Part I. January 25, 1979

PART I - January 25, 1979

[Interview conducted by Royal Jackson and Jennifer Lee at Peavy Hall, Oregon State University.]

Royal Jackson: What were the names of your grandparents?

Marvin Rowley: My grandmother and grandfather were Gangles.

Royal Jackson: Gangles?

Marvin Rowley: Gangle. That’s an Austrian family. My grandfather came from Austria; my grandmother was born in Minnesota. Her mother had just arrived from Sweden. She was Swedish.

Royal Jackson: Why did they come to this country?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think my grandmother came here about the time there was a large migration from the Scandinavian countries, and basically they left the Scandinavian country because of overpopulation. In those countries the wars of the earlier times had ceased, and they had a fairly prosperous period. Large families had the tradition to divide the land among the sons. The farmlands were being divided into unproductive areas. As I understand from talking to some of these people, they actually raised funds to ship the sons off to America, or to help them get passage to America so they wouldn’t have to break the farm into smaller units.

Royal Jackson: Do you remember your grandparents?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yes, my grandmother. My grandmother and grandfather were divorced. I just saw my grandfather once. My grandmother had a real influence in my life. She was a real, oh, what we’d call a “character” in a way. Real self-sufficient. She’d been left with a large family to take care of herself. She washed clothes for people, did housework, picked fruit.

Royal Jackson: This was in Minnesota?

Marvin Rowley: No, in Oregon. That’s after they’d come to Oregon that this happened.

Royal Jackson: Why did they come to Oregon?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think my great-grandmother and her husband had come to Woodland, Washington, some time earlier. About 1910, my grandmother, grandfather, and family came to Oregon. My grandfather had a variety of jobs. He worked in the woods as a busheler and a saw-filer back in those days.

Royal Jackson: Are we talking about your [grand]parents on your mother’s side?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, on my mother’s side. Of course, my grandmother cooked, and cooked in logging camps a lot of times. On my father’s side—my father was born in Vancouver, and I was born in Portland.

Royal Jackson: Vancouver, Washington?

Marvin Rowley: Vancouver, Washington. His family background, the Rowleys, came from early pioneer stock. The earliest records in New England have Rowleys in them, and as far back as we know is Saratoga County, New York, about 1800. The family came to Illinois about 1850, and on west the next generations.

Royal Jackson: What ancestry is that?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, basically English. And my great-great-grandmother was French-Canadian. Her name was Nepiere [Mary E. Nepiere]. But my father was born in Vancouver. His mother was a Manny, and her family was a Scotch-Irish family. They were in the sawmill business in the Seattle area. In 1905, my father’s family moved to Seattle and my grandfather worked for his father-in-law in a sawmill where downtown Seattle is now. My dad and his uncle greased skids on a skid road. I think as near as I can gather, it was near Lake Washington, probably around where the University of Washington is.

Royal Jackson: Do you remember that as a kid?

Marvin Rowley: No, no. That was a long time before I was born. I was born in Portland. They were only up there three or four years, and then came back to Portland.

Royal Jackson: How did your father happen to come to Oregon?

Marvin Rowley: Well, he was born in Vancouver, Washington. His family moved to Seattle, and then to Portland about 1906.

Royal Jackson: How did he come to Washington? Where did he come from?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I don’t know. His parents were born in Illinois, and his grandparents were born in Illinois, and I think they came, too. I’m not sure if it was just his dad who came west, or if he came with his parents. There were quite a few of the family in the Portland area, so I have an idea that they kind of came together. At the time of the Second World War, every Rowley in the Portland phone book was my relative—about a dozen of them. And now there are hundreds of them I guess.

Royal Jackson: That was in Portland?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, in Portland. Everyone in Oregon was a relative I knew about, but there were a lot I didn’t know about.

Royal Jackson: What year were you born?

Marvin Rowley: In 1924. In Portland out near the Lents District. Are you familiar with it? When I was four years old we moved to Tualatin, two miles southeast of Tualatin, to a place we nick-named “the sticks.”

Royal Jackson: Why did you move there?

Marvin Rowley: Well, the folks had bought a five-acre tract, and the place was called the “Comte and Colman Tract.” All the logged-off areas had been subdivided into five-acre tracts. They wanted to get out of town.

Royal Jackson: Was your dad a logger?

Marvin Rowley: No, he was a printer. Practically all his life he was a printer. Although he worked at different times, not in the woods, I wouldn’t say, but he worked around the woods people. Most of his family, you know, were in the woods. My uncles were woodworkers on both sides of my family. My mother’s only brother graduated from Oregon State University in 1939 in forestry. He worked for the Forest Service and BLM [USDI Bureau of Land Management]. On my father’s side, I had one uncle that was a high climber for Bridal Veil Lumber Company from the earliest I can remember. And other uncles, three of them—one was a railroad builder and one was a busheler for Hines Lumber Company all his life, and the third was a sawmill worker.

