SANCTUARY FOR SERVICE MEN
Neuberger, Richard L.
Sanctuary For Service Men By RICHARD L NEUBERGER Portland, Ore. THERE is a popular misconception, carefully nurtured by a certain section of the press, that all an American soldier or sailor...
...In Jefferson's time the bulk of our people lived in the countryside...
...One is Yosemite, where Frank Kittredge has made the welfare of the soldiers and sailors his first consideration...
...Many Army and Navy units have used the national parks as training grounds...
...he slept in the chilly Sierra nights with a single blanket, and he hiked for countless miles...
...It is not a rest hospital and convalescent center like the Ahwanee, but a place for a good time...
...There are a lot of soldiers and sailors to whom Yosemite Falls or the Grand Canyon offer more inspiration than a night of rollicking on Market Street, Broadway, or Alaskan Way...
...The 937th Engineers from Hammer Field in California purposely entered Yosemite Valley at the exact spot where the Mariposa battalion of volunteer cavalrymen rode into the region in 1851...
...They were home, thankful that at last the killing and shooting were at an end...
...Habits acquired during the war will govern many men's lives...
...It is not an uncommon sight to see a veteran of the Pacific's sternest battles strolling along one of Yosemite's picturesque trails with his wife and youngsters...
...This no longer holds true...
...Not soon will millions of Americans forget the horror of battle, the bleak loneliness of coral atoll or Arctic island...
...The ranger asked the visitor how he was enjoying himself...
...A certain proportion of civilians, too, want to raise the roof...
...Thus they are getting nearly four times the normal use of these American wonder spots...
...His own daughter had married an Army Air Corps captain in the shadow of North Dome...
...Perhaps this training is as helpful as the highly-touted field of professionalized athletics...
...McKinley Park Hotel has been taken over by the Army...
...The other is Mt...
...This trip is not for me," the man replied...
...McKinley National Park, far to the north in Alaska...
...THE two parks most widely known among Army and Navy fighting men are along the Pacific seaboard...
...A suite which formerly housed a banker and his wife for $25 a day now contains enough double-decker bunks for a dozen invalids from the fighting at Iwo Jima and Okinawa...
...William R. C. Schmidt, commanding the 76th infantry division...
...However, there is only one flaw—it isn't true...
...The shameful San Francisco V-J riot found soldiers and civilians alike reducing Market Street to a shambles...
...The famous antique rugs, Indian decorations, and stylized furniture have been stored...
...But many of the heroes have been farm boys who a few years ago were milking cows, directing a plow, or clearing stumps...
...they dance with Red Cross hostesses...
...These campgrounds were available only to men in uniform...
...The most frequent type of permit requested is for overnight bivouacking...
...For this reason it is encouraging that in the midst of war many soldiers learned to gain solace, recreation, and inspiration from the great garden spots of the American wilderness...
...Frank Kittredge used to take visitors on the trails and paths of Oregon and Washington...
...What you are seeing now will add music to" all you do through the years to come.' " A letter like that makes the men of the National Park Service feel that America's great wilderness preserves are fulfilling their purpose...
...The wild and willful picture which some newspapers have tried to paint of all service men simply is not true...
...Nor have all the visitors from the services gone to the parks individually...
...Since the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, more than 8,000,000 men and women in uniform have seen Rainier's crevasses, Yellowstone's geysers, or the other wonders of the park system...
...Through the medium of illustrated lectures and conducted tours in the Fredericksburg national military park," wrote the general, "you of the Park Service have enabled us to gain a clear and concise picture of the war between the states...
...Soldiers from every post in Alaska are sent to McKinley Park for relaxation...
...This is no evidence that all service men share such an ambition...
...The national parks are the most vivid natural relics of that past...
...But a lot of soldiers and civilians did not participate at all...
...Starr West Jones was on furlough and he wanted to see Yosemite on foot...
...One of the main reasons for this is that my other son was killed on the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor the day this war commenced...
...Navy doctors came to Yosemite, pitched camp and looked over the vistas of mountain and meadow...
...Millions of Americans now live in apartment houses and hotels, stacked on top of each other like cans in a grocery store...
...THERE is a popular misconception, carefully nurtured by a certain section of the press, that all an American soldier or sailor wants is a bottle of liquor, a wild and willing woman, and one hell of a rollicking time...
...Newton B. Drury, director of the National Park Service, estimates that the total contribution of lands, facilities, resources, and services involved in the 600 Army and Navy permits is well in excess of $30,000,000...
