THE GOSPEL OF WORK OFFERED A CRUEL, BINARY DISTINCTION

Today’s emphasis on “job satisfaction” puts too fine a point on it — the basic wants and needs of the job seekers who came west were driven by more humble visions of success and security. The Gospel of Work offered a cruel, binary distinction: you either had a job or you didn’t. That crash of the late 1920s and 1930s wasn’t just markets collapsing and factory doors slamming shut, it was the shattered hopes and dreams of those who’d come 2,000 miles simply for a paycheck.

Resilience in Residence

Out of its collective misery emerged some of Longview’s best qualities. A certain adaptability and toughness allowed first citizens to extend help to each other, to rally their resources, to collectively “suck it up.” The populace was many things, but one of them was not “spoiled.”

Most of the region had never really prospered during the 1920s, and thus residents typically had not indulged in the “two-cars-in-every-garage” kind of optimism common in more affluent states.

Carlos Schwantes

The Pacific Northwest

Many of the amenities and recreational outlets offered to the pioneers served not only their intended use — the diversion of fun and games — but also what we consider a more modern usefulness, relieving stress. Then as now, misery very often loves company.

Providing Clean Power

Since 1936 from page 21

Northwest hydropower produces no carbon emissions, thereby significantly reducing the total carbon footprint of the region’s energy production.

Photos of the early years revel in civic celebrations and spectacles at every turn. May Day celebrations were huge events. The public gathered in droves for Easter Egg Hunts, patriotic commemorations, and the yearly Rolleo. Even as individuals were challenged, the collective spirit seemed strong. Rolleo!

Recreation was social. Sports, games and competitions were public spectacles — group galas — and none quite so spectacular as Rolleo, which seems to have been a local invention.

Longview formed its Rolleo Association in June 1929, and within three months the new sport drew national attention:

The log-rolling was won by Peter Hooper of Kelso, Wash. Clad in trunks and spiked shoes, he maintained his equipoise on a log furiously spinning in water for 14 min. 50 sec., when Sam Harris, his nearest competitor, splashed off. Champion Hooper received $150 and a belt stout enough to hold his bemuscled girth.

Ed Sorger of Longview, equipped with spikes and a circling rope, squirreled up a 120-ft. fir tree, cut out the top, descended, all in 4 min. 5 sec. Among his prizes was a Paul Bunyan doughnut, one foot in diameter.

TIME Magazine, August 29, 1929

Eventually Rolleo Weeks were splashing Paul Bunyanisms all over town, the whole city joining in the spirit including the founder himself in red hat and blue jeans — a rare photo of Mr. Long in less than his formal best. As it would for the rest of the century, Lake Sacajawea provided a focal point and gathering place for Rolleo and for many other events. The Red Cross held swim meets to help promote swim safety. Water carnivals packed in participants and spectators, many in canoes and rowboats plying back and forth.

A

Good Walk Nearly Spoiled

Meanwhile, as still befits their tribe, golfers were determined to chase their little white pill no matter what manner of mire and muck might find it alighted. Impatient with the founding and funding of a modern country club, enterprising hackers (was the term ever used so

SPORTS, GAMES, AND COMPETITIONS WERE PUBLIC SPECTACLES

appropriately as in the brushy valley of the Cowlitz?) carved out nine holes between Pacific Way and Ocean Beach. John McClelland:

The course was short, rough, and an easy place to lose balls, but it was well-used, even after Weyerhaeuser built its railroad through the middle of it. Anyone who could clear the railroad track with his tee shot on the first hole had a good drive.

As for the larger ambition: A gang of on-site engineers and city builders could attest that golf courses are difficult and expensive to build. But Mr. Long gave his blessing in 1925 and the game was on. Money was to be raised by selling memberships in the fledgling Longview Country Club at $250 each. Pesky Kelso got in the game by declaring a course of its own in the works, trying to siphon off potential members as it had been poaching shoppers, diners and rental tenants already.

Luke Goodrich, president of the First National Bank, was elected club president and later owned up in a letter to S.M. Morris that, as was the case often in Longview, the club simply didn’t have the means or potential investment to do what older, more established cities had done: cont page 23 from page 22

Photos: Canoeists, Lake Sacajawea; Rolleo tree-topping; Longview’s first 9-hole golf course.

Personally I have worked just as hard for the country club as I have for the bank in the past year and while I have never in my life welshed on a personal obligation it now appears that I am to be put in the position of facing the possibility of the country club, of which I am the president, being compelled to default on its obligation.

Sympathetic to the particular irony of a bank president facing bankruptcy, Mr. Long and the Longview Company bailed out the fledgling club.

Good Sports

The team sports flourished, requiring a less manicured piece of ground and a less mannered clientele. Even before the permanent buildings were completed in Longview, the Longview Athletic Field had been fenced off, with a grandstand, near Baltimore Street, down the road from the St. Helens Inns. A baseball club was organized — the Forest Rangers — and joined a semipro league which Kelso, of course, had scrambled to join with its own squad, the Timber Wolves. Players were recruited with modest salaries and, more important, good jobs.

R.A. Long High School played its games there until R.A. Long Field was finished in 1928. The Community House / YMCA offered basketball, swimming and fitness facilities, along with a venue for entertainment and socializing.

Service and Socializing

There were more sedate forms of collective activity. Service clubs of all sorts blossomed in the new city, although many imposed population requirements, charter fees, and other qualifying actions. Lions, Elks, Kiwanis and Rotary all scrambled to establish chapters, but may have been outdone by the Longview Women’s Club, which not only declared itself but also built its own building near Kessler Boulevard, Depression and all.

Vandercook, Morris, and several others formed the Columbia Amusement Company and in late 1924 opened the Columbia Theater, built to host live drama and entertainment, as well as motion pictures. Road shows came to Longview regularly and five acts of vaudeville were standard weekend fare. However, as was often the case, Kelso had stolen a march on Longview in the entertainment game as well, with three established movie houses — the Vogue, the Liberty and the Auditorium.

cont page 24 from page 23

J.H. Kelly, a plumbing contractor, organized a soccer club, to the astonishment of the Long-Bell brass who’d barely seen or heard of the game. Playing its games at the local field and recruiting players with Canadian or British / Irish lineage, the Longview Timber Barons won the Oregon state title five years running and the Washington title once.

People + Place Then and Now

As John McClelland notes, “Longview was a city of joiners from the very beginning.” Moose, Eagles, Masons and Odd Fellows were established. Its American Legion Post, with 50 members, was formed in 1924. Wherever Longview recreated or socialized, it tended to do so in a crowd.”

Outdoor Paradise

Those who could afford some time off, time to lift their heads from the wheel of toil and look around, soon realized that Longview was an outdoor paradise. Hunters and fishermen delighted in the wild surround, thrilled especially by the variety of rivers and natural reserves. There were vast prairies to the north, ridge crests and stream beds flowing south. The six rivers of Cowlitz County — Kalama, Lewis and Toutle, Columbia, Cowlitz, Coweeman, — abounded with fish suitable for both sport and commercial anglers.

The Kalama River was famous for fly-fishing, especially for summer steelhead. Small boys growing up on the river first learned to swim and then to fish, gaining such an intimacy with the fish that they knew their hiding places. Fishermen unfamiliar with the river would pay local boys a dollar to point out where the fish were and always caught them.

Virginia Urrutia

They Came to Six Rivers

Then came the cars. The advent of automobiles and the building of roads did more than connect people and provide basic transportation. Automobile touring — and eventually adventures by bus, train or sternwheeler — became a popular recreational getaway. Few guests ever came to Longview without ritual visits to the Columbia Gorge, Mount. St. Helens, the Pacific beaches, and Bonneville Dam. Still, most of them put visiting the world’s largest sawmill at the very top of their lists.

Across the years the town has experienced economic bumps and neardisastrous unemployment at times. Development has been haphazard, almost in defiance of the Planned City ethos, as shopping malls and centers have spread throughout the region and sucked the life from downtown. The city has experienced social disruption, and is not immune to crime, addiction and poverty.

Still, for Longview a vision of the good life has endured. More than most towns. As John McClelland, Jr. and other historians have pointed out, Longview was bequeathed optimism, hopefulness and high expectations. It’s been more than lucky to count R.A. Long as its benefactor and developer. It’s inherited a strain of that good man’s idealism and vision, too.

Even if the founders experienced bumps in the road, disruptions shoving the city the other way, they dreamed big. And dreamed good. Until Longview gives every man, woman and child within its limits an opportunity to live happily, to improve mind, soul and body…Longview has an unfinished task.

R.A. Long, 1925

It’s difficult to say where the city stands relative to a hierarchy of needs. Perhaps no one has, or ever will, reach complete self-fulfillment. But futures are built as much on hope as in history, and Longview has always relied on that in generous supply.