CALDWELL, Charles FS 08-10-06, 1 03 Corrected · CALDWELL: And so [an] opportunity came up for a...

CALDWELL, Charles FS08-10-06, 1st half03__Corrected

U.S. Department of AgricultureForest Service

Region Five History Project

Interview with: [Charles] “Charlie” CaldwellInterviewed by: Susana LuzierLocation: Shasta Lake, CaliforniaDate: September 20, 2006Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; November 2006Corrections: Susana Luzier, 4.26.2007

SUSANA LUZIER: This interview is taking place in Shasta Lake, California. Today’s date is

September 20, 2006, and it’s approximately eleven fifteen. I’m sitting in the home of Charlie

Caldwell, and I’d like to begin by asking you what day you were born and where you were born,

Charlie.

CHARLES CALDWELL: Thank you. I was born in Redding, May 2nd, 1936. We moved from

Redding to Mountain Gate. That was in the early days. That was before the dam went in. Then

moved down to the Pine Grove area, if you’re familiar [with it], down behind the Giant Orange.

it’s about six miles north of Redding, into a brush patch, and there we lived in tents for the first

five or six years of my life, and then moved into an old barn-type place that my dad put together.

It was an old house, kind of like a barn. Didn’t have any ceilings, no rooms, no windows, no

doors, and it was kind of an interesting place to live. We didn’t know we were poor.

LUZIER: [Chuckles.] How many brothers and sisters did you have?

CALDWELL: I had ten brothers and sisters.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: I was right in the middle, number six of the eleven. Three brothers older, three

younger, two sisters older and two younger, so I was exactly in the middle.

Charlie Caldwell, 09/20/06, page 2

LUZIER: Where did you go to school?

CALDWELL: I went to school at Project City Grammar School. Let’s see, they had Project

City, Central Valley and Toyon were the three schools that they had at that time in this area. My

older brothers and sisters went to grammar school at Mountain Gate before we moved down to

the Project City School area.

LUZIER: What did you do while you were growing up? What kind of pastimes did you have?

CALDWELL: I spent most of my time working.

LUZIER: From what age?

CALDWELL: Whatever I could do. Probably from about ten years old, I was hitchhiking to

Redding and mowing lawns and that type of stuff and take all my money home, just to help out.

Dad died when I was ten years old, so Mother was a waitress, and she raised most of us kids.

My oldest brother went in the Second World War when he was seventeen.

LUZIER: When did you meet your wife, and where did you meet her? Tell me a little bit about

that.

CALDWELL: Okay. I got stopped there at the Project City School and then went to Shasta

High School.

LUZIER: Oh, okay.

CALDWELL: Shasta High School here in Redding. I just happened to see that in my notes.

Met my wife in—actually, we were swimming in Shasta Lake. I was working for the

Forest Service at the time, and stopped by Bridge Bay, and this one girl I knew introduced me to

her, and we went to the movies, and one thing led to another, and so we got married the 14th of

February, Valentine’s Day—

LUZIER: Ooh!


CALDWELL: —in 1958.

LUZIER: So you’ve been married forty-eight years?

CALDWELL: Forty-eight years.

LUZIER: That’s a long time.

CALDWELL: Yes, it’ll be forty-nine years in February.

LUZIER: Good for you! And how many children do you have?

CALDWELL: We had three children. We lost our youngest son when he was, like, twenty-two

years old. [Telephone rings.] Oh, my God! I have to take this.

LUZIER: Okay, you go right ahead. You go right ahead.

[End CD Track 1. Begin CD Track 2 (track 5).]

LUZIER: Okay, we’re on Track 5 now. We’ve taken the conversation on the telephone and

listened, and we sound really good, so we’re starting again, and Charlie is going to tell me a little

bit more about his children. You told me you lost your youngest son when he was twenty-two.

CALDWELL: Yes. He had been working for the Bureau of Land Management. He started out

with the CDF [California Division of Forestry] here in Redding and then went on to work for the

Bureau of Land Management and was on the Hotshot crew for the BLM in Kern Valley. His

foreman at that time was [Anthony] “Tony” Escobar, and he was a sawyer and so on, and he’d

just been accepted into the smokejumper program in Redding as a BLM detailer.

LUZIER: What was his name?

CALDWELL: Joe. Joseph.

LUZIER: Joseph Caldwell.


CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Okay. And what about your other children?

CALDWELL: Our oldest was our daughter. She’s forty-seven now, and she spent about twelve,

thirteen years with the Forest Service, and actually had—she’s bipolar, so she had a type of—

MRS. CALDWELL: Mental breakdown.

CALDWELL: —mental breakdown.

LUZIER: When this happened to her brother?

CALDWELL: No, no, it was after that.

LUZIER: Okay.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: And what’s her name?

CALDWELL: Her name is Deborah, D-e-b-o-r-a-h.

LUZIER: Good. Okay. Is she married?

CALDWELL: She’s been married twice, not married at the present.

LUZIER: Does she have children?

CALDWELL: No children.

LUZIER: No children.

CALDWELL: No, she elected not to have children, I guess.

LUZIER: What about your son?

CALDWELL: My son, Charlie—he got out of high school—he was very active in high school.

When he was a senior in high school, he was captain of the cross-country team, captain of the

track team, he was a pole-vaulter and runner, he was also captain of the wrestling team, and very

active young man. He went right to work for PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric] right out of high


school, and then he got laid off one season, so he worked for the BLM over in Nevada one year

and then went back to PG&E. He was actually the youngest operator that PG&E had ever hired

into a nuclear plant. He was pretty sharp. Mainly math is I think what he excelled in, so that

was a big part of him [sic; his] getting that job. So he’s been with PG&E for twenty-six years.

LUZIER: How old is he now?

CALDWELL: He’s forty-five.

LUZIER: Oh, so he’s a little younger than—

CALDWELL: Debbie.

LUZIER: Debbie.

CALDWELL: Two years younger than Debbie. And he’s a shift foreman for PG&E in Eureka

in a power plant.

LUZIER: Does he have children?

CALDWELL: Yes, he has three boys. They’re seventeen, thirteen and ten.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: All very active in sports. My son is youth pastor in his church. He’s been on a

lot of missions through the church and so on, and he’s actually the president of the skateboard

association in McKinleyville, and he coaches track at the high school. Spends his own money to

put in the track equipment and buy the pole vaulting poles and that type of stuff. I think he said

it cost him about five thousand last year.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: For the school.

LUZIER: Sounds like you can really be proud of your kids.


CALDWELL: Yes, yes. People told me—you know, some of the foster sons and so on that

grew up with our sons—says, “They ought to put a statue of Charlie up in McKinleyville.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.] Oh, that’s great.

What about your first jobs, besides working at ten years old, mowing lawns and making

money?

CALDWELL: I had a little business of my own where I hand dug leach lines and septic tanks,

and I actually helped an electrician wire a house one time. I did all this for, like, fifty cents an

hour, and I would paint houses and paint garages and do any kind of yard work that needed [to

be] done. I was kind of a manic worker. [Chuckles.] I would go into this great big yard or

something and be done in an hour, and I’ll only get fifty cents. [Chuckles.] But that’s the way I

did things. And I used to run from one job to another, just to—

LUZIER: Just to get it done and get—

CALDWELL: Get all the money I could make, fifty cents an hour.

LUZIER: Wow. Sounds like one of my sons, my fourth one. At what age in your life and what

year did you choose to start work with the Forest Service?

CALDWELL: I think it probably all started when I was in high school, and I got interested

doing a term paper. I did a term paper on forestry and lumbering, and I had one brother just

older than me that had already spent a season with the Hotshot crew on the Shasta-Trinity

[National Forest].

LUZIER: What was his name?

CALDWELL: His name was Tom, Thomas.

LUZIER: Thomas. Okay. Was that very long before you?


CALDWELL: It was, like, two years before, I think. He went in the Korean War. He was

actually a firefighter in Korea, attached to a firefighting outfit. So that kind of motivated me

there. I found it very interesting when I was doing all my research and so on, and so I basically

programmed myself to go right into the Forest Service. And so I went on the thirty-five man

Hotshot crew at Lakeshore when I was eighteen years old. It was called the Shasta Hotshots.

LUZIER: Did you fill out that biographical summary?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Oh, great. I’ll get that from you today.

CALDWELL: No, you have that.

LUZIER: Oh, I have it already?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Oh, excuse me.

CALDWELL: [Chuckles.]

LUZIER: That’s great. I’ll find it. And did you do seasonal work, or did you work year ‘round?

CALDWELL: No, it was seasonal when I first started. I started there in 1954, spent that season

on the Hotshot crew, and next year I went to work on the suppression crew, on the engines, and

worked a short time there, and that was the same year that my mother was killed. I was having a

tough time in this area with all the people we knew and so on. My mother had been killed, and

then my oldest brother had been killed ten days later.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: I was having a hard time as a kid dealing with things.

LUZIER: How old were you then, eighteen or nineteen?

CALDWELL: Nineteen.


LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: And so [an] opportunity came up for a packer on the Trinity National Forest. It

was the Trinity National Forest at that time. They changed in the fall or the summer of 1955 to

Shasta-Trinity, but at that time it was Trinity, and I went to work on the Big Bar District as a

packer, so I spent one whole season as a packer, and that fall I did a lot of blasting and so on, and

then they moved me into the warehouse in Redding, getting all the—I was working for Claire

Miller. Remember Claire Miller?

LUZIER: I sure do.

CALDWELL: Claire Miller is the one that motivated me into—he said, “You’re not permanent

yet?” I said, “Well, no.” So he said, “Come in at lunchtime. We’ll fill out an application.” And

we did.

LUZIER: And you were.

CALDWELL: And they sent me a letter back, the Civil Service Commission, saying I had a job

on what we called the Redding District at that time. I took it in, and the district ranger says, “We

don’t have any money. We don’t have a job for you.” [Chuckles.] I walked out with my tail

between my legs, and, Well, this says I got a job, and he’s saying I don’t. But Harold Peterson,

my old FMO [fire management officer]—

LUZIER: I remember him, too.

CALDWELL: Yes. I went to see him, and he says, “Let’s go in there.” He says, “You do have

a job.” And so at that time there was only two actually field type people on the district. They

had the district ranger, they had the assistant ranger, and somebody in timber, the district clerk,

and this Jerry Solus and myself. We basically [were] the Redding District at that time with the

FMO.


LUZIER: Huh!

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: That was before they went together with the Shasta and Trinity together, right?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: I’ll be darned.

CALDWELL: Yes, and our district offices were—you know, we bounced around. Originally

the Redding—I don’t know if we even talked about this already.

LUZIER: No, we didn’t.

CALDWELL: The Redding District, which is now Shasta Lake District, was—

LUZIER: It located on Shasta Dam Boulevard.

CALDWELL: Well, in [the] early days, Redding District headquarters was in Squaw Creek.

LUZIER: Oh, really?

CALDWELL: Yes, and the only way to get into Squaw Creek was over High Mountain, where

you turn off up there at Volmers.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: And go in over the mountains to get there. The Gilman Road wasn’t put in until

later years. I was blasting the road into the Hirz Mountain Lookout when they were building the

Gilman Road out past Hirz Bay and all that area. And so that opened up a lot of—new recreation

and campgrounds.

LUZIER: I didn’t realize that, that the Redding office wasn’t in Redding.

CALDWELL: Yes. Well, when I went to work for them, the Redding office was in the old Red

Cross Building on Parkview, and that’s where our district office was. We had a big warehouse

there.


LUZIER: I remember the warehouse being there, yes.

CALDWELL: We moved to Toyon, into the Bureau of Reclamation [building], spent one whole

winter over there rebuilding the inside of the old building there, and we had our district office at

Toyon, in the Bureau of Reclamation building for a while. Then we moved to Shasta Dam

Boulevard right down here. Rented an old block building.

LUZIER: It’s still there.

CALDWELL: Put a bunch of partitions in, and that was the district office.

LUZIER: No real space to park. I remember that.

CALDWELL: No, there wasn’t.

LUZIER: Still isn’t.

CALDWELL: You remember those days.

LUZIER: Yes, yes. I didn’t realize—I at one time thought you established the program here

about the Hotshots, but now I realize you didn’t—

CALDWELL: Well—

LUZIER: But you were the first Hotshot leader, weren’t you?

CALDWELL: The Hotshot crew went out in 1956; 1956 was the last year of the Shasta

Hotshots, because the Shasta-Trinity brought the smokejumper program to Redding, so they did

away with the Hotshot crew.

LUZIER: Two very different things.

CALDWELL: Yes. So the Hotshot crew was not reestablished until 1967, and that’s when I

started the Redding Hotshot program. I had been a smokejumper for two years prior to that, in

the detail program, spent 1966 as a squad leader in the smokejumper program, and when the job

opened up, I applied for it, got the job as a Hotshot superintendent. They said, “Okay, you’ve


got so many days to hire foresters. You need twenty foresters to start this program.” And that

was a challenge. We sent out everything we could to all the forests nation wide and got detailers

from different parts of the country.

The detail program was actually set up to take people that showed some kind of potential

as a leader in fire management to come to the program, get six months of intensified training plus

function as a Hotshot crew, and they continued on until—I retired in 1986, so I was there all

those years with twenty different people every year.

LUZIER: Wow. So you saw it really grow. Was it any different than it was to begin with, when

it first—

CALDWELL: No, nothing really has changed other than the fact that they’ve got a lot more

support now. I did most of the training myself because I didn’t have the outside resources to use

as a cadre, which they have nowadays. They’ve got people specialized in different things, where

[sic; whereas] back in those days, I had to write my own lesson plans and teach everything.

LUZIER: Oh. What kind of things did you teach?

CALDWELL: I’m talking about instructor training. I remember I had to go to instructor

training. I went to a regional instructor training program, and I think that was probably one of

the most effective and usable courses that we actually taught there in Redding, with the program.

All the people that have gone on that went through the program—so many times, I’ve gotten so

many thank-yous for the instructor training, because it gave them the confidence to get up in

front of people and talk. I think that was one of the big things. I really pushed the instructor

training. But I did most of it myself. I didn’t have any outside—

LUZIER: Oh, that’s really commendable, really.



LUZIER: And so you really liked the Hotshots even better than the smokejumpers. Did you

ever go back to smokejumping?

CALDWELL: I continued to jump. I actually jumped ten years, because I happened to be there

at the airport, and they had the detail program, so I was always there for early-season jumps.

Like, in 1970 I remember I got seven fire jumps before my crew came on.

LUZIER: So, then, you were there already smokejumping and training your Hotshots.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Okay. All right. And I know you’ve worked with some real interesting people, and

we talked about on the other tape about some of the interesting people, and we started out with

[Richard] “Dick” Tracy, but did you work with [Thomas H.] “Tommy” Blankenship and

[William] “Bill” Frost and Bud Pettigrew and [Sidney] [Nobles] “Sid” and all them?

CALDWELL: I knew all those guys, yes.

LUZIER: Did we talk about that on the tape? Do you remember? On the one that we’ve

already got? Maybe you could talk about how you worked with those kind [sic; kinds] of people.

I mean, did Tommy go out with you at all, or were you sent out by Bud and Sid?

CALDWELL: Yes. You know, they were the dispatchers, so we—

LUZIER: I don’t know.

CALDWELL: I really enjoyed working with all those guys. I don’t know how much we’ve

talked about—

LUZIER: Well, let’s don’t [sic; not] worry; let’s just talk.

CALDWELL: I’m trying to think back.

LUZIER: Yes, let’s just talk.


CALDWELL: I didn’t tell you about Lakeshore, itself. I stayed there at Lakeshore for ten,

eleven years. [Jacqueline?] “Jackie” and I lived there in a small trailer.

LUZIER: Oh, wow.

CALDWELL: But I was the foreman there after they did away with the Hotshot crew. Then I

was suppression crew foreman. I think I was actually probably the first—it was the first two-

engine station in Northern California, so I was actually the first GS-6—supervisory tank truck

operator, they called us at that time. [Chuckles.]

LUZIER: Ah. So were the smokejumpers out of there at first?

CALDWELL: No, the smokejumpers were out of Redding. NCSC wasn’t built yet, so they

actually went out there and sat under a shade tree at the airport, if they could find a shade tree

during the day, and then came back into the warehouse at night.

LUZIER: The warehouse in Redding?

CALDWELL: Yes, in Redding. That’s where the old fire cache used to be.

LUZIER: And that’s where the men stayed?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: In that barracks?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Kind of barracks, like?

CALDWELL: Yes, and they had a loft built up there for rigging parachutes and so on.

LUZIER: I didn’t realize that.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: So do you remember what year it was that they finally got everything going out there

at the airport, Northern California Service Center?


CALDWELL: It had to be around ’58.

LUZIER: Oh, that early.

CALDWELL: Yes, ’58, ’59.

LUZIER: I’ll be darned. Huh.

CALDWELL: Yes, I think it was finished by that time to where they could move out there.

LUZIER: I know I didn’t go out till ’67.

CALDWELL: Because they just built one—they had one barracks to start with, twenty-five man

barracks, and then they built the other one.

LUZIER: Of course, they had a cookhouse and all that.

CALDWELL: You bet.

LUZIER: And the dispatcher’s office.

CALDWELL: Part of my job there at the service center was running the cookhouse, too.

LUZIER: Really?

CALDWELL: Oh, yes. I had to go through all the menus with the cook and tell him what he

could order and what he couldn’t.

LUZIER: Really?

CALDWELL: Oh, yes. I had to deal with administrative officers that—

LUZIER: So that your men kept healthy?

CALDWELL: Yes. Didn’t think that we should eat as good [sic; well] as we eat.

LUZIER: Ah. But you need to keep your body healthy—

CALDWELL: Oh, yes.

LUZIER: —when you’re working all that. Wow.

CALDWELL: So they had some good cooks through the years there at the airport, too.


LUZIER: You remember [Joseph] “Joe” Noble and all them?

CALDWELL: Oh, Joe Noble and I worked together for years, yes. We spent a lot of time on

fires together. Joe was a good training guy, too. He made sure everybody knew what he knew.

LUZIER: I remember he was really into safety.

CALDWELL: Yes, yes, he was safety chief. He went on the fires as safety officer.

LUZIER: Kind of ironic that he would end up killed in that accident out there,—

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: —when he was a safety officer. Was Joe actually stationed out there?

CALDWELL: No, no, he was always at the Shasta-Trinity.

LUZIER: That’s what I thought, yes.

Well, how did you fight fires when you began working for the Forest Service?

CALDWELL: How did we fight fires? We most certainly didn’t have chainsaws. It was all

hand work.

LUZIER: Really?

CALDWELL: Yes, yes, it was brush hooks, Pulaskis and shovels, and McLeods. [?Can’t find it

in dictionary, but I think this is the Forest Service spelling. spl

LUZIER: I remember those McLeods.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.] Yes.

LUZIER: That’s what we built the trails with.

CALDWELL: Yes, we didn’t start using chainsaws on fires until the late fifties. Back in the

early days, we had a few chainsaws around, but they were two-man saws. There was [sic; were]

only a couple of us qualified to operate it, like this guy I talked about earlier. Jerry Solus and I


would go around and cut down hazard trees at campgrounds, big oaks and stuff that had to come

down, with this big two-man Titan, which was a big old saw.

LUZIER: I remember.

CALDWELL: And then they started making the smaller saws, and they still wouldn’t let us use

them on firelines.

LUZIER: I wonder why. Because it was hard to pack them in?

CALDWELL: Dangerous. They were dangerous in the early days. They didn’t have chainsaw

shafts. It was something new, and so until they got to the point of lighter saws, one-man saws

and so on, they wouldn’t let us use them on the fireline. We finally got permission to use them

on the fireline, and then we couldn’t use them at night.

LUZIER: Do you know why?

CALDWELL: Safety.

LUZIER: Because of the darkness. Yes, safety.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: That makes sense.

CALDWELL: People just didn’t know, you know, that any tool or anything you’re doing is as

safe as you make it. A lot of people—like, back in the early days we had—is that better?

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Where was I? We had—

LUZIER: That safety is as safe as the person that’s doing it.

CALDWELL: Yes, for sure. A lot of people didn’t understand that.

LUZIER: Did you rely on radios at all while you were firefighting?

CALDWELL: Yes, the radio thing—I think we might have already talked about that.


LUZIER: Okay.

CALDWELL: We had the large backpack radios and CB radios. I think that’s pretty much in

there.

LUZIER: Okay. So I think we’re probably complete, unless you can think of something that

you’d like to say that maybe we didn’t say last time, since we have another opportunity.

Anything that you—

CALDWELL: Probably right after you left, I probably thought of a lot of things.

LUZIER: Did you write them down?

CALDWELL: No. No, I thought we were done.

LUZIER: Yes. [Laughter.] Well, I’m going to send in all the pictures with this, now that I

know that things are going to go. I’ll send all the pictures that you’ve given me, hundreds of

pictures. I may have to borrow them again. It’ll depend on—because I got them at a very good

price, on sale at Office Depot, and I understand that I should have gone to Kinko’s maybe and

gotten better copies, but they’ll let me know whether they’re good enough or not, or maybe

they’ll just want a few of them. I don’t know. But I’ve got them all copied and ready to send in,

including your thank-you letter.

CALDWELL: How come you do all this? You’re just doing this because it’s interesting,

because it gives you something else to do?

LUZIER: I don’t have to worry about having something to do. [Chuckles.]

CALDWELL: Well, I know that.

LUZIER: And I love the Forest Service. I grew up in the Forest Service.

CALDWELL: Well, I knew that, and your dad was—


LUZIER: Yes. And I just think it’s a humanitarian thing to do. History needs to know about

this, you know.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Historically it’s very interesting to—

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: —go back over, and I’ve learned a whole lot just talking to you again.


LUZIER: So I really benefit from it, and Janet [Buzzini] does, too, I think.

CALDWELL: Yes?

LUZIER: She really enjoys it, too.

CALDWELL: Well, that’s cool.

LUZIER: Yes. No, we don’t get any benefit out of it. We do get—

CALDWELL: Are they going to type what we’re saying now?

LUZIER: Yes. I’ll turn it off. I’ll turn it off.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.] You come back with about four pages of our BS.

LUZIER: Yes. [Laughter.] I’ve got it off.

[End of interview.]


CALDWELL, Charlie08-10-06 (2nd half)04__Corrected

U.S. Department of AgricultureForest Service

Region Five History Project

Interview with: Charles E. CaldwellInterviewed by: Susana LuzierLocation: Shasta Lake, CaliforniaDate: August 10, 2006Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; September 2006Corrected by: Susana Luzier

SUSANA LUZIER: Now we’re recording. Whenever that light is on. You talk, Charlie.

CHARLES E. CALDWELL: Okay, testing, one, two, three, four, five. This is August 10th,

2006, and I’m sitting here right now with Susana Luzier [pronounces it loo-ZHER]

LUZIER: [Corrects pronunciation to loo-ZHAY.]

CALDWELL: Luzier.

LUZIER: Okay, we’re going to see if it works now.

CALDWELL: I know you changed it.

LUZIER: I got married.

CALDWELL: I know, and you made your last name sound French.

LUZIER: Yes. It is French.

CALDWELL: I know.

LUZIER: I wonder if we’re recording on another one. Yes, we are. We are. We’re recording.

So we can go right ahead. Tell me about what you were going to say, if I didn’t interrupt you to

much.


CALDWELL: Oh, I think I was just talking about [Richard “Dick”]Tracy and [Robert] “Bob”

Bob Kirsch.

LUZIER: With the smoke jumpers.

CALDWELL: Yes. [David] “Dave” Nelson. You know, you asked me earlier about some of

the people that really—

LUZIER: Had an influence on you.

CALDWELL: Yes, that really made [sic; had] an influence. I thought a lot about that, and some

of the names I come up with, names probably that you’d recognize, that I had so much respect

for, people that kind of went up the ladder and didn’t forget what it was like. In other words,

they kept in their mind a perspective of “this is what these guys are dealing with,” and one of

those guys was [Richard] “Dick” Montague. He hiked in the fires at night, lightning fires at

night with us over on the Lassen [National Forest] when he was the district ranger and things like

this, and he went on up and he became the assistant regional forester. I just feel that he never

forgot what it was like, and we always, the Hotshot crews and smokejumpers, always had his

support.

And another guy that fits right in there, a fire and aviation man, was Kenton Clark. Kent

Clark was just a real motivator, [unintelligible], yes. And you’ll appreciate in that book of letters

what he wrote.

LUZIER: Okay.

CALDWELL: You really will.

LUZIER: I’ll make some copies of those.

CALDWELL: It was kind of cool. [William] “Bill” [Bowman?] was a guy that—he was the

first line boss that I kind of used for a mentor, if you will. He really had his stuff together. So I


learned a lot from these guys through the years of growing up, if you will. The people like

[Joseph] “Joe” Noble. Joe Noble. I call him the Old Packer, because he used to pack people in.

He packed the regional forester in and stuff to Marble Mountains and—

LUZIER: Such a great guy.

CALDWELL: And [unintelligible]. Oh, yes.

