Freeman
TildenFreeman
TildenFreeman Tilden (1883-1980) received the national level Pugsley Medal in 1962, “For providing through his discerning observations, penetrating analyses and distinguished writing, a nationwide understanding of the purposes and objectives of national and state parks and the principles relating to their selection, establishment, use, and management.” The citation went on to say, “Through his studies and writings, Mr. Tilden has exerted an exceptional influence on the park conservation programs of this country.”
Tilden was widely revered as a teacher, mentor, and philosopher. His seminal work, Interpreting Our Heritage, discussed six principles of interpretation and is recognized as required reading for anyone pursuing a career in the field. It was originally published in 1957, but was reprinted on several occasions. However, Tilden was much more than a primary architect in the building of a professional interpretive foundation. Before he wrote his first words about parks or interpretation, he had already had an unusually prolific and successful career.
He was Born in 1883 in Malden, Massachusetts, north of Boston, as the eighth of Samuel and Millicent Tilden=s nine children. The son of a newspaperman, young Tilden soon joined the literate minority. His father taught him long passages of Shakespeare plays, which he recited to anyone who would listen. He was educated by private tutors and was just fourteen when he started contributing a column and book reviews to his father=s paper, the Boston Transcript.
Although his father expected his son to attend Harvard University after graduating from high school, Tilden chose instead to travel the world. He learned several languages and soon became a foreign correspondent. His journalism career took him to the Boston Herald in 1904; Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier 1905-06; New York Evening Post 1907-08; Standard (English Newspaper) Buenos Aires 1908-09; London (England) Daily Sketch, 1910. During the period 1920-23, he was European correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal, during which time he lived in England.
In addition to his role as correspondent he wrote short stories, and dozens of them were published in the Ladies Home Journal, Country Gentlemen, Collier=s Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and many other popular periodicals. Some of his stories were serialized over several issues of a magazine, and one of his stories was even printed in a soft-cover booklet that was tucked inside cigarette packages as a premium. The writer=s life seemed to suit Tilden, who was extremely intelligent, well-read, and genteel. He was also a keen observer of human nature and an adaptable wordsmith. He wrote poems, radio scripts, and plays, including one that ran a year on Broadway. He spent a great deal of time in New York where his literary associates included H. L. Menken, O. Henry, and other masters of the craft.
When he turned his attention to the novel, he succeeded at that too, publishing several between 1918 and 1928. These included, That Night, and other stories, Hearst International Library (& Methuen, London), 1915; Second Wind, B.W. Huebach, 1917; Khaki, Macmillan, 1918; Mr. Podd, Macmillan (& Heinemann, London), 1923; The Virtuous Husband, Macmillan, 1925; Wild Money, Doubleday Page, 1927; The Spanish Prisoner, Doubleday, Doran, 1928; A World in Debt, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936; Better See George, Harper Brothers, 1941. His plays included: Five O’Clock which premiered at Fulton Theatre, New York City, 1920-21; and Old Man Crabtree, which played countrywide by amateur organizations and was first produced in 1922.
Tilden met Mabel Martin, a former schoolteacher, during a trip to Ludlow, Vermont, and the two were married in October 1909. After the wedding, they lived in New York City but traveled often. In fact, none of the couple=s four childrenBMillicent, Jane, Paul Mason and FreemanBwere born in the same city. During the children=s early years, the family lived an adventurous, nomadic life both in the United States and abroad. Paul Mason, Tilden (who became editor of National Parks Magazine) told a friend he=d attended school in thirteen different locations.
After hop-scotching across the country, the Tildens moved to the small town of Warner in southern New Hampshire in 1929. Although Tilden continued to travel during winters while he worked on projects, he was most at home in Warner. He savored the pace and participatory nature of the village. It was also in Warner that Tilden penned his own periodical, The Open Door, in 1939. For a dollar, subscribers got Tilden=s take on everything from the current state of political affairs (he compared New England=s tent caterpillar population boom and bust to the New Deal) to the collegiate trend of goldfish swallowing (he suggested, tongue in cheek, that the cost of goldfish would cut into the budget for college books).
