Western Retail Lumbermen's Ass'n and It's Effect on World Affairs

By Jack Dionne

The Western Retail Lumbermen's Association, which holds its twenty-first annual Institute in Los Angeles from February 18th to 23rd, is entitled to all the honor that the lumbermen of the west can shower upon her, for good deeds done, and for history made.

For this organization is second to no other retail lumber association in the entire country from a standpoint of actual accomplishments that have improved and changed the face of the industry; and it is just and right that this fact should be known.

The Western Retail Lumbermen's Association was the first great retail lumber association to take up and preach and promote the gospel of intensively and intelligently and forcefully merchandising lumber. When they began this from a standpoint of modern lumber merchandising, lies between California and Texas.

So the Western Retail Lumbermen's Association can rightfully claim credit to having pioneerred the idea of modern merchandising of building materials, just as the Southern Cypress Manufacturers' Association rightfully claims to have blazed the trail for advertising and merchandising a wholesale lumber product; and none who speaks truth and knows the facts will attempt to cloud the title of the officers of the \illestern.

I have known men to lay claim to having been the first to preach the gospel of merchandising lumber, who not only didn't preach it THEN, but haven't the ability to preach it NOW so that anyone pays any attention to it, or gets any work, no other retail lumber organization in existence had ever breathed a thought on this now all-important subject.

The Lumbermen's Association of Texas was close behind, A. L. Porter's work with the Western slightly antedating my first campaign along the same lines in Texas. And it was in close cooperation with Mr. Porter and his publicity man, W. T. Denniston-a very gifted lumber publicity man-that I worked during the first several years of my efforts to inject better business methods into retail lumbering. We three collaborated continually in the exchange of idels dug up in our various territories, with the result that they were continually telling THEIR dealers in the Nprthwest what MY ilealer friends were doing in Texas, while I told the Texas fraternity what the 'Westerners were doing.

Today the members of the Western Retail Lumbermen's Association and those of the Lumbermen's Association of Texas rank far in advance of all other territories frorn a standpoint of lumber merchandising. The middle west comes close behind, with Kansas and Oklahoma up in the foreground.

California will be proud hostess to the Western Association, for California has developed the practice of modernly merchandising lumber to a greater and more general extert than any other state in the western group. Unquestionably, the titl,e of leading state in the American union impression from it. To Porter and his associates belongs the honor of starting the doctrine of CREATING BUSINESS in retail lumber associations.

In California the visitors to the Western Annual Institute will see in active daily practice, the more modern developments of the very thoughts that they put into circulation for the first time, many years ago. They will find the modern building stores and offices and sales rooms; they will find display, and plan, and service rooms where the public may come for building information and advice and ATMOSPHERE; they will find the use of plan books, of publicity' of built-in things, of attractiveness in retail lumber architectural service, of high class salesmanship, etc., developed to a point that they would have little suspected fifteen years ago. They will find lumber merchants giving service of the most unusual order, and finding that it brings big returns. They will find lumber merchants making a great success of doing the building THINKING for their communities.

And they will find a riot of home building architecture that gives the imagination full play, and appeals to the beauty-loving, luxury-approving senses.

They will meet in California scores of lumber merchants who will delight to sit down with them anderchange ideas for the creating of business, and they will be ahle to take home with them scores of new th-oggfts andlplans that they can incorporate into their own -atreirs {*idtD,therr get'hornc.