Interviewer: L

Interviewer: L.B."Tex" Worley

Catalog Number: GRCA 63379

Date of interview: May 28, 1994

Place: Albright Training Center, Grand Canyon, Arizona

Interviewer: Karen Underhill, Northern Arizona University (NAU) Special Collections

SUBJECTS:

Acquiring work mules for the Canyon

Badger fights

Career and family information

Canyon staff

Carlsbad Caverns

Changes to Grand Canyon and the National Park Service

Checking Station work

Dignitaries

Drag outs

Fish plants in Bright Angel Creek

Forest fires

Fred Harvey staff, including cowboys, etc.

Headquarters area

Hikers in the Canyon

Housing, including tent house

Information station at Williams

Job duties

Kolbs

Masonic Lodge

Naturalists, including McKee, Schellbach, Sturdevant

North Rim in winter

Parent Teacher Association

Phantom Ranch

Recreational activities

Shiva Temple trip

Shopping

Skiing

Union Pacific on the North Rim

Visitors and visitation

Wages

Wildlife, including lions, etc.

Underhill: This is May 28th and it's the 75th anniversary of Grand Canyon National Park. I'm Karen Underhill wish NAU Cline Library. I'm here interviewing Mr. L.B. Worley who was a park ranger and we'll talk about your experiences at the park. This is for the National Park Service [museum collection]. We appreciate your time. Begin with the general why you were here at the Canyon and the years.

Worley: Well, I had previously worked in Yellowstone National Park but Grand Canyon is closer to Texas where I grew up so I decided I'd like to get closer to home because I was actually working just during the summers. I fell in love with the park service and I wanted to get on permanent and finally did, and was here from 1932 to 1943, eleven years. And during that time I progressed from a temporary park ranger to a permanent park ranger to a district park ranger in charge of the Desert View district. In 1943, I moved from here to Carlsbad Caverns and was promoted from district park ranger here in Grand Canyon to chief park ranger at Carlsbad Caverns and that was the purpose of the move from here. Does that count as answering the question?

Underhill: That's great. When you were younger did you ever think you wanted to be a park ranger?

Worley: Oh, ever since I first went to a national park. I was taken more or less, I guess, by the uniform. And I was just determined I was going to be one. And it turns out that I made it.

Underhill: What did you think the first time you saw the Grand Canyon? What did you think of the Canyon?

Worley: Well, I was awed. I just couldn't believe that anything was that deep and wide and so beautiful. It was amazing to me.

Underhill: Do you remember how old you were the first time you saw it?

Worley: I'd be twenty-two years old.

Underhill: At the time you came to be a ranger down here, had you seen it prior to that?

Worley: Well, I'd seen pictures. No, I hadn't really been here 'til then.

Underhill: When were you last in the park before today?

Worley: About two years ago at the old timers reunion out at the Grand Canyon Squire.

Underhill: Tell me, what were your living conditions like back in 1932?

Worley: Well, back in those clays [it] was the depression days. It was the days of the

CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps]. It was the days when the wages were low and everybody that had a job was really thankful for it and it did serve its purposes in giving us a nice livelihood. I felt really quite fortunate in having $1500 a year salaried job, later went from $1500 to $1680, worked awhile at $1680 and finally got to S2000 before I left here. So those were days when money really counted. It was good money. I felt I was fortunate to be able to work for the park service.

Underhill: How many other rangers were here when you started?

Worley: I think we had nine. How many do you have now?

Underhill: I have no idea!

Worley: I think there were nine of us. That included two assistant chief rangers and one chief ranger. And it was when they created a district ranger job that I was appointed a district park ranger.

Underhill: What was your housing like?

Worley: Oh, we had marvelous housing. Well, when my wife and I married we moved in what we called a tent house. It was about, oh I guess 20 x 24, no partitions or anything on it. We lived in the whole shebang. We had a wood cook stove and the water was in a faucet just outside the front door. The cooking was by wood stove and it created quite a lot of soot that collected in the spark arrester on top of the tent house. We had to continually keep brushing the spark arrester to keep the soot from [stopping up the pipe and filling the house with smoke]. We had the spark arrester to keep from setting the woods on fire, that was the reason for that.