In each issue of his periodical, Tilden also shared personal news in a column called AChronicles of Ledgewood.@ Here he caught readers up on his choice of chickens to raise, fall leaf tours to Vermont, and encounters with nature, such as this one, published in the August issue:
The other day, after daily struggling at the typewriter for ideas that were coy, I took myself up the road to a nine-acre field, in the center of which stands a pine....Well, I threw myself down in the grass at the edge of the shadow of the pine, and stared up at the sky, which was not the steely blue so common at this time of year, but a blue which I have not seen since last I looked down upon the Mediterranean from the hills back of Nice. And I lay there content....I floated on a wave of untellable joy. I was entirely conscious of what was happening to me. I said to myself. AThis feeling has something to do with beauty. Here I am under my own pine tree; I am perfectly conscious. That is George Freeman over there, planting corn. And yet I am no longer tied to all this around me. For a moment, I am permitted to go outside the boundary I should have been loathe to speak like this a few years ago, fearing to be ridiculed. But I lost my inhibitions in 1929, along with some other small possessions.
Even as he was rooted in the granite hills of New Hampshire, Tilden maintained his ties in Washington and New York, where he belonged to the Player=s Club in Manhattan. It was there in 1941, when Tilden was fifty-eight, that he met a military officer who encouraged him to write about heavy armament. Tilden told friends he had tired of writing fiction and was looking for a more serious channel for his writing. Just before he agreed, though, he met Newton Drury, then director of the National Park Service. Drury painted a vivid and enticing picture of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. Tilden, ever the traveling adventurer, had always been a conservationist and he was intrigued. Thus, in 1945 he began consulting and writing for the NPS. His early work with the NPS involved formulating a plan for public relations and interpretation. During subsequent years, he studied and reported on the national parks, the state parks, and interpretive programs in national, state, and local parks.
A few years later, when publishing mogul Alfred Knopf developed an interest in conservation after a trip out west, he asked Drury to write a book about the national parks. Drury, in turn, suggested Tilden write the book: AI am confident that anything written by Mr. Tilden on the National Park System would illuminate the tropic. He has a delicate sense of humor and a keen perception of human values....I am confident that it [the book] would be profound without being stuffy, and think that it would sell,@ he wrote to Knopf. The resulting book, The National Parks: What They Mean to You and Me, pleased the publisher so much that Knopf called it Athe best book ever written@ on the national parks. Americans agreed. In droves they were slipping behind the wheels of their Buick Roadmasters and Studebaker Conestogas, pulling onto highways, and heading for the country=s scenic wonders. Now they had Tilden=s eloquent descriptions and warm anecdotes to guide them. One of the most eloquent passages in the book occurs when he writes about Grand Canyon and is moved to classify types of visitors to the park. After describing the first category, those who go as casual sightseers, and the second category, those who seek to know the meaning of what they see, he goes on:
There remains another group, who visit the national parks and make the most important discovery: they discover themselves. When they explain: ‘I didn’t know there were such beautiful and interesting places!’ what they are really saying is that they did not know that they had within them such capacity for the realization of beauty and significance. They fall in love with the national parks, not for the spectacular features within them, but for the essence of them. They do not state this in self-conscious words, but they feel it. They cultivate the pleasurable hobby of dabbling, second-hand, in the greatest of all mysteries, partly revealed, but only partly, in the study of the natural sciences; our place in nature. Whatever of this mystery can be learned, can be learned only where areas of size sufficient to preserve natural conditions in integrity are insulated from the march of utility.
Tilden=s travels had left him impressed with the things he saw in the parks, with one notable exception: the state of interpretation. Tilden believed that more attention needed to be paid to this critical interaction with visitors, and so in 1952 he urged NPS director Conrad Wirth to undertake a study of interpretation. Wirth agreed, and once a grant was secured, Tilden was contracted to do a “reappraisal of the basic principles which underlie the program of natural and historical interpretation in the National Park System.” As preparation for this mission, Tilden led tours at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine, Florida. He was seventy-two at the time.
The acclaimed, Interpreting Our Heritage, was published two years later. Other books followed, including The State Parks – Their Meaning in American Life and a profile of E. Jay Haynes, a pioneer photographer. And even then, Tilden did not stop working. He was a frequent guest speaker at the National Park Service Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where he suggested students might benefit from watching less television, and implored them to consider how their work might help visitors understand themselvesBnot by knowing the name of a flower or the date of the battle, but by finding meaning through the inspiration and mystery of nature.
After Mabel died in 1962, Tilden lived with his son Paul Mason and Paul=s wife near Washington, D.C., for a while, but he eventually wandered back to the eastern woodlands and bought a farm in Warren, Maine. He continued to advise the NPS. For example, in 1970 he embarked on an eleven-month odyssey criss-crossing the United States by automobile at the age of 87 to advise director George Hartzog on how the NPS could best respond to the energy crisis. In 1982, the NPS established the Freeman Tilden Award for excellence in interpretation, which is the most coveted recognition of an interpreter’s work.