Trailblazers: from whitewater to the white house: outdoorsman Hal Haskell provides insight into leadership.

Name: Harry "Hal" G. Haskell, Jr.

Title: Chairman, Dynamy, Inc.; Director, Inertial Motors Corp.; President, University of Delaware Research Foundation

Member since: 1970

Anyone who knows Hal Haskell knows that he's a jack of all trades. Much of that knowledge has been put to good use within the recreation industry and in NRPA. "My whole life has been outdoors," he says. He once won a sailboat race to Bermuda and has scaled down a New York City building to promote the opening of an outdoors store. But his leadership abilities acquired through being mayor of Wilmington, Del., Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs to Dwight Eisenhower, a congressman and consultant to Nelson Rockefeller were appropriate preparation for becoming chairman of the NRPA Board of Trustees from 1980 to 1985. Haskell is also the 1986 recipient of the Ralph C. Wilson Award and has been awarded honorary degrees from Hobart College and Fisk University and honorary trustee status from Brandywine Conservancy, Inc.

Importance of parks and recreation:

"I have my own belief that recreation and saving the environment of our parks and everything to do with the leisure time of people makes an enormous difference--not only in terms of what it does for the people in the country, but also for the environment of the country. They ought to have, in all the national parks, strong groups like at Acadia National Park that put up a lot of money for each park and take a deep interest in what's going on."

Words of wisdom: "NRPA provides [the annual Congress & Exposition] where people can come together. There are about 500 courses people can take. It gives a place for you to come from your state or location and you can get something you can't get somewhere else necessarily. My advice is to keep that going well because it does provide education across the board--really meaningful stuff."

Influences: "The guy who got me involved was Bill Brown. He had a strong desire to raise the importance of recreation in the minds of people. He was chairman for a long period of time and then he recruited all of us. I was president of Abercrombie & Fitch, which was an outdoor company then. He came to me and said you guys ought to list all the things in the outdoors that people could do. That interested me. So I got to know Brownie one way or another. We became great friends. He was the dominant figure at NRPA."

Keeping parks and recreation in the public eye: "You need people who can make things happen in governments of the states and in cities and the national legislature who will really give it the 'Teddy Roosevelt time.' You need leadership at that level and down. The only way to get to the upper level is to get the right guys in the House and Senate who have a gut feeling about it. I don't see any reason why NRPA can't get to that leadership. People can make a difference."