"The CCC was a great deal more than a work program," Kennedy said. "It was an education and nutrition program. Most of the people who worked there got the first decent meals in their lives. You could see the people growing, literally, eating good food and working hard outside. You can see the transformation in the photographs from the time."
At Yosemite, Jack Rettinhouse and his mother lied about his age -- he was 16 -- and signed him up for the CCC in Fresno in 1937.
In a sloppily typed letter in the Yosemite archives recalling his time at the park, Rettinhouse wrote: "I reminber I only weight in at 96 lbs when I went in and after two years I came back to Fresno and weight in at 145 lbs, so I gusse you can say the food wasn't bad. . . ."
There were some 600 CCC camps in various national parks during the program's decade of existence. Yosemite had more than most, with 10 encampments scattered throughout the park, from the Valley's meadows to the high country and atop El Capitan.
Yosemite's archive contains several colorful histories from corps enrollees who were stationed in the park. The letters of many, who had never been away from home, were filled with wonder at nature.
Darrel E. Stover ended his with this passage: "Yes, I would do it all over again. It was a new life for a nineteen year old kid. I, like so many of the others, inlisted as a teenager and came out a man. And it happened in the most beautiful place in the world, YOSEMITE."
Each camp housed about 225 workers, living in reinforced tents or wooden barracks. Although the park service directed the work projects, the Army operated the camps, with daily reveille, chow taken in a mess hall and military discipline.
Not long after the program began, an educational component was added, both to train enrollees in job-related skills and to address the widespread problem of illiteracy. Some enrollees taught their compatriots to read and write.
"That's when science and history and education went into the national park system, in a serious professional way," said Kennedy, the former park service director.
He said that the still-new idea of national parks gained a foothold as a generation of men connected with wild places. "Environmentalism took its largest forward leap in this country when those people learned it with their hands and with their feet," Kennedy said.
