Remembering Evelyn

Remembering Evelyn
J. Glenn Eugster
Undated

Overtime we connect with many unique people and places. Some of us have the good fortune to have jobs that send us into communities and landscapes, to work with people of all sorts, on designs, plans, and strategies for conservation, protection, and sustainable use. Looking back over the years the people and places I have worked with seem to meld together inseperably. More often than not, as I travel from one city to another, I see the people I have worked with in the places we practiced landscape architecture and ecological planning in.

On March 15, 1982 Evelyn Swimmer called me about employment with the National Park Service. Evelyn and I had both attended the University of Pennsylvania and she had heard of the office that I managed from Ms. Lenore Sagan, the Office Director for Professor Ian McHarg at the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning. Lenore looked for people that were interested in public service and pointed them in our direction. Overtime Lenore helped the NPS hire more than 65 landscape architects, city planners, and ecological planners.

Ms. Swimmer explained that she was a recent graduate of Penn and was looking for a job and was interested in the National Park Service. She explained that she had been successfully working for years in interior design and had made a career change to landscape architecture.

The call was similar to many others that came in and we arranged a time for Evelyn to visit the office. Little did she know when she called that our Division, a part of the larger regional office, was in the midst of chaos as the Reagan Administration was in the process of cutting domestic programs and reducing the size of the federal workforce. I scheduled Evelyn’s meeting around appointments I had made to interview for positions in Washington, DC with the American Land Forum and the American Rivers Conservation Council. Although I didn’t mention it to Evelyn, the times were not the best to be looking for a federal job.

On March 26, 1982 I met with Evelyn and we talked of her interest in NPS and the work we did with parks, landscapes, communities and rivers. There are times when you feel fortunate to have someone walk into your office and be interested in your practice and the day we met was one of those occasions. Ms. Swimmer made an excellent first impression with her warm smile, easy conversational style of communicating, and her resume. The interview revealed her interests in landscape architecture, commitments to a brave career change, and a type of professionalism that I was frankly not use to.

The Division of Park and Resource Planning, in two years had gone from an office of promise and optimism to one laced with insecurity and hopelessness. The work of NPS was like nowhere else and when you could concentrate on the job, it was the best work there is. Unfortunately each day was punctured by some news about “Reductions in Force” budget cuts, competing priorities, and sharp ideological shifts. In 1969 Allen Stovall a professor at the University of Georgia once told me that “landscape architecture was 70% political”. Although I didn’t believe him then I surely did in 1982.

Near the end of my interview with Evelyn I borke the news that I didn’t have any vacancies at the moment but hoped that we could work together. Much to my surprise Evelyn indicated that she was willing to volunteer for a month-or-two and wondered if she could begin on May 1. I told her I would check her references and if they were supportive she could join our office.

That evening as I lingered over cut-rate imported beer at the Kyber Pass Pub I thought about Evelyn Swimmer and our meeting. It wasn’t so much that NPS had hired Evelyn that day, it was more like she decided that this is where she decided that she would practice land architecture. More than twenty years later, as I reflect on her time with us, I’m thankful for her decision.

Evelyn was a wonderful addition to the group of people that I worked with. She was professional, slightly understated in her approach, mature, giving, and motivated. She told me her interests were in reclamation, the Lower Schuylkill, historic preservation, design, and social science. We talked of how she might spend her time with NPS and how I would try to match her interests with our needs. Our needs were many and Evelyn’s appreciation for the work we did made it easier for me turn away from the divisive activities that permeated the regional office and threatened the Division’s fuute.

The Division was slowly going through a regeneration. When Evelyn joined us we had a handful of permanent staff, a secretary, and two other “volunteers”. Our staff levels had plumented from 15 to 3 and our Associate Regional Director was encouraging us to “seriously consider other job offers”. Those of us in the Division had decided to try to see if we could ride out this turmoil. Most of our work focused on river conservation and it had been the reason we joined public service. Each day it was love-hate relationship between the work and organizational politics. We used our projects to retain our focus and draw satisfaction and joy from our work.

The first project I asked Evelyn to help with was a study we were doing to help communities, help themselves to protect the Farmington River in CT and MA. I had been doing stay work on the project and needed help to meet requests being made by the communities and then-Congressman Toby Moffit. The river was beautiful and the community was very supportive of our assistance. It seemed like a good project to involve Evelyn in.

She quickly took on the task of preparing an assessment of the rivers values and issues, and developed a system to classify its landscapes. Evelyn quickly proved that she loved to learn about new places, was a more than able researcher, could express herself graphically, and was comfortable calling other experts for information on her analysis. She also responded to the short-deadlines that were the nature of our operation. We worked well together developing a method for river conservation and shared the hard-work, excitement and satisfaction of what would become a successful river protection project.

Unfortunately Evelyn and the other “volunteers” found working for free to be problematic. Her interest was stronger than ever, and her value to the unit was obvious. She had impressed her peers, our partners, and the managers who weren’t trying to dismantle our office. However, positions were impossible to find and I was desperate to find a way to keep Evelyn and the others working for NPS. Creativity was our only hope so I appealed to management and asked that our “volunteers” be hired through 30-60-day special need appointments.

The 60-day window gave me time to look for other ways to keep Evelyn and the others on the staff. In July I found a supportive administrative assistant who suggested the idea of using small contracts—under $5,000, and done through a University, to hire people to help do our office’s work. Although I was position broke I had cash that our headquarters office was providing to us to do state and local river conservation assistance. By the end of July, as Evelyn and I presented her Farmington River evaluation to community leaders throughout the watershed, we were able to put through a series of small contracts to keep her working for the NPS. People along the Farmington and in our office in Philadelphia knew by then that Evelyn was a keeper and there had to be a way for her to keep working with us as long as she wanted to.