Excerpt from the Reminiscences of John B. Oakes, Part 4, Session 1, December 3, 1996, pp. 333–36.

After I'd been at the Times in the Sunday department, which was my first job after the war, after I got out of the army—five years of the army, I might say—instead of returning to the Washington Post I was offered a job by the Sunday editor of the Times and I did accept that—

Q: That was Lester Markel.

Lester Markel. And there are a lot of other things to be said about that, but I would want to say right now in this connection, that after I'd been working in the Sunday department in the "Review of the Week" section, as we call it, for a year or two, I asked Markel if we shouldn't have a conservation column. I think maybe I'd already left the "Review of the Week" and had become a member of the editorial department. The only point of my talking about this is in connection with the environment business and my own interest in it. I persuaded Lester—yes, it was 1950 or '51—that since the New York Times was carrying columns on a lot less important subjects like bridge and movie reviews and everything else, I thought that there ought to be a place in the Times for a column dealing with conservation, conservation news, which I felt we were neglecting totally in our news columns, although I was in the process of trying to beef it up in the editorial field. We'd always been pretty good in the Times on conservation, but on a very spasmodic basis, and only on certain particular areas, like the Adirondacks.

I persuaded Lester Markel, who was very dubious and almost thought it was kind of a joke, to allow me to run a column on environment news or conservation news in the Sunday Times, once a month only. He did it almost to humor me, I think, because he certainly wasn't very interested in it. But he did at least agree, and he put it into the travel section of the Times. He said maybe that had some relevance.

In any case, I had gotten an okay, so once a month entirely apart from my regular duties, which were, by this time, 1951, I was on the editorial board, writing editorials for the Times. Once a month for the next ten years I produced a column dealing with conservation, what we would today call environmental matters. And I think, although, goodness, I couldn't take an oath on this, but I think it was the first environment column to appear in a major American newspaper. And it dealt entirely with what I considered conservation news. Sometimes just tidbits, sometimes longer pieces on some area that was being protected or that needed to be protected, and it was much more on land and natural history and wildlife protection than it was on some of the other aspects of what we call environmental protection now, like clean water. Also very strong against giant dams, which I also wrote about editorially—the construction of these huge dams was going on at a great rate in the fifties—because of their very adverse environmental effects.

But anyway, for this column, I occasionally enlisted outside contributors. When I was going to be away I invited a few quite prominent conservationists. Nobody ever used the word environment.

Q: Until what? The sixties?

The column lasted just about ten years, and if I remember correctly—I actually have the file of that somewhere. From 1951 to '61. It was when I became editor of the editorial page, which was 1961, that I decided that I really couldn't continue.

I was finding it increasingly hard to get the time to do my once-a-month column. And I decided that when I was named editor of the editorial page, primarily because I just didn't want to take time out because I was going to be giving 500 percent of my time to that job and none other, and I foresaw that.

But I also wasn't so sure that as editor of the editorial page I ought to be writing a column on the side anyway, and I didn't think that was— somehow I just didn't think that was appropriate. But I wasn't going to give the time to it anyway, so I stopped it. As I recall, it was exactly ten years. And I didn't write all the columns, because I did get outside contributors now and then to write them. People like Dick Neuberger, Senator [Richard Lewis] Neuberger [no relation], who was a young and very ardent conservationist from Oregon during his short life. I wouldn't be surprised if—I don't remember now. I had other people contributing from time to time. But I wrote most of the columns. I am kind of proud, in a way, of that column, because I really think—it certainly wasn't the first time anybody was writing on conservation in the Times, but I think it was the first major newspaper column.