Reshaping Our National Parks and Their Guardians: The Legacy of George B. Hartzog Jr.

3: Journey to the Directorate [Contains Image Plates]

35 Hartzog left the military in 1946 in search of a career path. With his South Carolina contacts largely dried up, he decided to look in the Washington area, which also brought him closer to Helen Carlson. Paul Gantt, a military buddy, helped get him interviews with two federal agencies. They were the General Land Office (later Bureau of Land Management) in the Department of the Interior and the Office of the Solicitor of the Interior Department. The solicitor’s office offered work in public land law, the land office work in oil and gas leases. Because he believed oil and gas work would benefit his career, he chose the General Land Office. Within six months, he grew frustrated with government bureaucracy and joined a private law firm that provided counsel for such companies as Phillips Oil.1 Several weeks later, Hartzog got a call from Jackson Price, chief counsel for the National Park Service, another Interior Department bureau. Price had seen Hartzog’s credentials when he was processed out of the General Land Office. Impressed, Price offered him a job that paid more than his first government position and even his present private position. For financial reasons , Hartzog accepted. As he later admitted, he knew so little about the National Park Service that he thought he was being interviewed for a position in the U.S. Forest Service. “We didn’t know the Park Service in South Carolina. All we knew was the Forest Service from Francis Marion [National Forest].”2 In fact, he had visited only one national park in his life, Mount Rainier, while he was at Fort Lewis, Washington, awaiting a discharge from the army.3 CHAPTER THREE Journey to the Directorate 36 chapter three George Hartzog quickly gained an appreciation of national parks. He had joined a small agency, set in its ways but steeped in tradition and intensely proud of its mission. “You felt as though you had the opportunity for individual growth and achievement. Whereas in the General Land Office at that time you were a lawyer handling oil and gas leases and that was it and stay out of anything else, you know. And so I felt a sense of freedom and an opportunity for growth in the Park Service that I had not known in the General Land Office, and I think that persisted throughout that agency for many, many years.”4 . In October 1946, George Hartzog moved to National Park Service headquarters , temporarily housed in Chicago, where he rented a room until he married Helen in 1947. Due to a severe housing shortage, the newlyweds were forced to live in hotel rooms. City ordinances outlawed people from occupying a room for more than a week, so at the week’s close the couple packed up and moved to a new location. Finally, they managed to move into the apartment of a friend on temporary assignment. Because of his prior experience in the military police, one of Hartzog’s first tasks was to develop a law enforcement handbook outlining procedures for dealing with common ranger problems. Lacking park experience, he attended a park operations conference for chief rangers and clerks. Here the twenty-six-year-old Hartzog got to know men from parks he had read about but never seen and found himself impressed with their knowledge and love of their parks. They were “individualistic, tough, self-reliant men bound to a common code above service.”5 Holding them in awe, he wanted to become a part of this cadre of spirited, dedicated people. In October 1947, the National Park Service headquarters moved back to its home in the Interior Department building in Washington. Here Hartzog learned he would have to give up his position to a senior employee “riffed” from another federal agency. He had sufficiently impressed his supervisors, however, that they wanted to retain him, and so they created a temporary position for him in Region III and stationed him at Lake Texoma, Oklahoma. There, as regional attorney, he used his legal expertise to work out business and agricultural lease agreements for land around the lake.6 Just as he was completing this work in 1948, a position in Washington opened, and he transferred back to work with the legal and contract aspects of concessions management. In August 1950, his division chief died in an accident, leaving Hartzog the acting chief. journey to the directorate 37 Part...