29 minute read
Quips & Quotes
A Century on the LongView THE
Lower Columbia
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Q
UIPS & QUOTES
Selected by Debra Tweedy
Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything. --John Kenneth Galbraith, CanadianAmerican economist and diplomat, 1908-2006 It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. --Henry David Thoreau, American writer and philosopher, 1817-1862 The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope. --John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, Scottish writer and statesman, 1875-1940 Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. --George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright, 1856-1950
The sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy; walk and be healthy. The best way to lengthen out our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose. --Charles Dickens, English writer and social critic, 1812-1870
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. --Michel de Montaigne, French philosopher and essayist, 1533-1592 A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. --Italo Calvino, Italian writer and journalist, 1923-1985 The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. --Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian writer and journalist, 1927-2014 A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential? --Jane Wagner, American writer, director and producer, 1935If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair. --Shirley Chisholm, African-American politician, 1924-2005
Longview native Debra Tweedy has lived on four continents. She and her husband decided to return to her hometown and bought a house facing Lake Sacajawea.“We came back because of the Lake and the Longview Public Library,” she says. Wilbur (right) and Winston (left) use their handsome looks to avoid detention at their father’s alma mater, R.A. Long High School, Longview’s first high school. It was constructed in 1927.
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The Worker’s Paradise
The Longview founders feLT — and this was among their strongest convictions — that they could create a place where hard work was not just expected; it was honored and reasonably compensated. They faced a big task. Most mill workers were migratory, restless, and ornery. They regarded mill management as exploitive and their jobs dangerous. The culture of the mill towns, if you wished to call it that, was wild — a traveling circus of single, lonely men behaving very, very badly. Mr. Long and his colleagues resolved to improve the worker’s lot, and his expectations, in three ways: 1) Replacing the bare bones logging camps with more civilized and stable conditions; 2) Encouraging families, not just single men, to call their new city home; and 3) Building the trades — encouraging the development of skilled workmen, not just manual laborers — as the bedrock of Longview’s productivity and prosperity. For the most part it worked. Thanks in many ways to good timing, the radical unionists like the Wobblies never gained a toehold in Longview. Workers began to consider themselves potential family men, even if housing and amenities were always in short supply. And the notion that one might labor on behalf of a single company, for an entire career, and perhaps even pass that job on to one’s offspring, took hold. Longview became a town always building something. The sounds of hammers and circular saws echoed through the new neighborhoods. Tradesmen and contractors flourished. Unions grew strong and assertive, without breaking the backs of the owners. The banks and groceries and schools and churches emerged and multiplied in support of this powerful working class. Longview as Worker’s Paradise was as much a story as its Biggest Sawmills in the World. Until — quite gradually and so imperceptibly few even noted it at the time, or even remark upon it now — it suddenly wasn’t.
people+ place
then: the company’s town now: endangered species
Joe Lane, president, Pacific-Tech Construction, Inc., one of the few general contractors still operating and thriving in Cowlitz County.
where we’ve Been • where we’re GoinG
The Long View project pairs history with modern context. To celebrate Longview’s 100th birthday, Columbia River Reader is expanding its monthly “People+Place” feature to contrast the historical “Then” with the contemporary “Now.”
“It’s important to look back and celebrate the past,” said publisher Susan Piper, “but equally important to track the changes that make us what we are today. How close are we to the founders’ vision? What remains? What’s entirely new?”
Thanks to tremendous community support (see Partner Spotlights, page 26), the Reader will present 12 months of “People+Place Then and Now” reportage, then combine and expand these features into a commemorative book. The Long View: A Planned City and America’s Last Frontier written by Hal Calbom, with a foreword by John M. McClelland, III.
The Reader will coordinate with the Longview Centennial Committee, led by Reed Hadley and Arlene Hubble, to publicize civic activities and celebrations (see Centennial Countdown, page 26) and will host a Book Launch Gala in late June 2023.
THEN AND NOW 1. Developing Dreams 2. Empire of Trees 3. Heavy Lifting 4. Work Force 5. Renewable Resources 6. Finding a Voice 7. Transport and Trade 8. Power and Energy 9. Education for All 10. Sustaining the Spirit 11. Well-being 12. Dreams Developing
Work Force 4.
THEN
The founders could control almost anything — except politics and people.
NOW
Longview is a people paradise. But where have all the builders gone?
people+ place then
The Company’s Town
It’s simplistic to suggest Longview’s founders underestimated the people who were drawn to their planned city. More fairly, it can be suggested they overestimated the “trickle down” influence of the trends that defined their own Gilded Age.
Their beautifully planned and zoned streets and boulevards derived from models in Paris, Washington, D.C. and Kansas City. Their planners had glorious successes already under their belts and in their portfolios. Kessler, Nichols and others were apostles of the City Beautiful Movement and its avatar, Frederick Law Olmsted, ensconced at Harvard and inspiring the boulevarding of cities all across the country.
On the other hand, most of the pilgrims migrating to Longview were drawn from the school of hard knocks, and from somewhat meaner streets than the Champs-Elysees. And the Northwest lumberjack was of a unique species known almost nowhere else in the world: migratory, rebellious, fiercely independent.
Photos: This page, top: High climber, circa 1925. Loggers were typiclly single, itinerant, and ornery. Center: Young men running, circa 1924. Bottom: I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies) were an unconventional union bound by few rules, whose weapon was the wildcat strike, and whose legacy was often anti-union violence. Page 19, top: R.A. Long (right) in Rolleo gear, 1926. Bottom: Paving of Longview streets in the “hexoctagonal” configuration still standing up to wear a hundred years later. Page 20, left: Rolleo participants, circa 1926. Right: Construction of worker houses in the “model lumber town” of Ryderwood, 30 miles north of Longview. Page 21: top right: Schematic and elevation for Longview home, still well above a workingclass family’s paygrade; Top left: St. Helens Inns under construction, with capacity for 500 working men, one unit still standing today on Longview’s Oregon Way. Bottom left: Shacks at Longview Auto Park, the “first Longview slum,” in one author’s opinion.
Ultimately the founders’ visions were generous, altruistic, and progressive. But the City on the Hill envisioned by their leader was also utopian, over-reaching, and paternalistic. They misjudged the financial wherewithal of their new citizens; they feared the radical labor movements potentially infecting their workers; and they assumed Longview would be anything but what it ended up: the quintessential Company Town.
There was nothing at all wrong with the people who first came to Longview. Individualistic, free-spirited, ambitious. Optimistic and certainly brave.
The set of issues that would appear around the peopling of Longview arose mostly from the idiosyncrasies of the human species. And the predictable frustrations of a group of high-powered businessmen and industrialists trying to to put Planned People in their Planned City.
Planned People?
Wesley Vandercook, always attuned to the frictions in the machine, complained very early on that most of the people he’d expected to help him build the city simply wanted to sell him something. That in the best American tradition, the Rugged Individualists out there were mainly traveling salesmen. Mill managers and construction bosses were scared to death of Northwest organized labor, especially the notorious I.W.W., the “Wobblies,” who’d martyred themselves for the
from page 18 cause of labor in the Everett and Centralia incidents soon dubbed “massacres.” Used to the relatively docile, stable workforces of the South (largely black, and who considered a paying job superior to a history of slavery or indentured servitude) they read the headlines and considered the Russian Revolution relevant. “Workers of the World, Unite!” did not ring well with Long-Bell’s hiring managers.
From the Wobbly halls emanated the traveling delegates and other agitators who did their best to keep the wage slaves in an uproar. No employer officially recognized them, nor did any conventional union. Their weapon was the wildcat strike, always sudden, usually developing violence on both sides. The Northwest was their favorite campaigning ground.
Stewart Holbrook The Far Corner
Golden Handcuffs
The Long-Bell real estate gang, bubbling with enthusiasm and flush with preposterous advertising budgets, assumed a home-buying crowd flocking to the new developments waving earnest money in the air with one hand and forking over collateral with the other. Alas, most of the hands that reached out to them were actually empty, looking for a job first, a home perhaps later.
And, ultimately, the founders wrestled with their self-perpetuating dilemma: How do you control, own, and dictate virtually everything, yet build the empowerment and wealth that can free your citizens from the golden handcuffs of the Company Town?
