When Hawaii National Park was reorganized, Frank Oberhansley, superintendent, the Natural History building was adopted as Park Headquarters, and the Uwekahuna buildings, with their magnificent view in all directions, were reconstructed as the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. A new seismograph cellar was dug, away from disturbances of Uwekahuna cliff, and modern instruments were installed. Mr. John Forbes became assistant machinist; and on Mr. Finch’s retirement in 1951, Dr. Gordon Macdonald became volcanologist in charge. C. K. Wentworth moved from Honolulu to the National Park region and took charge of magnetic measurement, which had been established at numerous stations by physicists of the Geological Survey. During past decades physicists and chemists had visited the Observatory, among them Dr. Stanley Ballard, who equipped the laboratories with a Gaertner spectrograph; Dr. Harvey White of Berkeley, who found no radioactivity in Hawaiian lavas; and Dr. J. J. Naughton, who found a critical isotope of carbon in the emanations of Sulphur Bank. Modern chemistry was beginning to be applied to volcanology in the field, and this was what Hovey, Perret, and I hoped for fifty years ago. So much for dry facts of organization. In 1949 the summit crater of Mauna Loa erupted, with fracture and outflow of its south end toward Kona. This was followed in 1950 by lengthy rupture of the southwest rift with the most voluminous and rapid outflows of history, three of them going into the ocean and wreaking destruction in South Kona. The sequence of these outflows was from high sources first, with others opening farther south, and the most conspicuous flows following the steep Kona slope into the ocean, beginning at Hookena. Macdonald and National Park naturalists photographed and recorded everything. The old Hookena post office on the upper road at the home of the veteran Mr. Lincoln was carried away, and this occasioned much drama, for the old man didn’t wish to leave his home. The next house destroyed, an old landmark, was the Magoon Ranch. The third was the attractive and modern Ohia Lodge, a resort built of native logs in the wilderness. A separate large flow forked away from the rift, to the eastern side of the mountain, reaching the lowest landward elevation in the forest of Kahuku, and short flows spilled over the southwest rift on the east side. Several persons approached the flows in South Kona from the ocean. The early photographs of the first flows, where the hard sprouts and boulders of stiff aa partially cooled entered the ocean, showed big columns of vapor from contact with sea water. Not so with the third flow farthest south, explored from a canoe by Jack Matsumoto and a companion, equipped with motion picture cameras. The pictures were good color photographs, and the torrent of lava flowed down a steep bank of its own substance, hemmed in by hardened ridges at the sides, the stream intensely liquid and flowing directly into the ocean.