30 minute read
Quips & Quotes
A Century on the LongView THE
Lower Columbia
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Q
UIPS & QUOTES
Selected by Debra Tweedy
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions. --Alfred Adler, Austrian doctor and psychotherapist, 1870-1937 The habit of shutting doors behind us is invaluable to happiness; we must learn to shut life’s doors to cut out the futile wind of past mistakes. --Marjorie Holmes, American columnist and author, 1910-2002 When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light, If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it. --Amanda Gorman, African-American poet and activist, 1998The most valuable player is the one that makes the most players valuable. --Peyton Manning, American former football quarterback, 1976There’s absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go very slow. --Robert Frost, American poet, 1874-1963 You know you are in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. --Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), American children’s author and cartoonist, 1904-1991 Do you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid. --Stephen Colbert, American comedian, writer, actor, and TV host, 1964And when the rain beats against my windowpane, I’ll think of summer days again And dream of you. --Chad and Jeremy, 60s British musical duo, from “A Summer Song,”
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.
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Lumberjacks and Papermakers
When I Was playIng high school basketball there were 14 teams in a league with two divisions. That’s a lot of teams. But remembering who was who was pretty simple. Mostly the team you played wore the name of the town you played — Centralia, Chehalis, Olympia, Hoquiam, Aberdeen. Heck, even Kelso.
The mascots tended mostly to be animals: tigers, bears, grizzlies, eagles. Except, of course, those two aspirational cities on the Columbia — Longview and Camas. We were what we did. Longview the hewers of trees, the Lumberjacks, and Camas the pressers of pulp, the Papermakers. Hence the theme of this month’s People+Place, and Longview’s transformation from one to the other. The advent of the kraft paper process and the utilization of waste wood in Longview is probably more impactful, historically and economically, than the harvesting of Long-Bell’s forests. We may have been built on the timber business but it’s paper making that sustains us today. On this month’s cover we trumpet the somewhat astonishing fact that — pound for pound and combining the production of our three local paper- making companies — we are the number one paper producing city in the entire country. And we’re still employing, inventing, and evolving. That’s pretty good news. Camas, by the way, still produces a reduced amount of paper, but flourishes as a Portland and Vancouver bedroom community, with a charming downtown and plenty of coffee and croissants. And they retain the name of their high school mascot, the Papermakers, until they adopt “Lattemakers,” perhaps. As for that burly Lumberjack who greeted us as we trotted out onto the basketball court, carved in wood and eight feet tall? I hear he’s still there. But for accuracy’s sake, he should now have a white lab coat, a laptop computer, and a degree in chemical engineering.
people+place
then: early environmentalists now: leaning green
Lumberjack mascot
where we’ve Been • where we’re GoinG
hoNoriNg LoNgviEw’s cENtENNiaL
1923 – 2023
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 is coordinating with the Longview Centennial Committee, led by Reed Hadley, to publicize civic activities and celebrations (see Centennial Countdown, page 26) and will host a Book Launch Gala June 30, 2023.
THEN AND NOW 1. Developing Dreams 2. Empire of Trees 3. Heavy Lifting 4. Work Force 5. Waste Not, Want Not 6. Telling Stories 7. Transport and Trade 8. Power and Energy 9. Education for All 10. Sustaining the Spirit 11. Well-being 12. Dreams Developing
Waste Not
Want Not 5.
THEN
Long-Bell needed more efficient industrial processes, less waste, and other industry on the Columbia
NOW people+ place then
Early Environmentalists
The Northwest’s clearcuts are easy targets for knee-jerk environmentalists — they’re hard to miss, visually arresting, and often just ugly. And without question indiscriminate clear cutting worldwide is among the gravest of our environmental problems. The logging and growing practices developed here — which became a kind of evolved art, a uniquely Northwest forestry — are not so easily categorized and condemned. Cutting great swaths of trees courts controversy, of course. But among other industries based on extracting a natural resource — mining and fishing come to mind — today’s foresters can make a good argument for sustainability, efficiency and stewardship. Rarely do economics and environmentalism collide, or collude, so dramatically as they do in the hundred-year saga of the world’s largest sawmill town.
Longview embraces green, clean and lean
The founders of Longview were hardly environmentalists, at least as we define the term today. But the economic strategies embraced by those founders — to limit waste in their mill processes, derive new collateral products from those processes, and attract additional industries to diversify THE COMPANY NEEDED TO Longview —- have had undeniable long-term environmental effects, BEGIN CIRCULATING MONEY too, many of them beneficial. And THAT WASN’T ITS OWN they’ve helped the town survive.
