Marvin Rowley Oral History Interview, February 2009

MARVIN ROWLEY: Okay, when we moved to this place in Tualatin, there weren't any modern conveniences. We didn't have electricity in 1929. We got electricity in 1936. From 1929 to 1936, we lit the rooms with kerosene lamps. I'm Marvin Rowley. I've been in the forestry business all my life, I guess. I was born in Portland, Oregon in 1924. My folks lived on 81st Avenue in southeast Portland near Lents. Now I wasn't born at home. You ask dad, I wasn't born in the hospital. I think they called it a maternity house. The doctor my mother was going to maintained this place. When his patients were ready to deliver, they went to the maternity house. It was just a couple miles from home. I think that's where our first, my sister was born there and myself-two sisters and two brothers, were born there when we lived in Portland. We left Portland just before I was 5 years old. Moved to southeast of Tualatin, Oregon, in a community that was 5 acre tracks of a logged area. I was raised running ragged through the bushes [laughs]. I had eventually 3 brothers and 3 sisters. I was next to the oldest. I went to the Tualatin Grade School and Sherwood High School. Tualatin Grade School is 2 miles. In those days the place we moved to in Norwood was rather undeveloped. I can remember as a 5-year-old moving on this property. I can remember laying on a blanket on the floor of this house we were building and watched them put the roof over. They built the house as we moved into it. My dad worked on fixing it and I did, even after I went to college, improving it until it was fairly livable. As I said, we walked to school. The roads in the community were basically gravel and not very much of that. So, walking was, most people walked in those days, or, I don't remember riding horses there, either. I graduated from Tualatin Grade School. Then Sherwood High School, I was a senior in high school when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When I graduated from high school, I wanted to go into the Air Force but my mom talked me into waiting until I was 18. I wasn't 18 until October. Instead of going to the Air Force, I took a job milking cows at the Multnomah County Poor Farm near Troutdale, which I worked a month there and then I quit and went to work at the Oregon shipyard working on a bull gang. We was unloading box cars and trucks and things for the Liberty Ship that Kaiser was building, and I worked there until my 18th birthday. Then I quit my job, went and took a week's vacation and I signed up for the Navy Air Force. They closed their enlistments in the Army Air Force and I signed up for the Navy Air Force.

Now, we'll go back to growing up in the Tualatin community. Let's say we'll walk two miles to school. It was a dirt, gravel road. The area we lived in, like I said Norwood Community. Our 5 acre track my folks bought was on the end of the road. It was next to a farm, which was on the area toward us was mainly undeveloped land, trees, and brush, vine maple, hazelnuts, a lot of blackberries, and we, like I said, that was my playground. I was raised in the woods. The 5 acre track that we had Dad spent his time clearing stumps off of it and they were still there, some of them, when I was in high school. I'd come home from high school and help clear land. We had a hand stump puller that belonged to an uncle that we used for a few years. I learned to use dynamite through the stumps when I was about 12 years old. It was my dad that'd buy it and we'd use it very carefully. The education I got for living was basically from the woods that we lived next to. The town people called the area we lived in "the sticks." I was a kid from the sticks to the kids we were going to school with. So, the way we dressed, I saw a picture of one of my classmates, a Japanese kid, a female, Okazaki. Had this 2nd grade picture, and I don't remember seeing any, but every boy in the class had big overalls on. It was just what we wore. In the summertime I wore a pair of big overalls. That was it. I didn't wear shoes or a shirt, unless it was cold and that wasn't very often. It's interesting. I think I graduated to regular overalls by the time we started high school.

In the situation, one of the things I can remember about living there, we moved there before the Depression and then the Depression come on and influenced what a lot of people did. If an airplane flew over, we run outside and watched it or we'd hear it coming and it was something. There weren't very many of them around. They flew a quarter down the Willamette Valley, I think, in those days. The airplanes took a special way to go across the mountains. So, this is the kind of background, the growing up period. Nowadays I belong to the Tualatin Historical Society. Looking back at what was going on, and it's really interesting. They had a memorial, or a Tualatin Grade School meeting of all the graduates. They were closing the school, the old school. I went to this and I said, this isn't the old school [laughs]. The old school that I went to closed the year after I graduated from grade school, and so this one is a new school has been in existence long enough so they wore out another building.

