HFC Oral Histories

MAPS

NANCY MORBECK HAACK

NANCY MORBECK HAACK (narrator): Some people will never be a map reader. They will never get the information. It’s not because they’re dumb. Their mind’s just not wired that way. So, it’s another thing we had to consider always with the maps we made because I think it’s even less than half of the population can successfully get the information from a map.

LU ANN JONES (host): That’s Nancy Morbeck Haack. She spent 34 years working with the National Park Service publications group at Harpers Ferry Center.

HAACK: Originally when I came, I worked on everything. You name almost any park that was around before 1970, I worked on it.

JONES: Over the course of her career, Haack researched and designed dozens of maps for the Park Service, but among her most lasting contributions was the impact she made on the philosophy of cartographic design and information within the NPS. That philosophy was grounded in childhood experiences.

HAACK: Even before I went to college, I loved maps. I read maps. I was what I’ve always called a “map head.”

We traveled all over the country when I was a kid, four kids in a station wagon; first time, no seatbelts. [laughter] Went to lots of national parks, and I usually got to read the map because I could.

Nobody taught me. It’s like people who are good at music—I understood it. I understood it right away.

I read Esso maps, Esso road maps, extremely clear and concise. They weren’t full of a lot of extra stuff, unlike Rand McNally or National Geographic maps. They worked, you got to where you needed to go, and they always were there. So that was always, in my mind, my standard of what a good map looked like.

JONES: I’m National Park Service historian, Lu Ann Jones, and you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” In this series, we’re diving deep into the oral history archives of the National Park Service, to bring you the stories of the people who shaped the parks, and the Service.

Today: Maps.

HAACK: Vince Gleason was the head of National Park Service publications at Harpers Ferry Center, and he really wanted to move forward in the design world with the brochures. I had even noticed as a kid and a young person that the brochures were all over the place--all different colors, sizes, shapes, style, even messages, because there was no centralized structure for them.

JONES: The problems with the existing park maps may have been imperceptible to the average visitor. They were certainly attractive, and detailed – but the question remained: could anyone actually read them? The consensus was: not really.

So, when Haack joined the Park Service in 1977, her primary objective was designing maps that focused on communication first and foremost. To do that, she’d had to consider the way regular people actually absorb information, and tailor her designs to their needs. Questions of orientation and labeling and how thick the lines should be were all driven by a single purpose: the need to communicate.

The most significant design switch involved moving to a four-color system.

HAACK: I was hired as a professional cartographer. Vince was very excited that he would have someone who could help on his path to this high-style, high-quality four-color maps. So, my job was to plan, design, and what we say compile, meaning collect the information for the map itself.

Vince used the maps as one of his justifications for four-color. Now, he wanted that for photographs, too, of course, because we had brochures that were orange and blue. I mean, really unattractive things. Purple. Purple water. My favorite thing is the purple water.

Haack had studied under some of the preeminent cartographers of the day at the University of Wisconsin. She’d learned the latest mapping technology as well as generalized cartographic theory. Among the most significant lessons she’d learned: that a map is a system of communication. Appearance is important, but design decisions have to be motivated. The colors, lines, the symbols – they should all cater to the way people actually think.

In other words: no purple water.

HAACK: Vince had his definite ideas, most of which were crazy. Because of the language of maps, he wanted the maps to look like the terrain. So, he wanted all the desert maps to look the same. If there weren’t trees, he wanted it to be brown.

I would show him examples of Yosemite. Yosemite, up in the northern or the highest parts of Yosemite, there weren’t any trees. Was he going to show that differently than Yosemite Valley? Now, this was way before all these aerial photographs are being used as maps. This was still when I felt very strongly that the parks had to be green. That’s what people expected. They saw green, they think park and they think National Park, because it was a National Park brochure. So that took a long time to work through that, to keep it simple. Red roads, green parks, blue water.

JONES: The shift to four-color maps prompted a whole other series of map standards. Standards Haack wasn’t fully prepared to implement on her own. She had trained in the philosophy of cartography, but not the philosophy of general publication design. For that, she teamed with the chief designer for park publications, Nick Kirilloff.

HAACK: He was looking for much more of a grace of form. When you put an area label on, for example, the computer or a person who had no training would just plop it on there, but he would position it so it covered the area that it was identifying and there was no mistake of what it was. I mean, that sounds so obvious. Cartographers had all sorts of rules about the first position, the second position, where to put a label according to a town dot, and he didn’t follow those rules. He went with what worked, how people could understand that that label went with the dot.

