Q How
long have you been in the park service? Where did you begin your
career?
A I
graduated from college in civil engineering in 1972 and worked for a
private consulting firm for a couple of years. After that I got married
and did Peace Corps for two years in the Kingdom of Tonga in the South
Pacific. I was the roads engineer for the Kingdom of Tonga, supervising
their whole roads program on a variety of islands including the airport
and sea wall. In retrospect, it wa a lot like the National Park
maintenance operation with the Kingdom of Tonga having about the same
amount of equipment as the National Park. Although in Tonga, equipment
was costly to run and people would work for two dollars a day, so you
had more employees than in the park.
When we were about to leave there I was in my later twenties, married,
thinking about having a baby, and going, well, what was next in life? I
talked to an older guy in Tonga, a doctor, and had a little fatherly
chat with him. He suggested that I think about park maintenance. That
sounded fun, so, on my way home, I stopped in the Honolulu park service
office and asked if they ever hired engineers. They referred me to the
Denver office and it turns out that after serving in the Peace Corps,
volunteers have one or two years where you are eligible to be hired
non-competitively. That means that if you meet the qualifications and
they want to hire you, they can, without going through the register.
They offered me a job and I took it.
