1 50 1 https://highway89.org/files/original/c7dbf87062e63e2e01f16cd3dd8ffab7.mp3 6e43a491cb771a222a83e2341e4abb12 https://highway89.org/files/original/e0de45f69d9ebb87cef3b6c67f7ce874.pdf fb3f1710dbcdca4777fb1ff8a2e5e200 PDF Text Text LAND USE MANAGEMENT TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET Interviewee: Ron Goede Place of Interview: Ron Goede’s home in Logan, Utah Date of Interview: 16 October 2008 Interviewer: Recordist: Elaine Thatcher and Brad Cole Elaine Thatcher Recording Equipment: Marantz PMD660 Digital Recorder Transcription Equipment used: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems Transcribed by: Glenda Nesbit Transcript Proofed by: Elaine Thatcher, Randy Williams (3/09; July 2011); Ron Goede reviewed (27 July 2011) Brief Description of Contents: Ron discusses his family life, education in Nebraska in a German and Russian German communities, undergraduate work University of Nebraska, involvement with the Air National Guard as an aircraft mechanic, graduate studies at Utah State University in fisheries, and his career in fisheries in Utah. Reference: ET = Elaine Thatcher (Interviewer; Director, USU Mountain West Center for Regional Studies) BC = Brad Cole (Interviewer; Associate Dean, USU Libraries) RG = Ron Goede NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as “uh” and starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcribed. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. TAPE TRANSCRIPTION DISC One ET: This is Elaine Thatcher and Brad Cole. We are with Ron Goede at his home in Logan. And it is October 16, 2008. And it’s about 2:15 in the afternoon. And so we’re going to talk with Ron about his career in fisheries and whatever else comes up in the conversation. So Ron, why don’t you start by stating your full name your birthday and birth place? RG: Okay. Well my full name is Ronald William Goede. G O E D E. I’ve gotten used to that all the time now. So I remember. I was born in Columbus, Nebraska on April 4, 1934. Let’s see what all do we need now. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 1   �ET: No that’s all I asked you for. RG: Do you want me to just proceed with that. ET: Well if you just want to give us a quick rundown on... did you grow up there? RG: Well I was there until I was twelve. It was; I don’t know it was a German thing. And I was raised in a German neighborhood. So my father was a German Lutheran Minister. And spoke German. And we moved to Lincoln. And then I grew up in a German Russian immigrant culture. He took over a church there. And that’s kind of where I grew up. So a lot of my, a lot of my cultural background, even though it’s not my blood background. I was Prussian, you know. But my background actually was more German than Russian. ET: So did you grow up speaking some German? RG: Oh yea. Yea ET: You still speak it? RG: Yea. Not like I did before. I’m getting self-conscious about it. BC: What was your dad’s name? RG: Herman Martin Adolf Gerda BC: And your mother? RG: She was Irene Lavern Hahappold. HAHAPPOLD. And she was from a farming community. I had an intellectual side with my father’s side and she was from a big German farming community. Ronald Grandion, Nebraska. So on those two were big in my background. I learned to have a lot of consideration and respect for both the intellectual and the working side. Thought a lot of both of them; and that’s kind of stayed with me, always has. ET: What was your education like? RG: Um. Well of course I went to public school in Columbus up to the sixth grade and then went to high school in Lincoln: Lincoln High School. And then I graduated. And then [in] 1952 from there and then I started to attend [the] University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Started in engineering but didn’t like it. Stayed with it for a couple of years and then got out of it and went into arts and science. And that was a real turn on for me. So after the engineering I majored in botany. And then also I had a major in Botany and also one in Zoology. And I got a degree out of Lincoln: a bachelor’s degree. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 2   �ET: So you had a double major? RG: Yea a double major. ET: Botany and Zoology. RG: At that time they asked you to have one major and two minors or two majors. And so I was really into the biology period. So anyway I also got involved at this time in the military was hanging over your heads pretty hard. So I ended up, while I was going to University of Nebraska, I joined the National Guard. And I was in the Air National Guard and I was trained as an aircraft mechanic. So I worked up, went through one enlistment there. And then I ended up with about a year of active duty there too in the Air Force. At that time you had to have eight years in some combination military. The more active duty you had the less reserve time you had to do. So I was in there until I was going to be until for that eight years. And then I let’s see. I came to school up here at Utah State. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with biology so I applied for graduate work at: Duke and British Columbia for forestry; and Missouri and Utah State for fisheries; and Wisconsin and Purdue for pathology. And I figured well I’ll let them wade it out you know. And I got accepted at all of them. And so then that didn’t help. So I decided, actually one of the reasons I came to Utah was simply because I’d never been to Utah before. I could have easily gone any one of those directions because I was interested in all of it. But with a degree in Botany and Zoology, a bachelor’s, the only job offer I got was with the – was a fruit inspector in a post office in Kansas City. And I decided well I’d better rethink this. That wasn’t one of them things I had on my plan. ET: So you were still doing your time in the National Guard when you got accepted here? RG: Yea, that’s right. I would have just been finishing it here: the National Guard. And then when I came here there wasn’t an Air National Guard unit at that time close by here so I went into the standby’s reserve. I was still doing my eight year. And then let’s see, I finished the degree well somewhere in there. Let’s see in 1958 I went to work for River Basin Studies for the Fish and Wildlife Services River Basin studies in Alaska; and [I] did biological surveys on the Sisitna and the Yukon. ET: Was this after you got your masters? RG: No, this was between, about half way. I didn’t have any money. And I hitchhiked. I did about a year here and I was advised I had to get some money somewhere. And I hitchhiked to Seattle. And then from Seattle the Fish and Wildlife Service paid [for me to travel to Anchorage]. And then I had to live in a warehouse; I was just gonna go right to the boondocks, rather than get an apartment. I just lived in a Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 3   �warehouse: a Fish and Wildlife Service warehouse and slept on a sack of seines [fish nets]. And I had that little stove in there and they’d bring. The guys that worked the commercial fish stuff would bring me little catches every day. I had shrimp and things like that. But it wasn’t too . . . couldn’t have many guests. And then went out to start doing their surveys. And they hired me primarily for my botany because they wanted me to do complete biological surveys in impoundments. They were talking about putting three major impoundments on the Mississippi River. And they wanted to know everything that was alive basically in that proposed impoundments area up to everything that was going to be impounded. So I worked the length of the Susitna. And I finished the project. ET: And you were identifying plants at some point. RG: Everything. Fish and anything I could get. But plants are the one they were worried about; because it tied in so much to the game forage and everything else. And the streams were pretty heavily fed by the glaciers; by the Susitna Glacier. So it looked a lot like a sidewalk, you know, gray, the Susitna. And the salmon couldn’t make it up, the water was too rough. They had an area called Devil’s Gorge; the salmon couldn’t even get by there. In fact we lost a person. We lost a person in Devil’s Gorge. But I finished that project. And then I decided I had to make some decisions. Of course I couldn’t spend anything because I gave the banks of power of attorney because I wasn’t in town. There was no place to spend it. And so they just kept depositing it. That got me to where I could afford to go back to school. So I came back to Utah State. And I had a master’s project. I wrote a project up for and it went to Bill Sigler [he] was my major professor. He was in charge of the Fisheries program, the wildlife department then. And I wrote one [mater project] up on the effects of sodium fluoride. Fluoride was a big issue then: fluoridization. And so I had a project on the effects of sodium fluoride on primary productivity of a stream. I worked it out on the Logan River. So when I finished that. That took a couple of years. That was a slow process. In those days you didn’t get a lot of money for [graduate work?]. A matter of fact I built my experimental unit out of an old airplane canopy; one that Sigler had from surplus. It was a plastic airplane canopy and I had to cut it and I molded it in my oven in my apartment; burnt the hell out of myself. And it worked and then they decided to go ahead and build some for me – have them built. ET: So these were what? RG: They were microcosms. They were tubes where I could put samples of algae and so forth in there and then run the water past and collect the gasses and so forth. And then I would measure the chlorophyll in the plants to give an idea of what the productivity was. And that would go up or down, depending where the fluoride level was. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 4   �ET: Did the fluoride have a negative effect on the growth? RG: Not too much. It actually got a little. They got a kind of a carbon dioxide gush when you treat them with the fluoride. So it had an impact but we never, with that particular study we didn’t work out whether that was bad or not. But it was, it was. We didn’t have calculators then either. Except the big Marchant and Fridens [calculators] you know. We had to wait in line to use the calculators. You could have never set that on a table because it went ka kink, ka kink, ka kink. Finally it would slosh over. So anyway that was when I got a job. I started to work on a Ph.D. but it was just. I simply needed to find a way to make some money again. And I was kind of burned out with the whole process anyway. So I got a job with Missouri; the State of Missouri, and started to work for them. And I worked for about I think I went to work for them like in June of ’61. And then in October of ’61 yea October of ’61 they had the Berlin crisis and I got activated because I was still in the reserve. I only had about three months left on my eight years and I got activated. So of course then I’d joined a unit in Ohio and then they decided they didn’t have a crisis. But you couldn’t get out, you know. They didn’t have a crisis but they couldn’t let you go either. So I spent a year there just volunteering for temporary duty anywhere I could, just to keep it interesting. So I flew all over. And I was still a mechanic. And I was flying all over the country. So then when I got [out] Missouri had to [give me a job again]. [They] gave me a leave you know; they had to when I got activated. Except the same job wasn’t there [when I got out, so] I had to take a different job. And when I got to back to Missouri, I was working for their research group under Slim Funk: John L. Funk, out of Columbia, Missouri and then I took over. Just before I went to the service I had taken over the paddlefish study. This was the reason I was interested in Missouri in the first place. Of course I didn’t get that back. But I was also doing small bass mouth reproduction studies. And I kind of lost, lost those projects. And I ended up in lakes and impalement studies and I finally took over their public use – management in their public use areas like St. Louis and Kansas City and places. And then they started, they sent me to Stutguard, Arkansas to a workshop that Fred Meyer had. Fred Meyer was a parasitologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. And run it at the fish farming experiment station in Stutguard. And that was a two-week class. And that really turned me on. That was a really it was . . . it wasn’t strict fisheries, it was more fish health. And Fred told me that in about ten years ago fishery biologists would be a dime-a-dozen. But fisheries biologists with a special deal and I said, Wow that’s heavy. So I went back to Missouri and I wasn’t back there long. And I gave several papers, reports on the class. And I enjoyed doing that. That was fun. And I still like to do things like that. Like to talk, I like to talk to a crowd. Just like the Bridgerland Folk Society. But anyway while I was doing that, they asked me that their Chief of Fisheries, P.G. Barnacle in Columbia and he was, would have been. I mean yea, Chief of Fisheries. And he worked out of Jeff City, Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 5   �Jefferson City. But he asked me if I was interested in, well he wanted me to take a tour of their, the state fish hatcheries which were directed by AG George Morris who ended up being. I would class George as another one of my mentors. But he was a native Hillbilly: a very good fish rater. ET: Fish what? RG: Fish culturalist. And Missouri, well a lot, well a lot of the culturists in those days were locals. You know the people that have a knack for it are real savvy of doing it. They didn’t know why they were doing some of those things. But when I was taking the tour he had another man Harvey Willoughby was along. And he was chief of hatcheries for the Fish and Wildlife Service out in Minneapolis. And I had a good time with them. I could really relate to Harvey. And so Harvey and George both became really good friends. And they were until they died. I was always in touch with those two. But George and Harvey were both inducted into the Fish Culture Hall of Fame, they call it in Spearfish, South Dakota. A Fish and Wildlife - there’s a national program. ET: I never knew it was there. RG: Yea. And they have. So those two both made it into the [Hall of Fame]. And so they would good ones to draw to you know. Then they asked me if I would. What? ET: The Fish Culture Hall of Fame? And it’s with what the state fisheries up there? RG: No. It was actually started by someone. Actually a friend of mine, Arden Trandell, who was Fish and Wildlife Service. ET: Arden Trandell? RG: Trandell. Yes. And then he retired. But he’s, in fact I think Arden’s in there too. And then he ran it; took care of it for them for awhile, after he retired. And they’ve got the biosketches and CV of everybody’s that’s gotten. I’ve got all those. They ran it kind of through the American Fisheries Society. Then after I took that tour Harvey got his degree. Harvey Willoughby. I’m just, I’m pointing. This is a nondescript point. Amorphous. I guess. But anyway Harvey got his degree at Montana State with C.J. DeBrown. And he had two thumbs. From this joint down there were two little thumbnails. ET: Oh my word. RG: Just on the one hand. And I learned fairly early on that he would distract you that way. When you were arguing with him, he’d fool with that thumb. And I’d tell him, “Damn it Harvey, put that in your pocket.” And he’s says, “Well it works sometimes.” And I’d say, “Well I bet you can pick both nostrils at the same time.” Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 6   �ET: But he was just a wonderful guy. He finally retired in oh Grand Junction. And he’s dead now. And his name is Willoughby? RG: Willoughby. W I L L O U G H B Y. Just a great guy; he ended up being Chief of Hatcheries for the Forest and Wildlife Service out of Washington. And really did a lot of work with new species of fish in Europe oh like the Samo Hucho hucho. The big Danube trout that they tried [and the] Lake Horid trout that they brought over here and tried in this country. Neither one of them worked all that well. But he was just a real ET: The Danube trout and the what? RG: Lake Horid. I think its H O R I D trout. It was from Central Europe. From the Alps. But Harvey was a shaker and a mover you know. He was a good advocate of culture and disciplined culture. And I thought a lot of Harvey. And George was. Old George Morris was a great, had a great influence on me. And I had my, when I was trained. When I got out of the Air Force this last time; after then they gave me a discharge you know. Then I was finished with it. But I had nine years by this time. But while I was an aircraft mechanic I got an enormous respect for preventive maintenance. And I was a crew chief taking care of the aircraft, you know. And I was working with fighter aircraft. I had the F-80’s and 86’s and 84’s. And, but that stayed with me. I still feel that way. And I carried that became part of my professional credo. You know that take care of it before it breaks. And don’t let it break with it’s up there. The pilots take issue with that. They don’t like that. When they were going down they looked to see who signed the paperwork. So this all, this all comes down to where I kind of. Where I went and why I went there, and what I did when I got there. You know. I started in Missouri I got really interested in the fish health was a big part of it. And the fish diseases. And while I was working for Missouri they sent me to Lee Town, West Virginia for about eight months to study and Dennis Snieszko, who was kind of one of the world leaders in fish pathology in the world. ET: What was his name again? RG: Snieszko. S N I E S Z K O: Dennis Stanislas Snieszko. He came here, he was educated in Poland and came here to get away from Hitler. And because they wanted him on their bacteria warfare; and he wouldn’t do it. So he came here and went to work for Kent Dietrich which was bacteria warfare in this country. But that was okay as long as it wasn’t Adolf. And he didn’t like it. He was a gentle man. And I had, I had it [?] So I got those three. I had four mentors in my life. My father was one and then Snieszko, Bill Sigler and George Morris. People that had that kind of impact on me. A lot of people were teachers, but I always add a Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 7   �little extra for the mentors. They really get down inside. And I guess Dennis Snieszko is dead now. But boy I had a huge respect for him. Um, let’s see. ET: How long were you there? RG: About eight months; it was training, a formal training. They would only take four people a year. So then I was one of the four and it was very intense. Eight hours a day. You had four hours in a lecture and then four hours in the lab. All just, every day of the week. And you know, you were, you had exams and all that business. So it was formal. And Snieszko made a comment. He had been criticized by some of his peers for taking time out for to train from a research program. And his response to that was, there’s no point in building the bricks if there’s no one to build the houses. I still get choked up with this because he really meant a lot. And that stuck with me. And I never got that out of my system. So I did all my career a lot of training. But always I did it at the University here. But I did a lot of workshops. And when I developed that autopsy system I taught that to around 1500 people in 32 different states. And so that was a heavy, heavy part of my program was to pass on what we were finding to people, other professionals. So and I just. There were just us two. About two years ago. Two or three years ago I got the Snieszko Award finally. For distinguished service from the American Fisheries. And it’s interesting. You know one of the other scientists there, which I got to be really good friends with and was also, is a world famous pathologist. He’s dead now too. But it was Ken Wolfe. And Ken got the first Ph.D. here at Utah State. ET: Really RG: Not in fisheries. But the first. That was right after they went to the, at University from Ag College to University. He was the first Ph.D., Bill McConnell got the second one and John Neuhold got the third one. So, but Ken was a. He started the work with cell culture and stuff with, in fisheries. And so they could do. He was the first, developed the first cold-blooded cell line. So they could do the work with viruses. And I used his methods when I came here I found virus in Kamas; at the Kamas hatchery: the IPN virus. And started his cell culture here in my lab. But I was close friends with Ken until he died too. And Glen Hoffman was kind of the big. Did a lot of the early work on whirling disease. He was there too. These guys were all world class fish pathologists, men very well known. Hooked into. n Italy everybody came there to see those guys, you know. So you got to meet all these people and talk to them. And a lot of them spoke German. ET: So you got along fine. RG: Yea. It was funny how many of them did speak German; they weren’t all Germans. But German for awhile was kind of the technical language, scientific language. So anyway, so that’s where. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 8   �Then I came back to Missouri and I built their first disease lab, fish disease lab that they’d had. Down in southeast Missouri, down near Cassville Missouri. Not too far, about sixty miles out of Springfield. At a stake park down there. And had, and started working with fish quality. I liked that. I took it a step beyond the health and or disease and decided I was interested in the quality in a more general attack. And disease was just a part of that. And that’s kind of, that kind of became my thrust, all through the rest of my career. Was the fish quality and of course a lot of work with disease. But always in the context of quality. ET: So about what year are we up to now? When you came back to that RG: When I came back… I came to Utah after. I came back to in ‘62 after the air activation. And then went to Missouri for about eight months. And then came … I had worked before. I had to work. I went to work for the hatcheries there after Harvey. Had that meeting with Harvey, tour with Harvey Willoughby and George Morris. Apparently I didn’t know that but I was being assessed or evaluated. To see, because they were worried about putting a technical person with these old guys. You know. They weren’t happy about me being there. Those old guys. They had. Then you had a college graduate they stuck a couple of adjectives in there too. But Harvey maintained that since George was kind of a hillbilly himself. But Harvey said he didn’t know many people who would, who would get along with those guys. But he thought I would. And so the very first job I had there was working. And so I went to work as a hatchery biologist. And very first job I had there was a disease case. I never forgot. I still use this in lectures and stuff. But the, he didn’t want me there. That was pretty obvious. And he was very nervous about me being there. ET: Harvey didn’t? RG: No this old guy that was the hatchery superintendent for the Roaring River Hatchery. Bob Price. And we ended up being really good friends too. But he asked me. I said, “Well in the first place in Missouri you don’t just sit down and get right at the subject. You’ve got to get over to it, you know. Talk about the weather and everything else, you know.” And I finally said, “Well I understand you’ve had some trouble here.” Oh, he says, “they’re dead. But I don’t think it’s anything serious.” And he was serious. He was serious as hell. But I knew just exactly what he meant. But I was really struggling to keep from laughing you know. And that’s always stuck with me. That there’s being serious and then there’s being serious. You know. He was worried about it wasn’t going to be serious for him. He knew the fish were in trouble. He didn’t know whether he was. ET: They’re dead, but it’s nothing serious. RT: Yea. But I don’t think it’s anything serious. And so I started picking up a lot of their jargon. Well we cut it off twice, but it’s still too short. And then I’ve. I had a Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 9   �pretty active program there. And I started the kind of an inspection of the stations. Boy I spent an awful lot of time on the road, sitting there drawing stuff on napkins in the coffee shops, trying to figure out how we’re going to approach this. I always used to. I always used the approach of what are we going to do? I never did say, “What can I do for you?” And I think that made a big difference for them, because I made sure that. Because they knew a lot of stuff about fish that I just. I knew how to. What we were going to have to call some of it. But they didn’t know. They knew what to do. They had a system for, when they had a leaking dam board and a raceway. You just can’t seem to stop it from leaking. They used horse manure. They called it super seal. But it’s the. And it didn’t work as well from cows because their ruminants and they break the fiber down too far. But horses they put, it’s dry. It has to be dry of course. They’ll put that in there and it sucks that in to those boards. And then it swells and it’s obsolete. ET: Oh for heaven’s sake. RG: And so. The first time I ever went looking for. Up at Kamas they were having leaky boards. And we went out and got some. I had a tech, one of the techs that was working for me. We walked: a gal. We walked out and got. I said I got a bucket and we went out and got some horse manure. And we came back and the assistant Superintendent Ron Russell. He said, what have you got? And he looked in there and he say’s I’m not sending you out for strawberries again. But they got a kick out of that. And so they started calling it super seal too. Now you can’t find horses. So there was a lot of those kinds of things. I had to take that and understand why it was working and try to bring it down into some kind of a quantifiable thing. And I loved it. I really fell in love with the work then. Because I felt that they needed me and I needed them. And then that’s always stuck with me. And it was with me when I came here. Bill Sigler recruited me down here. He called me and said that this job was open out here and that this lab was built in 61. They started building it in 61. George Post. And so he said, he wanted me. He was assigned, or asked by the State of Utah to find somebody. And so Sigler thought that I would be a good one for that. And so I came. And I thought then. I hated to leave Missouri but this was a whole new, whole new thing here. ET: What year was that? RG: That was ’66 when I came here. I was. Sigler called me in 65, the spring of 65 and I told him I wouldn’t do it unless I had at least three months to get somebody in place and trained to do the job there. So then they gave me that much time. And then I came here. But I always, quality, fish quality was central to my program. So that in 1967 I found the virus in Kamas in the Kamas hatchery. BC: And where’s Kamas at? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 10   �RG: It’s up by the Jordan[elle], by the Heber and Kamas and Midway. Kamas is on the Provo [River]. ET: It’s up on the Wasatch back. RG: Upper Provo River yea. ET: You found whirling disease up there. RG: No IPN virus. It was one of. It was actually. He was losing everything. In little brook trout. And I looked at those fish and I says, that’s. And I wasn’t even set up for it yet. And I said “that’s got IPN written all over it: Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis.” And so I had a friend in Hagerman, Idaho who was at the Federal Hatchery there. He was a hatchery biologist who had been through and had already set up some cell culture. And so I took samples up to him and we ran it through the lab there. And it came out positive. And then I, then I started. It took me awhile to set that all up here and the get the equipment I needed. And then I started the inspections. I started inspecting all of the stations. ET: So where was the lab here that you set up? Was it on campus? RG: Yea. No it was out at the experiment station across from the landfill there. BC: On second north? RG: Yea. And that’s. You know I had a little office. Merlin Olsen came out to see me and he didn’t even fit in my office. I told him Merlin we got to go outside. ET: That’s still a fisheries office isn’t it? RG: Yea. And it’s, it’s re-expanded a lot. It’s a full. That was about 1967. Well it was ‘68. I had basically a full service pathology lab going there. I had the cell cultures and we had the bacteriology and everything. And it stayed that way. Then in [?] cause now we’re starting to get down to here you know. This was the formative stuff that got me into all this. They were having a lot of trouble. You have to back up here now a little bit and realize where fisheries were at that time. You know. Like in the ‘50s still, fisheries was pretty trial and error. Especially in Utah and places like Utah because they were damming all the. Putting it would be the large central Utah project dams or small irrigation dams. But it was getting where they didn’t have fish for that. This was, there were no lakes in Utah other than the Uintas which didn’t have fish. And so you couldn’t just dam that up and hope that the fish that are there are going to take over. Because it was a different habitat. And so, and they were doing a lot of trial and error. There wasn’t a lot of sense. Just put barracuda in you know. Oh let’s try those. They’re pretty. And then you know. Piranha you don’t have to feed them very often, you know. Oh look, you’d put a hand. Put a sign there that says keep fingers out of water and you’d Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 