Paul Mortenson Oral History Interview, September 2012

PAUL MORTENSON: I'm Paul Mortenson. I'm pretty much a long-time Oregonian. I was born in The Dalles in 1945, and my folks moved me to Mosier when I was a little tyke. I spent the first 9 years of my life there, then the next 9 in Hood River. I had kind of an idyllic childhood. I didn't know grandad on one side, Charlie Miller. He had died when my mother was young, but I knew my Grandma Miller, then Grandpa and Grandma Mortenson. They and my dad and his brother and sister, the Mortenson clan, had come out from Nebraska during the Depression. They went broke back there and just by sheer luck they had bought 40 acres at Mosier as a little investment and it gave them a place to go to, set up shop again and get a fresh start. But, after moving to Hood River, I ended up graduating from Wy'east High School there, and following high school I kind of stumbled around for a little while. I pumped gas and then I worked in a glass shop as an apprentice glazer. I know I was never completely satisfied Joe Hague because I was a little too careful and not quote fast enough in the glass business. I was always glad I knew how to cut glass, and I've even done it a few times over the years for people. I then went in the military and I was supposed to go in the day John Kennedy got assassinated. They shut down all military bases and all recruiting centers for at least a couple weeks. I ended up not going into the Army until December of '64. Turned out to be a stupid time to go because I just assumed I'd go down to Fort Ord and start boot camp, but as it was I just went down there and peeled potatoes for about 3 weeks until my boot camp class started in January. I went from Ford Ord to Fort Evans, Massachusetts.

I guess I'm going to back up just a little bit in talking about my upbringing. I forgot to say I'm the oldest of 7 kids. I got 4 brothers and 2 sisters. We get along pretty darn good, all things considered, better than we did as children, I'd say. It was when I recently retired from Starker's they all came down, along with a lot of other family members, and that was wonderful. But any rate, I went from Fort Ord to Fort Evans, Massachusetts, and it's a good thing I learned about humidity and such back there, because my next assignment was Vietnam and I actually knew what it was like to sweat all day long. I spent a year over there in '64 and '65, and I used to tell the kids I was a professional sand bag filler, because of the many things we did over there that was one that you could rely on multiple times per week, building up what they called the fire base and armoring various things and building just little command headquarters for some of the big wigs and so on. In fact, one time that I remember distinctly, we got a new executive officer in and he was not a very pleasant person. He decided that he wanted his own shelter in case of attack, and so we built the thing out of sandbags for him, and we were accustomed to putting them with knotted ends all in one direction. Well, he saw that and we had to tear the whole thing apart and alternate the knots, and that got him off to a bad start with us. I could go on and on about that particular guy, but I can't say I miss him at all. Didn't do anything especially heroic over there. I did have some thrilling moments, though. One of the most exciting times was when riding shotgun on the beer truck. We got our supplies in by air, but for some reason we had to drive 50 miles south to Da Nang through bad guy country to get beer. So, five or six guys would take a Deuce and a Half and go down to the U.S. Navy at Da Nang and get the beer and we would stay overnight down there and head back in the next day or so. We actually took rounds hauling beer one time and the beer was quite hot and foamed all over the place and I can remember the cursing that went on by guys that were mad about the beer getting slid open by the bullets. I was very fortunate that I was there early on in the war and it hadn't gotten so horrible yet.

After my year was up, people had told me it was real common for guys to put in for dream locations, where they'd like to go next. If you put in a year in a combat zone, you just about were guaranteed where you wanted. But an older guy who we called him "Pops," but he was probably about 30. He said, don't put in for the States and don't put in for Japan. He said you'll find your behind right back here right away. As I observed later it did happen to a lot of guys. I thought, well, what's as far from Vietnam as you could be? I thought Germany must be it. So, I put in for Germany and I just loved it over there, so much so that I've been back a few times since. But after my discharge from the Army in 1968, I started college at Mount Hood community, eventually transferred down to the U of O, and I majored in German down there and that landed me a job teaching in a German school. From '72 to '74, I went to Germany and taught English to German kids for a couple years. I made some of the best friends of my whole life while I was there. I still am in email contact with a couple of them. It's been real nice just keeping in touch with one another after all those years, but I came back from there and I ended up in Philomath and I didn't really have a job, didn't know what I was going to do. I always had a little interest in working in the woods, even though I didn't know what I wanted to do there. One of the Starker foresters and his wife, Dick and Rachel Powell, brought over a dish of cookies and welcomed me to Philomath. We talked a while and he asked what I was going to do, and I told him I didn't know. A couple days later, Dick came by and he said, do you like climbing trees? I thought, well, like any kid's that gone up the apple tree. So, that's essentially what I was thinking about.

Next thing I knew, I got a job offer from Starker for a job that was to last 2 weeks helping Dick to climb these so-called superior trees. There's a long story about how they got picked out to be super trees. There were bagged cones up in the top of those trees, and Dick and I would go up and get them. It was a lot different climbing than I had envisioned, and most of the time they weren't up all that high, but I did get up a couple really big ones. If those trees were taller than their neighbors, you would really feel the breeze up there. I can remember my stomach muscles hurt for a while from clenching. If that tree would start to sway, I would grab like that [makes bear hug gesture]. You're belted in and everything and you were perfectly safe unless the tree happened to break off at an old snow break or something like that. That was pretty exciting, and I got in pretty good shape doing it. I think I worked out alright at it because I was small and wiry. Probably the most exciting thing ever happened to me was coming down one of those trees, and the internodes, the space between the branches, was a long distance on those, and as I was coming down I lost my glasses. I'm blind as a proverbial bat, and so I'm letting myself down, and, of course, you didn't take off the limbs and come down with a belt like a regular climber. You actually went up the tree kind of like this [makes upward spiral gesture] in between limbs, and you came back down the same way. Well, I was coming down without my glasses, and looking down I couldn't tell how far it was to the next limb, so I was in a little bit of a sweat. Somewhere, probably 20 feet off the ground or so, I stopped to gather my wits and my breath, and I looked and there's my doggone glasses hanging on a limb. I don't know if I've ever been so glad to see anybody as I was them.

