Three old men stood and mingled among the crowd Wednesday. One leaned heavily on a cane, another relied on hearing aids to pick up snippets of conversation, and the third recalled seeing Mount Rushmore when it had three presidential faces, not four.
It was very long ago, indeed, when they were young and poor and desperate for work.
So they joined something called the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era program that planted about 3 billion trees, built countless trails in the wilderness, addressed erosion concerns and forever changed the course of their lives.
The CCC, as it was known, employed 3 million young men like them. They earned $30 a month and sent $25 home to mom and dad. The CCC was also a reflection of those imperfect times – blacks were separate from whites, and no women were hired.
These days, the Civilian Conservation Corps is an all but forgotten sliver of history. It's a story 91-year-old Bob Griffiths of Wilton has spent a good part of his life trying to keep alive while his fellow "CCC boys" succumbed to old age and illness.
On Wednesday, Griffiths was there on 24th Street for the unveiling of a bronze, life-sized statue of a CCC boy, joking with the small crowd that he was not, in fact, the model for the shirtless and chiseled youth leaning on an ax.
The statue will be housed at the headquarters of the California Conservation Corps, which began in 1976 and was modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created within a month of taking office.
Griffiths, who has always gone by "Griff," joined the CCC in 1935 because his father told him to. He stayed for three years.
"It took us off the streets and gave us inspiration. It was the beginning of my life," said Griffiths, who remains vibrant and witty despite his age and declining health.
Griffiths went on to enjoy a career in the Army Corps of Engineers and then as a civilian in the Air Force. He has been retired for 40 years.
Thirty years ago, he founded the National Association of Civilian Conservation Corps Alumni. He also raised much of the $20,000 cost of the statue.
Herbert Perry, 85, of Sacramento says that without the CCC, it's likely he would have become a painting contractor rather than a retired economics professor with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.
He joined the CCC in 1940, not long after his father was killed in a truck accident. Stationed outside Placerville, Perry got to meet a variety of young, middle-class men who talked about things he had never considered, including going to college.
"It changed me quite a bit," said Perry, whose father was a Portuguese immigrant who never learned to read or write. "I had never traveled very far. I met new people and had new experiences. I could see a lot of opportunities I never even knew about. I don't know what would have happened otherwise."
After stints in a steel mill, a foundry and at sea with the Merchant Marine, Perry earned degrees from Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, before traveling to England for his doctorate. He enjoyed a long career as a professor at California State University, Sacramento.
Arnie Blumhardt, 88, of Sacramento was 5-foot-4 and 120 pounds when he enlisted in the CCC in South Dakota. He grew up on a farm and remembers riding a pony to school.
"I didn't have a job. I didn't have anything. There was no work at the time. I had finished the eighth grade and there was no high school to go to," he said. "They put me on a train and we went all the way across the state to the Black Hills."
As Blumhardt recounted his story in detail Wednesday morning on 24th Street, he was flanked by a dozen current California Conservation Corps members following in his long-forgotten footsteps. The young men and women start at $8 an hour and view the CCC as a place to better themselves while bettering their state.
Fifty-one CCC crews have been dispatched to fight 18 wildfires throughout California.
Years from now, there may be a statue-unveiling ceremony for them, too, when they are old and overlooked, with their hearing aids and walking sticks, and guilty sometimes of going on too long about the good old days.
Call The Bee's Blair Anthony Robertson, (916) 321-1099.
