By David Blymire
If you wanted to see two young boys grow into world-renowned naturalists, you’d probably send them to live near meadows, woods and creeks where wildlife was plentiful.
You’d make sure they had plenty of time to explore their surroundings. Having a noted scientist for a father probably wouldn’t hurt, either.
The South Middleton Township village of Craighead Station near Boiling Springs provided just such a backdrop for Frank and John Craighead, who spent idyllic summers during the late 1920s and ’30s at an old family homestead in the village.
The identical twin brothers practiced falconry in a nearby meadow, a rare discipline for the time that led to their first publication — an article in National Geographic magazine.
They went on to make a name for themselves researching grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park.
When they weren’t exploring with their Cumberland County friends, they were doing chores, fishing, swimming in Yellow Breeches Creek or enjoying the rich characters of the neighborhood — until it was time to return home to Washington, D.C.
“We cried all the way home at the end of summer,” recalls Jean Craighead George, a sister of the twins and noted children’s author.
She says the rural area had a lot to do with her brothers’ burgeoning interest in wildlife, but “the adults contributed a lot.”
Their father, Frank C. Craighead Sr., was a forest entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, and their mother, Carolyn, was a biologist technician.
“My father taught us all the plants and animals,” she says. “It was like learning to read. You knew them. They had names.”
That awareness of nature and wildlife rubbed off on other people who knew the twins, says Dr. David Masland, named “Conservationist of the Year” by Central Pennsylvania Conservancy in 2003.
“I was blessed to know them,” he says. “They gave me an appreciation of wildlife. They did a great deal for me.”
Masland’s parents rented a summer house across the stream from the Craighead family when he was about 5 or 6 years old, and he became part of the Craighead clan, he recalls.
“I just trailed after them all the time and they were very patient with this young boy,” Masland says.
He recalls the family had all sorts of raptors about the house. One was a peregrine falcon named Ulysses. They also had hawks, barn owls and screech owls.
They would spend hundreds of hours in the meadow training their birds, he says.
“They would shoot sparrows by the gazillion,” he says.
The resulting friendship between Masland and the twins led to several trips out West with Frank and John.
Masland recalls hiking 20-25 miles per day through such places as the Grand Canyon, the Tetons and Yellowstone National Park.
The brothers were known for their pioneering use of radio collars to track the movement of grizzly bears. A local radio technician helped them develop their ideas during the 1960s.
“Hoke Franciscus was a big radio ham operator and he worked with them,” recalls William Kronenberg of Carlisle, another childhood friend and acquaintance of the Craighead family. “The three of them were best friends.”
Franciscus worked with Grover Hunt, a key figure in the Carlisle-area’s radio crystal industry. Kronenberg says Franciscus worked at his grandfather’s downtown store.
He says Franciscus was the “behind-the-scenes man,” a gifted technician who could fashion a portable radio by wrapping a copper wire around a pencil and connecting a few crystals. Those devices really worked, pulling in such local stations as WHYL, he says.
Four Craighead families spent their summers during the Depression era in a large Victorian house along Old York Road near the intersection with Bonnybrook Road.
“It was a great time to grow up,” says Bill Craighead, a cousin of Frank and John, who describes himself as the youngest of the Craighead clan at that time.
“We went barefooted from the time school ended,” he says. “We could barely get our shoes on in the fall because our feet had toughened from walking on cinder railroad beds or hot macadam roads.”
The area where they lived and explored was a family-owned settlement dating back to the earliest days of Cumberland County. Craighead family land holdings once stretched along what today is Old York Road from Boiling Springs to Holly Pike.
The village in those days included blacksmiths, a mill and a store where local men would gather in the evenings to play pinochle or some other game.
Bill Craighead says he recalls going to sleep in the evenings to the ringing sound of men pitching horseshoes.
George recalls being enchanted by the skills of one man who could spit tobacco and hit a bee. And, there was the local blacksmith who tried to fight progress. “He wouldn’t give up his blacksmith job until he died,” she says.
She also recalls visiting a nearby farm to buy local produce from a Mrs. Brenneman. “When I have corn on the cob today, I think of that woman,” she says.