Royal Jackson: How did your mother and father meet each other?

Marvin Rowley: They lived in the same area. The Rowleys lived on a street corner, and the Gangles lived three houses east. I think my mother went to Lents School for a time when they were living in that part of Portland, and my father graduated or he went through nine grades. That was in the Lents area.

Royal Jackson: What year did they get married? Do you recall?

Marvin Rowley: 1921.

Royal Jackson: How many children are there in the family? In other words, how many brothers and sisters do you have?

Marvin Rowley: I have three brothers and three sisters, so seven in the family. Like I say, we were raised on a stump ranch. We called it a stump ranch. My occupation during the high school days was to go out and grub stumps when I’d come home from school.

Royal Jackson: Your earliest childhood recollections are from that period when you moved out on the five-acre tract?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, I can remember living in Portland, but just barely. I go back and look for the house, and I can’t spot it. But I think it’s still there.

Royal Jackson: Did your father continue as a printer when you moved there?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, oh yes. He worked for several companies in Portland. He worked for Dunham Printing Company in Portland, which is a job-printing, or at least a good-sized job-printing firm in downtown Portland for close to 30 years. Then he started working for another company. He’d started working when he was thirteen as an office boy for a printing company, and his father died when he was—I think grandfather died in 1919 of the flu epidemic of the First World War. He left quite a sizable family of young kids. Dad had been working. I think grandfather was sick some before that, and Dad was working to help support the family for quite a time.

Royal Jackson: Was your mother employed?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, she worked in Kerr Nursing Home, an orphanage type of home in Portland. She was probably just eighteen when they got married.

Royal Jackson: So, after she was married she didn’t work?

Marvin Rowley: No, she didn’t work after that.

Royal Jackson: What did your family do as a family? Did they have a lot of activities together?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yes. We did everything together. Like I say, we lived in a country area where, in those days, you walked anywhere or rode. We had a Model T pick-up until 1938, I think. That was the family’s chief means of transportation. Sit on the tailgate of the Model T Ford and ride along. I remember falling out one time, and Dad never even knew it. And I ran along and caught up with him.

Royal Jackson: Was one of your parents more important in your life, more influential, than the other one?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t think so. I think they’re both important. I think our image of our father was probably more dominant than our mother’s, but both were important.

Royal Jackson: You mentioned something about your grandmother having a large influence. Was she living with your family at the time?

Marvin Rowley: No, she lived close by. She was rather self-sufficient. She had to be in order to get by. The thing that attracted kids was that she was always drying peaches and pears and apples and things. She’d have gunny sacks full of these around when we’d go over to visit. Those were our goodies.

Royal Jackson: What kinds of things did you do as a kid, for fun?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I’d run ragged through the cockleburs and corn.

Royal Jackson: That was for fun?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I was probably destined to be a forester or a logger from the beginning, just from what I liked to do. This five-acre piece we had was surrounded by undeveloped country, and all we had to do was go a few hundred feet and we were across the fence, and we were into the backcountry, you might say. Down the creek we picked wild berries in the summertime. Mother’d can them, and we used to gather hazelnuts, get a sackful of hazelnuts. I never find them that good now. Used to be able to find a bucketful on a bush.

Royal Jackson: You mean all seven of you went out and picked berries?

Marvin Rowley: No, just a couple of us boys, or sometimes more than that. When I was a kid we found a burned-out stump, a big old-growth stump that was burned out hollow. Had a hole burned in the root. We gathered a bunch of old-growth bark and made a roof on the thing and made a tree house out of the thing. We used to go over there and build a fire in it. That was our hut.

Royal Jackson: Did you have any neighbors when you were growing up?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yes. It was a rural area, and there were neighbors within 500 feet. One of the neighbors, the Bryans, lived just southwest of us. We didn’t have a direct road to their house—there was a road, but we had trails to everybody’s house. We’d build our trails that crossed—to grandmother’s house, a trail to the Bryans’ house. And then the roads went the long way.

Royal Jackson: How’d people get along then, with each other?

Marvin Rowley: You know, this was during the Depression days, most of what I’m remembering. I think we used to do a lot more sharing than they do now. You looked out for one another, didn’t have a whole lot of money, but we always had plenty to eat, and everything like that. We always had a cow or two on the place.

Royal Jackson: What do you remember about the Depression? Was that a difficult time for your family?