Okay, when we moved to this place in Tualatin, there weren't any of our modern conveniences. We didn't have electricity in 1929. We got electricity in 1936. From 1929 to 1936, we lit the rooms with kerosene lamps and cooked on a wood stove. We didn't have any plumbing, the outhouse. We didn't have any water. We carried the water from the creek. We didn't get water pumped to the house until 1936 when we got electricity. They changed things quite a bit. Oh, no telephones. We didn't have any communication other than mail and our mailbox, the Route 1 Sherwood, was about a quarter of a mile from the house. You had to walk a considerable distance to get the mail. Most things were, if you didn't go to Portland once in a while, they'd bought a lot of things from Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck catalogues. The radio, we didn't have a radio. I think we got our first radio about 1936. It'd come by an unusual circumstance. One of the neighbors got thrown in jail. One of his neighbor had pass at his wife and he caught up with him in the middle of Tualatin and he kind of wiped the streets up with him and got thrown in jail for 90 days. While he was in jail, we got to use his radio. He was a good friend [laughs]. So, we gradually got communication. We didn't have a telephone when I went in the Army in 1943, but they had one before I come home. So, you got a telephone in the area in the 1940s. Automobiles-my dad had a Model T Ford pickup. That was convenience for all of us. I think he kept that, he had a Model T until about 1938. I can remember when he traded it for a V8 pickup. We had visited a relative out near St. Paul down west of Woodburn. In those days you had a market road, they called them. It was paved on one side and gravel on the other side. We were going down this paved section and it was straight for a mile. Dad stomped down on the gas and had the thing up to about 60 miles an hour and he says, feel that! He says, 80 horsepower! 80 horsepower! The old Model T had about, I think had 35 or 40 horsepower. I don't remember them owning a regular sedan automobile until sometime in the '40s, late '40s.

My father was born in Vancouver, Washington. His father was born in Illinois. The next behind that was born in upstate New York. So, we migrated across the country in a 100-year time. Dad was a printer most of his life. He worked for printing companies in Portland, for Dunham Printing Company, Binford and Mort Publishing Company, and East Side Post. Except he took leave from printing during the first and second Word War and worked in the shipyard. But he was over age. He was too young to go in World War I and too old to go in World War II. He was an excellent machinist when it came to using equipment. One of the things I mentioned East Side Post. Right after the Second World War or right at the end of it, '46, I think, he was working in the shipyard and Jack Steel had started this company the East Side Post in northwest Portland and advertising, a weekly advertising paper. He bought this press to print his paper on, and Mr. Hoover was a man that moved his heavy equipment and tore it apart and put it together again. They didn't move it in one piece. When he was putting it together he asked Jack, who's going to run this for you? Jack said, I'm going to run it. Mr. Hoover said, when you find out you can't do it, see if you can get a hold of Jeff Rowley and see if he'll come and help you set it up. Well, that's what happened. He got a hold of my dad. Dad went to work for him and he worked for a couple, three years. I think the paper probably went defunct. So, Dad was, the Rowley Family was in the colonies as early as they have records. There's a town in Massachusetts called Rowley. Evidently it was named after a town in England that was called Rowley, but they did come across with a lot of mixing on the way. My mother was born in Minnesota to a Swedish girl and a Austrian husband. My grandfather Gangle, my mother's maiden name, was born in Austria and came to the United States when he was a young man. My grandmother was born a year after her mother came from Sweden and lived in Minnesota. As near as I can tell they were probably all working in the woods and farming. She came to Oregon about 1908 with her family, her mother and father and her sisters, and lived in the Woodland, Washington area and Vancouver north of Washougal. She was in Hood River for a while. They moved around a lot. Her dad cut firewood or worked filing saws and I think he cut timber some. Then they eventually moved to Portland. That's where my father and mother met. That's another unusual thing. My dad finally lived in the corner house about 3 blocks from downtown Lents, which is 92nd and Foster Road. The next house to it was the Adams's house. The next house was the Gangles, where my grandmother moved. My grandfather died before I was born, my dad's father, was born. The next door neighbor, the Adams Family, his wife died. So, Mr. Adams and my grandmother married. They both had 10 kids. So, had a lot of relatives.

Then my mother, one of her best friends was my dad's sister. She said she went over to see the sister, Vee, and my dad answered when they knocked at the door my dad opened the door and that's the first time she met him. They kind of hit it off and they married. That was in 1921. The family background had a lot of background of immigration into the United States and then native, too. My great grandmother on my father's side was named Nezpir from Illinois. We figured she was French Indian, because I've got a grandson that's done some research in the family history and he says she wasn't Nezpir, she was Nez Perce, which would have made her northwest Indian. This was 1870 at the time, so that was a pretty early time. The county, this was Multnomah County, ran a poor farm. They had a large building, several hundred people there, and a fairly large farm. They raised a lot of their own supplies, food that they ate and, of course, when we worked there I went to work for $65 a month and room and board and work clothes. We wore white uniforms, white coveralls when we were working in the barn. We ate in a family style in the main mess hall. I say I know they ate most of their own produce because when something was ripe that's what we were eating. They had about 1 acre of asparagus between the building and the highway, and when asparagus was ripe we had asparagus almost every meal but breakfast, which I liked, so I didn't have a problem. My wife and I went and stayed in this poor farm had been converted to a bed and breakfast and a hotel, using the old system, for our 49th wedding anniversary. They give you a tour of the buildings and everything, and this person was taking us on the tour and here I had been there. I kept telling things that I could remember, and we came to a picture of the yard in front with the asparagus farm plantation, and I said they used to have asparagus down there. He said, oh. We went around the corner and there's another picture and it showed a picture of the asparagus. They started looking at me, well, yeah he knows what he's talking about. They had a painting with the cows, were Holstein cows, black and white. They had paintings of them on the wall. They had one painting on the wall that no matter where you were in the hallway as you looked at this it was looking at you. It didn't matter if you was looking from that way to the left or to the right, it was always looking at you. I was fascinated at that picture.

