Incarceration, Education and Home

My daughter, Chloe, is interning at one of the new Seattle Housing Authority housing complexes, New Holly, while she is working toward her Masters Degree in Social Work at the University of Washington.  She thought I’d be interested in attending a discussion among her colleagues at New Holly and a group of non-profit housing providers talking about their policies toward admitting people into public housing who have criminal records.

While the Seattle Housing Authority’s policies do not mean that a criminal conviction will result in a denial of housing, it automatically defers any consideration for one year of an applicant or applicant’s family member if the person has been convicted of a Class A felony and incarcerated.  A partial list of those crimes listed on SHA’s site includes:

Arson, Assault, Burglary, Explosives, Extortion, Homicide, Kidnapping, Leading organized crime, Machine gun use in felony, Malicious explosion of substance, Malicious placement of an explosive, Manslaughter, Possession of explosive device, Possession, manufacturing or disposal of incendiary devices, Robbery, Setting a spring gun, Trafficking, Treason.

New Holly
Seattle Housing Authority

Applicants or family members are automatically denied if they are currently using illegal drugs, have been engaged in metamphetamine production, committed offenses that require sex offender registration, have a record indicating a pattern of alcohol abuse or a pattern of habitual criminal behavior. 

Keeping a safe environment for the people who live in public housing is clearly a paramount responsibility of the Housing Authority.  Beyond the physical safety that is fundamental, there are other economic factors as well.  For example, most of the new housing authority projects are now mixed income, with houses for sale where the income from the sale provides a subsidy back to the homes rented by lower income people.  Without an untainted sense of safety, the for-sale housing doesn’t work as intended and ultimately the subsidies flowing from the for-sale houses are less.

The housing authority enforces its policies by producing a criminal background and rental history credit check on each of its applicants.  These come from a number of criminal background data bases maintained by states – about 100,000,000 records in all – more than 90% of which can be accessed on the web. 

Background checks have become common in today’s human resources culture.  For example, 93% of employers conduct criminal background checks on some prospective employees while nearly 75% of employers perform criminal background checks on all their prospective employees.  Nearly all housing authorities make use of background checks, but the quality of the information they get is often poor. 

These records are searched and reports produced by a poorly known industry. Nobody really knows how many criminal background checking companies there are. There are big companies and there are one-man-band companies.  These businesses have grown up with the Internet and their employees or contractors are frequently dispersed and distantly supervised. There are no certificates or licenses required to do this work and often very little oversight. They are poorly regulated given how profoundly their work affects the lives of people  

Despite the housing authority’s efforts to get the best information available, it is not easy and it is costly to do the research necessary to verify the accuracy of information on the criminal backgrounds of applicants for housing.   There are many different types of errors.  Having a common name often leads to confusion in the database.  A Smith, for example, can be easily confused with other Smiths.  Many of these databases do not have the final disposition of a case.  If you've been arrested in the last five years, some databases do not have a record of any disposition of the case -- whether the case was dropped or you were found innocent or guilty.  Just 4% of the criminal database in Mississippi contain a disposition of the case within the last five years while 40% of Montana cases have a known disposition. Washington state is near the top, with 94% known dispositions of cases within the last five years, according to a US Justice Department review.  Also, the pure volume of information in these databases creates a growing backlog of updating that often cannot be met.  Frequently, companies in the criminal background business buy and sell information to one another that can lead to misleading data.  For example, one conviction can be reported several times, one felony arrest becoming five.  

We like to think that redemption is at the core of our criminal justice system, but as Jean Valjean, the lead character in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, points out to a woman on a Paris street, redemption does not come easily, then or now: 

“You want to know who I am?  I'm a convict! Yeah! I served my sentence.  Now my punishment begins, it seems. Look, in prison they gave me a bed of wood. Now I have one of stone. That's what they do when they set you free!”

Criminal databases, like Javert, the policeman who obsessively chases Valjean, are without the idea of redemption.  They do not distinguish between a mistake side-by-side with an otherwise ethical and productive life well-lived.  Like Javert, they focus on the mistake and ignore the life.  Someone else has to apply judgment and that doesn't come easily or without cost, time or questions.

US incarceration compared to European Union

The United States has a remarkable number of criminal database entries because we arrest, convict and incarcerate more people than anywhere in the world.  One in every four prisoners on the globe is imprisoned in the United States.  We are at the top of the incarceration chart according to Dr.  Alexes Harris, a University of Washington Sociology Professor who presented her work on incarceration at the meeting.  Our rate of incarceration is 762 people/100,000 population which totals to two and quarter million people behind bars or in prison today.  To this, add another seven million people under some kind of corrections supervision.  There are a total of 20,000,000 convicted felons living today in the United States, nearly nine percent of the population. 

This frenzy of incarceration has created massive aberrations in our governments and schools.  Many years ago, I was driving in a rental car through a dark night near Pendleton, Oregon.  I was listening to an interview with Clark Kerr, the famous University of California Chancellor who founded, in 1960, the modern university system that offered, for a time, near universal higher education in California and was seen as a model for the world.   

Clark Kerr with President Kennedy March, 1962
University of California Library

Kerr was near the end of his life and explained with great frustration that when he was head of the system, in 1960, the state of California spent 10% on higher education and 1% on its corrections.  In the year of the radio broadcast, I think it was 2000 or 2001, the state was still spending 10% on higher education, but now was also spending 10% of its budget on prisons.  Beginning in the late sixties, California increased its prison population by 500% as the courts were overwhelmed by the legislature mandating less judicial discretion and more determinate sentences like "Three Strikes" laws and no tolerance drug sentences. 

