In April of 2000, Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection Archivist Kim Beson let me tag along and participate in two oral histories she was doing. The first was with 1940s and 50s river runner Susie Reilly. The second was with two gents who in 1956 were flying helicopters out of Luke Air Force Base. They were first on the ground at the TWA-United wreckage near Temple and Chuar Buttes. The stories I heard that day got me hooked on oral histories.
Kim was instrumental in this. She gave me an hour-long training including the loan of a digital recorder and a stack of release forms. Those forms are the key to my efforts. That was 25 years ago. Since then, I’ve participated in more than 660 interviews of over 200 people resulting in 330 transcripts. None of these interviews are mine because they all are in the public domain.
The scope of my study has been the greater Grand Canyon region. Here’s a tip-of-the-iceberg look at the breadth and depth of the oral histories it has been an honor to participate in.
To the west, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom talked about growing up in Boulder City. He was on the 1963 low water Sport Yak trip from Lees Ferry to Bright Angel. To this day, he regrets hiking out with his sister and father. Bill and Buzzy Belknap along with Dock Marston and Mac Miller kept going all the way to the reservoir slack water called Lake Mead. Buzzy had a good friend named Jimmy Jordan Jr. Before he passed away, Jimmy told me stories of his father, Jimmy Sr., boating Grand Canyon in 1951 and about how he happened to light Rampart Cave’s sloth dung deposit on fire in 1976.
To the south, Jannie Turner spoke about growing up in Flagstaff and Sedona in the 1950s. Her grandmother was the first woman on record to fly over the Grand Canyon in the 1920s. Guy Williams also grew up in Flagstaff. He volunteered with Gene Foster on a Glen Canyon salvage archeology river trip she put together in 1959.
To the east, Harry Thompson at Green River, Utah, talked about winning the Canyon Country Marathon in 1961 and ‘62. Yeah, I know, that’s way up basin. Gail Nelson recounted working at the White Canyon Uranium Concentration Mill in 1951 next to the Hite Ferry. Gus Scott and Keturah Pennington recounted running Glen Canyon multiple times in the 1950s and early 1960s before Glen Canyon Dam drowned Glen Canyon. Alice Talakte talked about growing up near Page on the Navajo Reservation in the 1940s and ‘50s before Page was built.
To the north, Bonnie Bundy recounted working with her father Chet to supply river runners with food and gas at the mouth of Whitmore Wash in the 1950s. Pipe Springs Interpretive Ranger Allen Malmquist recounted his pet coyote named Rusty, building the Whitmore airstrip, and starting the horse drag-out of river running passengers at the Whitmore Trail in the 1960s. Allen and Sam Wolfskill had John Riffey stories. Sam recounted working on the North Kaibab for the US Forest Service, also in the 1960s. Mike and Muriel Kanan recounted working at the North Rim Lodge in the 1950s. They sang the “Sing Away” song for me. Ironworkers Mike Charley and Dennis Endischee recounted building the second Navajo Bridge in 1994.
Photo of Rusty the coyote courtesy Allen Malmquist.
Bruce Wilson took me the farthest back in time to running the Colorado River in 1942 with his father Neill, Otis Marston (nicknamed Doc on that trip), and Norm Nevills. Bruce was 12 years old when the trip launched at Lees and had his thirteenth birthday party at Phantom Ranch. Just a few years ago, Peter Brown and I recorded a series of interviews on a river trip through the Grand Canyon when Pete paddled a tule reed raft the length of the Canyon.
In the center there were people like Mary Hoover. Mary came to the South Rim in 1946. She was the election manager and recalled a lot of the locals from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Jim Haggart recounted his solo hike from Fredonia to the South Rim in 1973. Dick Hingson recounted decades of work on the overflights issue and Carl Bowman recounted decades of work on monitoring air quality.
And what have I learned? People’s recollections, including my own, can be wrong! I have come to think of oral histories as the spice in the stew of history. We can't live on spices alone, but we can live on stew without spices. Keep that in mind and please don't use oral histories as your sole source for historical understanding. That said, I’ve discovered making oral histories is easy, educational, and a whole lot of fun!
You can find a complete archive of my oral histories at https://grandcanyonazus.com/oral-histories.html
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