West Kootenay Forest History Project, Interview with Bill Waldie, Sawmill Operator.
Interviewed by Peter Chapman
July 28, 1990, Robson BC
Transcript for Introduction
A description of the history of the Waldie family mill.
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My father and mother came to Nelson as a young bride and groom in 1896, and my father was interested in the mining, wanted to get into the mining business. But he did take a job as a clerk at a hardware store, which he worked at for several years after arriving. Then, finally, he got a chance to buy some claims with some partners, and they bought some claims on Sheep Creek at an affordable price and he operated the Queen Mine on Sheep Creek near Salmo for eight years.
In 1908 anyway, he sold out, sold out the Queen Mine, and he had what you call a small fortune. He had about $170,000.1 think that was the selling price, more or less, his share of it anyway, and some gentleman at Edgewood had a little mill there which they called the Edgewood Lumber Company, and he talked to my father about - they needed money you see - and my father got sucked into this little business at Edgewood. And of course he had big ideas, and he thought that place, Edgewood, was no place for a sawmill, and the first thing he did was demolished the little mill at Edgewood and built a new mill, a good mill at Castlegar, which was known as the Edgewood Lumber Company. Gradually - there were other shareholders in it - but gradually he bought out the other shareholders, and it became his own business.
Then about 1928 he thought, 'well, there are no other shareholders, no other people involved, we'll change the name to William Waldie & Sons', and the name was changed to William Waldie & Sons Ltd.
Now this mill was [established around] a bandsaw, a nine foot diameter - a big band - a big type of saw, and I think we cut about fifty or sixty thousand board feet on an eight-hour shift - or the mill then ran a ten-hour shift. His fortune more or less disappeared and he was in financial difficulty all the time, all those years, you know what I mean? He burned out in 1918. I'm not sure, it must have been 1918 he burned out. The mill was rebuilt and got going, and of course he thought - he liked his family - he wanted the boys to go in with him, and we were willing.
Peter Chapman: How many sons were there?
Bill Waldie: There were three sons involved in the business. There were four sons altogether, but Fred never did go into the sawmill business. He spent his life as a mining engineer at Kimberley, pretty well. And then my father suddenly died in 1932 and we three boys were left to run the business, and it was a tough time, I'll tell you, real difficult times. Lumber was selling on the Prairie at that time for $16 a thousand [board feet], delivered there. There was only one way to get it there then, was by CP Rail, that's all there is to it.
Peter Chapman: I wondered what your job was at the mill.
Bill Waldie: Well, first my father ran the whole thing. We just did what we were told. But later we divided up, that I would be logging manager - mind you, we [Waldie & Sons] did some logging ourselves, and we bought logs. We contracted and we got 'em any way we could, you know what I mean, the best deals we could make. And I was logging manager. No real qualifications for the job, but anyway we did it.
Peter Chapman: When did you first work in the mill?
Bill Waldie: I left high school in 1922 and came to the mill to stay then.
Peter Chapman: Did you work in the summers before that?
Bill Waldie: Oh, well, only two summers. Only two summers. Likely be '20 and '21. Likely.
Peter Chapman: Where was the site of the mill?
Bill Waldie: Well, you know where the Castlegar lagoons are? Sewage lagoons? Well, you see the railroad bridge?
Peter Chapman: Yes.
Bill Waldie: Right there. At the railroad bridge. And the lagoons are there now too. That's where it is. You would never know there was a sawmill there that sawed lumber there for fifty years. That's pretty good, from about 1910 until about 1961,1 guess until Celgar dismantled it.
Peter Chapman: Did Celgar buy the mill from you?
Bill Waldie: Yes. Celgar bought the business, bought the business.
Peter Chapman: Where did most of your logs come from?
Bill Waldie: Well, Arrow Lake area as far up as Arrow Park. Ninety percent of them came from south of Arrow Park. Oh, more than that - 99% , I guess. We did buy a few logs from an operator at Arrowhead once in a while.
Peter Chapman: Did you work in the bush logging very much, yourself?
Bill Waldie: No. I never did any actual labour in the bush. I worked in the office there in the mill, and answered the letters and, oh, did all kinds of jobs, you know what I mean. Wasn't too departmentalized. The departments overlapped, if you understand me.
Peter Chapman: When the company was at its largest, how many people did you employ?
Bill Waldie: Certainly we must have had a hundred earning at the mill, and then the woods, on the payroll in one way or another. There must have been over a hundred.
Peter Chapman: How much of the wood that you brought into the mill came from your own logging and how much of it did you buy from contractors?
Bill Waldie: Well, I would say that we always bought more than 50% - or 50-60% was purchased anyway we could, you know what I mean, the best deal we could make.
Transcript for chutes
A description of chutes built for getting the timber to the lake for transport to the mill.
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Well, at Whatshan Lake we had little camps in there then, but there was no truck logging at that time, at the time I'm thinking of. Used to sleigh haul them to Whatshan Lake - you got the picture in your mind?
Peter Chapman: Yes.
William Waldie : Well, anyway, and sleigh haul them in the winter to Whatshan Lake, and then tow them down the lake in the summer. And I had a flume, we built a flume from Whatshan Lake to the Arrow Lake, about a five-mile flume, big 50-inch sides on it, a big flume.
Peter Chapman: The sleighs, would those ...? Some people have talked about sloops ...
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah, a sloop was a single bunk and the logs dragged behind, that's a sloop - and mostly downhill in this country, you know it was all hill. Mostly downhill was best. There wasn't much holding back, you understand.
