Oral history interview with Paul Thevenin [includes transcript], July 31 and August 5, 1995.

              Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection
Paul Thevenin Interview
Interview number: 53.53
This is the River Runners Oral History Project, this is July 31, 1995, and we're here [in Flagstaff, at Richard Quartaroli’s house] talking to Paul Thevenin. I'm Lew Steiger. Also present is Richard Quartaroli. 
Steiger: For starters, what I've been doing with everybody is getting them to just kind of give me a brief resumé of who you are and what your circumstances were, where you came from before you ever got to the river. And that sort of helps put your comments and your views in perspective for later on. So if we could just start with that, that'd be good. Like where you were born and how many brothers and sisters you had and how'd you grow up and how'd you finally end up river running? That's a bunch of stuff isn't it? 
Thevenin: I don't know! (laughs) Are we recording now? Okay, so you were talking on it the whole time then. Okay, where did I come from? I was born originally in Eureka, California, in 1934, and I had one brother who was younger than I am, although in these last few years, he's passed me -he's now much more mature than I am. And I had one sister who was technically a cousin, but she was in the family a couple of years before I was. She was never adopted because my parents kept hoping her father would somehow straighten out his life, but he never did. So she was actually in the family before, so there were three of us as kids. I was probably what was considered a nerd in today's language, or whatever the word is nowadays. I was out of it. The only reason they ever knew I existed is because if I happened to be absent that day, there was an empty seat in the classroom. They'd say, "Yeah, wait, who sat over there?" And so I was really a nobody growing up. So I had nothing to do but study and get good grades. And then somehow I miraculously ended up with an appointment to the Coast Guard Academy and went to New London, Connecticut, and rode the Greyhound Bus from California to Connecticut. And in those days that gave you a lot of time to reflect upon your life, what it was, and what it might be, and I decided I wasn't happy with what I was, so I decided I would be somebody different. And it took a few adjustments in that "differences" before I settled in on what I finally became. Anyway, so I graduated from the Coast Guard Academy, spent about eight years with Uncle Sam in the Coast Guard, and got out in 1960. I was going to be career, but I'd had a whole bunch of hardship duty out in all sorts of places, and they gave me a job that was a reward in Washington, D.C., where I only went to work every third day, so I had one day on and two days off, and if there was nothing going on at night, I still got a full night's sleep, and I was getting bored out of my skull taking lessons to be a dance instructor, taking lessons on how to be a masseur, which came in very handy later, and that's how I got into river running. So anyway, Uncle Sam gives you one year to decide where you're going to go and how you're going to get home, and he ships your stuff there. But I wasn't ready to go to California, and being raised, basically a half-breed -my father was Catholic, my mother was Mormon -I decided every Mormon ought to serve a tour of duty in Utah. So I notified my aunt that I was coming to live with her, and she was amenable to that. So I moved in with my aunt in Salt Lake and got out there and opened up the newspaper to find out what was going on, and found out I couldn't teach in Utah. I'd taught in Virginia for a year, just with my bachelor's degree, but Utah wanted a teaching certificate, and I thought, "Well, someday I'll have to get that." And I looked in the want ads and there were a whole bunch of job offerings, and one said, "Masseur needed, will train." And so it was out at the Deseret Gym under the auspices of the Mormon Church, so I went down there to check in and the guy said, "Well, I've had about twenty guys in today, I think I've already picked the guy, but what makes you think you want to be a masseur, and how long will it be before I can get you trained?" I said, "Well, I'm already trained." He said, "You are, huh?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "I'm getting up on this table, I'm tired. And so show me what you know." And fifteen minutes later I was hired in the Deseret Gym. A sidelight, it was under a guy by the name of Brother Jonathan, who had been World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion, who'd been one of my heroes when I was a teenager. And so I ended up working for him in the Deseret Gym. And that's how I met Jack Curry [Currey]. Jack Curry [Currey] had decided to go into the river business. He'd made one trip with a group of friends that fall, and decided he was going to go in the river business, and he spent a lot of time in the Deseret Gym playing handball, and while he was waiting for his turn at the court, he was reading a bunch of books on legends and stars and this and that and everything else, and somebody said, "Well, gee, if you're reading about stars, you ought to go see the new masseur, he used to be a navigator in the service." And so Jack came in to talk to me, and I knew how to find my way around the world by the stars, but I didn't know the legends, and that's what he wanted. And so I tried to trade him a series of massages for a trip down the river, and he didn't want any massages, and so the only thing left to do was to go to work for him. And he said, "What do you know about boats?" And I said, "Everything. I grew up out there in California, I was a Boy Scout, I did some canoeing and rowing, and I spent eight years in the Coast Guard." I convinced him I knew everything about boats and he said, "Okay, you're hired," and about that time I left the Deseret Gym and went to work for KLUB in Salt Lake City, "Club" Radio, in advertising, and Jack was in advertising with -I think it was KCPX, Channel 6 in Salt Lake. And so we had a lot of time where we could schedule our time together to put boats together and patch them and paint them and put names on them, and put names on a truck and all sorts of things. So I ended up being his right-hand man, all the time planning and organizing, so when we actually got into river running that spring, even though I had guys like Art Fenstermaker, who had run with Georgie White and Ken Sleight, and there was Ron Smith who was running for some of these same people, and Art Gallenson. Since I'd been with Jack in helping to put the equipment together, and because of my age -I got into it a little older than most guys did -I got into it at age twenty-seven -so because of my supposed maturity and working there putting all the equipment together, I ended up as Jack's right-hand man and being in charge of guys who'd run far more rivers than I had. In fact, I had never really run a river, but we showed up for the Yampa and Jack pulls up at the head of Warm Springs Rapid -and for those of you that know Warm Springs Rapid, back when I started back in 1962, it wasn't. It wasn't until a flood a couple of years later that Warm Springs really became a rapid. But anyway, Jack pulls up there, because in those days we had passengers who rowed the boats, and we got up there on top and he started talking about the tongue, the slide, the slick, the this and that and.... And I thought, "Well, okay, fine, I'll just follow the boat in front of me." They all went through and did a wonderful job, and I went through right behind them and all of a sudden we were all swimming and for years afterwards I looked at Warm Springs and tried to figure out where a guy could flip a boat. And for the life of me, I never could find a place to flip a boat in the old Warm Springs. Mother Nature came to my aid a few years later and made Warm Springs into actually a killer rapid, because I guess the first boatman, Les Oldham that hit Warm Springs unfortunately had his oars tucked under his knees and was sitting on his lifejacket like boatmen were prone to do in those days, and it was a cold spring trip, and he didn't anticipate Warm Springs being what it was, and he went over and under and the people said it was one graceful movement. His Army field boots and his Army field jacket just drug him under. So Warm Springs changed greatly. But anyway, so I got my first lesson in the fact that I probably had a few things to learn about rowing a boat. 
Steiger: Boy! Boy that's a lot of names to spell too. Let's start with Jack Curry [Currey]. 
Thevenin: Jack Curry, J-A-C-K C-U-R-R-Y. [CURREY] 
Quartaroli: Talking about Jack, could you tell how he introduced you on that first trip? Wasn't that the trip where he said, "We've never flipped a boat"? 
Thevenin: Yeah, the thing is, this was actually Jack's first commercial trip. He'd run a trip where he considered it was a river trip, because he'd gotten a group of friends together the year before, which leads into another story we may get to later on Amil Quayle. But anyway, so this was technically, probably, really the first trip he had. 
Steiger: The first commercial trip he'd ever done. 
Thevenin: First commercial trip. But as we talked to the people and told them about the safety procedures and precautions, he included the line, "Well, don't worry what happens if you flip or anything -we've never had a boat go over on a regular trip yet." And suddenly I'm upside down. I figure, "I've ruined this guy's record." He said, "Don't worry about it, we'll take care of that." And so the very next trip, as he's giving the same speech, he says, "Don't worry, we've never had a boat turn over on a regular trip yet." And I pulled Jack aside and I said, "Jack, what happened last week?" He said, "That wasn't a regular trip." And so in all the years I worked with Jack, his line was always, "We've never had a boat go over on a regular trip." And I soon learned that if a boat went over, that Jack didn't like. He didn't say, "We've never had a boat go over" -"we never had boat go over on a regular trip." And anytime a boat went over, that was not a regular trip. (laughter) 
Steiger: Oh man! 
Thevenin: So anyway, Jack Curry [Currey] got into the business. He'd come from Southern California as a Pillsbury salesman and gotten in with a group of guys up in Salt Lake: Mendenhall who became pretty big in construction, and Jerry Morgan who was into all sorts of sales work and they did a bunch of things together. They were part of that group that made that friendly trip down the one fall. They had a fair amount of money, and Jack had a fair amount of time and know-how, and they were technically all three equal partners, but Jack actually ran Western River Expeditions. 
Steiger: Well, so you got in absolutely on the ground floor. He had done one trip and then he decided he was starting this company? 
Thevenin: When I came with him, he had actually gone out and bought three boats, and so that's all Western had at the time I joined them, was Jack's one trip down the river and three boats. 
Steiger: And what kind of boats were they? 
Thevenin: They were the old Army ten-mans, or Navy ten-mans. They were ten-mans, whatever branch of the service they came from. 
Steiger: And that was the whole.... 
Thevenin: Well, that was the fleet we had when I joined him. And then we went running around looking for boats like that, and back in those days, if you were hard-pressed you'd pay fifteen bucks for one of those boats. You could sometimes get 'em cheaper. So that's one of the other differences in boats between then and now, is you could pick up a good boat for fifteen bucks or less. 
Steiger: And this is 1962? 
Thevenin: So I moved out in '61, I met Jack in the fall of '61, and so technically I joined Jack in late '61, but we didn't run any rivers until '62, and he'd run that one trip in '61. 
Steiger: How were the people on that first trip, and how'd the ones that went swimming, how'd they do? 
Thevenin: Well as I recall -the nice thing about memory, I was always encouraged both by my parents and by my church to keep a journal, so I could keep an accurate history of what went on. However, since I never did that, the stories always seem to get better each time they're told, since I have no point of reference. But as I recall, there were about four people in my boat when we flipped. By the end of the trip, there were at least twelve people talking about, "Well, when I flipped in...." And I kept counting numbers and thought, "No, they couldn't have fit in the boat." So how did they take it? Well, the ones who hadn't flipped had somehow latched onto the flip as their flip as well, and it became part of their story. 