Michael & Marilyn Perry
Lake Sacajawea from Longview Community Church bell tower. circa 1925 Who governs? Who rules? Who adjudicates? Who sets up the banks, loans the money, builds on the infrastructure? Who levies taxes? Suddenly it seemed like building the largest sawmill in the world was a relatively straightforward endeavor.
Landing and Expanding
The first people problem was what to make of the people already there. Kelso was at this time a modest trading center of around 2300 souls. The founders sniffed at it, and soon competed with it, constantly stewing about losing residents to “that town” so rife with the habits and idiosyncrasies of the mill towns they disdained.
Practically, Kelso offered few advantages, being on shallow water and too far from the proposed millsite (these were the days of walking to work, at least until Long-Bell chose, ironically, to locate many of its own developments some distance from the work sites).
Determined to profit from the new land opened by an expanded diking scheme, the company resorted again to the
cont page 20
Congratulations!
Eric and Rebecca Smith owners of Pet Works and, now, the Title Building originally occupied by Hart Drug Co. and Dr. A.B. Shaw, physician-surgeon.
Pet WOrks Website
Image courtesy of Longview Public Library The Title Building • 1923 Located at Commerce
and Hudson, Downtown Longview
inimitable Vandercook, who quickly allied with four current landowners and launched a buying spree. They offered cash money for land options. Intending at first to keep their motives secret (big mill needs the land) they soon abandoned that ploy and began throwing around greenbacks with abandon. Vandercook described his technique to his colleagues:
That first man was a moderately prosperous farmer who had a place in what is now the middle of Longview. He made it plain immediately that he wasn’t interested in selling out. He admitted he once had an offer of $175 an acre but he wouldn’t consider less than $200 an acre now.
John M. McClelland, Jr. R.A. Long’s Planned City
At this point Vandercook pulled from his pocket a roll of money wrapped in hundred dollar bills, and offered the farmer $200 on the spot for an option to buy his place within thirty days for $225 an acre. He peeled off two $100 dollar bills and held them out.
I spread it on thick, telling him how we foresaw a great city. Meanwhile, I had Judge McKenney writing up the option. When I’d finished, the farmer reached out and took the two $100 bills. He signed the option.
Wesley Vandercook
Working Force
The labor issues would take more time, would evolve as mill builders became mill workers, and would eventually result in a generally satisfactory labor / management climate in Longview.
It didn’t begin that way. The founders were shocked by the differences they found between Northwest lumberjacks and the southern workforce:
For one thing, they were migratory. They were not settled family men and for the most part they did not come from an agricultural background. Moreover, for most, the freedom of a migratory life was theirs by choice. They were adventuresome, often rebellious by nature, preferring work in the out of doors to the regimen and confinement of a regular job at a factory.
Lenore Bradley Robert Alexander Long
Here timing worked to the advantage of the founders. Although unions and especially the I.W.W. had made major inroads in the Northwest prior to the twenties, their movements lost strength and momentum late in the decade. The results in Russia were beginning to look less and less like a Worker’s Paradise, and the Wobblies’ adamant stand against United States’ involvement in World War I tipped public and working class sentiments against them.
The Model Lumber Town
Mr. Long and his colleagues made worker welfare a primary organizing principle and featured it in their recruitment. They welcomed the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, not a union in the strict sense, but an organization empowered to discuss working conditions with management. And, as usual, they relied on their own belief in the built environment — in the living conditions they could offer prospective workers and their families — as an inducement.
cont page 21
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from page 20 This was more than high talk. In their best “if we build it they will come” tradition, they built a model lumber town some 30 miles north of their planned city. Honoring their most senior executive next to Mr. Long, W.F. “Wild Bill” Ryder, they named it Ryderwood.
Ryderwood was a new idea in the Northwest, where loggers not only had suffered inhuman working conditions but had drifted inefficiently from one camp to another. Each old-time camp had three crews, it was said: one working, one coming, and one going. But Ryderwood had homes for families, a store, a school, a doctor, and a railroad that could take families to Longview.