Peter Chapman: Did you use sloops and sleighs?
Bill Waldie: We used sleighs in some cases where the distance was greater, you know what I mean, you get more on a sleigh, and mostly we used sloops because they loaded it so that it balanced pretty well. Not too much tail drag, they would get along pretty good.
Peter Chapman: And they would have been taking out 16-foot logs?
Bill Waldie: Yeah. Short logs. Sixteen -foot and all lengths, you know what I mean, but 16 to 20. Short logs went on here [Whatshan Lake] right up to about 1950, we were all short logs.
Peter Chapman: How did you get them down the lake then?
Bill Waldie: Towed them down. We had a big steam tug on the lake.
Peter Chapman: What was the steam tug called?
Bill Waldie: The Elco I [Edgewood Lumber Company I], and the Elco II was simply a second boat.
Peter Chapman: Can you describe the towing operation and the booms and all that a little bit.
Bill Waldie: Yeah. They were just round, flat booms, you understand. They weren't bundled at all, about what you call a 16 or 20 stick boom, you understand me, 16 or 20 boom sticks, or in some cases they went more than that, too.
Peter Chapman: Where was your booming ground? At the end of the flume?
Bill Waldie: Yeah. That's right. Mind you we'd boom any place developed a ... just go around it with the boat, pulling the sticks around the logs and no trouble ... we never had an elaborate booming ground, never had any equipment at the booming ground, the boat and the boom sticks, they'd make up the boom all right.
Peter Chapman: How long would it take the boat to tow the boom down from there?
Bill Waldie: Well, if everything was right and the wind was good, so on, why about three days maybe, three days, that's pulling day and night, about a mile an hour. And then of course you get lower down and have to tie some up, you see, where the river gets narrow here at Syringa, it used to get narrow. Only bring two or three booms into the river.
Peter Chapman: Did they operate the logging all year 'round?
Bill Waldie: I think some logging was going on pretty well all year 'round. Summer logging, winter logging, on different places. Summer logging was mostly chutes - log chutes. Do you know the word chute, C-H-U-T-E?
Peter Chapman: Flumes and chutes. One of them is with grease and ...
Bill Waldie: That's a chute. Put grease or oil, black oil or something to help the logs go, that's a chute and you got a pretty good grade on it, but there are lots of places in this country for it, for chutes, alright. There was a lot of chutes.
Peter Chapman: Why would you choose one or the other? What would make you decide?
Bill Waldie: Oh, well in lots of cases you didn't have water to flume the logs. I mean, here's the timber and here's the lake and there's no big stream anywhere around and so you couldn't. And in other cases it was too steep and a flume doesn't want to be too steep, the water would run away if - you know, if the grade changed from place to place, and a steep grade the water would run away fast and the goddamn log would be left squeezing on the flume sides, you know what I mean? It didn't work good unless you could have a pretty even grade, a pretty even grade for a flume.
Peter Chapman: It must have taken a lot of lumber to build a flume.
Bill Waldie: Oh you bet, oh you bet, oh you bet. Well what we did, we only built one flume, only the Whatshan Lake flume. We set up a small sawmill to saw the lumber at the site.
Peter Chapman: What about the chutes?
Bill Waldie: We used round logs, round poles, long poles. A chute was never made out of lumber. Always out of poles and ... a three-pole chute or a four-pole chute, depending on how many poles went into the building of the chute.
Peter Chapman: Did they have to hew them a bit?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah, yeah, just to smooth it down, a bit, smooth it down, that's all. Chute building got to be quite a fine art, you know what I mean. Talking about two-pole chutes, you know two poles, they had to be hewed a bit. We mostly went for three-pole chutes - one in the middle. There'd be braces every, set 'em on, oh, well it would be every eight feet or so, not more than eight feet apart, and spike 'em down. Buy these ship spikes, black ship spikes by the keg. About twelve-inch ship spikes, a square spike you know. Oh, chute building was quite an art.
Peter Chapman: What replaced the flumes and the chutes?
Bill Waldie: The truck, the logging truck. No log was hauled to our mill until 1930. Up to that time, and earlier than that, there had never been a log hauled to the mill by truck, can you believe that? And then in a few years it turned right around and it's all truck, pretty near all truck.
Peter Chapman: Did that make a difference as to where you could get timber?
Bill Waldie: Well, it made timber accessible that wasn't previously accessible, but it was long hauls. The truck revolutionized the business, in ten years say, twelve years, it revolutionized the business.
Peter Chapman: What came in first, trucks or Cats in the bush?
Bill Waldie: I as far as I am concerned, trucks came first, trucks came first. We didn't own a tractor until after 1940.
Peter Chapman: What's a jammer?
Bill Waldie: Well, it's a donkey [engine], call it a winch. It pulled logs out of the woods. But I don't know, we were never too successful with cable logging, we never were.
Peter Chapman: Why not?
Bill Waldie: I don't know, not enough timber per acre, I would say. But maybe that's wrong, but anyway, we never did very much of it. But horse logging up to - as far as skidding goes, most of it was done by horses, in my experience, right up to the '50s when we let her go.
Peter Chapman: Can you remember your first truck?
Bill Waldie: Yeah, I guess it was a Ford. I think it was a Ford.
Peter Chapman: Three ton? How big?
