Andy Kerr - Growing Up in Timber Country

By Andy Kerr

I was born in the mill town of Creswell, Oregon, 12 miles south of Eugene, the county seat of Lane County, which used to bill itself as the "lumber capital of the world." Sixty miles south of Creswell is Roseburg, the county seat of Douglas County. It billed itself as the "timber capital of the world." Basically, Douglas County cut more board feet of trees and Lane County produced more board feet of lumber.

My father and his brother built houses. They did fine work and never did a penny's worth of advertising, all business coming from word-of-mouth. The Kerr boys came from a long line of Creswellites.

My mother kept the books and invested the profits. She was the only college graduate (still) in the family, having moved to Cottage Grove in 1948 from Minnesota to teach school.

I have one brother, seventeen months older, who now sells Snap-On tools in Chico, California. For a while, he was selling logging equipment (at least it was second growth machines).

Family friends included timber mill owners, managers and workers. I went to school with their children.

Creswell is no longer a mill town. It made the change. One sawmill still remains, but the town has diversified. There is a golf course and resort. There's a company in town that makes metal detectors for airports. There is the processing plant where 60,000 chickens lose their lives each day. (But that's another story.) Creswell is now a bedroom community to Eugene.

The first Earth Day in 1970 passed without notice to this high school freshman. The second Earth Day was duly celebrated at Creswell High School. One could get out of school if you promised to pick up litter. Such a deal. I didn't pick up any litter that day. Instead, I was trying to get laid (with no luck I'm sad to report).

I was interested in the environment. I read much on the subject and the first two environmental groups I joined were Zero Population Growth and the Sierra Club.

In high school, I was a B-student, and the school counselor was always on my butt for "not applying yourself." I reasoned that since I could pull Bs just by showing up, listening, reading the texts and taking the tests, why try harder? My high school career was lackluster. I ran, and lost, for student body president, but did win the senior class presidency on the sympathy vote. The sergeant-at-arms was a friend since the first grade. Our greatest accomplishment would have been changing the school mascot from the bulldog to the turnip. We lost on a close vote.

I did edit the editorial page of the Creswell High School Crescendo, where I believe we were one of the first newspapers in the nation to call for the impeachment of Richard Milhouse Nixon. It was the editorial equating high school athletics and all that goes with it to the Catholic Church that was the most controversial however.

As senior class president, I had to preside over the vote for carnival princess, a lucky and lovely senior girl who would represent the class at the annual carnival. The representative of the class that sold the most carnival tickets was crowned queen. The popular girls were being nominated and then the school sergeant-at-arms rose and nominated me. I could read a crowd even then (though I couldn't speak to one, to which I attribute my loss for the highest school office) and the nominations were closed. I won quite handily I might note. I reasoned it would be fun to make fun of sacred (and stupid) high-school institutions and it might motivate the seniors to sell those tickets.

Gender stereotyping beginning to be challenged then. As a freshperson I had tried to sign up for home economics, reasoning it would teach me valuable skills later in life, but I was told that the "computer" wouldn't allow it. I regret not having pushed the matter.

My class did sell the most tickets and I was crowned "queen" or "king" depending on your view. I viewed myself as queen, but this was much too much for the traditionalists, who insisted replacing my dainty tiara with a foil-covered cardboard manly crown.

Upon my election as "princess", I immediately asked in front of everyone that the first runner up be my escort. I'm still pissed she got the tiara, but politically I did the right thing.

A family friend was a manager at Cone Lumber Company in Goshen, six miles north of Creswell where the Willamette Pass Highway (OR 58) leaves I-5. It was owned by Ed Cone, timber beast extraordinare and one-time mayor of Eugene. Using a Kerr Bros. Builders trailer, we scammed some fine old growth lumber for the one-time use of building some tacky carnival booths.

Cone had just completed an automated green chain. It was a huge mechanical wonder (before computers and lasers) that would sort lumber by dimension and length with the help of a human hand. The green chain (raw lumber) and the planer chain (finished lumber) were major sources of jobs. An untalented or unambitious employee might spend their career on the chain, where seniority would allow one to pull the 8-foot 2x4s.

High school ended positively. I was quite shy when it came to girls, but I was drafted by some clique to escort one of my classmates who was elected Homecoming princess (they all had ovaries this time). She went on to marry a black man (this just wasn't done in Creswell) and later served time for being the "wheel(wo)man" in an armed robbery. She later settled down and at a reunion she told me that it made it easier to explain which cousins were which to her small children. The white ones were from her side and the black ones from his.

In the early 1990s, the British Broadcasting Corporation and Oregon Public Broadcasting did a documentary on Mill City in the North Santiam Canyon east of Salem. (I had a great uncle whom we used to visit in Mill City. Great Uncle Art was the first guy I ever knew to wear his pants above his nipples, but again, that's another story.)

