Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/69

 Chapter Three mice." Charles B. Lipman, dean of the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted seeds of plants that grew in the whitest gypsum formations. The University of Chicago's Charles E. Olmsted, an instructor of botany, visited six national parks and monuments of the Southwest that year, and wrote to Tom Charles: "We still feel that … White Sands National Monument is more than worthy of its status and preservation." Olmsted "recommended it as something truly unique—both scenically and emotionally," especially the "sunrise and sunset … over those strange white dunes against the purple jagged mountains."

For general public promotion, Tom Charles offered similar access to the monument via correspondence. Mrs. A.F. Quisenberry of El Paso wrote to Charles in March to inform him that FDR's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, would visit her that month. Charles suggested a circle tour of Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, promising that "Government officials want to co-operate with you in protecting her visit from over crowded conditions." Theater operators in Albuquerque and Portales wanted sacks of gypsum for use in the lobbies of their movie houses. So did Coe Howard, state representative from Portales, who asked for a truckload of gypsum for New Mexico's exhibit in Amarillo's "Tri-State Fair" (Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). Tom Charles offered to lend one of the park service trucks for the task. If Frank Pinkley refused, he then remarked: "Possibly I can work my friend the Governor [Tingley] to send a [state] highway truck over with a little sand in it." (Pinkley rejected both options.) Then the Rock Island railroad mounted in the window of its Chicago offices a display of White Sands gypsum as a travel promotion. D.M. Wootton, publicity manager for the Rock Island, noted the prominence of the exhibit in the "Insurance Exchange Building" in the busy Chicago "Loop." Wootton's gesture prompted Charles to exclaim to the NPS's Isabelle Story: "I do not know how I can ever repay my friends … for the many nice things they say and do for the Great White Sands."

While scientific research and popular venues had been part of Charles' strategy for promotion of the monument, in 1938 three new concepts appeared: a children's story about the dunes by NPS naturalist Natt Dodge; Charles' efforts to tell the tale of the