Chase Gardens

Chase Gardens

In the thirties and into the early fifties, it was common for women to wear a corsage when they went out for dinner or dancing on a Friday or Saturday night.  In the southern Willamette Valley, these corsages were provided by Chase Gardens, which was a company  owned by the Chase family with a great number of greenhouses on the north side of the Willamette River, between Eugene and Springfield. They also grew fruit and vegetables for winter sales to the grocery stores.  The Chase family owned many acres of land along the north bank of the Willamette River, where they grew peaches and beans, a vast collection of bean yards where generations of Eugene and Springfield teenagers, from my parent’s generation up to and past my own, spent the summer picking the bean which went to the cannery and were sold all over the West Coast.   In the late sixties the Chase family sold their land for real estate development. The land is now freeways and businesses.

During the depression it was hard for Freeman and Everett to find work.  Ben was laid off from the U of Oregon maintenance department.  The only money that came in that first year was from the two boys finding a job at Chase Gardens pruning trees at ten cents a tree.

Freeman subsequently found work driving a truck delivering finished lumber for the Booth Kelley Lumber Company.  Everett joined his dad contracting, doing odd jobs, painting and roofing and glazing.  They spent one year in Portland as glaziers, putting up green houses on Portland’s east side.

With this experience Everett was able to get a job at Chase Gardens working on the greenhouses.  After a few years Ben was rehired at the U of O and once again the family had money coming in.

After returning from his war service in the South Pacific, Everett was able to regain  his old job at Chase Gardens, as head of maintenance.  Mom and aunt Carldene got jobs there also, making corsages.  This involved sitting a large table covered with boxes of gardenias.  The ladies trimmed the stem, then wrapped the stem in a green paper tape, a gentle downward twirling motion, then poked a pin with a nice looking glass head into the stem and put the gardenia, a lovely smelling white flower with dark green leaves, into a white box.  The boxes were gently packed and taken by truck to flower stores all over the valley for weekend sale.

The two ladies worked at Chase Gardens for several years after the war, until David, Carldene’s husband, took advantage of the GI Bill and moved to Monmouth to attend the Western Oregon College of Education. 

Mom got a job as a school cook, a job she had until retiring at age 65.

Dad found that working in the steamy greenhouses reactivated his malaria, contracted in the jungles of New Guinea, so he got a job at the Georgia Pacific Plywood Mill, where he worked until he was 62.  Then he told his foreman that he hated his job and he was quitting, and went out drinking.  Mom said he arrived home quite drunk.  He was able to work full time raising cattle on his 98 acre spread until Mom retired and they got a double wide trailer in Queen Valley, Arizona.

Mom said that Dad suggested they drive to New Orleans.  On the way they stopped to visit friends in Queen Valley, a small community east of Phoenix. Mom said she was surprised when Dad bought the trailer house.  She complained that she never did get to New Orleans.

Springfield Days

Springfield Days

At the beginning of 1946 we left Wendling.  The mill worker’s union decided that since the war was over they would go on strike for higher wages.  The Booth-Kelly company decided that they could get along without a sawmill in Wendling and moved everything to their Springfield mill.  The workers housing, A, B, and C Row, were torn down, and most of the other housing as well. 

Dad used the new GI Bill to order a new house built in Eugene, and until that was finished we were to live with his parents, my Squires grandparents.

In Springfield I took a school bus across town to Brattain Elementary School.

On weekends my parents liked to drive up to Wendling to drink beer and visit with Carldene and David.  The two army veterans, and others who showed up,  usually one or more of David’s brothers, enjoyed talking about their war experiences, and delighted in teaching me various ways to defend myself.  Many of these involved breaking arms or backs or trachea, which was far beyond anything that ever occurred to me.  However when I began school in Springfield at lot of the self defense moves came in handy.

Brattain Elementary School was much larger than the Wendling school, and the quality of education was nothing like the North Texas teachers laboratory school in Denton, Texas.  In the classroom I was bored, and would often get up from my seat and wander to one of the displays or bookshelves along the wall to find something interesting.