And the ladies, they had a terrible time trying to keep that stove going for cooking their food. There were no windows in this tent house. It was screen for about 2 1/2 to 3 feet all the way around it, with a flap that let down by means of some cords much like you raise and lower a shade now. And that was the way we had privacy in the house. And we used to say we had hot and. cold running water. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. But everybody just seemed to like it. All the ladies, they felt like they were fortunate to be married to somebody that could make a living, you know, for them. We had a lot of fun back then.

Underhill: Where did you get your foodstuffs?

Worley: Down at Babbitt's. I noticed today when I went through that that store was burned.

Underhill: Just a couple of months ago.

Worley: [The store was there ] And the administration building was just across the road from there, and of course to the west of Babbitt's was the Post Office. That's it. However, I was here before the Post Office moved. to that location. The first Post Office I remember was one that was just sitting on a slope over close to the parking area at the Bright Angel Lodge sitting kind of on a cliff there. Incidentally, Art Metzger was the postmaster.

Underhill: What did you think of Art?

Worley: Think of Art? Oh, he was a nice fella. He was a good historian and his wife [Ethel] was very learned. She was a good historian too. Art Metzger, after he retired, went down to old Mexico, and stayed for a few years. But he finally came back to Carlsbad, and I helped him get located in a retirement home in Carlsbad. He stayed there for a couple of years before he moved back to Arizona. [Ethel passed away and Art remarried. Then he and Jessie passed away within a week of each other down in Tempe.]

Underhill: You mentioned marrying while you were here. How did you meet your wife?

Worley: Oh, well it goes clear back to high school days. We came from the same part of the country in west Texas. I knew her in high school. Back in those days, you thought a long time before you got married. I wasn't in the position where I could support a family so we just kept putting it off until finally I felt like I could take care of her and went back and got her. We will be celebrating our fifty-ninth wedding anniversary on the 12th day of June. Just a little bit ahead of us.

Underhill: That's wonderful.

Worley: So that's how I met her. It goes clear back to high school days.

Underhill: Now when you were living here at the Canyon, and you had a day off, what kind of things did folks do for entertainment?

Worley: We just played ball, we sometimes went to Williams, and to Flagstaff, and to the theater. Something like that. We had to make our own entertainment. There was a community building here. As far as I remember, they had a community church. They had a [picture] show that came in maybe twice a week. A Masonic Lodge met on the upper floor of it. You mentioned entertainment, I don't know if you've ever heard of this or not, but they called it a badger fight.

Underhill: No.

Worley: Well, it's kind of risqué in a way. The cowboys down here would talk up this badger fight. They'd usually get some novice that didn't know what they were talking about and they would explain to him that they'd tie these badgers, one around each other,

and have them in a box over here and in a box over there. At a given signal, they would pull open the box up and let the badgers out. They would pull these ropes through this round loop and it was supposed to bring the badgers together for the fight. They'd talk it up for a week or so, telling that these badgers really were mean -- how they would have to have gloves with gauntlets way up here. You'd have to dress up in cowboy boots and chaps in case it got biting around your legs and all that sort of thing. They would really talk this thing up. They would get the word around. Everybody would gather 'round and sit on top of the rails at the corrals down at the mule barn and they'd get this ready for the badger fight. At the proper time they would lift [the box over the badgers]. Instead of being badgers -- they would pull this on together -- they had a couple of old china pots, [the kind that] go under the bed. Of course when they pulled them together they would break. Everybody just had a lot of fun with it. That's the badger part.

Underhill: So when new people came, you'd have to do it again then.

Worley: Oh yeah. We'd wait maybe until that had worn off and you'd find another couple of novices who didn't know what a badger fight was all about. Some of the Fred Harvey people, especially the Dries that worked around the mules, they were the best in the world to talk this thing up and everyone was just as secretive. They wouldn't give away anything. The ones that were pulling the badgers, they would be so embarrassed. You never heard of that one?

