Celebrating A Birthday For The National Park Service

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

                                                                                 Wallace Stegner

 

The National Park Service celebrates its 104th birthday today. It's an important day in our household. My wife and I devoted over 55 years of combined employment toward achieving its noble mission so vividly stated in the enabling legislation of 1916:

...to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

The journey from an idea to a resource management agency charged with overseeing more than 400 sites has been a complex and challenging one often carried out with limited resources directed at seemingly unlimited responsibilities. NPS Historians, Barry Mackintosh and Janet McDonnell, have written an excellent brief history documenting the agency to 2005. Their work, The National Parks: Shaping the System, is available online here.

The former directors of the National Park Service have left us some candid and in some cases historic commentary on managing the preservation-use dichotomy referred to above. I highly recommend their books, along with a biography of Stephen Tyng Mather, if readers are so inclined:

Albright, Horace M. (as told to Robert Cahn). The Birth of the National Park Service. Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1985.

Albright, Horace M, and Marian Albright Schenck. Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Hartzog, George B. Jr. Battling for the National Parks. Moyer Bell Limited; Mt. Kisco, New York; 1988

Ridenour, James M. The National Parks Compromised: Pork Barrel Politics and America's Treasures. Merrillville, IN: ICS Books, 1994.

Wirth, Conrad L. Parks, Politics, and the People. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980.

Shankland, Robert. Steve Mather of the National Parks. Alfred A. Knopf, New York; 1970

Today the National Park Service administers 419 units from the Caribbean to Alaska to the South Pacific. Its varied sites recorded 318,000,000 recreation visits in 2018. In all likelihood the future holds both more units and visits all in the face of declining funds, shrinking staffs, and a maintenance backlog of around $10 billion. Earlier this month President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act a few weeks after its passage by Congress. The law dedicates $1.3 billion for five years toward reducing deferred maintenance in the parks. Undoubtedly this will help lift the spirits of those staffing field operations who often see their work as a calling rather than a career. We can only hope their enthusiasm and dedication will spur additional legislation to eliminate the backlog and restore funding to restore for those many field positions lost over the past two decades. If the national parks are indeed our best idea they deserve nothing less.

Sources

Photos, Illustrations, and Text:
nps.gov
National Park Service entry, Wikipedia.com

Woodstock: Four Days Of Peace And Music At Max Yasgur's Farm

On this night in 1969 around 200,000 music fans hunkered down in the rain and mud at Max Yasgur's daily farm to enjoy the third day of the music festival we know as Woodstock. It attracted an audience estimated at 400,000 - twice what the promoters expected - with more than 35 of the leading or up-an-coming musical attractions of the day. Joni Mitchell didn't appear as scheduled but she penned a perfect description of the event, one that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young would bring alive as a #1 hit that still captures an audience.

Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
Said, I'm going down to Yasgur's farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog.
And I feel like I'm a cog in something turning.
And maybe it's the time of year, yes, and maybe it's the time of man.
And I don't know who I am but life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere was song and a celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil's bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.


In addition to CSNY, the following acts graced the stage during the "three days of peace and music":


Richie Havens

Swami Satchidananda
Sweetwater
Bert Sommer
Tim Hardin
Ravi Shankar
Melanie
Arlo Guthrie
Joan Baez
Quill
Country Joe McDonald
Santana
John Sebastian
Keef Hartley Band
The Incredible String Band
Canned Heat
Mountain
Grateful Dead .
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Janis Joplin with TheKozmic Blues Band
Sly and the Family Stone
The Who
Jefferson Airplane and Nicky Hopkins
Joe Cocker and The Grease Band
Country Joe and the Fish
Ten Years After
The Band
Johnny Winter and his brother, Edgar Winter
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Sha Na Na
Jimi Hendrix

Today, the Woodstock Preservation Alliance has this to say about the event's long-term significance to the American experience:

Woodstock was the culmination of a transformation in American popular music that had begun with [the] Monterey [Pop Festival]....Woodstock introduced the same wide diversity of talent, albeit on an expanded scale, to a truly mass audience....A subsequent documentary film...and several sound recordings helped establish what only two years before had been underground or avant-garde musical styles and ushered them into the mainstream.

Participating musicians, industry insiders, and rock critics and historians concur that Woodstock changed the way that popular music was programmed and marketed. Festival promoters noted the large numbers of fans who were willing to put up with often inadequate facilities....Promoters saw opportunities to improve their profit margin by more efficiently organizing festivals....They also understood that increased ticket prices would need to be offset...by moving the festivals from pastoral settings into sports arenas and convention centers and limiting the shows to a single-day or evening.... [Such changes] altered the festival-going experience... and thereby diminished the sense of community that many commentators considered the sine qua non of the Woodstock experience.

The development of "arena rock" marked the end of the rock "vaudeville circuit," and led to the demise of the smaller concert hall venues....The arenas also gave the upper hand to the style of music called heavy metal, represented by loudly amplified guitar based and blues-inflected bands composed almost entirely of white male musicians, whose aggressive style of playing was ideally suited for filling the audible space in arena settings.

After Woodstock, musicians apprehended the seemingly insatiable demand for their music and began commanding higher fees. It thus soon proved to be no longer economically feasible to book several major bands on the same bill....This in turn led to the segmentation of the fan base....In the years fol1owing Woodstock, however, fans were channeled into attending concerts that featured fewer acts, typically representing one or two musical styles.

Part of the Woodstock Festival's enduring legacy is the continuing efforts to counteract this trend by replicating the multi-performer/genre concert experience. Over the past three decades various parties have staged or attempted to stage successors to Woodstock, either by that name at different sites or else on or near the original site under a different name. [These efforts have had mixed success over the decades.]

If you want to remember this historic Aquarian exposition or imagine it for the first time you can choose among several original recordings. Better yet, watch the director's cut of the documentary, Woodstock. The film, an outstanding example of documentary film making, is a perfect capture of the concert as well as the pivotal national experience that created it.

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
wikipedia.com

Text:
quotation: woodstockpreservation.org/SignificanceStatement.htm
azlyrics.com

Lammas Day: The Festival Of First Fruits

It's August. We're still in the midst of the sultry dog days of 2020 where a cold ice tea or Stella, shade, and a steady breeze make the thought of even the smallest chores tolerable. You would think that a festival on this day would celebrate the middle of summer but you would be wrong. In both the pre-Christian and Christian eras today is Lammas Day celebrating the beginning of the grain harvest. The name derives from "Loaf Mass" where bread loaves made from the first grain harvests are presented at Mass and used in  Holy Communion. In pre-Christian times the festival also celebrated fertility, the first harvest, as well as the presentation of that harvest by tenants to their landlords. Over centuries traditions in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and northern Europe have blended into a festival of faith, food, and affection.     

Here is some music for the festivities:

And here is wonderful folk tune with a lyric completed in 1783 by the Bard of Scotland, Robert Burns. It's a perfect capture - who would expect less from Burns - of the spirit of Lammas as a festival of life and love:

For more information about Lammas this page at Wikipedia.