Dirk Van Hart earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in geology and began a professional career as a petroleum geologist in 1965. During the next two decades a gypsy life took him and his family to residences in Oklahoma, Texas, California, Guatemala, and Ecuador. In 1986 a career change brought him to Albuquerque, New Mexico. For the next seventeen years he worked as a geologist in Italy and Belize, and also for a short while as a student high-school teacher in Albuquerque, and as a contractor to Sandia National Laboratories working on characterization of the geology of Kirtland Air Force base. After semi-retirement in 2003 he worked for five years as a geological consultant until final retirement. In 1998 he began his twenty-year affiliation with New Mexico's only alumni chapter of ex-CCC "boys" (as they were called), and was the chapter's president for the last fifteen years. He learned firsthand about the CCC, its achievements, its men, and its enormous impact on the "Greatest Generation." The "boys" are now all gone. This book is his tribute to them. Van Hart is also the author of "Old New Mexico Route 44" from Sunstone Press.