Underhill: No, I haven't. Are there any other kinds of practical jokes that come to mind that people played on one another?

Worley: No, I don't remember. I can remember a very vivid incident that happened though, that might be of interest. We had a fish plant. We were going to plant some fish, some little fingerlets, in Bright Angel Creek. We made arrangements with the fish hatcheries to deliver those fish up here at such and such a time, late in the evening. We [park rangers that were married got our] wives to fix up a picnic lunch and everything, and we'd start from Yaki Point down the Yaki Trail [Kaibab Trail]. We'd arranged this so we'd have a moonlit night. So when we'd go there we'd have this picnic. Each ranger would have five or six mules. We'd unload those fingerlings into ten-gallon milk cans and load with ice water for the trip down into the canyon. [We would] put one ten gallon milk can on one side of the mule and the other ten-gallon balanced on the other side. There would be about five of us, each with about five or six mules. At around say

11:00 at night, we'd take off down the trail on this beautiful moonlit night. About all that'd break the silence was the-- whistling of the [park rangers] and the hollering and everything like that as we went down the trail and down across the bridge and up to Phantom Ranch and a little bit above. There we'd pull our string of mules out into the water and release the little fingerlings. Then we had to go back down to Phantom Ranch. They had a swimming pool down there at the time. We took a plunge in the swimming pool, got us a cabin over there, wait until morning to come back out.

I remember that as one of the most pleasant trips I ever made into the Canyon. I've had some that weren't so pleasant, especially when we'd get a call in the middle of the night on what we called a drag out. A drag out meant that these people had gone down during the day and then started to come out and were exhausted and completely given out. They would get to one of the emergency telephone stations and they would call for help. The Chief Ranger would then in turn call to send one of the rangers down with one, two, or three mules. We'd have to go up in the middle of the night to the corral, saddle those mules up, and go down the trail to the drag out. Usually what happened was they'd call for one, so that meant it'd take two. And when we'd get down there, there would be two or more, and we'd wind up walking out, leading the others, while the tourists were sitting back there riding on those mules. Those were not very pleasant memories.

Underhill: Did you ever lose anybody or did everyone usually make it out okay with some assistance?

Worley: Yes, we did, one, we lost one fella. He froze to death. There were two of them. This was wintertime and they were warned not to go. But they went down the Bright Angel Trail, all the way down. As they started back out, night overtook them and it began to get colder and the further up they went, the colder it got. Finally they stopped and built a fire, but one of them stumbled and put the fire out. The other one went on up to the rest station where there was a telephone and left the other one behind. The next morning, two fellas from the U.S. Geological Survey [USGS] went down and they passed this shelter where the emergency telephone was. They went on down a couple of switchbacks or so arid they saw a hand sticking out [above the snow]. They uncovered it and found that this fella was dead and had frozen. They went back to report it to us, the rangers, and called in to the office up here. While this geological survey man was talking, he heard some sort of a noise or grunting and he looked up. In under the overhang of the shelter was this other one who had made it up to there. He had tried to call but he didn't or couldn't read the instructions there that said he had to push in a knife switch. After some effort and no results, he crawled up under the overhang for as much protection as he could. He was almost frozen but was able to make some noises and attract the attention of this USGS man. While he was talking, he said "Wait a minute. There's another one here." So we saved his life but the other one was frozen. I think those two boys were from Michigan or Wisconsin or some place back there and they had come through and against the advice. They had gone down to the river and got back just above Indian Gardens.

Underhill: What other kinds of duties and responsibilities did you have while you were here?

Worley: Well, mostly checking station, fighting forest fires. I had one short assignment. We didn't have too many visitors -- and I'm sorry to say you don't have that problem now -- but we were attempting to encourage people to turn off Highway 66, which is now U.S. 40 at Williams and come up here. So we had an information station down there on that highway that people could stop and ask questions. In order to man that, a bus went from

here down there and one of the rangers would be on that bus. He'd get off and he'd stay there until the bus would come back in the afternoon and bring him back up here.

