Paul Thevenin Interview

Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection

Paul Thevenin Interview

Interview number: 53.53

This is the River Runners Oral History Project, this is July 31, 1995, and we're here [in Flagstaff, at Richard Quartaroli’s house] talking to Paul Thevenin. I'm Lew Steiger. Also present is Richard Quartaroli.

Steiger: For starters, what I've been doing with everybody is getting them to just kind of give me a brief resumé of who you are and what your circumstances were, where you came from before you ever got to the river. And that sort of helps put your comments and your views in perspective for later on. So if we could just start with that, that'd be good. Like where you were born and how many brothers and sisters you had and how'd you grow up and how'd you finally end up river running? That's a bunch of stuff isn't it?

Thevenin: I don't know! (laughs) Are we recording now? Okay, so you were talking on it the whole time then. Okay, where did I come from? I was born originally in Eureka, California, in 1934, and I had one brother who was younger than I am, although in these last few years, he's passed me -he's now much more mature than I am. And I had one sister who was technically a cousin, but she was in the family a couple of years before I was. She was never adopted because my parents kept hoping her father would somehow straighten out his life, but he never did. So she was actually in the family before, so there were three of us as kids. I was probably what was considered a nerd in today's language, or whatever the word is nowadays. I was out of it. The only reason they ever knew I existed is because if I happened to be absent that day, there was an empty seat in the classroom. They'd say, "Yeah, wait, who sat over there?" And so I was really a nobody growing up. So I had nothing to do but study and get good grades. And then somehow I miraculously ended up with an appointment to the Coast Guard Academy and went to New London, Connecticut, and rode the Greyhound Bus from California to Connecticut. And in those days that gave you a lot of time to reflect upon your life, what it was, and what it might be, and I decided I wasn't happy with what I was, so I decided I would be somebody different. And it took a few adjustments in that "differences" before I settled in on what I finally became. Anyway, so I graduated from the Coast Guard Academy, spent about eight years with Uncle Sam in the Coast Guard, and got out in 1960. I was going to be career, but I'd had a whole bunch of hardship duty out in all sorts of places, and they gave me a job that was a reward in Washington, D.C., where I only went to work every third day, so I had one day on and two days off, and if there was nothing going on at night, I still got a full night's sleep, and I was getting bored out of my skull taking lessons to be a dance instructor, taking lessons on how to be a masseur, which came in very handy later, and that's how I got into river running. So anyway, Uncle Sam gives you one year to decide where you're going to go and how you're going to get home, and he ships your stuff there. But I wasn't ready to go to California, and being raised, basically a half-breed -my father was Catholic, my mother was Mormon -I decided every Mormon ought to serve a tour of duty in Utah. So I notified my aunt that I was coming to live with her, and she was amenable to that. So I moved in with my aunt in Salt Lake and got out there and opened up the newspaper to find out what was going on, and found out I couldn't teach in Utah. I'd taught in Virginia for a year, just with my bachelor's degree, but Utah wanted a teaching certificate, and I thought, "Well, someday I'll have to get that." And I looked in the want ads and there were a whole bunch of job offerings, and one said, "Masseur needed, will train." And so it was out at the Deseret Gym under the auspices of the Mormon Church, so I went down there to check in and the guy said, "Well, I've had about twenty guys in today, I think I've already picked the guy, but what makes you think you want to be a masseur, and how long will it be before I can get you trained?" I said, "Well, I'm already trained." He said, "You are, huh?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "I'm getting up on this table, I'm tired. And so show me what you know." And fifteen minutes later I was hired in the Deseret Gym. A sidelight, it was under a guy by the name of Brother Jonathan, who had been World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion, who'd been one of my heroes when I was a teenager. And so I ended up working for him in the Deseret Gym. And that's how I met Jack Curry [Currey]. Jack Curry [Currey] had decided to go into the river business. He'd made one trip with a group of friends that fall, and decided he was going to go in the river business, and he spent a lot of time in the Deseret Gym playing handball, and while he was waiting for his turn at the court, he was reading a bunch of books on legends and stars and this and that and everything else, and somebody said, "Well, gee, if you're reading about stars, you ought to go see the new masseur, he used to be a navigator in the service." And so Jack came in to talk to me, and I knew how to find my way around the world by the stars, but I didn't know the legends, and that's what he wanted. And so I tried to trade him a series of massages for a trip down the river, and he didn't want any massages, and so the only thing left to do was to go to work for him. And he said, "What do you know about boats?" And I said, "Everything. I grew up out there in California, I was a Boy Scout, I did some canoeing and rowing, and I spent eight years in the Coast Guard." I convinced him I knew everything about boats and he said, "Okay, you're hired," and about that time I left the Deseret Gym and went to work for KLUB in Salt Lake City, "Club" Radio, in advertising, and Jack was in advertising with -I think it was KCPX, Channel 6 in Salt Lake. And so we had a lot of time where we could schedule our time together to put boats together and patch them and paint them and put names on them, and put names on a truck and all sorts of things. So I ended up being his right-hand man, all the time planning and organizing, so when we actually got into river running that spring, even though I had guys like Art Fenstermaker, who had run with Georgie White and Ken Sleight, and there was Ron Smith who was running for some of these same people, and Art Gallenson. Since I'd been with Jack in helping to put the equipment together, and because of my age -I got into it a little older than most guys did -I got into it at age twenty-seven -so because of my supposed maturity and working there putting all the equipment together, I ended up as Jack's right-hand man and being in charge of guys who'd run far more rivers than I had. In fact, I had never really run a river, but we showed up for the Yampa and Jack pulls up at the head of Warm Springs Rapid -and for those of you that know Warm Springs Rapid, back when I started back in 1962, it wasn't. It wasn't until a flood a couple of years later that Warm Springs really became a rapid. But anyway, Jack pulls up there, because in those days we had passengers who rowed the boats, and we got up there on top and he started talking about the tongue, the slide, the slick, the this and that and.... And I thought, "Well, okay, fine, I'll just follow the boat in front of me." They all went through and did a wonderful job, and I went through right behind them and all of a sudden we were all swimming and for years afterwards I looked at Warm Springs and tried to figure out where a guy could flip a boat. And for the life of me, I never could find a place to flip a boat in the old Warm Springs. Mother Nature came to my aid a few years later and made Warm Springs into actually a killer rapid, because I guess the first boatman, Les Oldham that hit Warm Springs unfortunately had his oars tucked under his knees and was sitting on his lifejacket like boatmen were prone to do in those days, and it was a cold spring trip, and he didn't anticipate Warm Springs being what it was, and he went over and under and the people said it was one graceful movement. His Army field boots and his Army field jacket just drug him under. So Warm Springs changed greatly. But anyway, so I got my first lesson in the fact that I probably had a few things to learn about rowing a boat.

Steiger: Boy! Boy that's a lot of names to spell too. Let's start with Jack Curry [Currey].

Thevenin: Jack Curry, J-A-C-K C-U-R-R-Y. [CURREY]

Quartaroli: Talking about Jack, could you tell how he introduced you on that first trip? Wasn't that the trip where he said, "We've never flipped a boat"?

Thevenin: Yeah, the thing is, this was actually Jack's first commercial trip. He'd run a trip where he considered it was a river trip, because he'd gotten a group of friends together the year before, which leads into another story we may get to later on Amil Quayle. But anyway, so this was technically, probably, really the first trip he had.

Steiger: The first commercial trip he'd ever done.

Thevenin: First commercial trip. But as we talked to the people and told them about the safety procedures and precautions, he included the line, "Well, don't worry what happens if you flip or anything -we've never had a boat go over on a regular trip yet." And suddenly I'm upside down. I figure, "I've ruined this guy's record." He said, "Don't worry about it, we'll take care of that." And so the very next trip, as he's giving the same speech, he says, "Don't worry, we've never had a boat turn over on a regular trip yet." And I pulled Jack aside and I said, "Jack, what happened last week?" He said, "That wasn't a regular trip." And so in all the years I worked with Jack, his line was always, "We've never had a boat go over on a regular trip." And I soon learned that if a boat went over, that Jack didn't like. He didn't say, "We've never had a boat go over" -"we never had boat go over on a regular trip." And anytime a boat went over, that was not a regular trip. (laughter)

Steiger: Oh man!

Thevenin: So anyway, Jack Curry [Currey] got into the business. He'd come from Southern California as a Pillsbury salesman and gotten in with a group of guys up in Salt Lake: Mendenhall who became pretty big in construction, and Jerry Morgan who was into all sorts of sales work and they did a bunch of things together. They were part of that group that made that friendly trip down the one fall. They had a fair amount of money, and Jack had a fair amount of time and know-how, and they were technically all three equal partners, but Jack actually ran Western River Expeditions.

Steiger: Well, so you got in absolutely on the ground floor. He had done one trip and then he decided he was starting this company?

Thevenin: When I came with him, he had actually gone out and bought three boats, and so that's all Western had at the time I joined them, was Jack's one trip down the river and three boats.

Steiger: And what kind of boats were they?

Thevenin: They were the old Army ten-mans, or Navy ten-mans. They were ten-mans, whatever branch of the service they came from.

Steiger: And that was the whole....

Thevenin: Well, that was the fleet we had when I joined him. And then we went running around looking for boats like that, and back in those days, if you were hard-pressed you'd pay fifteen bucks for one of those boats. You could sometimes get 'em cheaper. So that's one of the other differences in boats between then and now, is you could pick up a good boat for fifteen bucks or less.

Steiger: And this is 1962?

Thevenin: So I moved out in '61, I met Jack in the fall of '61, and so technically I joined Jack in late '61, but we didn't run any rivers until '62, and he'd run that one trip in '61.

Steiger: How were the people on that first trip, and how'd the ones that went swimming, how'd they do?

Thevenin: Well as I recall -the nice thing about memory, I was always encouraged both by my parents and by my church to keep a journal, so I could keep an accurate history of what went on. However, since I never did that, the stories always seem to get better each time they're told, since I have no point of reference. But as I recall, there were about four people in my boat when we flipped. By the end of the trip, there were at least twelve people talking about, "Well, when I flipped in...." And I kept counting numbers and thought, "No, they couldn't have fit in the boat." So how did they take it? Well, the ones who hadn't flipped had somehow latched onto the flip as their flip as well, and it became part of their story.

Steiger: So they weren't too traumatized?

Thevenin: No, I would say trauma was probably maybe the initial dump into the water, but then when they suddenly found everybody paying attention to them, it ended up being an ego-builder, to the point of, like I say, many of the other ones adopting the story to take back, that they were the ones in the boat that flipped.

Steiger: So how'd that first year go? Did you have a whole season? How did the business go?

Thevenin: Well, the business end, like I said, Jack and I were in advertising, and one of the things that was lacking back in those days for river runners -and I remember looking at Andy Anderson's brochure up in Idaho, how he bragged about taking down over three hundred people in fifteen years. And his advertising amounted to laying a brochure around at a bunch of stores and places like this. So if you wanted to run a river in Idaho, about the only place you'd find out about running a river in Idaho was to be in Idaho and see a brochure and say, "Gee, I guess I have enough time, I'll go. Gee, I don't have enough time, I'll forget about it." And there was almost no big advertising going on where people were spreading the word. And one of the things we ever did before we ran the river was got the advertising campaign going. And so we had passengers coming to us from ads, whereas in the old days it was people would pick up a brochure, and you didn't know whether you were going to have a trip or not until people would pick up a brochure and say, "Hey, I want to go on a river trip." So we actually had trips scheduled and advertised. We had them pre-sold. Hatch was doing some of that. Hatch had a few trips like that, and did a certain amount of advertising. Georgie White had the uniqueness of being a woman in the business and getting a lot of publicity with the little things that went along, the movie clips. When you went to a movie in the old days, you went to the movie, you had the newsreel, you had the cartoons, and you had some other little thingy going on. So Georgie White got in some of those other little thingies. Of course once TV started, then she was on a number of those shows: What's My Line, and things like that. And so she was doing some advertising, but most of the rest of them were relying upon word of mouth and somebody saying, "Well, hey, I went with So-and-So and Mexican Hat Expeditions" and this and that. But anyway, we launched probably the campaign extolling our virtues as river guides before (chuckles) we actually ran any rivers. And so we had people, and we had a pretty good season, running, back in those days as gypsies. Today [if] you're a Grand Canyon boatman, you're a Grand Canyon boatman: [If] you're an Idaho boatman, you're an Idaho boatman. Back then we'd start down in Utah and as the water ran out, we moved to Idaho, and then later on the company would run some trips in Canada and then we eventually started going down to Mexico in the wintertime. But that came a few years later. But one of the things we were talking about before, we were getting on spelling of names and we got onto Jack Curry [Currey]. But one of the things I mentioned in that earlier thing about Warm Springs: Les Oldham, who worked for Hatch, to get his spelling correct, it was, well, just Les, L-E-S, and Oldham was O-L-D-H-A-M. He had been fresh out of the military, he had come back and was running for Hatch in those days.

Steiger: Now, I want to get this straight. Here's Jack Curry [Currey], he's worked for Pillsbury, and he worked for advertising at a TV station. What do you think drove him into the business? Did he just love to run rivers?

Thevenin: Well, Jack was really a super-athlete. Jack probably could have gone to college on a number of athletic scholarships: football, swimming, et cetera, et cetera. And Jack was in good shape. He wasn't one of these guys who spent all of his time with weights, he was in overall, all-around good shape. But he married his high school sweetheart and they had kids and he just figured college was out of the business. He got a good job and he was a good salesman as well. Jack was a good-looking guy, made a good presentation, made a good pitch, could sell things quite well. And he loved the out-of-doors, and he loved that trip he went on. He thought, "Hey, this is neat, this is wonderful, this is what I want to do." And that was the heart and soul of Western, is Jack Curry [Currey] wanted to run rivers, and he was a good businessman, and he put the two things together.

Steiger: But it was mainly he just said, "I want to run a bunch of rivers." For himself, that was what he wanted to do.

Thevenin: Right. And he managed to accumulate people who thought that this was a neat thing to do. Like I said, in the old days, we'd have customers handle the boats. You'd maybe have six, seven, eight boats on the water, and you'd only have three professional boatmen.

Steiger: On the trip.

Thevenin: On the trip, because in those days, your clientele was outdoorspeople, whereas today our clientele, many of them have never zipped or unzipped a sleeping bag in their life. But back in those days, there was no such thing as "rental units" because everybody that went down the river had their own stuff. Most of them had their own rubber packs -again, surplus packs that you picked up. Some of them -well, when I started, a lot of my customers had a whole lot more experience on rivers than I did. I just happened to be the one whose name was on the list as being trip leader.

Steiger: Would you have customers rowing the boats on hard rivers?

Thevenin: Yeah, on hard rivers. And the thing is, it depended upon who you had. I mean, some of these guys would come down trip after trip. You know, after we'd been there a few years, some of these guys went down every year, and they were good. And if they weren't, if you ended up with a trip they weren't, you'd pull over at the head of any rapid of any size and say, "Okay folks, you stay here," run our boat through, walk back, run one of their boats through, walk back, and take another boat through. Then you'd go on downriver -you know, give the boats back to them -and go on down the river until you came to another rapid that you felt that they couldn't handle. And of course most of our stuff we were running was up on the Yampa and the Green and the Main Salmon and the Middle Fork of the Salmon, which were basically our bread and butter. Most of the rapids, if somebody was somewhat facilitous with the oars, he could handle it, as long as he followed the boat in front of him. So you'd put the guy, go down, and say, "Okay, now stay right behind me." They'd go, and if you had a group you figured couldn't do it, then you'd pull over and take your boat down and then take their's down.

Steiger: Oh boy, ___________________.

Thevenin: Well, while you're thinking about that, this is how Henry Falany got into the business with WhiteWater. We've skipped a few years ahead, but Henry and Wade Falany were coming up with a father and sons outing from Turlock, California. And at the last minute, their dad couldn't make it, so the dentist said, "Well, hey, Joe, I'll take your kids up there and look after yours while I look after mine." And we got there to Idaho, and the dentist ended up being one of the boatmen. And those of you that know the Middle Fork of the Salmon, the first major rapid you come to -in fact, the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, everything occurred rather rapidly. It's about 90 percent whitewater, and everything went fast. In fact, I'd guess it was almost a year before I could recognize the scenery of Velvet Falls coming up, because we got to Velvet Falls while I was still trying to explain to people what to do, and I would suddenly yell out, "Hey, this is Velvet Falls! Hold onto ___________." Anyway, I did that, we got to Velvet Falls, I suddenly realized we're there and I yelled to the boats behind me, "This is Velvet Falls, keep it right in the center where I go." And this one dentist who was handling the boat took a look at me drop out of sight in Velvet Falls and started rowing back upstream to slow the boat down, which, for those of you that are boaters know, that's not the thing to do on a set of waterfalls. And so he eased his boat right over the edge of the lip of Velvet Falls, and didn't have any speed, so when he hit the bottom, the back wave just caught it, and the boat started turning around like one of those little cages in a chipmunk cage, or something, going around and around and around. And this happened to be the dentist with both Henry and Wade on the boat. And eventually the boat came out and nobody was hurt, and pulled the boat ashore and got it rightside up, and got in their boat, run a little further down, and then we started off again. The Middle Fork was at the point where sometimes you went right of an island, sometimes you went left of an island, depending on the water level, and I was in the ten-man, and Art Gallenson was handling one of the bigger twenty-eight-footers. So we were at the point where the right-hand run looked like it might be a little shallow, so I said "everybody hold back a little bit," and I went down the right side and I signalled Art, "No, no, you'll never get the twenty-eight-footer down here. It's going to be a pain." So I was already committed to the right-hand run, so I drug my boat around over the rocks, and slithered and slid down, and came around out the underside of the island and looked back upriver, and I saw Art's boat way up the channel. He really should have been down about the same time I was, but he was way up there. And I looked and I saw the reflection of the boat on the water, and I thought, "Well, now, that's a strange reflection, because Western River Expeditions is written smaller in the reflection than it is in the boat. And then it suddenly came to my awareness that it was not a reflection, but it was a twenty-eight-footer sitting on top of an upside down ten-man. And the dentist decided that he was going to stay close to the boat, so he could hear the orders better. And so when Gallenson hit a rock and stopped, there was no room between the two boats, and the ten-man went up and underneath Gallenson's boat.

Steiger: Oh man!

Thevenin: And Henry and Wade were in the water again.

Steiger: This is their first trip?

Thevenin: This is their first trip. (laughter) And they were a couple of good kids. Henry was sixteen and Wade was fourteen, and they were good kids, they wanted to help around the campsite. They said, "If we ever do this trip again, we'd really rather row our own boats." (laughter) And so we talked Jack into hiring them. But yeah, we used to.... I mean, there were some hazards to letting the passengers handle their own boats. I think these two flips happened within about the first forty-five minutes of the trip down the Middle Fork. Now, in all deference to the dentist, he learned his lesson, and he didn't flip a boat the rest of the trip. But Henry figured, next trip he went down, he was going to be on the oars.

Steiger: Yeah! Okay, so that first year, you guys just ran all over the place. Or was that for several years? How did it evolve that you got to the Grand Canyon?

Thevenin: Well, okay, now we go back to Henry Falany. How'd we get in the Grand Canyon? Well, I stayed with Jack, and we didn't include the Grand Canyon in our first year, because Grand Canyon was the big one, and we wanted to get a little bit of experience elsewhere.

Steiger: But you fully intended to?

Thevenin: We fully intended to. So we came down in 1963 -I think it was 1963. That's the year they started holding the water back. And so my first trip down the Grand Canyon was very memorable. I ran all the way from Lee's Ferry to the Paria Beach, and the reason for that -I see the look on your face -we were trying to get information from the Bureau of Reclamation, and some of you may have feelings that the government is not always that forthcoming with information. And they're not always very forthcoming with correct information. And we tried to find out from the Bureau of Reclamation when they were going to hold the water back. Now, there'd been some sort of agreement that they would never stop the water off below 1,000 cubic feet per second, and it was marginal whether you could operate at that. And we tried to get information from them, we didn't, and just before we left, you know, we had this group of people. In those days we brought the equipment in, in the truck, with the people sitting on top of the equipment, and we didn't have to check in with the rangers in those days, but there was a ranger there, so out of courtesy, we would always stop in. People would stop in and say hi to the ranger, "How are things going?" blah, blah, blah. You know, "We're going in." "Fine." Nothing official. We said, "What have you heard about holding the water back?" He said, "Oh, I haven't heard much. Probably sometime this month." "Well, that's weird, it was only going to be a couple of weeks." He said, "Well, yeah, it could be or it couldn't be. I don't know, I haven't heard." So we go down, we rig our boats and load the stuff in and put the people on the boats and we start down. As we start down through that first little riffle, we suddenly see this ranger running across the beach, screaming and yelling and hollering at us. And of course we start to pull towards him, and he's screaming, "Can you make it at three hundred?" And we looked and we said, "You mean three thousand?" He said, "I mean three hundred," and obviously the guy's a nut, because they promised they'd never cut it below a thousand. And so we decided we'd be nice and pull in the beach, and straighten the guy out, and said, "Where'd you hear this?" "Oh, I decided to go back and phone after I got through talking to you, and found out they've already shut the water off." "How far did they shut down?" He said, "Three hundred." And so we pulled the boats up on the beach and started walking towards him, we said, "No, you mean probably three thousand." He said, “turn around and look at your boats”. In that amount of time, our boats were already out of the water and we just stood there and watched the rocks grow. They cut it all the way down to three hundred. And so we turned to our people and said, "Folks, there's a neat trip up in Cataract Canyon and we'll take you through Cataract Canyon and Glen Canyon." So we rolled up the boats and fortunately they were ten-mans, and drug them across the sand beach and up to the road and threw them in the truck and put the people up on top of them and drove up to Moab. So my first Grand Canyon trip was from Lee's Ferry to the Paria Beach.

Steiger: That's unbelievable!

Thevenin: And they trapped people in the Canyon. I think Hatch flew over with an airplane. In those days, nobody carried radios, and he was dropping messages with parachutes and things like that, to his people that were in the Canyon, saying, "Get out! Don't stop, don't camp until the water runs out." And trying to get people out of the Canyon, because Bureau of Reclamation gave us no warning whatsoever.

Steiger: How long did that last?

Thevenin: Well, during those years, you can pick up the National Geographics and things like that, and Dock Marston and things like that going down in what they called the sport yaks, which were nothing more than a cheap plastic bathtub. And they'd paddle through the pools and then not carry the sport yaks around the rapids, they would carry them down through the rapids. You could just walk on the rocks that were exposed. You didn't have to go around anything, you just walked through 'em, and carried 'em or drug 'em over the rocks and when you got to a pool of water down below.... So I think, as I remember, it was 1965 we started getting back on the Grand Canyon again.

Steiger: So you guys didn't do a trip that year then in the Canyon?

Thevenin: Well, doesn't it count from Lee's Ferry to the Paria?! (laughter)

Steiger: But, you were going to go. You're on a commercial trip. Had anybody been down there? Had anybody even seen the Canyon?

Thevenin: On paper, or in reality? No! As a matter of fact, no. (laughter) You know, the statute of limitations is over now, I think, but I remember my first license I applied for in Idaho -well, down here you didn't have to have a license or anything, so it made no difference. We just told the people we had something like twelve years of experience running the rivers. Well, if you put all of us together, we did have twelve years of experience, running rivers. You know, about one year each for twelve people, that's twelve years of experience. But when I ran my first trip in Idaho, where you had to have a license, I think I had thirteen years of experience on the Main Salmon before I ever went to Idaho! (laughter) Like I say, statute of limitations is long over, fellows, you can't come after me now.

Steiger: Well, nobody's put it quite so politically. We kind of knew that was the way it was, but man!

Quartaroli: What have been some of the other changes, other differences, at Lee's Ferry? You mentioned you didn't have to check in, you didn't have a license.

Thevenin: Well, the biggest change, yeah. There was a ranger there who was.... I really don't know what he was doing down there. I guess he was just sitting down there. When tourists came by, he'd answer their questions and tell them, "There's a rock, and there's where J.D. Lee built his thingy, and up there is the you know. So he was there to serve the public back in those days. Nice guy, friendly, knowledgeable about the area. People who came to visit him were more than welcome, because they didn't come that often. I'd drive down to Lee's Ferry and the only people we'd see was us. And we put on the river. In fact, even after we started running the river, many times, when you put on the river, there wasn't anybody else down there. I mean, you put on the river, you put on the river. You'd go down the river and say, "Ooo! that looks like another boat party somewhere up ahead," and you'd row like mad to catch up, and they'd row back upstream so you could talk to each other, because you hadn't seen anybody in two or three days, except the people that were with you. So that's one of the other changes, you know. It was an isolated experience back there in those days. Lee's Ferry -actually I think the buildings were in somewhat better shape in those days. They started to deteriorate when more and more people came down. Unfortunately, when someplace suddenly becomes popular, people keep wanting to take souvenirs, and there weren't enough rangers to keep an eye on things, and unfortunately some of the things did disappear down there. And so that's one of the changes. Then the first big change was when the Park Service or whoever it was, granted the Sparkses permission to not only run rivers down there, the Fort Lee Company, but they had the permit and everything planned for a big restaurant up on the hill where the employees' trailer parking is. And there was going to be a big restaurant up there, and they had the store down there, and they moved in a bunch of mobile homes for motel units. And it used to be a real party time down there, and we used to have a great time down there. A lot of the Fort Lee employees all lived up at Lee's Ranch, and that was their headquarters, the employees all lived up there. And we'd rig our boats and then go up and have parties up there with them, and Sparkses built their big warehouse down there. When they went to throw Sparkses out, one of the claims from the Park Service was that -and I can't remember what Tony's dad's name was -but anyway, the Sparkses "had unfair advantage over the rest of the river outfits, because they were there at Fort Lee." I do not ever recall once hearing any outfitter, or any boatman complain about his unfair advantage, except for one person, and that was Tony. Tony complained about it, because he claimed that by being there, his expense was about twenty percent more because he had to cover for all of us whose lifejackets got thrown out by the ranger or we forgot to get the ice, or we forgot this, or we forgot that. "Tony, do you have a pump we can take down with us?" And he maintained that he had to carry twenty percent more inventory to cover for the rest of us. So I do not know where the Park Service ever got the idea that Tony had unfair advantage. In his mind, he probably had an unfair disadvantage.

Steiger: That's great.

Thevenin: So anyway, all of a sudden, they said, "Tony, you gotta be out of there." And the motel units went first, and then the restaurant went. They let the store stay for a little while. Then they threw the store out. And then when the warehouse burned down, somehow -nobody's really clear exactly what happened there, but the warehouse burned down. It was really a sad occasion for most of us, because it was the only air conditioned warehouse that any river outfit had, and it was a great place to go run. You'd get your boat rigged or semi-rigged and couldn't stand the heat any longer, you'd find some excuse to run up to Fort Lee's warehouse and hang out in it. Of course they did have one advantage: they would fully rig their boat, not like some of the outfits do today where they load the boat on a trailer, they get down to the Ferry, then attach the side tubes. No, when that thing left the warehouse, it left it fully rigged, fully loaded, there was nothing to do at Lee's Ferry except back the trailer in the water and it was ready to go. And so therefore, the advantage they did have is their crew was never worn out by the time the boats were rigged, because they were working in the air conditioned warehouse the whole time. Then they finally threw the store out.

Steiger: I kind of remember when that warehouse burned. Back to what Richard was saying. So the rangers, early on, they didn't worry too much about.... It seems like they had a real different attitude (laughs) than they do today.

Thevenin: Yeah, it seems that way. Seems that way to me too. (laughter) I mean, well, in case this gets into print, we won't say too much about the rangers today, but back in those days, they were real friendly guys.

Steiger: Well, and they figured you were on your own....

Thevenin: If you were going to kill yourself, it was your business! And there was no mandate from the government, there was nothing in the regulations. I mean, nothing in their book talked about river running. They weren't responsible for that. Their job was to be tour guides around the little park area, tell people what was going on, and what had gone on there in past history. They were resources of information for the tourists. And there was nothing in the papers about having to have a permit. Utah didn't even start -a bunch of us helped, and I can't even remember what year it was -helped write the Utah rules and regulations for the boating licenses. Suddenly somebody said, "These guys gotta have licenses," and a guy by the name of Ted Tuttle [phonetic spelling] was the Director of Outdoor Recreation or something, Commissioner of Recreation for the State of Utah, and I think the guy's name was Bob Anderson who was the head boating ranger for the State of Utah -which again, they didn't have any contact with us, they were dealing with the power boats on the lakes and things like that, but somebody said, "Now you gotta take care of these guys running rivers." And (laughing) they said, "Golly, gee whiz, folks, we don't know anything about running rivers." So they came to the outfitters and said, you know, "We've gotta come up with a test for you guys, so would you help us?" And so some of the guys from Hatch and some of the guys from Western, and there were probably a couple of the other guides, you know, sat down and said, "What does a boatman need to know?" And then those guys selected the questions they [thought sounded] reasonable, and made up the test and then shipped them out to us to see, because, you know, I might row differently than a Hatch boatman, and it wouldn't mean that his was better or mine was better. So the questions were designed so that it didn't rely upon personal preference, but it did rely upon some knowledge of what was going on. And the test was worked out and a number of us were given the option of.... The one place the State of Utah did lie, Tuttle and Anderson I think told about five of us that because of our cooperation we could all have license number one. And I showed up there, I was the third person to walk through the door, and Glade Ross [phonetic spelling] from Hatch already had number one, and they handed me number three, and it had zero, zero, three on it, and I said, "I thought I was going to be number one." "Well, Glade got here, and we sort of promised him." So okay, fine, you know. Then I happened to think, because James Bond was just hitting the box office in those days, Agent Double "O" Seven, and I said, "Hey, Bob, do all these things have the double "O" in front of them?" He said, "Yeah." I said "Well, I want double 'O' seven." And by that time he'd already handed it to someone else that came through the door, and he walked around and said, "Oh, I've got to have that one back," and gave him number three. So I don't know who got number three, but I got "agent," so those were lifetime licenses, so I am still Agent Double "O" Seven for the State of Utah. (laughs) I can stand on a rock and scream, "I have a license to kill." (uproarious laughter) But anyway, so that was the licensing then.

Steiger: And that was in Utah?

Thevenin: That was Utah. And there were no licenses down here in the Grand Canyon. When I started, they had quit keeping track of people by number. You know, they used to number everybody as they came through the Canyon. I'm really not sure what year they quit that, but it was still a relatively small number, because I think, wasn't it when they did the Powell Centennial in 1969, they figured only twelve hundred people had gone through, and in the year 1972, I think it was twelve hundred people alone went through the Canyon that summer. So back in 1962 when I started it was a very limited number. You probably have better access to the numbers than I do.

Steiger: That was twelve thousand, I think ...

Thevenin: Twelve thousand, yeah.

Steiger: ... was when, in 1972?

Thevenin: Yeah, twelve thousand, not twelve hundred. But I think in 1869 it was only, what....

Steiger: Or 1969. Twelve hundred sounds.... Was probably not far off, because the first two hundred were down through the fifties. I think it took clear through the fifties to get.... What was it? By 1954?

Quartaroli: Something like 1954, yeah.

Steiger: Well, maybe it really took.... I don't know _________________.

Thevenin: So one hundred years, it was twelve hundred. And in one year, in 1972, it was ten times as many as had been down, total.

Steiger: So something happened there.

Thevenin: One of the things that happened was the Kennedys. See, nobody ever heard of river running, and when Goldwater went down, Goldwater's one of those that has a number -I don't know what his number was, you guys probably know.

Steiger: He was in the first 100....

Thevenin: Yeah, he was in the first batch. But when Goldwater would go down the river, there might be a little article in the Wall Street Journal saying, "Goldwater's out of town, running the Grand Canyon," and that would be all there was. But now when the Kennedys started doing things, it was on the front of Life magazine, Time magazine, Newsweek, and I can remember the pictures of Bobby Kennedy standing on the front of the raft, going down the Yampa River with his arms outstretched, and the title underneath saying, "The Kennedys conquer the river." And so there was a lot of publicity, which to us was a lot of foolishness, but it turned out that that foolishness is what turned the public into becoming river runner addicts, and that's where we suddenly got the change from the traditional outdoorsman to everybody and their nephew wanting to run the river because the Kennedys did it.

Steiger: I'm interested in hearing a little more about Jack Curry [Currey], because I never have met him, and I've always been curious. He's kind of a mystery, just kind of what it was like. What was he like? I'll give you about three questions in a row: What was he like? How long did he stay involved in the day-to-day operations? And how did Western grow?

Thevenin: Western boomed. How was Jack? Well, Jack, like I said earlier, was a real personable guy, great salesman, great athlete, great outdoorsman, family man -he had six kids by that time. I guess by that time he only had four, but he had a couple more shortly thereafter. The business was a family business. We would frequently work all day on equipment and stuff and Jack had brought in a couple of sheets of plywood and laid 'em across sawhorses, I remember, in the house, and the tablecloth would go down and we'd all go in and eat. We'd all sit around the table -the boatmen and the family -and it was one great big happy family thing. Just a great way to be. The early ones were, you know, I was there, and Art Fenstermaker, and Clyde Morgan came shortly thereafter, and John Cross, Jr. Then there were some others who sort of would come in and.... Yeah, okay, all of a sudden names at my age disappear. One of the owners of Western today.

Quartaroli: Bill George?

Thevenin: No. Okay, keep going.

Steiger: That's the only one I know.

Quartaroli: That's the only one I know.

Steiger: But Al Harris, Buck Boren [phonetic spelling] and those guys were later?

Thevenin: Oh, those were all later. Yeah, those guys came a lot later.

Steiger: Jake Luck?

Quartaroli: Art Gallenson?

Thevenin: Well, Jake Luck was still way later. Jake Luck came about the same time I left. But anyway, so.... Yeah, he's going to hate me when he reads this and finds out I can't remember his name.

Steiger: Maybe you'll remember before we....

Thevenin: Yeah, we'll provide it if I remember. But anyway, so there were a bunch of the others who would come in and run trips. Roger Upwald -I don't know whether you've even heard that name -would come and run a trip. And there's some other people that would come in occasionally and run trips. Amil Quayle, we ought to probably include Amil Quayle at this time, because Amil Quayle had been on that "friends" trip thing, he and his wife, and Jack was talking about how this was going to be his business, this was going to be his career, and "I'm going to start this thing." Amil was a good country boy from Saint Anthony, Idaho, and he really liked this type of life, and "Jack," he says, "Man, you're going to open that business? I'd love to work for you." And Jack was personable, he said, "Well, yeah, Amil, look me up next year if you're really serious about that, and yeah, you got a job with me." And Amil said, "I'm serious about it. When's that trip going to be?" "Well, you're up there in Idaho, so we'll be up there in Idaho probably about the first of July, and probably have a trip the second of July." And that was it. They talked about how much fun it would be, and I thought... Amil's a good sincere guy. So anyway, we finished running down in Utah and took the stuff up to Idaho and I think the trip was going out the third of July or something, out of Idaho, and we'd taken the stuff up there. In those days, you didn't have a warehouse, you'd go up there to a town and find something that was empty. In this case, we found a guy's garage behind his summer cabin, and that was Western Rivers' warehouse. And we'd gotten all the stuff unloaded and stacked around in big stacks, and we're all tired from the drive and unstacking things, we're lying around as boatmen were even more prone to do in those days, and this guy comes walking in and says, "Hi, is this where Western River is?" and we said "Yeah." He said, "Well, I got a trip going out tomorrow, what do I do?" I said, "You got a trip going out tomorrow?! We don't have one going out for two more days." "No," he said, "I got one going out tomorrow." I said, "Well, no, the office must have told you something wrong in the instructions. What'd they tell you when you called them?" He said, "Well, I didn't call them." I said, "You didn't call them?! Well, how did you get your reservation on the trip?" "Oh no," he said, "I'm not a passenger, I'm a boatman." (laughing) "You're a boatman?! What's your name?" He said, "Amil Quayle." "Any of you guys ever heard of Amil Quayle?" They never heard of Amil Quayle. _____________ Jack _____________, "We're supposed to meet a boatman up here?" "Oh, Jack and I were friends. We talked about this. I'm going to run that first trip tomorrow." "We don't have a trip tomorrow." Somebody called Jack and said, "Jack, did you hire a boatman by the name of Amil Quayle?" And Jack said, "Who?" "We had a guy here who says he's a boatman of yours." But no communication whatsoever between Jack and Amil during that period of time, and Amil just figured if he said to show up, he'd show up. And so Amil drove truck most of.... We finally put Amil on driving truck for most of the summer, got him on a couple of trips, and I guess he didn't even get on the water until sometime in August, but he was a faithful truck driver, and got on the water, he was a good boatman. But there he was, standing there, "Hi, I'm your boatman, Amil Quayle." "Who? What?" So anyway, we digressed on that.

Steiger: Well, it was just the early days. I'm curious to get....

Thevenin: Oh, Jack.

Steiger: Well, Jack and just the early Western.

Thevenin: So Amil was one of these that ended up becoming part of the inner core of the business, and everywhere we went. There were some other strange people: a guy who's now a hospital administrator, Craig Preston, was there in the early days. His father and uncle had took an early liking to river running, and Craig ended up with us shortly thereafter. You mentioned Jake Luck. Well, actually, before Jake Luck got there, when we were out in Vernal, Utah, we did the same thing -we looked for a warehouse and we tried to find someplace that was empty. Then for truck drivers, we'd try to find somebody who knew how to drive a truck and who had some spare time. And Bryce McKay's brother, I think his name was Verle [phonetic spelling], worked at an auto parts place, and we would get Verle to do a lot of our driving, and Bryce McKay was doing construction and Verle a couple of times said, "Gee, I can't really do it, but let me put in my brother. [He] isn't working construction right now, maybe he can drive for me." And so Bryce starting driving for us, and Bryce was a friend of Jake's and so Jake would occasionally come over with Bryce, but Jake didn't actually get into the picture until about 1966, I guess. And I got married in 1966, and for a honeymoon present to my wife in 1967 we took off and went with one of the.... One of our regular customers was Explorers Outdoors, a private group from Syracuse. The guy was a professor at Syracuse University, Dick Stoltz [phonetic spelling], and during the summertime, he would take all these rich kids on a six- or nine-week outdoor tour where they do mountain climbing, do a river trip, do sailing on the ocean, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Canoeing up in Minnesota. We had his group every year as part of our contingent. He said, "Some day, you ought to come with me." So in 1967 is when I left Jack Curry [Currey] and went with Dick Stoltz all summer. I ran with Jack in the spring, and ran with him when I got back off of that trip, but basically for that whole summer I was out, and that's about the summer that Jake Luck showed up. Like I said, I got married, and then the next year I started teaching school, so I wasn't there, available. So I was phasing myself out. When my first kid was due in 1968, I thought, "Well, you know, this is not the way a family man should be." There's some hazards to families and river running. I'm one of the few, I guess, that's been married once. So anyway, I packed up the family and said, "We're moving back to California, we're going to get away from all this foolishness. So I stepped out from Jack Curry [Currey] in about.... Well, it was 1967 I was gone most of the summer, and then the summer of 1968 I worked free-lance, but most of the trips I did run, I ran for Jack. So yeah, it was one big happy family thing. We worked on the trucks, we worked on the equipment. We ate together, we slept together, we did everything together.

Steiger: And traveled around just using those ten-mans, like the early....

Thevenin: Ten-mans, and then there were also some twenty-one-footers. The first year, I think we got two twenty-one footers, and the next year we got some twenty-eight-footers.

Steiger: And you guys would row those things, the twenty-eights?!

Thevenin: Yeah! Now, the twenty-eight-footer, once you learned how to handle it, the twenty-eight-footer was really a lovely boat. And it could be handled by one person. Once you got over the idea that when you had your fourteen-foot oar, you had an awful lot of weight. And you couldn't find commercial oars in those days that would hold up for river runners, so we found some guy in Mapleton, Utah -I don't know what his name is -unofficially around the company he was known as "Hatchet Harry." His oars very seldom broke. You could never find a matching pair, and some of the round handles had not gotten all the square taken out of 'em, from being four-by-fours at one time. But they were strong oars, but they were also very heavy. And so when you'd sit there with the oars dead, it took most of your energy just to hold the oars up, (laughs) because you had such a short distance between your hand and the post, and then you had this great big oar setting out there in the water. But after you got used to it, it really wasn't bad. And there was a real difference between a twenty-eight-footer and a thirty-three-footer, because a twenty-eight-footers only had twenty-four-inch, twenty-eight-inch tubes, whereas the thirty-three-footer had the big thirty-six-inch tubes instead of thirty-three-inch tubes.

Steiger: But you guys would row the thirty-threes too?

Thevenin: Yeah.

Steiger: You rowed 'em all?

Thevenin: We finally decided it wasn't practical for one guy, you just had really very little control. So you would put another guy -you had oar locks mounted up front too -and of course the oar locks in those days were half-inch or three-quarter-inch water pipe pounded down through wooden blocks that were nailed onto the frames. And then the oars had cut-up rubber tires put on 'em with hose clamps in the right position, and bent just a little bit so they'd fit down around the post. And you'd row with them. But anyway, so we started putting a person up front. Or sometimes, if it was customers, we'd put two people up front, one guy on each oar up front. And the brains were supposed to be the guy in the back, and the people up front were supposed to do whatever the guy in the back told him to do, which worked well if they could take orders, and they knew which one was left from right. And there was one other problem, when we put another boatman out there, if he had a difference of opinion on how a rapid should be run -and I remember Little Stinker on Ladore [phonetic spelling] Canyon.... Did you ever run Ladore?

Steiger: Yeah, just one time, but I'm trying to remember it.

Thevenin: Little Stinker was just a rock sitting up in the middle of the river, about, oh, couldn't be more than in about the first fifteen, twenty minutes of the trip. And Lee Sutton [phonetic spelling] was on the front oars, and I was on the back oars, and I got my end of the boat around Little Stinker, but when he put his end of the boat up on the end of Little Stinker and it flipped, unfortunately my end of the boat decided to follow suit, and it was really a tragic event, because it was a ski club, Ooo-ski-boss [phonetic spelling] Ski Club, and the primary reason for ski clubs, I'm convinced, to have an excuse to drink. And I'm a nondrinker, and so they decided that to keep the boatmen from drinking all their beer, they would put all their beer on my boat. And so when I flipped my boat, and we were concentrating on getting the people out of the water, it was terrible, because as soon as we would drag one out, and he would see a can of beer floating down the river, he'd jump back in. And their primary goal (laughs) was to rescue all the cans of beer, and we were trying to count to see if we had everyone accounted for, and it was really not until we got into camp that night that we finally were able to get a correct count of both people and the cans of beer that were lost, and found out there were actually no people lost. So yeah, we did row the thirty-threes. There were some interesting stories. I won't mention names, but we did have one guy who was related to the owner of a company who had a tendency to drink his lunch in those days. This was out on the Stanislaus in California where a thirty-three-footer did not belong, but we ran 'em anyway. All of a sudden I heard this, "C'mon Paul, put your back into it, we can get this thing off the mud bar. C'mon, push, push!" And I said, "Joe! We're still tied to the tree." "Don't worry about that. We can get off this mud bar, put your back into it." I said, "The passengers aren't on the boat yet." "The boat! Quit talkin'! Put your back into it!" And he's up there straining and groaning on the oars and trying to pull the boat down the river, which was probably the easiest part of that afternoon's trip. Because when we did finally get the people in the boat and I said, "Alright guys, get in the boat, he's ready to go," and I untied it, I not only had to drive the thirty-three-footer, I had to overdrive whatever direction he was pushing for. So there were some hazards to having another body up front.

Steiger: ... who had partial control.

Thevenin: Now one of my better front people was, you know Stuart Reeder, but I don't know whether you know Stuart's daddy, Grant Reeder.

Steiger: No!

Thevenin: Grant Reeder was an interesting person. He was a doctor, who somehow got into river running, loved it, decided that he wanted to become a river runner, but he had this commitment to his patients, so he went back to school to be an anesthesiologist so that he wouldn't have direct patients. But then he still felt.... He said, "Okay, I've got an idea. I will form a group." So he took in, as I recall, three partners, and said, "Okay, here's the rules of the organization: I will take all the evening calls, all the weekend calls for nine months out of the year, and then just don't expect to find me for the other three months, I'm going to go boating." And Grant Reeder was frequently on my front oars on the thirty-three-footer. And when Grant was there, then the thirty-three-footer worked quite well.

Steiger: The reason to use them was because you could put so many more people on them? Was that how come you guys used them?

Thevenin: And more people meant more money? Would we have had an idea like that?! Money hungry?! (laughs) I think that was the idea, yes -more customers, less boatmen.

Steiger: So just to trace that evolution, you started out with the ten-mans, and how many people would you have on those?

Thevenin: Oh, we'd sometimes squeeze in six passengers. We might have even squeezed in more than that, I'm not sure.

Steiger: And then you started saying, "Gees, maybe we'd better get a bigger boat"?

Thevenin: Well, the thing is, we found we just didn't have the room to carry things we'd want to carry. So the twenty-one-footers came into existence right that same year, and then the twenty-eight-footers showed up, I think it was about the next year, and [we] phased out the twenty-one-footers. The twenty-one-footer added a whole lot of weight, but didn't add that much more room, where the twenty-eight-footer added a whole lot more room, and I really think it was more manageable than the twenty-one-footer was. And then we found the thirty-three-footer, which was totally unmanageable!

Steiger: But, boy, could you put a bunch of stuff on it!

Thevenin: Oh, could we! We could get ten, twelve people or more on those things!

Quartaroli: What about the "J" rig?

Thevenin: Well, the "J" rig came along after that. Most of these boats that we were using were Army surplus. They were bridge-building pontoons, World War II, and they were built like pontoons, much like most of the boats are today, and there was what we called the donut part of it. They looked like boats, and the military, after they get through blowing up all the bridges, to keep the enemy from coming after them, then when they want to go in and take the city, then they had to build portable bridges. So they would drag these big things out, which were thirty-three-foot long, and they had a sausage that would slap down inside of them, and then they'd strap these things all together across the river, then slap down big planks of lumber across them, and drive the tanks across and into the town. And that's what we were used to, and these things looked like boats, and that's what we were using. And we would look for surplus sales and other places to find them. Hatch boatmen used to be sort of -it was a laughing joke that Hatch boatmen didn't know how to patch, but Hatch boatmen didn't need to know how to patch, because if they got a hole in it, they could put duct tape or something over the hole, and make it back home, and then they'd throw the boat away, because Bus Hatch had somehow collected a whole heap of boats, and he'd just pull another boat out of the swamp. Well, Jack was looking for that same ability, and somebody gave him a contact that there were a whole bunch of boats down in Kentucky or Tennessee or somewhere that the government was getting rid of, and Jack got a real coup. He ended up getting two railroad cars full of pontoons. I recall Gallenson and I unloaded those railroad cars and the vehicles and scooted them out. We said, "There's something wrong with these things, they're not what we want." And when we unrolled them, they were these long, skinny snout things that they had used in the Korean War when the military got smart and said, "Hey, these things are too big for one man to carry," and shoot, it took about four men to carry them. So they said, "Well, let's make them smaller." Instead of making them look like a boat, just what the snouts look like today. And one guy could carry 'em, or two guys could carry 'em easily. And then they'd strap 'em all together, it didn't make any difference which way the river ran, you could butt them together. That's what all the straps in the back end were for, that's what all these "D" rings were for, you could strap them together sideways, you could butt them together, whatever you wanted, for as wide as the bridge was. But they didn't look like a boat. And Jack, when he found out he had two railroad cars full of these things, started mass producing brochures, sending them to all the lakes and recreation centers all over the United States and everywhere he could find, trying to sell these things as bumpers for docks. You know, have this nice air cushion to bring the boat up to so you don't scratch the boat -you know, trying to get rid of them. And they were not selling very fast. (laughter) When the sale was over, we had one and three-quarter railroad cars full of 'em. To me, they looked sort of like the catamarans I've seen out in Hawaii. I said, "Jack, why don't we build a catamaran?" Jack said, "I don't want a catamaran." "Oh, Jack, you gotta do something with these things." "Well, on your own time, you can go ahead and build a catamaran if you want." And so I built the catamaran and decided it was a little bit unstable, so I thought, "Well, why not, instead of one pontoon on each outside edge and dragging the frame across them, just lash them all together sideways." I think I did four tubes together, and put a platform on 'em. Then we thought, "Well, maybe we just need it a little bit wider than that," so we threw in the fifth one. Of course the idea was to row it, and by the time you got five tubes side-by-side, the fourteen-foot oar didn't quite reach, and the longer oars wouldn't reach because they kept rubbing on the outside tube. And so I built this platform that was now a good four or five feet up in the air, so that when you rowed it, your oar would dangle down in the water. And that's about the time I left the company, and Jake Luck came along, and we were almost going to motors by that time. So I left to go on my tour with Dick Stoltz, and Jake came along with his welding machine and changed the wood to metal, and ran it with motors. So I think there was one trip run with that wooden stack tower, and I think that was the only time it was run, and probably the only time it should have been run.

Quartaroli: It'd be fun to see some pictures of that.

Steiger: So it wasn't like, the "J" rig division wasn't like, "I'm going to have a boat with a bunch of these tubes." (laughter)

Thevenin: It was "What are we going to do with these stupid things?!" I say it started out to be a catamaran. There are some people who are upset that Jack takes credit for the creation of the "J" rig. Having driven the "J" rig, I'm content to let Jack have that honor. (uproarious laughter) The early "J" rig -and this was Jake's fault, I blame it all on Jake -when he built the frames, he built them in two sections, which most of 'em are all built now. But the idea was the back section was only for the motor and for the boatmen. And so it was only about three foot long and it only extended over two of the tubes, and the middle tube was cut short. Well, it was just the single tube. The other tubes were butted together, and so you had four outside tubes that were butted together, and the center tube just had the one short tube, and then you'd sink this boatmen box thing down into the slot there, and ran a motor over it. But sitting back there by itself on all that rubber, being only about three foot long and about five foot wide.... You could always tell a Western boatman by his shins -they were bloody and they were bruised, and there were even stories about as a boatman would get to a major rapid, he would line up the boat and then immediately flop to the bottom of the floor, fetal fashion, and brace himself against all four sides of the box and wait 'til the rapid was over, and then get up. It was the only way he could protect his body.

Steiger: Oh man!

Thevenin: And then, of course, the frame, [we] realized it had to be bigger and stretched out over more of the tubes. It was a little less hazardous to the health of the boatman.

Steiger: That's a great story!

Quartaroli: Originally when you butted the tubes, blunt end to blunt end, and you just used those "D" rings and straps....

Thevenin: Yeah, we used the "D" rings and the straps.

Quartaroli: It flexed right there in the middle?

Thevenin: Yes, it flexed considerably.

Steiger: So you absolutely just strapped them together.

Thevenin: Yeah. And then we thought, well, this isn't really working all that well, and by that time we'd really become experts on patching and doing strange things with rubber. Many a boatman was known to volunteer to crawl inside those tubes and do the patching, just because he loved the smell. But you know, when you did all this patching, you finally got to the point, you realized when a guy was inside a tube, there was one guy inside the tube and the other guy outside the tube, and when you'd see the guy's leg completely relax, then you'd drag him out for air. But by that time we were very good at patching. So it did not take very much work to cut off one of those things and then butt it to the other one.

Steiger: Man, that is a great story! What kind of boatman was Jack Curry [Currey], and how long did he stay?

Thevenin: Oh Jack? As a boatman? Like I say, he was an athlete, he was an excellent boatman.

Steiger: And did he run the boats the whole time?

Thevenin: Oh yeah. Well....

Steiger: How did that happen? How did he move out from it?

Thevenin: How'd he move out to being in the office more? Well, as the business grew and grew and grew -I mean, when you start making money and you start thinking you gotta make money, and the business starts to get away from you, you start spending more and more time with the business end. So he ended up finding that he was just spending less and less time on the water, and more and more time playing with paper. And it ended up being left to most of the rest of us. He'd still come up, he'd still make a fair number of trips on the water. He loved the water, and he was good at it. He was good at reading the water, and I remember we had a guy by the name of.... Well, Henry Falany I said came to work for us, and then he ended up going out home. His dad had a fencing business, and his dad said, "You gotta come home and take the fencing business over. I'm going to leave it to you." Then Henry started running rivers out there on the Stanislaus, and then later on I went with him. But anyway, so Jack would occasionally need boatmen, and Henry wasn't too busy, and sometimes I wasn't and I'd come back to work for him. Dennis Prescott was a side-kick of Henry's, and Dennis Prescott, I remember we were on the river one time, and I mean, Dennis was going through oars like mad. And he'd just say, "Jack, the problem is, I'm just too strong for those oars." And Jack just took off with a running stance in that sand, just like a football player and blocked Prescott all the way down about a good twenty yards across the sand, right straight into the river, and Prescott couldn't get a footing or anything else. And Prescott weighed more than Jack did. And Jack just drove him right on out into the river with his shoulders. He says, "Now, if I'm not breaking oars, I don't want you to break any more oars either." And I don't think Prescott broke another oar the rest of the trip! (chuckles) No more comment about, "Well, I'm just too strong."

Steiger: God, we haven't even got to Henry Falany yet. But Western really did explode. Were you there....

Thevenin: I was there for the explosion. When I left, Western was the biggest thing there was going. They were bigger than Hatch, because of the multi-advertising.

Steiger: So that's like you and Jack just doing the advertising?

Thevenin: Well, I wasn't doing the [advertising], Jack was taking care of all that himself. I, like I said, became sort of his right-hand man in the operating of the thing. I would be the warehouse man, I'd be the guy who'd go out and find the warehouse in whatever town we went to, and locate the place to buy the supplies and things of that nature. But Jack was doing the advertising, that was his baby. And with the number of people that came in, we were doing well. This is one of the things that got us in trouble in Idaho, because -I can't remember if I mentioned when we were talking earlier -before [the tape] was running -Andy Anderson up in Idaho was one of the long-time guides in Idaho, and I can remember when I first started going up there, his brochure talked about taking down over three hundred people in the last fifteen years. Well, our first year, Western was taking down three hundred people. And when we started moving into Idaho, and these Idaho guides saw these mass production tours coming down the river, carrying all these people, "This outfit is stealing our customers!" Well, we weren't. We were hitting a completely different audience than they were. And we ended up with some very challenging situations in Idaho, because you did have to have a license in Idaho. And we had licenses, and the good old boys' network up there wanted us out of there, and we went through a lot of court action and things of that nature to establish our right to be there.

Steiger: And what was this audience? Who were these people that were coming with you?

Thevenin: The audience was the boatmen that were up there, the Idaho guides who were taking down like three hundred people in fifteen years -watching us take down.... "Well, these should be our customers!" But these were people that had never heard of river running until they got the mass production advertising from Jack.

Steiger: The guys that you were taking down?

Thevenin: The people we were taking down.

Steiger: Who were those guys? And how did he do it? How did he contact them and stuff?

Thevenin: Well, you know, advertising in newspapers, magazines, things like this. And one of the things we did, we made a TV show, the older people may remember a Jack Douglas series, Across the Seven Seas: Bold Journey, Bold Venture. And Jack went out and found a river in southern Mexico that nobody else had ever run. In fact, it caused a little conflict between Georgie and us because Georgie had gone down there to try to run that river, and had backed out on it.

Steiger: The Grijalva.

Thevenin: The Grijalva. And we went down and ran the river -or Georgie said, "Anybody can carry a stupid boat down a river. They didn't run that river!" So Georgie did not look kindly upon us because when the reports came out, it mentioned that "the famous Georgie White, Woman of the River," had attempted this thing and failed. And she didn't like the word "failure" associated with her name. We're not the ones that put it on there, but.... My first meeting with Georgie was something else again. To digress very quickly, John Cross and I were running Glen Canyon, and this was the summer after we'd done this TV show down there. And we were just about to pull into camp, and Georgie came whipping by us and grabbed the camp. We thought, "Well, what the heck, she has the right." But John and I had never met Georgie White, so we just went on down river a ways, found another camp and worked like mad to get our people fed and then told the people, "Now, you stay here, we're going to run up to the other camp," because we wanted to meet Georgie White. And on the way up, just as we got to her camp, there was one of her people down there by the river, and she recognized our boats from the TV show. She said, (excitedly) "Oh, you're the guys that ran that river down in Mexico. Oh, it's so wonderful! Oh, I was so excited when I watched that thing!" And all of a sudden this voice comes, "You don't know shit about river running, you get your ass up into camp and you don't be down here talking to these people! And you guys...." And I won't repeat all the language she said, but she talked to us and gave John and I the feeling that we weren't really welcome there, and we did the only thing two good substantial boatmen could do -we put our tails between our legs and ran like mad! (laughter) That was my first meeting with Georgie, and she was still miffed about we had done the Grijalva and she hadn't, and the words that came along with it when one of her passengers started telling us how wonderful it was. That did not sit well with Georgie. But anyway, so it was things like that. We took on things that- we had some other people up in Salt Lake that were doing adventure things that we cooperated with. There was a Bill Burge [phonetic spelling] series. There was a guy -I know him well (chuckles) -again the name disappeared -but did a lot of that. He was in radio up there in Salt Lake, and as a sideline, he did adventure shows. Mel Hardman! I don't know whether anybody's ever heard of Mel Hardman, but in radio, you could be whoever you wanted to be, and (mimicking deep bass voice) "Mel Hardman" when you'd hear that name, what do you think of? "This is Mel Hardman with the sports report." How do you picture Mel Hardman? Big, muscular. Mel was a great guy, but he was not tall, he was not muscular, his waistline probably matched mine, and he was not an Adonis -but his voice on radio! And my wife had heard Mel Hardman many times on the radio. I would keep popping back into radio or I would associate with my old friends on radio, and Mel Hardman had done one of his adventure films with us. And my wife loved Mel Hardman. And at that time we weren't husband and wife, we were just going together off and on, in between her various engagements. She got engaged a couple of times while we were going together, because I'd take off and be disappeared for a number of months, come back to find out she'd been engaged -but that's another story! But anyway, so Mel Hardman did this thing, he was having this big showing, and my wife said, "Oh, I want to go meet Mel Hardman." I said, "No, you don't, dear." She said, "Yes I do, I've always wanted to meet Mel Hardman." I said, "No, no dear, you do not want to meet Mel Hardman." She said, "You're jealous." I said, "No, I'm not." And she was very unkind when I introduced her to Mel Hardman. I took her over to Mel and said, "Mel, Loretta would like to meet you," and she looked at him and said, "You're not Mel Hardman!" (mimicking deep bass voice again) Because Mel Hardman, on radio (returning to own voice) did not look like Mel Hardman in real life. But anyway, we did a lot of this stuff, which was unusual. One of the other things that got us a head start in Idaho was a lot of the old-time guides did not like the Forest Service, and that's who was controlling things up there. Now we may have some differences of opinion with the Park Service, but we've learned through the years, we have to work with these people. Now, some of these guys up in Idaho, they were great guides, they were wonderful, they're the type of guys that legends are made of. But they were also cranky, and they could be cantankerous, they could be stubborn. And when the Forest Service sent out their photographer from Washington D.C., to do a brochure on outdoor life in Idaho, these guys wouldn't cooperate, and we did! So for a number of years there, all of the pictures of river running in Idaho was not the Idaho guides....

Steiger: "Courtesy of Western"?

Thevenin: Courtesy of Western River Expeditions. It also turned out, a number of years later, just before Henry gave up his Idaho license, we went up there to make one more trip down, and they'd established a visitors center there at Corn Creek. And we're in there looking at the pictures on the wall, and half the pictures are of Henry and me and other WhiteWater boys, and we're standing there going.... And the little ranger's over there, one of the seasonal rangers, all happy to greet the people, and wants to talk to them about things, and Henry and I are talking about, "Hey, that's a good shot of you," "Yeah, I remember that shot of you too." And the guy's saying, "Are you guys really in those pictures." So Henry and I stood up alongside the pictures and smiled, and he says, "Well, those could be you!" I said, "They are us." And the little ranger almost fell apart. (hyperventilates) "I'm seeing history right here before my eyes!" So anyway, so that was another way we got a lot of advertising, and we may not have agreed with the Forest Service, but they're there, you gotta deal with them. We dealt with them, they said, "Well, will you pose for the pictures?" and we said, "Yeah! We'll pose for the pictures!" And so "courtesy of Western River Expeditions," and the word got out.

Steiger: So the early Grand trips -what was your first Grand Canyon trip like?

Thevenin: We had shifted to the idea on Cataract Canyon and Desolation Canyon and Glen Canyon that you really needed to have a motor, because in those days -I hate to say it -the philosophy was, if it's more than fifty feet off the river, it doesn't exist. We were there to run the rapids, and there are some rather long stretches in the Grand Canyon that don't have rapids. And there were even longer stretches in Glen Canyon that didn't have rapids. And motors became a necessity. So when we made our first trip through the Grand Canyon, we carried a motor on about every third boat, and we'd lash it up. We'd extended the rowing frame -some of you are familiar with the old tail-draggers that stayed around for a long time. It was not that we liked it better that way, but boatmen logic and evolution don't always go together. So we had a rowing frame, and so to stick a motor on the back end, we just stuck a couple of boards on, made the rowing frame a little bit long. At least we had sense enough to put them together with pins, and just hang the motor frame right out over the water, which was a terrible place to run a motor anyway, for those of you that have ever sat on the back tube, it's a lot of action. But anyway, so we'd already adopted this policy, and so my first trip down the Grand Canyon, we're tooling on down the Canyon, and every time we run a rapid, we row the rapids, and then we get down in the calm water, we'd drop the motor frame over the side and drop the motor on it, because we could also pull the frame up out of the water. And we ___________, "There's no real point in dragging the frame up, it doesn't hit the rocks that hard." And then we'd hang the motor from it -we didn't want to leave the motor back there. So we'd pull the motor up, run the rapid, hit the calm pond, put the motor back in, hook up two more boats behind us, and drag them through the calm water and go on down. And Jack's philosophizing, as Jack frequently does, "You know, Georgie runs everything with a motor." "Yeah, Jack, that's fine." "We ought to try that sometime." "Yeah, Jack, fine, we ought to try it sometime." "We ought to try it on the next rapid." "Jack, the next rapid is Lava." "Yeah, I know that, we ought to try it." "Jack, the next rapid is Lava." "Yeah, we ought to try that." Now, this, as I remember, was, I think Jack had made one trip down the Grand Canyon, but this is my first trip down and I'd never seen Lava before.

