Norman Banks "Ike" Livermore Jr. (March 27, 1911 – December 5, 2006) was an American environmentalist, lumber industry executive, and state official. He was the only member of California governor Ronald Reagan's cabinet to serve during the full eight years of his administration. He played baseball at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
Early life and education
Livermore was descended from a pioneer California family with roots in Maine. An ancestor, Elijah Livermore, built a grist mill and a saw mill on the Androscoggin River in 1791. The town of Livermore Falls, Maine, is named after that ancestor.
His great-grandfather, Horatio Gates Livermore, came to California from Maine during the Gold Rush in 1850, and later became a State Senator from Eldorado County. His great-grandfather and his grandfather, Horatio Putnam Livermore, who came to California in 1856, used their Maine mill experience to become involved in the earliest days of hydroelectric power, helping to build the original Folsom Dam. His father, Norman Banks Livermore, was a founding board member of Pacific Gas and Electric. His mother, Caroline Sealy Livermore, was a conservationist in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on protection of the Marin Headlands and Richardson Bay; Mount Livermore on Angel Island is named after her. He had four brothers, geologist John Livermore (1918-2013), Putnam Livermore, Robert Livermore, and George Livermore.
Livermore was born in San Francisco in 1911, and grew up on Russian Hill. His summers in childhood were spent at his family's Montesol Ranch on the slopes of Mount Saint Helena that extended into Napa County, Sonoma County, and Lake County. He attended The Thacher School, a private boarding school in Ojai, California, where the "challenges of academics are combined with those of mountains and horses." At age 15, he rode his horse from Ojai to Big Sur, a distance of nearly . He also climbed the Grand Teton in tennis shoes as a youth.
Livermore attended Stanford University, receiving a bachelor's degree in Social Science/Social Thought in 1933. He went on to study briefly at the Harvard Business School after graduation. Missing the mountains of the west, he returned to California and earned an MBA from the Stanford Business School in 1936. His thesis was called The Economic Significance of California's Wilderness Areas.
Olympic athlete
Livermore had been the captain of the Stanford University baseball team. Former professional baseball player Les Mann was an advocate for baseball as an Olympic sport. As a result of Mann's efforts, baseball was selected as a demonstration sport in the 1936 Summer Olympics played in Berlin. Originally, the United States team was scheduled to play a Japanese team, but the Japanese withdrew. The American team was separated into two squads who competed against each other in a single game. Livermore was the catcher for the "World Champions" lineup which beat the "U. S. Olympics" lineup to win the demonstration game 6-5 before a crowd of 90,000 people on August 12, 1936.
Pack station operator
In 1929, Livermore rode a motorcycle up and down the Sierra Nevada, searching for a summer job. On the advice of a park ranger in Sequoia National Park, he was hired at a pack station in Mineral King because of his experience with horses and mules. That first summer, he shod mules, helped the camp cook, and did various chores. The following summer, he began leading mule trains into the wilderness of the High Sierra. The Great Depression hit the pack station business hard, and work was negligible the next two summers. He worked a bit in the summer of 1933, and business picked up for the summer of 1934.
In the fall of 1934, he interviewed the operators of dozens of pack stations throughout the Sierra Nevada, questioning them in depth about their business operations. He compiled a list of 71 pack stations operating in California's wilderness areas. This formed the basis for his MBA thesis at Stanford.
Beginning in 1934, he advocated for a trade group for pack station operators. By 1936, the High Sierra Packers Association had 35 members, and he served as its executive secretary.
In 1937, he bought an interest in the Mineral King Pack Station, and in 1946, bought two pack stations in the eastern Sierra that he merged to form the Mount Whitney Pack Trains. He was the largest wilderness outfitter in the Sierra Nevada for a number of years in the 1940s.
World War II service
Livermore was commissioned a lieutenant in the United States Navy during World War II, and participated in the amphibious landings on Sicily, Iwo Jima, Palau and Okinawa.