Steiger: So they weren't too traumatized? 
Thevenin: No, I would say trauma was probably maybe the initial dump into the water, but then when they suddenly found everybody paying attention to them, it ended up being an ego-builder, to the point of, like I say, many of the other ones adopting the story to take back, that they were the ones in the boat that flipped. 
Steiger: So how'd that first year go? Did you have a whole season? How did the business go? 
Thevenin: Well, the business end, like I said, Jack and I were in advertising, and one of the things that was lacking back in those days for river runners -and I remember looking at Andy Anderson's brochure up in Idaho, how he bragged about taking down over three hundred people in fifteen years. And his advertising amounted to laying a brochure around at a bunch of stores and places like this. So if you wanted to run a river in Idaho, about the only place you'd find out about running a river in Idaho was to be in Idaho and see a brochure and say, "Gee, I guess I have enough time, I'll go. Gee, I don't have enough time, I'll forget about it." And there was almost no big advertising going on where people were spreading the word. And one of the things we ever did before we ran the river was got the advertising campaign going. And so we had passengers coming to us from ads, whereas in the old days it was people would pick up a brochure, and you didn't know whether you were going to have a trip or not until people would pick up a brochure and say, "Hey, I want to go on a river trip." So we actually had trips scheduled and advertised. We had them pre-sold. Hatch was doing some of that. Hatch had a few trips like that, and did a certain amount of advertising. Georgie White had the uniqueness of being a woman in the business and getting a lot of publicity with the little things that went along, the movie clips. When you went to a movie in the old days, you went to the movie, you had the newsreel, you had the cartoons, and you had some other little thingy going on. So Georgie White got in some of those other little thingies. Of course once TV started, then she was on a number of those shows: What's My Line, and things like that. And so she was doing some advertising, but most of the rest of them were relying upon word of mouth and somebody saying, "Well, hey, I went with So-and-So and Mexican Hat Expeditions" and this and that. But anyway, we launched probably the campaign extolling our virtues as river guides before (chuckles) we actually ran any rivers. And so we had people, and we had a pretty good season, running, back in those days as gypsies. Today [if] you're a Grand Canyon boatman, you're a Grand Canyon boatman: [If] you're an Idaho boatman, you're an Idaho boatman. Back then we'd start down in Utah and as the water ran out, we moved to Idaho, and then later on the company would run some trips in Canada and then we eventually started going down to Mexico in the wintertime. But that came a few years later. But one of the things we were talking about before, we were getting on spelling of names and we got onto Jack Curry [Currey]. But one of the things I mentioned in that earlier thing about Warm Springs: Les Oldham, who worked for Hatch, to get his spelling correct, it was, well, just Les, L-E-S, and Oldham was O-L-D-H-A-M. He had been fresh out of the military, he had come back and was running for Hatch in those days. 
Steiger: Now, I want to get this straight. Here's Jack Curry [Currey], he's worked for Pillsbury, and he worked for advertising at a TV station. What do you think drove him into the business? Did he just love to run rivers? 
Thevenin: Well, Jack was really a super-athlete. Jack probably could have gone to college on a number of athletic scholarships: football, swimming, et cetera, et cetera. And Jack was in good shape. He wasn't one of these guys who spent all of his time with weights, he was in overall, all-around good shape. But he married his high school sweetheart and they had kids and he just figured college was out of the business. He got a good job and he was a good salesman as well. Jack was a good-looking guy, made a good presentation, made a good pitch, could sell things quite well. And he loved the out-of-doors, and he loved that trip he went on. He thought, "Hey, this is neat, this is wonderful, this is what I want to do." And that was the heart and soul of Western, is Jack Curry [Currey] wanted to run rivers, and he was a good businessman, and he put the two things together. 
Steiger: But it was mainly he just said, "I want to run a bunch of rivers." For himself, that was what he wanted to do. 
Thevenin: Right. And he managed to accumulate people who thought that this was a neat thing to do. Like I said, in the old days, we'd have customers handle the boats. You'd maybe have six, seven, eight boats on the water, and you'd only have three professional boatmen. 
Steiger: On the trip. 
Thevenin: On the trip, because in those days, your clientele was outdoorspeople, whereas today our clientele, many of them have never zipped or unzipped a sleeping bag in their life. But back in those days, there was no such thing as "rental units" because everybody that went down the river had their own stuff. Most of them had their own rubber packs -again, surplus packs that you picked up. Some of them -well, when I started, a lot of my customers had a whole lot more experience on rivers than I did. I just happened to be the one whose name was on the list as being trip leader. 
Steiger: Would you have customers rowing the boats on hard rivers? 
Thevenin: Yeah, on hard rivers. And the thing is, it depended upon who you had. I mean, some of these guys would come down trip after trip. You know, after we'd been there a few years, some of these guys went down every year, and they were good. And if they weren't, if you ended up with a trip they weren't, you'd pull over at the head of any rapid of any size and say, "Okay folks, you stay here," run our boat through, walk back, run one of their boats through, walk back, and take another boat through. Then you'd go on downriver -you know, give the boats back to them -and go on down the river until you came to another rapid that you felt that they couldn't handle. And of course most of our stuff we were running was up on the Yampa and the Green and the Main Salmon and the Middle Fork of the Salmon, which were basically our bread and butter. Most of the rapids, if somebody was somewhat facilitous with the oars, he could handle it, as long as he followed the boat in front of him. So you'd put the guy, go down, and say, "Okay, now stay right behind me." They'd go, and if you had a group you figured couldn't do it, then you'd pull over and take your boat down and then take their's down. 
Steiger: Oh boy, ___________________. 
Thevenin: Well, while you're thinking about that, this is how Henry Falany got into the business with WhiteWater. We've skipped a few years ahead, but Henry and Wade Falany were coming up with a father and sons outing from Turlock, California. And at the last minute, their dad couldn't make it, so the dentist said, "Well, hey, Joe, I'll take your kids up there and look after yours while I look after mine." And we got there to Idaho, and the dentist ended up being one of the boatmen. And those of you that know the Middle Fork of the Salmon, the first major rapid you come to -in fact, the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, everything occurred rather rapidly. It's about 90 percent whitewater, and everything went fast. In fact, I'd guess it was almost a year before I could recognize the scenery of Velvet Falls coming up, because we got to Velvet Falls while I was still trying to explain to people what to do, and I would suddenly yell out, "Hey, this is Velvet Falls! Hold onto ___________." Anyway, I did that, we got to Velvet Falls, I suddenly realized we're there and I yelled to the boats behind me, "This is Velvet Falls, keep it right in the center where I go." And this one dentist who was handling the boat took a look at me drop out of sight in Velvet Falls and started rowing back upstream to slow the boat down, which, for those of you that are boaters know, that's not the thing to do on a set of waterfalls. And so he eased his boat right over the edge of the lip of Velvet Falls, and didn't have any speed, so when he hit the bottom, the back wave just caught it, and the boat started turning around like one of those little cages in a chipmunk cage, or something, going around and around and around. And this happened to be the dentist with both Henry and Wade on the boat. And eventually the boat came out and nobody was hurt, and pulled the boat ashore and got it rightside up, and got in their boat, run a little further down, and then we started off again. The Middle Fork was at the point where sometimes you went right of an island, sometimes you went left of an island, depending on the water level, and I was in the ten-man, and Art Gallenson was handling one of the bigger twenty-eight-footers. So we were at the point where the right-hand run looked like it might be a little shallow, so I said "everybody hold back a little bit," and I went down the right side and I signalled Art, "No, no, you'll never get the twenty-eight-footer down here. It's going to be a pain." So I was already committed to the right-hand run, so I drug my boat around over the rocks, and slithered and slid down, and came around out the underside of the island and looked back upriver, and I saw Art's boat way up the channel. He really should have been down about the same time I was, but he was way up there. And I looked and I saw the reflection of the boat on the water, and I thought, "Well, now, that's a strange reflection, because Western River Expeditions is written smaller in the reflection than it is in the boat. And then it suddenly came to my awareness that it was not a reflection, but it was a twenty-eight-footer sitting on top of an upside down ten-man. And the dentist decided that he was going to stay close to the boat, so he could hear the orders better. And so when Gallenson hit a rock and stopped, there was no room between the two boats, and the ten-man went up and underneath Gallenson's boat. 
Steiger: Oh man! 
Thevenin: And Henry and Wade were in the water again. 
Steiger: This is their first trip? 
Thevenin: This is their first trip. (laughter) And they were a couple of good kids. Henry was sixteen and Wade was fourteen, and they were good kids, they wanted to help around the campsite. They said, "If we ever do this trip again, we'd really rather row our own boats." (laughter) And so we talked Jack into hiring them. But yeah, we used to.... I mean, there were some hazards to letting the passengers handle their own boats. I think these two flips happened within about the first forty-five minutes of the trip down the Middle Fork. Now, in all deference to the dentist, he learned his lesson, and he didn't flip a boat the rest of the trip. But Henry figured, next trip he went down, he was going to be on the oars. 
Steiger: Yeah! Okay, so that first year, you guys just ran all over the place. Or was that for several years? How did it evolve that you got to the Grand Canyon? 
Thevenin: Well, okay, now we go back to Henry Falany. How'd we get in the Grand Canyon? Well, I stayed with Jack, and we didn't include the Grand Canyon in our first year, because Grand Canyon was the big one, and we wanted to get a little bit of experience elsewhere. 
Steiger: But you fully intended to? 
