Jim and Betty Denison Oral History Interview, July-August 2009

JIM AND BETTY DENISON: [Singing] Three little fins in the-down in the meadow and the itty bitty fools and three little finneys and the momma finney, too. Swim little momma finney, swim if you can, and he swam and he swam all over the dam. Oh, boop, didn't one of them chew. Oop, boop didn't want of them chew. Oop, doop, diddle daddle one of them chew. They swam and they swam all over the dam.

JIM DENISON: How's that.

BETTY DENISON: [Laughs].

JD: My name is Jim Denison. I was born in Eugene, Oregon, in 1927 with a birthdate in July. My time in Eugene is a very short duration. My family moved back to Lebanon with my grandparents. I now live in Lebanon, Oregon. I have a tree farm in Eddyville area on the Bull, Oak creeks. My address, if you'd like to record it, is 9602 Harlan Road, Eddyville, Oregon. That's 97343. We've lived on this tree farm that we're on now off and on since 1972. My early days I was born in Eugene. That's Oregon. My mother and father split up shortly after my birth and my mother moved back to Lebanon where her home place was and spent some time in Lebanon until I was in grade school. We moved to Salem. My brother was born, and the two of us are the only sons for my mother. Her sister was our aunt that lived in Lebanon. So, Lebanon has been fairly close in our lifetime, always used to go to the strawberry fair every year. My grandfather had a law office in the upstairs what is now the Wells Fargo Bank building. At one time it was First National Bank. We sat in the windows of that and watched the parade and participated in the parades in Lebanon. Later years, then my mother remarried and we moved to Salem, and I started grade school in Salem. I think they decided when I started they ought to burn the school down, so three years later they did, and rebuilt a new school called Boise School. Boise school now is now intermingled with a bunch of hospitals and medical clinics in Salem and I've attended the 50th anniversary of my graduating class from that school and my 6th grade a number of years ago. That school is probably on its way out.

After leaving Salem, my stepfather got a job, he was working with the Southern Pacific Railroad as a railroad engineer. During the depression years he had to go back to firing on the engines. He spent a lot of time on The Dallas, Black Rock areas on a run from Salem up to that area. Later years, we moved to Klamath Falls then and I went to high school in Klamath Falls up to my senior year in high school. I joined the Navy at Christmastime and proceeded to see the downtown Los Angeles and San Diego for boot camp and then I was fortunate enough to be able to go to a school for quarter masters and that was in Gulfport, Mississippi. While in grade school, most of my activities were, as most youth, I did like to sing. My mother was a church organist and she wanted me to learn to play the piano. My brother Charles, which I mentioned earlier, now a land surveyor in Newport, Oregon, and I used to ride bicycles to Silverton and to Dallas. You try to do that today, and you'd be living pretty dangerously, but we enjoyed the years growing up in Salem. When my dad first went to Klamath Falls to work, he wasn't sure that that was going to be a long-term job. There was the locomotives taking him from Klamath Falls up to Crescent Lake. So, we spent a summer rented a cabin and I spent a summer and my mother and my dad and my brother and I at Crescent Lake. Another fun time, but that probably got me interested in timber resource nod waters because you're either swimming or running around the countryside up there in the trees was a wonderful thing.

I was fortunate, probably, in during the wartime, early wartime in World War II to be able to go to work for the Forest Service at age 16. I worked on a summer fire crew, had a fire camp on west side of Klamath Lake for the first summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. The next summer I was able to go back to that forest service, and they would put me on a lookout for 3 months. One thing about being on a lookout, you learn to cook all for yourself. I had a high school buddy on another lookout, and we spent half the day planning our meals for the next day so that it occupied some of our time. My lookout looked down into the camp for Weyerhaeuser lands and Klamath County. I got first morning up on the lookout. I see smoke down there and I didn't realize at Camp 4 they had a railroad there so that every morning they fired this locomotive up, so it has smoke every morning down at camp. That was an interesting experience, because we had to pack in 4 miles of mule train to get supplies up to me and get my stuff up there to start with and probably was really what turned me on for becoming a forester. I did have in high school a trigonometry teacher that just drilled trigonometry. I liked math and I found out later that in the Navy I ended up becoming working with a navigator as a quarter master. I had been a surveyor since 1952. Mathematics fit everything I've done. High school years were fun years during wartime, but I think that probably the draft was beginning to get a little heavy and my senior I thought maybe I might not be able to go the whole year. So, I decided at Christmastime to join the Navy. It probably has been the other part of my experience of navigation in the ocean as well as the land surveying, the two compatible things that have been very beneficial in my lifetime.

In high school, during the war years you concentrated on studies pretty heavy, but I also enjoyed some recreation as a sea scout. Klamath Falls, with Klamath Lake, had a wonderful place, an oil distributor there that sponsored a Sea Scout troop. I never got Boy Scout training, but I got a lot of Sea Scout training and building a boat and how to sail and that probably fits in in later years with the Navy experience. My mother being a church organist did want us to play the piano, and I did take a few piano lessons and through my lifetime music has been one of my big things. I've enjoyed all my life good music. I think that one of the other things that I joined a DeMolay Group in Klamath Falls, part of the Masonic Lodge order for young people. With a number of school dances and such as that, school life was probably not what it is today and probably what it was prior to World War II, but there was a lot of rationing of things that went on during the wartime, you know. We experienced the coupons of having to get gas to be able to go any place and it was a memorial time, memorable time. My dad during the Depression years thought that that was probably his worst time in his lifetime and I grew up through the Depression years. I probably didn't realize it, but I think I have gained a lot from that experience, so, in time for even going to today. The Depression years as we look back on them were probably a good experience for young people because the raising of a victory garden, we had to get a little yard garden in Salem. We had some bantum roosters. Tried to grow a couple of apple trees that were producing and my brother and I had an interesting experience one time that we took some apples off of this tree, and the next thing we know the next door neighbor, the lady that had come over and complained to my mother that we'd stole her apples. Well, we probably were on both sides of the fence line. That apple tree straddled the line. I think all these things during years like that are good experience for young people because you remember that in your older years and recycling and things like that that we do today are a result of what happened at that time, and I think people are beginning to start seeing even today that growing your own vegetables and whether it's an organic grower or whether you just grow it because you like to eat fresh vegetables. I'm not sure that the younger generation, yet, though has realized how tough things can be.

You didn't get in your car in those days. I think the first car I can remember was my grandfather's Essex that we rode around Lebanon in a couple of different parades at the strawberry fair. Then my dad's mother's first car was a big old Buick. It had a box trunk on it, and it'd eat lots of gas and you had to count to coupons of how many coupons it was going to take if it went to the coast. We did take a trip to the coast one time and back and I can remember now from being over on the coast for a number of years in later years that the bridges in Newport and a couple of other places on the coast were completed in 1936. That trip that we made to the coast from Salem, those bridges weren't there. We took the ferry boats across the bays. Salmon River Highway we know today is an interesting experience, because we used to have to go through Hebo and down through Cloverdale and Lincoln City, what's now Lincoln City, but in those days was Dee Lake and Nelscott and we stayed at a little cabin in Nelscott when we came over for a vacation several different times. That was probably the sum total of the holidays that we had. There weren't very many holidays celebrated during war years.

