By Bruce Anderson – Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 4, 1990
AVA: What’s your background—your family, where you grew up, etc.—let’s start there.
Walter Smith: I was born into a logging family. My father started with Willits Redwood Products in 1954, although he’d actually worked in the woods in Marin County believe it or not, cutting old growth redwoods between 1947 and ‘48, just before I was born. He lived out near Woodacre—actually logged out in that area I was born in San Rafael. He got hurt—a log rolled over on him or some damn thing and broke some bones. After he recovered from that, he worked for a tree service for a while, and he fell out of a tree and did some other damage. Then he got a job as a bucker with, as a matter of fact, an Indian faller up in Willits, and they partnered together. In those days, there was a faller, a bucker, and a peeler—they used to peel their logs out in the woods.
AVA: What’s a “bucker”?
WS: He’s the one who cuts it into logs. The trees were so big you’d only have to cut two or three or four a day. The faller would fall it, and the bucker would cut it into lengths. Before they had chainsaws, they would hand-chop them down, and they’d have a bunch of buckers come in. They used to fall them all and buck them as they went. In the redwood country they used to fall them all and burn off all the slash, and then the buckers would come in and buck them, into log lengths. And the crew would come in after that and skid them out. When they got chain-saws, they would fall them and buck them at the same time—and peeling, at that point—that was be-fore debarkers. And then they started bringing them in and peeling them in the mill yards. That’s how I started with my father: I bucked for him. That’s how you learn the trade—by being a peeler first, then a bucker, and then a faller and you learn how to fall the big redwoods. It wasn’t that simple, you know, because those big heavy redwoods split so easy you could destroy the whole tree by falling it wrong. Anyway, that’s how you worked your way up to being a faller. My dad did that in ‘54 with Willits Redwood Products. In 1958 that company bought some timber from Hammond Lumber Company up in Eureka and they logged out by a place called Dyerville, which is about eight miles north of Weott. They shipped the logs down to Willits by rail. We lived in a community where everyone in my neighborhood worked in the logging business. We lived in a place called Holmes Flat, which didn’t even have a store, just a post office.
AVA: This was when the so-called Redwood Empire was full of small mills…
WS: Oh, yeah. Huge numbers of mills. The biggest harvesting year ever was 1955, and there were something like 20 mills just in the Willits area, and I know you were saying Boonville was the same. Apparently there were around 300 mills at one time in Mendocino County. A lot of timber barons would come here and buy attractive timber land and they would log it—especially in the ‘50s, not so much early on—they would buy timber land and build a sawmill for ten, twenty, fifty, 100 million feet, log it off, mill it all up, and then close up the sawmill and move on. It wasn’t unusual for a sawmill to last ten to twenty years at the most.
AVA: At some point in the ‘60s, there began a conglomeration sort of process, with very large companies like Masonite…
WS: Well, yeah, Masonite did come here and buy up some timberland from Hollow Tree and Southern Pacific—they started buying some small parcels and piecing them together, and then Union Lumber Company—those were the people who had a long-range view of things. The people who started Union Lumber Company bought the Mendocino Lumber Company, and they started adding to their holdings, because Fort Bragg was pretty much divided up into smaller units, too, and Union started buying them up. I don’t know why they didn’t buy up the Caspar holdings. Caspar had logged up to Camp 20, which is halfway between Willits and Fort Bragg. They got up there about 1950, and they decided they didn’t want to do that any longer—the timber was getting harder and it wasn’t as high a quality. And they pretty much shut down the railroad and started going to logging trucks around 1950. But they sold out to the state, and I don’t know why Union didn’t buy them out to add to their holdings.
AVA: That’s part of Jackson State Forest?
WS: That is Jackson State Forest. And there’s been pretty much sustained yield there since then.