The effects of this trend, plus a stream of budget problems in the state, hit higher education hard.  A Stanford study done for the State of California says

Comparison of Corrections, Higher Ed

that between 1990 and 2008, higher education funding was reduced 40%.  Between 2008 and 2012, higher education funding lost an additional 28%.  Since 1980, prison spending has increased over 400%.  Fifty years after Kerr started an education structure that was the envy of the world, prison spending surged past higher education for the first time.  Today, California is one of a handful of states spending more for prisons than higher education. 

This has caused some perturbations throughout the system of governance in California.  Today, prison guards are the largest and most effective lobby in the state.  Even as the crime rate drops, the number of prison guards rises. And it is not only higher education that struggles from the financial demands of California’s gulag.  It is public safety in general.  Most local governments in California have seen reductions in public safety spending as prisons continue to suck up state money.  Today, the state of California spends as much on prisons as it did on all of law enforcement a decade ago.  According to the National Association of State Budget Officials, the average state expenditure for prisons across the US is just over seven percent of state budgets.

Kerr’s was a massive accomplishment, creating, for the first time, a state system of higher education that served the full range of higher education needs and interests.  It was an amazingly simple design.  The university plan developed by Kerr envisioned that the top 12.5% of high school graduates would be guaranteed a direct entry into the University of California, then eight campuses to be joined by two others a few years later.  This part of the system today is home to 235,000 students.  The top third of students would be provided access to the California State University system, 23 schools and 284,000 students.  Most of the state’s teachers come from those schools.  Everyone would have access to the Community College Network, now 73 colleges and 2.5 million students.  All would have the opportunity to move throughout the different elements of the system, based on merit.  In 1960, all were tuition free.  Students paid fees for food, dormitories, books and other costs, but no tuition.  It had its flaws, but it was radical, much admired and produced a constant stream of talent and opportunity that served business and government in California.  

Kerr articulated then, far ahead of his time, today’s information economy, driven by accomplishments of the men and women who would be prepared for it by his dazzling higher education system:

“What the railroads did for the last half of the 19^th century, what the automobile did for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry.”

Though he had a clear vision of the future, Kerr could not overcome the challenges of the present -- growing unrest at the Berkeley campus over civil rights, the calamity of Vietnam and the rise of Ronald Reagan.  Elected Governor of California in 1966 he immediately set out to find the votes, including his own, to fire Kerr and “clean up the mess in Berkeley."  In 1967, Kerr was fired “effective immediately.”

Famously, Kerr said:

“I came here fired with enthusiasm and left the same way.”

Kerr’s demise was the beginning of a long slide of his grand idea as tuition became more and more a part of the budget in higher education, rising to $13,200 today for the University of California schools, $7,025 at the state schools and about $50/credit at the community colleges.  Non-resident tuition rose to nearly $38,000 and the percentage of non-resident students rose to 23% from 11% as the schools traded off California children’s access to higher education for income to the system.    

At the community colleges, where inclusiveness ruled under Kerr, enrollment is down nearly 500,000 students as course offerings have been slashed, cost per unit has increased and teachers laid off.  The transfer from the two year schools to the four year schools is much harder to accomplish today.  The community colleges educate 70% of California’s nurses, 80% of its firefighters and 50% of its veterans. 

Now, you can’t lay all of it at the feet of a criminal justice system gone crazy.  The radical property tax limitation, Prop 13 and a couple of big recessions have played important roles, but the throw-away-the-key philosophy continues to erode California’s ability to pay for other important things.  In the frenzy to incarcerate, to want it all without paying for it, Californians have reduced their considerable contributions to our country and limited opportunities for its children.    

The problem with putting so many people in prison is that they must, at some point, be released.  Nearly 700,000 Americans were released from prison in 2012, more than 7,500 in Washington state and 1,500 people in King County, according to Professor Harris. 

Stable housing is among the critical factors keeping ex-convicts from returning to prison because, among other things, it helps in the formation of stable family relationships.  With housing and stable relationships in place, employment possibilities are far better.  With all three in place, not many people return to prison.  According to the Urban Institute, 40%-50% of ex-convicts will return to jail within five years.  By the way, the return to jail percentage in California is in the seventies.

The released prison population is not an easy population to house.  For several years, the Urban Institute followed nearly 300 released prisoners in Ohio and describes the members of that class this way:

Over 80% have a history of drug or alcohol abuse, 13% have a history of mental illness, 19% are illiterate, 40% are functionally illiterate.  Over 30% were unemployed before their arrest while 40% have not finished high school. 

More than half slept in a relative’s house their first night out of prison and 80% were living with a family member six months later, though less than half were paying any rent.

Amidst these distressing and depressing numbers, there are some points of light.  The US Supreme Court has capped the population of the California prison system and has reduced the size of California's prison population so that it fits better into the design of its prisons, though the goal is still 137% of design capacity.  Voters in California moderated the ‘Three Strikes’ law that was passed in 1994 and sent an alarming number of people to life in jail for minor offenses.  Three strikes will now only apply to violent crimes.  Today, dangerous and violent criminals will go to the state while less dangerous criminals will go to the counties with an emphasis on diversion from jail. California passed a tax increase last year to focus more of its criminal justice on diversion, among other improvements. It will be many years before the state truly reverses its decline into incarceration as a first choice, but it has started down that path.

