Dan Lay Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: [Pause.] Well, it seems like you had a strong interest in getting back to the land and to field work because, as I understand it, you spent a few years up there in Austin but soon returned to the field.

DL: Home. That's right, I ... as soon as the war was over and they had plenty of manpower, I turned it over to Caleb Glazener, who had been there all the time but he was an older fellow. He had been a school teacher for several years before he went to A&M and got his Master's in wildlife. He graduated three or four years after I did ... more or less, I'm not sure when. Anyway, he was well trained, and he was a gentleman and a scholar and highly respected, got along well with the public and everything. And--I talked him into moving to Austin.

He was very reluctant. He was a stout Baptist and he had his scruples, and he thought moving to Austin might put him in an awkward position, and I reassured him that he could do anything he wanted or not do what he wanted to. If he went out with a group and they were having a beer, he didn't have to have one if he didn't want to. [Laughs.] And he did a great job of holding things together and expanding after the war.

Will Tucker got fired that September, and as soon as he was gone, they hired the chief bookkeeper, Howard Dodgin, who had been there all through the years as bookkeeper. That was the days when they kept the ledgers by hand. And he had a group of ladies that did the bookkeeping. He was a good manager, and the Commissioners gave him the responsibility for the whole state. And he had Caleb Glazener to lean on for wildlife expertise, and they made a good team. Worked out well.

And I was afraid to go back to the land where I wanted to be, and ... I shouldn't make a point of it, I guess, but I was also afraid to do just about anything I wanted to do. My two bosses in Austin were happy I was out of the way, and as long as I didn't cause any political trouble, it was fine.

And speaking of political trouble, let me tell you about one incident with Tucker. I made talks around when I was invited, and the people at the Kiwanis Club in San Antonio, about April 1944, invited me over to make a talk ... no, it must've been late summer. Anyway, they wanted to know ... talk about prospects for hunting that fall. So I said, "Well, all right, I'll make you a talk." And I went over there, and I wrote out my talk. I hope I didn't read it, because the old, faded copy I've got now sounds pretty boring--it's got too much in it, and too verbose. But anyway, the first two or three pages was a report on what I knew about where the hunters would find good numbers of doves and quail and white wings and perhaps a few deer and turkey, they ... most of the birds that they were interested in, water fowl on the coast.

And then I said, "Now, I'm gonna change the subject because I've got a captive audience and I want to tell you what I think about a major problem that you people in San Antonio have." I said, "A number of you have ranches. This is the headquarters for south Texas ranchers and west Texas ranchers, and the banks here in town finance ranchers all over south and west Texas. And I've been seeing some very disturbing things in Kerr County and Gillespie County and west of the Pecos, and every time I go out there to look for big-horned sheep or any purpose, I'm impressed with your problem, and that is over-grazing. You've got too many cows, sheep and goats on every acre out there. Some of it is much worse than others." Well, anyway, I gave 'em a lot of examples of people that had ruined their land where there was nothing but rocks left, it was all eroded down to bedrock. And land where the history ... when I discussed it with the landowner, in the early days they had grass as high as the stirrups on their saddle, and lots of cows, calves ... everything was prosperous. Then they got sheep and goats, and some of 'em kept on until the goats had to stand on their hind legs to get the last piece of green available.

Anyway, I gave 'em examples. I didn't care who I made mad. Got back to Austin next morning. Will Tucker was already in his office at eight o'clock. And I went in, sat down at my desk, and he sent for me. I went in and he said, "I looked at the paper this morning, the San Antonio paper. Have you seen it?" I said, "No, I don't read it." He said, "Well, there it is. You're on the front page." Oh, great, and there was a headline. And he said, "That's a good way to get fired." And he said, "You're probably right, but let's hope the Governor's office doesn't get any letters or calls." So I laid low for a day or two and nothing happened and it was ... it all blew over. Nobody made a issue about it. But he said, "You can get fired that way." And the interesting thing about it was he, at that time, was in the process of writing letters ... a whole series of 'em ... that was gonna get him fired the next year.

DT: What sort of letters was he writing?

DL: Well, that concerns the building of a paper mill at Lufkin, and the pollution problem. The paper mill was built in 1939. The initial stages they didn't have a--sulfate-processing equipment, so it was pretty limited. But they killed a few fish in low water in the Angelina River. The mill was located on Peach Creek, northeast of Lufkin a mile or two, and it was organized by a man named Kurth ... Earnest Kurth, E.L. Kurth. He organized a corporation. They borrowed money from R.F.C. [Reconstruction Finance] Corporation, a Government Agency, at a low interest rate, to build the first paper mill in East Texas, to make newsprint, using pine.