Virginia Urrutia They Came to Six Rivers
The Houses of the Town
Because the city wouldn’t incorporate until 1924 (and still would remain a Company Town despite it) initial zoning and housing specifications were Long-Bell’s to set forth, subject to the Company’s well-meaning but paternalistic tradition. Based on the fact that the company workforce in the south had been predominantly black, it was assumed Longview’s new workers would be, as well:
The Long-Bell people were Southerners, used to seeing blacks. They assumed many blacks would choose to live in Longview. They made preparations accordingly, in keeping with the strong racial prejudices that prevailed everywhere at the time.
J.M. McClelland, Jr. R.A. Long’s Planned City
Benevolently, they thought, they set aside 16 blocks — 30 lots, each 40 feet wide, per block — known as the Highlands Addition, as the “Negro section.” This would allow nearly 500 black families to build or buy homes without, in McClelland’s words, “encroaching on the white neighborhoods.”
The greatest miscalculation made by the planners concerned the number of people who would make their homes in the new city in its first decade. By 1926 the black population had reached only 65.”
J.M. McClelland, Jr. R.A. Long’s Planned City
cont page 22
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from page 21 Furthermore, in the interest of keeping all its neighborhoods segregated by status and financial well-being, the real estate team had set floors on housing prices in its proposed developments — zones oriented to working class, managerial class, and executive class — driving many prospective buyers away at the outset. By March of 1924, many of the millworkers lived elsewhere: although 1,440 company men lived in Longview, 660 lived in Kelso, 312 in Rainier, and four in Kalama. This in a time when “commuting” to work was virtually unheard of.
Making Do in Mudville
Realizing it faced a crisis, the company built five large dormitories, known as the St. Helens Inns, to begin accommodating workers, but housing remained drastically short. The notorious Skidville continued to embarrass those celebrating the grand Hotel Monticello a few hundred yards away. Worse, the many families who couldn’t even afford the $7.50 a week for a room in Skidville, some 500 people, at one point, found refuge at the Longview Auto Park, described as Longview’s “early-day slum.”
The people were living in cars, shacks covered with tar paper (no floors) buildings made out of packing crates, tents made with just a tarpaulin stretched over a pole. Mud was so deep that cars could not travel in lots of places. I asked one lady why the baby was crying and she replied: ‘He hasn’t had anything to eat today, but my husband is out looking for a job now and he will bring some food when he comes home. At least I hope so.’
J.W. Nichols, grocery manager at Longview Mercantile
LONG-BELL CONTINUED TO HEMORRHAGE MONEY
For Richer, for Poorer
Ironically the founders’ egalitarianism often worked against them. Despite the segregations imposed in zoning, their vision was of an idealized future of equal opportunities, enshrining the family and Christian values so strongly ingrained in Mr. Long and his team.
Often they created these people problems by simply aiming too high. The country was already beginning a financial recession in the early twenties. Many of the first migrants were displaced lumber and timber workers, jobless, in the same boat as the company itself. And without realizing it, the founders continued to conceive of worker opportunity in their own privileged terms.
That the Longview Plan addressed such little attention to low-cost housing seems astonishing. But the guiding hand was J.C. Nichols and his experience had been in developing shopping areas and middle- and upper-class residential districts. His orientation stemmed from the City Beautiful Movement and his motivation stemmed from profit, not social reform.
Lenore Bradley Robert Alexander Long
cont page 23
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Photos: Page 22, from left: Longview Community Church, seeded by a gift from Mr. Long. Ringing the tower bells, also a gift from the founder / benefactor. This page, top: Gathering of young people on dock, circa 1924. Bottom: The Georgian-style library, completed in 1926 and subsidized by Mr. Long its first two years. Right: Artist’s sketch of the facade and tower of R.A. Long High School, Longview’s masterpiece.
The young Longview was actually a rather poor town in terms of monetary wealth, concludes its great chronicler John McClelland, Jr. Its residents were chiefly wage earners. In 1924, bank deposits totaled $1,027,450. Six years later, they had risen to only $1,750,000.
Acts of Faith
Meanwhile Long-Bell continued to hemorrhage money. And its founder continued his acts of good will and good faith. In December, 1924, Mr Long
came to visit the city and announced that he had news of great importance. At a dinner that night for merchants and legislators, he announced he was going to spend a million dollars of his own money on further improvements for the city.