When I worked in the shipyard I started on a bull gang, and then I quit for a week and went hunting, come back and made application to the Naval Air Force and went to work at commercial iron works running an acetylene torch at the plate shop making little pieces out of big pieces. They were building PC subchasers there. It was really interesting work. I found I had a foreman that I was working under that was just really good at correcting and showing you how to do things. An example of what he did, I was there about 3 months and in late December my application to the Navy Air Force was cancelled. They weren't taking anymore enlistments than that. So, I signed up for the Army, but when I went to quit to go in the Army, the night before I left commercial iron works they sent me out on an outfitting dock, which was an outside place where they were building ocean going tugboats. They had a plate they bent for the bow of the thing and they had to have all the edges beveled for a weld. I looked at it and turned on my cutting torch and started doing it like I'd been doing it all my life. As the sparks were flying off, it was a big piece of metal about probably 10 or 12 feet long and 4 feet across beveled. As I looked at the sparks flying, I could see faces. I thought, what in the world is going on? I said, there are 4 or 5 faces up there. I thought am I going crazy or what? I turned my cutting torch off to look, and there I had a whole of men standing around watching me. The foreman out there on the outfitting dock had said, don't stop. Don't stop. I just got them here letting them watch you work so they can see how to do it. So, I'd picked up pretty good amount from this one lead man that was really good.

I volunteered for the Army when I went to get my papers and go from Beaverton to Portland to take a physical. I quit my job a week ahead of time, so I was ready to go. I got my papers to go to Portland. I looked at them and it said, voluntary induction into the United States Navy. I thought, gee, I didn't want to go into the regular Navy. I looked at all the other papers there and the only difference between mine and theirs was the front page. So, I just took the front page off of it and threw it out the window. When I got in, passed my physical, they said come back in 2 weeks and you'll catch a train to Fort Lewis. I said, for 2 weeks. I already had a week off. I don't need a week more time. They said, oh you want to go in now, go through that door. So, I went through that door and I think there were 6 or 8 of us that wanted to go in right away. You raised your hand and swore us in and we were on a train in an hour headed for Fort Lewis, Washington. That was February 22, 1943. In Fort Lewis they gave us a test. I think it's similar to the way they do it now. They give you all kinds of tests, mechanical aptitude tests. They give us a hearing tests for Dalton dashes for the radio test and then they take your test results and use them to assign you to where you're going to be assigned. I found in a couple days' time I was on a train heading for Camp Wood, Texas. I had one, George Osburn was another one that was in that room of 8. We were together, got to Camp Wood, Texas, and we thought we'd try to stay together. Well, the day after we got to Camp Wood's the last day I seen him. I never saw him again. I don't know where he got assigned.

I got assigned to the Danger Storm Battalion and auto mechanics. Our training was 8 weeks of basic and 5 weeks of auto mechanic mixed in together. One of the interesting things, I got the mumps 21 days after I hit camp. The incubation period for mumps is 21 days. So, they sent me to the mump ward, I figured, well, I had to catch the mumps from somebody in this room. Sure enough, right across from me was a Mexican kid. The day we'd come into Camp Hood, I had a slight fever from a tetanus shot, and I was upstairs in the barracks where the sun was shining through the window. It was cold outside, and I was backed up against this window trying to get some warmth and standing behind 4 kids were playing pinochle. The one I caught the mumps was the one right in front of me. One of the things I had in the service over the years was they kept moving me to different positions in a brand new bunch. I'd always be moving away from my friends and I got used to it after a while. We graduated, finished basic training, and was sent to Camp Hyder, Arizona, out in the desert to the 30th cavalry recon squadron mechanized, which was a mechanized cavalry, no horses. I was assigned to a pioneer demolition squad. That's the closest I came to mechanics right then. I spent the summer in a pioneer demolition squad, which was kind of like play to me. I'd used dynamite when I was a kid. It was nothing new. We had one of the first power saw I ever saw, a Disston 2-pistons and a 4-foot bar with a scratcher chain, we called it. It weighed 120 pounds. The only thing we ever used it for was to cut 2'x4's and to make blocks for loading tanks and trucks and stuff on flat cars. While we were in Camp Hyder I got a furlough home and about halfway through the furlough I got a telegram telling me come back to camp, we're moving. I had to go back early and where we moved to-Bend [laughs]. We moved to Bend, Oregon, and maneuvers with the infantry that was at Camp Adair, 2 divisions and we were tasked to wander the other different problems, learning the ins and outs of warfare. Soon after we started these, they moved me from Pioneer Demolition Squad to Scout Jeep. Most of the time, I was working as a scout. We had 8 problems, and I survived one of them. I think I was captured twice, and I was killed 5 times, I think. They had referees with each unit and when you made an advance somewhere and you met opposition, you fired blanks and you did whatever they decide you ought to be doing. The referee would call a halt and they'd go out with a white flag flying on their vehicle and they'd confer with the other umpire or referee and come back tell you what happened, so you won or you lost. It was interesting.