I think after I joined the service my time has been has been primarily in trying to get an education of the best thing that happened I think was the fact that the GI Bill was passed and the returning veterans, like myself, that came back in 1946 and had the ability to go to school. I know from my dad's time that I would not have been able to go to college. I would have had to start working, and through the college years the education has been very beneficial. Forestry was my big love and I think that from the years working with the forest service as a youngster and then the experience at sea, then back coming back going to school working part of the time while I was going to school to support room and board. I ended up making it all the way through. I started with a class in 1950. We started with over 500 students in that class. Freshman class. We gradated with 120. Most of the students were returning veterans. There were lot of jobs available. Most of them had already married and so they were eager to get out and get to doing something. I was fortunate enough, I think, to be young enough that I wanted to stay in school and get my degree. The class of logging engineers that year was 22 students, not a big class. It was the last of the - what they call logging engineers. Then we became forest engineers. Patterson was our chief professor in the school and Pat was an old time railroad logging engineer, so I got the benefit of a little bit of railroad construction and such and never thought I would use that.

The era of railroad logging was just almost at an end. My seeing the trains down in the Camp 4 in Weyerhaeuser, and all they were doing was hauling logs from the reload into Klamath Falls. That was really not logging. It was railroads. The building of these tracks out through the woods was something that we got a little bit of benefit, but I learned what a frog angle was. I keep asking people nowadays, do you know what a frog angle is? They can came up with all kinds of answers, but the frog angle is how you compute the divergence from the mainline to a spur track and it's pretty critical that you get those cars off far enough from the mainline that the trains going by can pass each other. That frog angle, many times, was going into a spur into a mill and my first job down in southern Oregon when I got out of school, we designed a rail spur into a new mill site down there. So, I got the benefit of being able to use one of the things that I thought I'd never use. During the school years, we did a lot of field work. Summertime we spent my first summer in school was freshman year. I worked for Coos Bay Lumber Company, and one of my high school buddies and I were in forestry class and we went to Coos Bay and lived in Myrtle Point for three months and spent time on two different logging systems, one a sky-line system with a Cat and an arch working down in the some of the flatter countryside. The first morning getting out of a crummy on top of a mountain in the fog for a skyline is something that can behold that, didn't know where we were going other than the guy says follow me. Down across all these fallen logs. I thought we were going clear to the bottom of the canyon, because we were up on top of about a 3,000 foot ridge. Spent the whole day watching the rigging come out of the clouds and the fog and hooking onto big logs and then getting out of the way. For six weeks we did that. A good experience, but risky business. All over following working as a choker setter behind a Cat and the arch that can pick the logs up off of the grounds where one end's not dragging on the ground. These arches with steel tracks have a way of when they're backing into a pile of logs of knocking down anything that's standing there. I thought I was far enough away and suddenly a sapling went down alongside of me that was probably about 10 feet taller than the distance between me and the arch and I learned quickly that safety is one of the things you better practice daily or you don't last long on these jobs.

Second summer in college I worked with one of the college professors now was Johnny Bell working for the forest service on an inventory crew down in Rogue National Forest in Medford area. Lots of good experience there. Johnny says the only way he could find me though was when I started sneezing with all the yellow pollen from the pine reproduction we were working in out there that I'd sneeze my head off halfway through the day. He said, I always knew where you were. He says, I didn't see you but... I think I worked with 2 different college professors, because my third summer I worked for Pope & Talbot Lumber Company up in Oak Ridge and worked on a road crew engineering crew. That was probably one of the better things that happened to me. I did enjoy the surveying and the engineering. I was working for a full-time civil engineer. We had that job, when I took the job I was interviewed by Stub Stewart who later I got to know real well in the timber industry. He was a mill manager and plant manager for Pope & Talbot. Frank Kincaid was a forester up there and they had three foresters from college, Dick Bear from University of California; George Griffith from Oregon State and Harry Clark from Washington University. As you can see, sooner or later with three foresters that were older than I was and the experience they had that I probably wasn't going to stay there too long.

I got an opportunity to go to work for a civil engineer and a consultant forester down in Grants Pass and so, meanwhile, I had gotten married and had one youngster before we got out of college, our daughter Sharon. We moved to Grants Pass and started to work. A lot of the work was with Robert Dollar Company in Glendale. Again, that was road location up and down the, a lot of pretty primitive country down there at Grave Creek and down to the Rogue River. I think that that experience pretty well gave me a good background. Doug Theno was the logging engineer for Glendale, Bill. He had timber crews that worked with him. So, I got a little bit of time working as a compass man for a cruiser when the surveying slowed down. I got to meet a lot of interesting people. After about a year and a half of that, I ended up taking a job with Southern Oregon Sugar Pine in Medford, which is a company that was just newly formed. They had acquired a mill and tiller. Had them build a new mill at White City. That's where we located that railroad spur, into that mill site. A college graduate a year ahead of me from school was Bob Cline, and his dad, Weldon Cline, became the timberland manager for the Southern Oregon Sugar Pine. Bob started some of the first high-lead logging in southern Oregon coming out of the Coos Bay area for a number of years. He grew up, I thought, when I first went to work in Grants Pass that the only way you logged down here is with a Cat, hook onto a log and you might be on a 60 degree slope. You just threw the Cat in neutral and down the hill you went and hoped the log didn't catch up with you. Found out later that wasn't the smartest thing to do, and I think Bob's experience with cable logging was really the start of cable logging in southern Oregon. My time with Southern Oregon Sugar Pine was about 2 years. Then I had an opportunity to come to the coast, had a couple of job applications. A few rattlesnakes, yellow jackets, and poison oak in southern Oregon didn't take too long to realize that what people said over here there weren't any of those things in Lincoln County. In late 1952, I moved to Newport. At that time, we had to drive if you went up the coast on the old coast highway, which went over Cape Foulweather. We ended up renting a house on Cape Foulweather, or just beyond Cape Foulweather for a year. Every morning if the fog was there you never saw the highway until you got to Newport, practically. It seemed like the fog came in something terrible there. I don't know that I worked in those years.

I started out working for a small mill in Newport that was, there was 2 mills in Newport at that time: Lincoln Lumber Sales and Triangle Pacific Lumber Company. I was doing more consulting work and I really was doing working for the mill all the time. They wanted me to go look at land and buy logs and do a lot of different things which have been beneficial over the years. It ended up that Wineberg Timber Company were buying up tax lines in Lincoln County and I found in later years it was kind of in competition with the Starker Family. Bill Wineberg and TJ used to battel it out at the courthouse in the morning, I think, with the tax delinquent lands were being sold and those lands were selling anyplace from $1 to $5 an acre. That was my first experience in beating TJ, which I had seen him in college a couple different times that he taught in class a task or two but found out that the Miller Family that I was working for was Cascadia Lumber Company in later years had a timber cutting contract with the Starker Family on Mill Creek just south of Toledo. I got involved then, I think, more with the Wineberg Timber for a couple of years, but then Cascadia Lumber Company approached me and wanted me to go to work for them when their forester that they had injured his back. He was an old timer from Silverton area that worked Silverton Lumber Company, I believe, and some of the Longview Fiber lands up around Silver Falls. Henry Pritzloft was his name. I decided that going to work maybe every day and working for a company might be better than trying to piecemeal a little bit as a consultant, land surveyor. I'd got my land surveying license in 1952 after I'd worked with Theno down in Glendale. So, I thought maybe I could be beneficial to working with a Cascadia. I decided to take the job that they offered me. That was one of the better moves that I did in my lifetime. A good family to work for.

