Shaping the Park and Saving the Boys

Book excerpt: "Audretsch has given us insight into the scope of CCC work which otherwise might have lain dormant." He "has produced a meticulously referenced and detailed compilation of history of the seven CCC companies which served, 1933-1942, at the South Rim, North Rim, and Phantom Ranch to develop Grand Canyon National Park." ---Kathy Mays Smith Author, Gold Medal CCC Company 1538: A Documentary 2009 Recepient of the CCC Legacy President's Meritorious Service Award "Shaping the Park and Saving the Boys succeeds in large part because it strikes a good balance between what is old - the broader history of the CCC as a New Deal Program - and what is new - those tantalizing, heretofore unknown or forgotten details of day-to-day Civilian Conservation Corps work at Grand Canyon. Casual readers will enjoy the book both as a primer on the New Deal's most popular program, and as a snapshot of CCC life at Grand Canyon, while researchers will find themselves returning to its pages again and again for useful nuggets in the text as well as within the footnotes." --- Michael I. Smith, CCC Historian, Past Board Member CCC Legacy THE GREAT DEPRESSION was undoubtedly the nation's greatest crisis since the Civil War. Unemployment in the United States reached 25%. Many young men, without work experience or adequate schooling, were without hope. Then, on March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as president. In the sometimes-frenetic First Hundred Days of his administration, the president and Congress passed landmark legislation to return the nation to prosperity. One of those legislative milestones was the Civilian Conservation Corps program. The goals of the CCC program were twofold: revive the wasted young men and damaged natural resources. Over a nine-year-period, 1933-1942, nearly three million young men carried on conservation work in national parks, state parks, national forests, and other public lands. One of the greatest beneficiaries of the CCC was Arizona's Grand Canyon National Park. From 1933 to 1942, the park's infrastructure advanced as much as fifty years with the installation of trails, buildings, trail resthouses, roads, telephone lines, and many other improvements. Many of these enhancements benefit today's park users. Robert W. "Bob" Audretsch retired as a National Park Service ranger at Grand Canyon in 2009 after nearly 20 years of service. Since then, he has devoted himself full time to research and writing about the Civilian Conservations Corps. Bob holds degrees in history and library science from Wayne State University. He resides in Flagstaff, Arizona.