JONES: But aside from standardizing the width of lines, use of colors, and where to put the labels, the new park maps had a different approach to visual communication. A different way of thinking about the way the maps are used.

HAACK: The visitor-use map, it’s different than a map up on a wall, it’s different than a map in a book, it’s different than a map in an exhibit.

So, some parks are very welcoming. Other parks were pretty set in their ways. If it was a new map, it was easier to have a highly edited map, because the genius of the map is what’s not on it. We had a map done by a contractor of Mesa Verde and it showed the sewage lagoons. We didn’t need to show the sewage lagoons for the visitors, but it was complete. So that’s the sort of thing to think about. A map doesn’t have to show everything. It shouldn’t show everything. It has to have a reason, whether you’re driving around or you’re highlighting where things happened.

One of my favorite ones is constant requests for detail maps. So, I had to convince them that the public didn’t need to know where the ice machine was on the brochure map. That wasn’t the function of the brochure map. Usually when you were there, you looked around, you could see everything, so it was a waste of time and money, but people were so in love with maps, they thought that that was a solution. Of course, the percentage of people who couldn’t read the map, anyway, it didn’t reach; that information didn’t get to them. So, we still had detail maps that showed you where the ice machine is, but not as many.

Parking lot maps, yes, the famous parking lot maps that show you how to get to the Visitor Center. I’m sorry. We all go to shopping malls. We find our way into the stores, right? [laughter] So there are a lot of unnecessary maps.

JONES: Sometimes it took a bit of convincing park staff to see the value of a more selective approach--but only a bit.

HAACK: I think the proof was when they saw the map and they could read it. I think that’s what swayed them. So, there wasn’t a lot of “No, no, no” on my part. It was taking in all the information, creating the appropriate map.

JONES: The same standards applied to wayside maps.

HAACK: Once again, it’s a visitor-use map, so it has to be how they understand it. If you’re standing looking north, a north-oriented map is fine, or if you’re standing and the map is a big overview and you’re not really looking at anything, a north map is fine, but if you’re looking at something, the map better be oriented just as the vision is. And that’s been an ongoing fight, and I’m sure it’s still going on today. The people don’t get it. Like a trailhead, you want it to be going out and coming back as you’re looking.

JONES: Considering how each map would be used by the visitors assured there was no one-size-fits all approach to cartography in the parks. But it also assured that park visitors would always find them useful. Consider battle maps, which operate on a totally different organizational logic, and consequently, offer a different set of challenges.

HAACK: There are many, many excellent battle maps out there, which most people, even map readers, can’t understand, and they don’t need to understand, right? We don’t need to know where so-and-so stopped and tied his shoe on the way to the left oblique or whatever. [laughs] But the Civil War buffs need to know that. That’s what the difference is. I ran into a lot of pushback from Civil War people because I didn’t want to have maps that looked like that. I wanted maps that would just briefly tell the big picture and move on. If somebody wanted to know where a particular regiment was, there are tons of maps other places. They don’t need it in the brochure map or even in an exhibit map that way. There are tons of places they can find that.

So, the whole thing was, once again, simplify, simplify. Our late great publications historian, Ray Baker, was excellent at summing up all—he knew all the little details, but he could sum up the big picture better than a lot of parks could, and that’s what led me to realize you could make a very simple map, what we would call multiples, small multiples or series of maps showing change over time, and it would be a snapshot of that time. The only way to really show battle action is with animation, and we couldn’t do that in a brochure. The films do a great job of that. That’s where you show what happened in the battle, because you really show the troops moving back and forth.

The other thing they didn’t like is I didn’t use all the traditional battle symbols. I used arrows, but there are lots of crazy rectangles with slashes through them and things that meant things to people who knew the code, and even putting a legend wasn’t good enough. We found out really early that people read the width of the line as the number of troops, even if you didn’t intend that, so we were very careful after that to not show—sometimes you show a wide base because they were coming from a big area. Well, they read that as many more people.

JONES: Haack is credited with really driving this movement toward a more visitor-centered approach to cartography in the park service. With designing maps to help regular people navigate the sites they were visiting – which was challenging, since, for years, Haack wasn’t sent to the sites she was mapping.