Marvin Rowley: No. I’d say it wasn’t difficult for the most part. In 1936 was the only difficult year that I can remember, and that year my dad was out of a job. The only year that he ever was, was during that summer. He could’ve worked, but that was only one day a week, and that wasn’t enough to live on, so he went to work with a neighbor fixing roofs. This neighbor was a deadbeat, and dad worked the whole summer without getting a dime out of it. My mother and this kid were picking berries out at the Gresham area for about six weeks during that summer. I guess the big thing that stands out about that summer to me is that I ruined my shoes. I bought a new pair of shoes, and I ruined the shoes drying them out underneath the camp-stove. I had to go barefooted the rest of the summer, because I had no way to buy another pair of shoes. We were swimming in the swimming hole, and my younger brother slid down an incline into the water, and couldn’t swim. I started to take my shoes off, and decided the third time he went down, he wasn’t going to make it, so I jumped in with my shoes on, and pulled him out. Got them all wet.

Royal Jackson: Was that the end of your shoes for the summer?

Marvin Rowley: Yes.

Royal Jackson: When were your brothers and sisters born?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I’m the next-to-the-oldest. My sister’s two years older than I am, and then I’ve got a sister

Marvin Rowley: two years younger, and a brother four years younger, and another brother five years younger. The oldest sister was born in 1922, and I think our youngest brother was born in 1937.

Royal Jackson: Your mother was busy raising children a good part of her life.

Marvin Rowley: Yes, for a 10–12 year period. My younger sister was married when she was sixteen, so she left home about 1938.

Royal Jackson: Did religion play a part in your life when you were growing up, in your family?

Marvin Rowley: Oh yes. We went to Sunday school and church. When we moved out to the Tualatin area the American Sunday School Union had a Sunday school going at a sawmill. There was a Barclay Sawmill, and a couple–three houses built around it that they lived in, and they’d started a Sunday school there. I must’ve been five. We went to that Sunday school.

Royal Jackson: What church was it?

Marvin Rowley: American Sunday School Union—that’s a rural mission type of—it’s nondenominational. They’re sponsored by, I don’t know what group. I think it may be the Christian Women of America, or something like that was behind it, an eastern organization. Eventually they built a community hall in that area. It was the center of activities. They had Sunday school and church services in that.

Royal Jackson: Church was pretty important in life then?

Marvin Rowley: Well, yes. I think it was probably. I wouldn’t say it was the dominant part of life then, but it was an important part of that community and our family. It probably pretty much shaped all of our lives. I know at the time we started going to this church, my mother had been raised a Catholic. She had pretty much tossed out the Catholic religion, and my dad was raised in the Methodist church, and was rather inactive until we got involved in this.

Royal Jackson: Did you go to school there, in that area?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. Tualatin Grade School and Sherwood High School. When I graduated from high school in 1942, the very first job I had was working on the Multnomah County Poor Farm, milking cows.

Royal Jackson: What was that?

Marvin Rowley: It was an “old folks” home, the original old people’s home where people who didn’t have anybody to support them were out on this farm. They had all categories of people there. They had some who couldn’t work, some who could. Those who could work would get paid a little bit for their work. They had a barber shop, shoe shops, and the whole works that these older people ran.

Royal Jackson: This was at the tail end of the Depression, wasn’t it?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, the tail end of the Depression.

Royal Jackson: And the beginning of World War II?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, that’s what I said. I worked there a month, then quit to work in the shipyards. I was working on that poor farm for $65.00 a month plus room, board, and clothing.

Royal Jackson: How old were you then?

Marvin Rowley: I was 17 then. I graduated from high school when I was 17. That’s why I wasn’t in the service.

Royal Jackson: How did the War affect you?

Marvin Rowley: When the Second World War hit, everybody that had red blood was patriotic. We were attacked, and we felt it was our duty to defend our country. I joined the service as soon as I could. I was going to join as soon as I turned 18, and my mother talked me into waiting until Christmastime. Between my 18th birthday and Christmastime, they closed enlistments. I was trying to get into the Air Force. They’d closed it. They had all they could take. They closed the enlistments. I’d volunteered for induction, and went into the Army.

Royal Jackson: That was in 1943?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, that’d be February of ‘43.

Royal Jackson: Then what happened?

Marvin Rowley: I was sent to the mechanized cavalry for basic training. They trained me for two years to be a mechanic. I was in 13 camps in the United States. Yes—Texas, Arizona, California, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, Kansas—that’s in 23 months. I was in a group they called the Sight-Seeing Sixth Recon Squadron. Then I volunteered for duty overseas. I just made a T-5 Corporal in Fort Riley, Kansas, but I never did want to stay in the States. They put a list up on the bulletin board calling for volunteering for going overseas, and I think I was the third name to go on it. The next day, Captain Pritchard came up. I was working on a jeep at that time, had it all tore apart. I was lying down under the thing with my head under the dash, if I remember right, when he came up and said, “Rowley, you still want to go overseas?” And I said, “You bet.” And I looked up and it was the Captain, so, “Yes, sir.” He said, “You’ll leave tomorrow.” I crawled out of there and started getting my stuff ready. Somebody else put the jeep together, if anyone did.

