Jody – Father of Our National Park System

John Muir was born on April 21, 1838 in a three-story stone house in Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland. He was the third of eight children. His parents were Daniel Muir and Ann Gilrye Muir. He and his siblings attended the local schools of their small coastal town. His father was a strict religious man who believed that anything that distracted from Bible studies was frivolous and punishable. By the age of 11 young John had learned to recite “by heart and by sore flesh” all of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament.

In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to America. They settled near Portage, Wisconsin and started a farm called Fountain Lake Farm. John Muir’s father was a harsh disciplinarian who worked his family from dawn to dusk. During the rare occasions when they were allowed a short time away from the plow and hoe, Muir and his younger brother would roam the fields and woods of Wisconsin. John Muir became a loving observer of the natural world during those free moments.

John Muir also became an inventor. He carved practical mechanisms in wood. He made clocks that kept accurate time and created a device that tipped him out of bed before dawn. In 1860, Muir took his inventions to the state fair at Madison. He won both prizes and great attention. That same year he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He paid his own way for three years. It was at the university that he took his first botany lesson. Later, in his autobiography, Muir stated, “This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying into the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm.” As a freshman he studied chemistry with Professor Ezra Carr and his wife Jeanne. They became lifelong friends with Muir developing a lifelong interest in chemistry and the sciences. Although he never graduated, he learned enough geology and botany to inform his later wanderings.

In 1863, Muir’s brother Dan left Wisconsin for Canada. One year later John Muir left the university and also went to Canada, where he spent the spring, summer and fall wandering the woods and swamps around Lake Huron collecting plants. With his money running out, John met up with his brother Dan in Ontario, where they worked together at a saw mill.

John Muir returned to the United States in March 1866. He wound up in Indianapolis working as a sawyer in a factory that made wagon wheels. His employers came to value him because of his inventiveness in improving the machines and processes. In early March 1867, he had an accident that changed the course of his life. A tool he was using slipped and struck him in the eye. He was confined to a darkened room for six weeks and he worried if he would ever regain his sight. When he did he “saw the world- and his purpose- in a different light”. He believed the possibility of losing his sight was a lesson from God. From that point on he was determined to “be true to myself” and follow his dream of exploration and the study of plants.

In September 1867, Muir undertook a walk of about 1,000 miles from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico. He chose to go by the “wildest, leafiest and least trodden way” he could find. Once he reached Florida he planned to hop aboard a ship to South America. But he contracted malaria in Florida and abandoned those plans. Instead, he sailed to New York and booked passage to California. He sailed to Cuba, and later to Panama, where he crossed the Isthmus and sailed up the West Coast, landing in San Francisco in March 1868. From that moment on (even though he continued to travel the world) California became his home.

California’s Sierra Nevada and Yosemite truly captured John Muir’s heart. When he walked across the San Joaquin Valley and into the high country for the first time he called the Sierra the “most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen”. That first summer he herded sheep and made his home in Yosemite. Then he took a job building a saw mill for James Mason Hutchings. In his free time he roamed Yosemite. In 1871, he found living glaciers in the Sierra and conceived his controversial theory of the glaciation of Yosemite Valley. He was convinced that glaciers had sculpted many of the features of the valley. His theory was in stark contrast to the accepted theory of the day which attributed the valley’s formation to a catastrophic earthquake.

In 1871, John Muir discovered an active alpine glacier below Merced Peak that supported his theory. His former professor, Ezra Carr, and his wife Jeanne encouraged him to put his ideas into print. His papers were published as far away as New York. He began to be known throughout the country. Many famous American writers and scientists made their way to the door of his pine cabin. In addition to his geological studies, Muir investigated the plant life of the Yosemite area. He made field studies along the western flank of the Sierra on the isolated groves of Giant Sequoia. In 1874, he wrote a series of articles entitled “Studies in the Sierra”, launching his successful career as a writer. During his lifetime John Muir published over 300 articles and twelve books.

John Muir left the mountains for a while and moved to Oakland, California to write articles for leading magazines like Overland Monthly, Scribner’s and Harper’s Magazine. From Oakland he continued his wanderings and took many trips, including his first to Alaska. In 1880, he met and married Louie Wanda Strentzel, daughter of a prominent physician and horticulturist with a 2,600 acre fruit orchard. Together they had two daughters. They moved to Martinez, California, where Muir went into partnership with his father-in-law and managed the family fruit ranch with great success. But he grew restless to immerse himself in nature again. His wife saw his restlessness at the ranch and would sometimes “shoo him back up” to the mountains. At times he took his daughters with him. At his wife Louie’s urging, Muir traveled to Alaska’s Glacier Bay and Washington’s Mount Rainier. He championed protection of the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He was the public voice for setting aside the high country around Yosemite Valley as a national park in 1890, as well as for General Grant and Sequoia national parks. He petitioned the U.S. Congress for the National Park Bill that was passed in 1899.  In 1903, Muir went on a three-night camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt. That camping trip is considered the most significant camping trip in conservation history. He persuaded President Roosevelt to return Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to federal protection as part of Yosemite National Park. The trip had a lasting effect on the president and on the nation.

John Muir was a founder and the first president of the Sierra Club, which helped establish a number of national parks since his death. Today the Sierra Club has over 1.3 million members. Muir Woods National Monument, a grove of redwoods north of San Francisco, is named in his honor as well as Muir Beach, John Muir College, Mount Muir, Camp Muir and Muir Glacier. One of the most well-known hiking trails in the U.S., the 211-mile John Muir Trail, was named in his honor. John Muir has been called the “father of our national parks” and “one of the patron saints of twentieth-century American environmental activity”. Following Muir’s death in December 1914, Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, wrote that “the world will look back to the time we live in and remember the voice of one crying in the wilderness and bless the name of John Muir.”

“God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he can not save them from fools.” – John Muir

Jody – Resolving Conflict with Words

William “Bill” Jefferson Blythe III was born on August 19, 1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Jefferson Blythe, had died in an auto accident several months before his birth. His mother was Virginia Dell Cassidy Blyth, a fun-loving free spirit. She left Bill in Hope with his grandparents, Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, shortly after he was born to study nursing in New Orleans. The Cassidys owned and ran a small grocery store. At a time when the U.S. South was racially segregated, Bill’s grandparents sold goods on credit to people of all races. Bill’s grandmother was a strong-willed disciplinarian who tried to shape his character and taught him to read at an early age. Both his mother and his grandmother were strong women who competed for his attention. Bill remembered loving both of them during that time of his life, but always felt torn between them as a young mediator for their arguments.

In 1950, Bill’s mother Virginia married Roger Clinton, Sr., who owned a car dealership with his brother in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The family moved to Hot Springs, a busy resort town an hour away from Hope. Bill assumed the surname of his stepfather and when he turned fourteen he formally adopted the surname as a gesture towards him. His stepfather was an alcoholic who regularly abused his mother and his half-brother, Roger Clinton, Jr. Many times Bill had to intervene to protect them. Instead of returning his step-father’s physical abuse with more physical fighting, he usually appealed to him verbally for peaceful resolutions.

Bill Clinton attended St. John’s Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School and Hot Springs High School. He was an active student leader, an avid reader and a musician. He especially loved the gospel music of his Baptist faith. While his mother went to the racetracks on Sunday, Bill attended church to hear the music he loved. He was in the chorus at school and played the tenor saxophone, winning first chair in the state band’s saxophone section. He briefly considered dedicating his life to music. Sometime in his sixteenth year, he decided he wanted to be in public life. Two influential moments contributed to that decision. One was his visit as a Boys Nation senator to Washington, D.C. and the opportunity to meet his political idol, President John F. Kennedy. He was captured in a historic photograph shaking the President’s hand in the White House Rose Garden. The other was listening to Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, which he later memorized.

In 1964, Bill Clinton graduated from high school and left Arkansas to attend Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. With the aid of scholarships and part-time jobs, he majored in international affairs at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. While in college, he became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was a member of the Order of DeMolay, a youth group affiliated with Freemasonry. He is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi honorary band fraternity. He spent the summer of 1967 (the summer before his senior year) interning for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. Clinton received his Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service in 1968.

Upon graduating from Georgetown University, Clinton won a Rhodes scholarship to University College, Oxford (England) where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. While at Oxford he developed an interest in rugby and played for Oxford. Later he played for the Little Rock Rugby Club in Arkansas. Clinton switched programs and left Oxford early to attend Yale Law School. In a Yale library in 1971, he met fellow law student Hillary Rodham, who was a year ahead of him. They began dating and were soon inseparable. After just one month, Clinton proposed to Hillary and postponed his plans to be a coordinator for the 1972 McGovern Presidential campaign in order to move to California with her. Clinton did eventually move to Texas with Hillary to take a job leading McGovern’s campaign there in 1972. He had an office in Dallas and worked with future two-term mayor of Dallas, Ron Kirk, future governor of Texas, Ann Richards, and then unknown television director, Steven Spielberg. Clinton earned his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Yale in 1973. Following graduation, Clinton moved back to Arkansas with a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974 against a popular incumbent. Even though he lost, it was a close race and Clinton became a rising political star.

Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were married on October 11, 1975. Together they have one daughter, Chelsea, who was born in 1980. In 1976, Arkansas voters elected Clinton state attorney general. In 1978, Clinton ran for governor, winning an easy victory. At the age of thirty-two, he became one of the nation’s youngest governors ever. In 1980, he lost reelection, becoming the youngest former governor in U.S. history. Clinton went to work for a Little Rock law firm but spent most of his time campaigning for reelection. In the 1982 race, Clinton admitted his mistakes. He used his natural charm and effective TV ads to convince the voters to give him another chance. He won in 1982 and again in 1984. In 1986 and 1990, he was supported by the Arkansas voters for two, four-year terms. As governor, Clinton supported centrist issues. He helped Arkansas transform its economy. He strongly advocated for educational reform, appointing Arkansas First Lady Hillary to lead a committee to draft higher standards for schools in Arkansas. Governor Clinton’s reforms positively impacted Arkansas schools, which experienced a decrease in drop-out rates and an increase in college-entrance exam scores. From 1986 to 1987, Clinton served as Chair of the National Governors Association, bringing him out of Arkansas and onto the national stage.

William “Bill” Jefferson Clinton won the U.S. Presidential election in 1992. As President-elect, he vowed to focus on economic issues and issues supported by the middle class. As President, Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. He successfully passed welfare reform and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), providing health coverage for millions of children. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of President Clinton’s two terms in office. In foreign affairs, President Clinton succeeded in mediating peace negotiations in Northern Ireland between warring Catholics and Protestants.

Since leaving office, Clinton has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. He created the William J. Clinton Foundation to promote and address international causes such as prevention of AIDS and global warming. In 2009, he was named United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti and after the 2010 earthquake he teamed up with George W. Bush to form the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

“We must teach our children to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.”- William J. Clinton