Steiger: And these are Army ten-mans?

Thevenin: These are ten-mans, and we had the thirty-three-footers for support boats, carrying all the garbage.

Steiger: So you would hang motors off those too?

Thevenin: No, we wouldn't hang the motors off the thirty-threes. We'd just drag them along behind one ten-man, because we had the frames built for the ten-mans. And there'd be this little ten-man, dragging a thirty-three-footer behind on a rope.

Quartaroli: With nobody rowing?

Thevenin: No, we'd put the oars up while we're dragging it. But then we get to Lava, Jack has decided, "Okay, we're going to run it." "Jack, shouldn't we try it on something else first?" "Nah, this'd be a good chance." So we get there, and again we had passengers running the boats, so you know, the idea is, we'll take our boat through, and then we'll go back for the other boats. And my boat's the thirty-three, I'm rowing the thirty-three with Grant Reeder up front. We go through, and it was a messy run. I've got a couple of beautiful pictures of it some passengers took. As he shot the picture, all you can see is the top of Grant's hat and two of the oars sticking out through the water. I mean, the boat is totally, thoroughly underwater. This is a thirty-three-footer, and you can't see the boat. You can see Grant Reeder's hat, and you can see two oars sticking out.

Steiger: You guys went down the right?

Thevenin: Went down the right. That was the only place we knew to go, you know!

Steiger: Hey, sometimes it's the only place there is to go!

Thevenin: But anyway, we made it through. It was a lousy run, but we made it through. And Jack said, "Okay, go up and get the other boat," but we don't trust motors, we're still oarsmen. So Amil was on the trip, and so Amil is going to man the oars in case anything goes wrong. Now, if you're gonna run rapids....

Steiger: Jack tells you, "You guys go up and run this motorboat down"? It's not like he's gonna do it.

Thevenin: No, Jack was gonna do it, and Jack did it, he ran one through. But anyway, Amil and I go up, but we're not gonna trust the motor. So Amil was poised there with the oars ready, and I'm on the motor. And you can run rapids with motors, and you can run rapids with oars, but my advice to anybody is do not run them with both. As soon as I would get the boat lined up, a wave would come up and slap that oar that Amil had at the ready, and spin the boat around, and I'd be back there on the motor, straighten it out, as soon as I get it straightened out, a wave would slap the other oar and spin it the other way. And I mean, we're just zig-zagging all the way down there, with the waves slapping Amil's oars, and me trying to straighten the boat out. And it was a miserable mess, but we made it through. And Jack wasn't letting any of the passengers ride with us -it was just Amil and me. I think it was Amil. And so then we go back up and do another one, and it's the same thing -it's a miserable run, slapping those oars all over the place -but we make it through. And the customers started complaining, "Well, they made it through, why can't we ride?" Jack said, "Okay, some of you guys can ride. And so we all go up and get in the last boat to go through, and I'm tooling down there, and I finally got it all figured out, and I go into everything and I have never made a better run of Lava in my life! I am doing great, and even hitting the water on Amil's oars is not enough to budge me out of position. I've anticipated, I am doing it beautifully. I've got one hole left to go, and I'm mentally reaching back and patting myself on the back, and I looked down and I saw the sky, and I looked up and I saw the water. (others chuckle) And the guys on the bank said that it was the most graceful flip they've ever seen in their life. So often when a boat flips, it hits that wall of water and it shudders and it bounces, and it's looking like "should I or shouldn't I flip?" And they said this boat had no decision to make whatsoever, it was smooth. It just went into that thing, up the curl on the wave, and didn't even slow down and went right straight over, without a shudder. And I got to swim Lava, the bottom part of it. So anyway, so I think that was my first full trip down through the Grand Canyon, where we did it with oars and motors.

Steiger: And a thirty-three and the ten-mans, and you drug the thirty-threes and motored through the flats.

Thevenin: Yup.

Quartaroli: So is that where Katie Lee's expression, "My God, a garbage scow!" because he used to put the garbage in the thirty-three?

Thevenin: Yeah. Well, in those days we didn't always carry the garbage out. In those days we used to bury things. There was still room to bury them. When we started digging holes in the ground and all we found was garbage, we decided that was the time to carry it out. You couldn't find a new garbage hole.

Steiger: Now what year was that, the first time clear through?

Thevenin: Hm, must have been about 1965. I think it was two years after they closed it down, there was enough water to go through. Now I think Jack had made one trip without me through it, and then I was on the second trip that Western made through there. But I could be wrong, it could have been Jack's first trip through there too.

Quartaroli: So he was, at that time, starting to do several trips? He was getting ready for a full Grand Canyon season.

Thevenin: Yeah. The thing is, the Grand Canyon was not what you call a big seller, because prior to the dam -and as much as some people may hate the dam -prior to the dam you had your spring runoff, which you didn't want to run, although Georgie says she ran it at 110,000 on a spring runoff, which was probably a very interesting ride, especially over House Rock -Bedrock, I mean -and House Rock too, and a couple of those other things. And then it wasn't very long after that that it was too low to run. And then guys would go up north and run the other rivers. And so Grand Canyon was not a big seller. There wasn't that much time to plan it. You'd say, "Okay...." and you'd couch your advertising saying, "This is when the trip's going to go, assuming water conditions are satisfactory." But after the dam went in, then you could start planning for it. You at least had some idea you were going to have a certain amount of water down there. It was after that time that they started playing games with all the fluctuations, but the first few trips down there, it was a very low release. But as I remember, it was a steady release. It was a low release. It was a pain, because there were rocks all over the place, and it was a different Grand Canyon than what the boatmen know today. But it was consistent, and it was then basically all year round. Then when they started to get the dam a little fuller, then it started to be the fluctuation power demand from Phoenix.

Steiger: I've heard from several people that Grijalva story's really wild, just that whole trip.

Thevenin: It was. And if we can take a quick potty break, we'll come back and talk about the Grijalva.

Steiger: Okay. (tape turned off and on) ... about how you used to do the orientations for Henry, and you would just make the orientation last....

Thevenin: Until the boatmen got there, yes!

Quartaroli: As long as needed.

Steiger: However long it took.

Quartaroli: That happened to me one time. Bear and I just got off and we were bringing ice chests and duffles and different things, and the bus was already there and gone. We passed the empty bus heading back to Vegas, and we got there and Paul's doing the same thing that Bruce[Winter described in another interview... stretched out his talk until the boatmen arrived.] Said, "Give an orientation, and here's your boatmen." (chuckles)

Thevenin: It was funny, one of the years I decided I was leaving, and I wasn't going to come back anymore.... I've retired from river running so many times, I can't remember how many times. But anyway, I said, "Okay, I'm not coming back anymore." And I'm starting to give my little old dissertation, and fortunately the Park Service didn't have the rules then that they have now about, you can't rig during the time people are leaving. And we had probably about eight other companies that were down there rigging and stuff, and I started giving my orientation to my people, and all of a sudden, every truck starts moving, and they form a gallery around behind all the people (laughing obscures comment) and _____________ all climb up in the rafters of their truck, sitting up there. I'm looking at them, they're all sitting up there, staring down at me, while I'm giving the orientation to my people. The people all have their backs toward the trucks and they're wondering why I keep looking up -guys smiling and making gestures at me and things like that. As soon as I finally finished the [orientation] all of a sudden, from behind all of the people comes this loud applause. They turn around and here's all these trucks in a big semi-circle around me giving the orientation.

Steiger: The most famous orientation. I remember watching some of those. I remember watching you put some of those trips on.

Thevenin: A couple of outfits would send their people over. "Hey, go over there, that guy's going to give the orientation now. There's the guy, he's already giving the orientation, go ahead, go on over." And I'd end up giving orientations to about two or three outfits.

Steiger: Well, tell us about the Grijalva.

Thevenin: Okay, the Rio Grijalva. Well, the Rio Grijalva is a river down in Mexico, the southern State of Chiapas, which nobody'd ever heard of until the last couple of years when the Indians down there decided to rebel against the Mexican government. And I actually found out who the leader was, he was the son of a rich lawyer from Tampico, so he wasn't even a local down there. But anyway, up until that time nobody had heard of the State of Chiapas -in fact, the average Mexican didn't know the State of Chiapas existed. It's about fifty years behind the rest of Mexico. But anyway, Jack, in looking for places to do big name stuff had somehow located a couple of places and then zeroed in on, he'd flown down and looked at a number of places where we could make headline material, and decided on this one down in the State of Chiapas, El Sumidero Canyon is only about sixteen miles long, and most of the river is basically fairly flat except for two sections, the El Sumidero Canyon, which means "the drain," and Mal Paso Canyon, which means "the bad pass." And there's a little stretch of calm water in between the two canyons. Well, when Jack looked at it, you know, El Sumidero had never been run, Mal Paso had been run, and legend has it the army of Cortez tried to go through there, and they ended up killing a whole bunch of people, attempting to get through there and backing out and giving up on it. And legend has it that a lot of the Indian tribes down there tried to go through the canyon and never made it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now the interesting thing about the canyon is that there is a lookout point, you drive to the top of the mountain and you can see almost the whole canyon from about three thousand feet up. So you can see everything in the canyon, the whole time, but getting down into the canyon, you're down in tough water. And so some of the pictures we shot from up above, when I explain to people about the pictures, they say, "Well, gee, those rocks don't look very big," I say, "Well, what you have to realize is this picture is shot from three thousand feet up, and those boulders you're talking about are as big as a three-story house." And then they suddenly take the thing into perspective, because the Grijalva carries as much water as the Grand Canyon does. And going through that canyon, it gets tight and sticky and all that stuff. And there's some humongous waterfalls. And even in the thing, _______ mentioned that the great Georgie White had attempted to go through there and had to back out. So anyway, Jack found this and decided, "Well, gee, sixteen miles, you know, we've got to be able to put together a trip that's a little longer than that, so we were going to do El Sumidero, go through the calm water and go through Mal Paso as well. And then Jack Douglas said, "Okay, I'll send the photographer and I'll foot the expenses for the film, but I don't know what kind of story I'm going to get out of this, so I won't put any money into the trip." So Jack had to go out and find people that had money that were also interested in taking on a new venture like this. Well, the sixteen miles actually ended up taking us eleven days. We were headline material in all the Mexican papers, especially down in that area, and we had a number of things up in the States. It was covered in Life magazine, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, a number of things did articles on our run down there. And we also made the TV show. But the canyon itself was one that was not runable. We got into it, the people in the community all gathered on the bridge that went over the beginning of the thing -it was nice calm water at that point -all staring down at these crazy gringos doing this. "Why do you want to do this?!" And we went in the first day and just floated on down and camped the first night, and next day got up and came to this twenty-six-foot waterfall. It didn't go straight down, but it went down in about three stages, twenty-six foot, which is a little steeper, even than Lava. And we decided, "Okay, we're gonna have to line this thing." Carry the stuff around and line the boats down. But we want to get good shots of it, so we'd taken along three twenty-one footers and a ten-man -actually, I think it was a seven-man -just for a little support boat with a motor on it. And so we (swish!) went across the river, put the photographer on the other bank of the river, so he could get the shots of our action of lining and portaging and all this other stuff, with the river in the foreground. And we got part of it done that day, then decided, "Okay, it's time to go get the photographer." Art Fenstermaker and I were going to go get him, but Art was tying up some other details and Jack said, "Well, I'll go ahead and drive the boat," and I was going over just to help him, in case he needed to edge it upriver or something. We got over to the other side and picked up the photographer, and he got in the boat. In getting in the boat, I was holding the boat and letting him get in, and I was trying to make more room for him to get in, so I was in motion while he was in motion, and Jack was in a hurry to get going, and he gunned the motor before everything was set down, and as he peeled out on the river it just sort of did a nice little peel out in the river and up and over it went, right at the head of the twenty-six-foot waterfall.

Steiger: Turned over?

Thevenin: Turned over.

Steiger: Oh, my God!

Thevenin: And there we are right at the head of the waterfall. Well, Jack is in the back of the boat, close to the shore, and like I say, he was a great athlete, and could have had a swimming scholarship, and he just started stroking like mad and grabbed some of the rocks, right before the falls, and then climbed up on the rock and sort of dove in and jumped from rock to rock and diving, got to shore. Well, the photographer, whose name was Bob Moran [phonetic spelling], who later came back with us on a number of other adventures, and actually became my roommate for a couple of years, because we had so much fun on this trip. (others chuckle) But anyway, he and I are dangling from this now upside down boat, and we're on opposite sides of the boat, drifting right towards the head of this twenty-six-foot waterfall. And I found out that this guy was one photographer who really wasn't committed to his business. Because most photographers, you know, no matter what happens, they're going to do what?

Steiger: Hold onto the camera.

Thevenin: And so I muscled myself up so I can lean over the top of the bottom of the boat and say, "Bob, have you still got the camera?" And at that stage of the game, Bob let me know that the camera was not really what was on his mind.

Steiger: Like _______________________.

Thevenin: Anyway, we washed right up to the head of the falls, and there was a rock there, and the boat (splurge!) [wrapped] right on that rock, and Bob was dangling down one side of the waterfall, and I was dangling down the other side. And I was more in the mainstream. In those days we were much more the image of outdoorsmen than boatmen are today. We didn't run around in shorts and thongs and things like that. I mean, we wore manly clothes -we wore Levis and cowboy boots and things like that. Anyway, so I'm dangling over the waterfall, and the waterfall rips off one of my boots. The other boot was too tight around the ankle, it couldn't get off, so it ripped the sole completely out of the boot.

Steiger: This is a cowboy boot?

Thevenin: Yeah.

Steiger: So in other words, you're having to hang on pretty good.

Thevenin: I'm hangin' on as strong as.... And I'm watching my grip slowly go. And my grip goes before Bob's goes, and so I go (spew!) down through the slot, which then allowed the boat to slide Bob's way, and he slid off to the side and went over the first four-foot drop and got washed into sort of a back-eddy and got into the shore. Now, he was a good photographer, and he was a nut, because the next day when it got light and [he] got one of the other cameras, then they did put that boat back into that little pool again and had Bob crawl down and crawl underneath so here you got the scene of the waterfall all over the place, and the boat just looking like it's going to go [in], no it's going to bounce back and go out, and if at any time something had of gone wrong, he could have gone the rest of the way the next day. And so we have the picture on the film of him climbing out from underneath the boat. It's staged, but it's basically what had happened the night before when there was no camera going. Anyway, so I went down the center slot and we'd given people all these lectures, you know, if you get in the water, you make sure your lifejacket's on good and tight, and then you aim so that your feet go downriver and you hold your hands out, right? You know, just the way we teach people, if you get caught in a rapid, get your feet and then sort of block with your hands. And so I'm in this waterfall in this position, with my feet and my hands out in what I think is in front of me. However, I soon discovered that my body is not going that direction, as my head bashes solidly into a rock -ooo! -and then I decided there's only one position for this, and that's the fetal position, with my hands securely over the top of my head. And I'm bouncing around down there, and it tears my lifejacket in half, rips the collar completely off and everything else, and I'm....

Steiger: This was like a Mae West?

Thevenin: Yeah, the good old ones, the good solid ones -the ones that'll last any test the Coast Guard and give 'em. They didn't last that test! But anyway, I'm down there, I'm being beat to pieces under the water, and I only have so much air left in my lung capacity. I played tuba in the band, I got good lung capacity, but even that's going to give out. And I finally decided, "I'm gonna die." And now this'll show you what kind of a man I am. You know, there's people, as they're about to die, they realize, the thoughts that flash through their minds. And I had gone through home before I went to Mexico, and my parents had given me my Christmas present and said, "Now don't open 'til Christmas," and so I was a good boy and I left my presents all behind in Salt Lake, and at the moment that I realized that Death is there, my thought was, "I should have opened the presents!" (laughter) About that time, I guess my thoughts, the other side decided I wasn't ready to come to heaven or go to hell yet, so all of a sudden, blap!, I blast to the top, and I'm up on the top. "I think that's a lovely rosy sunset I see up ahead of me." And then I realized that that isn't the sunset, and that isn't roses, that's blood pouring out of the top of my head. And so I started swimming like mad for.... A lot of people said, "Weren't you unconscious?" It's a good thing I wasn't, because a short ways downriver was a sixty-four foot waterfall, which I'm just as glad I didn't go over that one. But anyway, so I managed to do some stroking over to a rock, got up on the rock and started poking around, and found the hole, right up in the very top of my head, and pushed my finger on the top of my head for a while, because, you know, most of those cuts aren't very deep, but they bleed like mad. So I'm sitting there on the rock looking around with my finger on my head, and the guys are way over on the other bank, running down. All three of us thought that the other two were dead, because when Jack grabbed the rocks, he looked down and saw both Bob and me go over the falls, and when Bob got dropped off four foot down, he couldn't see upriver and see Jack, and he figured anybody that went down through the center was obviously dead, and I got down there and I didn't know they'd dropped off along the way, and I figured (chuckles) gee, I'm not supposed to be alive and the other two definitely aren't. So we all thought the other two were dead. And of course the people on the shore on the other side knew exactly where everybody was, what the game plan was.... and I'm there with my finger on top of my head, sitting on a rock. Then they all realized that the other two, they could still get back across the river by taking one of those boats way upstream and rowing it across, picking up the other two, and then rowing back across. But there was no way they could get down to where I was, because past that waterfall was a sheer cliff on that side. And so I got in that little bay over there, finally got to shore, figured I'd better get there before I ran out of blood. And they could run down the opposite shore and semi communicate with me. Of course it was a terrible loud roar, and one of the guys, John Cross, Jr., had played baseball. And so they decided I needed some food, and the only thing that they could get across were oranges. They tried throwing tins of tuna, but John couldn't get a grip on the tuna to get it all the way across the river, so the only thing he got across the river were oranges. Now, if you ever get a chance to see the movie, for some reason, Bob Moran, when he narrated it and cut it and edited it, he put it in reverse order, that we had finished all the portaging, and then somehow I'd gone over the falls, and then they came immediately and got me. But I was over there for two-and-a-half days.

Quartaroli: Sitting on a rock?

Thevenin: Well, I got up on the beach. One other thing he did get across, they threw across one of those little waterproof cans that had matches in there. And with my great intelligence I found this sort of little cleft in the rocks where there was a bunch of driftwood. And I figure, okay, if I get the fire going on the bottom, it will slowly burn up, and I'll have a nice fire all night long. The driftwood was much drier than I'd anticipated, and I was soon faced with the idea that if the fire kept going much longer, I was going to be forced off my beach back into the river. So I got up the cliff above it and started kicking all the driftwood down to make a fire break in the driftwood, before I ended up back in the river. But anyway, so they actually hadn't portaged much of anything, just some of the equipment, but the boats were still up there, to do the lining and all that. And in lining the boats, they did lose one of the boats. The oarlock rigging came unhinged from three of its connecting points, and stayed connected with the other one, and it just ripped around inside that boat and tore it to pieces. And so then they were a little more careful with the other ones. So finally they got everything down, then they came across the river and picked me up. The nice thing about it is, I did get out of two-and-a-half days of work!

Steiger: Oh man!

Thevenin: Anyway, so we went on down the river. They checked me, and we had two doctors on the trip -I mentioned the Prestons earlier -the two Drs. Preston were on the trip -one was a dentist and one was an ophthalmologist, but, you know, they had some medical training. No, I guess the one was a G.P. [general practitioner]. They gave me shots and examined the head and said, "Well, it could be broken," and it was broken, we found out, we X-rayed it later.

Steiger: Yeah? Fractured skull?

Thevenin: Fractured skull. It was a three-way fracture.

Steiger: And you were over there for two days with this before you ever even got any....

Thevenin: Now many people assume that when you get a fractured skull, you have a concussion. I can tell the kids, and when I was teaching school, "No kids, you got the wrong idea, you gotta place things in order. To get a fracture you have to have what? You have to have a bone. To get a concussion you have to have a brain. And all I got was the fracture!" So I was perfectly safe. Later on the trip we helicoptered a guy out. The government provided a helicopter that came over for daily reports so they could put it in the newspaper and everything else, and we did get a guy who we helicoptered out ostensibly because he had a sprained ankle. Actually, the real reason we helicoptered him out is because he was barfing so badly at night from fear and indigestion and everything else, that he kept the rest of us awake. So anyway, a broken head, I could stay. A sprained ankle, the guy went. But anyway, so we ran into a bunch of other things all the way down. Like I said, it took us eleven days to get through it. We came to one where Jack said, "Well, we're going to have to line this," and Cross, Fenstermaker, Morgan, and I said, "Jack, get all the people to say they don't care whether they lose their luggage or not, and we will run all the boats through." And Jack said, "Do you think you can make it?" We said, "No, but we'd rather die trying, than do another portage." And we ran it through, and it was a whale of a ride. So we made it through with all of them. There were some fantastic passes down there, it made a great movie, it was definitely unrunnable. And we were supposed to be in National Geographic, but National Geographic, as you know, is the ultra-snob magazine as far as photography and clarity of photography goes, and some of our pictures were not up to their standards, and they said, "Well, if you go back and do it again and get some better pictures, we'll run the story, because it's a great story." And we said, "Well, we'll skip National Geographic this time," because we weren't anxious to go back and get more pictures. People said, "Would you do it again?" and I said, "No." But anyway, we did not run Mal Paso at that time, because we spent eleven full days in the canyon. In the film Bob says, "We were all united to conquer this canyon." Well, it wasn't so, because we had to put down a number of semi-rebellions who wanted to call in the helicopter and helicopter everybody out. But we had our ulterior motives, we were not interested in just having a successful run of the canyon, we wanted a big advertising promo, and backing out in the middle of it was not going to be a success. All those people had to worry about was their lives -we were worried about advertising. So advertising took precedence over life. So we made it.

Steiger: Now this must have been before you got married, huh?

Thevenin: Yes. As a matter of fact, I mentioned I was going with the girl I am now married to, off-and-on'ish, and when the news hit the papers in Salt Lake that I had almost gotten killed down there, she went out and got engaged. (laughter)

Quartaroli: To somebody else.

Thevenin: To somebody else, yes.

Steiger: Again. You were gone. Now this boat -I'm trying to visualize how it actually flipped.

Thevenin: Well, it was a very fast current, and there was a little bit of wave action. We're against the beach in calm water, and he comes pulling out from a rock, going at full throttle in a turn, and the water just caught that nose as it went around, and just sort of pushed the nose up. And as the rest of the boat came out of that turn, it just kept pushing that top edge up and over. And again, it was a very nice, calm, peaceful [slow rollover?]___________.

Steiger: Oh, okay, so there was a pretty good eddy line right there.

Thevenin: Yeah, there must have been. So in other words, the boat went out in the current and just....

Steiger: So you went over downstream.

Thevenin: As soon as that nose went out in the stream, it went over. That's why Jack was able to get to shore, because he was still basically.... The boat had pushed itself out in the current, but it was still close to the current back-eddy, rock protective line. (Steiger whistles)

Quartaroli: It's just like hitting that eddy line in a kayak and just ______________.

Steiger: Okay, so you went over upstream.

Thevenin: We were running upstream....

Steiger: And you flipped. It caught your tubes, sucked you down, and you went over. You didn't flip?

Thevenin: No, no.

Steiger: You did flip going down.

Thevenin: In other words, it caught the bow, pushed the bow up. Instead of the water catching us and pushing the close tube down, it pushed the other tube up. And it wasn't water pulling it down, it was that current action, just pushing.

Steiger: Pushing on the bottom of the boat.

Thevenin: Well, actually, it caught the nose. It caught the nose and was turning the nose, while the rest of the boat was still trying to be going upstream. So it was actually buckling the boat, which then made the nose turn over. (Steiger whistles) I think.

Steiger: That's amazing.

Thevenin: At that stage of the game, I was probably not doing a good, qualitative analysis. (laughter)

Steiger: Sounds like it happened really quick.

Thevenin: I was looking at the rocks in the waterfall, which we'd been looking at all day long, realizing that a boat could not make it, and knowing that I might be more fragile than a boat, I was anticipating.... I tell a lot of people, "Well, what they did was, they threw me over the rapid first to see if it would be safe for a boat, and then decided they'd better line the boat, after I came up broken." But it was great publicity!

Steiger: Oh man, two days, John Cross Jr. is throwing you oranges! That's incredible.

Thevenin: But we had lots of fun activities down there in that canyon. And as far as I know, we are the only ones to do it, except one year, in a drought year when the river, for all practical purposes, dried up, one of the Mexican hiking groups known as the Pañuelo Rojos, "Red Handkerchief Boys," because they all wore red scarves, hiked the canyon and they hiked down the waterfall that I went over. And by the way, we were allowed to name all the points in the canyon, because we were the only ones that did it. So that one is now known as Paul's Falls. So I went over, and the Pañuelo Rojos did a belaying down the same waterfall, because it was all rock then. (Steiger whistles) But we had a lot of support from the government. The Mexican government was there, the Governor came and gave us a farewell, and then when we finally did get back to town, he gave us a big congratulation party. The Governor was there, the Mayor of the city was there, and they all came to say hello to us, and we came out at the village of Chica Juasin [phonetic spelling], which again, most people would never find on a map. And the people down there couldn't find it on a map, because most of them didn't have a map. And when the Governor came flying in, in his helicopter into the city square, they were greatly amazed, because none of them had ever seen a governor before in their life. So it was quite an event. They had a big state party for us when the whole thing was over with, and we were hobnobbing with the Governor and the Mayor and the bigwigs in town, and we were the big things. We even sent them a copy of the movie and let them show it in their town square whenever they wanted to. We came back to that town quite often, because when we started running Mal Paso, we did run Mal Paso after that on a regular basis.

Steiger: So that was doable?

Thevenin: Mal Paso was doable, I did find myself in the water one more time thinking, "Well, I've been here before, I'm now out of air." Although it wasn't a pounding thing, it was just a great big huge one. I came shooting out of this thing, and the guy on my front oars caught his oar and it just pole vaulted him way out into space and into the water. As I was trying to figure out how I was going to get him out, then a big wave of water came over and threw me in, and I went straight down. This time I could see. In hitting me, it knocked most of my wind out, so I'm down there thinking, "I've been here before. I'm going to die. You know, it's much more pleasant this time." But I popped to the surface and lived. And so Mal Paso was not an easy run -in fact, probably one of the more dangerous things on the Mal Paso run, like I said, Mexicans enjoy watching gringos do strange things that they would never do. They were building the Mal Paso Dam at this time, and we got down there, and by stopping above the dam, we had this huge miserable climb to carry things up. We probably hadn't scouted things as well as we might have ahead of time, but when we got down there, and we talked to the people building it and the head engineer, he said, "Oh, the diversion tunnel. Go through the diversion tunnel with your boats." Why not? And so we coasted up to the diversion tunnels and Jack becomes a little nervous, because now all the Mexican workmen are lining the bridge and the dam and everything else to watch all this, and they're smiling and laughing and joking and everything else, and we're thinking, "Wait a second." They're all, you know, out there making bets on what's going to happen. We thought, "Now, is this the diversion tunnel, or is this the turbine?" And so anyway, we looked, and we get up to it, but there's the current going into it. Jack said, "Well, I'll go first. I've got a flashlight here on the back of my boat." And we had the little two-way radios. Jack said, "Okay, now you hang back Paul." "Jack?" "Yeah, radio's working fine." "Yeah, I can hear you." "Okay, I can hear you." "Good." "Okay." "Okay, I'm about to enter the tunnel. I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel though. But everything seems fine, nothing seems to be going on, just nice easy current." "Okay, Jack, you've now disappeared." "Yeah, I can see your light, Jack. You can hear me?" "Yeah." "Okay, come on in, Paul, I guess." "Okay." "Everything going?" "Yeah, there's a little bit of a noise up front." "Jack, what kind of a noise do you hear? Jack, your light just went out. Jack? Jack? What was the noise, Jack? Jack? Jack, I can't hear you, your light's not.... Jack? Jack?! Where's your light Jack? Come in, Jack." What it turned out is the diversion tunnel was not a straight tunnel, there were about two turns in it, and Jack had gone around a corner, and with our little radios, they were only line-of-sight, and so was the flashlight, and the light and the radio disappeared at the same time that Jack heard a sound. The sound Jack heard was the water rushing up against the side of the tunnel as it made the bend. But then when he got into that bend, then he couldn't see from behind, he couldn't see ahead, and there's no way for me to back out in the current. And so I'm coming around the same bend, and I suddenly lose the light behind me, and there's no light up ahead, and I'm in total dark. "Golly gee whiz, I wonder what's in here. Jack? Jack, are you there? Jack, I've rounded the bend, it's dark in here. Jack, where's your light?"

Steiger: That is hilarious.

Thevenin: And we came popping out the other side. There was nothing to it, it was a good safe run, but at that stage of the game, we were not sure.

Steiger: Did it ever occur to you.... (dissolves in laughter)

Thevenin: That a guy could get killed in this business? Yeah!

Steiger: Well, yeah! I mean, here you spend two days over there with your head broken. Did you ever think about quitting? And just all of these spectacular crashes and all that stuff.

Thevenin: You know the average intelligence of the average boatman. Boatmen do not have to be smart. (all chuckle) In fact, it helps if you're not very smart! If you're very smart, you probably don't get in to begin with, and if you are smart, you get out of it right away. Nah, it was fun! You know, hey, what the heck? The old story: Brave man dies but once, a coward dies a thousand times. I don't think it's really true. The stupidity factor enters in and you die a lot of times, but then you have this terrible tendency to forget about the danger. Then you read the newspapers about what a hero you are, and you say, "Well, let's go do something else that'll make publicity," and you do something else even more stupid. See, the news media rewards stupidity.

Steiger: Yeah!

Thevenin: But Mexico was fun, I loved Mexico.

Steiger: I actually went there. I've been to the Grijalva and looked down over that edge.

Thevenin: Oh, from Mirador?

Steiger: From wherever they built the dam.

Thevenin: Yeah. Evidently they did dam up El Sumidero.

Steiger: I saw it before.

