Oral History Transcript - Harry Bishop - February 5, 2008
Interview with Harry Bishop
Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux
Date of Interview: February 5, 2008
Location: San Marcos, Texas
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Interviewee: Harry Bishop – Mr. Bishop was manager of the Federal Fish Hatchery in San Marcos when President Johnson announced the property switch with Texas State University-San Marcos at the inauguration of former Texas State President James H. McCrocklin in 1964. The local Federal Fish Hatchery, now the site of the J.C. Kellam Building and the Theatre Center, was the oldest hatchery west of the Mississippi River.
Topics: Original National Fish Hatchery in San Marcos, Texas; transfer of the National Fish Hatchery land to Texas State University (Southwest Texas State College), Mr. McCrocklin (president of Southwest Texas State College); the new Fish Hatchery and Development Center in San Marcos, Texas; catfish delivery from National Fish Hatcheries to LBJ Ranch; German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
THIBODEAUX: This recording is part of the LBJ Centennial Celebration Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University. Today is February 5, 2008. My name is Barbara Thibodeaux. I am interviewing Mr. Harry Bishop at San Marcos, Texas.
Mr. Bishop, even though you have agreed to the terms and conditions of the release pertaining to this interview in writing, will you also verbally acknowledge your acceptance with a yes or a no.
BISHOP: Yes.
THIBODEAUX: Thank you very much.
Can you start out by giving some background information on the original National Fish Hatchery in San Marcos?
(pause) I didn’t mean to start out with such a tough question. (laughs)
BISHOP: Go ahead.
THIBODEAUX: Can you give me some background on the fish hatchery?
BISHOP: It was established about the turn of the century. The other century. I’m not positive whether it was 1900s or back in the late 1800s. There were fish hatcheries creeping west and southward. This is one of the oldest, touted to be the oldest west of the Mississippi River.
THIBODEAUX: Where was it located?
BISHOP: On the San Marcos River. Just a hundred yards or so downstream from the lake, is it Crystal Clear Lake? [Spring Lake]
THIBODEAUX: I think so. That sounds familiar.
Where and how did you become associated with the hatchery?
BISHOP: I had been working for the Oklahoma Game and Fish Department and the Fish and Wildlife Services started a new program. They were hiring college graduates to become pseudo – experts in warm water fish culture and warm water fish diseases. I was one of the ones they selected for their program and my family and I moved down here to be associated with that. I can’t tell you the year. You want to know all of this stuff?
THIBODEAUX: Yes I do. (laughs) But just what you remember is fine. I don’t want you to have to dig around to find information.
What was your position?
BISHOP: I was assistant hatchery manager. A man named Fred Richan, now deceased, was the project leader. I was there as his assistant and trainee. I was actually cooling my heels. I had already enrolled in a disease training school that was in Leetown, West Virginia, which was to begin early September. So I was just here through the rest of the winter and summer.
THIBODEAUX: How long were you with the fish hatchery?
BISHOP: About 28 years, and then military service. I retired about as soon as I could with thirty plus years.
THIBODEAUX: When you were with the fish hatchery for all of that time, did you have different positions?
BISHOP: Yeah, that was the first position here and when the hatchery closed, I went to Austin and I was an area biologist. I actually had the same position – no I didn’t. Scratch that. They created a new position. I went to the Austin hatchery, which LBJ also closed, which is right on the north side of Town Lake, just east of Interstate 35. (pause) He was on a roll; he gave that to the University of Texas.
THIBODEAUX: Okay. That was a question I didn’t know about. We’ll follow up on that one. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on their website claims that they donated the “aging hatchery” to Southwest Texas in exchange for its present location wherever it is moved to now. So can you describe what led up to the transfer of land to Southwest Texas?
BISHOP: How many broken arms I had? (laughs) While I was donating? (laughs) It was pretty sudden. I got a phone call from Albuquerque which was our regional headquarters. A friend of mine, Bob Stevens, was on the other end. He said, “Now hear me out.” He said, “We are going to close the fish hatchery.” And he said, “LBJ has decided to give it to the university. You need to understand the federal land disposal program.” He said years ago that the president of the university who was who?
