Andrew and Dan Gellatly Oral History Interview, April 7, 2008

ANDREW GELLATLY: I'm Andrew Lyle Gellatly, and I was born in the old Corvallis hospital on Harrison Street on May 26, 1925. It'll be my birthday, then. Then I came out to the farm and I was there until I was 18 or 19. Then I got married and we lived in Corvallis to start with and then we lived in Philomath and then we lived out here on the highway a while. Then we moved up here on the hillside. So, that's about my start. Well, my folks were Robert H. Gellatly and my Mother was Christine M. Gellatly, and they had four children: Robert Holmes, Jr., Raven Carl Gellatly, Delia Elizabeth Gellatly, and me, Andrew Lyle Gellatly. There's four of us. I got a picture here of all four of us. Now that was it. My sister has a heart infection, and she had an extra vein in her heart. They didn't have penicillin then and she was in the hospital a long time up in Portland, but they couldn't save her. So, she died when she was rather young, 18. There's just four of us.

DAN GELLATLY: Daniel Clifton Gellatly. I'm Andrew's nephew. My dad was Raymond Carl Gellatly, Andrew's brother. I was born in 1960 at Good Sam in Corvallis on I think it's-

AG: Harrison.

DG: Harrison. It was the same one before they moved the hospital. I lived next door to the old place. That's where my dad and mom had a place. I lived there, we put a, when I got married in 1978, put a trailer there and I pretty well lived right around the area. I lived short-term in the old house deal, the Gellatly place, for maybe a year. Then currently live next door. So, I've been in and around the farm all my life, too, and got two brothers and two sisters. Older brother is a half-brother. His name is McNealy. He's related to some of the McNealy's in Philomath. Older sister, Nancy Dale-Nancy Gellatly Dale. She lives in Portland and Ruth Christine Rayburn. She lives currently in Portland area. I have another brother, Doug, Douglas Carl Gellatly. My mom's first husband was killed. He was in the military. It wasn't part of any action, but it was a training mission. So, he died I believe before Jim was even a year old. My dad is the only father that Jim McNealy has known. He's 14 years older than me. Then, Chris and Nancy, are 9 and 10 years older. Doug is seven years older than me.

AG: We had cows and sheep and a few horses. We sold cream over at Corals to the creamery and got a little income there. Dad had sheep. He sheared the sheep and sold the wool there at O'Harris in Corvallis at the old Corvallis Freight Depot. That was part of our income and then we sold some timber to Ben Ellis. There's a pretty good chunk of timber on the other side of the river, and that was during the '40s, during the war. Then we had to put up hay every year for cows. I used to shock hay and pile it up in the plow and then we'd haul it in on a wagon with a hay rack on it and take it up behind the barn, and my dad would have a fork, like a harpoon he'd stick into it. Then we had a rope went from the fork up to the top of the barn and they had a pulley and then it went down to the other end of the barn, down, and out the other end of the pulley and you had a team of horses on the other end. They'd say, go ahead. This would bring up a big wad of hay. Then they'd carry it on rollers and it'd go over the haymow, and then somebody's say, trip it. Then they'd trip that and a big wad of hay would come down and the wind would blow and you'd get chaff all over. It was in the mow, and if you was in the mow you had to drag it back and flatten the haymow. That was quite a job, and the neighbor used to help.

I remember Joe Gray, he was a neighbor that would come down to help. He'd tell us kids to ska doodle if we got in the road. I remember him doing that. Well, we got by pretty easy. We cut wood and then we did some horse logging and got income. We didn't have an awful lot but we felt pretty good out there on the farm. That was what my early days were there. We used the horses and a four-wheel wagon and the big hay, wide hay rack about 10 feet wide. There was boards in front and boards in back. You'd go along on the hay field and sometimes it'd have two forks. You'd have a pitchfork and there'd be two of you throwing up on the wagon and sometimes just one. Then a fella on the wagon had to smooth it up and load it. It'd get up pretty high. We'd put the load up over 10 feet. It'd be off the ground quite a ways. You'd go across rough ground it'd fall off if you didn't have it flattened out good enough. Sometimes they'd have wagons tip over and hay slide off of them. That's the way they did. It was a team of horses on a big hay rack. Then they'd drag it up to the barn and they'd take this fork and carry it back to the mow.

DG: So, when did they get this?

AG: Well, they got that before I was born.

DG: Really?

AG: That was years ago.

DG: So, he didn't really use this for any of that stuff.

AG: I never did see him run it. That was early.

DG: It was an old steam engine that he had.

AG: He had it for the thrashing, but we had it in the shed, but I never did see it work.

DG: So, it was real early.

AG: Yeah, he sold it to McCormick for a saw mill up at La Grande and it was up there. He used it to run his saw mill. The school, first grade was at Pleasant Valley School District, number 15. It was up pretty near two miles from home out west on the old Shady Road. We used to walk it. So, I went there to the 7th grade and then they consolidated with Philomath and I rode the bus into the old west school in Philomath and graduated there from grade school. Then I went on to Philomath High for four years and graduated from Philomath High School in 1943. That's about the extent of my education, except just learning how to work.

DG: Ph.D. of hard knocks.

AG: Yeah. School of hard knocks. I remember walking in some pretty cold weather. We had a cold weather in the '30s that froze out all the green crops. I remember coming home and facing that north wind and it just about, I was just about crying it was so cold. It was quite a walk up there for a little guy. Pleasant Valley Schoolhouse was on what's now called Henkel Way. It was in just about an eighth of a mile on the old Alsea Road in and it was newer one. They had an older one up on the hill, but this was a newer school that I went to. It's, you might say that it's right just past where you turn to go up to Starker Tree Forest. It's on the old county road there.