Thevenin: Then I heard there had been such a hue and cry down there, that even though the dam is there, they have now quit holding back the water. I haven't been down there to check it. The last person I talked to was down there said that.... In fact, I was coaching soccer up in Eureka, California, with my little kids, and I was talking about it, and some woman was from Mexico. I said, "Oh, where from?" and she was from up around Chihuahua or somewhere. "I spent a lot of time down in the State of Chiapas." "Oh," she said, "Chiapas!" Like I said, there was a little town we came out, called Chica Juasin, and no Mexican has ever heard....

Okay, this is the River Runners Oral History Project, this is DAT tape Two of an interview with Paul Thevenin, 7/31/95, it's still Paul Thevenin, Lew Steiger, Rich Quartaroli, and this is just Part Two of the interview.

Steiger: Okay, we're rolling.

Thevenin: Okay, in case we got cut off on the tail end of the other one, we were talking about me coaching youth soccer up in Eureka, California, and one of the mothers of one of the kids on my team was from Mexico, and we happened to be talking about places in Mexico and I said, "I spent most of my time down in Chiapas," and she was all elated, and she said, "Oh, my brother's working down there." And we started talking about things. She said, "Well, you've never heard of the town that he was in, Chica Juasin." I said, "What do you mean I've never heard of the town Chica Juasin?! That's what I always tell everybody else -'you never heard of Chica Juasin.'" And she said, "You know where Chica Juasin is?!" And I said, "Yeah!" And we got talking about the fact that he was on that project to dam up El Sumidero, but it's way back in the sticks. Chica Juasin did not have any electricity in the village at all. A number of years later, they did get electricity and I want people to know -and I need to make a confession now to the Mexican government -that we did help supply Chica Juasin with its first wiring for the city. As we were driving through Mexico City, we'd gotten our directions a little confused as to where we should be and where we shouldn't be, and Mexico is not quite as consistent with putting their powerlines up as high as they might, and somehow I ended [up] way out in the suburbs and missed one of the turnoffs for the highway or something, and there were a bunch of cars backing up behind me, and I decided to be gracious and pull over to the side and let them by. The guys in the back of the truck said it was the most beautiful display of electricity they'd seen in a long time as the top of that truck, the metal beam, hooked into the wires, as I ducked under and ducked back out of, and I drug out about two hundred and fifty feet of wiring from Mexico City, and we donated it to the people of Chica Juasin. We didn't think we wanted to stop and explain to the officials in Mexico City, but I can just see the guys going out there to repair the break in the line, get in the reports "power's out," and they go out there, they look up, and there's all the wires between two poles, completely gone, and saying, "Hmm...." (chuckles) And so we donated the wire to the City of Chica Juasin and they told us they were soon going to have electricity, and so by the time the government came in to put in electricity, they already had a number of their homes wired with good wiring from Mexico City. Mexico was a world in itself. That was a wonderful place to be. There were many stories of Mexico -we could go on forever and ever. How much longer do you want to go on with Mexico?

Steiger: How are you doing?

Thevenin: Wonderful! Bringing back lots of memories about Mexico. A couple of quick stories about Mexico. I mean, river running in Mexico was fabulous, it was fun, it was great. We did that, we did the Usumacinta, which was back in the jungles in the Mayan ruins, and that was the main thing on that. But to drive through Mexico, driving a truck through Mexico, is an experience. [I] soon learned to read a lot of Spanish words that they don't bother teaching you in classes in school, like "no camiòn grandes," means "don't put that big truck down this road." And when you see the little thing that said, "puente angosto," when it says "narrow bridge," it's serious, it's really serious, don't try to squeeze two vehicles on there at the same time. And found out that many times somebody just picks up a street sign to use it for something. You know, there's this nice square piece of metal or something that will work well in some farmer's place, and so there goes your directions that say "turn left," and you suddenly find out you're in somebody's back yard, and you've got this great big two-and-a-half-ton truck and you're trying to turn it around in somebody's yard because the road suddenly petered out in their yard. I also ended up driving into the naval academy for Mexico because somebody had removed a road sign and all of a sudden I see this thing that says, "Antonio Lizardo," which translates into "Tony Lizard," which is the name of the Mexican naval academy, and I suddenly find myself surrounded by a bunch of people in navy uniforms wanting to know what they can do to help us with this big truck. And it was aiming it out of town, or driving through some towns in the middle of the night, making a sharp turn and pulling off somebody's roof because it hangs out over the street, and dealing with somebody on how much you're going to pay him for his roof to be repaired. Then he wants to know what you're doing driving this big truck through Mexico when you can't speak Spanish, and stopping at all the truck stops. Up here in this country when you drive a commercial truck, you gotta stop at all the checking stations, but they all speak English. But when you stop at the checking stations in Mexico, they don't speak English. Then all of a sudden when you stop, and you try to get your explanation half-way through and all of a sudden the boatmen in the back of the truck wake up and start making noise in the back of the truck, then you have to explain why you're hauling a bunch of people in the back of the truck. They're used to people being smuggled from Mexico to the States, and they're very intrigued with the idea that you're now smuggling people from the States into Mexico, and wanting to know why you're smuggling people into Mexico. So it was a wonderful experience, I loved it. Well, one other comment: You were talking about Jack Curry [Currey]. Now Jack Curry [Currey] also in his early life had been a butcher. And when you're down in Mexico running trips, you can't bring all the fresh stuff from the States with you. And the one thing Jack could not tolerate, so I did most of the buying in the market, is especially going in and buying the meat, where here you have these cows and pigs hanging from the rafters with all the flies all over them. And Jack said, "I can eat the meat as long as I don't see it. So I would go in and buy the meat. And I found out a secret, if any of you ever want to do it, when you go to the market, you can order T-bone, you can order filet mignon, you can order whatever you want, and you're going to pay that price, but what you're going to get is the next slab that comes off the cow. So you stand there and watch while he cuts the cow up, and then you push your way forward and you say, "I'll take the next thirty pounds," and you pay much less for thirty pounds of meat than you do for sirloin, even if you walk away with the sirloin." So Mexico was fun, besides the river running.

Quartaroli: You mentioned the one guy that got choppered out was sick. Was he sick from drinking the water, eating the food, or anticipation?

Thevenin: Well, in the event that he ever hears this thing, I think it had maybe something to do with his digestive system, but I think it had more to do with his nervous system. Because as I recall, he recovered almost immediately upon reaching the rim in the helicopter. Now there was one minor problem with the helicopter: The Director of Tourism, a guy by the name of Jose Pepe Comacho [phonetic spelling] who had done a lot of service for us, worked very closely with us, and he would frequently fly over in the helicopter. It was the Governor's helicopter pilot who was doing the thing, but Pepe would ride with him quite often, and we signaled him down, and Pepe spoke good English, and Pepe got out and found out what the problem was, and we explained that the guy's ankle was sprained. It was all wrapped up like it was sprained. And he said, "Well, you know, we can get him here in the helicopter." So we put this guy in the helicopter and Pepe I think figures he's going to slide the guy in, and then he's going to get in right after him, and the pilot said, "No, no, only two," and up he goes, and the look on Pepe's face was such that, "No, no, no, I'm not down here stuck with these crazy gringos! I didn't buy-on to go on this trip!" But the helicopter pilot came back for him, so Pepe was.... Pepe did come with us on a couple of the other trips, the nonhazardous ones. He went down Usumacinta with us.

Steiger: Sounds pretty fuerte.

Thevenin: Yeah, the sad thing is, a lot of these places we could only get into by river in those days. They've now put roads in, especially on Usumacinta. I understand you can drive into Yaxchitlan [phonetic spelling], you can drive into Bonampak [phonetic spelling].

Steiger: Oh really?! I ran that river and you couldn't get into any of those ________________.

Thevenin: Did you fly in?

Steiger: No, we boated down.

Thevenin: Where did you put in at to get to them?

Steiger: Frontera Echevarria [phonetic spelling]. Maybe that wasn't there when you guys....

Thevenin: Well, we flew in. Let's see, it was on the Usumacinta where we did flying into. See, on the Grijalva, we could drive into those put-in points. But the points you were mentioning were on the Usumacinta, and we'd fly into a place called Tres Naciones, and we had lined up this B-18. I was a buff, I lived during World War II, and I'd never heard of a B-18. I told Jack, "No, there's a B-17 and there's a B-19, but no, there was no B-18." (laughter) Well, I found out there was a B-18, and the military soon found the B-18 was not really a reliable airplane.

Steiger: So they sold it to the Mexicans!

Thevenin: It was big, and it was bulky, and it would carry a load, but it just wasn't really that great an airplane. But anyway, they ended up in Mexico and a lot of other places. You know, they would carry a fairly good-sized cargo. And so anyway, we get everything all lined up, we have the stuff stuffed into the airplane, and we go in for the first load and of course there's no seatbelts or anything, so we're free to wander around when we can. I'm up there in the cockpit with the pilot, and we're coming in, and I'm looking down the strip, and you know, things do look small from up in the air, but they looked exceptionally small, and I said to the pilot, "That's the strip down there?" And he said, "Oh yeah." (mumbling, can't decipher) "Yeah, yeah, sí, sí, sí." And I said, "Well, it doesn't look big enough." "Oh, sí, sí, big enough. Big, big. Big, big." And we drop a little over, he makes a pass over and goes around and comes back, and as he's coming in I say, "(clears throat) Are you sure?!" "Oh, sí, sí, I land here many times. Many times I land here. Many times." And we come in, and on both wingtips, we're hitting the trees. Fortunately, it's soft, jungle growth, but it just beats the leading edge of the airplane to pieces, for the last three feet on both sides of the airplane. And I looked at him and I said, "You land here many times?" "Oh sí, but always in a Cessna." (laughter) And so we get all the natives there, who by this time were very excited with this great big airplane landing on their strip. We paid them to start making the strip a little bit wider so the guy can take off. Even one of the huts was built out there, and it just barely cleared the hut, so we thought the hut had to go. And so my advice, if you're going to deal for the hut, make the deal first, before you burn the hut down, because they were all willing to burn the hut down, and then we found out how much money they wanted for the hut to be burned down. But we had to pay that price, because after they burn the house down, they weren't willing to dicker. Beforehand, we might have dickered. So anyway, we unload the stuff we have and leave it there and stuff, and the plane takes off and says, "Okay I'll be back, maybe this afternoon. Maybe we still have time for one more flight," and I'm thinking, "Maybe, maybe not." Because we were supposed to have two flights in, but by the time we got the thing all cleared up, no way. So we're left there at the village, and the plane didn't come in that afternoon, but that doesn't surprise us, we halfway expected it. And then he doesn't come in the next day, and it doesn't come in the next day. What had happened is, when the pilot got back, he took the keys to the airplane and threw them on the office desk and said, "I'm not flying anymore." And they had to look for two days to find another pilot qualified. And so we're sitting out there on the river, and they're back there in town. And when he threw the keys in, he didn't tell them a whole lot, and then they went out and looked at the airplane with all the bent-up wings, and they had to repair the airplane. So we're sitting out there in the village with two of the passengers had gone in with us, and the rest of them were all sitting back in Tuxtla [Guiterrez] for a couple of days. There were little things like that, and then there was the one we took down Sports Illustrated, because we wanted to get a real neat story, and the weather turned bad. We made the flight in and a couple of the little airplanes made the flight in, and one airplane got lost and landed at Piedras Negras, which you mentioned, and landed and the people started to get out and said, "Where's the other plane?" "Oh, the other plane's already gone, and they're over there in the village. People in the village." And so they got out of the airplane and the guy (zoom!) off he takes. And they get over in the village and the people in the village say, "What? No airplanes in here today." (chuckles) So these people are sitting down at Piedras Negras. And we'd heard the airplane going through the clouds and stuff, and all of a sudden the sound quit, and the natives in the village said, "Oh, boom!" indicating big crash.

Steiger: Oh, man!

Thevenin: And so we're thinking, "No, no, couldn't have been a big crash. No, no, no, no." So anyway, we wait up there for a day figuring, well, maybe something happened and they will be in tomorrow. And of course they're down in Piedras Negras, and nobody else is down there but them. And of course the people treated them very nicely, gave them the royal suite down there, which was the corn bin, I think, with all the rats. We did finally get together. We finally left a note in the village for them if the plane did come in, for them to fly them down to the next place, and we got down there and found out they were already there. Now the sad thing about that story is, after the trip was over with, we took the people flying to Bonampak at the end of that trip, and one of the airplanes in takeoff, the guys were getting into the airplane, the guy that was heading it up was a guy by the name of Tito Yeager [phonetic spelling], had a brand new airplane, and he was coordinating things, and Jack and Betty Ann Curry [Currey] and we're all getting into that airplane, and he said, "I want to make sure everybody gets off." He suddenly walked over and said, "Get out of my airplane." And they said, "Why?" He said, "I don't know, just get out of my airplane." "No." "Get out of the airplane, get out now, stand by the airplane." And this one guy came, the next-to-the-last guy, and the last guy he was waiting for came down the runway, and had a scratchy windshield, and was flying into the sun, and couldn't see clearly, and veered off to one side of the runway, caught his wheels on that airplane, and just pancaked right there on top of it. And if those guys had still been in the airplane, they would have been smashed flat. But by telling them to stay right there, when that plane pancaked on top of it, they just reached up, grabbed the doors, pulled the people out, got one duffle bag out and the plane blew.

Steiger: So the people were okay?

Thevenin: Banged up and scared, but they were okay, because the plane hadn't really picked up a whole lot of speed by then.

Steiger: So this guy just had a feeling.

Thevenin: Just had the feeling. "Get out of my airplane, I don't know why, get out of it, but stand by it." And so when that plane hit the other plane, they were out of the airplane, because if they'd been in the bottom plane, they wouldn't have been able to get the doors open. They just reached up, grabbed the doors [of the plane on top] grabbed the people out, got one duffle bag out, and the plane went (kapoot!) in flames. And so unfortunately the Sports Illustrated article talked more about the disaster than it did about the trip.

Steiger: That's so great for publicity!

Thevenin: But it was a good story -actually one of the best stories I ever read in Sports Illustrated was about a group who attempted to run El Sumidero, not knowing we had already done it. And their trip was a fiasco and a failure from beginning to end, but the guy who wrote the story had a marvelous knack for writing and it was such a good article, that even though the trip was an absolute failure, it was probably a better article that was written than it was about our success.

Steiger: I wonder, there was that guy, Chuck Carpenter, a kayaker. Were there kayakers you saw?

Thevenin: I don't know who-all it was. I've lost my copy of it, but they were a group of research scientists sponsored by Washington, D.C., or something. I can remember one of the lines in there, some guy was a gourmet cook, and he'd brought a bunch of stuff to make chocolate mousse, and one of the guys was going to investigate the mice in the country, and he'd brought about a hundred mouse traps or so. And when they go to go through customs, and you know mousse and mice maybe doesn't sound too much alike in English, but to the Mexicans, it sounded and spelled alike. And the guy is going through, "You have a mousse maker, and he has a hundred mousse traps. What is going on here?" (laughter) So yeah, it was fun dealing in Mexico.

Quartaroli: That was in the Sports Illustrated story that you were talking about?

Thevenin: Yeah.

Quartaroli: What year was that, do you know, they tried to kayak?

Thevenin: I think it was about two years after ours, so that would have been.... We did ours in what, 1962? 1963? What? That was 1963 we did that movie, I think. And so it was probably 1965 when that failure trip.... And they never did get launched, they'd take it all the way right down to the bank and the people from the village all come down and want to know if they're going to do it again. "What do you mean 'again'?" "You were not the people that were here two years ago?"

Steiger: I wonder what we're forgetting? I feel kind of like moving on to Henry, but if we're doing okay on time, because we've definitely got to go another session.

Thevenin: Okay, we'll do another session.

Steiger: What do you think? It's five [o'clock].

Thevenin: Well, just for the history book, as we get this stuff, one of the problems I've always had was commitments with women, and one of the things we're stalling on time now is I'm supposed to be taking a beautiful blonde down and delivering her to her father. So that's been one of the problems of my life, is women.

Quartaroli: Well, yeah, but we've got to get into some of the ___________ stories.

Thevenin: One of the last trips I just did with Moki Mac [phonetic spelling], Clair Quist had to come over to his new boatman, which was me, and take him aside and counsel him that some fifty-eight-year-old father was worried about why his twenty-three-year-old daughter wanted to sit up all evening with -"The man's older than me, sixty-one, why does my daughter want to spend time with him?!" I mean, it's just the backrubs, I'm sorry folks. (laughter)

Steiger: Oh, man, an old story. (laughter) To see a father on a trip worried about his daughter. That's never happened before, has it? (laughter)

Steiger: Well, usually when they're worried about them being with some virile twenty-two-year-old boatman. But when you start worrying about being with some nonvirile sixty-one-year-old boatman....

Steiger: I don't know, I think if you're a boatman, you qualify, whatever age you are.

Thevenin: You mean if you ain't a boatman, you ain't shittin', and if you are a boatman, you certainly are. (laughter)

Steiger: Yeah, that's about the size of it. (tape turned off and on)

Okay, this is Part Two of this interview. We're here with Paul Thevenin, and it's still Lew Steiger and Richard Quartaroli sitting here, only now it's August 5, 1995. We're going to somehow pick up where we left off.

Steiger: Boy, that movie was amazing.

Thevenin: That old Sumidero.

Steiger: My God!

Thevenin: It was a good promo.

Quartaroli & Steiger: Yeah.

Thevenin: It did a lot for the business.

Steiger: It's amazing to me that people would look at that and want to go. (laughter)

Thevenin: I always told them what we were doing here in this country was a tad bit safer.

Steiger: Yeah.

Quartaroli: Those boats still had the floor in them.

Thevenin: Yeah.

Quartaroli: When did you guys start cutting the floors out? That was, what, 1962?

Thevenin: That was 1962, I think, 1962 or 1963 ______.

Quartaroli: It was at the very beginning of Western, and you still hadn't done a Grand Canyon trip, but you were doing Idaho and Utah.

Thevenin: It was the winter of 1962-1963, so it was 1962, it was before Christmas, so it was in 1962.

You actually started talking about floors, yeah we had floors in the boats because boats had to have floors in those days. It was the thing -boats came with floors, you left floors in them. But what happened is a guy by the name of Art Fenstermaker had really jammed up his boat on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, and the hole was so big he couldn't patch it, and the water just kept running in, and water has a tendency to run in and not run out. And we just finally decided on our own, to take it upon ourselves to cut that floor out and figured we'd patch it in later, you know. Cut it out very neatly, so it'd be easy to patch back in. Art maintained that his boat was so easy to handle. We had to construct some sort of a little netting so the people wouldn't fall through the boat. But even after that, we glued the floor back in, but we always kept thinking about, "Gee, that boat was so easy to run without the floor, we filed that away in the back of our minds until we eventually got to the point we just said, "Nuts, let's cut the floors out!" because we were spending all winter long putting floors back in. We'd roll out material, and the floor would be all chewed up, ripped seams and little patches, and in the wintertime we turned the boats upside down and tear off old the old patches and then lay this great big sixteen-foot-long and eight-foot-wide sheet of rubber down and put glue on all of it. Of course I can remember working in the warehouse there in Salt Lake with all the windows closed because it was cold outside. You had some very high boatmen wandering around with all those fumes. I can remember the phone ringing one time, and I had my shoes off because I was walking around the stuff and didn't want to get dirty, and the phone rang and everybody knew that I was in charge and they decided that they couldn't answer the phone, because I was in charge. And I didn't want to answer the phones without my boots on, and I grabbed my boots and I looked at them, and I looked at them, and I figured, "You know, I put these things on a thousand times. If I could ever once figure out how to do it, I knew I could finish the job." And I stumbled and stumbled and tried, and finally I just said, "I'm going to answer it without my boots on," and everybody started cheering. By the time I got to the phone, I don't remember if there was anybody on it or not, but it started to sink into my head that it was time for all of us to go outside and roll in the snow for about a half-hour and get our heads clear. When a decision to answer the phone without the shoes on was a matter of applause, we figured there was something wrong with our brains. There was a lot of brain damage in those old days.... (tape suddenly goes silent for 2-3 seconds) It wasn't too much longer after that we finally did cut the floors out and then hung a wooden frame from over the nose and hooked it to the rowing frame and all that stuff.

Steiger: Well maybe just for starters we ought to go over the things that you made notes on, the things that you wanted to mention.

Thevenin: Yeah, okay, you were asking me earlier some of the early guys in the old days, who started, basically, Western, and of course Jack Curry [Currey] was the owner, and he had the two partners we already mentioned, Jerry Morgan and Bob Mendenhall, and those were the three guys that put up the money and the ideas and the brains behind it. But Jack was the only one of those three that really ran the company. In fact, when the other two came on river trips, they didn't make use of their ownership status, they would run a second or third boat and I felt perfectly comfortable being in charge of my bosses on the river -that's the way they wanted it. Of course when Jack was on the river, he was the one that was in charge. But when either Morgan or Mendenhall came along, they were perfectly content to take orders from somebody else. And some of the guys that were there in the early days, I think we mentioned Art Fenstermaker, Clyde Morgan, John Cross, Amil Quayle, and I think I left out Klaus Axman's name. I don't know whether you know Klaus Axman, but you know his brother-in-law, Les Jones, the map maker.

Steiger: Maybe we'd better spell Mendenhall and Klaus.

Thevenin: Okay, well Mendenhall was M-E-N-D-E-N-H-A-L-L, I think. And Klaus Axman was K-L-A-U-S, the last name was A-X-M-A-N. I don't think there was an "E" after the "X." Sometimes Klaus went by "Klaus," and sometimes he went by "Kloss" -it depended upon how English or German you were with the pronunciation. And Art Gallenson was there, I think we already talked about him. Van Lamb, I don't remember whether we talked about him. And Van's last name, Lamb, was spelled L-A-M-B. And of course shortly thereafter we hired both Henry and Wade Falany. It was interesting: Wade ran I guess about a dozen trips for us, and we were on a trip once with Jack and the conversation got to going about how old various people were, and somebody said, "Well, Wade's only fourteen," and Jack said, "No he's not, I don't hire fourteen-year-olds." "Oh, Jack, Wade's fourteen." "No he's not, I don't hire fourteen-year-olds. Wade, get over here. How old are you, Wade?" "Fourteen." "You don't work for me anymore." (laughter) So Wade got fired in the middle of a river trip, but I guess Jack let him finish the trip out.

Steiger: And he really did get fired?

Thevenin: Well, he couldn't really be fired, because he'd never been hired! (laughter) Of course one of the other key people in there was Jack's wife, Betty Ann, who worked there side-by-side with a lot of us on all sorts of projects. When we figured there was something we wanted to get done and Jack wouldn't let us, we'd talk Betty Ann into doing it, and she naively would do it, and then get bawled out by Jack for siding with us, not knowing that Jack had already made the decision, that we were trying to sneak this by him by way of his wife. Interestingly enough, some of those guys have gone on, keeping track of who went on to do what, and of course I mentioned Clyde Morgan, who now goes by the name of Ross Morgan, one of the famous Southwest artists. He's the one that constructed the Vietnam Memorial up in Salt Lake, and is now doing a Mormon Battalion Monument for down there in Tucson, and has done quite a bit. And so he's become rather famous in the sculpting world.

Vaughn Featherstone, although I didn't mention him, he was an off-and-onner again. But Vaughn Featherstone was an excellent boatman, but he ended up becoming one of the high mucky-mucks in the Mormon Church, one of the Council of Seventy.

Then of course some of the other ones that went on to boating fame: Dave McKay was there, and he became an owner. Dee Holladay was one of those guys that showed up with Don Katrin [phonetic spelling] a lot, and Dee Holladay now has his own company. Lynn Keller who was there in the early days, he's now one of the owners of Western. Amil Quayle even had his own river company, I guess, for a short period of time. Dave Kloepfer I guess ran a few trips for Western in the early days. He ended up owning a river company for a short time. Then of course Henry started off in his. And of course out of Henry came Mike Denoyer and Marty Mathis [phonetic spelling] who are now the owners of Grand Canyon. And Bill Gloeckler and Bruce Winter came out of Henry's outfit, who are now the owners of ARR [Arizona River Runners]. Joe Stevens [phonetic spelling] became Buffalo Joe, running river trips out of Denver, Colorado, area. And of course Ron Smith ran a lot for Jack in those days, and of course he was the original owner of Grand Canyon Expeditions. So Western in its subline, WhiteWater, fostered a lot of owners that are in the business today.

And there's a whole bunch of other people we could mention, but I don't know whether we want to go into a whole lot of names and stuff of people who were around.

Steiger: Ron Smith -actually, I hadn't heard that he worked for Curry [Currey]. I thought he got started with Georgie [White].

Thevenin: Well, he and Art Gallenson and Art Fenstermaker all sort of ran with Georgie, ran with Ken Sleight, ran with just whosoever. You know, I mean, Salt Lake was the river running capitol, and as kids, they ended up running around, a lot of these guys, together. But no, there were an awful lot of trips up there -especially in Idaho, where it was Ron Smith and Henry Falany and me ran a lot of trips together, all for Western.

In fact, there was the one scene where I got arrested and Ron and Henry were on the trip with us, and the State of Idaho wanted us in jail, the local people considered us local, and it was a fight between Boise and us, not really a fight between the State of Idaho. The Sheriff's Office and the Highway Patrol protected us for years, doing many subterfugious things to keep us from being arrested, but the deputy met me at the end of the river. He said, "Paul, I gotta arrest you this time." I said, "Well, okay, fine, that's the way it goes." Found out later that the State had wanted to come in and do it, and the Sheriff had told them if they set foot in his county and attempted to make any arrests, he was going to slap them in jail. And the guys in Boise said, "Well, you gotta yank 'em off the river." He said, "No, I won't, I'll take 'em when they get down to the end of the river. And don't you mess with anything, or you'll be in jail and you'll never see it." So the deputy was down there waiting for me when I got off, and he had a warrant for my arrest, which was misspelled, and two John Doe boatmen warrants. And he said, "Well, you're going to tell me who the other two boatmen are." Now in those days, Western all wore the yellow shirts with "Western" on 'em, and our names on our left lapel and all that stuff, and both those guys were standing there alongside me, and I said to the deputy, "You mean you want me to tell you who they are?" He said, "Yup." I said, "What happens if I don't tell you?" "Well," he said, "I've got a couple of options. I could guess as to who the other boatmen are. If I do that, I might get the right guys. I might get a couple of passengers by mistake. Or I guess I could figure they somehow hid off in the brush somewhere and I missed 'em." So I said, "Just for the record then, officially, I won't tell you who they are." And he looks up and down at Ron and Henry and looked around at the crowd and said, "Well, I guess then for the record I don't see anybody here that looks like a boatman." When he made that statement I swear I almost saw tears in Ron's eyes. But anyway, Henry and Ron stayed there with the people and loaded the stuff up, and I took off with the deputy and went into town, and mentioned again to the deputy that my name was misspelled, and he said, "Well, don't worry about that, you know it and I know it, but they don't know that over in Boise. As long as they spell it that way, nobody'll ever find your police record." So we got into town, couldn't find a judge, they were all out fishing, it was a Saturday, and I got thrown in jail and about a half-hour after I got settled in for a good nap and reading stuff, the deputy came back and said, "Oh, there's a judge in town now." I went over to his place and was sitting here at his house, and he said, "Oh, you're charged with running the river without a license." I said, "Yup." He said, "You understand the charges?" I said, "Yes, Sir." He said, "How do you plead?" And I said, "Not guilty." He says, "Did you run the river?" I said, "Yes, Sir." "Did you have a license?" I said, "No, Sir." He said, "Let me repeat the charges. You're charged with running the river without a license." And I said, "Yes, Sir." He says, "How do you plead?" I said, "Not guilty." "Well," he said, "this case is too difficult for me. I guess we'll have to hold it over for a higher court. How about next Monday at ten o'clock?" I said, "I can't judge." He said, "Why?" I said, "I'll be on the river." He said, "Without a license?" I said, "Yes, Sir." He said, "Hm. Well, when can you do it?" I said, "I don't know, I got a busy summer this summer." So it went on like that and he said, "I'll tell you what, we'll write this thing so that, let's see, 'to be held at trial by the Superior Court on such a day as mutually agreed-upon by the two parties.'" Which basically said if I didn't agree to show up, I didn't have to. He said, "Okay, now we've got to do this bail thing. Gee, the books here says it's a hundred dollars for an Idahoan, and three hundred dollars if you're out-of-state. You live here, don't you?" I said, "Well, if I were an Idahoan, I wouldn't be in this trouble. They're trying to run us out." He said, "Aw, you live here during the summer, and that's close enough. A hundred dollars bail." I said, "I don't have it." He said, "What are we going to do now?" Deputy said, "Well, a bunch of their people are still downtown. Let me go downtown and take up a collection." And so the deputy ran downtown and I stayed with the judge and looked at pictures of his kids and his grandkids and the fish and everything else, and lo and behold the deputy came up with one of the passengers that hadn't paid and said, "I'll write the check." The judge says, "Fine." The guy says, "Is my check good? It's from Salt Lake." The judge looked at him and said, "I don't know, is it any good?" He said, "Well, yeah, I know it's good, but ... you know." The judge said, "Well, you know better than any of us up here whether the check's good." So the guy wrote out a check from Salt Lake for a hundred bucks and I was out on bail. And we never did go to trial. About three months later, Jack got a phone call from the State of Idaho wanting to know how the money should be refunded, and he said, "Just send us a check." And he got the money back and I got a letter from the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association saying basically, "After our long years of friendship, it would be nice if you'd join our association." So....

Steiger: So you got arrested because the Idaho Guides filed a complaint against you guys for not signing up?

Thevenin: The Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association is a good thing. You know, if you're in politics, and you're a politician, and you're trying to do a good job, and you want to make some laws that are reasonably intelligent for, say, guiding, who would you go to for advice? The guides? Sounds like a good idea. And so they appointed about a five-man board, called the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Board. Now the problem with that is, they wanted to have the guys close, and so they picked the guides who were from the Boise area. Now the one bad flaw is, if you suddenly find out you are in power to control your competitors, would you be tempted to do such a thing? And unfortunately, some of those five men were somewhat tempted to protect their own interests. And their interests did not seem to be encouraging outsiders from the state of Utah to come up there and run rivers. And they kept changing the rules. We had licenses to begin with, and they kept changing the rules and kept hassling us for this rule and that rule and that rule and this rule, and we were in court and out of court and the courts would say, "Forget it, this thing is stupid," and throw the whole thing out of court. And finally we just said, "Okay, we're going to solve this whole thing once and for all," and we told them what day we'd be up there, and said, "We're not going to buy licenses this year, do what you need to do." And so we did it to force it into court, and so we ended up in court, and we won, and they suddenly decided to disband the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association and reorganize it with having not just guides on it, but having some non-guide businessmen on the same board who didn't know guiding, but could see the handwriting on the wall when people were protecting their own interests, because like I said, we were considered the locals over in Stanley and Challis, and places like that, because we would bring our people there, we'd buy our food there, we were housed there, et cetera, et cetera. We spent our money there. The guides from Boise would have their people come into Boise, they'd fly them into the river, take them down the river, fly them back to Boise, buy all their supplies in Boise, and the people there in those areas saw no revenue whatsoever. So when it came to the real fight, we were the locals, and the guys in Boise were the outsiders. And we'd have guides that'd come into our warehouse at one, two o'clock in the morning. They didn't dare be seen, because they had their own little interests to protect, and all the hunting guides were issued territories. And if you were friends with the Board, most of these guides were farmers, they'd get a nice little territory right up behind their farm. If they crossed the board, a guy in Challis may suddenly find out his area to go hunting was somewhere on the other side of the state. And so we would get a lot of late-night/early-morning visitors coming in, feeding us all sorts of information to help us in our legal battle. And like I said, the board got changed, and the Governor that year -may not have been entirely our doing -but decided not to run for reelection. So we think we had a little bit of influence up there. And like I said, I got the letter asking me to join their association. After that, we were basically accepted.