There are small signs that the criminal backgrounding industry is starting to move toward a set of standards that could lead to a bit more fairness and accuracy.  Attorney General Eric Holder has made criminal backgrounding a serious issue at the federal level and lawsuits are correcting abuses.  There is also new research from Carnegie Mellon University that demonstrates what we know intuitively – that the longer a person is crime free, the less likely he is to commit crimes in the future.  Depending upon the crime and when it might have been committed, the researchers found the point at which someone in the general population is equally as likely to commit a crime as a former criminal.  If difficult judgments are to be made about who gets help or who gets prison, it is an important step to back it up with data.  I’ve attached the study.

There is also good news on the educational front.  California has new revenue for higher education, the first such increase since the last round of cuts began in 2008.

Along with some good news comes some bad news from the City of Richmond, California.  Its council just voted to bar businesses performing work for the city from knowing whether someone has a criminal background by removing the box in which a candidate acknowledges having a criminal background.  It also bars the use of criminal background checks as a condition of employment. This know nothing approach is no better than what the throw away the key crowd did in the first place. 

It is a very tough call for a housing authority or any of the non-profit providers in the room to change some of their tough rules on housing ex-convicts.  Most have waiting lists of people who have committed no crimes and also need affordable housing.  Most of them do not have the supportive service environment needed for many ex-convicts.  Most don’t have the staff time or money needed for confirming the accuracy of background checks and determining the true character of some very complicated individuals. 

As Chloe and I walked out I turned to her and told her I was glad she cared about this stuff.  I told her she had to hurry up and get her Masters degree and get to work on this mess we have handed to her and her colleagues.  


Redemption and Criminal Background Checks

New York Times Obit, Clark Kerr

Brown vs Plata, US Supreme Court Decision on Prison Overcrowding in California

A Farm in a Day and WPA Golf

In mid-September we went on a driving trip across the state to Spokane, stopping in Moses Lake one night for a great meal with a friend and then heading out the next day to Spokane.  But we meandered some, off the freeway to the south, for breakfast in Othello, near the center of the Columbia Basin Reclamation Project.  The first part of that trip led to a posting last week about the origins of that amazing water project. Read the post.

Vernetta and Don on the right
Bureau of Reclamation

One of the people we learned about while researching the Bureau of Reclamation was Donald Dunn, whose family was the recipient of a promotion cooked up by the bureau to create a farm in a day.  For 24 hours 300 or more people built a farm house, outbuildings – chicken coop, chickens included, shop and the equipment to go with it.  The swarming workmen planted crops, herded the cows and horses onto the site and filled up the refrigerator and cupboards.  There was a cat and a dog, though the dog, Skipper, ran off with the coyotes.  Additionally, the Dunns got a gift from each state and territory.  Texas airlifted a special heifer.  The governor of Guam sent a case of coconuts. 

Dunn was the winner of a competition conducted by the Veterans of Foreign Wars for the Bureau of Reclamation who the VFW called “the most deserving World War II veteran with a farm background.” 

Columbia Basin land before irrigation.
Courtesy Bureau of Reclamation

In addition, the Bureau made it known that veterans who wanted could submit their names to a drawing that would give them a chance to buy property that was now desert but scheduled to be irrigated.  Four such drawings were held throughout 1952.  The last, held in Othello, selected 42 individuals.  I’ve been in contact with the daughter of one of those veterans who won the land lottery and she said her parents dashed to the Columbia Basin land once they had won to see the property they would buy, the plans for their new home in the car.  The wife took one look at the desert country, returned to Oregon City where they lived out their days.  Their daughter has the plans still. 

I’ve spent the last week finding out more about Donald Dunn and what happened to him after his new place was built on the day of May 29, 1952 and a little man-made finger of the Columbia River flowed right up to his 122 acre farm a few miles outside of Ephrata and made the crops the bureau planted bloom. 

First hole at Indian Canyon, 1935
Spokesman Review

The reason for our trip was to play golf at some of Spokane’s terrific public golf courses, including Indian Canyon, one of 103 golf courses built during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration, part of a stimulus strategy that provided work for millions of out-of-work Americans.  It seems odd that one focus of the WPA was the construction of golf courses, but it makes sense.  So many of the WPA workers did not have top shelf job skills and what was needed for a golf course --  moving rocks, trees, dirt – was muscle power, the one thing within reach of people who’d never had much access to education.  Also, the game of golf was turning from a rich man’s game to a game for everyman and, in the twenties, public courses were springing up everywhere.

Chandler Egan
Waverley Country Club

Indian Canyon is a lovely piece of work on a tough, hilly site.  What caught my eye was that it was designed by H. Chandler Egan, a golf course designer whom I knew designed courses I had played in Puget Sound and in Portland and who also was one of the greatest amateur players of his time.  He had a significant hand in the design of one of the temples of American golf, Pebble Beach, when he was hired to make it better for the 1929 US Amateur Championship, which he also played in and damned near won at 45 years of age.  He paid the price of staying an amateur, disappearing from the game for many years so he could make some money, a game he wasn’t very good at.  An international class golfer, he left his home in golf crazy Chicago in mid-career and started raising pears in Jackson County, near Medford, Oregon – 300 miles from the nearest competitive golf course.  Along with Don Dunn, I thought I’d learn a bit more about Chan, as his friends called him.