AVA: At some point this area became attractive to Georgia-Pacific and Louisiana-Pacific bought out Masonite…
WS: The first corporation to buy in was Boise-Cascade, and they bought Union Lumber Co., and at that time Union Lumber even owned Little Lake Industries here in Willits. Then Georgia-Pacific bought it in the early ‘70s, and they also bought Hammond Lumber Co. in Humboldt County, and that’s when they had the anti-trust suit against G-P, because they were then able to control the redwood market. Then they divided it off into Louisiana-Pacific. At first they divided the land up into inland and coast, with so much going to L-P and so much going to G-P. Then L-P started buying up timber companies on its own, including Masonite in 1986. That’s basically how we got the land divided up as it is. And I don’t know whether it was L-P or G-P which bought Crawford Lumber Co. which owned [mills in] Ukiah, Potter Valley, Covelo and Fort Bragg. And there was a group headed by Harrah that, at one point, owned the Willits sawmill. So the mills have just been bought up one by one.
AVA: So you’ve basically spent your adult life working in the woods.
WS: I worked in a mill when I was 18…
AVA: So you’re familiar with the mill process, too, and how mills work.
WS: Right. And then l went to college in San Jose and got married and stayed away from Willits for about six years. When I came back I was 24 and partnered up with my father and became a timber faller, and basically he taught me the trade of timber faller. When I first came back, I worked in the mill, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had just gotten a divorce, and I didn’t like the city. And I worked in the mill for about eight months, and I couldn’t handle that; it was boring. I was working on the green line as an off-bearer for the trim saws—just watching board after board after board go through [laughter]. So I asked my dad if he would train me. Of course my parents didn’t want me to become a timber faller, because it’s so dangerous. My dad had spent a lot of time in the hospital. People we knew were getting terribly injured, suffering all their lives, or getting killed outright. They didn’t want me to do that. But I wasn’t a city-type person, so my father finally said, if anybody is going to teach you, I’d better teach you. So he taught me how to cut trees, and we were still cutting big trees when I started. I’m probably the last of the old growth timber fallers. I learned that trade—how to cut big, old growth trees. Of course, there’s still people in Humboldt County that still do that, too. But certainly in Mendocino County, I’m the last of the old growth-trained cutters, and that was 1973. l worked in this area with my father for about a year, and he became the falling boss for Harwood Products. In 1973 Harwood bought out Willits Redwood Products, and that was the Willits mill; they already owned the Branscomb mill. And he worked for them until 1982 when they still owned the logging company, which is unusual, because all the other companies—except for G-P—had already gotten rid of their logging crews and gone to all-gyppo [contract loggers] logging. So in 1982 when Harwood was having hard times, they sold all their logging equipment to Schuster’s. So I just went to work as a gyppo faller for whoever I felt like, who paid the most money and was the best to work with.
AVA: Describe how the work in the woods is actually done. Now, a faller works on a board-foot rate. Has it always worked that way?
WS: Yeah, especially in California. Now, in Oregon there are some who get day rates, where they pay you so much a day, and even Weyerhauser used to send them out in vans and supplied he equipment and they were just like choker-setters and worked an eight hour day and stuck the saws back in the crummy and someone sharpened them and kept them tuned up for them. But here in California, it’s been gyppos, and, as we get farther down in the conversation, that’s why I say it’s so hard to organize them, because they’re independent. We’re like a small, independent businessperson. For a thousand dollars you can go out an buy a chainsaw and a set of cork boots and a hat and you can be in business for yourself and come and go as you please. It’s pretty common for timber fallers. to come and go from job to job. If you piss them off or you’re not paying enough, they’ll just go to the next best place. Especially if you’re any good, it’s easy to find a job.
AVA: So a faller will go out into the woods by himself?
WS: It’s against the law to be by yourself anymore, and it’s called single-jacking, when you go out and do both the falling and the bucking yourself. You’re supposed to be within shouting distance of another worker, and someone’s supposed to be listening for you at all times. You’re not supposed to be where there’s nobody else around. But, of course, that doesn’t work out 100% of the time; a lot of times you are by yourself. What you do is you always check out with someone that you’ve come and gone. Sometimes well leave an arrow on a stick pointing in or out, so that when someone comes by and sees which way the arrow is pointing, he’ll know if we’ve gone home.