DG: I think we just talked about that. It's where Ted Stevenson's house is, possibly?

AG: I don't know who lives there now.

DG: It's just across that little creek from the lane.

AG: Yeah.

DG: Yeah, and then we decided that that's how that little lot got notched out of Watkin's place.

AG: Yeah, that's the old Pleasant Valley Schoolhouse. They reconverted it to living quarters. That's where it is.

DG: Now, see, when you talked about the old road up above, we decided that's on Starker's property. Now, I noticed below the cemetery there's a road and you can see the old road bed, and it matches up with the lower end of Henkel Way. Is that kind of a newer?

AG: That's the old Alsea wagon road, the same one that goes here.

DG: Right. But you talked about it going above the cemetery at one time. Was there two different lanes?

AG: Yeah, because of the mud that went from the Gray place right up over the hill.

DG: Oh, I see.

AG: That's where the schoolhouse was, went up through the field there. It was a part of the Starker property now.

DG: So, there is the roadbed that goes around and below the grades and across there and below the cemetery. That roadbed is still there, too. That was one of the routes. That's probably the one that you're talking about going to that school, right?

AG: Yeah. That's the one I walked up, was the lower grade. Well, the school had each grade, all eight grades. It was a few of each grade. I don't know just how many there was. There was probably maybe 20 at the time, but it was all one room and it was all 8 grades. We had smaller desks and then we had the bigger desks for the bigger kids. There was quite a mixture there. I don't remember the total amount, but there wasn't too many.

DG: Do you remember about how many students?

AG: Oh, I don't think there was 20.

DG: When you moved in and went to school here in town that's when they stopped having classes out there?

AG: Yeah. They consolidated with Philomath. Charlie Olsen Hall was in Philomath.

DG: So, there was two schoolhouses there, but they were both Pleasant Valley Schoolhouses. Now, did grandma teach at the older one?

AG: Yeah.

DG: So, his mom taught at that older schoolhouse that we're talking about, the one that was up on the hill and that's where his mom was a teacher, Christine Miller Gellatly. Their names weren't Miller. They milled flour in Monroe, and their name was Jacobson, right? Their name when they came here was Jacobson, but then Christine Miller was, she used

it for her middle name, because her middle name was Jacobena and she didn't like it. So, she used Miller.

AG: My mother was born in Brownsville. That's where he had a job as a miller. Then he moved over to Monroe and was a miller there at Monroe flour mill.

DG: Okay, this school picture of is of the older one further up? Or, is this the one-

AG: Yeah.

DG: Yeah. This is the one that was further up on the hill.

AG: it's on the old county road.

DG: Older Pleasant...and this is the one that his mother, my grandma, taught at. That would have been around 1917, '18 or somewhere in that?

AG: Yeah. About 1917, '18 is right.

DG: Yeah. She graduated from what they, it's Western Oregon but it was called something normal school.

AG: Yeah, Oregon Normal.

DG: Oregon Normal. It was an all-woman's school at the time. That's where she graduated. It's Western Oregon State now.

AG: We had hot lunches. We'd take turns making our meal, had tomato soup and Spanish rice. We all took a turn at it.

DG: Everybody got their hand at cooking on the stove.

AG: Yeah, cooking the dinner. One of my teachers was Beth Bowerman. Her brother was Bill Bowerman. Her dad was a governor, too. Jay Rockefeller, or, Jay Bowerman was the governor of Oregon, too.

DG: Well, I went to school all 12 years at Philomath. We had a kindergarten up by the old college. It was where I went to kindergarten. The elementary school, at the time, had 6 grades at the elementary school. So, we went there, and then when we went to the 7th grade, we actually were at the high school. Seventh and Eighth grade were at the high school. In the middle of our eighth grade year is when they got the middle school there in Philomath, so we were the first graduating class of the middle school, which was hard for us to take, because we were kind of like in high school and then we had to go back with the little kids. Then, graduated from Philomath. I was most athletic of my class, had 1,000 yards rushing. My senior year was state pole vault champ, my junior year. I married Sandy Gurdie, which is one of the twins. A lot of people know the twins. Their family had a store in Corvallis. So, they remember the twins and all the Gurdies growing up if they spent much time in the '70s, or '60s and '70s. The store was older than that, but they had a newer store on the street that goes there by college.

AG: Western.

DG: Western Boulevard, that's right. Yep. So, we married in '78. We got three daughters. The oldest one graduated from Oregon State in 2000, which 101 years after my grandpa, same school. My middle daughter went to Western Oregon State University, which my grandma graduated. Then, my youngest will graduate this spring from Linfield, and they're all pretty athletic. The middle daughter was all-state 3 sports. They had a state basketball champion team when my middle daughter was a senior. They played for the state title in volleyball, then the middle one and the youngest one were on a state championship relay when my middle one was a senior and the youngest was a freshman. They were both on the relay. The youngest daughter, pretty athletic, too, she ended up, she was all-state volleyball for Philomath, ended up going to Chemeketa for two years and then transferring to Linfield, and they made the western regionals her junior and senior year. Her senior year she was team MVP, conference first team, Western all-star first team, and third team all-American at Linfield. The oldest daughter is Christine, and we named her Christine Marie, and the funny story, I guess, with her was we'd pick up the mail and my grandma's initials were the same, and we're still getting mail after my grandma passed way just mainly advertisements. But, we'd hand it to Christi when she was little and she thought it was for her, because it said Christine M. Gellatly. Then, my middle daughter and oldest daughter married Ruska, and her name's Ruska now. The middle daughter just got married, name's Cathy. She married Stan Steel's son, so it's Cathy Steel now. They youngest daughter's Chelsea. She'll graduate and she'll be moving to South Lake Tahoe, I guess, this summer.