Thevenin: We fully intended to. So we came down in 1963 -I think it was 1963. That's the year they started holding the water back. And so my first trip down the Grand Canyon was very memorable. I ran all the way from Lee's Ferry to the Paria Beach, and the reason for that -I see the look on your face -we were trying to get information from the Bureau of Reclamation, and some of you may have feelings that the government is not always that forthcoming with information. And they're not always very forthcoming with correct information. And we tried to find out from the Bureau of Reclamation when they were going to hold the water back. Now, there'd been some sort of agreement that they would never stop the water off below 1,000 cubic feet per second, and it was marginal whether you could operate at that. And we tried to get information from them, we didn't, and just before we left, you know, we had this group of people. In those days we brought the equipment in, in the truck, with the people sitting on top of the equipment, and we didn't have to check in with the rangers in those days, but there was a ranger there, so out of courtesy, we would always stop in. People would stop in and say hi to the ranger, "How are things going?" blah, blah, blah. You know, "We're going in." "Fine." Nothing official. We said, "What have you heard about holding the water back?" He said, "Oh, I haven't heard much. Probably sometime this month." "Well, that's weird, it was only going to be a couple of weeks." He said, "Well, yeah, it could be or it couldn't be. I don't know, I haven't heard." So we go down, we rig our boats and load the stuff in and put the people on the boats and we start down. As we start down through that first little riffle, we suddenly see this ranger running across the beach, screaming and yelling and hollering at us. And of course we start to pull towards him, and he's screaming, "Can you make it at three hundred?" And we looked and we said, "You mean three thousand?" He said, "I mean three hundred," and obviously the guy's a nut, because they promised they'd never cut it below a thousand. And so we decided we'd be nice and pull in the beach, and straighten the guy out, and said, "Where'd you hear this?" "Oh, I decided to go back and phone after I got through talking to you, and found out they've already shut the water off." "How far did they shut down?" He said, "Three hundred." And so we pulled the boats up on the beach and started walking towards him, we said, "No, you mean probably three thousand." He said, “turn around and look at your boats”. In that amount of time, our boats were already out of the water and we just stood there and watched the rocks grow. They cut it all the way down to three hundred. And so we turned to our people and said, "Folks, there's a neat trip up in Cataract Canyon and we'll take you through Cataract Canyon and Glen Canyon." So we rolled up the boats and fortunately they were ten-mans, and drug them across the sand beach and up to the road and threw them in the truck and put the people up on top of them and drove up to Moab. So my first Grand Canyon trip was from Lee's Ferry to the Paria Beach. 
Steiger: That's unbelievable! 
Thevenin: And they trapped people in the Canyon. I think Hatch flew over with an airplane. In those days, nobody carried radios, and he was dropping messages with parachutes and things like that, to his people that were in the Canyon, saying, "Get out! Don't stop, don't camp until the water runs out." And trying to get people out of the Canyon, because Bureau of Reclamation gave us no warning whatsoever. 
Steiger: How long did that last? 
Thevenin: Well, during those years, you can pick up the National Geographics and things like that, and Dock Marston and things like that going down in what they called the sport yaks, which were nothing more than a cheap plastic bathtub. And they'd paddle through the pools and then not carry the sport yaks around the rapids, they would carry them down through the rapids. You could just walk on the rocks that were exposed. You didn't have to go around anything, you just walked through 'em, and carried 'em or drug 'em over the rocks and when you got to a pool of water down below.... So I think, as I remember, it was 1965 we started getting back on the Grand Canyon again. 
Steiger: So you guys didn't do a trip that year then in the Canyon? 
Thevenin: Well, doesn't it count from Lee's Ferry to the Paria?! (laughter) 
Steiger: But, you were going to go. You're on a commercial trip. Had anybody been down there? Had anybody even seen the Canyon? 
Thevenin: On paper, or in reality? No! As a matter of fact, no. (laughter) You know, the statute of limitations is over now, I think, but I remember my first license I applied for in Idaho -well, down here you didn't have to have a license or anything, so it made no difference. We just told the people we had something like twelve years of experience running the rivers. Well, if you put all of us together, we did have twelve years of experience, running rivers. You know, about one year each for twelve people, that's twelve years of experience. But when I ran my first trip in Idaho, where you had to have a license, I think I had thirteen years of experience on the Main Salmon before I ever went to Idaho! (laughter) Like I say, statute of limitations is long over, fellows, you can't come after me now. 
Steiger: Well, nobody's put it quite so politically. We kind of knew that was the way it was, but man! 
Quartaroli: What have been some of the other changes, other differences, at Lee's Ferry? You mentioned you didn't have to check in, you didn't have a license. 
Thevenin: Well, the biggest change, yeah. There was a ranger there who was.... I really don't know what he was doing down there. I guess he was just sitting down there. When tourists came by, he'd answer their questions and tell them, "There's a rock, and there's where J.D. Lee built his thingy, and up there is the you know. So he was there to serve the public back in those days. Nice guy, friendly, knowledgeable about the area. People who came to visit him were more than welcome, because they didn't come that often. I'd drive down to Lee's Ferry and the only people we'd see was us. And we put on the river. In fact, even after we started running the river, many times, when you put on the river, there wasn't anybody else down there. I mean, you put on the river, you put on the river. You'd go down the river and say, "Ooo! that looks like another boat party somewhere up ahead," and you'd row like mad to catch up, and they'd row back upstream so you could talk to each other, because you hadn't seen anybody in two or three days, except the people that were with you. So that's one of the other changes, you know. It was an isolated experience back there in those days. Lee's Ferry -actually I think the buildings were in somewhat better shape in those days. They started to deteriorate when more and more people came down. Unfortunately, when someplace suddenly becomes popular, people keep wanting to take souvenirs, and there weren't enough rangers to keep an eye on things, and unfortunately some of the things did disappear down there. And so that's one of the changes. Then the first big change was when the Park Service or whoever it was, granted the Sparkses permission to not only run rivers down there, the Fort Lee Company, but they had the permit and everything planned for a big restaurant up on the hill where the employees' trailer parking is. And there was going to be a big restaurant up there, and they had the store down there, and they moved in a bunch of mobile homes for motel units. And it used to be a real party time down there, and we used to have a great time down there. A lot of the Fort Lee employees all lived up at Lee's Ranch, and that was their headquarters, the employees all lived up there. And we'd rig our boats and then go up and have parties up there with them, and Sparkses built their big warehouse down there. When they went to throw Sparkses out, one of the claims from the Park Service was that -and I can't remember what Tony's dad's name was -but anyway, the Sparkses "had unfair advantage over the rest of the river outfits, because they were there at Fort Lee." I do not ever recall once hearing any outfitter, or any boatman complain about his unfair advantage, except for one person, and that was Tony. Tony complained about it, because he claimed that by being there, his expense was about twenty percent more because he had to cover for all of us whose lifejackets got thrown out by the ranger or we forgot to get the ice, or we forgot this, or we forgot that. "Tony, do you have a pump we can take down with us?" And he maintained that he had to carry twenty percent more inventory to cover for the rest of us. So I do not know where the Park Service ever got the idea that Tony had unfair advantage. In his mind, he probably had an unfair disadvantage. 
Steiger: That's great. 
Thevenin: So anyway, all of a sudden, they said, "Tony, you gotta be out of there." And the motel units went first, and then the restaurant went. They let the store stay for a little while. Then they threw the store out. And then when the warehouse burned down, somehow -nobody's really clear exactly what happened there, but the warehouse burned down. It was really a sad occasion for most of us, because it was the only air conditioned warehouse that any river outfit had, and it was a great place to go run. You'd get your boat rigged or semi-rigged and couldn't stand the heat any longer, you'd find some excuse to run up to Fort Lee's warehouse and hang out in it. Of course they did have one advantage: they would fully rig their boat, not like some of the outfits do today where they load the boat on a trailer, they get down to the Ferry, then attach the side tubes. No, when that thing left the warehouse, it left it fully rigged, fully loaded, there was nothing to do at Lee's Ferry except back the trailer in the water and it was ready to go. And so therefore, the advantage they did have is their crew was never worn out by the time the boats were rigged, because they were working in the air conditioned warehouse the whole time. Then they finally threw the store out. 
Steiger: I kind of remember when that warehouse burned. Back to what Richard was saying. So the rangers, early on, they didn't worry too much about.... It seems like they had a real different attitude (laughs) than they do today. 
Thevenin: Yeah, it seems that way. Seems that way to me too. (laughter) I mean, well, in case this gets into print, we won't say too much about the rangers today, but back in those days, they were real friendly guys. 
Steiger: Well, and they figured you were on your own.... 
Thevenin: If you were going to kill yourself, it was your business! And there was no mandate from the government, there was nothing in the regulations. I mean, nothing in their book talked about river running. They weren't responsible for that. Their job was to be tour guides around the little park area, tell people what was going on, and what had gone on there in past history. They were resources of information for the tourists. And there was nothing in the papers about having to have a permit. Utah didn't even start -a bunch of us helped, and I can't even remember what year it was -helped write the Utah rules and regulations for the boating licenses. Suddenly somebody said, "These guys gotta have licenses," and a guy by the name of Ted Tuttle [phonetic spelling] was the Director of Outdoor Recreation or something, Commissioner of Recreation for the State of Utah, and I think the guy's name was Bob Anderson who was the head boating ranger for the State of Utah -which again, they didn't have any contact with us, they were dealing with the power boats on the lakes and things like that, but somebody said, "Now you gotta take care of these guys running rivers." And (laughing) they said, "Golly, gee whiz, folks, we don't know anything about running rivers." So they came to the outfitters and said, you know, "We've gotta come up with a test for you guys, so would you help us?" And so some of the guys from Hatch and some of the guys from Western, and there were probably a couple of the other guides, you know, sat down and said, "What does a boatman need to know?" And then those guys selected the questions they [thought sounded] reasonable, and made up the test and then shipped them out to us to see, because, you know, I might row differently than a Hatch boatman, and it wouldn't mean that his was better or mine was better. So the questions were designed so that it didn't rely upon personal preference, but it did rely upon some knowledge of what was going on. And the test was worked out and a number of us were given the option of.... The one place the State of Utah did lie, Tuttle and Anderson I think told about five of us that because of our cooperation we could all have license number one. And I showed up there, I was the third person to walk through the door, and Glade Ross [phonetic spelling] from Hatch already had number one, and they handed me number three, and it had zero, zero, three on it, and I said, "I thought I was going to be number one." "Well, Glade got here, and we sort of promised him." So okay, fine, you know. Then I happened to think, because James Bond was just hitting the box office in those days, Agent Double "O" Seven, and I said, "Hey, Bob, do all these things have the double "O" in front of them?" He said, "Yeah." I said "Well, I want double 'O' seven." And by that time he'd already handed it to someone else that came through the door, and he walked around and said, "Oh, I've got to have that one back," and gave him number three. So I don't know who got number three, but I got "agent," so those were lifetime licenses, so I am still Agent Double "O" Seven for the State of Utah. (laughs) I can stand on a rock and scream, "I have a license to kill." (uproarious laughter) But anyway, so that was the licensing then. 