AVA: So the crummy [a van] comes out in the morning full of workers, including a guy who drives the loader, a trimmer a choker-setter…
WS: A landing man, a cat-skinner, the loader operator, the skidder operator. A lot of times the loader operator comes out on his own. A loader operator is not a gyppo, but they usually start loading logs earlier and load later than the crew works. Some of the loader operators work incredibly long hours sometimes 14, 15, 16 hours a day. The logger, of course, wants to ship logs as long as the mills will accept them, and some of the mills will accept logs until 9 or 10 at night. If they start accepting them at 7 in the morning and you have a two-hour drive, you start loading at 5 in the morning—sometimes 4 then you are going to ship your last load to get there at 10 at night, you might be loading as late as 8 o’clock at night.
AVA: Are they hourly workers?
WS: Yeah, they’re usually hourly workers.
AVA: And what do they make?
WS: Oh, anywhere from 12 to 14 dollars an hour. I doubt if many are making as much as 14, but there may be a few.
AVA: Has that wage remained fairly constant?
WS: Yeah but I would say that even as long as ten years ago you found loader operators getting 12 dollars an hour.
AVA: When 12 dollars was more or less 12 dollars.
WS: Even when I was an operator, I found that the prices hadn’t gone up much in the last 13 or 14 years. When people really made big money was the late 70s. Everybody complains about Jimmy Carter’s administration, but the workers made good money in the Carter years, ‘76 to ‘80. I made $30,000 in 1979. Last year, owning my own corporation [laughter], I made $27,000.
AVA: What do the rest of the guys make now? The trimmer, the choker-setter…
WS: I think we pay pretty high wages, and they make between $18 and $25,000. We have one guy who made $30,000, but we paid him real well because he was kind of our boss, our logging superintendent, so to speak. So he made more than I did. And we had one faller that made $37,000—a hell of a lot more than I did. In the five years that I owned my own business, we hovered around $30,000.
AVA: What does a log truck driver make? Like for Schuster’s…
WS: With Schuster’s they start at about $9.00 an hour, and they work incredibly long hours—probably 12 hours minimum a day, so they get some over-time. So I would say they’re in the $30,000 range, if they work a good long season.
AVA: What about the independents, the guys with just one or two trucks?
WS: The last few years they made good money. With the whole bidding thing with Louisiana-Pacific in ‘86, ‘87, and ‘88, they didn’t make real good money…
AVA: That’s because there were lots of companies bidding against one another?
WS: Right.
AVA: And L-P was able to drive wages down?
WS: Right. But since we’ve had this controversy, they’ve loosened up their pocketbook, because it’s easy to keep employees quiet by paying them a little more money. We’ve found that in the last couple of years it wasn’t as hard dealing with them as it was in ‘85, ‘86 and ‘87.
AVA: But the fact that so many people have traditionally been independent puts these workers at a disadvantage when they’re dealing with a large corporations like L-P and G-P.
WS: Oh, yeah. Even the choker-setters, the cat skinners, and the loader operators were all fairly independent. I mean, it wouldn’t have been anything for them to quit one day and start up the next day working for somebody else. They still kind of do that with the gyppo operators, but, again, when you look back in the ‘50s, when you had 300 mills, if you had good employees, they were important to you, because of the competition of that many mills going.
AVA: So a lot of the mills were run paternalistically?
WS: Yeah, right. And the number of people who could do the work were in balance with the number of mills, so you didn’t have an over-abundance of workers for the resource, either. Let’s face it, back in the ‘50s we still had pretty much a virgin, old growth resource. What we were consuming at that time was certainly more than we were growing, but we had a hell of a lot to consume before we made a dent in it.
AVA: Now, a gyppo contractor is an independent who hires people to do the work in the woods, to cut down the trees. And then he sells the logs…
WS: Most of the time he works for the corporation.
AVA: So L-P for example, will advertise that they have some timberland to be cut, and all the gyppos will bid on it.
WS: More or less They also have a core of loggers that work for them regularly, and they’ll negotiate some contracts with them. Some of them are negotiated and some of them are bid. And you have the independent foresters who do the same thing. They may have loggers who work for them and they’ll negotiate, and then they’ll have some tracts…Like we worked on the Willits watershed and the forester who was working for the City of Willits put out a bid for logging the watershed, and we bid on that with a number of other gyppos. There’s just a whole array of ways. Also, the gyppo can go in and pay for the logs, buy the logs from a small landowner and resell them, but that doesn’t happen very of-ten. It’s mostly the landowner or the forester will hire the gyppo, either by a bidding process or a negotiated price.
AVA: Overall, the picture is that the large corporations have a bunch of these independent contractors bidding against each other?
WS: Well, as I said, they started easing up ‘88. but they started consuming a lot more timber in ‘88 and ‘89. But in ‘86 and ‘87, it was really a cut-throat business. They were bidding against each other, and they brought in the gyppo trucks from other areas to bid against local truckers to drive their costs down.
AVA: What exactly is going on in the woods now? I was on a panel the other night, and Gail Lucas said that they’re cutting so many trees now that there’s going to be a big gap in the resource. Is that a fact? That’s what all the loggers are saying privately.
WS: Yes. That is a fact There’s going to be a huge gap. Let me give you two scenarios, because L-P has their own version of the gap. Their version of the gap is that they want to do fiber on 30-year cycles, or 20-year cycles. So they’re saying that there is no gap, that what you want to do is reduce the amount of time that you have to spend between cycles.
AVA: Because for fiber, you can use small trees.
WS: Right. And you can use anything that will chip, and you can use any variety, though they are having some problems with tan oak, because it’s heavy, so what they do is mix it with a lighter wood. All of the wafer-wood we see now is a mixture of different kinds of wood.
AVA: So they’re getting out of big logs, because there aren’t many big logs.
WS: Right. What they’re saying is that they don’t need big logs, that they can do this fiber thing on short rotations, and we won’t have this gap, that we’ll replace our sawmills with chip mills. A lot of people are taking offense at that. I mean, who wants the carcinogenic crap that comes along with gluing that junk together. And why should we compete with chip gluing mills in the midwest with our redwood, when it’s a special species with special qualities.
AVA: And it only grows here…
WS: Right. That doesn’t make any sense in the long-term. But the long-term doesn’t make any sense to, at least, L-P. They want to harvest on 20-year cycles and make the land profitable and paying all the time. If you really look at, we have high interest rates, so you would be better off taking your money and sticking it in the bank and collecting interest at 7½ or 8%. If you’re putting in millions of dollars—rather than growing trees. If you grow trees for more than 30 years, you’re losing money to the interest rate money market. So in L-P’s eyes there’s not going to be much of a gap, because they’re going to go out and harvest chippable material.
AVA: There’s almost an endless supply of that, isn’t there?
WS: Well, no. I mean, how long can you go on stripping the land of everything? You’re basically making tree farms and you no longer have forests. And when you do that and you start getting this cheaper material, you start paying people less, and you end up with a lot of the Little Lake Industry-type things where people get poor wages.
AVA: When they talk about the timber industry here…what do they mean? Is the timber industry here a united front? Do the workers look on the corporations and the gyppo contractors as representing their point of view?
WS: That’s hard to say. It’s a united front when you talk on the landing, but it’s a different united front when you talk in public. I think that even Mike Anderson privately is not as gung-ho about the corporate ownership of our timberlands as he is in public.
AVA: He said as much the other night. He said that maybe there are alternatives, that maybe buy-outs and other arrangements are possible.