At any rate, since the job was supposed to last 2 weeks, I had been assuming that it was going to do just exactly that. But the next thing I knew they sent me out to be a chaser for the road builder. Lincoln Reed was the guy doing that work, and I was out there and I was out there just to do whatever he said, basically, as a safety man and choker setter and taking limbs off of trees and doing various things. One thing led to the next, and before I knew it Dick Powell was teaching me to plant trees. I've always told people that it was a 2 week job, but they just forgot to lay me off. Well, after being with Starker's for several months, I had a unique opportunity. My unit from Vietnam had a reunion in Chicago. So, I got permission to take off for a couple weeks, actually. Believe it or not, the only way I could afford to get to Chicago was on a Greyhound bus, and they had 15 days of unlimited travel for, I think it was, $88 or something like that. I went back there and had a good time and stayed with one of my best friends from the military. Then I was on the way back and my brother, Eric, was graduating from Eastern Oregon University. So, my intent was to be there for that. Eric told me that he wanted me to meet this really nice gal. He introduced me to Genie Sanderson, who is now Genie Mortenson. We got to be kind of a funny thing. We kidded about this, but we were dating at long distance, and driving back and forth between here and La Grande. We've told a couple people in jest that it was either buy new cars or get married, but it wasn't too long before I'd fallen in love. Genie was teaching school up there, and she knew my brother from classes at Eastern. Anyway, in 1976 she and I got married. She went to work teaching at Alpine down here. She ended her career teaching for Philomath Elementary, but we still have stories about Alpine. That was an interesting community.

In 1979, our son John came along. John is now, I think he's 33 years old. Yeah, he is. He's 33 years old, seems impossible. He and Heather have got two boys-Keith and Seth who are 4 and 2, respectively. Then in 1983, on the Fourth of July Laura came into the world, and she's now, well, also I forgot to say John's a civil engineer up in Lewiston, Idaho. Laura is a registered nurse in La Grande working what they call casual status, which means she's a part-timer. She's preferring to me a stay-at-home mom at this time, so she just works enough to keep her license up. She married a young farmer up there, Nathan Weishower. They live on the family farm and have a beautiful place. It's kind of interesting visiting up there, though. It is a fearsome climate. We've been there in the last couple winters during a couple blizzards. The absolute white-out conditions, snow drifts 20 foot deep in places, and It's almost next to impossible to drive anywhere because you can't even see the intersections. But, Laura in the meantime has got two children. She had 2 girls: Taylor is going on 4 and Brenna's going on 2. So, they're real close in age to their cousins. Of course, we just delight in spoiling those kids and seeing them as much as we can. Now that I've retired, Genie is retired, we look forward to more of that. I should say about Genie that she not only retired from Philomath Elementary, but she got the Alameda Educator of the Year Award as she was going out the door. I'm very, very proud of her. The kids, of course they went to school right here in Philomath and were the beneficiaries of that Clemens Foundation and they got their college education paid for by the Rex Clemens trust. It was only later that I realized how much difficult, more difficult it is for families that don't have such an opportunity. But, both of them started school at Eastern Oregon. Laura finished there. John did his first couple of years and then transferred to the University of Idaho where he got his civil engineering degree. Laura's nursing degree is actually issued by OHSU at Eastern.

During, I'll kind of hop back to my Starker job. I had the great pleasure of working with a lot of older experienced people. When I think back, of course, I mentioned Linc Reed, a road builder. But I also go to know Frasier Maxwell, another old road builder and quite a character at that. I knew Linn Brown quite well. Brownie ran the backhoe forest. Joe Lamberty knew Neil Wilt, tree grader operator, and I benefited massively, I think, by working with these older fellas that probably had more patience and time to explain things to me. Eventually, that boiled down to Len Mosier, who was, I think Len really didn't need a job but he worked well into his 70s grading road and all the rock for Starker. I think it was just because he liked being around all the young people. I probably learned an awful lot about road maintenance, which was eventually my specialty at Starker. I was a beneficiary of all these mistakes these fellas had made when they were young. I've remained always grateful for the opportunity to work with those guys. This one isn't old, but I worked with a fella named Steve Glade, who ran backhoe and I remember Steve as being one of the hardest working people I've ever been around. Sometimes you had to slow him down because he'd be started before you were quite sure which direction you were going. But he was a great guy. He's still around. He's retired from active work in the woods. As time went on, these older fellas kind of eventually quit working and/or passed on. I got to know a whole bunch of other younger operators who worked for me in the woods grading roads, hauling rock, repairing slides, putting in coverts. I honestly could say that a man couldn't ask for a better job than I had. I was really blessed by that, but Rick Robinson and his entire crew, his wife, Jackie, I worked with them a lot. Ed Webster, he's an owner, operator. He's got a grader and a backhoe and an excavator. John Mosier hauls a lot of rock for me. All just wonderful people that I've enjoyed working with over the years.