Bill Waldie: Oh, I imagine, three ton. Not big. Three-ton truck and 32x6 tires on it. Just, you know what I mean a light truck, just a light truck. Put bunks on it and a trailer. I used to make our own trailers out of junk, make it up.
Peter Chapman: Would the truck be up at Whatshan Lake?
Bill Waldie: Well, mind you, we never used the truck in the Whatshan. Along came the Depression and we were down to where we didn't log in the Whatshan for various reasons, and then when we came to start up again, the flume had rotted away and we never did get going again in there. We never trucked from Whatshan Lake, we never trucked it. What was left was left, and that's all.
Peter Chapman: How did the Depression affect your operations?
Bill Waldie: Nineteen-thirty was a good year, because the smelter was building at Warfield at that time and we sold them about six-million feet of lumber, one customer, six-million feet of lumber - '30 was a good year for us. Mind you, got into '31, we couldn't sell; we couldn't find buyers and we shut down. I mean to say, we never shut down permanently, but we shut down and run, and start and stop, and start and go - maybe three days a week, and then two days a week, and just sawing up logs we had in the water. No logging was done for two years. In '31 and '32, no logging was done at all. In '33, Henry Gopp, a local fellow, had some timber up here - government timber - that he wanted to put in the water for us, and so we made a deal with Henry and got about a million-feet of logs. This got going and everything kind of broke for us. We were able to sell the lumber without losing too much money and then we gradually expanded out again a little more.
Peter Chapman: You were actually selling at a loss?
Bill Waldie: Oh, I think so, I think so. Prices then were very low; but mind you, we were getting the stuff pretty low and got help pretty reasonable too. We had losses in the early years, in the '31/'32 period, when we were re-pricing inventory and all this stuff. We had losses then all right, but these new logs, they came in we got them for a good price, manufactured them for a low cost, got the costs down. I can't say exactly; I don't think the bank would let us go on if we were losing money.
Peter Chapman: Did you have to borrow money to buy logs?
Bill Waldie: Oh, we had a standing credit at the bank, of so-many-thousand dollars; but we had to explain to them all the time what we were doing, and how we were doing it, and how we were making out. But they we had a credit we could draw on, up to a certain definite limit.
Transcript for Clearcuts
A description of timber sales and cutting practices.
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Peter Chapman: Did your relations with the Forest Service change over the years?
Bill Waldie: We had good relations with the Forest Service. I don't think I can say they changed. I don't think that we had any trouble. I was well pleased with the local Forest Service, always pleased. They did a job. What I'm trying to say is they tried to accommodate us. They tried to cooperate.
Peter Chapman: Were most of your timber sales with a diameter limit?
Bill Waldie: Well, that's entirely different as compared to today. They [timber sales] were specified that you couldn't cut anything under 13-inch diameter breast high. We didn't want to anyway. That didn't hurt us. That's a relatively small tree.
Peter Chapman: Did you have to take everything bigger than that?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yes, you were supposed to take everything worthwhile. They never checked too tight on us on that though. Undoubtedly you would find trees that we should have taken alright, maybe they were crooked, or some damn thing, and they were left. They weren't too tough. They weren't too tough.
Peter Chapman: Did you ever have a clearcut sale?
Bill Waldie: You mean a clearcut? No. no. Not one, not one, not one. Nor did we clearcut. Nor did we clearcut. Mind you in my days there was no pulp. Chip market didn't exist, didn't exist. This has changed the whole thing, you know what I mean. Mills wouldn't be anxious to cut these six-inch trees if they couldn't get all these pulp chips.
Peter Chapman: Did you ever get a timber sale on a piece that had already been logged fifty, sixty years before.
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah. Sure we did, sure we did. Lots of places we cut where they had cut way back, old rotten stumps there four feet in diameter, three feet in diameter. They were rotten as hell. Sure. Sure.
Peter Chapman: You could see that it had been logged?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah, lots of places. And you know a lot of loggers were interested in that. Here we are cutting here and someone was here fifty years ago, right in here and that seemed to please them. But it was different. There was not clearcut then, and this clearcut is a complicated situation. It's not as simple as these goddamned environmentalists make out that 'don't clearcut'. In lots of cases if you leave a few spindly trees, they'd fall down. They'll blow down. Certainly within a few years they won't be there.
Peter Chapman: Did you see that happen?
Bill Waldie: Oh, sure. Sure. The trees we left in lots of cases blew down.
Peter Chapman: Sometimes after you cut a patch with this diameter limit, it would do well and regenerate and ...
Bill Waldie: Yes, and you can't lay down any rules. Where you have a mixed-age forest it'll do pretty good. But you get these old growth, even aged old growth forests, and I tell you there's nothing you can do but clearcut it. That's my opinion. If you leave a few trees, they can't take it. They've been in that heavy forest for so long under protection of the big trees and they can't stand it, and they'll blow down in a few years, a damn few.
Transcript for Competition
A description of local competition and other sawmills.
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Peter Chapman: You were one of the larger sawmills in the area.
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah, I think we were. In the '30s and '40s we were among the larger then, I guess that's right.
Peter Chapman: Who were your competitors?
Bill Waldie: Oh, in the '30s were was none. I would say that frankly, there was none. Burns wasn't in business then and Lingle and Johnson, that was at Slocan City now. We come back to Slocan City, Lingle and Johnson ran a sawmill at Slocan City. It would be a smaller operation all around. We used to compete with them in the Trail market, sell to the smelter and so on. Mind you, there was never any unfriendliness, but they were competitors. But there wasn't many. Even in the '40s there wasn't many. Burns came in the early '40s and set up at Passmore there.
