The year was 1965, late April in fact. I had just finished my first year of studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, although you’d have to use the term “studies” rather loosely, as I spent more time partying than I ever did hitting the books. Back in ’65, it was possible for a man to earn enough during the summer months to pay for his entire year of schooling. Unfortunately, most summer jobs for women paid less and made it harder for them to accomplish the same thing. I was one of the lucky ones who landed a decent job.
A friend I’d known in high school was working as a teller in a bank in the small town of Golden, BC not far from the Alberta border. We’d kept in touch, and he told me that there was a large sawmill in the town which often hired students for the summer months. He offered to put in a good word for me, saying he “knew a guy” who might be able to help. I wrote a letter to the management, begging for a job. Imagine my surprise when they wrote back and offered me a job for the entire summer – I was over the moon!
It was early May when I arrived, and they put me to work immediately. Now here’s the thing – their policy at the mill was that you had to be at least 18 years old to work there. I must have known that at the time, because even though I wouldn’t turn 18 until late August, I lied about my age in order to get hired. Pretty bold move for a young kid!
My job was working on what was called the planer chain. Logs would come to the mill on logging trucks, then get processed through the mill and come out as rough lumber. After a spell in the kiln, where the moisture content would be reduced to a certain acceptable level, the lumber would then be brought to the planer mill. When the rough lumber went through the planer, it would be transformed from rough, splintery lumber into the smooth, finished lumber you can buy at your local Home Depot. These finished boards would come out of the planer mill and end up on a row of conveyor chains which brought them out on to what was known as, logically, the planer chain.
This finished lumber came out non-stop, and it was the job of several of us who worked on the chain to keep up with the flow of boards. Each of us stood at a station and was responsible for certain boards that came down the chain. For example, I might be in charge of grabbing the 2×6 and 2×8 lumber. It wasn’t just that I’d look for those sizes – I’d also have to sort them into stacks of different lengths. You didn’t want to end up with a stack of 2x6s that were all different – the entire stack had to be, for example, 12 feet long. You had to stay sharp, looking for the boards that were yours and nobody else’s, and making sure they all ended up in the right place. We wore thick, crude leather mitts to protect our hands, and also a thick leather apron. You’d grab a board as it approached you, pull it towards and past you, using rollers to help guide it downwards on to the waiting stack. Every so often, you’d need to lay down a set of what looked like furring strips to help stabilize the stack and give a bit of breathing room between the boards.
This was hard work – you’d work up a ferocious sweat in no time and stay that way your entire shift. The only breaks you got were lunch, 2 coffee breaks and whenever the planer broke down, which wasn’t nearly often enough for our liking. During off-hours, the millwrights would sharpen or repair the cutting blades in the planer. There was a sign posted near where the planer operator stood, stating that “Old planermen never die, they just lose all their fingers.” It was a prestigious job to be a planerman, requiring seniority and skill, and of course it paid much more than we bums out on the planer chain earned.
The mill was operating two shifts, the day shift and the afternoon shift. I’d been assigned to the afternoon shift, which was the least popular. We’d start at 4:30 PM and finish at 1:00 AM. I had no car, so I had to hitch a ride to and from work every day, which sucked. The shifts didn’t rotate, so I was permanently on afternoons. I really hated the hours, because you had no social life whatsoever. By the time you woke up in the morning, all your friends had gone to their day jobs. Sure, you had all day to run errands, etc., but by yourself. By the time you showed up for work, they were all coming home to enjoy their evening. They paid us a few cents more per hour for working afternoons, but it didn’t make up for it. It was one long, lonely summer, which even strong drink didn’t alleviate. I managed to survive it, but it wasn’t enjoyable.
Back to school I went, and by the time my second year was winding down and summer was approaching, I was in need of a job once again. This summer promised to be better. My friend George, who lived in the same men’s dorm at UBC as did I, also needed a job. We both contacted the sawmill and they offered us summer jobs. By May 6th, we arrived in Golden. There, we learned of a family who had a couple of rooms for rent in their basement. George and I each got one and settled in.
One big change that had happened during the intervening year was that our employer, Kicking Horse Forest Products, had built a veneer plant next to the sawmill. They put George to work there right away. Dang, that seemed like a pretty good job, all indoors and in a clean, brand-new place. I asked to be put there for the summer, but by the 9th it became apparent that that was not to be. Also, we were working different shifts – George on days, I on afternoons. Fine for him, but for me it was like déjà vu all over again – not only was I working the dreaded afternoon shift, but they had me back at the planer mill working on the planer chain.
I knew several of the older guys at the mill, including some foremen. One of them was a boss at the green chain, and I really worked on him to see if he could get me transferred over to his area. Hallelujah! By the 13th, it was a done deal, and I was now making $2.22 an hour. Allow me to put that into perspective. A man could support a family on that, quite easily, making car and house payments and paying for everything else with something left over to create a nest egg. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but the world was a simpler and less expensive place back then.
The green chain was set up a lot like the planer chain. Lumber came out of the mill itself as an endless stream on a set of chains that moved it past you. A bunch of guys each had their station and would grab the boards that were theirs and pull them off the chain and on to stacks. A major difference between the planer chain and the green chain was the fact that the lumber on the green chain was “green” or rough. It was full of splinters, which were dangerous, sometimes penetrating the thick leather mitts that we wore, even rarely sending a man to the hospital if the guy in the first-aid shack couldn’t fix the injury. In addition, since the lumber on the green chain had not yet been dried in the kilns, it was much heavier – you had to work a lot harder to pull the lumber.