Royal Jackson: And where did you go?

Marvin Rowley: I went to the Pacific Theater, and spent almost a year in the Philippines. But the only real interesting part is that when I got to the Philippines.... I’d volunteered to go overseas, and they asked for a mechanic. They asked for a first sergeant, a clerk, and a tank commander. They took five of us out of the battalion. That’s the same thing as about 1,200 men. They took five of us. They figured they needed a mechanic bad. When I got to the Philippines, I ended up as a first scout in the infantry.

Royal Jackson: Now MacArthur had left by then, had he not?

Marvin Rowley: Well, they’d come back to the Philippines. This is on the return. They’d launched the Philippine invasion in Leyte first, and I suppose we arrived on the scene three months later. There was still fighting going on close by. They were driving across Luzon at that time; the one that I was put in was the 41st infantry division. We made the initial landings on Mindanao, at Zamboanga.

Royal Jackson: Did you help liberate any of the prison camps?

Marvin Rowley: No. We just landed in Zamboanga, and then spent a month on a little island called Basiland Island. Had 200 American soldiers and 300 Japanese soldiers on 600 square miles. We did our best to keep out of each other’s way. We tried to find them, and they tried not to find us. It wasn’t too hard of fighting.

Royal Jackson: What’s your most memorable experience during that period in the Philippines?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, there are a lot of them. I don’t know if there’s any one. I’ve had so many close calls and about 30 days of combat. Two times, hand grenades we had tied up in the bush for booby traps to warn us that somebody was trying to sneak up on us went off accidentally. One time, we put just a little too much tension on the line. There were four of us, actually lying within ten feet of it. It slipped, and the powder train started. We didn’t have any place to go. We just covered up, and nobody got hurt.

Royal Jackson: Nobody hurt?

Marvin Rowley: Nobody hurt. Then another time a little boy who was visiting me started home at dark and my sergeant started to yell that the booby traps were out. I ran and caught him and went down the trail with him, and I pointed out the wire. I’d just got to him and was setting him over the wire I had straddled when his little dog came tearing down over the hill, hit the wire, and set the thing off. I knocked him over and rolled on him, and I was about eight feet from it. It missed me.

Royal Jackson: This was a little Filipino boy?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, a little Filipino boy named Manuel.

Royal Jackson: He wasn’t hurt, then?

Marvin Rowley: No. He wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t hurt. He couldn’t have been hurt, as I was lying on him. But I wasn’t hurt either. Another time, during that time, we advanced one day and I was the first scout, and I led the advance all day and we didn’t hit anything. We went up a little river valley or creek valley with some steep hills on one side and caves dug into the hills. Nothing hid in any of them. We crossed up onto a ridge that had trenches dug on it, and the trenches were empty. We camped where those trenches were. The next morning, as we got ready to move out, the lieutenant sent me and another kid up to guard the trail. The trail went on this grassy place, narrowed down by two coconut trees, and then it opened up and came right together in brush, and the trail went out. We went up to those two coconut trees, and one of us sat on each side and we looked up the trail. We’d whisper back and forth to each other. We were guarding that trail. I’d led the day before, but that day the second platoon moved out first, and I was first platoon. When their first scout came up even with us, we stood up and walked back. We’d just cleared those guys, and the ground was rolling like this. We’d just stepped into the trail, and we were walking back after our equipment, and a machine gun opened up down that trail. The first scout had seen that guy. He was lying at the other end of this grassy opening, and they’d almost stepped on him. He waved the trail empty, and everybody fell out onto the trail, and machine guns fired down an empty trail except for Allen and I. We went over that hill just far enough so that when he fired, he was over our heads that far. We had our backs to him. We didn’t see him.

Royal Jackson: That was the second close call, then?