Steiger: And that was in Utah? 
Thevenin: That was Utah. And there were no licenses down here in the Grand Canyon. When I started, they had quit keeping track of people by number. You know, they used to number everybody as they came through the Canyon. I'm really not sure what year they quit that, but it was still a relatively small number, because I think, wasn't it when they did the Powell Centennial in 1969, they figured only twelve hundred people had gone through, and in the year 1972, I think it was twelve hundred people alone went through the Canyon that summer. So back in 1962 when I started it was a very limited number. You probably have better access to the numbers than I do. 
Steiger: That was twelve thousand, I think ... 
Thevenin: Twelve thousand, yeah. 
Steiger: ... was when, in 1972? 
Thevenin: Yeah, twelve thousand, not twelve hundred. But I think in 1869 it was only, what.... 
Steiger: Or 1969. Twelve hundred sounds.... Was probably not far off, because the first two hundred were down through the fifties. I think it took clear through the fifties to get.... What was it? By 1954? 
Quartaroli: Something like 1954, yeah. 
Steiger: Well, maybe it really took.... I don't know _________________. 
Thevenin: So one hundred years, it was twelve hundred. And in one year, in 1972, it was ten times as many as had been down, total. 
Steiger: So something happened there. 
Thevenin: One of the things that happened was the Kennedys. See, nobody ever heard of river running, and when Goldwater went down, Goldwater's one of those that has a number -I don't know what his number was, you guys probably know. 
Steiger: He was in the first 100.... 
Thevenin: Yeah, he was in the first batch. But when Goldwater would go down the river, there might be a little article in the Wall Street Journal saying, "Goldwater's out of town, running the Grand Canyon," and that would be all there was. But now when the Kennedys started doing things, it was on the front of Life magazine, Time magazine, Newsweek, and I can remember the pictures of Bobby Kennedy standing on the front of the raft, going down the Yampa River with his arms outstretched, and the title underneath saying, "The Kennedys conquer the river." And so there was a lot of publicity, which to us was a lot of foolishness, but it turned out that that foolishness is what turned the public into becoming river runner addicts, and that's where we suddenly got the change from the traditional outdoorsman to everybody and their nephew wanting to run the river because the Kennedys did it. 
Steiger: I'm interested in hearing a little more about Jack Curry [Currey], because I never have met him, and I've always been curious. He's kind of a mystery, just kind of what it was like. What was he like? I'll give you about three questions in a row: What was he like? How long did he stay involved in the day-to-day operations? And how did Western grow? 
Thevenin: Western boomed. How was Jack? Well, Jack, like I said earlier, was a real personable guy, great salesman, great athlete, great outdoorsman, family man -he had six kids by that time. I guess by that time he only had four, but he had a couple more shortly thereafter. The business was a family business. We would frequently work all day on equipment and stuff and Jack had brought in a couple of sheets of plywood and laid 'em across sawhorses, I remember, in the house, and the tablecloth would go down and we'd all go in and eat. We'd all sit around the table -the boatmen and the family -and it was one great big happy family thing. Just a great way to be. The early ones were, you know, I was there, and Art Fenstermaker, and Clyde Morgan came shortly thereafter, and John Cross, Jr. Then there were some others who sort of would come in and.... Yeah, okay, all of a sudden names at my age disappear. One of the owners of Western today. 
Quartaroli: Bill George? 
Thevenin: No. Okay, keep going. 
Steiger: That's the only one I know. 
Quartaroli: That's the only one I know. 
Steiger: But Al Harris, Buck Boren [phonetic spelling] and those guys were later? 
Thevenin: Oh, those were all later. Yeah, those guys came a lot later. 
Steiger: Jake Luck? 
Quartaroli: Art Gallenson? 
Thevenin: Well, Jake Luck was still way later. Jake Luck came about the same time I left. But anyway, so.... Yeah, he's going to hate me when he reads this and finds out I can't remember his name. 
Steiger: Maybe you'll remember before we.... 
Thevenin: Yeah, we'll provide it if I remember. But anyway, so there were a bunch of the others who would come in and run trips. Roger Upwald -I don't know whether you've even heard that name -would come and run a trip. And there's some other people that would come in occasionally and run trips. Amil Quayle, we ought to probably include Amil Quayle at this time, because Amil Quayle had been on that "friends" trip thing, he and his wife, and Jack was talking about how this was going to be his business, this was going to be his career, and "I'm going to start this thing." Amil was a good country boy from Saint Anthony, Idaho, and he really liked this type of life, and "Jack," he says, "Man, you're going to open that business? I'd love to work for you." And Jack was personable, he said, "Well, yeah, Amil, look me up next year if you're really serious about that, and yeah, you got a job with me." And Amil said, "I'm serious about it. When's that trip going to be?" "Well, you're up there in Idaho, so we'll be up there in Idaho probably about the first of July, and probably have a trip the second of July." And that was it. They talked about how much fun it would be, and I thought... Amil's a good sincere guy. So anyway, we finished running down in Utah and took the stuff up to Idaho and I think the trip was going out the third of July or something, out of Idaho, and we'd taken the stuff up there. In those days, you didn't have a warehouse, you'd go up there to a town and find something that was empty. In this case, we found a guy's garage behind his summer cabin, and that was Western Rivers' warehouse. And we'd gotten all the stuff unloaded and stacked around in big stacks, and we're all tired from the drive and unstacking things, we're lying around as boatmen were even more prone to do in those days, and this guy comes walking in and says, "Hi, is this where Western River is?" and we said "Yeah." He said, "Well, I got a trip going out tomorrow, what do I do?" I said, "You got a trip going out tomorrow?! We don't have one going out for two more days." "No," he said, "I got one going out tomorrow." I said, "Well, no, the office must have told you something wrong in the instructions. What'd they tell you when you called them?" He said, "Well, I didn't call them." I said, "You didn't call them?! Well, how did you get your reservation on the trip?" "Oh no," he said, "I'm not a passenger, I'm a boatman." (laughing) "You're a boatman?! What's your name?" He said, "Amil Quayle." "Any of you guys ever heard of Amil Quayle?" They never heard of Amil Quayle. _____________ Jack _____________, "We're supposed to meet a boatman up here?" "Oh, Jack and I were friends. We talked about this. I'm going to run that first trip tomorrow." "We don't have a trip tomorrow." Somebody called Jack and said, "Jack, did you hire a boatman by the name of Amil Quayle?" And Jack said, "Who?" "We had a guy here who says he's a boatman of yours." But no communication whatsoever between Jack and Amil during that period of time, and Amil just figured if he said to show up, he'd show up. And so Amil drove truck most of.... We finally put Amil on driving truck for most of the summer, got him on a couple of trips, and I guess he didn't even get on the water until sometime in August, but he was a faithful truck driver, and got on the water, he was a good boatman. But there he was, standing there, "Hi, I'm your boatman, Amil Quayle." "Who? What?" So anyway, we digressed on that. 
Steiger: Well, it was just the early days. I'm curious to get.... 
Thevenin: Oh, Jack. 
Steiger: Well, Jack and just the early Western. 
Thevenin: So Amil was one of these that ended up becoming part of the inner core of the business, and everywhere we went. There were some other strange people: a guy who's now a hospital administrator, Craig Preston, was there in the early days. His father and uncle had took an early liking to river running, and Craig ended up with us shortly thereafter. You mentioned Jake Luck. Well, actually, before Jake Luck got there, when we were out in Vernal, Utah, we did the same thing -we looked for a warehouse and we tried to find someplace that was empty. Then for truck drivers, we'd try to find somebody who knew how to drive a truck and who had some spare time. And Bryce McKay's brother, I think his name was Verle [phonetic spelling], worked at an auto parts place, and we would get Verle to do a lot of our driving, and Bryce McKay was doing construction and Verle a couple of times said, "Gee, I can't really do it, but let me put in my brother. [He] isn't working construction right now, maybe he can drive for me." And so Bryce starting driving for us, and Bryce was a friend of Jake's and so Jake would occasionally come over with Bryce, but Jake didn't actually get into the picture until about 1966, I guess. And I got married in 1966, and for a honeymoon present to my wife in 1967 we took off and went with one of the.... One of our regular customers was Explorers Outdoors, a private group from Syracuse. The guy was a professor at Syracuse University, Dick Stoltz [phonetic spelling], and during the summertime, he would take all these rich kids on a six- or nine-week outdoor tour where they do mountain climbing, do a river trip, do sailing on the ocean, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Canoeing up in Minnesota. We had his group every year as part of our contingent. He said, "Some day, you ought to come with me." So in 1967 is when I left Jack Curry [Currey] and went with Dick Stoltz all summer. I ran with Jack in the spring, and ran with him when I got back off of that trip, but basically for that whole summer I was out, and that's about the summer that Jake Luck showed up. Like I said, I got married, and then the next year I started teaching school, so I wasn't there, available. So I was phasing myself out. When my first kid was due in 1968, I thought, "Well, you know, this is not the way a family man should be." There's some hazards to families and river running. I'm one of the few, I guess, that's been married once. So anyway, I packed up the family and said, "We're moving back to California, we're going to get away from all this foolishness. So I stepped out from Jack Curry [Currey] in about.... Well, it was 1967 I was gone most of the summer, and then the summer of 1968 I worked free-lance, but most of the trips I did run, I ran for Jack. So yeah, it was one big happy family thing. We worked on the trucks, we worked on the equipment. We ate together, we slept together, we did everything together. 
Steiger: And traveled around just using those ten-mans, like the early.... 
Thevenin: Ten-mans, and then there were also some twenty-one-footers. The first year, I think we got two twenty-one footers, and the next year we got some twenty-eight-footers. 
Steiger: And you guys would row those things, the twenty-eights?! 
