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HENRY, Dick12-06-0603__Corrected
U.S. Department of AgricultureForest Service
Region Five History Project
Interview with: [Richard] “Dick” HenryInterviewed by: Janet BuzziniLocation: Chico, CaliforniaDate: December 6, 2006Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; January 2007
[Begin CD Track 1.]
JANET BUZZONI: This interview is taking place in Chico, California, at the home of Dick and
Nancy Henry, H-e-n-r-y. Today’s date is Wednesday, December 6, 2006. My name is Janet
Buzzini, B-u-z-z-i-n-i, and I will be conducting today’s interview with Dick Henry.
Hi, Dick, how are you?
DICK HENRY: Fine, thank you.
BUZZINI: Dick, I would like to begin by asking where you were born and where you grew up.
HENRY: I was born in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, a small town right on the ocean, in
1938. I grew up in that town. My father lived in that town his entire life, and when I went off to
school, why, some of the teachers I had had also taught my father, so it was kind of a noticeably
small town.
BUZZINI: Where did you attend school, and what was your major?
HENRY: I went to Penn State, and my major was forestry. I attended Penn State because New
Jersey only offered a two-year program at Rutgers [University], followed by three years in North
Carolina, so I went to Penn State as the closest place to get a degree in forestry.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 2
BUZZINI: Dick, I’d like you to tell us a little about your family, how many children you have,
and about your wife.
HENRY: Our family is a total of five. My wife, Nancy, and three children: Becky, Chris, and
Scott. Becky is now forty-two years of age, and Chris and Scott are thirty-seven. They are not
twins. We wanted to have a family, and we had some problems with miscarriages after our
daughter was born, so we decided to adopt, so our middle child is adopted. And then Scott, our
youngest, was born to us. So their birthdays are nine months and three days apart in age. I
sometimes—if people look at me when I mention that it was nine months and three days apart in
age, I sometimes forget to tell them that one of them was adopted. If they are really kind of
snooty, I don’t say anything else, just let them go off with that.
BUZZINI: You just let them think—yes.
HENRY: Nancy, I met in college, in Penn State forestry school. In those days, you went to
southern Pennsylvania, to the second forest academy in the nation, founded in 1906. Nancy was
in Chambersburg, about fifteen miles away, at an all-girls’ college. They were going to have a
dance one evening, and another college couldn’t make it, so Wilson College, where she went,
called over to the forestry school to see if any of the foresters would come. I got on the truck we
went to church in and went to the field in, and went over to the college. I wondered why I was
there.
There were girls on the far side of the room, and some of the boys on my side of the room
were just standing there, wondering why they were there, when I noticed a very tall young lady
and a short young lady were heading across to the boys’ side. They stopped in the middle of the
floor. There was a slight discussion. The short lady went back to the girls’ side of the room, and
the tall one kept walking towards me. And so we danced the first dance, and it’s always easier to
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 3
ask somebody you’ve already danced with to dance, so we had the second dance, and then she
said [sic; asked] where did I go to church, and I said, “The Methodist Church in Chambersburg,”
and she went to the Presbyterian. And I said, Oh, well, no difference between those two, so I got
off the truck at the Presbyterian church, and we’d see each other on Sunday.
That was in October 1956, and we’ve been married now forty-five years this past April
Fool’s Day. Yes, I was married on April first, because—the reason I was married on April first
was because the men were expected to pay for all the flowers in the church, and Nancy went to a
very large Presbyterian church, and if I had enough money to buy all the flowers, I would have
had another semester’s worth of money at school, so we decided to get married on the Saturday
before Easter because the church would be decorated with lilies, and there was a big lily cross up
in the front of the church, on scaffolding. It was beautiful, and so we decided to get married on
that date.
BUZZINI: Good for you.
HENRY: We told her mother and father, “Well, we’ve decided to get married next spring, the
Saturday before Easter.” Her father thought that was great, and he shook my hand and hugged
Nancy, and her mother came running into the living room. “You can’t get married that day. It’s
April Fool’s Day. You can’t get married on April Fool’s Day.” And I said, “Well, look at it this
way: I’ll never forget an anniversary.” I’ve never forgotten an anniversary, and it’s been going
great for forty-five years.
BUZZINI: Good for you.
Dick, let’s get into now the kind of summer jobs you held, positions that better qualified
you for your lifelong dream with the Forest Service.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 4
HENRY: Well, most of the summer jobs I had were to make money to get back in college and
were on the Atlantic coast, so I didn’t get into forestry work until 1960. In my previous years,
I’d worked in a soda factory. I had delivered soda. I worked on the boardwalk selling French
fries and hamburgers. I cut the lawn at the library. I did those kinds of jobs.
But in 1960 another classmate and I took the big leap and went to California, and we
went to the Willows District on the Mendocino National Forest—there was a Willows Ranger
District on the Mendocino at the time, where Dean Lloyd, L-l-o-y-d, was the district ranger. We
got assigned as foremen of a San Quentin inmate prison crew. Back in those days, there were
four federally-operated state prison camps. Two were on the Tahoe [National Forest], one on the
Mendocino and one on the Lassen [National Forest]. And so I spent the summer months with
that crew. Nineteen sixty was a bad fire year. From July third until I quit work in October, I had
only one day off. We just fought fire and fought fire and fought fire.
And it was back in the days of the good old 25 percent differential, and so your sixth day,
you only got 25 percent of your pay for thirteen hours. And then on Sunday you actually got
straight pay. In those days, there was no such thing as time and a half or that kind of thing. So I
did that job, and that helped me considerably because I kept in contact with the Mendocino,
specifically the Willows District, and I let them know when I was going to graduate, which was
December 1962.
So in October ’62, I got a telegram at ten o’clock one night, and it was from Region Five
saying, “Will you accept if offered GS-5 job? Mendocino National Forest, Willows, California.”
Which I immediately sent back a telegram saying yes. And that’s how I got on, and I believe
that working for the district in that job with the inmates is what had the district be comfortable
with me returning.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 5
BUZZINI: Dick, what made you decide to pursue a career with the Forest Service? You said
you went to forestry school, so obviously you were thinking about it for a long time.
HENRY: Actually, I was thinking about it for just a short time. I had all my life wanted to be a
[sic; an] engineer, a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer. And I went off to interview at
several colleges. I went to Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is a
very famous engineering school, but they looked over my grades. And, for instance, my grades
in history were 100. For three years, I got 100 in civics and history, and for four years I got 100
in English, and I did extremely well in other subjects, except in math I only had an 87 average
for four years in high school. Now, a lot of folks would think an 87 average was pretty good,
because it included solid geometry and trigonometry, but what the college person recommended
was that my interest really wasn’t in engineering, because I didn’t do as well in mathematics, and
suggested that I look for another field of endeavor.
So I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was devastated after that. I sent off for a
catalog from Penn State, just kind of on a whim, and I started leafing through the Penn State
catalog, and I found this course called Forestry, and I read up on it, and you built bridges, you
did surveying, you did a whole bunch of things that I really wanted to do as an engineer, so I
thought, Well, this is a back way into the engineering business, and I’ll go to forestry school. So
I signed up to go to forestry, and the more I was involved in it—
And back in those days, you actually did forestry things. In my freshman year, we
managed the Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, watershed, and we cut trees for pulp and paper
companies, for printing purposes, and we had our own sawmill on campus, and we made ties for
the Pennsylvania Railroad, and as we made those, we put them on a flatcar on the siding right
next to our sawmill on campus, and off they went.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 6
So I really got turned onto the forestry business, and then, as I said, in 1960 I went out to
California, heading up an inmate crew, and really got turned on, and so it was not a lifelong
dream, it was a change in direction based on a counselor, who [sic; whom] I don’t know and I’ve
never seen again, telling me not to do that.
Following my interview with that counselor, I went to my high school guidance
counselor and asked her what she knew about forestry and what she could tell me. So she went
to her catalog in her file cabinet, and in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, no one ever wanted to
become a forester. There was no interest in forestry. She didn’t have the slightest idea what it
was about and couldn’t find any literature on it. So I was on my own, and so on my own I
became a forester, and I believe had a fairly successful career with the United States Forest
Service, enjoyed it immensely and enjoyed all the challenges, and I’m very happy that I decided
that’s what I was going to do.
BUZZINI: Good for you. So you signed on the dotted line in 1962?
HENRY: In 1962 I signed on the dotted line. I was administered the oath by Coco Kiuttu, K-i-
u-t-t-u. Secoro del Roso Kiuttu is her name. Coco went on from being the district clerk at the
Willows District to administrative officer on I believe the Sequoia or the Sierra National Forest.
Became a GS-13, one of the first women in the outfit to go that high. So a really neat person
swore me into the outfit.
A really interesting district ranger was my first ranger, Dean Lloyd. He once came out to
where I was doing some thinning with the inmates, and we did our own marking, and then the
inmates cut to our markings, so we had a paint gun in our hand while they were working. So I
see Dean Lloyd pull up in his pickup truck, and it was a very dark green. We were in the process
of changing from very dark green to the, quote, “Forest Service safety green.” And on the roof
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 7
of this truck was about a ten-foot-long antennae [sic; antenna], which we had for years until we
got into the new radio business.
And he walked up the hill from his truck and said, “Well, Dick, why did you mark that
tree right here?” And I said, “Well, I marked it for these reasons.” He said, “Well, it was good
that you marked it. All of your reasons were wrong, and this is why you should have marked it,
and I’m glad that you marked it. But in the future, these are the reasons you should mark these
trees.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Well, good talking with you,” and he walked down
off the hill and got in his truck and drove off, and I didn’t see him again for several months.
That was Dean.
BUZZINI: Good.
Tell us which national forests you’ve worked on during your Forest Service career, and
then we’ll get into the different positions you held.
HENRY: Okay. Well, the forests I worked on was [sic; were] the Willows District of the
Mendocino—
BUZZINI: Yes, and you can do some dates.
HENRY: Do you want me to do the dates now?
BUZZINI: Yes, that’s good.
HENRY: I started on the Mendocino as a professional in January 1963, and I was a forester.
After sixty days on the district, I became the timber stand improvement forester. I then went to
work as a timber sale officer. Following that, I transferred to the Upper Lake District on the
Mendocino, where I was the assistant district ranger. Back in those days, the assistant district
ranger had the same authority as the district ranger. In other words, we were a line officer [sic;
were line officers], and when he was absent we could make line decisions.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 8
I held that job for four years, when I went to the Sierra National Forest in 1969. While I
was there, I was the STET timber management officer on the Minarets Ranger District, which
had just been combined. Excuse me, that’s not correct. You need to back up to where I moved
to the Sierra. I went to the Sierra as a GS-11 district timber management officer on the
combined districts. And while I was on the forest, my last few months on the forest, I became
the director of the largest Youth Conservation Corps camp in the nation at Minarets. It was up in
the forest at the Minarets work center, where I had sixty-five young men in the Youth
Conservation Corps program.
It was really interesting being in that program in its first year, since they were writing the
manual on how to manage that program during the summer that I was running the program, and
they got all of the manual put together on how to run the program in the late fall, after all of the
programs had shut down on the forests for the winter months.
From that position, I went to the Eldorado National Forest, on the Pacific District, where
I was the district resource officer in charge of recreation, wildlife, range management, et cetera,
on the district—everything except timber. And I swapped positions with another fellow. Both
rangers felt that we needed experience in the other field, so we actually transferred the same day
and moved into each other’s former house on the ranger district the same day.
Following that, in 1972, I went to be the ranger at Happy Camp [Ranger District] on the
Klamath National Forest. The forest had interviewed me several months earlier to be the district
ranger down on the Salmon River District, and they would not allow you to say whether you
were okay with accepting that job or not until you and your wife had traveled to Salmon River,
and then when you came back from Salmon River you could tell them whether you wished to be
considered or not considered.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 9
So we went down to Salmon River, and we got to the pass out of Fort Jones and looked
down the Salmon River. It was a gravel road for many a mile, and we decided to plunge off the
pass and head for the district office. And we’re going around this huge curve on the side of the
hill, and there’s the Forest Service name sign on the hill that says: Joltass Joe Curve,” and we felt
we were stepping back in history a little bit with the use of that name.
We continued on downriver, and a telephone company truck passed us, and the fellow in
the truck waved to us, and we waved back, and we got to the bottom of the hill, and there was
another telephone truck, and there was a person on the ground and a lineman on spurs up on the
top of the telephone pole, and the guy on the ground waved to us, and the guy up on top of the
pole waved to us. And I said to Nancy, “Well, maybe it’s not that they are so friendly, it’s that
they’re lonely.”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: So we kept going, and we got to the district office, which was considerably small. We
saw Betty Lou Kessler, who had lived with us on the Upper Lake District. Her husband [was]
[Richard] “Dick” Kessler, K-e-s-s-l-e-r, who was in Timber management. She was there, and
she had created this beautiful quilt, and Nancy saw this beautiful quilt, and she responded, “Yes,
that was my project for last winter. I don’t know what I’m going to do this winter.”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: And she said, “Oh, we’ve got to go. I’ve got to get to the post office.” And I said,
“Well, what’s the hurry?” She said, “It’s only open one hour a day, and you can go get your
mail and buy stamps, but the rest of the time it’s open, and you can go to your mailbox and get
your mail out, but you don’t have anybody you can talk to.” I found out that the zip code for the
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 10
post office down there was the same as for Fort Jones. They shared it because apparently
Salmon River wasn’t big enough to deserve its own zip code.
Well, after looking at all the things there, we were also going to have to farm out our
children to grammar school up at Fort Jones and just see them on Saturdays and Sundays during
the school year. The county didn’t plow the road except during daylight hours after the storm
was over, so we had gone through a lot of trouble to have a family, and we decided that we
weren’t going to put us through that.
At the time, I then said, “No, I do not wish to be considered for this job.” I had the
terrible gut feeling that I was never going to be a district ranger, that I had gotten myself off of
that list, and I wanted to be a district ranger so badly, because I felt you had to be a district
ranger to get to be a forest supervisor, and I wanted to be a forest supervisor.
So it was a long, quiet drive home from the Klamath, and a few months later we got
called and offered the Happy Camp job. In later years, I kind of thought maybe they wanted me
to go see the Salmon River job just kind of for effect and that when I heard about the Happy
Camp job I’d be thrilled and take it.
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: And I was thrilled, and I did take it. And Happy Camp was bigger than Salmon River,
but it had a lot of the quaint things going on there that Salmon River did. So I was ranger in
Happy Camp until 1977, when I went to the chief’s office to become the new national fuels
management officer. I held that job for a while, and then Hank deBruin, little d-e big B-r-u-i-n,
was the director. I have to tell you that probably one of the best people I ever worked for in the
Forest Service was Hank deBruin. And folks had funny thoughts of Hank. He had been the
director of public information and then got moved over to be the fire director. There were a lot
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 11
of people thought how can a guy in public information become the fire director? Well, in
Washington you have to know how to play the politics and know who’s on first and who [sic;
whom] you should talk to and who [sic; whom] you shouldn’t talk to and who [sic; whom] you
should say what to and who [sic; whom] you shouldn’t say not what to. And Hank de Bruin was
the best person I ever saw operating in the Washington office.