LUZIER: He was wonderful.

CALDWELL: He was a great guy. And, of course, I can’t leave out [Sidney] “Sid” Nobles

because Sid was—he was there for so many years, and it was like a brother thing with him, you

know.

LUZIER: I just worked with him the first year he came.

CALDWELL: Yes. But Sid Nobles was still right there.

LUZIER: He was really easy to work with and communicate with.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Yes, he had a good understanding for what people were going through.

LUZIER: And I really admire anybody that can work with “Bud” Pettigrew.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.] That is great. [Laughs.]

LUZIER: So were you gone a lot from home?

CALDWELL: Yes. As a matter of fact, when you say—I remember you writing that question

down. Probably the best example I can have of that [is] when the kids was all graduated from

high school and stuff, and I come home from a fire or something and I’m, “Ah! The kids grew

up way too fast,” and Jackie says, “Well, you was only here six months out of every year.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]


CALDWELL: And I got to thinking about it, you know, and basically it’s right. Even though I

was going on fires, I would come back and maybe overnight or maybe for a day, but if I came

home and there was no days off, I was back to work.

LUZIER: You really have her to thank for raising your kids [unintelligible].

CALDWELL: Absolutely, yes, and she raised a big garden and took care of everything, yes.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Raised a big garden and put up all the veggies and fruit and everything.

LUZIER: Took care of all their problems.

CALDWELL: I don’t know why she’s not doing it now. I’m doing it all.

LUZIER: [Laughs.] It’s your turn. [Laughter.] It’s your turn.

CALDWELL: I wonder sometimes now how I got it all done. Like, coming home just once in a

while and how I kept the place up, because [unintelligible] daylight [unintelligible], you know.

LUZIER: Yes, and you’ve really got a lovely place. I love how you fixed it up out there.

CALDWELL: Yes?

LUZIER: And I love your walls, because I remember those kind of walls in the Forest Service

houses, you know, that we lived in.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Yes, the knotty pine, yes.

Let’s see, did you mainly work on Shasta-Trinity [National Forest]?

CALDWELL: I’m noticing your questions there. The Hotshot crew was never Shasta-Trinity.

LUZIER: Ah. Tell me about that. So they were really—

CALDWELL: Regional.

LUZIER: Regional.


CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Oh.

CALDWELL: It kind of upset a few people through the years because they’re going, “God, we

got all this manpower here. We’d like to get some work out of them.” It wasn’t set up for

working these people; it was set up for a conditioning program, make a Hotshot crew out of them

and give them all the formalized training you can get into them. Just an example, off the top of

my head: like, years like 1983 we might have had 600 hours of training in [unintelligible], 640 as

a matter of fact, in my mind. And the rest was on fires. Well, this kind of upset people, you

know, at some levels, and they kind of forgot that it was set up by the Washington and the

regional office, and we were not attached to a forest.

LUZIER: We felt like you were ours. [Speaking as an ex-employee of Shasta Trinity N.F.]

CALDWELL: Yes, and they’re still not. They’re still not. They’re a regional entity.

LUZIER: Is the smokejumpers the same way probably, too?

CALDWELL: Yes. Well, you know, smokejumpers might be Shasta-Trinity.

LUZIER: No, I don’t think so.

CALDWELL: They came in original Shasta-Trinity, yes. Yes, they were Shasta-Trinity

originally.

LUZIER: Well, the service center probably is regional, too.

CALDWELL: Yes, it is, North Zone .

LUZIER: North and south, yes.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Because I know there’s seventeen national forests.

CALDWELL: So—


LUZIER: Unless they’ve added one.

CALDWELL: So we were always a regional crew, and, you know, we had a bus back in the

early days. The first bus I had was an old surplus Air Force bus. [Chuckles.] I picked it up, put

tires on it and so on.

LUZIER: That’s how you got to the fires then?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Because I remember I asked [unintelligible].

CALDWELL: We used to bus all through the years that I was there. I was the equipment

manager. I can’t think of the right titles now, but I was kind of an equipment manager, at NCSC,

and so we had a committee meeting, and I had says, “Well, top of the list here is a Hotshot unit

needs”—

LUZIER: Wheels.

CALDWELL: —“new transportation.” [Laughs.] And they’re all going, “What?” And then I

remember one time we put in for an enclosed van to haul stuff to fire camp. The regional

engineer shut us down, says, “We don’t have any of those.” Said, “Well, don’t you think it’s

about time we get one? Do you ever eat food in fire camp that’s been hauled over them roads?”

And they’re all looking at me. And so John McCauley, who ran the warehouse—he got his

enclosed van at that time. You know, it’s little things like that that really make your day.

LUZIER: Yes, a hot meal.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Yes. Most of the time, you went in—and then you hiked a lot, too.

CALDWELL: Oh, yes, depending on the situation.

LUZIER: Did you take radios with you, probably?


CALDWELL: You know, the radio situation was a real tough one. We had nothing when I

started, so I went out on my own and bought some CB [citizen band] radios, so we had

communication. On a crew you get so spread out, that many people. And we got these CB

radios, and we used those. But wherever you went, especially in Southern California, you

couldn’t hardly talk on them.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: And, you know, the radio thing progressed through the years. Like, back in the

days when I was on the forest at Lake Shore, we had a guy, almost like the Army, had a guy that

carried a BP backpack radio, and it weighed about forty-five, fifty pounds.

LUZIER: Oh, my gosh.

CALDWELL: Put it in a knapsack, carried it. Had the antenna sticking way out above his head,

and that’s the way [cross-talk; unintelligible]. We tried to stay in communication.

LUZIER: And you would hear from the dispatchers what you were supposed to do.

CALDWELL: Yes, we could talk to somebody.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: That was basically the type radio.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: So that was—I was talking to you earlier about the Hotshot involvement in the

organization. There was a lot of people that didn’t like it, forest FMO [fire management officer]

types in other areas, like, “Who in the hell do these people think they are? They think they’re

gonna be making decisions at that level?” Well, the superintendents were kind of a middle

manager, you know, like GS-7s, and they really didn’t get the credit for the personnel action, the

decisions they were making and so on. So I worked on this for a couple, three years, trying to


get this instigated. Ken Clark, Dick Montague, people like that said, “Yes, sir. We go for it.”

And it happened in ’76, so I was the chairman of that committee for the first three years.

LUZIER: Then tell me the name of the committee.

CALDWELL: The Hotshot—I think—I’m trying to put—

LUZIER: But anyway, they tried to make better plans?

CALDWELL: I’m trying to put a handle on it memory wise. The Hotshot Steering Committee

and Hotshot workshops basically is what we called them, yes. And it was a national thing. We

set it up so we had Hotshot superintendents from—

LUZIER: All over.

CALDWELL: —Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, all over. And it gave people an opportunity to

voice their problems. One of the biggest problems that they had is—I pretty much did what I

wanted to do with my training crew as far as physical fitness: exercise and running and using as

much time basically as I felt was needed.

LUZIER: To get them up to par?

CALDWELL: Yes. Other people didn’t get that. Other people did not get time. They wanted

production because they were on forests, and so that was an issue. The radio thing was an issue.

And we’ve gotten on top of those things through the years. We actually established committees

with the regional office and Washington office saying, “Good for you guys. This is what we

want.” Yes, it really totally improved things.

LUZIER: Did you get a better GS rating or anything?

CALDWELL: No. You know, nothing really happened there. I had been at the top of the GS-7

level for quite a few years, and—

LUZIER: Yes, because you’d been in so long, you’d get the top of the pay scale.


CALDWELL: Gary Harris—no, it was [Ronald] “Ron” Bakerville and I worked together on a

training ladder. Made one of my foremen a trainee. The foreman would be a -7; the trainee

foreman would be a -6, and the superintendent would be a -9, fire and training specialist.

LUZIER: That sounds reasonable.

CALDWELL: So that was the job—and then we worked for the -11 training officer. And so

that was accepted, so I was actually the first GS-9 there. It was kind of interesting because I was

the first GS-6 in North Zone because that was the first station. They have two engines, two

engines, and it was through a state co-op. The state was actually putting money into that station.

LUZIER: Do you remember what year that was? Was it when they started combining—

CALDWELL: Around ’57.

LUZIER: Oh, ’57. That early?

CALDWELL: Yes. I even drove a red truck one year. They gave us one of their trucks. It had

an automatic in it. It was a problem shifting back and forth on real steep terrain.

LUZIER: So they were thinking about combining and doing the inter-agency thing for quite a

few year.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: I wasn’t aware of that.

CALDWELL: We had CDF [California Division of Forestry] backup. When we were gone,

they would come to our station. It was kind of interesting because we’d give them some of our

rations, and they didn’t have the rations that we had, so we would give them some of our stuff,

and they would trade off, you know, some of the stuff they carried, and that type of thing. But

we—

LUZIER: You had a good rapport with them.


CALDWELL: We always had good rapport. I always had good rapport. I never had any

argument. But they used to—management used to argue about the lines. Being all over the

United States through the years you run into things. Clear back in 1987, I think it was, I was in

Arkansas for almost six weeks.

LUZIER: On a fire?

CALDWELL: On fires and a drought situation, and the district ranger—you know, he called me

over, like, “Hey, Charlie, c’mere.” I go over, and he’d go, “What’s the red flag? What does red

flag mean?” I mean, that’s the kind of thing you run into. Those people were, like, twenty-five,

thirty years behind R5.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: Now, I’m not saying that was good, bad or indifferent, but at that time I was

shocked because we already had the co-op agreements here with the CDF, Forest Service, BLM

[Bureau of Land Management].

LUZIER: I remember.

CALDWELL: Back there they says, “Go up here on Ridge So-and-so. You’ll find that old

road”—some of the highways were still gravel back there. “Go up Highway So-and-so and wait.

That’s the line. If the fire’s on that side, you don’t do nothin’.” And I’m going, “No, you gotta

be kiddin’ me.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: But that’s the way it was. And I’m going, “Why don’t you use some air

tankers?” “Well, ours are gone.”

LUZIER: Where’s the backup?

CALDWELL: “We got CDF, or you got some state air tankers out there.”


LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: “Oh, no, we can’t use theirs without Washington office approval” or something

like this. I’m going, “Really?”

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: I run into things—you know, people back there knew who I was. They’d go out

there and they’d go—the district ranger was the only one that could do a burnout or a backfire,

and you get on the radio and say, “What’s all that smoke coming over?” Says, “Well, Charlie

Caldwell’s backfiring.” He says, “Well, that’s okay. Charlie Caldwell can backfire, but nobody

else.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: I go, “Whoa!”

LUZIER: What a celebrity.

CALDWELL: Yes. That was one of the most interesting jobs I had through the years, and I

became very proficient, and I think that’s probably why they were calling me the guru. I was

looking through my old fire records and so on: firing boss, firing boss, firing boss. But, see, I

was also—you hear me talking about large-fire organization, which was most of my career.

Like, I was a line boss on a regional team. And George Mendel was my fire boss, and I was the

line boss, and George was an excellent fire boss because he just—“This is yours,” you know? I

had 2,000 people. One time in a fire in Arizona, they decided we’ll never have another fire camp

this big. It was way too big, 2,000 people in one camp. So that situation changed that. But it

was great being on the regional team, but if my team was up, they’d say, “Well, you can’t go

with your crew.” And I’d go, “Well, wait a minute. You just flew a plans chief in, sent a Lear


jet over to Tahoe to get him to come here. Now you’re telling me that you can’t come and pick

me up if I’m someplace else?”

LUZIER: Well, I remember—

CALDWELL: So I felt that there were some double standards there.

LUZIER: Yes.

LUZIER: Wasn’t it the sixties where they started the red cards and a list of what all the—like,

this person is a line boss or a supervisor? They knew what each person was capable of, to be

able to tell them to do that. I remember writing all those red cards up for Shasta-Trinity.

CALDWELL: Yes.,

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: In the later years, you know, yes, I became an IC.

LUZIER: And tell me what IC means.

CALDWELL: Incident commander.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Incident commander and branch director, which is the old line boss job. I was

also, like, safety chief in the old organization. Don’t know what they call them now.

LUZIER: I remember [Ronald] “Ron” Raley mentioned the IC, and couldn’t remember for sure

what it was.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Yes. So how did you work with Ron Raley?

CALDWELL: On fires, yes.

LUZIER: And he was a fire chief or fire—


CALDWELL: You know, when I first met Ron Raley, I think he was probably—might have

been an engine foreman at that time, you know? I can’t remember what all these guys were

doing way back when, you know?

LUZIER: Well, I know he really respects you, because he wanted to help with this interview.

CALDWELL: [unintelligible]. We enjoyed conversation, yes.