Peter Chapman: What about when your Dad started up at Edgewood. There were quite a few mills then, weren't there?
Bill Waldie: The Vale-Columbia Lumber Company. They were up here at Westley before Waldies were in business here, but they went out of business about the same time as Waldies got into the business. They were a big operator.
Peter Chapman: How 'bout at Nelson?
Bill Waldie: Well, I don't think any mill at Nelson ... Peter Hlookoff - Glacier Lumber Company - and Leuthold in Spokane. Leuthold, an American, he might have helped Hlookoff financially and so on.
Peter Chapman: And he was from Spokane?
Bill Waldie: Yes, he was an American
lumberman. Deer Park Lumber Company, of Deer Park, Washington. He helped Hlookoff organize the Glacier Lumber Company. They had a mill in Nelson, right on the site of - what the hell do they call it later? - Kootenay Forest Products. Same site. Same site.
Peter Chapman: Where did you sell most of the lumber over the years?
Bill Waldie: Oh, undoubtedly, most of it went to the Canadian Prairies, in the early years, up to the '40s - it went to the Canadian Prairie. That was the natural market. You understand. That's what the business was built for ... to supply that Prairie market.
Peter Chapman: Then what happened?
Bill Waldie: Well, gradually white pine, particularly, and cedar, to a lesser extent, became very valuable in Eastern Canada, and the United States too, and more and more were being shipped out and finally ... The Ontario market liked that white pine and paid a big price for it. On the Prairie they wouldn't pay the price for the white pine, it was no different to them from spruce.
Peter Chapman: The white pine, were you shipping that as specialty lumber or dimensional lumber?
Bill Waldie: Not dimension, no it was all one-inch thick, you know what I mean boards. It was just dressed four sides, as far as we were concerned, 90% of it. It was used quite ... facing boards on houses, boards around the windows and so on. And in kitchen cupboards and so on.
Peter Chapman: Were there some species that you cut more than others?
Bill Waldie: Well, when we went into the woods, we generally took what was there and we sold it to our best advantage whenever we could. But we did not go into the woods looking for a specific species in any case.
Peter Chapman: Did you cut yellow pine?
Bill Waldie: Yes, oh, yes. There was a good market for that too, you know, especially big yellow pine - you get lots of clear lumber off them.
Peter Chapman: And what about cedar?
Bill Waldie: Well, we had a lot of cedar, I'll tell you, millions of feet of that old-growth cedar. There wasn't much money in that. Or, you know if ever there was a knot it was big and loose, and I was ... the product that went mostly to Ontario was Number-2 cedar boards, we called it, big loose-knotted stuff, and there was a way it could be sold. It was lightweight, which was again a factor in selling cedar in Ontario. Only 1500 pounds to the thousand or so, and freight was not too great. But we got some clear cedar out of it and sell it here and there.
Transcript for Forest Firefighting
A description of forest firefighting, communication and log booms.
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Peter Chapman: Did your logging crews ever get called out to fight fires?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yes, oh yes, oh, you bet.
Peter Chapman: What would happen?
Bill Waldie: Oh, well, mind you if there was a fire, anywhere near, we were anxious to keep it contained anyway. But, no, no, there was Forest Service would just say they wanted the men, that's all, they wanted the men to go to that fire. And we shut down the mill here on more than one occasion to supply crews for fires right around here, right around here.
Peter Chapman: The Ranger would call you?
Bill Waldie: That's right, that's right. They wanted these men. They'd send trucks around to pick them up.
Peter Chapman: How did you communicate with your logging camps?
Bill Waldie: Well, we did put in a two-way radio - it went to camps on the lower lake here or where they were isolated. This was done in the '40s. Cost us a few hundred dollars to get an outfit that would work. We wanted a fifty mile range, and it was quite expensive.
Peter Chapman: What did you do before then?
Bill Waldie: We just got along, got along with mail and telephone, standard mail and telephone service.
Peter Chapman: But you wouldn't have telephones into the camps?
Bill Waldie: No. no, no, no. They'd have to go out and phone us, they'd have to go out and phone us, that's right. That's what we got along anyway.
Peter Chapman: What happened if they needed something at the camp?
Bill Waldie: Well, they'd have to get to a phone, that's all. Mind you, they never were out many miles from a little town of some kind. We were working close to the water, close to the towns. They were close, that's all. If it took half a day, well, it took half a day to get to the phone and make a phone call. That's all.
Peter Chapman: Were there families in most of the camps?
Bill Waldie: No, but there were communities like Arrow Park and so on. A lot of fellows worked for us year after year, and families lived at the community there, which was there anyway, you know what I mean. We didn't create it, but no doubt they wouldn't have been there if there hadn't have been work for them. They wouldn't have stayed there.
Peter Chapman: Did the camps run seven days a week?
Bill Waldie: No, no, we never ran seven days a week. I don't remember in my experience ever working more than five days a week, and these fellows would all go home for the weekend, pretty well. Some were single men. Some didn't have a home.
Peter Chapman: And a ten-hour day.
Bill Waldie: Well, I remember a little working ten-hour days. I don't think the woods worked more than nine or so. Not in my memory. Not in my memory. That's right. Up and at it early in the morning. Out in the dark in the winter months, out in the dark, but I don't think it was more than a nine-hour day. Used to take lunch out, the bull cook would take lunch out and build a big fire and heat a kettle, make tea. Real pioneer stuff compared to today.
