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28 | Who Gives a Hoot?

O

nhe t MoRning of JAnuARy 19, 1989, Gorton and McGavick

were settling in, assembling the senator’s staff. George H.W.

Bush was polishing his inaugural address, trying to find the best

place to reprise the “thousand points of light” he’d talked about on the

campaign trail. In the heart of the Olympic Peninsula, 2,400 miles away

in the other Washington, it was still dark when Jim Carlson headed for a

meeting at the Quinault Ranger Station. Carlson owned two mills. One

produced lumber, the other shakes and shingles. He also sold logs. Like

most of the hundred workers he employed, he’d been at it since he was a

teenager. Guys like Carlson loved the smell of sawdust in the morning. It

was hard, dangerous work, but you were outside with a plug of snoose in

your cheek, working with your hands and wits, not sitting in some office

in a monkey suit. Carlson’s business smarts gave him what he considered

the best of both worlds.

Loggers on the peninsula were mostly the offspring of Dust Bowl refu-

gees or old country immigrants—Swedes, Finns, Germans and Croa-

tians. Werner and Marzell Mayr’s father came to America from Bavaria

in 1905 and soon made his way to Grays Harbor where the mills hummed

and screeched 24-7, processing a seemingly never-ending supply of great-

girthed timber. Schooners lined up stem to stern at their docks. The Mayr

brothers began logging in the depths of the Depression with a horse

named Maude to haul the 12-foot sled they stacked with pulp wood. The

Dahlstrom boys were chips off the same block.

In 1970, when Ed Van Syckle, the retired editor of The Aberdeen Daily

World, set out to write a definitive history of logging on the Olympic Pen-

insula, he’d had a title in his head ever since his own days in the woods as

a teenager decades earlier: “They Tried to Cut it All.”^1

About two dozen mill owners arrived at the Ranger Station on the day

everything changed. They expected to be told the U.S. Forest Service

would offer for sale approximately 90 million board feet in the district in

1990—enough to keep them all going. But just before Christmas, when