LUZIER: So how do you feel about all the things that have changed in the workforce? Or am I

ahead of you?

CALDWELL: Well, no, not ahead of me. I wanted to do some of this stuff of my head. You’re

saying how things changed in the workforce. If you’re relating to fire management, the

aggressiveness has definitely changed. People are just not as aggressive as they used to be. I’m

not saying it’s safer. Maybe it is. But they back off a little quicker than what we used to do it. I

remember in 1987 the regional fire staff and Sid Nobles—the year after I retired, they came back

and says, “Hey, take your pick.” They took me to dinner at the [Hatch Cover?]. Not the Hatch

Cover. Yes, it was the Hatch Cover. They took me to dinner and said, “Hey, this is where our

fires are. Pick the one you want.” And I said, “What team you got there?” “Well, Stanislaus

had a team from Alaska.” And I’m going, “Oh, my God. Those people are going to back off and

let it burn.” And they got another team over here from someplace else. So I went to work for

them here locally, first in security, and then I ran the warehouse for everything coming back

from the fires, for fire readiness. Everything that was good, we’d get back into service, you

know.

LUZIER: Now, are you talking about when you quit being a Hotshot?

CALDWELL: Right. I was already retired.

LUZIER: Oh, you were—and tell me what year you retired.


CALDWELL: Nineteen eighty-six.

LUZIER: Nineteen eighty-six, and then you just kept doing other things?

CALDWELL: Well, I joined the Sheriff’s department at that time. The day after I left the Forest

Service in 1986, I was a deputy sheriff on Shasta Lake. I spent four years—

LUZIER: Out there with Lance Highet, maybe? Were you with Lance?

CALDWELL: No.

LUZIER: He must have been after you.

CALDWELL: Yes, I spent four years on the lake, and then seven years on the Sacramento

River. That was good duty, but they expected more. See, I went to all their special training. I

went back to college to be able to do this. I worked night shift, arresting drunk boaters, writing a

lot of tickets for actually safety. In other words, people just doing the wrong thing, you know?

Near-death things and that type of stuff.

LUZIER: Don’t know any better.

CALDWELL: With my background, every time somebody died, drowned in the lake or

something, when the body would come up or something like that, they would always call me.

They’d call me off the Sacramento River to go to a ramp, take my boat out, put it on the trailer,

drive up to Shasta Lake, go out to where they found the body—

LUZIER: And take it out.

CALDWELL: —retrieve the body, this type of stuff because I didn’t need a psychiatrist

afterwards. A lot of people couldn’t handle it, and they’d say, “Well, let’s get Charlie up here”

on just about everything. [Chuckles.]

LUZIER: Wow.


CALDWELL: I’m sure Jackie remembers those days. I’d go, “Why? Why do they need me for

this, you know?

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: But I understand. Either you can handle it or you can’t.

LUZIER: It takes a special kind of person to be able to have the compassion to handle [cross-

talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: So I spent seven years on the river, and was only make—I think when I left I was

making probably eleven dollars, something, an hour.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: As a deputy. You know, that’s not very much money for putting a target on your

chest.

LUZIER: No.

CALDWELL: And I had a lot of death threats. “I’m going to shoot you down on that river any

time I want” and this type of thing, you know? But that wasn’t much for that type of thing, and I

think the thing that really got me was after all my experience, my age, being set in my ways,

having young people in the department talking down to me. You know, “Don’t be talking down

to me. I don’t operate that way. I mean, you talk straight across the board or we don’t talk.” I

just decided to leave the sheriff’s department after eleven years.

Went to work as a truck driver—I kept up my Class A license—for Hedrick Logging, and

I worked up on the Hearst estate, logging for two years. Drove a chip truck and water truck up in

the logging woods. Did that for two years, and then a guy called me up that worked for me

twenty-five years earlier, that was a detailer on the Hotshot program, and says, “Hey, you still

live in the same place? I want to come see you.” And I’m going, “What?” I says, “What have


you been doing?” He said, “Well, ever since you taught me to climb trees, I’ve been climbing

for IBEW.”

LUZIER: What’s IB?

CALDWELL: International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

LUZIER: Ah.

CALDWELL: In the union. So he says, “I’m going up north on an inter-tie job, hooking

electricity together from Alturas to Reno.” I said, “Well, need any help up there?” He’s going,

“Oh, I’ll talk to the boss.” Talked to the boss. They needed a powder man. I’ve already got my

Class A license. My hazmat had expired.

LUZIER: Was that hazmat with Forest Service?

CALDWELL: Well, I had a hazmat with the Forest Service, but I also had state hazmat for

driving, on my Class A license, and that expired, so I went down and took the test again and got

my hazmat, and went right to work for them as a powder man. Then I did everything. I was

driving cement truck, I was doing all their grounding on all the poles, and they kept me on—I

was one of the last three out of probably 150, 200 people.

LUZIER: And where did you have to work?

CALDWELL: Alturas, Likely. [Note: Likely is the name of a town near Alturas.]

LUZIER: Oh, so you weren’t home.

CALDWELL: They followed—clear over to Bordertown.

LUZIER: Did you get to come home on weekends?

CALDWELL: Not very much. I was making overtime.

LUZIER: Oh.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.]


LUZIER: Making money.

CALDWELL: I was making money, the most money I’d ever made in my life.

LUZIER: Yes. Nowadays it’s really big time.

CALDWELL: I was only getting, like, seventeen fifty an hour for that. They were kind of

shaky. They should have been paying me twenty-five at that time. But anyway, I stayed there

for a year, went down to—the union called me up. I went down to the Geysers out at Clear

Lake. Are you familiar with the Geysers?

LUZIER: I’m not familiar with the Geysers, but I know where Clear Lake is.

CALDWELL: Yes. The Geysers are where they use the steam—

LUZIER: Oh, to make power.

CALDWELL: For power.

LUZIER: For power.

CALDWELL: Yes, electricity. I went down there, and a superintendent for Contra Costa

Electric saw me out there working and stuff, and he said, “I got two general foremen told me that

they had never seen anybody work like you in their life.” He says, “How would you like a job at

Contra Costa Electric?” And I shook his hand and said, “Okay, thanks.” And I took another job

in the line department down out of Tehachapi.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: Yes, I was going to work down there.

LUZIER: I can’t remember what Tehachapi is close to.

CALDWELL: East of L.A.

LUZIER: Oh, down that far.

CALDWELL: Yes. Well, it’s not that far. It’s east of Fresno.


LUZIER: Oh, okay.

CALDWELL: Yes, down in that area, Bakersfield, Fresno. Well, I took a job there, accepted it

over the phone, and then they called me up and says, “Hey, come down and sign the book for

302.” I said, “That’s the electrician’s union.” And they said, “You let us worry about that.”

Boom. I went to the hall down there, signed the book. They put me right to work in the refinery,

and I stayed there for over seven years.. I was a journeyman electrician.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: I know! And I was talking about the most money I made in my life as a powder

man over there. I was making forty-five bucks an hour!

LUZIER: Oh, my gosh, Charlie. That’s wonderful.

CALDWELL: Yes. So I was able to put a little bit away, made a down payment on a motor

home. [Laughs.]

MRS. CALDWELL: Which now we’re paying for.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.]

LUZIER: Yes, so you bought it new.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Oh. So why are you working on it?

CALDWELL: Working on it.

LUZIER: I thought you were getting it ready for a trip.

CALDWELL: Oh, well, you know, I had to get a tow setup and by that little car because you

can’t tow the Subaru. I had to get another little car with a tow setup on it.

LUZIER: So you can go places and then do things with the little car.

CALDWELL: Yes.


LUZIER: That doesn’t take a lot of gas.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Great idea.

CALDWELL: It’s so expensive.

LUZIER: I know.

CALDWELL: You know?

LUZIER: Well, it’s a good thing you made a lot of money. [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: Yes, really.

LUZIER: You know, there are some other things that we haven’t talked about. Do you want to

look over your notes? You came up with something that you want to talk about.

CALDWELL: I don’t know if—let me throw a couple of things in here. I told you earlier that

with the detail program—in other words, you’re getting people that are recommended by their

forest, like nation wide. I would get people from back East—you know, Michigan, Alabama,

wherever they were recommended from, their regional office going to our regional office into

North Zone and so on. And these are taking people that are potential fire managers.

LUZIER: That they thought were good fire managers.

CALDWELL: Exactly, and the results have been almost absolutely amazing. I could show you

where the people went up to before I left; in other words, the people that went through the

program, what they went into and what they’re doing. Now I know for sure that there’s probably

four or five of these people that worked with me in the Redding program that are now forest

FMOs.

LUZIER: Wow.


CALDWELL: Yes. Yes, I look back and—we used to get The Log. I got The Log for ten years,

and every log, I would highlight the people—

LUZIER: The people that you’d worked with.

CALDWELL: —that was on the crew that got quality step increases, got this, got that, moved

up the ladder, transferred here. It was real interesting. Now we don’t have that Log.

LUZIER: I think we still do have the Log.

CALDWELL: Somebody said it’s on the Internet.

LUZIER: No, I think they still mail it out. I’ll try to find out about that.

CALDWELL: They quit on me about ten years ago.

LUZIER: Really? No, they’re still doing it because when I was down in Vallejo, near Vallejo,

at some celebration that they had—oh, the 100th celebration of the Forest Service—I found that I

could still get The Log, the newsletter that goes back—

CALDWELL: Well.

LUZIER: So I’ll try to find out about that.

CALDWELL: Yes. So that was kind of interesting. But some of the things that—you know,

you do other duties as assigned, and I—

LUZIER: I remember that one.

CALDWELL: I told you about all the training and instructing, you know? I spent every night I

was home during the winter months working on lesson plans and—

LUZIER: Strategic.

CALDWELL: Yes! I had people always would call me up, say, “Well, we need you to go down

to sector boss school over here on the Inyo.” And I go, “Well, I’m really not prepared for that.”

“You can do it off the top of your head, Charlie.” I said, “No, nobody can do it off the top of


their head and do it right.” But people used to expect that from me. Man, they didn’t know how

hard I worked I lesson plans, organization, because I taught instructor training to my people, and

I think it was one of the most important classes that I put on. You can get all the fire you want

when you’re out there in the woods, strategies and so on, but instructor training—I’ve had so

many thank-you’s for instructor training through the years.

Fireline supervision training. They had done fireline supervision. Now some of the

retired Hotshot superintendents are putting on courses for outside—in other words, people sell a

package to the Forest Service, and these people are working for them and putting these programs

on. It’s like the Latiner [pronounced luh-TIE-nuhr] method of accident control. Remember that?

LUZIER: No, I don’t remember that.

CALDWELL: Well, I was an instructor for the Latiner method of accident control. It was a

package that the Forest Service bought.

LUZIER: What was that second word? Latiner [pronouncing it LAT-in-uhr] what?

CALDWELL: Latiner method of accident control. And Latiner picked this up from one of the

pioneers of industrial accidents and so on.

LUZIER: Oh, okay.

CALDWELL: From a guy by the name of H. D. Heinrich back in the forties. Well, Latiner

picked this up and went on with it, and then they made instructors out of Forest Service people.

The Forest Service—somebody behind a desk bought this package, and it wouldn’t work for us

because you had to have feedback, you know?

LUZIER: I think that’s kind of what the historical review and these interviews are about so that

they’ll know how to do things better.


CALDWELL: You know, until they try something new, they’re probably never going to know,

you know? It’s like the Russians. They used the trial-and-error method. It was the fastest, most

effective way. They considered people as being expendable. But the trial-and-error method is

definitely the quickest way to get the job done, to learn how to do the job.

LUZIER: And you can cancel out the things that didn’t work.

CALDWELL: Yes, and we’ve done a lot of that in the early days. But now, a little bit more

goes into it. I was a little alarmed here a while back when they sent the space shuttle up with a

known loose tile on it.

LUZIER: Yes, I was too.

CALDWELL: I’m going, “What? What [sic; Why] are they doing that?” But that’s the kind of

thing I’m talking about. It’s, “Well, we think they have a hundred to one chance of making it.”

Hel-lo.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.] A hundred to one.

But I was a driver trainer examiner from 19-I think-57 all the way through till I retired

because I became a regional driver trainer examiner when I went to the airport, so I’ve been a

driver trainer examiner almost my whole career.

LUZIER: Yes. I don't' remember who examined me.

CALDWELL: It might have been me!

LUZIER: Yes. I was with Jane Devlin, though, and I remember she’d never driven a car that

had a shift, and that was so funny because she kept jerking it up. [Laughter.] It was so funny.

But thankfully I learned to drive in a Forest Service pickup with my dad. That’s the kind of

things they did back in ’45.