Marvin Rowley: That was a close one. Another time we were setting out one of those booby traps and the Japanese came out ahead of us, and one of the fellows that had been setting the traps had handed his rifle to another person. When the firing started, he dropped that rifle in the trail. We went down after that rifle three times. The third time we got it. We reached down into the trail and pulled the rifle, and the rifle started to move. There was machine-gun fire all over the place. There were four of us down there again, and when Abrahamson got ahold of the rifle, he about half stood up to turn to leave, and he got hit in the arm. I come up out of there. I had a bloody nose from there down to there, but it wasn’t because I got hit. It was because I slid on the ground. But I went back down to that place the next day, when it was quiet. They weren’t around anymore, and every little bush was nicked that far off the ground. You could see where they’d fired across. We were down there. Wherever we camped—we were out in the jungle a lot in some of the mahogany-timbered areas—would really fascinate me, being from western Oregon. I used to take trips around through the jungle, sometimes by myself, or with one other person. I could never camp and look at a green wall and not wonder if the enemy was going to come out of that, how they were going to get there. If we were there more than one day, I’d slip out through it, and make a trip around. Usually, I found that most jungles are a lot thinner than western Oregon’s. We’ve got the thickest jungles in the world.

Royal Jackson: Is that right?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. In the temperate Coast Range, where the moisture blows up onto the shore, you have thicker underbrush than you do in the tropical jungles. The tropical jungle is thick on edge, but, as soon as you go through the edge, well, then the canopy’s above you and there are vines and things hanging down, and fairly thick, but you can step around through it and walk pretty

Marvin Rowley: easy. One time we were edged up into the trees along the river to get out of a sudden rain storm. We were standing there and I noticed this branch hanging down in front of me. “That’s an awful straight branch,” I thought, and I got to looking at it. It was a jungle viper that was dead. Probably eight feet long, draped over a limb, its head hanging down over it, but square head on the thing.

Royal Jackson: How do you feel about the Japanese themselves? What were your feelings about them as a race?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, the Japanese. I thought they were a fine race from the start. I didn’t have anything against the Japanese. I went to school with Japanese kids. I knew them first-hand before I went into the service. As far as fighters in the jungle, they were suicidal, fight to the death. We didn’t give any ground to them. Didn’t give them any chance to surrender, even. When we made our landing.... Talk about atrocities, I suppose. The Colonel told us we wouldn’t take any prisoners. One of my high school/grade school buddies, Hifumi Okazaki, was drafted into the Army eventually, and he was in the Philippines as an interpreter. He told me that they lost more of their personnel to Americans than they did to Japanese.

Royal Jackson: You mean the American Japanese in the American military did?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, the American Japanese that were interpreters had to go out and try to talk the Japanese into surrendering. Then they had to talk their way back in through the American lines, because the Japanese would strip American GIs of their clothing, and infiltrate the lines in that way. It was a real difficult assignment, and he said they lost several of their people from our own soldiers shooting them.

Royal Jackson: What do you remember about the people around the western Oregon-Portland area as far as their feelings toward the Japanese-Americans that were here?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t remember any hard feelings. Almost all of us felt that, those people that I know had felt like it was a real injustice to move them even. They’d been established on the land where they were for at least one generation.

Royal Jackson: You saw them, and most of your friends saw them as loyal Americans?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I don’t know of even one incident that the people we knew weren’t loyal Americans.

Royal Jackson: There wasn’t a lot of hatred toward the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and the War?

Marvin Rowley: Well, during the War, after Pearl Harbor, I think there could’ve been in other places, but, like I say, not in our area where we grew up. There was hatred towards an enemy, but I don’t think that I myself—I didn’t relate this to this enemy as being any Japanese person. I relate it as being a nation that was attacking us just like I’m basically half-German or have a lot of German in me. Well, the Germans were the most atrocious. They committed the murders of all the millions of Jews without any qualms. A lot of them thought they were doing the world a service. We’re part of that group, almost everyone.

Royal Jackson: Pick up now when you came back from the War. What year was it?

Marvin Rowley: I came back in December of ‘45. I had come down with hepatitis in the Philippines right at the end of the War. I was shipped home in a hospital ship. I had hookworms, and athlete’s foot, and ringworms, and boils, and hepatitis. I was down to 130 pounds or something the first time I was weighed after I started getting well.

Royal Jackson: Where did you come back to, to Oregon?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I came back through San Francisco, then up to the General Hospital at Fort Lewis for a

Marvin Rowley: time. I got a 60-day convalescence furlough. I came home and got married during that time.

Royal Jackson: Where did you meet your wife?

Marvin Rowley: High school.

Royal Jackson: Had you been writing to her while you were in the military?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, we’d been writing. I wrote to her all the time I was in the military. When I got out of high school and went to work on that Poor Farm, I went to work with my wife’s brother. So we’d been fairly close.

Royal Jackson: What was your wife’s maiden name?

Marvin Rowley: Parker.

Royal Jackson: What’s her full name?

Marvin Rowley: Marian Louise Parker. That fits with mine. I’m called Marvin Lavern, she’s Marian Louise. She was born in Sutherlin, Oregon. When she was six months old, her parents went back to Minnesota. They were from there originally. When she was eleven, they came back to Oregon.

Royal Jackson: What year was it that you got married then?

