Forests grow - part two

Yesterdays blog talked about the 4-H trees

I planted in the 1930's. I ran across a couple

other photos that add to the story.

The picture on the left shows me and the trees

in 1981. The one above shows the forest in

2007. Wish I could find the old picture of the

field before the trees were planted.

Amazing what a few years can do in tree growth.

Not to say what the years have done to my aging

process

Have You Ever Done Something Right?

I've made a lot of mistakes in my lifetime but once in a while I've done something right. For instance, I contributed something special to our back yard seventy years ago. I planted trees. Lots of them. And I had dreams at that time of becoming a forest ranger.

Well, I never became a forest ranger but I continue to love a forest environment. That's why I enjoy our nearby Huron National Forest so much. The picture above is not local, here in Michigan, but is a picture taken in the sixties of the yard surrounding the house I lived in in the late 1930's to the mid '40's. Nothing special about the picture -- a pretty location with one of New York's famous trout streams out back. I loved living there and I relish going back from time to time.

When my father bought the house and 40 acres of land for 2 and a half thousand dollars there were trashy old buildings in the back yard - pig pens - chicken coops - and a lot of trash.
There was a barn with a sway-back roof that we were sure would cave in at the first snowfall.
A year of hard work cleared the area and it was beginning to look very attractive. Except for a worn-out hillside pasture on the other side of the stream. That's where the trees fit in.

I got involved in a 4-H club and thought about different projects. My brother eventually excelled in dairy raising Jersey milk cows. I didn't like cleaning up after chickens - I didn't like the work involved in raising a garden - and forestry sounded great. One day I attended a forestry meeting and came home with 500 Scotch Pine seedlings and 500 Norway Spruce. (If the truth be known, it was probably more like 250 of each but, hey, even 500 seedlings were a lot of trees for an 11 year old.)

At any rate, my project was to plant all of those seedlings on the worn out hillside across the stream from the house. A lot were "heeled in" to keep them alive, but every day I would load some in a bucket of water and with a mattock I'd make a hole on the soil and plant the trees one by one. It took a lot of time but every one of those seedling trees went into the ground.

I didn't think much about them at the time - I was just glad to see them all planted. But as the picture shows, there are a lot of trees growing on the other side of the creek, and that picture was taken thirty or forty years ago. You ought to see the trees now, and that hillside has become a much larger area - a huge 70-year old forest. I look at it whenever I get back that way and think to myself, "At least once I made one lasting impression on the world" And I feel an inner sense of peace that all the work by a little kid wasn't a wasted effort at all.

No, I never did become a forest ranger, but I still love the world about me - especially the
beauty of forests and countryside.

It started with CBS

My first job was as a movie projectionist at a local theater during World War Two -- but the veteran who had held the job before the war came back safely and reclaimed his job. It was that way with a lot of guys who held wartime jobs - and it was challenging for we who were just out of high school.



I had a real interest in motion picture work and found a job with RKO Radio Pictures in Albany, New York. I'd ride a commuter train back and forth every day and my work involved cleaning the office area first thing and then wrestling cans of film that came in from theaters or addressing and shipping films to theaters in the area. I think the job only lasted one week. The only significant thing during the week was a B-25 bomber crashing into the Empire State Building with a number of lives lost and a lot of damage to the building. Unlike the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building continues to loom over New York City - but the memory remains.



The next few months I helped install lockers in a new frozen food plant, and then went to work in a gas station. My sympathy is extended to anyone who has to work under a car in the wintertime - it can be miserable.



In January 1946 my father finagled another job for me - this one in New York City where he was working for a bank. Through a friend who knew somebody who knew somebody else, he got me an interview with CBS when its headquarters was at 485 Madison Avenue. I was in awe of the personal department and was even more thrilled when they said they would try me out as a page boy..............in the CBS newsroom. But what was a page?



Ever hear of a gofur? It was an overstated name for an errand boy. Go get me some coffee.

Go get me some pencils. And even 'Would you deliver this to my wife at such and such address." But I got to wear an honest to goodness page jacket with CBS letters that I could flaunt all over the building -and even out on the street if I had an errand to run somewhere in the city. There wasn't much money involved but I was part of one of the biggest radio networks in the world. Wowee!

And to top even that, I was working with biiiiiig names in news - Eric Severeid - Bob Trout -- and my boss was Edward R. Murrow. Who cared about salary -- it was more than I could wish for just to be associated with people like that. And to pass celebrities like Arthur Godfrey in the halls.

One day I got called into Mr. Murrow's office. He said that personnel was going to change.The radio news staff was going to be reduced - including me. However, he said that I could stay
with CBS if I was willing to make a move to a new section that was being formed at Grand Central Palace - a department to be called CBS Television News. I'd never heard of anything like that and asked, "What would you do if you were in my position?" He reminded me that I had no college, little other experience in any other work, and he said, "Well, you might apply for a job with a country newspaper." That's how my time with CBS ended and how I ended up going to a small weekly paper not far from home. But that's another story.

Meanwhile, I wonder where I'd be and how my life would have worked out had I taken that
job in experimental CBS television news.