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Show 50 employment service vias hiring people for the Youth Conservation Corps. Karen applied and was accepted. It was 1971 and the Youth Conservation Corps, just getting started, had opened its first 64 summer camps all over the United States. It had been set up by the Department of Interior, the Forest Service, and some state agencies in order to give 15-to-l8 year olds a chance to learn about environment. At the same time the kids would do constructive work and earn minimum hourly wage. YCC positions were evenly divided among girls and boys, with the girls expected to do the same kind of as the boys, physical work/ At some "residential" camps the crew members lived in tents or bunkhouses or college dormitories; other enrollees lived at home and commuted to camp each day. For ten vieeks that summer, from Monday through Friday, Karen lived at a YCC camp operated by the Forest Service not too far from her home. Most of the 50 Corps members at the camp were high school students; only Karen and one other girl had a year of college. "We did a little bit of everything," Karen says. "We cut trees which had fallen along trails, cleared away brush, and planted new young trees. I remember an awful lot of painting that summer, mostly of Forest Service cabins. You wouldn't think they would take so long to paint, but log cabins must have twice as much surface area as anything else." At least once a week the staff members gave environmental education programs - they called them investigations - where the young crew members experimented with soil or water or forest ecology. "One of the things |