WS: I think that’s a common thread among most of the gyppos at this point. The problem is that the public may be confusing the industry as being the corporations, the corporate will. My position is, as part of the industry, that I’m anti-corporation and pro-industry. The industry is really us: the workers and the gyppos, not the corporations. The corporations have come here and are shipping out all the money to other places, and they’re so diversified that they’re not just timber companies; they have holdings and interests in other things. We’re really the industry, and it’s our community that’s at stake here, and the workers need to put up a united front against the corporations. They need to say, “Get out of here. We will buy you out; we will run it ourselves, and we will do a much better job, because we know what’s out there, and we know what needs to be done to keep it around.” That’s kind of a simplistic view, because certainly in. the past the robber barons—including Harrah and Padula, for instance—weren’t worrying about community. They were worrying about their pocket book.
AVA: Harrah and Padula, in fact, are planning to take a bunch of TPZ [timber production zoned] land on the coast out of production forever.
WS: That’s true. Harrah is a long-time subdivider.
AVA: He logs the land and sells it off.
WS: How do you think we got the subdivisions on Sherwood Road and Pine Mountain? Harrah was involved in all of that. His interest is in padding his check book. That’s why it has to go back to the community. The workers have to be able to control their own destiny. At this point, the corporations and the individuals that have the money and the power have all gone kind of hog wild, and they really don’t worry about us at all. We’re just incidental to their making money.
AVA: They seem to be behaving more like oligarchs, rather than an establishment with real roots in the community. The old-timers at least had roots in the community, and their children went to local schools. Now we really don’t know the people who are pulling the strings here.
WS: That’s true, but even in Harrah’s case, his kids went to school here. He’s lived in this community. On the one hand he’s building senior centers, and on the other hand, he’s kicking us in the butt and stabbing us in the back. It’s really hard to deal with guys like him and Padula—smiling and donating to the community. And L-P donates to the community. Every high school play and practically every social event in Willits has been donated to by the Harwoods, R&J, and L-P. They’re doing those kinds of things, but, on the other hand, the destruction that’s taking place in the woods and the detrimental effect it’s having on our communities is a hell of a lot more than the few pennies they’re putting in on the other end. The problem is that people—my father, for example revere these people. They’re wealthy, they’ve made it, and they’re doing good for the community. It’s different than what was happening in the ‘50s only in the sense that we’re coming to the end, where we are going to have this timber gap, and they are going to sell out. In the ‘50s, there was always another job to go to. If this mill shut down, that one was going full steam, and they needed workers. Or you could move to Humboldt County, or you could even move to Oregon. You can’t really go anywhere anymore and continue as it was.
AVA: What about this cynical manipulation of the workers from the press through the corporations, that it’s the environmentalists, the spotted owl and so forth, avoiding discussing of automation, overcuts, exports, moves to Mexico and all the rest of it?
WS: Obviously, if we started talking about the real issues, the workers would turn against them completely. Debating those issues on that level would give the workers a completely different view of it, but as long as they can keep them believing that it’s the hippie outsiders and the environmentalists, and, number two, I hold your paycheck. Most of us in America are over-extended on credit; credit was given to us working class folks, and we’ve over-used it, and when the paychecks stop, the truck goes back to the dealership, and the house goes back to the bank. So we’ve got real problems there, and if they threaten to cut us off tomorrow, we’d be in deep shit. They want to keep the real issues off the burner, and they hold our paychecks, and they will threaten you with that.
AVA: It seems that lately, given the magnitude of the cut, there’s been a frantic scramble for workers over the last couple of the years. They’re using kids right out of high school—which they’ve always done, I guess—and a lot of Hispanic workers…
WS: When I lived in Humboldt County, people did their jobs and stayed in the same place for years. I mean, there were choker-setters who could own their own car—nothing fancy—and own their own home again, nothing fancy—and raise two or three kids, and the wife didn’t have to work—a choker-setter! You could live your whole life as a choker-setter maybe get on a cat at some point, but maybe not. The guy who lived just across the street retired as a choker setter.
AVA: He worked all his life as a choker-setter?