Underhill: Do you remember about how many visitors a year you had in the 1930's?

Worley: Oh, it isn't [anything like it is now].

Underhill: A drop in the bucket.

Worley: Oh, well, those were the dust bowl days, depression days, and people just weren't travelling. They didn't have the money.

Underhill: What kind of people did you encounter up at the Canyon?

Worley: Well, most generally they were the nicest people in the world. I've often said that the people, even the rough people, they were on their best behavior when they came to a national park. We met some of the nicest people in the world. I don't think there is any nicer people than the visitors that we had even back then. No matter what kind of situation -- if they had an Oklahoma mattress on top of their car and the springs on the trunk trying to get to California or something -- they were on their best behavior when they visited the national park. I can't say that I didn't love the visitors, I did.

Underhill: What kind of people were working up here then for Fred Harvey and/or the park?

Worley: Well, most of the Fred Harvey girls and, well others, had previous experience in some of the other areas. Fred Harvey extended from back east, from Chicago you might say, clear to California. And some transferred back and forth. This has always been true, even the South Rim, although it's open all year round, has been rather seasonal. You get the bulk of the people in the summertime, and they were always nice people. Many of the rangers married these Harvey girls and that's the way a lot of the

families were started.

The same thing was true on the North Rim. The North Rim of course was used by Union Pacific and they had a very similar situation over there. They'd come out of Utah, mostly workers who were Mormons from Utah. I learned to really like them. I didn't know too much about Mormons until I came out here, but they're an industrious people, and they're a caring people. They like to take care of their own. Some people may differ with them as far as their religion is concerned, but they really take care of their own.

When I was over on the North Rim, I had a fella by the name of Marv Adams, a Mormon. He was our lookout man. We played quite a few practical jokes on him. I remember he didn't like to stay up in that tower when it was lightning and thundering. When a storm would come up, why, he would come down out of there, which he wasn't supposed to do.

He was supposed to look and see where these lightening strikes were. Well, he got the reputation for being fair weathered. He would be up there if the weather was fair. So one time a fella by the name of George Collins was here. He was in charge over there. I was working the checking station. He [Collins] went out to the dump ground and set some old tires on fire. Of course, it sent smoke way up. Naturally, [Adams] was up in that tower. He picked that up and run it out on his azimuth and found the location and called it in. Well, George knew he was going to call it, so he said "Well Marv, we just don't have anybody. Would you just take care of that yourself?" So he took off and when he got out there he picked up, oh about, a twoby-four piece of cardboard and George says something like, "Marv, you've done your job. You can go back, thanks." Or something like that. So, we always played practical jokes like that on someone.

Underhill: That's what makes jobs fun.

Worley: Yeah.

Underhill: How many forest fires did you end up fighting?

Worley: I wouldn't know... oh, I would say it's less than fifty. I never tried to keep count. Maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty or so. Some on the North Rim, some on the South Rim.

Underhill: Do you have a favorite spot in the Canyon?

Worley: I guess it would be here in the village.

Underhill: Really?

Worley: Part of the community center.

Underhill: Did you explore? You mentioned you've been on the mules, and I'm sure you did a lot of walking. Did you ever get on a river trip? Or explore the Canyon other ways?

Worley: Well, I'll tell you. One trip I made was from Jacob Lake in to the North Rim. Well, I made it twice. It's a ninety-mile trip -- on skis. We'd go from here out to Cameron, up across Lees Ferry on to Jacob Lake. This is in the wintertime and you could get that far on the road. So we'd tie up there and we'd put on our skis and snowshoes for the other forty-five miles into the Grand Canyon. There we'd take care of the buildings. Some of them needed snow shoveled off of them to keep from caving in under the weight. We would take care of that business and then ski back out. A total of ninety miles. And we'd usually do that, oh, we'd make two stops between Jacob Lake. We had snowshoe cabins. I don't know if they have them now. They use snowmobiles, I think, all the time now. But we didn't have them. It was just the old cross-country skis.