Let’s start with Dunn, driving a tank through France and into Germany in 1944 and, in the dark, pushing over the border into Germany, past several German towns, racing toward his objective without resistance, thinking that the bulky shapes behind him were American tanks like his, but he was wrong about that.  And soon the shapes closed in so close that the men got out of their tanks and tried to kill one another on the ground.  It was the third longest night of his life.

The second was seven years later when the flood hit his successful farm in Marion, Kansas, on land next to the family farm he had quit school to run at 14 after his Dad got sick.  Twelve inches of rain fell that day in 1951 and Cottonwood Creek put six feet of water in his house, even though the building  was on the highest point on the land.  The death of a twin son, at three months in 1947, was the first.

Donald Dunn Testifies in Washington, DC
At left is Congressman Henry M. Jackson
Bureau of Reclamation

After the flood, he and his wife sold everything that they could salvage and headed out to the Northwest, renting land in Yakima, Washington, starting up again where they felt it didn’t flood so bad and where, after five or so years, they hoped to have enough money to buy their own farm.  He saw about the contest for ‘the most deserving veteran’ and felt the bumps in his life were big enough and rough enough to make him at least competitive and he wrote the excellent winning essay.  He knew there was something up when he got a call from one of his brothers in Kansas telling him that the FBI was asking questions about him there. Then he got the call.

Egan had an easier row to hoe.  Born in 1884, his parents were wealthy, lived in a fine Chicago suburb, Highland Park, home today to many Frank Lloyd Wright homes and an eclectic group of A and B list names -- Michael Jordan, basketball player, Gary Sinise, actor, Billy Corgan, lead guitar of Smashing Pumpkins.

National Amateur Champion, 1904

When he was twelve, his uncle introduced him to golf while on a family vacation in Wisconsin and he must have been a fantastic teacher.  Egan’s cousin, Walter, his Uncle’s son, also played golf and for years they traded first and second place in the Western Amateur, a big tournament then.  Later, his family joined Exmoor County Club in Highland Park and Egan became the best player there.  As the Scots say, “he could golf his ball.”  On to Harvard where he is captain of golf team that won three Intercollegiate golf championships in a row, Egan becoming the individual champ as a sophomore.  At 20, in 1904, he wins his first US Amateur championship and then finishes with a silver medal in the Olympic Games in St.  Louis.  He repeats as champ at the 1905 US Amateur, something only a handful of players have done – Tiger Woods, Bobby Jones (twice), Lawson Little among them. 

When Egan was playing the US Amateur, it was considered a major championship and drew the best players.  There were professional golfers then, but the purses were ridiculously low.  The professional Willie Anderson won four US Opens between 1901 and 1905 and earned $800 – for all four wins!  Egan, with his Harvard education and Chicago country club relationships, tried selling insurance as a way to earn a living and keep his golf skills, but he didn’t do well and both his golf and finances suffered.  His daughter put Egan’s dilemma this way:

“He was torn between duty and pleasure.”

He moved to Louisville, Kentucky and started work in the railroad business but was not ultimately happy there.  In 1911, with his new wife Nina McNally -- yes, those Rand-McNallys -- they took a train to Medford, Oregon where he had purchased an apple and pear orchard.  Egan would not enter another national class golf tournament until 1929. 

Jackson County Historical Society

There was a fruit boom going on in Jackson County.  Refrigerated railroad cars made possible the movement of fresh fruit over long distances.  New irrigation projects allowed more orchard land to come into play.  Land owners and speculators reached out across the country for investors and what was happening in southern Oregon caught Egan’s eye.  The population of Jackson County would double between 1900 and 1910 but Egan’s timing was poor.  The fruit bust followed the fruit boom and the gentleman farmer idea didn't quite pan out. 

Egan's home in Medford, now on the
US Register of Historic Places
Jackson County Historical Society

Egan’s house was not far from a small nine hole track, owned by the Medford Country Club, an organization that formed about the same time as Egan was moving in.  In 1912, members asked him to work with them on improving the course. He designed a second nine and helped improve the first, but the club was on and off broke.  That same year he was asked to help design the back nine at Tualatin Golf Club.  He began playing regional golf, entering the Pacific Northwest Golf Association Amateur Tournament first in 1914, a kind of Cincinnatus bringing out the old weapons once again.  He completely dominated golf in the Northwest, winning the tournament five times over 18 years, finishing second twice.

Golf is exploding across the American landscape now, courses going up everywhere for both recreation and real estate.  In 1917, Egan designs Eastmoreland in Southeast Portland and, for the first time, gets paid for his design work.  As a thirteen year old, I remember teeing off on Eastmoreland’s first hole, unable to get my breath, as older players looked on and wouldn’t shut up. 

University of Washington Libraries

Don’s wife, Vernetta is pregnant and uncomfortable and has no idea what to do with the visitor in their new living room, Congressman Henry Jackson of Washington’s Second District, who is running for the Senate and on an eastern Washington swing. 

Thankfully, Don has the ability to talk with anyone and the girls love all the attention and try to sit still and be completely normal while the photographer stalks around them.  Barefoot, they’ve never seen a pair of shoes like the Congressman is wearing.  Dunn, Vernetta and the kids will appear in a campaign ad printed in most dailies across the state on October 26, 1952.