AG: Well, I went 4 years to Philomath High. It was during the war, '42 and '43. So, we had the athletic teams, and I remember going over to Alsea, and the minister here at the brick church called Reverend Pickerdale, he hauled 5 of us over to Alsea. We played 2 games, 2 basketball games that night and I think we won both of them. Just 5 of us went over there. I remember that. We rode in an old Buick car he had. We were pretty successful. Then we got a 2-year letterman, I guess, and I got fairly good grades and then I didn't go any further than that. I started after, well, during school there, after school I drove bus for Charlie Olson, school bus up Evergreen. Then when during the day Charlie and I was cutting timber for John Rickard up the Marys River. We walked over a mile, from about Highway 20 up on the railroad tracks and cut timber for John Rickard along the tracks. He took a team of horses and drove them into the river and floated them down to the bridge there by Marys River and they loaded them out with an A frame. We did that for a while. That was pretty good. They'd float them down the river and pull them out there and load them. So, I did that.

I worked for Willard Green for a while, and I helped cut timber once. I remember how close I had one time. We was up on the springboards doing a forking tree or a schoolmarm, and I jumped down and my older brother, Orville, shoved the steel wedges down and just about hit me in the head with them [laughs]. Missed me, but that was up on the Old Peak Road. I worked that way. I worked in the farm a little bit and then met Aline down, she was a janitor, I mean a waitress at the Chintimini Café, and I met her and then we got married and had three children and Ryan was the oldest. He went to Lewis and Clark, and graduated up there and then the older daughter went to Oregon State, and she graduated from Oregon State. Our third daughter was on a Rotary scholarship in Singapore, and she took a bus trip up to Malaysia, up toward Thailand, and her and another girl were killed by a dump truck. She was a good student. She got, I know one time she got straight-As at the University of Oregon.

DG: Wasn't she in an honors program at University of Oregon?

AG: Yeah, she was in the honors college.

DG: They still have a scholarship, an Andrea Gellatly scholarship, and it's an honors program at the University of Oregon.

AG: Yeah. We had that for a while there. I lost track of it. She was a member of the honors college. They did have a-

DG: I've looked online, and it seems like it's still valid.

AG: Well, good.

DG: Somebody's still funding it.

AG: Somebody's keeping it going.

DG: I think when she came back from that trip she had an offer to go to Tufts University.

AG: Yeah. She was going to the Fletcher School of Law in Foreign Studies. That's where she went from.

DG: She could speak Chinese, what is it? Mandarin Chinese and that's what she was mainly over there for. She was teaching English to Chinese students.

AG: Yeah. We went over there to see her in Taiwan, in Taipei, and she was teaching class in English up on the hill there in Taipei and then we was glad we went over to see her. She likes the Chinese, so we had some pretty good experiences over there.

DG: She had no problem, because she was 6' 3", and so she was a little bit intimidating, I think. They probably didn't give her any guff.

AG: Yeah. She had quite a good career coming up, but it was ended shorter. I had a son, Bryan, and a daughter Rebecca, and a daughter Andrea. They both all graduated from college, but Andrea didn't get to do anything with hers. First job I worked with my brother at Fred Alberson Lumber Company. We cut the first trees that were hauled out of Fall Creek on a truck. That was something there. Then I went to work for Stanley Lowler. I worked for Bud Harris a while, too, and we cut some big trees up on Skunk Creek.

DG: Is that where Junior got hit? Isn't that where he got hit on the shoulder with the limb, is that when that was?

AG: I wasn't with him then. Well, it was up for Alberson. I don't know where it was.

DG: Okay. You weren't there when it happened.

AG: He was working with Sam Watkins.

DG: I see.

AG: But I guess I should say something about this big old growth that grew up on top of the field. We had trees, we cut trees with 30,000 in them, and there's just a few of them up there. Anyway, I worked for Bud Harris and then went to work for Stanley Lowler up on the Sharp Ranch, up at Klickitat. He had a stud mill up there, and cut for him quite a while. Then he got to logging. He had an SJ4 that he bought and did quite a bit of logging. I worked for Bob Beth quite a bit. We worked in the watershed on the right aways and getting windfalls.

DG: What year was the mill there on the Sharp Ranch? Do you remember what year that was?

AG: That wasn't too long after I was married. It was probably in the '50s. Charlie hauled all the studs out and sold them to Stan Wilt over in south Corvallis. They had some awful good timber up there. We cut one 40. We figured we had 100,000 an acre. It was pretty good timber, but I'm not sure that's accurate, but It had a lot of timber on it. There were some for Rex and Stan Wilt and I spent quite of time up at Kessie's, up behind the Marys Peak cutting Kessie's timber. We cut some big old growth up there. I know one of them wasn't a real good tree, but it was 10 foot on the stump. Then his time ran out so he drug them out in his pasture there. Had quite a pile of big old growth piled up there and he was pretty good to work for. He had cows. I was talking to his boy the other day and he said that he wanted to know who was living on the Kessie place. They just went up there and they had a van. They're living down lower.

DG: I can remember visiting the Kessie place years later and they'd have equipment, graders and Cats and stuff sitting there and they'd have all their growing up through them, you know. They'd sit there for so long.

AG: Yeah, him and George Sawyer had the same idea about used equipment. They kept it all. You know George.

DG: Yeah, down here, old George.

AG: They'd appreciate it out and let it sit.

DG: But that's what I thought was funny, was actually it looked like a pretty good grader. It had alder 15 feet high growing up around it and through it.

AG: And out in the woods there, yeah. He's quite a guy. That was out, I guess, Rex took me out four times to show me where to cut. I thought that was pretty good, I guess.

DG: Rex?

AG: Rex Clemens.

DG: Rex Clemens.

AG: Yeah, went out four times with him. Was only to cut to the end of the Franklin Ridge right away. I rode up with him and Stan Wilt to show us where to start and his old dog ran along behind us. It got pretty hot.

DG: I like some of the stories they told about George when Rex would show up with the rig and he'd take the Cat and put a big mound up behind so Rex couldn't get out.

AG: Yeah, he had a lot of tricks that he sent. So, George sent Rex to Eugene to buy some spark plugs for a diesel. He was an ornery guy.

DG: The other story I remember from old George Froyer was that bought, the crew didn't know it, but he bought them all lunches and new lunchboxes.

AG: Yeah, I heard that.

DG: Every day they'd have their lunchboxes sit on this one bank and just as the guys were walking up out of the brush he'd come roaring buy with the Cat and just walk the Cat over the full length of their lunchboxes and kept going. He let them throw a fit for a while, and then he brought out the new lunchboxes with the lunches in them.

AG: He pull a lot of practical jokes. Some of them would get pretty mad at him. That was mostly in the woods and I sold real estate for a short time, but didn't have too good of luck with that. I had trouble with my eye and sort of quit working about, took Social Security at 62 and have some income, but that was about the end of my career.

DG: Know which Kessie, if it's a, might be a grandson or a son, but he was about the same age, but he went to Eddyville High School. I was a track guy, so I didn't do any baseball, but we had some kind of all-comers track meet. When it got done, I went over to the baseball field. It was summer league baseball, and they go, you're just the right size. So, I had stuff that I put on. One kid got hurt, so I had to put on his stuff because they had just enough to play. One of the kids playing on the team was one of the Kessies.

AG: It might have been Don. He'd be about that age.

DG: But he, you know, I never met him before but he knew who I was, just-

AG: Just from playing in high school.

DG: Right. But that was my only baseball game I ever played. I played one.

AG: I played up at Eddyville at Philomath High and a friend of mine was pitching and he pitched a no-hitter up at Eddyville. Boyd was quite a baseball guy, Boyd Eagleson. He was really into baseball.

DG: I played a lot of softball and his grandson, Larrick Cook, I played on teams with him and they showed up a lot of those to watch him play. He was always hollering. He was

always there rooting them on.

AG: He spent a lot of time with the high school kids in their athletic program. I mentioned Charlie Olson. I cut that timber up Marys River. That was all hand saw. Then later after the war, my brother and I cut for Joe Gray, the neighbor, and he bought 2 power saws. One of them was, they were Canadian, IEL. See, I can't, well one of them was a Timber Hog, big, heavy 2-man saw. Some way or another we weren't mixing, they had oil that wasn't mixing and we burned out, had just a metal bearing and we kept burning out metals bearings, the metal bearings. The other came from town from Canada to see what we were doing wrong. He figured that we weren't getting a good oil mixture.

DG: There's that picture you showed me, and here's Andrew and Kenny Gray and Jerry Gray's down below.

AG: I believe that was during the war, I believe. Oh, I wanted to show you, Joe Gray bought a drag saw.

DG: I like that story.

AG: He needed a place to cut a bigger tree, so he come up on the line, the creek between my folks. Flatly Creek was the line, so my dad let him haul it out through him at no cost. So, we fell this tree and then Joe cut it with a draw saw and sold it to Claude Decker to deal with it.

DG: Well, the story, the drag saw story I remember was right up here where they, I don't know who it was tried to use a drag saw to fell a tree and it barber chaired, and Dad said that was the end of the drag saw.

AG: Yeah. That was.

DG: But it was in the stand right up here, and it used to be this tree where the barber chair was still there in that stand. I know where it's at. My dad kept telling that story, and he kept showing about where it was at. Then, working in that stand I found the-

AG: Oh, the stump?

DG: ...yeah, the drag saw memorial tree. This is Andrew right here [points to a photograph], and this is Kenny Gray and his wife still owns the place, June Gray still owns the property next to ours. This tree is on her property, which is just up the creek from where I live. This is Jerry Gray. He sold out and his place is where the LaChapelles got their horses and stuff. That was Jerry Gray's place. After seeing this and talking to Andrew and he told me about where it was at, and I went up there and found that. It's kind of unique because it's got like a, Kenny's actually not standing on a springboard. He's standing on a sucker off the side of the tree. It's kind of a unique stump. Then this one's here. Then they got an A frame, a frame back here to load poles. Well, that's where my brother's house is now. It's across the creek. This is on Gray's, but just across the creek is the Gellatly's property.

AG: Yeah, they hauled it right out through my dad's place. They worked together good, those neighbors. I remember we was working up there with Joe Gray, the older Joe, and my mother came out and told us that President Roosevelt had died. That was in '44. I remember that. She came out and said that Franklin Roosevelt had died. It was pretty historic.

DG: Dad remembers when they bombed Pearl Harbor. You guys were across the river cutting or something, and when you came back and he remembers what you guys were doing.

AG: Yeah, we were down by the highway. It was kind of a frigid day. In fact, it got so cold over there in that canyon, and the trees loaded with ice and it'd sound like artillery going on. They'd break up about, oh, 15-20 feet, they'd break over and they'd go off and it'd sound like a canon. All one day there were trees popping over there from being top-heavy with ice. They'd really make a noise. I think that was about the same time as December 7, '41.

DG: This is my grandpa and Andrew's dad. It's up, like at north fork off the Gellatly Creek. It's the only main fork. This was headwaters of his water system for the farm.

AG: The intake, yeah.

DG: Intake, yeah. Then he had a-it wasn't all pipe, right? It was pipe and ditch?

AG: Well, it was mostly start with a, it was a, we created a wood pipe.

DG: Oh. Yeah. Okay.

AG: Later when it went to pieces, they dug the ditch. I helped dig the ditch.

DG: Oh I see. But this was about 1920 when he did this.

AG: I think so, yeah.

DG: So, then it was actually a pressurized system, once it got down to the house. But this was mainly used for the cattle and irrigating the garden, right?

AG: Yeah, well, they had it piped into the house, too.

DG: Oh, they-well, there's a spring right above there for the house.

AG: That was later.

DG: Oh, it was?

AG: Yeah. That was after this gave up.

DG: I'll be darn.

AG: This system gave up and then we had the spring that evolved.

DG: Do you remember how that, there's a concrete tank up there for the spring on the hill. Now, was there a pipe coming into that, or is that right where the spring's at?

AG: That's the spring and then we had a copper pipe to the house.

DG: Okay, so the spring comes out where the concrete is.

AG: Yeah.

DG: Okay.

AG: It's a concrete tile they dropped in.

DG: Yeah, this is on, like I said, the fork of Gellatly Creek but it's on Starker Forest property right now. As a matter of fact, let's see, two years ago we thinned... this was a piece of property that was traded, that Starker got in a trade with Weyerhaeuser and Weyerhaeuser it was Willamette Industries. Bohemia bought it from Ellsworth. But this, we did some work a couple years ago we thinned some of the stand between the two clearcuts that Weyerhaeuser did, so we worked just right above this. There's some white fir in a stand on a flat right above where this was at. I worked right by that.

AG: That was quite an interesting, Daniel got the blueprint of this plan. I wanted to have Dan pull this up and show some people what a drag saw is. This is what Joe Gray cut that tree up we fell, Kenny and I fell.

DG: Was it these actual models?

AG: Yeah, that's the same type. It's kind of built like a wheelbarrow. You put the dogs in the tree and the saw has got a universal thing that just goes back and forth. When you get the little gas engine smoking and the bark flying and the pitch, it makes quite a smell. It's a pretty fragrant job drag sawing up a tree. They don't do that anymore, but that was the way they cut their wood. I think Dan Farmer used a drag saw on his. He cut up a lot of peelers up there and sold it. He had an old V8 truck and he'd haul it into town as stow wood. My brother and I did quite a bit of horse logging. We built roadways and double decks. You'd roll a log and they'd drop down the first deck and then onto the bunk and then when you got the bunk loaded, well, you'd put planks across and load the second deck and then if you wanted to top it out you'd just put up, we had planks and peavey them up to the top and top it out. So, we horse logged quite a bit. It's a pretty good way to log without much equipment.

DG: I heard stories about grandpa being, must have been pretty strong because he broke lots of peavey handles, so he started making his own out of scrub oak because it was tougher. He broke too many of the regular handles.

AG: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you how it changed. I bought a peavey the other day and it cost me $95 [laughs].

DG: Then, when did you, when were you on your first Cat logging job, you think?

AG: Well, I got a Cat later. In the '60s and '70s I did Cat logging around. Logged up on the Botkin place and I logged Bud Bush's timber up at Hoskins up there. I remember that was the year of the yellow jackets. I sure had to be careful. They had a lot of yellow jackets.

DG: You logged on the Gerding place too, one time, didn't you?

AG: Yeah, I logged Gerding. I logged the top of this ridge off. I logged there at Gerdings. Jake Watkins and logged for quite a few people, mostly by myself. Then Pat Brown hauled. He was sure good to have out to get your logs for you, that was. Then you want to talk about a telephone. We did have an old crank telephone in the house. I think my dad was one of the first ones to have one, and it was a single line with the ground. The line would come in and you'd ground it. Then you'd get your phone and when you'd ring it it'd send 2 pretty good-sized dry cell batteries that powered it. You'd stick them inside the phone and then you'd crank it up and then they had numbers. Ours was 10F13. They had a different line and Westwood had a different number for their phone line. When you wanted to call out, you'd ring it once and you'd get Central down here at Philomath. Then they'd plug you in to where you wanted to go. It's sure different. My dad used to work on the telephone. They'd used to get crossed. Two of the lines would get crossed up and then you'd have to go with a stick and uncross the telephone lines and a man named CJ Lankton owned it, and then he sold out to a man named Baker. Then they formed the Pioneer Co-op and they bought, they got a government loan, an REA loan and bought it out from Mr. Baker. I helped the grade and helped them organize the Pioneer Co-Op at the grange hall. There was a fella from Eddyville. I can't think of his name. He's a forester and then several people up there. Borden got on the, Borden Road. They'd come there and they'd have their meetings and they finally got it going.

DG: Grandma and his mom and dad were charter members of this Marys River Grange.

AG: Yeah. So, I was in on that and I can't think of the man's name up at Eddyville. Oh, Glascaw. You probably heard the name. Well, H.R. Glascaw run the meetings. Rex Wakefield's folks were there. Dr. Quigly, he was a pioneer. So, we bought that and it got going and it was kind of hit and miss there for a while. Pat Boone had a resort over in Waldport. He said he went broke because Pioneers Telephone Service was so poor that he couldn't, he had lost his reservation. Anyway, they got a pretty good outfit now. Boyd's in it. Boyd Eagleson's a member of it, and Lois Best. They run it now. So, that was quite a change. We got electricity in 1941. That was more the REA money, and I got my dad's membership. It was Benton Lincoln co-op, and they had to buy a membership. I know in 1941 they had a couple guys come and wire it up and hook it up, and it sure felt good. You'd pull an old jerk light and have a light. Joe Gray, he was quite a kidder, the older Joe. He said, Andy, is there any bare wires? We did have a place that we didn't have any studs on the house down there, and it came through the wall. I said, yeah, there was the wiring came in and it was showing. He was just making fun of maybe we had some bare wire.

DG: Did the Grays get electricity about the same time?

AG: No, we got ahead of them. Joe hadn't had it yet. That was Joe. There was one man that kind of run the office over on 2nd Street over there, on 2nd and Monroe and during the war they had the draft, and his name was Yeller. He was the first one to have to go to the draft [laughs]. It's a fella that was running this Benton-Lincoln power company, a telephone company.

DG: Power or telephone?

AG: Telephone. Well, power. Yeah, power. Power company, electrical co-op. Before we got power, we had a gas Maytag motor washer. It had one cylinder gas engine on it. You had a tube. You'd run it out and it'd go: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Then, the next we got a Maytag with a ringer. It was an electric motor. The first one we had was a Maytag gas washing machine. That old motor was in the garage there for quite-

DG: Yeah, you know I think Dean ended up with it. Was that the one they used to fire up and then it'd run backwards if he did something just right? I think that's the one. They used to have it and you'd kick it to get it. They kept that motor from that washing machine for a long time. My uncle Dean really thought that was something. Somehow, he ended up with it.

AG: Yeah. We did get a refrigerator. That was really good to have something to keep food cold. We used to set some of it in the creek down there to keep it cold, the milk and the things that-well, that's something to get, turn the lights on. Robert cut this tree.

DG: Is that the one?

AG: Yeah. That's the tree that is on Bent Halsey truck out of Corvallis. He'd run a service station about where the first alternative is. He was a joker. That was his truck anyway.

DG: Isn't this Brian in the picture? You're holding Brian?

AG: Yeah.

DG: He's holding his oldest son, Brian, and this is all his kids right here.

AG: Yeah, that was one tree on the old place. I helped Bob trim the back end off it, the butt end.

DG: Did you fall that with a hand saw or with power saws?

AG: No. Bob cut it. I was working up at Lowler's, and I came home. We had a big old disk and power saw that were up in the barn. I jumped up on that thing and we had a 7 foot bar and I went down over the top. It made a pretty good cut on it. That's the one we cut the big old growth with on Skunk Creek, the same bar.

DG: This was cut on our place, the Gellatly Place across the river from the old house.

AG: Yeah. It was parked down here on the highway. Aline and I and Brian, we came out and I got a picture of it. That was a pretty big tree for up on the-it was in there with the corner with Gerding's place.

DG: Start from the beginning, the first time I was working on Starker I think I was probably a sophomore in high school, and our forestry teacher at the high school was also a Starker logger at the time, so he had classes-when we were sophomores we basically just went out and cut firewood, we'd earn money for the trip to the state competition every year. That was how we earned the money. We cut firewood. When we were sophomores, we just had a few guys that got to run the chainsaws and everybody else just split and loaded the wood. As I got out of high school I went to work for the same guy, but he was logging for Bohemia at the time. I logged on Bohemia ground for him for about a year. Then went to work for Dick Shaw, Harvey Shaw logging. I guess it'd be '79. He was a Starker contractor. So we'd thin and mainly at that time I'd do a little bit of cutting but mainly running equipment. That was when I was 19, and worked for him. It was just about in '82 I think it got pretty rough, and so I went to work for Saab Brothers and worked on yarder sides. I worked on the rigging for about 9 months. We were working clear down in the Five Rivers country on Siuslaw National Forest. It was real nice second growth units, but it'd take an hour and a half one way to get there sometimes. Then there was a brief period in between there where I did that, mainly worked on the rigging. If they had me run equipment, if necessary, a skidder or Cat or something.

I remember one unit that got, it was kind of fun, because this nice second growth. If it slid down in the unit, the cutters wouldn't chase it. So, I had to buck some of these second growth. You'd be able to buck three 40s out of them real easy, where they'd break. Nice trees. I guess they were probably, we were 2 guys on the rigging. We were sending like 13 loads a day, just two guys, but they were about 10, 11 log loads. Just nice trees. Anyway, then I went back to work for Shaw's. For one thing, I got $1 more an hour. Instead of going to Five Rivers country they were working on Hinkle Way, so that was a pretty easy choice. Worked for them up until about '85, and went to work at a sawmill running front end loader. I thought I was getting old and needed to do something easier at the time. So, I worked mainly in the log yard for Midway Forest Products, which is a little stud mill out there on Reservoir Road. It's not running anymore. I did that all the way from '85, sometime in '85 all the way up to '90, I believe it was. My brother-in-law, Jerry Girding, needed timber cut. So, I thought, well, now I'm 30. I'm getting pretty old, but I'll give it a whirl. Even when I was working at the mill, I did a little bit of work. Running loader wasn't necessarily that physical, so I would take on some, and I helped Jerry before that time just on some little jobs. He was trying to get his dad to retire. His dad was out there helping him, and he was in his 70s at the time. So, I believe it was, it may have been '91, but somewhere in there it was, I remember the mill was shutting down. I still had a job there but, you know, I could see the end of it. I thought I'd help him out a little bit and always liked the Starker's management-the thinning, and how they manage and you knew they were a good company to be involved with. We, just, oh, me and him for several years there. Then brought in his son, which is my nephew. It's the three of us. But the whole time I think since I was out of high school I also logged on our place after school, or after working on weekends. We did a little bit of logging for my dad. I've logged on our place for, it's almost 30 years now, too. That kind of brings us up to date. That's what I've been doing is working with my brother. Then, in the winter for him it'd get kind of slow. There was quite a few winters there where they'd go in December, January, February, I'd go help on some of the units for Gary Strom or Jack Bowing on big Willamette Industry units were and cut on those big units, which was always kind of fun, a change of pace.

AG: My connection to the Starker Forest is this quarter corner on 6th and 15th, Township 12, south on 6 west. Before I start telling more about that, I want to tell to tell the ownership's on that corner. It was, well, it was Ellsworth's and then Bohemia bought it from Ellsworth, and then Willamette Industry bought it from Bohemia. Weyerhaeuser bought it from Bohemia, and then they made this trade with Starker. It was all on the same corner over here with that little property. I did log on that corner in there on the Ellsworth property. It was pretty small and I got criticism for logging this small tree. There was one big one and quite a bit in it. I logged too much. Julie Spees was working with me. He owned the property. He kind of caretaked the Ellsworth place. We logged too much and I know Mrs. Ellsworth got pretty upset that we went over her income for logging. Anyway, I got criticism for it being too small a log, and when Bohemia bought it they cleared cut it.

Then we hunted up on there on this place, on the property and we went clear to the reserve line on Rock Creek. That was our hunting. Up where the orchard is now, there was these homesteads. One of them was Laura Downs. It was the Keys place. We used to go up and eat there the grapes and apples they had left there. Then we'd go up the hill to the Beckhart house. You probably heard of the Beckhart place. There was a pretty big house there up on top. Then you'd go a little further west, you'd hit the Black's place and then you'd go over toward the reserve line and there was Sleygal place. So, we traveled up through there on the Starker property now.

DG: I can remember that point up there. Dad always called it Nikart Point.

AG: Yeah, we made it up the Nikart's, too. That part of it. Part of it we knew was Ellsworth and then it was known as a Whiting estate. Did you ever hear of the Whiting Estate? Then Ben Ellis owned some of that up there. We'd hunt in there quite a bit. I remember once I drove a deer to Willard Green and he shot it. It was a roan. It had pink eyes and a roan color. Another time up there Willard was standing in Slego backhouse and shot a deer. Standing in the door of the backhouse.

DG: So, some of those buildings they weren't lived in but they were still standing?

AG: Yeah. The Beckhart place was pretty good shape but nobody was living there. Anyway, that's what we did.

DG: Yeah. Our property never, until recently, never really butted up against the Starker's. It was Starker's up the creek. We knew about where the line was.

AG: The Ellsworth.

DG: We'd go through Ellsworth. The easy route coming back home was to come through the Gray's and coming down that ridge from up there Neikirk when we hunted. That was the easy route back, because it was, you know, right down the ridge to the house. But we used to call that one up there the big buck canyon, because Dad shot two big bucks in the same canyon. That was, it was actually the main fork. It was actually the fork that goes over to old Peak Road. Not the first one but the second fork. There's a small fork that went straight on up. That's the one we called, we used to call it the Big Buck Canyon. That was probably later years. But I remember Dad shooting a big buck and the falling boys showed up and they helped us drag it out. I was pretty little at the time.

AG: This was shot on Starker's seed orchard above the Pleasant Valley Cemetery up on top of the ridge there right along the brush line. Gary Watkins used to log it, farm it and then before he planted the trees. This is right along the brush line on the east end of that field. This old buck was sneaking out and I shot him in the neck. That was it. The picture here is Willard Green, Ward Gellatly, and my brother, Robert, was home from the Army and me. The dogs are Jeff and Jerry.

DG: We knew where that pond was, so we either ride motorcycles or something, get up there. We actually planted it with bass and crappie sometime.

AG: You did?

DG: Yeah.

AG: I didn't know that.

DG: And little blue gill. They wouldn't get very big. Then somebody put trout in there, too. In the process of that, we stumbled across that orchard one time, and it was still when the fence was good. The gate was open, but what was funny-and there was some really good fruit-but in going around in that fence up at the top underneath these limbs of these trees we found this gate that was spring loaded. It had twines on it. It was set up so deer could get in there but couldn't get back out. We were just in there salvaging a couple years ago and of course the fence is all fell down, and everything's grown up. Well, I went around and that gate was still there laying on the ground.

AG: I never heard of anything like that.

DG: Yeah, we found that. It wasn't going to keep them out when we found it, even years ago, because the gate was down and it wasn't, but somebody'd set it up to try to trap deer in that orchard. I guess that's the Lilligrin. The Starkers are calling it the Lilligrin Place. I think that that fence was put up probably, you know, later from when you hunted years ago.

AG: Yeah.

DG: He probably tried to have his own private little range there.

AG: This is a picture of my brother and sister, two brothers and a sister and we rigged up a wagon for this old dog, Sport, to pull us. That's us up above the old house there. My mother took a picture of us. I remember once we had him hooked up down below the highway and we had it loaded down with Chittam bark, and this neighbor just moved in came by and he took off running with that loaded Chittam, chasing this neighbor.

DG: Andrew's standing behind the wagon and then Delia's in between there. My dad, Raymond, has got a hold behind the dog, and Robert's got the leash of the dog. Do you remember how old you were at this time?

AG: Oh, I think I was about 10 or 11, I think.

DG: So, it would have been in the '30s sometime.

AG: Yeah, it was in the '30s, early... it was in the '30s. Well, it started on the east foot of the Alsea Mountain and they've had Benton County Lumber Company, I think was around 1905 built the mill. Then they built a flume to the Wyatt there on Highway 30 in '20. They got, he must have put this wooden flume, like it was 8 miles of flume, to float their lumber down to the planer. I remember some of it being up along and across the river on the old place that we lived.

DG: So, this picture was taken, the flume is still in pretty good shape. So, this was probably taken, and it's before your time because the highway isn't built in the picture, too.

AG: Yeah.

DG: So, this picture was probably sometime, probably between '10 and '20, 1910 or 1920, somewhere in there.

AG: Well, probably not that late, but probably between 1905 and 1915, something like that.

DG: Okay.

AG: I got the history in that book, but I remember seeing some of the boards and they didn't have any knots in them. They were really nice lumber.

DG: From the flume?

AG: Yeah, the flume lumber was really nice.

DG: This is a picture of the family farm and then the other one I got here is actually pre, before the flume was there. That shows the bridge, the lane coming down from the old house down across and they even have a bridge going across the river. This was obviously before the highway, too. The lane that runs down there was before the highway, the one that we use for our driveway. The one that the New Yorker owns now.

AG: Oh, is it?

DG: Yep.

AG: Across there.

DG: He went to Walt Whitman High School in New York and he still carries his New York accent. That's who owns that place on the corner now.

AG: Oh, he does?

DG: Yeah. Single guy. He bought it from the Barns, Mrs. Barns.

AG: Oh.

DG: He's had it for about a year now. I don't know if you've been down that way when he planted the trees and stuff. Anyway, this shows the family place and the carriage house and the old barn, and it shows that there was some timber there, but there's also a meadow that goes clear to the top of the ridge.

AG: They had goats. They kept it cleaned up pretty good.

DG: Plus these trees that are in the picture, a lot of them grew up after they bought the place. Because their younger timber, this patch in here, looks like even if it was 50 years old, they would have been small, little trees when they bought it. They purchased the place in 1870, and so you know this is 40, 50 years later.

AG: They bought it from George Boone. It was James Bound's donation land claim and the one here next to it was Boyer, Blaire donation land claim. I might put a good word for Starker. I think they're doing a lot of good work for the community. I go out and walk at the park, Bruce Starker Arts Park. I like to go out there once in a while. I think that's pretty nice. I think the younger boys are doing well for the community. I think they're smart to have public relations and I think it's a really good thing. I like what they're doing. I feel pretty fortunate the time I've lived here and the things that have happened. I feel fortunate to be, I'll be 83 years old in May and I feel like I've got pretty good. I guess I've got a lot of gratitude for my life. It could have been better, but I'm pretty pleased with it.

DG: Well, I think that it's been a good place to grow up and raise a family. I guess I would say that my best accomplishment was helping my wife raise the kids. You know, I don't really have that many major successes, I guess, maybe staying alive cutting timber. That would be one. But just the main thing I think is unique is having this heritage and trying to remember some of the stories. I ran into a relative on a shuttle. I started going on and on and I said, well, I guess I remember all these stories because I live here on the place. We live on the original place, and so somebody's got to keep track of how everybody's interrelated. It's fun from my perspective to be, you have trees that are of a certain age and it dates what was going on, how long we had the property, before the trees even started growing and all that's really a nice perspective for my part. To see how there's a continuation of the forest and a real long-term perspective of the land out here on this south fork Marys River.

AG: I like that south part. My dad always liked to be out, he didn't like Greasy Creek. He liked to have it called south fork of Marys River.

DG: Yeah. I remembered that.

AG: We used to have it on the bridge down here at the grange hall, but I went by there the other day and it isn't there anymore. They used to have "South Fork" on the bridge. Some of the, I think Greasy Creek, maybe from the soil or the clay on the bottom of the stream that would kind of produce some bubbles and kind of a sudsy look. It looked like it might have been greasy. That's the way, it was because what was on the bottom of the creek that made it appear greasy.

DG: I'm Dan Gellatly. It's February 14, 2008, and we're on Flat Mountain. It's in the coast range. We're selectively taking poles out of the stand. The pole companies come through and mark the ones they think are straight enough for poles and then we go ahead and cut them, and depending on what needs to be done with them, we'll take a log off and make the proper length. [Dan operating a chainsaw and axe and falling a tree]. This is going to be a two-wedge tree. That limb tried to help me for a minute. There we go. I think we'll get 16 foot log and then I think, I'll look at the circumference, but I think it'll make several different pole cuts. [Makes base cut with chainsaw, then uses measuring tape].

It's 16 feet up, but it doesn't have to be exact because sometimes you have to take when you can reach underneath it. That one looks like 64 inches. So, 64 would be up to an 85 footer. It can either be anywhere from a 70, but based on the way the stand's been running if I take a 16 with this and it didn't break you should be able to get an 85 footer. There's no reason to go up and measure it. [Cuts through log with chainsaw.]

What did I say, Gary, 63? [Chuckles] I'll just double check it. Well, a little shy under, but I'll call it 64. So, what I'll do is I'll write that diameter number so Jason can look at it and then they can, the reason I don't have to go up there to see what the top diameter is regardless they can adjust it to get the top diameter where they want from a 70 to an 85 foot pole.