A. Claude Ferguson

Retired Forester

Alan Claude Ferguson was born in 1923 into a pioneer family of the Ozarks in Willow Springs, Missouri.

Claude joined the United States Forest Service in 1940 as a Lookout on the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri while a senior in high school.

After three years in the U.S. Navy as an Aviation Radio-Radar Operator and Gunner and Instructor during WW II, he returned to the Forest Service for 4-years. He then secured his B.S. in Forestry with Distinction from the University of Missouri in 1952.

Claude served in assignments on National Forests in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan and in the Forest Service Regional Office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He then served as Forest Supervisor of the Wayne (Ohio) and Hoosier (Indiana) National Forests with headquarters in Bedford, Indiana, where he enjoyed his retirement. Claude passed away June 15, 2006.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken
, And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Rudyard Kipling