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.

                        Climbing Around Aspen

Aspen in the summer of 1970 was full of active people.  Rugby had become popular.  Waitresses and bartenders would bicycle up Maroon Creek or Castle Creek or up Independence Pass before showing up for their evening shift.  Therefore I was not surprised when Sally, a waitress at my favorite bar, asked me one evening if I would take her mountain climbing.  She was going out with a friend of mine and he had recommended me as a mountain guide.

She was in good shape so I agreed.  Our first climb was New York Peak, a pinnacle jutting like a diamond up from a ridge that parallels the south side of the highway up to Independence Pass.  I had climbed this peak with Axe the summer before and it seemed like a good beginner climb.  It was also visible from the highway, so she could point it out to her friends.  It offered some nice exposure and simple rock climbing and the ridge was just a short traverse away if she got nervous.

The road in is marginal but I found a flat place to park sort of close to the peak.  Our first challenge was crossing the Roaring Fork, which undercut the forest floor here and flowed far beneath us, leaving us to cross by leaping a narrow chasm.  One slip, of course, meant a painful death. 

Sally blithely leaped across the open space and I followed and up we went.  I dutifully carried my climbing rope, the same one bought in high school in a joint venture with Axe and Tiger, and probably more of a psychological aid.

It was a nice experience for her.  We stood on the summit, the wind drying our sweat, gazing at the surrounding ridges and mountaintops.   She got quite excited and said she wanted to do another one.

A few weeks later we got together and climbed Pyramid Peak.  This is a 14000 foot peak a long par five from the Maroon Bells, but the rock composing Pyramid is much more solid than the Maroon Bells, which I never dared approach.

Pyramid I had climbed with Jim and later with Lee and a couple of other guys so I felt confident to lead her up.

After leaving Maroon Lake, the climb begins with a long scrambling hike through narrow valleys and up some steep ridges.  Near the summit we came to a steep face.  I asked her if she wanted to tie in to the rope, but she said she was fine, so up we went, side by side so I could coach her on hand and foot placement.  We were having a fine time when suddenly there was a loud explosion, a blast that caused us both to flatten onto the rocks and hang on.  The blast resolved into the echo of a sonic boom; a jet fighter had zipped overhead with no consideration for who might be in a delicate position on a mountainside.  We gasped and looked around. 

She said she was okay so we completed climbing the face.  From there it was a steep hike to the summit.  We sat drinking water, eating cheese and sausage, and enjoying the view of the mountains and lakes below us.  She laughed and said she wanted to do another.

Our third peak was Capitol Peak.  As some of you may remember that the mountain reached by quite a long hike in.  It was the first mountain I climbed in Colorado, with Steve and Jim about two days after we arrived in Aspen in 1967.  Then there was the climb of the pregnant women, although I don’t think that Suzi or N. G. or Deanne (did I miss anybody?) went further than the base camp.

This is another14000 foot mountain.  The first stage is a long steep hike up to a pass that can take the determined hiker to Snowmass Creek.  But the climber turns right and avoids the ridge by scrambling parallel to the ridge ever higher up the mountain until scramble and ridge meet prior to the summit at a narrow ridge, called the Knife Edge. This ridge is about 150 feet across and varies from one to two feet wide and appears to drop several hundred feet on either side. One side is an overhang.  Here Jim and Steve and I had roped up on our climb.  The crossing is accomplished by placing your hands on the overhang side, leaning back and shuffling sideways.  Although I imagine Axe could have, and probably has, jauntily strode along the ridge top, I was happy to shuffle.

We stood there looking at the Knife Edge while I explained the route and the method to cross.  I asked her again if she wanted to rope up.  Nope, she said, I haven’t yet and I won’t start now.

So across we shuffled.  My head was swinging back and forth, checking my progress and checking that Sally was in no danger of slipping to oblivion.  She was doing fine, and soon we were clambering up to the broad summit of Capitol Peak.

As we were hiking out, she said that she was done climbing.

A few years later I took Jane up some of these same mountains, and although she and I hiked into Capitol Lake at the base I never climbed Capitol Peak again.