And so I was his fuels management officer, and he thought I was doing a pretty fair job at
that. He didn’t like his budget officer. In fact, he transferred him to a forest in Utah, and he
thought the budget job was just kind of a part-time job, and so I became the budget officer for the
national fire budget as well, which really was a full-time job.
And then I got put on the planning team that developed the national fire management
analysis system called NFMAS [pronounced NIFF-mas], and went around the country training
people in how to handle that program.
Following that, they asked me to go to—by that time, we had changed fire directors. The
assistant director was still—in the Washington office, yes.
BUZZINI: Okay.
HENRY: Just a second. Why am I going to tell you that?
BUZZINI: You were trying to get names and places and dates and all that in here.
HENRY: Okay, yes, okay.
BUZZINI: Go.
HENRY: I worked in the Washington office, where my boss was [Lawrence A.] “Mic”
Amicarella. Mic had been a forest supervisor in Colorado, and he didn’t really have any
experience in fire, so it was kind of a challenge to deal with Mic. He also was great at leaping to
conclusions, and so you had to make sure the first verb and noun out of your mouth was on the
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 12
subject, because if you started off with pleasantries, he wanted you to get to the subject and that
was it, so he was a different style boss.
BUZZINI: Could you spell his name?
HENRY: Mick, M-i-c. Last name, A-m-i-c-a-r-e-l-l-a.
BUZZINI: Thank you.
HENRY: Are you interested in neat things I did while I was in the Washington office, or—
BUZZINI: Why don’t we wait and do that—
HENRY: —do you want to save that till later?
BUZZINI: —at the end of our time.
HENRY: Okay.
BUZZINI: And just continue with the dates and places of your different assignments.
HENRY: Okay. Then in 1969, the—no, that’s the wrong date. In 1970, Gary Cargill, last name
C-a-r-g-i-l-l, was the fire director. And he and Mic Amicarella asked me to consider three
different jobs, because they felt that I needed a change. One of the jobs would be to be promoted
from the Washington office, where I was a GS-13, and become a -14 as a national forest
supervisor. Another job would be to lateral out as a -13 and become a deputy forest supervisor,
and another job would be to go to Marana, Arizona, and become the director of the National
Advanced Resource Technology Center, which taught mainly upper-level, graduate student-level
fire courses but also did training in mining and lands activities.
A correction to my dates. I moved to the Washington office in ’77 and then to Tucson in
1980.
Oh, Nancy, something’s wrong here.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 13
[Recording interruption.]
BUZZINI: —three jobs, and you chose that one.
HENRY: Okay.
BUZZINI: Okay.
HENRY: So they asked me to consider three jobs, and so I said, “I’ll talk it over with Nancy
tonight and let you know tomorrow.” So I talked it over with Nancy, and we felt it would be
great to get promoted from the Washington office and go out as a forest supervisor. So the next
morning, I went back to Mic and said, “We’d prefer to take the -14 forest supervisor job and
make the move wherever, if you want me to be forest supervisor.” And Mic said, “Well, that’s
not really the job we wanted you to take.” And I said, “Oh.” He said, “We’d like you to
consider the other two jobs.” And so I said, “Well, I will, but I’ll talk with Nancy, and I’ll let
you know tomorrow.”
So I came back the next day and said, “We’d prefer to stay in Washington and take a
promotion in place.” And Mic said, “That’s not really the job we wanted you to take.” I said,
“You want me to go to Marana?” I said, “I don’t want to go to Marana. Nobody has ever left
Marana and become a forest supervisor. The people that leave Marana go off to be staff
assistants someplace, but there’s never been a forest supervisor come out of Marana.”
And he said, “That’s not a rule.” I said, “Well, it looks like it, because,” I said, “Marana
has been around for a long time, and nobody has ever come out of Marana and become a forest
supervisor. Even coming out of Marana and going to another job and then to forest supervisor.
Nobody’s ever done that, so I don’t want to go to Marana because I want to be a forest
supervisor.” And he said, “Well, we really want you to take that job.”
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 14
So Gary Cargill said, “Dick, I will support you for becoming a forest supervisor after
you’ve gone to Marana.” He said, “We have problems at Marana. We feel it’s being run too
much like a country club, and we want it to be run as an educational facility, and we think you’re
the person to go out and make that happen, and that’s why we want you to go to Marana, and I
promise you that I will support you to be a forest supervisor following that.”
BUZZINI: Why didn’t they tell you that in the beginning?
HENRY: Yes. But they were hoping I’d pick Marana, for some reason. Anyway, off I went to
Marana, where I enjoyed changing things around. When I arrived at Marana we had nine staff—
BUZZINI: When did you begin there?
HENRY: I began Marana in 19—[Pause.] Stop the tape.
[Recording interruption.]
BUZZINI: Okay.
HENRY: So in 1980 I went off to Marana, and I decided I was going to be the best director that
had ever been at Marana and that I was going to cause problems for Amicarella and Cargill not
knowing what to do with me because I would be so good at running the Marana operation that I
could be a forest supervisor, I could be virtually anything, but I wasn’t going to let them send me
off as some assistant staff someplace.
So off I went to Marana. I arrived. There were nine staff, and they taught four courses a
year. When I left Marana, we had eight staff, and we did fourteen courses a year, including an
international course in fire training for three weeks conducted solely in the Spanish language.
And we taught courses in minerals management and several other areas, lands area. So I started
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 15
watching who was going off to become forest supervisors, and I called Gary Cargill, and I said,
“You know, I’ve been here five years. I really think it’s time for me to move on, and are you
still going to support me as a forest supervisor?” He said, “Yes, I am, Dick.”
So the next thing I see is that the Eldorado has been filled by a guy out of Region Six,
and I thought, I want to go to Region Five because that’s where all the action is, and I’m hoping
I get a Region Five national forest, and I hope Gary thinks I can get a Region Five national
forest. Well, after I see who’s going there and I’m doing all this thinking, I get a call from Gary
Cargill, who said, “You’ve probably seen who’s gotten the Eldorado. You are going to get a
Region Five forest, but that’s not the one. Don’t panic.”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: And about two weeks later, I was offered the job of forest supervisor on the Lassen
National Forest. I really enjoyed that tour. I got to do a whole bunch of things, which we’ll talk
about later.
BUZZINI: When did you begin there?
HENRY: I began there in 1984, and I was forest supervisor for six years, the longest I was in
any position, and was there until 1990. In 1990 I was looking around for jobs, and the regional
fire director’s job in Region Six was open, so I applied for that but was not accepted. Then I
went off on detail to the regional office as deputy regional forester for six months and got to
work with Paul Barker a lot and had some really neat experiences in the regional office. When
the forest supervisor’s position was coming towards an end, six years having been the longest
time I’d been in any position, Paul said that I should apply for the fire director’s job in the
regional office. There was another fellow that wanted the job, and Mic Amicarella and the
deputy chief of—[Pause.]. West.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 16
BUZZINI: [Allan] “Al” West?
HENRY: Al West was the deputy chief, who promised him the job. And so there was a period
of time for people to take the acting job of fire director, and Paul Barker told me not to apply for
that. And so the other fellow applied for that, and I had a good feeling that he would be getting
that job. Paul had an agreement with Al West and Mic Amicarella that they would not propose
anybody else, that they will let him select his fire director.
Well, on the Friday night before the Monday that the selection was to be made, David
Jay, deputy regional forester, was in the Washington office, and he heard that Mic and Al were
going to nominate this other fellow for the job come Monday morning, so Paul said, “Well, I’ll
take care of that.” So Paul called George Leonard. George Leonard was the associate chief.
George also had been in Region Five and knew me when I was in timber management because
he was the timber director at one time. And Paul said he wanted Dick Henry because 1) he liked
working with him and we had a good rapport, and he felt that the regional forester’s office
needed a forest supervisor on staff because that’s where the reality was, people who had recently
worked on forests, needed to understand how things went on forests, and he wanted a forest
supervisor in the job.
So come Monday morning, recommendations were made by Al West and Mic
Amicarella, and George Leonard made a recommendation that Dick Henry become the director,
and so moved, I became the director. So it was under some tense days, weeks and months that I
was the director, since the favorite of the Washington office fire director and the deputy chief
was for a different person. I had to deal with—
BUZZINI: You had to prove yourself.
HENRY: —that. Yes, I had to, yes, more than prove myself, because it was really a bad taste.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 17
BUZZINI: When did you begin your assignment as director?
HENRY: I began in 1990 as the director and retired from that job in 1994, on doctor’s orders. I
really loved that job, and I wanted to become a regional forester. I had applied to Harvard
[University] for their advanced school where you went so that you could get into the group that
would be considered for regional forester and above jobs. And the same day that I was offered
the job as fire director, I received a letter from Harvard accepting me into that program. I really
wanted to be the fire director, because I just enjoyed the heck out of fire, so I sent back a “I’m
sorry, but I can’t take the Harvard position,” and I became the fire director.
Following that, then, I planned to go to Harvard so I could come out and become a
regional forester. There were some folks in the Washington office, plus Paul Barker, that felt
they should groom me to become the regional forester for Region Five, and so I was looking
forward to that. However, I have diabetes, and it became very active. While I was in the
regional office, I had to go on shots and see my hematologist several times a year, and I was told
that if I wished to live much longer that I needed to get out of a stressful job. And I said, “Well,
I’m not in a stressful job.”
And he said, “What have you done in the past month?” And so in the past month I’d
dealt with a typhoon in Guam and gotten relief out to them, and Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii, which
was a bit of a tough job. I sent two women out there to handle that job of running it, Alice
Forbes from North Zone and Karen Barnette, who was in Sacramento office, working in the fire
business. I sent those two out with full authority to act for me and the regional forester because
decisions needed to be made quickly, on the ground, to get on with dealing with the island of
Hawaii, which had lost one-third of its standing timber and it effect [had] become a rather large
pile of dead stuff.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 18
I shipped a task force of engines—a task force being five engines—out to Hawaii and
two Hotshot crews to Hawaii to help them in case they had fires with all of that downed material.
It was rather interesting. Alice would be in the room with a bunch of admirals and colonels and
generals and folks making decisions from the military bases, and they would announce at the end
of the day they would have to go back and talk to their boss, and they would have their decision
tomorrow, and Alice and Karen would say, “Well, this is our decision. We don’t have to check
with anybody, and it stands now.” These admirals and generals are wondering how these two
females from the Forest Service were able to make these decisions without having to check with
somebody from further up because obviously women couldn’t possibly have that much authority.
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: But they did, because I gave it to them.
BUZZINI: Good for you.
HENRY: So I had to retire, and I did on May 3rd, 1994, and two days later I went hypoglycemic
from having too much insulin in my system, so my doctor started lowering my insulin shots, and
six days after I retired, I was off of insulin. So apparently the regional fire director’s job has
stress involved in it. But I had spent my career in the Forest Service, most of it in California,
where stress—
BUZZINI: Was business as usual.
HENRY: Was business as usual, and you got used to it, and you just made decisions, because
they needed to be made and you didn’t think about all the stress. But apparently it was stressful
for me, so I retired, and I’m now being interviewed in 2006, and I’ve lived past the time they
said I would live if I stayed in the job.
BUZZINI: Good for you.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 19
HENRY: So I have some regrets about not—I would have loved to have been a regional
forester, but that’s the way it is in life, and I’m retired, and enjoying life as a retiree and still
dealing with diabetes.
BUZZINI: Let me ask you these, and then we’ll quit.
[Recording interruption.]
BUZZINI: Dick, thank you for the rundown on your career. It sounds like you had a very
colorful one. Your name was selected because we feel that you can contribute valuable
information about timber management in the fire program as they relate to your tenure with the
U.S. Forest Service, and we have a few questions that we would like to ask you regarding each
one.
[Recording interruption.]
BUZZINI: We’re ready.
Dick, now I wanted to ask you about some of the timber management programs during
your career. How did working in timber management help or hurt your opportunities for
advancement?
HENRY: From my perspective, working in timber management helped my advancement. I got
into timber management when I started on the Mendocino. I was a timber sale officer and a
timber stand improvement forester on the Willows District. When I moved to the Upper Lake
District—I moved there in December of ’65, and the following summer we had the Round Fire
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 20
on the Upper Lake District where I was, and it burned 25,000 acres, mostly in timber, and some
of it was in Type 1A. If somebody doesn’t know what Type 1A is, that’s the best ground, the
soil conditions, et cetera, for growing timber. It burned over some lands of the Fiberboard
Corporation, which they had been managing extensively on the Upper Lake Ranger District.
Following the burn, which was devastating—there wasn’t much left standing—we
decided to clear the land and plant it, so we put out contracts for D-8 and larger Cats [Caterpillar
tractors]. We wanted rakes on them, and we went in and piled all the downed, dead material
from the fire, and we hired fallers to fell anything standing taller than ten foot [sic; feet]. This
was accomplished. We burned the large piles, and we then planted.
In 2005, I took my granddaughter, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, an area where
cutting trees is thought of as being horrendous—and I wanted to show her what the world looked
like if you let foresters manage the land the way it ought to be managed, and I took her to the
Round Fire, and she couldn’t believe that there had been a big fire there, and I showed her the
pictures of the fire and showed her where she was standing and where all the naked ridges were.
They are now covered with 60- to 80-foot-tall ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.
BUZZINI: Wow.
HENRY: And the average civilian driving through the forest would probably complain about the
trees that are growing close to the road and their branches hitting their car. I doubt that we
would ever get somebody who complained about us, quote, “clear-cutting” back up there again,
because there would be no reason for them to accept what had happened; they would still think
clear-cutting was bad, and I could prove to them that it was good, but their mind would be made
up.
BUZZINI: Yes.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 21
HENRY: So I think that being in charge of that reforestation effort for three and a half years,
getting all the land planted and that particular amount of management and success in the timber
program helped me be viewed as a person who could get things done and who could therefore
handle other jobs where things needed to get done. I believe that timber management was a big
help in my career.
When I went to the Happy Camp Ranger District, I was there during the years of
President [Richard M.] Nixon’s Super Sell Program. He wanted timber to get on the market so
that lumber would be less expensive for the folks coming home from Vietnam, so they could get
houses that were less expensive.
At Happy Camp, the five years I was there, we never cut less than 100 million board feet
a year. If there are any readers of this book, 100 million board feet is equivalent to 10,000 three-
bedroom homes framed in wood and with mostly wood products. One year we did 125 million
board feet. That year, we were the biggest timber district in the nation.