THIBODEAUX: McCrocklin.
BISHOP: McCrocklin and explained the various delays to him. We don’t want him to think that we are dragging our feet. We want him to believe it was going smoothly. He said first it had to be advertised to all the other federal facilities and programs in the Fish and Wildlife Service. And there is a waiting period of 60 days – I don’t know, I’m making this up – 60 days, and if no one in the Fish and Wildlife Service wants that land, and they won’t, it is then advertised through the Department of the Interior. Anybody in the Department of the Interior or any program that wants to can ask for it, but they won’t, and so forth and so on. And he said finally it will be taken care of by the, I guess, by the Department of Education. I don’t remember if that is an entity into itself or not. But they go outside of the Department of the Interior and advertise it, and he said they [Department of Education] will ask for it. Their waiting period is 60 to 90 day waiting periods all along here and to try to make McCrocklin understand that process.
I shined my shoes and went up to talk to Dr. McCrocklin; introduced myself. He said he understood; he had been forewarned. He had a pretty good understanding of the federal land disposal hoops that needed to be jumped through. We had a real pleasant conversation, and at that time he brought up the school farm on McCarty Lane. He brought it up. I told him, I better correct myself, perhaps during that conversation, I had told him we had planned to make use of it. We were going to put a development center in there; development in the sense that it is an intermediary step between research and production. So that we would be taking research ideas and trying them out on a production basis to see if they would work in production. We haggled it around. I probably told him during the course of that conversation that I had been up and down McCarty Lane. I don’t know whether I said something about, do you have long-range plans for the college farm? I don’t know how the college farm property came up, but I had been up and down McCarty Lane all the way to the county line and maybe beyond. I knew who all owned the properties and about what they would want to sell them. And it just evolved from there. He kind of jumped on that and he went so far as time went by to get us the property, we asked for plus about another 40 or 50 acres adjacent to it.
THIBODEAUX: So did it turn out to be an even swap?
BISHOP: Well, I don’t know. If you take a pile of – I’m trying to get a good analogy – a pile of wood and trade that for a finished house, is that an even swap? Things followed in line. He saw to it that there was enough money made available so we could take the pile of wood and make it into another facility. I just don’t know how to answer the question. Not in my mind.
THIBODEAUX: So was the old fish hatchery the pile of wood?
BISHOP: No. The farm was just bare ground out here. It was the building material. We had a finished project in town.
THIBODEAUX: So when the website refers to it as an “aging facility,” did you need a new facility?
BISHOP: Yes, we had plans for that. A proposal of that had been submitted to Washington to redo the whole program at the old fish hatchery and make it into a development center. Construction would be needed, and money would be needed. I guess they have a copy of that down in the fish hatchery. Have you been down there?
THIBODEAUX: No, I haven’t.
BISHOP: There is a guy down there named Tom Brandt, B-R-A-N-D-T, and he would be happy to let you look in the library there and see what you might dig out.
THIBODEAUX: My question is whether you were consulted? It sounds like you were not consulted at the very beginning.
BISHOP: It is not a democratic process.
THIBODEAUX: Was your opinion sought at any time about the closing?
BISHOP: It didn’t make any difference; I gave it. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: What was your opinion that you gave?
BISHOP: I didn’t like it. Do you want the direct quote?
THIBODEAUX: Yes, I would like that.
BISHOP: I said after speaking with Dr. McCrocklin, “I went in there feeling like I had been raped, and I came out feeling like I wouldn’t mind being raped by the same guy.”
THIBODEAUX: That is an interesting quote. I’m glad we got that one. (laughs)
So did you feel better about the whole situation after talking to Mr. McCrocklin?
BISHOP: Of course, when we would start talking about the college farm and that sort of thing. That was a slow process too. It was nothing in concrete; he just threw out that idea and maybe had to approach some of his people. He said it was a big, expensive program and it wasn’t very productive for them. So when you are trying to save money, you look at the big programs and see if you can squeeze them a little bit, and he could. But I also thought it was really nice that he went ahead and got us the extra land.
