of that area hasn’t it? MR. GABRIELSON: Always, every since I knew anything about it, and I grew up there. We had lots of thunderstorms. And we had a lot of hail storms, and the occasional tornado. MRS. GABRIELSON: I can remember sitting in the schoolroom and seeing a tornado going around. MR.GABRIELSON: I can remember as a small boy being at Church one Sunday afternoon for a meeting and one of those hail storms came up. There were chunks of hail as big as my fist. They busted every window on that side of the church that the storm was coming from. MR. MARSHALL: Now, you were courting Clara, and your brother was courting her sister. Then, you left to go to college. Where did you go? MR. GABRIELSON: Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. Its south and west. It’s right at the junction of the Missouri and the Big Sioux Rivers. MR. MARSHALL: We used to go through all of the time going from Ardmore, OK to Minneapolis. One thing we always thought interesting was a bridge there that had iron railings and it made a special noise when you went over it. MR. GABRIELSON: It goes across to a little town in Nebraska. MR. MARSHALL: What did you take in college? What did you major in? MR. GABRIELSON: I majored in Zoology. MR. MARSHALL: What year did you graduate? MR. GABRIELSON: I graduated in June of 1912. After I graduated I got a job teaching Biology as Marshalltown, Iowa High School. I taught there for three years. Clara and I were married that summer of 1912. I had worked my way through college, and as soon as I finished and got a job, why, Clara and I got married on August 7th of 1912. The teaching job started in September of 1912. We moved to Marshalltown, Iowa and we lived there for three years while I taught high school. MRS. GABRIELSON: Here’s where Ira finally decided that if God had intended for him to be a teacher, He would have built him different. MR. GABRIELSON: I applied for a fellowship down at the University of Iowa and got it. After we had moved down there, I got a telegram from the Biological Survey wanting to know if I would accept the job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month and come to Washington. MR. MARSHALL: What kind of place did you live in while you were in Marshalltown for those three years? MR. GABRIELSON: For the first year we lived in a single room in a private home. Well, it was a two room apartment in a private home. MRS. GABRIELSON: They fixed it up. MR. GABRIELSON: The last year we were there we rented a furnished house. It was Old Man Manning’s place. MRS. GABRIELSON: That was the year that June was born. MR. GABRIELSON: She was five months old when we came to Washington. MR. MARSHALL: Let’s go back now to 1916. MR. GABRIELSON: I spent most of 1916 working in Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode Island on the Starlings. We built the house in Washington in 1917. MR. MARSHALL: So let’s pick it up from there. After you got the house built… MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the scientists. They laughed so much. They couldn’t believe that he could build a house. They were scientists strictly. Every weekend some of them would come out. They wanted to come and see where we were living. MR. MARSHALL: There men were from the Biological Survey? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, from the Survey. They wanted to see what kind of a place he had built. They never failed to be shocked by the things that June would say. I remember one time we were walking along and the editor was with us. He said, “There June, what’s that bird?” And he thought she’d just tell him it was a “birdy”. She said, “That’s a [scientific name in Latin]! MR. MARSHALL: That must have really floored him! MRS. GABRIELSON: Each one of the scientists was specialized on a different kind of species or bug or animal. Ira had found a big scarab beetle. There was a big hatch that that year. Finally one day when someone was out, June called out, “Hey Daddy, there’s another [scientific name].” She was only two and a half! MR. GABRIELSON: I collected all, or most of the [bugs] in America were collected on our screen door! This species had been described and were very scarce. All of a sudden there was a big hatch right there. BETTY MARSHALL: How many times did this happen? MR. GABRIELSON: Never again, it happened just that one year. BETTY MARSHALL: I was wondering about that because we do have the seventeen year cicadas. That was really something to experience. I enjoyed it. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, it comes every seventeen years. There are some of those bugs every year, but the big hatch is every seventeen years. I’ve seen it twice since we’ve lived on this place. MRS. GABRIELSON: The scientist soon learned that I had chickens. I’d fix chicken for dinner. I remember one time when Ira was gone. We were living out in the woods really and there were raccoons and opossums around. My chickens were young. It was the season of the year when I had some young ones around. They didn’t go into the chicken house and roost where they should have. They’d stay out in the brush. I used to have to go out and pick them up and throw them in you know. One time I did that and accidentally broke the leg of a chicken. Well, I just thought that’s too bad to let that chicken live that way. So I took and cut its head off and cleaned it and dressed it and cooked it. After that, June used to beg me to break another chicken’s leg. BETTY MARSHALL: What happened to your third brother? Weren’t there three boys in the family? MRS. GABRIELSON: There was Gabe and Guy and the younger one was Rush. He still lives in northern Iowa. He became cashier and then President of a bank. He now has retired. He sells insurance. MR. MARSHALL: Guy eventually married your sister didn’t he? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, they have always lived in New Jersey. They were married in 1918. They lived there until she died last fall. Guy is still there. MR. MARSHALL: Oh that’s right. I had forgotten that she has passed away. BETTY MARSHALL: How many children did they have? MRS. GABRIELSON: They had two; a son and a daughter. The son is now President of Nicolette Asbestos Company. They do a lot of traveling. They own property in Columbia. Guy had two or three companies. He had Nicolette and they made this water heater down here. I can’t remember the name of the company. After Guy met Cora, he went to the University of Iowa and finished there. Then he went to Boston and went to Harvard, and finished Harvard Law and School of Oratory. He also went through the Business Administration studies. MR. GABRIELSON: Dad sold the farm. My younger brother was there but he wasn’t very strong. He was more like mother’s folks. He wasn’t big and hulky like Guy and I were. MRS. GABRIELSON: Dad Gabrielson went and bought that bank in Crystal Lake. BETTY MARSHALL: Is that where Rush went? MR. GABRIELSON: That’s where Rush is now. He’s not in the bank any more. He sold his interest in it. He still lives in it. MRS. GABRIELSON: He still owns the bank building. MR. MARSHALL: He’s married. And he’s got a boy and two girls. The boy has never been right. He’s had some sort of mental trouble ever since he was a baby. He died some years ago. He had to be in an institution for years. MRS. GABRIELSON: The two daughters now live