When you think of Hjalmar or George Grafton or them or even Archie, what they went through to try and contact the men and even organize them in the first place. If you call that being a Communist, then give me a Communist.
—LILLIAN GODFREY
THERE ARE TWO UNSOLVED MYSTERIES in the village of Lake Cowichan—the dynamiting of the old abandoned police station and the whereabouts of the IWA papers, which were stolen the week of the Big Split. Most people think that whoever blew up the tiny false-fronted building, which had been just big enough for the lone provincial police constable and the occasional prisoner, did the community a service that night in 1950. Those who know the identity of the culprit aren’t talking.
As for the IWA papers, only a few elderly people know where the files are, and since they deny any part in taking the papers in the first place, they aren’t inclined to tell anyone else where to find them. They will reveal, however, that the woman who knows where the papers are is the widow of a blacklisted coal miner. He came to the lake and started logging in the 1930s, joined the loggers’ union and became the secretary/treasurer, and was blacklisted again with the connivance of the union he helped to found.
An active group of men and women had developed the loggers’ union into the strong but still unrecognized force it was in the early years of the Second World War. Hjalmar Bergren, Archie Greenwell, Owen Brown and George Grafton had not worked alone in the 1930s. Not only did men like Fred Wilson, Ernie Dalskog and Ralph Godfrey work with them, but so did a group of remarkable women.
The Ladies Auxiliary of the IWA was very far removed from the traditional image of an auxiliary. They held bake sales and knitted for bazaars, it is true, and even spent the occasional afternoon gossiping and trading child-care secrets. But the money made from the bake sales and bazaars went towards sending a full slate of delegates to the Federated Auxiliaries Convention, and an afternoon of conversation once a month was the only social time they allowed themselves in a busy schedule of business and educational meetings and fund-raising events.
It was IWA District One policy to encourage such activity by the wives of loggers—the funds the women raised were also used for strikes and by organizers; the children they nurtured grew up steeped in trade unionism; the social activities they planned enhanced the lives of union families; and the union consciousness they absorbed in educational meetings was deemed by the District One executive to render them less likely to block their husbands’ activities. But no group of women ever rose to the challenge of union recognition quite so enthusiastically as Local 30, the Lake Cowichan branch of the Ladies Auxiliary.
Edna Brown had been working with Hjalmar Bergren since 1935, but a lot of the women who were at the heart of the auxiliary during the war and in the heady days afterward came gradually into the movement from disparate backgrounds.
Lil Godfrey had arrived in the village in 1937, a recent bride set on raising a family. Until her son was out of babyhood, Lil wasn’t interested in the auxiliary. But Lil was Archie GreenwelPs sister. Bowater and Greenwell fighting blood coursed in her veins too. Archie was in the thick of things, and he could not resist prodding Lil into being more active. When she finally consented to join in 1940, she quickly became their most visible member—serving on the executive of the auxiliary and of the Parent-Teacher Association, catering union social functions, dreaming up ideas to improve the living conditions of villagers and supporting the war effort. She was efficient, intelligent, dedicated and impatient with those around her who didn’t see things her way or who didn’t tell the truth.
While Lil took over leadership in the local, Edna Brown assumed a role on the broader stage in the district and at the international level. Edna became more and more prominent, but she always embodied the warmth and dedication her lifelong friends so valued in her. And although she could be seen on podiums in Vancouver and convention platforms in Portland, her sturdy body and plain face seeming to emphasize her deeply held beliefs, the image that one friend cherishes of her is on the porch outside her kitchen. There in the fresh, moist air of a rainy lake morning, she brushed her hair with long strokes before she twisted it into a neat upsweep in preparation for another day of strenuous activity working for her husband’s union.
It was different for Eva Wilson. She swore she didn’t know her husband was a union man until after they were married and she had a baby. Fred Wilson had been a coal miner, just like Eva’s father, but her father was against unions. Fred, on the other hand, had been one of the leaders when the coal miners were fighting for their rights, and he’d been fired for editing the coal miners’ underground newspaper, the We Too.
How Eva managed to miss the fact that Fred was interested in unions is anybody’s guess, but it wasn’t long after they moved to the lake that she figured it out. They were living in a two-room shack with the kids sleeping in the bedroom and the adults sleeping in the kitchen when Fred got a job in the mill at Youbou just before the 1936 strike.
Fred was workin’ on the loading deck. And he was the only one that came out in sympathy with the loggers. And he let on to me that he was workin’ for a week and a half. I put up his lunch every morning. I was never so mad in my life ‘cause he had promised me he would never organize again. But that was a laugh.
It took Eva a little while to adjust to living in a logging community. The first dance she and Fred went to was at the new picket camp—two bunkhouses and a meeting hall at the back of the village. Eva had no idea where the picket camp was. She didn’t know that she would have to walk along the railroad track and through the bushes to get there. She didn’t know that the other women would be wearing sweaters and skirts or that the floor of the hall would be rough and splintery from all the loggers’ boots that had scuffed and slouched their way across its surface.
My first dance at Lake Cowichan … me in a long slinky black evening gown, no backing, spike heels… And up at the picket camp you had to sit on blocks of wood, you know … they kept looking at me as if I was something from another world.
Out of place, disorganized, self-deprecating, likely to say the wrong thing on almost any occasion, Eva became an active if reluctant union supporter. It was a measure of how few of them there were in the days before the union was recognized that Hjalmar Bergren included Eva Wilson in the small number of delegates who attended a union and auxiliary convention in Klamath Falls, Oregon, just after the war began.
It was all very new and overwhelming. There were only two women representing B.C., and when the other auxiliary delegate left for a committee meeting, Eva felt very alone. She had no idea what the speakers were talking about.
I could hardly remember my own [name] … Finally they said, “Now we’ll have a report from British Columbia.” Oh god, I had to get up and that mike and that big building, you know … But I gave them a darn good report. What I didn’t know I made up anyway. I had it briefly written down and then I—you know, I always glorify everything—I got the biggest hand of anybody.
Although the union was yet to be officially recognized, the war had brought about certain changes that removed the need for membership to be hidden. The most important change was the shortage of labour. Not only were healthy, experienced, male workers at a premium during the war years, but the demand for wood and wood products was high. Desperate employers hired men who had no experience in mill work or logging, men who were physically unfit or of small stature, men who were still boys. As one later recalled,
I was only sixteen years old, pretty skinny too and I got hit by a board and knocked across the chain and when I got up I just kept right on goin’. I never went back to the mill.
George Majer couldn’t believe the kind of men he saw in the woods: a heavy-set barber who was sent over from Vancouver and ended up on Workman’s Compensation nine times; a man whose vision was so poor that when he was put to work as a chokerman and got his glasses knocked off, he had to be led away by the hand.
When these workers proved unsatisfactory, employers suggested that enlisted men who had been loggers be formed into special logging battalions and brought back to the lake. That suggestion went unheeded, but by 1943 the National Selective Service had deemed loggers to be high-priority workers and thus subject to being “frozen” in their current jobs. Stan Clarke, the skinny sixteen-year-old, had a job as a bull cook at the new Honeymoon Bay mill when the freeze occurred. Getting up at five in the morning, making beds and bringing in firewood did not appeal to Stan for long.
At that time … you couldn’t quit your job unless you could find a replacement. So this fellow came out from the prairies. We used to call him “Hayseed” and I conned him into taking my job.
In another, more successful attempt to expand the labour force, the industry began to employ women. June Ekert’s mother had to get a job on the green chain to support her family when her husband broke his arm and her sons were in the military.
She really enjoyed it. It was too hard for her really, you know. But anyhow she went. There was quite a few of them took jobs during the war—like they could rack, you know, tie shakes or stuff up at the mill, or bundles and stuff and junk. Jobs they could handle. A lot of them went out whistle punking.
That was the year June was an auxiliary delegate at the IWA convention. She was only sixteen, but she was from a strong union family. The legendary Neil McDonald was her great-uncle. Her father and brothers were all union men. When Harold Pritchett, Hjalmar Bergren or George Grafton were at the lake, they stayed at the Ekert house. Her mother, her boy friend, his mother and sister—all of them were union people.
Lake Cowichan had a lot of families like the Ekerts. But Youbou was a little different when it came to the union. The town was second to none in its support of the war effort—under the leadership of company management, which offered to match all contributions if employees would pledge a day’s pay a month, ITM workers gave significantly, out of all proportion to their numbers, to successive bond drives and to the Red Cross. Youbou had an unusually high rate of enlistment among its young men. But because it was a company town with strong loyalty to a reasonably benevolent employer, membership in both the union and the auxiliary were lower than in Lake Cowichan or, for that matter, in Camps Three and Six, which belonged to ITM as well. Some people explained the low attendance at union meetings in Youbou by pointing to the large number of Chinese, Japanese and East Indian men in the work force. Others said it was the gas rationing that prevented people from driving to the meetings. A lot of people thought it was probably all the Communists in the union that made Youbou people more reluctant to participate.
You’d go to a meeting and listen to them … One of these fellows would show up as guest speaker. They’d introduce themselves, tell you a bit of how the regional council was going and then whammo they’d swing right off into a theory of how things were going in Russia. This used to really get to us … A lot of people would have joined the union even without check-off if it hadn’t been for this.
The ban on the Communist Party, which had been imposed by Ottawa during the time of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, was never lifted by the cabinet. R.C.M.P constables, who had been taught in the 1930s “to see Communists at work wherever men and women assembled to talk about civil rights, trade union problems, poverty and peace,” were not impressed when the Communists changed sides in 1941. “Communists have turned their coats but not their hearts,” said one Mountie.
The Communists’ new name, the Labour Progressive Party (LPP), didn’t fool anybody, especially not the two groups most interested in opposing them: the R.C.M.P. and the “white bloc.” The R.C.M.P. kept union leaders, including Hjalmar Bergren, under surveillance, noting unnecessarily their open and undisguised presence at public meetings. The so-called “white bloc,” the minority group within the union opposed to becoming involved in political activity, wished instead to concentrate on wages, hours and working conditions.
But the union was doing very well. By 1942, with then District Vice-President Hjalmar Bergren leading the drive for organization, the union was ready to challenge the logging operators.
We became a material force. A mass movement. Nobody asked anybody for permission of this or that anymore. When you got to a camp you just simply called a meeting, that’s all, and we told them we’re here to set up the union and what we need is a chairman and a secretary.
In June of 1942, Camps Three and Six voted to hold regular non-secret meetings. By October, ten camps and mills in the Cowichan area were ready to approach their employers regarding agreements. But despite the fact that the majority of VL&M and Lake Logging employees and a large number of men in the ITM camps were union members, it again took the inadvertent complicity of the provincial government to complete the unionization process. In April 1943, the passage of an amendment to the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act compelled employers to deal with a union when the majority of employees were members. Hjalmar was gleeful: “There was no such thing as ‘Please boss, we want a union.’ We had a committee and they met with them and that was all there was to it.”
The IWA had announced its full support of the war effort and pledged not to strike until peace was restored. In January 1945 the union reaffirmed this pledge and began to agitate for government action to ensure a tranquil return to normal once the war was over.
The Dominion Day parade in Duncan on July 1, 1945, was a memorable one. The Lake Cowichan entry featured the contestants for the first annual Lady of the Lake contest—young women representing each lake community and company wearing crepe-paper dresses of IWA green and gold. Their banner read, “We Support Local 8o’s labour programme. Equal pay for equal work for all. Every union man’s wife in an auxiliary. Unity in war and peace.”
The fine hand of the Lake Cowichan Ladies Auxiliary, Local 30, was in evidence that day as it was in almost every activity of worth that took place in the village in the mid-1940s. During the war the members had knitted for the Red Cross, started annual sports days, campaigned for village incorporation and joined in an alliance with other groups to form the United Organizations.
Lil Godfrey seemed to be everywhere at once: president of the Lake Cowichan Auxiliary and the PTA; secretary of the Lake Cowichan Labour Progressive Club. She and Edna Brown went to Camp Six to install Hildur Grip as the president of the new auxiliary there. At the Eighth Annual Convention of the Federated Auxiliaries held in Vancouver in October of 1944, Sister Edna Brown was the district president. Sister Lil Godfrey led the Local 30 delegation, which was by far the largest, and proudly read their report, which contained a staggering number of accomplishments as well as the information that their membership increased by several women at every meeting.
As the auxiliary turned its energies to the new problems of the postwar world, the women maintained their momentum. Now they worked to ensure that the Dominion government knew about the concerns of women—the need for price controls, the importance of listening to consumers. They organized peanut butter boycotts and buyers’ strikes and cheered their children on when they took effective action against a two-cent rise in the price of chocolate bars. As Eva Wilson said, “We stuck our noses into practically everything.” The 1946 trek may have been their finest hour.