In just a moment Ed Webster will be coming around the corner with the road grader. We're at the Starker Forest Devitt Clearcut, which was harvested in September 2008. We're doing the post-logging road maintenance. This road, actually, is going to get some patch rock afterwards, which will enable our tree planters and helicopter batch crews to access this property on a year-round sort of basis. We have a little bit of rock on the road already, but it wasn't quite enough for winter logging. We can hear the grader coming and he should be in view any time now. One of the things we do on this road grading in many, many cases rather than pull dirt from the ditch across the road, we burn that dirt up and then pick it up with the backhoe afterwards. That leaves us with a cleaner road surface and saves on rock. Ed Webster is doing the job for us. He probably does 70% of our road grading, and he's extremely good at it. He's been a road builder and he's hauled logs. He's hauled rock. He's done everything there is in the woods, I think. Ed is one of these guys that is always thinking about improvements, so he's tried various sorts of rollers. At one point he had a roller that was fastened to the road grader that he used and that worked pretty well, but he's upgraded to a heavier roller, which does a better job for us on the getting the road ready for harvest. You get a good picture here of how much rock the grader blade is carrying. You can also see that he's going to have to make another pass or two out here. My time working at Starker Forest, I've been blessed by working with a number of experienced contractors. Prior to working with Ed, I worked with an old fella from Philomath. That was Joe Lamberty. Joe taught me an awful lot of what I know about road maintenance, that the biggest plus of all about the job has been working with highly qualified and honest people that do a great job for Starker Forest. It's just been a pleasure to work with these folks. Now, we're here on Devitt Creek, and what we're illustrating here is a fish crossing. A number of years ago, Starker Forest began upgrading the coverts in primarily in the salmon and steelhead streams. Then they moved on to the trout streams, and we're now actually doing any kind of stream that could harbor fish. But in order to make the public aware of what we've done to these crossings, we put up a number of these fish crossing signs. In fact, I bought 100 of them. This one has remained unmolested, which is kind of nice to know. A handful of them got shot up right away and ripped down and stolen. We're quite proud of our work to improve fish passage in the streams on our lands. You can see that Devitt Creek is in September very, very low flow. It looks tiny next to the size of a 6-foot diameter pipe. The pipe itself is embedded. What that actually means is that it's below the surface of the stream. That enables us to get a natural bottom in the pipe, so sediment and sticks and gravel have flowed into this covert. It gives the whole thing a natural feel for the fish. If you can envision this tiny little stream in a 6-foot pipe, you know that this is intended to carry far greater storms. In fact, I can see the waterline inside, and we still apparently have never used not more than 40% of the size of the covert at this point. You might also notice that the streambanks are heavily vegetated. Whatever disruption that took place when the pipe went in is healed up and everything is looking completely normal here. I can personally testify that's there's some nettles down there.

Well, in addition to the road maintenance that was my all-time favorite job, I had a number of other hats that I wore. Some things you like better than others. I began, I got into being the rent manager. I won't go into full explanation of that, but over the years Starker has acquired a few houses in the process of acquiring forest land. So, we've commonly put renters in the places or we even inherited some renters, and the job eventually kind of smoothed out, but the very first one I got, and I won't name names or anything, but Bart took me out there and got me going on this. These people were already months in arrears. So, I had to start with some people that I eventually evicted. But, Bart and Bond are kindhearted and they cut people more slack than most of us would have. But I eventually learned that I didn't have time enough to personally do all of the maintenance on these rentals. In fact, it didn't take me long at all to realize I needed contractors to help with that. I have a long list that I've turned over to the people still at Starker of contractors that I used for various projects. That was another one of these just fantastic deals. You got to meet great people, but I probably would have been more willing to part with rent management than anything, but especially several years ago when it was a bumpier road than it has been in recent years. In the last few years, I've primarily I've had constant, steady renters. They haven't given me any grief. It's been a lot easier than it initially was. I also got into taking care of maintenance for the Starker Vehicle Fleet. That led to buying the vehicles and farming out the maintenance, figuring out where to buy the tires, figuring out what body shop to go to if we dinged one up. I'm going to have to give everybody at Starker a thumbs-up. Over the years we became a lot better drivers than we used to be. I know exactly why that is. We started paying attention to people's number of tickets. Everybody slowed down. I think that just helped massively, but it was one more job that I just loved because I like vehicles and I like the people that work on vehicles and I even got to be friends with car salesmen, which I was really blessed because I knew some of the most easy to deal with people. They started out with Gene Gullage at Wilson Motors and end up with Dave Dommolt, and both were just gems to work with. They believed in sales volume rather than making a mint off of each one they sold. It was kind of fun dealing with them, because you never got this business of, oh I'll have to go talk to my manager. These guys could cut a deal and you felt confident.

We kept going primarily to Wilson Motors over the years because of the wonderful service department that they had there. I enjoyed the sales people, and I also just thought the world of the mechanics and the people that were shop foreman and all those various important tasks over there. I also, I neglected to say how I really got into road maintenance. I had been occasionally been given out to a road builder or to a backhoe operator. I suffered a shoulder dislocation, and I wasn't going to be able to do very much physical work for a while. Gary Blanchard came up with the idea of having me take care of rock trucks and grader operators. That got me started. I'll say this to Gary, I thank you very much for sending me down that path, because it was great. I was trying to think. Oh, I also got into taking care of fire equipment. In fact, Starker sent me to about 3 different small engine and fire pump courses. I don't know how I'd rate myself. I was better than average, at any rate. It was another job that I enjoyed. In fact, when we were in the thick of things on a fire, I loved the pressure of getting that pump to run. I remember I could get kind of short-fused at times like that. That's not my usual M.O., but it was kind of funny because occasionally you're trying to fix a pump, and the guys on the fire line were just begging for it to be back and you would have just climbed to the back of the truck and started working on it again and the radio'ed go off. The radio was in the cab of the truck. So, you'd have to go down and respond to that. They said, have you got it going yet? I remember I answered with a vulgarity one time, because that was about the third time I'd been interrupted while trying to fix that fire pump. You know, it's kind of funny when you sit down and try to think of all the various things you did for your employer, and I darn near forgot that I was in charge of facilities maintenance for Starker. It's another one of those jobs that when I first got it I wasn't sure what I thought of that, but it became an excellent way to get to know contractors. We weeded through people, had a few that were just okay, but we ended up with some excellent ones. People put in re-roofing and doing the painting and doing the plumbing and electric and everything. Once again, I was just really fortunate to get to know such marvelous workers. I don't regret having done that at all. If I need something out here, I'll know who to go to because I had some good ones.

