After graduation in May 1937, I began work on the U.S. Forest Service Experimental Station at New Smyrna, near Norwich, N.Y.  One of the interesting things that I did there was to “shoot Polaris.”  The Experimental Station area of perhaps 200 acres (more or less) was laid out in sections, but there was the need to establish a true North-South base line through the area.  I had studied this procedure at college and here was the opportunity to do it by “shooting Polaris,” in other words establishing a true N-S line by taking a theodolite sighting on the North Star (Polaris) when at its eastern elongation or western elongation and then turning off the angle to true North.  The North Star has a bit of an orbit too, hence the need of observing it on the eastern or western extreme of its orbit.  We selected a suitable night and it all worked out well.

Well, while working there at the New Smyrna Experimental Station, I received an offer of a Civil Service appointment with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service to Salina, Kansas.  That did not appeal to me and I refused it, but I knew that I had toaccept one of the first 3 offers or lose the Civil Service rating for which I had qualified on the exam taken months before.  Then came another offer of a Forest Service appointment to a national forest at Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  (It was either Glenwood Springs or Colorado Springs – Memory fails me.)  I conferred with the director of the Northeastern Experiment Station, New Haven as to what I should do. He wanted to keep me, so he recommended to the U.S.F.S. that I should receive the same grade appointment (Junior Forester) in the Northeastern Experiment Station of the U.S.F.S. of the U.S.D.A., which offer I gladly accepted.  This was a secure and permanent appointment; so, for 4 years, my headquarters location was 335 Prospect St., New Haven, Conn., but my actual fieldwork was mostly elsewhere.

For several months I was involved in flood control surveys – first, for the upper reaches of the Merrimac River in New Hampshire, enjoying the field work in the beautiful White Mountain area, and then in the same sort of work in a farmland area around East Aurora (near Buffalo, N.Y.)

In about 1938, I was transferred to Cooperstown, N.Y. to serve as forest control technician with the Otsego County Forest Products Cooperative.  I was still with the U.S.F.S. Experiment Station but helping in this farmers cooperative venture.  I enjoyed the life and work in that naturally beautiful area within a thirty mile radius of Cooperstown onOtsego Lake, the setting for James Fennimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans” and Leather stocking Tales.  It was also where Doubleday invented baseball in 1839, so I was there for the Centennial Celebration in 1939, and even saw the aging Babe Ruth swing the bat in Doubleday Field.