Then one of the things, the first time I got captured, I was talking with the soldiers around this tent and I didn't think I'd said anything unusual but pretty soon they put me in the truck and sent me back to the intelligence officer. I got in the tent and they said what's your name? I told them my name is Marvin L. Rowley. My rank is private, and my serial number is 39327496. That's all I was supposed to say. He said, now you're in the 30th Calvary Recon Squadron. I'd never heard of them. That was a mistake. Pretty soon they sent me back to the prison camp, and they knew where I was from. The next time I was captured, we were on the defense and they'd sent our scout team up along the rim rock to watch this road, vehicles going by and tell what was going by on the thing, and 2 of us were up on the rim rock and the Jeep was down below. This kid I was with said I'll go up closer if you go back and bring the Jeep up underneath. Here, take my overcoat. It's getting warm. So, I had his overcoat and a couple apples in it. When I went back and down, and my Jeep's still sitting there but I saw another one going out across the sagebrush and the one I see down here was the enemy. So, I was captured. I walked right to it. I thought it was mine. They took me to their intelligence officer, and this was the infantry group and they said, what's your name? I said a name, my rank, my serial number. I never said anymore, wouldn't move. He got all his men around, and he said, now what that guy is doing is what you're supposed to do if you get captured. So, I was learning right along. I was mad. They walked me, I don't know, we walked 8, 10, 12 miles during the day with the infantry and every time we'd sit down I'd be careful and sit down over a telephone line that we'd lay down on the ground. They'd come off the reels and they'd keep the telephone lines going. I'd sit down over one and I'd break it before they got ready to go. I took a Fowler plate out of my rifle and [makes grinding motion], and chewed away at it until it broke. I learned to be a soldier, I guess.

When we finished at Camp Wood-no, at Bend, we went to Camp White in Medford. They sent me to another motor school, changed me from a line company to headquarters company and I went to work as a mechanic in the shop. In February we moved to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, all the way across the country, from Fort Devens to Camp Upton, Long Island, New York, Riverhead, Long Island. What was interesting, at this time this was early 1944 and what I found out over the years is what we did, we replaced two infantry divisions that were guarding the east coast and they went to Normandy. Our squadron spread out all the way across from Maine to Virginia at different parts of it. The squadron had about 3,500 men in it, I think-3 line companies and a heavy weapons company. It wasn't that much, probably 800 men. The danger wasn't nearly as bad then but they did have some coverage in case something came on. Then we went from Riverhead, Long Island, to Framingham, Massachusetts. I was there a couple weeks and they sent me to Fort Riley. That's another motor school, 90-day motor school. While I was in Fort Riley, my company moved from Framingham to Camp Pickett, Virginia, to Fort Riley. We moved every 3 months, or 2 months. When I graduated from that motor school, they sent me back to headquarters company into the higher echelon shop and promoted me to Corporal T/5, which was the first thing. About a week later they had a sign on the door wanted volunteers for overseas. I was the second name on the list. The next day a Captain Prichard came up to, I was working on a Jeep transmission and had it tore apart, and he said, he just comes up and said, Rowley. I said, yeah. He said, you still want to go overseas? I looked up and it was the captain, and I said, yes sir! He says, okay. Says, you leave tomorrow. Said, if I could, I'd trade you rank for rank and orders for orders. He wanted out, too.

So, I went overseas, and replacement depot in the Philippines on Leyte. The cleric looked at all your records and made appointments, I guess. He looked at my records and said, no doubt where you're going. You're going to the first cavalry division. They need mechanics bad. The next day they called my name to get in the truck and down the beach and into a landing craft and out on, the ship come over the horizon and we go up a cargo net. The outfit was 41st infantry. I think, well, they must need mechanics, too. Well, the next day we unloaded them at San Jose, Mindoro. I got my assignment as B Company. I think B Company doesn't have mechanics. Sure enough, it was a line company and the Captain Gray called me in his tent the next day, and he said, I looked in your records. He said, you don't belong here but we need men. I said, well, I don't mind it here. He said, we'll get you out when we can. I said, I don't mind it here. Whenever. We went into combat in the southern Philippines and patrolling southern islands and different things until near the end of war. In July we came back to Zamboanga where we initially made the invasion. Instead of getting moved to mechanics place, I got promoted again [laughs]. They made me Buck Sergeant, which was just a little step up. Then we dropped the atomic bombs on the Japs and ended the war. We were assigned to go occupy Japan. The day we loaded on the ship I came down with hepatitis. We went by a canal they emptied the sick bay onto the hospital at Okinawa, and that was in September, and I was supposed to fly to Guam on the 8th day of October, 1945. You say, why can I remember that? Well, a typhoon hit October 8, 1945 and nobody flew anywhere. It took the tents down we were in. They moved us into a partially constructed Quonset hut. The winds were 150 miles an hour. A lot of men lost their lives in that in Butler Bay and the ships turned over. It was really a rough storm.