Thevenin: Yeah! Now, the twenty-eight-footer, once you learned how to handle it, the twenty-eight-footer was really a lovely boat. And it could be handled by one person. Once you got over the idea that when you had your fourteen-foot oar, you had an awful lot of weight. And you couldn't find commercial oars in those days that would hold up for river runners, so we found some guy in Mapleton, Utah -I don't know what his name is -unofficially around the company he was known as "Hatchet Harry." His oars very seldom broke. You could never find a matching pair, and some of the round handles had not gotten all the square taken out of 'em, from being four-by-fours at one time. But they were strong oars, but they were also very heavy. And so when you'd sit there with the oars dead, it took most of your energy just to hold the oars up, (laughs) because you had such a short distance between your hand and the post, and then you had this great big oar setting out there in the water. But after you got used to it, it really wasn't bad. And there was a real difference between a twenty-eight-footer and a thirty-three-footer, because a twenty-eight-footers only had twenty-four-inch, twenty-eight-inch tubes, whereas the thirty-three-footer had the big thirty-six-inch tubes instead of thirty-three-inch tubes. 
Steiger: But you guys would row the thirty-threes too? 
Thevenin: Yeah. 
Steiger: You rowed 'em all? 
Thevenin: We finally decided it wasn't practical for one guy, you just had really very little control. So you would put another guy -you had oar locks mounted up front too -and of course the oar locks in those days were half-inch or three-quarter-inch water pipe pounded down through wooden blocks that were nailed onto the frames. And then the oars had cut-up rubber tires put on 'em with hose clamps in the right position, and bent just a little bit so they'd fit down around the post. And you'd row with them. But anyway, so we started putting a person up front. Or sometimes, if it was customers, we'd put two people up front, one guy on each oar up front. And the brains were supposed to be the guy in the back, and the people up front were supposed to do whatever the guy in the back told him to do, which worked well if they could take orders, and they knew which one was left from right. And there was one other problem, when we put another boatman out there, if he had a difference of opinion on how a rapid should be run -and I remember Little Stinker on Ladore [phonetic spelling] Canyon.... Did you ever run Ladore? 
Steiger: Yeah, just one time, but I'm trying to remember it. 
Thevenin: Little Stinker was just a rock sitting up in the middle of the river, about, oh, couldn't be more than in about the first fifteen, twenty minutes of the trip. And Lee Sutton [phonetic spelling] was on the front oars, and I was on the back oars, and I got my end of the boat around Little Stinker, but when he put his end of the boat up on the end of Little Stinker and it flipped, unfortunately my end of the boat decided to follow suit, and it was really a tragic event, because it was a ski club, Ooo-ski-boss [phonetic spelling] Ski Club, and the primary reason for ski clubs, I'm convinced, to have an excuse to drink. And I'm a nondrinker, and so they decided that to keep the boatmen from drinking all their beer, they would put all their beer on my boat. And so when I flipped my boat, and we were concentrating on getting the people out of the water, it was terrible, because as soon as we would drag one out, and he would see a can of beer floating down the river, he'd jump back in. And their primary goal (laughs) was to rescue all the cans of beer, and we were trying to count to see if we had everyone accounted for, and it was really not until we got into camp that night that we finally were able to get a correct count of both people and the cans of beer that were lost, and found out there were actually no people lost. So yeah, we did row the thirty-threes. There were some interesting stories. I won't mention names, but we did have one guy who was related to the owner of a company who had a tendency to drink his lunch in those days. This was out on the Stanislaus in California where a thirty-three-footer did not belong, but we ran 'em anyway. All of a sudden I heard this, "C'mon Paul, put your back into it, we can get this thing off the mud bar. C'mon, push, push!" And I said, "Joe! We're still tied to the tree." "Don't worry about that. We can get off this mud bar, put your back into it." I said, "The passengers aren't on the boat yet." "The boat! Quit talkin'! Put your back into it!" And he's up there straining and groaning on the oars and trying to pull the boat down the river, which was probably the easiest part of that afternoon's trip. Because when we did finally get the people in the boat and I said, "Alright guys, get in the boat, he's ready to go," and I untied it, I not only had to drive the thirty-three-footer, I had to overdrive whatever direction he was pushing for. So there were some hazards to having another body up front. 
Steiger: ... who had partial control. 
Thevenin: Now one of my better front people was, you know Stuart Reeder, but I don't know whether you know Stuart's daddy, Grant Reeder. 
Steiger: No! 
Thevenin: Grant Reeder was an interesting person. He was a doctor, who somehow got into river running, loved it, decided that he wanted to become a river runner, but he had this commitment to his patients, so he went back to school to be an anesthesiologist so that he wouldn't have direct patients. But then he still felt.... He said, "Okay, I've got an idea. I will form a group." So he took in, as I recall, three partners, and said, "Okay, here's the rules of the organization: I will take all the evening calls, all the weekend calls for nine months out of the year, and then just don't expect to find me for the other three months, I'm going to go boating." And Grant Reeder was frequently on my front oars on the thirty-three-footer. And when Grant was there, then the thirty-three-footer worked quite well. 
Steiger: The reason to use them was because you could put so many more people on them? Was that how come you guys used them? 
Thevenin: And more people meant more money? Would we have had an idea like that?! Money hungry?! (laughs) I think that was the idea, yes -more customers, less boatmen. 
Steiger: So just to trace that evolution, you started out with the ten-mans, and how many people would you have on those? 
Thevenin: Oh, we'd sometimes squeeze in six passengers. We might have even squeezed in more than that, I'm not sure. 
Steiger: And then you started saying, "Gees, maybe we'd better get a bigger boat"? 
Thevenin: Well, the thing is, we found we just didn't have the room to carry things we'd want to carry. So the twenty-one-footers came into existence right that same year, and then the twenty-eight-footers showed up, I think it was about the next year, and [we] phased out the twenty-one-footers. The twenty-one-footer added a whole lot of weight, but didn't add that much more room, where the twenty-eight-footer added a whole lot more room, and I really think it was more manageable than the twenty-one-footer was. And then we found the thirty-three-footer, which was totally unmanageable! 
Steiger: But, boy, could you put a bunch of stuff on it! 
Thevenin: Oh, could we! We could get ten, twelve people or more on those things! 
Quartaroli: What about the "J" rig? 
Thevenin: Well, the "J" rig came along after that. Most of these boats that we were using were Army surplus. They were bridge-building pontoons, World War II, and they were built like pontoons, much like most of the boats are today, and there was what we called the donut part of it. They looked like boats, and the military, after they get through blowing up all the bridges, to keep the enemy from coming after them, then when they want to go in and take the city, then they had to build portable bridges. So they would drag these big things out, which were thirty-three-foot long, and they had a sausage that would slap down inside of them, and then they'd strap these things all together across the river, then slap down big planks of lumber across them, and drive the tanks across and into the town. And that's what we were used to, and these things looked like boats, and that's what we were using. And we would look for surplus sales and other places to find them. Hatch boatmen used to be sort of -it was a laughing joke that Hatch boatmen didn't know how to patch, but Hatch boatmen didn't need to know how to patch, because if they got a hole in it, they could put duct tape or something over the hole, and make it back home, and then they'd throw the boat away, because Bus Hatch had somehow collected a whole heap of boats, and he'd just pull another boat out of the swamp. Well, Jack was looking for that same ability, and somebody gave him a contact that there were a whole bunch of boats down in Kentucky or Tennessee or somewhere that the government was getting rid of, and Jack got a real coup. He ended up getting two railroad cars full of pontoons. I recall Gallenson and I unloaded those railroad cars and the vehicles and scooted them out. We said, "There's something wrong with these things, they're not what we want." And when we unrolled them, they were these long, skinny snout things that they had used in the Korean War when the military got smart and said, "Hey, these things are too big for one man to carry," and shoot, it took about four men to carry them. So they said, "Well, let's make them smaller." Instead of making them look like a boat, just what the snouts look like today. And one guy could carry 'em, or two guys could carry 'em easily. And then they'd strap 'em all together, it didn't make any difference which way the river ran, you could butt them together. That's what all the straps in the back end were for, that's what all these "D" rings were for, you could strap them together sideways, you could butt them together, whatever you wanted, for as wide as the bridge was. But they didn't look like a boat. And Jack, when he found out he had two railroad cars full of these things, started mass producing brochures, sending them to all the lakes and recreation centers all over the United States and everywhere he could find, trying to sell these things as bumpers for docks. You know, have this nice air cushion to bring the boat up to so you don't scratch the boat -you know, trying to get rid of them. And they were not selling very fast. (laughter) When the sale was over, we had one and three-quarter railroad cars full of 'em. To me, they looked sort of like the catamarans I've seen out in Hawaii. I said, "Jack, why don't we build a catamaran?" Jack said, "I don't want a catamaran." "Oh, Jack, you gotta do something with these things." "Well, on your own time, you can go ahead and build a catamaran if you want." And so I built the catamaran and decided it was a little bit unstable, so I thought, "Well, why not, instead of one pontoon on each outside edge and dragging the frame across them, just lash them all together sideways." I think I did four tubes together, and put a platform on 'em. Then we thought, "Well, maybe we just need it a little bit wider than that," so we threw in the fifth one. Of course the idea was to row it, and by the time you got five tubes side-by-side, the fourteen-foot oar didn't quite reach, and the longer oars wouldn't reach because they kept rubbing on the outside tube. And so I built this platform that was now a good four or five feet up in the air, so that when you rowed it, your oar would dangle down in the water. And that's about the time I left the company, and Jake Luck came along, and we were almost going to motors by that time. So I left to go on my tour with Dick Stoltz, and Jake came along with his welding machine and changed the wood to metal, and ran it with motors. So I think there was one trip run with that wooden stack tower, and I think that was the only time it was run, and probably the only time it should have been run. 
Quartaroli: It'd be fun to see some pictures of that. 