The Congressman is telling Don that the United States Department of Agriculture is telling him that the cash crops in the ground -- potatoes, beans and corn -- will likely gross about $12,500, a good start, while other crops will help build the soil for the future.  Don doesn’t quite believe him but, as the harvest plays out, the USDA experts are right.  He’s just a couple of hundred dollars under that estimate.  Soon he’s talking to another farmer, President Harry Truman, who is in Ephrata campaigning for Adlai Stevenson.  Dunn gives him a bag of beans from his by now completely famous ‘farm in a day.’  As Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign train pauses in Ephrata on October 6, 1952, Dunn presents the general with a sack of potatoes from his first crop, receiving a thank you letter from Ike later that week. 

While a modest man, he likes the attention and can handle it.  By now he’s getting pretty good on his feet and makes a report to the Wenatchee Chamber of Commerce summing up his experiences on the new farm.  He testifies in Congress.  He said, in a visit to the farm in 2002, that he was speaking twice a week.

Later, in an interview after he died, one of his sons says what Don would never mention outside the family.  There were some problems.  Much of the equipment gifted to Dunn was antiquated stuff farm implement companies wanted to get rid of.  Dunn had to buy a lot of new gear.  And that irrigation water was expensive, even though it was deeply subsidized.  And something else was going on.  Clearly, Don was a good communicator.  His essay on why he should be ‘most deserving’ is extremely well done.  All the attention made him more confident and outgoing, and the lure of the farm less strong. 

 "The farm helped me hone skills for my second career, selling farm implements," he told the Wenatchee World. Blaine Hardin's book, "River Lost," says that three others failed to make a go of the farm after Dunn left. When Dunn visited in 2002, it was primarily a dairy operation. 

"I was a PR Man, not a moneymaker," is how Dunn described it in 2002.

He had created some new horizons that extended beyond the land.  So, he sold the farm after four years, erased $60,000 in debt, clearing $10,000.  He and Vernetta moved to Rifle, Colorado to run a farming cooperative.  Later, he went back home to Kansas, first to be a top salesman for the Carey Salt Company and later the best sales performer for the Hesston Farm Machinery Company.  He made real money and needed it.  Over the years, he and Vernetta added seven more children to their family for a total of nine.  His son says he won every sales incentive the company offered and that he and Vernetta travelled frequently and well, sometimes with the kids and sometimes not.

Vernetta died in 1999 and Don in 2005.  She was 77 and he was 83.  They had 21 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. 

A young man who caddied for Egan at Rogue Valley Country Club said that Egan rarely played with anyone, but would go out alone, playing three or four balls, hitting some shots over and over again.  He would put down his ever present pipe close to the ball before hitting his shot and the young man feared many times that the club would strike the pipe, but of course it never did.

Egan had a wide stance and didn’t get cheated on his swing.  His caddy said he had tremendously powerful wrists which he battled all his career.  Strong wrists are a friend of the snap hook.

In 1916, Nina and their daughter go back to life in Chicago ending what was likely an unhappy five years.  He sells the orchard but continues living in the house they built when they arrived.  A bit less encumbered, he now remakes himself as a golf course architect and a competitive golfer.

During the twenties, Egan is a very busy man, playing excellent golf as the premier amateur player in the Northwest and its busiest golf course architect.  From 1920 to 1925 he was working on the designs for courses in Hood River, the Eugene Country Club, Reames Country Club in Klamath Falls, Watson Golf Ranch south of Coos Bay, Seaside.  He also maintained informal relationships with Waverley Country Club in Portland, where members described him as ‘guiding Waverly’s hand’ as the club made changes to its layout.  The golf club in Medford had gone broke again and the organizers of the new Rogue Valley Country Club asked him to help shape the course in a way that would attract new members.  He did the Rogue Valley project for free. 

Seventh Hole at Pebble Beach with the sand dune
design created by Chandler Egan

In 1926 Egan played in the California Amateur Championship, winning at the old Pebble Beach layout.  He was completely smitten by the Monterey Peninsula, bought a house in Del Monte and began his work on the remodel of Pebble Beach with famed designer Alister Mackenzie, the designer of Augusta National and Cypress Point.   

The management at Pebble Beach wanted to make the course attractive to the professional tour that had been growing in importance throughout the decade and who would be passing through the peninsula on its way to the second Los Angeles Open in 1927.  A second objective was to make the course a showcase for its biggest tournament yet, the upcoming 1929 US Amateur.

Seventh at Pebble today
Wikipedia Commons

They would be deeply disappointed when the biggest golfing star in the country, Bobby Jones, got beat in the first round.  But they were thrilled when Egan marched through the preliminaries, though he lost his semi-final match.  He was on the map as a golfer once again.  On the basis of this performance, he was invited to be a member of the Walker Cup Team -- the best amateurs in the US against the best in Great Britain -- chosen by team captain Francis Ouimet.  He also received an invitation to and played in the first Masters Tournament. 

In between, he was designing courses in northern California, Oregon (helping with improvements to Gearhart by the Sea) and in Washington state, often working with Alister Mackenzie.  Frequently, he worked with swarms of WPA workmen at West Seattle, Indian Canyon and Legion Park in Everett.

In the spring of 1936 he caught pneumonia while working on Legion Park.  He had just finished clay renderings of the greens for West Seattle and checked himself into the hospital after a wet day on the Everett site.  He died a few days later on day three of the third Masters Golf Tournament.  He was just 51.  Perhaps the pipe he had in his hand or in his mouth for hours each day played a role in his inability to clear his lungs of the infection.



The Spokane Parks Department has done a good job with Indian Canyon.  It feels lush, even after the dry summer.  What I like about Indian Canyon is that the drive on the first hole takes you into the canyon and you don't come out until 18.  All the golf, its comedy and magic, takes place on the undulating, distant canyon floor.  On this day, the course wins.  Trudging up the hill on 18, my knee hurting, I give the match and the day to Chandler Egan.  

Compared to today's sports culture -- professional, select, heavyweight, international, big ticket -- Egan is an anomaly, the gifted amateur, someone for whom the game is just that, even when played at the highest level. 

Bobby Jones, who also aspired to be and was a gifted amateur golfer and who admired Egan, invited him to his first golf tournament, then called, less pompously, the Augusta National Invitational.  Egan begged off, saying it was just too expensive to get there.  However, Jones was a big supporter of the WPA and had serious stroke with WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins.  He knew that the WPA was about to start a project in North Atlanta and figured out a way to have Egan supply a design.  North Fulton is the only Chandler Egan design east of the Rockies. 

 Donald Dunn's story, in his own words

Chandler Egan's Golf Courses

Bobby Jones and others at Medford, Oregon memorial to Chandler Egan

Finding Charley Royer

I have the cattle industry in Wyoming in mind today because my grandfather was a cowboy there who never got to tell me his stories because he died 100 years ago this year, a 40 year old man with a wife and two children who was swept off a snowy Wyoming mountainside near where he had homesteaded, in Jackson Hole. 

They found him eight hours later. His heels were up against his head and the crowbar he was using to wedge dynamite into rocks along the path of the Nelson Irrigation Canal was resting on his chest. 

We know most everything about my Mom’s family.  The Hampsons were grocers and shopkeepers, many college educated, all documented in hundreds of pictures and letters, well-positioned on the Internet today, waiting to be found with a few keystrokes. 

Not so my Dad’s family.  They were roughnecks.  They lived on the edges of the continent and sometimes fell off, or got sick or had something fall on them or blow up in their hands.  Their afterlife on the Internet is, like their real lives, on the edge.

The Internet is one kind of life after death.  If you can be found, you can be still be alive to the people who matter.  That’s why I’ve been looking for Charley Royer.  I want more of his life. 

I have a handful of possessions that tell me something about Charley Royer.  One is unusual in that it is a candid photo shot in the A. A. Brown Studio in Rawlins, Wyoming.  He’s about to lick the edge of a cigarette he has rolled while another person -- turns out it is his father-in-law to be, my great grandfather – who is looking on across a fake tree stump and other props populating the studio.  The sun has badly faded this photo, propped, as it must have been, on a windowsill for many years. 

David Cripe had bicycled from Delphi, Indiana to Wyoming and settled with other Dunkards at Spring Creek, where with members of the Foutz family, built a pretty big house near the creek.  David axe-hewed the locally cut timber, put it all together and started taking in boarders.

That's where Charley Royer met Esther Cripe, David's daughter and just 18, while Charley boarded.  They are standing in front of the home that David Cripe and the Fautz family built five miles north of Saratoga.  Charley has a ridiculous tie on, the bottom part cut off, perhaps to repair a quilt.  Estie is her earnest self, staring at the camera just like she played cribbage, one hand behind her back.  On the front, she has written, "Just Married."

A third photo shows a few heifers in a field of sage brush.  On the back, with her shaky handwriting, my grandmother writes:   

“Charley’s and my start.”

That was Charley Royer's 'herd,' a handful of cattle that made him a rancher, gave him status in his tough town and, during the good times there, provided well enough.

Something happened recently that gave me a few more items to think about and add a bit more flesh to the cold bones of Charley Royer. 

Pick Ranch Round up Crew, 1894
Charley Royer is second from left
University of Wyoming Collections

First was a picture I found in the University of Wyoming Photography Collection when I changed the search from Charley Royer to Chas. Royer.  Bingo!  There’s the young cowboy, 22 years old in 1894, working on the Pick Ranch Roundup. 

Calm and confident, he looks into the lens with his legs around an odd looking horse with a speckled face, but I’m guessing a damned fine horse that performed to Charley’s considerable horse expectations. 

Charley’s hat is cooler than most of his colleagues and his forearms are crossed easily over the top of the saddle pommel.  He looks ready for work, a tough western kid who knows hard work and doesn’t complain, though I wonder, looking hard at the photo, if he didn’t leave his rope back in the tent.

That’s the Charley Royer I’ve been waiting a long time to see.

The other thing that happened is that I found the Wyoming Newspaper Project, an on-line, searchable data base of more than a million newspaper pages.  Charley, who moved to the Snowy Hills area of Wyoming in 1893 when he was just 21, exists on a lot of those digitized pages. 

Created by the Wyoming State Archives, the Wyoming Historical Society, the Wyoming State Library, the University of Wyoming Library and the Wyoming Press Association, the data base allows you to search by newspaper, by county, by city or by key words across the data base.  It started in 2009, long after I thought I had all the information I’d likely be getting about Charley Royer without moving to Wyoming.  While still a work in progress, it will only get better – and it is free.

