Filmmaker Ken Burns focuses on the CCC period in one episode of his upcoming six-part documentary to be shown on PBS, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea." Surviving CCC members are interviewed, telling how the program transformed their lives.
"FDR called the CCC 'building human happiness,' " Burns said. "The dignity that you see now in the not-at-all-faded memories of people who as teenagers had their lives reformed, they have had their molecules rearranged by being in the CCC."
Al F. Monteverde joined in 1933 after having no luck finding a job. Upon being sent to Yosemite, he wrote: "We ddint' know what we wre getting into but we all looked at it like the chance of a lifetime, something to do at last, thank God! Our minds and our bodies would have something to do."
Work in the park proceeded year-round. Crews constructed the Wawona Tunnel in 1933, cut the May Lake Trail and replaced the climbing cables at Half Dome.
"The park service was poised to help the president because we had master plans sitting on the shelves," said Yosemite's chief historian, David T. Humphrey.
The park's 6,816 CCC enrollees built walls and buildings using rocks and trees in the park. Those projects remain today and help create Yosemite's rustic look.
"The work was hard, but we loved it," wrote Leighroy Davis of Waterford, Calif. "Building rock walls on the down hillside of trail, swinging an eighteen pound rock hammer all day plus the pick and shovel was turning boys into men."
Some of the improvement projects were put to immediate use during the Depression as families from around the region took to camping all summer in the park to save money.
The National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonpartisan parks advocacy group, has testified before Congress that the nation's 391 parks have billions of dollars in "shovel-ready projects," some of them remnants of the system's more than $8.7-billion maintenance backlog.
Citing the CCC as a model, the parks group is advocating the development of a National Park Service Corps and estimates that investing stimulus funds in parks would create about 50,000 jobs. The group has studied the economic impact of parks, particularly in rural areas, finding that every dollar spent at a park generates $4 in benefit.
Construction projects could be contracted out and stimulate the local economy, said Jon Jarvis, park service director for the Pacific-West region.
"We have literally thousands of those types of projects," he said. "The infrastructure of the national park system has come in fits and starts. It was massive during CCC; now a lot of those systems are inadequate and failing."
Jarvis, whose father was in the CCC, said he would like any new park service projects to "set the standard to be as green as possible, to use that bully pulpit to educate the public about what they can do."
"There's a legitimate opportunity to make us part of the stimulus package," said Stephen Martin, superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, where some 1,000 CCC enrollees labored. "We have a broad need for people to work in parks. We can offer employment programs for college students -- help educate them. We require work from engineers and accountants."
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julie.cart@latimes.com