11   �have it made you know because that’s an invitation to. Wouldn’t have to feed them. And this was a research program. The experiment station was primarily to develop fish culture techniques and methods and equipment to get better fish and more fish. Primarily more fish. And so I took issue with that whole, that whole idea. And I told them, I can’t buy. I don’t want to go for more fish. I’ll go for better fish. And that’s more of a sensible goal than as many fish as I can raise. I’d rather get the best fish I can raise. And then also decide what you’re going to plant; what species, when you know. When do you plant them, how many do you plant. And feed. They were still feeding a little meat when I got here. You know. In Missouri I had that too. I developed diets. But that was. You would feed livers. Get a lot of livers. And they’d dye them green so that you wouldn’t sell them for. And that was the law. And nothing like ET: And you fed that to the fish huh? RG: Nothing like grinding up a bunch of green liver you know. God, that’s awful stuff. And then the. Those old superintendents told us. Always figured you couldn’t raise a trout without liver. And so a lot of times they just almost beg you for more, some liver. Because they said, I know this is going to do it. And so I’d go ahead and I’d recommend a little liver for them, just because it made them feel good. It never did do any good. But anyway the upshot was, part of this is the fact that there were no diets for trout like the pellets. Like we feed now. And we were feeding some pellets, but the diets weren’t well worked out. And they would break in 40-50 days you know. They would have trouble. They would have to feed a little meat. And everybody, there were several serious programs in the country working on diets. So a good part of my first year or so was testing, developing and testing diets. I had mixers and pelleters and everything here. And then I’d have to. In order for anybody to bid on our feed contract, it might be a million pounds of feed. They would have to, we would have to test the feed. But all of this was part of that quality. A lot of the diseases; the bacterial and virus. The microbes that we had were there because of the feed wasn’t good enough. They made them very susceptible to everything that was trouble. And so we had to work. Then we so that’s program. We even had one that we worked out with Paul Cuplin who was Chief of Hatchers for Idaho. Paul and I worked up a program on jogging, fish jogging. We’d have them pull. Take the, in the hatchery, lower the water so that the fish would have to swim harder. And let them swim for about an hour and then fill it back up. Get ‘em ready. ET: Fish exercise program huh RG: We called it jogging. And we also had programs for stamina. And stamina was a big thing. And this gets in the whole idea of fish quality which was. But the fish stamina, we had a stamina tunnel out here where you would. It would be about eight foot long and a big. I think it was an 8 inch plastic Plexiglas tube and reservoirs. And you’d put fish in there and then you would. You could pump water through it at a given velocity. You measured fish swimming speed in body Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 12   �lengths per second. And you would swim them at a given body lengths per second for a given time and find out what the. Then you could measure. A lot of times they would simply start to drop out of the picture, because they couldn’t hold. They could hold for awhile and then they’d get tired. And you couldn’t tell whether they were sweating or not. Hard to do with a fish you know. But anyway so then you measure how long it took them to fatigue and then, and then how long they could. You would have to let them rest and put them in it again. But in the streams they don’t always have a choice. So but that all became part of what you had to evaluate in order to evaluate what the quality of the fish was. ET: And was this work applied throughout Utah. Or mostly up here in the North RG: No it was. But that was the thing. My program was basically state-wide. And it was the only program. So they were beginning to pretty much do what I wanted them to do. BC: Was it a program just for the state hatcheries, or does it cover the commercial hatcheries? RG: No, the commercial. We started doing it for the commercial hatcheries later. They were hard to work with. I had a long history with White’s Trout Farm out there. [Speaking to Brad Cole] Your neighbor [at White’s Trout Farm]. Clark White had , Grant’s dad or uncle was the first one. But they’ve had meat and stuff for a long time. So there’s nothing grosser than that, a big old plop and it’d float out then [?] and then the fish just coming roaring in there to eat. ET: Really. I had no idea. So now at this point did you ever get your Ph.D.? RG: Nope. I never [did]. No. In there when I was. That’s why I came back. That was one of the reasons I came back here. But while in that time I got par planitis in my eye. They didn’t know what it was for quite a while. ET: What was it called? RG: Par planitis is a part of the eye. And it was a sterile inflammation; wasn’t a microbe. And they worked on that for quite a while. Keith Gates was my eye doctor; it took him quite a while to diagnose it. And he finally said. Discovered that in England where they have socialized medicine they keep a lot of these records in one database you know. And he said. “A hundred percent of the par planitis sufferers were smokers.” And I smoked then. And that was good enough for me you know. That didn’t mean that everybody that smoked couldn’t get par planitis. But everyone that had par planitis was a smoker. And I told him, well that could just be because of you know, that always changes things with the smokers. They get vassal construction and that sort of thing. So I quit that. But it did a lot of, a fair amount of damage and I was on steroids for about two years: Prednizone. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 13   �And I backed off. I asked him what I was facing. And I said I don’t quite understand now what route to take in my career. It looked like I probably was going to loose the sight in that eye. And he advised me to just, it might be well to look for more administration. And that wasn’t what I wanted to do. But I dropped; I basically just gave up on the. I just decided I had some things I wanted to finish while I still had enough eye to do it. And I dropped the Ph.D. program. And still did a lot of work on it. And the funny part is I had, I already had the class work and I had taken the comps. I just, I just had still a fair amount of work to do on the research. And then it probably wasn’t smart to drop the thing when I was already, had two legs on you know. But I’ve never regretted. It never did, never made too much difference to me. I just kept. I’ve always kept. I still even now, and it’s been. I’ve been retired for eight years now. And I still read like I did when I hadn’t retired yet you know. I keep up with the professional stuff because that’s where my interests always were. I don’t ever read. Lisa [wife] can’t understand that because I’d be laying there reading. She thinks I’m reading a novel and I’m reading up on the history of western thought. She says, “You mean like west. Like Box Elder?” BC: Is there any? RG: There’s no thought over there. They haven’t got that far yet. But I’ve always been. I’ve loved information. I’ve just never been much of a novel reader. But I’ll read Garret Harden’s Tragedy Commons or something like that. And I love that stuff so. DISC Two RG: But the quality control is so important; and that all is brought into play. But what I was trying to point out was we had to develop all these other things before we did. First you had to know how to even measure the quality. We worked that out with the. We set up quite a physiology lab up there. But that was where my big interest was: measuring stress and quantifying stress you know. And measuring the same things you do in people; the same steroids and so forth. And define what the stress is and therefore help you define which were the stressors. A stress is a response and a stressor is what causes the response. So stress is good. The actual response that’s one of your ways your body has of keeping up. It’s when it has to do it too long why then it goes to distress and maladaption rather than adapting. And so then I worked up a system for quantifying that and quantifying health. I hated when we started to do the inspections for the diseases and the certification. We killed a lot of fish then just to take just to do the surveys. And I hated just coming up just whether they had these diseases or not. I wanted, if we’re gonna kill them let’s get some information out of them. And so that’s what. And so I developed what they call the HCP: the Health Condition Profile. And that’s the one I taught. That really caught on finally. I published that in the American Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 14   �Fisheries Society. And that come on. That’s the one I got, people were asking me to teach that all over the country and in Canada and in Mexico. ET: RG: So some of the work you did helped changed policies at the state and national level Yea, very much so. And I was always a member of the fisheries staff down in Salt Lake. Went to all the staff meetings and I always had a heavy impact on what they did and the directions they took. And so I knew also what the frustrations were with the legislature and a lot of times I would have to do battle with them. They didn’t. That never bothered me too much. There were a lot of times when I couldn’t come down and couldn’t make it to the staff meeting in Salt Lake. And they’d do something they knew I wasn’t going to agree with. And then they’d have to draw straws to see who had to tell me it. The secretary followed me out into the parking lot one time up there and she said, “Wait I got most of your comments, but