Peter Chapman: Did you ever lose logs in the river? Did you ever have booms break?
Bill Waldie: Yes we did. In the early days, there was quite a little loss. The river's pretty fast there, and you've got to swing these booms in and ... anyway we did lose logs, we lost some logs.
Peter Chapman: What would you do if a boom broke?
Bill Waldie: Well it's gone, it's gone down the river, it's gone forever. So many thousand dollars lost. Period. No way to get them back.
Peter Chapman: They'd end up down in the States?
Bill Waldie: Sure, sure.
Peter Chapman: What would cause a boom to break?
Bill Waldie: Well, the main thing was the swinging them in there at the bridge. Sometimes they would hit the pier, the boom would hit the pier, you see, if they had too big a boom, too big and the boat couldn't hold it, hit the damn pier and a boom stick would probably split. Anyway, a lot of logs would go down the damn river and so on. It did happen on some occasions.
Peter Chapman: Who were the crew on the Elco?
Bill Waldie: Well, they had the same men year after year. Old Cap' Sutherland, he's down here in Raspberry Lodge. He's 99 years old now.
Peter Chapman: Did he come to work for you?
Bill Waldie: He came down from Nakusp. He came down from Nakusp and took the job here in '31. That's right.
Transcript for Local Sales
A description of local markets for lumber and how the mill was powered.
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Peter Chapman: Did you have a lot of competition from the coastal mills?
Bill Waldie: Well, we weren't aware of it, I guess to put it that way, we weren't aware of it. But we were all selling in the same market. If their price came down, our price went down. That's all.
Peter Chapman: How much of your production was sold locally?
Bill Waldie: Well, it developed more and more, kept developing more and more. I think probably a third or so locally. We did have a retail lumberyard in Castlegar. It was a later ... that wasn't set up until about 1950,1 think, but it never sold a big percentage.
Peter Chapman: Did you have to change the equipment in your mill? Did you have to rebuild your mill sometime with new equipment?
Bill Waldie: No, we never changed the equipment. The mill burned out in 1918, and we bought used sawmill equipment here and there. There were some pieces of equipment from the Kamloops Lumber Company. It had been at Kamloops, shipped to Kamloops some time earlier. We never changed anything, I would say. Maybe I'm exaggerating at "anything," but we just ran that equipment. That's all there was to it.
Peter Chapman: Your main saw was a double-cut band ...
Bill Waldie: Double-cut band saw, that's right. All the logs had to go over that double-cut band was, back and forth, back and forth until it was worn out, the log was worn out or sawn up, that's right.
Peter Chapman: How was the mill powered?
Bill Waldie: One steam engine. We weren't hooked up to the West Kootenay Power until I don't know, early '40. We had a little steam generator you understand, to generate power for the sawmill yourselves there, it was just a small deal, lights only, it wasn't a ... no electricity, no electricity until some time in the '40s, maybe the middle '40s, I think.
Peter Chapman: The steam plant would run flat belts?
Bill Waldie: Yeah. Yeah. A line shaft went in from one end of the mill to the other, the line shaft. And then you 'take off this line shaft with pulleys and so on, and take off for this machine and take off for that machine and at the speed you wanted, you would work out the size of the pulley necessary, knowing the speed of the line shaft. If it run from a big pulley to a small pulley, you'd get speed - small pulley to a big pulley, you'd slow it down. You understand, it was all calculated out.
Peter Chapman: What was the fuel for the steam engine?
Bill Waldie: Waste wood. Waste wood, sawdust and shavings automatically drop into furnaces and all waste wood, though. Nothing else went into those furnaces.
Peter Chapman: You could run the mill on just what you produced?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah, and stuff left over, and dry white pine. That was the hottest fuel of all.
Peter Chapman: What other kinds of machinery did you have there other than the head saw?
Bill Waldie: An edger, a trimmer, and we made wood lathe, which is a lost art, which is no more now.
Peter Chapman: Tell me about making lathe.
Bill Waldie: Well, we picked slabs out of the conveyor, suitable slabs. There was lots of them, without too many big knots in them, and you run them through a bolter first, that's where you've got three or four saws set an inch-and-a-half apart.
Peter Chapman: Is that like a gang saw?
Bill Waldie: Yeah, same thing, except in miniature. The slabs were cut off automatically four feet long, and the lathe's four feet long, anyways. Just the good pieces were picked out. And then you've got an inch-and- a-half one way and it might be anything the other way, and you feed them into a gang saw, about three saws at a time. A fella could make lathe pretty fast, pretty fast. And we made shingles out of the cedar. Made shingles. Lots of suitable single material in this country, there was at that time you know. The big cedar with the hollow butt, lots of clear wood on the outside, damn good shingle material.
Peter Chapman: Were there times when you were short of sawlogs?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yes. We would run out of logs - we didn't have enough ahead, you know.
Peter Chapman: Why not?
Bill Waldie: Financial problems. Didn't have enough money to put into that log pile.
Peter Chapman: When was that? During the Depression?
Bill Waldie: Yeah, all right, in the Depression, and in the '40s, again, you know, I mean the goddamn sawmill put them through faster than we could get them out of the woods there. Just call it poor management if you want, but I remember being short of logs lots of times. We could have put through bigger quantity if we had more logs on hand.
Peter Chapman: Was it ever a shortage because on the forest end there wasn't available timber?
