Two members recall service in conservation corps

POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. -- The Civilian Conservation Corps provided more than 3 million young men with a sense of stability in an economy that could not provide them with work, according to former CCC member and Poplar Bluff resident Roy Hayes.

Hayes was one of only two original CCC members to attend a recent meeting of the National Association of Civilian Conservation Corps Alumni Poplar Bluff Chapter 62.

Chapter 62 was once 80 members strong, but more than 70 years after the CCC was disbanded, it has dwindled to Hayes, 91, and Neal Holloway, 84, of Puxico, Mo. The club has been opened to wives, sons and daughters of former members.

Hayes and Holloway shared their memories of the program that provided about $700 million in wages to CCC men and their dependents between 1933 and 1942. Members of the New Deal program were paid $30 a month, $5 to keep and $25 for their families, in exchange for work in the nation's public forests, lands and parks that visitors still enjoy today.

"It was something that helped people that wanted to be helped," Hayes said, adding people laughed at then-president Franklin Roosevelt when he proposed creating the corps. Yet, within about a month of his inauguration, the corps began employing a generation of men who had been unable to find employment.

The CCC are credited with planting more than 3 billion trees, constructing roads, building nature trails and many other public projects.

Within Missouri, including camps near Van Buren, Eminence and Piedmont, CCC workers built 240 bridges, sloped and terraced 1,600 miles of land in the Soil Erosion Project, strung telephone lines and created ponds and refuges for wildlife.

Hayes joined the corps in 1936, after graduating as valedictorian of Broseley High School. He planned to save the $25 sent to his family to pay for a semester of college in Cape Girardeau.

Hayes later served in the U.S. Navy and funded his education with the G.I. Bill.

Holloway went on to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps. His family now owns Holloway Lumber in Puxico.