BUZZINI: Wow. And what year was that?
HENRY: That was in 1975.
BUZZINI: Wow.
HENRY: So when you got the biggest cut in the nation and you successfully pull it off and you
have people coming out to view how you’re cutting, because that 125 million board feet came
off in a variety of ways—we actually had one timber sale that we used horses. So that the
watershed people would be happy, there were diapers on the horses.
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: When the horse raised its tail, the strap attached to its tail opened a bag that was hung
below its anal port, and the horse droppings went into the canvas bag.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 22
BUZZINI: Wow.
HENRY: The man who ran the horses thought it was somewhat ridiculous, but the watershed
people were just enthralled. We always wanted to keep them happy, and so that’s how we
logged. But we also logged with helicopters, with Cats. We had the largest skyline tower. We
had a 110-foot-tall tower that “Benny” Vincent, a logger in Happy Camp, had. And we had a
main line, which was 2-7/8 inches in diameter and 6,000 feet long. Remembering that 5,280 feet
is a mile, this cable was over a mile long, stretching from one ridge top to another. On the far
ridge top, the cable was anchored to three large stumps in the ground, and a D-8 Cat that had dug
a hole for itself and was tied to, and the carriage went out on this large cable, and the cable went
down and picked up logs and brought them back to the landing.
The cable was so high in the air and so long that for the first time in my career or
anybody’s career in the Forest Service, we had to file a flight plan for a stationary cable because
it was high enough out of the canyon, above 4,000 feet, that there was concern by the FAA
[Federal Aviation Authority] that planes could hit the cable, so they requested that we put those
big orange balls on the cable, like you see on transmission lines. However, there’s a carriage that
rides along that cable coming out from the landing, and as soon as we operated the carriage the
first time, there would be a large number of balls in the center of the cable and some to the far
end, but nothing on one-half of it coming towards the landing, so they said then we would issue
NOTAMS, which is a notice to airmen, that that cable was there.
Having the largest cut in the nation makes you noticeable. Using all of the various ways
of logging—horses and Cats and skylines, et cetera—gets you noticed, and getting out the cut.
In the days that I was in timber, getting out the cut was a big deal.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 23
BUZZINI: Yes, I was going to ask you about the importance of the timber targets, and
obviously that’s what you’re touching on right now.
HENRY: Yes, it was extremely important. Each ranger district was expected to get out its cut,
and each of the districts’ cut—when those were totaled up, was the forest’s cut, and the forest
was expected by the regional forester to get its cut out. And then the chief had an expectation
that each region was going to get out its cut, which was a collection of all the forests in that
region. And so at the bottom level, where the cut started, at the ranger district, the pressure was
fairly high to get out the cut. It was high in the regional office and the Washington office as
well. However, there weren’t any chain saws near any of those offices; it was at the district level
that the pressure was fairly extreme, and you knew that if you got out the cut and were successful
in that, you might move on to bigger and better things and that if you didn’t get out the cut and
that happened probably more than one time, you needed to accept the fact that you probably
were not going on to higher places in the outfit, because success was rewarded with promotion,
and if you were smart, you knew that. And so I always got out the cut and in several years
exceeded the cut.
BUZZINI: Were you always comfortable with the levels, of the targets that you had to meet?
HENRY: I was comfortable with the levels from a forestry standpoint. I had no problem. Our
forest timber plan and our growth was [sic; were] equaling our cut, and so I had no problems that
we were over-cutting, which was, of course, the cries of the Sierra Club. I did not believe we
were over-cutting on the Happy Camp District. My biggest problem with getting out the cut was
the budget necessary to get out the cut. We had to fill positions. For instance, at Happy Camp, it
was a tough place to get people to come. The nearest doctor was seventy-five miles away in
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 24
Yreka, and also the location—the nearest small hospital, the nearest reasonably-sized hospital
was in Medford, Oregon, 110 miles away.
One time, I went around the region advertising the Happy Camp District to people who
wanted to move up in timber, and say, “Hey, this is the place” and showing them pictures of the
horse logging and the skyline equipment, trying to entice them to come to the district. At one
point, I had seventeen vacancies in the permanent, full-time positions because I couldn’t get
people to come to the district, and it’s hard to get out the cut when you don’t have people
available to make that “get out the cut” happen. So it wasn’t a professional forestry problem, it
was a budget problem and it was a personnel problem. Young couples wanted to move to a
place where they could start a family and the wife could go to the doctor’s office, and if there
were any problems, the doctor’s office was close by or the hospital was close by, and so young
married couples were not interested at all in coming to a place like Happy Camp.
I don’t know whether this is where you want me to talk about the Happy Camp clinic or
not. We could do that later.
BUZZINI: Maybe towards the end of this one?
HENRY: Okay.
BUZZINI: Tell me, were there major changes that you saw or experienced in the different
timber harvesting methods on your units?
HENRY: There were some. There were people that were just totally against clear-cutting. I
used to like to explain to them that I believed that they really did enjoy clear-cutting, and they
would looked shocked at me, and I would say, “How many of you in this room ski?” And there
would be people that would raise their hands that they skied. And I said, “Well, you ski, for the
most part, in large clear-cuts.” I said, “All of those ski facilities that are on national forest
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 25
system lands and on private lands—to accommodate the skiing, there have been clear-cuts, and
so you really do enjoy the effects of clear-cuts if you’re skiing.” “Well, that’s okay, but we’re
not okay with those other clear-cuts that you do.”
And so during my time, we attempted to not clear-cut, and at Happy Camp I let the
planning forester, Keith Crummer—K-e-i-t-h, last name C-r-u-m-m-e-r, later the district ranger
on the Corning RD, Mendocino NF, and then on the Almanor District on the Lassen National
Forest. Keith wanted to try a less-than-clear-cut operation in a Douglas fir stand on one of the
ridges, and so he went in and came up with small openings. Some of it looked like the old unit
area control cuts, and he wanted to do these partial cuts. The year following that timber sale, we
had extensive blow-down in those areas because folks don’t understand that when Douglas fir
grows, one tree supports the other, and when there is a big group of them growing together, they
usually don’t blow down, but when it’s been changed so you’re taking out some of the trees and
leaving other ones, that they then stand as single trees or groups of two or three trees, they are
really subject to wind-blow damage, and Northern California gets its winds every so often and
proves that point. So we attempted to not clear-cut but went back to it as a way to manage the
stands and not have as much dead and down material as a result of our logging operations.
Yes, go ahead.
BUZZINI: Dick, now I’d like to ask you which laws or other Forest Service policy changes
caused the greatest changes to the timber program during your career, and why.
HENRY: Most of the major changes occurred about the time I was leaving the Happy Camp
Ranger District, very big in timber, and going to the Washington office and the fuels job, so the
ranger that followed me at Happy Camp got caught up in all of the great new rules and
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 26
regulations and laws that affected timber management. His name is George Harper, last name H-
a-r-p-e-r.
BUZZINI: And what period of time are we talking about?
HENRY: This would be from the mid to late seventies. I got caught in the National
Environmental Quality. I got caught up with the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers believing that
any drainage which flowed into, in my case, the Klamath River should be administered by the
Corps of Engineers if it had water even one day a year running down the little creek, and so they
came up with a program where we had to get a permit from the Corps of Engineers to put in an
eighteen-inch culvert on a rather minor road, a proposition where, in my past as a forester, I was
allowed to determine that an eighteen-inch culvert was good enough and could go in the road and
didn’t even need to be engineered, that engineers needed to be involved in the bigger pipes. And
now we were saying that we had to take that decision to the Corps of Engineers. It limited us for
a while until we finally got the Corps to agree to a more standard policy of responding to that.
But my years in the “get out the cut” was—we were successful in getting out the cut. We
did not have a lot of problems in doing that. And we—I think I’ll talk about the public meetings
in the next part of this.
BUZZINI: Okay. You touched earlier on the budget as regards the timber management
program. Is there anything else you’d like to add about how the budget affected the program?
HENRY: Basically, as most of the folks know who probably will be reading this, it takes two
actions of Congress to make something happen. They have to first pass a bill called the enabling
act, which says such-and-such is going to happen; every person in the country is going to get a
24-inch color television set paid by the feds. That is a neat act. It allows them to say that’s what
they’re going to do.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 27
However, they can’t do it until they pass a bill funding that. And so Congress can say
we’re going to cut this much and we’re going to do this and that, but what gets done is
accomplished by the amount of money that makes it to the ground to make those things happen.
And so as the money trickles to the ground with a portion being taken by the Washington office
to run the timber operation in Washington and a portion by the regional office to run the timber
operation in the regional office, a portion by the supervisor’s office to run the supervisor’s office,
then there’s that money left for the ranger district to get out the timber program.
In a place like Happy Camp, where the timber program is the largest thing going on, you
take some of the timber funds to help pay for the clerical staff, to help pay the light bills and the
utility bills, and then you get down to what you have left to actually pay foresters to get out on
the ground to do the work. And in some years, that becomes a task possibly for Noah to
handle—
BUZZINI: [Laughs.]
HENRY: —because of the amount that starts out, which is smaller than you needed in the first
place and gets smaller as it comes down the line. So, yes, budgets do affect you, and it becomes
tougher to get out the cut with less money than you know it takes to get out the cut. But you
work your folks as best you can to get out the cut, and that becomes the goal, to get out the cut.
Your question here, Were there any significant changes in the degrees of control? At
Happy Camp, I enjoyed having an extremely competent staff that reported to me. In charge of
planning of the timber sales was Keith Crummer. I’ve already mentioned him. In charge of
administration of the timber sales was Chris Carr—Chris spelled C-h-r-i-s, and the last name
Carr, spelled C-a-r-r. Chris was a mountain of a man, for those who don’t know him.
BUZZINI: Oh, I know him.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 28
HENRY: Chris used to weigh about 285 when he was in great shape in the summer and about
three and a quarter [325 pounds] in the winter, just a big guy, and so when he walked up and
talked to somebody, they usually agreed with what he said, and so he was very effective in the
administration of timber sales. If the timber sale officer was having a problem with a logger,
why, we then sent Chris in.
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: We basically got done what needed to be done.
[Recording interruption.]
BUZZINI: We’re on pause.
HENRY: Okay, you can take it off pause.
BUZZINI: Okay.
HENRY: Because Happy Camp was able to get out the cut every year and to manage its timber
sales so that the folks in the supervisor’s office, when they came out and inspected the
sales—they agreed with what we had done on the ground, how we had handled the road
construction, what we were doing about slash piling and recreation for after timber sale
activities, and at one point [Daniel] “Dan” Abraham, A-b-r-a-h-a-m, was the forest supervisor on
the Klamath for a few years while I was there, called me up one time and told me that he and
Dale Heigh, last name H-e-i-g-h, who was the forest timber staff officer, were not going to be
coming to Happy Camp because things were well in hand and they were quite happy with how
we were doing things, and they needed to spend extra time on two other districts and try to get
their attention.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 29
And so for almost two years, we did what we had always done, was [sic; which was] get
out the cut and do things in the right and proper way, and the supervisor’s office was fine with
that, and so when you talk about were there significant changes in the degrees of control, control
was left up to me as the district ranger. I was proud of that, and because they had done that, I
think, you know, you work hard to please the boss, and when the boss gives you all that
authority, you really work extra hard to make sure that you deserve his good thoughts about how
you manage the district. And so at that time, I was very lucky to have an excellent staff. We
worked together extremely well, and we got out the cut.
BUZZINI: Good for you.
I want to ask you now about the relationship between the timber, quote-unquote, beast
and the other specialists. How would you characterize the relationship between timber
management people and other specialists on your unit?
HENRY: In my young days on the Mendocino, we had two groups of specialists. We had
timber management and we had engineering, and engineering designed all of the roads so that
timber management could get out all of the cut. And we worked together quite closely,
extremely closely. We would get on the ground and walk on the ground with the engineers about
getting a road out to where we could harvest this unit that had been marked, and we came to
agreement fairly well. The engineer might tell us at some point that we had to put in a large
culvert and that the timber sale was going to have to pay for that, and so we would deal with the
timber sale appraisal to take care of that kind of thing, but it was basically timber and
engineering folks, and they knew their jobs quite well.
And then all of a sudden the Mendocino hired a landscape architect, and the timber guys
talked to themselves and said, “What do we need a landscape architect for?” “I don’t know.”
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 30
And the engineering guys talked to themselves and said, “What do we need a landscape architect
for?” And then the engineering guys said, “I don’t know. Maybe the timber guys know.” And
so the timber guys and the engineering guys talked about what do we need a landscape architect
for, and we came to the collective conclusion that neither group knew why we needed a
landscape architect. “We don’t know why we want one. We’re not sure what to do with one.
And I sure hope they don’t mess up with what [sic; mess up what] we’ve got going really well,
between the engineers and timber beasts.
Well, sure enough, they messed up what was going well between the engineers and the
timber beasts. The landscape architect said, “You need to take a tree down over there. It’s not
marked, but you need to take it down because if you do that on this curve of the road, it will
provide a vista for the public to see a long distance.” And the timber beast said, “Well, we left
that tree there on purpose, to provide seed down into the area below, to grow new trees in the
forest.” And the landscape architect said, “Well, you can go plant trees there. That’s not a
problem. But you need to take the tree down so the public has a vista to see the rest of the
forest.”
And so it became a thing of, “What’s a landscape architect know about growing trees and
what we have to do to grow trees and to get out the cut? They’re an impediment to us getting out
the cut, and so we don’t like landscape architects.” And so whenever we know that a landscape
architect is coming out, we work really hard to be someplace else on the district than where they
are.
As we went along, other specialists showed up, and they were called specialists because
they were different; they weren’t engineers, and they weren’t timber beasts, they were
specialists. And for us, that was a term like being a third sex.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 31
BUZZINI: [Laughs.]
HENRY: “Specialists.” Before long, the Mendocino had a watershed specialist, and they had a
soils engineer, and, you know, it went on like that. , Well, you wondered what the heck all these
people were going to, and they apparently were sent to foul up getting out the cut, and that’s the
way we viewed them.
Well, as I moved on to being a line officer, district ranger at Happy Camp, I in fact
decided that I needed a soil scientist at the district, because there were soils problems and as the
line officer responsible for that piece of real estate, I did not need to be the reason the Klamath
River became brown. So here I am, going from a timber beast in my younger days, wondering
what the heck we were doing with those “specialists,” to where now I am telling the forest
supervisor, “I know he has all of those specialists, but they cannot devote enough time to my
district to make sure I get out the best timber in the best way to deal with all of the other
resources on the district, and so I want my own specialists.” And now I’m talking to myself
about how, in my younger days, I couldn’t understand why we had those “specialists,” and now
I’m requesting from the forest supervisor that I have my own corps of “specialists” on the Happy
Camp Ranger District. So you can see that—
BUZZINI: So in the beginning there was a little bit of tension, right?
