The head man of the Great Smokies Park is Ross Eakin. His men say he has
one of the smoothest-working organizations in the Park Service. He has
been in charge here from the start. Before that he was superintendent at
Glacier, and at Grand Canyon.
The Smokies have been fortunate in having the CCC and the WPA. Without
them to do the work and do it cheaply, the Park Service would have been
decades reaching its present advanced stage of improvements.
They have built hundreds of miles of trail, and fire roads for trucks,
and camping grounds and bridges and even beautiful stone buildings for
Park Headquarters, at one time there were 17 CCC camps in the park, and
even now there are seven.
The park does have, it seems to me, one definite lack. And that is
enough Rangers for direct contact with the public. The park charges no
admission, so you are not stopped or given information when you drive
in.
The public’s hunger for authentic information is expressed in the
experience of one of the Rangers. When he first came here, he took a
rustic cottage in a tourist court, right in town, but every evening the
tourists would see him come home from work in his uniform, and from then
till bed time there was a line at his door. He finally had to move.