Red Cedar Shingle Had Best Year

By JACK DIONNE

I remember many years ago making my first series of addresses to the shingle manufacturers of the Pacific Northwest, and telling them the following:

"The good things of this world don't just happen. You have to use your brains and your energies to make worthwhile things happen. The trouble with shingles is that those who make them do nothing else. They just sit around and wait for Providence to bring them a market, and prosperity. And what you have got to learn is that that job belongs to yourselves, and not to Providence, and whenever you get busy creating prosperity, then, and not before, will you enjoy prosperity."

I have thought of that often during the part year, as I watched the shingle manufacturers of the Northwest making their first deliberate and successful efforts to hold the shingle market.

Shingles have long been a thorn in the flesh of the retail lumber trade, because the market has always been so unstable, and undependable, and subject to such sudden and dynamic fluctuations, that a man never knew when he bought a car of shingles that they wouldn't be just half that next week. No one is more interested in a dependable market for shingles, than the retail lumberman.

So HE, too, has watched the shingle market this year with unusual interest. And looking back over his books he discovers that there were fewer rises and falls in the Red Cedar Shingle market this year than during any previous year-except the high tide that followed the war-and that the waves that DID develop were less severe than has been the custom. In other words, there was more of deliberate sanity in the Red Cedar Shingle market this year than ever before.

And the answer is that there was more cooperation among the shingle manufacturers this year than ever be- fore, and there were fewer shingles sold this year throrrgh unreliable and undependable people than ever before.

The shingle producers got their shoulders to the rvheel early in the year, and they evidently said to themselves and to one another, "Let's show the world that there IS actually sorne common sense in the shingle industry."

It would be unwise to state that the shingle folks had had a very remunerative year, eve'n as it was. The price never got high, and there rvas considerable curtailment, and unusual effort to hold the stock for a fair value. But there was no time during the year when they actually gave their shingles away, as they have so frequently done in the past.

And the year ended strong, with an improved demand, and increasing price, and the prospect for a very strong shingle market during the first sixty days of 1926. The mills of both the American Northrvest and British Columbia curtailed their output very heavily during November and December, and there is every reason to believe that shingles will open strong in the New Year.

The bbst efiect that the shingle experience of 1925 will have is on the mentalities of the shingle men themselves, for they have .convinced themselves and one another that the shingle market can be made more stable, that shingle men CAN and WILL coeperate (that fact used to be seriously doubted), and that shingles can be sold as sanely and successfully as other commodities.

I congratulate the shingle men.

Large Purchase Of Timber

Spokane, Wash., Dec. 20.-The largest timber deal made in the northwest for several months was closed recentlv when the Weyerhaeuser interests purchased a 16,000-acrl tract with 300,000,000 feet of standing white pine from Henry Turrish. Consideration reported as $1,800,000.