So, in the first part of November they put me on a hospital ship and sent me to San Francisco. Got into San Francisco around the 1st of December, I think, in Madigan General Hospital in San Francisco, and then put us on a train headed for Fort Lewis. It was Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. Madigan is in Fort Lewis. This was the first part of the middle of December. I got, after a little treatment there I got a 60-day convalescent furlough. Come home. Got married. Went back up to Fort Lewis when we couldn't find a place to rent, even, so we sent my wife back to her folks and I stayed in the hospital until I got out. Got out of the Army on, I think the 22nd of March, 24th of March, 1945, '46-1946. I was in 13 camps in 2 years and I think most of the times when I changed camps, sometimes we had the same group as before, like from Camp White to Riverhead, Long Island was all the same bunch. Other than that, when I'd go to another place I would have a different group and you'd get acquainted with a new bunch all over. What I found out in my time in the 41st Infantry, my position was First Scout. In an infantry company is divided into platoons, about 40 men in a platoon, then squads-10 to 12 men in a squad-and then in the squad there's a First Scout and then there's a Squad Leader and an Assistant Squad Leader, a Browning Automatic Rifle Man and a Bazooka Man. You advanced in the order I give from the First Scout went first and usually the Squad Leader come next, the Rifle Man and the Assistant Squad Leader toward the back. In case something happened, he'd move up and take over. So, I found what was interesting is the time I spent in the brush growing up prepared me for being the First Scout better than anything the Army ever did. One day when we moved out as a company and I was the lead man, didn't hit anything. One of the other parts of our company did kind of a side deal of deployment and the First Scout was killed on that one. Second day we sent and got daylight and the Lieutenant sent me and another kid up to guard a trail that we were going to go out on. There were 2 coconut trees, one on each side of the trail and a little grassy space that was maybe 10, 15 feet wide and about 50 feet long and then the bushes on one end. We sit there behind these trees and this kid smoked a cigarette. We'd peak out up there every once in a while. When they got ready to move out that day, the second squad moved out first and when the first scout, when they got to us we just walked down on the tail end and when they got behind them we stepped in the trail and move them back down and get our equipment. About the time we stepped in the trail a machine gun opened up down that trail. The First Scout had saw the machine gun and gave a [makes backward directed gesture] that and everybody fell out of the trail except Allen and I. We had our backs to them. Well, the ground sloped like that. We were just down the hill far enough so the shots went over our head. We'd sit there probably a half hour with a machine gunner if he'd had an itchy finger, he probably would have shot us, but he was waiting for more game.

So, that's just kind of an example. My nickname, the kids would come in after I was there, even then they were recruits, I was a seasoned veteran. I worked almost 3 years and 2 ½ years, and they called me bulldozer, because I could walk through the jungle about as fast as I walked across the lawn and they tried to knock it down to get through it. It was kind of interesting. This is a picture taken at Fort Riley, Kansas with the 30th Calvary Recon Squadron Headquarters Company. These were all mostly technicians, very few privates. I was one of the privates at the time the picture was taken. Its right here where the little blue line is, is me in the picture. I was almost in the rear rank. At this time they took the picture, they would pull KP, work in the kitchen for a week at a time and they just private, so there's just few privates and we were on duty in the kitchen about a third of our time. Well, right after this picture was taken I was promoted to technician, corporal rating. They decided that because they didn't have very many privates, the corporals were going to take KP, too, and they'd start with the newest one, which was me. I was on KP for almost 2 weeks in a row. The cook was a very good cook. I liked working with him. So, that was no problem. This is a picture of me in Army uniform, probably in 1944 in October 1944. I had it taken in San Francisco area when I was going through to go overseas. I had it sent to Mary, so I never saw it until I come home from the service in late 1945 or early 1946. Okay, this is a certificate I received for passing the auto mechanic course at Fort Riley, Kansas. It was a 3 month course and a comprehensive study of the mechanics of the vehicles that we were operating and how we would keep them up in shape, which in Headquarters Company, we did some minor repairs on the equipment. If it took more than a minor repair it went to Ordinance Company, higher up in the Army. This prepared us for doing most of the work that would be done in normal operation. I come home and got a convalescent furlough. Of course, if you had hepatitis, it's a liver disease. Basically in those days the best thing they could do was feed you sugar because sugar doesn't take any liver action to digest. By the time I got home in December I was pretty much over the hepatitis but I had other things, I had abscessed arms that were healing up.