Genie and I, of course I mentioned earlier we got married in 1976. A couple years later, we built our first house at Marys River Estates, stayed in it for 21 years and Halloween of 1998, we moved out to this property, which is, it's been our dream to be out here. We got 53 acres, and about 40 of it is in trees. The part's that's not in trees works out real good because we have 2 horses which need a place to graze. In fact, I've got virtually everything fenced. I've done a little bit of logging in this area. Of course, right here by the house, if we do anything at all we'll take out a few trees, but we'll never slick this one off. It'd be a little bit too close to the house. I haven't got nearly as much done as I'd love to out here, but we actually need to do some more thinning. We got some old trees that probably should be clear cut, but it's a dilemma because those same trees are actually part of our view shed. We haven't decided exactly what to do. They not only provide a view of some beautiful big trees, but they hold the dust back a little bit, too. I wanted to go down here and just point my finger at eventually a couple of the other trees we've got. I should probably also tell you that I put in some pine trees, because my wife's from eastern Oregon and she was lonely for a ponderosa pine, so I've got them scattered here and there. It's not an ideal spot for them, but they're doing okay. She appreciates it. This place, the selling point for Genie was the deer fence that surrounds about 2 acres here. It's made gardening a lot easier. In the fall, when we're all done with roses and berries and things like that we go ahead and open the gates and let the deer in to clean up the windfall fruit and sort of prune the shrubs for us. In fact, on the winter days a lot of times the deer bed down by the patio door of the basement, and we get to look out there and watch them chewing their cud and looking at us.

In the background, you see this reprod growing back there that is getting some fairly good size to it. This other than the big timber on this property, it's an abandoned Christmas tree plantation. So, no I didn't plant it. Yes, I need to thin it some more, but a lot of it is getting to the stage that it may be due to commercial thinning. I was able to talk to Ed Webster, who grew in this neighborhood, even played on this property as a kid. He said that this Christmas tree, former Christmas tree field, was an oat field when he was a boy. It's a little bit ironic, because when I was digging a pond on the property with my Cat tractor, I kept hearing a clank when I was 6 feet down. I thought I was about to lose a track. I kept getting off the dozer and checking my tracks, and I couldn't find anything wrong. Eventually, I found the shoe of a workhorse that I had been running over 6 feet down and erosion had covered up the creek gravel over the years. Of course, I wasn't around to see it happen, so I don't know where the erosion came from, but obviously uphill somewhere. But it's ironic to know that you've got 6 feet of it. This house was a fixer-upper that we purchased, and Genie can testify to this, too. We found things here that would make an electrician tremble. We found fixtures that were not even mounted. They were just fastened to the sheet rock. We found a wire that was just cut off in the wall and not covered with wire caps or any sort of thing to prevent disaster. We've put a lot into this, and my wife loves these do it yourself and home owner fixup shows. I just about cry every time one of them comes on, because she gets some of the best ideas from watching these shows. Of course, those guys can do a complete remodel in about 24 hours, and it takes me weeks to accomplish anything. We're out here on our Norton Hill Tree Farm. We're at the confluence of Brush Creek and Branch Creek. This is actually a bridge that the most recent re-decking of it was, in fact, probably the installation and everything was Jennifer. This is a pretty typical Starker type bridge, sitting on a flat car and put the cross ties down and the planks over that and the way you go, you got a bridge. But it's an economical way to get a creek crossing. These things incur a lot of maintenance. In fact, this one was decked kind of tight, so the water doesn't get off and it, every time I get a backhoe out here I have them clean the scum and the grass and things off of this thing. But, it's, as you can see, it stays dirty and it stays wet, but it actually could use some more drainage. That's actually why the gaps are in the bumpers at the side, just to let the water off the thing.

We got Rick Robinson here, and Rick and Jackie run Jamaro, or Rick Robinson Trucking. Rick was barely out of high school, I think, when he first started working for Joe and hauling on us.

RICK ROBINSON: 1979, so I was four years out of high school.

PM: I remember when Gary first sent me out to check you and Fred Hackama, to see if you're hauling full 10 yards. That was when we got to know each other, and I liked you right away. You've stuck it out for a long, long time. I'd also say that Rick has gone from a kid that probably didn't know a anything to somebody that's got an awful lot of experience, well, on his seat for one thing.

RR: Yeah, learned a lot, and learned a lot from the guys I hauled with out here.

PM: I think that's true and I think that we at Starker learn from you guys at the same time.

RR: Yeah, it's been a learning situation and I would hope to think, or, hope at this point in time that it has made a difference on how everybody has done things.

PM: You know, you can clearly tell they're not getting weighed, I think when you see those loads. Of course, this truck with the drop-axel carries considerably more than the ones without, anyway. Rick Robinson has laid down a load of rock for us. I'll just go up here and have a look at it while he's getting turned around. This is some really nice looking 3 inch. Looks like it'll be a good winter rock. Well, I'm standing here in an area that's sort of like a walk down memory lane. Kirk Bonesil and David Heart and I planted on this side hill here, I think in the spring of '75 or '76. In fact, I remember a lot of things about it. One thing was there was a lot of slash on the slopes, and occasionally as you traverse the slope planting trees you'd be crossing a small alder log and it would take off with you and you'd end up 15 feet further down the hill than you wanted to be. But, I learned a lot of things planting trees and learned a greater appreciation of the forest in general. I always remember when Dick Powell took a bunch of us out and taught us to plant trees, and he came back to check on us about noon and we said, well, this is impossible. You can't get through the slash and the ground's too rocky. I don't know, we had about 5 different complaints. Dick said, no, it's not. He went down there and showed us how to do it. We all hung our heads in embarrassment and went back to work. Dick was a good teacher, because he was able to go show you just exactly what you should have been doing. This area that we planted in has been well, it probably got a pre-commercial thinning, but it's absolutely had a commercial thinning, and well, by the time this stand is up in the 65, 70-year range, these are going to be some whoppers, because they're pretty good-sized trees now. At this stage of my life, I'd hate to have a 50-pound bag of trees hanging on my backend. I also see some elk tracks right here, too.

This is the Steve Rice Helioport. Steve Rice was a logger who worked on this for years, both as a private contractor and an employee of another logging company. Steve's one heck of a nice guy, but we used this heliport, obviously, as a heliport, but it was also a place to bring visitors. You could stand here and look out over the vast number of seedlings the Starkers planted out here. Much of this tree farm was a project in itself of one that needed rehab. So, we did a lot of logging in the early days, followed by occasional logging since then, but we did an awful lot to get the land ready for planting and get it stocked up better with conifers as opposed to the brush and the hardwoods that it had a lot of on it at the time. But, I always remember just bringing my own father up here one time and proudly showing him just some of what Starker had accomplished and Dad was not easily impressed, but he looked out there and he said, by jiminy, he said, you fellas must have planted millions of trees out here. He might have been a little high on that, but we sure put in a lot. I've realized it's still a great place to bring people and have a look at things. I'll have to keep that in mind if I get an out-of-town visitor and want to impress them.