Bill Waldie: Call it what you want, the timber was there all right, but we didn't have the organization to get it out fast enough, that's right.
Peter Chapman: But, as you were logging over the years, did you find that it became more expensive to get the wood out?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yes, it was more difficult, that's right, that's right. It was getting farther back, and we'd have to build a bigger mileage of road and haul it greater distances, and it was a problem.
Transcript for Operations
A description of how the Waldie business operated.
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Peter Chapman: Could you describe your own logging operations a bit to me?
Bill Waldie: We didn't have any floating camps. Mind you, I wouldn't say we never had. We did not at Whatshan Lake have a floating camp there, but generally we built log buildings, that's what we did. Later we built lumber buildings too. Built them with the idea that we could take them down and put them up again if we designed them right, but never were taken down.
Peter Chapman: You must have hired an awful lot of people. Was it hard to keep your operation staffed?
Bill Waldie: They were coming and going all the time, though.
Peter Chapman: Did you get good cooks for the camp?
Bill Waldie: Well, mind you, in the wartime years, there was trouble getting the cooks, and trouble getting everybody then. In the late '30s and early '40s. It was a problem, just local fellows that lived around here. I'm not thinking of the mill. We never had any trouble at the mill, because enough people lived around here ... but in the woods, we did have trouble, just get enough bodies there, never mind how good they were, get enough bodies there. I remember having trouble. I remember making trips around the area to see if I could find some men - get the name of a fellow who wasn't working, and go and see him if he wanted to go to work. Well, what the hell, if he wanted to work, he was already working. It was tough. It was tough.
Transcript for Poles
A description of logging for poles and the brokers used to sell their lumber.
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Peter Chapman: Did you make poles too?
Bill Waldie: We made poles, yeah. We made quite a lot of poles. We had a pole yard right up here where the pulp mill is now.
Peter Chapman: How did you sell the poles?
Bill Waldie: Up to Walter Levitt in the Spokane, or Levitt and Nagle, or some damn name of the firm.
Peter Chapman: In Spokane?
Bill Waldie: Spokane. But the poles never went to Spokane. The poles ... we shipped them to Galloway, B.C. out east of Cranbrook. They had a yard there you see and they went there. We dealt with them for any years.
Peter Chapman: Did you use lumber brokers?
Bill Waldie: Yes, yes, yes.
Peter Chapman: Is that how most of your lumber was sold?
Bill Waldie: Yes, yes.
Peter Chapman: Who were the brokers?
Bill Waldie: Oh, I remember Harvey Perkins in Calgary, H.F. Perkins Lumber Company was one. He was strictly a broker. He never had any lumberyard or sawmill or anything else. He was just an office. He knew all the dealers in Alberta well.
Peter Chapman: And he would take your lumber?
Bill Waldie: Well no, this is the way it worked. He would go around and take the orders from the [lumber] yards. They wanted this and that, so many pieces of ... and he would take these orders, that's all, and send them to us. He would deal with other mills too. But he was around among these fellows, every week. Oh, he visited us a couple times a year. Not regularly, just to get to know us, and what our equipment was like, and what we had, and so on.
Peter Chapman: Would you ship to him or would you ship to the yards, the lumberyards?
Bill Waldie: No, no, no, no. You sent in an order to ship to so and so. But he would pay us though. The way he did business, we billed him. We billed him, and he in turn billed the other fella. But the lumber never went to him, it went to some damn lumberyard in some town in Alberta. That's right.
Peter Chapman: Did you have to be careful about the brokers?
Bill Waldie: Well, if they were in business and reliable, you know what I mean, it would be known if they were unreliable. We had no exclusive arrangement with anyone, you know what I mean. We had the right to sell to another broker if we wanted to.
Transcript for Timber Quota
A description of timber quotas and upset prices.
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Peter Chapman: Did you have a quota at the time when Celgar bought you? Did you have a timber quota from the Forest Service?
Bill Waldie: No, no. Not at the time they bought us out. We applied for timber sales as we wanted 'em, and the Forest Service, I would say, at the time did their best to accommodate us. We had no trouble. Tell the forest ranger, you know, there is a piece of timber here we'd like to get. He says, 'Yeah, I know that piece of timber, and we can get a sale through. It might take three or four months. Got to advertise it, and we got to cruise it and might take three or four months.' Anyway, all I am trying to say is that the Forest Service did cooperate and help as much as they could, in my experience anyway.
Peter Chapman: So you would get the timber for the ...
Bill Waldie: The upset price, what they call the "upset price." That's the way it worked out, and I knew there was competition in the cedar pole business. Bell Pole Company, they were working in the same area, but they didn't want sawlogs, they wanted poles.
Peter Chapman: If Bell took a sale that had sawlogs on it would they sell the logs to you?
Bill Waldie: I don't think so, I don't think we ever bought logs from Bell. I don't ever remember buying logs from Bell.
Transcript for Sawmill
A description of how the sawmill operated.
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Peter Chapman: At the mill, I guess how well things went depended on the sawyer.
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah, that's right. Mind you, he did the best he could. Some were a little better than others. That's right. I used to figure the difference between the band saw and the circular saw was quite a lot of saw kerf, quite a lot of saw kerf.