We immediately got acquainted with the mill manager and started talking about water pollution. Our chief of game wardens of East Texas was Earl Sprott, and he lives at Lufkin and I was living at Lufkin, and Sprott had a game warden who was trained as a biologist ... we didn't have a job for him ... named Coleman Newman. He assigned Coleman Newman to start taking water samples, and look for dead fish and ... just in the reports and check on reports from fishermen, and the mill manager was always very gracious when those people went to see him. Said, "We're going to take care of our pollution. Don't worry about it. Everything's gonna be all right." That was in 1940.

Nineteen forty-one-forty-two had a few more fish kills and the size of the mill was gradually growing, and they still hadn't done anything. They dumped their waste directly into Peach Creek and it went to the Angelina River, and the fishermen as far south as Diboll ... I mean, as Evadale on the Neches, near Beaumont, were complaining about fiber in the water clogging their fishing nets. They were wasting a lot of fiber, losing it. Then they started their sulfate plant, using acid treatment, and created an awful lot of waste water. It was very toxic and killed everything in the creek. Black water coming out with lignin, all kind of by-products of the process, and no settling tank, no pools to control the fiber.

In about 1943 they started their expansion, and--I think it was the summer of '43 that their first big die-off occurred. The fish were killed for miles. They talked about how there was a drift a quarter of a mile long where a treetop had stopped it. All the dead fish piled up against it, mostly catfish and gasper goo, and other fishes, some bass and crappie ... and the fishermen in Nacogdoches were outraged. They'd been knowing about the conversations with the mill manager and the promises that they weren't gonna kill any fish, and here they were, big fish kill. So, they hired a lawyer. They all collected money and hired a lawyer to write the letters, and he started writing letters.

'Course Tucker already knew about the problem. He had had his chief of pollution control, Faubian, over, talking to the mill manager. We continued to take water samples, had them all stored in Austin ... and the mill manager continued to say, "We're gonna do somethin'." And, finally, Tucker sent Faubian to see the local district attorney to see if he would file an injunction. And, that got Mr. Kurth's attention. He wrote a nasty letter back. "You might know, that fellow's more my friend than yours. He's not gonna file any injunction," and he didn't. We knew he wouldn't because Kurth had hired--the local [state] representative was also an attorney, and he was Kurth's attorney, so he had clout in Austin. I could tell you his name, it doesn't matter.

Anyway, things gradually built up a head of steam, and things got worse and worse. And, finally, Tucker wrote Mr. Kurth a threatening letter, saying, "If you don't proceed with those promised levees to stop direct dumping in the public waters, which you know is illegal, and which you know we helped you with years earlier because you didn't like salt water coming down from the oilfields, and it caused you expense to repair your boilers. Now we've got a new kind of pollution and the same law applies. We want you to know that it's illegal, and we're going to take legal steps if it's necessary. We hope it won't be necessary. Will you please tell us what you're gonna do about your pollution." It was a very nice letter. And he said, "Now I know the district attorney's not gonna back us up. We know probably no judge would close your mill down over catfish. But it's still illegal and it's my job to tell you it's illegal and we're gonna do what we can."

It couldn't've been a nicer, more deliberate effort to represent the resources, and still confront a big business man who was used to doing his own way of having nobody interfere. Private enterprise had had its best. And Mr. Kurth was an example of the old-time timber baron who had run all over everybody in their way all over East Texas, and I can give you lots of examples if anybody wants 'em. Anyway, Tucker wrote this letter, and within two days, Kurth had a three-page answer, threatening Tucker. "You haven't been giving us any warning. Nobody has ever told me we had any pollution problem. I don't know whether we have or not," or ... I believe he said, in that letter ... I could show you a copy. Incidentally, the only reason I know anything about this, from Kurth's side, is the original correspondence is in the Special Collections of the SFA Library. And there're--box after box of papers from Kurth's lumber company are in the files with copies of his letters, copies of Tucker's letters, copies of the mill manager's memorandums to Kurth about the threat and the legal problems and the need for control of the pollution, none of which were available when Tucker wrote his letter and when Kurth wrote his answer.