On the playground, crowded with kids from mill working or logging families, I had a hard time fitting in.  A lot of the boys carried knives in their knee high boots, and mumblty peg was the popular game.  This involved throwing a knife into the dirt in an attempt to make it stick, a skill I still sometimes practice.  I had several cousins at Brattain who gave me some social life but in general I spent a lot of time by myself reading.

The Squires grandparents lived on Kelly Street, at the foot of Kelly Butte.  Grandad Squires who was recently retired from the painting department of the U of O maintenance department, had built the house himself.  The house was el shaped.  At one end was the kitchen, which had a door opening to the back lawn and fruit trees, a door off of the driveway that abutted a covered walkway to the garage, a container in the wall to hold stove wood for the cookstove that had an outer and inner lid, to keep out the cold.  Out of habit, the old people kept a dipper which they filled with water from the tap.  There was a pump in the back yard in case the city water ever gave out.

From the kitchen one entered the dining room, which featured a large oak dining table, a cabinet for dishes and silverware, and at the other end a bookshelf holding adventure and mystery novels left there by the five or six children who had grown up in Springfield.

On the north side of the dining room was the grandparent’s bedroom, separated by a curtain, and a stairway leading to the second floor.

On the south side was a sitting room, creating the el shape, which contained a big wood stove for heating the house in one corner and in the other was a table on which sat a large radio.  In front of the radio was a rocking chair, for Grandad, and in front of the wood stove was a big stuffed chair, for Grandma.  In the southwest corner was a long couch with a small table in front.

The front door was in the northeast corner of the sitting room.  There was a shelf next to the front door holding a picture of Ronald in his WWI uniform and a picture of my dad in his WWII uniform.

Upstairs, which was unfinished, was one large room with several beds where the girls had slept, and around the corner was another room, which was for the boys, Everett, Freeman, and Bruce.  Here there piles of old magazines of a male nature, usually about boxing or mystery magazines.  Bluebook, a magazine for men, was also available.  This was a men’s version of Redbook, a magazine for women.

The lumber Ben had used to build the home was all cedar, still red and slightly fragrant.

Their house was on a double size lot, with a large vegetable garden taking up one half.  Every spring a friend of granddad who owned a team of plow horses would come to plow up the lot.  Ben and Ellen would grow corn and other tasty plants for canning and eating during the winter. On the open land north of the house was a large plot of strawberries, growing big and fat and juicy in the soft loamy soil.

Early in my residence there I discovered a chicken house up the hill on the northwest corner, with fat hens and a couple of roosters pecking the soil.  To my six year old delight, the chickens ran when I approached them.  I was happily chasing the chickens when I heard heavy breathing and the sound of pounding feet behind me.  My granddad was chasing me!  And he was angry!  I veered away from the chickens and led the chase into the house, where I escaped into my mom’s lap.  After a few minutes of heavy breathing granddad calmed down.  He urged me to never chase the chickens, which request I honored.  He taught me to find eggs the chickens had laid, piling them carefully in a basket for breakfast.

Behind the house was a steep hillside, the east side of Kelly Butte.  This was a scene of exploration.  I found a section of mud which cousin Skip and I slid down one spring day, sliding over and over in the gooey mud, till we were both barely visible beneath our layer of silt.

I tried the same thing one summer day, but the mud had dried and I bounced rather than slid, and ripped the sleeves off my shirt, and tore my forearms as well.

At the top of the butte was a section of exposed rock, where I had my first rock climbing experience. 

I also climbed the trees on the hillside.  I was just then reading Tarzan, and found places where I could leap from tree to tree.

We lived there for almost two years, then in the spring of the third grade we moved 

The Big Flood

In the fall of 1945 Mom and Dad and I lived in the little red house in Wendling, and

I began the second grade in the Wendling grade school, quite a change from the North Texas State Teacher’s College laboratory grade school I had attended in Denton.  Dad got back the job he had prior to the war, as head of Maintenance at Chase Gardens in Eugene.   He found jobs for Mom and Carldene there as well.  My aunt Carldene’s husband, David, had returned from the European Theater of Operation and was now working in the woods, bucking and trimming fallen logs, and the company offered housing for him and the other loggers.