Peter Chapman: Did you have facilities for sharpening the band saw?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yes. There was a filer right there. The saw would only run about four hours, I guess that's what they figured, so they had to have facilities for sharpening it. Twice every shift they'd change saw blades, In the middle of the shift. And then if it doesn't seem to be running right, change her another time, they'd stop and change saws. Oh, sure, saws, I used to have three or four saws to keep the thing going and may hit a little rock, and mind you the bark was on the log and it had been skidded along skidding trails, you know what I mean - and rocks get embedded into the bark and the bark was not removed, so you had to have lots of saws.
Peter Chapman: How long did it take to change the saw?
Bill Waldie: A few minutes. A few minutes. I don't think maybe as much as five minutes. You've got to stop the machinery of course, everything had to stop. Take the tension off. And a fella on each side takes hold of the saw and gives a lift at the right times and just slips over, and it goes onto a hanger - - you understand, a wooden hanger and they pull that up, put the new saw on the hanger, and lower it down right with the wheels, you know what I mean, and again slip it on. I imagine it would [weigh] a couple of hundred pounds. Maybe a couple of hundred. There was no real effort for these fellows to lift it.
Peter Chapman: Did you also have a planer?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah. We had two planing machines, and a resaw in the planning mill. A resaw is where you bring in two-inch lumber and resaw it to one.
Peter Chapman: Why would you have the resaw?
Bill Waldie: Suppose you got a bunch of 2x8s, and you want a bunch of 8" ship lap - you know ship lap was a big thing back in my days, you know, 1" lumber for sheeting up buildings - and all right, you put the 2x8 through the resaw and you've got two pieces of one by eight. And then it goes through the planer and makes ship lap. You could have 2x8 on hand and make shiplap out of it. Anyways, better to resaw the 2x8 than saw a 1" on the head rig. The head rig would do that much more work, turn out that much more lumber if we were cutting 2-inch as compared to cutting' 1-inch.
Peter Chapman: Did you cut match planks for Powell?
Bill Waldie: We did sell them some, we did sell them some. One time I don't know what years it was, would it be in the late '40s or early '40s? We sold them some. Then we got back to shipping it east and that way getting more money out of it.
Peter Chapman: You could get more money shipping it to the east instead of to Powell?
Bill Waldie: Well, that's what we thought. You see it was just match plank, match plank and at one price. Well if you cut it up yourself, you can get some high-grade out of it and so on, but its a moot point which way you got more money out of it.
Peter Chapman: Did you have a kiln?
Bill Waldie: Yeah, we had a kiln, we had a dry kiln.
Peter Chapman: When did you build the kiln?
Bill Waldie: Oh, must have been built around the early ... about 1920 or so. We couldn't put more than ten percent of our production through it, you know what I mean, pine and so on, high-grade stuff and that, but it was a slow process. It would be in the kiln about four days or so.
Peter Chapman: Did you dry stack a lot of the ...
Bill Waldie: Well, that's the way we did going back early. Then the lumber carriers came in and so on and fork lifts and so on, so piling wasn't so important... maybe getting up two or so units high, but going back there, when I first went out, and I used to push the piles up as high as I could do it, straight pile, you know, neatly put up and stripped just so. It was very important that it looked right when it was done. It was very important.
Peter Chapman: When you were selling wood to the brokers, it would all be sold green then?
Bill Waldie: Most of it went to the Prairies. It was green, it was green or partly dry. That's true enough. That's true enough. The only real argument for dry lumber is it's a lot less money for freight because it's lighter, it's lighter per thousand feet.
Peter Chapman: Were the freight costs very high from here?
Bill Waldie: Well, not high, compared to what they are today, but 48-1/2 cents [per hundred pounds] to Winnipeg. Thirty-two cents to Calgary. Well, if you multiply by two, mind you if the dimension is over two ... but multiply by two at 48 cents, say, and two-thousand pound per thousand [board feet], you have nine dollars or ten dollars. There'd be ten dollars freight, all right, going to Winnipeg. Today your prices are a hellish lot higher than that.
Peter Chapman: And at that time, how much were you getting, delivered in Winnipeg?
Bill Waldie: Oh, I can't remember that, but I remember historically, early days, about fifteen dollars a thousand price at the mill, and then it got up into the twenties, and during the Depression period lower still, down to twelve dollars a thousand in '32.
Peter Chapman: So it cost almost as much to ship it as you got for the wood?
Bill Waldie: Yep. Urn-hum. I remember the mill price. That's what sticks in my mind. But prices varied you know what I mean. In other words the price in Winnipeg would be higher than the price in Calgary, mind you. You get back to about the same mill price, which seems reasonable and logical.
Peter Chapman: When was your hey-day? When were things the best?
Bill Waldie: The best years we ever had undoubtedly would be in the late '40s, the late '40s I would think.
Peter Chapman: Why?
Bill Waldie: Well, business was good, prices were - after the Wartime Price and Trade Board were disbanded our prices went up, you know, prices were pretty good. Mind you, costs were going up too, at the same time. But oh, no there were some nice years in the late '40s.
Transcript for Timber Scouting
A description of how timber was found, timber sales and how it was extracted and brought to the mill.
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Peter Chapman: Whose business was it in the company to be scouting out new timber?
Bill Waldie: I guess mine.
Peter Chapman: How did you do that?
Bill Waldie: I guess hearsay. But mind you, timber was not scarce at that time. Timber was not scarce here. We just worked along at what we knew or what we heard. If there was a chance, we'd go and look at it.
Peter Chapman: Did you have a launch to go up and down or did you use the tug?
