“In 1964, Glenn Fisher, a brilliant and cantankerous Agriculture Department scientist whom I befriended years later, and Casey Kays, a New Jersey outdoorsman, independently began calling attention to the imminent destruction of Sunfish Pond and the lovely meadow around it, which was bisected by the Appalachian Trail” and which was threatened with extinction by a proposal to construct a dam on the Delaware River at Tocks Island.
This account is excerpted from the Kiko’s House blog of award-winning editor and reporter Shaun Mullen in his posting dated Monday, April 2, 2007.

“The persistent Fisher and Kays, who had joined forces to form the Lenni Lenape League, caught the first wave of the environmental movement and rode it to Sunfish Pond.

“Over 1,000 people joined U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his young wife, ” Mullen continues, “on a widely-publicized protest hike to the pond in 1967″ (when the blogger of this posting, Billy Givens, was still living in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was an employ of the U.S. Army Missile Command on Redstone Arsenal, where Werner Von Braun developed the rocket that took former U.S. Marine Colonel and U.S. Senator into space).

Mullen continues, “The power companies [that owned Sunfish Pond and the 6,500 acres surrounding it and that now comprise the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area], “eventually relented and sold the land back to New Jersey.”

(New Jersey had purchased the land from the state’s industrialist Charles C. Worthington, for whom Worthington State Park lying withing the Recreation Area is named.)

(To be continued)