in New Jersey. MR. GABRIELSON: One daughter does. The other daughter lives in Minnesota. She went to New Jersey but she didn’t stay. Dorothy is married to a fellow who is a football coach in Wells, Minnesota. Its a little school, but they’ve won the state championship every once in a while. MR. MARSHALL: I think that name rings a bell. Now, let’s go back a little bit. You had gone back to school again, but left and came to Washington. Then you went to Portland for a number of years? MR. GABRIELSON: No, we were here in Washington for three years, from October of 1915 to the summer of 1918. Then, because of the war, I was to go out and fill a vacancy they had in the Dakotas, trying to control prairie dogs. I went out there, and then I got ordered to take over South Dakota. I was in the Black Hills in Rapid City I think it was, looking for a place to live. Clara was at my Dad’s in Crystal Lake. I got a telegram from E. W. Nelson, who was Chief of the Bureau, wanting to know if I would go to Oregon instead of setting up an office in South Dakota. They had some trouble out there. I didn’t know anything about Oregon except where it was on the map. So I called Clara and asked her if she was willing to go out there and take a stab at it. She said yes, so I called Nelson, or sent him a telegram. I told him, “I don’t know anything about Oregon, but it can’t be any worse than South Dakota. I’ll take a chance at it.” We landed in Oregon about three days before Christmas. I went up to Fargo and checked out my stuff to [unintelligible] and then they told me to stop in Boise and get some information about the rodents that I was supposed to work on. I stopped there, and while I was there Clara and June both came down with the flu in that 1918 epidemic. We were staying in a hotel. I couldn’t get them into a hospital. The hotel people tried to throw me out. I wouldn’t go. They finally agreed to let me stay if the doctor would come up the back elevator. They finally got so that they could travel and we got on the train and went to Corvallis, Oregon. We got to Portland. It was snowing like hell when we passed over the Blue Mountains near LeGrand, Oregon. When we got to Portland it was raining. I got them into a hotel right close to the station. They had these interurban trains all over western Oregon, and the next morning we got on the interurban. It was just three or four days before Christmas. It was a very short time, I don’t really remember. We got out of that car downtown, and the roses were in bloom all along the street. We had left Fargo when in was about forty below. We decided right then that Oregon was okay. We went down to Corvallis and lived there. I worked out of the Extension Service office for about six months. Then we moved up to Portland and moved into the Service office. There were two people there besides myself. Stanley Jewitt who was working on predator animals, and the Game Warden. There were three of us. We had a little office in the Post Office building. We stayed there for seventeen years. During that time, I worked mostly as rodent control problems, finding out how to control rodents. We did an awful lot of research work. MRS. GABRIELSON: They didn’t know what rodents were there. And nobody knew. And they didn’t know how to control them. MR. GABRIELSON: We used poisoning and trapping to try and control them. We tried everything. We developed a lot of the methods that were used for years before they developed some of these modern ways. One of the things that we stopped was this; all of the grain farmers up there were using phosphorus on wheat. They were killing all of the songbirds. They were killing everything. This was being done by the farmers. We got a combination of strychnine and oats. The small birds won’t eat oats very much, and strychnine doesn’t kill birds very much. Any bird that’s got a crop is pretty near immune to strychnine. Chickens are immune. You can hardly stuff enough strychnine into a chicken to kill him. So we got the farmers to change. My biggest job was to get the farmers to use that. We used to go out and do demonstrations. We used to tricks. One of the funny things was that we found two ground squirrels that had different feeding habits. One of them would pick up a grain of oats and take the shell off before he put it in his mouth. The other one would pick up a dozen of them and stick them in his cheek pouches. The paste that we put it on with would dissolve and kill him before he ever swallowed it. So, we devised a brittle flour paste for the one that shelled it. He shelled off enough. I used to go out and tell the farmers that I’ll kill the big squirrels, but I won’t bother the little ones. Or, kill the little ones and not the big ones. I’d use the oats with the starch paste on. The big ones would pick it up and you’d see them eating it. They’d run around and have a good time. The little ones would die. They were two different sizes. Then I’d say, “Now, we’ll kill them both.” I’d put out the flower paste and get both of them. The farmers were very much impressed. BETTY MARSHALL: Are squirrels rodents? They don’t go up in the trees? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, they are rodents. They don’t go up in the trees at all. They burrow in the ground. There were enormous numbers of them. We couldn’t find a grain field in Oregon that didn’t have a big swath eaten into it by the ground squirrels that had their nests along the fence rows. BETTY MARSHALL: Do they vary much from a chipmunk? MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they are much bigger. They have many, many species. Some of them are very pretty animals. Some are not, but they have dozens of species of them. BETTY MARSHALL: They’re not blind like a mole? MR. GABRIELSON: No, they burrow and have their nests in the ground, but they do they’re feeding and all of their running around on top of the ground. They feed during the day. They are not nocturnal; most of them. There are some that are, but most of them are not. MR. MARSHALL: How long did you stay in Oregon? MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed until 1935. MR. MARSHALL: Then what happened? MR. GABRIELSON: I got a telegram from Ding Darling who was the Chief of the Bureau. He said that he had completed his reorganization of the Bureau and it meant a new assignment in Washington for me, and that he hoped I liked it. MR. MARSHALL: What did you tell him? MR. GABRIELSON: I came damn near telling him to go to hell and quitting the Bureau! I liked it in Oregon! MRS. GABRIELSON: By that time he had become Regional Director. He was in charge of the all of the work of the Bureau in Washington, California, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. He had a little empire of his own. They didn’t have money enough to go out and check on him. MR. GABRIELSON: I was running the show all by my lonesome. I came near telling him to forget it. Sometimes I thought the worst decision I ever made in my life was to come back east. MR. MARSHALL: Well, I don’t know. If you hadn’t of come back east, we wouldn’t have got to know you probably. MR. GABRIELSON: I came back here in 1935 in February as assistant chief of the Research Division. I don’t think I ever worked at it. I had an office there. Darling would come and say to me every once in a while, “Here, I want you to do