...They were the most resourceful, the best able to take care of themselves, the most ingenious when dependent wholly on their own energies and devices...
...It may be possible that a lad in the woods or on the farm can acquire a better appreciation of the eternal verities of life than someone rou-tinized by our urban civilization...
...The Ahwanee is now, devoted exclusively to the recuperation of naval veterans from the south Pacific...
...A PARK ranger met an elderly man on one of the tree-hemmed trails in Crater Lake National Park...
...Kittredge: "John Muir may have been the first to appreciate the beauty of the Sierras: but we of today, who come to them from the turmoil of skyscraper Times Square, or harlequin, unreal Hollywood, are in better position to appreciate their centuries-old grandeur...
...Lecturers and naturalists at virtually all the parks report that their most attentive listeners are invariably in uniform...
...This makes a good story, stimulates salacious minds, and justifies bare-legged pictures...
...Men and women in uniform constitute approximately nine percent of the total population of the United States, but they comprise 32 per cent of the visitors to the National Parks...
...Nearly 600 permits have been issued to the armed forces for various war purposes...
...He wrote to Mr...
...Your program was not only enlightening from an historical point of view, but afforded each officer an invaluable lesson in logistics and tactics of the Civil War...
...During the past year approximately 2,210,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines have visited the parks, monuments, reserves, and historic sites under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service...
...The files of the National Park Service, at national headquarters in Chicago and at offices in the field, bulge with letters from service personnel...
...ONE of the first men to plan the adaption of the national parks to service needs was Frank Kitt-redge, a smiling gnome-like ranger...
...A prized communication is that from Maj...
...they eat chicken and steak and drink fresh milk...
...I wanted him to get away from the war for a little while and to have something peaceful and beautiful to remember...
...In his book Major Joe Foss, the great Marine flying ace, points out quite saliently that the outstanding men in his unit were farm boys...
...As a nation we have exalted athletes...
...He climbed the walls of Glacier point...
...The scene clung in his memory...
...This," said a colonel of engineers at Sequoia park, "is the best way I know to combine work, recreation, and education...
...Kittredge set aside Yosemite campgrounds particularly for service personnel...
...Barney Ross, Dave Schreiner, Niles Kinnick and a few others proved themselves on the battlefront, as on a gridiron or baseball diamond or prize ring...
...OURS is a nation of cities...
...They were agrarians and tilled the soil...
...America's system of National Parks is nearly 75 years old, but today this system has a new importance never before attained...
...The National Parks of the United States, and particularly the great wilderness parks in the States of the Far West, are sanctuaries and havens of refuge for our soldiers...
...The dust-spotted riders from Mariposa were the first white men to see the dazzling falls and lonely cliffs of the Yosemite...
...they fish and hike and ski, and thus they forget the Aleutians' williwaws, Nome's bleak tundra, and the bitter cold of the Tanana valley...
...They sleep in beds with sheets and spring mattresses...
...Sergeant Starr West Jones was as poetic as his name...
...Some recent statistics from the U. S. National Park Service demonstrate that this is correct...
...In fact Drury has ordered that any automobile in •which a service man or woman is a passenger be exempted from the customary entrance fee when it crosses a park boundary...
...Thirty-two per cent of all the people now using the national park system are service personnel...
...Facilities were provided for the bivouacking of entire regiments and battalions...
...Kittredge and his staff have spent many hours scouring the nearby community of El Portal for cottages and bungalows where the wives of these Navy patients can live...
...They inclose trees which can never be cut, valleys and upland which can never be exploited...
...Sure, a certain proportion of service men want only to take the town apart...
...Look closely, Starr,' I whispered to myself...
...The presence of loved ones is important to the recovery of health...
...Yet the visitor to the woods on whom he looks back with greenest memory is the Army sergeant named Starr West Jones who came into the Yosemite Valley with a 47-pound pack, strong shoes, and a stout heart...
...Yet only a relatively few athletes have excelled in battle...
...He recalled how the Army visitors, officers and enlisted men alike, had looked in awe at Yosemite's granite cathedrals...
...The late President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that the United States was protecting a great past...
...he lived on meals of rolled oats and raisins...
...Many of the service pilgrims have learned history, too...
...It is for my son, who is a sailor in the United States Navy and has a furlough for a few days...
...A few weeks later the Navy took over the luxurious Ahwanee hotel as a convalescent hospital...
...Kittredge looked at Yosemite's scenic marvels and decided they were rightly the possession of the soldiers of America...
...Approximately 800 patients are recovering from battle fatigue and combat nerves in the quiet rooms of the Ahwanee...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 40