One day in late December the rain began pouring down.  Walking home from school GD, who was now in kindergarten, and I looked at Mill Creek as we crossed the covered bridge.  The water was rising fast.  We hurried through the rain, our heads down, holding hands in the murky dusk.  There were no lights in my house so we continued on up the hill to where Grandma stood on the porch, holding an umbrella.  When she saw us she came running out.  “I’ve been looking for you boys.  I was worried you had washed away.  Come on in.  The radio says Springfield is flooding.”

As it got darker we began to worry that my folks would not make it home.  David called from his parents.  His sister in Marcola had told them that the Mohawk River was flooding Marcola and the bridge to Wendling was under water. 

What was I to do?   Granddad came home and said that Mill Creek was over the covered bridge to town.  We listened to the radio news from Eugene describe the rising Willamette River overflowing its banks.  Grandma said that I would have to bed down in GD’s room.

Then we hear the sound of a big truck.  Grandma peered out the window.  Lights from the truck were coming up the plank road.  It stopped at the bottom of the hill.

Grandma said, “My stars, if that isn’t the Downing cattle truck.”  The Downing family owned a lot of logged off land between Wendling and Marcola and ran a substantial cattle ranch.  Soon we saw three people hiking up the hill and the cattle truck turned around and headed downhill. 

It was Mom and Dad and Carldene walking up to us.  I was so relieved.  GD and I jumped around till Grandma told us to hush.  Grandad went to the door and we watched them take off their wet coats and shoes on the porch.  Grandma gave them towels. We were all laughing and asking questions.

They had made it as far as Marcola, but the water was too high to cross the bridge to Wendling.  The three of them were huddled in the rain trying to decide what to do when up drove Johhny Downing in his empty cattle truck.  He said he was sure the truck was high enough to make it across the bridge, and if the Abercrombie girls wanted to chance it they could hop in.  There was only room for three in the cab, so Dad had to climb in back and stand in the ankle deep manure.  We all laughed at that. 

Mom and Dad took me home and put me in bed while they ran water for the tub.

The next day the water had receded and life was back to normal.

Sawmills

Sawmills

I thought that you might like to read about timber production, how the two by four gets from the forest to your back yard project.

The loggers in the woods cut down the trees.  When this was done by hand, either with an axe or with a saw with a handle at each end, it was a very difficult task, requiring the utmost in physical effort, hour after hour, day after day.  When power saws were introduced in the forties cutting down the tree became a little easier, and quicker. 

The buckers were the men who trimmed off the limbs and sawed the fallen tree into workable lengths, which were either dumped into a river or flooded creek to float down to the log pond next to the sawmill, or they were lifted onto trucks by a big crane attached to a tree and driven to the mill.  There were also flumes, which were virtual ditches made of wood supported by timbers that acted like a stream and carried the logs in water to the ever popular log pond.  When I was in Jr High School my dad and I would go deer hunting in the woods up past Wendling and we would sometimes walk the flumes, high above the ground looking down for deer.

The saw mill was where the logs were cut into boards similar to those one now buys at Home Depot. 

The star of the sawmill was the head sawyer.  Like a judge, he sat in a big easy chair with a host of buttons at his disposal.  The management would give the head sawyer a sheet of paper with the contract of lumber they need for that day.  The head sawyer was able to look at a log and estimate what he needed to do to begin the process of filling that contract.

There were men running across the logs floating in the pond carrying long handled tools with a hook at the end called a “peavey.”  Although they sometimes slipped and fell into the water they usually were able to hook the log they wanted and conduct it through all the other logs to a moving chain that would catch the log and pull it up onto a carriage where it waited for the sawyer to begin slicing.  He had a band saw, a continuous strip of toothed metal that whirred at a high speed.  The carriage brought the log up to the saw,  bzzzzt and a slab of wood fell onto another carriage.  There were air driven spikes that held the log and the slabs in place and by pushing one button or another the sawyer could flip the slab to the position he desired for another pass into the band saw.   The piece of wood he cut off of the slab was called a cant, and the cant was flipped on a set of rollers and sent into the mill itself.

