What is a Maps and Records Clerk?
The Kotzebue headquarters was in a government building owned by the FAA. When we moved in after our first few days of operating out of a hotel room, our Finance Officer, Jim, had already activated a telephone line so we could communicate via voice to the Fairbanks BLM District Office. We set up our radio and had communications with aircraft and our field team leaders.
I, however, had additional needs. In order to justify the considerable logistic expenses fighting 87 fires, our unit needed to send daily typewritten reports to BLM in Boise, Idaho, as well as to Fairbanks. All the reports were then processed to Washington where Congressional approvals were needed for these emergency expenditures.
Though I did not understand exactly how the final monetary requests were routed, it was impressed upon me that my reports were necessary and needed to be sent in a timely manner- daily if possible.
So Jim saw to it that two important pieces of equipment were procured mostly for my use.
The first to arrive on the scene was a small 40-pound piece of hardware called a “telecopier”. This was a forerunner to our present fax machines, which did not yet exist for general use in 1977.
The telecopier hooked up to our incoming phone line. It had a small spinning drum/spindle to which a typed or drawn-upon piece of paper was attached. A phone number was entered- hopefully to a similar machine connected and powered at the receiving end of the call. Once the call connected, pressing a button caused the drum to spin. A photoelectric cell would then transmit the change of black to white on the page - the text or drawing. At the other end, the opposite translation would result in a transmitted page coming off that drum. All this predated our present digital processing and worked pretty well.
In fact, this worked too well! After several weeks of frenetic activity, my workload became repetitive, and I often found myself at night with no incoming actions as fires subsided for the evenings and crews rested.
Once my reports were typed and telecopied, I took some time to draw cartoons related to unusual activities. One I remember vividly occurred when two smokejumpers had returned from helping set up a radio transmission relay on the top of an area mountain. They reported seeing a strange perfect circle imprinted in the snowpack near the summit. They said it looked like a flying saucer had landed, and they even saw markings where something may have “exited” the circular imprint.
Now I wondered what these fellows had in their canteens, but they seemed genuinely perplexed and excited. They had deployed the radio equipment, so we sent them to their lodging for rest before their next deployment.
I didn’t want to write this story into a report to Boise, so I decided to draw a cartoon with a brief synopsis for my Fairbanks contacts. My picture showed small flying men with beanies on their heads with propellers. Flying over Kotzebue!
The cartoon transmitted fine and must have caused a good laugh because I was asked to send more! This I did, though none were remarkable enough to remain in my long-term memory for 43 years.
As for the strange imprint? One of life’s unknown mysteries!
I also connected our telecopier to a number in Anchorage that connected to the Anchorage Daily News. Here, again during my late hour down time, I sent occasional dispatches describing noteworthy activities of the day.
One such dispatch was exciting enough to be printed on the front page of the Anchorage paper. The incident involved a Native crew member who became extremely ill on the fire line. Our radio operator alerted us that he may have appendicitis and need immediate medical care.
The resulting actions were to walk him across a smoking burn area in a D-6 Caterpillar to a local stream where a flat-bottomed boat awaited. This took him down-river to Golovin, where there was a person with medical training who could assess his condition in a phone consult to a doctor in Nome. Then we could airlift him to Nome if necessary.
As I wrote the incident for the news reporter, I must have imbued my narrative with the sense of excitement and near-panic we felt as we did not know the outcome until the next day.
There were three outcomes: FIRST, the sick fellow did not get flown to Nome. It was correctly determined through the Golovin call to Nome that he had food poisoning from eating some bad C-rations! He was fine.
But the SECOND outcome was more personal.
It seems the newspaper story was picked up by an AP news service and the result was a request to entertain a news reporter/photographer from Time Magazine. Sure enough, within two days a young man in nice clean pressed jeans with a big camera appeared at the Kotzebue terminal asking to be flown to a fire.
We had to accommodate him so we put him in a small plane and sent him along to a fire site surrounding a mining location at Haycock (inhabited for a time by the Jorgensen family. I wonder if this was where my Copper Valley schoolmates Trygve and Cecelia Jorgensen came from?). We knew the fire was active on all sides of the tiny airstrip there, so we expected some degree of excitement from our young visitor. Indeed, he refused to exit the plane. Too much excitement!
The following week a short article was published in Time Magazine accompanied by an aerial picture of a fire line marching across the tundra.
Then came the THIRD outcome, which was a directive that I stop publicizing our activities beyond the required reports! No more dispatches and no more cartoons. Whoops.
As I mentioned earlier in this story, there were TWO pieces of equipment brought to headquarters for my use. The second came about two weeks into the operations. It was a monster that stood 3 feet tall and weighed several hundred pounds. To this day I don’t know where it came from, but it was quite useful for information coming into our operations. It was a teletype machine, one with a keyboard and a roll of paper on which printed information arrived with a clatter associated with the press rooms we see in movies. With a line dedicated to our Fairbanks office, reports would come in periodically-and often- letting us know what was happening around the State.
This behemoth was important enough that we placed it next to our building stove with its never-ending large black enamel pot of “camp” coffee. The coffee was made and kept filled by Claire, the Las Vegas lady brought to us by Bob the smokejumper. It was her only duty and she fulfilled it well. There we would congregate whenever the keys started clacking and the paper roll began to move.
Sending information out via this equipment required some skill since there was no backing up on a line so codes for mistakes were needed, and messages had to be carefully typed and, where possible, abbreviated. Incoming copy could be ripped off and posted to a board or given to a responsible team member to process.
I never liked this machine beyond the feeling of being in a real newsroom. Like the camp coffee, the teletype kept us awake!
And along with our typewriter, radios, our telephone, and our telecopier, we communicated.
That was how a “Maps and Records Clerk” worked for our government!
