Bearded Look-Alikes

Ron Lindmark and I were clean-shaven young men when we worked together in the mid-1970s at Intermountain Research Station headquarters in Ogden, Utah. Lindmark moved up to a post in the Forest Service national office and that led to his appointment as Director of the North Central Research Station, the hub of renewable natural resource studies in the Midwest.

Lindmark’s messages usually contain a fascinating bit of trivia or two in addition to the normal accounts of the whereabouts and activities of mutual acquaintances. His latest communication did not disappoint. He had been reading this Blog. “I just had to include this photo after viewing your photo,” he said. “I noticed that the lower parts of our faces are similar.”

I noticed that the economist, who had been well-trained as a scientist, had carefully qualified his observation. Unlike many men of similar vintage, Lindmark still has an abundant crop of hair on top of his head as well as on the bottom. He also continues to be a rather handsome guy for an old gaffer. Unfortunately for me, those facts seriously limit the number of our similarities. However, the story Lindmark sent with the photo of himself and his alleged famous likeness described a situation with Latino hero worshippers somewhat similar to one of my experiences.

Lindmark said he had taken to sporting a scraggily full beard he started on a camping trip shortly after retiring. He converted it to the present carefully trimmed goatee after his wife, Lynette, protested that he looked like Yasir Arafat. The trim job apparently made him look like another celebrity. On a visit to Mexico, several young storekeepers insisted that he was Colonel Sanders of fried chicken fame. “I said NO, he died several years ago, but I am his brother,” Lindmark recalled. “That was a mistake! I was mobbed.” Lindmark’s grandchildren also noted the resemblance, and the bobblehead pictured with him here was a birthday present from them.

I concealed myself behind a semi-full beard for about 20 years before deciding the goatee was more sophisticated (and also called less attention to the increasingly sparse cover on the top of my head). While fully bearded, I experienced a look-alike encounter in Jamaica when Sandy and I were taking a tour with a busload of other visitors. We were in the first two seats next to the driver. I was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat.

The driver had stopped so we could walk past some open-air shops to an historic church and back. Just as all were aboard, a teenager waving his arms ran out from one of the shops. He pounded on the bus door, pointing at me, and yelling, “Kenny Rogers, Kenny Rogers!”

The driver angrily indicated he wanted the interloper to get away. When the racket continued, the driver simply started to pull away. The Rogers fan was undaunted. He ran along beside my window, and as the bus accelerated he jumped up and clung to the rear of the vehicle. He continued to bang on the bus and yell what he thought was my name. At the next stop the driver dismounted and pried the teenager off his bus.

Actually, Kenny Rogers and I have one thing in common. Although it is true that Rogers is a great showman who knows how to tell a musical story, neither of us has much of a singing voice.

Nevertheless, I thought being mistaken for him was quite an honor; at least I did before discovering an entire web site devoted to Kenny Rogers look-alikes.

Shhhh . . . They’re Secret

Amid complaints that security at President Obama’s inauguration was on the lax side, a Secret Service spokesman was quoted as saying, “The agency’s security measures are not always visible.” Surprise!

During my government service, I encountered the secret agents twice. My observations were (1) the real surprise is how public Secret Service operatives actually can be; and (2) those guys are very good at their jobs.

During my time at the Intermountain Research Station, the Station Director dispatched me and two other staff members to Washington, DC for a week to take a training course given by the Juran Institute, a consulting group reputed to be leading experts in the “Management by Objectives” system that was the current fad among government and private industry gurus. My teammates were Gordon Booth, the Station Biometrician, and Maureen Stettler, a rising star in the Operations Group. Our job was to learn all we could about MBO and come back with recommendations as to whether the Station should adopt all, some, or none of the ideas.

The class met in a hotel several doors down the street from the Soviet Embassy. Room rates in that hotel were too high for Forest Service types, so we lodged about six blocks away in a Holiday Inn. An early continental breakfast was included in the course benefits, and the three of us made an early morning hike every day to take advantage of that. Only a few classmates rose early enough for the breakfast hour.

One man was there every morning before we arrived. He bore a remarkable resemblance to actor Stacey Keach, and was the only classmate who always wore a dark suit and tie. He also was the only one with a slight bulge in his jacket near his left shoulder, which all of us concluded meant his was packing “heat.” A name tag he always wore confirmed that possibility. It clearly read: Secret Service.

