MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — He spent 45 years doing the same job every day. Fortunately for longtime Division of Natural Resources Fisheries Biologist Frank Jernejcic, he loved every minute of it. Jernejcic will officially retire from the agency this week in the exact same position he was hired for in December 1969.
“People ask me what I’m going to do when I retire, I tell them I don’t know, I’ve been doing what I’ve wanted to do for the last 45 years,” laughed Jernejcic as he shared memories of his career on a recent edition of Ram Trucks West Virginia Outdoors.
Jernejcic grew up in the Cleveland, Ohio area but came to West Virginia because his mother was from Morgantown. He had family nearby and West Virginia University offered a strong forestry program. He wanted to work with animals and it seemed like the perfect fit. Ironically, he didn’t have a preference about whether to become a game biologist or a fish biologist. He just happened to take the job available.
“There was nobody here at that time,” he explained. “Back then the districts had just been realigned. This district headquarters was originally in Middlebourne. I was lucky when I went to grad school I could have worked with fish or game, but I received an assistantship to work with fish. I was just lucky.”
Soon after grad school Jernejcic joined the Peace Corps and was dispatched to India. He immediately concluded he’d made a mistake. He resigned after two months and came home assuming he was about to be drafted and shipped off to Vietnam. However, he got a high lottery number and Uncle Sam never called.
“Shortly thereafter, I got a call from Bernie Dowler, he and I were in school together, he was ahead of me, but he recommended me for the job. I interviewed, and that was it.” said Jernejcic.
From his position working out of Fairmont, Jernejcic was always able to be on the forefront of change. He helped shepherd the agency through the dicey and difficult periods of pollution cleanups and acid mine drainage. He worked through dozens of chemical spills, fish kills, and other assorted environmental and habitat problems. He was instrumental in creating the data base which tracks bass tournament results when they were first becoming popular and was able to see the ebb and flow of good years and bad on the tournament angling circuits.
Jernejcic played more than a small role in helping mould the state’s whitewater rafting industry from its infancy to the powerful economic engine it represents for the state today. He started out as a guide with Wildwater Unlimited for rafting pioneer John Draggon and when the state decided to start regulating the industry, Jernejcic largely wrote the rules for how it would be governed.
“At that time the attitude was this might be a wilderness experience and if it was a wilderness experience the key was isolation,” said Jernejcic. “We were setting limits on how many people could go down the river at one time and trying to determine the carrying capacity of each river.”
The industry naturally evolved and Jernejcic helped negotiate with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the first releases from Summersville Lake to create the Gauley River Rafting season.
“That was back before anybody had a feel for any of that,” said Jernejcic. “I won’t say we muddled through it, but I was the only one in the department who was a paddler or had a feel for that kind of thing.”
Jernejcic worked with Captain Harry Shaver who represented DNR law enforcement at the time and they set out all of the rules, one of which was peculiar.
“We looked at the qualifications for a guide and whether one should know how to swim,” laughed Jernejcic. “I believe back then that wasn’t even a requirement.”
Eventually Jernejcic gave up his whitewater kayak for a customized fishing kayak. He spent countless hours on the river fishing. His fishing trips both on and off the clock would occasionally draw the ire of superiors, but he always couched his angling adventures in logic.
“Because I fish an area, I know what’s going on with the fish and with the water. I work with hydropower development for example and help companies make decisions on how to develop that area,” said Jernejcic. “If you don’t fish that area and don’t realize how effective it can be, you’ll let that company pretty much tell you anything they want. But because I fish that area I know how important it is. I know where to develop a fishing pier or a fishing path. Companies come to us with those development ideas and have sometimes have no idea what they’re doing.”
Another area where Jernejcic was able to blaze new trails where nobody else had an interest was with snakes. He kept snakes in his house when he was a college student–which certainly helped him maintain a desired level of solitude even from his family.
“My dad loved animals and I got interested in snakes because of him. When I came to work, nobody was interested in snakes,” he said. “It was a novelty and an unoccupied niche as far as anyone working with them and in many ways it was frowned upon by the agency when I started doing programs with snakes.”
Today, the DNR has a full department dedicated to non-game wildlife which includes snakes and other reptiles and amphibian creatures. During Jernejcic’s early years, his passion was about the only thing the agency had in the arena.
“It’s funny, when I went to sign up for Medicare and Social Security a lady at the Social Security office remembered me and said I got her to touch her first snake during a program we had years ago at the Middletown Mall in Fairmont,” he said. “That’s gratifying and brings back a lot of memories.”
The last few months have involved a flood of memories for Jernejcic. Once he made the decision to retire, he tasked himself with cleaning out his office at the DNR district headquarters in Fairmont. The room could qualify for an episode of the TV show “Hoarders.”
“I’ll open up a file and find minutes from a meeting in 1970,” he said. “Or the other day I opened a file and found pictures from the Cheat River I took with a Polaroid camera. It’s hard to get rid of that stuff.”
Although he’ll be retired, as he mentioned it’s unlikely a lot of Jernejcic’s life will change. He plans to fish more and hopes as a retirement project to document the location of rattlesnake dens at the Cooper’s Rock State Forest and Snake Hill Wildlife Management Areas both of which lie only minutes form his front door. Chances are he’ll once again have plenty of solitude as he engages in the pursuit.
“Probably so,” he said. “That’s fine by me.”