He would build a library, two stories high, and by 1926 it arose amidst stately oak trees, resplendent but without books. For two years after, Mr. Long had to support the library in order to keep it open, according to historian Virginia Urrutia. Later, in a meeting of the Men’s Brotherhood Bible class, which had hundreds of members, he announced plans to donate land for a “community church” and pledged money toward its construction, if members would chip in as well. He would also buy a set of bells for its tower.
Mr. Long’s final significant gift to the city was its magnificent high school, which cost him more than money. To afford it he had to mortgage his very own R.A. Long Building in Kansas City, which embittered his heirs — tired of seeing so much money migrate west — for years after. Urrutia wrote:
Designed by the same architect who had made the Monticello Hotel and the library beautiful, R.A. Long High School facing a spacious grassy campus looking toward Lake Sacajawea, was the pride of the city. Mr. Long himself spoke at its dedication in 1928, but few knew that the gift of three-quarters of a million dollars came from money he had to borrow. •••
TECHNOLOGY OVER THE YEARS
The electronic delivery of moving images and sound from a source to a receiver, by extending the senses of vision and hearing beyond the limits of physical distance, has had a huge influence on society. Conceived in the early 20th century as a possible medium for education and interpersonal communication, television became by art commissioNEd by PErry PiPEr, crEatEd by thE midjourNEy ai. mid-century a vibrant broadcast medium, using the model of broadcast radio to bring news and the Lower Columbia Informer entertainment to people Perry E. Piperall over the world. Youth and Family Link offers a variety of programs to serve the local community, They focus on under-served needs, avoid duplicating services and strongly practice the belief that agencies must PARTNER to maximize resources. All Link services and programs are FREE. The organization believes that services and care must be accessible to those who need help.
Please join us in supporting this vital community resource. To learn more, visit
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The Evans Kelly Family
One Of LOngview ’ s piOneer famiLies.
see story, pg. 33
Work Force 4.
THEN
The founders could control almost anything — except politics and people.
NOW
Longview is a people paradise. But where have all the builders gone?
people+ place now
Endangered Species
Joe Lane’s is a terrific success story. Joe and his partner Cal Miller formed Pacific Tech Construction three decades ago and continue to prosper. With more than 200 employees spread literally around the world and a regular pipeline into a profitable niche market, federal contracting, they’re on an uptick in a downturning business. Barely 20 percent of Pacific Tech’s work is new construction. The rest is fixing things — remodels and rehabs and upgrades. The work is sophisticated, focused, and rarely local. The job they’re wrapping up for the Longview Public Schools is a conspicuous exception, spending federal money at the local schoolhouse.
THE SYSTEM IS THE SOLUTION
It’s a sobering sight at an elementary school — newlyinstalled cameras and a sophisticated security system protected by floor-to-ceiling sheets of bulletproof glass. “It’s a job we wish we didn’t have to do, for sure,” said Pacific Tech’s Jake Kelsey, “but the Feds gave the District half a million dollars to protect school kids, and the contract’s ours.” Assisting school staff in orienting to the system, Pacific Tech team’s affability and good humor countered the explicit purpose of the system: defense “ against an active shooter intent on doing harm. “The business is more and more sophisticated,” Joe Lane told me earlier. “If you can’t find your way around a computer and a lot of complicated paperwork you’re not going to compete.” Only five percent of Lane’s business is recruited new; the rest is based on long-term relationships developed with buyers, regulators and contract managers. Competition is regional, even national, for this kind of work. Pacific Tech maintains multiple offices and competes where it can bring both experience and economies of scale to bear. “I’m sorry to say the old model of a local general contractor with four to five reliable subs is pretty much history,” said Lane, “even local work tends to go to bigger outfits with thinner margins.”
I’M SORRY TO SAY THE OLD MODEL IS PRETTY MUCH HISTORY
Photos, this page: Counter-clockwise from top: Slate Miller, Jake Kelsey, and Bryce Miller, of Pacific Tech Construction, review final specifications for the new security system.
Using sophisticated cameras, a single point of entrance, and bullet-proof glass, the system provides security and peace of mind for administrative staff and parents.