The family’s trip to the Carlisle market house each Saturday was a special treat. She recalls seeing “beautiful flowers and fruits.”
“Mother had characters she would buy from,” she says.
She says daily routines included doing chores after breakfast. But once those were completed, the children were free to explore.
“I look at the way parents protect their kids today... we were so much freer then to explore and nothing ever happened to us,” she says.
She says the women “maintained the culture” of the family. Her aunt would play the piano and the others would sing.
Her mother also “enforced the cultural side... we had to read for an hour after lunch. We learned discipline.”
But she describes her parents as “free spirits” who flaunted some of the social rules of the day.
She recalls how the mother of one of her childhood friends in Washington reacted upon learning that the Craigheads had allowed her daughter to go barefoot: That friend “could never play with me again.”
Among the books they read was “Tom Sawyer.” But the book only gave them even more ideas.
George says their mother would send her and her brothers to their rooms for a nap. “They would climb down the rainspout like Tom Sawyer and climb up at end of an hour. Then they would call out in pitiful voices, ‘Mother, can we come down now?’”
The Craighead family home in the village still bears the marks of those days: original murals that adorn the walls of the kitchen.
“If you felt you had something to contribute, you were allowed to,” George says.
Up to this day, anyone who spends a night in the home may draw something on the wall.
Many of George’s drawings can still be seen on the wall. They’ve since been joined by scores of contributions from others.
Bill Craighead says about 8-10 trains per day passed through the area on a track connecting Mt. Holly Springs and Carlisle. It crossed the Yellow Breeches at a bridge that still stands.
He was fishing on the railroad bridge one day when he heard the old steam engine’s whistle blow.
Trapped in the middle of the bridge with a train approaching, the 8- or 10-year-old boy had no choice but to just hunker down in the middle of the track.
“All of a sudden I looked up and there was the guts of the train,” he says.
Craighead says a summertime flood in 1933 took the normally three-foot-deep Yellow Breeches to closer to 15 feet deep.
“The kids took great delight jumping off the top of an iron bridge” that crossed the creek, he says.
George retold that story in “Summer of the Falcon.” The parents, however, found out. One of the book’s scenes describes the kids coming clean about what they did.
But amid all of the adventures, the twins kept their focus on learning about wildlife.
Craighead recalls a fish kill on the Yellow Breeches upstream from the village resulted when a truck spilled some sort of toxic material into the creek.
“My father and the twins went over to Conewago (Creek) and caught a lot of bass and, you might say, restocked the creek after the poison had gone by,” he says.
Back home in Washington, the twins spent “every spare minute fishing, canoeing and learning the names of plants” on the Potomac River at a time when the water was still pure enough to drink, says a biography of Frank Craighead at the website of the Craighead Environmental Research Institute in Montana, a research foundation Frank established in 1955, though under a different name.
The website says the twins and several of their friends drove west in 1934, steering a 1928 Chevrolet along dirt roads and camping by the roadside each night. They captured and photographed many hawks and falcons.
They visited Jackson Hole, Wyo., and met naturalists Olaus and Mardy Murie.
“The spectacular beauty of Wyoming remained with them through subsequent travels and they promised themselves they would return some day to live near the Tetons,” the website says.
Their adventures that year produced an article, “Adventures with Birds of Prey,” published in 1937 by National Geographic.
Frank and John attended Penn State, where they starred on the wrestling team and earned science degrees in 1939, the website says.
After World War II, the brothers bought 14 acres at Moose near Jackson Hole. They married, built log cabins on the land and earned their doctoral degrees in 1949.
The brothers split up in the early 1950s, with John going to work for the University of Montana and Frank deciding to work outside of academia.
But their paths merged again in 1959 when they began a 12-year study of grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park.
Frank at this time was living with his family in the Craighead village area but his new job required him to drive to Yellowstone each spring. The family would follow after school and spend the summer at the cabin in Moose, returning to South Middleton Township in the fall.
By 1966, the long drives had become too much. Frank added indoor plumbing to the cabin so the family could live there permanently, the website says.
The grizzly bear study led to four articles in National Geographic magazine, two National Geographic TV specials and four lecture films, the website says.
