“That evolved into an interest for sharing history with people and making it interesting to everyone so that they would want to learn about great things that happened in America,” she says. It also evolved into her first book, “What Dreams We Have: The Wright Brothers and Their Hometown of Dayton, Ohio,” which became a sales item to help promote the park. Honious stayed put for 15 years in Dayton, unusual for park service staff, she says. “People tend to move a lot. Parks are small and if you want to do something different or move up the ladder, you often need to move to gain that experience.”
JUGGLING
But then an opportunity did arise and she landed in St. Louis to be the chief of museum services and interpretation of what is now Gateway Arch National Park. It was another chance for her to create museum exhibits and a park that would interest people and foster their curiosity about history and America.
‘FLAT HATS’
CC Alumni Protecting and Preserving Our National Parks
AND MORE
“When I got there, there was the beginning of an international design competition to redo the park, and the kickoff of a $380 million dollar public-private partnership. … I helped with the development and design of a new 55,000-square-foot museum that’s underneath the arch and then the redo of the building and how it would operate and be staffed.”
By Kirsten Akens ’96
Photo by Melissa Lyttle
If your picture of a National Park Service employee is a ranger with green pants, a gold badge, and a broad-brimmed, quaddented flat hat guiding people through the wild outdoors, you wouldn’t be wrong. Assigned to 419 designated areas and more than 150 related areas across the country, many of the more than 20,000 permanent, temporary, and seasonal employees still greet visitors in this uniform. But park service properties go way beyond our natural heritage — as do the jobs (and clothing) of a handful of CC alumni we spoke with who steward our national park system.
A N N D E I N E S H O N I OUS ’87 Twenty-eight years ago, Ann Deines Honious ’87 (pictured above) began her employment with the park service as a historian for the National Capital Region in Washington, D.C. She spent two years surveying structures along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park; documenting them, their locations, and the condition they were in; and conducting research to determine their eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places. From there, she headed to Dayton, Ohio, to be the historian at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. “I was lucky in that it was a brand-new park. I was the second employee there,” she says. “I started two years after it was authorized by Congress and I got to experience the development and the creation of a national park.” Honious also got to tackle a wider variety of tasks than is typical for a historian, from planning storytelling and exhibits to helping develop management documents.
28 | COLORADO COLLEGE BULLETIN | SPRING 2020
Five years ago, Honious moved once again, to take on the role of deputy superintendent at National Capital Parks-East, an administrative unit of parks that cover more than 8,000 acres and includes more than 90 sites within Washington, D.C., and Maryland, including the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site, Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and the one Honious calls a “hidden gem,” Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens. The history of the gardens goes back to Civil War-veteran Walter Shaw and his daughter who purchased the property in the 1880s. The two planted water lilies in a pond on the grounds that Shaw had brought with him from his bachelor home in Maine. What was first just a hobby for the family evolved into a business, growing and selling lotus and water lily flowers. In the 1930s the land was to be condemned, but Congress authorized a purchase, and the gardens were saved. “We have a large number of lily ponds,” Honious says. “They bloom in July and it is spectacular.” While Honious, a history/political science major at CC, says working for the park service was something she “fell into,” she’s loved the experience because she’s been able to share the country’s historical culture in new ways. “I had really good high school teachers, and then my CC experience, that made history interesting and focused on everyone, not just the traditional history of the Great White Male. I wanted to be able to find ways to share that and inspire others to learn about American history, the great people and places.”