And immediately after the confrontation, which happened in January of 1945, Kurth went to a meeting with his mill manager in Austin to ask for more time so he could do what needed to be done for pollution control. And he said, "The only reason I'm here is I don't feel comfortable with the adverse public reaction we've had from people in Nacogdoches, who think that catfishing in the Angelina River is a serious problem, and I think it's a bunch of nonsense," or something like that. Anyway, he showed his contempt for cat fishermen and fishing in general, compared to a mill that offered 800 jobs. And, Tucker stopped talking about injunction. They went ahead and built their levees. They started controlling their pollution in 1945, and the worst of the damage was somewhat reduced.

Then in June of '45, the Governor, "Coke" ... what was the name, "Coke" Stevenson ... ... appointed two new commissioners. D.K. Martin in San Antonio was a real estate man who handled sales at large ranches and knew lots of people. He had a lot of political influence. That's the only reason he got appointed, I guess. T.S. Reid from Beaumont was appointed because I guess he'd made some contributions to the political process. He was a retired business man. Wealthy, due to his family wealth. He was an acquaintance of mine all my life. He lived about four blocks from where I was reared. His was a big colonial house, mine was a modest cottage. But anyway, he was a good friend of mine, T.S. Reid. And when he was ... when he arrived in Austin I was happy to welcome him. In general, all through the years, employees have been discouraged from being close to commissioners and I never had any correspondence with any of 'em, or any phone calls, for that matter, that I remember.

But anyway, Mr. Reid made a point to me that "We've got to get rid of Will Tucker. I said, "Well, why?'" He said, "Well, I can't tell you but ... we got to do somethin' about him." That was just a flag. Boy, it was depressing, and I sat there wondering what was going on. And in the summer, he went down to the King Ranch somewhere, and he ... the state had bought him a station wagon. And he had a wreck in a state vehicle, and he'd probably had too much to drink. I don't know any details but the commissioners met in ... I guess in July, maybe it was August ... and decided to relieve Tucker of his duties. And as far as I knew, that wreck was the reason, although there was something going on before that because of what T.S. Reid had told me.

Twenty years or 30 years later, I was going through the files in SFA [Stephen F. Austin State University] Library, and I found all this correspondence between the mill manager and Mr. Kurth about the pollution problem, but no answers from Kurth to him, and Kurth's letters to Tucker and Faubian and mill manager's letters. And on top of that, there were ... oh, there was one key letter from Kurth to the publisher of The Dallas News, who was a good friend and he came up and hunted deer on Kurth's hunting club each fall and winter. There are such letters in the file as Kurth's talking about whom they'd invited as guests for this hunt they were planning ... things like that.

And, when the Tucker letter arrived about threat for a lawsuit, Mr. Kurth wrote Ted Dealey. Said, "That fellow in Austin is being unreasonable, and we may have some trouble, and I want you to get ready to help me." Or something ... to those words--I can give you a copy of the letter. And he said, "Get in touch with the chairman of the Commission," who lived in Dallas at that time, Colonel Buckner, whose family established the Buckner home. Colonel Buckner was Tucker's big friend and buddy, strong supporter. Said, "Get in touch with Buckner, and also Gene Howe." And Gene Howe was on the Commission from Amarillo, and he was a publisher of a newspaper up there, and both of 'em were customers for this newspaper plant ... and stockholders probably, I haven't checked that. So, it's easy to say that there's some connection between the two but I couldn't prove it.

DT: Well, maybe I can ask you one more question and we get to take a little break. Do you have any sort of general things to say about the sort of intersection between special interests that have very focused efforts on behalf of special projects or pieces of land, and then the sort of counterbalance of the general public that owns the wildlife and that has an interest in this really commonweal. What happens when those two run together?

DL: Well, that's the basis of almost everything that's happened in East Texas. In Texas as a whole, there's been political pressure of one kind or another for everything, good or bad. And, there's a--the public has really had a declining equity in their title to the wildlife. All through the years, there've been some places where ... behind the locked gate there was a independent operation, like the King Ranch. And, most of the legislation--most of the processes that affected wildlife included public hearings and the public had an opportunity for some input, and sometimes we've had reasonably good public input. But usually it was at the hearing stage and had ... wasn't enough to offset the private interests that might be working behind the scenes.