After saying hello on the first morning, we started to share a table with the agent every morning. He told us he had been a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, and described his work with the Secret Service in detail. He left one thing out; he obviously was there guarding someone, but he never revealed who that was by word or action. We learned later that the Postmaster General of the U.S. was among our classmates, and so was a Marine Corps general, but we never noticed the agent going near either man.

Of course, it didn’t take long for us to observe that an agent wearing a Secret Service name tag wasn’t very secret. And the cold war was pretty warm at the time, and the Russians were just down the street. Our agent shrugged that off. “They know who we are, and we know who they are. Most of us don’t work under cover. But some do, and they’re around at the right times.”

There were no reports of anyone being attacked on embassy row the week we were there, so it seems fair to conclude that our public agent friend and his secret buddies did their jobs well.

About a year later, the annual national meeting of Forest Service information directors was held in a hotel in downtown Salt Lake City. By then, smoking had been banned in meeting rooms, so I stepped out into the hallway at intervals to have a puff. One day at mid-morning a man dressed in a dark suit was standing on a stairway next to my adopted smoking area. He asked what my business was in the hotel, and when I told him he said he too worked for the Federal Government--as a Secret Service agent!

“The First Lady is coming to give a talk at a luncheon for Republican leaders,” he said. “Mrs. Bush will be coming right by here and going into that room. We scouted everything out yesterday.” The room was directly across the hallway from our meeting room. “If you come back about 11:30, you’ll get to see her,” the agent said.

I ventured the opinion it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to attack the extremely popular Barbara Bush. “Not so,” the agent said. “She is a grand lady, but there are lots of crazies out there, and we take no chances.”

Impressed by a Secret Service assessment that I wasn’t a crazy, I showed up shortly before 11:30. It was a good feeling to know the agent trusted me. But he proved he didn’t trust anybody. “You can stand over there,” he said. “Keep your hands out of your pockets. You can clap when she goes by if you want to, but that’s it. Don’t make any moves to go toward her.”

Mrs. Bush arrived on schedule in the middle of an entourage. I noticed several men in dark suits ahead and behind the group. When the doors opened and the assembled luncheon crowd cheered, I added a bit to the applause for her. I didn’t make any other moves.

Michael Contezac occupied an office next to mine when I started my Forest Service career at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison. Contezac had worked in the White House before transferring to FPL. He characterized his job in Washington as “pretty much of an errand boy.” Frequently, people in the communications office handed news releases to Contezac and he was charged with delivering them without delay to a duplicating and mailing operation in another part of the building.

Contezac’s favorite story about White House duty attested to Secret Service efficiency. He said he was trotting down a hallway with a news release one day when he turned a corner and bumped into a tall man. The next thing he knew he was flat on his back on the floor. When he looked up, a .45 was pointed squarely at his eye. “Son, you should take it a little easy around here,” the tall man said.

The tall man was Lyndon Johnson. The gunman, of course, was a Secret Service agent. They take no chances.

Cold Off the Press

Oops. A couple of friends have accused me of negligence for failing to announce here the completion of a project that kept me out of other mischief for nearly two years. So, to make things right, here's the pertinent poop.

Building a Research Legacy: The Intermountain Station 1911-1997, by Richard J. Klade, actually was completed three months ago. However, bureaucratic haggling among the publisher's minions and financing snafus prevented copies from rolling of the presses until just now. Attempts were made to fill some of the 259 pages with accounts (and photos) of people and events somewhat more interesting than those in many dull histories. So it might be worth a look.

The book can be viewed or printed out at two web locations:

www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr184.html offers a way to order a CD or paper copy. There is no charge for a disc or copy, and no shipping charges. Who says there's no free lunch?

www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/25206 lets a reader view or download the document, and also offers the chance to evaluate the book. If you do that, please be kind!

To order a paper copy or CD direct from the publisher, ask for Building a Research Legacy, RMRS-GTR-184. Provide your name and complete mailing address.

Telephone an order to: (970) 498-1392

Fax an order to: (970) 498-1122

E-mail an order to: rschneider@fs.fed.us

Snail mail an order to:

Publications Distribution
Rocky Mountain Research Station
240 West Prospect Road
Fort Collins, CO 80526

Or, if you are among the masses who probably are not intensely interested in getting a look or a copy, but like alternative methods, put a note in an old bottle and toss it into the nearest major body of water. That seldom works, but is interesting and can be a good test of your throwing arm.