'Noble warrior' Fremont protects precious streams

By Dan Klepal
Enquirer staff writer

Every day is Earth Day for Mike Fremont.

A youthful looking 83-year-old Avondale native who is an avid canoe racer and
completed the Boston Marathon each of the past two years, Fremont was working to
preserve America's rivers long before there was a Clean Water Act, before the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was created, and before Earth Day was born.

Today, as some 50 million people worldwide celebrate the 35th annual Earth Day,
Fremont will be at work - as usual - with one of the many environmental groups
he has co-founded.

Fremont credits his environmental awareness to a most unlikely source - an auto
mechanic. Carl Ray was working on the hearse a friend bought so they could strap
their canoes to the roof and haul them to the Little Miami River.

"He came out from under the car, all greasy with a cigar hanging out the side of
his mouth, and said: 'You guys know what they're doing to your river?

"Well, you ought to get out of your damn canoes long enough to find out,'"
Fremont recalled.

The future environmentalist didn't like what he found. The year was 1966, and
the Hamilton County Engineer's Office was talking about building a bridge over
the Little Miami.

Fremont believed then that the bridge would devastate the river and its wildlife
with noise, traffic, trash and salt. (He believes the same today about the
current proposal for a new bridge at Horseshoe Bend on the Little Miami as part
of the billion-dollar Eastern Corridor road project.)

Just like that, a lifetime of environmental activism was launched.

Protecting the future

"What we're working on here is the future for coming generations," Fremont said,
leaning back behind a cluttered desk in the second-story Wyoming office that
houses several environmental groups, including Rivers Unlimited and the Sierra
Club. "We're not a religious group, but this, I feel, is equivalent to living a
religious life.

"We're helping, and that is the most rewarding thing anybody can do."

After years of fighting to have the Little Miami River brought into the National
Wild and Scenic Rivers program, Fremont and a handful of other conservationists
met in Denver in 1973 to talk about forming a national organization that would
help get more rivers into the federal program, which is designed to protect them
against pollution and development. That organization became American Rivers - a
national version of the statewide group Rivers Unlimited that Fremont founded
one year before.

Chris Brown, chief of the National Park Service's National Designations
Division, wasn't at that meeting, but has heard many times over the years the
story of how American Rivers was founded. Brown worked at American Rivers in the
early 1980s, before moving over to the Park Service.

"Legend has it that Mike slapped the first $100 on the table to fund the
organization," Brown said. "There's an old saying that conservation without
appropriation is just so much conversation. Mike took action.

"I came on the scene in 1982, while Mike was still on the board of directors. He
has this kind of dogged determination and just unflagging spirit and commitment
that was really inspiring to me. I realized this is what real dedication is made
of."

A noble warrior

Michael Miller, a professor of biological sciences at the University of
Cincinnati and an authority on the environment and water quality since the early
1970s, said Fremont has been a noble warrior against all threats to streams and
rivers. His first battle was against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which
wanted to build a dam at Red River Gorge in the Daniel Boone National Forest.
The dam was never built.

"He's amazing," Miller said. "He seems to be getting younger. I don't know
anyone in his age category who is so intellectually bright. Give Mike a topic
and he'll make the most poignant statement in the room. He'll kill ya."

Fremont said he and others were moved to found American Rivers because in the
five years of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers program, there had been no
rivers brought under the program's protection.

"We thought this is our job, to protect them," Fremont said. "In those days, it
was mostly protecting them against dams. We just thought there has to be some
opposing force, and we were it."

Fremont believes his biggest accomplishment may be his most recent. In the past
eight years, he has been working with Ohio State University on economic studies
that show how much money must be invested to restore degraded rivers, and what
the economic payoff is for that investment. Fremont says thorough economic
analysis on a handful of streams around the state has consistently shown a huge
payoff, on the order of $4 returned for every dollar invested.

Scenic, clean rivers infuse cash into the economy because they are attractive
places that raise property values, which in turn brings in more money to local
governments and school districts, he says.

Removing politics

For that reason alone, Fremont sees a bright future for the state's waterways.

"When you show the benefits exceed the cost, you take the politics out of it,"
Fremont said. "It enables politicians to invest in rivers. This is the stuff
city administrators die for - increasing the tax base."

As a boy, Fremont attended Walnut Hills High School, before graduating from Taft
in 1940. Asthma kept him out of World War II, so he decided to become an
engineer to help with the effort here at home. He graduated from Yale.

"I was always kind of afraid of the outside world," Fremont said. "That's why I
wanted to work with things, not people."

After spending a few years in Boston and Pittsburgh, Fremont returned home and
started L.H. Fremont Industrial Equipment, a company still in existence and now
known as Torque Inc. The company now is run by his son Tom. The company sold
machine brakes, clutches and drives to industry. By the time he retired in 1988,
Fremont's company was selling equipment all over the world.

Unpaid volunteer

Fremont was equally busy with his environmental moonlighting.

Rivers Unlimited, now with about 300 members, was the first and is the oldest
statewide organization dedicated to preserving rivers.

Fremont, president emeritus of the organization, is an unpaid volunteer. The pay
is the same as he has received for any of his environmental work: zero.

With his wife Marilyn Wall, Fremont co-founded the Mill Creek Restoration
Project in 1993 and Friends of the Great Miami in 1999. Eric Partee, executive
director of Little Miami Inc., said there have been few people more valuable to
conservation than Fremont - either on a local or national scale.

"Certainly, Mike has been the conscience of the environmental movement here
locally as it relates to rivers and streams," Partee said. "Nationally, he
serves a very similar purpose. He's just a tremendous asset."

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