By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

Arundel Newspapers Staff Writer k

President Herbert Hoover built a school and established a “Summer White House” in the mountains which were to become Shenandoah National Park.

Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. vacationed and honeymooned there at his family’s “Bird’s Nest” cottage, and later, as governor of Virginia, he led the drive to acquire land for a park in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking before 5,000 assembled at Big Meadows on July 3, 1936, dedicated the park’s 1,76,429 acres “to the present and sueceedmg generations of America . . . presenting the beauty and wealth of the hills, and the mountains and the plains and the trees and the streams.”

But the three statesmen played only bit parts in the birth of a park. The starring role belonged to a showman — George Freeman Pollock, a little giant who dreamed big dreams and staged mountain top extravaganzas worthy of P. T. Barnum. He charmed snakes, keeping as many as five rattlers loose in the bathroom of his Skyland cottage, and he charmed politicians, winning them over to his plan for a national park in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

As a boy in Washington, D. C., Mr. Pollock preferred nature’s classroom to the schoolhouse. He played hookey more often than he played student, skipping reading, writing and arithmetic lessons to go hunting, fishing, camping and hiking in the woods with Dicky Daddies, his beagle. “I longed for the wilderness and for adventure, and all efforts to interest me in anything else failed,” he recalled in his autobiography, Skyland: The Heart of the Shenandoah National Park.

To escape the tedium of the desk and blackboard, he convinced the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist to take him on as an unpaid assistant. He learned quickly, graduating from skinning specimens to collecting small animals in the field.