How it all began . . .

I reckon it all began when I was just a very young whippersnapper. My father was in the retail lumber business. At one time he purchased the total output of twenty three sawmills in the East Multnomah and Clackamas County area! He had his own railroad siding near the Portland airport where he would ship a trainload of timber a month to a broker in Indiana.

As a boy of 6-7 years old, I would often get to ride with my father to many of the mills in his 1949 forest green Studebaker pickup. No seatbelts or car seat requirements in those days!

I recall one mill in particular, the Koch Mill in Sandy, Oregon. What a thrilling place for a little tike! One of the reasons for the remembrance of this particular mill was the straddle carrier rides. This was a special piece of mill equipment that was designed to straddle a unit of timber approximately 36” wide and four or five tall. As soon as the drivers of these units would see my father’s pickup, they would race to see who would be able to take me for a ride in their straddle carrier. What a blast!

From these sorts of experiences I suppose the sawdust became part of my brain and bloodstream.

Jumping ahead twenty years with four years of college behind me, I began a teaching career of 30 years. These years were marked by summers and weekends working the woods, putting and processing about a hundred cords of firewood a year. Some of those summers were also marked by small logging jobs to help friends.

As the years past I met a young lady that had a 70 acre timber/tree farm near the community in which I taught. As time would have it, I asked her to marry me. I asked the question on our first date, after visiting the tree farm! It worked! Some would say “the rest is history” and that is just about correct. We continued providing firewood during summers and weekends until about 1983, when I got the urge to produce lumber rather than firewood. I looked around for a year or two at different mill designs and decided on a Mobile Dimension Sawmill. I discovered they were manufactured in a town just East of Portland Oregon, Troutdale.

After visiting the factory, I wrote out a check for a down payment and ordered my first mill. I came home and began building my mill. One of my past students who lived near by was “drafted” to construct the mill building for me.