CHAPTER 1

LIFE ON DRIFT CREEK

By Ronald Robert Parmele

Ronald Robert in 2007 age 67

            I can remember Grandma Willis dying. The funeral service was at a funeral home in Delake. Burial was at Taft Pioneer Cemetery between Nelscott and Taft; at the top of the hill beyond were the old SDA church used to stand. To get there now it’s above the Inn at Spanish Head parking lot. I remember sitting on the top rail of the front yard fence watching the family visiting, after a meal was shared with all present, at grandpa’s place.

            I remember the war. I was about six years old by the time it was over.  

             After WORLD WAR II the world was never the same again. All of moms and two of dad’s half brothers went to war. Dad and his oldest brother had families and stayed at home and worked hard. Timber was needed for the military bases, and new factories, to build planes, tanks, ships, etc. Men were needed everywhere. Dad’s older brother Francis was raising beef in Eastern Oregon.

            Women went to work in the factories building weapons and parts for everything from bolts to nuts.  Mom, by this time had four of us kids. Shirley, Ronnie, Jeannie, and Dick. It was all she could do to raise us.  She made all of our clothes.  We went barefoot until we went to school.  We were lucky to have shoes for church and camp meeting 

            Mom and Dad took us, along with half our cousins, to camp meeting every summer for as far back as I can remember. We never missed the Oregon Conference, Gladstone Camp-Meeting. I know I went for 42 years straight without missing a single one. We had the same tent location for years and years.

            Mom would bake all the bread, cookies and sweet rolls, canned goods, beans and corn mostly, which were always part of our meals. I don’t think she bought much more than milk at the campground store. We kids usually got one dollar to buy pop cycles, they were five cents then. We always had all we could eat for those 10 days. Dad had to work so he would head back home Sunday, work all week, but he always made it back, the hundred miles, by Friday night for Sabbath.  Sunday, we would pack-up and head back home to the coast.

            The war was over by 1945 and things were still going strong. Over 400,000 men were killed in the war. But far more were coming home. The government started building a national freeway system, of four lane highways, across the country, east to west and north to south everywhere. The men coming home had to have jobs. The Army Corp of Engineers built dams across all the big rivers to create electricity. They quickly put all the men coming home from the war to work. Things were booming!

            Prices started going through the roof. Bread was .25 cents a loaf, milk was .50 a gallon, candy bars were .05 cents, milk shakes were .25 cents and hamburgers were .25 cents.

                                                                                                 My first milk shake was at the Mitchell Drug store across from Abrams store

                                                                                                            in Taft. It was 25 cents and the Hamburger was the same.

              Rent had gone from $15 to $25. Wages went from .35 cents an hour to .75 cents an hour. It wasn’t long until Cars were over $1,000.00 and a house was over $5,000.00. It was madness!

             Dad loved to go to the Oregon State Fair. In about 1945 he saw his first power saw for cutting timber. A “Mall” chain saw.

            He and George Schaffer bought one together. They were the first ones on the Oregon Coast to have one.  It had the longest bar they made with a handle on the far end. They took turns manning the motor end while the other pushed on the handle end. It was big and heavy, but boy did it cut! They were still getting paid by the board foot, as if they were cutting with cross cut saws. They were really making the money hand over fist. The bar they bought was over eight foot long.

                                                                                                              Dad is pushing, George Schaffer on motor end

                                                                                                                                                           Big Spruce

Dad teaches the Mall Company man lesson.

            The following year we went back to the fair. A Mall Company man was demonstrating the saw by cutting a slice off the end of a four-foot diameter log. The saw wasn’t running right and it wasn’t cutting straight. Dad asked, the guy if he wanted him to show him how to run the thing? The guy was already mad! He said, “What makes you think you can make it run any better, and who are you? Dad said, he had been using one, just like it, for a year. The guy said, “Go ahead if you think you can.”

            Dad started it up and made a few adjustments to the carburetor. He shut it off and asked the guy for a file. He sharpened the teeth and started it again. He cut a 2” slice and then a 1” slice. It cut straight and ran like a dream. Dad handed it back to the guy and started to walk away, but the people watching started asking questions of dad. Dad told them it was the best thing he had ever bought. The Company man wanted to hire dad to stay and run the saw for him. Dad said. “Why would I do that, I can make 10 times that cutting timber.” and he walked away. It was funny! He was the best thing that happened that day for the Mall Co. Dad was making over a thousand dollars a month and that was about three times more than anyone else in the woods at that time.

