Everything Fred – Part 12

30 March 2021

Park Manager. Golden Memorial State Park. Another trailer to live in. At least there was a storm shelter in back of the trailer. Walnut Grove, the closest town, is in Mississippi’s tornado alley. I can recall at least three times the town has been hit.

I couldn’t keep the cats in the park so Dad took them at his trailer in Pulaski. They pretty much loved the place. Unfortunately, not too long after, Sam disappeared. Dad supposed it was squirrel hunters who shot him. They don’t like cats because they can take out squirrels – Rascal actually brought one to Dad. Sam was always a roamer anyway and his curiosity probably got him shot.

One rainy Sunday Dad called me up and said Rascal was in a tree and could get down. I told him it was a cat. It could go up and down if it wanted to. He couldn’t stand it. He parked his truck next to the tree and climbed atop the cab to coax the cat down.

Golden Memorial is a very small state park. It does have a 15 acre lake on the property and I put in a nature trail while there. There are two pavilions and at the time, you could camp there with trailer pads available. We never had a lot of traffic. Today, it’s a day use park only.

There was a concession stand that provided all kinds of snacks (uncooked) for visitors and it was run by a particular governor’s mother. When I first got there, I didn’t pay it much mind but I later found out she was working about 4 hours a day and getting paid for 8. I had a quiet conversation with her and told her that in good conscience, I couldn’t do that. She left soon after.

Years later I was working at Itawamba Junior College in Fulton, Mississippi and the department head came rushing into my lab and said in a panicked voice “The FBI is here and want to interview you!” I laughed and headed over because I figured what it was about. They asked me if the governor had ever coerced me to do something that was illegal. I explained that no, he hadn’t and I had even chased off his mother who once worked for me. It really shook up my department head. He thought he had hired a crime figure.

I had an assistant park manager and two grizzled guys for maintenance. We also had a YCC program with 3 kids. I wasn’t impressed with any of them except for one Black female teen. She was very sharp. I put everyone to work on building the nature trail and then worked with the Black teen on hosting nature walks during the day. She jumped in with both feet and learned everything I tried to tell her about the flora and fauna of the place. I actually put her in charge of the YCC group. That caused the two white guys to quit. They wouldn’t work for any n****r girl. I was OK with them leaving. Their positions were filled relatively quickly and before I allowed them to work I made sure they had no problem with working with her.

We had a lot of mature pine trees in the park. Several were dead and a danger to people in the park and several were infected with the southern pine beetle. You could walk by a tree and hear them gnawing. I called a person I knew in the state office (my immediate supervisor) and asked permission to remove the diseased and dead pines. I got a verbal OK. Yea, I know, I was young and stupid.

I had arranged for a local business to haul the trees away, saw it into timber and pay the company by simply sharing the timber. We used our portion of the shared timber to make bridges along the lake for the nature trail.

I soon got a call from the head of the Mississippi Park Commission. He wanted to know why I was clear cutting the timber in the park. The call was on speaker phone in his office and I asked if my immediate supervisor was in the room. He spoke up and said yes he was. I then asked if he remembered me getting verbal authority to clear diseased and dead pines. I was ready for him to deny it but to my surprise, he admitted he had given me permission. The call quickly ended after that.

My park assistant had a wife and young son and both parents were young themselves. They were from out west somewhere and were into health food. In particular, I remember them never eating processed cheese. I don’t think you could buy non-processed cheese in Mississippi at the time. I was later heard that after I left the park system, the assistant was caught selling drugs on park property.

My lifeguard was Larry Thrash from Sebastopol, Mississippi. My grandmother Ruby used to go there all the time to buy antiques. I think that’s where I got my fascination with old things. The antique shops were like museums to me. There’s not much there in Sebastopol other than a few antique stores and a post office.

Anyway, Larry only worked the summer. In the fall he started at Millsaps. It turned out to be a lifelong friendship and we are still in touch today. He ended up as a postal carrier and retired a few years ago in San Antonio. Every time I visit my cousin Jo out there, I try to make time to visit with Larry.

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Anyway, to be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot to do at the park other than swim, fish, and hike. I kept trying to find some way to bring people into the park and Forest radio had an answer. It was the only radio station you could get consistently and they had a segment where they aired all the events going on.

I approached my best friend Crag Knox and asked if he would be willing to have his band show up and play for 4th of July. I couldn’t promise them very much money – just petty cash but I also promised them all the beer they could drink after the event. They agreed. Crag’s band was a blue grass band. He and I built a small covered stage next to the concession stand, did the wiring for overhead lights and amps and microphones. I advertised a 4th of July party at the park with Forest radio and put up flyers in Walnut Grove.

