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Summer Hire Perspectives – 1961, Larry Brown

From an Interview with Larry Brown, December 2009

A temporary job with the Bureau of Public Roads gave Larry Brown a firm foundation of skills in 

surveying and construction inspection. His memories of three summers in the Colorado Rockies and 

one in Yellowstone National Park still resonate fifty years later.

After spending two summers working in Colorado for the Bureau of Public Roads and what is 

now the Central Federal Lands Highway Division, Larry Brown was sent to Yellowstone National Park 

to work for his third summer. It was 1961 and he was assigned to a project at West Thumb, which “was 

a bit of a center at the time,” he said, with cabins, a gas station, a campground, and a store. “They even 

rented row boats to go out on the lake.” Unfortunately it had been built “on a hot springs basin, and so 

it was not very stable,” he said. “So they wanted to do away with it and replace it with Grant Village.

“Fred Behring was the Project Engineer 

there, and he had been there forever. Everybody 

knew him.” Another of the crew members he 

remembered was Al Johnson who later tried out his 

hand at writing, and Larry has one of his books. “He 

lives in Arkansas and he's been a lobbyist all these 

years; worked for the highway department in 

Arkansas....

“There was also “a young whipper snapper 

kid – we called him Cowboy. I don't know what he 

did all summer. We went our way and he went his,” 

he said.

“We lived in a trailer and we ate in a boarding 

house. Best food in the world; all you could eat.” 

The woman who ran the boarding house “would pack 

our lunches every day,” he said. She prepared three 

meals a day, and it was “really good stuff. Man, we 

were livin'.”

“They used to have these little cabins in these 

villages that you could rent for $6,” Larry recalled. 

“They had two rooms: a bedroom, and a kind of a 

The crew at Yellowstone in 1961 included, from left 

to right: Warren Frame (Lovell, WY), Bob Gish

(Pennsylvania), Bob Jones (Cheyenne, WY), 

Project Engineer Fred Behring, Norm Merrill

(Wall, SD), Al Johnson (Virginia), and Bill White

(Denver, CO). Photo courtesy Larry Brown.

living room, and a light bulb hanging from the ceiling.” The cabins themselves, he said, were “long 

and narrow and ugly. They had a little stove, and the stove came with a little wood, but you weren't 

allowed to cook – unless you could sneak it in. I think they just didn't want people burning down the 

cabins.”

A retiree from Federal Highway Administration was also present at the interview. “My family 

was visiting Yellowstone National Park about the period of time you're talking about,” Dave Reilly

said. “We stayed in one of those cabins, and I can remember my Mom was just appalled that she 

couldn't cook in the cabin. She cooked out in the car on the Coleman stove – or sometimes she would 

sneak the Coleman stove into the cabin.” His said his family had vacationed in the park “before the 
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earthquake.” Centered outside the Park, just north of West Yellowstone, Montana, the 1958 quake 

caused a landslide that resulted in the formation of Hebgen Lake. The Reilly family returned after the 

quake to see the changes, Dave said, because “my Dad was fascinated by the earthquake.” 

Larry added that “all those cabins in all those different villages have been torn down now, 

except in one spot, at Roosevelt Village.” They're still available if you make your reservations early 

enough, he added, but “if you want a room in Yellowstone National Park for anytime during the 

summer, you have got to plan months in advance.”

Since the village at West Thumb was due to be 

replaced, Larry continued, the BPR was building a 

road to the new campground. The project included 

“three wooden bridges: pile driven bridges, about 60 

feet off the water.” The Park Service would not allow 

any metal in the bridge construction, “so even the 

surface of the bridge was made out of wood. It was 

2x4's laid on edge, and hand nailed in. These poor 

guys,” he said, shaking his head over the work that 

went into the three bridges. “As I recall, the three 

bridges were labeled A, B, and C: A was (about) 100 

feet, B was (about) 200 feet, and bridge C was about 

300 feet long. As a bridge inspector, Larry had to 

make sure the pile driver would “reach a certain 

compression without breaking it – so many blows per 

inch. And so then I'd say 'OK, good! Stop before you 

break it!'”

His boss couldn't have asked for a more 

dedicated inspector. “One night I was off visiting my 

girlfriend in Old Faithful, 19 miles away.” When it 

Bridge construction at West Thumb, Yellowstone 

National Park, 1961. Fred Turner and another 

BPR employee named Bill are standing below the 

crane. Photo courtesy Larry Brown.

came time to leave for the evening, he found that his car was out of oil. There was “a leak in the oil 

pan or something, and I couldn't drive it home. But I liked inspecting that bridge so much – I liked that 

job, it was my baby.” So he started walking.

He ended up walking all night. “I figured I could hitchhike,” but not a single car came along. 

“Somebody finally picked me up, after dawn. I learned a lesson that night. In those National parks, 

nobody goes anywhere at night. There's no reason to go anywhere at that time in the morning,” he said. 

“It's a wonder I didn't get eaten by something.”

At the time he was there, Larry said, “the girl to boy ratio in the park was about four to one—”

“So he went back there year after year,” his wife, Fran, interjected.

“College girls would come and be maids and waitresses and stuff like that,” he quickly

explained.

“The stores in each of these villages around the National Park at the time were called 

Yellowstone Park stores. They were owned and run by the Yellowstone Park Company.” That 

privately owned company had the contract for many years, he said. “Finally they lost that bid and 

they're no longer called Yellowstone Park stores. People who worked in those stores – there'd be 

some...who would have forty years in there – they'd come back every year. It was their life.” Now, he 

said, “the only thing that remains of West Thumb is a small store that used to be a Yellowstone Park 

store. There might be a gas station.”
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Since he and Fran have been married, they 

have taken motorcycle trips to various national parks 

nearly every year and have stayed at the new 

campground several times. “Every time we go back I 

always go look at the bridges and see if they are still 

standing,” he said.