WS: His entire adult life as a choker-setter. He had a house and all and the whole works, and that was not unusual. As wages stagnated, though, we had to have younger and younger guys doing the choker-setting, because that was the lowest-paying job, and they would be getting $9.00 an hour seven months a year, and you couldn’t raise a family that way, so we had teenagers doing that. Then along came 1982 when we had a severe depression in the timber industry, and a lot of people just got out of it. They went to being welders or construction or whatever, and to fill that gap, when we started to build back up, came the Mexican immigrant. We had Mexicans before ‘82, but it was just a sprinkling here and there. Up to two or three years ago, you rarely saw a Mexican timber faller, but now there are whole crews of Mexican timber-fallers, and, again, wages have been lower.
AVA: And that’s true in the mills, too.
WS: Yes, and in a lot of the mills. They’re willing to work for a lesser wage, and they’re willing to do the boring jobs day after day. They’ll pull the green chain 10 hours a day 300 days a year. When they talk about timber workers, who are they talking about? They’re usually not talking about Philbrick and Anderson and Hiatt. Those people are owner-operators, who, for the most part, inherited their businesses. The majority of the workers are now Hispanic, Mexican. They’re not as likely to be telling the boss that they should stop cutting, especially if they’re illegal. Besides, they’re ignorant as to what’s really going on.
AVA: Well, they’re new here.
WS: They’re new here, and they’re here doing the work. Somebody tells them to set the chokers, and they set the chokers. I’m not saying that their ignorance is their fault; they just don’t understand the process that’s gone on, the history of the whole thing. They’re just here to make a buck and to work.
AVA: How do you account for the fact that so few of the mills have been unionized? There’s the Fort Bragg mill, but L-P workers actually decertified their union not too long ago, in fact.
WS: Yeah, about 1977 or ‘78.
AVA: Is it fair to say that they did that because it was basically a corporate union. and there’s no point in having $25 to $30 taken out of your paycheck to support a union that doesn’t support you.
WS: No, I think what happened is that, really, L-P broke the union. Harry [Merlo] started about that time, and he was going to cut costs…
AVA: They’re famous for union-busting.
WS: Well, yeah, they were going to cut costs and make a bunch of money…
AVA: How did he do it?
WS: He just told them: “Decertify your union or I’ll shut down your sawmill.” So they decertified their union. He just used a bullying tactic.
AVA: So workers are basically unprotected.
WS: That’s right.
AVA: You don’t hear much from workers, because if they do complain, they’re out of there.
WS: That’s right. That’s not just timber workers, either; that happens in all kinds of businesses. Another thing is, L-P runs all their mills as individual units. Even when they shut down a mill, and the guys go to another [L-P] mill, they have to start at the bottom, and they lose all their seniority. Guys from the closed mill in Potter Valley got on the night shift the shift that nobody else wants—in Ukiah, and now that they’re shutting down the night shift, even a guy who’s been with L-P for 25 years and gets on another shift at another mill only two weeks after a guy who’s been there for only a year, loses his job. And they do that to keep wages down. I just heard that they’re going to shut down the night shift in Ukiah and start up another shift in Clover-dale, and the Cloverdale starting wage is $7.00 an hour. They may be making $9.50 at Ukiah. Each mill is a unit, and when you start there you start at the starting wage at whatever your job description is. If you happen to be a saw-filer or a fork-lift operator, a skilled worker, rather than just a lumber-puller, you’ll probably start higher than $7.00. But if you’re not skilled—say, a Mexican working on the green chain in Ukiah, and you go to work on the green chain in Cloverdale, you’re going to go down to whatever the basic start-up is.
AVA: Do you think “One Big Union” as a slogan makes more and more sense?
WS: [laughter] I certainly do, and I think the decade of the ’90s may prove that.
AVA: This is a terrible situation from the workers point of view. You have these timber products corporations making more money than they ever have, and the workers making less.
WS: That’s right. And you see L-P shipping machinery out of Potter Valley down to Mexico, where they can get even cheaper labor and they can pollute the waters down there…
AVA: But the poor workers here just sort of lay down and took it, like being struck by lightning.