The Kotzebue headquarters was in a government building owned by the FAA. When we moved in after our first few days of operating out of a hotel room, our Finance Officer, Jim, had already activated a telephone line so we could communicate via voice to the Fairbanks BLM District Office. We set up our radio and had communications with aircraft and our field team leaders.
I, however, had additional needs. In order to justify the considerable logistic expenses fighting 87 fires, our unit needed to send daily typewritten reports to BLM in Boise, Idaho, as well as to Fairbanks. All the reports were then processed to Washington where Congressional approvals were needed for these emergency expenditures.
Though I did not understand exactly how the final monetary requests were routed, it was impressed upon me that my reports were necessary and needed to be sent in a timely manner- daily if possible.
So Jim saw to it that two important pieces of equipment were procured mostly for my use.
The first to arrive on the scene was a small 40-pound piece of hardware called a “telecopier”. This was a forerunner to our present fax machines, which did not yet exist for general use in 1977.
The telecopier hooked up to our incoming phone line. It had a small spinning drum/spindle to which a typed or drawn-upon piece of paper was attached. A phone number was entered- hopefully to a similar machine connected and powered at the receiving end of the call. Once the call connected, pressing a button caused the drum to spin. A photoelectric cell would then transmit the change of black to white on the page - the text or drawing. At the other end, the opposite translation would result in a transmitted page coming off that drum. All this predated our present digital processing and worked pretty well.
In fact, this worked too well! After several weeks of frenetic activity, my workload became repetitive, and I often found myself at night with no incoming actions as fires subsided for the evenings and crews rested.
Once my reports were typed and telecopied, I took some time to draw cartoons related to unusual activities. One I remember vividly occurred when two smokejumpers had returned from helping set up a radio transmission relay on the top of an area mountain. They reported seeing a strange perfect circle imprinted in the snowpack near the summit. They said it looked like a flying saucer had landed, and they even saw markings where something may have “exited” the circular imprint.
Now I wondered what these fellows had in their canteens, but they seemed genuinely perplexed and excited. They had deployed the radio equipment, so we sent them to their lodging for rest before their next deployment.
I didn’t want to write this story into a report to Boise, so I decided to draw a cartoon with a brief synopsis for my Fairbanks contacts. My picture showed small flying men with beanies on their heads with propellers. Flying over Kotzebue!
The cartoon transmitted fine and must have caused a good laugh because I was asked to send more! This I did, though none were remarkable enough to remain in my long-term memory for 43 years.
As for the strange imprint? One of life’s unknown mysteries!
I also connected our telecopier to a number in Anchorage that connected to the Anchorage Daily News. Here, again during my late hour down time, I sent occasional dispatches describing noteworthy activities of the day.
One such dispatch was exciting enough to be printed on the front page of the Anchorage paper. The incident involved a Native crew member who became extremely ill on the fire line. Our radio operator alerted us that he may have appendicitis and need immediate medical care.
The resulting actions were to walk him across a smoking burn area in a D-6 Caterpillar to a local stream where a flat-bottomed boat awaited. This took him down-river to Golovin, where there was a person with medical training who could assess his condition in a phone consult to a doctor in Nome. Then we could airlift him to Nome if necessary.
As I wrote the incident for the news reporter, I must have imbued my narrative with the sense of excitement and near-panic we felt as we did not know the outcome until the next day.
There were three outcomes: FIRST, the sick fellow did not get flown to Nome. It was correctly determined through the Golovin call to Nome that he had food poisoning from eating some bad C-rations! He was fine.
But the SECOND outcome was more personal.
It seems the newspaper story was picked up by an AP news service and the result was a request to entertain a news reporter/photographer from Time Magazine. Sure enough, within two days a young man in nice clean pressed jeans with a big camera appeared at the Kotzebue terminal asking to be flown to a fire.
We had to accommodate him so we put him in a small plane and sent him along to a fire site surrounding a mining location at Haycock (inhabited for a time by the Jorgensen family. I wonder if this was where my Copper Valley schoolmates Trygve and Cecelia Jorgensen came from?). We knew the fire was active on all sides of the tiny airstrip there, so we expected some degree of excitement from our young visitor. Indeed, he refused to exit the plane. Too much excitement!
The following week a short article was published in Time Magazine accompanied by an aerial picture of a fire line marching across the tundra.
Then came the THIRD outcome, which was a directive that I stop publicizing our activities beyond the required reports! No more dispatches and no more cartoons. Whoops.
As I mentioned earlier in this story, there were TWO pieces of equipment brought to headquarters for my use. The second came about two weeks into the operations. It was a monster that stood 3 feet tall and weighed several hundred pounds. To this day I don’t know where it came from, but it was quite useful for information coming into our operations. It was a teletype machine, one with a keyboard and a roll of paper on which printed information arrived with a clatter associated with the press rooms we see in movies. With a line dedicated to our Fairbanks office, reports would come in periodically-and often- letting us know what was happening around the State.
This behemoth was important enough that we placed it next to our building stove with its never-ending large black enamel pot of “camp” coffee. The coffee was made and kept filled by Claire, the Las Vegas lady brought to us by Bob the smokejumper. It was her only duty and she fulfilled it well. There we would congregate whenever the keys started clacking and the paper roll began to move.
Sending information out via this equipment required some skill since there was no backing up on a line so codes for mistakes were needed, and messages had to be carefully typed and, where possible, abbreviated. Incoming copy could be ripped off and posted to a board or given to a responsible team member to process.
I never liked this machine beyond the feeling of being in a real newsroom. Like the camp coffee, the teletype kept us awake!
And along with our typewriter, radios, our telephone, and our telecopier, we communicated.
That was how a “Maps and Records Clerk” worked for our government!
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