HAACK: I didn’t go to parks for a long time. It was awful. I made maps of these places without going to the parks for the Park Service. I’d been to a lot of them on my own time. So that was another issue that to be a visitor advocate was really difficult when I was never a visitor [laughter].

JONES: So how exactly did she design maps of places she’d never visited in a professional capacity?

HAACK: It’s magic. [laughs] No, a lot of research, a lot of research, and we didn’t have the Internet for research, lots of books. The thing that was so great about Ray Baker, this historian I mentioned, is you could go in and ask him any question about anything, not just history, and he’d turn around and get a book off his shelf and give it to you. [laughs] So it was a treasure trove, a treasure trove of information. I’m an information-driven person.

JONES: Eventually, Haack did get to make more site visits—and the parks she visited were better for it.

HAACK: Well, Mesa Verde is the one that comes to mind--no one could figure out how to leave that park. [laughs] They’d come to these intersections and there’d be a sign to here, a sign to there, but no sign to park exit, no sign to the Visitor Center, no sign to anything. And they [park staff] actually were very grateful—Bill Gorden was the editor out there with me—very grateful to us because Bill and I had traveled quite a bit and cursed out signs everywhere we went, particularly in non-park areas in New England. We thought they [the signs] were sort of like downtown Washington, D.C., how horrible they are. So, Mesa Verde, they took our advice, they changed the signs, and now people can leave. [laughter]

JONES: Nancy Haack retired from the Park Service in 2011. And since then advances in navigational technology have only made the world more accessible. These days, travelers are more likely to turn to their iPhones than print maps. Unless they happen to be visiting a national park, where the scarcity of cell towers means that GPS is less likely to work. For those visitors, Haack is happy to know her print maps will always be available to help them find their way.

HAACK: Yeah. The idea that you are contributing something for these park visitors was important to me, so that kept me going, kept me coming to work.

JONES: This has been “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. My colleague Betsy Ehrlich and I conducted the interview with Nancy Haack in Purcellville, Virginia, in 2016.

This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter, with assistance from Marcelino Vialpando, for the National Park Service. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

THE EVOLUTION OF INTERPRETATION IN THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE REBECCA “BECKY” LACOME

LU ANN JONES (HOST): When you visit a national park, the rangers are easy to spot: grey shirt, green pants, tan flat hats. But there’s one type of park personnel that you’ll probably spend the most time with: the interpretive rangers.

They’re the park service storytellers.

Their job is to communicate to visitors the meanings of artifacts, events, and landscapes through the act of interpretation. Interpretation is a practice, but it’s also a philosophy -- and one that is always evolving. I’m National Park Service historian, Lu Ann Jones. And you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” In this series, we’re diving into the oral history archives, to bring you the stories of the people who shaped the parks, and the Service. Today: Connecting people to parks through interpretation.

Becky Lacome was 13. She was hiking with her scout troop in the Sierra Nevada. They had stopped on the trail and listened in to the park ranger’s talk. And then it struck her: maybe someday she could do this, too.

BECKY LACOME (NARRATOR): When I had that epiphany at 13, I think I later realized when I was in college that it was a spiritual gift. That it was a calling. It was my personal mission.

JONES: She got her first permanent Park Service job in 1986 at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky -- it’s the longest known cave system in the world. It was about 400 miles of surveyed, underground caverns.

LACOME: The only way to see Mammoth Cave was on a guided tour, and so we had to have a huge interpretive guide force. It’s a tradition there, there were many multigenerational cave guides and seasonals, many of whom were teachers during the year, and came back to do their first love of cave guiding in the summer. A lot of tradition. Steeped in tradition.

JONES: When Lacome began her career, the NPS had long been tackling the question: what was the most effective way to communicate with visitors about what they were seeing?

In the 1950s, a man by the name of Freeman Tilden became one of the first people to articulate the principles of what we call “heritage interpretation.”

Tilden’s goal: Help NPS visitors to connect. Encourage them to care. Tilden promoted the idea: “Through interpretation, understanding; through understanding, appreciation; through appreciation, protection.” Through engagement, he insisted, would come a love for the land: environmental and cultural stewardship.

LACOME: It was always assumed if we did that well, people would care about national parks and support us in preservation just by learning more about these places.

JONES: During the 1960s and 1970s, park visitation soared and the number of park units grew. But slim budgets had reduced the ranks of interpreters, and opportunities for career advancement for interpretive rangers stalled out.

Becky was lucky. By the time she joined the NPS, interpretation was coming out of its slump. Energetic new leaders began to focus on interpretation as a practice and a profession. In the 1980s, the first formal training program was called Interpretive Skills.

Yet certain assumptions shaped NPS interpretation philosophy: the interpreter was the expert -- and visitors were simply passive listeners.

LACOME: It was very much about the interpreter, the park ranger, as the authority, the source of the knowledge, the font of knowledge for the public. It was largely a one-way communication strategy. But then that was the way people were taught and learned at the time. That’s the way I grew up learning. The teacher. The lecturer.

JONES: Interpretive talks were pretty formulaic.

LACOME: One thing that they actually taught us which now we laugh about, the mantra was, “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Have a good theme. Introduce that theme. Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then tell them. That’s the body of your presentation. That’s all your facts and information and stories. And then tell them what you told them.” In other words, recapitulate. Put a bow on it. And a nice conclusion.

JONES: But new ideas were brewing. The Service was on the cusp of what was being called an “interpretive revolution.”

In the 1990s, the new idea was meanings-based interpretation--or as one proponent put it, how to connect hearts and minds to places, objects, and other park resources. This played out in the NPS by helping visitors find personal relevance in the events that the parks commemorate, the buildings and landscapes that they preserve, the stories they tell.

LACOME: That whole notion of connections, the notion of appealing to people’s intellects as well as their hearts, that just went crazy across the broad profession. We started talking about meanings and relevance and intellectual/emotional connections. And connecting the tangible resources of national parks with their intangible meanings and the big universal concepts that they represented.

JONES: In hindsight, Lacome calls the early 2000s a "golden age" of interpretation in NPS. She would find her calling as a training specialist in the Interpretive Development Program at Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Her job was to help interpreters think about new ways to connect with visitors.

LACOME: It became about trying to fulfill Tilden’s principle of making it relevant, of helping audiences find personal meaning in the stories of national parks.

JONES: Then, in the 2010s, interpretation evolved yet again: park rangers were now urged to share agency with visitors.

LACOME: And using the word “agency” not as referred to ourselves as a government agency or bureau, but in the more broadly philosophical definition of that term as all Americans have agency or should have agency. They should have voice when it comes to their national parks.

JONES: In the past decade, the parks became even more audience-centered and more interactive. Rangers invite visitors to share their stories and relate those stories to what they see around them. Experiencing the parks has become a collective endeavor.

LACOME: If we really believe that these places belong to the American public—“find your park,” this is your park—then we can’t always be speaking for them or to them. It really needs to be collaborative. And we’re a long ways from completely figuring out what that means.

JONES: Twenty-first century interpretation is dynamic and always changing. Our national parks can be safe spaces to engage in dialogue, to explore essential questions about the challenging issues of the day--race, immigration, income inequality, climate change, environmental justice, and more.

LACOME: We can’t just sit and ignore those issues in the national parks. In fact, national parks are the places to have those conversations. They are the premier, primo places, because we can tie our understanding of history represented in these nationally significant places and landscapes to where we are now as individuals and as a society. And what does that mean for the future? What did we learn from the past and the present that helps us be better citizens, that helps us establish a more healthy planet and just society in the future? Big stuff. The big stuff, right?

JONES: The National Park Service has played a major role in the evolution of the interpretive profession. Over her 32-year career, Lacome feels she has been blessed with the opportunity to contribute to that process. Now in retirement, she hopes the NPS will continue to lead the way -- helping interpreters and visitors pose big questions. Questions we can all ponder together.

This has been “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. My colleague Betsy Ehrlich and I conducted this interview in November 2018 at the Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. It’s part of our National Park Service Oral History Project collection.

This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter for the National Park Service, with help from Otis Gray. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF PARKS PUBLICATIONS

ED ZAHNISER

LU ANN JONES (HOST): Today, when you visit a national park -- no matter which park you visit -- you receive a brochure with entry. It’s a glossy, sturdy piece of paper, folded in half and quartered, with a thick black band running across the top.

Whether you’re visiting a desert park or a forest park, a glacier or a beach, these cultural and literal roadmaps to the parks articulate a unified system of land management.

But it wasn’t always like that.