As soon as the lumber had made its way through the series of saws inside the mill, it came out on to the green chain. The first man to touch it was a grader, someone who had been trained to visually inspect each board and grade it for quality. He would make a mark with a big crayon on each piece indicating the grade. The guys working on the green chain would note the mark and stack the lumber accordingly. There was always a small percentage of the boards that could benefit from being cut once more, not for length but for width. For example, a 2×8 might have some flaws but could be cut down and make a perfectly good 2×4 or 2×6. The boards that had been marked that way were destined for a saw that was known as a resaw and would get put into a pile of their own. This is important to know for later, and I’ll come back to it.
The guys on the green chain were a good bunch, and we got along well together. The bosses would move us around a lot, and some nights (yes, I was working the afternoon shift) there were too few of us and we’d have to work way too hard to keep up with the never-ending stream of lumber passing by. Time passed, and on June 3rd we got a new foreman. He was a good guy, and kept me gainfully employed. One of the big bosses, a cranky old German fella who was my foreman’s boss, would come by sometimes, making sure we were working hard (we always were). I’d see this guy on Sundays when I went to mass at the little Catholic church in town, and he recognized me from work.
The mill would run different types of lumber – sometimes it’d be spruce, or cedar, or whatever the logging trucks brought in. It was all about the same to us out on the green chain. We belonged to a labor union, the IWA (International Woodworkers of America). There was a lot of talk of a strike, and in fact 14,000 workers in other mills did go out on strike but not us. Our mill was one of the biggest in the Interior of BC, and for some reason we kept on working.
Came June 22nd, and there was a lot of talk at the mill about putting on a third shift, what they called a graveyard shift. Interesting name, right? – who ever came up with a name like that? One of the guys on my crew on the green chain got promoted to running the resaw on afternoon shift, and we were pretty jealous. It was a big step up in pay, and prestige. Then they announced that the graveyard shift would be fully manned and would begin right away. This was a huge step – it meant that the mill would have to hire a large number of guys, bringing the total employment up to 400 men for the entire sawmill.
I came up with a crazy idea. By now, I had a pretty good idea how the mill worked, and the next time I saw the German boss (which was pretty much every day) I asked him if they had picked a man to run the resaw on the graveyard shift. He said they hadn’t but would soon. I told him I was interested, and he laughed out loud, telling me to my face that I had no experience running the saw, had too little seniority and was way too young to take on such a responsible job (I was 18 years old at the time). He told me to not even waste my time entertaining the idea. I was crushed.
The graveyard shift was set to start on Monday at 1:00 AM sharp. My job would be to work on the green chain with all the other guys on that shift. Well, I’d had all weekend to think about it, and I showed up for my shift with the other guys and boldly walked up to the resaw. There was nobody there, so I hit the power switch and turned it on. This was a huge piece of machinery, a huge band saw with two-inch teeth which towered over my head. At the operator’s station was a large array of buttons, switches and levers, all of which meant absolutely nothing to me. I broke into a cold sweat as reality set in and I tried to figure out what to do next. I spent some time experimenting with the controls, then gingerly tried to run a few pieces of lumber through the saw. Talk about trial and error!! I bluffed my way through the first few hours, and by the time our shift had our lunch break, I was totally unnerved. I couldn’t even eat, I thought I was going to throw up. Somehow I managed to get through the entire shift, then headed home.
The next night, I showed up and went right back up to the saw. Nobody was there to tell me otherwise, so once again I turned it on and started to cut lumber. The German boss came by and gave me a scornful look, but let me continue. A day or two later, he came up to me and said that since they didn’t appear to have anyone else with more seniority who wanted the job right now, I could keep running the saw for the time being. By the end of the week, it appeared that nobody else wanted to bump me from the position, so the job was mine. When he told me that they’d have to re-do my time card for the entire week to indicate my new position, he actually said it with a smile on his face and a hand-shake. Friends, I’m happy to tell you that I had bumped my pay up to $2.56 an hour and had therefore given myself a 15% raise. With every passing day, I got better at the job and was happier than a pig in shit. The stress diminished quickly and I settled in for the long haul – I came to really enjoy the job
There were 400 men working at the mill, a lot of them new hires because of that third shift they had put on. From May 6th, the day I started work at the mill, to June 23rd, the day I started running the resaw, I had only been working there for 48 days. There was a tremendous turnover of employees at the mill – it had a reputation of being a place where anyone passing through town could get a job just for the asking. Many left as quickly as they arrived. We all belonged to the union, so seniority was all-important. It’s shocking to think back on it and realize that I had so much seniority after only 48 days that I could step into a plum job, a job with more pay and a lot of prestige, and nobody could step forward to bump me out of the position. My good fortune lasted until September 16th, at which time I quit my job at the mill and returned to Vancouver for my 3rd year at UBC.
In retrospect, what happened that summer 54 years ago, shoe-horning my way into that sawyer’s job was probably one of the gutsiest things I ever did. I still get a grin on my face when I think back on it. Sadly, I have no photos of the sawmill. I went back to Golden to proudly show the place to my wife about 25 years ago, and was shocked to see nothing but an empty field where the mill once stood. There is this one photo I took back in 1966 which shows stacks of lumber on the far right side of the image, but that’s all I’ve got. That view of the Purcell Mountains was our scenery from the mill every day – not too shabby, right?
Looking northwest to the Purcells