THIBODEAUX: What reasons were given to the closure?
BISHOP: LBJ and the university wanted it.
THIBODEAUX: So there wasn’t any pretending.
BISHOP: Flagrant power. Right.
THIBODEAUX: Well that takes care of my next question. I was going to ask if you thought this was politically motivated.
BISHOP: Just motivated. I don’t think it was Democrat versus Republican or anything like that.
THIBODEAUX: It was politics in action.
BISHOP: Well he and McCrocklin were pretty good friends. Of course, Jake Pickle was involved and Pickle and McCrocklin were pretty good friends. It couldn’t have been done without the political power of LBJ.
THIBODEAUX: So do you think that Mr. McCrocklin was the instigator?
BISHOP: Probably, probably. I didn’t even know that. No, all we ever heard was that LBJ was giving it to the university – arranging for the transfer to the university.
THIBODEAUX: So amazingly enough the Austin hatchery had the same fate. When was that?
BISHOP: Probably five or six years later. They used to worry about it. That hatchery was on the helicopter route between Bergstrom and the farm, the LBJ farm, and that guy would see a helicopter fly over every morning at six o’clock when LBJ was at the ranch bringing people or mail or whatever to the ranch. He worried about it.
THIBODEAUX: And so it was transferred to UT?
BISHOP: Uh huh.
THIBODEAUX: Was there another hatchery built in Austin to replace it?
BISHOP: No.
THIBODEAUX: So that was just closed?
BISHOP: There was never a discussion of that that I know.
THIBODEAUX: You worked at the Austin hatchery also?
BISHOP: I transferred up there as a regional biologist.
THIBODEAUX: Did you transfer back to the one here?
BISHOP: To San Marcos?
THIBODEAUX: Yes.
BISHOP: Oh yes, but long years later. I went from Austin to the regional office in Albuquerque as an assistant regional director for fish hatcheries. Gosh, I did five or six years. It was a continuous program. We never did give up on the idea of a development center here and I guess we just continued with that. There was an interim between the closing of this fish hatchery and the opening of this development center. This is what it is now, it’s a development center.
THIBODEAUX: Was it quite a long stretch – how many years between the opening and closing?
BISHOP: I think I just said it was five or six, might have been four or five. In the interim, I was transferred to Albuquerque as part of the administrative program there. From there, I was transferred to Boston as part of the administration there. Then the guys that had been – had a lot of trouble with construction here. The guy that finally came and opened it up was down in June, I can’t tell you what his name is. Anyhow, he was transferred in from Washington [D.C.]. And I called Albuquerque, same guy in Albuquerque, Bob Stevens, and I told him that I was the best person qualified for the job down here and I wanted to transfer down here. I was willing to take a demotion to do it. If he didn’t transfer me, I was going to file charges. (laughs) He said, “You’ve got the job.” That wasn’t done the right way, but that’s the way it was.
THIBODEAUX: You made an interesting comment about power. I was going to ask if you see this as an exercise of power, but I think you commented that it was strictly…
BISHOP: It was just the President of the United States wrote a memo saying that an Executive Directive, I guess, saying that this is going to happen. You can look at this activity as a triangle with the LBJ thing on top and the Department of the Interior on one corner and the university on the other. There was no conversation between the university and the Department of the Interior until they called me and told me to go and see McCrocklin. It was all done between LBJ and the university and the Department of the Interior. But the Department of the Interior at the Washington level. [They] never did speak to me, a guy named Frank Howard, never did speak to me, but he got an accommodation for handling it well.
THIBODEAUX: (laughs) I am sure that didn’t make you very happy.
What kind of an impact did this have on the San Marcos area?
BISHOP: They were going through the – are you familiar with the Neighborhood Rehabilitation Project?
THIBODEAUX: No.
BISHOP: They were a bunch of small, I’ll say wood, kind of inexpensive houses along the river, between town and the river. And they took all of that out, and this happened about the same time. It just upgraded the whole neighborhood. It was good for the university and hence, good for the city.
THIBODEAUX: But it took out lower income housing to develop higher end buildings?
BISHOP: Uh huh. I don’t know what the program was called. It has been a while.