If you wanted to see two young boys grow into world-renowned naturalists, you’d probably send them to live near meadows, woods and creeks where wildlife was plentiful.
You’d make sure they had plenty of time to explore their surroundings. Having a noted scientist for a father probably wouldn’t hurt, either.
The South Middleton Township village of Craighead Station near Boiling Springs provided just such a backdrop for Frank and John Craighead, who spent idyllic summers during the late 1920s and ’30s at an old family homestead in the village.
The identical twin brothers practiced falconry in a nearby meadow, a rare discipline for the time that led to their first publication — an article in National Geographic magazine.
They went on to make a name for themselves researching grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park.
When they weren’t exploring with their Cumberland County friends, they were doing chores, fishing, swimming in Yellow Breeches Creek or enjoying the rich characters of the neighborhood — until it was time to return home to Washington, D.C.
“We cried all the way home at the end of summer,” recalls Jean Craighead George, a sister of the twins and noted children’s author.
She says the rural area had a lot to do with her brothers’ burgeoning interest in wildlife, but “the adults contributed a lot.”
Their father, Frank C. Craighead Sr., was a forest entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, and their mother, Carolyn, was a biologist technician.
“My father taught us all the plants and animals,” she says. “It was like learning to read. You knew them. They had names.”
That awareness of nature and wildlife rubbed off on other people who knew the twins, says Dr. David Masland, named “Conservationist of the Year” by Central Pennsylvania Conservancy in 2003.
“I was blessed to know them,” he says. “They gave me an appreciation of wildlife. They did a great deal for me.”
Masland’s parents rented a summer house across the stream from the Craighead family when he was about 5 or 6 years old, and he became part of the Craighead clan, he recalls.
“I just trailed after them all the time and they were very patient with this young boy,” Masland says.
He recalls the family had all sorts of raptors about the house. One was a peregrine falcon named Ulysses. They also had hawks, barn owls and screech owls.
They would spend hundreds of hours in the meadow training their birds, he says.
“They would shoot sparrows by the gazillion,” he says.
The resulting friendship between Masland and the twins led to several trips out West with Frank and John.
Masland recalls hiking 20-25 miles per day through such places as the Grand Canyon, the Tetons and Yellowstone National Park.
The brothers were known for their pioneering use of radio collars to track the movement of grizzly bears. A local radio technician helped them develop their ideas during the 1960s.
“Hoke Franciscus was a big radio ham operator and he worked with them,” recalls William Kronenberg of Carlisle, another childhood friend and acquaintance of the Craighead family. “The three of them were best friends.”
Franciscus worked with Grover Hunt, a key figure in the Carlisle-area’s radio crystal industry. Kronenberg says Franciscus worked at his grandfather’s downtown store.
He says Franciscus was the “behind-the-scenes man,” a gifted technician who could fashion a portable radio by wrapping a copper wire around a pencil and connecting a few crystals. Those devices really worked, pulling in such local stations as WHYL, he says.
Four Craighead families spent their summers during the Depression era in a large Victorian house along Old York Road near the intersection with Bonnybrook Road.
“It was a great time to grow up,” says Bill Craighead, a cousin of Frank and John, who describes himself as the youngest of the Craighead clan at that time.
“We went barefooted from the time school ended,” he says. “We could barely get our shoes on in the fall because our feet had toughened from walking on cinder railroad beds or hot macadam roads.”
The area where they lived and explored was a family-owned settlement dating back to the earliest days of Cumberland County. Craighead family land holdings once stretched along what today is Old York Road from Boiling Springs to Holly Pike.
The village in those days included blacksmiths, a mill and a store where local men would gather in the evenings to play pinochle or some other game.
Bill Craighead says he recalls going to sleep in the evenings to the ringing sound of men pitching horseshoes.
George recalls being enchanted by the skills of one man who could spit tobacco and hit a bee. And, there was the local blacksmith who tried to fight progress. “He wouldn’t give up his blacksmith job until he died,” she says.
She also recalls visiting a nearby farm to buy local produce from a Mrs. Brenneman. “When I have corn on the cob today, I think of that woman,” she says.
