8. MILL WORKERS

Donald M. Dickey: Airlie, which wasn't a very big church. They, I wouldn't say they were real religious people, but they were not anti-religious either, I mean, if a minister would come in and conduct some services most of 'em would show up. Except this one old boy [Perkins] that made the comments about that gopher being as ugly as he was or something like that. I don't think I ever saw him go to Sunday school.

8. MILL WORKERS

Bob Zybach: So they had a Sunday School then at the school, and then they had a.

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, every now and then. Sometimes it didn't last very long and sometimes it would last six months or a year or some traveling minister or something would stop by and start up a Sunday school. Oh, like Neil and his brothers and sisters and dad and mother and my dad and mother and my brother and I and, oh some of the other people that lived around the mill, there were quite a lot of people that lived in mill shacks around the mill.

Bob Zybach: That was going right towards our next question. In the mill shacks there was one of the Tandys, Matthew, and the Becks, do you remember those families?

Donald M. Dickey: Beg pardon?

Bob Zybach: Do you remember the Tandys or the Becks that lived in the mill shacks there?

Donald M. Dickey: Tandys didn't live in mill shacks. Becks lived in them.

Neil Vanderburg: There was, I think Elmer did or.

Donald M. Dickey: Elmer and his mother lived in a cabin down by Forest.

Neil Vanderburg: Forest's cousin lived in a mill shack down there.

Donald M. Dickey: Oh,...

Neil Vanderburg: Marty, I think his name was.

Maxine Dickey: Oh yeah.

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, he lived in a mill shack. He was another mill worker that drifted around jobbed here and there. What was his name?

Neil Vanderburg: Alvie. A-L-V-I-E.

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, he was quite a hunter. He and I went out on a coon hunt one night and we got a coon over on Folks Hill.

Bob Zybach: Do you ever remember any stories of rattlesnakes on Folks Hill?

Donald M. Dickey: No, I don't think there was any rattlesnakes over there. We used to hunt graydiggers over there in the spring. And I never saw a rattlesnake.

Bob Zybach: Did you ever hear of any?

Donald M. Dickey: No.

Bob Zybach: Okay. On the mill shacks. Were those only built when they put the mills in? Were there any people living there or any homes there before the mills came in?

Donald M. Dickey: No they weren't put in untill the mill was put in. There was no place to live, they'd come along, they'd get some of that side cut lumber and "salmon up" a shack and move in.

Bob Zybach: Did any of the local people work in the mills?

Donald M. Dickey: Oh yeah, . . some of the young fellows particularly. But, well I worked in .

Donald M. Dickey: Weinert's sawmill one summer. And a couple of friends of mine that went to school over in Airlie worked there the same summer. We had a sawyer that was building homes. He was logging, oh I think 20-28 feet logs, or 24 foot, something like that. They were only about so big.

Bob Zybach: About 20 inches?

Donald M. Dickey: Well, I doubt if they were more than 18. Sixteen to 18. And this old sawyer he'd ram her through and bang. And we cut over 200 logs a day some days. And one day this friend from Airlie was riding carriage and sitting, oh what do you call that [setting ratchets: NV], anyway he moved when the sawyer got back to where he wanted it, why he'd two fingers or one finger or whatever fit, the guy would work the lever to get it back real fast. And the old sawyer he got in a hurry. Boy, I thought my friend was going right into the saws but he didn't. Sort of scared the sawyer. He slowed down after that. There was another young fellow, he was from around there someplace, but he wasn't really local. He was . . ., no I was off-bearer, right behind the saw, and he [Edgar] ran the other saws to cut the timber up into 2x4's or whatever. And very frequently we would have 1000 feet of lumber piled over on work horses. We'd get caught up and we had to have a new log come in. And they had a guy out on the pond that didn't give you much time. They were really putting lumber out that summer.

Bob Zybach: Was that the same pond that Neil said the flume came down to?

Donald M. Dickey: No, this was another pond at the new mill.

Bob Zybach: So they built two ponds on Savage Creek there.

Donald M. Dickey: No, one of them wasn't on Savage Creek, it was over on the side of the hill. And, that second mill, it wasn't too big a pond, it was big enough to hold all the logs they needed at the time but they hauled the logs in either on a dirt road or part of it was, well they put lumber and slabs on it and made a sort of a slab road and haul the lumber in on that. They haul 1000 or 2000 feet at a time on an old Ford truck or something of that sort.

Bob Zybach: What did you call that, slab road, or.

Neil Vanderburg: Tram road.

Donald M. Dickey: Tram road, probably.

Bob Zybach: Or corduroy?

Neil Vanderburg: Tram road is what we called them. They were two 4x12's nailed side by side on a bunch of cross rails.

Bob Zybach: So those were tram roads but without the metal rails?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, there was no rails.

Bob Zybach: Oh, okay.

Neil Vanderburg: Did a lot of those around the country. Lumber was cheap.

Bob Zybach: There was tram roads on Soap Creek, but I always thought they were the type with the metal rails. They call them plank roads or corduroy roads in different areas of the country.

Neil Vanderburg: Corduroy roads the planks were crosswise. Tram roads they went lenght wide.

Donald M. Dickey: These tram roads saved bringing out dirt. I mean, if you had to level up an area you put some logs on top and your 4x10's or whatever they were and then your slabs across lengthways on it and make a road pretty fast.

Bob Zybach: So, the mill would be cutting up the logs and then taking some of the lumber back out and constructing roads in the new areas.

Donald M. Dickey: Well, they were burning slab. Slabs were sort of a waste product.

Bob Zybach: So that's what they used for the roads.

Donald M. Dickey: That's what they used for the roads, ordinarily.

Bob Zybach: Would they burn the stuff up in wigwam burners, or just out in open fires?

Donald M. Dickey: Usually they just had open fires, didn't they Neil?

Bob Zybach: Do you remember the Becks?

Donald M. Dickey: The Becks? Yeah.

Bob Zybach: What do you remember about them?

Donald M. Dickey: Maxine can probably tell you more about them. Do you want to tell him?

Maxine Dickey: I did. [Had talked about the Becks at lunch.]

Donald M. Dickey: Oh. Yeah, he was real religious, I think, because he didn't have to work when he got religious. And he'd go to Klamath Falls or someplace or another, leave the family there and get by the best they could. And there were three or four kids and Mrs. Beck. They were pretty nice family, actually, but the old man ought to have had his teeth taped together a time or two.

Bob Zybach: I understand that Mrs. Forest Tandy and your mother sometimes had to help feed some of the families in the neighborhood.

Donald M. Dickey: Probably did, I don't remember off hand. I know Mrs. Tandy did, and we had apples and stuff we gave them. And Mabel Tandy, Forest's wife, had a heart as big as the moon

Maxine Dickey: There was a cute story about that. And I say this to him every now and then. But whenever Forest got ranting about something you know, or was having some kind of trouble, he was complaining, she'd look at him and say, "Do you think you'll ever amount to anything Tandy?" And this usually calmed him down. So I say that to him sometimes. "Think you'll ever amount to anything Dickey?"

Donald M. Dickey: Rate I'm going now, I don't think so. [Laughs]

Maxine Dickey: This is a story about Mabel. And she had, she was legally blind. You know, across the room she could not count how many fingers you held up. So she had her knives painted red, the handles, so she could.

Donald M. Dickey: Elmer Tandy, Forest's brother, was sawyer quite a while there. He and his mother lived in a little house down by Forest, down there, maybe it was the next place. Anyway, until Elmer decided to go to. . . he got married and decided to go to another mill.

Bob Zybach: So, how long had the Tandy's lived there?