The Game, Fish and Oyster Commission was changed to the Game and Fish Commission for some reason, I've forgotten why. And then when John Connally was Governor, he got a bill passed that abolished the old Game Department, by whatever name, and combined it with the parks, which was having great difficulty and low funding, depending on appropriations each year. And this served neatly one of Connally's major problems. One of the running battles on the Coast between sports fishermen and duck hunters concerned the dredging of shell, which ... for highway construction and for chicken feed, for manufacture of cement even. It was a cheap, generally available, resource, deposited by the centuries, dead oyster shell, under the waters of all of our coastal bays. Belonged to the public. And, way back in perhaps the '20's, dredging started on a fee basis with a license from the game people.

At first the Game, Fish and Oyster Commission administered this and collected a fee of two or three cents a yard ... cubic yard ... of shell, the money to be spent on state fish hatcheries. That's the way the fish hatchery program got started. And, as the shell got more scarce and the public outcry got louder, they gradually raised the price. It was about 10 or 12 cents a cubic yard when things got really critical, and there was a building volume of public opinion in favor of passing legislation to stop it. And Connally got elected during those times, and I'm sure some of his best support came from the shell dredgers. They were headquartered in Houston. His law firm probably took care of all their business, for all I know.

In any case, Connally got the Legislature to abolish the old Commission. That meant he could appoint all the new ones in the combined Parks and Wildlife Department. And he appointed all of the new commissioners all at one time, six or nine ... I've forgotten which number. And that immediately took the pressure off of the shell dredging. We didn't try to do anything more about it, as a public agency. I was going around making talks that the shell dredgers themselves should stop dredging voluntarily while there was still a little left. As a token of their appreciation of all the long years they'd spent using a public resource, they should leave a little for its values to the ecosystem and the public and the fisheries. And they said, "No, our people'll be out of work," and I said, "Well, they're gonna be out of work in another year the way you're going, anyway." "Oh, no, that's different." But anyway, as soon as they ran out of shell they quit dredging shell. Started using limestone from central Texas and their people didn't have any unemployment. Anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent.

DT: Well, let's take a little break.

DL: All right.

DT: But I think this is wonderful stuff that you're telling me. ...

DT: Well, let's resume then. Again it's August 29, 1997, here with Daniel Lay in Nacogdoches, and ... I thought we might talk a little bit about the fall and rise of cattle and pasture in the years after the Depression. I was particularly interested in some of the effects on ... well, how much money people have and how they manage the land, and in particular how they run cattle on their land.

DL: Well, I want to go back further than the Depression, if you don't mind. Most of the early settlers in the forested part of East Texas brought their cows and their hogs with them, and they were looking for a place to use 'em, to run them on open range, and that was part of the attraction of Texas was a place for their livestock. They'd homestead a place, build a house, clear enough land to grow a small crop.

But their primary source of income was hogs and cattle, and the country was very productive. Cows could go to the marshes, where there was something special in the spring. They could go to the switch cane bottoms in wintertime, get out of the bad weather and eat switch cane. They didn't need any winter supplements. They were robust, healthy animals and made strong, large-boned calves. Governor Roberts in 1875 described how flourishing the livestock business was in East Texas, based on the bounty of the countryside supporting the herds.

Hardly any animals were confined to ... in pastures. It was open range, and there was no control of whose bull serviced which cow. The hogs were earmarked as soon as someone could catch 'em. Those that weren't marked belonged to the first fellow that caught 'em, under some conditions. The courthouse was important as a registered place for cattle brands and hog marks, and all went well in the woods for many years, beginning about 1825 on through to the years after the Depression.

Until about 1945, there was no fire control, and burning was an accepted part of the range management. Every cow man burned his territory at least once a year, in order to green up the grass. And, when I was fresh out of school, not really conversant with range management, I proposed to a number of old-time settlers who'd been burning the woods all their life that they were making a mistake, that they were burning up grass their cows could use and it wasn't good for the range. They were tolerant, they didn't run me off, but it took a while before I realized they knew what they were doing.

The ecosystem was primarily based on a fire regime. Long leaf was tolerant of fire. All of the prairie-like plants that grew under long leaf were tolerant of fire, and in fact they needed the rejuvenating effects of fire, none of which I had any comprehension of. But trial and error had taught the Indians and the early settlers that burning the woods was beneficial to them for various reasons. It also reduced fire hazard. If you split rails to build a fence, you didn't want some wild fire to come through and burn it down immediately. So you raked trash around it and made a little fire lane and set the ... let the fire burn on the outside of your little fire lane, and that way you protected your yard and your fences. Most yards were raked clean with a homemade brush ... homemade broom ... so there wouldn't be any fires creeping under the house and setting ... starting a fire.