CALDWELL: Sure. But I was also—I told you before—I was—oh, I didn’t tell you that. I was

a blaster, but I was also a regional blaster examiner for fireline explosives, and I did that for

years.

LUZIER: Now, when would they have to do that, when they were backfiring?

CALDWELL: Backfiring or burnout situations in steep terrain. We actually carried napalm

with us.

LUZIER: I’m not sure what napalm is.

CALDWELL: Jellied gas in a canister with a 20-second fuse. So you strike the fuse—


CALDWELL: —had a striker on it, then you’d throw it.

LUZIER: Twenty seconds! Wow!

CALDWELL: That gives you enough time—

LUZIER: To run.

CALDWELL: —and it gets it to where it’s going.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: It gets it to where it’s going. Yes, you don’t want to hit a tree right in front of

you because they blow up and the shrapnel from the tin can comes out of it like a flying saucer

sometimes. I did that type of stuff. I was a Red Cross instructor for standard, multimedia and

advanced first aid all through the years, too. I did that forever, American Red Cross certified. I

didn’t just do for the Forest Service, which was my main thing; I did it for operating

engineers—you know, in the wintertime the Red Cross would call me and say, “We need you to

instruct here, there.” Went to a mill in Anderson one time, that kind of thing. But I instructed in

a lot of different things, you know.


LUZIER: By simulation? I think you said something about—I was wondering whether you

were there when we did that out in [cross-talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: Yes, I was the—Simulator Operator.

LUZIER: You were the run that ran it.

CALDWELL: I started with the old Mark Five simulator, which we had in the warehouse.

[Joseph] “Joe” [Ho?] and I—do you remember Joe?

LUZIER: I remember Joe. He was the radio man, wasn’t he?

CALDWELL: Yes, he was a beautiful guy.

LUZIER: Yes, he was.

CALDWELL: Loved him like a brother.

LUZIER: He’s one of them that went in [cross-talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: It was one of those tough things.

LUZIER: Yes, with Joe, [unintelligible].

CALDWELL: We got off on the simulator. It was a tough situation, trying to make things real

on a simulator that nobody—you know—

LUZIER: You knew you were playing.

CALDWELL: It was easy to put a picture up there, but I would spend many, many a night

making silhouettes. I even used peanut butter for smoke on the screen, on Fresnel lenses. Yes.

LUZIER: Oh, so we’d think it was a real fire?

CALDWELL: Yes. And I can make silhouettes so I can make the fire bigger, or I can make the

winds coming out of the east. I’d push the fire toward the west with my silhouettes. I’d have the

fire pre-made and this type of stuff. And so I spent a lot of time doing that sort of thing. When


they built [NCSC?], I had a lot of input on what needed to be done with that simulator. I’m sure,

you know, with the technology today—that is much more realistic.

LUZIER: It’ll be so much easier.

CALDWELL: And they’re using it, and that makes me feel good, the fact that they’re using this

for a lot of their training now.

LUZIER: That’s a really good thing because I could see, you know, just what I did wrong,

because they’d play it back, and I’ve seen what I did wrong as a dispatcher.

CALDWELL: Yes. So that was good.

I set up—I have a hard time, “I this” and “I that,” but I understand in report writing or

anything else, you need “I did this.” So I was detailed to Marana.

LUZIER: Arizona?

CALDWELL: Arizona, to the training center, for the national training, and ran the fire simulator

there. It was called a Mark Three fire simulator. Well, they never really did get anybody else in

there for me to teach how to do it, and they weren’t using it that much. It was kind of sitting

there, so they gave it to CDF, and they brought it out here to the CDF Training Center at Ione.

They said, “Well, we don’t even know how to set it up,” so I went down there to tell them what

they needed to do: build a room, separate it with glass here, do this, do that, roll players back

here. They built the most beautiful situation, so much better than I ever had.

LUZIER: What we had out there.

CALDWELL: What we had.

LUZIER: Because we were in a big warehouse.


CALDWELL: Yes. And then I had to teach them to write programs and all about photos,

getting photos of the areas that they wanted to do their fire exercises in and we’ll write an

exercise from that.

LUZIER: So you were on the forefront of that, too.

CALDWELL: Yes. And so, you know, the fire simulation thing was really big, and then it kind

of died out for a while.

LUZIER: Had a definite place.

CALDWELL: I’m really happy that they’re doing it now, and they’ve got—you know, with the

technology now, they can do so much more.

LUZIER: Yes, that’s great. Well, it’s like you said, trial and error.

CALDWELL: Exactly.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Exactly.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Just so I don’t forget, when you get back—you know, I was talking about doing

most of the instructing with the people back in the early days and not having the resources for

cadres and so on, but I actually taught tree climbing.

LUZIER: Oh, really?

CALDWELL: Tree climbing and para-cargo chute retrieval. I talked [about?] rock climbing

and rappelling, and we’d spend a good time on that, and it paid off a few times through the years.

However, we did have some managers saying, “Well, they didn’t get this sector boss training or

something, but they sure as hell got the rock climbing in.” Well, you know, that was one of the

big esprit de corps things, you know? People forget about that. They forget about the fact that


you get them on the volleyball court or you get them all up on some rocks, and it creates a

camaraderie there that—

LUZIER: You’d really have to have camaraderie with—

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: —the Hotshots.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: [unintelligible] make everybody happy about what they were doing. It takes a special

kind of person.

CALDWELL: I did all the instructing as far as helicopter operations. When ICS [incident

command system] come in, I was the instructor in the ICS, basic ICS.

LUZIER: Now, ICS is Inner-Regional Command Center, Service.

CALDWELL: System.

LUZIER: System.

CALDWELL: Incident command system.

LUZIER: Incident command system, okay.

CALDWELL: Which is FIRESCOPE [FIrefighting RESources of California Organized for

Potential Emergencies].

LUZIER: Yes. Okay, great, got it.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Which is FIRESCOPE.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: All right. Okay.

You flew to a lot of the locations with your staff. I know you did that.


CALDWELL: Yes, we flew—

LUZIER: What weight was your backpack? Do you remember?

CALDWELL: Yes. We were kind of limited to how much we could fly with. I can’t remember

the exact amount. It was, like, thirty pounds or something like that? And we usually carried

about ten, twelve pounds on our backs, in our small backpack. You load up a little bit more

when you go out on a fireline and so on, but yes, you had to keep everything as light as you

could.

LUZIER: Now, did you jump out of the plane, or did you get set down somewhere?

CALDWELL: No, as a Hotshot crew, we got set down.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: That’s what I figured, yes.

CALDWELL: You talk about jumping out of planes, I was probably the first helijumper.

LUZIER: The first helijumper.

CALDWELL: In Northern California.

LUZIER: Oh, tell me about that.

CALDWELL: Well, helijumping was when you just stood out on the skid—we didn’t even have

a step [chuckles], and put on a suit similar to the smokejumper’s suit and jump out and jump off

the skid.

LUZIER: Who prepared your parachute?

CALDWELL: We didn’t have parachutes; we just jumped off the skid.

LUZIER: Oh, you just jumped.

CALDWELL: Yes.


LUZIER: And tell me about that. On a skid?

CALDWELL: We stand out on a skid of the helicopter and jump off on the ground or into brush

or something like that.

LUZIER: Oh, wow. Oh.

CALDWELL: They discontinued the program. In Region Three back in the early days, they

started doing this after we started the helijumping, but they would jump out and grab a tree.

LUZIER: Oh.

CALDWELL: They got smaller trees. They’d jump out and grab a tree and climb down. We

had a bad accident in Region Five, which I think caused the—

LUZIER: Elimination?

CALDWELL: —program to die. A guy stepped off the helicopter skid thinking manzanita and

it was madrone.

LUZIER: Oh.

CALDWELL: Killed him.

LUZIER: Oh, wow.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Did you have any of those things happen while you were on shift very much?

CALDWELL: No. However, I was on the ground—see, I talked about jumping for two years,

but I actually jumped for ten years because I was there in the detail program.

LUZIER: So they would call you.

CALDWELL: And I could go before my crew came on. Each year, I could go jump fires. So I

was on the ground on a fire on the Trinity side when we lost a jumper. I actually watched him

float down, and I knew something was wrong when he exited the airplane because he jumped on


another fire right next to us. We jumped the day before. We were talking—at that time, we had

a line around our fire, and there was a couple of us going to walk over to this other fire, and

about that time the DC-3 came in, and the guy jumped out. Killed him.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: Stepped over his static line.


CALDWELL: Broke his neck.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: Yes, it was sad.

LUZIER: But those kind of things happened.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Yes. It takes a lot of training.

Let’s see, can you give me an example of what was expected of you and your crew in the

early years compared to when you retired?

CALDWELL: Yes. There was really no difference in what was expected of us. I think in the

later years, they were a little more cautious about what they wanted you to do, because we had so

many more restrictions with the ten standard firefighting orders in thirteen situations, which has

changed to more—but thirteen situations to watch out—so people got a little more cautious on

where they’d want you to go, and you get smarter about—

LUZIER: What you can do?

CALDWELL: Yes, what’s possible and stuff, and downhill line construction, you know. They

say you can’t do downhill line construction anymore. Well, that’s totally wrong. You got a

situation where you can put one foot in the black and it’s burned clean, build downhill line


construction, but that’s what I’m talking about, is, yes, it’s changed because people aren’t

thinking about—I kind of ran into it in sheriff’s department, too—my discretion. I’ll make that

decision, you know? This isn’t my first rodeo. I know what we can do and what we can’t.

For example, we went on a CDF fire down here in the [unintelligible] country out there

west of Red Bluff, and they’re going, “Hey, Charlie, we need”—out there at night, and he goes,

“We need to build the line down this ridge and up the other side.” I’m going, “Dude, you see

that fire down the canyon? Wrong place to be.” And he says, “Oh, oh, okay, Charlie. You

know more about it than I do.” And I said, “Well, whatever. In this case, I think you’re right. I

do know more about it than you do or you wouldn’t have mentioned that

LUZIER: And think about all the possibilities.

CALDWELL: You bet. And there have been times where you have turn down an original

assignment, and the assignment may have come out of the planning section, yes.

LUZIER: So you have to use wisdom.

CALDWELL: Yes. You see, I was very fortunate to be in the position I was, because I was also

an operations chief, so I had all this training and I knew all the stuff that needed to be done. I

was very fortunate there.

LUZIER: Well, you’ve seen a lot in your [cross-talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: I think if you read those letters in that book of letters—

LUZIER: I’ll make a copy of them.

CALDWELL: You will pick up how these people felt. I was the first—

LUZIER: The first [unintelligible].

CALDWELL: I was the first person of that grade level to ever go to advanced fire behavior, as a

GS-6. People just didn’t—you weren’t considered management.


LUZIER: [unintelligible].

CALDWELL: Yes. So I was the first one at that level to go there. I was the first one at my

level as a Hotshot superintendent to go to fire generalship, the national [unintelligible]. And

these kind of things help set precedent in the future, and so, yes—

LUZIER: You can be very proud of that.

CALDWELL: I was, you know. I am, and I was at the time. I’m going, Right on! This is a step

in the right direction. And then I got into the position where I could recommend other people to

go to these different things, yes.

LUZIER: Now, did you have anything to do with the recruitment and retention of employees?

CALDWELL: In the early days, I did all the hiring. In 1972 and 1973 they did away with the

detail program, but they still wanted the Hotshot crew, so I actually hired people. I had a lot of

people for the two years come back, and we did a big project.

LUZIER: It was only a two-year program then. Is that what you’re saying?

CALDWELL: No. Well, they just shut it down. And then so I said, “Hey, we want this back.”

They tried this in the later years. It was about 1982, ’83, somewhere in there. They actually

came right over to my office and said, “Well, there’s been a decision made. They’re going to do

away with the Hotshot crew here in Redding and put them at Hayfork, and it’s going to be a

forest Hotshot crew.” I go, “Really?” [unintelligible]. Walks right over to my office and says,

“This is what’s happening.” Well, I think it was probably [James] “Jim” Smith at the time, my

foreman. We were sitting there looking at each other going, “Whoa, this is [unintelligible].” I

said, “Well, I don’t know if I’m buying that.” [unintelligible], deputy chief of the Forest

Service—we were pretty close.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]


CALDWELL: And I said, “What the hell’s going on?” I won’t mention names. And he says,

“Well, what do you mean?” I said, “I hear they’re going to do away with the Hotshot crew.” He

said, “Like hell they are. We like this training program. We like what you’re doing. Don’t

worry about it.” “Yes, sir.” A half hour later—and, of course, Lanky’s going—my foremen are

looking at me, going, “Holy smoke.” About an hour later, [Donald] “Don” Spence comes over

to the office, and he scratches his head and said, “Well, I don’t know what the hell happened, but

you guys are completely reinstated.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: Just like that.