how do you spell sucks.” You know. So the thing is that the Colorado River Wildlife Counsel asked in 1967. They asked for me to come up with some idea on. I accused them of dangling fish and that was the term. I got Harvey Willoughby going on that. I said, “You’re into fish dangling that’s what you’re doing.” And he says, “What do you mean?” And I said, “You call and say, we got IPN do you want them. Do you still want the fish? We’ve got IPN virus.” And I knew a lot of people who were really in sorry need of the fish. They’d go ahead and take them anyway. Even though they were, they carried this virus. And I said, “No.” I said, “I’m just telling you, you’re dangling the fish.” I said, “Look you can have these.” And so they actually asked me to come up with some kind of a way to how do we approach fish dangling. There were seven states in the Colorado Wildlife Council: the seven states on the Colorado. I was so involved this is hard for me to put this all in one dimension like that. But I started. It took me three years actually. I came up with the first meeting I had with them after we talked about the need to do something about this. Then I told them what I thought was going on and I wanted to, I said, “We need to start looking for this stuff. And I found out that the ones that were fighting it. I finally realized that they were afraid they already had these things, and what happens then. And I told them, “Just don’t bury the horse until you know he’s dead,” you know. “Let’s see where we are with this thing. We’ll do a survey.” We had a list of diseases; I put that together. And so they said, they appointed the Colorado River Wildlife Council fish disease committee. And we worked. And that was composed by design, one fish, federal pathologist, one state pathologist, one state fisheries manager and one state fisheries administrator. So that we got all those elements to argue it out before hand in committee and then go talk to the larger technical committee and then the council itself. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 15   �And boy I had a real round. The first meeting then, it was in Paige, Arizona. And I really got into it with them over there in that. They used parliamentary trickery to get the floor away from me you know. And they asked if they could ask a question so they gave the floor up. I gave the floor up so they could ask this questions. And then they wouldn’t give the floor back to me. And I blew my cork, you know. And I told them, “My God, you’re gonna listen.” And they says, “Well.” They said, “We got to study this thing.” And I said, “It’s only . . . this isn’t the communist manifesto. It’s a three-page policy.” And I said, “I assumed, I guess I was misinformed. I assumed everybody could read. Everybody that comes to this meeting can read. And I really got nasty with them. And they finally agreed to read it and we come in the next day and they passed it. Now as far as that committee was concerned, and then that goes on back to each of the seven states and they decide whether they’re going to. They all have to ratify what the policy that we had developed. BC: And what was the policy exactly? RG: The policy was that basically you couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to introduce fish into the Colorado River drainage unless they’d been inspected and certified by somebody. Which they really sadly needed. They all had their own kinds of statutes. So this was the policy, they would use their statutes however they had them set up in order to comply with that policy. ET: So did this have to be accepted by legislators, or just through . . . RG: No they could do it. Well some of them did it through the legislature but some of them already were. Like Utah was enabled. We had already been enabled by the legislature to write rules. ET: So this just went to the Fish and Wildlife Service then? Or the Fish and Wildlife Department. BC: Division ET: Division. Whatever it is at the state level? RG: Well the fish. Oh at the state level. Yea. ET: That’s what you’re talking about. RG: Yea, each of the local. That’s what the council was. The council didn’t have the Fish and Wildlife Service. It only had the states. And they all agreed. They just didn’t they didn’t know how to approach it. And that’s what I had to do. But at this time, at this time we found out that the. Well I found out that we didn’t have standard methods. So if you’re going to inspect and have. You got to have some kind of standard methods and people acceptable to use them. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 16   �ET: Now when are we talking about? When did this happen? RG: This was [19]67. It took me ‘67, ‘68 let’s see. No ‘67 was when I did it for Utah. ‘69 I did it for. I was asked to go to Colorado River Wildlife Council and then that took basically it took then through ’70; let’s see ‘68, ‘70. Yea it took me two years to get it all set up so that they would all take. And we finally passed it and it went into effect in [19]73. And from ‘73, I was on the committee for nearly 20 years. And we basically met every year and we would, we had forms they had to fill: had inspection forms that had to have standard methods in order. And people that were on our list as acceptable to do the inspection. And we had to put that all together. And then we would meet periodically to fine-tune the thing if we had problems. But it worked well. ET: Is the Logan River part of that drainage? RG: No ET: It doesn’t ago into the Colorado River does it? RG: No but the states all, what the states all did that was just [like what] that council. The states all passed it for their whole state. So that once we did that then it was the same for the Logan River and the Bear River and as it was. This is all the Great Basin here so. And the Colorado River is. Well a lot, a lot of, about half the states in the Colorado River drainage. And it’s the same way with the upper Colorado States: Idaho, Colorado and Utah kind of sit at the top of the drainage. But it was difficult because we did. And then also all this time I was also working with the American Fisheries Society. And I set up Jim Warren. We started to work on the disciplines in sections. We were trying to create a fish health section. American Fisheries Society was geographic, you know. You had a western division, a central and so on. And the states each would have a section, chapter in those divisions. But there was nothing for the disciplines. And the disciplines were too dilute. And so Jim and I worked/did the changes in the constitution of the American National, American Fisheries Society that set up the formation of discipline sections. And then when that passed, we became the first discipline section to form under that. And so we had the fish health section of the American Fisheries Society. And then fly fish culture and pollution and so forth. All these started to form. And then part of our mission was to police our ranks and to come up with standard methods. And, so we had technical procedures committees and all that stuff, you know, and certification board. And they had an unassembled exam kind of thing. What their criteria, their education and their experience. And they had to meet criteria in order to be considered a certified inspector. And this was all part of the. So, but I actually had done this for the most part before we ever got to, before they ever got to that; Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 17   �because I’d done it through the council. And when it passed the council, Colorado River Wildlife Council, it really was quite a stir because that’s the first regulations in the country. And the Great Lakes Commission filed suit. They called and they wanted some information. This was all of the states on the Great Lakes and Canada. And everybody that was on the great lakes. And so they used the Great Lakes Commission and did something very similar with little odd and end differences depending on geography and so forth. But it was the same thing; each state [province] in Canada ratifying a policy. And then the eastern seaboard states followed suit and then finally the Columbia [River]: the Columbia drainage. And so within about four years we had the biggest. We had basically the trout and salmon of North America covered. ET: Wow RG: All starting from this. For all purposes I started what they call the drainage concept of fish disease control. And so drainages mean a lot to me you know. When I was taking a test after my accident, in the LDS hospital they were giving me these little tests to find out if I was with it or not; or how I was doing. And they wanted me to name the capitals of the states. And I just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom all the way down. And she says, “How do you do that?” Lisa said too. She thought there’s got to be a mistake there. And I said, “No.” I said, "I know where the drainages are. That was so much a part of who was doing what, where and when that I never even had to think about it.” I said, boom, boom, boom. I knew what rivers they were on there, what the drainages were and where the capitals were. ET: So basically it sounds like once you got the Colorado River Wildlife Council to read your proposal RG: Yea ET: They got right on board with it. RG: Yea ET: So you didn’t have to fight that battle that much once they read it. RG: No. I set up a. You say you’ve got this centered more around the tape. I’ve got a copy of [the] resolution, very first; a resolution for their consideration. And why we should be looking at this, you know. And they bought that. They approved that one, that finding in ‘72. ET: Because there weren’t any political enemies of this policy? RG: No. There was more fear. They really were. That was serious business if they had to close hatcheries, because it meant destroying the fish. You might have to Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 18   �destroy 100,000 pounds of fish. And so, Nevada was