Since my previous video session, I got to reflect a little bit about a misstatement I made. It's not a huge deal, but I said I joined the Army in 1964, but the truth is I went in in 1963 and got out in 1968. I just wanted to set the record straight on that. When I get back to Starker Forest activities, one of the things that was very rewarding was improving our gates. For years we built them out of railroad iron, and of course they served us well. But the gates and the roads and the equipment got bigger and bigger and I heard about Georgia Pacific building what I call a unigate. It's a structure made all in one piece that's buried in the road. But they were making them out of heavy railroad iron, and Radke put me onto a guy, I think he was over at Jefferson. Went over there and had a look at these things and they were gosh awful heavy. I had Joe Lamberty over there, and he looked them over and on the way home Joe said, you know, it wouldn't cost you anymore to build these out of tube steel. He said, used metal sells for X a pound. He said that iron weighs 3 times what steel does, and it makes the price the same. So, we were all, I was overjoyed to try Joe's ideas. So, he built the first stereotype, and I can honestly say that I wanted to correct anything about it. You have to envision when you install these gates, you dig a big I shape in the road crossways. The stabilizers of the gate go down into holes and the bottom superstructure of the gate goes down in there. The result was that the gates are a lot harder for vandals to do anything to. We've even had them run into and they still open and shut, which is an amazing thing. But I'd have to give Joe Lamberty the credit for a lot of that. Then after Joe finally got out of doing those things, Rick Robinson started building them. One of the additional, many, many hats you wear at Starker Forest is keeping the roads open, in particular after the winter and spring storms. I played a large role in that, but certainly not a singular role. No one really could keep up with all the road opening after winter storms. We cooperated and worked together on getting those roads open. Occasionally, we used contractors to open a road that was just beyond what you could do with a chainsaw, but an important time of the year, because frequently the tree planters and the spray helicopter and people like that needed to get to certain areas. We did everything we could to get those roads open for them. Now, the Starker summer crew is a little bit of a misnomer, because occasionally we had kids that worked part-time year round. I played an important role for years in running that summer crew. Eventually, Cam Muir inherited the job and he does a great job of it. Fred Pfund handles the inventory crew.

These kids come in, they're smart as whips. They're usually forestry students, but they, in many, many cases, they're not skookum yet. It's been a real challenge to teach them to drive safely and to operate equipment. I say the power saws probably the most exciting thing for them to run and the most potential hazard, although if you look at our safety record, you'd find that people sharpening machetes suffered the most injuries on the job. You'd put the thing up on a vice and sharpen it with a file and, by golly, if you slip you really slash yourself open. But we always did the best we could for safety and we, well, I won't say we always did. When I first started, we weren't wearing protective gear or anything. We started wearing the chaps and the ear protection and eye protection, and those are all good things, especially if you looked at some of the chaps after just a week of use, you realize that the saw had hit it frequently. Starkers donate Christmas trees to many various institutions and all the way from occasionally doing the State Capital tree up in Salem to the most frequently done tree is the Benton County courthouse tree. I have a lot of experience with them, because I put in at least 20 years of supplying that tree. That got to be a pretty smooth project. The one for the state capital building was a really interesting show. It was a big tree, but it had limits because it had to go through doors and down the hallways and they would bring honor prisoners to carry the tree. Once you got it there on your trailer, your job was mostly to walk along behind and just admire how they did it. Then they used a block and tackle to stand the thing up. I think the prisoners were plenty glad to have something to do other than sit in their cells. We were always really proud of all the tree we gave. We've done churches. We've done schools. We've helped out a lot of folks getting a nice Christmas tree, and have to give credit to Fred and Rick and Cam, because they've been deliberately planning noble firs for a great number of years on our units so that we got likely candidates for Christmas trees. It's amazing when you think about all the multiple little projects that you do, but the company picnic and in some cases other events that the company took part in were ones that I had a great role in.

Probably the most fun of all was going to the company picnic at Thompson Lake, just the most beautiful place. It was a lot of fun. I think when we first started, we were doing potluck, and then we got to using a caterer and a barbeque chef. Eventually we narrowed it down to potluck plus a barbeque chef. There were a lot of reasons for that, but you had far fewer leftovers to deal with than when you had a caterer. Back when Betty was alive, she would occasionally engage me in helping her and we would run a special little tour for the company. I remember we had a day where we all went out to the early vineyards. We took sack lunches. We did a little wine tour. Another time we went up to, oh, gosh, I've forgotten the name of it. It's up north of here. It's got an airport. We drove up there and had supper and we had a Corvallis bus driver handling it. When we got ready to leave that evening, it was late and dark. The headlights on the bus wouldn't work. Just by pure coincidence on one of our firetrucks I'd had exactly the same problem and I knew precisely where to dig to fix the headlights, and it was a happy ending to what could have been a real tragedy.

One of the things I took on over the past, actually many years, in 1997 I got my grandpa's pickup from my dad. It was a '41 Dodge. It had been sitting in his shed for years and years. Dad didn't have any interest in working on it. He spent a career fixing cars and I think he didn't really want to do any more of that. But, I brought it out here in 1998 and just gradually began tinkering with it, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I needed some professional help. So, I took it to a hotrod shop over at Tangent, and proceeded to turn the thing into a stock-looking but modernized pickup. It's got a V8 motor and automatic transmission and air conditioning. It's a lot of fun to drive. I know my grandpa and my dad would approve if they were alive, because they liked things like that. Grandpa in particular was a speed demon. He used to thrill us kids. We were too young to be scared when he would drive fast. At any rate, that pickup is still in a state of flux. I've got it to where it's painted. It looks good. It runs good, but it needs still some just little things on the inside to fix it completely up. One of the things that I stated off getting involved in trapping at Starker Forest, because I was doing road maintenance and looking out for coverts. The beavers are a huge enemy of culverts and roads. Of course, I love them dearly but they can really raise cane with your facilities and we eventually discovered that they were also killing not just hundreds but even thousands of trees by peeling them. They occasionally cut them up into pieces and use them, but a lot of times they just peeled them.