Underhill: Had you ever skied before you came to the Canyon?

Worley: Never. But I had some good instructors. We had two or three fellas here. You never went alone. Always two, or sometimes three. They were very good, one or two of them had been on the high Sierras of California and took snow measurements and stuff. They knew what they were doing and they were willing to tell us. In fact, I didn't even know you had to put wax on skis when I first started out. I learned that you not only had to, but you had to do it right or else you went back and took that wax off and put some more on. So I learned quite a lot about it. I never was professional or anything like that, was always an amateur.

Underhill: It was good exercise.

Worley: It was a ninety-mile ski trip, in and back.

Underhill: In terms of the animal population, were there animals around then that you don't hear of now or don't think you see?

Worley: Well, you hear of them. But, I saw my first cougar in the wild on the North Rim. I was going down the road and there was a sharp turn in the road. As I made the turn there was a little open spot there. This cougar had started across to the other side of the roadway but saw that he couldn't make it because I was coming around too fast, so he turned and went back into the woods. I got to see it from both sides -- going this way and as it turned out, going back the other way. That's not to say that I haven't seen lots of tracks. I've seen lots of tracks, especially around those springs and water holes and so forth, when you're on patrol.

But another incident -- and this happened on one of those ski trips -- we got into that little park, we used to call it the deer pasture, over there close to the checking station on the North Rim. It's open out there and we saw a sort of a strange like track. Most of the snow was just like it fell, just beautiful, but we had this track going out across there. It seemed to cover, oh, about two and a half to three feet in width. We couldn't figure out what was going on so we decided to follow those. We followed it around until we finally determined what it was. It was either a snow geese or a snow... what do you call it... a snowbird of some kind that had apparently landed and couldn't take off. Every time it would try to take off, its feet would go down into the snow, and the wings were flopping and everything. It finally just got to the point where it gave out, and I guess a coyote or mountain lion or something ate it up. That's what we concluded it was. It was this snowbird that was trying to take off and couldn't make it. That was sort of an unusual thing.

Underhill: In terms of dignitaries, did you encounter any of the visits and pull out the red carpet sort of thing while you were here?

Worley: Well, when I was at the checking station, every so often there would come in somebody from Washington or back east or a political person. When they would get to the checking station where we were, they'd present this letter. No matter what it said in paragraph one, two, the last paragraph read like this "Please extend any and all possible courtesy consistent with the proper performance of your official duty." Now you figure out what that meant!

Underhill: That's a new one.

Worley: "Please extend any and all possible courtesy consistent with the proper performance of your official duty." I've seen the letter often, and I would usually give them a complimentary permit and refer them to the office down there. Sometimes a ranger would be assigned to them and then take them out onto the rim, show them around and everything like that. But I've often thought about what in the world [that last paragraph meant]. I guess if I hadn't done the right thing though, they would have told me. I never did get called on that, so I guess I handled it properly. But I never did know just exactly what that meant, and I don't think they intended for you to know. They intended for me to use my own judgment and hopefully do the right thing, and it wouldn't get them in trouble and it wouldn't get me in trouble. And that's the way it worked.

Underhill: Some of the other people who were known at the Canyon at that time, Emery Kolb and Eddie McKee. It might be a little early for Eddie McKee but earlier

folks like that....

Worley: Oh, I knew Eddie McKee yes, and Don Schellbach. Did you ever hear of him? He was a naturalist who worked for Eddie McKee. He would do anything to get a laugh out of or amuse people. I believe he would've stood on his head if it'd been necessary. One time he went out along the rim towards Desert View and a shower came up and he was in one of these convertibles with the top down. It started raining and he just got out and abandoned the car and got in with a tourist and left it out there. They came out there and it had so much water in it [indicates approximately 2"].