Marvin Rowley: January 20, 1946.

Royal Jackson: And you were how old?

Marvin Rowley: I was twenty-one.

Royal Jackson: What did you do then? Were you discharged from the military?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, I was discharged a couple months later. Course, we’d already determined I was going to the university to take forestry, and we started working toward that. We came down to Corvallis in July of 1946, and bought a 50 by 100 lot on 28th and Fillmore Street—way out on the edge of town. We started building a house. We were building it ourselves. Took me four years to do it.

Royal Jackson: And you were a student all this time?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I registered at Oregon State that fall. I started in Forest Management. First term I was here in Forest Management. After talking to kids that were here, course we were all veterans and more mature than the normal college student now, first thing I found out was that almost all Forest Management students went to work for the USDA Forest Service. I’d always thought that was my goal until then. But the next thing I realized, to hear them talking, the ones that’d been working for the USDA Forest Service sounded so much like the Army. That wasn’t for me.

Royal Jackson: Did your wife go to school?

Marvin Rowley: No. She was going to work and put me through school, but, instead of that, she had kids.

Royal Jackson: That was work enough.

Marvin Rowley: Yes.

Royal Jackson: You started in Oregon State in 1946?

Marvin Rowley: Right.

Royal Jackson: And finished in what year?

Marvin Rowley: 1950.

Royal Jackson: What did you do after you finished?

Marvin Rowley: First, I finished that house. I had a few odds and ends to finish on that to sell it. I started working on that. Then, when I finished that, I was going to look for a job. Before I could finish the house, I had two job offers. I graduated in Forest Engineering, and my first job offer, which looked real good, was to manage a section and a half of young hemlock, cutover land that a forester had bought up near Bridal Veil, Oregon. I was toying with taking that offer when another one came. They needed a timber cruiser, compass man for a timber cruiser, and work in the Forest Engineering Department for Umpqua Plywood Corporation in southern Oregon. I wanted experience like that, so I took that job in June 1950. I worked for Umpqua Plywood for four years in various capacities, as a timber cruiser for six months, as a field engineer for three years, and as an area manager for a six-month period.

Marvin Rowley: And, talking about people that influenced your life, I think the individual I worked for most of that time was a fellow by the name of Bill James. He’d graduated from the University of Washington with Bill Davies in his class. In fact, that was how I made contact with the job. Bill James was just a fine person to work with, and a real good person to work with in that he gave me my head, let me do what I thought needed to be done, but also was critical of the job to the point where he gave direction. He was a Forest Management graduate; he was keen on forest management. He was working as a forest engineer, but we used to spend a lot of time talking about what we’d do different with the land from the management standpoint, if we could do it. At that time, there was very little thinning going on in the Pacific Northwest—even at that time. At that time, we used to talk thinning; we saw some going on. There was a guy doing it along the highway, and we’d talk about whether or not he was doing it right.

Marvin Rowley: In 1954, that job with Umpqua Plywood, I still had Bill James to work with some, but I also had a general logging manager who’d come on the scene and been there a year and a half or so. I was finding it more and more difficult to make my philosophy go along with his. I looked around for another job. I almost went to work for Booth Kelly, a company in Springfield that Georgia-Pacific bought out. I spent two days riding around with their land manager looking at a job there, which would have been looking at trespasses, and property-line surveys, and working with the land manager in the management end. I thought I’d like that.

Marvin Rowley: At the same time, my brother-in-law, the one I started work with on the Poor Farm, had bought a farm out at Bellfountain in 1947. Between 1947 and 1954, he’d got involved in logging some timber off the old property and working for neighbors. He and I had run into possibilities of working together doing thinning, with the young timber in that area, and working with the county agent. Stony Jackson was county agent then, and we ran into a job that looked like it’d be a good starting place. Eventually, I decided to go to work as a contract logger rather than work for somebody else, and I figured, if I did that, I could always go work for somebody else. That job lasted 19 years.

Royal Jackson: You had your own business to operate?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, we started our own business. We bought a used cat and a power saw, and hired our trucking done to start with, loaded with an A-frame. We started in 1954. Then, 1956 we did an experimental thinning for the…, actually it was cooperative between the School of Forestry and the county agent. The Forestry School gave 40 acres up on the Spaulding Tract to the Extension Service to use as a demonstration tract. We were hired to do that work for them with the chance to put some of our philosophies to work and show them what we could do,

Marvin Rowley: and they were giving us some guidelines. We did that job, and then we negotiated a sale on a forest in 1957, I think it was, up on Oak Creek. From Oak Creek we logged ‘bout 300,000 feet, I think, off that sale, in the fall of 1957, early spring of 1958. Then over a two-year period we bought, on a bid, every sale the University put up. They put up one a year, and nobody else would bid on them.