this.” It has nothing to do with my work. He sent me on all kinds of crazy stunts. He called me up one morning about nine o’clock and said that he was in trouble. “I’ve got a conflict.” I’m supposed to be at the White House at ten o’clock and I’m supposed to be in front of some damned House Committee. He said, “You’ll have to go before the Committee. I asked him, “Well what Committee is it?” He said, “I don’t know, you’ll have to find out!” I asked him what they were talking about, he said he didn’t know that either. So, I had to find out, and finally did. I couldn’t think of what I was going to say in the taxi on the way up there. But I got by because I knew more about it than the Committee did. BETTY MARSHALL: Would you know what year Mount Rushmore was carved out? MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember. I remember when it was built. I was in the Black Hills in 1916. They hadn’t started working on it then. It was in the 1930’s sometime. MR. MARSHALL: When you came back to Washington and were working for Ding Darling, where did you live then? MR. GABRIELSON: I rented a room for a little while from one of the fellows in the Bureau because Clara and the kids were still out in Oregon. MRS. GABRIELSON: I stayed there until the girls were out of school. MR. GABRIELSON: She drove east by herself. MR. MARSHALL: In a Model T? MR. GABRIELSON: No, in a Model A. BETTY MARSHALL: How many kids did you have then? MRS. GABRIELSON: I had four. [End of tape 1] MR. GABRIELSON: I had been given another job. Ding called me in one day and said, “I got $35,000.00 from the American Wildlife Institute and $30,000.00 from Congress. I want you do go out and set up some cooperative wildlife research units. I asked him, “what’s a cooperative wildlife research unit?’ He says, “I don’t know, you’ll have to do find out!” Then only think I knew about that was going on anything like it was out in [unintelligible]. So I went out there and talked to those fellows and found out what they were doing. I also found out the kind of courses you have to have to train wildlife people. I started out. First, I tried to put the nine units we had money to finance in different ecological areas so we could take full advantage of it. The original idea was that we’d get several states to contribute money to it. That never worked out. The state laws won’t let them. I found out ways to beat it, but that was much later. I started out to set up these units, and I was up at Oreno, Maine setting up a unit up there when Clara was driving east. I met her at Guy’s house in New Jersey after I had finished setting up the unit in Oreno. What I had to do, it seems now that it would be impossible, but it worked. I had to get the State Agricultural College and the Game Department to join the old Biological Survey, and the American Wildlife Institute which was the predecessor of the Wildlife Management Institute to meet together and agree on a program to finance it jointly. [tape skips] MR. MARSHALL: This is May 31, 1974. On Side two we had just begun talking about how Ding Darling had told Gabe to go out and establish a cooperative wildlife unit. We’re going to pick up at that point. MR. GABRIELSON: I had to set up nine of them. I had seven up them set up and Virginia was one of them; out at Blacksburg. I had packed my suitcase and bought a ticket. I had all of the arrangements for the Game Departments in Oregon and Utah, and the college people to meet me. I had gone downtown. I was going to take the afternoon B&O train to Chicago. I said goodbye to the family. Along about noon, the telephone rang. It was Ding. He asked when I was going on the western trip. I told him I was leaving that afternoon. He said, “You’ll have to cancel it.” I told him I’d only be gone ten days and asked him if whatever he had wouldn’t keep until I got back. I had all of the arrangements made. “No,” he said, “You can’t”. I told him it was going to cost him a lot of money in telegrams and telephone calls. But I canceled it. I asked him what he wanted me to do. He said, “You just stay there until I come in.” I asked him where he was and he said, “I’m out I the sticks.” In ten days or so, he came in. He called me and asked me to come up to his office. “I want to talk to you”. It was a hot day in early October. I had no necktie on. If I did, it was hanging down, but I started for his office. MR. MARSHALL: What year was this? MR. GABRIELSON: It was 1935. I got part way up to his office and he came out waved his arms and said, “Go get your coat on, we’ve got to go up to the Secretaries Office”. Well that didn’t surprise me because any time anything from the west came up he took me along because I knew more about it than anybody in the Washington office. I had spent a lot of years out there. Usually, he’d tell me about it. But he began to ask me about Clara and the kids and how I felt. He never said a word about what we were going to talk about. Finally, I said, “Say Ding, what’s the row about this time?” He said, “Oh there’s no row this time. We’re just changing Chiefs of the Bureau and you’re the new Chief.” BETTY MARSHALL: Wow, can you imagine? MR. GABRIELSON: I said, “Jesus Christ!” BETTY MARSHALL: So now were you taking his place? MR. GABIELSON: Yeah! He was just stepping out. MR. MARSHALL: Who was the Secretary? MR. GABRIELSON: Henry Wallace. So what Ding was trying to do; I’ve always accused him of it, and he always denied it; but he had arranged this all with Wallace. He tried to get me to walk in there, and have Wallace congratulate me or say something to me and me in total ignorance of it. If I hadn’t of asked a straight question that would have happened. I got in there and Wallace stuck out his hand and said, “Congratulations on your new job!” BETTY MARSHALL: Now is he the one who ran…..? MRS. GABIELSON: He ran for President. MR. GABIELSON: He was the Secretary of Agriculture. He ran for President on a liberal party ticket. He ran at the time that Roosevelt was running for reelection, and Landen from Kansas was running too. MR. MARSHALL: So, this was October 1935, and Wallace congratulated you as being the new… MR. GABRIELSON: Then he asked me what my new policies were going to be in my new job. MR. MARSHALL: What was your new title going to be? MR. GABRIELSON: Chief of the Biological Survey. I said, “Mr. Secretary, I don’t know. Mr. Darling just told me outside the door!” He said, “Well, I’m going to tell you; I don’t know anything about this wildlife work. Ding says you do. You take it and run it and if there is any time I can help you, why you call on me.” MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that great? BETTY MARSHALL: Was he pretty knowledgeable about the subject? MR. GABRIELSON: He didn’t know anything about it! MRS. GABRIELSON: But he knew he didn’t. MR. MARSHALL: That’s the point see. What did you think about this Clara? MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was very, very pleased of course. It meant recognition for Ira. He’d always been away from home. I knew that would go on. But he just visited once in a while. So that’s the way it went. BETTY MARSHALL: So you set up nine or ten of these cooperative units. How many of them are there today? MR. GABRIELSON: There are eighteen. BETTY MARSHALL: But they are regional things still? MR. GABRIELSON: They still try to keep them in