We used to say [that naturalists are] smart people, but they're just not practical -- some of them. This Eddie McKee and Barbara, they lived just up the street from where we lived, over there on Avenue... I guess it's Tonto or something like that, over in the residential area. They came up there one time -- they had a Buick, I believe it was -and something went wrong. Eddie was driving and so Barbara got out of the car. She came around to the drivers side and said, "Eddie, move over." So Eddie moved over and then finally she said, "Oh wait a minute, you come back, get in here." She went out and lifted the hood of the car and tinkered with it, and she said, "Now press on it," and so it started off. She was the mechanic and Eddie was the naturalist.

Underhill: Did you spend much time with Emery Kolb at all?

Worley: I was in and out of his studio many times.. I knew his son-in-law who was the chief ranger at Carlsbad Caverns before I went there, Carl Lehnert. I never did know too much about Mr. Kolb except I knew he took a lot of pictures of social things and so forth. My wife, she was the president of the Parent Teachers Association here in Grand Canyon one year, and I remember they had some sort of social get together and he came over and took pictures.

We had a number of dignitaries come in here with the Masonic Lodge -- I mean Grand Canyon Lodge forty. I don't know if they have a Masonic Lodge here now. Well, they did then and it met on the second floor of the community building. Well at different get togethers Emery Kolb would be called in to take pictures. There's a number of pictures that are around showing those get togethers. I can't remember, I believe it was the National Geological Society that wanted to [explore the Shiva Temple. I didn't see this but] someone told me this thing. Whenever they finally got up there -- which they said is almost impossible to do -- there was a welcome sign by Emery Kolb. You've heard of that?

Underhill: Yeah, apparently he left some photographic things. He wanted the folks to know he'd been up there first. Well, what do you think of the Canyon as you see it now?

Worley: Well, the Canyon itself is just as beautiful as it ever was, and it hasn't changed. But, oh my goodness, up here in this village and everything. I never dreamed when I left here that you would have roads that were one way now. All these houses, buildings and the traffic and everything. I was out by Yavapai and Mather. And, of course, the entrance road had changed. I'm just amazed by the numbers of people you have here. I don't know what we would have done if we'd had that many. Well, we'd have to have had more people. I wonder what your population count is here in the village now?

Underhill: Of that I'm not sure. I actually live in Flagstaff. But I know they get four million a year.

Worley: That's just amazing to me. But I was here during the depression years and during the dust bowl and during the time when people just couldn't move around. They just didn't have the money to do it. They stayed home. But as far as the Canyon itself, it's no different than then.

Underhill: How do you think the park service has changed?

Worley: Well, the biggest change, I think, in the park service is in the communication and transportation. Like I said before, it took about six or seven days to go in to the North Rim from Jacob Lake and do what we had to do that now you could do in a couple of hours with a snowmobile. That is the improvement of transportation. When I first came here, the CC's [Civilian Conservation Corps] were working here. They were completing

the first trans-canyon telephone line and we thought that was really something. I'll venture to say that now it's almost obsolete and you're using either a radio or fax machine or a computer or something like that to handle all these things. It's in that area that the biggest changes have been made. It enables you to accomplish so much more in such a short period of time. I wouldn't say I'm 100% for computers and all, because I've had some kind of sad experiences with some of these computers. I had some bank problems once and went down to take care of it and this girl said, "Well it was the computer did this." And I said, "The computer? The computer does just what you tell it to do and if there has been a mistake, someBODY has made a mistake." I still feel that way, but it's still a better method than what we had.

Underhill: Do you think it's a different sort of person now that becomes a ranger or do you see similarities?

Worley: Oh, I can't quite get used to rangers with beards, hair hanging down in pigtails, something in the ear. That sort of thing, that's not what we were taught when we were rangers. It's that sort of thing, and of course, I guess I shouldn't say this maybe....

Underhill: That's Okay!

Worley: There's more women now. That's probably a good thing because there are a lot of talents that are women jobs. But I don't think there are many of them that want to go down that trail on a fish plant. However, they don't do that sort of thing anymore. If they've got some fish to plant down there, I'd venture to say they'd do it with a helicopter and hover down there over where they want it and release those fish right out into the creek and come back. It's in the area of transportation. It's so much easier to do the things that were hard when I was a ranger.

