Daily Archives: February 10, 2012

It was the summer of 1953, and I was fifteen.  My dad contracted with the U.S. Forest Service to eradicate various types of plants that carried half the life cycle of a disease called Blisterthat’s.  Blisterthat’s disease killed white pines in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The white pines were a major resource and economic driver of the timber industry at the time. Dad and I worked the previous summer… more