Welcome, friends, to the home page of the men who served in the Civilian Conservation Corps at Camp Cedar Hollow, in what is now Cedar Hollow State Park, in the Ozark hills of southern Missouri.

My name is Cornelius Friedlander. I am 81 years old. I was born in the city of St. Louis in 1918 and grew up on the south side in a flat with no hot water, the third of six children. My father lost his job at the shoe factory in 1931 and did not find steady work again for five years. In the spring of 1936, when I was 18, I signed up for the CCC at the relief office, and on April the 14th of that year I got off an Army truck at Cedar Hollow with a paper sack holding everything I owned. I stayed two years.

After that I was an Army engineer in the war, in France and Germany, and when I came home I went to work as a carpenter. I carried a union card for 35 years. I have built a great many things, but I have never been prouder of anything than the stone shelters on the ridge trail at Cedar Hollow, which I helped build when I was 19 years old and which are standing there still.

I learned to make this page in a class at our senior center this spring. My instructor is a patient young woman and I am a slow typist, so please forgive any errors. It is my hope that this page will help us find the men of our camp we have lost touch with, and that it will tell our grandchildren what we did. If you were at Cedar Hollow, or your father or grandfather was, I would very much like to hear from you.

Fourteen of the old boys came back this year. In 1983, which was the fiftieth year of the CCC, we had about forty, and we filled the Dining Lodge so full that the park people set up tables on the terrace. This year we fit at three tables with room to spare. But we had the wives, and the widows of five of our men, and children and grandchildren, and a great-grandson in a carrier, sixty-one people in all, and it was a very fine day.

We gathered at ten o'clock. Mr. Glen Blackstone, who at 83 was the oldest man there, led the Pledge of Allegiance, and then we called the roll. Each man stood when his name was called and said his camp job, as we used to say our names at roll call. Then I read the Last Roll, the names of the men we have lost since we last met, and we had a minute of silence. Mr. Thomas Poulin's grandson played Taps on a trumpet from the terrace, and I do not mind saying that not many of us had dry eyes.

After the dinner (fried chicken, green beans, potato salad and four kinds of pie, potluck) the park sent up a pickup truck and a van and took those of us who did not care to walk down to the dam. The rest of us walked. It is a quarter mile and downhill, and the coming back is uphill, as it was in 1937. The water was high and clear and running over the spillway the way we built it to do. Mr. Johnny Stamey put his hand on the stone and said, "Still there." It is still there.

The park's naturalist set up a tape recorder in the side room and nine of the men sat down and told their stories for the park's records. I was one of them. She says she will make copies for anyone who wants one.

Pictures were taken by several people. Mine are at the drugstore. When my granddaughter can help me put them on the scanner at the senior center I will add them here.

The 2000 reunion will be the third Saturday in September as always. We voted to keep meeting as long as two of us can get up the hill.

The camps were run by the Army. Our commanding officer was a reserve officer, Captain Joseph Conroy, and he ran Cedar Hollow like an Army post, with reveille and retreat and inspections, but we were not soldiers and we did not drill with rifles. The work in the woods was run by the park service men, the superintendent and his foremen. So we had two sets of bosses, one for the camp and one for the job, and we learned to keep both of them happy.

A day in camp, as near as I can remember it:

The pay was thirty dollars a month. Twenty-five of it went home to your family by allotment check, and you kept five. That five dollars bought cigarettes and candy at the camp canteen and a picture show in town on Saturday if the truck was going. It does not sound like much today. My mother told me years later that my twenty-five dollars was what kept the six of us in our flat during the winter of 1937, and that my father cried the first time the check came, because it was the first money in the house in a year that was not charity.

The uniforms were Army hand-me-downs from the World War, wool olive drab, and they did not fit anybody. The supply sergeant threw them at you by guess. I was skinny then and my first pair of trousers would have gone around me twice. We traded among ourselves until things fit, and there was a man in camp, Leslie Brady, who could sew and who took in more trousers than any tailor in St. Louis. The new green dress uniforms came along after my time.

The mess hall fed two hundred men three times a day. We were boys from the city who had been going hungry and boys from the hill farms who had been going hungry, and we ate like it. The Army weighed us when we came in and again later, and I gained eighteen pounds in my first three months. Kitchen police came around to everybody. I peeled enough potatoes at Cedar Hollow to plant the state of Missouri.

The barracks were long wooden buildings with a stove at each end, and in the winter the man nearest the stove roasted and the man in the middle froze. The first company that came in 1934 lived in tents until the barracks were up. We heard about those tents for years.

School. In the evenings there were classes, and some of the men learned to read and write there. I took typing, which I am using right now, sixty-three years later, and woodworking, which became my life's work.

Everything was done by hand or near it. We had a few trucks, a tractor, an air compressor for the drills, and dynamite, and the rest was picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, rock bars and boys. The stone came out of the hillsides in the park and the logs came out of the woods. Our foremen wanted the buildings to look as though they had grown there, and I think they do.

When the camp closed in the fall of 1941 the barracks were sold and hauled off. If you walk up the old camp road past the maintenance shed you can still find the concrete footings and the steps of the mess hall in the trees, and the stone flagpole base, which Mr. Arthur Stickles found under the leaves in 1983.

For the young people who may read this. The Civilian Conservation Corps was started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the spring of 1933, in the worst of the Depression, and it lasted until 1942, when the war took the men and the money. It gave work to young men who were single and out of work and whose families needed help, and it put them to work on the land: planting trees, fighting forest fires, stopping erosion, and building parks. People called it Roosevelt's Tree Army.

About three million young men served in the CCC in those nine years, in camps in every state. They planted something like three billion trees. A great many of the state parks you visit today have roads, trails, lodges and dams that were built by CCC boys, and you can usually tell them by the stonework.

For most of us it was the first steady work we ever had, and the first time we had enough to eat. I went into the Army in 1942 already knowing how to make a bed, take an order and work all day, and so did a great many CCC boys. The Army was glad to have us.