Laird Logging

                                                     Gold Beach Ranger District

                                                        Siskiyou National Forest

 

During the 1970’s and into the 1980’s Laird Logging was the second largest logging company in Oregon after Huffman and Wright Logging based in Canyonville.   Laird was based in Gold Beach and was the principal logger for Champion International Corporation, which had a large plywood mill there along with extensive timber lands.   Laird had his shop, equipment yard, and fleet of yellow log trucks on property owned by Champion next to the mill.  In addition to his fleet of trucks, he had three yarders, logging tractors, mostly Cats, road construction equipment and a helicopter with a pilot.   

 Laird’s first name was Shirley.  He had been raised in the Coquille Valley, south of Coos Bay.  His dad had been a logger and Shirley spent many years working for him and eventually inherited the logging company.  Shirley had a rough voice and reminded me of a drill sergeant I encountered when I went through basic training in the Army.  Shirley’s voice was always noticeable while talking over the Curry County radio system, which most loggers as well as Forest Service personnel had while dealing with timber sales.  He would not hesitate to chew out one of his own employees over the radio, which we could all hear.  It was never pleasant.  Shirley had been a Marine during the Korean War and in many ways was still fighting the war.  He carried a hand gun in his pickup because as he once told me he did not trust some of his employees.  Due to a labor shortage in the area some of his employees were inmates from the local county jail under a work and release program, where they were picked up in the early morning and returned to jail after a hard day’s work in the woods.   Shirley usually kept one yarder and some tractors busy logging on Champion’s land.   His other two yarders were used on Forest Service timber sales purchased by Champion on the three Westside Ranger Districts of the Siskiyou National Forest, including Powers, Gold Beach and the Chetco Districts.  When Champion did not keep him busy he would bid on jobs for South Coast Lumber Company with a mill in Brookings.  His equipment was good-- you seldom saw any broken-down piece of machinery in the woods with Shirley Laird’s name on it.  Even his fire trucks were top notch, in contrast to some loggers who put these on the bottom of their maintenance list.   

In my years working as a timber sale contract administrator on the Gold Beach District from 1979 to 1988 I had four timber sales for which Shirley Laird was the contract logger.   The first was the McLobster Sale, purchased by Champion with 12 million board feet of timber consisting of five clearcut units ranging in size from 20 to 60 acres in the head waters of Lobster Creek, a fish-bearing stream that drained into the Rogue River about 10 miles up from Gold Beach.   Some of the riparian buffers along the stream below these units were inadequate because they did not provide the necessary protection required by the stream protection provision of the contract.   There were slopes exceeding 100% or greater than a 45 degree angle and many of the large trees on these slopes would have ended up in the stream after being felled.   By contract modification, requiring agreement by both Champion and the Forest Service, these buffer areas were extended upslope from the stream by 100 to 200 feet depending on the terrain.   This deleted an estimated amount of timber from the original sale volume which had to be made up by adding an additional 20 acre unit on the sale area under the modification agreement.   

Laird logged with two yarders, one being a 110-foot tower on a Skagit yarder reaching out 2500 to 3000 feet with the skyline cable to achieve the necessary log suspension for soil and stream protection.   A motorized carriage was used to yard one to four logs at a time depending on the weight of the logs.  This system employed four men on the landing, a yarder engineer, a log loader operator and two men, called chasers, that released chokers, cut limbs off logs, branded and painted log ends.   Usually six men worked in the brush on the rigging crew, including a rigging slinger supervising 3 or 4 choker setters and the man in charge of the entire operation, called the hook tender, whose name was Jack.   He was a tough supervisor and it was common to hear him yelling at the rigging crew from the landing.   If a man got fired or quit on the job he had to ride in a logging truck back to town.  It was very dangerous work and accidents were frequent, sometimes fatal.  There were incidents when Laird’s helicopter was used to move injured people from the woods to the hospital in Gold Beach. The helicopter also was used at times to fly cable from the yarder to the other slope beyond the clearcut unit to save time of rigging cables on the ground by hand.   There was a water bucket available for fire suppression if needed.   Also, the helicopter was made available to the entire community for emergencies.  

Laird use to employ a cage that would hook to the carriage to transport the rigging crew out of the unit at the end of the day.  This practice stopped after a near-fatal accident where the yarder engineer was not paying attention and the cage flipped over the skyline.   This practice was not looked upon highly by the state health and safety people either, and after that one incident the crew preferred to walk out at the end of the day, for their own survival.

The other yarder Laird used was a 50-foot swing boom using a running skyline system reaching out 800 feet to complete logging out the upper corners of the units.  The hook tender for this operation was Pete, a quiet man, who seem to be suspicious of his crew and kept a low profile.

Like most loggers Laird’s priority was to get as many loads a day off the landings as possible; any other work requirements were secondary.   In order to keep up with erosion control and slash piling requirements it was customary to allow the logger no more than three landings pending completion of cleanup work before moving to a new landing.  Laird had pushed the limit as he was moving to his fourth landing leaving three with uncompleted work.  The logging manager for Champion had been notified of this non-compliance.  The remedy was simple; the logging manger took away the log branding hammers for both yarders and told Laird he could have them back when the Forest Service was happy again.  After two days of no hauling while doing the required work Laird went back to logging.

