And yet friends here say that on their trips out West, and even down below in their own deep South, they frequently talk with people who have never heard of the Smokies.
But that can never happen again. After the current mass of words which this column has fired into the air, anybody who never heard of the Smokies will have to be jailed as a fifth-columnist. This is the final warning.
HEAD MAN
The head man of the Great Smokies Park is Ross Eakin. His men say he has one of the smoothest-working organizations in the Park Service. He has been in charge here from the start. Before that he was superintendent at Glacier, and at Grand Canyon.
The Smokies have been fortunate in having the CCC and the WPA. Without them to do the work and do it cheaply, the Park Service would have been decades reaching its present advanced stage of improvements.
They have built hundreds of miles of trail, and fire roads for trucks, and camping grounds and bridges and even beautiful stone buildings for Park Headquarters, at one time there were 17 CCC camps in the park, and even now there are seven.
The park does have, it seems to me, one definite lack. And that is enough Rangers for direct contact with the public. The park charges no admission, so you are not stopped or given information when you drive in.
The public’s hunger for authentic information is expressed in the experience of one of the Rangers. When he first came here, he took a rustic cottage in a tourist court, right in town, but every evening the tourists would see him come home from work in his uniform, and from then till bed time there was a line at his door. He finally had to move.
DRIVEN AROUND
Both Assistant Chief Ranger Harold Edwards, on the Tennessee side, and Assistant Chief Ranger James Light, on the Carolina side, have driven us all around through the interior of the park on fire roads—gravel truck trails not open to the public.