Movie Logging

Rcveals Many 'New Wrinkles in Woods Practices as Developed by Hollywood,Directors Paul Hosmer in "Deschutes Pine. Echoes"

To some of us who have spent most of our lives in the woods and around sawmills, logging has lost some of the original glamor and romance which we w,ere led to believe rye would find in it after reading certain colorful uovels composed by a desk logger in a steam-heated New York a'partment, and the busitress has deteriorated into plain ordinary work. To find out how logging should really be carried on, to discover the real romance of the modern logging camps, and to learn a lot of new tricks in the art of falling trees, log cutting and odd and sundry ways of handling al ale, we must visit one of the moving picture shows depicting the hardy lumberjack in his natural surroundings, and se'e how modern logging should be done, as conceived in the nimble brain of some Hollywood director, whose idea of a modern camp is a log cabin set on a hillside, entirely surrounded by trees, and peopled u'ith a motley collection of youths wearing a week's growth of whiskers on their faces, but invariably possessing the latest thing in haircuts, including the recently patented Duco finish. We got the idea some way that- camp barbers must have gone out of the shaving business, bul they know all the latest tricks in hair bobbing.

- A few years ago a compa:ly of estensible stars got permission from the manager of a lumbering operation near where rve \Mere situated (which we will refer to hereafter as The Haywire Lumber Company, just to be cute), to use their plant and camps as a backgrouud for a picture 'scenario which some person or persons unknown had thought u,p ap- parently while under the influence of cocaine. After seeing the leading lady, who was not hard to look at, although. we thought a"little more judgment in the matter of diet mi-ght have-improved her chinces of sometime playing the lead i:r Peter Pin, we decided it wouldn't hurt us any to watch this company work and learn how movies are made. We became educated in a very short time.

It turned out that all the participants in this misdemeanor were first-class actors around th! hotel lobby, but in the woods-not so good. There was a dog in the outfit that had apparently been educated at Harvard and, as we recall it, h-e was a first-class actor, but he had poor support. The leading man deserves special mention, ih particular, to say nothing of other things-he should get, such as a ninety-day senteice on the rock--pile and reduction to the ranks'

NICHOLS &

LUMBER CO.

This lumberiacli hero had ideas of his own as to how a woodsman s'hould dress, but they should have been suppressed before allowing him to rrin wild in the woods. In the story he was a young man from the East who had moved to the western forests to make an honest living, if possible. How he did it so fast we never found out, but in the very first reel he appeared as a camp foreman, which !s quite a responsible position for a young fellow just out of a -convent. He took up a strategic position on a stump directly in front of the camera, from which vantage point, with maly dramatic gestures, he high-balled the puncher to let the strain outlf the mainlinC, dictated the policy of the company regarding the way a choker should be set and outlined Lis vie*"s as td the pro-per manner of falling a tree, notwithstanding the fact t6at -any regular foreman would have sat on'the iiu*p in a somnol-ent Jtate until the sun got too hot, when he would betake himself to a comfortable spot in the shade and relapse again into semi-consciousness until he heard the jammer wh-istle. Our dashing young hero alsg.entertained lome peculiar fancies regarding wogds clothing. He afiected one'of those flat, wide bri,mmed felt hats, such as the college boys throw into the air at a lootball game, so popular with lumberjacks, but the thing we remember the clearest about him ii the lie he wore. Aside from the fact that during our meager experience in the woods we have never seen a lumberjack with a necktie on, the idea was probably first rate, but what impressed if rparticularly-on our memory was the tie itself. It was one of those broad, !o-*'ing affiirs such as one sees in Greenwich Village on a sightseeing tour and stamps the wearer as a poet every time, even ttt.rftt h. *"y be wiriling away the time writin'g advert-ise- :' menti having to do with a young lady who couldn't tell him what the trouble was, the subject not being referred to by nice people. Where onr hero got the idea that Greenwich Village neckties were being worn among our. best woo^dsmen i"e never discovered. Et..t with the tie he lasted five reels before somebody finally shot him. He was a tougher bird than we gave him credit for being, however, and while we hoped the-wound would prove fatal, he managed to pull through and surprised us all by marrying a pretty good looking girl in thL sixth and last reel. Another eccentricity of our-young logging superintendent was his insistence on wearin! a pair of tinftistrriding pants. We don't ever recall seeing-a p-air of theJe in the ivoods before. It's a French conceit we believe.