Diversify or Die
Logging and lumbering were inherently expensive and wasteful. Even setting aside the colossal costs of their big mills, Long-Bell faced a daunting task. Rarely had loggers attempted to extract and export logs and lumber from such forbidding terrain in an isolated forest at the far corner of their own country. It would not be enough to simply produce “big numbers,” up to a million board feet a day by the time the mills hit full stride. Long-Bell would have to become much more efficient and cost-effective. First, limiting waste: memorably cited by Vandercook in his initial report as an annual loss in the fir region alone of around six billion board feet a year. The sheer amount of wood fibre lighting up the skies in the notorious wigwam burners frustrated the practical engineers and dismayed the accountants and financiers.
A second company goal was product diversification, spurred by two technological innovations in the wood products industry.
One was the discovery in 1909 of the sulfate or
Kraft process to transform commercially worthless wood like western hemlock into newsprint. For many lumbermen it was like finding a whole new forest.
Carlos Schwantes The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History In time the Pacific Northwest would become the leading source of pulp and paper products in the United States. Schwantes continues:
A second innovation was plywood, developed in 1904 at a box and barrel factory near Portland, but that industry did not become commercially important until the mid-1920s. The development of plywood made it possible to recover millions of board feet of wood, once thought lost to forest fires.
The Company Town Gets Company
Finally, the company badly needed to begin circulating money that wasn’t its own. Not counting the giant mill, Long-Bell by 1926 had invested $6.5 million in Longview. It owned the bank, mercantile store, hotel, newspaper, concrete company and the dredging operation. It provided the water pipes, sewers, and electricity.
A year later, thanks to a national advertising campaign, developers had attracted a few solid businesses, including a San Francisco-owned bank, a paint manufacturing plant, a concrete brick plant, and a Standard Oil marine distribution center. But the big opportunities — and the weaning off the co-dependence of city and company — would come via the huge commercial sites and deep water port facilities adjacent to Long-Bell’s new mills.
The Long-Bell brain trust had one primary candidate in mind.
The Two Longs
George S. Long of the Weyerhaeuser Company managed its western operations from his office in Tacoma and a palatial home overlooking Commencement Bay. It was George Long who sold Long-Bell its original
Cowlitz and Lewis County timber stake, making barely a dent in the company’s formidable 900,000 acres it had purchased from James B. Hill of the Northern Pacific Railway Company in 1900 for $6 per acre.. Though in photos he tends to resemble a cross between an undertaker and a college dean, Long was a legendary lumber and businessman with a zest not just for success in the marketplace, but an inherent love for the game of business and for his rough and tumble industry.
George Long, Sr. looked like a cleric in his formal portrait. In real life he smoked cigars, used salty language and commanded the respect of loggers and mill hands.
J.M. McClelland, Jr. R.A. Long’s Planned City Mark Morris decided to call on Long and reported that yes, Weyerhaeuser was looking for a site on the Columbia and might consider Longview. A long game of cat and mouse began between the two companies, featuring Robert Alexander Long, who found it worrisome and stressful, and George S. Long, who seemed to revel in it. There were meetings and negotiations in St. Paul, Weyerhaeuser headquarters, verbal hints and commitments, but insistence that news of any deal come from Minnesota, not Washington or THE LONG-BELL BRAIN TRUST Kansas City. HAD ONE PARTICULAR The Long Game Eventually in July, 1925, George Long notified Mr. Long CANDIDATE IN MIND he was exercising his purchase option, but still withheld a public announcement. The price for 544 acres along two miles of Columbia River waterfront was $227,500 plus $5,000 interest on the option. Still, the game-playing continued.
Photos: Facing page: On the Stump. Huge trees yielded great yields for early loggers and timber companies, but a culture of waste dogged the industry. This page: Above: Tree topper, circa 1925. Right: Under construction, this “wigwam” burner opposite the Long-Bell power plant stacks was the largest of a breed common throughout logging country.
To Long’s associates it seemed as if George Long relished keeping Long-Bell in suspense, and in the process keeping R.A. Long in a continual state of apprehension. Even the civilities of lighthearted conversation succumbed to misinterpretation. Whenever the two Longs met, George worked in a mildly offcolor joke, then slyly studied the expressions of the straightlaced Robert — or so thought Long-Bell’s executives.
