Foreword

In the winter of 1957–1958, I had letters from five different locations in Oregon, inviting me to come to Oregon to write a logging story. Teachers and children there wanted to be represented in my Regional Series. Several of the locations sounded promising, and I exchanged letters with the children for a time. But unfortunately, due to illness in my family, I was unable to follow up by traveling to Oregon. So all my contacts were lost.

Other projects for other books intervened, but the idea for an Oregon logging story was never forgotten. I collected what material I could find and I read books on Oregon, but found little or no information on how a logger’s family really lives. Not until 1966 was I free to entertain the thought of a trip to Oregon. I knew, from the past experience of writing all the other books in the Regional Series, that the only way to get the material was to go to the region and get it firsthand from the people living there, and to get my own impressions through my own eyes, ears, mind, and feelings.

One of my previous correspondents had been Mrs. Portia Shiltz, editor of the Myrtle Creek Mail, a small weekly newspaper. I wrote to her to renew our acquaintance, and with the help of a small news item in the Mail, I began to receive more Oregon letters. One of the first came from Viola Rogers of Drew Rural Station, Tiller, Oregon. Mrs. Rogers wrote:

“I run a country store and my husband has a gas station. All our friends are loggers …”

That was enough. Instinctively I felt this was the place I wanted to go. When Mrs. Rogers offered the hospitality of her home as a base for my stay while doing my field work, I felt more certain than ever that the choice was the right one. I never regretted the choice.

In June of 1966 I flew to San Francisco, where I was met by Celeste Frank, the former Iowa teacher who had helped me get material for Corn-Farm Boy. She offered to go with me, drive a car for me, and help in every way possible. We flew from San Francisco to Medford, Oregon, where the Rogerses met us. They drove us fifty miles, over our first Oregon mountain, to Drew and to their home.

Then began many happy adventures. My time was short, I had hard work to do and I had to work fast. My days were crowded, filled with new experiences, new people, and a completely new way of life. As always in other regions, everyone was eager and anxious to help.

With Mrs. Frank as a congenial companion, I attended the Rooster Crow contest at Rogue River, visited Skeeters’ Logging Camp at Prospect, toured the Oregon Veneer Mill at White City, interviewed Mrs. Al Cooper, the grandmother logging-truck driver at Shady Cove, and rode on a logging truck myself with Bob Bonney from the logging location in the forest 3500 feet high for 135 miles round trip to the mill at White City. Besides interviewing logging families, I made sketches, took photographs and helped Mrs. Frank collect specimens of Oregon trees, flowers, and shrubs.

The families who contributed generously were: Glann Rogers, foe Zimmerman, Ralph Stauch, Joe Crumpton, Richard (Bob) Bonney, John Niemela, Al Cooper, Ray Norris, Jim L. Jenks, Clair Henry, and Cliff Hughes. To them all and their children go my sincere thanks for making this book possible.

In many ways, it has been one of the most difficult of my Regional books to write. The technical information regarding the several methods of logging has been difficult to absorb and to simplify to a degree whereby it would not overload the story interest. Yet this concrete information telling just how the logging is done must be a vital part of the story especially for boy readers. So it could not be omitted.

I had anticipated that it might be difficult to tie up the men’s occupation to family life and the children’s interests, but here I was agreeably surprised. In perhaps no other Regional that I have written is the father’s occupation more fully shared by wife and children. They all literally live logging. They eat and sleep logging all the year round just as I have been doing while writing and illustrating this book.

There is an appeal about logging, about the whole story of the big woods and what has happened to it over the years, the drama of its disappearance at the hands of man’s greed, and the long slow course of his coming to a realization of his folly, and a determination to rectify his mistaken policies and do what he can to bring the forests back to Oregon. I hope it is not too late—although scenes of desolation on logged-off mountainsides have left a scar on my memory never to be erased. By way of contrast with the majesty and grandeur of those portions of the forests still left intact, surely one of the most magnificent of God’s creations, one cannot help but wish that man had come to his senses sooner, that the lust for money had not so dominated the lumber companies’ objectives to the exclusion of all other values.

One must remember that logging is a way of life to the people who live it and depend upon it for their well-being. To them the cutting of trees is not a tragedy, but an occupation, a means of earning money to pay for food and consumer goods. It is the only way of life they have ever known and being in it and of it, it is hard for them to see it as objectively as the outsider can.

All the logging that I witnessed and heard about was being done on National Forest land. I heard many conflicting opinions regarding Forest Service policies and practices, expressed by honest men who know the woods and have worked in it all their lives as their ancestors did, and whose way of life is bound up in the forest. I heard more antagonism than approval of Forest Service practices. The loggers are better able to judge these matters than I, an outsider and casual but keenly interested observer. I have expressed no opinion of my own, but have merely acted as a reporter, setting down what I heard.

Incidentally, the Forest Service men are not called “rangers” in this area. In fact, I was told that if you called one of their men a “ranger,” he would be sure you were from back east or would “drop dead with shock.”

To be a logger or not to be, is a question every boy in the logging areas will have to decide for himself. There is no doubt there is a pull and a fascination about the occupation which can get into the bloodstream of some, while others will turn away from it.

Logging is in a period of transition.

Besides the actual cutting and harvesting done by man, other forces—fire, disease, and insects are also working for the destruction of the forests. This means that logging as done in the past is nearing an end, and that man’s work in the woods will in the future take on a different character. The answer, therefore, for the true forest lover, can be only the one chosen by my hero—a constructive approach. Lumbering, too, has changed, has lately become so diversified and has created so many new jobs, it is certain they will attract the boys of the area in the years to come. That, of course, is a different story.

As in my other Regionals, learning to know and trying to understand a new way of life has been a rich and rewarding experience, and I thank my many Oregon friends for making it possible.

Lois Lenski

August 14, 1966