different ecological areas. MR. MARSHALL: You might explain how these things are funded. If I’m not mistaken it’s funding not only by the Wildlife Management Institute…. MR. GABIELSON: ….by the Biological Survey, the Agricultural College and the State Game Department. MR. MARSHALL: So in other words in Virginia, at Blacksburg, the Game Commission funds it, the WMI funds it, and so does the college. MR. GABRIELSON: The FWS does too. MR. MARSHALL: So four groups fund it. Can you describe a little bit about what they do? MR. GABRIELSON: They were set up to do three things. One was to train people for work in the wildlife field. That was one objective. Another was to do a lot of the fact finding that the states had not been equipped to do. The other was to do practical research; not just purely theoretical. Another objective was to set up demonstration areas to show how it as down. None have them have ever done very much in the demonstration department. MR. MARSHALL: But they do quite a bit. MR. GABRIELSON: They do a lot of research work. MR. MARSHALL: Sometimes, if we have a problem, we can go to them and say that ‘something is happening with the pheasant, could you do a study’? So it works out. MR. GABRIELSON: The programs have always been oriented towards local problems of that Game Department, where ever it is. But the fund of knowledge that they have provided and the number of men that they’ve trained; I don’t know how many now; but about the time I left the Bureau in 1946 there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 trained men who had come out of these units. BETTY MARSHALL: Did you say once that you have trained some men from Canada? MR. GABRIELSON: We brought a lot of them down here. They’d get their training. I got mixed up in a Canadian outfit. There was an outfit called CIL, Canadian International Company. According to them they were always being badgered. The man I first talked to has been dead for many years, but he came to me and said, “Isn’t there something we can do with our money that will help wildlife more than provide beer for Christmas parties?” I told me that there were a lot of things, and he asked me to write up two or three for him. I wrote two or three outlines of things and sent them to him. One of them was setting up training schools. There was no school in Canada where they could get any training. One of them was patterned on this Wildlife school. They fooled around with it for several years, because they were in some law suits. But one day they called me and said that they were ready to talk business and they wanted me to come up and talk to the Board of Directors. I went up to Montreal and talked to them. After several weeks, my telephone rang one day. This was after I was with the WMI. They said that they had decided to take this training thing that I outlined. Canadian students all had to come down here to get their education. We’re going to go with it on two conditions. The first is that if you will be Chairman of the Committee that handles it. I told them they were crazy and that they didn’t want an American for that job. This was when the anti-American stuff was getting started. I said that there would be some resentment among Canadians. They said that they had thought of that and they wouldn’t put any money into it unless I was the Chairman. I asked them what the other condition was. They said I was supposed to pick a Canadian to work with me. They said that they would give me some time to find someone. I told them that I already know someone in Canada that I could work very well with if they could get him. It was Orris [?] Lloyd. I gave them his address and he agreed to it. He and I spent one hell of a lot of that money. We had 15 schools now in Canada, giving training to wildlife people. This went on until the cut out the program last year. BETTY MARSHALL: They just cut it out? MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they had accomplished their objective. They’ve got the colleges, and the Canadian government, and the Provinces are giving fellowships. It’s an automatic thing now. We had a little money to give fellowships and to get started. They are using their money to promote progress. MR. MARSHALL: So now, let’s go back a moment. You stayed on as Chief of the Bureau until 1946. Then you went with the Institute? What promoted this now? MR. GABRIELSON: Largely, it was my doctor. From the outbreak of the war in 1941, and in 1940 they combined the wildlife service and the fisheries service into the Fish and Wildlife Service. They moved both of them into Interior and I was Chief of the outfit. When we got involved in the European war, they moved the Park Service and us, and the Bureau of Animal Industry out to Chicago and put us in the old Merchandise Mart. Just after we moved out there, we had sold our house. Just after we got out there, why, they set up under the War Powers Act the Fisheries Commission. They made Ickes the head of it, and me the Deputy and I did all of the work. So I commuted from Chicago to Washington and a lot of other places. I hardly slept in the same bed twice. I had always had some gall bladder trouble. And it got so bad that my doctor told me, “Now listen, you either quit that damned job or get a new doctor because you are wasting my time and your money. I can’t do anything to help you, living the way you do.” So I went to talk to old man Ickes, who was my boss then. I arranged to step down and do some writing. I was to be a senior biologist. About that time, these guys started to pester me to take that job. I turned them down time and time again. They kept offering me more money. I told them it wasn’t a question of money. I told them that I had my plans all laid out. They offered me so much money that I couldn’t turn it down. I finally agreed to go in 1946. Then I found out afterwards that the reason that they kept after me was that I was the only one that all of the contributors could agree on. BETTY MARSHALL: Was Rockefeller into the Institute when it was still the American Wildlife Institute? MR. GABRIELSON: No, he’s never been involved with it. This was a different thing. It goes back to 1911 when a group of people were distressed at what was happening to wildlife in America. They formed an organization called the American Game Protective Association. It was mostly a bunch of wealthy people. I don’t know who they hired first, but they had Seth Gordon. They had Paul Miller, and Locke, and several people. They changed their name once to the American Game Association. Then there got to be a fight between some of the supporters. It split into two. One bunch which was mostly DuPont supporters and their allies like Remington Arms and Eastman Kodak and two or three railroads called it the American Wildlife Institute. The other group set up a separate program based mostly on the propagation of game. It was out in southern Illinois, and mostly financed by the Ollin [?] people and some others. I don’t know too much about the history of that one because I never had too much to do with it. In 1945, they commenced to want to get together again. There was one man in Ollin and one man in Remington that worked on it until they finally got everybody to agree to unite the two programs. They set up a new joint program and I was the guy who was picked to run it. MR. MARSHALL: Something that I know only vaguely about is that the field people like Larry Young who was out at Horicon Marsh for a long time before you brought him in here. And I know guys like Phil Barsky who were the field men ….. MR. GABRIELSON: ….of the Wildlife Management Institute. MR. MARSHALL: Those are the regional guys. There are from four to six or seven of them. BETTY MARSHALL: What was Rockefeller tied into? MR. MARSHALL: Was it the World Wildlife Fund? MR. GABRIELSON: Lawrence has never been in that except that he contributed. He took several little park organizations and combined them in to the present Parks and Recreation Association. He set it up. Dwight Redding was chairman of that for a long time. MR. MARSHALL: That’s what Rusty Groh worked at for a long while before he left. So you stayed with the Wildlife Management Institute, but in the mean time you were also involved with the World Wildlife Fund and with Lindbergh and Fritz Phillips and all of that. Are you still involved with them? MR. GABRIELSON: I’m still a member of the Board. I’ve gotten out working at any office, but I’m still a member of the Board. And, I’m honorary President of the American Wildlife Fund. MR. MARSHALL: So you were President at the Wildlife Management Institute until when? MR. GABRIELSON: Until 1970. MR. MARSHALL: That was when Dan Poole came in right? MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. MR. MARSHALL: When you were in there Pink Guteruss was the Vice President right? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, he was. Dan Poole was the Secretary. MR. MARSHALL: So when you stepped out Dan came in as President. Larry Yahn came in from Wisconsin to take Dan’s place. Lonnie Williamson came in as editor of the newsletter. You’ve seen a lot haven’t you Gabe? MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, I have. I’ve built the Wildlife Management Institute. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, I know you did. MR. GABRIELSON: I think that we’ve been talking for about an hour and a half or two hours, and we’ve covered a lot of things. But there are so many things I’d like to talk about, and questions I can’t even begin to think of right now. One of the things that we’ve touched on many times in our talks is your back pack experiences around the country. I never cease to be amazed when we might be talking about a certain place and you immediately come out with how you know the place intimately having been there. You can describe the flora and fauna. I think that’s just great. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I covered North America pretty well in the field work that I’ve done. I enjoy it. That’s the thing that I enjoyed more than anything else; being outdoors. I’ve got a pretty good working knowledge of plants. MR. MARHSALL: I think you have! MR. GABRIELSON: I know bugs and things like that. There used to be a lot of fellows like that. We called them ‘all around naturalists’. But there’s darn few of them now. MR. MARSHALL: That’s right. One of the questions that is bugging so many people nowadays especially in the business that we’re in; and that is people like us and people that hunt and fish talk to each other and we agree. But the thing that concerns us is that there is such a movement for anti-hunting. How do we combat this? MR. GABRIELSON: I think that this is the inevitable result of the movement of people into cities. In my boyhood days, this was an agricultural country. The majority of people lived on the land and knew something about wildlife. They might not very much, but they knew the animals that were around them. They were mostly farmers or people in small towns who dealt with farmers all of the time. They knew something about the life cycles of animals. These people in the city don’t know a banana from a potato. This is the basic problem. Then, you’ve got a lot of emotional people who get very excited and emotional. You have to get emotional about something and a lot of them get emotional about wildlife. They get to the point where they….I’ve known people who thought it was terrible to kill anything. They wouldn’t even kill a mosquito. If one landed on their arm, they’d brush it off. They carry it to an extreme. MR. MARSHALL: But they are great steak eaters. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, when they start in on me, I say ‘well, how much meat do you eat?’ And then I tell them that they are not very consistent because something had to die to provide that meat. MR. MARSHALL: It just never occurred to them. MR. GABRIELSON: They don’t want to think about it. There is only one man I’ve ever met; and I’m not going to use his name because I have a lot of respect for his consistence; he won’t wear leather shoes because that’s the hide of an animal. He’ll wear sneakers or canvas shoes or some synthetics. He won’t eat meat of any kind. He won’t eat anything where something had to die to provide it to him. Henry Wallace was one of them. He was a complete vegetarian. He would eat eggs, and drink milk and he would eat cheese. I had lunch with him many times and I never saw him eat anything other than vegetables and fruit. BETTY MARSHALL: Wasn’t he a big man? MR. GABRIELSON: He was a tall gangly man. I had a lot of respect for Henry Wallace. I didn’t agree with his philosophy a lot but I’ve never known a man who lived up to his basic philosophy better than he did. He never swore. He was a fine human being. [Mrs. G. reminds Mr. G of something having to do with Mr. Wallace-unintelligible] MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, that was just a freak thing. I was always interested in those plants. I’d always try to bring them home and try to grow them. I had quite a collection of them. MRS. GABRIELSON: We happened to have a place where the soil was well drained. It was in an old river valley. Those mountain plants would grow there. MR. GABRIELSON: I was growing them and playing with them all of the time we were there. I had an uncle came out there. He had lost his business. He had been married to a woman who divorced him and pretty well cleaned him out. He came out to Portland and saw my plants at just about the time that the rock garden craze started in Portland. He came out with people who wanted to buy these plants. I wasn’t in the business. Finally, John said, “Why don’t we start a nursery? I’ll do the work; you just show me the plants.” So, we started a nursery. I showed him what to do with them and how to propagate them. I had five acres of ground so we started a nursery. We began to sell those plants. The wealthy women in town commenced to come out there prowl all over the place. We got one contract to build a gigantic rock garden for a very wealthy man. I think we sold him nearly everything we had that was ready to sell. I went to other nurseries and bought more. I think we did about $20,000.00 worth of work for him. One of the women who came kept wanting to out in the field with me. Well, I was working and I didn’t have time to drag a woman around with me. She was a married woman too. And I was married too. One day I was down in Grants Pass, Oregon working. I came in from the field all tired and dirty and Kirk says, “You wife is up in your room.” I said, “You’re crazy! My wife was in Portland with the kids.” He said, “Well, she said she was your wife, and I gave