They just built a mill in Toledo that had a mill up at Sweet Home for a number of years. I think kind of an interesting thing that that mill at Sweet Home, Mr. Miller, the dad, George E. Miller, would just open the gate in the morning and log trucks would appear on the scene and they'd dump logs and buy them and they thought that was going to go on forever, I think. They had the opportunity to some long-term contracts with some of the Hill Family and such in that area. I think eventually Willamette Industry took those contracts and decided that was what they were going to do, but suddenly I think the logs began to dwindle coming into Cascadia Lumber Company. That mill located now would be located where the Safeway store is in Sweet Home. So, the Millers bought a piece of property in Toledo and over the couple of years' time they built the sawmill. About half of the mill from Sweet Home ended up in the mill, in big timbers and things that they reconstructed the mill in Toledo with. I think then the younger Miller boys were Jim and Robert Miller. Jim was my boss in the Timberlands Inn and Robert was the mill and then the log sale, lumber sale. They had been buying lumber from a number of mills around Lincoln County and having it planed and then they were just doing the brokering and the selling of lumber. I think with running a mill they had the idea that we better get some longer-term cutting leases, so that was one of the first, I think, 1031 Exchanges was put together on that timber on Mill Creek with TJ Starker. We logged, my memory is that it was several hundred acres up there that still logging primarily with spar tree, wooden spar trees and M & W Lumber Company were four partners, Floyd Malcom and Lloyd Malcom, Orville Wooley, and Harry Wallace were the M & Ws. They logged most of that timber on Mill Creek off the Starker lands and it went in to the mill at Toledo, and this was done in exchange for lands that the Millers were acquiring in other counties.

My job was being a forester and a logging engineer and the lands over there turned into a lot of land acquisition. We bought lands from primarily in the good timber belt of Washington and Columbia Counties and some down in this area. The Millers, I think, had had contracts with Wineberg Timber finally with about 12,000 acres that they logged off of the Wineberg lands and were probably the first mill to operate on Siuslaw National Forest Timber sales. Siuslaw was a prime candidate for a clear cutting and big sales. I can remember the first sale we worked on was up that one creek out of Waldport, [?] Saddle they called it. Another sale on the north end was on Spooner Ridge, and some of those sales had 15 to 20 million board feet in them. They were large sales. Provide the mill that only cut about 30 million board feet a year a pretty good source of material. Of course, it was in competition with a lot of other people who were cutting 30 to 50 million board feet a year. Willamette Industries and Hampton Lumber Company were big contenders up in the north end and the south end there was lots of mills, Philomath and Eugene and down the Lobster Valley. I think the old time fire warden in here told me one time when I first went to work that there were over 50 sawmills in Lincoln County in 1950. Most of them were little dinky mills. In fact, every little creek had a mill in it someplace that were cutting railroad ties. That part of the history probably today we start looking at railroad ties and instead of Douglas fir they want hemlock. If you find it what... the Douglas Fir second growth in this area was just thought to be a weed for a long, long time. That was where some of these lands that Wineberg was buying, they may have been logged a little bit-a little bit of old growth might have been taken if they found some old growth but instead of second growth timber it wasn't good for anything until these tie mills started in on it. If it was spruce and hemlock it was just left. A lot of the lands, especially along the coast, would have 10 to 25,000 board feet of conifer, but it was all spruce and hemlock and nobody was using spruce and hemlock at that time. It made a lot of land be available in this area for a long time.

I got a lot of traveling experience for Wineberg, but also working for the Miller Family. I've cruised timber in Vancouver Island working for Wineberg and clear up the north end of the island. I've worked down in Mendocino County, Humboldt County and the redwoods at that time were the second growth redwood wasn't worth anything. There were stands that would run almost 50 to 1,000 acre of second growth redwood around these big old growth stumps that had been logged, and yet no one was using it. This bill that started in when I first came over here in 1952, the Triangle Pacific bought a mill down at Arcata. They were one of the first mills to start using second growth redwood. They had a terrible time down there for a number of years because of trying to dispose of the bark from redwood in burners they found out they had to run bark through about two burners, these big burners, to get to the third one where it would finally burn up. That redwood country was something else. I met a logging truck one time on a road up there with one of these off-highway trucks that had bumps that were about 16 feet wide and they had logs that were over 16 feet high on them coming down the road. It didn't even look like he was going to put his brakes on. I don't think he wanted to. Trying to get out of the way. I had the same experience one time with Pope & Talbot on the long logs. They wanted the logs 64 feet long to take into the mill to cut long timbers and you'd meet a log truck on a curve someplace with a 64 foot log on it, you find out that tail sweep. Well, it creased a canopy was on the back of a pickup, but fortunately it didn't hit the cab. I got a lecture one day on that, driving on off-highway roads, you better be watching what's coming down the road. Today we use a lot of citizen band radios to help.

Working on the exchange with the Starker Family on timber land for logs, a lot of the work up in Washington County was around Vernonia in that area. We ended up, Bruce Starker and myself and I think at least two or maybe three trips would go up about once a year and look at the lands that we had acquired up there and see whether something they would take as an exchange. I always figured that most of what we looked at was pretty good, so I thought they would take it. I can remember one time, though, we looked at a tract up there and Bruce said, I don't think we want that. That was the first piece I think they turned down anything we ever bought, and I'm not sure they ever turned anything down after that. Always on this trips coming back we had to stop at a little restaurant that he liked the milkshakes. That was every trip that I made with him we had to have a milkshake up there. I enjoyed time with Bruce, and especially something like that because you had a chance for a couple hours to just talk about experiences and getting to know a little bit about the family. Over the years I've known the two boys, Bart and Bond real well. My wife has worked with them in the industry. Their mother, Betty, was a crown jewel, a real fine lady. She was very instrumental in getting the aquarium started in Newport. That was something that, another experience, though that if you want to look back at things that Triangle Pacific Mill in Newport is where the Oregon Aquarium is. They used a lot of the wildlife setting there as a log pond. They brought logs up with a tug boat and they ran them over the hill down into a little pond that fed into this mill that's sitting right where that aquarium is. It's a pretty good example if you leave thing alone for about 20 years you can't recognize what the previous use of that land was. Land in this country over here recovers dramatically well. That's good and bad for a lot of the high site lands with the Bryce cover we have creates a lot of problems for foresters. Over the years its trying to find the tools you could use and then find out you sooner or later you can't use them. It's just one headache after another.

My time after joining the Navy in 1944 I was in the fourth class in 1945 at boot camp in San Diego. I joined in Christmastime, so I got a train ride over Christmas holidays to San Diego. A beautiful climate down there and probably the best time of the year for somebody going from Willamette Valley or Klamath Falls down to enjoy the sunshine in the boot camp. I joined with two classmates in class in high school. We ended up going our separate ways after boot camp, both of those parties are gone. Jim Grimes ended up as a county assessor in Klamath County. Had a big cattle ranch down there. Willard Anderson was the other party and he died in an auto accident 2 weeks after he came back from the service. Willard's brother, Alvin, has been working with the forest service for a number of years up at Hebo. I got to know him real well. He was a predecessor of mine to the lookout that I was on in southern Oregon. But the service experience, I was fortunate that most of my classmates ended up on ships and heading out still wartime. The kamikazes were bombing anything that floated out there. Some of these destroyer escorts are not quite fast enough to do a lot of maneuvering. Lost a lot of friends out of that class. I was fortunate to get to go to quartermaster school along with a bunch of flunk outs from the V5 program, which was they were going to be pilots, they thought, but I think they could see the tail end of the war that they didn't need all the pilots they were producing so they ended up in this quartermaster school along with me. We ended up in Gulfport, Mississippi. I probably lost my fondness for anything that was ever good in Mississippi because six months down there sweltering in the heat and such. The barracks were built, they excavated a hole in the ground to build a barracks over it. Then the barracks every day when that four inches of rain comes in about a half hour it would steam the rest of the night. It was like being in a sauna bath. I didn't think that was where I wanted to work then.

It's those days, though, we did get to travel in on weekends into New Orleans and that was kind of a fun experience. I didn't think I'd ever see New Orleans again, but I've gone back there twice since I got out of school and out of service, so I guess there's a reason to go to New Orleans once in a while. Came back and was assigned to a ship out of a base at Livermore, California, out in the flat lands and drying up mud out there. You'd put on your whites, take off for liberty for a weekend and go into San Francisco dressed in whites and with the wind and the fog comes in you'd freeze to death. You never thought about that for a while. I was about a month and a half waiting for this ship assignment and then they found out I was assigned to a ship that was in a shipyard being converted from some torpedo tubes they had on a destroyer escort they put on depth charges for making it somewhat like a sub chaser. The first trip we made out for a little shakedown we went into Port Hueneme in California, which was a munition depot. Since I was a quartermaster they put me on the helm until we got to the port down there, and then a pilot took over and I'll be darned if they didn't back the ship underneath the dock there and stripped the depth charge, all containers off the backend of the ship so back to the shipyard again. My time in wartime was spent primarily in the shipyard or thereabouts until I think we were one of the first ships into Hong Kong Harbor. That was where left and the next stage and went to Hawaii. Wouldn't even let us off the ship in Hawaii and on into Hong Kong. We met these cruisers in Los Angeles and several other destroyers and destroyer escorts. We were kind of a harbor patrol for a while and then they put us on the running back and forth the foremost straights into Shanghai up the Yangtze and Huangpu River. I got to see a little bit of China in my military experience, but not in wartime. The ship that I was on, before they retrofitted it was running airplane recovery off of Guam and the crew was when they finally came back to the shipyard they pretty well changed all the crew except for a couple of the key people on the ship. One of the quarters first class quartermasters and I was a third class and working under him and the navigator. Got a lot of good navigational experience. I never thought much about leaving San Francisco or Los Angeles Harbor and heading for Hawaii, I figured there was islands out there you probably would find it.

Then heading for China it was seven days that it takes to get across and you think that all the plotting you've done on these maps with the currents and the winds and the storms and you wonder, well, are we going to hit within a 100 miles of where we think we are? I'll be darned when the daylight came and the shoreline showed up here's this dock that you go through to get back behind the big island that Hong Kong is on. That navigator, I had to give him most the credit for it. All I did was plot the bearings and distances that he gave me to plot. Found out you could do a lot with a navigation as long as you knew how to use the stars and the sun and a few other things. Good experience. Navigation by using all of the celestial objects we have to work with. Very little radio communication off shore. We had LORAN at a few stations because you came up the coastline. You could triangulate between two points and pinpoint a position pretty well with that LORAN, but those were very few and far between. Once you finally got out to sea then, maybe 100 miles or so off shore, you're on your own figuring out currents. The Bowditch is a book of navigation. It's the bible in the Navy that also was beneficial for a lot of trig tables they have in it that we used in early day surveying. My surveyor's license I found out that using Polaris, the North Star, is one of the better ways of getting a true bearing to start a survey from. We had a surveyor in this county that all of his surveys were based on a Polaris bearing and that was the early surveyors from Taiwan. I think that was the way they established bearings to work from. I think that you have to marvel at the technology that's developed over the years now to where you see that you can hold a little hand compass or a hand GPS and figure out within a few feet of where you are on this earth. I only hope that someday they'll get it down to wristwatch size, because I know it can be done.

We're standing in part of our recreation area on our family tree farm and this is what's called the Big Elk Creek that's right below us here. If you look off in the distance there you'll see where Bull Creek comes into the Big Elk. Bull Creek is a salmon-spawning stream. It has a natural barrier at the mouth there that during the summer months its sandstone and salmon can't get over it, so there's quite a pool that the salmon stay in until the rains come in the fall. Then when the rains start in, they head up that stream, but this stream was the pool below that is our swimming hole. My sons run a challenge camp out here for young people for about four different years and bring it where they can take canoes up and down the stream on the Big Elk. Craw-dadding has been a real fun type activity. The swimming hole probably with a rope hanging on it on the other side of these maple trees here is a drop off that every kid has to experience it. A picnic area we have up above where we're standing, this stream doesn't have much of a gradient up stream for quite a ways so they put in canoes and kayaks and rafts. Then down below this there's some fairly fast running water for about a half a mile. We've really enjoyed this part of it. That was one of the best parts of owning a tree farm, I think, is being able to raise a family where you can have a picnic area and spend a half an afternoon swimming and then going after a few crawdads and then you have a cocktail in the evening with a crawdad tail. This is one of the examples of some of the wildlife activity on our tree farm. We ended up with elk on some of our plants we planted, but looking now at beaver damage.

I never thought being an Oregon State Beaver would have any problems, but our cousins that like to live in this wildlife habitat start picking on trees the size of this tree, and some of the redwoods that we planted in here we've lost about 10 or 12 of the riparian trees we planted in the last year. We started some of our riparian planting projects early in this little parcel in here was a strip along the coast that I got a few dollars from the state for a governor's watershed enhancement. We planted I think all Douglas fir through here when we first did this. We pretty well cleared it and then went through and planted Douglas fir. Found it too much shade for the fir. What few alders were growing in here and then blackberries that pretty well took this country over. This is a western red cedar and we found after, well, about 3 years ago that the western red cedar was going to survive pretty well under this shade. Some of this turns into be a solid blackberry patch. The other competition here with blackberries and nettles and elderberry. We've got biodiversity I guess somebody would call it now. It may not be all what they want in a riparian area but I think it'll succeed.

Well, I'm standing in one of the earliest plantations we have on our tree farm on the Big Elk, and the trees in here are about 25 years old. We just measured one tree that's 13 inches. I think probably between 12 and 14 inches is probably the average diameter of these trees now, but beginning to look like a tree farm that I'd like to look at. Hopefully this is going to meet the objects we set aside in our management plan. We bought this property primarily for a return on investment but also for a recreation area and this has provided a lot of recreation and tree planting for the youngsters that no longer want to become foresters. It also has provided a place for horseback riding and activities for the challenge camp that my son ran. I think that if we had to a fully stocked stand on 65 acres looking like this I'd feel pretty wealthy but our ownership was a mile and a half of stream through it, a power line that goes through, part of the highway, or county road right away, we're lucky if we have about 40 acres out of the 65 that's actually in trees. This stand is all Douglas fir. Early on in my career in industrial forestry, we planted Douglas fir and I thought that was still the money maker. You notice, I think earlier on in some of our plantations we've gone with a lot of cedars and hemlock, redwoods, coastal, and then Sierra redwoods. But still Douglas fir will probably take the majority of the occupancy of the ground. Fir survives well. These soils in this area are some of the highest class soil for timber growing in Lincoln County. It's an [?] soil. Came off the slopes of Marys Peak a lot of this material, formed on these benches just above the river.

We're standing on an edge of a road that comes off of an old military road that was built in the early days that connected the railroad crossing above Elk City and ended up over in Toledo. We're looking into a drainage here of the Yaquina River and upstream from Elk City. Much of the land out there over the years has been reforested by a number of different industrial companies in the Starker Family. A lot of it looks like I think when you pan around a picture like this you see a lot of land that you can't tell where you were because of who's property was. At one time you could.

We're looking into an area out near Eddyville on the Yaquina that was part of what Publisher's Paper Company acquired from WOW Lumber Company. It had a sawmill in Eddyville. WOW was the Weinert Brothers and Stan Ottokirk, the owners have operated for a number of years with landholdings that they had. Publisher's Paper Company bought that WOW lands, harvested what little bit of remaining salvage there was on most of those acres and then reforested them. My job as a division forester in Toledo was to see that we had a crew that could do this type of work and start in early along with some work that was done by Publishers up in Tillamook. It was pretty massive clearcuts of what was remaining on the land, burning and used herbicides and fire, lots of time spent trapping mountain beaver and then replanting with 2-1 seedlings. Most of the foresters at that time thought that 2-0 seedlings is expensive as they could afford. 2-1s were kind of an unheard of and a 2-1 is a tree that's grown in a nursery for 2 years or in a seeded situation for 1 year, planted in the nursery or replanted, or at least growing one year in a transplant bed. The seedlings sometimes were anyplace from 2 to 3 feet in height with pretty good-sized root structure. If you notice, I think most of the work winner was Georgia Pacific, or whatever it was, Publisher's Paper Company or Starkers.

You're looking at a hillside out there that looks like its solid conifer stocking. I think that the success that over the years with these plantations they've been very, very good. Some people were satisfied with 50% and 60% survival. I think most of the companies felt that if they had less than 90% survival that they were kind of falling behind, but the key in this close range is the site preparation. Once you harvest whatever's there, whether it's a mature stand of trees or whether it's a pile of junk with a lot of hardwoods on it, you've got to get rid of the competition for the first couple of years so seedlings would grow. We didn't have a lot of the chemicals that we have in 2009 now that can do things that we had to do with fire and maybe one aerial spray job to kind of beat the brush back for one year, but that was the reason for the 2-1 seedlings. Most those trees had a head start above the brush and they stayed that way. A 2-0 seedling that planted and many of the companies thought that that was all the money they wanted to spend. Had a lot of failures in those plantations. They're a little spotty.

My job with the Division of Forestry down here required, well, eventually we ended up with 15 people working out of Toledo. We had a number of foresters, a road builder, a superintendent, a maintenance man. I'd like to name a few of them because they were the ones that should get the credit for this kind of work that produces what you see on that hillside. We started out with Jim Harris as a land forester down here. He came from Tillamook. Eventually his job was taken over by Shannon White and Dick Roseberry. Shannon's a retired consultant now and Dick Roseberry worked for Diamond Match Company down in Redding and went back there when he left this area. Dale Nickles was another one of our lands foresters. Jim Carr. We had people from Tillamook we borrowed every once in a while. John Washburn was the chief man to run up and down a lot of the early burns that we did because that required slashing all the debris after trying to log what little salvage there was. It took somebody to run over that debris to string out a bunch of Primacord with jellied gasoline cans. I can remember the first two burns that were on what they called the W unit that lies just at the top of what you can see on these ridges back here. There were two units of 400 acres each that were lit the same day. It was instant fire when you set those Primacords off. That 400 acres was all afire at once. It kind of reminded me of pictures I'd seen of atomic explosions, because those created clouds up to 30 and 40,000 feet, just a big thunderhead. Those were key individuals.

Shannon White is still doing a lot of work for different companies in the herbicide inventory type works. Most of the people-Red Snyder was an old timer that worked for us that worked more in the logging management and we had a Marvin Graves and a Jim McKenster and Jim Horner and Keith Woods in the road department. Keith is driving a log truck today and working for one of the loggers here in Toledo. I think Jim Horner's semi-retired. Jim McKenster was a grater operator with a college education. He liked to run the grater. Marvin Graves worked for us for about 3 or 4 years down there and then went to work for one of the major road building contractors. Excellent grader operators. They were standing here and just thinking about the crew that it took to do this work on the WOW project. I can't remember even some of the names of the people that did this work. My effort was just to try to assemble a crew and get the job done, but the pictures we have of an early crew contained pictures of Jim Harris, was one of our foresters. Marvin Graves was a grader operator. Keith Woods was a road engineer. Jerry Sparks handled one of the areas of area supervisor. Jim Carr was another reforestation specialist. Nells Hagum another area supervisor. Stan Gan was kind of an all-around know the woods type. In the front row of the picture is Dale Nickles, Shannon White, and Red Snyder. Red was a Boatswain Mate in the Navy. I always thought that's the kind of a master sergeant you need or somebody that can keep a crew like this halfway in shape. Missing from the picture were Jimmy Horner and Gary Smith. Jimmy Horner was a road supervisor. Gary Smith another area supervisor. I guess probably one of the most important people of all is our receptionist and secretary, housemother taking care of a troop as a den mother maybe, but Linda Stewart was very instrumental in keeping all these people in line. Her efforts, I think, made a success of the WOW story.

We're standing here looking at this panorama of the Yaquina River. Landslides play a key thing in road construction and some of the way some of this country's been formed. There's a slide area down below us here that was not created by the road construction. It appears if you're driving up here that it might have been somebody just pushed a bunch of dirt over the edge. Many places that was the occasion when back in the earlier days of logging right after World War II that bigger the equipment and the very poor dispersal of logging slashed on a road does create some landslide problems. In here was a landslide I think the only flat ground I heard one time in Lincoln County came from landslides. That was probably true. We had these little benches were the river flowed through the and then from there on we got steep ground that Mother Nature, I don't think, likes steep ground so we're trying to flatten it all the time.

We're now looking down into the Yaquina River and the road you see is the Elk City to Highway 20 cutoff, a county road, a railroad track right above the road there it was the early means of transportation to get into this area. Then we're looking at a timber stand over there just above the house and such and a Christmas tree plantation that's on the Starker's Dierdorf tract. The Dierdorf Family that were one of the small woodland owners in the area back in the 1960s and '70s. Started doing some planting of trees and thinning. We ended up, I think, with Don Dierdorf worked with the post office. A great family and people that we've known on the small woodland organization in this county. We're standing here looking at some of these were highway construction that's going on 2009 over through the WOW tract. We're looking at where the original WOW road came through the top cut on the hillside between the Yaquina River and dropping down the Updike Road then into the Big Elk Creek. The amount of dirt that's been moved so far for this highway construction is just almost mind-boggling to see the size of this cut. I don't think people appreciate it when they drive through on a highway at about 60 miles an hour someday that all the efforts that've gone into these stands of trees that you see that are, two burns I talked about earlier were in 1976 and so these trees are getting upwards of 40 years old that were planted up here. Today's harvesting schedules are probably not too many years and they'll be harvested again.

BD: My name's Betty Denison. I was born in El Paso, Texas. I lived there until the middle of my senior year and then I moved to Oregon. My history in El Paso was a lot of fun. I lived in the middle of town, not the downtown area but the outskirts of town. There were four military bases there in El Paso. One of the things that I can remember about that is that we had a B29 base and every once in a while planes would come over and couldn't quite make the mountain that we lived at the foothill. We had regular burial grounds up there. Our high school, we would go up there every year and clean up the burial grounds and we've made it into a real memorial. We also had our school letter was up on the mountain, so every year we'd go up and paint our mountain, our letter on the mountain. That was the one thing about El Paso that I really remember the most. I remember standing out in the yard and my mother saying, oh no, and fainting as a plane hit the mountain. There's a lot of history up there for me as far as my growing up in my neighborhood. For fun I used to ride horses. I did a lot of drawing and we lived right at the end of the Depression. The money was scarce, so I'd go draw pictures of the horses and they let me ride free. I did a lot of that. In high school I was drum majorette for the four years that I was in high school. We did a lot of traveling. Every other year we would go to Lubbock, Texas, for a ball game, a football game. Those other altering years they would come there. When I moved to Oregon I finished my senior year at Eagle Point High School. From there, my first job was at Montgomery Wards. I've always worked in accounting until I went to work for Medford Corporation. Then I worked in the computer area of the ship for shipping. From there when my mother passed away in '63, I moved to Portland. Went to work for Georgia Pacific. Worked there until they shut down the Portland office there and then I went to work for George E. Miller, which is the company that Jim worked for. I talked to him for several months on the telephone. Well, actually, just a couple months. Then one day one of the gals over in the Toledo office decided it was time that we met. So, she sent us to the Ice Follies in Portland. That's the first time I met him was with a group of us. We went to the Ice Follies in Portland. Then one morning my boss walked into the office and Mr. Miller walked into the office, and he says I hear you and Jim are getting married? I said, no! I says, he asked but I said no. I didn't want to get married.

So, I took his coffee into him and Bud Miller walked in and took his coffee to him and he says I hear you and Jim are getting married. I said, no, we're not. He says, yes you are. I said, no. So, pretty soon Jim walked in and he says, yeah, they're getting married. Let's see, when will that be? They set our wedding date. We were married on May 27th thanks to the Millers, two months after I actually met him in person. There was a sequence here. My mother and dad new each other three days and they were married and they were on their honeymoon when my mom died and my brother and I always felt like we were the third and fourth wheel in the family because they were so close together. Jim and I knew each other actually had known each other face-to-face two months and we were married. I kind of thing we're still on our honeymoon. I don't think it's ever ended yet. Our honeymoon, speaking of honeymoons, we were married in Newport and we went camping. We left in my folks' trailer and at 6:00 in the morning I woke up to a class in tree identification. That was my first morning of our honeymoon was a tree identification course, yes [laughs]. He's taught me everything I know. I've done a lot in the timber field, but actually as far as being out on the ground, I made it my practice wherever I worked that I went out to see what was going on so I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. I guess, I think my most involvement have been with the Women in Timber. Myself and Jane Newton and Cathy Roberts were the 3 people that started up the Women in Timber in Oregon.

From there we traveled around the United States and helped put together a couple other Women in Timber organizations in other areas. We went to Alaska and met with them up there for a week. I spent a week of traveling all over Alaska while my husband fished and brought some beautiful fish home. He spent a week of fishing and enjoying himself. Then I was involved in the tree farm program before it actually became the tree farm program. It was when it was an OFIC. Was it? Yeah. Jim and both I worked with the tree farm program there and then when they decided to give it up I was asked if I would take it and become director. So, I became director and served as director until I became ill and was unable to stay as director, but I've still been involved. We did the 1996 convention in Portland and it was one of the biggest that they had had. This year they did it again. Actually, last year they did it again and it was even bigger the year that we had it in '96. I've worked on the Society of American Foresters Conventions that they've had in Portland. I've been really involved in everything. I always thought it was neat that my husband came home to me to talk about his job in evening instead of going to tavern. I always this was-a lot of people said don't you think he thinks you're kind of keeping an eye on him and what he's doing. I said, well, that was not my intent.

JD: Betty and my decision to move to Lebanon was primarily for health reasons. We both had been going to doctors in the hospitals almost monthly and we decided that rather than drive from the coast to Lebanon or Albany or Corvallis that we would just move over here where we do have good medical facilities. My grandparents' home is still existing in the town. An interesting thing that my mother played an organ for a number of years. She started playing in Lebanon for silent movies in the theater. She also was a church organist for the Presbyterian Church in Lebanon. Through our time that Mother was alive we lived in Salem and Klamath Falls and she was a church organist in both of those towns, so my brother and I got to sing in church choirs pretty regularly. We did like music, though, so that we didn't really object to that other than it took up some of the time for playing.

I think that also that my grandparents were very influential in the government entities in Linn County. My grandfather was a schoolboard in Lebanon. He was also a district attorney for the county, started out early on from a graduation at Willamette University and then moved to Albany and started his practice in law there. We later will be looking at a small parcel that my grandfather acquired as a payment for a court case that he solved for some people between Sweet Home and Cascadia. It's a little, was a 300 foot frontage on the Santiam River. I think that we call it our old growth forest. It was one acre up there and probably have about five old growth Douglas fir on it. We have almost as much old growth as the rest of the state of Oregon has percentage-wise. I would like to comment a little bit on Betty's activities and her. She's really the leader of this family of getting us started and being involved in a lot of the activities of both Women in Timber, Two Tree Farm, Small Woodlands Association. Because we did like to travel, we've been to all the states in the union. I don't think Betty has been to Hawaii but I got a free trip to Hawaii and back via the U.S. Navy. We're looking forward to even more, a tree farm tour is coming up in two weeks in eastern Oregon. It's out of the town of Union County in the little town of Unity, places that most people don't even know are a part of Oregon. I spent 4 ½ years with the Small Woodlands Association as president. I followed a gentleman, Phil Cool, from over in the John Day area and Phil was a real cowboy. I enjoyed just visiting with him and the activities that we had on tours in eastern Oregon were so much different than what we do in western Oregon, that it's just a fun thing to go over there. Most tree farmers in eastern Oregon think that they are cattle ranches, yet probably have more timber in the backyard than most of our small woodland owners have in the western part of the state. Acreage-wise they may have 10,000 acres and we have 10 or 15 acres in a tree farm. Our tree farm we visited earlier has 65 acres in it now, but I can probably grow on that 65 acres what they can grow on 600 acres in eastern Oregon.

BD: Jim talked about our traveling. We did an awful lot of traveling, but we met an awful lot of people that have become very good friends. A funny incident that happened to us one time is we were back in Washington, D.C., with Women in Timber. The forestry people on a get together for us in the evening. I was talking to this gentleman from Bremerton, Washington. He was one of their representatives. I said this is really a stupid question, but do you by chance know a Harry Campbell. He said, sure, I know Harry. I know him real well. We went to high school together. He said, I almost married his youngest sister until she went off and married some kook. I looked at him and I says that kook you're talking about is my father. We met in Alaska and in several other areas. We became really good friends but that's one thing I'll never forget about one of our tours of places that we went to. But we did, we were very, very fortunate to meet a lot of wonderful people all over the United States. We were on the, both of us were on the National Tree Farm Board and that gave us a good opportunity to know a lot about the different areas and meet a lot of the different people. We thoroughly enjoyed that.

One thing I didn't mention is our children. We have seven children. Four of them were Jim's by a previous marriage and two were mine and then Jim and I had one and then we raised, helped raise 27 foster children over the years. A couple of them were long time. Three of them were long time. The others were just short stays. That was a wonderful experience in our life. I talked about our children. Our oldest daughter, Sharon, was Jim's. She is a physician assistant in Maupin, Oregon. Her mother is Nancy who all of us are very, very good friends. We spend a lot of time together. Share a lot of things together. Next daughter would be Diane and she is in charge of the heart ward in Virginia Mason in Seattle, Washington. Then there is Margene and she works for the state police in Alaska in Fairbanks. Then actually comes, I'm going by age, then will be our daughter, Connie, who passed away a couple years ago. She was my daughter and then Stephanie is next in line and she is also my daughter and she's a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines. Then our son, Don, who is in Iraq right at the moment. He's working with the police, training the police in Iraq. He's been there, this is his second duty over there as a private citizen. He left being chief of police in Toledo, Oregon, and went over there and then left his post altogether at Toledo and has gone back to Iraq. Next is our little baby, and this is Carrie. She's kind of dad and I's pride and joy. She's both of ours and she owns an accounting office as well as a tax office. She does both accounting and taxes for right here at Lebanon. Then that just leads me right on into my grandchildren and I'll start at the top again. Our oldest children never had children, but she has a four-legged child. He is probably spoiled worse than any of the children that we have. He's pretty spoiled, but he's a fabulous dog. Then next is Diane and she has two daughters. One of them is a wonderful choreographer and a dancer. She graduated out of Seattle in art up there dancing and art. Next would be Margene and she has a son. He is doing missionary work. He also works for a missionary school in Montana. He just got back from Africa from doing some missionary work over there.

JD: You better get Diane's second daughter.

BD: Oh, I did! I'm sorry. Thank you. I forgot Malory. She's also had just graduated from nursing school and she's the second oldest daughter's daughter. Then from there is, let's see, that was Margene. Then there's Don and he has, Stephanie was next, wasn't she? She has twin daughters. She's our flight attendant. Both of them started working for Alaska Airlines and then they got married and now one of them is working for one of the weight loss clinics up in Tacoma and the other one is a massage therapist working for a couple doctors up in Tacoma as well. Then our son, Don, he has Melissa was his daughter who just passed away this past year. Then he had Savannah and she's in the Navy. She works on helicopters and then his son is also in the Navy. No. He's in the Air Force. He's over in, he's not in Iraq.

JD: Saudi Arabia.

BD: Saudi Arabia. He is one of these fellas that makes sure that our planes are well-fueled in flight. He works in that area of planes. Carrie has got a daughter that is going to school in Monmouth. She's going to be a nurse. She right now during the summer is working over with our oldest daughter. The name of my grandchildren are Jessica and Malory and Eli and then there is Melissa and then Melissa and Savannah and then there is Carson and Courtney, Katie, Carmen and Jacob. Then I have twin granddaughters: Heather and Kay Linn.

Then there is Christa Linn and she is a step-daughter, step granddaughter. Then there is Cassie and there's JD. Then there's Brittany and Jessie. I think that takes care of all of them.

JD: My music background I think that my mother tried to get Charles and I both to take piano lessons and of course when you're 6 or 8-year-old kid, kick the can or something else was more fun than practicing on a piano, so I reluctantly, I don't think I did much as far as trying to learn to play the piano until I got into college. I did take a year of piano in college and I'm taking a little piano lessons now at age 82, which I'm not too sure a lot of people think that's too smart. Music has been part of my life and I really enjoy singing. We enjoyed singing in the church choirs. I also sang in a barber shop quartet in Newport. A number of quartets around the country we've attended different functions where they sang and I think that the Buffalo Bills that sang in Music Man were really my inspiration for quartet singing. They were national champions one year and after that we formed this quartet in Newport. All are gone now except for myself. So, I'm kind of the lone ranger playing piano instead of singing now, but it's been a fun thing to do and I think that I hope that most of our children appreciate music. I don't appreciate today's era of music, but I can go back. We had satellite radio out on our tree farm that plays 1940s music. That's probably going to be my era, the 1940s and the early 1950s.

Church activities were very prominent in both Betty and my life. We've been involved with the Presbyterian Church in a number of activities from work being on a session at different times in Newport and Corvallis. We lived in Corvallis for 11 years while Carrie was going to school. Then moved back to the tree farm after she graduated. I think that all the kids had to sing in choir. That was one of the things from the tree farm that when we're all living out there that we end up with a carload of kids and ourselves going to church and singing on the way and we got there we sang in the choir then went home. But it was a wonderful pastime.

BD: That was something that we did all the time no matter where we went. We were always singing. The kids loved to sing. They all have great voices. One of our daughter that's passed away now won the title of runner up to Miss Oregon by singing.

JD: Connie.

BD: That was Connie. Our daughter Connie. She sang, walked off the stage, and sang professionally all over California and Oregon for a long time. As a matter of fact, she put her first husband through college by singing, entertaining. It's just something that all the kids do. Carrie, all the kids sing. They all sing. They love to sing. Jim's 75th birthday, we threw a big surprise party for him. That one was just hilarious, because our youngest grandson was playing ball, baseball at the time. So, the only way we could get Jim to where we wanted him to go happened to be in the park where we were throwing this big surprise party for him. So, we said, hey we're taking you down to see a ball game. Well, then when we got there, Jim says, hey look at all those people. We said, yeah, something must be going on. He said, well, let's walk up and see what they're doing. Well, as soon as we got there then everybody was a surprise. We spent four or five hours with everybody just singing and the kids all singing. They had gotten a group of people there that played records and so everybody sang. It's something all of our children have done all of their lives. I think I was one of the very fortunate children growing up that my mother and I were the best of friends. We were buddies, pals, and mother and daughter last. We did everything together. As a matter of fact, when I was in high school the kids would bring me home and my mom, Thursday was my day to iron. My mom would take off with the kids and go down to the local drive in and have pop with them while I stayed home and ironed. All the kids wanted my mom to go everywhere we went. She was one of these ladies that could do anything. We had an old '37 Chev. She took it apart and put it back together again and it ran better than it did before she took it apart. There wasn't anything that she couldn't master. Anything that went wrong in the household it wasn't my dad that did it, it was my mom that did it. We raised chickens. As I said before, we were part of the tail end of the Depression and we had our own garden and we raised chickens and rabbits and that's what kept us alive. We had one chicken that got really, really sick and that chicken came and lived in the house with us until it was well, and then it went back to the chicken coup. That's just the type of person that she was. She was just a real wonderful, caring person that I don't think I would be the person that I am today if it had not been for my mom.

My dad, he did a lot of traveling. I didn't-the business that he was in the earlier years of my life he worked for a tire company and had to do a lot of traveling. That was one of the reasons my mom and my brother and I were so close is that we spent a lot of time with her. As I grew older then we spent a lot of time together. We camped. We did a lot of camping. One way my dad could keep me into camp was to say, now watch out for the bears. I was right back in camp immediately. We did a lot of camping and things like that. I was very fortunate in my childhood. I had a very close relationship with my family. We did a lot of things together. That's one thing that I hope that I have accomplished with my children, is that we have a closeness. A lot of kids that we found out by raising our foster children were not privy to. There's something that really draws a family together is doing things and sitting down at the supper table, eating together, and spending priority time instead of doing some of the other things that are being done nowadays. That's my little blurb.

JD: We're standing on the riparian area that's adjacent to the south Santiam River near Cascadia, Oregon. This property is about one acre in size, 300 feet up and down the riverfront, very narrow between the highway and the river. The property was acquired by my grandfather back in the 1930s when he did a lawsuit for a local individual up here that built a cabin for him on this property. It's been in the family, then, since 1932 and we have hopes of leaving it for our children to enjoy for their lifetime for a picnic area. I don't believe you could ever build a house on it. With the riparian rules and highway rules we put up with in today's society, I doubt if you could log a tree off of this. I do have a few very old Douglas fir in here. This property extends up river from where we're standing here for about 200 feet downriver to a small stream that flows under the highway and into the river. That stream used to be the water system we had. They had a cable rigged up in a tree and down to a spout in the creek down there where you could lower a bucket and then reel it back up. We had running water that way.

BD: You tell how you used to look through the hole in the ceiling at the trees at the bridge.

JD: Yeah, the cabin had a shake roof on it and at night you could lay in bed and watch the stars through that shake roof, which you often wondered why it didn't ever rain inside, but shake roofs are amazing. I think Betty and I have enjoyed this property for a number of years. My brother and his wife come up here fairly often.

BD: Kids come up.