HENRY: I would say there was a lot of tension, not a little bit. The engineers and the foresters
got really uptight about what these “specialists” were going to do and how they were going to
foul up what was working very successfully for the engineers and the timber beasts. But it took
a few years to where I became a line officer responsible for more than just “getting out the cut,”
and I needed my own. I thought it was kind of ironic. One day I was just by myself, driving up
the mountain, thinking back to my younger days, not wanting any of these “specialists” to foul
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 32
things up, and now I’m asking for them on the ranger district because the supervisor’s office
can’t give me enough specialist time to get out the cut.
I did get, in my later years, deeply concerned about the numbers of “specialists” that were
in the Forest Service and the lack of foresters that were in the Forest Service. It really concerned
me. But I’ve also taken a look at what the forestry schools, colleges are teaching. For instance,
at Penn State, my alma mater, you go into the forestry program, and you don’t do anything in
forestry until your junior year, and that’s when they say, “This is a tree compared to a cow.”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles softly.]
HENRY: I had to learn 1,200 species of trees and be able to identify them and write their name,
their family, genus and species in Latin. Now when they graduate from college, they know a
dozen trees and that’s about it. And so in my younger days, I believe foresters were taught a lot
more. We were taught range management; we were taught wildlife management; we were taught
soils management, things in college, so when we got on the ground we felt comfortable with all
of those things. And then when they moved the specialists in, we felt they were impinging on
our abilities to manage the lands with the things we already knew. But today’s foresters come
out of college with a whole lot less knowledge in the forestry game as used to come out of
college, and so they need all those specialists.
Plus today they’re not really getting out any sort of cut. The Klamath, when I was on it,
cut over 300 million board feet a year, and the last year I was in the Forest Service they cut 4
million feet. I had a small sales officer at Happy Camp that I charged with getting out 40 million
feet a year in just small sales on the district, and now the entire forest gets out 4 million feet. It’s
ridiculous, and it has gotten to that level by all of the laws and rules passed, laws by Congress
but mostly laws by judges. And I haven’t quite figured this out yet.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 33
I would love to ask a Ninth Circuit Court judge [sic; ask Ninth Circuit Court judges] what
forestry college they went to to enable them to make these forestry decisions, where they got
their master’s degree in forestry, their doctorate in forest management, how they can make
forestry decisions in laws that really don’t fit what’s needed on the ground. They are making
decisions based on what they heard at the last cocktail party they were at by somebody from the
Sierra Club, and the forests are being managed now by people with no knowledge of forestry;
namely, judges and lobbyist groups. And forestry management of specifically federal lands in
this country has gone to heck and gone.
I would not want to be in the Forest Service today.
BUZZINI: As a timber beast especially, right?
HENRY: Especially as a timber beast or as a fire person, even. The roads on the Lassen
National Forest that were built by timber sales provided easy access for hunters, for
recreationists, for people who want to go to a campground and not go to a pristine—you know,
like, state-run campground, where there’s electricity, sewers, et cetera. They want to go
someplace and camp. It doesn’t have a picnic table. They just want to go camp and rough it.
Those are the roads those people drove on to do that. Those same roads are the roads fire
engines drove on to take people out to fight forest fires.
Well, they’ve since decided that those roads shouldn’t exist, and they haven’t just
blocked off those roads, they’ve gone in and taken the drainage structures out of those roads, so
if you want to open that road again for a fire, you just don’t take a tractor and bulldoze down the
big berm at the start of the road and knock down some of the water bars in the road so it’s easier
to drive over, the road doesn’t exist. You’d have to do a complete engineering job and go in and
spend months to put culverts in to open the road. And so access for fire suppression has gone
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 34
down considerably, so it’s not just a timber beast thing, it’s the management of the national
forest. It’s the fact that forest fires get much bigger today than they did in my career, because of
access, access which has been eliminated by cries from the Sierra Club and decisions by federal
judges who have no knowledge of land management.
I had to deal with my doctor. We have agreement that I will not tell my doctor how to
treat my various illnesses if my doctor won’t tell me how to manage national forest system lands.
And every doctor that I have, and I have many, say that they have a good agreement with that.
They like that, me [sic; my] not telling them how to be a doctor. The Forest Service puts up with
judges, who know absolutely nothing about managing the land, making political decisions about
things that should be decided upon a scientific basis, and we have lost that in this country. I
quite frankly feel very sorry for line officers in the Forest Service today, and I’m glad I’m not in
the Forest Service.
And I never thought I would say that. I looked forward to retiring and going around
bragging that I retired from the United States Forest Service, a right and honorable organization
that’s done great things, and people would say, “Oh, you were in Forest Service! Well, you
know, that’s really neat. I enjoy going up and doing this and that in the national forest.” Well, a
lot of folks can’t go up and enjoy doing that in the national forest because it’s been taken away
from them by people who are just dumb. I feel sorry for the folks running the forests, and I
would not want to be in their position today.
BUZZINI: I think a lot of people feel that way, Dick.
To sum up the timber management portion, during your career there were probably some
controversies that you had to deal with regarding the timber management program. Would you
tell us some of them, like, for instance, the clear-cutting issue?
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 35
HENRY: Well, clear-cutting was an issue, because the Sierra Club was getting its feet under
itself and starting to take hold, and were putting out calendars and three-color printed things that
were mailed off to unknowing folks. So clear-cutting became a big issue, and as I said earlier, in
managing various timber stands, in some cases you have to clear-cut. Now, you can clear-cut ten
acres and do some clear-cuts in an area over time so it’s not as noticeable to the public, but the
fact remains, you still need to manage the timber on that particular ridge based on that timber
type that’s there, by clear-cutting. And there are places where you can leave standing trees and
you can go in and pick about and take trees off and you’re doing fine with timber management,
but clear-cutting has always been an issue with the Sierra Club.
In fact, when I got to the Washington office, I found out there was an organization in one
of the Southeastern states; I can’t remember—South Carolina, North Carolina—but they asked
school kids to go out into the forests near them and take pictures of the worst-looking clear-cuts
that they had seen, and so they would get all these pictures of new clear-cuts in, and then they
would make up a calendar of all these terrible pictures of clear-cuts. Of course, they did that
each year. They never went back to a clear-cut twenty years later and saw how the trees that had
been planted there were growing.
I’d love to take a flock of folks to the Upper Lake District on the Mendocino and show
them the pictures of the bare land after the Round Fire, and how we knocked everything down
and piled it up and burned it, and then planted and now how the Sierra Club can drive through
and be amazed at this forest that was growing. They would think it was an old-growth forest,
whatever an old-growth forest is. I’ve always wondered if God planted trees millions of years
ago and they’re still around? So clear-cutting was an issue.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 36
Even-aged management was an issue because, as I said before, some timber needs to
grow in multi-storied stands, and some can be clear-cut and done in even-aged management, but
not all of it. There was a reforestation backlog in the sixties and seventies because we couldn’t
plant as much as we had cleared. Some of that was due to nursery production, some of that in
the mid seventies was due extensively to Sierra Club types uptight about the use of herbicides.
Believe it or not, the nurseries in California, the nursery in Northern California, was not allowed
to spray in the nursery chemicals to prevent grass from growing because the grass took the water
from the little seedling that was trying to come out of the ground and the grass grew faster than
the seedling. And so it was sprayed with herbicides that took out the grass but not the seedling.
Well, some folks got it passed that the nursery could not use herbicides, so they had to go
to hand weeding. They actually had people who had to go down each row of trees that were
planted and pick grass blades that were growing, and the costs of weeding went up from just
spraying an herbicide to hand picking little grass blades—went up tremendously. The cost was
so high that the nurseries’ production went way down because they didn’t have enough money to
do all of that hand weeding and still get out their seedlings.
And then, of course, there was the controversy over salvage sales. Whenever we had a
fire, the Forest Service would want to go in and salvage that material because, while the fire has
killed the tree, you can still get lumber out of that tree and provide it to the public at a reasonable
price and keep prices of timber down so people can afford to build homes. However, there is a
part of the community that thinks that salvage sales is just an excuse to sneak in and ravage and
pillage the forest, and so when a forest supervisor puts up some salvage sales on a forest fire,
why, he’s immediately brought before the Sierra Club, and someone files a lawsuit, and it gets
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 37
hung up in court, and by the time it makes it through the courts, whatever was out there has
decided to rot, and that’s the end of the salvage sale.
Use of herbicides has been controversial. It was made controversial, I believe, by
hippies, young people living out in the forest who did not like the forest being sprayed with
herbicides. The reason they were living in the forest [unintelligible], you know, to live in nature
and commune with nature, and part of the nature they were living with was their marijuana
plantations. One of the best places to plant marijuana is in a fairly recent Forest Service tree
planting site because there is the right amount of sun and shade, there is the right amount of
indistinguishment, if that’s a word, from the air. When you look down from the air, you see the
plantation and you see young trees growing and you see brush growing, and it’s hard to pick out
the leaves of the marijuana plants, and so they love to see that.
One time on the Happy Camp District, I was standing on a landing where a helicopter
was working, and being loaded with herbicide to go out and spray the plantations, and within
about five feet of me was this young hippie gal with two children, and as the helicopter took off
and went out to spray, she turned to the two children and said, “Well, there goes your college
fund.”
BUZZINI: Oh!
HENRY: I thought that was a rather interesting statement. And then another time, my office
was being picketed by several young women with babies. They said that their babies were being
killed by the herbicide being sprayed where they lived. In reality, their young babies weren’t
being hurt by the herbicide because it wasn’t being sprayed where they lived, but it was being
sprayed on their marijuana plantations, and that’s why they were being hurt.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 38
And so when you see a picture in the paper of a young mother and her baby and she says
that they’re spraying herbicide where she lives, why, then the American public takes up her
cause and rallies to the courts to stop those terrible, evil acts by the United States Forest Service
in spraying young mothers and their babies with herbicides, which of course never happens, but
that was presumed.
And you note: Developing lack of trust in the Forest Service timber harvesting by state
and some local entities. One of the big problems that happened as the cut went down—most
folks don’t know, but the counties receive monies from the feds based on the cut that has
occurred in their counties. For instance, the Lassen National Forest. Portions of the Lassen
National Forest lie in nine counties in Northern California. The Lassen enjoys being in more
counties than any other forest in the region. And so each of those counties, based on a pro rata
share of the forest, of the acreage of the forest, gets a pro rata share of 25 percent of the monies
that the forest generates. The Lassen National Forest one year generated $40 million in receipts,
the most receipts in the nation from any national forest.
BUZZINI: Wow.
HENRY: And that was mainly generated because the forest grew a lot of sugar pine, and sugar
pine is really great for making clear moulding stock, and there are big prices paid for trees out of
which you can get clear moulding [unintelligible] and some finished boards. So the Lassen was
taking in big bucks, and 25 percent was going to these nine counties based on their pro rata share
of the Lassen National Forest. And those monies were being used for—the money can only be
used for schools and roads, so they were enjoying paid teachers’ assistants and additional courses
in other subjects being paid for by these monies.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 39
Well, the cut started going down as the public decided that they wanted the National
Forests to become national parks. And as the cut went down, the receipts to the counties went
down, and as the receipts to the counties went down, they got really uptight with the local forest
supervisor because they were getting less of a share of the 25 percent funds. So as forest
supervisor of the Lassen, I would be working at home and I’d need to go get a part at the local
hardware store, and I’d walk into the local hardware store Saturday afternoon, and I would be
happily greeted by the superintendent of Lassen County School District. And there would be
small talk, like “How are you doin’, Dick?” and “What are you here for?” And quickly the
conversation would go to, “The cut doesn’t look too good this year, Dick, and we’re not gonna
get enough money to run the schools, and what are you going to do about that?”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: “Well, I can’t do much about it because our cut’s been reduced because of these
reasons.” “Well, the public’s not going to be happy with you when I tell them that you’re cutting
our funds to our school districts.” And I said, “Well, maybe we should have the school districts
reported in the paper as being okay with the Sierra Club and other people coming up with
reasons why the timber shouldn’t be cut in the first place.” “Well, no, you’re not going to tie that
one to us, Dick, but we’re going to be able to tie the reduction in budget to you.”
And so that went on on a regular basis. I got my hair cut at the local barbershop, and
most people can go to the barbershop and talk about whatever they want to to the barber. The
forest supervisor has to be extremely guarded in his conversation to the barber. If he says one
thing wrong to the barber, by Wednesday half of the town will know what he said at the
barbershop.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 40
So, yes, the local government and ultimately the state government come [sic; came] up
with a lack of trust because they don’t see the reason you are cutting the funds coming to them,
and they have a hard time relating that to the lack of cut and relating that back to, as I call them,
the “greenies,” who don’t want the forest cut in the first place. They only see the reduction in
dollars.
BUZZINI: And some of them probably are greenies.
HENRY: Yes.
BUZZINI: Yes, yes.
HENRY: And they don’t see all the other parts of that. It’s sort of like when I went to the
regional office I learned a fact, that the largest county north of San Francisco has the largest per
capita membership in the Save the Redwoods League, and the largest county north of San
Francisco has the largest per capita use of redwood. So I can just picture Bill and Martha.
Martha is in the redwood hot tub, on the redwood deck,—
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: —and Bill is seated in a redwood lounge chair, and Bill says to Martha, “Don’t forget,
tomorrow we want to write a letter to Senator [Dianne] Feinstein about reducing that cut of
redwood up in Northern California. We know there’s no cutting on federal lands, but we’ve got
to stop the cutting on private lands of those landowners who own that redwood, because we
don’t want them to cut any more of those redwood trees. Those are beautiful trees, and we need
to keep them.”
BUZZINI: Hah! [Laughs.] What a contradiction, huh?
HENRY: Yes.
BUZZINI: Yes.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 41
HENRY: So, yes, there’s all kinds of lack of trust, and that’s the way it goes.
BUZZINI: And that continues today.
HENRY: Yes, it continues today by people not understanding—I have a saying that other people
have said, that milk comes from a 7-11 store and lumber comes from a lumberyard.
BUZZINI: Hah!
HENRY: And no one ever understands that lumber comes from a tree stump in the forest and
that milk comes from a cow. They have been separated from the land and the purpose of the
land and what grows upon the land, and this generation doesn’t accept that fact at all. They have
no understanding of the cow or the stump.
BUZZINI: Okay, Dick, in a few minutes we’ll start talking about fire, but let’s take a break.
HENRY: Okay.
[Recording interruption.]
HENRY: Okay.
BUZZINI: Dick, I’d like to ask you now some fire type questions. I understand that you were a
district ranger at the Happy Camp Ranger District on the Klamath when the concept of
FIRESCOPE [FIrefighting RESources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies] was
evolving in the early seventies, and even though you weren’t directly related with the
FIRESCOPE aspect, I know that you did have an extensive background in your career in
different fire capacities. Would you tell us some of those, please?
