Paul Schullery interview -- July 24, 2008

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Paul Schullery Edited Transcript – July 24, 2008
Fly Fishing Collection
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Western Washington University Libraries Paul Schullery
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Fly Fishing Oral History Program
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This interview with Paul Schullery was conducted at his home in Bozeman, Montana, on July 24, 2008. The interviewer is Tamara Belts.
TB: How did you happen to become a park ranger in Yellowstone National Park?
PS: On a trip from Ohio around the West in 1969 with a friend, we visited another friend. We had all been high school buddies, and this happened when we were between our junior and senior years in college. This friend had a summer job as a South Entrance gate ranger in Yellowstone National Park. His job was to sit there in the kiosk, wearing his ranger uniform and handing out maps and information. That sounded to me like a fun way to spend a summer, so in 1972 I applied and was given a job.
By 1972, I‘d already dropped out of graduate school for the first time (I had been a history major in graduate school and I eventually did finish a master‘s degree). I didn‘t really anticipate staying in Yellowstone for a long time. After four or five years of college, I realized that I had no idea what I was going to do if and when I grew up, so I thought I would just do stuff that sounded interesting. I spent a year digging ditches and then decided it was time to do something else. I only knew that I would try it for a while. It was a seasonal job. After the summer, I would look for something else.
But as it happened, I fell in love with Yellowstone. I was hooked and I stayed. Even when I left the Yellowstone area for a few years now and then, Yellowstone was still the center of my world and that led to a whole bunch of interests—natural history, photography, writing, history, and, of course, fly fishing.
TB: Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?
PS: I think I knew it for a long time before it became conscious because I can remember when I was just a kid, thinking up stories, and occasionally writing them down. When I first decided to drop out of graduate school, maybe a year before I went to Yellowstone for the first time, my graduate advisor asked me if I‘d ever thought about writing for a living. He said, ―You know, you‘re a pretty good writer, you might consider that.‖ That was the first time, I think, that it had become real in my mind so that I serously considered it.
It had always been something I thought I would enjoy, but it had never really occurred to me that I could go ahead and do something like that. I don‘t know why not. I think it was because nothing permanent had occurred to me. I had no idea what I should do next, or how to go about finding something. But once my professor suggested it to me, I started thinking more about it and within a few years I started to publish things. I suppose I was kind of slow getting started, but it takes me a while to think about things.
Yellowstone provided so many opportunities, so much practice in everything to do with writing and researching. And Yellowstone eventually re-engaged me with American history, and I went back to my master‘s program. It took me six years to get through a two-year master‘s program, because I had discovered life, and Yellowstone. I was busy. But every now and then I would go back to school for a little while. When I wrote my master‘s thesis, it was a study of the Yellowstone Archives. Yellowstone has its administrative record collection dating back to the beginning, back to the 1870s. It‘s fabulous; it‘s now an official branch of the National Archives.