hard. And Nevada said you can’t close. Willow Beach had IPN virus: that big national hatchery down there by Lake Mohave. I remember well we had a big knock-down drag out over that too. And I said, “If we close Willow Beach we’re not going to have fish for a season, for a whole season, which hurts. You know licensing and that type of thing. And so I said to them “Well so handle it. Handle it.” But I told them, “No I think what I would like to do then, if that’s the case. Is that the only reason you’re not going for this.” And they said, “Yea, we simply can’t. We can’t handle destroying that many fish because we won’t have fish to satisfy our program.” And I said, “If most of these programs are like ours, they’ve got surplus fish. And so let’s talk to all of these seven states and they’ll, see if we can get enough surplus fish out of all of those states to cover your needs for the loss of Willow Beach.” And that’s what we did. So it’s all having a heavy impact on Utah too. And you know we destroyed for IPN we destroyed the Kamas Hatchery and destroyed the fish: disinfected. You have to disinfect it with chlorine. You know and start over. And we did it with Springville; we did it with Logan hatchery here and the one at Loa. But [we] didn’t have to do them all in the same year. ET: So did that result in wiping out IPN? RG: Yea, never got it back again. And I had also been pushing for fish quality so hard and measuring stress that I started selling the idea that it’s a game of inches. I call it incremental degradation. Colorado says, “We call that incremental aggravation.” And I said, “How about incremental defecation.” And we was teaching that if the fish, the hatchery is properly managed, properly loaded and the fish are properly handled, you’re not going to have these diseases. Even if you have them, it won’t be too serious. We just can’t afford to have them go with that disease out where the wild fish are going to get clobbered. Let’s see I retired in 2000. Yea it was 2000. Then we had, we used to feed a lot of antibiotics you know on a grand scale. And after I started that we did the bacterial diseases and so forth. We hadn’t since 1972. Since from ‘72 to 2000 we only used antibiotics twice in that whole, that whole period. Because it was a proper approach and disciplined approach to the raising of fish that made the difference. And then when they finally, the FDA started passing laws that said you couldn’t use these drugs: antibiotics. Or you couldn’t use the stuff even to just clean the gills up you know. And I said, “I don’t.” Boy they were afraid to drop some of that stuff. And I said, “I don’t think you’re going to have, just keep doing what you’re doing and you won’t have, you’re going to have a very minor problem.” And that’s what they did. . . . But it was, we just never let up on the game of that business you know; you can’t. And then when I went to work. When Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 19   �I retired, Colorado asked me to come and talk to them. They had a problem with their fisheries managers were not agreeing with, particularly whirling disease. And I wasn’t working for Utah anymore. Eddy Coachman, who was their Chief of Fisheries; I had never been on his Christmas card list. We were kind of enemies. Because I’d never agree to what Eddy was doing. Anyway he’s the one that asked me to come and talk to them, which made me suspicious; probably going to hang me or something. But they paid the way, so I agreed to go. And for three days I fielded questions from them. Eddy just says, “I’m gonna let you handle this.” He says, “I’m, I have nothing left to say to them.” So I fielded a lot of really tough questions. That’s when they said the incremental aggravation. Anyway I told them, “You guys, you’re losing track of what, of what you’re all about.” And I told them. And I still. And I gave this lecture to Utah a number of times too. But I said, “We have, our mandate is to be stewards of the natural resource. Agriculture mandate is to be stewards of commodity. Production of commodity, they’re not always happy playmates.” And I said, “What makes it tough for us in this business, for the state fisheries programs, is that when you. A lot of ours is pure recreation. The rainbow trout and stuff that we plant, that’s in a sense it’s a commodity; because we’re selling our licenses and so forth.” But I said, “The rest of the part, the wild cut throat and all of this stuff. All of the [?] the least chubs and the humpback suckers and stuff like that in the Colorado.” I said, “That’s stewardship. And they hadn’t thought about that.” And I said, “You can, you can. The further you get away from stewardship. Over here with the rainbow, we can. There are a lot of things we can do with the rainbow. We can put them back. But over here you can’t go out and kill out all the cut throat because some of them are endangered species, you know. And in fact you couldn’t even if you wanted to.” And they had not thought about that so. I had sold all that to Utah years ago. And you’ve got, you’ve got to be concerned. The rainbow we can do something anytime. It would be costly but we can do it. But over here you’ve got these wild cut throat and there’s nothing we can do. And so that’s it. You know. ET: So your approach with the wild fish is habitat RG: Habitat, yea. Habitat and making sure that if there are any fish. I also classified all the streams in the state. And I had help from the managers to do that. And they gave them how I wanted them ranked you know. So that would go in our computer database so if this says you’re gonna plant more rainbow trout in Gunnison Lake and that’s not supposed to be there, the computer will flag that. And, so we don’t run the risk of just inadvertently putting them where we shouldn’t. And that had all become part of the operation. And so I say it’s hard because what we did had an impact on the whole state and all of the fisheries. And when we started to decide, when we wanted to say when we discovered. We didn’t know. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 20   �When I first got here our ideas of a cut throat trout were relatively primitive including mine. No mine, yea mine were pretty primitive too. It’s nice to be primitive every once in a while. But anyway a cut throat was a cut throat was a cut throat trout you know. We knew. We knew about the Colorado River Cut Throat and the Bonneville Cut Throat and Bear Lake Cut Throat and so forth. But we didn’t treat it that way. We were getting eggs out of the Yellowstone Lake. Finding a lot of Yellowstone cut throats and then we would take a few locally. But we weren’t managing that way. And then we discovered, we found a pure strain of Bonneville cut throats in Trout Creek or in Deep Creek mountains on the, like on the Nevada border. And then we were convinced they were pure, pure Bonneville cut throat. And this point we started analyzing all the DNA and all that other stuff so we could actually identify the Bear Lake cut throat is actually a Bonneville cut throat. And that all is because this was, this was Lake Bonneville. And over on the other side, it’s the Colorado River cut throat. The Colorado cut throat they call it. And, but, so we had done so much damage through bad management and so forth. And so the certification law added a whole new wrinkle. And so if I wanted to put, I wanted to reclaim cut throat water through like . . . And we got a lot of streams like that. Where the cut throat, the cut throat are. There were cut throat up in the, really high waters. And … but you couldn’t put anything up there. You want to start it again. Get cut throat up there. But it’s got to be the right cut throat going to the. And it’s got to be a Bonneville cut throat going into Bonneville cut throat water. And then we had management populations and also recreation populations. You had to . . . that was part of the management. You often didn’t even allow fishing. But you would use that as a source to get some of the other stuff started in another place. But you had to have that all certified, those populations. And it took a couple of years to certify a population. And we would do that here. We would certify the populations. And then they were free to take eggs or fish. Usually they would take eggs. And then move them to another drainage and let them hatch in another whatever other stream. And, so that all became part of a kind of a routine operation. And we’ve, we kept the Bonneville’s off just recently, off the rare endangered species. They were, they wanted to list them as endangered species which would have: we could kiss the management good bye then. Because then you can’t do anything. But, that all becomes part and parcel of that whole. And then the system that HCP: Health Condition Profile system. That’s probably the one that I, that I’m best known for is the Health Condition Profile. And we just call it HCP. But I used to call it autopsies. And then I found out that’s not what I was doing. Did you know that? ET: Necropsies. RG: Do you know why? ET: No Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 21   �RG: An autopsy is of your own species. ET: Oh RG: So fish don’t autopsy themselves. So a human can autopsy another human; that’s an autopsy. But it is necropsy. And I told them, “But fish don’t have necks. We’ll call it necropsy.” Well they don’t have knees either. But and then I started that and that’s. When I quit or retired I had around about a thousand of them done in the state and I kept track of both the hatchery ones and the wild ones. ET: So the HCP was done on a dead fish RG: Yea. You would. EG: Okay RG: Yea. What it is. In an infinite population, more or less, a big population I would have to have 20 fish. But I could, I could take from the 20 fish and say especially if they were the same year class. I could take and I can tell what’s wrong, the condition of the whole water with those 20 fish statistically. And I had, I had done the program. I’ve got a book out on it. And I wrote and designed a computer program for it. So you entered your data and it would calculate it and then type the report form. ET: Wow RG: And so I taught that. And just, just everyone, they’re still using it. I thought probably that it would disappear. But Lisa and I went through the lab in Seattle, that big fisheries center they got up there. I know a lot of those people. And they introduced me as we were going. The gal was doing some work with one of the. And they introduced me and she says. She’s calling it the Goede index. And I said, “You didn’t get that from me.” It supposed to be the Health Condition Profile. And that’s, apparently that’s what they’re starting to call it: the Goede index. And now whether it’s a big research project or what, it’s just one of their tools. Even if you look at one fish, if you catch it up at White Pine, you can open that fish and you can get some idea where he fits in this scheme. You know, whether it’s something you should be worried about. And so, but I have people tell me that I was the chief source of mortality in the states too. I sweep down there in the north and kill all the first born and things like that once a year. ET: So I want to know if you have been inducted into the Fish Culture Hall of Fame. RG: Nope, not yet. One thing you have to do there is get someone to ET: Nominate ya. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 22   �RG: Nominate you. I was surprised when I got in the Sneszko Award because it’s kind of the same kind of thing but for pathologist. You know. BC: I met a guy in Flagstaff that nominated himself for a Pulitzer Prize. RG: Well someone’s got to do it. ET: We’re not going to have much time left on our card I think. Doesn’t this last about an hour and a half on the high. BC: I don’t if you’re on the high end or not. RG: Is there anything that you wanted me to concentrate on. ET: You’re doing great. BC: We might have to do another session sometime. RG: There’s just so much. BC: I was sort of curious about. Tell us a little bit about Bill Sigler. RG: Okay. Well you’ve got the Mossback book. [Mossbacks by Ron Goede and Lisa Duskin-Goede: Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives: 925 G551] ET: Well I was going to ask you. Has Lisa. Has Lisa done the Mossback’s work. Has she, did she interview all the guys. RG: She interviewed them, yea. And she helped; she didn’t finish that whole study. (That was one of those things that, what was her name? Kathy Pearcy (was it Pearcy) in Humanities or something—for someone else. [Lisa] was doing that when she was doing gerontology and all that stuff. She thought that would be a good Ph.D. program.) ET: Well just briefly maybe you ought to mention who the Mossback’s are since we brought it up. RG: Okay. But, you have, we gave you a copy of . . . BC: Yea, I have a copy of that. ET: Just mention who are the Mossbacks. RG: Okay. The Mossback’s were: it’s a little hard to define because it started informally, you know, when Bill Sigler retired in 1974. And he was bummed out Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 23   �about retiring he didn’t like that. And, so we had a kind of a get-together. A lot of his old students got together and had a little seminar: a little symposium. Anyway that didn’t start the Mossbacks, but it got them talking about it. Well these guys are all, they were. The mossbacks were originally were old Bill Sigler’s, older students. And Sigler came out of the, retired from the war, WWII. These guys were mostly GI’s and most of them out of WW II on the GI Bill; a lot of them combat veterans. And that was a little different, not your average college freshman, these guys. A lot of them had things they still won’t talk about. So anyway, we decided to get together. About three years in a row we got together and then we just decided that you had to be in this business for a while before you got to do this. And we call them mossbacks. Because you have to be there long enough until you’ve got moss on your back. And but they’re, they’re all over. They’re not just Utah though. They’re all, most of them, are from within reasonable [distances], like Fort Collins. McConnell was from Fort Collins. He got that second Ph.D. Bill McConnell he taught at Colorado State until he retired. Bob Behnke wrote the book; this new book on trout and salmon of the world: great book. And Jay Udy is in his 90s now. And he was in mapping before the war effort: cartography and that sort of thing. Stacy Gebhards, he was here and he’s got a number of good books out. He was a good biology and he was Chief of Fisheries for a while for Idaho. He’s written a book called Wild Thing: [backcountry tales and trails] it’s about his career. He took Arthur Godfrey. There were three: Arthur Godfrey, Walter Hickel and there was one other. He took them all on a float trip down the Salmon River. I was kidding him. You know, Hickel was the one that said you can’t let nature run wild. ET: Wasn’t he Interior Secretary? RG: Yea ET: Yea RG: He was Governor of Alaska too. ET: Alaska RG: Anyway. So anyway these guys, Fred Eiserman. Fred was just inducted into the Wyoming Hall of Fame, along with Jim Bridger. I’m going wow! You’re, that’s, isn’t he a little older than you. I said, “I don’t think I’ve met him. He is a mossback?” No I’m serious. It’s in the, I’ve got the magazine and they had a big ceremony. It’s a serious award. There were four people that were inducted. It’s the Wildlife Hall of Fame or something. It’s not a Fish and Game type of thing, but Wilderness Hall of Fame. And Fred got his degree here. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 24   �ET: Fred? RG: Fred Eiserman and he worked for Wyoming. But Wylie is a good friend of mine and he’s the youngest one. And Stew Clark just died. Eight of them are gone now. So that’s one of the problems with this kind of a group. So we have every year when one of them drops out, we have a toast. And break the glass you know. The first year, well Sigler was still alive when Bud Phelps died. We threw the glass. We decided to throw, just throw them in. Let’s do just like they do in the movies and we’ll throw the glass in the fireplace. But I found out only about half of them could hit it. We had glass everywhere, boy. It took us about an hour to clean up all the glass. So we started putting a rock in a garbage can and we’d throw them in the garbage can then finally. But there is Al Regenthal: he is about 87 now. No he’s older than that. Anyway, most of them are up there. And, I basically, when I wrote the little prologue that I pointed out that we: one thing that occurred to us as we were doing all this. And of course I was a part of that from the beginning. But these guys were the vanguard of a very young profession. They were the first ones out there actually doing some science and not just empirical wisdom. And it was kind of interesting. They were born in the depression, tempered by war. And it was serious. Some of them had some pretty tough times. So and they went into school probably couldn’t have done that if it hadn’t have been for the GI Bill. Regenthal and Essbach and McConnell all came out here together from New Jersey. And Raganthall’s still with Utah, Arizona. Essbach went to Arizona, working for their fish and game. And McConnell was at Colorado State teaching. And McConnell just died. ET: So it sounds like your career kind of, and theirs spans the transition from folk wisdom to scientific-based. Scientifically-based RG: Yea. That’s probably a good one. I haven’t used that, that’s probably a good term. I always called it empirical wisdom. You know. Just because it, a lot of it was empirical it wasn’t scientific. But a lot of it was good stuff. And a lot of the early stuff before those guys was just terrible. And it was, if it was wet it was a quality fish. So but that’s when you carp and everything else you know. So, it’s pretty important I think. But their level, I think we were good for the, our effort was good for . . . . And I’ve been told that several times by people who’ve retired since. That he felt that, that our effort through the experiment station and so forth elevated the fisheries and brought it to a different plane. And it’s hard. They didn’t have good hatchery people. I was their technical advisory because I was coming up with all the new stuff. But they had Chief of Hatcheries too, but the guys didn’t know anything. And they were regional. And this was a big thing that I changed. They were, each region like the northern region in Ogden, would have somebody. Their Chief, their fisheries manager would be in charge of the hatchery. It was a line staff organization. And I told them. I said, “These guys don’t know anything about culture.” Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 25   �So I wrote a fairly involved definition of culture. And told, let’s see Bill Geer got to be Director at that particular time, Bill Geer was director. And I told him, “We would like to, I would like to see you centralize the hatchery; because they’ve got to be working for someone who actually understands hatcheries.” And so the rest of the organization is still strictly line staff. But the hatcheries were centralized. And then there was a Chief of Hatcheries in a Salt Lake office who came out of the culture scenario. And then I knew a world-class fish culturist, Joe Valentine, who was wanting out of the Fish and Wildlife Service. He already had 18 years with them. And so, I got them to hire him. He was willing to come. Joe started the work for them. And I liked Joe. And Joe and I got along really well. So that was a big help too. So we, we had a good staff. And I think Utah led the way on fish health management because nobody had that. That drainage concept really brought the thing to the range of possibility. We’d failed many times because there was just too many, you couldn’t draw something up for Utah that fit Florida, you know, because it’s just a whole different ballgame. In the southeast water, something they pump out of their basement. And here it’s the lynchpin of survival you know. So anyway it’s very important and I felt good about it and Sigler. I point that out in the Mossback book that one phrase he always used that I coined is: That it was a privilege to serve. And so I . . . . there’s just a few things that I get emotional about. And that’s where it was: a great bunch of people. And that’s not easy to maintain that level. I don’t know if they’re at that point anymore. ET: When you say it was a privilege to serve. That’s sort of an old-school approach to public service RG: Yea. ET: So you felt, you felt the weight. I’m asking I guess. You felt the weight of the public responsibility on your shoulders? RG: Yea, this was our mandate to steward the natural resource. And do a decent job of it. And a lot of the battles were just sheer ethics. You know. Yea, boy I had some tremendous . . . Boy I remember one big battle I had with them. I got up and left the meeting. And I still had to drive back to Logan. And I was furious. And I said “I’ve bent over backwards to do a lot for this outfit. But I[‘ll be] damned if I’m going to bend over forwards.” ET: And that was with whom? RG: With the fisheries staff. And then when, over whirling disease when the Leavitt’s were, when . . . that was, those were black days. ET: Yea, we haven’t even talked about whirling disease. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 26   �BC: Yea, we haven’t talked about whirling disease. RG: Oh wow. Well those were. That was the end of a lot of things. We got bad hurt on that: a lot of people lost their jobs. ET: Do we need to schedule another session? RG: Yea I think if you’re. Because now you’re ready to really get into some of those Things . . . There are some things there that are kind of funny too. And I even have, I got along with the Leavitt’s and then I didn’t get along with them you know. Dane Leavitt, the Governor’s brother [Mike Leavitt]. I like Dane. He’s a lawyer in Cedar [City, Utah]. BC: Did they ever try to sell insurance for the whirling disease or? RG: The Levitt Group. Yea, no. Mark who . . . they were always covering up for Mark. He was the one that was screwing things up. Young Mark. And he’s one of those guys that would always answer the phones in an important meeting and just sit there and talk. And that just really hacks me off when people do that. And so I called him, and I called his brother Dane in Cedar. Said, you know, “I said I want Mark’s phone number, cell phone number.” And he was suspicious right away because he knew I didn’t like Mark. And I told him what he was doing. And of course that even irritated Dane. And he like that so much he set it up. He decided. He had somebody call. I told him what I wanted is that we got a meeting on Thursday and I want someone to call Mark at that meeting and ask for me. And so that’s what they did. Dane set it up and Mark picked that phone up and he says, “Hello.” And then he says, “Oh.” He says, “Oh.” He says, “Here it’s for you.” Oh yea. I don’t know whether Mark ever found out that that was Dane. ET: Well let’s, why don’t we stop here. It looks like we need to talk about whirling disease, some of your ethical battles. You want to talk more about Bill Sigler? BC: I’d be curious to talk just about Logan and stuff and that. RG: Yea. ET: So we need to have another session with you I think. We don’t want to wear you out all in one. RG: Yea. ET: Are you doing okay? RG: Oh yea. It’s just that. When Eisner read that little bio sketch I did for the Mossback book he said. He said he could see. He said I could see reading that Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 27   �BC: that you had a calling. And it’s actually true. That idea of quality really was stuck in doing something. And I’ve always been very public service oriented, service oriented. I’m not interested in the other stuff. I don’t really care about the material stuff that goes along with it, because it usually doesn’t. But anyway it was so. It is hard to talk about that without setting that foundation. Yea. That’s good. ET: That was great. This has been a great session. BC: I’m afraid to turn this thing off that I’ll erase it or something. RG: You know when we joined, when we became the. Oh! When we became the Natural Resource, Department of Natural Resources and the Division of Wildlife Resources under the department, that was not a happy day either. You know. That was back in the ‘70s. Bud Phelps was Director then, and Phelps was a good friend. And the people, the guys, all the parks and forests, everyone became part of the . . . and there were, they shared a coffee room. It was the old DWR coffee room. But they said, Bud said, they were sniping at each other, always just under their breath. And Bud Phelps came out with a directive then that said, “They’ll be no sniping in the coffee rooms.” It was a directive. And so I went out in the hall with him and I said. “You know he used to have a wall committee. You couldn’t put anything on the wall unless it passed the wall committee.” BC: We had one of those in Flagstaff. RG: Oh hey. BC: The Classics committee is what they called it out there. RG: Well I told Bud. “Well you know now you’re gonna have to, now your gonna have to form a snide comment committee.” And he says, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well someone’s gonna have to decide in whether a snide comment has in fact been made.” And he sat there and stared at me. And I said, See right now you’re wondering if I’ve made a snide comment. ET: That’s one of the things I like about you Ron, your sense of humor. RG: That’s the only thing that keeps you up and running. ET: Well, do you have a calendar available? Do you want to try and set up another appointment now or later? BC: I don’t have a calendar with me but I’m usually pretty open. ET: Let me grab mine. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 28   � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/270">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/270</a> Digital Publisher List the name of the entity that digitized and published this item online. Hosted by: Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library Conversion Specs Recording equipment: Marantz PMD660 Digital Recorder Transcription equipment: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-11-12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ronald William Goede interviews, 16 & 28 October 2008, and transcriptions Description An account of the resource In Ron Goede's first interview he talks about growing up in Nebraska, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, joining the Air National Guard in Nebraska, attending Utah State University to earn a Master's Degree in fisheries, and his work in various fisheries throughout the United States, especially in Utah at Utah State University. In his second interview Mr. Goede talks about his work as a fish pathologist in Utah, whirling disease in fish, water stewardship, politics: his fight to get good science into the Utah fisheries and water legislation. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Goede, Ronald William, 1934- Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Cole, Bradford R. Subject The topic of the resource Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Interviews Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Family Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Career in Fisheries Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Childhood and youth Fisheries sciences--Research--Utah--Logan River Fisheries sciences--Research--Missouri Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Friends and associates Willoughby, Harvey Morris, George Snieszko, Dennis Stanislas United States--Air National Guard Doctoral students--Utah--Logan Fishes--Diseases--Research--Utah Fishes--Quality--Research--Utah--Logan Fishes--Quality Fish hatcheries--Utah--Logan Fishery policy--Utah Colorado River Wildlife Council Fishery policy--United States American Fisheries Society. Fish Health Section Sigler, William F. Mossbacks (Club) Whirling disease--United States Whirling disease--Research--Utah Whirling disease--Research--West Virginia Utah. Division of Wildlife Resources Utah--Politics and government Fishery management--Utah Trout Unlimited Fishery research stations--Utah Fisheries--Utah--Monitoring Fishery scientists--Professional ethics Utah State Agricultural College. Wildlife Dept. Mentoring in education--Utah--Logan Student contests--Utah--Logan--Anecdotes Women in fisheries--Utah--Logan--History Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. Oral history Interviews Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Nebraska Logan (Utah) Alaska Logan Canyon (Utah) Colorado River Lostine River (Idaho) Utah Colorado Kamas (Utah) Madison River (Wyo. and Mont.) Strawberry Reservoir (Utah) Scofield Reservoir (Utah) Utah United States Logan (Utah) Cache County (Utah) Utah United States Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2009 20th century 21st century Language A language of the resource eng Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection, FOLK COLL 42 Box 2 Fd. 10 & Box 3 Fd. 1 Is Referenced By A related resource that references, cites, or otherwise points to the described resource. Inventory for the Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection can be found at: <a href="http://library.usu.edu/folklo/folkarchive/FolkColl42.php">http://library.usu.edu/folklo/folkarchive/FolkColl42.php</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of the USU Fife Folklore Archives Curator, phone (435) 797-3493 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FolkColl42bx2RonGoede Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 16 October 2008 28 October 2008 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2008-10-16 2008-10-28 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections