Ralph and Stella Eagleson Oral History Interview, February 8, 2008

RALPH EAGLESON: Ralph Melvin Eagleson. I was born June 21, 1925 in the house across the creek by a midwife, I assume, was there. I don't know. My father passed away in '26, so I never knew him. So, my mother raised us, basically, us five, five children. Then in 1933, my older brother drowned, Robert Eagleson. There was just the 4 of us left, but I think in '36 or '37, she married Frank Swarner somewhere in that area, but he wasn't here too often. 00:01:00He worked out at Montgomery Fir Farm in Corvallis. He helped build Camp Adair.

STELLA EAGLESON: I'm Stella Gilmore Eagleson. I was born in Toledo in the house, because in those days we didn't go to the hospital. My mother was Gertrude Stella Gilmore and my father's name was Harrison. My grandparents, Aida and Clifford Thompson, lived in California most of the time. My father's parents were in Washington. However, my father was the 11th child and the youngest. I never did know my paternal grandparents. I have 8 sisters. There's Edna, Jackie, Aida, Myrtle, 00:02:00Betty, Edson & Elsie (twins), and then I had a younger sister, Sarah Edith, who isn't living. She died as an infant. My brothers were Harrison and Louis and Edson. I guess I named him along with the girls, because he was a twin. Well, let's see, my great grandparents were both born in Maine on the east coast and they were sea fairing people. They came to the west coast around the continents because no Panama Canal at that time. In fact, supposedly we had a great relative, my great-great grandfather's uncle or someone who was Robert Gray, the explorer. However, we've never been able to trace it through, 00:03:00so I can't verify it. My mother's people came over land. Her parents, my mother's parents, lived in Colorado where she was born and then they came to California and part of the time they were in Oregon.

RE: My grandparents were Clarence and Mary Sawyer. They came here from Wisconsin. Now, this is in about, I think, 1898, and settled out at, I think, North Howell, just north of Salem, and Gervais and that and Woodburn in that area. I don't know how many children they had. I could probably count them up by looking in the picture. There was quite a few of them. Then, my other grandparents, one of them 00:04:00I think came from Ireland, my grandfather Eagleson. I'm not sure of that. Then my grandma, I don't know where she came from. The only thing I remember is she lived in Woodburn and we would go see her. My grandfather came out after the war from North Dakota where he had lived. All his relatives, most of his relatives, are in North Dakota right now in Saskatchewan. Boyd probably told you he visited them back there. Yes, he did. He walked into a sheriff's office and threw his driver's license on the desk and the guy was the same name as Boyd was, Boyd Eagleson. He was a sheriff there in North Dakota. I guess they got quite a kick out of that. But other than, I'm not really up on my grandpa Eagleson's family.

I have 3 brothers and, no, two brothers and 1 sister: John Harriet, and Boyd. We all kind of grew up together here on the farm doing milking and tending chickens and cleaning chicken houses every week. We'd clean the barns every day. We cut hay to feed the cows, but we, after my father died, Bill Wakefield was a big help because he was always here to help us, anything we needed. Then when my stepfather came in about '35 or '36, he helped some in the fields. He built the chicken houses. He was 00:06:00a good carpenter. He worked at Camp Adair when they built it. He also worked at the Arrow Rock Dam up on the Columbia River. That was before, not before I knew him, but before he was married to my mother. But, things were kind of tough, I know that, here because when my father died there was a $10,000 mortgage on this place. That's what it had cost. They hadn't been able to pay any off. They had moved here in 1918, and my mother somehow paid it off with chickens, eggs, and cream that we sold. Us kids when we had an old horse by the name of Judd. When we took cream to the road, we'd take the horse, put it on the sled 00:07:00and ride down to the road, because this was all dirt. There was no gravel on the roads. We'd put the cream up on the stand and turn the horse around. He'd come home, pull the sled home. My mother'd pick him up here at the front of the house [laughs]. I spent a lot of my time, like when I was about 4, sitting over here on the hillside watching the sawmill work down here. They had a sawmill right here where my first covert is. They logged. The horse logged and then they did, at times, have an old Mack truck, hard rubber tires, that they hauled logs from up the canyon. But I guess that's about all for that.

SE: Well, my father in Toledo worked at the CD Jonson Lumber Company for most of his life. He worked at a planing mill. 00:08:00My mother in, oh, I don't know, part of my growing up I worked for, in the welfare office in Toledo. At that time, the courthouse was still in Toledo before it moved to Newport. Around the house, we just had the common chores: the girls did the dishes, made the beds, and whatever needed to be done and my brothers fed the, we had dogs and cats, they fed those animals. But we lived in a large house right in town, so we didn't have any farm to worry about. I don't remember too much about growing up. I do remember sometimes in the summer, we did have a car. It was a Star. I don't know if you've ever heard of that or not. It was used only for special things. You just didn't run around in it. We always walked to school, 00:09:00but I went to Stanton School, which is on the western side of Toledo. The students that came by bus or lived on the other side of town went to Burgess School. Then when we got to junior high, I lived about 4 or 5 miles, first of all, from the elementary school. It was a large kind of square building with 2 floors of students and a basement. We had teeter totters and swings and things like that and monkey bars in the basement. I always liked my teachers [laughs]. I don't know how good of a student I was. Then when it came to junior high, that was very handy, because the school building was just across the street from our house.

Some of the things that I remember, one of the questions that we were told to think about was 00:10:00when we had a first washing machine. I don't know-it must have been when I was quite small. I don't know how long we had had it then. We had it in the utility room, and of course it had a ringer. I was small enough that I enjoyed going in and leaning up against it and feeling the warmth and the movement of it. We always had electricity because the CD Johnson Mill furnished it to the town. My growing up just really wasn't too spectacular. I do remember that when we did go on occasional picnics or something, which we did to Newport and Siletz both, at that time there was no bridge out of Newport, so we crossed on the ferry, and that was always quite an experience and lots of fun. During the summer time, my mother would take my sisters and myself and we would go to Siletz where they had some berry farms, and 00:11:00I can remember I wasn't much help. I would just carry boxes and eat a few, but the rest of them, because they had strawberries and raspberries and black caps. So, it lasted the share of the summer.

RE: I went to school down at Eddyville. They had a 2-room school, two teachers, and that's four in each class. I remember my first grade teacher was a woman by the name of Miss Nelson and she had, I think it was a Model A Ford car with a rumble seat. Once in a great while, she'd let the first graders ride in that car. She'd drive around a little bit with it. I always got in the rumble seat, I know that. When we learned our ABCs and could count to 100, we would get a penny. 00:12:00A penny was a lot of money in those days. I had no teaching at home. My mother was a teacher. She taught at the little Elks school up here on the hill. You've probably heard of it. Dave Hiatt's trying to find it, but he hasn't been able to yet. But, when I was, we had, like you said, about the horse coming back up here, that was when I was pretty young because later on it went all to milk. We didn't sell cream. We had a separator make cream out of it. We had hogs. Because they got skim milk. We had, as long as I can remember, we had what they called an old push-pull washing machine. You pushed a handle and it agitated. It was wooden 00:13:00and it didn't-we used that, of course until electricity didn't come here until 1941, and then 3 weeks after we had it, we had a big ice storm and that was the end of that. The Army was going through. We had lots of snow. They were going through. It was right after war was declared. I remember they came. I was down at the road on my saddlehorse, and they stopped and told me there was a deer down the road that was in bad shape and bleeding badly, so I borrowed the neighbor's 30-30 and went down there on the horse and it was a terrible sight. It's eyes was out on the front of your first. It's eyes were out on the end and its whole body was all covered with those nobs. 00:14:00So, I just shot it. It fell in the creek and away it went. We had also that same year we had that ice storm, I remember it was-Boyd wasn't. He was gone then. I went up to bring the sheep in and there was about 20 head up at the old Tony place. They were all frozen to the ground. It slid off when they first stood and they were just frozen to the ground. They couldn't move. They died right there. I couldn't do anything because I couldn't stand up. The dog couldn't stand up. I think we lost 25 head that night.

When I was about 12, maybe 13, I cut bands on the thrashing machine, an old stationary thrashing 00:15:00machine, but only for a few days. We got $1 for 8 hours' work. But, it was fun. I thought it was fun, you know? It was real fast work. I don't know if you've ever cut bands or not. That's about the only job we had. There was no place to get work. I went into the service when I was 18. The fish in this creek behind us down here, I can remember them keeping us awake at night making so much splashing in the creek. I know that doesn't sound feasible, but it happened. My older brother, John, says the same thing. He says nobody believes him, either. They'd push themselves out on the sandbars and die. They were nice, fresh fish. There was no room in the creek. Fishing for trout-the salmon were no good to eat when they got here. 00:16:00But fishing for trout, it was kind of like when I'd come home in the wintertime from school, that was kind of my job in some ways was to catch a bunch of trout for supper. It wasn't hard to do it. There was just so many trout in the creek. Today, there aren't any. Yeah, the deer, I never saw a deer until I was 9 years old, and now when they did find a deer in this country, this was back in the '30s, the neighbors took dogs and went and caught it. There was no other meat. You could not afford, if you raised pigs, you had to sell them and that's the same way with veal from the cows. You sold it. You didn't eat any of it. We didn't have any, very little meat, if any. We didn't raise, we raised chickens. We had chickens, but no, we didn't raise rabbits at that time. 00:17:00Stella and I raised rabbits here after we moved up 50 years ago.

SE: Okay, well, when we were growing up, we had, as I said, a large house and we also had a very large yard. We raised chickens and we raised rabbits and we raised berries and we raised, well, we had several apple trees and a prune tree. We always had a large garden, but we didn't have room for it at our house, so it was always with some neighbor or some outlying person who shared some and we all helped work in the garden, too. I came home one time with blisters all over my back, and I thought my mother was going to jump all over my father. 00:18:00When I went to school, we lived, oh, about half to three-quarters of a mile from the school, but this was during wartime. No one took you anywhere in your car. You either walked or you didn't get there. My junior and senior years I worked after school downtown in what was a florist shop. I mostly worked for the fellow that owned it that also had a State Farm Insurance Company. So, during my junior and senior years I would leave school about 1:30 and walk to town, which was better than a mile. But I did this daily and thought nothing of it. I enjoyed that and then I also worked on Saturdays in summers. That was about most of my work experience in Toledo.

RE: I joined the Marines in 1943. It was November, November 16. I went to boot camp in San Diego and from there to Camp Pendleton. I went through artillery training and then they took us aboard an aircraft carrier and we went to Hawaii. There was about 3,000 of us on that aircraft carrier plus the compliment of the crew. When we got going around coming inside of Diamond Head, everybody rushed to one side of the aircraft carrier and it just heeled right over, and the captain said get over on the middle of this thing. It came back. 3,000 men could 00:20:00tip the balance of weight. I was there for about a month on Oahu. Then they moved us over to Kauai. I was there about, I think we left there the first of June of 1944. We went to the Marshall Islands. Went to Enewetak. Stayed there in the harbor and the Atoll for 29 days. Then we went on up to the Mariannas then landed on Tinian. I can't tell you the date, but it was somewhere close to the first of July. We set up our guns over by the airfield where there was about 400 B-29s, and they would land over us. They very seldom took off over us, but they'd land over us. Sometimes coming in only 50' above you. Pretty impressive. 00:21:00But we had Japanese air raids. We had lots of action there. I came home in November of 1945. I remember getting home here December 5th. Immediately went fishing [laughs]. Then I was around for a month and then I was sent up to Indian Island, Washington, up on Puget Sound for a guard station for, I was discharged on March 5, 1946. 00:22:00Stella sold me my car insurance in 1946 on my first car I had. I think I must have got it in probably in September or October of '46. No. Yeah, '46. I didn't get home until '45. But, that's how I met her. Go ahead.

RE: Yeah, my brother-in-law, now, insisted I take her to a dance at the Rainbow Girls, I think it was, in Toledo.

RE: Yeah, we'd met then. But, he insisted I take her. Well, one thing led to another and you know how it goes. We started going steady then and, at least I was going steady. I don't know about her. She might have had some help on the sides. I don't know.

SE: Not after we started going to together.

RE: Oh. 00:23:00Then we got engaged on her, what was the date? It was-

RE: The prom. Her prom in Toledo.

RE: We moved here in 1957, January 7, 1957, we moved into this house. We've been here 51 years. It doesn't look too bad. The 9th year we built this house, to frame it and put a roof on it and the plaster on the walls, was $18,000. 00:24:00Then most of the doors I put on by myself, all the trim around the house and on around the doors. I put all that on. It took a few years to do it, because, like Stella said, we did not have a whole lot.

RE: We had a well, we have a well in our backyard. That's where we get our water, even today. I guess that's about it on that. In May 1946, I started cutting timber by hand, standing on springboards sometimes 15' to 20'. One time I was up 35' on a springboard falling trees. We cut that way all that, well, we cut through the summer and then that fall I was cutting for my brother, John, up this canyon here behind the house. 00:25:00That fall, I went to work for Eddyville. They just started their outfit down here, Eddyville Mill. I was bucking logs there. I didn't fall any. But it was lots of hard work and awful poor weather. One of the things that happened while I was down there, is etched in my mind, I'll never forget it--another set of fallers. They had a power saw at that time. We hand bucked. They were down in a hole, kind of a sink hole, and right in the bottom of it was a tree about 4' through, a schoolmarm, two of them. Well, they didn't springboard them up. They cut them off from the ground. What they'd do is put a little face in them and then go in the bottom cut and put two steel wedges, one on each side, and they'd just saw it up to where it split. You know what I mean?

Well, this 00:26:00other fella and I, a guy by the name of Frank Metcalf, were bucking and we saw them. They sawed it up. The tree started out, of course it was down in the hole. It was a big rise, there. When it popped, they just shut the saw off and walked behind the other one. But there was a sliver caught in the chain. When that tree went up in the hill, it took that saw with it. Then it flipped. I bet it went 100' in the air, that saw did. Just over and over and over, you know? When it come down, they went over to the gunny sack and picked it up. It just blew it all to pieces. Then later on Avery Crawford and I, well, we were cutting up here together, too, and we were bucking down there, but then he got hurt so he couldn't buck. 00:27:00We cut again up here the following spring. Then we bought a power saw, a big Disston. Used it for a while. Worked down on the other side of Big Bend, if you know where Big Bend is? On that straight stretch. We cut them hillsides in there. That's about the time we got married.

SE: Well, after were married about, oh, a year and a half later, on March 28, 1949, our first child was born. His name's Stephen. Three years later on the same date, I mean, the same day. Not the same year, why our daughter, Mary, was born. That was also March 28th. Then our son, Dan, was born on October 27,19-

RE: '52... '54.

SE: '54. Then our daughter, Julie, the last of our four, was born April 29...

RE: '57.

SE: It would have been '57, yeah, because it was the year we moved into this house when she was born. Of course, they were all perfectly wonderful children. I wasn't working at that time. I was a full-time mother and enjoying most of it. Well, when our children were growing up, they were approximately 2 to 9, Ralph went to work at Tillamook. He was cutting timber at Tillamook and they were very long days. Then he moved up and stayed up there, and the children and I stayed home. 00:29:00He just came home on weekends. So, when summer came we decided to move the family up there, so he found a small house for us, and we stayed there with the children. Just came home on weekends, rather than being in Tillamook. But, when fall came, he expected to be finished cutting up there. We debated whether to start the children in school, but we decided they would be better off if we just brought them home. I was home with 4 children while he was in Tillamook while they went through the chicken pox, the measles, and mumps, one at a time. With the four of them, that meant 2 or 3 of them at a time. Since Wilma, my sister-and-I, and Ralph's mother, had never had the mumps, they couldn't come into the house for about 6 weeks. They delivered groceries and things. But, he came on the weekends, but he wasn't much help on the weekend [laughs]. No. 00:30:00I take that back. He was a good help on the weekends. But, that was the year of the plague. I would not like to live it over. But that was about the only really rough year that we had. Pardon?

RE: I said, you had lots of problems here.

SE: [Laughs] Well, that's just the way it goes.

RE: I was living the Life of Riley up there, you know? How it goes when you're cutting timber out in the snow. We were about 3,000 feet elevation and, well, to tell you the truth, I cut a 26' log off of an old growth tree that was about 8' on the stump on a hillside, and it turned and went in over into the bottom of the canyon. Not rolled-it went in over end. It was probably 8 foot through on the little end when we got to the bottom, broomed out. I don't know how they scaled things like that. One time up there, I was across the canyon from the yarder 00:31:00and it was snowing hard and they was taking this log up. I knew it had 5,000 feet in it. They was taking it up. It got up and lodged behind the guideline stump. The choker setters and the whistle pump was down by the fires behind stumps and nobody could whistle. Nobody whistled. That triple drum, it had 1/8" x 3/8" mainline and it parted right in the bull block. It just, just a great big sheet of lightening when it went off, when it broke. Here it came. That big tree came back down, log. Everybody got behind stumps. I was watching it. It came down. Went out of my sight and the choker setters told me later it came up way on my side. It was all solid rock on the bottom, and then it turned and went down this steep canyon. When the haul back came tight, it broke it. That was when I worked for George Hopkeys. 00:32:00He went the next day and he said he walked a mile down the canyon and never found it. Nothing. Lost his buck rigging and all. Working over there on, oh, I can't remember the creek now. Anyhow, over on the Siletz River, and I climbed up on a rock bluff, and there was a lone old growth tree stood up there and years before somebody had been there and fell trees off of it, old growth tree, but this one was standing and it was about down on that side probably 200 feet high. That bluff on that one side. Where I went up wasn't. My partner was down there working on that side, so when I got the tree faced, it was, oh, 5 ½', 6' on the stump. I fell it right out over that stump that was standing on the edge. When I did, it just went right on over. The butt went right on over and it changed ends. 00:33:00When it hit the ground, it saved. Ray said, I don't know-Ray Marge, who I was working with, he said, I don't know why it saved, but the big end went into the ground and then it came down. He said, it broke every log I cut all that day. He was cutting little hemlocks. I got to work for Rex Clemens. I think it was about the 15th of May of 1962. Worked in Lobster Valley, all nice timber. Big timber. Steep ground. But, we enjoyed it because we enjoyed him very much, Rex Clemens was a wonderful man. As long as you worked hard, had no problems. If you didn't want to work. You didn't have to. He'd just let you off.

Then in '62 we had the Columbus 00:34:00Day storm which blew down about 4 billion feet of timber here on the west coast. Brother Boyd and I first started over on Honeygrove in some blowdown that was there. From there, we went up onto Grass Mountain and cut there that winter, the winter of '62. It was bitter. These old growth trees were froze in better than 2" in the wood. Not in the bark. We finally had to just quit for a while because it would, they would break too easy. Hemlock was just like dropping a piece of glass when you fell them, because there's so much water freezing in them. I remember getting out of the pickup one morning and there on the snow was a cougar track right where we parked the pickup from the night before. From 00:35:00there, we went up onto Marys Peak and through several years there we cut 16 ½ million feet on that one side and we cut over on the other side on Blue Mountain, too. You know all these places. We enjoyed our work, our time with Rex Clemens. He was a wonderful man. Willamette bought him out in the winter of '72. We moved up onto, I'm trying to think of the creek down there. Dang it. Comes out of the Alsea... Digger Creek. Started there. The first tree I fell was just 8' inside the bark and it saved to a length of 274' of logs. Boyd cut one. 00:36:00He got 245' out of. It was a beautiful tree. Mine wasn't beautiful. It was just big. We couldn't scale them because of the situation. You couldn't get the tape through them. But, it was all we liked Willamette. They were good to us. The men, our bosses were fine people. We had our arguments, sure. But other than that, there was no problems.

SE: Want me to start?

SE: Okay. Our son Stephen graduated from high school here at Eddyville in 1967.

SE: Yeah. In 1967. Then he attended OTI in Klamath Falls and got an engineering degree. Then he went into the service 00:37:00and served in Vietnam, and when he came back he went back to Oregon State and finished with degrees in-

SE: Yeah.

RE: Engineering physics.

SE: Engineering physics and liberal arts, because he spent one of his years in France.

RE: Yeah, he spent...

SE: He loved to travel. Then our daughter Mary, graduated in '70.

RE: We didn't finish with Steve.

SE: Oh, no.

RE: Mm-hmm.

RE: You forgot to say-

RE: '75.

SE: Stacy also was married, and she has a...

RE: 10-year-old.

SE: A 10-year old.

RE: 10-year-old.

SE: Has a 10-year-old son. He's our only great grandchild. 00:38:00She and Eli live in Portland. Did I finish her?

RE: Hmm?

SE: Did I finish her?

RE: You never finished Steve.

SE: She and Glen lived in Goldendale, where they lived ever since they were married.

RE: You forgot to add in-

SE: Okay, then I guess we come to Dan, right?

RE: We didn't add Steve spent 2 years in the Peace Corps in Ivory Coast of Africa.

SE: Oh, well, that's true. After Steve graduated from-

RE: Oregon State.

RE: Well, he went on a trip, too, with the circus before he did that.

SE: He what?

RE: He went on, traveled with the circus.

SE: Well, that was before he went into the service.

RE: Oh, I guess you're right.

SE: He was having difficulties finding a job, and so a part-time job was offered to him at the employment service. So, he worked for the circus for a couple of days and he enjoyed it so much 00:39:00that when they left, he left with them. As I said, he liked to travel.

RE: Yep. He traveled.

SE: Sorry, you're not getting these a little more sorted out. Okay, how far did we get with Mary and Glen and their four children? Did we get past Stacy?

RE: Yeah, didn't you name Stacy and Marisa?

SE: Stacy and Eli, but I don't think I got to-

RE: Oh, that's right.

SE: ...to the second daughter, Marisa. Is a college professor at Eastern Washington University.

RE: Ellensburg.

SE: Yeah, and she went to college in Indiana.

RE: I think so.

SE: Then she worked for a couple of years, and then she went and got her master's. Now she's teaching at Washington.

RE: At the university.

SE: Trisha, the third daughter-

RE: How about Dan? Okay. Go ahead.

SE: Well, yes. Her birthplace, the two young children were actually adopted, but, no, and they went, Trisha came from Columbia when she was about a year and a half old. After she graduated, Mary homeschooled her children. So, practically all of the time. When Trisha graduated, she wanted to be a nanny. She and a girlfriend of hers thought this would be great. So, they went to nanny school for a year and she has been doing that for the last 5 or 6 years. She's still in San Francisco where she's working. But, while she's been doing this, the boy she's been staying with is growing up, so she had quite a bit of free time while he was at school. She's been taking classes, both at a community college there and on the internet. 00:41:00She's hoping to, she's planning to do something different next year when she leaves this little boy and his family. Jessica was the second daughter they adopted. She came from Guatemala. She's a very sweet child, too, but she's deaf and she has been since they had her. Of course, that was another task the family had to deal with to learn sign language. Jessica is still at home. I think that takes care of the Humphreys.

RE: Yeah, I think so, too.

SE: Okay. Then our son, Dan, graduated in '52. Yeah. He is married to a lovely girl named Verena. They live in Salem. They have 2 children: Brad, our grandson, is this year, 00:42:00I guess you'd call him a junior. Actually, he started as a sophomore, so this is-

RE: At Oregon State.

SE: ...his third year, but he will have another year after this year. He's taking engineering physics.

RE: No. No. Chemical engineering. Brad's taking chemical engineering.

SE: Okay. Brad's taking chemical engineering. Don't ask me. I can't keep all of them straight anymore. Anyway, he's a very wonderful child, and he takes after his mother's family because Brad is well over 6' and none of the rest of us come anywhere close. He's a wonderful person. He's a really special boy. His sister-I started with Brad didn't I? I should have started with Megan.

SE: Because she's the older of the two, and she's a senior this year at OSU.

RE: No. University of Oregon.

SE: Oh right. OSU's Oregon State. 00:43:00See, I told you I get this all mixed up when we're trying to talk and think at the same time. Anyway, she is a senior at the University of Oregon in Eugene and will be graduating this spring. So, she's a very sweet, special-all of our grandchildren are wonderful. They really are, as are our children and their spouses. We have a great time when we all get together. Now, did I get-

RE: Yeah, better go to Julie.

SE: Oh, I haven't got, yeah! I just got to Julie. Julie's unmarried, but she's a wonderful person, too. She's into all kinds of things, businesses and all. She works for an adoption service. The name of it?

RE: Troutdale.

SE: Hmm?

RE: In Troutdale. I don't know the name of it.

SE: I know it's in Troutdale. I don't know. I can't think of the name of it right at the moment, but she has worked for adoption agencies a good share 00:44:00of her working years.

RE: After she graduated.

SE: She graduated from Linfield. We skipped that.

RE: Hmm?

SE: We skipped Julie graduated from Linfield.

RE: Oh, yeah. Julie graduated.

RE: I retired from Willamette Industries in December of '87, and probably, as I remember, probably laid for a month or so, and then we cut for Larry 00:45:00Cook for some of, on some of Starker's land. It was a far cry from what we'd been cutting , but it was cutting. Then we could only, at that time, only make so much a year before I couldn't work anymore, because Social Security. I remember going down below Triangle Lake someplace and that was the most beautiful ground. There wasn't a thing on the ground. There wasn't a thing on the ground. It was perfectly clean. No brush. I was only able to work about 3 days and I had to quit because of making too much money. Then I worked on our own land in '90. We logged some timber, and I cut it. Tom Cook and Ron McNealy logged that. Then again in '93, they logged 00:46:00some more. I think it was '93. Yeah, '93. I cut just a little bit of that. I didn't cut too much. Then in, I think that was, no, in '95 they logged an area back in here and I didn't cut only 2 or 3 days in '95. Then, other than that, I sold Larry Cook logged some of our area, too. Most of it just trash. But it's cleaned off and it's all growing back to little fir trees now. The last time they planted 14,000 trees on it, a whole bunch of them. Some of Starker's trees. That's what they said they were. Miller planted them. That's about it, I think.

SE: Okay, when our fourth daughter, Julie, graduated, fourth child Julie, graduate from school, she decided I might be lonely. And so she didn't want that to occur. So, she was quite concerned about it, and she finally talked me into going down. We knew that there were a couple of positions vacant at the school. So, I went to work at the school in the library as an assistant, and I worked there from 1974 for about 20 years until I retired. I really enjoyed it, but my husband didn't think it was nice at all to do that.

SE: Because I had been a homebody all these years and not having me at his beck and call. But I really enjoyed it, and he soon got used to it. We worked it out. But, I did enjoy that time. Well, I still do volunteer work at the school 00:48:00and have ever since I retired and I worked in the library. I work on the card catalogue and fixing the books go on the shelves, run the computer. Whatever needs to be done when I'm down there, I help the people that work there, keep it up to date. Since it's become a charter school, it's a little different because they don't have a full-time librarian or anything. The woman who supposedly runs the library also teaches classes and everything else. So, she can use all the help that she can get. I enjoy the work. So, I'm still down there.

RE: Go ahead.

SE: No. You're doing fine.

RE: Well, on October 25, 2007, we celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary. 00:49:00We had a deal at the church where all of our children put it on for us.

SE: Our children put it on for us, and we didn't really want to, because we're not big for big occasions, but they insisted. It was wonderful. They were wonderful.

RE: It was. They brought all the food with them. That's the main thing, you know.

SE: Seeing all of our friends and it was well-attended, and we were really surprised that so many people turned out. It was great to see all of them.

SE: Friends, relatives. Whatever.

RE: Well, in 2004 Stella and I decided we needed to sell some of this land, because, well what we wanted to do was 00:50:00try to give our children some of the money before it came all in inheritance, which we have done. In about August of 2004, or September, we had a final agreement with Starker Brothers and, Starker Forest, I should say, and we were happy and they seemed to be happy. We haven't regretted it at all. When we were going to sell, we thought we would sell it all. Everything, and then just get the permission to stay here as long as we lived, but it was kind of hard for me to accept that without having any land and any-I'd lived here all my life, and it would just be quite a shock to me not to be able to take my 4-wheeler and go look at things. Anyhow, 00:51:00we Stella and I compromised and we sold 200 acres instead of all of it, and we still have 244 acres, which you kids can sell when we're gone. In 1984, we started having military reunions. The first one was in Las Vegas. The second one was in Memphis, Tennessee. We did not go. The third one we went to Orlando, Florida and went through the Disney World there while we was there. It was right close to it. Every year since then, except for one in Wisconsin, we have went to a reunion. It's always nice to see some of the boys again. If you look at the pictures you'll see some of them in there. 00:52:00The old home place was probably taken from about where our present house is today, right now. I would say probably in the mid '30s it was taken. It looks, the barn isn't there. The chicken houses aren't there. Starker owns a lot of this property you see here now. The 40 acres especially up there. We'll just bring it out. This is a picture of my mother probably taken in the early '60s. It looks to me like. Because she was getting along in years right then.

Well, this is a picture of my second grade class in the front and the whole 8 grades of Eddyville Grade School. 00:53:00The teachers: Margaret Ryan and Miss Bensel. I don't remember her first name. She was my second grade teacher and my brother Boyd and my sister Harriett are both in this picture. My brother-in-law, Gabe Shavaria, is in the picture, and a lot of the other fellas, but some of these students and I went clear through high school. Gabe was not one, he moved to Toledo, and so I didn't get to go through school with him. But, those were the good old days. This is a fish I caught when I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I went out on a trade wind stroller. I was given the handline, which went straight down. Had 8 pounds of lead on it. This fish bit. 00:54:00I couldn't bring it up, but there was another man that did. One of the crew. That was the only salmon caught on the trip. There was one or two bass caught and when we got back in the skipper said, well, I'm going to keep the fish. Of course, that made me feel kind of low down. I went ashore, and there was an old man standing there on the dock. He said, what's the matter, son? I said, I caught a fish out there, but they won't give it to me. He said, yes they will. He went aboard that thing and came right back with that fish, which made me feel pretty good. That was really my first salmon I ever caught. I've caught a lot since, but the first one is always the best.

This is a picture of Gene Humphrey and myself. We went through high school together. I was thinking together, but, yes he did. Well, we graduated 00:55:00together and then that was in 1943, we graduated. Then later that summer Gene went into the Navy, probably 2 weeks ahead of me when I went into the Marine Corps. We got together in Los Angeles. Gene had a hotel room. I didn't, but I didn't stay there. I don't remember where I stayed. That's been a long time ago. I had a good time, but I didn't see Gene then until we came back from the service and he lived up in Nashville, married Ted Harmson's daughter. We was lifelong friends. But he's gone now. But we had a good time together. Now, 00:56:00this picture was taken on Trout Creek, flows into the Alsea River. It was nice second growth we cut. It was on Starker land. My great nephew, Larrick, beating the wedge on that and I'm probably sawing at the time. You can't really tell. I don't see shavings flying, but, anyhow, he had to beat it over. It was good timber, not overly large but nice. Larry, and this was for Larry Cook and Larry had a bunch of trees on this same unit that were kind of a bastard growth. He cut them all, and I know Starker done very well on price-wise on these trees. You probably remember it. 00:57:00They were beautiful things, but they were right beside the shovels. Naturally, he'd cut them.

This other picture is as the tree was going. See I was stepping back a little bit to keep from any limbs coming back. As I remember, we were fairly close to the line there. I think we had a property line right close there and we cut right up and down it. But anyhow, they were nice, it was nice timber. I didn't mind cutting that at all. I cut some real nice ones there on that land. Not only these, but we had some trees that had to be pulled. I can't remember the young fella's name that run the skidder, but he was really good at it. 00:58:00He'd back right up to the tree and stand on the arch and put a choker on it. He said, where's it going? I'd say, going to land right out there. Okay. He just pulled off the side and pull on it. But other than that, I see both, I've still got my old chaps on. I still got them out here in the shed.

SE: Starting from the left to the right, the people in the wedding picture, this is Ralph and I's wedding picture. The first bridesmaid was Joanne Christiansen, then Betty Gene Thacker, my sister Myrtle, and myself. The flower girl Nana Lumus at that time. You go ahead. It's your side.

RE: Then from right to left, my brother Boyd, my brother-in-law Gabe Shavarea, Avery Crawford, and myself.

SE: I'd forgotten that.

RE: Gabe was right there to change it. I always figured somebody must have let the air out of the tire, because the next morning we stopped at a service station and they just pumped it up, it never lost air, so somebody let the air out of it.