Most people are apprehensive about fire on account of their education by propaganda from Disney and from the Forest Service with their Smokey Bear. Yet, they don't realize that fire all the way through Texas was responsible for all of the prairie and savannah land. The central Texas post oaks, the coastal prairies, the Great Plains, were all kept relatively free of woody plants by fire. This was altered when stockmen quit burning and decided that particularly out west they needed that forest for the cows. They couldn't waste it by burning it.

Originally, buffalo were the only grazer in Texas, and the deer, which were common of course, were browsers, not grazers, and the buffalo's pattern of grazing was intermittent. They grazed it down to the dirt, in huge crowds ... in huge herds. But the effects was like rotation grazing would be today, under some conditions, only it wasn't on any cyclic migration-based routine. It was intermittent and erratic. Buffalo grass, blue gamma, were beneficiaries of that heavy buffalo grazing. That's where buffalo grass got its name.

But, in many sections of the country, excessive additional grazing beyond the pressure being applied by the buffalo, even in East Texas, brought difficulties for the flora. Some species were so palatable, they were heavily consumed, like most of your legumes, and with unrestricted numbers of animals on the range, there was a great deal of overgrazing in East Texas and everywhere. The Depression came along and changed some things. A lot of people nearly starved to death and some drifted off, trying to find better territory.

But what really brought changes to East Texas was the ... World War II when a lot of cotton farmers gave up and went to town to work in the shipyards and make more money easier than they were making on small farms. That left a lot of vacant farm land in small plots, uneconomic for grazing units. But the best use, if you didn't want a stand of trees to be reestablished, was to place that land in large managed pastures with improved grasses, which led to a type of monoculture that's--not really representative of what the country can produce. Coastal Bermuda has crowded out just about everything else where it's well managed with fertilizer and mowing, heavy grazing. And, the land that's now in Coastal Bermuda is land that's almost lost its value for wildlife.

Likewise, they don't burn it because they've got herbicides now, they don't have to worry about hardwood invasion. They spray it with herbicides when they need to keep the brush down, so there's no burning.

The parallel to that is that after the war, in the '40's and '50's, pine trees became somewhat more valuable. Where you could hardly find anybody that wanted to buy 'em for ten or $15 a thousand, that price crept up, and I was real proud when I sold some for $35 a thousand, about'1952 maybe. The ...

DT: That's per thousand board feet?

DL: Yeah, stumpage, tall scale. The point I'm making here is that the forest land owners had to put up with trespass from hunters who owned the wildlife and had a tradition of free access, and they had to cope with the settlers' livestock that had traditional access to all the grazing. And they gradually fenced, and passed laws about burning, and laws about liability. If a hog caused a wreck, the hog owner might be sued, and about 1955 or '60, various precincts started voting to exclude and outlaw free-range animals. And that was the end of open-range grazing, and that was the beginning of the forest industry's full control of the land, including no uninvited guests or animals. [Pause.] That's probably enough about grazing.

Now, the people that owned these larger pastures of Bermuda grass are almost all affluent. They've had income from mineral leases, they've had income from timber sales. Recent timber sales have been bringing upwards of $500 a thousand for pine in 1997. Calves that used to do well to bring $50 might bring a thousand dollars now. Times have changed substantially. As a consequence, you have affluent landowners with more cash flow, more income, mostly on land that they inherited or bought for five or ten or $20 an acre, years and years ago. Where the land might be worth a great deal more now, they're not interested in selling. But neither are they interested in cutting back to the grazing pressure, to see what native plants might show up in that pasture if they quit fertilizing the coastal Bermuda and try to let it go back to native grasses. If they'd do a little burning, and do a little rotation grazing, there are various things that could be done to have fun with the ownership of a tract of land and see what you ... the owner could do to reestablish some of the old-time plants that were part of East Texas, part of our culture, served the early settlers in many ways.

Sassafras is one example. Everybody in East Texas used to dig sassafras roots and drink tea made from the roots each spring for a tonic. Now where would you go to find the sassafras roots? They've all been killed. People look at sassafras and a lot of other plants in their pasture and say, "What good is it?" They pay money to have herbicide treatments that get rid of it.