In the mill were a sequence of tables with powered spikes and saws that would trim the ends of the cants and slice the cants into boards of various dimensions.  These operators also had a sheet of instructions and using their hands and knees they operated buttons that raised and lowered saws and hooks and produced the boards.  The boards then went down a series of belts where inspectors would decide the quality of the board and mark it with chalk.  This is the job my mother had during the war. 

After the board was marked it went to the green chain, which carried “green” boards, that is boards that were fresh from the pond and still full of moisture, down to a line of waiting men who manned separate stations along the length of the green chain and depending on the size and length of the board pulled it off and stacked it on a pile of similar boards.  This the job I had each summer I was in college.  It required little talent, but a lot of strength and energy.  We wore heavy leather mittens and a leather apron.  There were rollers running the length of the green chain to facilitate getting the boards from the chain table down to the stack of boards.  It was easy, just push down, guide the board across your apron, line it up and drop into the pile, jumping down every few feet of heights to throw a thin board across to stabilize the pile, then hop back up and grab the boards for which you were responsible from the unending line of boards.  If you missed one it would travel down to the end of the chain. If too many of your boards got past you the green chain foreman would come and have a talk with you.  You only stopped the chain in a dire emergency.

From the green chain the green lumber was taken to the drying sheds and then to the planer mill, where they went through mechanical planers which smoothed them down to salable pieces of wood.

The actions in the planer mill duplicated the green lumber mill.  The men on the planer chain again stacked the boards by width, thickness and length.  These stacks were taken to the yard boss, who oversaw storing the planed lumber before it was shipped out. 

Finished wood was shipped either by freight car, which involved Carloaders, men who loaded the wood into the boxcar, a job that combined strength, agility, and the ability to stack the boards in the most efficient manner; or it was shipped by truck.

The most onerous job in the planer mill was handling flooring, especially tongue and groove flooring.  These boards, usually one inch thick, six inches wide, ten to twenty feet long, were stacked six high by the planer men and tied at each end with twine then carefully piled one atop the other till the straddle bug swooped in, lifted up the load, and carried it to the yardman.  The yard workers had to pick up the six-board packages, toss them on their shoulder, and carefully place them in vertical storage to await the loaders.  The unskilled yard man on his first night of work could easily tear off the twine holding the bundles together resulting in a messy slowdown of production.

The hierarchy of the sawmill workers ran down in skill level from the head sawyer through the men who operated the various machines in the mill, then to the men who pulled boards and piled them up.  There were also clean up men and yard men, who swept up the sawdust and collected the broken pieces of wood that accumulated under the mill and under the chains and around the yard.  In Wendling in the early days this scrap wood was usually taken to a teepee burner, named for its shape, and burned.  The atmosphere of a sawmill town was usually thick with smoke, ash, and cinders.  We developed a skill in getting cinders out of our eyes.

In Springfield, when I was in college, the scrap wood was thrown into a chute that led to a giant wood grinder, called “the Hog.”  The ground up wood was used sold for wood chips or particle board.

 My first year I fed the Hog several times.   It was fast paced work, shoving wood in a chute while wood scraps came down from above, none of it tidily placed but sticking out every which way.  One summer day I came to work to find an ambulance and some policemen and several supervisors.  Some poor person on the day shift had been hooked by a broken board and pulled into the Hog, to his doom.

Other skilled jobs were saw filers, who spent the day sharpening all the various saws and replacing the dull ones on the line.

Of course the most important man to me was granddad, the head millwright.  He was the man who was in charge of repairing anything in the mill that broke, from a link on the green chain to the support frame for the overhead crane that was used to stack the cants, slabs of raw wood, in piles for later use.  Often I would come to work and see granddad and a group of his welders and oilers peering  at a nonworking piece of machinery.  They had to be efficient and skilled in order to keep the endless chain of wood moving down the line.

Now there are few sawmills in the Willamette Valley, and now computers have replaced most of the men who ran the various saws and other machines. But as you drive by one of the remaining sawmills if you look closely you will see men pulling boards off of the green chain, and you will still see a couple of millwrights gazing dolefully at a broken piece of machinery.