A Memento To An Era -- Ccc Alumni Fight To Preserve, Restore New Deal Landmark Of Camp Waskowitz

The manager of Camp Waskowitz didn't know what sort of fellow he was dealing with when he showed Bob Robeson one of the camp's old buildings two years ago and told him he was going to tear it down.

"Oh no you're not," Robeson shot back.

To Robeson, a veteran of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, the long, narrow one-story wood building was more than a dilapidated structure. It was history.

He wasn't about to stand by silently while one of the nation's last remaining CCC camps was dismantled building by building.

Robeson, 76, of the Lake Forest Park area and now regional director of the National Association of CCC Alumni, was painfully aware of the fate of most of the 4,000 camps built during the 1930s. Nearly all had fallen down, been torn down or been altered beyond recognition.

Less than 60 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the CCC to put a Depression-ravaged America back to work, the physical evidence was almost lost.

Robeson said that when he visited his old camp in Wyoming, "I couldn't even find any vestige of it . . . When we see one standing, we would like to see it preserved as a memento to an era that means something to a lot of people."

Unfamiliar to younger Americans, the CCC was created by Roosevelt to put unemployed young men to work for the departments of Agriculture, Interior, Labor and War.

During its nine-year life span, the CCC employed 3 million of the 13 million Americans who had no jobs in 1933.

Camp North Bend (Waskowitz' original name) was one of 100 CCC camps in Washington. It was built during four months in 1935 to house the 200-plus men of CCC Company 2911.

Put together without insulation or interior walls, the spartan wood barracks were "one step removed from tenting it," in the words of Paul Bray, facilities supervisor for the Highline School District, which now owns the property.

The camp has been turned into an outdoor-education center. Fifth- and sixth-graders from several school districts use the bunks where members of "the three C's" slept and carved their initials half a century earlier.

One of those CCC recruits was Seattleite Charles Walker Smith who, like his father, couldn't find work during the Great Depression. "The old man kicked me out, said go . . . He couldn't support me any more."

During his 18 months at Camp North Bend, Smith earned $30 a week building roads for the U.S. Forest Service. Like his comrades, he saw $5 of his weekly paycheck. The government sent the rest to his family.

At camp, he said, "I learned how to get along with my fellow man."

Tom McCormick used bookkeeping and management skills he learned at North Bend in his later career in the Army and Air Force.

Today, McCormick says, "Probably the most spectacular thing about the place is the trees. I planted some of them. Now they're enormous things."

Camp North Bend crews cleared brush, burned logging slash, fought forest fires, built the North Bend Ranger Station, built roads and planted trees. Smaller "side camps" were built on the Green River in Lester and on the Middle Fork Snoqualmie at Goldmeyer Hot Spring. A small detachment built a fire road in the Skykomish Valley.

Trucks took men into Seattle on the weekends. And, of course, there were the visits to nearby Pop's Tavern and to the cemetery to rendezvous with local girls.

The camp was closed in 1942, when recruiting soldiers for World War II became the government's top priority. Not surprisingly, many of the military's recruits came from the CCC.

"When the war came on, since we were living in Army barracks, we were dressed in military uniforms, we were under orders of military officers and we had military chow; we were just about all-military except we never learned how to kill people," Robeson recalls.

The camp served as a wartime holding facility for the Coast Guard and then as a youth recreation camp operated by King County police. Its name was changed in honor of Fritz Waskowitz, captain of the University of Washington 1936-37 football team and one of Washington's first casualties in the war. Lt. Waskowitz is said to have crashed his damaged bomber into a Japanese cruiser, making him - an American - the first kamikaze pilot of the war.

Under Highline School Superintendent Carl Jensen, the district obtained the 10-acre property in 1957 and turned it into an outdoor-education center for elementary students. It provided a permanent home for the "outdoor camping" Jensen had pioneered in one location after another.

Through a series of purchases, the school district has expanded its holdings of forested land around the old CCC camp to 349 acres. Each year, more than 4,000 students from the Highline, Federal Way, South Central, Vashon Island, Seattle, Lake Washington districts and some private schools spend a week learning about nature in the woods of Waskowitz.

Students also are introduced to the camp's New Deal history.

Although the Highline district replaced roofs, added foundations and improved heating, some of the 10 original CCC buildings had deteriorated badly by the beginning of the 1990s. The school district's architects advised the district to demolish and replace most of the buildings.

CCC alumni had been holding annual reunions at Camp Waskowitz for the better part of a decade when they learned of the plans to tear it down. Launching an effort to spare the historic buildings, they made allies in the school district, in King County government and among citizen boosters of the outdoor-education program.

Their efforts resulted in the camp's designation as a King County historic landmark last year, and its addition this year to the National Register of Historic Places. Those designations have brought a $200,000 state grant and a $50,000 county grant to support restoration efforts.

But historic-landmark status also is expected to increase the cost of improvements - originally pegged at $4.9 million.

Even Robeson is astounded by the rising cost. He's vice president of Friends of Camp Waskowitz, a citizens group committed to raising $5 million to $8 million for renovation.

"I've told them that I think they're out of their minds," he laughs. "I think when that camp was built it probably cost $20,000."

Robeson doesn't believe the full cost of restoration will be raised during his lifetime, but he's committed to working for it as long as he can.

Some observers believe it was a mistake for the school district to seek landmark status. With the King County Landmarks and Heritage Commission looking over the district's shoulder, renovation becomes more complicated as well as more costly.

"You can't maintain an old atmosphere and still maintain the safety, health and the welfare of the kids. I think the district realizes that, whether they'll admit it or not," says Jerry Ruston, who recently retired as assistant to the camp's facilities manager.

He calls the camp's much-touted historic value "a bunch of hogwash," arguing that the Catholic Youth Organization's Camp Don Bosco near Carnation is a better example of a complete CCC camp. However, Julie Koler, King County's historic preservation officer, reports that Bosco has been so altered it doesn't qualify for landmark status.

The Association of CCC Alumni hasn't found any camp in the United States as complete and authentic as Waskowitz.

Boosters of historic renovation view a preserved camp as a tribute to the CCC's founder, Roosevelt.

"Probably one of the better things he was known for were his CCCers," says Kathy Hand, a former Highline School Board member and co-president of Friends of Camp Waskowitz. "What better way to honor him than in the restoration of a CCC camp. And I'm not a Democrat."

Memories of the Civilian Conservation Corps are growing dim as the ranks of veterans thin. Most have died; the average age of the remaining alumni is 76.

Alumni members believe more than history is at stake. They're trying to persuade another president in hard times - Bill Clinton - to resurrect the program.

"We need it back, that's for sure," says Clifford Ditlefsen, who lived at Camp North Bend in 1939 and 1940. He thinks it's a great opportunity to teach young men and women from the inner city to learn about discipline and hard work.

Robeson shares Ditlefsen's dream. Working in a camp setting, he believes, would "let them understand that they're worth something and that their work is meaningful."

Just as the original CCCers learned in their day.