            It was a couple of years before all the logging companies started complaining that the fallers were making more money than they were. So they started buying the saws and paying the men by the hour. Dad said he knew it wouldn’t last forever. He was glad that they were buying the saws though. As Bullbuck for the Ring Brothers, it was dad’s job to oversee the timber fallers and fell trees to.

Dads’ new Kaiser Cars.

             In 1946 dad saw a Kaiser car at the Oregon State Fair, being made by Henry Kaiser, who had built thousands of ships for the war. He now turned his factories over to building cars. Dad had to have one! He bought a 1946, a 1948 and a 1952 before it was all over.

     Our first 1946 Kaiser

  Our second was a 1948 Frazier /with foldout bed

           A dealership opened in Newport and dad bought a new 1952 Kaiser with every-thing on it that was possible. It had a spare tire kit for the back bumper, a sun visor over the wind-shield and a push button radio. It was a beautiful car. It was the car I learned to drive in.

          They stopped making them in 1954. They still made a smaller car called the “Henry J”. But it didn’t last long; they stopped building cars in the early 1960’s.  Dad wanted to keep his new car clean and out of the rain. He bought a big army surplus tent and parked the car under it. Of course it made a real good slide. Dickie and I would climb to the top and slide down the canvas. It was real fun until Dick and I got to the top at the same time. It ripped a hole around the center pole and down it came. Dad wasn’t too happy about that. He made a single car garage out of lumber next.

                                                                                  The Ring Brother Logging Co.

            Robert and Roy Ring, Orville’s half brothers, came home from the service and started their own logging company with their brother Ray, and dad Ring as head of the cutting crew. They got a contract with C.D. Johnson’s big mill in Toledo. They logged up around Logsden, east of Siletz.

                                                                                                                                              Donkey, loading logs

             They were going full gear when Grandpa Ring was involved in an accident at the landing that sent him severely wounded to Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland where he died eight days later from multiple internal injuries. That happened in September 1947. He would have been 65 years old and ready to retire the next November. We buried him in Newport cemetery.

            What had happened, as my uncle Bob told me before he died, was that the counter weight log dropped, as grandpa was walking under it and he got crushed. If you look at the picture above you’ll notice the, big log made, arm that swings the logs over the truck. One of the donkey’s drums can pull the arm over the truck bed. You don’t need to use the second drum to pull the boom arm back over the logs, which you want to load, if you have a counter weight to do the job. The second drum can then be used to lift the logs up. The counter weight was a large butt end of a log about five feet by ten feet; it slid up and down the side of the spar tree. It only had to pull the boom arm back over the log pile. They had it guarded by a few logs at the base, but it was designed to never come all the way down to the ground. But in this case Earl Parmele was loading his own truck, which the drivers did sometimes. Apparently, Earl wasn’t used to running it and let the drum brake loose all the way and the counter weight dropped fast enough to pull the arm past the logs, to be loaded, dropping all the way to the ground. Why, grandpa had taken a short cut under it no one knows.

1883 - Ray Ring - 1947

                                                                     1945 Grandpa and Grandma Ring                                                                         My grandmother Parmele / Ring

            Grandpa Willis was able to sell his place and the Ring Brothers needed a bull buck to replace Grandpa Ring so they asked dad to take the job and we moved to Siletz to live with mom Ring for a while. It was a help to us, plus she was too lonely to live alone.

            Jeannie was in the second grade. Most of the cousins lived in Siletz also, as my brother Wendell had his own logging company there too. We planted a large garden, did lots of canning, made jam and jelly from local berries, went to church school in Toledo, taking turns with Eola Parmele and Shirley Willis, taking the children to church school. I was able to get a job at a dry cleaners shop in Toledo, saving the extra trip during the school season.

            Mom Ring wanted to sell her Siletz property and get property closer to Toledo. She became interested in the Richard’s place, about 3 miles out of town towards Siletz. It needed some improvements with the roof and foundation, so we invested in improvements, and we all moved into the Richard’s place where we spent several years. It had 20 acres about half was timber. It had good bottomland for garden and pasture. It had an orchard with a variety of about 15 fruit trees. There was a barn for a cow, so we bought a cow. We lived there until everyone was out of the eighth grade, all but Dick.  

                                                                                       Shirley, Grandma Ring

Dickie, Jeannie, Ronnie

About 1950 while living with Grandma near Toledo

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