Steiger: So it wasn't like, the "J" rig division wasn't like, "I'm going to have a boat with a bunch of these tubes." (laughter) 
Thevenin: It was "What are we going to do with these stupid things?!" I say it started out to be a catamaran. There are some people who are upset that Jack takes credit for the creation of the "J" rig. Having driven the "J" rig, I'm content to let Jack have that honor. (uproarious laughter) The early "J" rig -and this was Jake's fault, I blame it all on Jake -when he built the frames, he built them in two sections, which most of 'em are all built now. But the idea was the back section was only for the motor and for the boatmen. And so it was only about three foot long and it only extended over two of the tubes, and the middle tube was cut short. Well, it was just the single tube. The other tubes were butted together, and so you had four outside tubes that were butted together, and the center tube just had the one short tube, and then you'd sink this boatmen box thing down into the slot there, and ran a motor over it. But sitting back there by itself on all that rubber, being only about three foot long and about five foot wide.... You could always tell a Western boatman by his shins -they were bloody and they were bruised, and there were even stories about as a boatman would get to a major rapid, he would line up the boat and then immediately flop to the bottom of the floor, fetal fashion, and brace himself against all four sides of the box and wait 'til the rapid was over, and then get up. It was the only way he could protect his body. 
Steiger: Oh man! 
Thevenin: And then, of course, the frame, [we] realized it had to be bigger and stretched out over more of the tubes. It was a little less hazardous to the health of the boatman. 
Steiger: That's a great story! 
Quartaroli: Originally when you butted the tubes, blunt end to blunt end, and you just used those "D" rings and straps.... 
Thevenin: Yeah, we used the "D" rings and the straps. 
Quartaroli: It flexed right there in the middle? 
Thevenin: Yes, it flexed considerably. 
Steiger: So you absolutely just strapped them together. 
Thevenin: Yeah. And then we thought, well, this isn't really working all that well, and by that time we'd really become experts on patching and doing strange things with rubber. Many a boatman was known to volunteer to crawl inside those tubes and do the patching, just because he loved the smell. But you know, when you did all this patching, you finally got to the point, you realized when a guy was inside a tube, there was one guy inside the tube and the other guy outside the tube, and when you'd see the guy's leg completely relax, then you'd drag him out for air. But by that time we were very good at patching. So it did not take very much work to cut off one of those things and then butt it to the other one. 
Steiger: Man, that is a great story! What kind of boatman was Jack Curry [Currey], and how long did he stay? 
Thevenin: Oh Jack? As a boatman? Like I say, he was an athlete, he was an excellent boatman. 
Steiger: And did he run the boats the whole time? 
Thevenin: Oh yeah. Well.... 
Steiger: How did that happen? How did he move out from it? 
Thevenin: How'd he move out to being in the office more? Well, as the business grew and grew and grew -I mean, when you start making money and you start thinking you gotta make money, and the business starts to get away from you, you start spending more and more time with the business end. So he ended up finding that he was just spending less and less time on the water, and more and more time playing with paper. And it ended up being left to most of the rest of us. He'd still come up, he'd still make a fair number of trips on the water. He loved the water, and he was good at it. He was good at reading the water, and I remember we had a guy by the name of.... Well, Henry Falany I said came to work for us, and then he ended up going out home. His dad had a fencing business, and his dad said, "You gotta come home and take the fencing business over. I'm going to leave it to you." Then Henry started running rivers out there on the Stanislaus, and then later on I went with him. But anyway, so Jack would occasionally need boatmen, and Henry wasn't too busy, and sometimes I wasn't and I'd come back to work for him. Dennis Prescott was a side-kick of Henry's, and Dennis Prescott, I remember we were on the river one time, and I mean, Dennis was going through oars like mad. And he'd just say, "Jack, the problem is, I'm just too strong for those oars." And Jack just took off with a running stance in that sand, just like a football player and blocked Prescott all the way down about a good twenty yards across the sand, right straight into the river, and Prescott couldn't get a footing or anything else. And Prescott weighed more than Jack did. And Jack just drove him right on out into the river with his shoulders. He says, "Now, if I'm not breaking oars, I don't want you to break any more oars either." And I don't think Prescott broke another oar the rest of the trip! (chuckles) No more comment about, "Well, I'm just too strong." 
Steiger: God, we haven't even got to Henry Falany yet. But Western really did explode. Were you there.... 
Thevenin: I was there for the explosion. When I left, Western was the biggest thing there was going. They were bigger than Hatch, because of the multi-advertising. 
Steiger: So that's like you and Jack just doing the advertising? 
Thevenin: Well, I wasn't doing the [advertising], Jack was taking care of all that himself. I, like I said, became sort of his right-hand man in the operating of the thing. I would be the warehouse man, I'd be the guy who'd go out and find the warehouse in whatever town we went to, and locate the place to buy the supplies and things of that nature. But Jack was doing the advertising, that was his baby. And with the number of people that came in, we were doing well. This is one of the things that got us in trouble in Idaho, because -I can't remember if I mentioned when we were talking earlier -before [the tape] was running -Andy Anderson up in Idaho was one of the long-time guides in Idaho, and I can remember when I first started going up there, his brochure talked about taking down over three hundred people in the last fifteen years. Well, our first year, Western was taking down three hundred people. And when we started moving into Idaho, and these Idaho guides saw these mass production tours coming down the river, carrying all these people, "This outfit is stealing our customers!" Well, we weren't. We were hitting a completely different audience than they were. And we ended up with some very challenging situations in Idaho, because you did have to have a license in Idaho. And we had licenses, and the good old boys' network up there wanted us out of there, and we went through a lot of court action and things of that nature to establish our right to be there. 
Steiger: And what was this audience? Who were these people that were coming with you? 
Thevenin: The audience was the boatmen that were up there, the Idaho guides who were taking down like three hundred people in fifteen years -watching us take down.... "Well, these should be our customers!" But these were people that had never heard of river running until they got the mass production advertising from Jack. 
Steiger: The guys that you were taking down? 
Thevenin: The people we were taking down. 
Steiger: Who were those guys? And how did he do it? How did he contact them and stuff? 
Thevenin: Well, you know, advertising in newspapers, magazines, things like this. And one of the things we did, we made a TV show, the older people may remember a Jack Douglas series, Across the Seven Seas: Bold Journey, Bold Venture. And Jack went out and found a river in southern Mexico that nobody else had ever run. In fact, it caused a little conflict between Georgie and us because Georgie had gone down there to try to run that river, and had backed out on it. 
Steiger: The Grijalva. 
Thevenin: The Grijalva. And we went down and ran the river -or Georgie said, "Anybody can carry a stupid boat down a river. They didn't run that river!" So Georgie did not look kindly upon us because when the reports came out, it mentioned that "the famous Georgie White, Woman of the River," had attempted this thing and failed. And she didn't like the word "failure" associated with her name. We're not the ones that put it on there, but.... My first meeting with Georgie was something else again. To digress very quickly, John Cross and I were running Glen Canyon, and this was the summer after we'd done this TV show down there. And we were just about to pull into camp, and Georgie came whipping by us and grabbed the camp. We thought, "Well, what the heck, she has the right." But John and I had never met Georgie White, so we just went on down river a ways, found another camp and worked like mad to get our people fed and then told the people, "Now, you stay here, we're going to run up to the other camp," because we wanted to meet Georgie White. And on the way up, just as we got to her camp, there was one of her people down there by the river, and she recognized our boats from the TV show. She said, (excitedly) "Oh, you're the guys that ran that river down in Mexico. Oh, it's so wonderful! Oh, I was so excited when I watched that thing!" And all of a sudden this voice comes, "You don't know shit about river running, you get your ass up into camp and you don't be down here talking to these people! And you guys...." And I won't repeat all the language she said, but she talked to us and gave John and I the feeling that we weren't really welcome there, and we did the only thing two good substantial boatmen could do -we put our tails between our legs and ran like mad! (laughter) That was my first meeting with Georgie, and she was still miffed about we had done the Grijalva and she hadn't, and the words that came along with it when one of her passengers started telling us how wonderful it was. That did not sit well with Georgie. But anyway, so it was things like that. We took on things that- we had some other people up in Salt Lake that were doing adventure things that we cooperated with. There was a Bill Burge [phonetic spelling] series. There was a guy -I know him well (chuckles) -again the name disappeared -but did a lot of that. He was in radio up there in Salt Lake, and as a sideline, he did adventure shows. Mel Hardman! I don't know whether anybody's ever heard of Mel Hardman, but in radio, you could be whoever you wanted to be, and (mimicking deep bass voice) "Mel Hardman" when you'd hear that name, what do you think of? "This is Mel Hardman with the sports report." How do you picture Mel Hardman? Big, muscular. Mel was a great guy, but he was not tall, he was not muscular, his waistline probably matched mine, and he was not an Adonis -but his voice on radio! And my wife had heard Mel Hardman many times on the radio. I would keep popping back into radio or I would associate with my old friends on radio, and Mel Hardman had done one of his adventure films with us. And my wife loved Mel Hardman. And at that time we weren't husband and wife, we were just going together off and on, in between her various engagements. She got engaged a couple of times while we were going together, because I'd take off and be disappeared for a number of months, come back to find out she'd been engaged -but that's another story! But anyway, so Mel Hardman did this thing, he was having this big showing, and my wife said, "Oh, I want to go meet Mel Hardman." I said, "No, you don't, dear." She said, "Yes I do, I've always wanted to meet Mel Hardman." I said, "No, no dear, you do not want to meet Mel Hardman." She said, "You're jealous." I said, "No, I'm not." And she was very unkind when I introduced her to Mel Hardman. I took her over to Mel and said, "Mel, Loretta would like to meet you," and she looked at him and said, "You're not Mel Hardman!" (mimicking deep bass voice again) Because Mel Hardman, on radio (returning to own voice) did not look like Mel Hardman in real life. But anyway, we did a lot of this stuff, which was unusual. One of the other things that got us a head start in Idaho was a lot of the old-time guides did not like the Forest Service, and that's who was controlling things up there. Now we may have some differences of opinion with the Park Service, but we've learned through the years, we have to work with these people. Now, some of these guys up in Idaho, they were great guides, they were wonderful, they're the type of guys that legends are made of. But they were also cranky, and they could be cantankerous, they could be stubborn. And when the Forest Service sent out their photographer from Washington D.C., to do a brochure on outdoor life in Idaho, these guys wouldn't cooperate, and we did! So for a number of years there, all of the pictures of river running in Idaho was not the Idaho guides.... 
Steiger: "Courtesy of Western"? 
