Hello and welcome to the Program College podcast. I'm your host, Liz Kay, and I'm joined by producer Chris Judge of the Class of 2005. Here are the Providence College podcast. We bring you interesting stories from the fire family.

This week, we're talking with Bill Burke of the class of 1984. Burke has worked for the National Park Service for more than three decades, starting as a ranger at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, followed by assignments at parks in New Jersey, Virginia and Wyoming.

He spent most of his career, however, as the cultural resources program manager for the Cape Cod National Seashore. But the unique title, Keeper of Time. He graduated summa cum laude from PC with a degree in history, followed by a master's degree in colonial history and archeology from the College of William Mary.

Bill, thanks so much for joining us.

Nice to be

here. Can you tell us a little bit about the Boddicker Cooper of Time?

Yeah, keep your time. Doesn't that sound important? Right. Someone locally, a local newspaper reporter interviewed me a number of years ago and kind of threw that into the article she wrote. And it sounds really impressive, actually. You know, historians, that's what we do.

We keep time. We keep track of the past. We try to get a better sense of where we've been and where we're going. And so Cooper of Time is it's kind of nice.

So what drew you to a career in the National Park Service? Where did you visit national parks growing up?

We did. We went to national parks, small historical national parks and the East Coast. I remember my family taking me to Boston Freedom Trail. We went to Washington, D.C., saw the National Mall sites, Lincoln Memorial, Manassas Battlefield. So we did go to a lot of national parks sites.

My dad was especially keen on history is a big history buff. It always wished he had become a historian and a history teacher. But, you know, one thing or another got in the way of that. So I felt like, hey, this is an opportunity.

I love history. And you know what? What a better way to do it other than maybe teaching in the classroom, but maybe to work at national parks, places where history happened. And that sense of being in a place like Independence Hall where I started my career.

How exciting is that? And a lot of all of us have had history classes and. High school, college. And many of us find them to be drawn to many dates and memorization and stuff like that. But, you know, when you go to places where history happened, whether it's Ford's Theater or the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln's home in

Illinois or wherever it is, you really have a better understanding of events. Well, why people did what they did. So, yeah, national parks are really cool.

So tell us about your day to day, your what a day in your life is like.

Right. So I think when when someone says historian, you know, what what is a historian? Do they think of the professor with the beard and the glasses and the English setter sitting by the fire with all the volumes of books piled in front of them?

My job here at the National Seashore is. Well, we do research like an historian does on our lighthouses or captains houses, our archeological sites. Native American history. So that's part of my job. Kind of a classic historian, John.

But the other part is we have a physical thing, unlike a history professor in my job. We have physical things to take care of, the whaling captains houses, the archeological sites. We have a very large museum collection. So those are things that need care and attention.

So my job is kind of split it into being a museum curator, an archeologist, a research historian, and then trying to get funding and understanding how historic houses are maintained. And the best approaches to taking care of those.

So it's a multifaceted type of job.

So you've got preservation, you've got museum work, archeology all wrapped up in public programs, too, right?

Yeah, public programs is a part of my job. And that's where I started. My career is talking to the public about history and which I still do today. And that first job at Independence Hall was. Everything I dreamed it would be, which was taking history and the concepts of history and boiling them down into fun facts and

a story that people can follow and that will inspire them to read more about Independence Hall. So, yeah, it's a public speaking and talking to people about the history that happened at these various parts of their work, that is really what got me into it.

Could you tell us about the museum collection? I think it's pretty extensive, right?

Yeah. So we have a half million museum objects at Cape Cod National Seashore. And so if you think about it for a minute, Cape Cod had lighthouses and Coast Guard stations and. Native American sites going back 10000 years.

And so our museum collection reflects a lot of the scrimshaw that was covered whalers at sea. We have lots of cranberry cranberry bar tools that were used to harvest cranberries. I was a big industry in Cape Cod. We have lots of items related to Native American story with stone tools and arrowheads from all of the archeological sites

. So our museum collection has small boats and everything else. Lighthouse lenses, everything else that would be related to living by the sea. It's a tremendous collection, and some of it is on display at our main visitor center here at the National Seashore.

If you look back at your days at P.S., are there classes of professors or experiences that helped you in your work that helped you work today?

Oh, for sure, yes. Providence College. I loved Providence College. So I had professors like Dr. Grace, Dr. McCaffrey, Dr. Fratello, these are professors that inspired me. They were just more more than just regurgitating history to me, but they were really passionate about different time periods, whether it was forest or history, took a lot of European history or

colonial America. And I also enjoyed my roommates who were into history, but everyone had to take Western civilization classes. And so I was the go to like tutor for them, so I got them sort of interested in history and learning in a strange kind of way.