JD: We only wish we could do a little more as far as improving it for a campsite, but I'm not even sure we could get permission to do that. We're standing right above the river and that's really right above the river, because it's about 60 feet straight down to the riverbank. Looking at the river as clear as that water is, it shows that Oregon is still one of the leaders in the country, I think, for having clear water. I enjoy looking at trees and water, so most of the property that Betty and I have acquired over the years has had some kind of water frontage on it. We could not compete with our-

BD: Employer?

JD: Employers in buying timberland, so we bought river frontages, canal creek, and down on Mercer Lake and Devil's Lake and other places.

BD: Salmon River.

JD: That's been kind of the life history of the Denison tree farms. Looking at that gravel bar over there, if that rock was someplace accessible, that would be a valuable asset for selling this decorative rock. All this river rock is nice and round and clean.

BD: In years past, the kids would come up and swim and camp out here. They all just had a lot of fun fishing, swimming, just having a great time running around, not down in the river. It took a chore to get them down to the river. We had a big heavy rope that was tied to a tree at the top and then it was fixed down at the bottom. That was the only way they could get down, by sliding down the bank and holding onto the rope. They thought that was great stuff.

JD: We're standing by a western red cedar tree that was one of several trees during my college days. I would gather up some seedlings from the tables at...

BD: Fernhopper.

JD: Fernhopper's banquet. I believe this tree is one that we planted back in the about 1948 or '47. It's got a pretty good size to it now. I think I could probably sell that log.

BD: If you could take it out [laughs].

JD: One thing looking around here that there's lots of young cedars coming into this property, too. That's one thing that cedars will do, grow in the shade of a lot of big old trees. I think that kids will always enjoy-we've planted cedars in our tree farm out there, having a mix stand. I think that if you can remove them, that probably will be one of the most valuable trees that we grow today. We hope that the children can enjoy this property in future years. The ability to camp here with a tent and such as that will always be here, but I think as far as ever putting an improvement on it, it'll be something that there'll be a lot of resistance of you can afford it. It's probably best to leave it the way it is.

BD: If you don't live here year-round on it, it'll be demolished anyway by vandalism.

TIM RABE: Good afternoon. I'm Tim Rabe and I'm the Lincoln County Extension forester from Oregon State University. Rick Fletcher's here. He's the Benton Linn County's extension forester, and we're here to recognize the Denisons as the Oregon Small Woodland Association 2009 Tree Farmers of the Year. I'd just like to say that I'm pretty new here. I've been here about a year and I'm probably learning as much from people like the Denisons as they are from me. It's supposed to be me teaching them, but I think it's them teaching me. But somebody who's really got a lot of history, both here and also in Benton and Linn is Rick. Rick has known these folks for years, a lot longer than I have. I guess Gary, we can say a little bit about what we're doing here. Gary Blanchard's here. He's videoing this, and the Starkers are putting together a history of some of the really pioneers, the folks that have done this sort of work and have been private land owners for years and years and have a lot of history throughout this area. This is going to be put into archives and libraries will have a chance that future generations will be able to look at this and they'll be able to see what these folks did and some of the work that they did. This is kind of important, and it's something nice, again, that the Starkers are doing and we're glad Gary's here to do this. I'm going to let Rick talk a little bit about Jim and Betty since he's got that history with them.

RICK FLETCHER: It's a delight to be back in Lincoln County again. I was actually here as an extension forester a few years ago. I went over here and filled in between Bill Rodgers and Jim. A lot of good friends I see sitting around and it's good to see people like Joe Steencook and others that I haven't seen for a while. The tree farm of the year program was started in 1941. It was an Oregon northwest idea to actually start it in Portland, Oregon.

BD: Washington.

RF: Well, actually the meeting that established it was in Portland, Oregon.

BD: Oh, the first one, yeah.

RF: The first tree farm was actually up in Washington. The whole purpose of the tree farm program is to recognize excellence in stewardship, people that are doing a really good job taking care of the land. You know everybody doesn't get certified to be a tree farm. This isn't something that you get just because you own land. You get tree farm recognition because you take good care of your land. There's a set of standards, and as Jim found out there's also a plan you have to write. You have to keep some records. It's not for everybody. It's really for those people that are the most outstanding stewards, the people that are really doing a good job taking care of the land. That's what the program is all about. It's really to recognize that because a lot of the public just think these forests grow, that you don't have to do anything. They just grow and they don't know about invasive weeds. They don't know about animal damage problems. They don't know about all that kind of storm damage and insects and disease and all things that we deal with out here that we can affect by our management to have productive forests so that we can have a lot of the products that society wants: clean air, clean water, woods products. A lot of the things that come from our forest are vital to our nation.

So, the tree farm program recognizes excellence in stewardship with this in mind. Private landowners, it's only for private landowners. It's for people that have demonstrated that they do an excellent job of managing their land. The tree farm contest recognizes the very best of those stewards across the United States. It's exciting to me that we finally got around to recognizing someone who has had such an impact on stewardship of forests in Oregon as Jim and Betty Denison. I met Jim years and years ago back when he ran one of the finest industrial forestry programs in the country right here in this area for Publisher's Paper. At least, when I met him he was working for Publisher's and had just a crack staff of people that were taking a lot of really cut over land that had kind of come back to brush and salmonberries and things that weren't as productive and converting all that land to really productive conifer forests. They were known as the best people around to do that. They were doing just a heck of a job over here. Jim, and I've just followed your career. It's been fun to watch Jim, too, because you know I mentioned to somebody here that he retired, and they said Jim hasn't retired. And it is true. It's absolutely true because then he started Denison Consulting and a lot of you have been the benefit of his expertise in terms of engineering and forestry. Jim has certainly has had an impact, not just on his own property but on a lot of properties around here. Betty, likewise, I had the pleasure of working for a number of years with Betty and it's fun that you get to be the tree farmer of the year, because Betty as the person in charge of the tree farm program for Oregon for a number of years was actually recognizing other people for their stewardship and during her tenure here I think we had the Adeles were the national outstanding tree farm winners.

BD: That's correct.

RF: She really oversaw the tree farm program at a really critical time in Oregon when we weren't really sure whether we were going to have a tree farm program. Betty's leadership was instrumental just in making sure that that tree farm program kept going and that tree farmers continued to get recognized and stewardship of the forest is still a value that the public recognized. You've got to take care of forests, you can't just own them if you want them to be really productive. I'm just delighted to see the Denisons recognized for the excellence in stewardship on their own property but I got to tell you these are folks who have contributed a lot to the community and forestry in other ways, too. I'm just delighted and just congratulate you guys on just a tremendous job over the years taking care of your forests and taking care of other people and their forests, too. Congratulations.

BD: Thank you.

JD: Thank you, Rick. It's been a pleasure.

RF: My pleasure.

BD: The following pictures are of our deceased daughter, Connie, and her family. Stephanie is singing a tribute to Connie. Through the years Stephanie kind of took a backseat to Connie as far as her singing. She didn't really do a lot of singing other than in the school and in the church choirs. Both girls sang in the church choir. After she became a flight attendant, she kind of opened up and has been doing a lot of singing. One year she and two of the fellas did all the singing for the Alaska Airlines at Christmastime. So, this is a spring forth and a true dedication to Connie that Stephanie sang at her wedding. [Recording of "Wind Beneath My Wings" plays.]

JD: I played a song for a final exam while I was in college. I had taken one year of music and the piano. I think that was to satisfy my mother's wishes that one of us kids would learn to play the piano. The final song that I played was "Clair de Lune." I've always liked that song. Claude Debussy, the author of the song, and that and a couple of other of his songs were always favorites of mine, but this "Clair de lune," I can still play that today about 60 years later. I think at least I learned something while I was in music. [Recording of "Clair de lune" plays.]