Anyway, they give me the 60-day convalescence furlough, and Marian Parker, who just happened to be the sister of the man I went to work on the poor farm with, I'd come on this furlough and we'd always written to each other about once a month. I come home on a furlough in September 1944, and Marian's mother wanted me to come over to their house for dinner sometime. So, I was in Portland. Marian worked at the Beacon Moving and Storage. I went to the office and made a date to go to their house and eat, and I never left. I found a letter I wrote to her the day I got back to Fort Riley after the furlough, and it said I've had a lot of time to think on the train ride back here and what I want to do with my life, and the one thing I decide I want to do is spend the rest of my life with you. So, after that we wrote a letter almost every day, except when I was in combat. There were times when I didn't write for a week or two at a time. You didn't have writing materials or a way to send it if you could write it. That's what led up to getting married on the furlough when I was supposed to be sick [laughs]. We got married on January 20, 1946. Then when I got out of the Army we figured I was going to go to Oregon State and take forestry. There's another unusual-we couldn't find a place to live in Corvallis. We looked, I don't know how much time we spent looking, but we had money saved up. We bought a lot and built a house on it. Moved into it about the time we got a roof on it. The house is still there [laughs]. My wife kept track of every dime we spent on that thing, down to nickels and dimes we spent for nails and stuff like that. When we sold the house in 1950, or '51, we had $3,800 in it. I found an interesting item was $5 for a building permit. Well, first of all, going to Oregon State, like I said we got married in January. We started building the house in July of 1946 in Corvallis. It was always our idea that I'd go to school and Marian would get a job, a secretary somewhere, to help support us. Well, in July when we started building the house we found out she was pregnant. So, our first daughter was born in March of 1947 in Corvallis. Then another daughter was born in August 1948. So, we had 2 girls while I was going to college. Then when I graduated I went to work in Myrtle Creek for Umpqua Plywood. Our son was born in 1951, Allen. Then the last one, Ronda, our last daughter was born in 1958. Yeah, our first daughter was Linda. It's interesting she was born on her grandmother's birthday. She became a special one from her grandmother. Joan was born in 1948, and that brought a total, with Allen and Rhonda of being four.

Okay we're out here on McDonald Forest. It's a Forestry Club cabin. The forestry students had built a cabin in the 1920s here on this site and it burned down in January of 1949.

At the time, I had built a house in Corvallis. Because I had plenty of electives from the Army days, I took electives and some of my electives was architectural drawing and planning from all the university offered at the time. I was taking these courses when the cabin burned down and as a member of the Forestry Club, I got on a committee to look into building a new cabin. This one here we worked with the campus engineer on details what had to be and the cabin here is the result. We started building it in the fall of 1949 and had it mostly up by May of 1950, but the interior needed quite a little work. Because I had worked on the design and worked with the campus engineer on it, I got a job as being the construction foreman. So, that's where I spent my spare time during the 1949-1950 school year. You see the logs all come from the forest. They had a washer plus sawmill on Oak Creek at the time. They sawed the logs on 3 sides and set them vertical instead of horizontal. There's a bracing on the inside and tresses were designed by one of our forestry students in forest products. We brought a crane out here from the campus and one of our forest engineers run the crane that put the tresses up. It made most of the students worked on this cabin in one way or another during that time. The fence we see around this here, the rail fence, is made out of black locus that blew down during the Columbus Day storm on this hill just up above, and when we were tearing the old fence that had rotted out and we put this in about 1975, I suppose. It's still holding together today. They used to have a spring thaw, the forestry students would spend a Saturday morning doing repairs and maintenance work on the school forest and then at noontime they had a feed here they called "been hole beans" where they would dig a trench, build a fire in it, get a good bit of coals, and then put buckets of beans in it and cover it up and let it cook for a day or two and would dig them out during that spring thaw and that was our lunch. When I come here in 1946 to take forestry, I had originally signed up in forest management. But during the first term in the forestry F 111 class, I found that this forest management students were talking about working for the government as rangers and they were saying, yes sir, no sir, wearing a uniform and a badge. I thought, I had enough of that in the Army. I investigated forest engineering, and found that most of those men that graduated forest engineering worked in a different situation and that's when I switched to forest engineering.

When I graduated from college, I went to work in southern Oregon at Myrtle Creek for a company mostly known as Umpqua Plywood. I worked 4 years there in various situations. Then when the job went sour. I was having problems with it. I don't think they were having problems with me, but I was looking for another job. My brother-in-law, Dick Parker, the one I went to work with, after I graduated from high school, worked on that Multnomah County Poor Farm wanted me to go logging with him. He bought 200 acres in Bellfountain area south of Corvallis, and I finally decided that, yeah, I could do that. I could go to work with him and if it didn't work out I could always go look for another job. So, we started logging and we were specializing in stand fitting and improvement. Not very many people were doing it at the time, and in 1956 we took a couple of jobs with the university and they liked what we were doing. We liked working with them and it ended up in working a contract with them. Every 2 years we would renew the contract. Worked the forest management in the forest as they needed. We're kind of on the south end of McDonald Forest. It's probably northwest of the hospital in Corvallis about 2 or 3 miles. This area down below us was the Jackson Place. This part of the land was bought from Jackson and in 1946, fall of 1946, I was in classes down here where we were studying and learning to pace and run a compass line. This was a young forest where the professor could stand down there and point up here at the road and tell us to pace up there to milepost 7. You can see that white post up there, pace up there and back and see how far it is. So, this is about 60 to 70 years old. They've done some thinning through it. It's probably been thinned through twice. It's just a good example of what forestry, tree growing land can do for you. Okay, I really haven't given much on my relationship to the forest here. I've talked about coming back in 1954. I came back to Philomath and began a logging company with my brother-in-law called Riley & Parker Tree Farm Service. We specialized in thinning and salvaging and rejuvenating timber stands. We started working in 1956 under contract for the university. We bid on timber sales and bought all their timber sales they put up from 1956 to 1959. In 1959, they decided that we could negotiate a contract for 2 years at a time and we would be responsible for doing the work that they wanted done, whether it was salvaging or thinning, road building, culvert cleanout, whatever. That's where we were and why I came to be on the forest. That contract run from 1959, renewed every 2 years until 1973.