The BBC and OPB could have used Forks, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula, or a dozen other Oregon towns, or they could have used Creswell 20 years ago.

I went to the same school system for 12 years. There were about 100 of us when I entered the first grade. There were about 100 of us when I entered high school. 66 of us graduated in 1973. About three of us went off to a four-year college and at least one has died in the woods.

There is only one occupation in this nation that is more deadly than logging. Not policing, not coal mining, not ocean fishing. The only occupation more dangerous than logging is being an astronaut.

Death was common in the woods when I was growing up. The safety standards have improved. Helicopters can now get the injured to hospitals that have better lifesaving and life-restoring techniques. The mortality rate has decreased. But as we log the last of the big forests on progressively steeper slopes, the dangers increase.

I also remember the maimed. Loggers who had a log roll over them and lived to tell about it. Those walking wounded as they hobbled around town with their distorted bodies, reduced to drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at the cafe.

It was, and is, an ugly way to make a living. Getting up at 3 AM, starting work at dawn. If you died in the summer, your fellows would put you in the shade until quitting time. You were dead anyway.

It was safer and drier if you worked in a mill. It was possibly even a union wage. The best union was the Shingle Weavers Union. Shingle Weavers were highly skilled and highly paid. But none of them had all their fingers. "Less to get caught in the machines" they'd joke.

In high school, I had a choice. I could have dropped out and gone to work in the woods or the mill. I could have made good money, bought a new truck, a little house and settled in.

I could have been lower middle class, working half the year, weather and market permitting; collecting unemployment the other six months.

I chose instead, mostly because I had the option, to go to college.

When I was in the sixth-grade, we were loaded on the school bus for a forest field trip. In 1967, this was as close as it came to "environmental education."

We headed up Moseby Creek outside of Cottage Grove to see some forest "management" by the Georgia-Pacific Corporation. We boys in the back pretended that the school bus was a logging crummy and we were headed for a day of work in the woods, like so many of our fathers.

24 years later, I remember three things from that trip. The first was how to tell a hemlock by its tilted top. The second was that clearcutting was good for wildlife. The third was what the G-P forester with the big orange pickup told me: that they'd cut and grow trees forever to keep the mills going to provide lumber for homes all over America. I still believe what he told me about hemlocks.

In that same era, I helped my father get lumber for his jobs. We'd go down to Mr. Dugan's mill near Drain. While Vernon was casing the stacks for the best lumber, I'd look around the mill.

The thing I remember most was that the mill was old. All the equipment was '50s vintage or earlier. The mill ran only when the market was up. Even a 13-year old could see that the mill wouldn't last forever. If you know where to look, you can still see Mr. Dugan's mill rusting in the weeds.

My friends and I used to sneak down by the wigwam burner of one of the Creswell mills and toss wood scraps, bottles of Coke and other debris into the fiery inferno. You could feel the heat for quite a distance and we'd soon retreat after heaving our offering into what we were convinced was the closest thing to Hell on Earth. I remember hearing some grown-ups say that if the government was successful in shutting down the wigwams to reduce air pollution, the mills would have to go out of business, because they couldn't get rid of their wastes.

They did shut the wigwams down, but the mills stayed in business and the dirty black smoke that used to cover the town gave way to the invisible but more irritating stench from Weyerhaeuser's Springfield paper mill that I could smell on foggy cold mornings while walking to school.

Weyerhaeuser's yellow trucks seemed to be everywhere back then. My family used to hunt deer on the Fremont National Forest in Klamath and Lake counties. I remember driving through Camp 9 and Camp 15—closed now, no longer needed, like the mill in Bly several years back and the Klamath Falls a few years ago—and thinking that logging camp life wouldn't be too bad. I also remember what was essentially a 12-mile square clearcut of about 100,000 acres. Even to a teenager worried mostly about getting a car, getting laid and getting rid of zits, it seemed they were cutting an awful lot awfully fast.

Weyerhaeuser, by its massive presence, seemed so reassuring. They'd taken over the Woodard sawmill in Cottage Grove and had built a veneer mill there too. Their sawmill and papermill dominated Springfield. They had big mills in North Bend and Klamath Falls, and that was just in Oregon!

In the 8th grade, we students got to see a Weyerhaeuser film extolling the virtues of sustained yield. Since the film was out-of-date even then, we giggled at the cinematic style and the funny old clothes the actors wore. The film portrayed Dad working at the sustained yield mill, while Mom stayed home. Young Bobby would have a job at the mill, just like Dad. Suzy would of course marry a millworker and live down the street.

That same year in November, 1969 1,500 protesters rallied outside federal offices in Eugene. It wasn't to protest the Vietnam war, but to protect French Pete, a low-elevation forest outside of Eugene threatened with logging.