WS: Yes, I thought that was rather strange. When that happened, that’s when I became active. That was the straw that broke Walter’s back, so to speak. The day that happened, you should have heard people on the landings, truck drivers and everyone—they were just furious. I mean just up-in-arms. I mean that everyone, knowing that their wages were going to stay the same and that they were going to have to shut down sawmills and then finding out that they were going to Mexico. Yet who said anything? Just one person out of 1,600.
AVA: The fear of workers I find just appalling and sad.
WS: It bothers me that we, as a group, don’t take more responsibility for our own well-being, but we’ve kind of let…
AVA: Maybe they’ve won; maybe it’s over. The woods are going to end as a large source of employment, and the corporations are going to continue indefinitely to do what they’ve done making lots of money at the expense of these communities.
WS: Maybe that’s true. But I think the biggest thing that scares them is that Forests Forever is going to change the makeup of the [California] Board of Forestry. That may be the only thing that Forests Forever does in the long-term sense of change. I don’t even know about that; I’m just as much against corporate environmentalism as any corporation.
AVA: In fact, there are aspects of corporate environmentalism in that initiative. The bulk of the money allocated would go for buyouts of land that’s already owned by wealthy people.
WS: I feel akin to a lot of environmentalists, but I don’t feel akin, for example, to the lawyers who run the National Resources Defense Council. I don’t feel close to the Sierra Club, but I feel close to some of the individuals who are trying to make changes. I talked to Anna Marie Stenberg and Roanne Withers, for example, about turning the woods back over to the communities and the workers.
AVA: You mean a takeover and/or buyouts of corporate lands and mills? it’s not unprecedented.
WS: Yes. I think those are viable things to do.
AVA: We’d need the leadership and cooperation of people like (Mike) Anderson and Philbrick and all of the gyppos. They would have to be convinced that it’s a good idea. One problem we have in Mendocino County is that there’s no forum to discuss any of this. We just end up with both camps sniping at each other over this huge chasm of misunderstanding.
WS: At this point it can’t be discussed because the corporations are in the way. I think the environmentalists are getting their message across. If you’re talking about worker buy-outs and worker participation, they just can’t talk about that with the corporations around. I’m somewhat surprised that the Schusters, the Andersons, and the Hiatts sound like they’re defending the corporations. Whether they mean that or not, I don’t know. At one point in this whole discussion, it seems as though they were quiet. Six months ago, you didn’t know who Philbrick or Hiatt or Anderson were.
AVA: Well, I happened to play softball with them, so I know who they are, but the average person…
WS: But you didn’t see their names in the paper, and you didn’t hear them talking about the damn environmentalists and everything. But all of a sudden you do, and I wonder what’s going on.
AVA: (Mike) Anderson seems like a pretty decent guy to me, but with groups like “We Care” and the remarks that you do hear with greater frequency there’s this undertone of violence, that these alien beings who are invading our communities and are going to destroy our families, which is a traditional fascist theme, you know. That does not assist rational discussion.
WS: Right. That’s taking away the real issues. It’s like Mike Anderson before the Board of Supervisors when he opposed the Forest Advisory Committee’s recommendations, he never once talked about the issues: the overcutting and what that meant and how we were going to change it. No, it was people from outside, people the Board picked weren’t representative, etc., but he never once talked about the issue of overcutting. I think it’s just fear: I think they just don’t want to talk against the corporations.
AVA: Well, in Anderson’s case and I guess Philbrick’s, too—they’re doing a lot of work for the corporations. They should be upfront about that.
WS: In Anderson’s case, I think everyone knows that he does 100% of his work for Georgia-Pacific. At the same time, it says something about our society. I think you’ve said something about this before. They call us outside agitators, but here’s a group that’s come in and made jelly out of people who were, at one point, real spokesmen for our industry, shipping the profits out, holding their thumb on us. We’re talking about a free society, and in this free society, Philbrick, Anderson and I can’t sit down publicly and talk about the real issues, about how L-P and G-P are ruining our communities, because they’re going to get the axe if they do. In Romania they just shoot you, but in Mendocino County, they starve you to death.
AVA: That’s a good place to stop on a Fourth of July weekend.