The trek came in June, after the new union had been on strike for one month. The strike was noteworthy mainly because it was called as soon as the union felt comfortable abandoning the cooperative stance adopted to ensure a successful completion of the war. It was the first strike in which loggers and mill workers walked out together. The official demands were for wage increases, a forty-hour week, union security and the checkoff—all issues dear to the hearts of committed union members.
There was a certain inevitability about the strike. The union was free to flex its muscles for the first time since it had been recognized. And although it participated in negotiations with the employers’ agent (R. S. Stuart Research Limited), and said that the day’s pay that each member was donating to the Fighting Fund was to “prevent a strike,” there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that a strike was bound to happen.
The guiding hand of the Communist Party was in evidence. The leadership of District One of the IWA was almost entirely Communist. Harold Pritchett, who had been the first president of the international IWA until he was barred from entry into the United States for his communist affiliations in 1940, was now president of the B.C. district. Hjalmar Bergren, who was proud of his Communist Party membership, was vice-president. The fact that the union officers were also so prominently connected with the LPP, a party whose political affiliations were well known, was a factor in the employers’ reluctance to accept union shop and checkoff.
The strike began in a subdued fashion at 11:00 A.M. on May 15, 1946. Youbou mill workers walking off the job were met at the gate by their sublocal president, who asked them to be law-abiding. They quietly walked towards their respective homes.
Adverse weather the previous winter had meant that few loggers had any extra money for the lean days ahead. The time-honoured Cow-ichan Lake tradition of Gordon’s Stores offering credit to off-work loggers was not possible this time, because wartime credit-granting regulations still in effect prevented merchants from extending credit beyond thirty days. Besides, Stanley Gordon had just died.
There were rumours that a lot of the wives were not in favour of the strike, that there would be some divorces as a result of the walkout, and that a man had received an anonymous phone message telling him to order his wife to stop talking against the walkout. But when it appeared, a month into the strike, that there was no end in sight; when the recommendations of the Chief Justice’s mediation were rejected by the union; when the government announced that it was going to operate some of the mills in order to provide desperately needed wooden boxes for the berry crop ripening in the fields; when the union decided to organize a mass march on Victoria to demonstrate to the politicians the unity of the lumber workers: then the auxiliary was out in front to show that the women supported their husbands.
Each local was to be responsible for feeding its own men during the trek to Victoria. The Ladies Auxiliary, Local 30, threw themselves into preparation. They canvassed local merchants for donations of food and cash, they arranged transportation and baby-sitting, they compiled song sheets and scouted out musical talent. Everything was made ready for the June 15 trek to Victoria.
On June 13, IWA members from the mainland arrived by chartered CPR boat at Nanaimo, where they were billetted in the Civic Arena and where they spent the evening listening to a truly inspirational speech by Darshan Singh. The Courtenay contingent was accommodated and entertained in Ladysmith and the Port Alberni people in the Duncan Agricultural Hall. The evening’s activities in Duncan consisted of a series of speeches. The guests from Port Alberni were treated to a harangue by a speaker who blamed the Canadian Manufacturing Association (CMA) for many of Canada’s troubles and accused the Cowichan Leader of being the CMA’S “lick-spittle.” A second speaker branded non-union woodworkers to be “hitchhikers” whose thumbs should be cut off. The editor of the lickspittle newspaper fussed in print about the “communistic taint” of the leaders and called for a secret ballot, charging that members feared reprisal for giving an honest opinion.
The various contingents reconnoitred in Duncan the next morning, and the trek began in earnest. All the Cowichan Lake union men and almost all of the women in the auxiliary were in the fleet of cars that had pulled away from the lake that morning. Mary Greenwell was left behind because she had five children to look after.
There were between three and five thousand union-minded people sleeping in Victoria that night in the barracks at the army’s Camp Macaulay, which were made available to them by the major-general in charge of Western Command. The major-general was not frightened by the “union hordes,” but many Victorians were. Lil Godfrey, who was there with her husband and eight-year-old son, recalls, “They thought sure we were going to explode everything. I’m sure the people were terrified. We were damn radicals, I guess.”
Saturday, June 15 began with drenching rains, but the air was warm and everybody in the barracks was excited. A wary group of local citizens, dressed mainly in business suits and carrying a banner that read “Victoria Citizens Committee WELCOME I.W.A., “ materialized to lead the parade, as if by their very presence they could prevent trouble. They were followed by the women of the auxiliaries from Cowichan Lake, led by District President Edna Brown. Several of them carried signs that spelled out the union demands, and most of them, the Victoria Colonist noted, wore slacks. The men followed, wearing work clothes, fedoras or soft peaked caps, many of them with service ribbons and discharge buttons on their chests. They marched four or five abreast in a column that stretched for eight blocks, singing union songs and “hootin’ and hollerin’.”
There were enough people to go “clean around” the parliament buildings as they waited for the strike leaders to confer with Premier John Hart and his cabinet. Government office workers came to the windows when they heard the singing. Jack Atkinson, secretary of the Ladysmith sublocal, was standing beside an excited Finnlander.
He spoke pretty bad English and he was right close to me. We were about six or seven deep. And the girls were all stickin’ their heads out the window and he hollered, “Come on out. We not gonna suck your head off …”
June Ekert thought the old legislative building was very impressive, especially when the union leaders came out through the heavy double doors and Harold Pritchett told them they had an agreement. All the people cheered. Lil Godfrey remembered how inspiring it was: “You don’t forget it in a hurry.” Darshan Singh exulted, “The strike was 100 per cent successful.”
The sticking point had been the forty-hour week. The operators would go no lower than forty-four hours—five eight-hour days and four hours on Saturday. The union argued that it wasn’t worth their while to go to work for only four hours. The compromise was a five-day week for the first six months, to be followed by a six-day week for the next six months. Union lore has it that by the time the first six months were over, everyone had become so fond of having Saturday off they continued to stay home for two-day weekends.
Management seemed more comfortable with unions after that, and it was easier to organize the men. Twenty-six thousand men now belonged to the union in District One of the IWA. The master agreement was signed on June 20, and on June 23 the earthquake hit.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone at the lake. There had been lots of minor tremors over the years, each one duly noted. In 1942 a more severe tremor had shaken peoples’ doors and windows. But no one was prepared for the shaking that started at 10:14 on Sunday morning and was felt all up and down the coast from B.C. to Oregon. And no one experienced the quake with quite as much severity as the people at the lake.