Nick

Leaving Denton

The memories that stick with me of Denton include walking to the town square to watch movies on Saturday afternoon.  I was six but my parents felt secure in sending me off on my own.  The movie was always preceded by a newsreel, fighting in Europe and Japan and some sports, then a cartoon, then a sing along, a bouncing ball hopping on the words we were supposed to sing.  Everyone joined in, then we sat back for the show.  I really enjoyed the westerns.  My favorite was Hoot Gibson, a former trick rider who kept his six shooter in his boot.  Mom bought me cowboy boots, and I always kept my cap gun in my boot to honor old Hoot.
I also remember the silver thaw.  One early spring morning I awoke to find all the trees covered with a sheet of ice.  A cold wind had blown in from the north as it was raining in the night and frozen the whole town.  It was beautiful.
As it got warmer the fireflies came out at night and the landlady's two kids and I and others would run around the front lawn barefoot with a jar to capture a firefly.  The parents sat on the front porch.  One evening we were playing "mumbly de peg" with our hunting knives.  This involved seeing how accurately you could throw your knife in the ground.  The landlady's daughter thought to give it a try, and on her second throw the knife went through her foot.  She started squalling.  On the porch the landlady spit in her can and said, "daughter, stop that yelling and pull that knife out and come up and let me look at your foot."  I checked a quick glance at my mom, certain that she would have rushed to my aid if it were me.
In April, before my seventh birthday, dad got some leave and we drove up to Oklahoma to see moms relatives.  We had a 39 Plymouth coupe with jumpseats in the back.  First we visited aunt Neva, who lived on a farm outside Enid, Oklahoma.  We parked in the town square so mom could call Neva to come and show us the way to her farm.  This was the first time I saw cars double parked as a general practice, farmers and ranchers pulling their pickups alongside a parked car and strolling into the store or barbershop.
Aunt Neva owned a burro, which she urged me to ride.  I got on, cowboy boots kicking the burro's ribs as I had seen in the movies.  The burrow stopped and lowered his head, and I slid off over his neck onto the dusty corral floor.
There were two sets of relatives, the Pricketts,  Grandma Abercrombie's family, and Grandad's family, the Abercrombies.  The Pricketts claimed to come French royalty, according to mom, who laughed explaining about the "D'Bonfoy Finger" which was a slight bend in her little finger and a sign of her royal background.  Grandma was the oldest of about fourteen children, her youngest sister being the same age as my mom.  Mom said they were great enemies as children because that aunt wanted mom to do as she said, being the aunt.
The Abercrombies had come over from Scotland early in the eighteenth century and settled in Georgia, where they had land.  By the mid eighteen sixties they had a prosperous distillery that was situated between Atlanta and Savannah, which a few years later became part of the wasteland left by General Sherman when he subdued the South.  The remnants of the family made it to Kansas but did not prosper so when the Cherokee Strip, the last of the land in Oklahoma promised to the eastern Indian tribes for settlement, was taken back by the US Government and opened to homesteaders, they drove their wagons south and found free land, where they spread out and began raising wheat.
After visiting a few more of the Prickett side we drove to Great Grandad Abercrombie's farm.  I was amazed to see so many cats on the barn roof that they were pushing each other off.
Great Grandad Newt taught me to milk a cow, showing me how to squirt a shot into the mouth of one of the cats mewing around us.  He sent me and his hound dog exploring the rolling hills, where we jumped a large animal that bounded away.  I ran back shouting that we had seen a deer, but they all laughed as said it was only a jack rabbit.

On the eighth of May, 1943, the Germans finally surrendered to the Allied Forces, and the war in Europe was over.  Shortly thereafter, the Army told Dad that he could extend his stay and become regular Army rather than a reservist, or he could be separated from the Army.  He wanted to go home, so he chose separation.  At the end of the school year we headed back to Oregon.   We stopped at Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, and spent a night in Santa Barbara.  In San Francisco we stayed with Dad's sister Lela and her family.  They owned an apartment house on Hayes Street.
Her children were Jack, a couple of years younger than I, Judy, two years younger, and a baby, Rick.

Finally we were back in Wendling.  I was excited to see GD and hear all the news.  On the morning of the 15th of August we were playing in Grandma's yard when the mill whistle began blowing.  We looked at each other, startled at this uncommon occurrence.  The George, the older boy who lived behind Grandma, came running out with a bugle, which he blew loudly, then shouted: "The Japanese have surrendered!  The war is over!  The war is over!"  We hugged and danced and shouted to Grandma.
This was the first time I stayed up till midnight, as the adults partied and sang songs and planned what they would do when the boys came home from the war.

things to do in Denton, Texas

If you wanted a social life you could always get in a fight.  On the way home from school one afternoon one of the public school kids started walking alongside me.  His tone was insulting, and I took offense, and soon we were rolling in the grass struggling for supremacy.  I finally was able to hold him down, get in a couple of punches, and force him to say Give.  We sneered at each other and I walked on home.
Our apartment was on the third floor of a large house, and we had a stairway out back that served as a fire escape.  I was reading a comic book before dinner when Mom called me.  "There is a boy here to see you," she said, and went back to her preparations.
At the back door was a larger kid whom I had never seen.  I stepped out onto the landing and he grinned evilly.  "You the kid who fought my friend Jimmy? "
"Was that his name?  Yeah, I guess so."
The big kid had blond hair and a round face.  He was holding a paper bag out of which he pulled a knife, a rope, and a pair of pliers.  "These are what I use to torture kids who beat up my friends.  And I'm going to use them on you if you go after Jimmy again."  He tried to look menacing, but he had a dumb expression.
I was skeptical.  I could not believe that someone would torture me.  I looked down into the yard.  "It's a long way down.  You better get out of here."
He frowned.  "I better not see you around."  He descended.
Mom asked, "who was that?"
"Just some kid who wanted to play.  I told him we were eating dinner."
I asked the son of our landlady, who was older and went to the public school about the big kid and he laughed and said not to worry.
The next few days I kept my eyes open but I never saw either of them again.
One day we had a terrific rain storm, and afterward I went outside to float a wooden boat in the rushing gutter.  The water emptied down an opening in the side of the street, taking my boat with it.
I followed the street to where I could see a small crowd of boys playing.  There was a storm sewer opening into a big field, creating a creek where none had existed before.  The boys told me this happened when there was a heavy rain, and we spent an hour or so making dams and throwing sticks in the water, then the flow slowed down to a trickle, revealing a tunnel with a sandy bottom.  We began exploring the tunnel.  Our was was lit by the openings in the street, little windows above us.  Because we were small, we were able to crawl through them out onto the street.  This was very exciting for me, because I was just reading about Jean Valjean  escaping Javert in the sewers of Paris, and here I was, in a tunnel under the street!
I spent many happy days under the streets of Denton after this.
One morning Mom woke me up.  "Nicky, you've got to see this.  There's been a silver thaw."
Everything was covered in ice.  I slipped on the sidewalk on the way to school, and the teachers let us out of class to walk around campus and look at all the trees encased in ice.  The sun came out and it was like living in a world of glass.  By midday it had all melted.