There's a plant down on the coast that was in rice fields that was real important for doves and quail as a food source. Caperonia palustris is the scientific name. It was listed probably in the early edition of Plants of Texas, published by A&M about 1940. It was shown as a member of the flora on the Texas Coast. The same publication put out about 1990 didn't list it - not even in there. It turns out that a few plants are still down there, but the botanists didn't find 'em, and it's a broad-leaf plant that was the main source of food when I was collecting dove crops to see what they were eating, and it was probably also an irritant to the rice farmers as a weed in their rice. Modern herbicides took care of the problem and it's not even listed in the book nowadays. [Pause.]

As a rule, west Texas was badly overgrazed and still is. Once in a while, you hear about an old-time rancher like Watt Matthews on the Clear Fork of the Brazos who just died, who is recognized as a true conservationist and rancher. I was privileged to be a guest of Mr. Matthews several times for meetings. He was always good to let us use his old ranch house on the banks of the river for a staff meeting. And, he was proud of his pastures with native grasses. He didn't want any exotic, introduced plants or animals on his place. He didn't want any excessive grazing that would cause hardship for the most palatable of these grasses, the better quality grasses. He abhorred such grazing pressure that a pasture turned out to have very little in it but needle grass. Out there needle grass was a weed to him, whereas a lot of people managed it as if it was good grass 'cause that's all they had. That's a good indicator of overgrazing.

One would think that families with great properties would want to do like Ted Turner's doing now in New Mexico. My good friend, Joe Truitt, wrote a recent book called Circling Back, published by the University of Iowa Press. And he is working as a consultant now, and Mr. Turner learned of his services and employed him to reestablish prairie dogs on a ranch he had just bought in New Mexico. His objective is to return the land to the condition it was in when there were buffaloes present and no cattle. He immediately got rid of all the cows on this ranch and started moving in some buffalo, and he's well on his way to demonstrate what ranch management with buffalo can accomplish. Same thing could be done in Texas.

DT: Do you think that this new wildlife exemption tax will help people look at alternatives to using cattle to qualify for the agricultural exemption?

DL: I'm sure it might help some. For one thing, it's being misused here in Nacogdoches by people with high-priced real estate land putting a few cows, calves or planting ... I believe pine trees are eligible also as a crop. It can be used as subterfuge, and I don't approve of that because other tax payers are disadvantaged. But where it's used well for wildlife I'm all for it of course. The wildlife profession voted to support it officially.

DT: [Pause.] One other sort of specific topic I wanted to touch on, if you've got a moment, is to talk about reservoirs. There've been a number of dams built in East Texas, and ...

DL: The two largest?

DT: ... I was curious if you could talk about some of the impacts and the controversies regarding that.

DL: The two largest are Toledo and Rayburn. Together they cover about a quarter million acres of land. And, the original construction was fought by forest industry, and that's one political battle they lost. The water interests wanted a better supply for refineries and rice farmers on the coast and they won that battle. The impoundments were built after the present laws about mitigation went on the books, but we were unable to get anybody to seriously consider the rights of wildlife in the planning and construction of those two lakes. They were constructed in the early 1960's. Rayburn opened in 1965, I think, and Toledo in '66.

At the beginning there was a tremendous beneficial effect on water fowl and on fish. Flooding new land brought a huge amount of new nutrients into the water, and there was a flush of food for fish and everything prospered out there. The brim, the bass, the crappie, the catfish, were there in great numbers and they were all fat and plump. On the ramps where you launched your boat there would be a machine where you could put your brim in it and put a quarter in the slot and have all the scales knocked off like a old-time washing machine. It was fixed to scale the fish. There were so many people coming in with sackloads of brim, there was no limit on 'em. For crappie you could catch 50 and keep them. That was the glory days of the reservoirs, and it only lasted five, six, eight years.

Since then, the lakes have been getting less and less productive. Now after 30 years, more or less, it's unpredictable if one might catch any fish at all when he goes out. The good old days are definitely gone, they're not likely to ever be back. The land that was flooded will never produce any more squirrels, hickory nuts, food for mallards. All the great things that were supplied by that fertile river bottom and the adjacent hill sides ... they're gone forever. And, that lake's ... those two lakes'll probably be standing a hundred, 200 years from now. All they're accomplishing is interfering with the cycling of nutrients. When it floods on the watershed, water levels go up. Silty water comes in. The silt goes to the bottom of the lake, with the nutrients, and most of it is done where it's not used by fishers or anything else. The flow out of the bottom of the dam is still water, with no nutrients to speak of.