My first experience working with trappers was with Woody Holderman. He was retired from fish and game and he had been responsible for putting beaver out in this area, and he always told me within 2 years they had him busy catching them, because it was such a huge success. They are a rodent and they do what rodents do and reproduce. But Woody was a wonderful fella and a great trapper. He really got me one time, though. I didn't know him well, yet. I didn't know anything about his sense of humor. I had been out to an area that he had been trapping, just checking on it. He saw me the next day and he said, say, were you out there, Paul? I said, well, yeah. I was. He said, well, he said, I saw the tracks and the spore. He said there was kind of a small fella, about 140, 150 pounds. He said, he urinated in the road. He said, was that you? I said, oh, my gosh. This guy knows everything. He wasn't one to usually joke like that, but he had quite a time with me. When Woody was cutting back in his trapping, we started to use a professional trapper, Bob Gillman and his various people. We had realized what a horrible problem we were having with our young conifers getting killed. An entire side stream of young trees were disappearing and turning into brush. So, Gillman started doing that and Mark Gorley got involved. Mark and I coordinated for years on that. The final trapper that we used in recent years is Ron Aymand from Eddyville. Ron, he's just an amateur trapper. He takes a small area, and every year he goes out and gets a few for us. But, we have had far fewer visits to plug coverts ever since we started getting after this in serious fashion. With today's concerns about erosion and dirt getting into streams, it's a darn good thing that we're catching these beavers before they can have make an entire road disappear and a stream muddy up.

One of the really interesting and rewarding things that I did, Starkers had had a many-years problem with dirt bikers in particular going up to the railroad grade and just tearing the heck out of everything. Gary Blanchard came to me and said, we got to something about and essentially challenged me to make contact with these people and see if we could come up with, through a combination of the carrot and the stick, get these guys to clean up their act a little bit. I had a wonderful time over the years working with Buzz and Larry and Tim, and an old guy Wayne Allen who was called "Dirty," and not because he was personally dirty but because of his dirt biking. He rode dirt bikes way into his 70s, which is pretty astounding when you think about it. But of all the public groups I've worked with, there's really nothing more rewarding than working with the Flat Mountain Riders. They took this all various serious, and through talking to me and being out there and seeing the woods, they became fans of forestry. It just made the whole thing a very rewarding experience. That, then, led to working with the Mudslinger Group, headed up by Mike Ripley. Mike is one of these dynamic guys that is just, he's busy, busy, busy and he's always working hard, and he wanted an area for a mountain bike event. I wanted to keep the mountain bikes and the dirt bikes separate. So, I took Mike to Tum Tum Tree Farm. They used a combination of rock roads, dirty roads, skid roads, and the occasional trail to build a big course for two yearly events, the prime one being the Mudslinger. These guys just astound you with the way they'll ride. Mike is one of these people that never seems to run out of energy. I think he's actually given up his day job and is coordinating mountain bike events all over the northwest now. But, he's a great guy. One of my all-time favorite things was working with the police officers that patrol the forest, the forest deputies and the game officers. Gary Blanchard had had that responsibility, and when Gary was cutting back to half-time, that was, we were actually asked is there one of Gary's jobs that you'd like to take? I said, I want to work with the cops. That led me to lots of exciting times and some of the best friends a guy could ever have.

I have to mention Jeff Wilcox in particular. That's actually the late Jeff Wilcox. Jeff was suffering from cancer, but he never gave up. He and I became very close, partly because of our common experience with cancer. I and these other officers had some fairly major successes in tracking down people growing marijuana on Starker's land. Of course, there were a lot of other things going on, miscellaneous vandalism. It's a shame, but people you had beer and a couple of goofballs, and they'll cause trouble to no end. But these deputies and game officers have done a bang-up job of getting these people in court, and they also got the judges to where they take to where they take this sort of thing serious these days. But, it's a needed activity and it's very rewarding to work for these people and get to know them. Turns you into a better citizen, too. You think, by golly, I couldn't think about breaking the law when I know all these cops.

One of the multitude of things that I got involved in was rock quarries. This related from everything from just routine, day-to-day coordination with the people that were running Starker's quarries, talking about the quality of the rock, the size of the rock, how many thousands yards we needed of a certain size for the coming winter and things of that nature, but I also put in a few episodes working with the people who shoot the quarries. That was all very interesting, too. You would set out with the goal, you were going to make 10,000 or 20,000 yards of rock. You would tell these people: I need a certain amount of dry run, I need a certain amount of 3 inch and a certain amount of an inch and a half. They would make it happen. It's another bunch of really fascinating people to work with. Probably what got me really started was working with Joe Lamberty when he ran our rock quarry. I just evolved from that to dealing with other quarry operators. One of the things that's very important to a timber company is communication, and so as another little side job I became the coordinator with the radio companies and cellphone companies and we got, of course, the radios were in place before I started at Starker Forest, but I worked with the people at the radio company upgrading our facilities upgrading our radios, installing radios in pickups, taking radios out of old pickups. As cellphones came along, I was in on the initial purchase of cellphones. It eventually evolved to being Steve Wyatt's job. It was a fascinating sort of thing, learning about cellphones and learning about where the antennas are placed. We were fortunate enough to own a few peaks that they wanted antennas on, and so I dealt with these people in placing antennas on us, and one of the big eye-openers about the whole thing is that, let's say you've got 2 ridges. One's 1,300 feet and one's 1,700 feet. The thing you, well, the lay person assumes, of course, they want to be at the highest peak. As it would turn out, that wasn't always the case. They needed to shoot in a certain area with their signal, but they also had licenses. The terms of the license would determine where they were sitting, because they couldn't go to Philomath and transmit all the way to Salem, for example. They needed to cover Philomath and Blodgett and Corvallis and Monroe, but not go to Salem and interfere with somebody else. It was a big learning experience. I've told a number of people that I wish I owned every ridge in Benton County.