But I actually almost left Providence College a couple of years in. I was thinking about careers, and I really wasn't jazzed about being a history teacher in a classroom setting. So I was more interested in the outdoors and maybe history, teaching history outdoors or at national park sites.

But then I applied to a bunch of forestry schools, and I was busy the first semester of sophomore year. I had all the catalogs I was applying to schools. I got into a bunch of forestry schools, and then I had to make that decision by the deadline, whenever that was.

Was I going to transfer out? And I decided that I'd stay with history. That was kind of my default passion and that I would find a way to not be in a classroom necessarily, but to engage the public with.

Important events of history and actually physically do either at the Nationals Park sites.

I think you got the chance to study abroad when you were

at Providence as well. Right. Yeah, I went to Switzerland. It was a semester, a single semester, and three were in Switzerland, which at that time was the the main go to place for study abroad at Providence and thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

I thought. American history was old. You go to Europe, and I remember walking past Freebird Cathedral, which was built, I think in thirteen fifty, you know, so it was it was such a great experience. And I think it further fueled the history of.

Providence College was was and is a great history as a great history department with a lot of diverse professors and, of course, offerings. You know, when I was there, this is one of the reasons why I chose Providence over so many of the schools are floaters because of the history program.

And I'm glad

you actually started working for the Park Service while you were students. Correct.

Yeah. So Ed After's right towards the end of sophomore year when I had the big fork in the road and I decided to stay at Providence College, I didn't go to forestry school. Towards the end of the sophomore year, I applied for the national seasonal position, which is where most people started in the first season.

And I got a seasonal job at Saratoga Battlefield Revolutionary War Battlefield in upstate New York. Beautiful pastoral setting. I was so excited. I went there. I borrowed my dad's car for the summer and it was so nice to do that.

I had no place to stay. I remember Skidmore College for a couple of weeks, and then I I'd move every few weeks to different people's couches in the living room. I spent all summer there, and I didn't even I had never been there before.

I knew nobody there. But it was one of those things. Life lesson was if you really want to try something, just do it. You'll figure it out later. I'll just. But yeah, it was first the summer after sophomore year, summer after junior year, I worked at Saratoga and then right after I took a year off from school

before grad school and did more work at other national. Park sites dressed in all kinds of cool living history outfits, Revolutionary War uniforms and so on. So as. Yeah, I got a head start at college, and I advise anyone to do that if they can during summers to really make use of those summer time breaks and try

out different careers in your field to to get a head start to

your work probably comes with a different set of occupational hazards than an academic historian. So we discuss what that would be like. What are some of the things that you have to contend with day to day?

Well, yeah, I think if you're if you're at a national park site, you're talking about the same story every day to the visitors. You have to train yourself not to sound like you're repeating yourself every day and that it's a brand new subject for the public every day because they're coming and it's an important place wherever they're

visiting to hear about the story. So you have to really reinvent yourself every morning. In my early part of my career in public speaking and keeping it fresh every time you presented, I know, a super, super hot. Wearing those Revolutionary War uniforms, the first several seasons that I worked for the Park Service.

You know, you're out in the field with five letters, all in linen, firing off black powder muskets and the public's loving it. But you're just totally drenched in sweat after the day. But, you know, I'll take those problems over maybe some classroom headaches, which is a pain in the butt.

And, you know, over the years, just so many funny little things that have happened with visitors at different national parks. I've worked on some of the funny questions that you get. In fact, yesterday we had a visitor who, after describing a program that we're going to do on Henry Bestin, who wrote The Outermost House, which is a

seminal work about Cape Cod, written in the 20s by Henry Beston, visitors still thought Henry Beston was alive and was going to meet the author of the program. So just little things like that, you know, Henry Bessen? Well, I've since passed away, and this was a program about him, and he wasn't going to actually do that.

So the National Park Service doesn't use Ouija boards for public presentations.

Right. The other thing that kind of drives me crazy is a lot of people want to know about ghosts at our historic houses. You know what's haunted? Because, you know, hauntings are a really big thing with history now.

It's an attempt, I think, in the history world to try to get people more interested in history, to say that this is haunted or that's the or that is haunted. So I have a resistance towards that because it to me, it's an essential sensationalize things.

But you have to kind of humor people. We don't have any haunted things at Cape Cod National Seashore, as far as I know, but other people are convinced there is.

But I'm glad you're not lowering yourself to the standard of making something fit for for cable television. Ghost hunters programing that sets. Good to know that the standards are being upheld. So Cape Cod has a really fascinating natural and cultural history, and I'm curious what what aspect are most intriguing to you?

What's your favorite era in the many errors that you've had to study at the seashore?