Lenore Bradley
Robert Alexander Long
Photo Credits: Historical photos from Longview Public Library digital archive. cont page 20
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Lake Sacajawea and Kessler School circa 1925
Longview: Keep on Flying High!
Longview Airport Spectators gather at the 5th Anniversary Air Circus, 1928
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The Heavyweights: Back row, left to right: H.H. Rock, Sumner T. McKnight, Wesley Vandercook, Bill Ryder, Rudolph M. Weyerhaeuser. Middle row: Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser, F.S. Bell, Dr. E.P. Clapp, Horace H. Irvine, Charles A. Weyerhaeuser, George S. Long, Jr., William Carson, C.R. Musser, S.M. Morris. Front row: John P. Weyerhaeuser, company president. May 27, 1924.
from page 19 More time passed, more anxiety mounted, until in June, 1926 an advertisement suddenly appeared in an issue of the Saturday Evening Post stating that Weyerhaeuser intended to build three new mills in Longview! There had been no notification to Long-Bell, and there was no mention of when such building might begin. “Long was desperate to know,” said Bradley. “By 1926 he and his company were troubled financially.” At last, in October 1927, the game long grown tiresome (and three years after meeting with the Weyerhaeusers in St. Paul), the first pile was driven for three Weyerhaeuser sawmills and a shingle mill on the Columbia River at Longview. The first mill went into operation 20 months later. As it had five years before, the entire town turned out to celebrate. Mr. Long’s biographer highlights the contrast between these two giants of their industry, the momentous bargain they struck in the 1920s, and her own picture of those tense days in Tacoma:
George tipped back his desk chair, settled his tall, lanky frame at ease, and lighted a cigar. Across from him, dressed in his summer uniform of white trousers and navy blue blazer, red carnation in lapel, sat Robert, straight and stiff in his chair, appearing controlled,
but anything but relaxed. Lenore Bradley Robert Alexander Long
New technologies would help Longview diversify, and renew its resources, as much as business development. These innovations would involve both sophisticated chemical processes and a very human quality control process which came to be known as “de-stinking.” In 1925 Monroe A. Wertheimer came to visit Long-Bell to explore sourcing wood chips for a kraft paper plant he was considering, possibly in the Northwest. Wertheimer headed the Thilmany Paper Company in Kaukauna, Wisconsin. Anxious for business diversification and waste utilization all in one fell swoop, the Long-Bell team was enthusiastic, with one caveat. cont page 22
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Walter G. Mezger Fertile ground on Longview’s experimental farm
Despite its colossal machines and innovative new industrial processes, the city also would depend on more traditional resources —- notably, agriculture and animal husbandry. In the 20s the country was still overwhelmingly rural, and most everyone coming to Longview had either been raised on a farm, worked on a farm, or bought foodstuffs from a place down the road. Most homemakers anticipated a backyard garden as essential to their livelihood. The founders wished to demonstrate and advertise that the Cowlitz delta would not only facilitate this, it was indeed a fertile garden of earthly delights. Let the word go out: No one with a spade and bag of seed would starve in the model city, that the very land itself was rich!
The remarkable fertility of the soil in Columbia
Valley Gardens and the mild, equable climate of
Longview make this district a gardener’s paradise where a wealth of produce can be raised to meet the growing demands of Longview.
Photo caption, Longview News, circa 1924 Hence, a model farm program located on the lower slope of Mount Solo. Or, in the best entrepreneurial spirit, an Experimental Farm Program, suggesting new techniques brought to bear and a grand public relations push. One individual, Walter Mezger, was given license by Long-Bell to grow whatever he could as quickly as he could. In the rich alluvial land of the delta, he produced spectacular results. The livestock side flourished as well, at least in the newspaper accounts. The astonishing production beginning with a mere 1,200 chicks, nourished since one day old —- some 385 eggs a day! — warmed the hearts of oologists and real estate hucksters alike.
Photos: Clockwise from top: Walter Mezger and a prize cabbage from the demonstration farm. Mezger beat out five other Louisiana farmers to come to the planned city and plant; Mezger and cattle. His grandson Skip, six years old, was in charge of three cows; The legendary Leghorns. Their “85 percent lay” in November 1925, was heralded as one of the great successes of the Mezger / Long-Bell Experimental Farm.