her a key.” So, I took another key and sure enough Clara was there! I said, “What in the hell are you doing here?” She said, “Mrs. Berry somehow found out that you were down here in southern Oregon.” The Siskew Mountains are a very old mountain range. And they’d got a whole flora of plants that are not found anywhere else in the world. I was working there. She had gone and found Clara and got a babysitter and brought her down to be there, so she could go out in the field with me. MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that beautiful! MR. GABRIELSON: So I took her out with me and showed her all of these plants and she went ape! Just nuts! The next day was Sunday so I took her out and showed her these plants. She went to England where there was a fellow running a very fancy English garden magazine that she was acquainted with. She started telling him about this trip and what she had seen. He asked her to write an article about it. She told she couldn’t do it, but she gave him my name. I got a letter from this guy wanting to know if I would do an article about the alpine plants in this area of Oregon. So I wrote the article, and sent some photos of the area I had taken. He sent me a thing that looked thing that looked like a horse blanket. So I began to write a lot of articles for this magazine. I don’t know how it started, but there was a fellow who ran a printing office in Harrisburg, and he was the father of the American Rose Society. I can’t remember his name. He wrote to me and told me that he had corresponded with the guy Cox, over in England. He wanted a piece on Alpine plants in North America. And he had asked this fellow in England to write something. He told me that the fellow in England wrote him back and told him that I was the only man in North America that could do it. I expect that there were lots of people, but I happened to be the only one that Cox knew. So this fellow wrote to me and said that he wanted me to do a monograph on American Alpine plants. He said he’d publish it if I would write it. I said, “Hell no!” I didn’t have any time to do a monograph. Finally I got a letter from his assistant, wanting to know if I ever came east. I had orders to go to Washington then. I said, “Yes, I’ll be back there in a few months.” And he said that he thought there was a misunderstanding. So I stopped in Harrisburg at this outfit’s headquarters. I talked to them and decided to write that book. That book was written on the train between Washington and Portland, Oregon mostly. MR. MARSHALL: This is called, Western American Alpines, by Ira Gabrielson; published in 1932 by MacMillan and Company. There is a forward by H. M. Cox of London. MR. GABRIELSON: That’s the fellow! MR. MARSHALL: [reading] … “He never hesitates from stating his opinion of a plants beauty and possibilities for the garden. And I for one am perfectly content to abide by his judgment.” I think this pretty well sums up what a lot of people think about Gabe and Clara! Yes indeed. MR. GABRIELSON: And I wrote most of it on the train! MR. MARSHALL: And speaking of writing, you know I asked you a number of years ago if you had any extra copies of your book on game management. You didn’t have any. But I found an old weather beaten copy down in Virginia somewhere. I meant to bring it over tonight so you could autograph it for me, but I’m going to bring it some other time. It’s not in very good shape but it’s a good book anyway. MRS. GABRIELSON: Have you got a copy of “A Little Bird Book”? MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ve got a copy in there unless the kids have carried it off. I’ve got a copy and it has Ira Gabrielson in it. It’s one of those little…. MR. GABRIELSON: It’s in that Golden Nature Series. I wrote the first one. MR. MARSHALL: We ought to bring that one out too. MRS. GABRIELSON: That little book has made him more money than anything else. MR. GABRIELSON: They’ve sold over 5 million copies of that. It called “Birds”. I’ve got a note from one of the people in the office from about a year ago saying, “You’ll be interested to know that this check covers the five millionth copy of your book that has been printed.” MR. MARSHALL: Incredible! When did you first write it? MR. GABRIELSON: It was published in about 1950 or 1951; after the end of the World War. MR. MARSHALL: How many books have you written, roughly? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know. There were three MacMillan books, the little bird book, and a book which was not published by MacMillan; they sold it to MacMillan. I can’t think of the name of it. Old Horace McFarland. There was Birds of Alaska, and Birds of Oregon. I edited the Fisherman’s Encyclopedia, and I wrote most of it. MR. MARSHALL: I remember you told me about that one. MR. GABRIELSON: I wrote part of the Taylor’s Garden Encyclopedia. BETTY MARSHALL: Would you say that you had awful good science teachers when you were in college? MR. GABRIELSON: I never took any botany in school. I knew more about birds than my boss the zoologist. BETTY MARSHALL: Well, where did you learn it from? MR. GABRIELSON: I just learned it. When I was a kid, I had names for the birds. I had no books. BETTY MARSHALL: Well where did you get the names? MR. GABRIELSON: I made them out of my head! MR. MARSHALL: He had a way to classify them in his own way. MR. GABRIELSON: I got to know the birds that were around where I was living. There were no bird books like you have now. I had names of my own for them. The first book I got my mother bought for me. It wasn’t a very good bird book, but I thought it was wonderful. It was Apgar’s Birds of the Eastern United States. Mother found it somewhere and got it for me. MR. MARSHALL: How old were you then? MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was about 14 of 15. MR. MARSHALL: Back in Iowa. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. And I can’t remember when I didn’t know about plants. Mother was a gardener and a damned good one. She gave me a little patch of land out behind the house and I had all of the wildflowers growing that I liked from along the Little Sioux River. BETTY MARSHALL: I’ve tried, but never been too successful in our yard. I know that the daisies do better in the sun. MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, most of the daisies like the sunlight. There is one that will grow in the shade but it’s not a very pretty one. MRS. GABRIELSON: [unintelligible]….they’ve sent some people, some botanists to learn all about these plants that he has put in. One of them said, “Oh, what a botanist you are!” And Ira says, “I’m not a botanist at all!” BETTY MARSHALL: Just by nature you turned out to be. MR. GABRIELSON: I just know plants. MR. MARSHALL: I’d like to get some holly from you some time. MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve got lots of little seedlings. MR. MARSHALL: Have you? MR. GABRIELSON: Sure. They come up all over the place. If you want some, I’ll take a spade and fix it so you could move them in the fall. I don’t think you’d better move them move them now it’s late. I filled Larry’s yard. MR. MARSHALL: I know. He’s very proud of the stuff that you have given him. He’s got a lot of things coming on now. MR.GABRIELSON: I’ve given a lot of people holly, but you’ve got to root trim them a year before. MRS. GABRIELSON: And you’ve got to prune the tops as well. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after you dig them you do. The leaves are there to stimulate growth of the new feeder roots until you have a ball of them. Tomorrow, I’ll go and dig some holes around them. MR. MARSHALL: Speaking of tomorrow, it’s getting late and maybe we ought to be moving along here. MR. GABIELSON: You don’t have to go. My bedtime is midnight! BETTY MARSHALL: Do you have a favorite TV show? MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t ever watch television. We don’t have a TV that’s any good. BETTY MARSHALL: We don’t either! The best one we had was one that the neighbors were going to throw in the garbage. MRS. GABRIELSON: We have one that June had here. But I don’t know how to turn in on. MR. GABRIELSON: I tell you, all of the writing I’ve ever done, I’ve done at night. MR. MARSHALL: Me too. MR. GABRIELSON: Listening to that damn stuff interferes with my work habits. I’ve gotten more fun out of life than any individual is entitled to. MRS. GABRIELSON: He always says that throughout his life he’s done everything he would have been doing if he were independently wealthy. MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wonderful! That’s a great thing to be able to say! We talked about going back and forth to Richmond. I am enjoying what I am doing down there. But I am not enjoying the commute and so forth. I’m kind of torn between two desires. We like it up here, and …. MR. GABRIELSON: Well, you just move the Game Department up here! MR. MARSHALL: That’s a good idea. Except I think they’d all commit suicide if they had to come up here! MR. GABRIELSON: Tell them to come to Northern Virginia; they don’t have to go to work! BETTY MARSHALL: Northern Virginia is an awful word! It’s Northern Virginia versus Richmond like the north and south again! MR. GABRIELSON: Northern Virginia is a foreign country as far and the southern half of Virginia is concerned. MR. MARSHALL: You’re right! South of Fredericksburg is a no mans land. So I have a passport so I can go between! BETTY MARSHALL: In the winter, spring, fall, you name it, they can have ten inches of snow in Richmond, and would any local station talk about it? We won’t have any, but we’d never know that they did because the radio stations won’t talk about it. MR. GABRIELSON: Richmond gets more snow that we do because they are closer to the mountains. MR. MARSHALL: It’s amazing. It’s called the fall line. MR. GABRIELSON: We sometimes get the effects of the storms that come from the west. Generally those storms come this way and go out the St. Lawrence Valley. We get the southern edge of them. The storms that produce the most snow come up the coast. And as they come, they swing east of here. Sometimes they get more snow in Norfolk than we get here. MR. MARSHALL: I am looking now at a picture that Clara just showed me. It’s their wedding picture. This was in Iowa in August of 1912. This is beautiful. And this one is 50 years later! MRS. GABRIELSON: It was taken right here. MR. MARSHALL: Well that is just beautiful. MRS. GABRIELSON: You can’t imagine we are the same people! MR. MARSHALL: You’ve had a very interesting time haven’t you? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, all our lives. This summer it will be 62 years that we’ve been married. MR. MARSHALL: Good heavens! You know one thing I wanted to ask you was about how you got started going up to that place in Canada. It’s in Quebec isn’t it? MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, it is. Messine is the Post Office. When we first went there, it was Messine, but if you sent a telegram the railroad had to go to Burbedge. It was right in the same place. MR. MARSHALL: When did you get that place? MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Ira was Director of the old Biological Survey. And they had some kind of international meeting. It was in January I believe. He and the Canadian representative got along beautifully. They settled their problem right away. But the State Department people and the Canadian Department of External Affairs had to worry about the wording of these things. It meant that they were going to have to stay over a weekend. Ira had no one. But there was a man who graduated from the University of Iowa and whose thesis was written about the birds of Iowa. It had been Ira’s bible for years. He called Dr. Anderson up and asked if there wasn’t some place we could go and get out of this town for the weekend? Dr. Anderson took him up the Gatineau River. He couldn’t get up to their place which is on the same island that we later built on. He had a friend who had a cottage up in that area. Ira liked the looks of the country. Because of that, and through the Andersons, we were able to rent a place which was right next to their place on Big Island on Blue Sea Lakes. ….Ira had promised the girls that he would take them on a trip in the summer so they could learn the eastern part of the country. But that didn’t appeal to them. They didn’t want to go anywhere but up to Blue Sea Lake. We found that the lot next to it was for sale, so we bought that in 1938. In 1939 we built our house. We’ve been up there every year except the year I almost died and the year I broke my ankle. MR. MARSHALL: I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s beautiful. MRS. GABRIELSON: We have about four acres up there. And the island was divided so that everyone had lake shore. And the lots go up to a peak. MR. GABRIELSON: Our part of the island has never been logged. It’s got virgin timber on it. MR. MARSHALL: When do you go? MR. GABRIELSON: About the first of July. The ice doesn’t go out of the lake until some time in May. Last year they told me it was May 15th. MR. MARSHALL: Did those folks up there have a big party for you up there didn’t they? MR. GABRIELSON: It was our 60th wedding anniversary. MRS. GABRIELSON: It was just remarkable. The things that people would go to so much trouble to do for you. MR. GABRIELSON: It was all of the people on the island; all of the people we knew. They had the wing-ding in the biggest house there was which was on the main land. All of the people on the main land could drive. All of the people on the island had to take a boat. MRS. GABRIELSON: There wasn’t enough dock space for everybody. Some came by car, and we divided up the boats and commuted together. They shipped lobster in and had a lobster dinner for us. Of course we had plenty to drink. After the dinner was over they had fireworks! They had all of the youngsters coming by lighting them! MR. MARSHALL: Here’s a picture of the house on Blue Sea Lake up in Quebec. And here’s a book on Wildlife Refuges. It was done in 1943. There’s this other one on Wildlife Conservation which was done in 1941. MR GABRIELSON: There’s another one on wildlife management that I did for the Service. MR. MARSHALL: Oh and here’s Birds of Oregon. I haven’t seen this one. That was done in 1940. MR. GABRIELSON: I worked on that one for years. Look at the picture. It’s a painting that Murie did that up on the Boukshe River on the Olympic Mounds long before it was a Park. He made a sketch while we were out together. I had collected one. He told me that when I finished the book, he would do the frontispiece and put that owl on it. MR. MARSHALL: And here we have it right