“We had bears in the camp pretty much 

daily....There were two loops in the park. You could 

drive either one of those loops, (in) two or three hours, 

and you'd see fifty bears.” With those odds, he said, 

“there was about one bear incident with a tourist per 

day.”

But it was the bears that visited the nearby 

town of West Yellowstone, Montana, that provided 

“the greatest show – the most amazing thing I've ever 

seen: We could go to the city dump and watch the 

grizzlies frolic in the dump.” 

He and his friends would buy a six pack of 

beer and they'd park the car at the edge of the dump, 

Pile driver (and operator “Red”) at 

Yellowstone National park, 1961. Photo 

courtesy Larry Brown.

and the bears would just “walk right by. They are awesome that close up,” he said. “They'd get into a 

fight and it would just be the most vicious fight you ever saw in your life. They're moving so fast, and 

they're so big and so strong, and fur was flying.

“In those days you backed up to the dump and you threw your stuff over the embankment,” he 

said. “One time we pulled up to the embankment, but couldn't see the bears very well, so we had to get 

out of the car. So here we are, lined up on the top of the embankment, watching the grizzlies down 

there. There's one mother with a couple of cubs and they were rummaging and rummaging and 

rummaging.” It was an eerie evening, with a fire 

burning here and there in the dump, and in the twilight 

“you can't see them very well.” They stood there 

talking and watching the bears, “and that was really 

stupid,” he said, because “all of a sudden, the mother 

was standing with us on the embankment. It just 

happened that fast!” They all dashed back to the car. 

“She didn't try to get anybody, but she just wanted to 

say, 'I'm the boss here and don't you guys forget it.' 

Boy, she got her message across.” 

Larry recalled there were two brothers living in 

West Yellowstone who were studying the bears. They 

were “ranchers, and they were famous for their 

knowledge about grizzlies. They would go out and 

crawl into the grizzlies' hibernating den in the middle 

of the winter” to do their studies, he said, and “they 

knew more about grizzlies than anybody else at that 

time.

Employees faced the challenge of mud at 

West Thumb, Yellowstone National Park. 

Photo courtesy Larry Brown.
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“The endangered and threatened species act was not in effect at the time,” he said, but “all of 

the environmentalists at the time were saying 'the grizzly is declining and is endangered because we are 

taking away their habitat.' 

“And these two guys, these two old ranchers, said 'they're not threatened because we're taking 

away their habitat; they're threatened because we're shooting them.'” That was simply the most 

practical way in which the local people could deal with the bears. The grizzlies would “walk right 

down the centerline of the main street of town and they'd get shot. They're not afraid of anything, just 

absolutely have no fear.” Larry couldn't remember the brothers' names, but, he said, “You still hear 

about them every now and then, 50 years later.”

The work, he said, was lots of fun. “I loved it. I learned so much about construction and 

engineering and stuff and I used it the rest of my life.”

Although Larry did not fulfill the prophesy Bill White made during his first year with the BPR, 

he was quick to acknowledge the value of the experience. Sometimes, he said, it was “a knowledge I 

didn't even know I had until I was confronted with it.”

He also admitted to being tempted by an engineering career. Wiggling in a transit, he said, was 

“common sense,” but the course work in civil engineering had him worried. “It was a tough course. I 

didn't know whether I could hack the course in college.”

His career choice was also influenced in a way by his high school counselor. “You know how a 

young kid gets his nose out of joint. I had an advisor in high school whom I didn't like. She said, 

'you're obviously engineering material; go be an engineer.'” Larry said his reaction to this advice was 

“I'll show her, I'm not going to be an engineer,” but he thinks now perhaps he should have followed that 

career path. “It was kind of a natural for me; I really enjoyed it.”

Overall, Larry said, “It was a great job, a neat experience....Throughout those four years I had 

the total experience on a road, from absolutely a gleam in somebody's eye to the paving and striping. It 

was really fun.”

After retiring from a career in mining reclamation, Larry Brown purchased a small farm in 

Palisade, Colorado. He is pictured above at his home with his orchard in the background. For the past 

seven years, he and his wife Fran have spent their winters cruising in the Sea of Cortez and along the 

west coast of Mexico aboard their sailboat “Merlot.” Dave Reilly retired from the Oregon Division 

Federal Highway Administration in 2005. He and his wife, Marili, have spent two winters cruising in 

Mexico aboard their sailboat, “Tamara,” often in the company of the Browns. 

Stories in this series have been developed by Marili Reilly from interviews and correspondence. 

Retirees who would like to share their memories may email marili.reilly@dot.gov.
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Larry Brown had already left the project when BPR began construction of Bridge A (top two photos), a bridge 

about 100 feet long that would serve the “new” campground at Grant Village. At lower left, the beginnings of 

construction on Bridge B, approximately 200 feet long, in 1961. The photo at lower right shows Bridge B today. 

(1961 photo courtesy Larry Brown. 2010 photo courtesy Wade Johnson, WFLHD.)
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Bridge C in 1961 (top row) and 2010 (lower four photos). At approximately 300 feet, this is the longest of the three 

bridges constructed by BPR at Grant Village. (1961 photo courtesy Larry Brown. 2010 photo courtesy 

Wade Johnson, WFLHD.)