I’m National Park Service Historian, Lu Ann Jones, and you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service,” a podcast series about the people who shaped the parks, and the Service.

Today: the hidden history of parks publications.

ED ZAHNISER (NARRATOR): I don’t know how to make this story short. [laugh]

JONES: That’s Ed Zahniser.

ZAHNISER: I’m a retired senior writer/editor for the publications group of the National Park Service.

JONES: For almost as long as there have been national parks, there have been park brochures—but the earliest iterations were worlds away from the brochures we know today. The very first were created by the first park stewards, the United States Army in 1916, the year the National Park Service was born. Later, production was handed over to railroad companies, since most of the traffic to and from the parks was on trains.

Over the years, publications continued to evolve as the number of parks in the system grew—and grew. By the middle of the 20th century, there were over 250 parks. And each had its own brochure, with its own singular design.

For the publications department, it was a lot handle.

Something had to give.

The National Park Service began to reimagine publications as a system, rather than a collection of unique titles.

To articulate that system to the public—and keep up with the growing demand for publications— they needed standardization, in both the look and the voice of their print materials.

To meet those needs, in 1970 the National Park Service opened an Interpretive Design Center. For the first time, the parks’ various interpretive media functions – audiovisual, publications, museum exhibits – were located under one roof. Still, inefficiencies remained.

ZAHNISER: Shortly before I came, the protocol, I was told, was that the editors would write a manuscript and just sort of, in the parlance of publishing world, throw it over the transom to the designers, and they would lay that out as a brochure. And the size of the brochure would really depend on how long the text was or how short the text was. So they weren’t that involved in the concept.

They were, like, illustrating a piece of writing.

JONES: When Zahniser joined the office of publications at Harpers Ferry in 1977, the NPS was undergoing a cultural renaissance. They wanted to reach ordinary park visitors—folks who were curious about but not specialists in archeology or wildlife biology or geology or any of the myriad subjects explored in national parks. And revitalizing their publications was a big part of that mission. To do that, the publications office needed to make some changes: they needed a more efficient workflow; they needed a welcoming voice and standardized design; they needed Massimo Vignelli.

ZAHNISER: I thought that the best thing that ever happened to the office was Massimo Vignelli.

JONES: Modernist designer Massimo Vignelli had recently won acclaim for designing New York’s subway signage and maps. But the national park publication project presented the designer with a unique set of challenges. Chief among them was how to unite such naturally and culturally diverse sites under a single design standard, while still capturing what was special about each one.

His solution was misleadingly simple.

ZAHNISER: He established the idea of a design platform, and that the more gridded that platform was, the less time you spent wondering what size sheet of paper should we use, should it be horizontal, should it be vertical, should it be this wide or that wide? He established that for printing economy, but part of design is recognizing that you’re doing this on paper, and these papers go through presses, and presses are a certain size. So those sheets of paper were all standardized in width and modularized so you could have a narrow brochure, and it would be half of the whole sheet, and then you could have different lengths.

JONES: Vignelli’s modular grid system measured roughly 16 inches by 23 inches. Those dimensions allowed the Park Service to create brochures in ten different sizes and formats. A distinctive black bar at the top maintained a consistent look; inside this bar, the pamphlet or page title is set in white Helvetica typeface. And he called it unigrid.

ZAHNISER: We had this theory of thirds, which I think still stands: which is that anything you look at can be pleasingly divided, I mean, intellectually pleasingly divided into three parts, visually and intellectually.

JONES: The unigrid is not just another template. It is a comprehensive graphic design system that standardized formatting and production. It allowed the designers, writers, and cartographers to focus on content and creativity while conveying a strong visual identity for the agency. Perhaps most importantly, Vignelli’s unigrid concept allowed designers and editors to work together, to focus on visual and written content simultaneously.

ZAHNISER: So that set the stage, I think, for the writer and the designer and eventually the cartographer to really work together in advance of doing anything, to work together on what’s the story, how do we tell it, how do we divide it up.

I think Vignelli at least intuitively understood that a reader makes a preconscious decision when looking particularly at print. There’s a preconscious decision of whether or not this looks like I can readily read it, and today there are so many other options instantly available, that if you look at something and the type is too dense, you will move on. So, you’ve wasted whatever effort you put in, you know, big budget, into trying to communicate.