LUZIER: Oh, that’s interesting.

CALDWELL: I know. And when something like that happens you go—you know, you’re not

sure what’s going to take place, but who in the hell is this Hotshot superintendent calling the

chief?

LUZIER: He probably never knew it.

CALDWELL: They probably didn’t, but, you know, all those people knew me back there. It’s

like [Charles] “Charlie” Gripp. Remember Charlie Gripp?

LUZIER: Yes, I do.

CALDWELL: He was one of my first foreman. He’s retired. Lives up here at Mary Lake. He

retired as—Regional Safety Officer.

LUZIER: I forgot that name.

CALDWELL: Yes, he retired as regional safety chief? So, you know, there’s all these guys still

doing Forest Service stuff. They’ve been instructing. They do all these kinds of things, and

that’s good. But Charlie Griff had the Stanislaus Hotshots, back in the early days, I think it was,


and he was back in Michigan, and he says, “I walked into the supervisor’s office.” He said, “I

walked in, and I looked [unintelligible]. ‘Oh, hi, Charlie.’” And he looked, and he said they had

a statue, one of those paper silhouette statues of me in the supervisor’s office in the lobby in

Michigan.

LUZIER: Oh, for heaven’s sake!

CALDWELL: Yes! And he’s, “I was blown away.” [Laughs.]

LUZIER: Oh, that’s funny.

CALDWELL: I know. But it was all a result of this wildfire thing.

LUZIER: Now, was it a statue or a cardboard—

CALDWELL: The cardboard silhouette thing.

LUZIER: Silhouette.

CALDWELL: Yes, in my firefighting gear.


CALDWELL: Yes. So I never did get to see it, but it was a funny thing, you know.

LUZIER: I’m going to ask you this question. I’m not sure it’s even relevant at this point. At

one time the Forest Service emphasis was on fire protection and management, and then on the

developing of public resources. However, the developing of our public resources became

overdone in some areas. Activist groups and changing society during the seventies and eighties

aimed at changing the laws to protect the environment. How do you understand the transition of

this achievement, and what were the costs and benefits? Do you have anything to say about that?

CALDWELL: Well, to put it short and sweet, I’ve always thought of the beginning of fire

management, the setup—I may not be saying things correctly, but the setup to protect first

people, property, and Forest Service property, period. I guess I just said that like it should be.


And then the urban development thing, you know—like, it was nothing—back when I first

started in the Forest Service, you could walk into a local bar or something and they go,

“Goddamn Indians did a better job of taking care of the forest than you guys do.” Well, people

were short-tempered back in those days, and boom! You know? You’re talking to me like that.

I’m proud of my organization and so on. And you see these things happen and progress through

the years, and—it really hurts me to say this, but I burned up the same home twice in a backfire

operation on purpose, five years apart, in L.A. County.

LUZIER: The same home?

CALDWELL: Same home they built right back in the same place, and it was the only place

feasible to stop this thing from burning that. You don’t go telling people this, but as they move

out into this stuff, if they don’t live with—

LUZIER: All the regulations?

CALDWELL: Well, yes, the regulations and have some urban development plans for fire

management. One of my old foremen—a little story behind him. He was working in the city of

Berkeley after he retired on the urban development thing. He’s no longer doing it; I don’t know

what happened there.

LUZIER: They had that big fire.

CALDWELL: Yes. But, you know, the public pressure—and I think the news media have so

much to do with it. They print stuff—it’s like being in a war, you know. Second World War, we

didn’t really know a whole lot, and then all of a sudden we know everything.

LUZIER: And we are everything.

CALDWELL: And now we’ve got everything going on, and I’m going, What have they done?

Why are they putting news of the war in the news of what’s going on in Lebanon right now?


Why are they putting in the back pages of the newspaper? Who’s doing that? And all this stuff

always starts up there somewhere, right behind a desk someplace. People come up with these

things. “Oh, we’re gonna scare the public if we say this or do that.” “Oh, well, they’re not

gonna vote me in if I don’t do this.” And so there’s a lot of manipulating going on.

It really bothers me that they step back and let these fires burn. Now, that controlled burn

that went out of control up there at Mount Shasta, all they had to do was get a weather report that

day. That particular day, right now. Step outside and look.

LUZIER: Yes, and the thing with Lewiston, the BLM one. All they had to do—David was over

there, and it was windy. Why in the world would they start a fire? They did.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: You know? And then I know who was the scapegoat. I mean, he was a fine guy.

CALDWELL: I don’t know if I really touched on what you wanted there, but—

LUZIER: Yes, because we have had achievement, but at what cost and benefit? You know, it’s

kind of [cross-talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: Yes. Well, I mean, when you take a 747 and put 12,000 gallons of retardant in it,

what a change that is. Twelve thousand gallons, you know? I remember the air tankers back in

the early days of biplanes with forty gallons, the old PBYs that the wings used to break off of

and kill the pilot.

LUZIER: Tell me about PBY again.

CALDWELL: PBY was a high-wing aircraft actually developed in World War II, kind of a sub

chaser type thing, and they had TBMs, which was a torpedo bomber.

LUZIER: And that’s what they started with.


CALDWELL: Well, yes, those were the early ones, but they actually started out with water

balloons out of biplanes.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Yes. And, you know, there’s a lot of history there in the air attack that’s got to

be someplace out there at the airport. I don’t know where it’s at.

LUZIER: Well, I hope that—

CALDWELL: But it’s got all the early-day—

LUZIER: —[William] “Bill” Frost will be able to talk about that a little bit, I hope.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: If you have anything to say about it, that would be great.

CALDWELL: Yes, yes, [Ernest] “Ernie” Gentry was really up on it, too.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: [Calvin?] “Cal” Ferris.

LUZIER: Cal Ferris. I remember him.

CALDWELL: Cal Ferris was involved in this.

LUZIER: I remember him and his vehicle he always worked on. [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: I’ve got pictures in here from Cal Ferris. He emceed The Return from the Moon.

LUZIER: Oh, really?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: I didn’t know that.

CALDWELL: He was the emcee, and he brought me back pictures. There are two of them

sitting right there, and I’ve got a couple back in the hall.

LUZIER: Oh, wow.


CALDWELL: Yes, it was kind of a neat thing.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Cal and I—I was very fortunate to be able to—work with Cal and call him my

friend.

LUZIER: That was F-e-r-r-i-s.

CALDWELL: Yes, it was.

LUZIER: Yes. Well, what are you most proud of in relation to your Forest Service life?

CALDWELL: I think, without a doubt, my involvement in helping people get where they want

to go in the organization, because you can do whatever you want to do, and people used to call

me—you know, a fire control officer, a district ranger—says, “What did you do to my guy?

God, he got a quality step increase when he came back for doing this particular project, and he’s

doing this, and he’s going to be upgraded this spring. What did you do to him?” I said, “Just

opened the door. He did it all for himself.”

LUZIER: You gave him incentive.

CALDWELL: Exactly. And that’s the type of thing that I feel—you know, it’s like I turned

down quite a few district fire control officer jobs through the years. I felt that I was doing more

good personally and for the good of the Forest Service and fire management right where I was at.

I had a lot of pressure to me. They said, “We need people like you in other places.” People like

me. You know, I think this is probably the most important job in the Forest Service. When Dick

Tracy retired, I was encouraged to apply for his job.

LUZIER: I remember that.

CALDWELL: And I did not do it. I thought about it a lot. It would have been an upgrade. It

would have been a fun thing to do, get back into jumping.


LUZIER: Prestige

CALDWELL: I’m seventy years old. I feel like I can still go out and jump on one.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: But the thing of it is, I felt that the Hotshot unit with the detail program was

probably the best thing that the Forest Service ever did.

LUZIER: And a very important—

CALDWELL: Yes. And so, yes, I feel that was probably the most important thing that I ever

did.

LUZIER: Great.

CALDWELL: I don’t know if I should say this over the mike, but I had this black guy working

for me, [a] detailer, the brother of John Smith, who was the first—the older brother, and he was

detailed down from Mount Shasta, [unintelligible]. Well, he spent a year with me, and he still

stops by all the time. His brother, [James] “Jim” Smith—it’s kind of interesting because, well, it

was kind of a “do it my way.” They said, “Now, his name is James. You gotta call him James,

because he doesn’t like it if you don’t call him James.” The guy looked at him and laughed and

said, “Oh, really?”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: Second day he was there, he’s going across the yard, and he’s kind of [bipping?]

a little bit, and [sings], “Skoobie doobie do. Skoobie doobie do.” I said, “Hey, Skoobie,

c’mere.” He’s Skoobie today.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]


CALDWELL: I said, “C’mon in the office.” About mid-season, had him in the office. Said,

“How would you like to be the first black superintendent in California?” He goes, “Uh, uh, uh,

that’d be great.”

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: I said, “Okay, but you gotta do everything I say.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: “There’s no ifs, ands or buts. You do exactly what I say if we’re gonna

accomplish this.” This is really off the wall. I don’t even like talking about it because—

LUZIER: I think it’s wonderful.

CALDWELL: No, but it’s like—but it happened. I says, “Okay. You need to get out of

Dunsmuir. You need to get out of this temporary employment. You need to go to Southern

California. You need engine experience, you need helicopter experience, you need the Southern

California exposure. When I get an opening here, you’ll come back as a trainee.”

LUZIER: That’s great.

CALDWELL: We were on the phone a lot. It happened.

LUZIER: What about women?

CALDWELL: He came back. He came back—I’m going to put that question aside a minute.

He came back to Redding as a GS-6 trainee. The Sequoia had an opening for a Hotshot

superintendent. I said, “You got your application in there?” He’s going, “No, I want to stay here

a while longer.” I says, “I don’t recall you asking me if you could stay longer.”

LUZIER: [Chuckles.]

CALDWELL: And he goes, “Uh, uh, uh, I just thought”—“That’s my job. That’s my job. Sit

down. Get your application going.” They closed it that day. I said, “Reopen it for a couple of


days.” They said, “Charlie, we can’t do that.” I said, “I’ve got a black candidate here.” “Oh.

Okay, it’s open.” And he got the job.

LUZIER: Great.

CALDWELL: First black Hotshot superintendent in California.

LUZIER: Now, isn’t that name—has gone further, hasn’t it?

CALDWELL: Oh, yes, he’s area manager—

LUZIER: [Laughs.] In Bureau of Land Management?

CALDWELL: No, Los Padres National Forest, which used to be two districts and now

it’s—what do they call them, management zones or something?

LUZIER: I don’t know what they call them.

CALDWELL: They’re not districts anymore.

LUZIER: Oh, really?

CALDWELL: No.

LUZIER: Ooh, I’m way behind. [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: Me, too, sometimes, but I still talk to these people, you know, and they tell

me—you know, kind of stay up with a lot of things.

LUZIER: That’s great.

CALDWELL: I did the same thing years earlier, 1973. A kid by the name of Milford Preston.

He was black. I said, “How would you like to be the first black smokejumper in California?”

LUZIER: I remember that.

CALDWELL: And he’s going, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.” Well, we did that. [whispers]:

[unintelligible]. They hated me for it.

LUZIER: [Laughs.] It had to be done.


CALDWELL: They hated me for it. Well, he went on. He jumped for years. He jumped in

Alaska, out of Missoula, Montana. He worked winters for North Base. Last year, I had just read

where he was a lifetime member in the smokejumpers association which I belong to. It costs

$1,000 for a lifetime membership.


CALDWELL: It’s twenty dollars a year or $1,000 a year [sic].

LUZIER: Might as well pay the thousand; you’ll live that long.

CALDWELL: Well, yes. The only reason I had it is I go, Well, I’m seventy years old.

LUZIER: You might live another thirty years.

CALDWELL: No, no.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: So I had it become a lifetime member. But anyway, he got it right after that,

boom! Moved over to Reno and died in less than three months. So that was kind of a sad thing.

LUZIER: Yes. Now, which one is it that died?

CALDWELL: Milford.

LUZIER: Oh, wow.

CALDWELL: Milford Preston.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Do you want to say anything about women and how you feel about women, too?

CALDWELL: Sure.

LUZIER: Some women are pretty sharp.


CALDWELL: No problem at all. The first two girls on the Hotshot—we didn’t have people

apply for the program.

LUZIER: It was a pretty hard program.

CALDWELL: Yes, and there was a different mindset back in the early days. You said

something earlier, you know, like, “What made you decide to go into the Forest Service?” or

something, or that was one of your questions, and this started out when I was, like, seventeen

years old. And I wrote a term paper.