Quartaroli: Did you have membership, or any dealings with the Western River Guides Association? They probably started about that same time too.

Thevenin: Yeah, they were a group of guides who got together, and then they slowly got themselves semi-organized. Jack and I decided at least the two of us ought to join. And we joined, went over there for the meeting and had our names read in. Our names got read in and we were accepted as members, and Don Hatch took the floor and tried to get both of us thrown out, made a motion to throw us out, and when he went to look for a second, Ted and Bus and Smuss Allen and all these other guys had gone out to the restroom, so there was no second.

Steiger: How come he wanted to get you guys thrown out?

Thevenin: Well, again, you know, who was there that was big-time besides Hatch? And here comes along this outfit from Salt Lake, Western, that's suddenly pumping.... You know, Hatch was the only one that was doing it really big-time, and here comes along another competitor and we're eating into their market. That doesn't always sit too well. As the years passed on, Don and Ted and I and everybody else all became great friends, but it was that initial surge of "Here comes Western." Although we were living in Utah, Idahoans considered us from Utah, and the Utahans considered us Californians. And if not that, at least we were from Salt Lake, and that was bad enough. So there was a little bit of animosity there.

Steiger: You mean from Salt Lake as opposed to Vernal?

Thevenin: Vernal.

Steiger: The capitol of the river, and then [state] capitol.

Thevenin: Yup. But like I said, there was a little bit of friction there in the beginning. It wasn't with all of them. You know, I don't think Ted ever took the rivalry seriously. I think Don was much more the businessman that took it seriously.

Steiger: You know, that's funny, because I never got to know Don, but from what I sort of heard from just the people that did, my impression of him was always that he was less the businessman than Ted. It's interesting.

Thevenin: I can remember one of the hearings that we had up in Salt Lake, I almost didn't recognize Don, because he was dressed in a suit and a tie.

Steiger: Well, I was curious to hear about.... You said that when you got married, kind of when you left Western, there was a period of time where you -I guess this was the first time that you retired, where you packed up and just said river running life wasn't going to be any good anymore, and....

Thevenin: Well, it wasn't that river running life wasn't going to be good, I just didn't want river running life to interfere with married life, because now that I was married and about to have children, I felt that that ought to be the number one priority, and I'd seen so many people who had been in the river running business whose marriages didn't last, because river running came first. And so I figured to avoid temptation, I would get me out to California. Of course my parents were out there, and my sister kept telling me that they were getting old and I needed to come out and they were going to be dead in two years, but I got out there and they started seeing the grandkids pop up and it took 'em fifteen years before they died. So I just figured getting out to California, my priority would be family, and not river running, and that was why I quit the second time, because I had made the mistake of going to visit Henry and he had just started to run the Stanislaus and the Tuolomne there in California and he was building fences during the week for his father's business, and I stopped in to see him and he said, "Oh, come on down, just run a river one weekend with me." And so I did and then I ran another one, then my wife decided we needed a little bit of money to pay for all the expenses of me driving down, because driving down to Turlock and driving back up pretty well ate up all the money I made as a boatman, so she said, "Well, if you're going to run a few trips, why don't you just stay down there?" So I stayed down there and I built fences out there in the Modesto Desert. For those of you that don't know Eureka, a hot day in Eureka is about seventy. I mean, that's terribly hot, and I was up there living a school teacher's sedentary life at seventy, then going down to Modesto and Turlock area at a hundred and twenty degrees and building fences out there in the desert, and then running rivers, which was a shock to the system. But anyway, so we got there and we started running a few rivers and I built fences, and then the business got bigger and people said, "Well, what are the other rivers?" and we'd tell them about the Grand Canyon, we'd tell them about Idaho, and we'd ship most of them off to Western and other people and they'd say, "Well, how come you keep shipping us off to other people? Why don't you guys do it?" So Henry said, "Okay, maybe we ought to run a few trips." In those days you didn't have to have the permits and stuff. So he said, "Well, let's book a couple of trips." I said, "Okay, we'll run with you." So in those days, everything operated out of Turlock, we loaded all the equipment in the truck and drive to wherever we were going to run a river, and our warehouse was the back end of the truck, and we'd run one or two trips and then go scooting back to Turlock. Then it got to the point it was more and more, and my number two child was six weeks old before I ever saw her. And I thought, "Nahhhhh, this has got to come to a screeching halt again." So I said, "Henry, goodbye, let's part company, we're friends, but I'm out of it." And I stayed home one summer and my wife said I'd never do that again. And we had a kid born that summer. Henry was talking to me and said, "You really mad at me or what?" I said, "I wasn't mad at you, I just decided I needed to be with my family." Henry said, "Well, if that's the real reason, I'm tired of spending all my time in the office, so you come back as manager and I'll run the river." So that's how I got back into it again. I ended up being manager for Henry there at WhiteWater in Kanab and Fredonia, and the family came with me every summer. So the reasons were always I wanted to place the family first, and river running kept getting in the way.

Steiger: So now just to trace Henry, so he came down and did that first trip with you guys.

Thevenin: Henry did his first trip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon on the Western River Expedition trip, and his daddy didn't come. It was a father and sons outing, and his daddy didn't come, and he and Wade hung around with us boatmen. We'd give them all sorts of little chores to do. In those days we were cooking on wood fires, and we were digging pits to bury things in, and anything we asked these guys to do, they'd do it. And so we said, "Hey, how'd you guys like to have another trip up here?" "Oh, yeah, we'd love it!" And so we talked to Jack, said, "Hey, we got a couple of real sharp kids." And so they came back, I think they ran a couple of other trips that summer, and then the next summer Jack hired them, not knowing Wade was fourteen. So then Henry stayed with Western for, I think, two years. Then his dad said, "Hey, son, I've got this fencing business, I want to turn it over to you. Come on home." And so Henry left Western, went on home, and started building fences, but couldn't get away from rivers, so he started running the Stanilaus and Tuolomne.

Steiger: And so Henry was ...

Thevenin: Henry was about sixteen when he made that first trip.

Steiger: ... when he started, and Wade was fourteen.

Thevenin: Fourteen.

Steiger: And Gloeckler was in Wade's class.

Thevenin: Yeah.

Steiger: So that's how those guys got involved.

Thevenin: So when Henry went home to do the fencing business, I guess by that time Gloeckler was about sixteen or seventeen, and Wade told Henry, "Hey, I'll get a bunch of my buddies," and Denny Prescott and Bill Gloeckler, and Bruce Winter came later on some, somewhere else. They're also the guys who when they jumped out of WhiteWater the first time, they organized an outfit called Relco, which a few people may remember was.... The Sierra Club decided they were going to become purists and only run rowing trips with their ARTA company. They had all these people that wanted to go on motor trips, and so ARTA became strictly rowing, but those that really wanted to, went down with Relco.

Steiger: Because they really wanted to motor.

Thevenin: Motor, yeah. So you have a lot of people switching back and forth in this whole affair.

Steiger: So essentially, when you were managing then, you had just all these teenage kids -those guys were the crew.

Thevenin: By that time, by the time I became manager, then I ran along with them, alongside, when we were doing this stuff in Utah. So by the time I became manager, they were probably about twenty, right around there. And they were young, I was old.

Steiger: Well, you weren't that old, now were you?

Thevenin: Well, let's see, I started when I was twenty-seven, and so let me see.... I was getting close to forty. That may not be awfully old, compared at sixty it doesn't seem old, but when you're trying to deal with a bunch of twenty-year-olds, you suddenly start to feel it's getting old.

Steiger: That's a pretty wild time.

Thevenin: And of course that's about the time that old Richard Quartaroli came along, and he came down as, what, a passenger the first time?

Quartaroli: Swamper.

Thevenin: Swamper the first time. He and a young lady he was going with at the time came down and it was back in those days where you worked all day long and drove truck all night. I'd worked all day, drove the truck over to pick up the trip, was on my way to de-rig, throw the stuff on the truck, and then drive home, and I'm going down the highway with my eyes blinking more than my lights were, and I said to Richard, "Do you know how to drive a truck?" and he said, "Yeah," and without anything else, I pulled the truck to a halt and said, "Okay, it's yours." And so he drove the truck back into Kanab and I went to sleep. That basically it?

Quartaroli: Basically, yeah, and I never got away from the job of driving the truck after that, either! (laughter) It's like I should never have said I knew how to drive the truck, because then it was.... Well, even if you didn't know how to drive a truck, you ended up driving it anyway. There were no hired truck drivers.

Thevenin: Yeah, nowadays they hire guys just to drive the truck. In the early days, a couple of times we had truck drivers. That's how Bryce McKay [pronounced Mackey] got in, and I think most people know Bryce that drives for Hatch. Bryce started his driving with Western. We used to hire his brother occasionally to drive the truck out in Vernal, and his brother couldn't make it all the time, and Bryce drove for us, and I got to tell people, "I've known Bryce so long, I can remember when he had two legs."

Quartaroli: I was just going to ask you that, if you knew him before he lost his leg.

Thevenin: Yeah, I knew him before he lost the leg, yeah. He used to drive for us all the time. I remember taking him down the river right after he lost his leg, and he got his new artificial leg. A lot of people don't know that Bryce has an artificial leg, and even in the beginning, he limped a little bit, but didn't tell a lot of people. Took him down on a Cataract trip just so he could recuperate, and he'd just gotten his leg, and he had it tucked up under his pants leg and stuff, and he's telling me how his leg was getting a rash down there, it was getting blisters on it. I said, "Well, gee son, unhook that thing and slide it out a little ways, nobody will know." And he was sitting on the load -this was a rowing trip -and had some people sitting up front, and we went into this rapid and just ka-boom! into the rapid and the leg goes flying out from out of the pants leg, and kicks these people in the fanny up front. And people turned around to see who kicked them, Bryce said, "Would you hand me my leg back, please?" (laughter)

Bryce had a very annoying habit with that leg, though. We'd be loading the [pop?] coolers, and chipping the ice, and he always had this thing about he'd park the ice pick in his fake leg, and I swore at him, "Bryce, one of these days, you're going to get the wrong leg!" People would be standing there watching, and Bryce would finish chipping ice and go wham! with the ice pick right in his leg, and you'd see these people turn green! (laughter) So Bryce is another one we ought to give credit to Western for, for bringing him into the fold. He came in as a truck driver.

And of course we had another interesting gal up in Idaho. Many of the outfitters, oldtimers, remember Bud and Stella Critchfield [phonetic spelling]. Stella did most of the driving, and Bud would pitch in when he had to. So in the early days we did have a few people that were designated truck drivers, but somehow we got away from that and it got to be whoever was off duty drove the truck. If you weren't off duty, you ended up driving at night.

Quartaroli: You had a little run-in at night, too, driving the truck one time with Curry [Currey], about the black cow at night?

Thevenin: Well, in the early days, yeah, we were driving as cheaply as we could and we had some trailers hooked up to a Ford Fairlane, and the trailers kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We got to the point up in Idaho we'd have to get all the people out of the Fairlane, and the transmission just wouldn't make it up the hills, and so people would be up with their hands on the trailer, hands on the Fairlane, just sort of pushing it up the hill, to get over the hill. Jack had ordered a Galaxy, beefed up, big engine, big springs, big this, big that. It was still a car, but it was a Ford Galaxy, so it was big. This was going to be the answer to our prayers, and somehow, Ford couldn't quite around to getting it delivered, and so at the end of the season we figured the Fairlane was just never going to make it back. We didn't need the stuff in Salt Lake for a while, so we left the trailer up there and managed to make it down to Salt Lake in the Fairlane. And oh, a couple three weeks after we were back down there, we finally got word the Galaxy was in, brand new car. Jack called me, and so I came out and got it and went out and got the trailer hitch put on it, and headed for Idaho. Going up through Mackay, Idaho, between Mackay and Challis there's this nice canyon, lovely canyon, but that night there were no stars and there was no moon and I came out of that canyon and.... Have you ever seen black cows at night? Neither did I. And I saw this little fluff of white, and what had happened, there was a little dog that had turned around, had a little piece of white on its chest, so I hit the brakes to avoid the dog, and all of a sudden I saw these shadows up ahead of that little fluff of white, and I recognized they were cows, and I looked and the cows were from fence-to-fence all the way across the highway, everywhere. There was a herd of about a hundred and fifty of them.

Steiger: Oh my.

Thevenin: And when I finally came to a stop, there were six dead cows and one dead Galaxy. And the interesting thing, there was hair and hide on the oil pan, so I must have gone up and over one of them. (laughter) It was a wild ride! When I came ___________ I was in the middle of a hundred and fifty cows, and trying to get the door open with all those cows around was a real problem.

Like I said, sometimes we were on the other side of the law up there in Idaho, and the Sheriff up there in Idaho, in Custer County, had a tendency to be cantankerous, old Glen Reid [phonetic spelling]. He could be cantankerous, and there were times he didn't like me. But at that stage of the game, he disliked those Salt Lake guys that brought those black cows up, disliked them more than he disliked me. And so he said, "No, those weren't ranging cattle, those cattle were being driven up the highway," so he gave them the ticket for driving cattle without proper lighting. (laughter)

Steiger: There probably wasn't anybody with them?

Thevenin: No, no, they were herding them up. They were herding them up the highway at night.

Quartaroli: Driving a cow without the proper lighting!

Thevenin: So like I said, they ended up with six dead cows and one dead Galaxy. Those guys did have to pay for the repair on the car, and I called Jack and he said, "You up there?" and I said, "Jack, you ever see black cows at night?" He said, "No." I said, "Neither did I." He said, "What are you talking about?" Then I told him the tale and figured I'd head for Canada. So we left the stuff up in Idaho for another month while the Galaxy got repaired. Driving was almost as exciting in those days as the rafting part of it was!

Steiger: Now I know we talked about it, I just forgot. So Jack Curry [Currey] sold out, and then he had a real estate deal, and he got an island, and what's he doing now? He's running trips again?

Thevenin: Well, in fact I just had it out in the car, I found out I did bring with me a couple of brochures. I've got a brochure out there from Jack now for running the islands off of Anacortes, Washington, you can take one-day trips, you go out to just one of the close islands and back. You can take, I think it's up to a five-day trip where you make all those islands off the coast of Anacortes, Washington. So I got one brochure for that, and I got one brochure for a trip up in Alaska.

Steiger: On the Tatsenshini or something?

Thevenin: Well, if we want to, we can take a break from the tape and I can go out and grab those brochures.

Steiger: No, that's okay, I'm just....

Thevenin: So he's back in the business. Whether he actually runs all the boats himself, or whether he subleases them out and somebody else.... I'm not sure, there for a while I know he was subleasing a lot out to his son, Steve. But he's living up in Orem now.

Quartaroli: You haven't mentioned Steve Curry [Currey]. When did he bring him in? Did he run with you at that time?

Thevenin: No, they were all little kids in those early days. I guess when I finally left there, Steve probably was somewhere around twelve, something like that. So Steve didn't actually get into running rivers until long after I left. I think they were out there in the warehouse helping us pack food and things like that, which sometimes was very helpful, and sometimes left some things to be desired.

Steiger: I think we got this on the other tape -I didn't get a chance to go over it -so you were with Western until 1969 or something?

Thevenin: [Until] 1968. I semi-left in 1967. I think the other tape we mentioned that we'd had this one outdoor adventure group that kept talking to me someday I ought to come with them for their whole trip, which was mountain climbing as well as boating, as well as canoeing, et cetera, et cetera. And so the summer of 1967, the year after I got married -I got married in 1966 -so in 1967 I took most of the summer off. I ran for Jack in the spring and the early summer, and then when I came back from that trip, I ran a couple more trips for him after that. And then I decided I was going to move to California, so I told Jack. We quit and all that stuff and so I was going to move in 1968, and then somebody asked me to make a trip, and Jack asked me, "Well, gee, before you go, can you make a trip?" So even though I'd planned on heading for California as soon as summer got started so I could find a place to live, I didn't really get out of Utah until about the end of August. And most of the trips I ran for Jack, but I ran for Ken Sleight, and I ran for John Cross, and just bounced around, did a bunch of things.

Steiger: And so then you left.

Thevenin: Then I left, and went to visit Henry, Christmas of 1968. And so I ran some trips on the Stanislaus and the Tuolomne, so I really didn't miss a summer.

Steiger: So then in 1969 you were on the Stanislaus and the Tuolomne.

Thevenin: Yeah, summer of 1968 I did that sort of independent stuff, but most of it was with Jack, and then by actually spring of 1969 I was back doing the Stanislaus with Henry. And then 1970 we started running a few trips in Utah and Idaho, then back to the Stanislaus again. In 1970, that's when my second daughter was born, and so I said, "Hey, let's knock this off, let's cool it," and so 1971 I ran an Easter trip for Henry, but I didn't run during the summer. And my wife said she wasn't going to put up with me being home again for a summer. So that's the closest I came to missing a year of river running.

Steiger: So in 1972, that's when you came back and started managing.

Thevenin: Yeah.

Steiger: What kind of boats did Henry use early-on?

Thevenin: Well, early-on on the Stanislaus was the ten-mans, and then we ended up putting thirty-threes down the Stanislaus only. A thirty-three doesn't fit, but we ran it anyway. (laughter) I ran thirty-threes everywhere. Then when we came back here we ran -I can't remember whether Henry had any twenty-eight-footers. I think we ran thirty-threes carrying cargo and ten-mans carrying people.

Steiger: So you were oar-powered?

Thevenin: Yeah. And then we put the motors on right after that. We were right there in that transition period. When I came back in 1972, it was all motors.

Steiger: That's what I remember.

Thevenin: It was all motors in 1972. We chucked the rowing business and went motors. But 1972 was also, as I remember, the year the Park Service announced that this is the year how many people you take down.... And man, we took down every YMCA I think there was in California! or Boy Scout group and everything else. We had some big trips that year.

Steiger: Okay, so that year when you became the manager, you kind of knew from the git-go the race was on, in terms of establishing a use.

Thevenin: Yeah. And we packed 'em down. In fact, it sort of backfired on us because they didn't announce it up there in Cataract that they were going to do the same thing. And so we ended up with almost nobody in Cataract, and pumped almost everybody through the Grand, and got the numbers up to the point that when the numbers came out, it became viable. We weren't as big as we wanted to be, but it was a financially feasible thing.

Steiger: Bill mentioned that. That sounds like that was a pretty wild year. That was the year I got in there, that I snuck in. I was so green I wasn't really aware of what was really going on, that the big picture was to get as many trips down as you possibly could.

Thevenin: That's what everybody was doing, because that was what your business was going to be based on, and you were going to be stuck at that figure for ever and ever. The Park Service did do some modifying on that thing afterwards. I think Dave McKay ended up getting a permit, but he hadn't taken anybody down in 1972, so they gave him a permit with no user days. McKay claimed it was a little strange to have a permit to run the Canyon, but he couldn't take anybody down it. So they did that. I forget, there was one other company I think that came in the same way. They'd gotten their permit, but they didn't have any people to take down.

Steiger: Maybe that was Vladimir [Kovalik]. I know Wilderness World, it was the same kind of thing, they kind of snuck in after the fact. Well, were you involved in the design of the Whitewater boats?

Thevenin: Well, yeah. See, I'd been out that year when they decided to really make the motor rig what it was. We did use motors before that, and we had the frames that we carried. Basically, they were made out of two-by-tens or two-by-twelves, or whatever it was. We had a whole bunch of nuts and bolts and things like that, so they would fit in the truck. We basically carried the boards, and the holes were already predrilled, and so we get there to the river, you'd start reconstructing this thing and start putting the bolts in them. And so the frames were all basically all wood, and you'd bolt them together and run that way. And I can't remember whether Henry ever ran any taildraggers, or whether when Henry started he had the motors on the inside. I really think when Henry started we had the motors on the inside.

Steiger: What I remember about the WhiteWater boats was just how big they were.

Steiger: Well, they evolved. When we got rid of the wood, we went to the metal frames. It was really a great design as far as safety went, because all the boxes ran down the outside edge. And so when the people sat on the boxes, they were facing inward, so you had three feet between them and the wall. And in those days, boatmen did occasionally hit the wall. We had those big steel frames, they had these big, looked like dishes had been attached to the corners of the frame so we wouldn't have a sharp corner on them, and it did not take very long for those dishes to no longer look like a dish, they were folded up like a tortilla.

Quartaroli: Like a taco.

Thevenin: (chuckles) A taco. Right around, from people hitting the walls. So as far as safety went, you know, the WhiteWater boat was ideal, because the people were all on the inside, and the cargo was all on the outside. And you had the boxes that ran down the outside edge up front, what we called the "A" boxes, which were short, and people could sit on them fairly comfortably, and in the center was your duffle, and then there was a track between the duffles and the boxes where all the ammo cans were tied down. And on the rear frame you had your gas cans, your big boxes, your freezers and things like that. Your tool kit, your boatman box with all the spare parts. We used to carry, besides two spare motors, we always used to carry a couple of spare units in the boatman box, just in case. And there were times when we used them all, and had to borrow. The motor was back there, and we usually tried to keep the people up front, because all of the wild action was normally in the back. But yeah, the real thing about it was that they were made out of heavy-gauge steel, so they would reach all the way across the boat and still be able to put those frames inside a trailer. You had your basic center frame, and then you had what we called the wings, which were where the boxes actually sat that were made of one size smaller square tubing, and then you'd slide those in. And when they were new, they slid nicely. When they were full of rust and sand they sometimes stuck, and when a boatman would smash the wall very hard with a corner, sometimes you couldn't get them apart, and you had some unique ways of trying to carry them back home to Kanab to get them there. I don't know whether Richard ever banged a frame that badly.

Quartaroli: Yeah, Jake Luck says the worst damage on a frame he ever saw was one I did! (chuckles)

Thevenin: Which wall did you hit?

Quartaroli: Oh, I kind of fell asleep and went down the right side of Pipe Creek at low water through all those boulders, bent up the back frame. I just kind of woke up in the middle of this boulder pile out there. Yeah, he probably still tells that story.

Thevenin: Well, the thing was, they were heavy, they were durable. They would take a blow. They would also deal a blow to your back when you were loading them, and I swear steel heats up more than aluminum does, and they were always hot when you were trying to load them, but it was really a fairly good frame. We only had one minor flaw with it, the time I went through Lava.

Lava is my girlfriend, Lava has done more to me than all the other rapids put together. We covered this on the other tape, didn't we, my magnificent run through Lava? Well, again, we always put everybody up front, and set them on the deck up front, and I let the geologist stay back with me, and I had my two daughters on the trip and a couple of swampers from my home town, and put everybody up front and told them to hold on, and checked where I was going to run in Lava. Yeah it looked pretty good, and I realized I was just a little bit off, and went to correct it, but it was only a little off. Those front frames were tied down with two-inch nylon strapping with the big "D" rings, and the big harness snaps and things like that.

Quartaroli: Chains also.

Thevenin: Yeah, I mean, that thing could not come off of a boat. I mean, it was on there solid. And I just dropped into that hole, and that wave of water came across and the geologist came sliding off one of those boxes in the back, hit me on the leg, and I reached down, pulled him up, said, "You alright, Dick?" He said, "Yeah," and I climbed up on the frame real quickly to count the bodies up front to see if they were all there, and there was nothing but rubber up there. There was no frame. The people were still holding on, but they were off to the side of the boat, and the frame flipped. And that boat looks awfully long when you're standing up there looking and there's nothing but rubber up ahead of you. They went all the way through, because this was the wave at the very top of Lava.

Steiger: Were you guys running left, and didn't quite _________________?

Thevenin: We were running left, but I wasn't quite leftish enough, or I went a little too far leftish. Well, let's see, if I had been a little further right, I would have missed the hole, if I'd been a little further left I would have missed the hole. So could have been either way, but I shouldn't have been where I was. But the rest of the trip after that hole was fairly smooth. I was able to stand up there and count people and see where they were.

Quartaroli: I wasn't on that trip, but I saw some photos from it, that frame sliding off and then catching, caught that edge and it flipped over ______________.

Steiger: So it did. So it went off, got the corner and flipped.

Thevenin: Flipped in the water, and some of the people came up underneath. I mentioned where the ammo cans were tied, and the ammo cans got slid around, so some of the people came up and got their breath of air there and then we yelled at them, "Get out from under there!" and they got out. It didn't take very long for them to obey. And we had them all rounded up fairly soon. The only one that really got miffed is Robin was running around picking people up. He had people posed on the nose of the boat to grab them as you came up on them, and Robin came up on this one lady a little fast, and the people missed and she went all the way into the boat and passed through the motor, and she got a little miffed. She didn't mind being flipped, but she thought it was sort of an insult to be run over.

Steiger: Oh man, that's Robin Falany?

Thevenin: Yeah. And we got them all rounded up. Some of them did go through Little Lava as well. And we got most of them rounded up in that calm pond right below Little Lava, but not enough to get back into the beach, so we pulled in on a sort of a beach that exists at low water, just below there, and radioed out and fortunately found an airplane and let them know what had happened. We had all the stuff back. And the strange thing is, those boxes were pretty well water-tight, and being upside down they floated that frame, and we didn't really lose anything.

Steiger: Was the frame still attached to the boat, or did it come....

Thevenin: Oh it was completely loose. It was floating free.

Steiger: It left! (whistles)

Quartaroli: But you managed to flip the frame back over, loading everything _______________.

Thevenin: Yeah, in fact I nosed the frame into shore with my boat. The interesting thing, I came up to the people to pick them up, they said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm picking you up." They said, "No, the boat flipped." I said, "No, the boat didn't flip." I had trouble arguing with those people that the boat hadn't in fact flipped -they knew it had flipped, the frame was there. But yeah, I was the one, I got my nose behind the frame and pushed it into shore. And then we got into shore, we couldn't flip it over with all that weight on it, so we individually, one at a time, removed the boxes, and then when we had the boxes off, we flipped the frame back over and we were ready to go the next day.

Steiger: Where'd you get the frame in at?

Thevenin: On that beach....

Steiger: So the frame ran Lower Lava, too, stayed up that whole time.

Thevenin: Yeah, everything ran it. Now you know Jimmy Hall. Now Jimmy Hall has a much better story. I'll try to do my Jimmy Hall talk. I talk a little faster than Jimmy does. He said, "Yeah, there was Pablo, he went in that hole, and that wall of water done come across that boat, and just whipped him and that whole rear frame right out of the boat. And he realized he was adrift in that water in nothing but a frame and figured the only thing he could do was plane it all the way down, so he opened that motor up full bore and he ran all of Lava, just in a frame." So Jimmy's version of my flip was it was the rear frame that came off, and I almost like Jimmy's version better. I can just almost close my eyes and see me planing down through Lava on the rear frame.

Quartaroli: As long as you kept the throttle up, you were alright.

Steiger: I think that's something you've got to do, everybody. My dory flip was right there. We were going left, and I didn't quite get left enough. Right in there, right into the corner.

Thevenin: Well, I've been everywhere in Lava, and that's one of the places that I did flip in the early days. I don't know whether we mentioned it, the transition from oars to motors -did we talk about that last time, about Jack saying, "Well, you know, Georgie does it with motors." We did talk about that?

Steiger: Yeah, and you guys ran __________.

Thevenin: Had Amil out there with his oars in his hands, and that one beautiful flip there. And some of the people who are going to read this know the lovely Connie Tibbetts, and I always had a big crush on Connie, and saw that Connie had her group up on top of the mountain above Lava, looking down, explaining it to them, and I thought, "Well, I've got to run my best to impress her," so I did my very best to make sure I was coming in at just the right angle, and everything was perfect, and it was! I was doing my good job, and I was going to impress Connie, and somebody hadn't tied down one of those five-gallon coolers of lemonade, and just as I hit that first bump, that five-gallon jug of lemonade comes flying off and hits me right in the shins with a wall of lemonade in the cooler, and I got flat on the deck. Now I maintain that I was in complete prone position. Connie tells the story that she saw me down there coiled up in fetal fashion in the bottom of the boat. She looked down and said, "Well, that's a novel way to run Lava." But have you ever tried to get yourself standing up when you're down flat in a boat in the middle of Lava? (laughter) It was not working. Every time I tried to get up, I was flat on the floor. The boat did make a perfect run. The boat made an ideal run. I think everybody was impressed at how well the boat did. They just wondered why I was down there on the floor, and yes, Connie was impressed -she remembers that to this day.

Steiger: Yeah, that's the way it goes, every time you have a really good run, there's nobody there, you're in the back. And every time they're out there, I'm sure, with the movie cameras and the telephoto lenses and all that....

Thevenin: I did have one other good run -I don't know whether we mentioned it -the time that Amil flipped a boat in Upset, and those were, again, the days when we carried spare oars, and this was on a single thirty-three, so you could row them, but he'd messed up all of his motors by the time he'd got there, and when he flipped, he lost all but one oar. And so he managed to coast the thing in downriver, and got into Havasu and hiked those people out.

Steiger: This is with a thirty-three?

Thevenin: This is with a thirty-three-footer.

Steiger: Wow. So he turned one over.

Thevenin: Turned one over.

Steiger: Now this is Western?

Thevenin: This is back in the days with Western.

Steiger: And he's on a one-boat trip?