Imagine, I thought, what a novel idea. Part of the National Forests that isn't logged. I had grown up on the Cottage Grove Ranger District of the Umpqua National Forest where clearcuts were common, even in the city's watershed. This novel, at least to me, idea stuck with me.

In high school, I read an article in the Cottage Grove Sentinel about the late Bohemia Corporation's Stub Stewart holding forth on logging and the environment. He assured us that forests were just a crop and one could start cutting at one end of a forest and by the time they were done at the other end, start over and cut again. It was then that I realized their plan wasn't to replace the forest, but rather to eliminate it and have plantations instead. It was to be more similar to a cornfield than a forest. Stub's role as a guiding force in my life should not be underestimated.

I went off to Oregon State University in 1976, having narrowed my choice to journalism at the University of Oregon or electrical engineering at Oregon State University. I chose the latter because it was 40 miles further away, an important consideration at the time. After two weeks of EE, I sold my slide rule back to the bookstore and found refuge in the American Studies Department where I could take any classes I liked.

At OSU, besides being a mediocre student (I avoided the natural sciences religiously and concentrated on history, political science and economics (the dismal art). I helped start a student environmental center, which served as base of operations for my growing interest in forest protection.

About that time Weyerhaeuser built a second growth mill in Cottage Grove. It was a marvel! Why it would take a log down to a 4" top! They used to leave crap like that in the woods! They weren't worth the gas to take them to the mill.

A couple of years before I moved to Portland, Georgia-Pacific moved its headquarters back to Atlanta. Orange trucks are now more prevalent in the Deep South than in the Pacific Northwest. They took the G-P sign off the building now called the Standard Insurance Center. Mercifully, they also hauled Perpetuity, a work of "art" depicting a young seedling growing in the center of a huge and hollowed old growth log, to the Western—er, now it's the World—Forestry Center, up by the Portland Zoo.

A few years ago, Weyerhaeuser brought the last raft of logs down the Millicoma River and closed its North Bend mill. That mill once employed 1,500 people, but it closed with 250 workers. Their new second growth "mill for the '90s" employs about 75.

The year before that, Weyerhaeuser brought the last train of logs out of the Mohawk Valley. They didn't close their Springfield sawmill then, choosing instead to enter the federal timber market for the first time—to out-compete smaller mills (now out of business) which had traditionally cut only federal logs.

A few years before that, Georgia-Pacific had sold its Moseby Creek holdings to Weyerhaeuser. That action proved that the yellow trucks planned to stay around, at least for awhile, although the orange trucks formed a caravan back to the Georgia pines.

The yellow trucks look different now. I remember that when I was a kid most loads had three logs, many had just two and we'd often see one-log loads. Weyerhaeuser, unlike most others, may plan to be here in the future, but their trucks, loaded with 30 or more little logs, might not stop at the mill at all but go straight on to the docks.

It's not just old growth that's being slicked off and floated to Japan. 40-year-old logs are being shipped out of the country; trees that were planted 40 years ago in expectation of being cut 40 years from now. Not only is the timber industry exporting our heritage, they are doing the same with our future.

When Weyerhaeuser closed their Springfield lumber mill, they blamed the spotted owl for the dwindling log supply. Their timing could have been better since, in that same week, George Weyerhaeuser proudly announced in Tacoma that quarterly earnings were up 29%. The company wasn't satisfied, though, and now plans to dump their less-profitable divisions. Since their real estate, paper, log export and other divisions are doing fine, it can only be assumed that Frederick Weyerhaeuser's grandson is thinking of dropping the sawmilling side of the family business. Don't expect the Big W to build a new second growth mill in Springfield; they've said their Cottage Grove operation is quite adequate for their future needs.

Also citing the spotted owl, Georgia-Pacific announced the closing of their Springfield second growth mill. They said they couldn't get enough logs to keep it going. Yet, the orange trucks that are still here in Oregon are hauling logs from G-P lands directly to the docks. The mill isn't closing permanently yet. It's been bought by some sharp operators who won't bother with unions and union wages and will do more automation, so as to compete more effectively. Apparently, the new owners figure they can find enough logs.

While mill owners aren't suffering, timber workers are. They think the spotted owl and those damned "environmeddlers" are the cause of all their troubles.

Environmentalists know that the cause is overcutting on both public and private lands, automation in both the mills and the woods, changing markets, and the export of unprocessed logs overseas.

The workers are afraid. Most are uneducated; many are illiterate.

They figure since their granddaddies logged, why can't their grandchildren?

The reason for such expectations is that the forests of the Pacific Northwest were so big and so vast that it took three generations of loggers to cut through them, unlike the forests of Maine, Mississippi or Michigan, which took only one generation. Here, for the first time, loggers and millworkers put down roots.

The boom is now over. We've just about cut it all. The timber industry isn't up against an owl, it's up against an ocean.