LUZIER: In high school?

CALDWELL: Forestry and lumbering.

LUZIER: Oh, really?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: I did mine on marriage and family. [Laughter.]

CALDWELL: So I did this thing, and yes, I wanted to do that. And a brother just older than me

had been on the Hotshot crew at Lakeshore Shasta Hotshots in ’82 [sic], before he went into the

Korean War [sic], and so I’ve been around, had that mindset way back then. Now, where were

we when I got off on that?

LUZIER: Oh, about women. I was wondering about your feeling about—

CALDWELL: So what I’m saying is back in those early days, a woman wasn’t even at fire

camp.

LUZIER: No. There probably weren’t even women cooks.

CALDWELL: Oh, the things I read when I was a kid about women and fires and stuff was,

like—I don’t know if we should let them vote or not.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]


CALDWELL: Yes, it was kind of like that, you know?

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: And in the logging woods? No, they might—you might have a woman cook’s

helper, but, you know, it was just a different world. So this thing kind of progressed all through

the years, and everybody goes, “Ah, women can’t handle the firefighting” and stuff. And I was

always of the thought of you’re buying into—you’re always going to have a weak link. On, like,

a twenty-man crew, you’re going to have a weak link. Okay, it kind of felt like if I get two

women on a crew, I’ve got two built-in weak links because they’re not strong. They couldn’t do

the pull-ups. They learned to do the pull-ups. Working for me, they did. But they just didn’t

even apply. Women did not apply for these kind of jobs.

LUZIER: Because they knew what the mindset was.

CALDWELL: Whatever they knew. I don’t know what they knew and why they didn’t do it

and why girls didn’t do it. It’s like Diane Pryce.

LUZIER: I don’t remember her.

CALDWELL: She was the first woman smokejumper.

LUZIER: Ah.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Do you remember what year? Do you have any recollection of that?

CALDWELL: Yes, somewhere in the seventies, I think.

LUZIER: Diane what was her last name?

CALDWELL: Diane Price, P-r-y-c-e.

LUZIER: Oh, Bryce.


CALDWELL: Pryce, P-r-y-c-e. You know, that kind of progressed. The first two girls I had on

my crew did an excellent job, you know? They fit in well. It was probably more awkward for

them than it was for me and some of the other people, but—

LUZIER: And for the men.

CALDWELL: Yes. But I ran into situations like it was a very tough physical fitness program

and running every day, and I sat them down and talked to them. “You gotta let me know. I

didn’t just fall off a turnip truck. I know women have periods. I know it’s worse on some than it

is to others. You need to talk to me. Think of me as a mother, not a father, because you don’t

talk to your father. Think of my as your mother and let me know, ‘I can’t do this today.’” And

they wouldn’t do it, and it was very frustrating for me. They’d be out there in the middle of

nowhere, crying. And that was a tough thing for me to deal with. Firefighting crew and

[unintelligible] laying down on the ground or sitting down on the ground, crying? It was tough.

They never taught any of the guys, any of the supervisors how to supervise women. I’m talking

field supervision. I’m talking about hard-work type supervision. You got a guy out there, you

say, “You dumb so-and-so, blah, blah, blah, blah. Get your ass moving,” whatever. You don’t

talk to a woman like that. I don’t care if she is on the fireline.

I had a set of standards. I call them old Hotshot traditions, things. You didn’t even cuss

in front of woman, and you didn’t wear your hat when you walked into a restaurant. You never

told a dirty joke around women.

LUZIER: And that was done.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: I always just walked out of the room.


CALDWELL: There was a lot of this stuff that I never allowed, and I call them old Hotshot

traditions. If you did any of these things, you got fined, and all the fines were used for an end-

of-season party, and we had a lot of fines, but the Hotshot traditions goes on and on and on.

Some of the things you wouldn’t even want to hear it.

LUZIER: What year do you think they started, that you had your first Hotshot woman? Could

you tell me that?

CALDWELL: Yes, I can tell you that, but I’ll probably have to look through—

LUZIER: Well, just approximately. You must have been doing it for quite a while.

CALDWELL: I had three women in—

LUZIER: Because ’73—

CALDWELL: —’85 I had three women

LUZIER: Yes, because ’73 is when it started to change. That’s when I left for ten years.

CALDWELL: I don’t have that written down. Let’s see. [Refers to notes.]

LUZIER: Do you know, we’ve been talking for two hours and fifteen minutes?

CALDWELL: Wow.

LUZIER: Wow. You’ve said a lot.

CALDWELL: If you look at my—

LUZIER: I don’t have to know—

CALDWELL: Okay, it was in the seventies.

LUZIER: In the seventies.

CALDWELL: Yes, yes, it was in the seventies.

LUZIER: It had to be after ’73 because I would remember if it was before that.

CALDWELL: I want you to look at this.


LUZIER: Okay. And what is this?

CALDWELL: Sorry about that. Now, just look.

LUZIER: Okay.

CALDWELL: This is my personnel file.

LUZIER: Oh, your personnel—

CALDWELL: Look through in fire, NCSC in 1981.

LUZIER: Oh, it did?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: It’s kind of funny—kind of strange, not funny. It’s kind of strange that that fire

was—you know, you can talk about 9/11 and—

LUZIER: I wasn’t there.

CALDWELL: —the Northern California Service Center, 5/11/81.

LUZIER: Oh, really?

CALDWELL: The only reason I wasn’t there and my two foremen wasn’t there—in that office,

which was attached to the warehouse; we were on the south end, right where that plane went

in—I made an administrative change in tour of duty because my crew was coming on.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: I had everything for my crew laid out: fire pants, fire shirts, all the training

materials, everything laid out on tables the full length of the warehouse. I lost everything. I’m

talking sleeping bags, packs—

LUZIER: Oh, wow.

CALDWELL: Everything. I lost all of my training stuff.


LUZIER: I remember that it was May 11th.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: And we lost fire people, didn’t we?

CALDWELL: Yes, and I lost four good friends.

LUZIER: All your stuff.

CALDWELL: Every training aid, all my—lesson plans.

LUZIER: Where’d you have your folder, that it got saved?

CALDWELL: Upstairs.


CALDWELL: Yes, yes, this was up in the—Accounting and Personnel.

LUZIER: I was really glad that I wasn’t there.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: I’d already left.

CALDWELL: But it was tough. It was tough getting started again. We had to put out calls to

other bases. Every Hotshot crew in the country sent me packs. We was using different packs.

We looked like clown crew coming in because everybody had different color packs. We had

some from Missoula; we had packs from [DLP?]. Anyplace you had a Hotshot crew, they sent

us a couple, three—if they had extras. And so that’s how we started the season.

LUZIER: Wow. Bless your heart.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: And so you’re going to let me have some of the photographs so I can make copies?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Do you have any photographs in this binder that you’re going to let me—this thing?


CALDWELL: I don’t think there’s any photographs in that, but I’ll get—I don’t know if you’d

be interested in that other one.

LUZIER: And then tell me again about that movie. We weren’t on the tape when you talked

about the movie that was made.

CALDWELL: It was called Wildfire, and it was a documentary. I think Bell Telephone was the

one that put it on, and Lorne Greene [star of the TV program Bonanza].

LUZIER: Oh, really?

CALDWELL: Yes. I’m surprised you never saw it.

LUZIER: I’ve never seen it, but they probably know about that, but I’m going to write it down.

CALDWELL: It’s kind of a—you know, not very well done, but when you stop to think

about—it.

LUZIER: The situation at that time.

CALDWELL: Yes, at that time, the level of expertise and so on.

LUZIER: And you’ve got lots of things you’re going to let me share by making copies. And so

if you had your life to do all over, would you change things that you’ve done, or do you think

that—

CALDWELL: I would have worked harder at spending more time with my kids. That is the

thing that was the hardest for me. In later years, I went, My God, I spent all these years, all these

years fighting fire. [Chuckles.] I’m having to laugh because I’m going, here I am out there

with—

LUZIER: All these kids.

CALDWELL: Yes. Engines, people, helicopters. I’m on a regional fire team; I’m in Arizona,

and thousands of people working [for me], and I’m making twelve bucks an hour?


LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: And I’m going—

LUZIER: Twelve bucks an hour. My God, Charlie, it didn’t feel like that. I thought I was little

paid.

CALDWELL: Twelve fifty, maybe. But my brother kept trying to talk me into going into PG&E

[Pacific Gas & Electric], and I’d have been making the big bucks many, many [unintelligible].

He goes, “It frees your time?” And I said, “Nah, you don’t understand. I’ve got the best job in

the world.”

LUZIER: So that’s the way you felt about it.

CALDWELL: That’s the way I felt about it. This is the best job in the world

LUZIER: That’s the way I felt, too.

CALDWELL: You know? Smokejumping was one of the greatest things I think I’ve ever done

in my life, and my fondest memories, the people that I associated with in the jumpers and the

jumping and just the—I’ve always thrived on adrenaline rushes.

LUZIER: Yes, excitement.

CALDWELL: Yes, you know? I’ve been a motorcycle rider all my life. I go to the Bay Area,

somebody goes in my garage, steals my Harley.

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: Yes. I don’t think I would have changed a thing.

LUZIER: Now, we talked about who in particular was an influence for you. Can you think of

anybody else you want to mention?


CALDWELL: I do want to mention the people that worked for me that I learned from that were

a very important part of my life and my family’s life because they were so close to the kids; the

kids knew them like they were—you know? They just loved these guys.

LUZIER: Yes, like the way I was raised.

CALDWELL: And most of my foremen were that way. Probably the two key guys that really

got close and that I learned so much for [sic; from]—I call them “educated idiots” all the

time—but [Kenneth] “Ken” Blonski and [Michael] “Mike” Horney. And Mike ended up retiring

as Tahoe dispatcher, which I was a little disappointed because he used to tell me he wanted to be

chief of agriculture.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: Which I know he could have done. And Ken Blonski, who was a foreman for

me—I told him, I says, “You know, you need to go back to school, get a little bit more on your

sheepskin and start making these decisions,” because he was having a hard time with some of the

decisions that were coming down. “You need to come back.” Do you know Ken?

LUZIER: No, I don’t remember that name.

CALDWELL: Okay. Ken—I got on the horn, and I started doing things and doing what I could

do and reading the manual and saying, Okay, I can do this. I can do that. I got him a sponsor in

the Forest Service, sent him back to school at Fort Collins, Colorado, and he got his master’s in

fire science.

LUZIER: Oh, wow.

CALDWELL: He worked summers for me, went back to school in the wintertime. Came back,

was FCO, FMO [fire management officer] on the Lassen.

LUZIER: I don’t recognize his name.


CALDWELL: Moved around different places. Ended up in the regional office, deputy fire

management officer. I don’t know what his title was, but he was there. Ended up he was Region

Five budget analyst. I tell you, the guy had a brain.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: When he came to work for me, he already had his master’s in criminology.

LUZIER: Huh! So he already had—

CALDWELL: He already had that.


CALDWELL: I’m going, What a wasted talent.

LUZIER: You.

CALDWELL: “You need to be up there,” and he went up there, and he did well.

LUZIER: Yes, so you feel like that’s really an accomplishment—

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: —to see these people grow.

CALDWELL: And I had to grow with them. I had to grow with them. And to me, that was an

important step—

LUZIER: In leading these people on.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Yes. Beautiful. Well, let’s see, so you have a real sense of accomplishment, and

you’ve just kind of elaborated on that.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: What are some of your observations about things back then and now? We’ve kind of

talked about that. Do you want to say any more about that?


CALDWELL: Observations about then and now.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: I think we probably—

LUZIER: We’ve covered that.

CALDWELL: We’ve covered that pretty well with some of my other stuff.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: I think we have.

LUZIER: Yes, I think we have.

CALDWELL: I think basically—you know, you don’t age if you keep an open mind, active

body and are able to change with the times and accept change. So many people cannot do it.

LUZIER: They turn seventy, and they think they’re dead.

CALDWELL: You have to accept the changes. You have to accept the people. It’s like,

“What’s wrong with that damn kid? Look at them baggy pants.” Well, that’s what they do

nowadays. It’s okay.

LUZIER: And it’s a fad.

CALDWELL: It’s okay.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: God, I remember wearing Levis when I was in high school. Only had one pair,

and they stood up by themselves when I took them off.