Thevenin: He's on a one-boat trip, and the motors wouldn't.... See, the thing is, if we'd known as much about motors then as we know now, Amil probably could have fixed the motors. But in those days when a motor went bad, we didn't know anything about mechanics. You pulled it off, you put the other one on. If it went bad, then you went to the oars. And he was on the oars and he lost all the oars but one. And he managed to get that thing in there at Havasu and hiked the people out. Jack sent me and some kid we had from California and said, "Okay, take four oars and go around, and hike back down Havasu." And so we're carrying these four oars. I mentioned earlier, these oars were made by this guy, Hatchet Harry, down there in Mapleton or somewhere. I mean, they were heavy. They were heavy suckers. And we're trying to carry them two at a time. Finally I got smart, I said, "We'll bundle them up, all four of them. We'll carry them safari-style with our supply of food hanging from the middle." Well, before, when we got to Mooney Falls and Havasu Falls, that was fun, we'd throw those things over one at a time, and they'd go down, they'd hit the water, they'd disappear and pop back up and jump about five feet out of the water. Then we crawled through the hole, went down and retrieved them. We were carrying them down there, I finally said, "Nuts, we gotta tie these oars together." So we carried all four oars together on our shoulders, and that got to be a pain. And I thought, "You know, we got a perfectly good river here," so we'd float them down the river. Then we'd get to one of the falls, I'd have the kid hold back and I'd go downstream and say, "Shove 'em over," and we got to talking about the travertine and all the little holes and what would happen sometime if one of the oars got stuck in one of those little travertine tunnels. And we got down, and I'm down there at the bottom of this waterfall, which, my guess, looking back -see, we didn't know the names of anything upstream -my guess is it must have probably been Beaver, because Beaver was the only one big enough for it to have been. So I'm down below Beaver -my guess is it's Beaver, anyway -and I say, "Okay, send 'em over." He said, "I already have." I said, "Well, they haven't come down to me." So I start walking upriver, and I get all the way to the falls, and there's no oars in the water. And so I start diving to the bottom, and sure enough, there they are, all four of 'em wedged in this tunnel, three-quarters of the oar buried in one of those tunnels, and the pressure had been enough, it jammed them in there, and I could get on the bottom of the thing, I could stand on the bottom and I could pull on the oars, and they would not budge. The kid says, "Well, are we going to hike back out for more oars?" I said, "No." "What are you going to do?" "I'm going to hike down and take the boat out." "Well, Amil couldn't take it out." I said, "Amil had passengers, we don't." He said, "Well, there's only one oar. Can we do it with one oar?" I said, "No. Kid, you got your choice right now. You can walk back up the canyon, or you can come with me." And for some reason he decided to come with me, and we walked down there, and sure enough there was only one oar. It was sitting there in the heat. When the tubes were black, they had a tendency to blow up, so the tube just behind the nose tube on the left had popped. I wasn't going to patch it. I thought, "Okay, fine, we'll just shove off, and we'll look for some driftwood somewhere along the way." And so we're just tooling on down, and I'm pushing and pulling. We find a big hunk of driftwood, and so I grab that and so I've got one oar on one side and driftwood on the other side. Then we find a bigger patch of driftwood and I get a bigger driftwood oar. You know, I'm doing pretty good, I'm getting down that river, oar on one side, driftwood on the other side, have a couple pieces of driftwood in case one of them breaks. I'm tooling on down the river. In those days, there weren't a lot of people in the canyon, so we didn't see anybody. And just tooling on down the river with oar and driftwood, and oar and driftwood. I came to Lava, and I had said, "You know, we may find another oar downstream somewhere." We did when we got to Lava. The kid says, "This is Lava!" I said, "Yeah, it's Lava." "Well, what are you going to do?" "I'm going to run it!" He said, "Shouldn't we line the boat?" "Nah, we'd never catch it afterwards." He said, "Can you run it with driftwood?" and I said, "No, but I can get most of the way through it. (laughter) If you want to be safe, kid, go walk around it." He said, "Well, you gonna ride it?" I said, "Yeah, I'm gonna ride it." "I'll ride it too." So I'm up there, entering Lava, and boatman reflex, I'm concentrating more on Lava -the big problem with the boat, I mentioned that one tube was soft, so if you aimed straight downstream, you were going at an angle, because the nose of the boat really wasn't aiming downstream, it was aiming off to the left somewhere. So I'm going in the rapid, trying to adjust for the nose not pointing downstream, and I get that momentary reflex a boatman has, one quick adjustment, and I go (eyah!) and I hear this crack, and there went the driftwood. And so there I am entering Lava with one oar and it was push-push-push, pull-pull-pull -made it through Lava, and right down below, in that back-eddy over off to the left is an oar. (all chuckle) So the rest of the trip was a breeze, I had two oars from there on down.

Steiger: It was in an eddy?

Thevenin: I think it was the eddy on the left. See, this was low water, and so there was an eddy over there on the left before it went into Little Lava.

Steiger: There was an oar that was big enough?

Thevenin: It was one of Amil's oars.

Steiger: That is unbelievable! I can't believe that. Now wait, I just gotta get this straight. Amil is down there, this is a thirty-three.

Thevenin: Thirty-three-footer.

Steiger: And it has no floor in it, had a motor and a set of oars.

Thevenin: No, this one had a floor in it, because this was a taildragger, with the motor hanging over the tail end.

Steiger: Amil's on a one-boat trip, flips in Upset, turns it over in Upset.

Thevenin: Turns it over in Upset.

Steiger: Manages to get everybody back together and gets the boat rightside up.

Thevenin: No. Goes through until he gets down to Havasu. And I recall he left it upside down until he got to Havasu.

Steiger: And he got it into Havasu.

Thevenin: Well, again, it was low water, so it was easier pulling them out, you know.

Steiger: And he pulls it into the mouth of Havasu, upside down.

Thevenin: You'll have to check with him. As I recall, he said he swam in with a rope. (laughter) And then pulled it in. He grabbed the end of the bow line and jumped and swam, and then pulled the boat in.

Steiger: Unbelievable!

Quartaroli: That's even better yet.

Steiger: That's incredible.

Thevenin: And then hiked the people up.

Steiger: And called and said, "Hey, we didn't make it."

Thevenin: Yeah, had them pick 'em up there at the head of Havasu.

Steiger: And Jack calls you and says, "Go get the boat."

Thevenin: Yeah, it was a couple of weeks later. We left it down there for a while.

Steiger: What year would that have been?

Thevenin: Ahhhh, probably.... It predated the "J" rig, so it must have been.... Probably, I think it may have been 1967, the year that I was gone most of the summer and I just got back, I think. It was either 1966 or 1967.

Quartaroli: Who was the kid that was with you?

Thevenin: I don't even remember who the kid was.

Quartaroli: Did he ever come back?

Thevenin: I don't think he ever came back. I only had one other minor problem with him. We got down there to Diamond, and Bryce was picking us up at Diamond, and derigging the boat and rolling it up and go throw it on the trailer and it starts to sprinkle, and the kid says, "Oh, wonderful, I can get a shower." "Get to work, right now! Now! Now! Get the thing on the trailer!" "What, are you guys afraid of a little bit of rain?" "Yes!" (chuckles) And we got that thing thrown in the back of the trailer and headed up. And we got about a quarter of the way up and the water started getting higher and higher and higher in Diamond Creek, and we had me running in front of the left tire, we had this kid running in front of the right tire. And so if the water ever got above our knees, then Bryce would know he had to go to the left or to the right. So we were the fall guys so that the vehicle wouldn't fall, so we're running up ahead of the vehicle, if we step in a hole and we'd have to step to the side one way or the other to find out where the high ground was. So the kid learned why we were afraid of rain.

Quartaroli: Was this with the Ford Galaxy?

Thevenin: No, by this time we had yellow International Travelalls, and Bryce was driving the International Travelall up there with a small trailer behind it. See, there was some Indian up there, one of the Hualapais who had seen the water coming, he went for high ground, which was a sensible thing to do. But we're plowing through that thing, and he takes a look at us and said, "Well, white men can do it, so can we." He pulled down off that same hill and pulled in behind us, and without the weight that we had, he just started drifting down. So we grabbed a rope and tied it on the back of our trailer, ran down, tied it onto his bumper, so now Bryce was towing up the trailer and this other pickup, with me and this kid running out in front of the wheels.

Steiger: Unbelievable!

Thevenin: Made it to the top, though! I got up to the top, and it really cut loose up there. I had a convertible, and the top went completely, and you've seen in the cartoons where all of a sudden the guy opens his car door and the water pours out? (laughter)

Steiger: That was it.

Thevenin: That was it! (laughter) I opened that door and let the water out of my car.

Steiger: And that was at the top of Havasu?

Thevenin: That was at the top of.... I can't remember, I left the Park at Frazier Wells or something. No, not at Frazier. I was thinking I left the park over there at....

Quartaroli: Hualapai?

Thevenin: No, Peach Springs. Left it parked under a tree at Peach Springs.

Steiger: And hitched a ride into Havasu. Must have.

Thevenin: Yeah, I left it there at Peach Springs, because I knew I was going to come out, and got a ride over to Frazier Wells, because I didn't leave it at Frazier Wells, I left it at Peach Springs, because I knew I was going to come out there, and got a ride over to Frazier Wells, and then the drop off.

Steiger: So you drove out in your convertible with the oars.

Thevenin: With the oars, yes.

Steiger: So Amil and those guys must have turned the thirty-three right side up before they left.

Thevenin: Yeah.

Steiger: Incredible story.

Thevenin: We'll have to check with Amil sometime to get the true account of exactly what happened on that thing. But that's close.

Steiger: That is unbelievable.

Thevenin: So that was fun in those days.

Steiger: Oh my gosh! And so you guys didn't see anybody else the whole time?

Thevenin: No. No, didn't see a single soul down there that whole time we were down there. But as long as we're talking about that and switching back to Lava again, one of the other unique things is back when we were still made out of wood frames, and I had this German on the trip that had always wanted to swim a rapid, and I kept telling him, "No, no, you can't swim rapids, no." And it was one of the dirty times of the Grand. The water was brown. And Henry went through -it was going to be a picture run -and Henry went through and had his people take pictures, got them set up in some position. "Hey, can we run back and ride through with Paul?" Well, our boats weren't terribly full, so Henry said, "Yeah, a couple of you can," and almost his whole boat came up -instead of taking pictures, came up and got on my boat, so I'm almost a double boatload. Park Service doesn't have to worry about this, this was before the days you put limits on how many people per boat. But I had a pretty full boat, and I went into that thing, and it was a pretty good run, except when I got to that hole at the very bottom, and the boat just went down into that thing, and the frame just buckled upwards, and being the two-by-twelves, the wood, they just snapped right in the middle. And then when we came out of it, then they went down, but now they were disconnected in the middle, and those floors just sort of flopped off to one side, and people started dropping off the boat. And this one German said, "Ah, I saw my chance, and so I did a back flip. I got down there, then I couldn't see, and I didn't know which way was up. I'll never swim a rapid again!" But we got that boat pulled into shore and those were the days when the Park Service was making us carry spare oars, even if we were going to do nothing but run motors. And so that time the oars did come in handy, because we used the oars to replace the two-by-twelves that went across. The one sad thing about it, this German also had a buddy who was a camera nut, and he asked if he could position himself down in my pit, so he could take action pictures of me and the grimaces. Well, one piece I left out of the story, ______ just rapid shooting, shot after shot after shot. Okay, one of the waves came up and just ripped the motor off the transom, and that's why I ended up in the hole down there, because the motor was gone, and so this whole time this guy is shooting, and I'm down there trying to grab ahold of the motor, because it's still running, it's on a safety rope. But it's running around underwater, and I'm afraid it's going to slice a tube, so I'm screaming at the people "Hold on!" "What are you doing on your knees?" "I'm looking for the motor!" And then we hit that hole down there and the front frame fell apart. So Lava and I have had a long history.

Steiger: And here you are coming back for more.

Thevenin: Here I come back for more. I remember the bravest thing I ever did once was when I was training a guy and I finally said, "Okay, you can run Lava." (chuckles) And I went all the way up to the front of the boat and sat there with my arms folded so I wouldn't....

Steiger: Shut your eyes.

Thevenin: (chuckles) Yeah. (Steiger does camera/tape check.) Bad runs: you know, these are the things that stories are made of. I mean, the good runs don't make stories. I mean, the perfect runs through the Canyon, it's almost like, you know, this last trip I went down, the water level was so ideal my son was running his boat down through there, and you know, we tell these people about these rapids, and then we make these slick runs, and they almost look disappointed. You know, the stories don't come from the good runs. "I went down through Lava this time, and I entered on the left and went right past that rock and slid off into the tongue. And man, that was a real smooth run." I mean (chuckles) what kind of a story do you get out of that?

Steiger: Well, it's funny to me. I mean, you know, just since I've been around, just since the early seventies, the technology has really evolved: the boats are ten times better, we know how to run the....

Thevenin: And in all honesty, the boatmen are a whole lot better.

Steiger: Well, because we've had all this practice. But in a lot of ways, it isn't near the adventure ____________.

Thevenin: Well Henry maintained he never hired me because of my boating ability. He hired me more for my entertainment factor. (all chuckle)

Quartaroli: I was on a trip with Paul one time, and the people would say, "Paul, what's this one rated?" and he'd say, "Well, I don't know, what do you want? Do you want a five or do you want a ten?" And they'd all go, "Give us a ten!" So Paul would do his best to really bump up these rapids. "Give us a ten, Paul!"

Thevenin: I want to say something here about the Hualapais, with their river trips. Those suckers do their best to give those people tens on that lower run. I mean, the way you give them a ten is you hit the biggest hole at full bore, and I see those guys in that lower end of the Canyon now, and that's what they do. They've only got those two tubes in the water, and they can really pick up the speed. They hit those things that are basically ones, and those people have water flying all over the place. Those guys can make an exciting trip out of those nothing rapids.

Quartaroli: One of the best "seat of the pants" runs I ever saw -I don't know whether you remember this, Paul, or not -but in 1979 I'd started as a boatman, but I was swampin' that trip, and you were up at the top of Bedrock and the boat got a little too close to the wall on the left. At the top there's kind of a little point that sticks out. And you hit the stern of the boat, so it kicked the stern out and put the nose of the boat facing the left side down Bedrock.

Thevenin: Yes?

Quartaroli: You don't remember, but anyway I do, because this was a most amazing thing. So instead of trying to drive around to the right, Paul turned even further left and aimed for the left wall, put the bow of the boat into the left wall, it bounced around, did a three-sixty [360o turn] and went down the right side of Bedrock.

Steiger: Now wait a minute.

Quartaroli: He did a bank shot. It was amazing. Okay, he's looking down at the rapid, and the stern of the boat got too close to this little point of rock that sticks out on the left, so the stern bounced, which swung the stern to the right and the bow of the boat to the left, going right down that left channel. So instead of trying to turn right, and trying to drive around to the right side, he aimed even further left and bounced off the wall with the bow of the boat, the bow spun around back upstream, did a three-sixty, and down the right side, just like that's where he was supposed to have been.

Steiger: And that's low water?

Quartaroli: Well, it wasn't real great water. Well, I don't remember what the water was like, I was just amazed at the run, because I was just starting to run a boat. I'd run a half-a-dozen trips or something, and I had no idea what we were going to do. And when he pulled that act, God, that was a real clever move, I'd have never thought of that one.

Thevenin: I'm not sure if it was thinking, or just reaction.

Quartaroli: Well, whatever it was, it worked.

Thevenin: I have been down the left side of that rock, though.

Steiger: Yeah, you and everybody else.

Thevenin: Well, I was waiting my turn one time, you know, just motoring upstream waiting for my turn, and as I was waiting for my turn, I suddenly saw smoke, and I said, "Well, that's the end of that!" The motor quit and I was steering down, and it just took me and it shot me right past the rock into the left side, shoved that boat right up -there's a little grotto right there, right at the top of it -shoved that boat in there, wedged it tight, so there I am on good solid rock, and I take the motor off, put the new motor on, get a couple of people on both sides of the boat to help shove the boat out into the current, they climbed on the boat, and we just went right down the left side, a beautiful run. (chuckles) But it just shoved my boat up there so hard I was pinned right in the rock and had good solid footing to change the motors.

Steiger: I've seen a bunch of boats go left, I went left there one time.

Thevenin: Well, it beats going up on the rock.

Steiger: Yeah, beats turning over right there, that's for sure.

Thevenin: I can remember one of my first runs, when we were doing the combination motor-rowing thing. Denny Prescott went into it, and I was hanging back for him to get through it, and I figured he was okay. He was at the point he was going to make it, and I hadn't realized he was going to make it up on top of the rock, and so I was already starting into it, and the current was too hard, and I spun the boat around a hundred eighty [180o turn] to try to motor back upstream, and I couldn't do it with the current, so I'm just running through that rapid, motoring upstream, and I'm going down there, just drifting with that current, and this is when we had the taildraggers, and so the motor's hanging out over the end of the boat, and I'm going there, as I come up on top of the water, this prop is just whipping around like mad about four inches away from Prescott's boat all the way down. (laughs) I figured if I lost four inches, that prop would have just sliced his boat to pieces, and shut me down.

Steiger: Oh man! (quick break, tape turned off and on)

Thevenin: ... less than productive.

Steiger: Well, you gotta admire him for going out there and settin' 'em all down.

Thevenin: Who, Les?

Steiger: Yeah.

Thevenin: Oh, well, the thing is, you know, all the good maps are extensions of the Les Jones map, you know.

Steiger: Yeah. _________________ this thing here.

Thevenin: Belknap [phonetic spelling] took Les Jones' map and just cut it in pieces and made it into a book. And then Stevens [phonetic spelling] came along and took Belknap's book and added some more information to it. The good river maps are basically just an extension of what Jones did. Jones just put 'em on a roll, and the other guys said, "Hey, that's too unwieldy," and they just whacked 'em up into pieces.

Steiger: But it's the same....

Thevenin: But it's the same philosophy. In fact, I almost failed a class in college once. A professor said -__________ elementary school -and he said, "Remember, north is always at the top of the map." And I said, "No it's not." And we'd had some other discussions before. He said, "I don't want to hear from you anymore." So I went home and brought in my river map. I said, "Here. Here's the top of the page, it's not north." He said, "This isn't a map." (chuckles) That was his solution. "North is always at the top of a map, this isn't a map." Academic intelligence and all that stuff.

Steiger: A lot of people use them ____________.

Thevenin: But he was one of the first guys. Les was to start bending maps so that the river ran top to bottom, or on his roll, side-to-side, no matter which way north was.

But anyhow, now that we're back and before we get lost, there was one other thing I wanted to get on this tape, and that's the rebuttal to old Gloeckler and Winter. They didn't really tell the full story, on that trip they talked about on theirs. And I'm going to fill in some of the pieces, because this was in the early days when we were scratching, and I mentioned we took down YMCAs and Scout groups.

Steiger: This is 1972?

Thevenin: Yeah, or whenever it was, either 1972 or 1973, whatever Gloeckler said the date was. No, it had to be later than that, because it's when Gloeckler was leaving, so it was later. But we got in the mode of taking down all these youth groups at discount prices, and all these universities wanted discount prices, and this trip that Gloeckler and them were talking about on their thing, the University of California -I think it was Berkeley -wanted to go down, and they wanted to go at full price, full deluxe everything. And Henry gave us the order, he said, "Look, this group we need to -I want you to really impress this group." And Bill and Bruce mentioned some of the things about that trip, but I don't think that Bill mentioned that he was trip leader, and the night or a couple of days before the trip happened, we had our boats committed down there in the Canyon, and we're supposed to come off, and they had a flash flood. And so we didn't get the boats there and he points out the fact that the boats came around later, and they got started on the water at three o'clock in the afternoon and went down and camped at the Paria Beach and walked up for lunch the next day.

Steiger: Oh, that was that trip.

Thevenin: That trip. Well, this was the trip Henry said we want to impress them. Well, they only had four boats, we'd promised them five. And so we were trying to get the other boat out, so as soon as we dropped the four boats off.... And the thing is, this gal had told her people, "Now if you want to watch the fun, get up real early in the morning, go out and watch them rig the boats." Well, the guys were down there, and there were no boats to rig, and we came through with the boats later on, dumped the boats, ran up to Kanab, got the food, came back down, the guys had the boats blown up, we put them on the water and all that stuff, and said, "Okay, now there's only four boats, we're going to leave some of the stuff behind. We're on our way now to pick up the fifth boat, we'll get it on the water tomorrow, and it'll be right behind you and it'll catch you in a day." And then of course Gloeckler and them mentioned the water went out that night, the boats were on the beach, and they didn't actually get away until about three o'clock. Well, I came back, finally getting the boat, coming back, got there about four o'clock, and nobody told me they had just left an hour before. So we rigged that boat, put the gear on it, and all this other stuff, and told the guys to split. We kept two guys, Joe Greeno [phonetic spelling] and Shirl Nagle, and said, "Go catch 'em." And just as we're ready to launch, we suddenly find one of the passengers who for one reason or another -if you know Bart Henderson, you might ask Bart where the young lady was that she missed the trip that went the day before -but anyway, she suddenly said, "I'm with this trip and I didn't get on the boat." So we said, "Okay, now guys, take care of her" and all that sort of stuff, and it was about three days before that extra boat caught them. (uproarious laughter)

Quartaroli: They only left two hours later!

Thevenin: They only left two hours behind them, and they're on a single boat with one girl, and it took about three days to catch up with them.

Okay, now the rest of the story that Bill and them told about: The trip goes on, and I go down there at the end of the trip to pick them up. And we're coming out of the Temple Bar in those days, and they're not in. And I come around, I'm supposed to meet them at ten o'clock, and I get there just a few minutes late, and no boats. I figured they're just a little bit behind schedule, and I wait around, wait around, they're not in, nothing, nothing. So finally about eleven, I started saying, "Gee, I'd better rent a little power boat." So I go make arrangements to get a boat and I say, "Well, we want to impress them, so I'll grab some sodas, so I'll have some nice cold soda, because it's probably been a long hot day on the lake." And so I grab a bunch of cans of soda and beer and stuff and put 'em in some ice chests and I get the boat loaded, and I'm just ready to take off, and the guy yells, "Hey, there's a phone call for you from Bill." And I said, "No, no, you mean it's for Bill." "No, I think it's for you from Bill." I said, "No, Bill's on this trip, it can't be. Well, I'll take it anyway, I'll take a message for Bill." So I go up there and I get on the phone, Bill says, "Hey, how'd the trip come out?" And I said, "Bill, where are you?" "I'm in Flagstaff, how'd the trip do?" I said, "No, Bill, you're the trip leader." He said, "I know, how'd the trip do?" I said, "Bill, the trip isn't here yet." He said, "No, you're kidding me. Where's the trip?" I said, "Bill, are you phoning from Separation?" because I remembered there used to be a phone at Separation. I said, "Are you stuck somewhere up canyon or something?" He said, "No, I'm in Flagstaff." I said, "C'mon Bill." He said, "How'd the trip do?" I said, "Bill, I haven't seen the trip." He said, "No, you're kidding me," I said, "No, I'm not kidding you, you're kidding me." Because I can't get it through my mind, because the trip's not out and Bill tells me he's in Flagstaff. And what had happened is, they were in the process of developing Relco, and part of the deal was, Gloeckler was going to stay with Henry and continue to run trips so there wouldn't be too much ill feeling. The other guys went over to run Relco, but they were having trouble with the contract. So Rick Hilshamer [phonetic spelling] come barrelling down Diamond Creek on a motorcycle and meets them there and says, "Bill, we need you in Flagstaff to sign the contracts." Well, Bill figures, "Well, I made it to Diamond Creek, there's really nothing left to worry about," so he turns the boat over to the other guys, and takes off on this motorcycle. Then he waits until about noon to call me and see how the trip was, and of course the trip should have been off by two hours, you know, and there's no trip. And he finally convinces me he's really in Flagstaff. And I said, "Bill, if you're serious, you're in Flagstaff, we're in big trouble." "Well, we can't be," he says, "I left them at Diamond and they were on schedule." So I said, "Well, Bill, I'll call you back later." So I go down to the boat, and I jump in the boat and just barely take off, and here comes a boat just around that bend. (big sigh of relief) "It's only one o'clock, they're three hours late, but they're here." And I go barrelling out with the boat figuring, "Well, I'll still go deliver the soda to them, good will stuff, you know." And I pull up the guys said, (gasping for breath) "Out of gas -boats -back there -haven't seen one -in over three miles." I said, "What do you mean you haven't seen the boats in three miles? He says, (gasping for breath) "They're running out of gas like mad up there. We're just getting in." I said, "What about __________________?" "Oh, we've been out all day." So I handed them some stuff and figured, "Well, I'd better zing on back in." So I ziggy back on in, get a bunch of gas cans, get more beer and soda, and figure, "Well, now by the time I go out, I'll see another boat," and sure enough, they were right. I got out around the bend, and there were no boats in sight. So I go barrelling on up the lake and I get to the next boat, and I finally see them and say, "Where are the other boats?" "One you can just see in the distance back there." So I gave them some gas and some beer and soda, went on to the other boat. They said, "Oh, we just ran out of gas." So I gave them some gas and some beer and soda. And I go up river and I find two more boats sitting together, they're both out of gas. And so I give them the beer and the gas and stuff, and I say, "Okay, there's one, two, three, four, five. That's all the boats." They said, "No, one more boat." I said, "No, there were only five boats." They said, "No, six." I said, "No, we started with four, the other boat caught up with you, that's five." "No, six." I said, "No, there can't be six boats." "Yeah, you remember we left a boat at Diamond? Well, two of the passengers wanted to see if they could run it out." (chuckles) And so they gave them the boat. The only problem is, the motor handle was broken off, and so they gave the guys a set of channel locks and vice grips, and so the one guy sat there on the floor, holding the motor and the gas thingy with the channel locks and the vice grips, and the other guy is standing up saying "left, right, left, right," telling him what to do. Now, the thing is, the one guy who seemed to be in charge had legally and officially changed his name to "Rain," and he wore a feather in his head. I'm not sure what held the feather in, but there was just his head and his hair and a feather. But his name was Rain, and as soon as I found out, when they told me, "Well, Rain has the boat." I said, "What do you mean, 'Rain has the boat'?" "Rain." I said, "What's Rain's name?" "Rain." So I thought, "Okay, we're in trouble." The other guy turned out to be.... Oh, at the beginning of the trip there was one guy who didn't come in with the people, he came in later, and he flew into Page, and he kept calling down about every hour, because he'd been told somebody would come meet him. "No, don't worry, the trip hasn't left yet." "Well, the trip was supposed to leave today." "Don't worry, the trip hasn't left yet, we'll be up to pick you up." Finally he got worried and he hitchhiked down from Page. Sure enough, he got down there before the trip left. Anyway, so he was the other one who volunteered. So we got two guys in this boat who are now out of gas, they have no way to control the boat, except for channel locks and vice grips, one of them whose name is Rain, and the other one's name is Bill Taylor. And Richard knows Bill. And Richard figured if any people could do this sort of thing, and still smile about it and have fun, he wanted to be a part of it. So Bill Taylor came back to be one of our top boatmen.

But anyway, by the time we got all the people out of there, it was a hot day in Temple Bar, they had arranged for airplanes to pick them up to fly them to Vegas, the airplanes all left about two o'clock and left all the people behind. The people had left all their money in Las Vegas, no money for the motels there at Temple Bar. (chuckles) Henry said we should impress them, and I am positive to this day, between Gloeckler and me and everything else, those people have never forgotten their trip. (laughter)

Steiger: They didn't come back.

Thevenin: They came back, but they did not come back with WhiteWater. (laughter)

Steiger: Oh man!

Thevenin: So that's a couple more details, and I don't think Gloeckler mentioned the fact he left the trip at Diamond Creek.

Steiger: No, he conveniently forgot about that one. And now, what was this guy Nagle? We'd better spell that.

Thevenin: Shirl Nagle, S-H-I-R-L, I think is the male spelling for Shirl, and Nagle was N-A-G-L-E. And Shirl lived in Boulder City.

Quartaroli: Was he Henry's cousin or something?

Thevenin: Who?

Quartaroli: Shirl Nagle.

Thevenin: I don't think he was related.

Steiger: So those guys left with a pretty little lady that Bart.... Now, was Bart on that trip?

Thevenin: No, Bart worked for Hatch.

Steiger: Oh! So they left with a pretty little lady that had....

Thevenin: Gotten lost in the wrong river company.

Steiger: Got lost with Bart.

Thevenin: And we will not speculate any further in print.

Steiger: Okay.

Thevenin: We will not speculate why it took them three days to catch up, either.

Steiger: Because they were an hour behind. (laughter) Those guys. So they continued to work for WhiteWater, even after.

Quartaroli: Joe Greeno, he's a story in himself.

Thevenin: Well, Shirl Nagle was a story in himself too.

Quartaroli: I never knew Shirl. I met Joe Greeno.

Thevenin: You never knew Shirl? He was the one that -he could go through more equipment faster than anybody else I ever knew. He went through three clutches on the truck in one summer. He went through his three motors between Lee's Ferry and Phantom Ranch, phoned for a motor -and he's a big kid, strong -he hiked up, they drove a motor around to him, and he carried the motor down on his shoulders to the boat.

Steiger: Oh my God! From where?!

Thevenin: From South Rim.

Steiger: Oh my God. He carried the whole motor?

Thevenin: He carried the motor down.

Steiger: And this is how big of a motor?

Thevenin: I think these were, we ran thirties [30 horsepower] then, yes.

Steiger: That's a strong guy.

Thevenin: Yes, he was.

Steiger: That's unbelievable. Gloeckler said he had mentioned carrying lower units and stuff, but nobody ever said nothing about a whole motor. Man!

Thevenin: ________ Gloeckler talk about the time he split his head open? I don't think he did.

Steiger: No, he didn't talk about that.

Thevenin: While the tape was off, Richard was talking about when did the jackasses come in? No, that wasn't Gloeckler.

Quartaroli: That was Sam West? He worked for the Park, Lew, _______________________.

Steiger: Sam West. He started out Sam Street.

Quartaroli: I can never remember the combinations of it. Wasn't the story it was him....

Thevenin: You mean the story about him being called "Silent Sam"?

Quartaroli: No, about him having his head cut open.

Thevenin: No, it wasn't his head. As I remember, it was his throat. We carried the fifty-five-gallon drums of gas down, and as I remember, he got pitched onto the edge of that drum, right on his throat, and he only talked in a whisper for a while.

Steiger: He was a wild character, I'll tell ya', in those days. I remember when he was Sam Street and he lived up in that cave, working for Tony. And then he worked for OARS for a long time.

Thevenin: Then he became a Park Ranger.

Steiger: Yeah.

Thevenin: But anyway, the jackasses, you know, came after we moved the motors on the inside and there were a lot of rocks down there. Somebody came in with a jackass, and the first jackasses were direct acting. See, the ones most everybody uses now are the dual-acting ones, so when you pull up on the handle, the motor comes up through a set of scissor hinges. The old ones, it was just a pin, and when you wanted the motor to come out, you pushed the handle down, and it just like a teeter totter pushed the motor up out of the water. And then when you wanted to motor to go back down, you let go of the handle, or you let the handle come back up, and the motor would go down. And I think it was Mile 24½ or Mile 25 or somewhere right in that area, and the bad thing about those things is, when the river would kick the motor up, when the motor would get kicked up by the water, the handle would go down. And of course after you went over the bump, then the motor would drop back in the water and the handle would come up. And it was one of those actions there, the same time Gloeckler got pitched forward, while the jackass handle was down, and he was still going forward when the motor dropped back in the water, which brought the handle up, just split him open, right across the face of the skull up there. Just a solid blow. I mean, you hit a boatman in the head, you're basically alright. So about the same time, some gal had fallen off the frame and went in that little hole between the two frames, was down there in the tubes. And Gloeckler immediately realized he's got to get her up there, and of course he runs up to grab her out of the hole. He's bleeding like mad, because head wounds always bleed like mad, and so he's reaching down to pull her up, and his blood is now pouring down on top of her, and then the passengers get all excited, and they start crowding around -whenever you see blood, you know -they start crowding around, and Gloeckler's trying to get them to get back so he can get the girl up. He's finally shoving them, saying, "Get out of the way, it's my blood." He's shoving the passengers out of the way, finally drags the girl up, and she's afraid he's going to bleed and pass out. Of course we bring the other boats through, and there's Gloeckler bleeding like a stuck pig. By this time he has the girl up, so we pull over into the back-eddy there and take a look at the skull and figure all it is, is just the skin. So we start holding it closed and it quit bleeding, so we just sat on Gloeckler and took out the needle and thread we used on the boat and started sewing Gloeckler up, and he ran the rest of the trip.