HENRY: A little quick history on Dick Henry. My father was the local fire chief in my
hometown for a while. The first time I ever fought fire, I was nine years of age, and I helped my
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 42
dad run a 1929 Hale pumper. When the fire was over, I got to learn how to rack 2-1/2-inch hose
in a horseshoe lay in the back of the pumper. I always had an interest in fire.
In my hometown, because most of the men were out of town during the day, we had
juniors in the fire department, and if you had good grades in school and belonged to the fire
department, when the fire whistle went off, you were allowed to get up out of your class and
leave quietly and run to the firehouse and get on the fire engine. There were three folks in town
that worked in town that were checked out on the engines, and so you had to wait till one of them
arrived to drive the engine, but you could do everything else. You could wear a breathing
apparatus and go into a house with a hose. You could do whatever any of the other firemen
could do; you just couldn’t drive the engine. This was at the age of fourteen.
So I was very active in the local fire department at the age of fourteen, as a junior, and as
I grew up, I went on to become a regular member of that fire department, and to this day I’m an
honorary member of that fire department, even though I’m in California and the fire department
is on the coast of New Jersey. So I always had a desire to be in the fire organization.
When I started in the outfit, timber was what I worked in, but whenever there was a fire, I
tried to get on the fire, and I always volunteered to go on lightning fire assignments so I could
get on fires, and on weekends I always volunteered to work somehow for the fire folks and be
available to chase off to a fire. A bunch of the foresters—they didn’t like fire, but I loved it, so I
enjoyed being picked up on overtime on the weekends and doing whatever the drudge work was
that you had to do: paint a roof or put in a fence, waiting for the fire whistle to go off so you
could dash off to a fire.
Early in my career, I worked my way up the line, and I can remember getting my red
cards. I was a sector boss in Northern California, but crew boss in Southern California.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 43
Somehow Southern California thought that it had all of the knowledge of fires and it was the
only place in the world where fires occurred, so if you were a northern person in fire, when you
came south, you had to drop a grade in what you could do, and so I could be a sector boss in
Northern California, but if I went south, the highest I could be was a crew boss. That always
kind of ticked me off.
And I worked my way up to being a service chief on a Type 2 team, and a fire boss on a
Type 2 team, and then ultimately I became a service chief on a Type 1 national team and really
enjoyed that.
When I was at Happy Camp, I was a service chief on the Type 1 team and handled a
bunch of fires, the Hog Fire on the Klamath was a big fire, but my team was actually called to a
smaller fire that later just joined in with the Hog Fire and became part of that. I enjoyed that part
of my career, and following my assignment at Happy Camp, I went to the Washington office. I
still wanted to stay on a Type 1 team, and I asked Hank deBruin if I could be on a team on one of
the national forests near the chief’s office, that [sic; whether] we could work that out. And Hank
said no, they didn’t like Washington office people being on the teams because if something
occurred on the fire that folks didn’t like, they did not want to have to deal with the answer that
“well, a Washington office person from the Division of Fire was on the team, so it couldn’t
possibly have been a bad decision,” et cetera.
So I had to give up being on a fire team, and the rest of my career, I was not on a fire
team. But I loved fire dearly, and wanted to become involved in it and wanted to become a
regional fire director. I say a regional fire director. I only wanted to become the fire director in
Region Five because that’s where all the action is. In some ways, my view of Region Five and
fire was similar to Southern California saying you had to drop a grade when you came south,
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 44
because Region Five folks think that nobody else has fires or that none of them are tough.
Having been raised in New Jersey, I fought fires in the pine barrens, and I’ll put up a fire racing
through the pine barrens to any fire in Southern California racing through the manzanita and
brush, as a tough fire.
So I wanted to do everything there was to do in fire. I became a heli-jumper. We didn’t
have a long period of heli-jumping because we had more injuries in heli-jumping than we had in
smoke jumping in forty years, but I became a heli-jumper on the Upper Lake Ranger District and
jumped from a helicopter and wore all the gear that smoke jumpers wore except the parachute.
Jack Lee and several of us got certified as heli-jumpers at the same time. But that program
quickly died, and we went on to bigger and better things.
But for a whole year, we used to practice jumping off the tailgate of a pickup truck going
five miles an hour up the Elk Mountain Road, because the rules for the helicopter were no more
than five miles an hour forward speed and no more than fifteen feet above the ground. Of
course, the helicopter pilot felt that the ground was the top of the manzanita. Now, in the Upper
Lake District, it grows twenty feet high, so the helicopter pilot is fifteen feet above the twenty-
foot-high manzanita. That’s thirty-five feet. And you’re eyeballs are six feet above that, so your
first look of where you’re jumping is forty feet, which was always kind of surprising.
Anyhow, I just enjoyed the heck out of fire. And I worked hard to become the regional
fire director in Region Five and enjoyed my time in that position before I had to retire due to
health reasons.
I had some interesting times in the fire organization because things were changing. The
rules were changing, and women were coming out to fight fires. Of course, all of us men knew
they couldn’t fight fire because they never had and therefore they never could. My first big fire
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 45
that I went on was in 1960, and it was the Big Flat Fire on the Gasquet Ranger District of the Six
Rivers National Forest, and the only thing flat was the camp where the fire camp was. After that,
it was straight uphill or downhill. Word was there was a lady in the fire camp, and it turned out
that she was a nurse, and she had a tent, and she wore black slacks and a black sweater; I’ll never
forget. She had very gray hair, and she had a Red Cross on her sleeve.
And it turned out that this lady was one of the Seven Angels of Bataan. For those reading
this that aren’t old enough to know about Bataan, there was the Bataan death march at the start of
WW II, and there were seven nurses that survived the death march and lived in the camp with the
survivors of that death march, administered to the medical needs of those soldiers, and this lady
was one of those heroes. That was the first lady in fire camp. Even the clerks were males. They
were called general district assistants, and males came out to fire camp; women didn’t come to
fire camp.
Well, in 1976 I was the service chief on a Type 1 team, and we had a fire on the Shasta-
Trinity and Mendocino, along the boundary. And we got a group of folks, a fire crew from
Chico, and they were the Hot Flames of the whatever—I can’t remember the name of their
crews. But they were all women. So it was quite the talk of the camp. We now had this all-
women crew in camp, which made a change because before women were allowed in camp, you
slept in your sleeping bag, and when you got out in the morning, you put your clothes on
standing on top of your sleeping bag, and then you sat down and put your boots on, and then you
went and got breakfast.
Well, now with women in fire camp, standing on top of your sleeping bag, maybe naked
or with your jockey shorts on, it wasn’t the thing you could do, so now you had to scrunch your
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 46
clothes on while lying in your sleeping bag, and so these women were making things rough in
fire camp.
As the service chief, it provided me with an interesting new problem. The head of the
women’s crew came to me and said that they needed some feminine hygiene supplies that
normally we hadn’t maintained in fire camp. And so I was told that I needed to get some
tampons and napkins in fire camp, because some of the women had brought some of those
supplies, but some hadn’t, and supplies were running short. So I went to my supply officer and
asked her to order a case of each, and she did. But nothing came in that evening. The lady from
the fire crew talked to me the next morning and said, “Hey, they really need to have these,” and I
went to my supply officer and said we needed to make sure they got to fire camp.
Well, they didn’t, and this went on and off for four days. On the fourth day, I said, “You
need to tell them to send that stuff out here, and make sure they don’t double up our orders and
think each order of every day should be coming out here, but we need one case of each at this
fire camp today, period.” So my fire boss, [James] “Jim” McLean, and I had to go out and check
out some roads that the district ranger said needed to be oiled, and we needed to make a
determination whether the fire was going to pay to oil those roads or not, so we’re out looking at
roads, and as we come back towards fire camp, we get on this switchback overlooking fire camp,
and we see a building that had not been there before.
It had a yellow roof. And we drove down, and as we got closer to that building, we found
it to be the Kotex building. It had a yellow roof because BIFC (Boise Interagency Fire Center)
[pronounced BIFF-see] had now—this was the first year they started sending out these big
yellow tarps. Well, when you drove around and looked at the other wall of this building, it was
the Tampax building. What had happened was a semi-trailer—I went and checked with the
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 47
supply officer. She said a semi-trailer came up, and it was loaded, and they asked where to put
the stuff, and people weren’t sure, and then they said, “Well, why don’t you put it down by the
aid station?” So they took it down there, and as the people were unloading these cases—these
were cases of cartons of boxes—they decided to stack them up. Well, they stacked them up and
sure enough, they had a nice high wall of cardboard boxes. So they stacked all the other boxes
on the other side, they put the tarp across, and now they had a shaded area and they had three
cots under there. People could come rest and get salt pills or get whatever was necessary, and
depending on whether you were east or west of the building, you were sent to the Kotex building
or the Tampax building.
That was a first for me, and it was a first for a whole flock of other folks. Obviously, this
twenty-five-women crew did not need that much in the way of supplies, and so when the fire was
over, they were shipped back to Redding, to the fire warehouse, where [Sidney L.] “Sid” Nobles,
who ran that operation and was just thrilled completely with me taking up this much space in his
fire facility—and in later years he told me that every time there was a fire and anyone wanted
anything out of the North Zone cache, they got a case of each shipped out to them, and he hoped
it would never come back.
BUZZINI: [Laughs.]
HENRY: Actually, there was still a bunch of that stuff there when the plane crashed into the
cache, and the cases were burned up, and they finally got some of their floor space back from
being occupied by “that stuff,” as Sid called it. I don’t know whether you want this in the book.
I don’t know whether you want this published or not, but as a guy growing up in fire, [I thought]
it was an interesting thing to have occurred in my fire career.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 48
Another thing I’m really proud of is the women I’ve helped get into the fire side of the
business or just into the Forest Service. When I was district ranger, we had several women
moved up on the district, and that was about the start of the women’s movement was when I was
district ranger at Happy Camp.
BUZZINI: Tell me the years again.
HENRY: I was at Happy Camp from ’72 to ’77. When I was on the Lassen as forest supervisor,
which was 1984 to ’90, we had three ranger districts. One of the district ranger’s job became
empty, and I decided it was high time the Lassen had a woman ranger, so I made a conscious
decision that I was going to pick a woman ranger. Now, I know that’s not too good, to not be
picking males, but it was time the Lassen had a female ranger, and the only way they were going
to get it was for me to select one.
So I sent out the advertisement, and we got four women who applied. I read what the
women’s backgrounds were. Quite frankly, I couldn’t picture any of these folks being a district
ranger, so I actually went to the best of the worst, in my view, of what was needed to be a ranger,
and it was a person in the planning shop on the Los Padres [National Forest]. Now, I didn’t like
planners, because I had been on a forest where there was a ranger that didn’t perform very well,
so they created a planning shop. They got rid of the ranger district, combined it with another
ranger district so they could lose that ranger district job and take the ranger, who was not doing
well as a ranger, and put him in the planning shop, because planning was a good place to store
people who couldn’t do things right, except in later years we found out planning ran the outfit,
but we didn’t discover that in time to know that we shouldn’t be putting clods in the planning
shop.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 49
So this ranger is moved to planning. Well, planning had kind of a bad name, so here’s
this young lady in planning. I read what she’s doing, and it’s all planning type stuff. But she’s
the best of the lot, and I’m going to have a woman ranger come heck or high water, so I select
her. And she comes to the district, and she’s on the district about three weeks when we have a
problem. This is on Hat Creek District. The ranger’s name is Karen Barnette, B-a-r-n-e-t-t-e.
Karen gets to the ranger district and gets to know her staff, and we have a problem on the
district. Eskimo Hill was a snow play area. And we were having accidents at Eskimo Hill. We
have—people would slide down the hill on a rubber tube. We didn’t supply the rubber tube; all
we had was the hill out there. Well, they would crash into a tree. Well, they shouldn’t have
done that, but they did.
They would then sue the Forest Service for the injuries they received from crashing into
the Forest Service tree on their snow play hill. Somebody would come down on a toboggan and
crash into something, and they would sue the Forest Service. So I decided the way to cut out
these suits against the Forest Service was to say there’s no more Eskimo Hill snow play area.
We’ll just take down the signs. It’s not a snow play area. If somebody wants to stop by the side
of the road and go up and play on the hill, have at it, but we haven’t invited them there as a snow
play area, and we will get out of the lawsuits.
Well, I’d pretty much gone to that decision, and the staff had agreed with it, and I get a
call [that] Karen Barnette would like to come visit with me about Eskimo Hill, okay? So my
secretary makes a date with her to come over and talk to me, and Karen comes over, and she’s
very well organized. She comes over, and she puts up flip charts, and she describes what the
problem is as I perceive it, and what the solution is as I perceive it, and then what the problem is
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 50
as she perceives it and what the solution is as she perceives it. And by the time she gets down
with her presentation, I agree with her that Eskimo Hill should stay open.
And I am thoroughly impressed with the young lady district ranger from Hat Creek, who
has only been there three weeks, [and who] comes over and meets with the lion in the lion’s den
and deals with the lion, and the next thing you know, the lion’s agreeing with her.
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: She really impressed me. And so as time went on, I got to know Karen better. I had a
policy on the Lassen that the forest supervisor would go out one day a month on each of the three
ranger districts, and that was to be with the district ranger. And if the supervisor had something
he wanted to make sure the district ranger knew or understood, he would tell him, but the rest of
the time was the district ranger’s, to go show them projects that they had going and were proud
of or talk about problems or talk about personnel moves that might need to be made, but it was
the ranger’s day with the supervisor.
I did that with each of the three rangers, and I was always impressed with the problems
and discussion and the solutions that I had with Karen. I got a call from a forest supervisor in
Region Six. They had a vacancy at I believe the Sweet Home District—I can’t remember the
forest it’s on. [Transcriber’s note: the Willamette National Forest.] Anyway, they were looking
at Karen as getting promoted to a -13 district ranger. I talked her up to that forest supervisor, and
I said, “I’m not thrilled about losing her, but she is sharp, and she needs to move up.” And so
she went up to be the -13 ranger on that forest.
Her husband worked up there as well. Well, her husband got offered a job to work with
CDF [California Division of Forestry] in Sacramento, and notice went out around the region: Did
anybody have a job near the Sacramento area that they could provide for Karen Barnette so that
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 51
she could be with her husband, who was taking a job with CDF? Well, I saw the name Karen
Barnette, and I didn’t have a vacant job in the Sacramento area for Karen, so I called Alice
Forbes, and I said, “You have twenty-four hours to create a job, write a job description, get it
approved so I can select Karen Barnette from Region Six to move to Region Five, because she’s
one sharp lady, and I know we can use her in the Sacramento area; we just don’t know what the
job is yet.”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: So Alice wrote the job and had her doing the fire outreach with the other agencies in
Sacramento, of which—everybody else was in Sacramento except us and the Park Service. She
had her dealing with Jon Kennedy, who was the regional forester’s right arm in Sacramento, and
in fact Karen got office space in Jon Kennedy’s office, and she did a fantastic job there. We
created the job for her, but we created it for a fantastic person, and she went to that job.