LUZIER: Well, that was the fad.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.] I know. I fit it because I only had one pair.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: When we were kids, we got—


LUZIER: You didn’t have time to [cross-talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: We got one pair of pants, one T-shirt and one pair of tennis shoes. When I was in

high school, I got, “Oh, aren’t you cold?” [Gruffly]: “I can handle it.” I was freezing to death in

my T-shirt, and I never told anybody [laughter] I couldn’t afford a coat. If there was a coat, it’s

something I slept under, an old leather jacket or something, because we never had any beds, none

of us, growing up. Summertime, it was on the ground outside. Wintertime—

LUZIER: I remember camping that way.

CALDWELL: —got a roof over—

LUZIER: I didn’t think anything of it.

CALDWELL: Yes. We didn’t think anything of it. We didn’t know we were poor.

LUZIER: I never knew it, either.

CALDWELL: It was okay.

LUZIER: We always had enough food.

CALDWELL: That’s what my kids come back and say now, “Dad, I didn’t know we were

poor.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: I said, “Yeah, I was workin’ for the government.” [Laughs.]

LUZIER: My kids say the same thing, but they don’t say, “I didn’t know,” because they knew.

They knew they were poor, yes.

CALDWELL: Yes. My daughter used to come home—

LUZIER: I didn’t think we were poor. I thought we always had it pretty lucky to have enough

for food.


CALDWELL: In the early years, her early years, she would come home from school and go,

“Dad, everybody in my class had got a color TV.” “Dad, do you want to go over to So-and-so’s

house with me and watch Bonanza in color? You’d love it.” [Laughs.] So one year for

Christmas I came home with a color TV, old Scrooge. [Laughs.]

LUZIER: Yes, that’s the way I was.

CALDWELL: But we just didn’t have the money to do a lot of the stuff and still survive. She

knew a million ways to cook hamburger.

LUZIER: Yes

CALDWELL: Venison. We lived off—you know—

LUZIER: Yes, the land.

CALDWELL: Lived off the land basically. I did a lot of hunting.

LUZIER: I’m going to take a lot of pictures and include them, and I’ll bring them back to you,

and I’d love to have some of those fire pictures. I think they might appreciate that. And maybe

those two sheets that you found. What do they have on them? Is it something—

CALDWELL: Oh, that burnt stuff? No, that’s just garbage.

LUZIER: That’s just garbage? Okay.

CALDWELL: Yes, that’s the personnel folder crap.

LUZIER: You showed me two things, and your personnel thing—that might be interesting.

CALDWELL: You’re welcome to look at it. This is—

LUZIER: Your résumé?

CALDWELL: Résumé? It’s the old-type application we used.

LUZIER: Yes, I sure remember that.

CALDWELL: But, see, this goes back—I might have a more current one, because this is to ’69.


MRS. CALDWELL: You put in for a bunch of Hotshot—not Hotshot but at the [unintelligible]

during [cross-talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: Yes, I know. I applied for a job on the Chugach in Alaska once. People say,

“You never apply for a job.” I said, “Yeah.” Yes, I got called on the carpet because I was

turning down district fire control officer jobs. Remember [William] “Bill” Bradley?

LUZIER: No, I don’t remember that name.

CALDWELL: He was a deputy forest supervisor here, and before that he was forest supervisor

on the Modoc [National Forest].

LUZIER: It must have been before Paul [unintelligible]. When I came on, Paul Stathem was

Forest Supervisor.

CALDWELL: Yes. And he came out—well, he called me up and said, “Will you come to the

office?” And I says, “Is it about that”—“Can you come in [unintelligible]?” I said, “Is it about

the Yolla Bolla FMO job?” And he goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, I’m pretty busy with training

right now.” I says, “It’s a two-way street. If you feel the need to talk to me, you know where my

office is.”

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: How I got away with that shit, I don’t know.

LUZIER: [Laughs.]

CALDWELL: You ought to see some of the letters I wrote about different things that were

happening, like uniform allowances and stuff. I got on people’s cases heavy. I never gave

anybody any slack.

LUZIER: Yes.


CALDWELL: But he came out there to my office, and he says, “I don’t want you to think we’re

twisting your arm.” I said, “How in the hell do you expect me to feel when the forest

supervisor’s got to come out here and talk to me about this? If I wanted that job, I would take

that job, but I’m not going to commute from here to Yolla Bolla every day, and I’m not going to

move up there.”

LUZIER: I almost went to there, as a district clerk.

CALDWELL: They said, “We can force you to.” I said, “I’m aware of that. I understand how

that works.” But I says, “You know, nobody has ever given any considerations to the fact that I

did apply for jobs. I know you guys want—they wanted me to leave here, not because I wasn’t

getting the job done, because they felt that I would be better making management decisions at an

upper level, because you don’t even consider me a middle manager down here where I’m at. So

why didn’t I get some help when I applied for a job?” He goes, “You applied for jobs?” “Yes,”

I said, “I applied for the forest FMO job on the Chugach National Forest in Alaska.” I

said, “Reading the job description, I was the only person in the U.S. Forest Service that I know

of that fit that job description, and I did not get the job because nobody helped me get that job.”

He said, “Well, who did get the job?” I said, “A helitack foreman from the Angeles that was a

hardship case.” I said, “One year later they called me up and said I can have that job; he had to

come back on a hardship case. A year later, they said, ‘Without even applying, you can have this

job.’ I said, ‘Put it where the sun don’t shine.’” And he goes, “Oh, well, I wasn’t aware of that.”

I says, “That’s what I’m talking about. The concern is get me out of here, go do this, go do that,

but when I do something, nobody is helping me.”

I said, “I applied for a job on the Kaibab.” I said, “Sixty percent fire, 40 percent fuels.”

LUZIER: That would have been perfect.


CALDWELL: “You heard what I said about fire,” and he’s going, “Yeah.” “Well,” I said, “you

want to know who got the job?” I said, “A fuels management specialist from Region Six. They

called it another hardship case.” I said, “Why didn’t I get some help for that? They did the same

thing. The guy couldn’t handle the job; he couldn’t handle the supervision, the fire management

end of it, and they got rid of him, and they said, ‘Hey, Charlie, you still interested in this job?’ I

said, ‘Go away.’”

But that’s the kind of things, you know, that you put up with through the years, and

everybody goes, “Why are you still here? Why are you still doing this?” When I found

something I really wanted—

LUZIER: You strived for it.

CALDWELL: In the early days, I tried to get a job on the Salmon River in Idaho. I turned down

my first fire control officer job in 1959.

LUZIER: That was the year I came to work.

CALDWELL: At Tule Lake. It was called the Tule Lake District at that time, I’m sure. Maybe

it was still [unintelligible].

LUZIER: Do you feel like we’ve said enough?

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: This is probably the longest one we’ve done. It’s two hours and thirty-five minutes,

and we still could talk and talk and talk. I know we could.

CALDWELL: Susana, I’m sorry I wasn’t more structured, because it would help if I had

followed your list, and I really appreciate all the work you did on putting down something that I

could relate to.

LUZIER: I figured you’d like that better than—


CALDWELL: You did well on that. I know that I bounced around—

LUZIER: No, you didn’t. You did well. You did beautifully.

CALDWELL: Yes, but I bounced off on stuff, so I hope that it doesn’t bother them.

LUZIER: What they’ll do is they’ll pick and choose. They pick and choose. Have you read the

book that they did before? [Transcriber’s note: The Lure of the Forest]

CALDWELL: No.

LUZIER: I’ll bring it over to you when I bring that form thing over.

CALDWELL: That would be interesting.

LUZIER: And pick up your—if you would fill that out, that would be great, and I’ll come back

and pick that—gosh, I can’t remember the name of it right now. But what is it I had you fill out?

A profile? What’s that called? Biography.

CALDWELL: Biographical information.

LUZIER: Yes. If you could fill that out a little—

CALDWELL: Born.

LUZIER: You can turn it over and fill it on the back.

CALDWELL: Education.

LUZIER: Yes, that kind of stuff. I’ll come back and pick that up and bring—

CALDWELL: I had twenty-five years of college.

LUZIER: Really? You sound like me. I was always taking college classes. When my kids

were almost all grown up I only need one more class to graduate with an AA.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.] Most of mine was physical fitness at college.

LUZIER: Huh!


CALDWELL: I went to college for years. Those guys, those coaches and stuff out there—I’d

go, “Hey, Coach, I left something in there.” He’d say, “You don’t have a key to that room yet?”

[Laughter.] It was kind of like that.

LUZIER: I don’t know how many credits I’ve got out there, but there’s a lot.

CALDWELL: Well, I’ll tell you, not only in the Forest Service, it’s kind of everywhere I’ve

been, I’ve been very fortunate that people like me.

LUZIER: Yes, I know. Everywhere I go, they talk well of you.

CALDWELL: I told my daughter when she went to work for the Forest Service—I said,

“You’re going to hear a lot of stories, Debbie,” I says, “and you’re gonna find out that people

either liked me or they just hated my ass.” And a year or two later, she goes, “You know,

Daddy, you were right.” She says, “I met a guy in the Hayfork Hotel, started braggin’ on you to

me,” and she said, “You know”—

LUZIER: [cross-talk; unintelligible].

CALDWELL: No. “I could really care less. Why don’t you go talk to my Dad.” [Makes

blustering, muttering sounds.] And she walks away.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: But she run into that a few times because they did a lot of block burning, and she

was all involved in a lot of that kind of stuff, and so she ran into—

LUZIER: I know you never took your kids on a fire, but my dad used to take me brush cutting.

CALDWELL: Yes?

LUZIER: And trail blazing and that kind of stuff.

CALDWELL: We’d walk into fires that were close.

LUZIER: You did?


CALDWELL: So they could see what was going on, yes. We went into the Lassen up there and

walked through the burning.

LUZIER: Yes. I used to wonder how I got so much done, yes.

CALDWELL: I’ve already ridden my bicycle through this fire across the way up here.

LUZIER: Have you?

CALDWELL: Yes. [Laughs.] I ride my mom’s bike.

LUZIER: I’m so glad it went that way, because my daughter-in-law and our stepson, my

stepson—they were right on the edge there.

CALDWELL: Yes.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Where do they live?

LUZIER: I live four blocks from that. I live on Black Canyon Road and Pensacola, but they live

right on the railroad, so they were asked to evacuate.

CALDWELL: Yes. Black Canyon and Pensacola?

LUZIER: I live on Black Canyon and Pensacola, and it came down to Boca, and so it could have

come our way.

CALDWELL: We’ve been going up there and throwing our Frisbees, because we kind of got

into Frisbee golf a little bit. That’s something she can do a little bit [unintelligible].

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: But we’ve even got a Frisbee golf portable thing here in the back yard. It’s one

of the things my son does. They’re a hundred dollars apiece. He got nine of them, so he can set

up a nine-hole course.

LUZIER: Oh.


CALDWELL: For the kids and stuff over there [unintelligible].

LUZIER: So it’s golf but it’s Frisbee?

CALDWELL: Frisbee golf. Would you like to see them?

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: . . .we finish here, I’ll show you what they are, because—they are different than

regular Frisbees.

LUZIER: Let’s close this, and I want to thank you for spending all this time when I know you

were reluctant to even do the interview in the first place, so I’m very happy that you decided to

do it.

CALDWELL: You know, it’s hard to—

LUZIER: I hope I’ve asked the right kind of questions.

CALDWELL: It’s hard to put things together that—

LUZIER: Make sense.

CALDWELL: Make sense, and in the back of your mind, you’re going—it’s like this girl that

wants to write about the Hotshot superintendents and is supposed to come up this fall. I haven’t

even looked at her questionnaire, but it’s about that thick. [Demonstrates.]

LUZIER: Wow.

CALDWELL: And I’m going, You know, if I’m going to go to all that trouble, I might as well

write a book myself.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: Or get somebody to write for me.

LUZIER: Yes.

CALDWELL: And I sometimes—


LUZIER: You know, you could do it on a tape and have what they call a ghost writer. I’m a

writer, but I’m probably not good—but I could sure type up this.

CALDWELL: She’s a writer, too.

MRS. CALDWELL: Are you? You’ve got to come to our Writers’ Forum.

CALDWELL: Yes, she’s got every writing course—

MRS. CALDWELL: I’ve done everything I could to tell you how to do it and help you.

LUZIER: Yes. So I’m going to close this, and we are two hours and forty-five minutes. I think

that will be just—

CALDWELL: Really? You getting thirsty? You need to drink your water. I didn’t drink my

Dr. Pepper.

LUZIER: Oh, we’ve just been so busy.

CALDWELL: [Laughs.]

[End of interview.]

CALDWELL, Charles FS 08-10-06, 1 03 Corrected · CALDWELL: And so [an] opportunity came up for a...

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Transcript of CALDWELL, Charles FS 08-10-06, 1 03 Corrected · CALDWELL: And so [an] opportunity came up for a...