Underhill: Did you and your wife have children here at the Canyon?

Worley: Oh yes. Our oldest boy [Morris], he's now president of Rayrock Mining Company. It's a mining company headquartered in Toronto. That's our oldest boy. He went to first year of grade school here at Grand Canyon.

Underhill: Did you have any children that were born here at the Canyon?

Worley: The other one, [our second son, Kemble], was born in Williams. My wife went to Williams but I considered him born here. He was the one I was telling you about [conversation prior to interview] who got acquainted with Glen Sturdevant's boy over in Saudi Arabia. Kemble is in charge of the Census Bureau in Tucson, Arizona, now and just built himself a new home and plans to retire. It may seem incredible, here he is ready to retire and I'm still around.

Underhill: Just for the tape we're saying that the story about Sturdevant's son will be on

file in the [museum collection and] library too. So if somebody is watching or listening to this they should look for that one as well.

Worley: Do I need to say that as well?

Underhill: If you'd like to do a brief version that might be good.

Worley: Oh well, you'll see it later in the tape, about this son of mine who met up with the son of Glenn Sturdevant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They worked for the same department over there. Both of them were born at Grand Canyon and their fathers were rangers at Grand Canyon and they started their livelihoods here. [Kemble and Ty Sturdevant became good friends in Saudi Arabia.]

Underhill: It is a big coincidence. Do you have a favorite Canyon story? Or when you think of the Canyon does a particular image or story come to mind?

Worley: No, I don't really have any particular favorite. I mean it's a lot of similar practical jokes. I still remember some of those things very vividly in my mind.

Underhill: Of the parks that you've worked in, do :you have a particular favorite?

Worley: Yes, it's Grand Canyon. I can say this without equivocation if I were picking out any segment of my life that I've lived that I enjoyed the most, it would be the eleven years that I spent at Grand Canyon, from 1932 to 1943. It was during that time that I got married. It's that time that I got permanent status, and my two children were born. That is the section of life that 'I pride the most. It's the best part of my life.

Underhill: If there's anything you could do differently, would you change anything?

Worley: Oh, some people say, "If I had it to do over again, I'd do this, I'd do that." I don't want to live it over again. If I had it to live over, I probably would make a bigger mess than I've made on this ore. So I don't want to try it and repeat.

Underhill: Is there anything else you would like to add to your experience here in the Canyon?

Worley: I guess if I thought about it enough I could think of enough to fill up a book.

Underhill: Which you should do!

Worley: But no, I don't know. Some of the things that have happened since here connected with the Canyon. Why I remember shortly after I left here and went to Carlsbad Caverns. Of course, there we did all of our sightseeing and showing of the visitors on foot down the trails. Out here you do a lot of it with mules. Lon Garrison, who

used to be in charge of this research center here, he called me and wanted me to go to Fort Bliss -- that's in El Paso -- and pick out some mules that were surplus. They were doing away with the Cavalry over there. So, f went over there and selected the mules that later came to the Grand Canyon. Course, they're all a long time gone now, but they later served their term here at Grand Canyon. Some of them came from Fort Bliss and they were ones that I'd picked out after I left here. So I served Grand Canyon a little bit after I left.

Underhill: While you were here, did you have a mule that you preferred over others? Did you have a group for the park that you chose from?

Worley: No, I never did get attached. No, they were pretty much a mule is a mule. Oh there were different personalities, I guess you'd say, but not much. I never did get attached to any of them.

Underhill: Well, I sure thank .you for sharing your story with us.

Worley: Well, I hope it will serve. You can send one that tape.

Underhill: Sure, we'll have Carolyn [Richard] do that. We'll get you a copy of that too. Thank you very much. It's been great. I won't forget the badger pot story anytime soon!

Worley: Well, we had that several times.

Underhill: Well, it gives me ideas for when I go back to work. Well, thanks very much. END