When Jon Kennedy retired, the smartest thing the Forest Service could have done was to
put Karen in that job. However, there was [sic; were] some problems in San Francisco that the
folks in public information in San Francisco thought that Sacramento somehow was taking away
from their job, and they didn’t want the Sacramento job to be there, so it was killed. Karen then
accepted a job with the Bureau of Land Management, and she’s now the assistant state director
for the Bureau of Land Management, and it is the Bureau of Land Management’s great glee that
they have Karen, and the Forest Service should be extremely disappointed that they have lost
her. I’m really proud of Karen and how she’s moving up in the outfit, and I’d like to believe that
I had a part in that by selecting the “best of the worst” on the list for district rangers at Hat Creek.
Just an amazing woman. And I’ve told people this story I just have told you right now, I
was requested to do in Region Three. The regional forester in Region Three talked to Paul
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 52
Barker and wanted someone, preferably a deputy, to come from Region Five and explain to
Region Three how the women’s program was going, and the consent decree and those kinds of
things. So one of the deputy regional foresters was sent. He painted a very bad, bleak, dark
picture. The regional forester in Region Three couldn’t believe what was being said and called
Paul Barker and said, “This is what the guy said.” I won’t mention his name. He went to work
for another agency and has long since passed away.
But the regional forester in Three was looking for a positive image of what was going on,
not the story of all of the things that had gone badly. So I was sent off to Region Three to tell
them the story, and so I told them the story of Karen Barnette. I gave a copy of my speech to
Karen. I said, “You’ll want to see this so that you know, if you hear things coming back, what
I’ve been doing.” She got a kick out of the speech I gave. And I told all the folks in Region
Three, “You may not know Karen Barnette yet, but in your career you will hear her name or you
will work for her, because she’s moving up in the outfit, and you might all be working for her
one day.” So that’s Karen.
Now let’s pause a moment.
[Recording interruption.]
BUZZINI: Okay.
So, Dick, on another fire related note, after you left the Washington office, you were
reassigned to Marana, Arizona. Would you tell us what you did there and what that was all
about?
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 53
HENRY: Well, at Marana, at Pinal Air Park, outside of Marana, actually, is the National
Advanced Resource Technology Center, formerly known as the National Fire Training Center.
While I was in the Washington office, we changed the name of the facility because Hank
deBruin found out that the Department of Labor was going to take over all, quote, “fire training
centers” in the United States, and he did not want to lose Marana, so he told [Charles]
“Charlie” Harden, [Ernest] “Ernie” Anderson, who had been a previous director at Marana, and
me that before noontime we were to come up with a name for the Marana operation that did not
have the word “fire” in the title.
So we sat throwing words out, and the first one was “National” because obviously it was
a national facility, and we didn’t want to mention fire, so we thought we’d mention resources,
and you can always sneak fire under that because it had an impact on resources, and since it was
a national facility and one—the only kind, it was advanced, so it became the National Advanced
Resource Technology Center. So I was the director of the National Advanced Resource
Technology Center for five years, where we did a lot of fire training that originally had been
done in the National Fire Training Center.
We did other training as well. Probably the toughest one for me was the I-520 course,
which is the program that you go through to become a Type I fire team. It’s the highest fire
training course there is, and you go through that course to be the Type 1 IC [incident
commander] and finance chiefs, et cetera. The other courses that were not in fire that we taught
were minerals management and surveying and those kinds of things.
In I-520 you passed or failed that course. It was a three-week-long course, and we had
folks come from various regions and various states attending the training, and when it was all
done, there were usually a few folks who didn’t pass the course. I felt that when a person [sic;
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 54
people] didn’t pass the topmost fire course in the nation, that it was the director’s job to inform
them as to why they didn’t pass the course, that it wasn’t up to some instructor that was at
Marana for a short time, teaching the course, and they may have failed that person’s class, which
is why they were failing, but it wasn’t the instructor’s job to tell them why they failed.
And so I would sit down at night with each of the people who failed, explain to them why
they had failed, what they might need to do to come back to Marana another time, and how they
could improve themselves in the meantime in their fire career. I had grown men break out in
tears and just deeply sobbing that they had failed I-520. I had one man from the Los Padres
National Forest that I had known for years in fire, who came and was actually being pushed to be
in the wrong job, and that was adequately displayed when he attempted to do that job during the
training at Marana. I sat one evening and explained to him why he had failed, and [sic; delete
“and”] telling him how he could come back again. And he said, “But I only have two years left
in the outfit, and I won’t have time to come back again,” and he had wanted to retire on his name
tag, I guess, of life that he had passed that course. I of course was concerned why the forest had
sent somebody to that level of training who only had two years left in the outfit, and called the
forest to ask that question.
I did get called by the forest supervisors as to why some of the folks didn’t pass, and
when I told them, they understood. But when you’re sitting telling a grown man that he hasn’t
passed a course that he’s fought tooth and nail to get to, people—I’ve known people who applied
to go to Marana five, six, seven years in a row and didn’t make it. I mean, it was the course to
get to. And when they finally made it, they wanted to pass, and when they failed, it was
extremely disheartening for them.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 55
But I felt it was my job to talk with them about that, and I did. But it was probably the
hardest time I had at Marana. I did it, though, on the basis that this is the highest training course,
these are the people we’re certifying as the best to be on an incident command team, and if they
don’t pass the course and I just kind of wave that by and let them be certified to be on a Type 1
team, I do not want to face the possibility that an action taken by that individual causes the death
of a firefighter, because ultimately it would be my fault because I had allowed them [sic; him or
her] to pass. And so I decided that I was the last place in the lifeline, so to speak, that had
control over saving lives in firefighting by failing folks who should not be placed in the position
of running incident command teams at that level. And so for that reason I did it, and I believed,
and I believe to this day, that I may have saved some lives by failing some people who wouldn’t
have cut it in the Type 1 position. But those types of decisions don’t come easy [sic; easily].
But, as I used to tell folks, “I checked your job description, and it only graded out GS-1. All the
rest was hazard pay.”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: So I took on that job.
I also was at Marana at the time when we were starting to get women into the fire
management program. We had something to do with the selection of folks coming to Marana.
The regions would send to Washington all of the people that they wanted to go to the [I-]520
course, and then Washington would send us all of the recommendations that the region had for
their people to take that course, and then we sat down at Marana with a Washington office staffer
there, and went over those lists to decide who was coming to I-520, and that decision was made
as to who from the states was coming, who from other federal agencies were coming, as well as
from the Forest Service.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 56
And so as we started to get women in the fire service, we needed to provide women with
the opportunity to grow in the fire service, and those who had grown significantly and had
already proven themselves [sic; themselves] at the I-420 level needed to be considered for the I-
520 level, and so during my tenure at Marana we made a very conscious effort to select women
where we could from those various lists. I feel very good about having been able to do that and
be in the right place at the right time to provide that opportunity for women.
And that’s what I believe I did in the Forest Service, provide the opportunity. The
women had the guts and the get-up-and-go, like Karen Barnette, the willingness to come beard
[unintelligible] the lion in his den and tell him his decision about Eskimo Hill was wrong. But
they needed the opportunity to get through that male screen of just guys in I-520. You know,
that was never meant to have women in it; it’s too a high level for women, et cetera. And so my
job was to provide the opportunity, and their job was to prove that I had made the right choice in
providing that opportunity.
Some very sharp women moved up in the outfit, and I’m very proud of the little bit I had
to do with that. In my retirement, I look back upon having made those decisions and feel good
about having done them. Also having taken a whole bunch of flak for having done that, but
that’s part of your “hazard pay.”
BUZZINI: So from Marana then you went to be fire management director in San Francisco?
HENRY: No, from Marana I went to be the forest supervisor on the Lassen National Forest. On
the Lassen, I kind of changed things around. We had gotten all these—remember I talked earlier
about all these “specialists,” these people that weren’t timber beasts or engineers? And we now
had a whole flock of these people. And so I made a pronouncement that every individual on the
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 57
Lassen National Forest, no matter what their job was, was going to have a red card in the fire
organization.
So that announcement went out, that everybody was to take the step test because they
were going to get a red card. Well, the forest geologist came in and said he didn’t sign on to
work in fire, and he was going to fail the step test on purpose so he didn’t have to be red carded.
And I said, “Well, if you don’t want to fight fire and be a geologist, one of the things you could
do is go to work for the Smithsonian Institute. They don’t have a fire division. And you can be
a full-time geologist. But if you want to work for the Forest Service, you’re going to be in fire,
because in the Organic Act it says we’re going to fight fire, and so everybody’s going to fight
fire that works for the Forest Service. So you are going to take the step test.” “Well, I’m going
to fail the step test,” he said. “I don’t care, you’re still going to get a red card.” “Well, what am
I going to get a red card in?” I said, “I can give you a red card to help loading trucks at the fire
cache. I can give you a red card—you know the forest, and you can be a lead truck to lead
Caterpillar tractors on low-beds around to the fire camp. You can be a driver for the fire boss.
You can do a whole bunch of different things. You can assist in the budget office, handling the
fire time slips. But you’re going to be red carded in something. So if you want to pass the step
test, that’s fine. If you don’t want to pass the step test, that’s your decision, but you’re still going
to be red carded fire employee.”
Even my secretary was red carded. She had worked on the forest in her younger days,
and her husband was a tank truck operator up at one of the ranger stations, and she knew the
forest well, and so—Valerie Brown was her name. She was red carded to drive a lead pickup
truck. Everybody on the Lassen National Forest had a red card.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 58
Well, that shook up some folks elsewhere in the region because no other forest supervisor
had said that that was going to happen. Some forest supervisors, I think, were just flat out afraid
to say that, and some just didn’t want to say that, but while I was on the Lassen for six years,
every employee had a red card. It was some way to assist the fire department, whether it was as
a sector boss, a line boss, on a fire crew or in that group of people who are supporting the fire
suppression organization that you don’t see out on the line; they’re back in the office running
paperwork or they’re loading trucks at the fire cache. But everybody had a red card.
I felt good about that, and some people got involved in fire who wouldn’t have normally
gotten involved in fire and found out that they actually liked their involvement in fire and
decided that they wanted to head down the path towards involvement in fire management. I
think we got those people because of that action of [sic; my decision that?] everybody’s going to
have a red card.
In this day, when we have people from all kinds of disciplines who have no fire
experience at all working for the Forest Service, I think we achieved [unintelligible] everybody
has a red card, but things have changed, and supervisors have changed, and the workforce has
changed, and I doubt that’s going to happen.
It’s similar to the time when I was district ranger at Happy Camp and we had to shut
down the planting contractors because we had snow in the upper elevations and they couldn’t get
up and get to some of the areas, and there were small areas that they weren’t going to be able to
get to, so I decided that everybody in the district ranger’s office was now a tree planter. And I
advised everybody that the next day they come to work with work clothes on and high boots
because they were going to get on the Hotshot bus and go up the hill, and they were going to
plant trees because the district folks were going to go to all those areas where the planting crews
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 59
were not going to get to, and they were going to chase the snow up the hill. As the sun melted
the snow off the hill each day, and you could get another two acres up this spot and another two
acres up that spot, the district office folks were going to be planting in those areas.
I got a call from the forest TMO [timber management officer] and [sic; who] said, “I
understand you’ve made your entire district office tree planters.” I said, “Yes, I have. We’re
having tree planting instructions this morning, and this afternoon we expect production from the
office tree planting crew.” He thought that was fantastic and suggested it to a couple of other
district rangers, who apparently didn’t have guts enough to tell their district clerk that she was
going to go up the hill and tree plant.
BUZZINI: I would have loved to have done that.
HENRY: Anyway, everybody in the district office were tree planters, and everybody on the
Lassen had a red card.
BUZZINI: Good for you.
HENRY: That was how we operated.
BUZZINI: So from the Lassen, then, you went to San Francisco and fire.
HENRY: Right.
BUZZINI: So tell us some more fire stories. What happened in San Francisco?
HENRY: Okay. So from the Lassen I went to San Francisco in fire. I got there in time to be
deeply involved with the consent decree. The consent decree was a decree agreed to by Zane
Smith, then regional forester, with a court that said we did not have enough women in the Forest
Service and that we needed to have 43 percent of our workforce be women. This was based on
the fact that [for] the State of California, the workforce was 43 percent women, even though a
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 60
big chunk of that was women schoolteachers and nurses, and we didn’t have a lot of those in the
organization, but we had to get to 43 percent.
So the biggest number of employees in the region was in fire management. In the
summertime we had 8,000 employees in the region, 6,000 of which [sic; whom] were in fire. So
if you’re going to change the number of people that are women, the fire department better get on
with it because that’s where the biggest opportunity for change is. And so I met with Paul
Barker and decided we were going to take a bunch of actions, and put women into jobs, and we
were going to do it where they were capable and suited for those jobs, but we were not going to
do it where they were not.
And so we would get a list from some forest, and they’d have a woman that could have
been selected to be on an engine crew, and we would tell them, “You need to select that woman
to be on the engine crew,” and they’d say, “Well, she barely meets the qualifications.” And we’d
say, “Yeah, but what’s the rest of the engine crew?” “Well, it’s four folks that have been in the
outfit for at least ten years, and the TTO [tank truck operator] has been in the outfit twenty
years.” “Well, then you can have a young person on your crew that doesn’t know a lot about fire
and train them [sic; him or her] and still stay in fine shape from a safety standpoint.”
But there are some jobs where we just can’t do that. And so one day I got called to a
meeting, and there were only two men in the room, Paul Barker, the regional forester, and
myself, and the rest of the people in the room were a woman who was head of personnel, the
Pacific Islands woman’s [sic; women’s] program coordinator, the Native American women’s
program coordinator, and the Hispanic woman [sic; women’s] program coordinator
We had a job vacancy, and it was for a pilot, and pilots came under my purview. I was
the director of fire and aviation, and cooperative fire. And so we had three people on the list.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 61
We had a male pilot with 10,000 hours of time in multi-engine ships, and we had another male
pilot with about 4,000 hours in multi-engine, and the ship that the person was going to be flying
was a twin-engine [Beech] Baron aircraft flying either for executive transportation or as a lead
plane, and we had one other person, a woman, with 1,000 hours.