Charley’s choice to move to Wyoming feels like a difficult one and made just as he was coming of age.  Born in Logan, Ohio in 1872, his father, Israel Royer and mother, Nancy Ann Fox, were rural people living in a southeastern Ohio town separated from the rest of the state by the Ohio hill country and the Hocking Forest.  Charley’s birth there would have pushed the population of Logan one person closer to 2,000.

The family bumped along, south and west to Indiana, likely into Kentucky and up to Southern Illinois where Nancy Ann Fox had family.  Babies came along the way and Charley’s dad, Israel, honed his skills as a tree fruit expert and planted fruit trees for the farms they passed through and sometimes settled in. 

When Charley was in his teens, Israel answered an ad from the Sac and Fox Indian Agency in Oklahoma, then known as the Indian Territory, where several tribes were settled under government protection.  It was part of federal policy removing tribes from the east and south to the Midwest that would, President Andrew Jackson argued, make both Indian and settler safer.  The policy also contemplated a transition into agriculture and small farming for the resettled Indians, though many wanted to keep the culture they grew up in.  Israel would become a part of that policy with his tree fruit expertise.

Moses Keokuk in 1868
American Tribes

Soon, the Sac and Fox lands were full of fruit trees and Israel was friends with the Sac and Fox chief, Moses Keokuk.  When the chief’s wife died, it was a tradition to burn the teepee they lived in, but it seemed a shame to burn the brick house built for Keokuk by the government when he brought his tribe to the Indian Territory.  He moved out of the brick house and gave it to Israel for his family.  Charley probably lived in that house for a time.

However, government policy on the Indian Territory changed as pressure mounted from settlers who wanted much of the Oklahoma lands opened up for homesteading.  Israel by now was running a transportation business around Stroud, in the Indian Territory, his horse and wagon bringing goods and supplies to the Sac and Fox Agency.  In 1889, the first of several “runs for the land” occurred, with settlers allowed to claim unassigned lands in the Indian Territory.  As federal policy changed further, additional land runs were held until in 1891, Israel would join thousands of others to run for the land on the Sac and Fox reservation where the tribe ceded its reservation in return for 160 acres to each of the nearly 600 tribal members, the remaining land subject to the run for the land settlers. Israel was successful, got his land and is buried there.  The property is still in the hands of his descendants. 

That year, when he was 21, Charley headed up toward Wyoming.  He was no tree fruit guy.  Charley Royer was a cowboy.

When Charley arrived in Wyoming, the state was in considerable turmoil.  An open range war was taking place, the Johnson County War, with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association deciding on violent action against smaller homesteaders who they liked to call rustlers.  It was a particularly tough time for anyone ranching in Wyoming.  Their stock operations were badly damaged by the cattle die-offs during the blizzards of 1886/87.  It wasn’t all weather that worked against them.  The monopoly practices of the stock growers, who decided what cowboys would be hired for the round-ups, what unbranded cattle would go to whom and who was a rustler and who was not.  Those who were deemed rustlers by the association were lynched or otherwise murdered at no legal risk to the association or to their employees who actually looped the rope around the necks of people they believed were rustlers -- or those they thought were about to become one.

In 1892, the small groups homesteading in the north of the new state formed their own association, a move the stock growers, urged on by the big Johnson County ranchers, saw as abetting the rustlers. The stock growers decided to do something about it once and for all.  They first hired some muscle, 21 gunmen from Texas and one from Idaho.  Their plan was to take the train from Cheyenne to Casper, gather there and head up to Buffalo, the county seat of Johnson County, where they would seize the court house, get hold of the heavy weapons stored there and chase off or kill somewhere between 15 and 70 people they had on a list.  All of this, they thought, would take place with the full support of the good citizens of Johnson County.

On the way, they stopped at the big Tisdale Ranch, picking up some reinforcements, but while there they heard that 14 rustlers were holed up at the KC Ranch nearby.  They changed plans and laid siege to one of the cabins on the ranch where, in fact, two local cattlemen and a couple of trappers were staying there.  The two trappers tried to escape and were captured by the stockgrowers.  The private army then opened up on the cabin, killing one of the residents and, after they set fire to the house, capturing the other.

Two locals passing by saw what was happening and were detained.  However, they managed to escape and lit out for Buffalo, bringing news of the insurrection.  Buffalo was not a friendly place for the big ranchers and people there believed the big guys were after small ranchers, not rustlers, who many people in Buffalo used a different name for -- neighbors. 

After the confrontation at the KC Ranch, one of the Johnson County ranchers urged caution and the insurrection went to a ranch nearby to consider options.  Soon, the Johnson County Sheriff and a number of locals surrounded the ranch and were reinforced by state militia.  After two days, the stock growers and their muscle gave up, were arrested and several were later charged.  None were brought to trial. 

In 1897, Charley had to return briefly to the Indian Territory to help bury his dad, Israel, who died of ptomaine poisoning while transporting goods from Guthrie to Stroud. 

Estie Cripe at about 16 years

When Charley returned, he signed on as one of two boarders in John Cripe’s house in South Spring Creek, outside Grand Encampment.  David's daughter Estie lived there and soon her sister, Sadie, joined her. They had come from Indiana where the family was part of the German migration that took place before the Civil War and had a role in saving border states for the union, especially Missouri.  The Cripes were Dunkards, full immersion protestants, and Wyoming was promising.