JONES: All this time and effort for the sake of communicating with visitors they would probably never meet. And that’s the job of the Service members at the Interpretive Design Center -- toiling behind the scenes to enhance the visitor experience, through engaging print materials like brochures and signs, and later, books.

ZAHNISER: Vignelli was not a writer, but he was a genius designer, just no question, and a visual genius, too. Because in that Yosemite book, like we were talking before this interview about how we provided him with six hundred photographs. He came to our office to work on that book, and we started at about ten o’clock in the morning. So we had these six hundred photographs, and he went through a lot of the photographs. I had been working with the photographs for a couple of months, so I had a pretty good grasp of what they were and how they related to the different parts of the book that we were trying to present.

At around ten o’clock in the morning, I started showing him photographs. Well, like at three in the afternoon, he might say, “You remember that photograph you showed me?” And he could describe that photograph from five hours ago with enough precision that I, who was pretty familiar with the whole body of photographs, could find that photograph and hand it to him. Also, I watched him. Every once in a while, he would just stop and stare off into nothing, and I realized he’s going through every page in that book in his head.

So, what we got from him were little thumbnail drawings of each two-page spread in the book, little thumbnail gestures with his fat pen, but the gestures were so accurate that the designers could place all the photographs that we selected out to go with that thumbnail dummy. We started that book at ten a.m. and finished at midnight in the conference room. We just stayed in that office and worked that whole time.

We got the manuscript set in the typography of the book. So, as he was working on it, he was reading it, and I was in heaven, because he kept saying, “Wow, this is interesting. Did you write this?” No, he said, “Who wrote this?” I said, “Well, I wrote it.” He kept saying that, which that was great validation for me. But that was back in the days when we had time to work on those books, because there’s a lot of great stories attached to Yosemite if you have time enough to learn them and put them out.

JONES: Unigrid was adopted as a cost-saving endeavor, but it would end up changing the way the publications team approached their written interpretation efforts as well.

ZAHNISER: So, that started to help you think about telling stories, because most places have more than one story. A place like Yosemite it has a natural history, it has a human history, it has a National Park Service history, it has a controversy history, and it has, in my opinion, the most spectacularly concentrated, stupendous scenery that I’ve ever seen anywhere.

We eventually convinced Vince, our boss, Vince Gleason, that since an increasing amount of energy was going into design, and into refining the cartography, that we needed writing that came up to those sorts of standards of communication.

JONES: Before this publications department renaissance, most of the writers were scientists and research historians. They had their own agendas about what should be covered. And this created some tension.

ZAHNISER: We fought to present these natural parks, so to speak, as cultural places, because some of them had a cultural history that was greater than some cities. So that was a big breakthrough in treating parks holistically as a human experience, as natural experience, as humans as part of natural history, natural history as part of humanity.

I quickly realized that one of my jobs as an editor was to protect the readers from geologists and archaeologists, because they want to take people so far into the weeds--because they’re not thinking about the reader.

JONES: Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about. Serving the visitors. Creating materials that anticipate their needs and speak to their interests. Materials that echo the ethos of the National Park Service at large, and communicate with one voice:

The parks may be diverse, but the Service, that is singular.

ZAHNISER: I think somewhere you asked about, or maybe I made up my own question about, “How do you measure success?” For me, it was like I was out in Yellowstone, out of my car but at a viewing place or something, and there’s these people on bicycles and they’re reading the park brochure and reading it as a group, sort of. “Hey, did you read about this?

“Yeah.”

“Well, did you read about this?”

“Yeah.”

That’s success.

JONES: Over 25 years later, the NPS still uses unigrid for all its publications.

Ed Zahniser wrote and edited new unigrid park information brochures for many National Park System areas. They included Channel Islands, San Juan Island, Death Valley, Petrified Forest, John Muir, River Raisin, Bryce Canyon, and Yellowstone. Also, among his publications are national park handbooks on Apostle Islands, Assateague, Big Bend, Great Smoky Mountains, Yosemite, North Cascades, Yellowstone, Glacier Bay, and the U.S. Virgin Islands sites.

Ed retired in 2013, after 36 years with the National Park Service publications group at Harpers Ferry Center for media services.

This has been “A Sense of Place: Stories Of Stewardship from The National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. My colleague Betsy Ehrlich and I conducted this interview in November 2015 at Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. It’s part of our National Park Service oral history collection.

This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter, with assistance from Marcelino Vialpando, for the National Park Service. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.