On October 18th, the day they were 6 months old, the 485 pullets laid 353 eggs or 72.8 per cent. The lowest days production — in November, the month of high egg prices — was 363 eggs! or 74.8 percent, the highest was 416 eggs or 85.7 percent! Mr. Mezger had tried to cut down production a little, as he was afraid an 85 percent lay was too much for the health of the fools, but from the looks of them it was hard to believe they could be injured by this lay. They averaged well over 4 pounds and were exceptionally strong and vigorous.
From article “LONGVIEW EXPERIMENTAL FARM MAKES REMARKABLE RECORD WITH ‘HENACRES’ LEGHORNS Longview News, circa 1924
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from page 26
St. Helens across the river in Oregon had a kraft mill, and it could be smelled miles away. They did not want such an odor to waft over their model city. A new process had been developed to reduce the odor,
Wertheimer assured them. He would send them samples to sniff.
Virginia Urrutia They Came to Six Rivers Thus followed one of the more unusual exchanges in the history of industrial development. In return for Wertheimer’s sniff samples sent to Longview, Long-Bell sent several carloads of fir waste to experiment with back in Wisconsin.
The Craft of Kraft
The kraft paper process may have had as much, or more, to do with the development of industrial Longview as saw-milling, log exporting or aluminum making. The raw material for paper is wood pulp. In the kraft process wood chips are reduced to almost pure cellulose fibers, and become paper through a process that’s both chemical and mechanical. The word “kraft” is German for “strong,” the competitive advantage long claimed for paper produced this way. HE WOULD SEND
THEM SAMPLES TO SNIFF
The chemistry is critical. Wood chips treated with a hot mixture of water, sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide, known collectively as “white liquor,” are freed from the chemical linkage of lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose. The process requires vast amounts of water, which is why paper plants are usually situated on lakes or rivers, and is known for its often odorous emissions.
The advent of the Longview Fibre Company, as it came to be known, was the result of three fortuitous circumstances. First, the Long-Bell team was frantic for diversification of the industrial base, and willing to propose attractive terms; second, Longview was already awash in wood waste, chips and sawdust, and could afford to offer a perpetual supply of the papermaker’s raw material; and third, Monroe Wertheimer called upon an influential and astute friend, Harry M.Wollenberg, an oil company president, to assist him in negotiations.
The site was selected, east of the Long-Bell plant where the Cowlitz flows into the Columbia River. A bottle of sulfate pulp made by the new “destinking” process worked out at Kaukauna was mailed out to
Longview, where it was sniffed critically in S.M. Morris’ office.
It was bad but not too bad, it was decided, so the contract was signed.
John M. McClelland R.A. Long’s Planned City
A Powerful New Industry
The Wertheimer-Wollenberg collaboration proved fruitful, and eventually Wollenberg and his successors joined, and ultimately succeeded the Wertheimers as owners of the successful enterprise.
cont page 23
Photos: This page, clockwise from top: Longview Fibre Company plant; Women working at completed plant in the late 1920s; Plant under construction. Facing page, top: Ryderwood farm raising tree seedlings, later destroyed in a 1933 fire; Bottom: Early replanting on a recently-logged site. Weyerhaeuser would later supplant LongBell as apostles of the high yield or “reforested” forest.
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Before the end of the decade, Longview had gained its second major industry. When ground was broken in 1927, the city ensured a degree of future prosperity based on a significant new enterprise. And an overlooked and useless byproduct, waste wood, had become a renewable resource still valuable today. A town founded on choker setting, high climbing, log ponds and lumber would now welcome a different species of worker — chemists and environmental engineers. The band saw, planer mill and storage shed would share prominence with the digester, the evaporator, the boiler. Changing its chemistry, Longview evolved a new lexicon for life at the mill: cutting, planing, drying and stacking now joined by cooking, recovery, blowing, screening, washing and bleaching.
Farming Trees
Long-Bell’s thousands of acres of trees seemed vast and boundless. But the founders soon realized they were a finite resource. They also knew that natural regeneration of the huge firs — their dense canopy limiting light and moisture — was a centuries-long process. They also were inhibited by the hilly terrain: in the South, standard practice had been to log land then repurpose it for agriculture, virtually impossible on the precipitous slopes of the Cascades. Timberland would remain just that.
and destroyed most of the seedlings. Then the depression hastened what Virginia Urrutia calls “the extravagant cutting of trees” as lumbermen struggled to break even despite deflated prices. Still, the idea of “tree farming” began to gain more traction. Since Douglas fir seedlings needed full sun, unhindered by the shade of nearby trees, the foresters could justify clearcutting whole swaths of forest which could then be replanted more productively.
