Timber!: The Story of the Lumberjack World Championships

Stay on Your Feet, Stay Dry

Judy Scheer Hoeschler was born in 1956 and grew up in Hayward with Tony Wise’s six children as her playmates. From the time she was in elementary school, Hoeschler was fascinated with logrolling. She entered the Lumberjack World Championships’ companion amateur competition at thirteen, and the lady was a champ. “Now I’m really hooked,” she said. “I’m getting a trophy.” A year later, in 1970, Hoeschler entered the open championships competition. This was the elite division. The big guns were not from Wisconsin but visitors from West Coast logging havens. “We were intimidated by them,” Hoeschler said. It was no surprise that Hoeschler lost in the first round of her first competition. She took a dunking. The top women at the time were Cindy Cook, a four-time winner; Phoebe Morgan, champ in 1971; and Penni McCall, champ in 1972. Hoeschler gradually made gains, reaching the semifinals. Just from observing and studying the best men and women, Hoeschler realized that the men were far more aggressive, working hard to dump the other guy rather than just fending off moves in order to stay atop the log. “Most women rolled defensively,” Hoeschler said. She adopted a no-guts, no-glory attitude, being proactive and trying to put foes away rather than just reacting to what the competition did. There are tricks in the arsenal of good logrollers that can sway a match. Some of the best can maintain balance as they dip one foot into the water and kick 63 Stay on Your Feet, Stay Dry Stay on Your Feet, Stay Dry upward in an attempt to spray water in an opponent’s face. Once regarded as a dirty move, now such aggressive tactics are routine. In 1973, Hoeschler was seventeen, and she won the title. A newspaper headline proclaimed “Hayward Girl Wins!” From 1973 to 1977, five years in a row, Hoeschler was unbeatable. She was a celebrity in Hayward and within the timber sports community. “Logrolling was the premier event,” Hoeschler said. Calling Tony Wise a visionary for seeing the possibilities in creating the championships and holding them in Hayward, Hoeschler said she was intrigued by the games from the first moment she saw them. She and her friend Liz Wise played, worked, and appeared (in one guise or another) at Historyland. In 1969, Hoeschler was queen of the Indian village on the banks of the Namekagon River. Meanwhile, logs were floating in the water, and when she had time Hoeschler drifted over to the holding pond and practiced her rolling, imitating what she saw competitors do. No one instructed her. “I was just trying to figure it out on my own,” Hoeschler said. “I remember being obsessed. ‘How do I stay on?’” Another friend, Mailys Hodde, who had been the local Muskie Queen, learned logrolling from Billy Hopinka, a local Native American, and she performed in logrolling exhibitions for tourists at a pancake house located adjacent to the Lumberjack Bowl. Patrons could pour their maple syrup on their breakfasts and watch logrolling for amusement. Hodde was very entertaining, said Hoeschler, who also was a Wise logrolling exhibition hire once she became a star. Logrolling was a skill needed in the logging industry when lumberjacks were forced to break up logjams and start logs floating downriver. Logrolling in the championships is sport, but logrolling in the camps was part of the job. Much of American society was still chauvinist in 1960 when the Lumberjack World Championships began, so the prevailing thought was that homemaker women were too weak, too dainty, and too much at risk to cope with the heavy equipment needed to chop wood or reduce logs to pulp. But it was thought possible that ladies could balance on a floating log and topple another lady into the water. In the context of the championships that was not an unseemly prospect. There was no physical strength necessary and no physical contact. So logrolling became the first women’s sport in the championships. Women did not compete against men—and still don’t—but they do compete in logrolling in addition to men. 64 Stay on Your Feet, Stay Dry Another name for logrolling is birling, and birling was one of earliest popular lumberjack sports. The U.S. Log Rolling Association was formed in the 1920s, and when Tony Wise began the Lumberjack World Championships it was the only timber sport that had...