Stan Clarke was trying to sober up in the cabin at the Riverside Hotel he shared with his widowed mother.
My mother was screamin’ to get in a doorway. And I remember running out and seeing all the bricks fall off the chimney at the hotel. Hardly anybody talked about the strike ending because of the earthquake.
At Yap Alley, Ralph Harvey was standing with his two small children beside his newly finished motorboat when the ground started to tremble and he saw a wall of water sweeping inshore. Grabbing the children, he fled inland, looking back in time to see the wave hurl logs and driftwood at his boat and demolish it entirely.
Hermas Anderson was out on the lake in a rowboat fishing with three small boys. They were near a log boom when they heard a terrific roaring. Anderson looked towards Youbou and saw trees swaying violently and the big crane at the mill swinging from side to side. Then he noticed a fifteen-foot-high wave coming from the direction of the land and sweeping towards them. He was rowing hard to get away from the boom when, just before the wave reached them, it curled under the surface and lifted the boat gently on a huge blister of water that just as gently subsided, never rocking the boat, leaving it evenly keeled as the wave moved away from them, appearing and disappearing, again and again, out into the lake until they could see it no more.
All along the north shore, as the logs thrown up by the wave were sucked back out again, there was a tremendous noise that sounded like gravel being sucked down too. At Camp Three, Ron Watson was building a boat in his backyard about a mile inland from the lake. His wife, Florence, came flying out the back door and demanded to know what he had hooked up to the house: “It was being shaken like a dog.” A field was undulating, as if made of water, and the railroad too was moving in waves.
Winnie Whiskin was keeping house in Camp Six for Harry Irwin. On that Sunday morning he had just come into the floathouse from putting his boat away. Winnie was lifting dry laundry off the wall rack when she heard a grinding noise and said, “I think someone is trying to start up your boat.” Then the floathouse started to shake.
And the house went out and the house came back and the house went out and the house came back onto the shore again. Everyone on shore thought the people in the floathouses were in trouble and everyone in the floathouses thought the ones on shore were in trouble.
On the shore, stumps seemed to tip and heave. On the water, floathouses creaked, bucked and ground against the docks. The water churned. Old stoves, dishes and silverware that had been lying on the bottom of the lake rose to the surface. Mud curled and billowed up. Suddenly the water disappeared, sucked away from the shore so far that the bases of the pilings for the docks stood bare. Then it swept in again, churning and muddy, coming and coming as if it would never stop.
At the Honeymoon Bay mill camp, the water pipes that stretched from the land to the floathouses twisted as the docks heaved up and down. In the Myers’ house on shore, however, a jar of jam merely fell over in the cupboard and a little coffee slopped into their saucers.
No one at the lake was seriously injured either. In the days that followed, the concern was for the effects of the earthquake on the lake itself. The disappearance of logs and debris from the shoreline was not a problem, and the new hot springs that seemed to have opened in the lake bottom might well turn out to be beneficial. But the hundreds of dead fish and the muddiness of the water were disturbing. The disappearance of the beaches at the mouths of all the creeks was a major catastrophe for swimmers. Fishermen, however, pointed out that the new deep water where Cottonwood and Wardroper and all the other creeks flowed into the lake might make good places to catch fish.
Gertrude Myers said the pilings at Honeymoon Bay went up and down for days. The year before, she and her husband, Cedric, had moved down the lake from Camp Six to Honeymoon Bay, pulling their house behind them. Theirs had been an eye-catching flotilla: a float-house with window boxes full of snapdragons and planters full of gladiola, towing two more floats, each covered with flowers, followed by their woodshed with the outhouse perched on top. Edith March observed their sedate progress and thought she was in Venice for sure.
Cedric was a sealer, working in the woods for his uncle Neil McDonald at Lake Logging, which had built a sawmill at Honeymoon Bay in 1942 and a townsite for company workers. Shortly after the earthquake, Leon Koerner, owner of the Alaska Pine Company Ltd., bought out Lake Logging and continued to operate the mill and the woods under the name Western Forest Industries (WFI).
The new company built a new logging camp, “the most modern logging camp living site in British Columbia,” in a flat-bottomed mountain valley between the east and west forks of the Gordon River on the other side of the divide. Gordon River camp was only ten miles from the Pacific Ocean, but the company railroad led in the other direction—east to the lake. The flat-roofed company houses at Gordon River, designed by architects with maximum window space to provide “solar home features,” were spare structures built more for utility than aesthetic appeal. Their spareness matched the mountain slopes that rose steeply, already bare of trees, on all sides of the camp, leaving, as one booster wrote, “that suggestion of ruggedness inseparable from B.C.’s logging areas.” The denuded slopes would remind old-time loggers of the homely little camp just a few miles away at Rounds, where Neil McDonald had made it possible for the union to get its first toehold in British Columbia. Rounds was run-down and old-fashioned, part of the old that was being swept away by the new company as it modernized the entire operation and built a fancy new company town at Honeymoon Bay.
Stan Clarke got his real start in logging on the boom at Honeymoon Bay. The scrawny teen-ager was now a full-grown man who had had his fill of sawmills in a short spell at Youbou during the war. When he “went on the water,” he started as a deck hand on Westminster Boy, the Lake Logging tug, towing booms from the Gordon River log dump to the loadout at the Foot. When he lost a chance to be master of the tug because he was too young, he moved to the Meade Creek boom and then transferred back to Honeymoon Bay, by then owned by WFI.
They used to call Stan “the hell diver” when he first started working the boom, because he fell in so much. But he didn’t care. “You bounced up and climbed back on the logs and kept on working.” The ultimate aim of the boom man, according to Joe Garner, was to become so sure’ footed he would never fall off.
I always figured if you couldn’t roll a log fast enough that you could walk ashore on the bubbles, you were a poor boomer. I was a catty boom man, believe me. It took an awfully good man to roll me in.
Although they were on the mill payroll, boom men didn’t like to consider themselves mill workers, preferring instead to preserve, in their own minds at least, an image of agility and hardiness, and resenting, as well, the presence of Sikhs on the boom. East Indians, labelled “ragheads” by the less tolerant, belonged inside the mill to some people’s way of thinking.
Some people thought that there was no place on the boom for anyone but the young, either, but the middle-aged men on the crew did not agree. Cedric Myers was no spring chicken when he started on the boom, but he lasted about twenty-five years. Being a sealer in the woods, going up and down the steep slopes from setting to setting, had been terribly hard on his legs. But Cedric refused the offer of an alternative job inside the mill. He still wanted to work with raw logs.