Cropping Up
The idea that trees might be considered a “crop,” first floated by Ryderwood forester John B. Woods, would not really take hold until after World War II, and it was Weyerhaeuser, not Long-Bell that would take the credit. CHANGING ITS CHEMISTRY, Utilizing burned-over land in the Grays Harbor LONGVIEW EVOLVED A NEW area for experimentation, the company set up a program dedicated to resource protection, reforestation, LANGUAGE FOR LIFE AT THE MILL and sound economics:
Long-Bell, having already suffered the loss of timber in the South, began to think early of planting new trees on logged over land, just as Europeans had done years before.
Virginia Urrutia They Came to Six Rivers The company started a nursery in the Ryderwood tract to nurture trees that would grow to cutting size. Unfortunately, a fire swept through the nursery in 1933
The experimenting foresters, considered half-crazy and certainly visionary by many, were able to practice these methods without disturbing any methods in the surrounding area hallowed by history and carried on without question.
Virginia Urrutia They Came to Six Rivers Tree Farm Number One, dedicated in 1941, made national news at its inception. Eventually all the forest lands in Cowlitz County would sustain tree farms. With the successful implementation of its high yield forestry program, Weyerhaeuser would capitalize on its dual identity as both tree cutter and tree conservationist, using “The Tree Growing Company” as a tagline in the 1980s. There followed decades of new technologies and innovative conservation strategies. It’s an unlikely paradox: An industry founded on the exploitation, and likely extinction, of this vast natural resource would find a way to renew itself.
TECHNOLOGY OVER THE YEARS
We’ve come a long say since Russia’s Sputnik-1 on Oct. 4, 1957. Satellites gained GPS after 1978 and hit the consumer market generally a decade later, though the devices we might remember were closer to the 2000s. Satellites today are getting cheaper to launch thanks to reusable rockets, such as SpaceX’s, as well as their tiny design, “CubeSats,” about the size of a 4-inch long, 4.5-pound box. Our Earth-orbiting friends assist in tracking weather, mapping the planet, and providing military intelligence, among other things.
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Waste Not Want Not
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THEN
Long-Bell needed more efficient industrial processes, less waste, and other industry on the Columbia
NOW
Longview embraces green, clean and lean
Leaning Green
Few industries have seen such relentless use, re-use, re-purposing, recycling and rederiving from their core product — the towering citadels of cellulose we call trees — as has the timber business. It’s now simply the wood products industry. The effects on Longview have been lucrative, chaotic, fickle. The change, the retooling, the opening and ebbing of new markets, the uncertain supply and demand, not just of trees but the “waste” from trees, have kept executives and engineers on their toes, and sometimes reeling.
Above: NORPAC CEO Craig Anneberg (front) and Recovered Fiber Superintendent Kit Corrigan at the new recycling center.
NORPAC RECYCLED
NORPAC CEO Craig Anneberg goes out of his way to credit his Longview team. “We had to sit down and figure out how we were going to adjust to a shrinking market,” said Anneberg. “NORPAC has always considered itself to be the thinking person’s company and it has certainly proven to be the case. The entire organization has pulled together to “ make this happen.” Started more than 40 years ago to manufacture newsprint, the company has responded to the times themselves. It’s transformed itself from a newsprint mill feeding the world’s daily newspapers to a pulper and paper maker helping put those delivery boxes on your front door. In September they put into full-time operation one of the most sophisticated recycling systems in the country, able to re-process and re-use a greater percentage of cardboard and waste paper than with previous technologies. “Very few mills want to handle big volumes of mixed paper anymore,” said company CoPresident Tom Crowley, pointing to the new drum pulper, “but we will.” There is no roar of band saws and whirr of chippers feeding the operation. Just a vast warehouse filled with bales of paper and cardboard ready to take another turn around the block. Which makes NORPAC about as “green” as you can get, relying virtually 100 percent on recycled feed stocks, including waste streams other recyclers are rejecting. “Everybody is talking about how do we do better packaging,” said Anneberg. “We figure we can be part of that solution.”
On the business side, the spin-offs, carveouts, public offerings, mergers and acquisitions have been endless. And made a professional class of bankers, investors, and attorneys a happy living along the margins. Longview’s empire of trees has given way to a vast commonwealth of companies. Few are locally owned anymore. They stretch around the world but still write substantial paychecks for local labor, tradecraft, and executive talent.