I was told by the women in the room that I was going to hire the woman with 1,000
hours, and I said, “Well, she doesn’t really have a lot of experience doing that,” and they said,
“What are the minimum requirements for that job?” which they well knew was 1,000 hours. I
said, “A thousand hours.” They said, “Well, she meets the minimum requirement; then you’re
going to select her.” I said, “No, I’m not. I’m going to select the man with 10,000 hours
because I really would like gray-haired old folks that had had many an opportunity for a plane to
crash and had solved the problem and landed safely and are alive today to say, ‘Hi, I’m your
pilot.’ I really don’t like to see young pilots. They haven’t had the opportunity to crash as
much.”
“Well, this woman meets the needs, and you need to have more women in the fire
organization, and so you’re going to select her.” And I said, “Well, you may force me to select
this woman, but if she does [get the position], she is only going to provide executive travel.”
“Well, what do you mean?” “She is only going to fly the woman’s [sic; women’s] program
coordinator for the Hispanic program, the woman’s [sic; women’s] coordinator for the black
program, and the woman’s [sic; women’s] coordinator for the Hispanic [sic] program , and the
regional personnel officer.” And they looked at me. And I said, “You might tell me I have to
hire her, but I determine what work she does, and I’m not going to put her up flying lead plane in
front of a large air tanker going down some canyon with 1,000 hours. I’m just not going to do
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 62
that. That’s the minimum requirements. We’re looking for people with more than the minimum
requirements.”
So finally they agreed that I could hire the guy, and I said, “That’s what you need to do
when you’ve got that kind of—it’s not like being on a fire crew. I mean, it’s the person in a
plane determining whether it flies or crashes.” [Telephone rings.]
[Recording interruption.]
BUZZINI: So, Dick, you were telling us some of your outstanding memories, especially as it
relates to the hiring of women. You just were talking about you were able to select the male
pilot, but surely there were other opportunities where you could select the best-qualified female.
HENRY: Yes, there were several of those. When we had vacancies on my own staff, I worked
hard to place women in those positions, and when I went to the regional office as the fire
director, I had eighteen people on staff, of which [sic; whom] one was a woman. That’s not
counting the clerical staff. When I retired four years later, there were nine women on my staff.
(In other words – 50% of my principal staff were women.) They were excellent women. One of
them, Sue Husari who was my regional fuels specialist, went on to get a job with the Park
Service and is now the western fire director for the United States [National] Park Service for all
of the western states, including Hawaii and American Samoa and the western world. I feel good
about having gotten them into a position [sic; positions] where they could get those jobs.
I mentioned earlier Karen Barnette. I created the job for her when I was the regional fire
director, and she since has gone on to be the assistant state director for the Bureau of Land
Management. We selected a variety of women to head up training positions. Our regional fire
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 63
prevention officer [position] was filled by a woman, and because of her having to move to San
Francisco to have the job and having the kids in school near Placerville and her husband working
in the same area, we made her duty station Sacramento so that we could accommodate her family
needs and we could still get what we needed from her in the way of heading up the prevention
program with her office being in Sacramento, and she could travel from that location to the other
forests and was actually closer to more forests than the regional office was anyway. So I feel
good about having selected women for positions and tried to make the conditions under which
they accepted those positions easier for them to accommodate with their families.
I had folks talking about—you know, what do you do when you get a woman that doesn’t
cut it? I said, “Well, we just don’t have them [sic; her] do the job, or we move them [sic; her] to
a job they [sic; she] can do, or we counsel them [sic; her] that they need [sic; she needs] to find
another line of work.” I said, “All of you older males know of a whole bunch of white males that
did not do well in their jobs, and so they were put in some job in the supervisor’s office.” And I
said, “You’re perfectly willing to work in an organization where we took the culls and put them
in supervisors’ offices, but you get up-tight if there’s one woman [who] comes along [who]
doesn’t do her job. You need to give the women as much slack as you gave men in your earlier
days.”
And I said, “Quite frankly, the women that are coming along—it’s a smaller percentage
of them that are not making it, because we have top-notch women that are applying for the jobs,
whereas before, we had males applying for the jobs, some of which [sic; whom] were top-notch,
some of which [sic; whom] were not. And so don’t talk to me about women who won’t make it.
In my career, I only had one that needed to be counseled and [sic; to] go to work in another area,
and she was successful in that area.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 64
BUZZINI: [unintelligible] just in the wrong place at the wrong time kind of thing, huh?
HENRY: Right, and she just needed counsel to get to her right area. All the other women I ever
hired were great. They had fought their way up through all those white males who thought they
were perfect, and through that Forest Service green glass ceiling that said only men could handle
these jobs, and done very well, and I’m proud of all of them.
When we got to the regional office, in dealing with the consent decree, I was there during
the time Paul Barker was told by the district court judge, “The next time I see you in this
courtroom, you better have your shaving kit with you and have all of your affairs at home taken
care of because if I get this same report, you’re going directly to jail from this courtroom.”
BUZZINI: Mmm! For not filling the quotas?
HENRY: For not meeting some part of the consent decree, whether it was the quotas or some
other conditions. The Forest Service was flat out going to meet all the conditions of the consent
decree, and the biggest one was 43 percent women within five years. So there were forests that
had vacancy announcements out, and I would call the appropriate staff on the forest and advise
them that they really wanted to select a woman for that job because we had to get to 43 percent.
And the safest place to get to it were on large crews, where you could have 5 percent or 10
percent of folks not really knowing what was going on but were trainable, and bunch of folks
who knew what was going on, as compared to one-person positions, where you really had to
have—
BUZZINI: They’d stand out like a sore thumb.
HENRY: Yes. So we worked hard to make that happen. I had forest supervisors who weren’t
happy with me, and I had fire staff that weren’t happy with me because they felt I was pushing
women too much, but they didn’t understand what the problems were on the regional office end
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 65
of the line. When the regional forester is told he’s going directly to jail, not pass Go, not collect
two hundred dollars, you place emphasis on a program.
BUZZINI: Yes.
HENRY: And you may make selections that you’re not thrilled with, but you make selections
that are okay and will meet the needs of the agency, and for the most part will take care of the
job that needs to be done on the ground, but the old idea that only males can do that job needs to
be gone, because we’re going to be 43 percent women. While that means that engineering needs
to pick up some, and some of the other disciplines, when you control—75 percent of the regional
budget was just the fire budget—and 6,000 out of the 8,000 employees, then you are the biggest
part of either the problem or the solution, and I’m here to tell you that you’re part of the solution
because Dick Henry doesn’t manage the problem, he manages the solution. That’s the way I’ve
done [sic; done it] my entire career, and that’s the way I continue to do it.
[Recording interruption.]
HENRY: Yes. So go ahead.
BUZZINI: So, Dick, you’ve given us a long, in-depth [discussion] of your career with the Forest
Service, how you’ve helped women and other people along, and so before we conclude our
interview today—I know that you’re proud with the role you’ve played in some of the special
projects in different places, so will you tell us what you’re most proud of with regard to the role
you played as a Forest Service employee?
HENRY: Well, thanks. While I was the district ranger at Happy Camp—for those of you
reading this, Happy Camp is seventy-five miles west of Interstate 5 from Yreka, which is the
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 66
town most northerly in California, just south of the Oregon border. You go down the Klamath
River seventy-five miles—a lot of people believe they’ve gone into the pure wilderness. And
when I was the ranger there, the nearest doctor from Happy Camp was in Yreka. There’s a small
hospital in Yreka, but if you needed anything major done, you had to go to Medford to the
hospital, which is 110 miles away.
And the town of Happy Camp had attempted to get a doctor to come to town, and they
even had put a billboard out on Interstate 5, advertising the fact that they wanted a doctor in
Happy Camp, and they had gotten no applications. So several of us got together, kind of the
town fathers. Happy Camp doesn’t have a mayor and council; it’s the largest unincorporated
town in Siskiyou County, and the folks in town decided several years ago and still maintain that
they do not want to become a town because then the county will make them get curbs and
sidewalks, and they don’t want curbs and sidewalks, and so they’re not a town!
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: So, yes, that’s amazing. Janet just laughed, and rightly so, but the Forest Service was
a big part of that town, and so several of us got together and talked about how we might get a
doctor to town. I suggested that we build a medical facility, and then the doctor would come,
sort of like, you know, I’m building a baseball field and they will come. Because we had not
been able to get a doctor to Happy Camp by saying, “Please come,” what if we said, “We’ve got
a facility already built, and you can come, be the first doctor, get it up and running, and put that
on your list of things that you’ve wanted to get done in life.”
So eleven of us got together, and we formed a corporation called Happy Camp Health
Services, Incorporated, and I became the secretary of the corporation, and we proceeded to get to
work to build a clinic. I mentioned that there were these work projects that you could get a hold
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 67
of and get money for, and the Forest Service had gotten them over time, and many a ranger
station in Region Five had been built with some of these work projects. And I said, “There’s
[sic; There are] some open right now.” And I said, “What if we apply for those?” Well,
everybody said, “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Dick, but since you know so much
about it, you apply and let us know what happens.”
So we worked up an application for these monies, and we sent it off to the county, and
the county said it was too big a request for the county to handle, so they sent it to the state.
Governor [Jerry] Brown at the time looked at all of these requests that he had, and he approved
two, one in Southern California and one in Northern California. And the one he approved in
Northern California for $100,000 was the Happy Camp clinic.
And so we were able, with this $100,000, under this workforce training program, to go
out and hire a person to head up that program, and then hire twelve contract-type folks who
couldn’t get jobs in building trades, since we had people that could set forms and pour concrete
and frame houses and that kind of thing. And with that $100,000, we actually got all of the
concrete poured at the clinic. Our district clerk’s husband owned the only concrete plant in
town, and she talked with him, and so he supplied us the concrete for just the cost of the cement
that went into the concrete; he didn’t charge us for the rock or the sand or the use of his trucks,
because the clinic was right across the street from his yard, so whenever we needed concrete,
he’d come over and pour the concrete for us.
And we got the two lumber mills in town—we had a dimension stock mill in town and a
plywood mill in town, and they agreed to furnish all of the wood products at no cost, and so
before long, we had a clinic that had been framed out, had hand-split sugar pine shakes on the
roof—every one of them was a clear shake; there was not one knot on the roof; this was a 6,500-
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 68
square-foot building. We had designed it with the help of an architect in Medford who
specialized in medical buildings, and saw a need for our building and agreed to assist us at no
fee, so here we had this large building framed out. It was sided, and had a wood-shake roof, and
all the windows and doors in it, so it was buttoned up from the weather, and we ran out of
money.
So we said, How are we going to get the interior work done? We need to do the finish
wiring. We need to do the finish plumbing, and we need to do all the finish woodworking
around the doors, and we need to make all the cabinets for the doctors’ examining offices and all
the cabinetry for the office staff, et cetera.
Well, one of the members of the group was the local judge, and he was a lay judge. He
was only a judge when needed, and the rest of the time he had his own cabinet shop. It was a
2,300-square-foot building, and he made custom-made cabinets and doors and all kinds of
woodwork. So he volunteered to do all of that, and for years I had been doing electrical wiring
and plumbing, and we got agreement with the building inspector that the local building inspector
would inspect what I did, and if I wasn’t doing it right, he’d tell me and we’d make it right.
And so I would go home from work at five o’clock at night and have supper and then I
would go to work at the clinic, wiring, from seven o’clock till ten o’clock on weeknights. And
on Friday night I went down to the clinic after supper, and I worked until three o’clock Saturday
morning, and then I went home and got up and went down to the clinic at eight o’clock Saturday
morning and then worked till midnight Saturday night, and then went down Sunday morning at
eight o’clock and worked until ten o’clock Sunday night, and then went to work as district ranger
Monday morning.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 69
In that way, I was able to finish wiring in all of the rooms. I even hooked up an X-ray
machine, which I had never done, but I got a wiring diagram from the company who [sic; which]
had built it. The machine had been given to us by a doctor going out of business in Medford.
The machine was about twenty years old. And I got the wiring diagram, and I hooked it up. The
targeting light—that’s the light that puts the little X on you so they know where they’re aiming
the X-ray machine—in it wouldn’t work, and I checked out, and the transformer wouldn’t work,
and I needed a twelve-volt transformer. And where does one get a twelve-volt transformer in
Happy Camp? Well, you go home and you get your kids’ trains out and you steal the train
transformer, and you set it on twelve volts and put it inside the housing of the X-ray machine,
and now the X-ray machine has a targeting light.
And to make sure the X-ray machine works, and since you’ve done the plumbing for the
developing machine and you’d built the darkroom, you go into the darkroom and you load the
bucky with a sheet of X-ray film, and you take it out and put it in, and you bring out the control
cord, and you measure the thickness of your arm with the calipers, and you check up and see
what the dosage should be, and you punch the button, and the X-ray machine goes whiz-bang,
and you take the X-ray into the darkroom and put it into the developing machine, and a few
minutes later it comes out, and you put it up on the light box, and sure enough, it’s an arm with a
radius and an ulna and wrist and fingers, and by golly, the X-ray machine works. And this is
thirty years later, and my right arm hasn’t fallen off, so I guess everything was okay.
And I did all the finish plumbing and hooked up all of the wash basins, twenty-three of
them, all of the toilets, thirteen of them—
BUZZINI: Oh, God!
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 70
HENRY: And did all the finish plumbing work in the building, and on July Fourth, 1976, we
were able to dedicate the Happy Camp Clinic. We got our first doctor from the Public Health
Service. You go to college, and you get the Public Health Service to pay your way through
college; then you owe them some years as a doctor where they need you. Well, Happy Camp
qualified for assistance by the Public Health Service, so we got a doctor and his young wife, who
were transferred to Happy Camp to be our doctor, and we now had a doctor and a hospital
facility at Happy Camp. We could deliver babies, we could do some minor operations, we had
an operating room, an X-ray room, a triage room. We had room for two doctors and three
examining rooms for each doctor and a large waiting room and an ambulance entrance to the
building, and everything was wheelchair accessible, and we had a clinic going in Happy Camp.
Probably the thing I think the most about is what I did to make that happen. My district
administrative officer was a retired major from the United States Army, and at the dedication day
he came up to me and he said, “Well, Dick, when you get to the Pearly Gates you tell them your
name is Dick Henry. If he says, ‘Are you the one that worked on the Happy Camp Clinic?’ you
say yes. He’ll say, ‘No more questions. Come on in.’”
BUZZINI: Ohh! [Chuckles.]
HENRY: So I really feel good about the Happy Camp Clinic, and to this day I’ve had
firefighters who have been on fires in the Happy Camp area that have needed some medical
assistance [and who] will tell me, “Hey, Dick, I was at your clinic.”
BUZZINI: That’s neat.
HENRY: Thirty years later, I still have ownership for the Happy Camp Clinic in my heart and
feel really good about what I was able to do there.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 71
The Forest Service officially or up the line never noticed it. I don’t know why, but after
the clinic was built I was able to get young married people to move to Happy Camp. I didn’t
have a problem filling jobs with young married couples who wanted to have children, and
recruitment at Happy Camp was far easier now that the clinic was there, so some folks could say
I got the clinic there to help fill vacancies on the district, and maybe so, but I also had three
children and a wife, and they were four other good reasons why we got the clinic going.