All logs required a brand, assigned by the purchaser on each log end to identify them as to what sale they were from for log scaling and payment purposes; also, loggers and sub-contractors were paid according to the log scale.  A spot of yellow paint was also required on one log end for export control since no National Forest logs were allowed to be exported, except for Port Orford cedar which did not have a domestic market at the time.

At least once a week log trucks were inspected as they left the sale area for branding, painting and load receipts.  If loads were found to be in non-compliance they were parked until the situation was corrected.  This usually involved a person leaving the landing with a branding hammer and can of yellow paint.  This definitely slowed down production and got the logger’s attention quickly.   Laird could hear the truck driver call back to the landing over the radio for someone to come and brand and paint logs.  Laird would enter the conversation with his rough voice in frustration with it all.   It would not take him long to be on the job giving some people on the landing his advice on what they should be doing or else, and it was never a friendly exchange.   

One of my most memorable encounters with Laird was on the Camp Victoria sale where he was logging for South Coast Lumber.   The crew operating the 110- foot tower had completed yarding operations on one unit and moved to another unit leaving a mountain of slash on the landing.  Pete, the hook tender of the swing boom yarder, was ready to move on to this landing to complete yarding the upper corners of the unit.  He called me on the radio telling me he could not operate with all the slash piled on the landing and was going to push it over the side into the unit with a bulldozer.  I arrived on the landing and said he could not do that. At the moment we both looked down the hill to see a cloud of dust behind Shirley’s pickup truck coming toward us.  Pete replied to me, “Well, let’s see what Laird has to say about it.” Shirley jumped out of his truck and wanted to know what the holdup was.  Pete told him the situation with the slash and Shirley said to push it over the side.  Pete replied that the Forest Service wouldn’t allow that.  Laird turned to me and barked, “Then what should I do with it?”  I told him if he pushed it over the side he would have to yard it back up and pile it again or he could burn it under a permit.  Laird elected to burn it, so I requested a burning permit over the radio from the District fire management people which they granted with the condition that Laird provide two fire trucks on the job with a hose lay around the pile.   He agreed, got two fire trucks and put his crew to work laying out fire hose and wetting down the area around the pile as it started to burn.   About an hour into the job one of the pumper engines ran out of gas.  Since all the crew was busy I took it upon myself to fill the tank from the five gallon gas can provided on the fire truck.  Just as I was getting ready to pour the gas into the tank Laird came up from below the landing yelling, “Don’t do that!” He told me he had put sugar in all the extra gas tanks because he thought employees were stealing gas from him.  He had some good gas in his pickup that was used and in the end all that slash went up in smoke with no spot fires. 

The big Skagit yarder was moved to a long clearcut unit and after yarding the first sky line road reaching out 3000 feet Jack, the hook tender said he could not find any more adequate tail hold trees on the far slope across the stream below to anchor the skyline to.   After looking into this I agreed and permitted him to use the north bend system which involved leaving the skyline in place on the first road and highlead yard to it.  When I returned to my pickup to write up the agreement for this change in yarding systems I went to place a copy in Jack’s company pickup.  Upon opening the door I noticed somebody had left a BM on the driver’s seat!  I did not hang around to see what was said at the end of that day.    

By 1984-85 Champion had cut all the mature timber on their lands and could not compete with other purchasers for National Forest timber sales under a declining lumber market and the mill was closed.   Laird was out of a job and had to close up shop and move.   He moved his entire operation to Lakeside, north of Coos Bay where he went to work for International Paper Company until they closed down a few years later.   Laird retired after that, sold most of his equipment, laid off his permanent employees and moved back to Gold Beach.

By the end of the 1980’s other mills were closing due to an inadequate log supply, conflicts with labor unions or the decision by corporate boards to move operations to southern forests in the U.S. where there were second growth plantations ready to harvest.   It was the mill and logging employees that got the short end of the stick with no pensions and no other jobs to go to in their small communities.   Some relocated to other areas for work, some qualified for job training programs at local community colleges and some could not cope with the change, like Pete the hook tender, who committed suicide.

  Laird died in 2002 at the age of 72 and was buried with full military honors as a Marine Corp staff sergeant.  

Today the only remaining mill on the south coast that I know of is South Coast Lumber. All the others are gone, including Champion, Moore Mills, Rogge Lumber, Westbrook, and Georgia-Pacific.   The Siskiyou National Forest is now combined with the Rogue River National Forest and the Chetco Ranger District has been consolidated with the Gold Beach District.   The timber management and engineering staff now is only a small fraction of what it was in the 1970’s until the 1990’s.  For example, there was a Westside Engineering office north of Gold Beach which closed sometime in the l990’s. It had 50 to 60 permanent and seasonal employees serving the three westside Districts doing road surveys, design work, construction inspection and road maintenance consisting of graders, dump trucks, backhoes and other equipment.

It is all history now.