Janet celebrates her 75th anniversary in the Park, part 3

Continuing from “Janet celebrates her 75th anniversary in the park, part 2” . . .

During the summers of 1940, 1941, and 1942, we stayed in a room in the bunkhouse. It was a long, narrow building divided into small rooms that primarily housed bus drivers for the Yellowstone Park Company. In our room, which, I think, had a window alongside the door, there was just room for two double beds, one or two chairs, and a small table with a wash basin and a cooking element, where Mother improvised meals for three, since Daddy ate with the other employees. A chamber pot was kept under one bed. I believe we had two such rooms one of those years.

The bunkhouse was located behind the ranger station and away from the back door of the Inn, an area now part of the big west parking lot. I was happy to find the exact location on an old map, since the bunkhouse would have been torn down long ago. I snapped this photo of the map during Lee Whittlesey’s June 2006 Southern Park History class.

Calling Old Faithful Inn our home

Some of my most vivid memories center around the Inn. We spent relatively little time inside the lobby. In fact, I believe Mother made sure we were never in the way of the tourists or the Inn employees. But I remember that occasionally a bellhop would pop some corn in an oversized corn popper in the lobby’s huge stone fireplace. A few times during our summers in the park we were taken up the many stairs to the top of the lobby and out to the roof. I remember the many flags always snapping in the wind and the unique two-person wicker chairs, shaped like an S. From the roof I saw an Old Faithful Geyser nighttime eruption lit by a spotlight a few times, but that was usually too late for us little ones to stay up. It was thrilling to see.

Another thing that made a big impression on me was the unique style of the balcony desks. Joan and I would often sit at these and play–or perhaps she would read to me by the light of the center lamp. The desks there now are not the originals designed by Robert Reamer, but they are very similar to those I remember.

Sometimes we would watch Daddy as he got out his large red megaphone and called out the names of people who were to ride in the big yellow buses. I remember feeling that he was a very important person indeed with that responsibility.

Returning to the Inn many years later, I realized that the area around Daddy’s transportation office had been changed. Where you now find a large window and the porters’ stand was a door to the back of the Inn and the place where we could find Daddy during working hours.

More from Janet’s memoirs in the next post in this series . . . .

---

CREDIT: The photo of the partner writing desk is by Leslie Kilduff. You can find it on page 77 of Yellowstone Treasures, fourth edition.

The full article “Celebrating an Old Faithful Area Seventieth Anniversary,” was published in August 2009 in The Geyser Gazer Sput, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 5-8.
Janet wrote a longer version of these memoirs at the instigation of Park Historian Lee Whittlesey, and they are now preserved in the library of the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center in Gardiner, Montana.