Bill Waldie: Oh, no, we travelled on the CPR boat, or road and car. Well, anyway, when we wanted to head into the woods where there was no road, why we made suitable arrangements best we could.
Peter Chapman: Was most of the timber right along the lake?
Bill Waldie: Within walking distance, say. If there was no road, you could walk a few miles. We didn't make any big cruise of the area to find out where the timber was, at all.
Peter Chapman: How could you tell if it was worthwhile or not?
Bill Waldie: It doesn't change that much from place to place. The cost of getting in ... the cost of access was the thing we were really thinking about. How many miles of road we would have to build and how much it would cost to built this road.
Peter Chapman: The roads, that would have been in the '40s and '50s?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah.
Peter Chapman: And then before that, flumes and ...
Bill Waldie: Well, chutes and everything else, but timber was relatively close to the lake, or else we weren't interested, you know -- relatively close, within a couple of miles or so.
Peter Chapman: Did you actually cruise it and calculate the volumes, or did you just guess at it?
Bill Waldie: Just guessed at it, just guessed at it. That's right. I don't think we were fooled very often. And then - what the hell? - the Forest Service cruised it for you. You apply for a certain piece of timber, they cruise it for you. You know what they think before you put up any money.
Peter Chapman: So you would tell the Forest Service - you would ask them to cruise an area?
Bill Waldie: We would make an application for a timber sale, that's all.
Peter Chapman: And would they decide the boundaries?
Bill Waldie: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes. You couldn't bite out just a few acres of the choicest. You would have to take what they thought was a reasonable section.
Peter Chapman: How big was an average sale? How many board feet on average?
Bill Waldie: They varied so damn much. Sometimes there were just little corners, and other times - in some cases ten, twelve million, in some cases - that would be big ones, really big ones.
Peter Chapman: If you were cutting fifty-thousand feet a day, how many thousand feet of logs would you have to put into the mill to get that?
Bill Waldie: At that time, we were working on the B.C. log scale. The B.C. log scale was based on what they thought you would get cut out of a log. That's what the log scale was based on. You could cut out of a log more than the scale showed because the scale figured out cutting the log into inch lumber and most of it was cut into two-inch, so there was way more sawdust allowed for in the scale that was actually taken out. The scale allowed for an overrun.
Peter Chapman: And [ten-million board feet] would last you a good part of a year then?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah, it would, but we were never working on just one sale, we were working on dozens of different places at the same time. Timber sales were active for many years.
Peter Chapman: Once they advertised the bid, then what would happen?
Bill Waldie: They advertised that it was offered for sale and the date of the sale was mentioned, and you'd turn up and - see we never had any competition on any sale, never had any competition on any sale, that I remember.
Peter Chapman: You never had to bid against anybody?
Bill Waldie: No, never had any competition at any sale. I say this, now I could be wrong. There might have been one or two cases, but I don't remember others turning up at our sale.
Peter Chapman: Why not? Was there a gentleman's agreement?
Bill Waldie: I never made an agreement with anyone. It was inconvenient for them to get to that place. They didn't have equipment to tow logs on the Lake and so on.
Transcript for Selling
A description of why the mill was sold.
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Peter Chapman: Why did you sell the mill?
Bill Waldie: Well, I guess the philosophy was the only time to sell something is when someone wants to buy, and it was the first time in our history that anyone had shown any interest in buying. They approached us. We didn't go out looking for them. They approached us and said it might be the best solution, rather than be competing with each other. And they being so much more powerful, financially, we might get the worst of it, picking up timber and so on. They didn't want to be competing with us, having any trouble with the government saying you're squeezing out these small fellas and this kind of thing. They didn't want that.
Peter Chapman: Did they continue to run the sawmill?
Bill Waldie: Yes, they did. They bought it out in 1952 and we stayed right on, as "was the way they wanted it, but then the agreement was for five years, but subject to either party could change it if they wanted to, you understand me. And I stayed there for the five years, and my brother Bob stayed there another year after I, and he might have stayed right on, he wasn't thinking of anything else, but he got a heart attack and the doctor told him he'd has to not have a stressful job, and the job he had there he was selling lumber you see, a damn stressful job.
Peter Chapman: That must have changed the area a great deal to have a large company operating here.
Bill Waldie: Oh, you bet. It was tremendous changes. Tremendous changes.
Peter Chapman: Were you in charge of the logging end of it?
Bill Waldie: Oh, no. No. They changed that right away, right away. I was no longer in charge. I guess they figured they had a better fella, but Ron Jordan of Nakusp, they put him in charge of logging in the area.
Peter Chapman: And then they were building the ...
Bill Waldie: Well, you know nothing happened '52 to '58,1 would say nothing happened whatever. I guess there was a little slow down and they didn't... they got the pulp mill going in '60, in the fall of '60.
Peter Chapman: So you sold out at a good time?
Bill Waldie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. We did, we did. Well, undoubtedly we were influenced by the fact that we'd been there for thirty years - more than that, and hadn't really made a fortune, and here was a chance to get... it was an appraisal deal. That was the terms. Independent people would appraise it and that would be the price. That would be the price.
Peter Chapman: Were these New York people that you were dealing with?
Bill Waldie: Oh, yeah. Cellanese Corporation of America. They called it Celgar, that's true, Celgar - a Canadian corporation -Celgar Development Corporation, a Canadian company. But Cellanese Corporation of American were the ... and I think they pretty well lost their investment. They turned the mess over to the government, if they'd look after the bonds.
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