There are long-term consequences of this and many other things that weren't anticipated. The short-term benefits of a land use practice is one that causes most decisions. And yet, someone needs to be asking questions as to the wisdom of the action for the long-term. I was mitigation coordinator, the first Texas ever had, and I butted my head against a wall mostly, going to meetings with the Corps of Engineers in Austin and in Galveston, meetings with the Soil Conservation Service that were busy building flood control structures all over the state and ... little if any mitigation was ever accomplished under my years, up until 1979 when I retired. Since then, some of the newer projects have planned for mitigation, and that was just part of the accepted expense for doing the project, and that's the way it probably will continue to be in the future.

DT: Could we talk a little bit about the future? I'm curious if you have some thoughts about the coming challenges, old problems that don't seem to go away, that sort of thing.

DL: Conservation of water is an issue that's been ignored. It's gonna have its time, sooner or later. The paper mill uses millions of gallons of water every day, pumped out of the ground, the one at Evadale the same way. Yet, new paper mills are being built in ecologically sensitive areas where there's no new water used and no effluent. They have a closed system. Just recycle their own water and keep it clean enough to use over and over. Can be done, it's just more expensive. A lot of the farmers that irrigate waste water. A lot of water is planned for uses that are never needed, like rice. Rice is going out of the picture for economic reasons. Yet we've got an infrastructure of canals and reservoirs dedicated to irrigating rice that won't be there. We've got Toledo Bend privately owned by the Sabine River Authority. You've got a series of river authorities all over the state that are private entities, operated on their own with practically no public oversight, using public resources. The water belongs to the public. And even after 30 years, I understand that only about 5% of the water from either Toledo or Rayburn is being used commercially downstream.

DT: Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that are underneath Toledo Bend and Sam Rayburn and elsewhere. I think you mentioned earlier you had some favorite spots that fortunately are not yet flooded, that you've enjoyed?

DL: Well, you bet. One of my favorite spots is the 44 hundred acres of forest land in the forks of the river between the Angelina and Neches Rivers. That was bought by the Corps of Engineers in 1954 as a flood control structure ... I mean, as a water control structure ... to move water down the Neches towards Beaumont. It's about ... I think about eight or 10,000 acres of water and another eight or 10,000 acres of flowage easement around the upper end when the water is high. And, they had to buy it all but they didn't kill all the timber because they keep the water at a certain pool level and it leaves some of the timber unflooded. And that unflooded timber is one of the best remaining forests of hardwoods in Texas. One of my favorite places.

Another is a pitcher plant bog on the ... Angelina National Forest, near where I worked with red cockadeds in 1969-73 area of time. I don't remember the compartment number but it's about ...

[Tape 3 of 3, Side A.] DL: ... ... about six or eight miles west of Rayburn Dam. This is a hillside bog that isn't very suitable for pines and none have established, and it's got a lot of pitcher plants and associated species, including several rare plants ... water plants, wetland plants. White azalea, poison sumac, a very showy orchid. And, it's surrounded by a few trees, like magnolia, the deciduous magnolia. Some call it sour magnolia. It grows in a acid bog situation. A number of other plants there that were unique to that site, and the relationship to the woodpeckers is that there were woodpecker colonies all around it.

And I used to go to the bog to sit in the shade and enjoy my lunch at noon, and ... nobody around, except one day I was irritated. That was one of the ... that was my first experience with a off-road vehicle. There I was, at least three miles from the nearby graded road, and I heard this chug-chug and here comes a

[Video tape cuts out, remainder transcribed from audio recording made simultaneously]

off-road vehicle. A guy jumping logs and coming through the bushes and came right up to see what I was doing. He had his little vehicle and taking off. It was public land. I guess it was all right, but it sure ... the noise was one of my early examples of noise pollution.

DT: Well, over the years you've done certainly your part to try and preserve some of these fine spots and help us understand it. It looks like we've run out of tape. But I wanted to thank you for your time today, ... DL: Well, you're quite welcome. DT: And I hope that we can resume this sometime later. DL: I'd enjoy another round sometime. DT: Great. DL: I hope I can have a good visit with you and find out what-all you're doing. DT: Well, thank you very much.