Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/102

90 be linked to the churning process of World War II. Thus the experiences of Johnwill Faris and his co-workers speak not only to life in the dunes, but also to the redefinition of the park service in the boom years after 1945.

A quick glimpse of the uniqueness of White Sands at war can be grasped from perusal of visitation data for the years 1940–1945. Despite institution in the late 1930s of an entrance fee (adjusted in 1941 from 25 cents per person to 50 cents per vehicle), the numbers remained far greater than those for comparable NPS units elsewhere. Using 1939 as a base for measurement (59,000 visitors), White Sands saw visitation peak in 1941 at 73,000, then decline by 1944 some 54 percent (to 35,000). Yet the number of visitors soon rebounded the following year to 56,000, and then reached a trajectory in the early postwar era (over 100,000) that continued for the rest of the century. Given the fiscal constraints of wartime, the workload facing NPS personnel at the dunes never eased for any length of time, placing pressure on resources, facilities, and staff that few other parks could match.

Visitation for the years 1940–1941 (up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941) showed little change from the preceding decade. Scholars, film crews, and government officials drove through the park entrance on inspections for research, entertainment, or supervision. In December 1940, Paramount Pictures sent a camera crew to film Tom Charles, now the proprietor of the burgeoning concession, as he drove tourists over the dunes. Charles and his "White Sands Service Company" vehicle thus advertised the park to millions of movie goers who saw the Paramount series, "Unusual Occupations," on their neighborhood screens.

Visitors also poured into White Sands on the "Play Days" of 1940 and 1941, lured in the latter year by the landing at the dunes of a commercial airplane owned by American Airlines. The Alamogordo chamber of commerce saw this as excellent publicity for its efforts to connect the basin with the outside world, and park service officials acquiesced, though they warned eager tourism boosters not to expect permission for a permanent landing field. Perhaps ignoring Frank Pinkley's earlier rebukes of Tom Charles' drives over the dunes, Hugh Miller, superintendent of southwestern monuments, identified the "landing strip" as "a satisfactory location, now almost as level as a floor and devoid of vegetation so that no permanent disfigurement of the area would result." Then using words that once brought the wrath of NPS officials down on Custodian Charles, Miller concluded: "Evidence of any special smoothing would be obliterated by the first windy day."