At right: Joe Lane runs a virtually global business from a home office in Kelso, employing more than 200 people worldwide.
WHITHER THE TRADES
“If this doesn’t get any better ten years from now you’re going to need a robot to do your electrical, your sheetrock and your plumbing,” said Joe Lane, lamenting the decline in the conventional building trades. Jim Sessions, whose family has been in the plumbing business in Longview for more than fifty years took it one step further. “But just try rigging a robot to clean out a plugged-up toilet!” Both men have witnessed a dramatic decline in the available skilled tradesmen and especially in the apprenticeship and job training programs that offer these critical skills. “We’ve got to get the trades back into the schools — the junior high and high schools,” said Sessions. “Not everybody is on a four year college degree track or wants two hundred thousand in student debt when they’re done.” “And these are well-paying jobs with great security,” said Lane. “These days you can almost write your own ticket — location, company, conditions.”
THE D-I-Y DILEMMA
“Most of the mom and pop shops are long gone,” said Andy Busack, third generation owner of Busack Electric in Longview. “The out- of-town contractors gobble everything up, and they’re just about impossible to compete with on price.” Thanks in some part to the advent of Home Depot, Lowes and the like, contracting has become more a wholesale than a retail business. Do-it- yourselfers buy their raw materials the same place small contractors do, at the local home store, and there’s less room for mark-up, overhead, and profit margins when everyone competes on price. “I have five or six employees at any one time. I need to pay them a living wage and help them support their families,” said Busack. “I can’t possibly compete with national firms with a thousand electricians who can spread their overhead out and underbid me every time.” What used to be a relationship-based SUPPLY CHAINS THAT BIND business is now a regional, national, or “I’ve never seen supply chain issues so bad, for even global market for skilled employees the big businesses as well as the little guy.” and materials. And your competition may So says a Longview wood products executive.. “That just adds pressure all up and down the labor force, for efficiency and quality well be that guy next to you in line at the home improvement center buying lumber at a deep discount. and honoring contracts.” “It’s getting so I dread coming to work every day lately, this job I love Thus, two powerful, global forces influence both Longview’s and I’ve done for thirty years, said Busack. “It’s just too much.” big and small businesses: the lack of highly trained skilled labor, thanks to recent trends but exacerbated by the pandemic; and catastrophic delays in supply chains across the economy. “ “The result is felt every day for the small guys, especially,” added Jim Sessions. “You get the manpower, you can’t find the parts. And the reverse is true. We’ve got all the business we can handle right now because we just can’t get people to ON THE CHEAP “We barely do any residential anymore,” said Joe Lane, “ and if we do it’s usually a favor for come to work for us. And stay with us.” somebody or we even take a loss on it.” To maintain the relationships that are the glue holding small-town economies together, many contractors and tradesmen are operating at break-even or in the red. “We have all the business we can handle, just can’t get the people to do the work,” said Jim Sessions. Worse, many people hiring in for training, in an applicant-friendly market, disappear after two weeks or go back on unemployment. “I’m sorry to say it, but a lot of kids just don’t want to do this kind of work anymore,” said Lane. On this most everyone agreed. “And the irony is, you need those computer and management skills here, too. It’s a lot more than just pounding nails and pouring concrete.” “The trades are what held the whole system together,” said Andy Busack. “Now it’s just about getting the job done as cheap as you can, wherever you have to go to get it done.”
THESE ARE WELL-PAYING JOBS WITH GREAT SECURITY IT’S A LOT MORE THAN JUST POUNDING NAILS AND POURING CONCRETE
Photos, clockwise from top: Lennar Homes. a national company, is building Longview’s first residential subdivision in more than 10 years at Mt. Solo Place, anticipating 160 new residences. Lennar exemplifies the migration beyond the scope of the local contractor / builder: its web site advertises homes available “in 21 states and 78 popular real estate markets. Tradespeople still at work in Cowlitz County — concrete finisher, electrician, and plumber. Hal Calbom is a third generation Longview native who works in public affairs television and educational publishing. This is his fifth year photographing and writing Columbia River Reader’s People+Place feature. Reach him at hal@halcalbom.com.