WHITHER WEYERHAEUSER
“Longview is still a wonderful place to work and live.” said NORPAC’s Anneberg, his own company originally a joint venture between Weyerhaeuser and Nippon Paper. “We get a lot of talent from this town, part of our legacy, I guess.”
The Weyerhaeusers were entrepreneurs extraordinairé. They bought and sold like madmen, especially timberland, of course. At the end of World War I they realized Uncle Sam had unused troop ships languishing at the docks, so they bought them to carry their lumber all over the world. They developed innumerable subsidiaries — from mortgage banking to personal care products, financial services, and information systems consulting — then divested themselves periodically. At this juncture, it’s a wood products company with a whole lot of real estate. And the saga continues.
In Longview, the Weyerhaeuser lineage is three main inheritances: NORPAC, the company created in partnership with Japanese interests in the seventies to manufacture newsprint; now independent and producing a variety of printing and writing grades; Nippon Dynawave Packaging, a subsidiary of Nippon Paper Industries of Japan which manufactures liquid packaging used for cartons of milk, juice and similar products as well as market pulp sold and converted into consumer products globally; and Weyerhaeuser, still on the old site, cutting some lumber, but shipping most logs overseas.
WESTROCK AKA “THE FIBRE”
Today, one of Longview’s founding industries is owned by WestRock, a multinational that lists more than 300 properties among its holdings, and markets everything from home and garden supplies to media and electronics , as well as container board and kraft paper.
Quite a change from its inception.
“Permitting was a little different in those days, among other things,” said Rick Wollenberg, former CEO, speaking at a recent Rotary meeting. “Nowadays you spend five years answering a lot of questions, but it still takes them only a few minutes to say no.” This drew an appreciative laugh for a whole host of reasons.
Wollenberg and two Westrock executives were there to share news of a modern box plant to be built in Longview, which will replace the existing facility, and be greener than green, of course. “Timing couldn’t be better,” said mill manager Steve Devlin, “People are eager to replace plastics, so it’s a great opportunity for our packaging side.”
Like his former colleagues in the paper and packaging business, Wollenberg tells a remarkable story of market changes, raw materials shortages, financial crunches, and technical innovation. “When my forebears started this business everything was packed and shipped in wooden boxes. Corrugating more or less changed everything.”
Rick Wollenberg
Longview Fibre Co. President, 2001-2007
“IT WAS IMPORTANT TO DEMONSTRATE YOU COULD GROW THINGS AND RAISE ANIMALS PEOPLE ARE EAGER TO REPLACE PLASTICS SO IT’S A GREAT OPPORTUNITY
MEZGER ON MEZGER
Walter “Skip” Mezger III happily shares memories of his Grandpa Walt, he of the Experimental Farm and the record pullet lay. “He was a hard working, incredibly proud man. He only told you one time what to do.” Skip has an entire portfolio of Mezgerania, including handwritten letters from A.L. Gibbs, Longview mayor, and J.D. Tennant, who would oversee the experimental farm from his lordly porch at Rutherglen. “Mr. Tennant offered him $125 a month to run the farm, and $150 moving expenses. Pretty good money in those days.” “They built that house expressly for my dad and his family,” said Mezger, “That’s how important it was for the company to demonstrate you could grow things and raise animals.” He has memories both cherished and slightly anguished, from his grandpa’s love of music to his insisting Skip learn how to behead and gut a chicken at age six. “Grandpa wasn’t all work. He loved music. Today our family still has a sax and a clarinet he handed down to us. And he was a drummer for a swing band that played all around the area.” Favorite memory? “He gave me my nickname “Skip “when I was three years old. And it’s stuck ever since!”
Walter “Skip” Mezger III
WestRock’s Longview site, formerly Longview Fibre Company
FROM FARM TO CROP
Tree farming has been intimately linked with public relations and company imaging since Long-Bell started talking about it in the 1930s. The notion that trees could be a “crop” not a ravaged resource was ballyhooed about the country for years. In 1967, Weyerhaeuser would take the lead in what later because an industrywide sustainability movement by announcing a “highyield” forestry plan, with improvements in everything from seed propagation to wildfire control. The evidence of their success is all around us. Clearcuts, yes. But by the end of the century America’s tree farm movement would include 95 million acres and enlist over 70,000 members, from corporate giants to enterprising families. Cropping up everywhere.
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.