When Charley went to his dad’s funeral in the Oklahoma Territory, Grand Encampment, Wyoming was a cattle town.  When he came back, it was becoming a copper town.  Nearby, copper ore yielding nearly 33% copper had been discovered at the Ferris-Haggarty Mine.  Soon, the Boston-Wyoming Smelter Company found a lot of money to build a smelter and an overhead tramway that ran 16 miles from the mine face to its smelter in Grand Encampment.  Suddenly, Grand Encampment was thinking about incorporating.  And it did, in 1900.  It also thought about hiring Charley Royer as a town Marshal, which it also did, in 1902, paying him $90/month. Soon they needed an opera house, and they got one of those too.

Charley worked at just about everything, calling himself a rancher, a miner, a butcher and a cowboy.  He was well-liked and wowed the folks at a costume dance in 1998 which he attended with his brother Lew as an Indian Chief, perhaps something he brought back after Israel’s funeral, perhaps something given him by Moses Keokuk.  His costume was voted the most beautiful.   

His companion at these dances was Estie Cripe and, in June, 1900, they were married in Saratoga, at the home of the Justice of the Peace -- just family present.  Then they went out to the house on Spring Creek and posed on the porch.

Grand Encampment, About 1900

His wedding announcement had him also working as a butcher partnering with a man named Norwich.  Moving into Saratoga from the Cripe place at Spring Creek.  Then he became Marshall in Encampment and he bought half a block along with his brother in laws.  There is evidence they were doing well.  Chas.  Royer, for instance, had a telephone, #55.  Marshal Charley was praised highly in the Grand Encampment Herald in the spring of 1903, a few months after my dad was born:

"The town of Grand Encampment is an orderly place, one of the best behaved mining camps known.  This fact is due chiefly to efficient officers such as Marshal Charles Royer and Night Marshal Ben Gabbott, who have been reappointed by the city council.  These gentlemen are indeed stars in their line and know how to keep order."

On the other hand, Estie and Charley frequently showed up in the newspaper listing properties to be sold for non-payment of property tax, on which was added a late fee and a charge for the advertising announcement in the paper.  While Charley worked hard, he appears to have been a lousy businessman.  Even worse, the combination of law enforcement and cattle ranching made life dangerous for him.  

“Chas. Royer Shot.”

“Tuesday, while looking for stock in the Jack Creek country, Chas. Royer was fired upon by an unknown party, inflicting a flesh wound just over the kidneys.  Royer rode to the ranch of Alex. McPhail on Spring Creek after receiving the wound, and Wednesday was taken to Encampment.”

“Royer had dismounted to water his horse and take a drink of the water from Jack Creek, himself, when he felt the twinge of a bullet and the report of a rifle.  The bullet entered the left side, passing just under the skin and missing the backbone by but a hair’s breadth.”

Saratoga Sun, May 1905

My grandmother, not much of a talker, told me once as a child a story of their returning to Saratoga from Encampment late at night in a carriage.  Three toughs on horseback followed them the whole way, a hundred yards back.  Charley loaded his rifle and handed her his pistol. 

I asked her what she expected to do.

“I’d of killed those that Charley didn’t.”

Two fires at the smelter, a stock scandal and a drop in copper prices took the Grand out of Grand Encampment and the mine and smelter closed in 1908.  There was no one to police or cut meat for and a brief item in the Rawlins newspaper notes that a certain plaintiff, the Cosgriff Brothers, the largest sheep owners in Wyoming, had won a judgment of $569.56 against Chas. Royer, six months pay if he was still working as a sheriff, which he wasn’t.

Charley and Estie did what many people in dying communities do – they turned to tourism.  In 1908, they guided two couples from Chicago into the lake country around Spring Creek for a month’s worth of fishing and hunting.  The Grand Encampment Herald was effusive:

“They went with a complete pack out-fit and with Mr.  Royer as guide they are assured of having a splendid time in the hills.”

The Sidleys and the Copelands of Chicago came back the next year, 1909, and spent a month in Yellowstone.  Charley and Estie decided to just stay there in Teton County, filing papers on a homestead in Jackson Hole where they continued working on what they called a dude ranch, taking in people at their house or guiding them into the wilderness.  Charley was particularly well-known as an elk hunter and brought some fancy names, like Robert W. Service, the poet, to a big game prize. 

After they buried Charley, Estie tried to hold on to the homestead, but took up with a cranky older man named Roth who was mean and had just one eye but promised to take care of the kids.  He ran off after she had one of his.

Estie turned to cooking in logging camps while raising her three children.  But the dangerous world that was Wyoming in the first two decades of the last century fought her the whole way.  One son died in the great influenza epidemic, another was crushed in a railroading accident and a third blew off his hand while playing with a blasting cap. 

She didn’t say much, never wept and was a cutthroat cribbage player, even while teaching a child.  She worked.  She’d kill a chicken for Sunday dinner while pulling weeds in the garden.  There was nothing sentimental about her, except I knew, somehow, she loved me. 

I have no idea what she did when they told her what had happened to Charley up on the Nelson Irrigation Project.  But I have an informed supposition.  The snow slide happened at 5:00 PM and they found him at 1:00 AM. 

I’m almost sure that when the men who delivered the news left, she went back into the kitchen and started breakfast for the kids, who’d be waking up soon, and she needed to carefully figure out the 35 or so words she’d have to say to them.


Oklahoma State Oral History, Israel Royer Farm

Wyoming Historical Society, Johnson County War