Royal Jackson: Why was that?

Marvin Rowley: Well, basically, we were doing a thinning, salvaging job, and the timber was so small that the average logger then would just turn up their nose and say, “No, no, we can’t make it on that.” Our philosophy of management and cutting and the type of work that we did just fit it, so we bought several of these sales along about that time. In 1959, we were able to negotiate contracts with the University where they would sell the logs, and we would do the logging for them. When we got this negotiated contract, we’d negotiated for two years at a time, and it freed the University from being tied up to managing this. At that time, we started a general cleanup, thinning program. We started at the north edge of the forest and moved south across the forest.

Royal Jackson: By the forest, you mean McDonald Forest?

Marvin Rowley: McDonald Forest, yes. We’re talking about university forests. So from 1959 to 1973, this was basically it. I was in on the management of the university forests. Bill Davies was a forest manager and he set policies for us. We’d decide the area we were going to work in, set the guidelines, and go out and do the work. That work included building the roads, developing access, marking the timber, and merchandising it, selling it.

Royal Jackson: So, when did you become the manager of the forest?

Marvin Rowley: July 1 of 1973. When Bill reached retirement age, they decided that probably they were going to have a problem replacing that position with all the duties he was carrying out, because he was head of a department plus the forest manager. I was, up to that time, doing a lot of his management work by just conferring with him. It looked like, maybe new personnel was needed....

Royal Jackson: Even though you weren’t officially connected with the school?

Marvin Rowley: Yes.

Royal Jackson: You were an independent contracting . . .?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I wasn’t on the staff. I was contracted to do certain types of work, and it’d be spelled out just how we’d do it, so in a sense I was managing on the contract. And, although it’s similar to the contract we operate under today, we’ve modified that contract some for today’s situations.

Royal Jackson: I’d like to get some more of that in our next interview. Let me switch now, a little bit, to a little more philosophical vein. What has been the biggest influence in your life?

Marvin Rowley: I think family has been a big influence, and these individuals that were working in the forest industry, and my mother’s brother, Larry Gangle, was a graduate forester. He had a big influence on that. Of course, I think, as I got out into the industry, I liked the outdoors. Maybe it’s hard to tell just what develops interest, but, all through my life, it’d developed to the outdoor type of thing. But it also developed into managing, and we had experience growing crops, and growing the trees, and seeing them respond to treatments has continued to add to the philosophy.

Royal Jackson: So, from your youngest days, you had an interest in growing things, in forestry in general?

Marvin Rowley: Well, yes. In growing things. When I was a kid we used to go to the Mount Jefferson

Marvin Rowley: Wilderness Area every summer—from the time I was 12 years on. We spent two weeks up there one time, just by ourselves, the family.

Royal Jackson: Packed in? Or how did you get in there?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yes. Packed in. We each took a pack in. We packed in several years. Those days you didn’t even have sleeping bags, you just rolled a bundle of blankets up in a quilt, and used a gunnysack for a pack, sometimes. I think we carried in there one time with..., I told my mother I had 13 rolls of bread and a roll of liverwurst. I got so tired of eating liver, I never ate it for several years.

Royal Jackson: How has life changed since you were a kid? In general, is it very different, in your perception?

Marvin Rowley: Well, yes, it is. I think it probably depends where we live, but the life in general is more urban. That’s the biggest thing. I think another thing that I find is just meeting people. I’m out-going, and I don’t have any trouble meeting them. But, if you’re a little conservative or introverted, you could live all your life and not meet your neighbors now. Before, that was impossible. Yet, I wouldn’t say we got along any better then than now, because we probably had our spats and feuds then.

Royal Jackson: Do you think values are any different now from when you were growing up?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yes. There are tremendously different values. I know the values that our kids have.... We counted everything we had that’s been rather dear, and didn’t run off and spend money just on the spur of the moment. Where our kids came along and think nothing..., they think when they got married, for instance, if they didn’t buy a home that was worth $50,000 or something like that, something was wrong—I mean compared to today’s prices, they thought the world owed them a living.... And one of the things I think I’m really upset about is land-use planning or the general philosophy of people today in the general area of what should be required and what shouldn’t be. I have a lot of sympathy for the hippie-type person that moved out on the head of Marys River, for instance, and built the house around himself. Because I think we should have that right.

Royal Jackson: Do you think there’s any loss of personal freedom?

Marvin Rowley: I know there’s been a loss of personal freedom. I think I’ve got a 100-acre farm out there, and that I should be able to live in a cabin if I want to on that. And it shouldn’t be anybody else’s business.

Royal Jackson: How are you limited?

