National Yule Tree? Capital Out on a Limb

After the pomp and the parade down main street, the 59-foot, 3 1/2-ton Shasta fir tree, swaying from a crane, was gently lowered into a Southern Pacific Railroad car and strapped down, ready to roll to its special appointment 3,500 miles away.

“This is going to Washington, D.C.,” Police Officer Joe Berry told a wide-eyed boy who was wondering what was going on, “for President Reagan’s lawn.”

Well, Berry was half right.

That brisk November day, the tree was actually destined for a spot about two miles east of the White House. And on Wednesday night, outgoing Speaker of the House Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) threw a switch lighting 5,000 bulbs on this first Christmas tree for the Capitol building ever selected from west of the Mississippi.

Berry, however, is not the only one confused about Christmas trees in Washington, where America’s favorite yuletide symbol has a surprisingly contentious history.

Besides the Capitol Christmas tree, provided by the U.S. Forest Service, there is the National Park Service’s national Christmas tree, which will be lit by President and Mrs. Reagan tonight on the Ellipse across the street from the White House, and the White House Christmas tree, lit last week in the Blue Room. All have their adherents in the friendly struggle over which is the most official national symbol.

“Our office gets a flood of calls this time of the year,” sighed Sandra Alley, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service in Washington. “We always have to sort out which tree is which.”

Forest Service officials admit they are rankled that most of the attention goes to the National Park Service tree on the Ellipse. “They automatically get all the coverage,” complained Al Wolter, a spokesman for the Forest Service. “We have to try harder.”

No National Tree

Certainly one has to be careful in referring to the Ellipse tree as the national Christmas tree. “There’s no such thing,” huffs Capitol landscape architect Paul Pincus. “And anyway, it doesn’t compare with the Capitol tree.”

The Forest Service does enjoy a quiet bit of revenge. As a courtesy, it used to light the Capitol tree five minutes after the President lit the Park Service tree. “Now we light ours one day before,” Pincus said with a chuckle.

The first Capitol Christmas tree, lovingly planted on the building’s west lawn by Pincus in 1963, was killed by rats four years later. “Rats in the root system finished it off,” Pincus said.

From 1967 to 1969 Pincus went with what he calls “a Tinkertoy tree.” He would stack and cut three 18-foot evergreens to create one 50-foot-tall tree. “It looked pretty shabby,” he now admits. “Heck, it would have been better to use a plastic tree.”

Tree From the West

Since 1970 the U.S. Forest Service has supplied Pincus with his giant Christmas trees, so far without serious mishap. Until this year, all the trees had come from Atlantic Seaboard and Great Lakes states. The Forest Service first decided to look for a tree from the West, Pincus said, “because I was tired of going to the same places again and again.”

Faced with bids from three western regions of the Forest Service to supply the tree, Wolter said his office “just ended up drawing straws.”

Before it was felled and had its 59-foot crown sawed off for national display, this year’s Capitol Christmas tree was a 104-foot tower in the Klamath National Forest.

Trees of this magnitude aren’t simply cut down.

Just a Push Over

Instead, explained “Big Ed” Knolls, a retired logger who supervised the cutting, the Klamath giant was simply pushed over. A heavy hook was dragged behind the tree to rip out the roots, then a bulldozer gently nudged the giant fir until it fell. For the Capitol Christmas tree, a crane helped ease the tree down to an earthen mound, built up as a cushion before the operation. Cutting a tree this size and letting it fall, Knolls cautioned, allows it to “hit the ground so hard the boughs explode off the trunk.”

The National Park Service started the Washington Christmas tree tradition back in 1923. On Christmas morning, President Calvin Coolidge stepped outside to light a Park Service tree on the White House lawn shipped in from his native Vermont, but “Silent Cal” declined to say a few words for the NBC radio microphones.

In the early days, the community Christmas tree, as it was then called, moved around a lot. From 1924 to 1953, the tree was set up at five different locations in the White House neighborhood, with the President showing up to flip the switch.

Pressure from community leaders led to the tree finally settling down in 1954 in the Ellipse, where it was assigned as focal point of a Christmas Pageant of Peace.

Switched to Live Tree

By the early ‘70s, in the wake of natural disasters such as the 54-m.p.h. wind gusts that bowled over a 72-foot spruce in 1970, and increasing protest by environmentalists, the Park Service switched to a live tree. “Being the National Park Service, we decided we shouldn’t advocate cutting down trees,” said Sandra Alley.

In 1973 a 42-foot spruce was planted in the Ellipse, with the expectation that it would serve as the national tree well into the next century. Four years later it died mysteriously, held together at the end only with baling wire. “We don’t know what happened,” Alley said. “We burned it as that year’s yule log.”

The next tree fared even worse, blown over within a year by what Alley called “D.C.’s wicked wind witch.”

So, in 1978 the Park Service sent out a crack horticulturist team to scour the country for a tree “with larger roots,” which they found in the front yard of Mrs. William E. Myers of York, Pa. The 30-foot blue spruce thrives to this day.

Promotional Stunt

Somewhat overshadowed by its larger cousins, the White House Christmas tree was conceived in 1966 as a promotional stunt by Donald McNeil, executive director of the National Christmas Tree Assn. He got the idea from a state contest among growers in Wisconsin to provide a Christmas tree for the governor’s mansion.

Ron Palmer and his wife Dorothy, along with Charley and Dorothy Burton, are co-owners of the Windy Knoll Tree Farm in Mossyrock, Wash. They won the right to present this year’s tree to the President only after surviving rigorous state, regional and national competition.

Winning the nationals allowed Palmer to choose the presidential tree, but it also left him with a perplexing problem. Having been in the Christmas tree-growing business only nine years, the tallest tree on his farm was 10 feet. Association rules require that an 18- to 20-foot tree be presented to the President.

“They spent hours upon hours driving around Mossyrock (pop. 463) trying to find a tree,” said Kathy Bowman, who works at Windy Knoll for the Palmers. “The last one they looked at just happened to be perfect.” For a place in history, or at least the Blue Room, Mossyrock’s Bob and Babe Frazier graciously surrendered the 20-foot Noble fir that had been growing in their front yard.