Lynton Keith Caldwell: An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act

Author’s Note

xi During the course of several years, beginning in 2001 after being introduced to Caldwell by a mutual friend, I enjoyed countless conversations with him. He was then eighty-seven and working on his last, still unpublished book, “The Latter Days.” When he learned I was a mature student completing a degree at IU, he asked me if I could help him with his research. As time went by, we gradually formed a close friendship. I think it was sometime in 2002 when I asked Caldwell if he had ever thought about someone writing his biography. He looked thoughtful and then said something like: “I think you would be quite suitable.” By that time I was well aware of the hundreds of files and piles of papers, letters, and newspaper cuttings that not only filled the large basement of his home, Cedar Crest, but were crammed into boxes in the garage and packed into every drawer and cupboard in his study. I realized that beforeIcouldevenstarttowritehislifestoryIwouldsomehowfirsthaveto put those papers in order. By this time, I had come to know his daughter, Elaine, and son, Ned (and their respective spouses, Phil and Pauline), quite well, and so, during one of Elaine’s then frequent trips from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Bloomington to check on her parents, I broached the idea of the book to her. I told her it would mean giving me access to all her parents’ papers, including their private correspondence. Elaine not only immediately gave me her permission, she supplied me with many vivid recollections of her life growing up as the daughter of Keith and Helen Caldwell. The family has since given me their unquestioning and unreserved support throughout the years it has taken to complete this Author’s Note xii Author’s Note book. Unfortunately, because of its original length, a great deal of the manuscript related to Caldwell’s personal and family life and quotes from Helen’s detailed letters and reports on their world travels ended up on the cutting-room floor. This is a shame: they are well worth reading, not least for their political, social, and historical content. For a year or more I sifted, sorted, compiled, and read. And in the course of putting together the sequence of Caldwell’s life, I began to ask him many questions. We would sit in his study and talk sometimes for hours about his childhood, his university experiences, his life as a young man during the Great Depression, his developing ideas, his early strugglestofindhismissioninlife,hismarriagetoHelenandraisingtwo adopted children, his early love of nature, which gradually turned into a growingpreoccupationwiththeincreasingpollutionandenvironmental despoliation that he began to notice almost everywhere he traveled, and his deepening desire, using his largely self-taught knowledge of ecology and his expertise in public policy and administration, to try and do something about such problems. For these reasons, I cannot state with any accuracy the actual day he told me this or that, only that the best conversations took place between 2002 and 2004, the years before his health really began to fail. I wrote notes on scrap pieces of paper and even at times on the backs of my hands in order to remind myself of something he had said. Fortunately, because as a true “pack rat” he had kept every paper, photo, letter, and document pertaining to his life and the lives of his parents (as well as the family genealogy compiled in the 1930s by one of his father’s sisters), the evidence supporting much of what we discussed is now in the “life by year” folders that form part of the Caldwell Papers collection at Indiana University. Withregardtoreferencesinthebookto“calendar”entries,Caldwell never kept a journal or diary as such. His 1950 “Notes on Travel in the Western States” is the only time (as far as I could ascertain) that he kept a full day-by-day journal. Instead, beginning in 1934, he devised his own systemforrecordingdetailsofhislife,bothpersonalandprofessional.In January each year, beginning in 1934 and ending around 2000, he took a single large sheet of thick brown paper and divided it into small boxes, one box for each day of the year (six months on the front and six months on the back, with the months inserted along the left-hand side). Then, Author’s Note xiii throughout the year he wrote very brief notes in very tiny letters about any event he wanted to record: birds...