I was rewarded, and pleasantly surprised, by just a great shindig of a going away party. They held it at the Scout Lodge in Philomath. I honestly haven't taken head count to know how many people came, but it seemed like an awful lot to me. Starkers put on a heck of a spread. There was good food. Well, in fact, one of the highlights is that there were two cakes, and one was a beaver cake and one was a duck cake. I enjoyed that immensely. But colleagues and Starkers did an awful lot to make that a success. The people that were invited were, of course, colleagues and then we had business contacts and we had contractors and had people that are just friends. It was just a wonderful mix of people and a mix of old and young, for that matter. We had kids, I think ranging from about a year and a half up to 20-ish or something like that. That was a fun, fun event. Well, I was really touched by the whole thing. The Scout Lodge is such a beautiful facility and it was a nice place to have that event. One of the things that Starker did to, of course, they consulted with me and, in fact, it was Ann who consulted with me about who to invite and I was able to go down the list of people that I worked with and people that I had various affiliations with and some that were just plain friends. All those folks got invited. Of course, some couldn't come. We even had a few surprise attendees. That was just fine, too.

Probably the highlight, though, of the whole thing for me was that my entire large family of siblings was there. Well, it's just not often that we all get together at once, and it was a great deal. I think I'll just talk about them a little bit in order of birth, and, of course, they came with my nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews. I won't get into every one of them, but I'll mention the siblings and their spouses, and this is in order of birth. My brother Neil and his wife Jill came down. We see a fair amount of them, and they live in Sandy. Neil's also retired now and Jill is still slaving away. Then my brother, Eric, and his wife Michelle came down from Portland. They both actually work for the Oregonian. They brought along a couple kids. Of course, it was just wonderful seeing the whole bunch. Then my sister, Sheila and her husband Brent came and they brought along their little 3-year-old daughter that they adopted and it's always nice seeing the young people as they grow up and having them at events like this. Then my brother, Dennis, came down. He came with his boy, Sam. He lives in the Portland area. Then my brother, Bob, and his wife Ramona came down from Snohomish, Washington. It was a real treat to have them come so far for an event like this, and finally my baby sister, Mary Ann came. Her husband had duty that week at work and was unable to show up, but I'm sure he'd have been there if he could. My daughter, Laura, came down with my beautiful granddaughters, Taylor and Bren. Laura's husband Nathan was busy with harvest at home and when harvest is going on there's just no free time at all. I don't remember for sure if he was in blue grass or wheat at the time, but it was one or the other. Then my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Liz and Walt from northeast Oregon, they came down, brought along a grandson and that was just another great time to have them down. We see quite a bit of them, actually, and frequently stay with them when we're in eastern Oregon. My son, John, and his wife Heather and their boys live in Idaho, and it was just too much to come on a 2-day weekend. They, at a minimum, need a 3-day weekend to get down, and ideally, a 4-day weekend. I know that their hearts were with us, and we love them and miss them. The person I absolutely can't leave out, though, is my wife Genie, who's not only the center of my life but over the years she became a part of the greater Starker family as well.

It all got going years ago when the kids were taking swimming lessons at the Starker pool, which is unfortunately long gone, but that's another story. But eventually many of the women at Starker got involved in what they call crafty investors. Literally it is an investment club and they've become good friends and they have a lot of fun together, but I think without Genie I just wouldn't be who I am. That was a special thing and it was, I just can't even put it in words. I want to once again thank the Starkers and all my colleagues and I remember the event fondly. I was touched at the time and I remain so. One of the things that is worth noting when you've been at Starker like that, you aren't just exclude from future events, and you're included in everything: baseball games and Christmas parties, company picnics. It's a very wonderful family sort of group. I thank everyone very much.

MARC VOMOCIL: My name is Marc Vomocil. I'm a forester at Starker Forest. I've been a good friend and coworker of Paul's for 38 years. Paul and I lived together when he first started working here. We lived a couple years together. Paul was the best cook that I've ever roomed with, sorry Sally. I was the best bottle-washer he'd ever roomed with, sorry Genie. We lived together in an apartment in Philomath and in a house that I purchased in the mid '70s. A couple funny stories about when Paul and I lived together. He would often answer the phone. Paul's the best jokester and voice imitator I know. Paul would answer the phone with a Mexican and Chinese accent and pretend that he was the proprietor of a restaurant or a Chinese laundry, and it would really confuse the people who were calling us. We did this before caller ID. So, Paul had no idea who was calling. He would lead them on for just a few seconds before he told them who he really was. Another funny story that happened when we lived together was a girl that I dated casually in college and her roommate came over one time for dinner. Paul and I thought we were having girls over for a double date. Unbeknownst to us, they were coming to us to sell us Amway and hook us up with the program also. Paul never forgave me, I think, but I didn't know that's what they had in mind. I bought a few products and we sent them on their way. We never signed up to do that. I'm going to miss having Paul here at Starker. He has a wonderful personality. He was fun to be with. I also really enjoyed his door of life, which was his office door covered with pictures of his grandkids.

DICK PAUL: Hey Paul. It's Dick Paul. You worked at Starker Forest about as long as I have, and that's been a good thing for all of us. One of the things I've really appreciated is, coming to work here has been a pleasure because we know the people. We can depend on the people and all these people have been great for all of us individually in our careers but also great for the company. One of the things I really appreciated about you is you've done a great job here. You've kept our roads in great shape. You contributed greatly to our success. You kept our vehicles in great shape. I think your moving in across the hall some 38 years ago has been a good deal. We gained a friend, but we also gained a good colleague. Appreciate your coming here and I think it's time to go spoil the grandkids.

