CCC works may be answer to Katrina

The three men, now in their 80s, remember their disbelief when they saw, after years of near starvation during the Great Depression, plates of piled-high pork chops in the mess hall.

They remember how their Civilian Conservation Corps experience changed the rest of their lives – for the better – because President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw their suffering and did something about it.

“If you look at the history of this nation, you’ll see ups and downs,” Joseph Wagner, 83, said. “The nation went into a deep hole. It had to dig out. The only way it could dig out was with human effort.”

For his Depression-era work project, Wagner straightened out streambeds and built rock walls near Pullman.

Keith Holmes, 84, was trained as a machinist, and it became his lifelong career.

Fred Blood, 88, cooked for his fellow corps members at a CCC camp at Heyburn State Park in Idaho.

I met the three gentlemen Monday morning. They belong to a committee hoping to preserve the structures built by CCC workers during the Great Depression at Riverside State Park, including the suspension bridge that spans the Spokane River at the Bowl & Pitcher.

Hurricane Katrina had just blown through the Gulf Coast hours before the meeting, and the extent of the damage – to the land, to human beings and to our national psyche – was unknown.

Now we know the size of the deep hole our country again stares down into.

All week, as I watched images of hungry, thirsty, angry people, I remembered these three men who experienced hunger and hopelessness in the 1930s, when the unemployment rate stood at 25 percent, and families lined up for blocks to receive charitable offerings of food and water.

Roosevelt and his government plucked 3 million men, ages 18 to 25, out of poverty. In the CCC, the young men planted trees, fought fires, laid telephone wire, built camps, bridges, trails, outhouses and conserved topsoil. From 1933 to 1942, they worked in national and state parks and on other public lands. They made $30 a month and sent $25 of it home.

Monday morning, I also met Frank Dorman, a Riverside State Park ranger. For a decade, Dorman has been leading the charge to preserve the CCC history at the park, through upgrading the structures that young men built long ago – including the suspension bridge, a picnic shelter, several stone and wood structures and the “only double pit toilet in the Washington State Parks system still in use,” Dorman said.

Dorman and others also hope to build a cultural-historical interpretive center at Bowl & Pitcher, recounting not just the CCC experience, but the history of the Spokane Tribe who wintered there. And the story of how nature carved out the landscape at Riverside State Park. During the Ice Age, floods of biblical proportions raced through the Northwest after an ice dam breached again and again near modern-day Missoula.

“I’m anxious for the youth of today to understand this,” Dorman said. “Unless people know, they can’t care.”

There wouldn’t be a Bowl & Pitcher now without the Ice Age floods. There wouldn’t have been a Civilian Conservation Corps if Roosevelt and other leaders had lacked the courage to say we cannot let our young people go without food and hope. We are better than this. And we were.

If we forget history, the saying goes, we are doomed to repeat it. But if we forget history, we also are doomed not to repeat it. Maybe President Bush and other leaders will steal ideas from CCC history.

Maybe Hurricane Katrina’s desperate and hungry young people can build the new places they will call home. Maybe this human effort will change the rest of their lives – for the better.

Dorman, the CCC veterans and many others are working valiantly to preserve the touchstones of history at Riverside State Park, from nature’s prehistoric and violent handiwork, to the handiwork of the gentle men who came later, their bellies full of pork chops, their hearts filled with hope.