And there were raw logs aplenty floating in booms that clustered on the water in round formations at the mill log slips. Cedric took to boom work right away and quickly lost the extra weight he’d put on by indulging in too many coffee breaks at Gordon River. There was no coffee or pie on the boom. Cedric lost the weight so fast, women asked Gertrude if he was sick.
Down the south shore a few miles from Honeymoon Bay towards the Foot, past the former site of the Ashburnham estate, on land littered with huge logs that had been too large for oxen to skid half a century before, was another new sawmill and logging operation, this one owned by the Stone family. Carlton Stone, Jack to his friends, Papa to his employees, had built the Hillcrest mill at Sahtlam, near Duncan, about the same time Mayo and Kapoor Singh were building their mill. In the intervening years he had developed a reputation as a fair employer and an innovative operator.
When the company used up the timber at Sahtlam, leaving the remnants for men like Karm Manak to finish off with their portable sawmills, the Stones moved their operation—mill, machinery and company houses—to Mesachie Lake.
“Mesachie” was an Indian word that meant wild or crazy. Locals swore that even when other parts of the area were calm, there was nearly always a disturbance at Mesachie Lake caused by winds that seemed to swoop down from the mountain valleys to the southwest. The road that connected Mesachie Lake to the Foot was just as wild. People had a lot of names for it: the Burma Road, Devil’s Gulch, the Road to Perdition, Neuralgia Pass. Those who had something bad to say about the road “comprised all members of the population endowed with free speech.”
The road provided lots of opportunity for humour and even some bitter sarcasm, but living in the company town made up for a lot of the tribulation necessary to get to it. With water mains, sewerage, street lighting and boulevards shaded by ornamental trees, Mesachie held itself second to none in communities at the lake and was certainly able to give Honeymoon Bay a run for its money as a good place to live.
Across the road from the family houses, most of which were renovated ones from the old site, was the single men’s camp, which contained newly built bunkhouses offering either one- or two-man rooms, showers and a drying room for wet bush clothing. As in Honeymoon Bay, the bunkhouses and cookhouses were still racially segregated, a practice that was vigorously defended by all the races involved on the grounds that each group—white, Chinese and East Indian—preferred its own style of cooking and felt more comfortable with its own people. The three groups worked together and lived apart.
The king of the main cookhouse was Charlie Monti, from Italy by way of Rounds camp, and a legend at the lake. A baker by trade, Charlie was good at his work and had high expectations of the people who worked for him and the men he fed. He expected people to come when he announced mealtime on the cookhouse triangle, and he had been known to brandish a meat cleaver when people didn’t live up to his standards.
The logging superintendent at Mesachie was a tough customer too. Lemuel Traer had been a high rigger in his younger days, and he wouldn’t tolerate drinking in the woods. In the thirties, when he worked for the Stones at Sahtlam before the union took hold, it was said that Traer “fired three or four [men] every morning just because they didn’t walk to the crummy right… He’d hire another couple that were standing there.”
The owner of the Hillcrest operation at Mesachie Lake had a different reputation. Although he was a tough businessman and a man not afraid to gamble, Carlton Stone was regarded as a humanitarian. In the Mesachie mill, some of the single employees and a handful of the married ones were East Indian, most of them long-time employees. Unlike many people in those years, Stone had no time for racial discrimination. From the time he started logging in 1912, he had employed Chinese loggers and Japanese and Sikh mill workers before even Mayo Singh did and long before the Youbou mill. Just before he died in 1950, he fulfilled a long-held dream—to build a church that would incorporate all of British Columbia’s structural woods. In an area very short of proper religious buildings, St. Christopher’s was an inspiration.
Mesachie Lake was touted as the gateway to the West Coast, a rather grand appellation for a gravel logging road that ran for miles through mountain slopes logged off at eye level and below. An observer of Cowichan Lake during the war had bemoaned the absence of trees.
At one time it must have been very beautiful. In parts it is beautiful still, but the large stretches of mountainside that have been stripped of trees, and so denuded of soil that never again would they bear forest, [are] a depressing sight.
The chief ranger at the Forest Experimental Research Station near Mesachie Lake had reassuring words: “[N]ow only mature trees are cut and there will be natural regeneration; old methods that left the hills looking as they do have been abandoned.” During the war, men employed at the research station had prepared land for a Dominion government reforestation program. Right after the war, members of youth organizations in Youbou, twenty-eight boys and fourteen girls, planted 30, 000 seedlings in three weeks on the logged-off land adjoining the mill, earning funds for their organizations and proving when the output was measured that girls were the best planters. But the theory of forest regeneration in vogue at Cowichan Lake in the late 1940s was that the forest that still grew on the “green-capped heights” of the mountains on slopes too steep to be reached by logging railroads would seed the slash-covered, denuded slopes below, and the lake would look beautiful again.
But soon truck logging made the trees on the green-capped heights disappear. What had begun as a transportation method used only by gyppo loggers and stump ranchers had now come to the big camps. Gradually at first, and used in conjunction with the existing rail lines, logging roads reached up to where the railroads could not go. The trucks were a motley collection, ranging from the “dilapidated and crawling” with a minimum of braking capability to brightly coloured wheeled giants with hydraulic brakes. At first these trucks brought the logs from the spar tree to the railroad, replacing the yarder. Gradually they replaced the railroad as well, moving the logs from “stump to dump” in one efficient operation.
Whereas the introduction of power saws, which occurred at about the same time, resulted in many men losing their jobs, truck logging provided jobs both for mechanics and for road crews. It was the roads themselves that gave truck logging its bad reputation.
Edo Nyland was a forestry student who worked in his summer holidays on the new logging roads between the lake and Port Renfrew for British Columbia Forest Products (BCFP), the new owner of ITM, Hemmingsen-Cameron and Malahat Logging. Edo noticed that the narrow rail beds, being less steep, had much less impact on the landscape, and they allowed water to escape downhill between the rails. Road beds were wider, exposed more bare ground to the elements and acted as a more effective barrier to the natural flow of water. Ditches constructed on the upper side to channel rainwater were meant to be drained at regular intervals by culverts that fed into already existing stream beds wherever possible. In practice, there were fewer culverts installed than there should have been. The water accumulated in the uphill ditches. Once it finally found an outlet, water ran through with such force that it took vegetation and soil with it until it was stopped by the road below. In addition, the vegetation on the downhill side of each road was deprived of the amount of water it was accustomed to, a situation that created a desert below each switchback.
Other innovations at this time were also mixed blessings. In 1939, an inquest jury investigating the death of a logger at Port Renfrew recommended the use of hard hats in the logging industry. No one who worked in the woods liked the idea. They demonstrated their unfamiliarity with the concept by pronouncing both words with equal emphasis: HARD HAT. “HARD HATS were just like wearin’ cement.” “HARD HATS made men careless.” “They didn’t stop widow makers.” “The brims didn’t stop the water from running down your neck.” Hard hats used to end up sitting on stumps while the men wore old, well-broken-in soft hats that offered protection only from the rain.
Power saws were resisted with equal dedication. The first ones had appeared at the lake in the early forties—German saws, five feet long and heavy as sin—for the bigger coastal trees. It took two men to operate them, and no one could lift the 165-pound saws up the steeper hillsides. No one was interested either in fulfilling the newspaper editor’s prediction that “Loggers [will] turn German devices against Hitler.”
By the time power saws were streamlined and could be operated by one man, they had demonstrated their usefulness. Whereas in the 1930s it took two sawers to keep one bucker busy, now one man with a power saw could work so fast he had to help the bucker to keep up with him.
The adoption of power saws and the aversion to hard hats should have been the leading cause of logging accidents, but that was not the case. In 1947, faulty equipment was responsible for only 2 per cent of the ninety-eight logging deaths in the province. Falling and bucking were responsible for 33 per cent, and nearly all the men killed were members of the IWA working on contract. Men on contract were paid for what they cut, not for how long they worked. The contract system had been imposed upon them by management, but no one made the men cut corners and work unsafely.
Lome Atchison, now the safety director at Camp Six, or Caycuse Beach Camp, as BCFP called it, had been in the union almost as long as Hjalmar Bergren. His 1948 letter to the B.C. Lumber Worker was a difficult one for such a man to write.
[M]any of the larger companies have been earnestly and honestly pushing safety for many years … The safety problem in the BC Logging industry has grown to such proportions that the IWA and the B.C. Lumber Worker must clean up their own backyards before criticizing other organizations.
The Caycuse Beach Senior Men’s First Aid Team had been the best in B.C. for some time. But expert first aid did not change the fact that it was still a laborious process to bring a stretcher-borne injured man over logs, stumps and rocky bluffs to reach a road, nor the fact that there still was no hospital at the lake. And no matter how good the teams were or how hard the safety directors worked to instill better practices, men still died as the result of logging accidents. In a small community, the victim was usually someone everybody knew. It was something Mary Greenwell found very hard to deal with.
They used to log quite close right down in here when I first came and you could hear the whistles from the woods and you knew, so many whistles would be a death, so many whistles would be an accident and all the women would gather … and wait. It was seven whistles was a death.
Laurie Beline had known nothing about logging or logging deaths when she came to the lake, but when she married Ole, a faller and “the best Scandinavian time button accordion player on the Island,” she learned fast.
I know I used to come up to where Scholey’s Stores was. Whenever the ambulance went by I went down. I used to run to the store just to see who was … whether it was your own or who it was that was carried out by ambulance. That was scary.
There was usually a doctor resident in the village, but no matter how many meetings were called and how much money in small amounts was donated after the meetings, the people at the lake could not raise enough money to build themselves a hospital. And no matter how many millions of board feet of lumber and logs left the lake to make however many hundreds of thousands of dollars for any one of several large companies, no logging company at the lake ever offered to help build a hospital so that injured loggers would not die of shock on the road to Duncan and new lake babies could be born close to home.
And another problem loomed. There was an acute shortage of housing as soldiers returned home, and loggers and mill workers for the new Mesachie Lake and Honeymoon Bay operations crowded in as well. New companies brought in many more employees; new roads brought outlying workplaces within daily driving distance of the Foot. Now anyone who wanted to live in the village could—no matter where they worked around the lake.
During the war, Lake Logging had taken over Rundquist’s boarding-house for some of its single male employees. And for married men who had served overseas and men who worked for Hillcrest or WFI there was going to be a chance to buy a house. One hundred houses were to be built in a cooperative effort, with the provincial government donating land on the southern edge of the village, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation putting up the money, the Stone family arranging for the logging slash to be cleared, and a café in the village agreeing to feed the workmen.
As soon as the tenders were called, the debate began over what to name the subdivision. While the Garner Brothers’ construction gangs built the houses, the debate continued. Such a modern concept as a subdivision must have an elegant name. The suggestions honoured local citizens—Gordon Heights, Carlton Park, Greenwood Heights—and famous European landmarks—Stonehenge and Rheims. Many peo* pie felt that the name should include some recognition of Carlton Stone. The final choice was Parkstone—worthy, appropriate, elegant and quickly ignored. For a time the new area, with its preponderance of young married couples, was called “Diaper Hill,” and then people settled on what would become its permanent name: the Hundred Houses.
With a subdivision and an incorporation certificate, Lake Cowichan was starting to shed its fishing/logging camp image. But the community clung to the past in at least one way. There had always been a British army officer to fulfill certain important duties and to lend an air of imperial respectability to the community.
Lt. Col. John Henry Boyd was born in Manglor, Southern India; he was educated in England and served his king and country in the Cameroons, Nigeria and Mesopotamia. In 1929, he retired at the age of fifty, married and immigrated to the lake, where he and his wife settled near Craig’s Landing, right next door to the Gardener Cust Boyds. The John Henry Boyds’ house was a cross-shaped structure formed when the Colonel, as he was always called, added rooms onto each side of the old Abernethy farm barn. This eccentric plan used the old barn itself for a living room and retained such barnlike features as the original concrete floor and an extremely high ceiling.
Colonel Boyd seemed to step right into the shoes of the late Colonel Haggard, who had left the lake ten years before him, but Boyd per-formed his official duties with a great deal more warmth and enthusiasm. As the years went by, he became justice of the peace, coroner, stipendiary magistrate, secretary of the school board and an alderman.
The short, compact, white-haired man looked just like an English country gentleman, and his wife enhanced that image by being very social. Elizabeth Boyd “belonged to everything. She was IODE. Very active IODE.” But the Boyds fit into the community. When they first arrived at the lake, Elizabeth had to row to the village for her supplies just like everyone else who lived in the vicinity of Marble Bay. When the Colonel changed into work clothes to cut wood or hunt deer “he acted the same as any other bushman.” The Boyds were generous and did not discriminate when they offered the use of their land. Among the many groups that had picnics at Colonel Boyd’s was the sublocal of the IWA.