MARK GOURLEY: I'm Mark Gourley. I probably spent more time with Paul over the years, many, many hours, than I have with any of my other family members, just the way the years and the days kind of added up. Paul, I've always enjoyed all of his jokes. His inflection in tone and sense of humor is probably the best that I've ever been around, ever. I think he might have been a good, damn good standup comic. He's pretty amazing. One trip that I remember the most, Paul and I and Bo took an old beater truck, drove it clear over to his in-law's place on the other side of La Grande...Summerville? We loaded hay out of the field and fished that afternoon and the next day we got up and headed home and I remember we were fighting a headwind the whole way and that truck I think was a 1930s vintage type of truck. We did a whopping 35 miles an hour most of the way through the gorge, and eventually got home. We always had fun, had a good time. A lot of joke-telling, mostly Paul was telling jokes and I was doing the listening. Really over the years have enjoyed working with Paul a lot. We slept a lot of hours in the pickup together out in the brush waiting for the weather to change or take naps in between mopping up during fires. Paul was always good at driving the pumper truck up and down the hills and getting water there when we needed it. We burned up a lot of hose together putting the hose leads in the wrong spots. Paul was always an expert. To this day, I know he still is great at getting pumps to work when no one else can. He was really good about fixing all the roads that needed fixing and all the heliports fixing so I can get the batch trucks and helicopters where I needed to. Just tell Paul, and the next thing I know, it's done. I've always enjoyed that. I hope him and Genie have a great, great retirement. I hope he can grow lots of great veggies in his garden and lots of big fish in his bond.

JENNIFER BEATHE: I'm Jennifer Beathe. I've worked with Paul at Starker Forest since 1997 or 1998. There's many things that I'm going to miss about working with Paul. First of all, he's an expert in road maintenance and automotive matters, so I've asked him for a lot of advice over the years. I'm going to miss being able to ask somebody just down the hall for some advice. I'm going to miss his usually great jokes. Sometimes the best ones are about Catholics and nuns. We share that in common in knowing some Catholics and knowing some nuns. I'm going to miss having a friendly ear. Every time I would have a conversation with Paul, he's always listening to you like he is really interested in what you're saying and is a great conversationalist. Good storyteller and I appreciate Paul's friendship over the years. The only thing I won't miss is having to share my office with a Duck fan.

CAROL STEVIE: I'm Carol Stevie. I've worked with Paul for almost 23 years and been great friends during that time. At work I want to say Paul was one of those great guys. We had a calendar that people checked in and checked out each day. He was the top one, always made sure that we knew where he was. He was easy to train. Another thing I loved seeing your pictures of your children and your grandchildren. It was always kind of cool that after you'd been up to visit them to check your door to see what new pictures that you had on it of the kids. That was great. I loved that. Kenny and I both have loved doing things with you and Genie and loved our relationship we've had. There's just kind of one thing, Paul. I mentioned something about one day about going antiquing and you said, oh, I don't like that. But we have to train you, maybe take you to your favorite restaurant or something so that you'll go antique shopping. It's really pretty fun. You might like it. But anyway, we wish you the very best in your retirement and we love you.

CAMERON MUIR: I'm Cameron Muir and I've worked for Starker Forest for 25 years, 27 years. I met Paul probably his first month or so, maybe second month of working when he first started with Starker Forest. He came out and helped us brush some roads down towards Glenbrook, and he told us that he was there to spy on us. We took that for the truth, and performed very well that day. He got an earful from my wife, and it was in sailor language. He got an earful from everybody else that day as well. That was pretty fun. I worked with Paul on roads off and on through the whole, my whole career at Starker. Plus he was a tree planting inspector and followed us around during a spell of tree planting when I was a contractor for Starker. He also got an earful then.That's probably why he was glad to graduate out of tree planting inspection. He was pretty much instrumental in me getting my job here, and I really appreciate that and him bringing me in when we were in a real deep recession and there was really no work to be had anywhere. He has been pretty instructive teaching me things about roads and building maintenance and plantation maintenance and that kind of stuff since I've started working here and we've had a pretty good relationship working with each other through the years. I'm really appreciative of that relationship.

GARY SPRINGER: I'm Gary Springer. I've known Paul about 11 years since I came to work at Starker. One of the things that struck me about Paul right off the bat was his quick sense, and ready sense of humor and wit. He just had a comeback for everything. He's a really interesting, funny guy. Another thing that I learned early on about Paul was that he really took his job very seriously and if he said he was going to get something done, you just knew it was going to get done. He was very reliable that way. He's been a great guy to work with over the years. He's retired now, and I just wish him the very best.

ANN NELSON: I'm Ann Nelson. I've known Paul for many years. He has been a great coworker for the last 4 years. He has taught me a lot. His loyalty, his love for his family, his friends, his coworkers has just really made a lot of difference in my life. I wish you all the best, Paul.

GARY BLANCHARD: I'm Gary Blanchard. Paul and I've been friends for a long time. We were both born in the Columbia Gorge. He was born in The Dallas. I was born in Hood River. We grew up in Mosier. There are a few years' difference. I'm a little bit older than Paul, but I knew his family well. Some of Paul's characteristics, I think, can be traced back to his parents. He has a great sense of humor, quick wit. His dad was just like that. His compassion, I think, came from his mother. His mother was real sweetheart, one of the nicest people I've ever known. Paul is first in line to go visit a sick friend at the hospital or lend a helping hand when somebody needs it. Paul is a people person. I think that's his real strength. That's apparent. When you hear him talk about the contractors and the coworkers and the people that he is around, he expresses appreciation all the time for what he learned from them, how much they taught him. Well, I think that's just Paul. We're going to miss that at Starker Forest. So, we wish him the best in retirement and know that he and Genie are going to enjoy those grand kids.

BARTE STARKER: I'm Barte Starker. I've been in this place for my whole life, and Paul's been here most of that time, too. It's a real pleasure to have had him here. He's the life of the party in many cases. He's the party organizer in all cases, and that's a real treat for us to have him keep the mood light and the troops happy and have all the side chores that are just are necessary to do get done without a whimper of regret or anything. Paul just gets things done and is happy to do it and we all enjoy the things he gets organized and it's a pleasure to be around him and have him work for us keep the roads open and the neighbors happy, and it's just a real friendly atmosphere that Paul just exudes everywhere he is, so really happy to have him here. Proud to have him here. Thank you.