Thevenin: Courtesy of Western River Expeditions. It also turned out, a number of years later, just before Henry gave up his Idaho license, we went up there to make one more trip down, and they'd established a visitors center there at Corn Creek. And we're in there looking at the pictures on the wall, and half the pictures are of Henry and me and other WhiteWater boys, and we're standing there going.... And the little ranger's over there, one of the seasonal rangers, all happy to greet the people, and wants to talk to them about things, and Henry and I are talking about, "Hey, that's a good shot of you," "Yeah, I remember that shot of you too." And the guy's saying, "Are you guys really in those pictures." So Henry and I stood up alongside the pictures and smiled, and he says, "Well, those could be you!" I said, "They are us." And the little ranger almost fell apart. (hyperventilates) "I'm seeing history right here before my eyes!" So anyway, so that was another way we got a lot of advertising, and we may not have agreed with the Forest Service, but they're there, you gotta deal with them. We dealt with them, they said, "Well, will you pose for the pictures?" and we said, "Yeah! We'll pose for the pictures!" And so "courtesy of Western River Expeditions," and the word got out. 
Steiger: So the early Grand trips -what was your first Grand Canyon trip like? 
Thevenin: We had shifted to the idea on Cataract Canyon and Desolation Canyon and Glen Canyon that you really needed to have a motor, because in those days -I hate to say it -the philosophy was, if it's more than fifty feet off the river, it doesn't exist. We were there to run the rapids, and there are some rather long stretches in the Grand Canyon that don't have rapids. And there were even longer stretches in Glen Canyon that didn't have rapids. And motors became a necessity. So when we made our first trip through the Grand Canyon, we carried a motor on about every third boat, and we'd lash it up. We'd extended the rowing frame -some of you are familiar with the old tail-draggers that stayed around for a long time. It was not that we liked it better that way, but boatmen logic and evolution don't always go together. So we had a rowing frame, and so to stick a motor on the back end, we just stuck a couple of boards on, made the rowing frame a little bit long. At least we had sense enough to put them together with pins, and just hang the motor frame right out over the water, which was a terrible place to run a motor anyway, for those of you that have ever sat on the back tube, it's a lot of action. But anyway, so we'd already adopted this policy, and so my first trip down the Grand Canyon, we're tooling on down the Canyon, and every time we run a rapid, we row the rapids, and then we get down in the calm water, we'd drop the motor frame over the side and drop the motor on it, because we could also pull the frame up out of the water. And we ___________, "There's no real point in dragging the frame up, it doesn't hit the rocks that hard." And then we'd hang the motor from it -we didn't want to leave the motor back there. So we'd pull the motor up, run the rapid, hit the calm pond, put the motor back in, hook up two more boats behind us, and drag them through the calm water and go on down. And Jack's philosophizing, as Jack frequently does, "You know, Georgie runs everything with a motor." "Yeah, Jack, that's fine." "We ought to try that sometime." "Yeah, Jack, fine, we ought to try it sometime." "We ought to try it on the next rapid." "Jack, the next rapid is Lava." "Yeah, I know that, we ought to try it." "Jack, the next rapid is Lava." "Yeah, we ought to try that." Now, this, as I remember, was, I think Jack had made one trip down the Grand Canyon, but this is my first trip down and I'd never seen Lava before. 
Steiger: And these are Army ten-mans? 
Thevenin: These are ten-mans, and we had the thirty-three-footers for support boats, carrying all the garbage. 
Steiger: So you would hang motors off those too? 
Thevenin: No, we wouldn't hang the motors off the thirty-threes. We'd just drag them along behind one ten-man, because we had the frames built for the ten-mans. And there'd be this little ten-man, dragging a thirty-three-footer behind on a rope. 
Quartaroli: With nobody rowing? 
Thevenin: No, we'd put the oars up while we're dragging it. But then we get to Lava, Jack has decided, "Okay, we're going to run it." "Jack, shouldn't we try it on something else first?" "Nah, this'd be a good chance." So we get there, and again we had passengers running the boats, so you know, the idea is, we'll take our boat through, and then we'll go back for the other boats. And my boat's the thirty-three, I'm rowing the thirty-three with Grant Reeder up front. We go through, and it was a messy run. I've got a couple of beautiful pictures of it some passengers took. As he shot the picture, all you can see is the top of Grant's hat and two of the oars sticking out through the water. I mean, the boat is totally, thoroughly underwater. This is a thirty-three-footer, and you can't see the boat. You can see Grant Reeder's hat, and you can see two oars sticking out. 
Steiger: You guys went down the right? 
Thevenin: Went down the right. That was the only place we knew to go, you know! 
Steiger: Hey, sometimes it's the only place there is to go! 
Thevenin: But anyway, we made it through. It was a lousy run, but we made it through. And Jack said, "Okay, go up and get the other boat," but we don't trust motors, we're still oarsmen. So Amil was on the trip, and so Amil is going to man the oars in case anything goes wrong. Now, if you're gonna run rapids.... 
Steiger: Jack tells you, "You guys go up and run this motorboat down"? It's not like he's gonna do it. 
Thevenin: No, Jack was gonna do it, and Jack did it, he ran one through. But anyway, Amil and I go up, but we're not gonna trust the motor. So Amil was poised there with the oars ready, and I'm on the motor. And you can run rapids with motors, and you can run rapids with oars, but my advice to anybody is do not run them with both. As soon as I would get the boat lined up, a wave would come up and slap that oar that Amil had at the ready, and spin the boat around, and I'd be back there on the motor, straighten it out, as soon as I get it straightened out, a wave would slap the other oar and spin it the other way. And I mean, we're just zig-zagging all the way down there, with the waves slapping Amil's oars, and me trying to straighten the boat out. And it was a miserable mess, but we made it through. And Jack wasn't letting any of the passengers ride with us -it was just Amil and me. I think it was Amil. And so then we go back up and do another one, and it's the same thing -it's a miserable run, slapping those oars all over the place -but we make it through. And the customers started complaining, "Well, they made it through, why can't we ride?" Jack said, "Okay, some of you guys can ride. And so we all go up and get in the last boat to go through, and I'm tooling down there, and I finally got it all figured out, and I go into everything and I have never made a better run of Lava in my life! I am doing great, and even hitting the water on Amil's oars is not enough to budge me out of position. I've anticipated, I am doing it beautifully. I've got one hole left to go, and I'm mentally reaching back and patting myself on the back, and I looked down and I saw the sky, and I looked up and I saw the water. (others chuckle) And the guys on the bank said that it was the most graceful flip they've ever seen in their life. So often when a boat flips, it hits that wall of water and it shudders and it bounces, and it's looking like "should I or shouldn't I flip?" And they said this boat had no decision to make whatsoever, it was smooth. It just went into that thing, up the curl on the wave, and didn't even slow down and went right straight over, without a shudder. And I got to swim Lava, the bottom part of it. So anyway, so I think that was my first full trip down through the Grand Canyon, where we did it with oars and motors. 
Steiger: And a thirty-three and the ten-mans, and you drug the thirty-threes and motored through the flats. 
Thevenin: Yup. 
Quartaroli: So is that where Katie Lee's expression, "My God, a garbage scow!" because he used to put the garbage in the thirty-three? 
Thevenin: Yeah. Well, in those days we didn't always carry the garbage out. In those days we used to bury things. There was still room to bury them. When we started digging holes in the ground and all we found was garbage, we decided that was the time to carry it out. You couldn't find a new garbage hole. 
Steiger: Now what year was that, the first time clear through? 
Thevenin: Hm, must have been about 1965. I think it was two years after they closed it down, there was enough water to go through. Now I think Jack had made one trip without me through it, and then I was on the second trip that Western made through there. But I could be wrong, it could have been Jack's first trip through there too. 
Quartaroli: So he was, at that time, starting to do several trips? He was getting ready for a full Grand Canyon season. 
Thevenin: Yeah. The thing is, the Grand Canyon was not what you call a big seller, because prior to the dam -and as much as some people may hate the dam -prior to the dam you had your spring runoff, which you didn't want to run, although Georgie says she ran it at 110,000 on a spring runoff, which was probably a very interesting ride, especially over House Rock -Bedrock, I mean -and House Rock too, and a couple of those other things. And then it wasn't very long after that that it was too low to run. And then guys would go up north and run the other rivers. And so Grand Canyon was not a big seller. There wasn't that much time to plan it. You'd say, "Okay...." and you'd couch your advertising saying, "This is when the trip's going to go, assuming water conditions are satisfactory." But after the dam went in, then you could start planning for it. You at least had some idea you were going to have a certain amount of water down there. It was after that time that they started playing games with all the fluctuations, but the first few trips down there, it was a very low release. But as I remember, it was a steady release. It was a low release. It was a pain, because there were rocks all over the place, and it was a different Grand Canyon than what the boatmen know today. But it was consistent, and it was then basically all year round. Then when they started to get the dam a little fuller, then it started to be the fluctuation power demand from Phoenix. 
Steiger: I've heard from several people that Grijalva story's really wild, just that whole trip. 
Thevenin: It was. And if we can take a quick potty break, we'll come back and talk about the Grijalva. 
Steiger: Okay. (tape turned off and on) ... about how you used to do the orientations for Henry, and you would just make the orientation last.... 
Thevenin: Until the boatmen got there, yes! 
Quartaroli: As long as needed. 
Steiger: However long it took. 
Quartaroli: That happened to me one time. Bear and I just got off and we were bringing ice chests and duffles and different things, and the bus was already there and gone. We passed the empty bus heading back to Vegas, and we got there and Paul's doing the same thing that Bruce[Winter described in another interview... stretched out his talk until the boatmen arrived.] Said, "Give an orientation, and here's your boatmen." (chuckles) 
Thevenin: It was funny, one of the years I decided I was leaving, and I wasn't going to come back anymore.... I've retired from river running so many times, I can't remember how many times. But anyway, I said, "Okay, I'm not coming back anymore." And I'm starting to give my little old dissertation, and fortunately the Park Service didn't have the rules then that they have now about, you can't rig during the time people are leaving. And we had probably about eight other companies that were down there rigging and stuff, and I started giving my orientation to my people, and all of a sudden, every truck starts moving, and they form a gallery around behind all the people (laughing obscures comment) and _____________ all climb up in the rafters of their truck, sitting up there. I'm looking at them, they're all sitting up there, staring down at me, while I'm giving the orientation to my people. The people all have their backs toward the trucks and they're wondering why I keep looking up -guys smiling and making gestures at me and things like that. As soon as I finally finished the [orientation] all of a sudden, from behind all of the people comes this loud applause. They turn around and here's all these trucks in a big semi-circle around me giving the orientation. 