THIBODEAUX: Well that was an interesting result. And of course, resulted in just a few transfers and losses of jobs?
BISHOP: Well, let’s see. Fred Richan retired. I think he stayed on in an interim position with the university. I was transferred to Austin. There were two other guys here; one of them was transferred to Colorado and another one was transferred to Louisiana, and some temporary laborers, two temporary laborers, one of them is still living, maybe both of them. If you want those names, one of them was named David Ybarrara, and …
THIBODEAUX: B-A-R-R-O-W
BISHOP: Ybarraro – Y.
THIBODEAUX: Oh, oh. Ybarrara.
BISHOP: and the other one was named …I’ve got another name, but I can’t come up with it. Fine young Hispanic gentleman.
THIBODEAUX: And were they transferred?
BISHOP: No, they lost their jobs.
THIBODEAUX: Just lost their jobs. (pause) Was there any other information that you have about the fish hatchery or the transfer that I did not ask about?
BISHOP: (pause) No, I’m sorry I didn’t have all these dates in front of me. I don’t do well on dates. But we stayed here about five more years. I transferred to Albuquerque and then to Boston. Then, I guess, it was about five years before we came back. I was at the Boston office about five or six years. It was fun. That was a good place to be.
THIBODEAUX: In Boston?
BISHOP: Uh huh. We enjoyed that. In fact, we’ve enjoyed every place we’ve been. I feel sorry for people who hate where they are and hate where they are being sent. But we never did want to leave and never did want to go, and never did want to leave, so it worked out well.
THIBODEAUX: But you wanted to retire in San Marcos?
BISHOP: Oh yeah. We had children here. We have two daughters living in Austin and a son move to Albuquerque when we did, but he was enrolled at the University of New Mexico and then Albuquerque. But then he transferred to Texas State Teachers College or something – way back then. And I have another daughter in Phoenix that went to Albuquerque with us and she started going to the University of New Mexico or New Mexico State University down in Las Cruces and never rejoined the family as such. She got married from down there.
THIBODEAUX: Did you ever run into Mr. McCrocklin again?
BISHOP: I went to see him shortly after I transferred back up here, but he was not in real good health. He passed away. You know I met both of his sons and kind of know them and Mrs. McCrocklin, but I don’t think they could pick me out of a crowd. It wasn’t a big deal from their perspective.
THIBODEAUX: And you never met Mr. Johnson?
BISHOP: No, I never did. Never did. In fact, I am not sure that I saw him. He drove through the hatchery. I went to town for mail one day, about ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. [When I] came back, I was in a Fishing and Wildlife Service green station wagon with a big yellow decal on the side and I was in uniform. I pulled up to the gate and I was stopped by a secret service guy who said, “What are you doing?”
I said, “I’m going back to my office.”
And he said, “Who are you?”
I said, “I’m the project leader here. Who are you?”
He said, “I’m the Secret Service. You can go ahead, but just don’t do anything unusual.”
So I just went back. One little interesting thing, I don’t know when this happened, in December because we were picking up pecans out there, there was a real good pecan tree out there. And I was out there talking to yet another Secret Service guy and I took my pocket knife out and started peeling pecans. He said, “What are you going to do with that?”
I said, “I’m going to peel this pecan and then eat it.” He was referring to the knife, I guess. Then he said why don’t you put that away or something; I don’t know what he said. (laughing) And about that time a big, black limousine came through, just whipping through and left.
THIBODEAUX: So he was just on a site-seeing tour?
BISHOP: I guess so. Perfunctory look, I guess. McCrocklin was there too; I don’t know.
THIBODEAUX: With measuring tapes? (laughs) Well that’s all I have unless there is something you want to add?
BISHOP: I can give you one other little insight. It doesn’t have to do with the hatchery here, but with the way things are done. I got another phone call from Albuquerque. This was prior to the transfer of the fish hatchery. In a fish hatchery, your most prized possession is your little herd of brood stock, your adult fish, because you keep a limited number of those, and you try to select the ones you think are best and that sort of thing. And so all of the fish hatcheries are proud of their brood stock, at least in channel catfish root stock, especially where it was kind of a new program, at that time the reproduction of channel catfish hatcheries. [I] got a phone call from Albuquerque saying that “I’m putting you in charge of a project.” We want, I don’t remember, a hundred or two hundred of your brood stock to go to the LBJ ranch and we want them delivered tomorrow morning shortly after midnight.
And I said, “What’s happening?”
He said, “I don’t know. That’s the word we got and that’s the word you got.”
And I said, “We don’t have anywhere near that amount.”
He said, “Well,” he said, “You organize it and just be sure it gets done.” He said, “You can talk to the hatchery at Inks Dam.” I don’t remember whether Austin had any catfish, I guess they had some catfish, but Inks Dam and Tishomingo, Oklahoma [had catfish]. So we organized this. I called these guys up and told them what I had been told they were going to do. This means taking the water out of the ponds and selecting whatever number of catfish each one of them was to contribute and putting it all on a truck and getting it down to Inks, which is at Burnet. Shortly after midnight, I don’t remember what time it was, one o’clock, and we did all of that and no other communications. We did all of that and arrived there and went across the little low water crossing and the foreman of the ranch came out. I told him who I was and what we were doing. He said, “Yeah, we were waiting for you.” And he said, “We’ll show you where to take the fish.”
I said, “What’s happening?’
He said, I forget the name, “The German is coming.”
I said, “Who would that be?”
And he said, “Konrad Adenauer.” I forgot the nickname. He said LBJ always called [him], I don’t think it was the Kraut, I think it was probably “the German’s coming, and he loves to catch catfish.” (laughs) “So you’re here to supply his entertainment, probably for two hours.” And it just really emasculated our catfish program. But we did that. I can remember driving around on the ranch over to the newly constructed airfield, landing strip, and putting these fish in about, I don’t know, we divided them in about ten to fifteen ponds. Real secret operation, except that within two weeks, some of my friends with the State Game and Fish Department started needling me about our catfish program. They knew every step of this project. I don’t know how, if one of the guys talked to them or somebody else talked to them. It wasn’t the secret project. That wouldn’t have been good PR, I suppose.
THIBODEAUX: How long did it take you to recover all your catfish?
BISHOP: Probably less time than I think, a year or two, I guess. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: That’s a very good story.
BISHOP: It was a surprise.
THIBODEAUX: That is very interesting.
BISHOP: But you know, power is power.
THIBODEAUX: Yes. Interesting study in how power is exercised.
BISHOP: Well, he had a lot of power, and he did exercise it. I am sure a lot of good came from it.
THIBODEAUX: Certainly, for the university.
BISHOP: Yeah.
THIBODEAUX: They got the J.C. Kellam Building.
BISHOP: And this is a good program. We work with the university. When I was there, we hired six or eight university students as temporary help in the summertime. Some of them worked through the winter and some worked on their master’s program out there. It is a good program for the university. Always had good relations with them.
THIBODEAUX: Even before the new facilities were built?
BISHOP: Yeah. During the transition and we grew closer to them as time drew near. They’re active in picking the project leader. But when I got down here, they kind of wanted to sit and talk with me and tell me what they had hoped. I guess they hadn’t expressed their hopes [about what] would happen about cooperation between us and so forth. And that’s it.
THIBODEAUX: That’s good information about the story about LBJ and about the university too; its place in San Marcos and how it operates with different organizations.
BISHOP: Have you met him (McCrocklin)? Did you ever meet him?
THIBODEAUX: No, I never met him. I did interview his son, John McCrocklin, but I never met him.
BISHOP: He was a mover and a shaker, charming man. I can remember sitting in the barber shop getting a haircut one time and there were probably five or six people in there. He just strolled in and as soon as he stepped inside, he was the center of attention and the center of everything. I think that is the way he was everywhere he went.
THIBODEAUX: So he and LBJ were quite a pair. (laughs) Not much chance against the two of them? (laughs)
BISHOP: Poor McCrocklin. He was a very capable man, but he didn’t play by the rules, did he?
THIBODEAUX: No.
(End of interview)