In 1973, Bill Davis was the forest manager at the time and then my supervisor under the contract I was working under and he was retiring. One day I asked him who's going to take over for him? He said, I think you are. He talked me into applying for the job managing forest and lo and behold, the university bought it. I became forest manager in 1973, and retired in 1986. So, I spent over 30 years of my life on this forest. As forest manager, Bill Davis had been responsible directly to the dean, Dean Solberg. No go-between. When I was hired as forest manager, Dr. John Buter was appointed supervisor. I answered to him and we answered to the dean together. It was a real good situation. To begin with, we had a minimum of records done each year for what was done on the forest. As a forest logging operator, I used to make that for Bill and work with him on making his annual report. John and I kept the same thing up, but we expanded it and made it more detailed. We kept track of the research projects that were on the forest. The researchers that wanted to work on the forest had to get our approval so that we didn't conflict with each other. Our logging operation was fit into the research as much as possible. It made a good all-around working situation for a university forest. At the same time, we were always available for classwork activities and trips and surveys to take place. Along with that, with me managing the forest I hired students to do work that they could do on tree planting, maintenance work, and the various crews, stand densities and all that. A lot of it the students would do. At times I had as many as 20 or 30 students working. This bridge over Baker Creek runs out of the Starker Forest property that is just to the south of us and within McDonald Forest. We put a bridge in here instead of a covert because of the problem of beavers. Every beaver, every covert that we put in in an area like this would be plugged by beavers continually, so we got a bridge with a wide open slot to it. The last thing our forest engineering class did in 1950 was locate a road from Sulphur Springs, which is to the north of us, out along Baker Creek to go to the Starker Forest that was an uncut area and they were bringing a logger in to start logging on it in the summer of 1950. That logger happened to be a friend of mine, Richard... Kurt Nicholadis and Dick Rooney were the logging partners that did that job.

Okay, as we're looking south on Baker Creek here, the original road that opened it up for logging was just on the east side of the creek. I don't know if that's part of what we see up there a brown streak or not, and there's a log laying above that, but that's about where the road is. It would need rebuilding to be usable now. When we built this road in here, this was a solid patch of wetland plants. It had been eaten out by the beavers now. They build dams along here. You can see the little strips across where the old dams are. They pretty much opened it up. Down below is a Sulphur springs where the sulphur water that the pioneers used it for spring tonic water. I believe some of them did. I met an elderly man who said when he was young his father would come out here with a bucket, brought a horse and buggy, and they would get bottles of this water to take home. They called it spring tonic water. His mother fed it to them to keep them well. So, if you need healed, maybe we got a place for you. Here we are on the Evergreen Acreage Tree Farm. To give you a little background on where it comes from, back in my earlier narrations, I told about building a house in Corvallis. When I finished college, we moved to Myrtle Creek and sold that house and, among other things, I bought 150 acres out south of Corvallis that was cutover land and a couple of 3, 4 years I sold that to Ralph Hull who's a timber owner out that way, and used that money to buy this property in February of 1957, I think. This is 100 acres. Its north 100 acres of the Joseph B. Wood Donation Land Claim. It was occupied somewhere in the early 1850s. So, at the time we purchased it, it was about 40 acres of Douglas Fir second growth timber, and a 30 acres of pasture land, 30 acres of fields with an old barn on it. The house had burned down the year before we bought it. So, I registered it as a tree farm, which we see the American Tree Farm sign here, the same year I purchased it with the intent of using it for growing trees, not general farming. That's where we're at. Initially we logged about 30,000 board feet off of it the first year after I bought it to clean up, thin things that were too thick and over the years I've thinned and planted and worked at it. I think we've harvested about 1,200,000 board feet off of it since then. My estimate of what is on it now is about 1,200,000 feet of growing stock. I now have about 14 age classes generally scattered around through the property. I've done some clearcut, mostly thinning, but when it needs it I remove the stand. At the time I am now I could cut about an acre a year and never run out of timber. I estimate I can cut 40,000 board feet a year. In the last 2 years I have only cut 30,000 in two years. So, now if I gone on that I cut 90,000 this year. The market isn't any good, so maybe it'll be 120,000 or something next year. I belong to the Oregon Small Woodlands Association. Each year we look for a tree farmer in our area-his is the Benton County area-to promote tree farming and we demonstrate to the public and to other tree farmers what we can do, and I happened to be the nominee for 2001, and we have the sign to advertise it.

