Paul Shealer went to the White House, but the Carbon County extension director did not abandon Penn State for politics. He accompanied a perfectly shaped Douglas fir that he and his family personally presented to Hillary Clinton for use as the First Family’s Christmas tree in the White House Blue Room.

In addition to his Penn State Cooperative Extension duties, Shealer owns and operates a 40,000-tree Christmas tree farm, Evergreen Acres, in Auburn, Schuylkill County. The longtime agriculture agent was not just called out of the blue to provide greenery for the Blue Room—his trip to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was one of the perks of having one of his trees designated a 2000–2001 co-champion by the National Christmas Tree Growers Association. Another Pennsylvania grower, Daryl Bowersox of Hillsview Tree Farm in Snyder County, will supply the 2001 Christmas tree.

“The Christmas tree association holds a convention every two years,” Shealer explains. “At each convention the growers pick two winners, and they provide the White House indoor Christmas tree for successive years.”

Unlike George W. Bush, Shealer’s road to the White House began at the 2000 Pennsylvania State Farm Show. Every year, Pennsylvania’s top tree is chosen in the lobby of the Main Exhibition Hall. That year, Shealer won with an eight-foot Fraser fir that so epitomized the image of a holiday tree that he almost didn’t enter it in the show. “When you plant new plots of trees and watch them mature, usually one or two trees stand out,” Shealer explains. “As a grower, you keep an eye on them, and give them extra-special care and very careful trimming by hand. That Fraser fir was one of the best I had seen. I wanted to save it for the national show.”

When Shealer measured the fir, however, he found it was right at eight feet, the upper limit for entries in the state and national contests. Another season of growth for the national contest would put the tree at nine feet. Growers can trim branches from the bottom to reduce height, but in this case trimming would have ruined the fir’s shape. “I bit the bullet and cut the tree,” Shealer says, still sounding agonized about the decision. “It won hands down, which qualified me for the national convention.”

After using his best tree to win the state title, Shealer was as nervous as a kid at Christmas about picking a tree that could hold up to national competition at the 2000 convention in Rochester, New York. At the convention, Christmas trees compete in three categories: pines, firs, and other species (usually spruce, cypress, and cedar). Three judges look at 30 to 35 trees entered by growers nationwide. The first-place trees in each class are then displayed, and all convention participants vote for the top two. “It’s really a jury of your peers,” Shealer says. “In my own mind, I was confident. I’m just happy everybody else was thinking the way I did.”

Hillary Clinton, then First Lady of the United States and now a U.S. senator from New York, addresses visitors and media after receiving the White House Blue Room Christmas tree, an 18-foot Douglas fir grown by extension agent Paul Shealer. Shealer’s family, from left, wife, Sharon, son Paul, and daughter Briana, accompanied the tree on its trip to the White House, where Shealer (to the left of Mrs. Clinton) delivered it personally.

“Having two Pennsylvania growers win the national competition happens once in a blue moon, and having our growers supply the Blue Room tree is a special honor,” says Donald “Moose” Craul, owner of Maple Hill Farms in Lewisburg and a 1952 Penn State agronomy graduate. Craul’s farm has supplied all the Christmas trees for the White House porticos and public spaces for the past 15 years.

You would think Shealer might have been running out of perfect Christmas trees just when he needed one most, but the White House requirements had a new wrinkle. The tree had to be exactly 18 feet, 6 inches tall to fit the scale of the Blue Room. The farm’s nursery, where Shealer keeps genetically superior stock, happened to hold three large, great-looking Douglas fir trees, one of which was taken to the White House by Shealer, his wife, Sharon, daughter Briana, and son Paul.

“I’ve been trying to develop my own seed orchard since 1980, and these trees are part of that,” Shealer says. “I pay very close attention to genetics. A tree is not just a tree, and in the future, genetics will play a major role in the Christmas tree industry.”

The White House gardener and head usher made the final selection, a tree that weighed over 500 pounds. “We usually go with whatever species the grower thinks is his best,” says Irv Williams, who has been the White House superintendent for gardens and grounds for more than 50 years. “We usually do a little bit of pruning, and then the tree’s limbs are wired from top to bottom for support. The lights are not a problem, but most of the ornaments are hung on the outer part of the branches.”

After the Shealer family submitted to White House security checks, Paul delivered the tree. “I was not going to miss the chance to drive my truck and trailer through the gates of the White House,” he says laughing. After the Shealers spent the night in the nearby Jefferson Hotel, the tree was loaded into a horse-drawn wagon and formally presented to the First Lady on November 29, 2000.

Shealer, who sells between 3,000 and 4,000 trees from his farm every year, says the experience has been not only been a personal triumph, but has also enhanced his credibility as an extension agent. “When I work with Christmas tree growers, they realize I’m not working with them from just an academic viewpoint, but also as a real-world practitioner. I think it gives me more expertise in my extension job and gives cooperative extension credibility in the industry as well.”

—John Wall