The family’s trip to the Carlisle market house each Saturday was a special treat. She recalls seeing “beautiful flowers and fruits.”
“Mother had characters she would buy from,” she says.
She says daily routines included doing chores after breakfast. But once those were completed, the children were free to explore.
“I look at the way parents protect their kids today... we were so much freer then to explore and nothing ever happened to us,” she says.
She says the women “maintained the culture” of the family. Her aunt would play the piano and the others would sing.
Her mother also “enforced the cultural side... we had to read for an hour after lunch. We learned discipline.”
But she describes her parents as “free spirits” who flaunted some of the social rules of the day.
She recalls how the mother of one of her childhood friends in Washington reacted upon learning that the Craigheads had allowed her daughter to go barefoot: That friend “could never play with me again.”
Among the books they read was “Tom Sawyer.” But the book only gave them even more ideas.
George says their mother would send her and her brothers to their rooms for a nap. “They would climb down the rainspout like Tom Sawyer and climb up at end of an hour. Then they would call out in pitiful voices, ‘Mother, can we come down now?’”
The Craighead family home in the village still bears the marks of those days: original murals that adorn the walls of the kitchen.
“If you felt you had something to contribute, you were allowed to,” George says.
Up to this day, anyone who spends a night in the home may draw something on the wall.
Many of George’s drawings can still be seen on the wall. They’ve since been joined by scores of contributions from others.
Bill Craighead says about 8-10 trains per day passed through the area on a track connecting Mt. Holly Springs and Carlisle. It crossed the Yellow Breeches at a bridge that still stands.
He was fishing on the railroad bridge one day when he heard the old steam engine’s whistle blow.
Trapped in the middle of the bridge with a train approaching, the 8- or 10-year-old boy had no choice but to just hunker down in the middle of the track.
“All of a sudden I looked up and there was the guts of the train,” he says.
Craighead says a summertime flood in 1933 took the normally three-foot-deep Yellow Breeches to closer to 15 feet deep.
“The kids took great delight jumping off the top of an iron bridge” that crossed the creek, he says.
George retold that story in “Summer of the Falcon.” The parents, however, found out. One of the book’s scenes describes the kids coming clean about what they did.
But amid all of the adventures, the twins kept their focus on learning about wildlife.
Craighead recalls a fish kill on the Yellow Breeches upstream from the village resulted when a truck spilled some sort of toxic material into the creek.
“My father and the twins went over to Conewago (Creek) and caught a lot of bass and, you might say, restocked the creek after the poison had gone by,” he says.
Back home in Washington, the twins spent “every spare minute fishing, canoeing and learning the names of plants” on the Potomac River at a time when the water was still pure enough to drink, says a biography of Frank Craighead at the website of the Craighead Environmental Research Institute in Montana, a research foundation Frank established in 1955, though under a different name.
The website says the twins and several of their friends drove west in 1934, steering a 1928 Chevrolet along dirt roads and camping by the roadside each night. They captured and photographed many hawks and falcons.
They visited Jackson Hole, Wyo., and met naturalists Olaus and Mardy Murie.
“The spectacular beauty of Wyoming remained with them through subsequent travels and they promised themselves they would return some day to live near the Tetons,” the website says.
Their adventures that year produced an article, “Adventures with Birds of Prey,” published in 1937 by National Geographic.
Frank and John attended Penn State, where they starred on the wrestling team and earned science degrees in 1939, the website says.
After World War II, the brothers bought 14 acres at Moose near Jackson Hole. They married, built log cabins on the land and earned their doctoral degrees in 1949.
The brothers split up in the early 1950s, with John going to work for the University of Montana and Frank deciding to work outside of academia.
But their paths merged again in 1959 when they began a 12-year study of grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park.
Frank at this time was living with his family in the Craighead village area but his new job required him to drive to Yellowstone each spring. The family would follow after school and spend the summer at the cabin in Moose, returning to South Middleton Township in the fall.
By 1966, the long drives had become too much. Frank added indoor plumbing to the cabin so the family could live there permanently, the website says.
The grizzly bear study led to four articles in National Geographic magazine, two National Geographic TV specials and four lecture films, the website says.