Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon

7 / The Second World War

CHAPTER 7 The Second World War There was so much work, it's almost unbelievable. We are working so much we hardly had time to spend our money. Everett Richard~on, 19811 The Second World War had a profound and disrupting influence on most American communities. It brought an abrupt end to years of unemployment and economic stagnation, and it revolutionized the work force when thousands of women took jobs outside the home for the first time. It uprooted people and sent them into the armed forces or to centers of defense manufacturing. The drain of labor to the military and to defense jobs created an acute shortage of workers in traditional occupations like agriculture and lumbering. What had been a plentiful labor supply before the war became one of scarcity after 1941. People who had experienced long periods of unemployment during the Great Depression suddenly found their labor in demand. Despite long work days, the inconvenience of rationing, food shortages, and military conscription, the wartime years meant improved economic conditions for most. It was a heady experience for families who had suffered through decades without steady work. When the war ended, the region's forest products industry entered a prolonged period of expansion. Log production, which had plummeted during the early years of the depression, more than doubled in Coos County during the 1940s and increased another 25 percent in the 1950s. The completion of the sprawling Weyerhaeuser plant in 1951 augmented the region's productive capacity even more, and further concentrated manufacturing facilities on the bay.2 The immediate postwar years saw the emergence of hundreds of small outfits, some of whom made good money over the short haul. Although gyppo and small mill operations multiplied during this period, large corporations like Weyerhaeuser still dominated. The effects of war in Europe and Asia came early to centers of natural resource processing like Coos Bay. When Japan diverted civilian ships to assist with its imperial conquest of China in 1937, the Coos Bay Logging Company had to curtail production, because it relied on Japanese ships to market its logs in Asia. In January 1938 the 95 96 HARD TIMES IN PARADISE Coos Bay Pulp Corporation, almost totally dependent on the export of pulp to Japan, found itself without a market when the Japanese suddenly cancelled all their orders. Japanese traders informed Wylie Smith, the manager of the pulp mill, that they could not obtain import permits. Smith believes the Japanese warlords probably were more interested in purchasing "scrap iron and oil for their armament program ."3 But that was only the beginning of the disruption of normal trading channels for the Coos Bay forest products industries. The pulp mill was closed for eighteen months until the fortunes of war in the Atlantic led to the reopening of the plant. When Germany invaded Poland and sent its ships into Scandinavian waters in 1939, that power play effectively cut off imported pulp supplies to the big converting mills on the East Coast. Those buyers immediately placed large orders for pulp with West Coast mills. According to Wylie Smith, international events were directly responsible for the pulp mill resuming production in the fall of 1939. When its Seattle investors sold the plant to the Scott Paper Company in 1940, the new corporate owners retained Smith as resident manager.4 Although logs were in short supply during the war, the Scott Paper mill operated steadily with a complement of more than 100 employees. Because of its isolated location, Coos Bay was not an important recipient of defense contracts. Although the Navy awarded the Kruse and Banks shipyard in North Bend an early contract to build four mine sweepers, those shipbuilding orders did not create many jobs. Even so, the Coos Bay Times exulted that the area was entering "the defense picture with a sizable order" and stood "on the threshhold of a boom." When the Navy announced plans to station antisubmarine boats and other small craft on Coos Bay, the newspaper was even more ecstatic.5 But that editorial crowing for anything that promised jobs ended when people began to leave in large numbers for the armed forces or to defense jobs in Portland, Seattle, and California. Nevertheless, the construction of new defense plants, especially in southern California, helped to revitalize a moribund lumber market by the early spring of 1941. Although the Times reported that unemployment "was virtually nil," that condition probably reflected people leaving for the armed forces and to defense...