Steiger: The most famous orientation. I remember watching some of those. I remember watching you put some of those trips on. 
Thevenin: A couple of outfits would send their people over. "Hey, go over there, that guy's going to give the orientation now. There's the guy, he's already giving the orientation, go ahead, go on over." And I'd end up giving orientations to about two or three outfits. 
Steiger: Well, tell us about the Grijalva. 
Thevenin: Okay, the Rio Grijalva. Well, the Rio Grijalva is a river down in Mexico, the southern State of Chiapas, which nobody'd ever heard of until the last couple of years when the Indians down there decided to rebel against the Mexican government. And I actually found out who the leader was, he was the son of a rich lawyer from Tampico, so he wasn't even a local down there. But anyway, up until that time nobody had heard of the State of Chiapas -in fact, the average Mexican didn't know the State of Chiapas existed. It's about fifty years behind the rest of Mexico. But anyway, Jack, in looking for places to do big name stuff had somehow located a couple of places and then zeroed in on, he'd flown down and looked at a number of places where we could make headline material, and decided on this one down in the State of Chiapas, El Sumidero Canyon is only about sixteen miles long, and most of the river is basically fairly flat except for two sections, the El Sumidero Canyon, which means "the drain," and Mal Paso Canyon, which means "the bad pass." And there's a little stretch of calm water in between the two canyons. Well, when Jack looked at it, you know, El Sumidero had never been run, Mal Paso had been run, and legend has it the army of Cortez tried to go through there, and they ended up killing a whole bunch of people, attempting to get through there and backing out and giving up on it. And legend has it that a lot of the Indian tribes down there tried to go through the canyon and never made it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now the interesting thing about the canyon is that there is a lookout point, you drive to the top of the mountain and you can see almost the whole canyon from about three thousand feet up. So you can see everything in the canyon, the whole time, but getting down into the canyon, you're down in tough water. And so some of the pictures we shot from up above, when I explain to people about the pictures, they say, "Well, gee, those rocks don't look very big," I say, "Well, what you have to realize is this picture is shot from three thousand feet up, and those boulders you're talking about are as big as a three-story house." And then they suddenly take the thing into perspective, because the Grijalva carries as much water as the Grand Canyon does. And going through that canyon, it gets tight and sticky and all that stuff. And there's some humongous waterfalls. And even in the thing, _______ mentioned that the great Georgie White had attempted to go through there and had to back out. So anyway, Jack found this and decided, "Well, gee, sixteen miles, you know, we've got to be able to put together a trip that's a little longer than that, so we were going to do El Sumidero, go through the calm water and go through Mal Paso as well. And then Jack Douglas said, "Okay, I'll send the photographer and I'll foot the expenses for the film, but I don't know what kind of story I'm going to get out of this, so I won't put any money into the trip." So Jack had to go out and find people that had money that were also interested in taking on a new venture like this. Well, the sixteen miles actually ended up taking us eleven days. We were headline material in all the Mexican papers, especially down in that area, and we had a number of things up in the States. It was covered in Life magazine, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, a number of things did articles on our run down there. And we also made the TV show. But the canyon itself was one that was not runable. We got into it, the people in the community all gathered on the bridge that went over the beginning of the thing -it was nice calm water at that point -all staring down at these crazy gringos doing this. "Why do you want to do this?!" And we went in the first day and just floated on down and camped the first night, and next day got up and came to this twenty-six-foot waterfall. It didn't go straight down, but it went down in about three stages, twenty-six foot, which is a little steeper, even than Lava. And we decided, "Okay, we're gonna have to line this thing." Carry the stuff around and line the boats down. But we want to get good shots of it, so we'd taken along three twenty-one footers and a ten-man -actually, I think it was a seven-man -just for a little support boat with a motor on it. And so we (swish!) went across the river, put the photographer on the other bank of the river, so he could get the shots of our action of lining and portaging and all this other stuff, with the river in the foreground. And we got part of it done that day, then decided, "Okay, it's time to go get the photographer." Art Fenstermaker and I were going to go get him, but Art was tying up some other details and Jack said, "Well, I'll go ahead and drive the boat," and I was going over just to help him, in case he needed to edge it upriver or something. We got over to the other side and picked up the photographer, and he got in the boat. In getting in the boat, I was holding the boat and letting him get in, and I was trying to make more room for him to get in, so I was in motion while he was in motion, and Jack was in a hurry to get going, and he gunned the motor before everything was set down, and as he peeled out on the river it just sort of did a nice little peel out in the river and up and over it went, right at the head of the twenty-six-foot waterfall. 
Steiger: Turned over? 
Thevenin: Turned over. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! 
Thevenin: And there we are right at the head of the waterfall. Well, Jack is in the back of the boat, close to the shore, and like I say, he was a great athlete, and could have had a swimming scholarship, and he just started stroking like mad and grabbed some of the rocks, right before the falls, and then climbed up on the rock and sort of dove in and jumped from rock to rock and diving, got to shore. Well, the photographer, whose name was Bob Moran [phonetic spelling], who later came back with us on a number of other adventures, and actually became my roommate for a couple of years, because we had so much fun on this trip. (others chuckle) But anyway, he and I are dangling from this now upside down boat, and we're on opposite sides of the boat, drifting right towards the head of this twenty-six-foot waterfall. And I found out that this guy was one photographer who really wasn't committed to his business. Because most photographers, you know, no matter what happens, they're going to do what? 
Steiger: Hold onto the camera. 
Thevenin: And so I muscled myself up so I can lean over the top of the bottom of the boat and say, "Bob, have you still got the camera?" And at that stage of the game, Bob let me know that the camera was not really what was on his mind. 
Steiger: Like _______________________. 
Thevenin: Anyway, we washed right up to the head of the falls, and there was a rock there, and the boat (splurge!) [wrapped] right on that rock, and Bob was dangling down one side of the waterfall, and I was dangling down the other side. And I was more in the mainstream. In those days we were much more the image of outdoorsmen than boatmen are today. We didn't run around in shorts and thongs and things like that. I mean, we wore manly clothes -we wore Levis and cowboy boots and things like that. Anyway, so I'm dangling over the waterfall, and the waterfall rips off one of my boots. The other boot was too tight around the ankle, it couldn't get off, so it ripped the sole completely out of the boot. 
Steiger: This is a cowboy boot? 
Thevenin: Yeah. 
Steiger: So in other words, you're having to hang on pretty good. 
Thevenin: I'm hangin' on as strong as.... And I'm watching my grip slowly go. And my grip goes before Bob's goes, and so I go (spew!) down through the slot, which then allowed the boat to slide Bob's way, and he slid off to the side and went over the first four-foot drop and got washed into sort of a back-eddy and got into the shore. Now, he was a good photographer, and he was a nut, because the next day when it got light and [he] got one of the other cameras, then they did put that boat back into that little pool again and had Bob crawl down and crawl underneath so here you got the scene of the waterfall all over the place, and the boat just looking like it's going to go [in], no it's going to bounce back and go out, and if at any time something had of gone wrong, he could have gone the rest of the way the next day. And so we have the picture on the film of him climbing out from underneath the boat. It's staged, but it's basically what had happened the night before when there was no camera going. Anyway, so I went down the center slot and we'd given people all these lectures, you know, if you get in the water, you make sure your lifejacket's on good and tight, and then you aim so that your feet go downriver and you hold your hands out, right? You know, just the way we teach people, if you get caught in a rapid, get your feet and then sort of block with your hands. And so I'm in this waterfall in this position, with my feet and my hands out in what I think is in front of me. However, I soon discovered that my body is not going that direction, as my head bashes solidly into a rock -ooo! -and then I decided there's only one position for this, and that's the fetal position, with my hands securely over the top of my head. And I'm bouncing around down there, and it tears my lifejacket in half, rips the collar completely off and everything else, and I'm.... 
Steiger: This was like a Mae West? 
Thevenin: Yeah, the good old ones, the good solid ones -the ones that'll last any test the Coast Guard and give 'em. They didn't last that test! But anyway, I'm down there, I'm being beat to pieces under the water, and I only have so much air left in my lung capacity. I played tuba in the band, I got good lung capacity, but even that's going to give out. And I finally decided, "I'm gonna die." And now this'll show you what kind of a man I am. You know, there's people, as they're about to die, they realize, the thoughts that flash through their minds. And I had gone through home before I went to Mexico, and my parents had given me my Christmas present and said, "Now don't open 'til Christmas," and so I was a good boy and I left my presents all behind in Salt Lake, and at the moment that I realized that Death is there, my thought was, "I should have opened the presents!" (laughter) About that time, I guess my thoughts, the other side decided I wasn't ready to come to heaven or go to hell yet, so all of a sudden, blap!, I blast to the top, and I'm up on the top. "I think that's a lovely rosy sunset I see up ahead of me." And then I realized that that isn't the sunset, and that isn't roses, that's blood pouring out of the top of my head. And so I started swimming like mad for.... A lot of people said, "Weren't you unconscious?" It's a good thing I wasn't, because a short ways downriver was a sixty-four foot waterfall, which I'm just as glad I didn't go over that one. But anyway, so I managed to do some stroking over to a rock, got up on the rock and started poking around, and found the hole, right up in the very top of my head, and pushed my finger on the top of my head for a while, because, you know, most of those cuts aren't very deep, but they bleed like mad. So I'm sitting there on the rock looking around with my finger on my head, and the guys are way over on the other bank, running down. All three of us thought that the other two were dead, because when Jack grabbed the rocks, he looked down and saw both Bob and me go over the falls, and when Bob got dropped off four foot down, he couldn't see upriver and see Jack, and he figured anybody that went down through the center was obviously dead, and I got down there and I didn't know they'd dropped off along the way, and I figured (chuckles) gee, I'm not supposed to be alive and the other two definitely aren't. So we all thought the other two were dead. And of course the people on the shore on the other side knew exactly where everybody was, what the game plan was....