Things were not going well in District One of the IWA. It had been possible before for the leaders to get away with being Communists, but IWA headquarters was in Oregon, and the American government didn’t see Communists in quite the same tolerant light. There were a growing number of IWA men who didn’t either.
Shortly after the end of the war, in a development first described by Winston Churchill in his famous “Iron Curtain speech,” the communist bloc in eastern Europe lined up against the West, and the American right-wing responded with, “We told you so.” Now the pressure grew against the Communists in the IWA. Washington passed the Taft-Hartley Act, an anti-labour, anti-communist piece of legislation that gave organized labour no choice but to purge itself of Communists if it was to continue to be an effective force.
District One IWA leaders were barred from international union meetings unless they lied about their communist affiliation when they crossed the border. Embattled District One leaders charged that the IWA head office was violating the district’s autonomy, slandering its leaders, appointing disruptive organizers, failing to provide services commensurate with the high per-capita fees Canadian unionists were paying to the American head office. Pressure mounted from within the district, too, as the non-communist “white bloc” charged that the leadership was no longer in touch with the rank and file.
John Stanton, a Vancouver labour lawyer, would point out years later that as long as the union was fighting for recognition, the IWA in B.C. was healthy, because the men and their leaders were united in a common cause. But the relationship changed, according to Stanton, when the union got checkoff and the companies deducted union dues directly from the men’s pay. After that it was no longer necessary for the leaders to be there to collect the dues. Grievances were handled by district head office. The personal connection was gone. The leaders assumed that they still understood the rank and file, but they had lost touch and didn’t know what the men were thinking.
In 1948, the international IWA increased pressure on District One, demanding investigations into its funds and keeping up a constant barrage of anti-communist propaganda on the district’s own radio program, Green Gold, broadcast weekly on Vancouver radio station CJOR. American interference was becoming intolerable.
On the weekend of October 2 and 3, at a meeting in Vancouver of the District One council, the thirty-man executive voted 29-1, with only the New Westminster delegate opposing, to sever connections with the IWA. Their plan included transferring B.C. IWA funds to a new Canadian union, which they called the Woodworkers Independent Union of Canada (WIUC), and whose existence they announced at the same time. Among the eight speakers who supported the motion was Edna Brown, who spoke for the Ladies Auxiliary and reminded the council that District One leaders had been “the first trade union people who ha[d] agreed that women are important in the trade union movement.”
Less than eighteen hours after Ernest Dalskog, the president of the new union, announced the split, the IWA reported that $18, 000 was missing from the 1947 dues of District One. The IWA got a Supreme Court injunction freezing district funds and records. The rebel leaders evaded officials of the court for several months, thus preventing the injunction from being served. In addition, the injunction did not include the funds and records of individual locals, because it was within the rights of each local to decide which union it wanted to affiliate with.
The rank and file of some locals announced immediately that they would stay with the IWA. AS a union organizer at Youbou said, “You can’t go around for six or seven years building up the IWA and then turn around and say it’s no good.” But that was just what the former leaders of Local 1-80 tried to do on October 7 at a meeting in Duncan.
As hundreds of men from Duncan, Chemainus and Cowichan Lake gathered in the IOOF meeting hall, it became obvious that many would have to stand outside. A move to the armoury only marginally improved the situation: more men, though still not all, could fit into the building, but there being no seating, everyone had to stand for the duration of what looked to be a long evening. As Local 1-80 President Owen Brown tried to bring the meeting to order over shouts and catcalls from the audience, someone moved that he be ousted. The motion carried with a large majority, and though Fred Wilson was allowed to read the report of secession, he was interrupted many times. Ernie Dalskog’s presence drew a smattering of applause, but his explanation of the reasons for the split and the importance of Canadians controlling their own union engendered little enthusiasm. The crowd was with Tom Bradley from the Vancouver local, who suggested that political rather than union ends were being served. For the remainder of the four-hour meeting, member after member spoke until someone accused them of staging a filibuster intended to discourage some of the men from staying to vote. Action from the floor forced a show of hands. The majority voted to stay with the IWA and the armoury emptied quickly.
The Lake Cowichan Ladies Auxiliary had voted two days before, on October 5. It had been a good year for them, climaxed by the District Council meeting in August at Retreat Cove on Galiano Island. The Lake Cowichan delegates had taken a ferry to the mainland and then driven to Steveston where Fishermen’s Union President Homer Stevens, a Communist himself, had taken them to Galiano on a fishing boat.
A report on the discussions at Galiano was an item on the agenda for the October 5 meeting, following the first order of business—the vote on whether to disaffiliate from the IWA. Not all auxiliary members were in attendance, and some absent members would later charge that the postcards customarily sent out to announce meetings had not been received. When the disaffiliation vote passed, the IWA charter was removed from its frame, the books were closed, and delegates were elected to attend the constitutional convention of the new union. Included in the list of delegates were Edna Brown, Lil Godfrey, Eva Wilson and Laurie Beline.
By the time the women who did not wish to change their allegiance met, the new IWA District Council had informed them that there was to be no politics in the IWA Ladies Auxiliary. If they weren’t sure what they were supposed to do, they were to get the sanction of the union local. It was better, the District Council said, if union women restricted their activities to holding bazaars and serving coffee on the picket line.
For Lil Godfrey and her brother Archie, who were among the rebels, keeping politics out of union business would have been unthinkable. Growing up fatherless in a family full of strong left-wing ideas, they may have been torn between the views of two uncles, one a Communist and the other a socialist, but they never doubted that political activity was important. As adults in Lake Cowichan, the brother and sister were at the centre of community activities, working with people of all political persuasions. Just as it was hard to keep union concerns separate from community ones, so it was impossible for Archie and Lil to separate political activities from those of the union. Lil was the secretary of the Labour Progressive Club; Archie was a delegate to the 1946 party convention. But in provincial elections, they voted for socialist Sam Guthrie of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).
The CCF and the LPP did not see eye to eye. The provincial CCF was involved in a crusade to eliminate Communists from the leadership of all B.C. trade unions. It seemed to be an impossible situation for people like Archie and Lil, but for Lil it all came down to what was good for the community. There was no LPP candidate for her to vote for, so she voted for Guthrie. She knew his background as a leading figure in the big coal miners’ strike, she knew he had gone to jail in 1913 for what he thought was right, and she knew he was a “doer.”
