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Yet not a tear fell anywhere for Harold Ickes. He had asked for it. Ickes was on vacation when the defense door was shut on him — his first vacation in three years.
For the Secretary, Head Forest Ranger Bill Augustine had had his men tidy a weatherbeaten five-room log cabin on Mt. Storm King in Olympic National Park, the "last big woods" in the U.S., at the extreme upper-lefthand corner of the map. Harold Ickes pulled on a pair of the most unpressed trousers the natives had ever seen, an old grey sweater, a pair of scuffed brown oxfords, and opened his shirt-collar. His young red-haired wife, Jane (Dahlman), changed to tight-fitting blue cowboy dungarees, jodhpur boots, a tan wool jacket. Safe at home, 3,000 miles away on the Olney, Md. farm, were the two babies: two-year-old Harold McEwen Ickes, a beautiful, healthy, roto-section child, with big blue eyes and golden curls; and little four-months-old Jane, who looks like any four-months-old Jane. Without a care or worry the Ickes settled down to vacation.
This week the vacation ends. The famed peninsula rain, which sometimes drips 122 inches a year, washed them out. Ickes looked tired, his face grey where it was not floridly blotched. He growled to a reporter: "I haven't hrd a vacation yet." Said Jane Ickes: "All this talk of vacation is so much fluff."
In the rare bright spells Jane, so rain-weary she wanted to leave, slipped into a dark red swim suit, plunged into chilly Lake Crescent. Sometimes she chopped wood for the fireplace. For exercise the Secretary took hikes among the giant trees, where the wet ferns grow head-high and the epochs-old windfalls of trees are 50 feet high and as solid as a stone fort. Once they went salmon fishing—a pure public-relations gesture from Honest Harold, who loathes the water and once grumbled at riding on the President's yacht Potomac with a crack: "I'm willing to die for the President but I'll be damned if I get seasick for him."
The little fireball reformer just didn't know how to relax and have a good time on his vacation. He kept his assistant and his private secretary busy day & night (living at the Rosemary Inn near by they were losing money; Government expense accounts allow by statute only $5 per day). He answered heavy daily mail from Washington, talked long distance two to four times daily with his colleagues, wrote a magazine article on the gasoline problem.
Most important of all, Mr. Secretary Ickes delivered a shrewd speech in Tacoma to win the Northwest to his side in the great three-cornered battle which is now going on for control of the new defense power projects—a three-cornered battle in which Ickes is arrayed against Leland Olds of the Federal Power Commission on one side and all the sponsors of the Regional Valley Authorities on the other. In his speech, dedicating the Tacoma power substation to J. D. Ross, the late public power pioneer, he hit the farthest north any New Deal figure has come in programming the Administration's future power policy: