Homer Davis Oral History Interview, January 15, 2008

HOMER DAVIS: My name is Homer Davis. I was born in 1924 on January 7th. I'm not sure whether I was born in Corvallis or out on the farm. I know my mother did and my sister that was born dead was born there at Blodgett. It was kind of a mystery whether I was born here in Corvallis but out there. But I think I was born here at the hospital because she lost the daughter, see. That's what I had taken in. The records are all here in Benton County, anyway, over here in Corvallis. I went to Blodgett Grade School between 1927 to 1937. I started 00:01:00school when I was 5 ½ and got out of grade school early and went-I was always ahead of the other kids by a year because they did send me to school. She couldn't stand me at home, I guess [laughs]. Then I went to Philomath High School in '37 through '41. I would have graduated in '37, it was 4 years older. I went in that fall and was in there until '41 then when I graduated. Then we come out and worked for Dad all this time. We was in there and he was a real good teacher, did us up right by showing us all we had to do to be fathers and 00:02:00raise kids and do this sort of thing, and he knew the strict thing. Uncle Ray would come up and shop and they would sharpen plows and things there in the shop there because this was a family deal and my grandpa Davis moved out from Philomath out there in 1911 or '12 is when he bought that 250 acres that they've got there. Then Uncle Ray bought the place where Cy lives now. He had that down there and so they worked back and forth plowing ground, worked ground and hayed and everything together, the two families.

Then Oran Davis, the other brother, he had the service station down at the end of Norton Creek. He was kind of a, he always laughed and told us he was the 00:03:00black sheep of the family, walked up the railroad track and went dancing up at Summit and stuff and come home. Grandpa get him cornered and he'd milk a cow or two but not very much. He was gone most of the time, I guess. He went to World War I. He was in that and come back and then he bought the service station in 1932, about right in there from the Blodgett Family, which is a place that I bought later. It was always interesting to talk to him down there, get the stories that they had. So, then I went I came out of high school I was still only 17 so I had to wait for a little while to go to work in the sawmill over at 00:04:00Blodgett, because I had to be 18 to work in the mill. All of us boys started the job of working in the sawmill over there to start with to get a little start. That sawmill was owned by John Thompson, and as the story went he worked in the mill down at Alder where the iron bridge across the street down there and the railroad tracks and things. They had a sawmill in there that they was right in the river. They had a dam in there and they had the sawmill and the old remnants of the sawmill was there when I was growing up. He would walk down the track from Blodgett down there and walk in the sawmill all day and then walk back home at night. That was John's deal and he finally bought that piece of property 00:05:00across from the Blodgett store and built his sawmill up there on the hill and his planer and everything. They hauled from Marys Peak. Their logs come from up there.

I was real fortunate, I got to go over to Guam and get assigned to a ship, a USS Boston, was in Tokyo Bay. The war had just ended. The war ended when I was in boot camp. The sent us over there to relieve the guys that had the points to come back. A lot of fellas had been through a lot. We was the flagship for the third fleet. We was up and down the coast of Japan and one guy was duck hunting. 00:06:00The admiral on board was duck hunting and we'd go wherever he wanted to go duck hunting. We went duck hunting [laughs]. On one of them there, at Kerry Bay, there was a Ford motor plant. It was there. It wasn't scratched a bit but had Ford all over it, I mean big signs and things. That's what the Japanese were driving was '37 Fords. They had some way of putting fuel into the trunk. I don't know whether it was coal or what. I don't know what they had. But the four or five little Japs would jump out and push that and a big cloud of smoke would come out from under it and they'd get going again and stop straight and go. That's what they were driving and running around in Japan at that time. I got to see Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the two places that were bombed. There was a terrible lot of heat and a lot of explosion there when that was done. They had 00:07:00people out in there selling different little items they had to sell right while we was there. They was kind of still scared. They didn't know what-but I think a lot of them probably cancer and stuff later from all of that A-bomb that hit anyway. Then when I got to come back, came into San Francisco. About two days before we came in, we went out and the whole ship dumped the ammunition over the side, just walked and threw it into the ocean because they didn't want anything to be on the ship when they come into the harbor here. So, I knew where all my money went that was given to that.

I was on duty that morning and got to stand up on the bridge with the, well, the 00:08:00old captain. Not the captain, but the admiral. Not admiral-what was he? An executive officer just under the captain. We guarded the keys to the ammunition locker is what we were doing. Then we'd be on duty to run around and get different things he wanted. I thought I was real fortunate to stand up there and come under that bridge up there pretty high up and see that good sight. I was really a thing with me I'll always remember about. The people that are in the service, you wouldn't believe what they'd done and what they went through to get us back home. I mean, some of them guys they would put in on shore. I had a cousin that was in there and they had put him on Guam and he said, well, we went into Guam. They didn't give us nothing to eat when we went in. Nothing came in 00:09:00for 3 days. Said I had a little bit of powered coffee and water to drink and that was all you had. They expected you to get killed. They didn't expect you to come back. They just put them out there and put them in foxholes and that was the end of it.

He told one funny story. I think you'd like to hear. He said that first night that he was on there they dug in a foxhole, him and two other guys. In the middle of the night said it's so quiet out there at that time, you just can't realize how quiet country can be. He said about that time they heard something crawling towards them. They knew it was a Japanese coming in. So, they was in there with their knives and their guns and all ready and pretty soon the thing dropped into the foxhole with them and it was a big old land crab. Said they had 00:10:00more stabs in it than you could believe because when we realized what we'd done we really laughed about it because it'd just scare you to death, you know? Just things like that. They'd scare you beyond belief, but yet when it really happened it was funny. I was in the Marine Corp. and it was 90 Marines on the ship and 1,200 sailors. We were treated as officers on there, really. We were just doing this guard duty for the Keys and some of them was on the captain's orderly. But they was on 24-hours a day, but we got off every night and we'd seen every movie there was in the country, I think. We got off at 7:00 at night and then we was off 2 days and then back on 1 day. We were on it. You'd get spit 00:11:00shine one day and then you had 1 day off and it was quite a duty to have.

Anyway, we come, I came back in 1946 in May under the Golden Gate. The next day we went to logging over here at Granger for Zeller. Willard and Forest Porter had the logging contract to take that timber out and I come in and Forest Porter went down and hooked on the one log and run his Cat up into a pile of limbs, ran a limb through a radiator. He didn't get the radiator fixed until we was done 00:12:00logging the thing. He was in and out every once in a while, Porter was, but he didn't, wasn't too much help. But we had one log that our old Cat, the valves were getting bad and we couldn't pull it. So, Grant Downing said well, he said, let me pull up. He had an Army truck that they had. There was a winch on the front and trailer on it. He went right up there, up the hill, and hooked on that log and backed right down to the landing with it. Because he had more weight than we did with that truck. So, we got through that job. Then we kept, oh, getting little jobs around and doing our grain thing. We're still into that some, now not as much, because they'd let most of the land go back. Willard was 00:13:00falling timber and I was helping him some and getting other jobs and we just kept working at that. We wanted to get-trying to keep our families going, anyway. Now, you want my parents' names and-?

GARY BLANCHARD: Sure.

HD: It was Raleigh F. Davis and Edith M. Holly was my mom and dad. Grandparents were Edwin Davis and Emma Watkins, and Lon Holly and Lydia Dodge. They were older. I didn't know them very much because my mother was, oh, around the 10th child in the family and they was twins. They lived in Blodgett. I knew of them 00:14:00when I was a kid, but they died before I was very old. I married Doris Barryman Heirs. Did you ever meet Melvin Heirs? He was, logged with George Schroeder and I think died of cancer early. So, I married his wife and she had two kids when I married her. They was Bill and Betty Heirs. Then we had one child: Buster Jay. Well, it was in 1942, I believe, that we started farming that 300 acres at Gray Oat and sold to Joe Wilk for turkey feed. We did that about 3 or 4 years. Had most of us up on my uncle's place at the head of Glatley Canyon. Then we leased 00:15:00the farm from TJ up there, the Eisele place. I think it was 40 acres in there, so we farmed for him. Then we had another place up Norton Creek and had 30, 40 acres on it. We'd farm that and how we did this was we'd give the owner of the property a third of the oats that'd come off of it, or whatever the price would be for it, for the rent. For the land. We took 2/3 for doing the work and that sort of thing. We had a chance to buy that property from my uncle up there for $5,000 when I went into the service, but then I was going to the service. We had 00:16:00no way of knowing if I was going to come out and that property then was logged after I went into service and in a few years. They took $22,000 worth of timber off of it, but that's when timber was coming up. Cliff Gee logged that in there. I guess it went into Clemens Mill apparently. That's as far as I know. Then there was another guy or two that got it. They farmed up there for a while and then he went on down by Eugene somewhere and bought a different farm and it was just kind of bumped around there several years until I think when the Willamette Industries owned it or something and they sold it to you guys or traded or something to Starkers.

Well, we farmed that acreage out there, 300 acres of gray oaks in the '40s. Then we got to logging after that. We sold it to Joe Wilk for turkey feed. We leased land from TJ Starker. It says here. Carl Holly, my uncle, had that land up there and as the story went, I don't know what years they did it, but they went in and cut all the trees off. He bought those Grady boys a couple good axes and they just chopped them down and left the limbs on the bottom, natural limbs. Never 00:18:00thought anything about it. Those turned around and grew up and those trees were 30', 40' high when we pulled them over and cleared the land to go farming. That had been done several years earlier. That was one of the first things we figured out was timber that you don't leave that bottom row of limbs on the stump, because they will turn up and grow. It was interesting. Then, when I come back out of the service, I don't know what year it was, Willard and I bought a TD18 Cat and went to logging around. We logged up Norton Creek there. Then we got a job with Carl Bennett for over at Alsea for logging and that was some of the Holly property up in there and back behind. They had a skyline and we just, two 00:19:0018 Cats would pull logs onto the skyline and the donkey would take them up to the top of the hill and load them up. We thought that was quite an operation to get into [chuckles]. This old Cat we bought kept throwing clutches. We finally found out what was wrong with it. It had a cracked frame. Willard and I went in here to Conlon's International on 3rd Street, took that Cat off and took it clear down and took one day during noon hour and we took a couple sledgehammers and broke the frame all up so we'd get the axle out of there and rebuilt that Cat from the start. It cost us that year $17,000. We only made $22,000 all year. 00:20:00I was under the impression to get out from under it and Willard was still wanting to keep it, but I wanted out. I guess I threatened him too many times or something.

After that, then I went over to Borden Company. I was wanting to get away from logging, so I bought a milk truck over in Albany and hauled milk over there for 3 years for the Borden Company. You'd go-I bought a route that was 90 miles driving every day and it wasn't over 10 miles out of Albany. It was the best experience I ever had meeting all those people and working with them. If they had any extra farm, like prunes or any crop to haul in, I'd work with them and 00:21:00haul that for extra money for the truck, because there's some part of the year you didn't have enough milk to pay it off. That was as near as I could figure in '46, '47, and '48. Then Stony Jackson got a hold of me and said that he had a job he wanted me to go on up in Ridgefield, Washington, run a Grade A Dairy for a man that owned Albina Engine & Machine Works down in Portland. So, I went in and looked at it and I took that over there in the fall of '48. Moved to Washington and milked 26 cows up there and had 500 laying hens [laughs]. I got a 00:22:00chance when I was, I had been in the service, and so that paid $90 a month from the government to take this course that you go out at night and you take a course for farming. I took that, and it helped out quite a little bit. But I still, they were changing then. The milk production went from butter fat to 100-weight milk. It just, a person couldn't get the quota fast enough to get the thing moving money-wise. So, I decided I'd come back down here and buy a place at Blodgett in '52. I bought that 130 acres on Norton Creek road there from the old Blodgett place, really. We had a crop of mint grass for 2 years I was in 00:23:00there. I tried to do that for a while and trashed that and hauled it up to Tillamook. That wasn't paying off any very good. I had a few cows I brought down and just selling Grade B milk and I kept working into getting falling timber and working for people that way. So, I worked with Willard for about, oh, I guess it was 4 or 5 years until they couldn't get enough logs. The way the prices were going, Carl couldn't get enough to do to keep me going, too, so I went out on my own to sell timber for different people.

You'd work, well, it's all the same, you'd get out there and you'd want that all fell the day before and you couldn't get it all done because they wanted and this sort of thing, but it was a good job, but timber cutting is one of the most fascinating jobs you can get into. I fell a timber for the M. Zeller logging again. I got back with them and there was a guy out here that ran, that had taken over that logging outfit. He was kind of crippled. I fell for him down there below Nashville, two different sets. The first set we went on, there was 4 of us falling in there. We paired off 2 and 2. When they all got through the trees averaged 3,000' to the tree. Beautiful timber. I'd never seen anything 00:25:00like it in there. He hauled it down to the mill there at Eddyville, and they had it all set up. They had 2 Cats logging in there and bringing it under a donkey that had slack line loading. I worked for Kim Birch for a couple years up in Marys River. He had a little sawmill and we sawed alder and fir and we'd get about a truckload of lumber a day from the little mill, just a single axle truck. I'd haul it down to Eddyville there in the evening. It'd be the last thing I'd do so we'd have a truck the next day. I came back and went to work for 00:26:00Gee Logging then. I got a job driving truck driving for Cliff Gee Worked for him for 5 years all over the Alsea Mountain. Good experience and then I went to driving for Finner Logging. Drove for them for 5 years. Then went to work for Benton County. Worked for Benton County for 9 1/2 years. I don't think there was a piece of equipment Benton County had that I wasn't on before I had been out of there in 9 1/2 years. We always had fun saying that you never could find anything I could do, so they just kept putting me on different things.

Then I decided - my wife got MS about that time. I wasn't making enough on wages working like that, so I decided I'd have to change over and get something that'd make a little more money to go. We took her back to Mayo Clinic. Got the same diagnosis. She had MS. She just kept getting worse every year. That went on for about 20 years. Let's see, then I got down here I went to work for Thompson up there, a high lead log rim. Some of those years, I don't know which it was. I worked for him a couple years. Then I came back and went to doing these other 00:28:00jobs, driving truck and so forth. Then I finally bought a D7 Cat to work up there on my place so I could clear the land and put in trees and work for Dale Han down there. There was over a mile of land up through there. Cleared that whole bottom off. You remember that being cleared? Well, I was the mainstay on that. He came out there one day and he was so happy that I was clearing an acre an hour for him, that willows. Then on the other side people were getting mad at me because I was taking the deer habitat away, so I was in on it both sides [laughs]. That land, Dale's got it all in grass now. Got his cows pasture. Well, Doris and this MS was something that, it's real hard for the person that can't 00:29:00do what they want. Their mind's good but the rest of their body is not there. I had her there at home for a while and decided I wasn't a caregiver. It was just too hard on me to give her care and see her go downhill. I just couldn't put up with it anymore. So, I put her in a nursing home, which was probably the hardest thing of my decisions to make. Nursing homes are hard to find a good one to put people into. First thing you want to do when you're picking a nursing home is you walk into it and the smell will tell you immediately they're either taking care of them or they aren't. I finally got one up in Dallas that did a pretty 00:30:00good job for a while for a couple of years. Then they went bad on it. Then the state stepped in and got them straightened out. But I don't know what she went through when I wasn't there with all of this. It was a bad one. So, she had that for 20, 25 years. She'd lose each year, in the hottest time of the year she'd lose either use of a hand or an arm or a leg. It just kept going downhill, but her brain, her mind was good yet.

Alright I moved over to Sisters in 1986, so it was '85 that I sold the place at Blodgett to Starker Forest. I built a house over at Sisters and that was a big 00:31:00experience of my life. I wasn't a carpenter and the guy that turned it back to me when I got over there. I had to get the people in to do the building or did a lot of it myself. Found out I could do it. Quite an experience. We built a real nice home. Then I had a heart attack. I worked for, I was working for Black Butte Ranch on the golf course and I got off one fall there and in February I had the heart attack. Put me down to where I couldn't do anything anymore, practically. They said to get rid of everything that looked like work. But I have come along pretty good. I've had a lot of different things. I had two other attacks since, and finally decided I couldn't finish that place at Sisters, so 00:32:00we sold it and then I bought three acres over in Prineville and put a manufactured home on it. That was the first time I ever had a place that was all done when I moved into it. It was kind of nice. We did woodworking and built quite a few things with woodworking. I had a lot of experience with that.

