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organization which was nationwide and which had to be alerted at a moment's notice for disaster relief or special relief in emergency quarters. This was an emergency operation, all right.

Within a very few weeks we got some men in the forests. Persons proved to be just as good as I thought he would be. He was many more difficulties than I saw, and I saw plenty. It was really a crazy idea and pipedream. If Persons and I hadn't walked into it, and if George Dern hadn't walked into it and been just a terrific support, it would have been absolutely insane.

How the Forest Service did reject it! We got hold of the man who was the head of it then. He subsequently died and F. A. Silcox succeeded him within the first year of the Roosevelt administration. The whole Forest Service rejected the idea. They just couldn't do it. They said we were crazy and they had to have trained people. If the President wanted the trees taken care of, why they could hire the men right around the localities. They'd like to do that, but they wanted farmers and people around forests who were used to forests to come in and work. They didn't want a lot of city men coming up to work in the forests. It just horrified them.

Persons and I sat down with a very small group of