Steiger: There's a tough customer, that old Gloeckler.

Thevenin: Boatmen have to be strong, not necessarily bright.

Steiger: It's better if you're not too bright.

Thevenin: Shall we digress and tell another story about not being too bright and tell about the Hatch boys when the trailer got a flat tire in the middle of the night? Those guys went to change it, they change it and they cursed those guys for putting the lug nuts on with the power hammers, and they strained and they groaned, and they finally got that stupid thing off, and slapped the new tire on, and went to put the lugs on, and the nuts slid right onto the lugs. They'd been left-handed threads, and those guys had undone every one of those things, stripped the threads all the way off of 'em. (laughter)

Steiger: Oh man.

Thevenin: So they just tied up that extra axle with baling wire or whatever they had, rolled on in on the other tire. That takes a strong man to strip all those threads off.

Steiger: Stubborn.

Thevenin: But yeah, boatmen can be that way. I think Winters even went down for the count. Talk about the time he went down, they were working late at night, and they were bringing up the lantern, and he dropped the lantern and the glass slashed his leg and they sat on him and sewed him up, and when his dad saw the stitches -dad was a doctor -he said, "Hm, good job, I'll leave those stitches the way they are."

Steiger: I remember hearing that story. That was the trip Bart was on. They were a little late on that trip, too, I remember. Actually, Bart told me that story. I ended up writing that down. That's another one of those "trips from Hell." (aside about changing tape) This is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is Tape 3 of an interview that we're doing with Paul Thevenin. This is Lew Steiger and Richard Quartaroli is here too. And this is still 8-5-95.

Steiger: Okay, we're back in business here.

Thevenin: Okay, since we switched tapes, should we switch subjects? I was talking about one thing we probably ought to include was the advent of women, because I was around to watch that.

Steiger: Yeah.

Thevenin: When I came in the business, it was a man's world, except for Georgie, who had fought her way in, clawed her way in, got her way in, whatever you want to say, she was in. She didn't go through any women's lib club to get in, she got in by herself. But she didn't really make a lot of room for other women to come in behind her. And I can remember in the very early days, there were no women outside of Georgie. I think most of you guys know Connie, and was it Holly that was with her at the time? Do you remember Holly?

Steiger: I remember Holly Mitchem.

Thevenin: Was she a buddy of Connie's?

Steiger: Yeah, and a girlfriend of Dennis Mitchem's, there at ARR. But I don't know that she....

Thevenin: I don't think she actually handled a boat, but she swamped for Connie.

Steiger: She swamped a lot.

Thevenin: And so I guess they kept pestering Fred Burke, and he finally said, "Okay, you can have a boat," and they didn't like the color of the boat, so I think they're the ones that started ARR having the boats that greenish-bluish color, because they didn't like the color of the boats. And Connie fought her way in. For those that don't know Connie, she's adept at river running, she's a pilot, she used to scare the hell out of people, thought it was nothing but fun to fly that little biplane of hers down over the highway, low to it, and meet some car coming head-on, and scare the daylights out of some car when he came up over a hill and saw he was face-to-face with a prop.

One of the other gals I remember in the early days, Louise Hoagland who ended up running for ARTA, which became AZRA. She was a passenger of mine on a fourteen-day Sierra Club motor trip, where we cooked in the dark every night. She and her husband were supposed to come down, and the husband was a stockbroker, and the Stock Market was going berserk, so he just said, "You go down. I won't be able to concentrate and have fun." Half-way down [she said], "I'm going to make sure I get my husband down here next year," and then half-way down she suddenly shifted to "I'm going to get my husband to become a boatman." And I said, "Louise, you know a good self-respecting stock broker, you may get him down the river, but a river guide, no." And she kept talking about that all the way down the rest of the trip, how much fun it would be if her husband were a boatman too. I came back the next season and I'm down there rigging, and all of a sudden here comes this long, lanky gal running over, dragging somebody behind her, says, "Hi, Paul!" "Louise, you're back!" "Yeah, I brought Roger." "Oh, whose trip are you going down?" "Oh, we're boatmen." And I said, "What do you mean 'we're boatmen'?!" "Oh, we're both boatmen." And I said, "Noooo." I looked at him and I said, "Roger?" "Yeah." "You're the stock broker?" "Yeah, I was." I said, "What happened?" "Well, every night I came home for dinner, she had those stupid slides out and I kept telling her, 'Okay, dear, fine, fine, next year I'll go down the river. Fine, fine.' She kept brainwashing me, and then she found this ad for ARTA’s Boatmen School. And she wanted me to sign up, and I said, 'No, dear, I'll make a river trip, but no, I won't sign up.' Finally she kept nagging me, I said, 'Okay, fine, I'll go on vacation, we'll go to boating school.' I figured that'd be the end of it. Basically, it was -it was the end of it. I got down there, learned how much fun it was to be a boatman, so I told them [the brokerage house] goodbye, and we're boatmen. She's telling the truth." And so both Roger and Louise Hoagland became boatmen.

And there were a bunch of other ones that came in that were.... But I was there, close to those two, when they came in.

There was another gal that lives.... And I can't remember Liz's last name. Some of you probably remember her.

Steiger: Liz Hymans.

Thevenin: Was it Hymans?

Steiger: Yeah.

Thevenin: She came down and we were unloading stuff, and I will admit I had a little bit of the male attitude: WhiteWater stuff, as we mentioned, was a little on the heavy side, and that could be a slight understatement. And Liz came up and said, "I want to work for you guys." And I looked at her and I said, "Ma'am, a lot of our stuff is pretty heavy around here. It takes a lot of work and effort," and I put on that he-man role. She said, "Well, can I hand you something?" I said, "Yeah, hand me those motors over there," and she did and I thought, "Well, this is one gal I don't want to argue with."

Steiger: That was Liz that did that?

Thevenin: That was Liz. "Just hand me that motor up." I think it was only a twenty-five [horsepower] in those days, but just with one hand she reached down, grabbed the motor and handed it up to me on the trailer. And I said, "(clears throat) Yeah, but I don't think my boss is going to hire any women." And of course Henry, it was a long time before Henry even let women be authorized swampers. But Liz made me think right then and there that maybe saying our equipment was heavy wasn't going to be the proper excuse any longer.

Steiger: Did you ever know Ellen Tibbetts? She rowed for the dories.

Thevenin: Ellen. I've probably met her.

Steiger: If you met her, you would remember her. She's the one that always sticks out for me. Well, they kind of blew our cover, didn't they? (laughter)

Thevenin: Yeah, you know, going from the old days where it was male-dominated, [to] the trip I went on just a week ago, the trip leader was a woman, and I was way down the line, because as far as with Grand Canyon Expeditions, even with all my years, I was junior man with GCE, and my son swamper and the other swamper had had six trips with GCE, so I went to bottom man on the barrel, taking orders from one of the women -it was Sally. So it was quite an experience to go full tilt where women were not accepted, to me having to take orders from the women.

Steiger: So how was it?

Thevenin: It was fantastic! And I mentioned a couple of times that boatmen today -and they are boatmen -I think Cosmopolitan came down and wanted to call them boatpeople, and they almost didn't get out of there with their lives. These women worked long and hard to become boatmen, and that's what they are. But it was great, and as I've said before, the younger generation, including the women, they know more about geology than I probably even want to know. They know more about the rivers and the rapids and what's going on with all that stuff. They have it all memorized. To me, running the river was always an experience, I never knew where the rapids were. I'd come around the bend and I'd ask one of my customers who had the map, "What's that one?" So it was always a new experience for me. I don't know whether it takes the fun out of it for these guys or not. It was a great experience.

Steiger: Oh man, it was. I don't know where we're all going with it. I tell you, it's an interesting time.

Thevenin: Unfortunately, we've had the battles.... Well, when we first came in, the Park Service, Forest Service, really had no jurisdiction, and suddenly they decided they had jurisdiction. Ahhh (big sigh), I think they have a tendency to forget I worked in Washington, D.C. for a while, and the thinking of public servants is they are not public servants, they're public masters, and they keep trying to inflict their philosophy on other people. And so sometimes it takes some real battles. Hopefully, the boating world will stick together, and with all the differences there are between motors and oars and new way and old way and whatever way it is, the one common enemy is that if the Park Service ever goes to a single concessionaire, and puts it up for bids strictly on money, that river running definitely will not be what it was, and it will not be for the better. So gotta convince public servants that they are public servants, not public masters.

Steiger: That's a pretty good line. We're going to have to find a way to sneak that one into the bqr. (laughter)

Quartaroli: That might be the title of _____________.

Thevenin: Well, I can remember all those hearings they had -you probably heard in the past -Henry thought I was more fluent in speaking than he was, so I ended up going to probably more of those hearings than he did, and he'd fly me all over the country. And I can remember we went out to San Francisco, and we were supposed to speak in the order in which we appeared, and I was one of the first ones there and turned in my little card and a guy by the name of Steve Martin was the ranger who came from the Grand Canyon, knew me well, and as people would walk in, he'd make a very definite point of pointing at my card, and pointing at the fact that he was putting it on the bottom of the stack. And sure enough, some four hours later, when the judge who was conducting the hearing said, "Well, we just have one speaker left. Mr. Thevenin, I see that you have fourteen legal pages of rebuttal to this survey that we've done here, and the Park Service plans, so surely you don't want to speak." And I said, "Sir, I was one of the first ones here, and I do want to speak." He said, "Well, you've got it all in writing." I said, "Yeah, and that piece of writing will never see the light of day." He said, "Well, we've been giving people three minutes, but due to the fact that we're running short on time, could you cut it down to two minutes?" Now earlier in the evening, he had interrupted the hearing, somebody came and whispered in his hear, he closed the meeting down, said, "We're going to take a short break here, the TV crew is here, they want to come in and set up, so we'll take a break while they set up." They set up, he called the hearing back in session, he said, "We're now taking things out of order. They came here primarily to hear the Sierra Club." He asked for the Sierra Club representatives to come up and speak, and then he took a break and said, "Alright, now TV crew wants to be able to take down," and they went off and so the public hearing, as far as the TV went, was strictly a one-sided event. The hearings were basically a fraud. The one thing that saved us, probably at that stage of the game, and many of you probably do not like the gentleman who may have been the savior at that time, but the river operators were in a lawsuit with the park service. And President Reagan selected our lawyer to be the Secretary of the Interior. Some of you remember the name of James Watt. I do not think James Watt ever wanted the job, he did as much as he possibly could to antagonize the public to get thrown out, but the one thing he did do, while he was in, he sent a letter around, said, "You people will remember that you are the public servants. Those of you that cannot roll with this punch, had better go find a job somewhere else." And it was amazing, while he was in office, the difference of the attitude of the Park Service towards the boatmen. And it was much more conciliatory. Then of course Watt left and things went back the way they were, and we started taking orders again.

Steiger: Oh, don't get me started on that! For years, I don't know, things were okay, and then man, there was a period of time in there where we sure got a bunch of rotten eggs in the Park -but don't get me started. So that San Francisco deal, that was the motor/rowing deal.

Thevenin: Well, they tried to bill it that way to try to put a wedge between the boatmen, but after we started talking to, explaining to some of these guides who had never read it -I mean, that was a big problem, speaker after speaker after speaker got up and said, "This is wonderful. I haven't read it, but from what I've heard...." You know, they were only hearing certain things out of it. But the whole thing was a poorly written document, their figures were completely erroneous. They took the survey of the pollutants that were in the water from downriver, but they would not print the pollutants that were there at the dam, you know, to make a comparison. And we pointed this out, and they said, "We don't need to. We just know it's polluted downriver." And I maintained that most of the pollutants in the river were coming from the lake." And they said, "Well, we don't have any figures to prove that." And I said, "Why don't you take your little equipment up there and take those readings?"

Steiger: Right below the dam.

Thevenin: "And then tell us how much came in from the dam, to where you took them downriver." Because they were talking about oil spills and everything else, and I calculated from their figures the amount of oil that they anticipated was in the water from spills, that every motor outfit was pouring half their gasoline into the river to come up with figures that big. And I maintain that most of those figures were coming from gasoline and oil that were being spilled in the lake. Because, yeah, you do spill some gasoline, but the amount that they were coming up with would have had to been every guy pouring about half of his gasoline in the river.

Steiger: I didn't realize that was a huge part of.... I sort of felt like the main concern was aesthetics.

Thevenin: Well, yeah, it was partly aesthetics, but when you read the document, and this is what we did, we got some of the rowing guys to read the document, and then they got scared, because they realized what power it was going to give them [the Park Service] and they were going to be able to cut anybody off at any time they wanted. You know, when the thing first started, a lot of the rowing guys said, "Hey, great, we'll get rid of the motor jockeys and get rid of the noise." And then when we got them to read that stuff, a lot of them swung over to our side after they read that publication.

Steiger: I worked for Fred, so I was biased, but I always felt.... And actually, I felt like, "Well, okay, if we had to row, that wouldn't be the end of the world." But what swung me was, I looked at the numbers and it just struck me, "Wait a minute, you guys are going to get rid of motors, and you're going to increase the numbers of people that are coming down here, tantamount to an increase." And I just thought, "That's not really doable. We're going to be stacked up everywhere if you do that."

Thevenin: The thing is, for the rowing guys, when a motor trip goes by, it makes the noise of the motor, then it's gone. But if you put all those people on the water, and they're all launching at the same time, you're never going to have any privacy.

Steiger: That's what I felt like.

Thevenin: You're going to have those guys with you all the way down the river.

Steiger: And not only that, but you're not going to have the flexibility, because if you're rowing, you really don't. I mean, you can go just so fast, and you're there. With a motor, if you have a long enough trip, or even if they're just different schedules, you can spread out a lot better.

Thevenin: So the salvation is, the rowing guys and the motor guys are going to have to get together and come up with a common defense or they'll all be out of here.

Steiger: Well, you know, it's funny, the new one, it really isn't. We're lining up here to have a battle right now, and I don't think it's really motors versus rowing right now. This next go-around which is coming is private versus commercial.

Thevenin: Or single concessionaire versus the whole group.

Steiger: Just by the way that the prospectus has been let out, you think?

Thevenin: Well, this has been sort of the ulterior motive in the background, because they keep saying, "Other National Parks, we only have to deal with one concessionaire," which is true. And that's why you go to any of these other parks, you're paying five-and-a-half bucks for a hamburger. If you don't like the price, you can't go anywhere else. Here, if you don't like the price with one river company, you got seventeen others to go to. You don't like the style of one outfit, fine, you've got another style. But you go to the average National Park, and you've got no choice, you take what you've got. And then they [start] talking about all the scandals there are with these big concessionaires who keep playing with their books and paperwork and cheat the government out of money. Hell, the average boatman doesn't have enough brains to cheat the government, so they're probably getting their fairest deal out of the boatmen down here. When you start getting some multi-conglomerate company running something, they're going to hide everything in the paper. So it's really counterproductive, in more than one way.

But should we get off that? We'll go on to something else.

Steiger: Yeah. I'm trying to think....

Quartaroli: Well, another regulation, we've got the possible Coast Guard changes, instead of working with the Park on licensing and things like that. There was a Coast Guard move, twenty or twenty-five years ago.

Thevenin: Twenty-five years ago.

Quartaroli: You were around.

Thevenin: Yeah, I was around for that.

Quartaroli: Could you give us a little background?

Thevenin: Yeah. First of all, we went with nobody regulating us, and then everybody wanting to get in the act, including the Coast Guard. I spent eight years in the Coast Guard, I went through the Academy and all that stuff. I was an officer, and I was in charge of enforcing all the regulations on ocean, the harbors, the navigable waters, and when the Coast Guard decided twenty-five years ago -no, it was more than twenty-five years ago, it must have been closer to thirty years ago -to step into this thing, they brought up basically the same test they gave guys that were running the motor trips down in San Francisco Harbor. You know, questions like, "What's the maximum capacity of the bilge before you have to have such-and-such?" The boatmen didn't know what a bilge was. By the time we started cutting bottoms out of our boats, we didn't have a bilge. And one of the questions I remember is, "If you are proceeding downriver in a fog and you hear a vessel blowing two blasts on his whistle, what do you do?" Well, I couldn't find the answer down there, but the obvious answer was, you stood on the bank and cheered the idiot on. I mean, if anybody's trying to go upriver in a fog! (chuckles) I don't know too many guys that went upriver in a boat. But I mean, these were the type of questions that were on there. They just grabbed the same test.

The one organization that gave probably the more sensible test that I've seen of any of them, the State of Utah got pressured into it by the Legislature and I guess Ted Tuttle was the Head of the Recreation Department for the State of Utah, and Bob Anderson was the Head Boating Ranger, and they came to the river outfits and said, "We're going to have to license you guys. Would you get together with us and help us make up a test?" And so a bunch of us all sat together with the State of Utah and made up questions that we thought would be appropriate questions to ask the guy if he wanted a boating license. And then when there were differences of opinion, so it wouldn't be, "Well, I like to push and you like to pull, which is the best way?" We avoided all types of questions like that, and we'd go over all the questions, everybody would say, "Well, nah, I don't think that's a good answer, because I really prefer to do it this way, and I get by just as well." Then we'd throw that question out. And so by the time they got the test put together, it was questions about boating, and they were things that everybody agreed to, that this was something that people that were boating ought to know, and it wasn't a personal bias or personal preference on whether you were motor, whether you were oars, whether you were pushing, whether you pulled, whether you did a paddleboat or whatever it was, it had no bearing on that. It was just, you know, questions about the river and how to read the water, and things of that nature, and they put together that test. The only thing is, Tuttle and Anderson did, I think he promised every one of us we could have the number one license.

Steiger: Yeah, I remember.

Thevenin: Or did I mention that earlier?

Steiger: Yeah, you said and then you got there and....

Thevenin: Glade Ross [phonetic spelling] had already grabbed number one, and so they were all 0 0 1 and 0 0 2, and they handed me 0 0 3 and I said, "Gee, if I gotta be stuck with this, I can't be number one, make me Agent Double-Oh Seven." Now that was the only organization I know of that really came to the boating people and said, "Hey, we're going to start licensing you, would you help us come up with the test?"

Steiger: Well, I don't know if we're going be able to whup [win against] these guys out of here, I think they're in here. The Coast Guard now, I think they're here. I think it remains to be seen what we're going to have to do, but I don't think we've got 'em....

Thevenin: ___________ the test I took this year with the Park Service really had nothing to do with boating, it was, "How well do you understand the regs of the Park Service? What temperature do you cook the food at, how cold the ice box has to be, what places are off limits?" One of the questions I missed, that really isn't a boatman's responsibility: "At what length does a boat not have to be licensed by the Coast Guard?"

Steiger: That was on there, huh?

Thevenin: That was on there.

Steiger: What's the answer?

Thevenin: Twelve-footer. I marked sixteen. But that's not one of the things that boatmen -maybe the owners need to know that, you know, but the boatman himself doesn't need to know whether his boat has to be licensed. There were some other -I forget, I missed three questions, but they were.... But the test was not really on being a boatman, the test was, How well could you read the Park Service regs and memorize them? And being a teacher for all these years, and of course it's not that different from the old regulations, so having been the Area Manager, where it was my responsibility to know the rules, it really wasn't that difficult for me to read it, review it, and remember it.

Steiger: Well, best case scenario, I wonder what this thing is going to look like in another thirty years.

Thevenin: Well, I may not be here to see it.

Steiger: Who knows if any of us will be, for that matter. I just wonder, I look at how much it's -I look at all the changes since 1962, that's a heck of a lot of water under the bridge.

Thevenin: Yup, and there's one more bridge. I will say that about the bridge, though, that bridge does not bother me.

Steiger: The new bridge?

Thevenin: Actually, there's two new bridges since 1962.

Steiger: Yeah, the Gray Bridge and....

Thevenin: The double bridge down there -Navajo Bridge and the other one down there at Phantom. When I started running, the metal bridge.... In fact, the plan was, when they got that metal bridge in, they were going to tear the other one out.

Steiger: The black bridge.

Thevenin: Yeah. And then when they went to take the first mule ride across that bridge, the mules would not set foot on it. They just stopped and said, "We ain't goin'!"

Steiger: I don't blame 'em, either.

Quartaroli: That's interesting, I didn't realize they were going to take the black bridge out.

Thevenin: Yeah, they only needed one bridge, but the mules wouldn't take it.

Steiger: Good thing they left it up there. That's a typical government thing. But seriously, I wonder what's going to happen. I guess there's no telling.

Thevenin: Well, like I say, people in there are going to have to make sure that they "read the water" carefully and see where those back-eddies in government are. The one thing about it is, eventually the politicians get replaced, but unfortunately, many of the career personnel stay on and on and on.

Steiger: Yeah, except for.... Well, don't get me started.

Quartaroli: I remember a little funny thing about regulations. They used to figure out boat capacity. Didn't they count the number of valves?

Thevenin: Yeah, by the number of valves. The idea was that every compartment had a valve, and so that was the first, yeah. So it was easier on the rangers to count the valves, yeah.

Quartaroli: But then when you had a trip that you had a few more people than you had boat capacity, ________________________.

Thevenin: Yeah, that rule didn't stay very long, because it was one of the Hatch boatmen, the ranger came down and said, "I'm sorry, you have too many people for the number of valves." The boatman said, "No, don't you mean I don't have enough valves for the number of people?" (chuckles) And the ranger said, "Well, it's the same thing, isn't it?" The boatman said, "No," and opened up his can and very quickly cut a hole and threw in one of those Bridgeport valves, and said, "Now, do I have enough valves?" And because the regulations said, "valves/people...." So they decided they'd better come up with a different way of analyzing it. Yup, that did happen.

Steiger: It seems like we're probably forgetting something, because every time I do one of these things, what we do is, I always think of the perfect question when everything's all packed up and we're driving down the road, or tomorrow or somewhere, it'll be like, "God, why didn't we ask about this, why didn't we ask about that?"

Thevenin: Well, one quick thing that deals with this: The one time the Park Service, and the boating people, and the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Sierra Club, and Trout Unlimited -and I'm leaving out a bunch of names I know -about five years ago decided that we may not all agree with each other, but the one thing we did agree, is the news media really didn't know what they were talking about. And so we put on that media trip where I think Sobek's [phonetic spelling] WhiteWater -by that time Henry was out of it -but Sobek gave one of their boats, and was it AZRA gave one of them?

Steiger: On the dam fight, yeah Brian went.

Thevenin: Brian and I went down with.... I forget who the boatmen were.

Quartaroli: 48 Hours?

Thevenin: No, no, this was a media trip where we took all the newspapers and the magazines. We had U.S. News and World Report, we had I think Sports Illustrated, we had Rutgers Press, we had a whole bunch of things going down. And the guy who's now the Secretary of Interior, Bruce Babbitt, came down and made the speech at the dinner the night before, talking about how there were things that needed to be done down here. And the one thing that most of us agreed on, we needed the beaches back, and we needed this. So we agreed on a lot of things. We disagreed on some of the ways they were to be done, but it was interesting, at least that group of people got together on one thing, and that was to get the news media down to actually see it. It would be nice if we could all get together on a number of other things as well.

Steiger: Like what?

Thevenin: Maybe it would be nice if some of these guys would go down on a commercial trip. I can remember years ago, when I guess the first real Shigella scare came in, and of course immediately they wanted to blame it on the poor health standards of the river trips. But you know, if you've been doing things this way for years and years and years, and nobody gets sick, and then all of a sudden, it makes no difference which company it is, everybody's getting sick, it can't suddenly be the way we're doing the meals. They got some guy from Washington, D.C. out here with U.S. Public Health Service, and he was an expert, so they sent him down. And when he was giving his report, he said, "You know, I went down as a passenger on this trip, the boatmen were down there tinkering with their stupid motors, and they came up and started fixing dinner, they had grease on their hands and they whip out their knives and start cutting the food. I was appalled. With my training and my upbringing, I almost retched. It was just absolutely disgusting. But at the end of the trip, I realized nobody had gotten sick. I thought I'd better go down with another outfit. They can't all be this filthy. So I went down with another trip. It was really the same thing. I watched those guys clean their fingernails with their knives and then they'd cut the salad. You know, it was bad, but I didn't feel like retching. I'll go down again. You know, I need to have the first-hand experience. So I got on with one of the trips as a crew member, as a swamper. I made sure I did everything right, and the guys alongside me, but it began to hit me, nobody was getting sick. And I thought I'd better go down another trip. I suddenly found myself whipping my knife out of the scabbard and starting to cut the lettuce and tomatoes and stuff, and you're doing it too. (all chuckle) You know, in all those trips nobody got sick. I don't think it's the way the boatmen handle the food." Never heard from that guy again! (laughs) They shipped him to Siberia or somewhere. But to start off with, "it was abominable and it appalled me," and he ended up doing it the same way the boatmen did, and the final line was the same way every time. Nobody got sick. Now I agree, it's probably better we are washing our hands, and probably is better that we have all the soap containers and the dish washing and all that stuff, and I've got no objection to that.

Steiger: Well, we're trying. I tell ya', they keep comin', though. The latest one is they want us to wear little plastic gloves on our hands when we're putting out the lunch. And anything that isn't cooked.... That's the next one that we gotta fight off.

Thevenin: I think we may lose the wilderness experience with pink latex gloves.

Steiger: Yeah, that's what it boils down to.

Thevenin: Maybe the pink latex gloves when we play with the porta-potty, but not when we're playing with the sandwich meat. And I will say this, one thing that's come in that I was impressed by is these new water filter systems. Hey, man, you know it's no more “well, let's pull in at Vasey's, let's pull in at somewhere else,” and maybe if the water is running clear and dropping the alum and the lime in the water. Hey, these little suckers are fantastic. I don't know that they ought to be mandated, but I sure think they're great.

Steiger: They're the happenin' thing.

Quartaroli: They're a good addition.

Thevenin: And I understand they kill almost everything. So the water that people are getting now is better than the water they're getting at home.

Steiger: Well, what are we forgetting, guys?

Thevenin: Well, let's see, How did I get out of the business? Well, I never did.

Quartaroli: Never did, you just did a rowing trip.

Thevenin: It's addictive. I did a rowing trip. I don't know whether we mentioned on the tape that this year we had the youngest and the oldest licensed boatmen on the river in the Thevenin family, old Art being a full-fledged boatman. You can be a boatman at eighteen, but I guess there aren't any eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds running this year, so Art at twenty is the youngest, and me at sixty-one, swinging those oars around. I don't know whether we talked about that trip or not, but after not rowing for twenty years and not rowing in the Grand Canyon in twenty-five years, it was a new learning experience. Like I say, most of the good stories come from the failures, and when I missed that rugged landing at Redwall.... (laughter)

Quartaroli: That was the low point of the trip.

Thevenin: I made it in though! I pulled the boat up as far as I could and rowed across the river like mad into the back-eddy on the other side, and rowed up the back-eddy and came back and made a try again, and remembered "no, no, it's the inside of the current line going upstream I want to ride, not the outside." So I found out I couldn't turn the little black handle on the oars the same way I did on the motor. It didn't read quite the same. But by the time the trip was over, I'd had a good trip, and the people were all right-side up, and I was not completely sore.

Steiger: Well, looking back, do you have....

Thevenin: Do I have a big love, _______________. We won't mention their names, there were too many of them. We did mention the fact that I am a licensed masseur, and that was always one of the bonus features on the trips that I was on. But no, do I have any single happy memories? I think in the Grand Canyon, Lava and I have an ongoing love affair that is probably as sadistic/masochistic as they can ever be. Lava beats the daylights out of me, and I keep coming back.

Probably my favorite river.... Did we get on the Idaho at all or not, on the Salmon River and all the hermits that were up there? Actually, in all honesty, probably my favorite river in the past -it's not the same nowadays -but the Forest Service has chased all the hermits off and they've done all sorts of things. The Main Salmon, I think, was a really underrated river, especially for giving people an outdoor experience, because you still had hermits up there at that time, and some of you.... Have you ever run the Salmon?

Steiger: Yeah, just once. I only did it one time.

Thevenin: Was Buckskin Bill still up there? Or is he now a legend? Buckskin Bill was a hermit on....

Steiger: He might have still been up there. I was up there in the late seventies.

Thevenin: Ah, late seventies, I think he was gone by about that time. Anyway, Buckskin Bill was a guy who'd grown up in Oklahoma with Indian heritage, and the family felt that you ought to spend one year on Mother Nature before you became a man. And so he had gone to the university down there in Oklahoma. He was born there when it was Oklahoma Territory. He went to the University of Oklahoma, and he'd done some surveying work up in Idaho. He said, "This is where I'm going to chose to do my one year," and he hiked up the Salmon River and sat down on an old mining claim and lived up there for a year. When he came out, the Depression was on. He thought, "Man, it's tough out here. I had it great up there." And he went back up and said, "I'll stay up here until this thing blows over. And he didn't come out until World War II when they drafted him, and served as a bombardier on a flight crew. Then he went back in after World War II, and he was a unique guy, made all of his own guns, made all of his own knives, and made all of his own pots and pans, got the old drill stock and bored holes out of it, made riflings in it and everything. Just did everything by hand. A rather unique hermit, because old Fenstermaker and I pulled in there the first time because we were curious about this big pink building. He welcomed us with open arms, told us we could stop anytime. We used to bring the people down, all these people from the city, and they'd meet this real old hermit up there. All these things he could show them and tell them.