Archie’s priorities had changed. He had been active in the campaign for incorporation of the village, and after the 1946 strike he became the full-time village clerk. Politics for Archie were the art of the possible.
Over the years I found myself working with many that were Conservative, many that were Liberals, many that were CCF or NDP or Communist or whatever it may be and this had been my life.
For ten years Archie’s first loyalty had been to the Communist Party, but he changed his politics after October 1948 “because of the way the Party demanded the split and because of how things were handled.”
When the Lake Cowichan sublocal met sometime between October 7 and 18 to vote on whether to disaffiliate, the result was a foregone conclusion. The advertisement in the newspaper said, “Attention All Woodworkers” and was directed at all union men around the lake, but as they arrived for the meeting, anyone who said they were IWA was denied entry to Unity Hall. The loyal IWA men, 150 of them, moved over to the community hall, held a meeting and elected new officers. Eighty-seven men stayed at Unity Hall to elect officers of the new WIUC Local 80: Ernie Dalskog, national president; Owen Brown, local president; and Fred Wilson, financial secretary. Ralph Godfrey was one of the trustees.
On the evening of Monday, October 18, a truck belonging to a Lake Cowichan welding firm, a station wagon and two sedans pulled up in front of the IWA local office in Duncan. As the news editor of the Cowichan Leader watched unseen from the street, four men unlocked the door and walked in. Demonstrating no apparent haste or secretive’ ness, they loaded the welding truck with four desks, nine chairs, two typewriters, a mimeograph machine, a “motion picture machine” and a number of other items, including records contained in filing cabinets. They drove away in the direction of the lake.
During the next few days a number of Lake Cowichan people were asked to store various pieces of office furniture. Fred Wilson and Owen Brown withdrew $17, 500 from the Local 1-80 bank account, reasoning that the money was part of the dues paid by loggers from the lake, and therefore belonged to the new union. They carried the money around with them for a couple of days, trying to find a place to keep it. Edna Brown wanted no part of it. Eva Wilson was more helpful.
[So] it was at our house, and it was in Nanaimo and wherever we went. Finally we sent it to Harvey Murphy in Vancouver—the Mine, Mill and Smelters, you know—and it was in his care. Well then, it was too hot, you see, so they shipped it back to Fred again.
The money was a small part of a much larger sum that the Supreme Court wanted back from the former District One leadership. By the next spring, Ernie Dalskog and Harold Pritchett were in jail in Vancouver for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of the money, and authorities were looking for Hjalmar Bergren. In April, Owen Brown, Fred Wilson and two other men stood trial for theft of furniture, equipment and records. The defence argued successfully that no theft could be proven because no furniture had been identified.
At an assize court trial in Nanaimo later that same month, Brown and Wilson were acquitted on charges of stealing union funds when the judge found that they were acting on the instructions of a general meeting and that there had been no intent to steal. The money and furniture were eventually returned, but the files disappeared.
In the aftermath of the 1948 split, the IWA and the WIUC vied for the loyalty of woodworkers at the lake. But the IWA always seemed to have the upper hand, and they began to receive support from employers, who were glad to be able to deal with an anti-communist organization.
For the WIUC union and auxiliary, there was a brief time when things seemed to go well. “The Wooies,” as they were called, still had the energy that had brought them through the battle for union recognition. Now they were prepared to start over again. But in many ways they were fooling themselves. They called their meeting in Vancouver in April of 1949 their “national convention.” They congratulated them’ selves on the great strides they had made. And the Lake Cowichan women organized social events to keep up morale.
At one of their garden parties, the raffle for a dollhouse was won by a newcomer. Myrtle Howkey had met Hjalmar Bergren at the 1946 IWA convention. She was an English woman, a stenographer for the Vancouver IWA office and a novice writer. Forty-four-year-old Hjalmar fell in love with the twenty-five-year-old dynamo. They married in 1949 and moved to Lake Cowichan, where he introduced her to left-wing politics. Later in life she would run unsuccessfully in an election as a Communist Party candidate.
The WIUC dissolved within a year of its founding. “It sort of fizzled out,” was how Archie Greenwell described it. “And of course all those that were on the executive … they got expelled from the IWA.” June Ekert Olson remembers it as a bad time. “[T]here was quite a lot of bad feelings in the district at the time. Bad friends. Bad friends.”
Forty years later, in a gathering of former members of the Ladies Auxiliary, membership in the Communist Party being just as notorious as it had always been but a lot less threatening, Eva Wilson would remember how she heard the subject of membership in the Party mentioned several times during her husband’s trial. “[T]he judge said that Fred and Owen had been sold right down the road, you know; there was no sign of any Communism or anything else.” Lil Godfrey added,
Don’t you think this is the first label that even the bosses like to put on anybody who wants to stand up for their rights or take the opposite side of the fence to want better conditions?
To which Mary Greenwell contributed,
Well if they were [Communists], they did a good job, didn’t they? Of organizing everything. I’d say that. There wouldn’t have been anything if they hadn’t. No union.
And Lil concluded, “Whether they were reds or what they were.”
Hjalmar stayed loyal to Communism, but the split had been hard on him. He would later say that he was involved in the split only because everyone else was and, as usual, he had a philosophical explanation.
The reason that it came about actually was that we didn’t have a program of action. We always had a program but at this particular time we didn’t. And instead of calling a convention and laying down the policy and gathering forces… we didn’t do that. We got involved in, oh, I should say personalities and one thing and another. It’s a hard question to explain. I’m not prepared to go into it in depth.
The perpetrators of the 1948 split were blacklisted from the union they helped to found. Eventually most of them were reinstated, but not Fred Wilson. “That was one thing he wanted to do, get back into the [union] because he started it. He was the first president,” Eva Wilson said in later years.
One afternoon before the WIUC folded, the Lake Cowichan local and auxiliary had a picnic at Ashburnham Beach. Lil and Ralph Godfrey dug up a little copper beech sapling and took it home to plant in the front yard of the house they had built in the village not long after they were married. The tree flourished and grew to be so large that by the time the Godfreys were old, the tree was big enough for them to sit under in their lawn chairs on a very hot day. Sheltered by the thick mantle of iridescent burgundy leaves, they could look towards the lake down the street where they had spent all their married lives.
But Lil Godfrey doesn’t live in the past. Instead of drifting back as most elderly people do in their conversation, Lil likes to talk about things that are happening now. As for the missing files, all she knows is that she had nothing to do with hiding them. If she knows where they are, she certainly isn’t saying.