Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon

8 / Lumber Capital of the World

CHAPTER 8 Lumber Capital ofthe World "TIM-BER-R-R!" That lusty cry, first sounded on the banks of Maine's Kennebec, then boomed from the lips of the Saginaw loggers, is today echoing in full volume among the hills and crags of Oregon's southwestern coast. Portland Oregonian, June 8, 1947 At the end of the Second World War, southwestern Oregon had one of the largest remaining stands of old-growth timber in the United States. Covering a vast four-county area, much of that forested wealth was tributary to Coos Bay, the best shipping port between San Francisco and the Columbia River. The timber also was close to California, soon to be the center of a booming home-building industry. Because lumbermen already had cut over most of the privately owned and easily accessible timber along the Columbia River and in the Grays Harbor and Puget Sound region, timber holders in the Coos country confronted great marketing opportunities. Within two years of the Japanese surrender, newspapers were heralding the Coos Bay region as the "lumber capital of the world." The healthy California and foreign lumber markets placed heavy demands on both labor and the timber resource in southwestern Oregon. The communities in the Coos country literally hummed with activity in the postwar era as new mills opened, gyppo operators multiplied, and immigrants flocked to the area. Coos County's population grew more than 30 percent in the 1940s and 1950s, an increase that is comparable to that of many areas in California during those two decades.1 There were periodic housing shortages on the south coast, especially during the summer months when migrant laborers flocked to the area to work in the woods or in the mills on the bay. The lack of housing and the abundance of jobs contrasted sharply with the late depression years when, according to one resident, there were "lots of houses for sale" and "times had not gotten all that good."2 But the shortage of houses and apartments and the movement of people through the bay communities were symptoms of the time. In the years after 1945 Americans were a people in motion, frequently changing employment and moving to new locations for better-paying jobs or improved working conditions. For people yvho were raised in the tradition of packing their bedroll and leaving fo; the next mill town or logging show, those experiences were not new. 107 108 HARD TIMES IN PARADISE As was true elsewhere after the war, there was a heady optimism in the bay country, an atmosphere that suggested the good times would go on forever. Because of the excellent growing conditions and the fact that the largest timber holders in the Coos Bay district were "treating timber like a crop," the Oregonian predicted bright prospects for the long-range economy of southwestern Oregon. Forecasters, it said, "look for no end here to the song of the ax and saw." For working people like Bill Brainard, a young, proud, and self-conscious Indian, that meant confidence and a willingness to move on if "somebody didn't say good morning to you right." And those options were available to everyone, he insists: "You didn't have to stay any place you didn't like."3 Until he took a permanent position with a utility company in 1962, Brainard worked at a variety of jobs-gyppo logging , rafting on the river, operating a towboat, and short stints in the Menasha and Weyerhaeuser mills. According to Bill McKenna, the good times of the postwar era convinced people that an economic collapse like the Great Depression "could never happen again. Bad times were a thing of the past." McKenna remembers that he "had no qualms about quitting" a job because it wouldn't be hard to find another one. He sold plywood, "gyppoed for a while," worked for a local dairy, and when that company wanted to transfer him, he quit and entered the teaching profession. McKenna's work experiences during the 1950s were living testimony to Bill Brainard's claim that "if you wanted to do something, it was here to do."4 Ross Youngblood, a young graduate forester from Oregon State College, began a thirty-year tour of duty as head of the new Coos Bay district for the General Land Office in 1944 (Bureau of Land Management after 1946). Because the war had delayed the introduction of caterpillars and gas and diesel donkeys, a few operators were still using steam...