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KEEPING IT
ROLAND By Patrick Dunning
Rex Lumber has long had the advantage of having the Roland brothers in the filing room.
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GRACEVILLE, Fla. s the saying goes, good sawmills don’t exist without having good saws. For Rex Lumber’s home division in Graceville, Fla., they believe good saws begin with veteran saw filers Tommy Roland, 78, and Pete Roland, 76. The brothers were born in Hartford, Ala. in the early 1940s with a mechanical inclination in their DNA. Tie that together with a work ethic you can’t buy and the result is two of the South’s best sawmill men. Of course, they’d never personally hold themselves in such high regard. But to a surrounding cast who can tell story after story of a time either brother influenced them in a positive way, the resounding voice would sound something along the lines of, “You won’t leave the same after you’ve met them.” Head filer is just one of the many titles the Rolands have held since each joined Rex Lumber in 1976, continuing to work under owner Finley McRae. Their careers began after a cousin of Tommy and Pete’s working at the Graceville mill caught wind of a position opening. McRae was having problems with his round saws and needed two filers. McRae was tipped off by their cousin that the two had a gift working with their hands. “McRae said he was interested in hiring if we were interested in working for him,” Pete says. 22
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Pete, left, and brother Tommy Roland are well respected among their peers at Rex Lumber’s home base in Graceville, Fla.
Tommy says McRae has always been aggressive in his business approach. “He knows how to make money and stays on the cutting edge of technology.” That includes ensuring employees have the training they need to perform a job well. He told the brothers he was bringing in the man who developed the Foley saw grinder the following week to show them the right way to file saws. “Finley told me, ‘I want you to go in there and learn all the wrong ways to file saws, because that’s what they’re doing,’” Pete says. “And he was right. There were a lot of differences in the way he showed us to do it.”
ROUND SAW U. During the crash-course of learning to level blank plates and manually place tips, McRae had another filer sent from a saw manufacturing company to educate them on how to straighten a dished saw and make it run. It wasn’t long before they graduated from “Round Saw University.” Between 1978 and ’79, Rex Lumber switched to band saws. Not far
behind was John Stanton, a 78-year-old band saw guru, to assist the Rolands. He’d come twice a week for half a day, rotating the brothers bi-weekly for a month of hands-on training. “My first day with Mr. Stanton, he told me he was going to a work a section and to watch,” Tommy recalls. “When he got through with that portion of the band saw he asked if I saw what he did. I said yes sir. So, he laid his tools down and told me to do the next one.” Stanton inspected Tommy’s first attempt and approved. Pete remembers being appreciative of Stanton for keeping instruction simple to grasp. “He always gave us something to build on and that’s all we needed,” he says. “We had that mechanical mind, so it was easy to pick up what he was saying once he explained what was happening.” Before coming into the fold with Rex Lumber, Tommy and Pete spent their childhood in Columbus, Ga. Their grandfather on their mother’s side worked fulltime in a textile mill and did carpentry as well. That’s where the two were taught their first lessons in the virtue of an honest
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