Right. So we have 10000 years of human history as as most places in New England. So I think one of the fascinating parts of the history is when the native peoples who were living here for a solid seven, eight thousand years uninterrupted, kind of start meeting up with European explorers and settlers during what's called the contact period

early. Sixteen hundreds. And that that would be a great time to be a fly on the wall to see the interaction of the two cultures. And certainly we have some archeological sites that are associated with that contact period.

So that's one of the time periods when I was at Providence College. I didn't really learn much about, but I was set up through the academic training there. To dove into topics like like the contract period and then on the opposite spectrum, we have a lot of Cold War history on Cape Cod.

These were radar sites, radar installations that were developed by MIT and the military to watch for the Soviet bombers coming with nuclear weapons. And so reading about Korean history and the threat that we had during the Cold War and how Cape Cod played the role, because we we kind of were stuck out closest to where those Soviet

bombers might be coming from. So it's a really interesting story. So, yeah, we're going from Contactually to. The 1950s, so as a historian here, you have to. Kind of be flexible in your ability to absorb and interpret what was happening.

Nimble in order to go where you go from precolonial, the colonial Cold War and back. It is hard not to visit Cape Cod. And certainly we have plenty of students, current students and alumni who live on Cape Cod who visited all their lives as New Englanders.

But it's hard not to visit and not consider how it's been impacted both by the pandemic and by climate change or will be impacted by climate change. Just curious, what work is being done at the National Seashore to try to protect some of the

historic sites that are there? Right. You know, I'd say climate change is the biggest threat to the integrity of the national seashore in terms of the infrastructure, parking lots, visitor centers, literally shorelines or eroding away. There's parts of the beach here that erode away 20 feet a year or more.

And so we have a small cadre of scientists that work here from mapping folks to folks who specialize in salt marsh restoration. But yeah, our coastlines in retreat. We probably lose five acres of upland every year to coastal erosion.

So the park gets smaller. And so we're trying to we can't necessarily stop sea level rise, but we have to try to respond to it as best we can. Understanding. How salt marsh salt marshes in particular can protect shorelines and we hope to keep them healthy, and then we have to understand if we're going to build a

new parking lot for beaches, we have to understand where to put it. So we have to really have the science down and that climate change is a huge topic here on long range concerned. And then the pandemic had lots of interesting impacts that nobody really thought about.

But as they've played out, we've got a lot more visitors coming to the National Seashore. It was a place of sanctuary and refuge. We never closed the beaches during the pandemic at all, whereas other national parks actually physically closed.

So, yeah, people are really into the outdoors more. This is a nationwide phenomenon. You look at bicycle sales and running shoes, sales and everything else, people are spending more time outside looking for opportunities. To recreated it, so here we are.

Visitation is booming. Beaches are packed. Despite the great white sharks that are out there, which is part of the natural evolution of the environment here. Yeah, the pandemic is is definitely changed. The amount of people here and the passion for which they're pursuing recreation, which I've never seen quite the enthusiasm I've seen the last couple of years

. And it's interesting to note, Cape Cod was always kind of a test case for pandemics. You know, in the 19th century, there was a couple of smallpox epidemics here on Cape Cod, which killed a fair number of people.

And the smallpox was introduced because Cape Cod was sort of an international port for whaling ships and fishing vessels. And so Cape Cod was a backwater. But in the places like Provincetown, that had a lot of whaling ships coming and going.

These were places that actually were hit with some of these smallpox epidemics. So. It's kind of an interesting little experiment out here in Cape Cod as to how the epidemics, pandemics play out,

where you spend your time thinking about and preserving the seashores past. What do you think the future holds for the park? And what can we how can we continue? What can we do to continue enjoying it into the future?

Well, we have a big job ahead of us to preserve all the historic houses, museum objects, archeological sites. These are all resources that need continual daily care and feeding to maintain. We need to keep building our knowledge base about what we have.

And I think most importantly. To recognize that the stories that we tell here at Cape Cod need to be diverse and inclusive of indigenous history, which wasn't the case 20 or 30 years ago, where we would have exhibits about history of Cape Cod and never once mention the indigenous people who live and lives here today.

So our exhibits now reflect some of that indigenous history. And so the last thing on that is we have more recent history that we were kind of ignoring. One example in the modern house. The development of modern architecture and modern houses on Cape Cod.

So here you have internationally known architects like Marcel Broyer, Walter Gropius, who? Designed, built and or lived in or seasonally on Cape Cod and lo and behold, it wasn't until a couple of decades ago we recognized that some of these houses were significant.

So the lesson learned is that recent history can be really important. And the the untold stories of people who never really had a real voice in the narrative. Those stories need to be told, too. So those are some of the things moving forward we need to keep in mind.

Well, Douglas has been a fascinating conversation, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

Oh, thank you. It's been fun.

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