This area behind me, it was a stand of Christmas trees. What you see now didn't make it. The market wasn't right for them or they just didn't have the quality they wanted, and we left them grow into timber. They're looking like they're coming pretty good. Some trees in there that maybe deformed because of Christmas tree work, but most of them that we left are good trees. One of the problems I started planting chestnuts about 1989. The large ones we see in this area come from that area. I planted some new ones that are certified trees from California that produce a better nut. From these trees, I'm going to graft to the other ones as they develop. The seedling trees don't always produce the best nut for selling. So, what we're looking at now is just increasing our production of nuts that may be sellable. Otherwise, we eat them all ourself. As we go through you'll look at these trees. There's a tree that I cut it off and grafted it, and the graft didn't take. The sprout that's there now is a seedling yet. We'll try grafting it on later. These chestnuts here in 1989, one of the first tree that had produced nuts was this one. It's about 12 inches diameter at breast height. One of the things about chestnut, if they don't make nuts for you the nuts are available for the wildlife that's here. The wood is a merchantable timber crop when it matures. Bob Rackham used to be our extension agricultural forest man in Benton County. He went to Italy and looked at chestnut production in Italy. He came back talking about it. I bought my first trees from, oh, a nursery in Newberg. They imported. None of them lived. They found the root stock when they grafted onto it were not compatible, as near as I could tell. Well, the next ones I bought from Brooks Nursery north of Salem and they were seeding chestnuts, probably Chinese-European crosses. These trees right here, this one and the one behind, there's four of them right here that are my best shaped nuts and are the easiest to clean. That's what I'm going to work on. The new seedlings I purchased there, the Colossal and Nevada, are a fairly large nut and have a good, easy cleaning nut. They're easy to get the shell off them. The place that we're on, I showed you on the tree farm, my wife Marian is buried here where this post is in an urn. That's probably where I'll end up, too, eventually, because this is a family forest through the Rowley Family trust. We figured it's a good place for it. Eventually, we're going to put a little concrete slab for the bench to sit on.

This area right here is filled with daffodils from the old homestead. Early in my life when I was 30 years old I made a commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and joined the United Brethren Church in Philomath. Through the years kept up on the missionary endeavors of the church. I had one daughter that spent 9 years in Peru working as a Bible translator. I went to Honduras 4 times to work in the missionary program on a short-term basis there for 2 weeks at a time and became acquainted with the people there and kept contact with them over the years. I went to Africa after Marian died. I didn't have anyone around and no one to keep me from not going, so I went to Sierra Leone, West Africa for a week time with my pastor. We were supporting several churches in Sierra Leone that are managed and superintended by a Sierra Leone pastor. We call him Pastor Ben, its Benjamin. It's interesting. We have a small church with less than 100 people and we're supporting 5 churches in Sierra Leone with over 500 people in them. We pay their pastors, which isn't a lot but I think now they're getting $30 a month. The superintendent, we buy rice for all the kids. They run two schools that have over 500 kids in the schools and our church supplies all their rice for their one meal they get while they're in school, besides giving them textbooks and things like that when we can. So, it's been interesting work where less native people have 500 on the other side [laughs]. If you're familiar with Sierra Leone, it had a war about late 1990s, and they stopped over from Liberia and they burned churches and hospitals and killed at random. If they didn't like somebody and didn't kill them, they might cut an arm off to make sure they couldn't hold a weapon. This is the kind of country that we've gone into and are trying to rebuild the Christian structure there.

Okay, this is a picture of part of my family at the time we was working on the forest. The lady on the right is my mother. Then my brother, Jessie, and his wife, Peggy, myself and my wife, Marian, and then Vee and John Orville Heart are the other two, my father's sister and her husband. Well, I got married in 1946, like I said when home on a convalescent furlough to Marian. We were married for 60 years. She had diabetes and had complications in the last 5 years of her... that took quite a little care, and she passed away in May of 2006. I remarried in about a year and a half to June Pitts. We had been friends for over 50 years. When I worked in Myrtle Creek in 1950, I worked with her husband. We kept contact with each other. He became a logger in eastern Oregon, so we kept in contact through the years and Jean died about 1901, or 1902-2002, excuse me [laughs]. We kept in touch with each other, and we decided we should finish our lives together. That's where we are now. Oh, no telephones. We didn't have any communication other than mail and our mailbox, the Route 1 Sherwood, was about a quarter of a mile from the house. You had to walk a considerable distance to get the mail. Most things were, if you didn't go to Portland once in a while, they'd bought a lot of things from Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck catalogues. The radio, we didn't have a radio. I think we got our first radio about 1936. It'd come by an unusual circumstance. One of the neighbors got thrown in jail. One of his neighbor had pass at his wife and he caught up with him in the middle of Tualatin and he kind of wiped the streets up with him and got thrown in jail for 90 days. While he was in jail, we got to use his radio. He was a good friend [laughs].