All in Jest: One Lick R. Evergreen, the Park Service's Ranger Caricature

Jesters belonged to royal courts, not national parks. Yet for a short time in the late 1950s the National Park Service (NPS) had its own ranger caricature to speak truth to power. Part mountain-man stereotype and part voice of the field staff, One Lick R. Evergreen wore an exaggerated ranger uniform, turned up at conferences and sent comments to NPS newsletters.

Creating the character

Director Conrad Wirth asked Dan Beard, superintendent of Everglades National Park, for ideas to bring some humour to the coming Park Development Conference, held at Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in September 1957 on the theme of Mission 66, Wirth's construction and facilities programme. Beard invented "One Lick Rotation Evergreen" to speak for employees in the field. The name was spelled One Lick, One-lick or Onelick.

One Lick Evergreen's uniform jacket, 1957. NPS History Collection, HFCA 181.

Karl T. Gilbert, assistant chief ranger at Everglades, made the "uniform":

• a coat from Dan Beard's closet, with the NPS arrowhead patch and 10½ oversized white service stars on the left sleeve — for 53 years in the NPS;
• an oversized Stetson, its brim enlarged with cardboard, with the official leather NPS hatband;
• leather puttees, or leg wraps, dropped from the standard uniform in 1936;
• a metal ranger badge stamped with One Lick's grade, GS-2/3 — harder, since no off-the-shelf item would do;
• tan plastic glasses with a big fake nose, a red wig, and a brown beard with moustache and sideburns.

One Lick Evergreen's metal badge. NPS History Collection, HFCA 179.

The debut

John G. Lewis, superintendent of Isle Royale National Park, played One Lick, who first appeared on the conference's last day at Grand Teton — before almost every NPS superintendent, five regional directors, the chiefs of the eastern and western design and construction offices, most park concessioners, Director Wirth and several guests. One Lick stomped in and threw his saddle at the feet of a startled Laurence Rockefeller before taking the stage.

The minutes do not record the speech, but Beard later noted its gist. Using the jester's licence to mock without punishment, One Lick demanded to know who had put "that big hay barn" — Teton Lodge — in the middle of his elk range, then turned his observations on NPS staff, Mission 66 and the Service in general. He was an instant success.

Keeping him alive

Afterwards Beard wrote to Wirth about One Lick's future. He called him a "living caricature" of the Service — and, as newspapermen know, a caricature can be more powerful than the best editorial. One Lick might not be erudite or well shaven, Beard wrote, but his uninhibited, grassroots outlook could be "quite penetrating". His one warning: if anyone had to write a report about it, Evergreen would never come off the hills again.

Beard's rules to "keep the old gopher alive and under control":

• the actor or writer stays anonymous;
• Associate Director Eivind T. Scoyen checks his remarks in case they are "too barbed";
• a two-year plan to "guide and nurture" the character, because the idea, with its light touch, could build esprit de corps.

The "face" of One Lick Evergreen. NPS History Collection, HFCA 180, 182 and 183.

Until the next conference, Beard proposed, One Lick would be Beard, Lewis, Scoyen and "Tiny" Semingsen of Wind Cave, editor of the employee and alumni newsletter The Stephen Mather Family Newspaper — "but not as a 'committee' because that implies a report."

Lewis, pleased with how the portrayal had gone, agreed, and on October 30, 1957, suggested column titles for One Lick: Needles from Evergreen, One-lick and a Promise and From a Fir Place. On December 11, 1957, Scoyen approved the plan: One Lick must be kept alive and stir up enough fuss now and then that employees would not forget him — and Scoyen would check his remarks on the understanding that this did not make him responsible for everything One Lick said.

Beard's worry proved justified: Scoyen rejected six of the first eight quips Lewis sent in for Evergreen's "colyum". They survive in the One Lick Evergreen file in the NPS History Collection. Jokes aimed at President Eisenhower or Congress were clearly out — though time has dulled the barbs, and many references mean little now.

One Lick Evergreen at Everglades National Park, 1958. NPS History Collection, HFCA-01366.

The travelling jester

One Lick sent comments and photographs from special assignments, such as months at Everglades in 1958, and telegrams to conferences he could not attend.

At the 1959 Biennial Visitor Services Conference at Colonial National Historical Park, the conference newsletter Ye Dailye Ranger featured him every day. He arrived by boat on the York River as an "unidentified stranger, thought to be some kind of park ranger"; the next day's paper reported that the pessimists had been right — it was old One Lick. Said to be 100 years old, he took the microphone to scold the "young squirts" who acted as if they knew anything about parks.

One Lick Evergreen at the 1959 conference at Colonial National Historical Park. NPS History Collection, HFCA-01366.

The final issue reported that he had burst through a cordon of rangers into Phi Beta Kappa Hall, bullied the delegates with tales of high-ranking administrators who had won superior performance awards, and mocked Mission 66 architecture — until the delegates jeered, he fled by a side door, and two rangers caught him and locked him in the stocks.

The dean of park rangers

In April 1958 C. Ray Vinten, superintendent of Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, wrote a song "to perpetuate the memory of the dean of all park rangers", sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas — one of the "original songs of my more stupid years", he later said. Its verses paint a "ranger of rangers" who hides in the mountains and comes out once a year: red curly whiskers, big muscles, poison to the ladies but loved by grizzly bears; a friend of the wilderness living on nuts and berries; a civil-service wonder who got in by mistake, with a wide, dirty hat, who would rather walk than ride. The song also made him a GS-5 on paper for 37 years — a promotion from the previous year's GS-2/3.

Sheet music for Ray Vinten's song, April 1958. NPS History Collection, HFCA-01366.

Back to the hills

After a couple of years One Lick went back to his beloved mountains for good — but not before becoming an official member of the NPS Employee and Alumni Association.

One Lick R. Evergreen's membership certificate. NPS History Collection, HFCA-01366.

He was not forgotten. The menu for a dinner of NPS retirees on September 12, 1978, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was dedicated "Honoring the Memory of One Lick Evergreen."

Sources

• National Park Service, NPS History Collection, "50 Nifty Finds #44: All in Jest." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/50-nifty-finds-44-all-in-jest.htm
• The article's sources: the One Lick Evergreen file (HFCA-01366) and Ye Dailye Ranger, December 2–4, 1959 (HFCA 1645), NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; and "One Lick Evergreen," Courier: The National Park Service Newsletter, March 1978.
• The original names "Isle Royal National Park"; it is Isle Royale.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words; the song is described rather than reproduced.