Peter Corley-Smith: Going back just a step, if I may - um, did you work a shifts, or did you work sort of day shifts?

Don McCusker: No, just day shifts. Well, until later years when they got peelers and that in the pole yards, then they put two or three shifts on the peelers, if there was a lot of wood coming in. If there was more coming in than they could handle with the peelers, they would work a double shift.

Peter Corley-Smith: So, in war time would you have to take off in the morning?

Don McCusker: Well, in Lumby when I worked up there in the yard, we used to start at seven in the morning and work till four in the afternoon with an hour off for lunch.

Peter Corley-Smith: How did you get out to your show? Did you have to walk out or did you get the crummy or what?

Don McCusker: There were crummies supplied if you had to go a distance. But people staying in camp were close enough that they'd jump on the bush foreman's pick-up or something, and he'd just drop them off at their various locations sort of thing - and some, you could walk to it. And then after the poles were made, they were inspected by the pole inspector and he'd put a stamp on it, and then the skidders went in and took them out to the landing where the trucks were parked. Once the inspector had been in and marked the poles with a hammer stamp, which happened to be a bell in this case, they were paid for those poles. The inspector turned his tally in what he had inspected on strip number so-and-so, and there was a credit given for that.

Robert Turner: I see.

Don McCusker: Then from then on in they could just be skidded down and mixed with all the other poles.

Peter Corley-Smith: How did they work the stumpage on the poles?

Don McCusker: We had to make our forest branch returns at the end of each month and send them in to the forest branch at Nelson or over here at Kamloops and we would be billed. We would be billed by the Forest Service for what we had reported.

Peter Corley-Smith: They didn't send sealers in to check you all the time?

Don McCusker: I believe now they do that. They have check sealers and that sort of thing for the logging companies, sawmills and that. But no, back then we didn't. We had to make the returns.