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The goal did not die with the unsuccessful attempts at getting a· registration act in Califor nia in the 1930's. Work continued on the project, with Roscoe Davis, Franklin Sweger, and others drafting and promoting the proposed legislation to influential persons. Although New Jersey had licensed health inspectors since 1912, California's Regi stration Act for Sanitarians, which was finally passed in 1945, was the nation's first Registration Act for Sanitarians. Standards were set and an examination required. This paved the way for rapid strides toward professionalism during the next 20 years.
THE IMPETUS
One of the key players in developing the professional in environmental health was Walter S. Mangold who when he started work as a district sanitary inspector for the Los Angeles County Health Department in 1931 began his lifelong work of elevating the sanitarian through training and education. At the first Mangold Banquet held by the California Association of Sanitarians in 1962, Malcolm H. Merrill, M.D., director of the California Department of Health said that Walter Mangold was appalled that most of the men in the field in 1931 were untrained political appointees who were called sanitary inspectors and who thought of their work as law enforcement only. Dr. Merrill said he had seen what a great influence one man can exert and that he had seen Mangold introduce the sanitarian to the total public health arena, develop standards for the profession, change the status and raise the morale of sanitarians, set up a basic training program of college curricula for sanitarians, and organize and systematize a chaotic field so that it had a solid basis for the almost unbelievable expansion of the field of environmental health that was just beginning to be seen (in 1962). Walter Mangold developed training courses for sanitary inspectors in Los Angeles, where he was imbued with the potentialities and responsibilities of the sanitarian in public health. Mangold's work was recognized by Dr. Karl F. Meyer, director of the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research in San Francisco, who invited Mangold to organize and supervise a formal training course for sanitarians at the University of California at Berkeley in 1937. Enter another actor - In 1936, A. Harry Bliss had become Alameda County's first sanitary inspector, and as a result took the first course available at Berkeley under Pro fessor Mangold. Bliss told Dr. William Walter in 1984 that Mangold took an interest in him and together they tried to broaden the concepts of sanitation. Then, when Bliss returned from World War II military service, Mangold invited him to become the third member of his staff at Berkeley and help develop a bachelor's degree program in sanita tion. Others on the team were Dr. W.W. Sampson, an entomologist, and J.H. Skillin from Spokane, Washington. "Walter Mangold," said Harry Bliss, "was convinced that a bachelor's degree in sanitation was a necessity. Walter worked most of his life for the sanitarian and did a tremendous amount of work in the evolution from the sanitary inspector to sanitarian: He was the person to take the inspector in the health department and make him a public health sanitarian...through education. That took some doing, and he did it; it was a real accomplishment.''
Harry Bliss was not destined to stay at the Berkeley campus, for he was shortly selected to go to UCLA to develop a special curriculum for sanitarians. Soon after, he convinced
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