But it’s still operating to this day, and it’s operated by the Indian Health Service. The
largest number of people in Happy Camp are now Indian. They always were. In fact, our kids
came home one day and wanted to know what a minority was, and I said, “We are.”
BUZZINI: [Laughs.]
HENRY: Because Happy Camp was 55 percent Native American and 45 percent other folks. So
the Indian Health Service runs it, but everybody is welcome to the clinic. You don’t have to be
Indian to get into the clinic. Anyway, that’s probably the highest thing on my list of feeling-
good things.
BUZZINI: Good for you.
HENRY: When I went to the Lassen, we had an old home up at the shore of the lake. It was the
first summer home on Eagle Lake. My thoughts originally were to just get rid of it and put some
more recreation area in on the lake. An employee of the Eagle Lake District said, “What if we
said that that could be used by, like, Ronald McDonald? You know, they have places in the
cities where could go and stay. What if we said people could come to this house that exists and
they could take their kids to the lake? And these would be people that had sick children.”
Well, we talked it over and thought there was a lot of merit to that idea, so we decided
we’d take on McDonald’s, that they had done some of that kind of work, not necessarily this
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 72
kind, but we would track down some McDonald’s folks and see what we could do. So I
contacted McDonald’s in [the] Sacramento area, and McDonald’s are all privately owned, but
most of the people who own them own at least three or four, and one man in Sacramento had
twelve of them.
I asked if I could come to—they have a board meeting once a month. I asked if I could
come to their board meeting and make a presentation, and he said yes, so I took the fellow from
the district, and we went down and made a presentation and told them that this was what we
would like to do and that we’d sure like to make an agreement with them. And so they all started
talking amongst themselves. “Well, Al, you know Senator So-and-so personally. Why don’t
you talk with that person about making this happen?” And, “Joe, you know this person and that
person, and make them happen [sic; talk to them and see if you can make it happen].”
I said, “Gentlemen, I’m the person that can make this happen. I can make the agreement
for the United States Forest Service. I’ve been authorized by the chief to make agreements
directly for this operation, and we don’t have to go through any other office, and you don’t have
to go turning on the United States senators or any of the congress folks. You are talking to the
person that can make this agreement today. And I would like to leave here with a tentative
agreement.”
So the mood in the meeting changed to, “Okay, how are we going to do this?” And one
guy said, “Don’t we have $400,000 in some fund that we use for such-and-such a thing?” “Well,
yeah, we got that $400,000.” “Well, what if we used it for this?” “Yeah, we could use it for this.
All those in favor of using that $400,000 for this, raise your [hands]. Okay, [unintelligible].
We’ll sign on for $400,000 to start this off.”
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 73
And I said, “That’s a great start to a really neat program.” And with that, we got started
with Ronald McDonald, and they said, “For $400,000, can we get to name the camp?” And I
said, “For $400,000, you get to name the camp.” And they said, “We want to name it Camp
Ronald McDonald at Eagle Lake.” I said, “That’s the name of the camp.”
And so we went on to get involved with the Telephone Pioneers [of America]. These are
people who have worked for the telephone company for more than twenty-five years, and they
go out and do projects that are needed by society. And the Telephone Pioneers we already had
working on the forest on the Hat Creek District. They had built several little docks out into Hat
Creek so that people in wheelchairs could go out with a fishing rod and drop a line off the pier
and catch fish that had been planted there by Fish and Game, and they made some boardwalks in
some campgrounds, and they had modified a couple of our toilet facilities so that wheelchairs
could get into them. And so we already knew those folks, and so we talked to them about getting
involved, and we got some plans drawn up.
The house that I originally was going to tear down—the house became the center for the
Camp Ronald McDonald at Eagle Lake. It was where the administrator would live and where
we would have meetings and [where] the office management people would be. And we built I
believe it was fifteen cabins, and we built a big mess hall facility that was multi-functional. I
remember working—one weekend I took my radial arm saw up there, and I spent the entire day
cutting two by sixes into six-foot lengths to have enough to make an 1,100-foot-long boardwalk
that was no steeper than a wheelchair could take, which meant we had to have landings every so
often and a switchback or two, and it took 1,100 feet of boardwalk to get down to the lake, even
though the distance to the lake was about 500 feet. But we made it so that it was wheelchair
accessible uphill and downhill, and we had boardwalks throughout the entire camp, and all of the
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 74
cabins were connected by boardwalk so the kids in wheelchairs could get from one place to
another.
The last time I saw the facility, I was fire director, and I was up on the Modoc [National
Forest] at a meeting, and I was flying in one of our Baron aircraft back to the Bay Area, and I
asked the pilot, since we were so close, if he could fly over Eagle Lake so I could see Camp
Ronald McDonald, and that was a really great feeling, looking down at the lake, seeing all the
cabins and seeing all of it still there and working fine.
And then in the regional office, as I’ve mentioned before, probably the thing I feel best
about—I feel good about doing a bunch of things: getting it so the Forest Service employees in
Region Five could wear turn-out gear. You know, down at Mormon Rocks there’s a station
on—what is it, the San Bernardino? I think it is. Anyway, it’s the Mormon Rocks station. They
go to 300 vehicle accidents a year on the road in front of their place. Burning vehicles are
dangerous. Ninety percent of the smoke from a burning vehicle is deadly poisonous because it’s
burning plastics and oils and all kinds of things.
So for them to safely fight those fires—now, somebody can say, “Well, we shouldn’t be
fighting vehicle fires.” No, but they’re going to set the forest on fire, so yes, we should be
fighting vehicle fires. The folks in the Washington office that still believe that we should only
fight fires that are burning inside the national forests, and if your house is next to the national
forest we fight the bushes behind it but don’t put any water on your house—hopefully most of
them have left the fire shop.
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.]
HENRY: And I feel good about saying, “We’re going to put Nomex on fire engines where that
is needed for a reasonable proportion of the fires that those people fight, and we’re going to put
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 75
breathing apparatus on Forest Service fire engines so that when you get to one of those fires, you
can have a b.a. on and your gear on and safely fight that fire.”
I also said that I could not put it in writing because the Washington office was having
enough time [sic; was having a hard enough time] dealing with my changes that I wanted to
make, but at a fire staff officers meeting in Sacramento, I said, “Any of the forests that wish to
get on with collar brass, feel free to do so. I will not say anything at all about it, but you will not
receive a letter from me authorizing it, because Washington will just tear me apart over that.
They believe that there’s no rank in the Forest Service and we shouldn’t be doing that. But I
well know that in Southern California, when someone from the L.A. County fire department
shows up, they want to know whom they’re talking to, and they want to know whether that
person is a captain of an engine company or whether that person is a fire chief. And it’s hard to
tell with us all in the same green suits. It’s reasonable—we’re dealing with other agencies—for
us to wear collar brass.”
And I was quite pleased here—not too long ago I went to the fiftieth anniversary of air
tankers over at Willows, and there were a bunch of Forest Service folks there, and they were all
wearing collar brass, and I thought, Aha! It happened. And it was the right thing to happen.
Should have happened years ago, but I feel good that that I let it happen on my watch.
And, as I’ve said before, I feel extremely proud of the fact that I changed the regional
office fire director’s staff from seventeen males and one female to nine males and nine females
during the time I was in the regional office. And I feel extremely proud of the fact that two of
those women have gone on to much higher positions in other agencies, and I feel extremely
proud of that.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 76
I really feel good about my Forest Service career. I had great feelings about the people I
met. I have known a whole bunch of really great folks. I’ve known a few folks that didn’t thrill
me in life, but I worked around them or over them or made it work anyway. I had a great time.
It was thirty-two years of enjoying the challenges, and I like the fact that my bosses saw
somebody who—
BUZZINI: Gave you [cross talk; unintelligible].
HENRY: —could take on a challenge, and they gave me the chance to take that challenge on.
They gave me the chance to be the—
BUZZINI: They believed in you.
HENRY: Yes, they believed in me and let me be the first director of the largest YCC camp in
the nation and let me be a regional fire director, knowing that I was probably going to do this and
that, or had me become the director at Marana to take it out of being a country club atmosphere
to a more scholastic atmosphere. In fact, when I left Marana, all of the courses at Marana were
in the catalog of the University of Arizona in Tucson, in their postgraduate school, and they
would send one of their people out to register people in those courses. You had to pay for it, but
you could get three credits of graduate credits in a variety of fire courses and some of the other
courses. But every course at Marana was a postgraduate-level course in the University of
Arizona, where you could get college credit, which did not happen before I went there.
So I have a whole flock of things to feel good about. I have a whole flock of people that I
appreciate having given me the chance to do things, and I like to feel that I took a bunch of those
folks’ ways of management and put those into my management system. I admired [Douglas]
“Doug” Leisz, and I like to believe I picked up a few of his ways of dealing with people so that I
could successfully deal with people also.
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 77
I liked Sotero Muniz. You could go to a meeting with Sotero Muniz in the front of the
room, and when you left the room, you could ask everybody who left the room, “Who was he
looking at?” And you would swear he was looking only at you. The room had 500 people in it,
and 500 people could swear that Sotero Muniz was only looking at them. And he taught me to
look at the people in the room, not give a speech and stare at the back of the room, to have eye
contact with the people in the room and talk, in effect, with them and not over them or at them or
at the back wall.
And Hank deBruin and his standup staff meetings, where he kept people informed of
what was going on so that when they made decisions, they made it [sic; them] with the latest
information, which is why I felt comfortable sending Karen Barnette and Alice Forbes to Hawaii
to deal with the Hawaii hurricane, and why I felt comfortable sending folks to Guam and making
agreements. I said, “You”—I made everybody the assistant director of fire and aviation
management. Personnel said I couldn’t do that, and I said, “Well,”—they said you have to make
them—what was the title? What were you called if you were some kind of assistant? Group
leader. And I said, “Group leader. A group leader is a guy that goes out and gets in the first
biplane and flies across the English Channel to bomb the Huns.” “Group leader” is a nondescript
term telling you nothing. When I’ve got a guy out in Guam talking to the governor of Guam, the
governor of Guam needs to know he’s talking to somebody in the outfit that can make a
difference and he’s talking to the assistant director for fire and aviation management. So you can
call this person what you want to in personnel management, but I’m calling them [sic; him] the
assistant director, and I’m telling them [sic; him] all their business cards are to say, “Assistant
Director.”
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 78
And so you keep all of those folks well informed, and you feel comfortable with them
making decisions because they [sic; they have] got as much information as you have. And you
can get a lot more done when there’s eighteen more of you making decisions than when there’s
only one of you making decisions because everybody has to filter it through you. I learned that
from several people, that [that] was a way to operate, and I enjoyed doing that.
BUZZINI: Instead of micromanagement.
HENRY: Yes, instead of micromanagement. I told everybody on my staff, “You make the
decision with the information you have available. If, after I hear that decision, I disagree with it,
I will not change that decision. I will not go to people and say you were wrong. I will say, ‘For
these reasons, you should make the decision a different way in the future,’ but I will never go
back and shoot you down in front of anybody. Sometimes I may have just picked up some
political thing that changes what it’s about, and if I haven’t let you know that by the time you
made the decision, that’s my fault. You’re all smart people, and I’m the fire director, but one of
you might be the fire director next. You’re all smart. So you go make the decisions as the fire
director, and I will live with them, and we’ll get a whole flock more done than if you go out there
saying, ‘Well, okay, but I’ve got to’”—
BUZZINI: “Check with my boss.”
HENRY: —“‘check with the director.”
BUZZINI: [Chuckles.] Yes.
HENRY: “And then it all comes back through me. That is not a way to run an outfit.”
BUZZINI: Good for you.
HENRY: So I think we were very successful as a regional fire management team, getting things
done in the expanded role of Region Five. Most folks don’t know that Region Five handles
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 79
Guam and Saipan and Tinian and Rota. If you go out to those islands, some of them have
painted the fire trucks red. If you scratch the red paint, green is underneath. I went to the island
of Rota, which is in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Rota is a small
island, and during the Second World War we didn’t even bother with it. It had Japanese on it,
but it was so small, we just went around it. We wanted the landing fields on Tinian, and some of
you are old enough, reading this, will know that Tinian is where the Enola Gay took off with the
atomic bomb, the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan and also the second atomic bomb dropped
on Japan. The Navy left them a fire engine in 1946, when the Navy pulled out of Tinian, and the
fire engine wore out. They were fighting fires on Tinian by throwing sand and beating on them
with palm fronds when we got a new Forest Service engine on Tinian in 1991.
But back to the island of Rota. I go down to the Quonset hut and there are two fire
engines in the Quonset hut, and that’s the fire equipment for the island of Rota. One of them is
an older piece of equipment that Guam shipped out to Rota. The other one is a four-wheel-drive
rig, and the side doors are still Forest Service green, and you can see where the Forest Service
emblem has peeled off of the door, and you can see the shadow of the numbers of the rig. And
this rig happens to be 2334. And 2334 was a three-quarter-ton, four-wheel-drive pickup with a
slip-on fire unit that I drove in the summer of 1960 from Plaskett Meadows [on the
Mendocino]—
BUZZINI: Wow.
HENRY: —as a summer fireman before the inmates showed up.
[Recording interruption.]
Dick Henry, 12//06/06, page 80
BUZZINI: You were talking about that you used to drive that at Plaskett Meadows.
HENRY: Yes. Here we are, I’m on the island of Rota in the Commonwealth of the Northern
Mariana Islands, in a location that’s across the International Date Line—it’s already tomorrow
there—and here is 2334, four-wheel-drive pickup with a slip-on unit in it that I had driven in
1960, when I was sent up to Plaskett Meadows for a couple of weeks to cover for the prevention
officer. And here the rig is, out 10,000 miles west of there, on the edge of the Sea of Japan. It
was a rather unique feeling at the time.
BUZZINI: I’ll bet it was.
Well, Dick, I just want to thank you for your time. Is there anything else that you would
like to add before we conclude our interview? We’ve just about covered every topic I can think
of, but maybe you’ve got one or two you haven’t covered.
HENRY: Oh, Janet, I’m fine with what we covered. I was surprised that I was one of the
interviewees. At one time, I was asked if I would be an interviewer, but I was going back East
and wasn’t going to be able to fit into that timeframe and just never thought of myself as one of
the interviewees, so I was surprised when your letter came and quite pleased to be given the
chance to be a piece of the history in whatever file cabinet this is going to end up in. Thanks.
BUZZINI: I want to thank you for your time today. It’s been most enjoyable for me, too.
Well, it was two hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
HENRY: [Laughs.] If I tell my wife it was two and a half hours, that would be fairly close.
[End of interview.