Some radical ideas on timber falling were broached by the young man, too, in the early p,art of the picture, and we received quite a thrill when he and another young actor attempted to fall a tree. It was quite a sight, and we learned something from the exhibition. As we see it there isn't very much to cutting down a pine tree-a pine is a small tirnber as timber goes in the west-but apparently there is a lot more work to it than we thought. All the pine fallers we have seen are in the habit of giving a tree a casual glance, putting in an undercut with a few well directed strokes of an axe, grasping a cross-cut saw and dropping the tree within three irches of where they wanted it to go without thinking anything about it. The subject is, how"ever, a great deal deeper than we suspected, and these two young men showed us where our modern fallers are all wrong. In the first place, it seems that a casual glance at a tree is not enough. To do it right one must walk around the tree at least three times, ,meanwhile going through a lot of ,motions with the arms and shoulders, squinting at the sun, pacing off distanges, e,stimating windage, and breathing deeply and passionately to show the intense nervous pressure under which one is working. After, going through all these preliminaries the two young fallers attacked the tree with an axe, which is against our best judgment after watching several hundred fallers do their stuff. It took quite a lot of hard acting to drop the tree, too, and an air of excitement and nervous tension ,seemed to pervade the picture so that we finally removed oursselves from the scene after making three different bets with the manag'er of the Haywire Lumber Company as to which way the tree would eventually fall. It turned out that we lost them all. We havent learred yet why the idea of using a cross cut saw didn't occur to the young men, but they doubtless had a reason for not bringing one into the picture. They may have spent their early life on a hand logging show.

A good many cuts were necessary during this log- ging scene while the young men rested from their labor and allowed some of the hired help to,pour water on them. When the tree finally began to lean the young men registered_great excitement, and so did the generil manag6r of the Haywire Lumber Co. We were considerably uplet oursel'ves when we learned that after all the calculations the fallers had made, the monarch of the forest was going to drop in an entirely different direction from any we had bet on, and it was only by fast headwork that the actors saved the pictlre by suddenly turning around and gazing the other way. Lower and lower bent the top until finally the butt snapped and the tree flopped acrois the new- mainline track, breaking twelve dollars worth of merchantable timber ofi the top log, squashed a new 60-pound rail so far into the ground that the section gang didn't find it until next day, which of course delayed the noon train with the fresh meat for camp until too late for supper, whereupon the cook drank a quart of banara extract and left for town in disgust to finish up the jag, and forty-two cars of logs were delayed a day in getting to the mill while the jeriy gang cleared off the right of way.

This noble act accomplished, our hero wiped his brow with a standard model red bandana hanky, breathed passionately.fifteen or twenty times, and tried torlook as il he had been committing such acts of vandalism all his life and was proud of it. The manager of the Haywire Co. had other ideas, but he couldn't say them out loud as he was surpposed to be getting a lot of free advertising out of the picture by allowing his woods to be flashed on the screen. More than a year afterward a government scaler ran acr )si the stump the actors had left and broke down and cried, and there was some talk by the timber fallers, in whose strip the tree originallv stood, of a suit against the movie outfii for defamation of character, although the manager of the Haywire Lumber Co. succeeded in smoothing thiJ difficulty out by promising to appear as a witness in their favor if anyone ever attempted to accuse the boys of having left such a stump.

We noticed a few other discrepancies in the picture afterwards, also, such as when the young logging boss walked into the commissary and called for i cigar and the storekeeper actually had one in stock. There was one other scene, too, where the hero walked casually towards the cookshack when the dinner bell rang. Evelybody knows that such a thing is not done in a logging camp. If you donit run there is no use in starting.

The picture itself, when we got a chance to see it some three years later, was rotten, and the manager of the Haywire Lumber Co. tells us he had only been to two movies in the last four years and they were society dramas where he felt reasonably certain of not having to look at any moving picture logging. Meanwhile the company rnooches along in its old-fashioned, shiftless manner, falling trees with saws; the woods foreman sits in the shade of a loggirg flat and watches the operation complacently through half shut eyes; the skidder engineer hauls in the logs when the whistle-punk gives him the highball; choker setters climb around in the brush like squirrels and set chokers anyway they can to make them hold until the log is decked; the trains even under these slipshod methods, go through on time, and the company had never mis,sed a dividend.

We are anxiously awaitipg the arrival of the next movie outfit wis'hing to take some logging scenes. We can stand just'one more good laugh like the last one and then we're ready to cash in any time.

Frank Burnaby Teaches Men To Sell

Weekly classes in Salesmanship have been inaugurated by Frank Burnaby, President of the Sun Lumber Company, at"Beverly Hills.

Twenty-five employes of the company attended the classes, where they are taught by competent instructors.

A village parson's daughter eloped in her father's clothes. And the next day the village Blatter came out with an account of the elopement, headed: "Flees in Father's Pants."

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