People came out of the woodwork! It was the busiest day of the park. People had to park on the side of the road to the entrance of the park. G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery was campaigning for U.S. House re-election. He showed up at the park and walked straight towards me and said “I came to Walnut Grove to campaign and no one was in town.” Everything was closed. He said he now knew why. He asked my permission to go through the crowd and pass out cards. I figured it was OK and let him. There’s nothing more patriotic than campaigning on the fourth. He was also running un-apposed. He later wrote me a glowing letter and copied the park commission. I thought to myself – this can’t be good. They don’t like someone being complimented. I was soon to be proven prescient.

Crag and his band played for hours. There were others who volunteered, including my two grizzled workers. All in all, it was a great success to get people to the park.

One day I was walking below the dam of the lake and noticed water coming out of crawdad holes in the dam. That got me worried. At least the water was clear and not muddy. I put in a call to the park commission and asked for help. It took a while but they sent out an engineer. He hinted, obtusely, that it might be best to shut down the swimming area – our biggest draw to the park. It turned out to not be such a problem because it was after labor day. Later, the engineer approved reopening the lake. I did spend some time blowing up crawdad holes with acetylene.

I also had the problem of stray hunting dogs in the park. They got to be a nuisance. If they had tags, I would call the owner. One of the YCC people overheard me saying I was gonna shoot the next wild dog. He didn’t realize I was kidding. I would shoot a pistol with rat shot into the air to scare the dogs away but I would never kill one or shoot one.

Later this guy drives up in a pickup and starts swearing at me for trying to kill his dogs and said he was more than willing to shoot me. I calmed him down and explained that if they had tags, I called the owner and if they didn’t, I would shoot in the air to get them to leave the park. He apologized after he calmed down and left. A YCC kid told me later told me it was his uncle and he had embellished the story to get his uncle riled. He didn’t realize the uncle would jump in his truck and come after me and threaten to shoot me.

I was out around the park one day when my assistant came looking for me. Two people from the state came up. One immediately jumped on me and started in on how he knew I was ignorant of child labor laws and I had to shut down several operations in the park. It was just the way he said it and I went red in the face. I told him quickly he might be surprised how much I did know about child labor laws and I would be happy to show him to the exit of the park. (I didn’t say it quite that nicely.) His buddy with him had to get between him and me and calm me down and pull his buddy away. The other guy apologized and provided me with a piece of paper that was much more innocuous that the firebrand buddy led me to believe. Here’s a hint. Don’t start a conversation with how ignorant the person you are talking to is.

Soon after I had my tête à tête with the governor’s mother, I got a phone call from payroll asking me to provide a secondary payroll. When I asked what that was, I was told to take a payroll sheet, put all the peoples’ names on it, put no hours down and sign it and turn it in. I told her I was uncomfortable with that. We hemmed and hawed a while and finally she grew frustrated and said it was OK if I wrote across the payroll sheet “Not for payroll purposes.” I was asked to do this once a month.

I was friends with the park manager at Roosevelt State Park near Morton. I called him up and asked him what this was about. He had no idea and had never had to submit a subsidiary payroll. He asked me to provide him copies to look over and I did. After a while, payroll quit calling me asking me to submit subsidiary payrolls. I never figured what that was about.

Soon, I was called in for a review at the Park Commission. I met with my contact and the park commissioner. I was stunned when they asked me to take over as manager of Roosevelt State Park – a much larger and busier park than Golden Memorial. I said no. I didn’t want to be a local boy managing a park where everyone thought they could get me to do whatever they wanted. The director was perturbed. He said I “was not my own man.” Again, I turned red with anger and said he might be surprised how I was indeed my own man and had been for most of my life. He backed down after he saw how angry I was. However, I knew my time with the park commission was fast drawing to a close.

Hilda Hill contacted me and said she had a job for me teaching biology at Mantachie High School in Mantachine, Mississippi. I leaped at the chance to get out of the job.

Before I left, I was in a conference with other park managers down on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and happened to catch a ride with the park manager at J.P. Coleman State Park and Roosevelt. I casually dropped into the conversation that I had been offered a new park. They didn’t bite. So I finally asked them if they were curious as to what park I was offered. They finally said yes and I told them Roosevelt. As you might guess, it was a total surprise to the manager of Roosevelt. It was my way of warning him before I left the park service.

On to Mantachie!

Stay tuned!