And there was an old hermit up there by the name of Dan Carleson [phonetic spelling] who claimed that I ruined him. I was going downriver one time and in the early days we did anything to make money, and we were scratchin' for customers and Jack sent me down with a twenty-eight-footer with only two people -one on one end of the boat, and one on the other end of the boat because they didn't like each other. They met in Stanley and decided right then and there they didn't like each other, so they sat on opposite ends of the boat. They talked to me, but they wouldn't talk to each other. I'd talk to one, then I'd talk to the other. And I'm going down, and here's this guy stumbling down the rocks. It's getting late, I'm looking for a campsite. I yell over at the guy, "Hey, oldtimer, you need a ride somewhere?" He suddenly looks up at me and says, "What, what, what?" I said, "Do you need a ride?" "Where to?" I said, "I don't know, where you going? You're stumbling in the rocks." "I can make it." "I'm sure you can, but do you want a ride? The rocks are getting rough, and it's starting to get dark." "Well," he said (gruffly), "you wouldn't take my dog." "Yeah, I would." At that time I would have taken anybody to match with those two people. "What do you want to give me a ride for?" I said, "Well, it's getting dark, you're stumbling on the rocks, I don't want you messin' the rocks up." "Well, it is gettin' dark. Where are you camping?" I said, "Dillinger Creek." He said (gruffly), "Why you goin' to Dillinger Creek?" I said, "It's a great campsite, and it's just down around the bend." He said (gruffly), "I know where it is." I said, "Well, then do you want a ride down to Dillinger Creek?" He said (gruffly), "That's down across from where I live. You must know where I live." I said, "I don't know where you live. Do you want a ride or not? Get on the boat or don't." "My dog can really get on?" I said, "Yeah." So I finally got him on there, and all of sudden, these guys start asking questions, "What's he doing out there? Why's he there?" And he suddenly becomes sort of the expert, and he starts talking to these people. They started getting together so they can both ask questions. He's bringing my people together for me. We get down there, we drop him off, and he said (gruffly), "Drop me off here, I don't want you to know where I live." So I dropped him off, then I pulled across the river and camped. He said (gruffly), "Now don't you guys watch me." "Don't worry." So that's the last I saw of him. I thought he was out of the picture. So the next year I go up there, and one of the boaters up there -almost everybody ran the power boats, the jet boats -and Joe Scobel [phonetic spelling] says, "Hey, you know Dan Carleson?" I said, "Dan Carleson?" He said, "Yeah, he's a hermit, lives down there by Dillinger Creek." "Oh yeah, I know a guy. Yeah, Dan! Yeah, okay, I know who you're talking about." He says, "We haven't been able to get our boats down there so far this year. We can't get past those first set of rapids and get back upstream." I said, "Well, so what?" He said, "Well, the guy hasn't come in for his spring supplies yet, and we're worried." I said, "So?" He said, "Well you get down and you find him." "I don't know where he lives." He said, "I'll draw you a map." (chuckles) So I go tooling on down. He said, "By the way, if you find him dead, you gotta bury him." I said, "Fine," I'm a nice guy. And so I get down there, and I pull off and I leave my people. I said, "Stay here, fish, whatever you're going to do. Play in the water. I've got to make a little trip." And I walk up, follow this trail way up in the woods, and I go up, there's this guy sitting there, and I say, "Hey, Dan!" He whips around with his gun barrel, (gruffly) "What are you doin' here?" I said, "You're Dan Carleson, aren't you?" He said, "Yeah, what are you doin' here." I said, "I came to see if you were alive." "Why?" I said, "The guys up in Salmon are worried about you." "Why are they worried?" I said, "You didn't go out for spring supplies. They're worried. Do you have enough food?" "Yeah." I said, "Besides that, if you're dead, I've gotta bury you. So tell me you're alive so I can get out of here." (gruffly) "I'm alive. I don't care about those guys, they don't need to know anything, don't tell 'em." (laughter) I said, "Ah, they're worried about you." "Ah, don't need to worry about me." I said, "You got enough then?" He said, "Well, I'm out of tobacco. You have any tobacco?" I said, "I don't have any tobacco. You want me to bring you some next trip?" "Nah, I couldn't afford it." I said, "Well, you couldn't afford the tobacco?" "Nah, you guys charge too much for freight." I said, "We don't charge anything." He said, "Where you makin' your money?" I said, "I got a whole bunch of California people down there, they pay for me to come down the river. You want some tobacco, tell me, I'll bring it." "Well, that's all I need. How much you want me to give you?" I said, "When you get the tobacco, you pay for it." "Well, you ain't gonna charge me no freight?" I said, "No, I ain't gonna charge you any freight. I'll bring you the receipt from the store." "Well, alright, but don't tell them guys I'm alive." So down the river I go. I get back and Jack has changed the schedule and I've gotta stay in for a week, and so Fenstermaker's gonna go down. So I tell Fenstermaker how to find the guy's place, and give him the big can of Prince Albert and the little receipt attached to it. So Fenstermaker goes down, parks his people down at the bottom of the hill and he walks up. Carleson looks at him and says, "What are you doin' here?" "Paul couldn't make it, here's your tobacco." "You know where I live now." Art said, "Nah, I forgot already. You owe me $2.81." "Two eighty-one?!" "That's what the tobacco costs." "That's all tobacco costs. What about the freight bill?" "No freight." "You're as dumb as the other guy. You can't make a livin' on this river not chargin' for freight." "I got a whole freight full of California guys down there." "You too, huh?" "Yeah, we're makin' money off of California." "Well, you tell that Paul fellah that I want to talk to him." Art said, "Fine," goes on downriver. I come in the next week, "Hey," I said, "you needed tobacco, Art's trustworthy, he won't tell anybody, he didn't bring anybody up with him." He said, "Aw, two of you don't charge freight?" I said, "No." "Well, hell," he says, "the bears are eatin' the apples up here." I said, "The bears are eatin' the apples, so what?" He says, "Got a couple boxes of apples out here. Your people eat apples?" I said, "Probably." "You get these damned apples out of here, the bears are eatin' 'em." So I carried two boxes of apples down to the boat. He says, "Tell that Art guy to stop next time." So Art stops and he says, "Damn bears are gettin' in the cherries. Got two boxes of cherries." (all chuckle) So he stopped next time, we kept stoppin' and walkin' up there, leave our people down and walk up. He said, "Them people down there ever do any work?" I said, "Well, they don't have to." He said, "They willin' to do any work?" I said, "Yeah, why?" He says, "I didn't pick you any fruit this time." I said, "That's okay." "No, no, I want to get rid of the fruit. Get them folks up here." I said, "But Dan, you don't want people to know where you live." "Aw hell, you guys know where I live, I may as well let them know." And so I start hauling the people up there, and here's this guy, he starts talking to the people about this and that and everything, and the trees. See, somebody had gone in there to homestead and left this great orchard with apricots and apples and cherries and everything else. So all summer long, we stopped there, people would go up and pick fruit, we had fresh fruit for the whole trip, and go on out.

Next year I'm comin' on down the river and one of the outfitters up there by the name of Smith, he had a base camp about fifteen miles downriver from the put-in, but way above Dillinger Creek. I'm going down, and we were not on the best of terms with the Idaho guides -we mentioned earlier about being in jail and stuff. The Smith boys were some of the ones who were after us for jail, and I'm passing Smith's place down there, and all of a sudden this guy is waving, a friendly smile, sreamin' at me, "Hey, Paul, come over!" He was in a little cook shack up there. So I think, "Well, this is an unusual greeting from the Smith camp," so I start pulling over, and here comes Dan Carleson out. I said, "Dan, what are you doing up here?" He said, "I'm cookin'!" I said, "You're cookin'?!" He said, "Yeah, I'm cookin' for Smith now." I said, "What about your place down below?" He said, "Oh, hell, you ruined me." I said, "I ruined you?!" He said, "Yeah, you brought all them damned people in all summer long, then fall came along, I relaxed, and finally glad to get away from all them people, and then come December and I got lonely, and January got lonelier. I remember old Smith had been after me to cook, and so I hiked up to Smith's camp and said, 'Hey, you still want me to cook?' He said, 'Yeah.' So now I see people every day. You ruined me as a hermit." (laughter)

And there was another gal down there, Frances Zonmiller [phonetic spelling] who'd come. She'd been a telephone operator in New Jersey, and she came out West, couldn't find any man Back East that she liked. She walked in the bar in Riggins and said, "Okay, I'm out here to marry a guy. If there's a guy man enough to marry me, stand up." Old Zonmiller stood up and said, "Well, woman, I got a place upriver. Ain't very homey, but if you want to marry me, I'll take you up there." She married him and outlasted him and outlasted another husband. I remember I took a group of Girl Scouts from Newport Beach down there and took them out for a hike and we ran into Frances and here's this "gal of the woods," talking to all these girls. She didn't talk to very many people, she didn't like us guides [or guys?], we were a pain. But all of a sudden she saw these girls, she decided she wanted to talk to girls. She started talkin' and talkin' and talkin' and talkin', and tellin' tales. These kids were just all in awe. And it's gettin' dark. So finally I said, "I gotta get these girls back to camp." We come walkin' back into camp and the one leader is just irate, accusing me of all sorts of things. "Out there walking with those fourteen girls. I don't know what you did...." Don't worry, if I was with fourteen girls, I couldn't have done that much. And we brought them back, there was all these neat experiences up there, all these hermits up there, and other people that lived on the river and all sorts of stuff.

Steiger: Are those guys still up there?

Thevenin: No, the Forest Service up there tried to run them all out. Like I said, I ruined Carleson. Frances Zonmiller I think is still on hers. Hers was patented land. And Buckskin Bill is dead. And there was another guy by the name of Frank Lance [phonetic spelling] who lived down there, he's dead. His favorite activity at ninety was to hike out twice a year for supplies, get his supplies loaded, go in the bar and get drunk, get in a fight. Broke his jaw at ninety. Some guy got a blow through and broke his jaw at ninety years old. All these people would stop and visit down there on that river. So there were other rivers besides the Grand Canyon.

Steiger: Yeah, well, it sounds like you knew a bunch of 'em. So you got all through Utah and all through California.

Thevenin: Up in Idaho, and then down in Mexico, Guatemala. Then we had not the river running operation, but a diving-snorkeling-island operation down off the coast of Belize.

Steiger: That was Henry?

Thevenin: That was Henry. That was fun. Yeah, people would go down there. It gets bad when you say, "Okay, folks, you gotta eat this lobster until it's all gone." And we had lobster fritters for breakfast, we had lobster sandwiches for lunch, we had lobster...." These guys were going out and bringing in lobster by the ton. We said, "Look, if you bring it in, you gotta eat it." So we were feeding them lobster three meals a day. And that's tough.

Steiger: Wow, sounds like it's been a pretty good ride. When you teach, what subject do you teach?

Thevenin: A little bit of river running, and I throw in some academics. (laughter) No, I try to keep the river running down to a minimum, but I do show them, the day before Christmas vacation, the day before Easter vacation, I show them one of those movies you were talking about. We do sneak river running in occasionally. The last part of my career was all math, and I've taught everything -cooking, English, social studies. Taught journalism.

Steiger: And what years? Like high school kids?

Thevenin: Yeah, mostly high school. I taught junior high and high school. I had an elementary credential, but I never did actually teach elementary. They looked at all the education I had and said, "Gee, we don't know what to give you," so they gave me a general credential, which licensed me to teach anything.

Steiger: They don't make too many teachers like you. I wish I'd had somebody like that.

Thevenin: Well, most of my kids indicated they found out having me for a teacher was a unique experience. Most of my administrators said dealing with me was a unique experience too. My one principal came in to me -brand new principal.... I always like to tell the kids ahead of time what they're gonna face. "And if you don't like what I'm gonna do in class, you can go run to your counselor, you cry a little bit, and you can get out." And so I was telling him some of the things I had done in the past to maintain discipline, and this new principal came over and said, "Mr. Thevenin, I received this phone call from a parent who's worried about her child being in there in your class. I'm sure there was some misunderstanding. She said something about her daughter came home saying that you'd thrown a kid through the door once?" I said, "No, sir, there was no misunderstanding." He said, "What?!" I said, "There was no misunderstanding. I'm sorry about it, I only meant to throw the kid up against the door. The hinges were weak or something, and the door went down. He and the door went into the next room." "I'm not sure I want to follow this up." (laughter) And he left.

Steiger: And so that was the end of that.

Thevenin: No, there were some other incidents that he worried about frequently. Some mother got intimidated one time and yanked her kid out of school and took her over for a while to a school in the neighboring town because I was such a tyrant. And the daughter finally convinced her mother she was sick and tired of going to that school in the other town and wanted back. So the mother said, "Well, alright," and the first thing she did was run to the counselor and say, "I want back in Thevenin's math class." Because I was outrageous.

Steiger: Are you still active in the Church?

Thevenin: Mormon Church? Yeah, most of the time. I'm on vacation now.

Steiger: How do you reconcile that with all that geology stuff in the Canyon?

Thevenin: What geology stuff?

Steiger: You know, how old the rocks are and all that kind of stuff?

Thevenin: You mean, on Sunday I should close my eyes and pretend the rocks don't exist, and on Monday through Saturday pretend God doesn't exist?

Steiger: I'm just fishing for some kind of cosmic data. (chuckles)

Thevenin: Some cosmic data. Well, let's put it this way: My degree was in science, engineering degree, and I've read the Bible very thoroughly, more than once. Now, there are a couple of things the average person hasn't done. The average Christian hasn't read the Bible, and the average scientist gets focused-in on only one phase of what he's studying. Now the Bible does not say how God made the earth. It says in the first day he did this, the second day he did that. So people take it literally. But what is a day? Like we're talking about in this "day" of river running. Are we talking about Saturday, August whatever it is. Fifth? Is that what today is? But is today's era of river running only today? Or is it the last twenty years? So what is today? Now, also, was the Bible written in English? And when was Genesis written? Who wrote Genesis? Do you know?

Steiger: I have no idea.

Thevenin: Moses. When did Moses come along? According to biblical history, about three thousand years after Genesis started. The Lord said, "Hey, Moses, nobody's gotten around to writing this stuff down, would you take a few notes here and start writing?" And so he wrote in one of the Aramaic languages, that got translated to something else, which got translated to something else, and I don't know whether you've done much with translation, but that's one of my assignments in the Church now, I'm with the Southeast Asian people, and I become more and more aware of the awkwardness of going from one language to another, and trying to make it make sense.

But anyway, so as far as I'm concerned, the Bible doesn't say how God did it. God said "Let's do it." Now to me, if God is as smart as he his, he probably had a blueprint. In fact, if you read the Bible, you'll find Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 sort of tell the same story. But if you read between the lines, Genesis 1 is saying, "Let us go down and do," and Genesis 2 is saying, "And they did." So to me, Genesis 1 is the blueprint of what they planned to do, and the repetition in Genesis 2 is not a repetition, Genesis 2 is saying, "And then we went down and did it." Now also, you figure Genesis covers about a good three thousand years of history, and it covers it in (spurt!) that many pages. So the Bible is not a history of how the world was created, it's the history of who created the world. Now, are those rocks a billion years old? Welllll I don't know. When I went to school, they weren't a billion years old, they were only a few million years old. And then when I went to college, they were a few million years older. And now they're a few billion years. And the rocks haven't changed -the scale has changed. Now, how old are the rocks? I don't know, I haven't the vaguest idea, but I'm sure that the one that is now listed as 1.5 billion came into existence before the one that is 1 billion, which came into existence before the one that is 900 million. So I think the order is probably right. The dates, I don't know. There are some people that say a day with the Lord is like a thousand years. They unfortunately leave out the word "like." And they say a day with the Lord is a thousand years. So that means the world is.... And so in the six thousandth year, the Millennium will come, and so they're all looking for the Millennium and they climb up on a mountain and say, "Whoops, what happened? The Lord didn't come. He lied." Now the Lord didn't say he was going to come. He didn't say it was that date, somebody else said it was that date.

So no, I don't have any trouble, because if I hear five geologists, I'm going to hear five different inter[pretations], unless they all schooled under the same guy. But you've got five geologists from different schools, you're going to get a different story on the Canyon, of how it happened. Which one happened? Maybe a combination of all five, maybe something totally different happened. I don't know, but it makes a good logical sequence. Darwin is one of my heroes. Darwin didn't say man came from monkey -somebody else said that from Darwin. Darwin said let's categorize all these things -single-celled animals, two-celled animals, birds, mammals, and all that stuff. He said, "Let's put 'em in categories." I think Darwin did a fantastic job. But Darwin also at the end before he died said, "My work should not be canonized. It is subject to review like any other scientific thing." And even more so, what the writers wrote about Darwin needs to be looked at with a jaundiced eye. So no. However, does that mean I don't believe in evolution? Nah. Because if you are an intelligent man, and you're building something, what would you build first? The simplest thing, and then go on to the more complex? Or are you going to start with the most complex and build down? Which way would you go?

Steiger: I suppose I would start with the simple.

Thevenin: Like a one-celled creature, and then put two cells together, put ten cells together. So the theory of evolution doesn't bother me, because if I were creating the earth, I'd start with the simple stuff, figure out how to make it work, and then put it all together. I don't believe, like many Christians do, in the abracadabra theory of religion, that God suddenly went out and said, (great exclamation of effort). I don't think he did that. The Bible doesn't say he did that. He said, "And God said, 'let there be man.'" But then what happens on a river trip? The boss comes to you and says, "And let there be a trip that leaves on August 12." Is that all that happens? No. You gotta pack the food, somebody's gotta book the customers before that. But all the boss says is, "There will be a trip August 12." Right? The Lord said, "Let there be...." And maybe somebody else got stuck with the work.

So no, I have no trouble with the two of them. I don't believe as many Christians believe -I don't believe as many scientists believe. There's even doubt about a lot of your ion testing methods, you know, carbon 14. What's the whole philosophy behind carbon 14 testing?

Steiger: Does it have to do with the half-life?

Thevenin: Half-life of carbon 14. What is carbon 14? It's a radio-active carbon, right?

Steiger: Okay. (laughter)

Thevenin: Carbon 14 deteriorates to what?

Quartaroli: Carbon 12 and something else.

Thevenin: Carbon 12. Why does it deteriorate? Because it's unstable, right? And it has a predictable instability life, right? That's how you can come up with these half-lives and all that jazz. Now that's based upon the fact that the carbon 14 that we find floating around in the universe today has always been at that level. Now let's assume that there had been no volcanic reactions, no cataclysmic things, nothing. Let's assume that at one time there was no carbon 14. Then everything would have been carbon 12, right? Now if you pick up one of those things that has no carbon 14 in it, what do you assume now? That it's many billions of years old.

Quartaroli: It's completely decayed down.

Thevenin: Right. But possibly, there was no carbon 14 in. Now possibly, on the other hand, if there was a time where there was no carbon 14, the build-up of carbon 14 occurred as you had these gaseous explosions in outer space and your eruptions and things like this, and you know, things came together and you had your atomic collisions, and so carbon 14 was not always in the atmosphere as it is today. It built up. Then somewhere along the line, you got this line that if you assume it's the same, you have no carbon 14, you say it goes in a straight line right down to here. But if it's some other period of time, there wasn't that much carbon 14 in the air, then it didn't take that long to decay, so it's really that much younger. So even the carbon 14 thing is under scrutiny, that maybe somewhere along the line, instead of it being a straight line this way, it's a sort of a curve this way, as the build-up of carbon 14 came. So it may be a whole lot younger than we think. How much younger? Beats the heck out of me! Does the Bible tell us how old the world is? No, but there are Christians that'll tell you how old it is. But I don't know where they get it from. There are Mormons that'll tell you, "Yup, Kolob." You've heard of Kolob? You never heard of Kolob Canyon in Utah? Yeah. But Kolob is the star out there that's close to where Heaven is, where God is. Okay, fine, where is it? Mormons are ones who have a tendency to say this thousand year thing. Maybe it is, I don't know.

Steiger: Well, it'll be interesting to see.

Thevenin: Either that, or none of us will see it, maybe none of it exists. Maybe we'll all return to dust, and we won't see anything.

Steiger: Well, if some of these guys are right... I think I'm going to Hell! (laughs)

Thevenin: No, actually, in Mormon philosophy, Steiger, you cannot go to Hell. You're excluded, you're not allowed. Neither is Quartaroli. You see, Mormons have reserved Hell for themselves -only Mormons can go to Hell.

Steiger: If you've been one and....

Thevenin: If you know the whole truth and then turn your back on it, then you can go to Hell. But since you haven't even accepted part of the truth, you can't turn your back on the whole truth. So I'm sorry, you're not allowed to go to Hell. No matter how hard you try, you can't go.

Quartaroli: Is that the same for going to Heaven also?

Thevenin: Oh yeah, the top Heaven. See, we don't believe in there's just either Heaven or Hell -there's these gradations in between. And there will be.... (whistles) To me, it doesn't make sense that the guy lives this much better, he suddenly goes to Heaven and gets everything, and this guy who's just maybe donated twenty-five cents less to Goodwill, and he goes to Hell. Nah. There's got to be sort of little steps, you know, little rewards, "A," "B," "C," "D," "F."

Steiger: Well, we'll see.

Thevenin: And this is all on tape, huh? You gonna give 'em Mormonism?

Steiger: No, I'm thinking about our transcriptionist, she's gonna kill me! (laughter) But it's interesting to me. Okay, what are we forgetting for this interview? We're forgetting something.

Thevenin: Now, I may go to Hell, so we'd better get that on tape. (laughter)

Steiger: Okay, we got that one. We haven't heard any lightening bolts. So we're okay for today.

Thevenin: No, my God is more a God of natural consequences.

Steiger: Well, there's something out there, whatever you want to call it. I don't have a word for it.

Thevenin: We'll let you use the word "God," we won't give you too bad a time.

Let's see, what have we left out? We've got my beginning. Oh, have we covered my end? We have not covered my demise, have we? Okay, my final resting place is on my mantleplace at home already. My son has been actively engaged in pottery for the last number of years, which is one of his better grades in school, so he said, "Dad, what do you really want?" And I've been, in my church work, working with a whole lot of people that have been dying, and realizing that the morticians and the funeral parlors and the cemeteries are making a great deal of money out of all this. So I said, "Son, make me a little vase to put my body in, my last remains." So my thing is now sitting there on my mantlepiece. It's beautiful: on one side it has a nice picture of the Canyon, a scene; and on the other side there's a little gold placque that says, "Paul Thomas Thevenin" and gives the date of my birth and leaves a little place over there. So my urn is sitting there waiting for me. Now we have talked about, possibly, when that day comes, we'll seal the top of it, and we'll get one of these inner tubes from one of these wheelbarrow tires, and we'll wrap it around the urn, and we'll put a rope on it and drag it behind somebody's boat and see which rapid finally gets it.

Quartaroli: Well, do you think it'll be Lava, or do you think it'll go before that?

Steiger: Oh, undoubtedly.

Thevenin: I think all the rest of the rapids will bow to Lava and say, "That's Lava's, we will leave it alone," and the boat will have a perfect run through every rapid, and when it gets to Lava, that's where it will happen. And my remains will be smashed to pieces and spread to the bottom of Lava, providing the Park Service doesn't forbid it.

Steiger: Well, there's probably a way around that too.

Thevenin: You mean, we just won't tell them? (laughter) But if any Park Service person reads this, let me give you a warning, whether there is a Heaven or Hell, and you stop my ashes from meeting up with Lava, I will come back.

So now we've covered my beginning and we've covered my end. We just don't know when. However, I did think on that rowing trip, the ideal thing would be, as I went through Lava to make this absolutely perfect run, and have the passengers all turn to me to tell me how wonderful it was, and find me there dead at my oars. But it didn't happen. (laughter)

Steiger: That'd be a good way to go. Well, señor, can you think of something we're forgetting?

Quartaroli: No.

Thevenin: You want any other names? Let's see, in the early days there was Sid Hudak....

Steiger: You gotta spell 'em. [Darned right! (Tr.)]

Thevenin: S-I-D H-U-D-A-K, who started out as a very nice sweet kid on a youth trip, came up, became a river guide, and the last time I saw him was when I made my final trip down the Salmon River, and this scroungey old bum came running across over at me and says, "Paul! I haven't seen you in ages!" And his beard was down to his waist, and that was Sid Hudak. He'd come from a nice, good, clean, sweet family in Southern California, and was now a hermit up on the Salmon River.

Steiger: Ruined him!

Thevenin: Then there was Craig and Rick Preston, the Preston boys, who Craig learned from Bryce McKay -remember I think we talked about Bryce McKay losing his leg. Craig, on the night of graduation, got hit by a car and broke his leg, and he said, "There goes my season for the summer." He sat around the house for about a week and told his mother he was going nuts, and he just wanted to go out there and play around the warehouse. So after a little while he got tired of that, so without telling his mother, we got one of the big plastic garbage bags and tied it around his cast and tied it around his leg and shipped him down the river and had the passengers.... He'd say, "Okay, now we're in for the trip. If you guys will help me into the boat, we'll be on our way." And with that big cast, they had to help him into the boat and out of the boat.

Steiger: But he rowed!

Thevenin: But he rowed.

Steiger: Oh man!

Thevenin: With a cast on his leg and a big plastic bag around the cast to keep it dry.

Steiger: We need to spell [his name].

Thevenin: Craig, C-R-A-I-G.

Steiger: I think we got that one, but Bryce McKay. How's McKay spelled?

Thevenin: Oh, like you'd spell McKay, M-C-K-A-Y. Part of the family pronounces it "Mackey," the other pronounces it "Makay."

Quartaroli: Is Bryce related to Dave?

[END AUDIO TAPE 3, SIDE B, BEGIN AUDIO TAPE 4, SIDE A]

Steiger: Okay, this is Cassette #4. This is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is a continuation of an interview done with Paul Thevenin. Lew Steiger is the interviewer, we're doing it at the house of Richard Quartaroli. This is the last little piece of this interview.

Thevenin: All the Hatches are related. Senator Hatch is related to.... But they don't even know where the tie-in is, last I heard.

Let's see, who else haven't we talked about? Let's see.... But anyway, Rick Preston went to jail for Jack, and spent time in jail. Pete Gibbs, who when we were rowing down the river on the Yampa -did we talk about that one? And Warm Springs?

Quartaroli: You talked about Warm Springs, how you flipped a boat there.

Thevenin: Before it ever became.... Then we were down there in the flood stage, and Dennis Massey was in the Hatch boat, and I went around one side of Dennis and Pete Gibbs. We had two families that came on that trip, and we had a big boat, twenty-eight-footer with me in it, and Pete Gibbs in one of the ten-mans, and the women had gone to the beauty parlor the day before the trip to get ready for the trip so they'd be good for the pictures, and it rained, and that was the year that the thing flooded and Warm Springs became a real rapid. The women got out there and said, "Oh, nobody's going to ride in that little boat." I said, "Well, gee, we don't have enough room, we've got to have somebody [ride in that little boat]." So the two women rode in the little boat, and they couldn't stand it, so the next day they said, "No, everybody rides in the big boat." Pete Gibbs was a young, good-looking guy. He was part of Art Gallenson's crowd, and two teenage girls wanted to ride with Pete so badly, and I said, "Folks, there is absolutely nothing in this next ten-mile stretch. There's nothing. A boat could not go over anywhere around here. If the girls want to ride [with Pete] they'll be perfectly safe and we'll pick them up before we get to the first rapid." And little was I to know, that as I went around the front end of Massey's boat, and Pete and the girls went around the back end of Massey's boat, there was one little pile of water running over one little rock, and Pete flipped in it, and the women in my boat are having heart attacks. Massey takes his knees off his oars and goes to the back of his boat and pulls the girls on board. And the women said, "Oh, our babies are safe!" And I thought to myself, "Ma'am, if you knew Dennis Massey, you'd prefer to have your daughters in the water." But anyway, Massey was one of the early-day boatmen for Hatch.

Let's see, did we talk about Pete Sunwald [phonetic spelling], who was one of my boatmen in the early days when he was a medical student? I came here to Kanab as Henry's manager and lo and behold the doctor in Kanab was Pete Sunwald. And you know something? The people in Kanab had never heard him talk about being a boatman! (chuckles)

Steiger: Didn't let 'em know about that.

Thevenin: You heard what happened when Western first moved into Fredonia, and one bishop in church got up and made the speech that "Brothers and Sisters, there's a new element moving into our society...." [He] went on and on about the evils _______. And he said, "It is reputed that they use women more often than most people use soap." And the guys down there said after church got out there was a constant stream of cars full of women just circling around the warehouse. (laughter)

Steiger: Oh my God!

Thevenin: So when Pete came down here to become a doctor and the attitude towards boatmen was that, he never let a soul down here know that he'd been a boatman. (chuckles) And I blew his cover. I said, "Well, you know Pete was a boatman of mine." "Doctor Sunwald was a boatman?!" So, you know, there was a time in life when it was not well to mention that.

Let's see, who else? There were a bunch of other people in those early days that were part-timers. I remember Roger Upwald. I think he ran with Georgie and stuff, and he'd done a lot of running, but somehow I always ended up being senior boatman. When Warm Springs first came in, and Jack took a look at it and said, "Oh, gee, we're gonna have to take all the boats around." And Jack missed the landing at the other end and left Upwald and me to go back. Upwald was on a trip with Jack, and I was on a trip with Gibbs, and we didn't really trust Gibbs that much, he was fairly new. So with Jack going around the corner, missing the landing, couldn't get back up, Upwald and I are going back up, take the boats through, walk back up, take the boats through. And Upwald was a philosopher, and he said, "You know, Paul, the only problem is, these guys get slightly sideways. You keep that nose down, keep into the waves, every one of 'em straight, nose on, these boats cannot go over."

Steiger: Ut-oh.

Thevenin: And so we're putting in for the last two boats, and I'm about ready to push off, and Pete's about ready to push off, and "I think I'll wait up." Pete said, "Go ahead, you get out there." I said, "Well, alright." So I had this strange feeling that something was wrong. So I pulled out in the rapids and I go on through and I get down to the other end and I start to pull in, and people are starting to grab -I said, "No, leave my boat alone. Where's Sunwald?" "He's just putting in now." I said, "Leave my boat right here in the eddy, don't tie it up." They said, "Why?" And Upwald had more experience on the boats than I had, you know, and Upwald had been doing this whole philosophy bit on the way up there. And all of a sudden somebody screamed, "He's over!" And I looked, and there's Sunwald upside down, and people swimming like mad, and so I just start rowing like mad out there. And just as I get to the boat, Pete lets go of his boat, throws his arm up over my boat, the first words out of his mouth, he says, "They will too go end over end." (laughter)

Steiger: This is Sunwald or Upwald?

Thevenin: Upwald, Roger Upwald. I switched names -Roger Upwald. So one of the guys who was experienced and philosophized and we found out that sometimes philosophy and Mother Nature don't always go together.

Steiger: I tell ya', it's uncanny how many times if you say something like that....

Quartaroli: It leads you right into it.

Thevenin: But those were his first words -not "thank you, gee that was rough" -it was "they will too go end over end."

Steiger: That's U-P-W-A-L-D.

Thevenin: U-P-W-A-L-D, I think. So there were a bunch of guys who were part-timers who'd come out for a trip now and then and stuff like that. So there are a lot of names we're probably leaving out, somebody will be offended and all that stuff.

Steiger: Oh, no.

Thevenin: That's the way it goes.

Steiger: The way these things go....

Thevenin: Some of them like Pete Sunwald will probably wish I had left his name out!

Steiger: Well, you'd have to dig for it, because in writing something up, we're only going to get ten percent for a finished piece. That's the way that works. The rest of it lays there in the tape on the shelf, and maybe somebody someday comes and looks at the whole thing. But as far as what you have room to publish, it's kind of disgusting how much you have to walk away from.

Thevenin: (mimicking old curmudgeon's voice) Well, then, children, I guess that's all for now, it's time for my nap.

Steiger: Okay, we're winding her down.

[END OF INTERVIEW]