here. It’s a Northern Spotted Owl, “a rare inhabitant of the dense spruce and fur forest”. It’s from a painting by O. J. Murie. Gee wiz, this is beautiful. I’m looking through here and seeing so many nice things. Here’s a bird that has always intrigued me, the Loon. MR. GABRIELSON: We have them up at the lake and we like them. MR. MARSHALL: I think they are my favorite bird. MR. GABRIELSON: We have them on the lake all of the time. MR. MARSHALL: They are aptly named aren’t they? MR. GABRIELSON: They have that laugh that sounds like a maniac almost. At dawn and sometimes at night they’ll get in the air and fly around the island and call. It’s a different kind of call. MR. MARSHALL: It’s a different call. Not a giggle. It is kind of haunting. MR. GABRIELSON: There are several pair that breed each year up at the lake. MR. MARSHALL: We haven’t talked about the subject of firearms. What would you say was your favorite kind of shooting? MR. GABRIELSON: I grew up with a waterfowl loader. It’s the only real game we had. I did get a few Prairie Chickens in the last end of them. We still had a few nesting on our place long after we quit shooting them. We didn’t have any other upland game birds in the country where I grew up, but we had lots of waterfowl. We were down at the south end of a little chain of lakes and marshes that came from the Ocabogue Lake. It came right down through the country and we had lots of geese and lots of ducks. MR. MARSHALL: I grew up in Minneapolis and around Minnesota as you know. I guess my favorite kind of hunting was pheasant hunting. MR. GABRIELSON: There were no pheasants when I was growing up. MR. MARSHALL: I used to go waterfowl hunting but for some reason my Dad never was much of a waterfowl hunter. He did like to hunt pheasants. You know, you go along with what your Dad did. I can remember that in the fall when the season was in, we’d go every weekend. Then he’d come and get me after school sometimes and we’d go ‘til dark. I guess that’s why I am so intrigued with the pheasants here in Virginia. One of the things that interests me from when I’ve hunted with these people from Virginia. Now they are getting accustomed to the pheasants because we’ve have four seasons. Both of the guys; some of the people from the Game Commission and others had never hunted pheasants. They reacted so strangely; as did their dogs! The dogs couldn’t believe what was happening with these pheasants. They were so used to hunting quail. You know what a pheasant will do! Sometimes if you don’t hit him square and when he might be wounding but he’s running 45 miles an hour before he hits the ground! This just threw the dogs all off. They didn’t know what to make of that! It’s quite a bird! MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve done some pheasant hunting, but I didn’t do it growing up out west. They had lots of pheasants in Oregon. That’s where they started in about 1890. MR. MARSHALL: I’m trying to remember now. Our first year we had a two day season. We killed about 225 here in Virginia. Since then we’ve had a one week season. We’ve been averaging about 400 a year. MR. GABRIELSON: Is that mostly in the Shenandoah Valley? MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. But strangely enough, the second highest county was Loudoun. Page County was the highest and then Loudoun. That’s going to change I think. MR. GABRIELSON: There’s got to be grain fields before they’ll do too good. MR. MARSHALL: The thing that intrigued me out in Page County was that it was very reminiscent of Iowa and the Dakotas and Minnesota. There were little grain fields and plowed fields and brushy ditches and some woods. It was also near some water. It was good habitat for pheasant. It looked like pheasant habitat. MR. GABRIELSON: That’s why I asked if it was the Shenandoah Valley earlier. It looks like pheasant country. MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, and there was some corn too. MR. GABRIELSON: We see one here once in a while but I think they are escapes from some of these feeding farms. There was for a long time a shooting place up here, you know, one of those controlled shoots? They brought in birds and turned them loose. I’ve seen some turkey down there. MR. MARSHALL: You know, I’ve never killed a wild turkey. That’s something I want to do. MR. GABRIELSON: I have. MR. MARSHALL: I know, darn it! I don’t begrudge you that, I’d just like to do it myself! This last spring gobbler season I took my daughter Nancy, whom you’ve met. She goes to school out in Harrisonburg. I arranged for her to be able to go along. I also brought Eric who is the youngest. We went out and spent the night in Harrisonburg and met with a couple of the people from the Game Commission who had taken the day off and we went hunting. My daughter went with those two guys. My son went with me. My son and I didn’t hear anything. But Max Carpenter who was with Nancy got a 21 ½ pounder with a nine inch beard! It was really a beautiful bird. What was so thrilling to me was that Nancy was with him when he got it. She heard him gobble and called. She was a little bit dismayed to see this bird shot, but I think she was still kind of proud that she was long. MR. GABRIELSON: I had a funny experience once when we had started home from south Texas. A friend of mine in Kingsville, which is only about 100 miles, wanted me to stop and go fishing with him. I had my fishing tackle in the car. He wanted me to take my fly rod. I went out to a little bit of a pond they had on this little place. There might have been two or three acres of it. He fished with bait. I said, “I want to see you catch something with that fly rod.” There are brim and black bass in here. There might have been brim, but I never had one of them strike it. He was fishing with shrimp. I took a look at that shrimp and picked the nearest colored fly that I could find. I started to fish and you know, I got three beautiful large mouthed Bass with a fly. He just didn’t believe it! He said, “What are you using!?” I told him, “Just a dirty little bunch of feathers!” MR. MARSHALL: You know what of the hottest fishing lakes in the state right now is called Lake Anna, which is down here about two hours south west of here. It is the VEPCO [Virginia Electric Power Company] impoundment for the cooling of their water from the towers. So far it’s terrific for bass. It slacked off a couple of weeks ago because the bass were on the beds, but it picking up again. There is a lot of controversy about this because VEPCO says that it’s going to continue to be good fishing. Our biologists and the Atomic Energy Commission say that this isn’t going to be the case. When they put those reactors on line the water is going to heat up and it’s going to destroy all of the microorganisms that the young bass eat. And consequently if they don’t have anything to eat they aren’t going to make it. MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right. MR. MARSHALL: So we heard two sides of the coin. We had an outdoors writers meeting, and one night we heard our biologist and the next night we heard the VEPCO people. Of course they painted it all in glowing colors. But the inevitable…. [end of tape 2] |
Images Source File Name | 9268.pdf |
Date created | 2012-12-13 |
Date modified | 2013-03-06 |
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