Mom and Dad

Walking down the streets of Denton I began to notice that Mom was shorter than most other ladies.  She wore  her hair combed up in back,  piled atop her head, held in place by decorative combs, and she had very good posture.  She smiled and laughed a lot, and when she did housework she sort of sang, a vocalized humming, la la la without any real tune.  She could lose her temper, but was mostly kind and loving.  She often seemed to forget I was there, staring into space and not responding to questions.  If I finally got her attention she would just laugh gaily, dismissing any concerns I may have voiced.
In his uniform, with his first Sergeant stripes, Dad was an authority figure.  Once he took me to his office, and all the younger enlisted mean were very wary in his presence.  He was also shorter than the other soldiers.  He had a big grin, rendered kind of goofy by the big gap between his two front teeth.
When he got home from the training base he would start drinking beer.  I was urged to play outside.
Sometimes other Army friends and their wives would come over on Friday night.  In my bedroom I could hear them talking and laughing.  In the morning there was always a mess of empty bottles and snacks of food on plates.  I helped myself to the snacks and sometimes tried a sip of beer from a bottle not emptied, then I went into their bedroom to say that I was going outside to play.
If it were a Sunday they would make sure I was dressed in my suit and send me off to Sunday School at the neighborhood church, but on Saturday I wore old clothes and went outside.
I also liked to sit and read.  I had discovered Classic Comics, which were comic book versions of classic novels.  My favorite was Les Miserables, mostly because of the scenes of Jean Valjean running through the sewers.  I also liked Robin Hood.  Actually I read almost everything I could get my hands on, from Thornton W Burgess to books featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.  Dad offered to read to me, but I said I would rather do it myself.
There was not much interaction between my parents and me,  they mostly left me on my own.

School in Denton Texas

Denton Texas was like nothing I had ever seen.  The streets were paved, long, and lined with trees.  The trees were all deciduous, not a fir tree among them.  Even in midwinter they still had big flat leaves.
Mom held my hand as we walked down the street.  She had directions to the grade school from our land lady, who had shifted the can she spit in to her left hand and waved her right up the street before us.  "Straight up there,  honey, go a few blocks, you cant miss it."
So off we went.  After a few blocks I saw children walking down a cross street, headed for a large building, but we plowed straight on.
The houses got larger, and changed from wood to brick and stone construction.  A group of big buildings stood before us, sidewalks purposefully leading across vast green lawns.
We were both overwhelmed.
A young lady walked by and mom asked her if the grade school was nearby.  The young lady pointed to one of the large buildings and told us to go in there to register for the elementary school.
A man with grey hair and rimless glasses wearing a grey suit asked mom to fill out the proper forms and took me aside to ask me some questions.  He showed me a couple of books and I was able to read them with no problem.  I had been reading aloud from Horton Hatches the Egg to GD for months.
We did some addition and subtraction problems.  He smiled and told mom to take me to the first grade classroom.
The school in Wendling was small and simple.  The alphabet marched in order across the top of the wall and the students sat in desks attached to the floor in orderly rows and all recited in unison.
The classroom I entered in Denton was noisy.  Children stood or sat in small groups, and there were at least six young ladies helping the teacher in leading the separate groups in discussions or demonstrations.
Mom said, "They must do things different in Texas," and kissed me goodby.  I was led to one of the groups by a pretty young lady and after a few minutes I was eagerly engaged in the discussion.
At the end of the month mom got a bill, and we realized that she had enrolled me in the teaching lab of the North Texas State Teachers College.  She had to pay tuition, but she said that the education was worth it.
We were taught Spanish as well as English, typing, cursive writing; we discussed everything with the young ladies rather than listen to the teacher lecture.  Once a week we marched  hand in hand to attend college concerts and plays.  I shall never forget their production of "Showboat," and the young man in blackface singing "Old Man River."