Marvin Rowley: Well, now I have to get a building permit to build a house, which I can see. But I can’t move into that house until they certify it finished.

Royal Jackson: Do you think there’s too much government regulation there?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, too much, way too much. They regulate.... And the other thing, of course, on this land-use planning business, I think I’m trying to look at it from an unselfish viewpoint and I see population coming, we haven’t reached zero population growth. Probably in Oregon we’ve been gaining people, and we’re going to gain a lot more before it starts down. So, what do we have? We have a bunch of selfish people living in the city here, or living around the thing, and they say, “We’ve got it just the way we want it now, we don’t want anybody to ever change it.” They’re saying, “You’re going to ruin our environment, if you break these pieces up into five-acre tracts.” Or, “You have got to keep them 40 acres.” So what’d they do? They ruin their environment by breaking them into 40-acre tracts. The lawyer, the doctor, the affluent person

Marvin Rowley: that can afford it goes out and buys his 40 acres, and builds his house on it, and promptly locks it up so it’s not used in production anymore unless he wants to, and he doesn’t have to, because he pays taxes. And they say that’s protecting our environment. Well, it really isn’t. It’s not giving the guy that was born in a ghetto-type of a situation, and we could call a ghetto an apartment complex down here, oh, on Highland Way, a guy that’s living in one of those apartments that wants out of it.... He can’t get out of it, unless he gets to be affluent.

Royal Jackson: Have you been involved in politics at all?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, a little bit.

Royal Jackson: In what way?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I was on the Philomath School Board for 14 years. And I worked actively in the State Representative campaign the last two legislative sessions, trying to defeat Bob Marx. Felt like he was doing us a disservice. And, of course, in this same line, in the line of private forestry, I think the State of Oregon is on a direction that has discouraged forestry for small woodland owners. And we’re trying to, we’ve been politically trying to change that. I think this legislature we, if we get through the small woodland option bill that state forestry and the small woodland group have worked on, we’ll probably make the biggest headway since 1900 as far as small woodland owners…. Up to this time, they can’t tell me that they’re encouraging me to grow trees. Only thing I’ve heard is, Bob Straub has stood up and said, “I am going to grow trees.” But he hasn’t done anything about making it really attractive. I’m a small woodland owner, and I’m growing trees because I’m a forester, not because it looks smart to me.

Royal Jackson: How do you feel about your life and career? Did you meet your expectations, whatever those were?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yes. I’m not sure I had expectations to start with. Along in this line of values and things, my expectations—probably basically I feel satisfied if I’m serving. We can reminisce about missing the boat and getting rich and things like that, but that really isn’t the important thing to me. One year when I was logging during our big-time logging time, I guess we’d say, I had 50 men working for me. I grossed $1,200,000, and, of course, I netted $15,000 that year, personally. That wasn’t a big deal. But, if you want to say that financing and the potential was there for making a big killing, things happen right. Or, if you make the right decisions, and there’s a lot of excitement in that…, but that really doesn’t mean as much to me as just seeing a good job done.

Royal Jackson: What do you want for your kids?

Marvin Rowley: Well, for my kids…. First of all, we wanted a good education for them, as good as they were capable of doing. I didn’t want to push them beyond their capacity.

Royal Jackson: How many kids do you have?

Marvin Rowley: Four.

Royal Jackson: What are their ages?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, 31, 29, 25, 21. Something like that. I know Rhonda just turned 21, but I’m not sure of the rest.

Royal Jackson: So, one thing you wanted for them was a good education?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, I wanted them to have the freedom to do what they wanted to do. We’ve never been one to tell our children what to do. I had some ideas what my parents wanted me to do, but we

Marvin Rowley: wanted our kids to have a good education, and then we’d given the best. Whatever they decided they wanted to do, we wanted them to put their best into it. I think they’ve all been doing pretty good on that.

Royal Jackson: What are your goals for the future?

Marvin Rowley: You know, I don’t know. I would like to go on as forest manager. I’d like to get my forest-management position into the place where it was down on paper, and I’d like to see an understudy as an assistant for me. In case I wanted to move on to a different job, I could leave him with a job that he’d already know, know the job enough so that he could really keep McDonald Forest and Dunn Forest productive as far as a university forest…. The experiments, the research that’s being carried out on it, and the instructional uses would be of high caliber. Right now, if I wanted to leave, I would leave them in a real bind. If they got the right person to follow me, he could pick that up after a time.

Royal Jackson: Besides your goals for the school forests, are there any other personal goals you have for the future?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I’d say, one of the things I have in the back of my mind is, if I were to leave the University right now, it would probably be to go into some type of work that would be maybe in an undeveloped country. Some type of sideline missionary work that would be social improvement alongside some of the other work being done.