Then I finally moved back down here and I'm in Samaritan Village at this time. Well, this is the Eisele Plantation for Starker's Forest. In late '40s, Willard and I farmed this ground to grow gray oats for the Wilk brothers. He pulled two 00:33:0016" plows behind a little T20 Cat. I had a Ford tractor. It had steel on the wheels. It didn't have rubber at that time, and we would plow this and work it down and put in the oats and row it and then we had a thrashing machine we bought over at Halsey for $100, drug it home behind the pickup and thrashed the grain and piled it up here in stacks and Wilk would come out here in a ton and a half truck and haul it to Corvallis to feed his turkeys. Now, his is 2008 and we were working back then so this is 58 years old, a stand of timber that the Starkers have now. It's growing quite well. It's just amazing to see these trees 00:34:00that we used to farm all through or farm around. Alright, this is a place I bought in 1952, and it is at the mouth of Norton Creek and Highway 20. It was the old Blodgett donation land claim. It was 132 acres. I had it until 1985 when I sold it to Starker Forest about 100 acres of that is what they bought. That's about it.

Alright, this is a property that my brother and I farmed around and on and helped neighbors in here farm. This is my old ground that my dad bought from his father, which my grandad come into this country in 1911 or '12. Then Dad bought the property from him and he farmed here for years. So, this is just the old, I guess, some people would call it the old stomping ground, probably. It's been real good to me in here on this ground. I was happy here. This is property that my uncle Carl Holly owned at one time, 700 and some acres in here. This is some that Willard and I farmed the gray oats in it. [Traffic interrupts audio] the 00:36:00house behind me is where the old [traffic interrupts audio] used to be. My wife's dad taught up here when we was first married. He'd ride a horse out here to teach school up there and so this property was, well, owned over the years by the Holly family. Then my uncle Ray on the Davis side bought it later and he had 00:37:00a Grade A dairy on part of it. This is a road that I fell timber on by hand in 1942 and '43. It's known as the Alliston Road now and at one time it could have been known as the Sheely Creek Road or the Choker Creek Road. It was a lot of fun there. We built a Tram road down in here at that time. That was a road that is built out of 3'x12' plank. It would put two runners on each side and then just plank it across with a 10' plank. On the corners they had a little longer plank that they'd put on. That road was, I helped tear it up again and they put 00:38:00it somewhere else for a while. That was a workday when you would pull those planks up and throw them on the truck when they was wet. This is old memories and a lot of fun up in here.

This is the Alder Station, a pole yard they called it. There was a pole yard in here for years that sold piling. They had the siding in here behind me that loaded the poles out on the railroad and this has been known for years here. In fact, people come in here, the Gradicks come in and this is where he had his mail-ordered wife delivered into. It's a real old station. My dad and them used to sell cork here for the sawmill workers. They would buy the hams and bacon and 00:39:00things from my dad and uncle. We'd put them down here and I don't remember what year the sawmill was in here, but Johnny Thompson worked in this sawmill when he started working in sawmills. It's right in behind us over here. I walked down a little farther and show where the sawmill was in there. It's in here right straight behind me in the fir trees.

Well, I'll walk on across now. Down here on the other side of the road was milk shacks where they sold the bacon and the hams and food. My dad and Uncle Ray logged a lot, some logs up there right below Blodgett Store one year and then 00:40:00they put them in the river and floated them down to the sawmill. They never got paid a dime for them. The sawmill sawed them up and sold the lumber and they couldn't get nothing out of it. So, they worked one whole year for nothing, but I guess they got a good thrill out of riding the logs down the river then in high water. We'll come around to where the water tank is. The old steam donkey, the steam engines they had on the railroad, they had a water tank right behind me. We'd come down from Blodgett and load up the water and then run back up to Blodgett and hook on the train and get around. There's a hill right in there behind me that they had to get a little bit of a run at to get up at that time. 00:41:00Starkers have got all this timber laying around in here now [chuckles]. Right behind me is the steel bridge that goes across Marys River here. It's been here for years and years. They've got quite a weight limit on it now. You don't haul much across it. But, it belongs to the county. I've fished off of it and went on it with a boat to fish and everything, so it's an old one. One of these days they'll be putting a new one in there, I imagine.