MAY 2018 FORBES ASIA | 57to pin a condom on the bulletin board. His dad had moved to
California, his mom to Alaska, so a family friend took him in
and he graduated from a public school in Washington.
In 1948 he purchased a yellow Ford convertible and drove
down to California, where his father had a portable sawmill
that he wheeled through forests. In 1951 Emmerson and his
father built a sawmill in Arcata, a town not far from Redwood
National Park. he next year Emmerson was drated into the
Korean War. While he was away, Curly’s drinking habits put
the sawmill in jeopardy of closing. When Emmerson got back,
he took over and turned it around, investing in better equip-
ment and adding a second production shit. For many years
he worked seven days a week. For exercise, he chopped wood.
“We didn’t have any money. We didn’t have any timberland.
We were the poor guys,” Mark says.
he 1960s brought
on a short-lived part-
nership with another fa-
ther-son irm, Mike and
John Crook. In 1969
their joint venture had
$38 million in sales—
$263 million today—and
they took it public; at
the time, Emmerson was
president, John Crook
was executive vice pres-
ident, and each owned
40%. Five years later the
partnership dissolved.
Crook had wanted Sier-
ra Paciic to become a re-
tailer for builders and
do-it-yourselfers, and ve-
toed buying more land.
Emmerson took the
company private, buying
out Crook and the other
shareholders for $38 mil-
lion. Free to buy timber-
land, Emmerson soon
amassed around 150,000
acres, though most of Si-
erra Paciic’s logs still
came from national for-
ests. At the time, public
pressure from environ-
mental groups to reduce
sales from national for-
ests was mounting. Wor-
ried about tightening
regulations, timber com-
panies like his frantically
bid on government logs
while they could, driving
up prices and throwing the economics out of whack. In 1980,
amid the buying frenzy, Sierra Paciic purchased 73% of its
timber from the government and lost $13 million.
But there was a silver lining. he high timber costs drove
rivals out of regulation-heavy California. In 1988 Santa Fe
Southern Paciic Corp. sold 522,000 acres of prime timberland
to Sierra Paciic for $460 million. he Santa Fe deal turned Si-
erra Paciic into the biggest timberland owner in California.
“Bank of America gave us credit for half a billion dollars,” re-
calls Emmerson. “A n d it’s more than we deserved. It was a
monstrous deal for us. Today that land is worth, I think, three
times what we paid for it.” Over the next decade, Sierra Pacif-
ic purchased 800,000 more acres from Georgia-Paciic, among
others. It now has 1.68 million acres in California and 291,000
in Washington State.