Kennys Loggin – On Strike!

Oct 23, 2024 - 10 months ago

It was a time of layoffs, strikes, and injuries!

Kenny's Loggin' - On Strike! — *Ken Wilson (L) and Russ Waller (R). Photo: Dave Baker.*

I had my scaling ticket at this point, but M&B didn’t need me to be scaling at the boom. Instead, they sent me to work in Iron River. The trees were yarded full length by a grapple yarder to the roadside, then a long boom loader would pull the logs out onto the road so Laurie Pendergast and George Siegler could buck and grade them. I would then scale the processed logs. This was private land and M&B could export this wood. This was what I was doing when the I.W.A. went on strike. Eventually, these trees were loaded full length on logging trucks and dumped at Menzies Bay. The tug would tow these loads over to Trout Creek and de-water them. M&B had made a dryland sort there to process the export wood. There was lots of overtime for me and Russ Waller, who operated the tug taking booms of these full length logs over to Trout Creek. I think that was the end of family picnics at this site.

M&B then sent me out with the fallers to upgrade the logs in the setting. One of the fallers was Roger Wright. He was in a nice setting with lots of prime yellow cedar (cypress). I had a price list with me and totaled up the volume and dollar value. Not long after lunch Roger asked how much we got; my answer was over seventy thousand dollars. That was enough for Roger, he shut the saw down for the rest of the day, says we made enough money for M&B today. This job didn’t last that long because of compensation rules where fallers had to be two tree-lengths apart. M&B didn’t know I had some falling experience working with my dad at Wilco Logging in the early seventies.

M&B and the local union members were arguing over fallers. The company wanted to hire some more fallers and the union said we have some guys that can be fallers. Lots of men wanted to be fallers because of the high pay rate and the prestige that went with it. Everyone that wanted to be a faller put their name on the list and got a tryout for falling. I tried out, but didn’t do too well. I was sent to fall a five-foot hemlock with a bigger saw than I was used to. There were seven guys up on the road watching me (bull-buckers and foremen). So I failed. I think in the end the company took eight union men and then hired “off the street.”

While on strike, I helped my brother Rodney who was working for Twin Holdings (Farwell brothers), they had a gravel pit with a screening plant at the end of Evergreen Road. Farwell’s had a major building project at Hidden Harbour. There were quite a few second growth trees on the gravel pit property. Rodney would fall a few trees and yard them to roadside, where I would buck them and scale them. Once we had enough, a self-loading logging truck would load and haul them to Cawley’s sawmill on Duncan Bay Road. These logs would be then cut up to make posts, railings and decking for the condo project. My Dad, living close by at Ocean Shores condos, took photos of the project from beginning to end.

The strike was over in the first week in December, but there wasn’t any M&B work until middle of January. I worked at several jobs on the boom including deck hand on the tug with Russ Waller. I also worked swiftering on the barge with Bob Louma and George Cassidy, as well as working on the breakdown float where I pulled bundle wires off of the bundled loads. Everyone was laid off by the end of January due to heavy snowfall.

The lay-off didn’t last too long, we were back to work in the first week in February. I worked a couple of days deck handing, then I finally got back to scaling. In February, I was mostly scaling with the odd day deck handing. During that time, I took Survival First Aid Training and in late February, Bart Bjarnison took the scalers to Chemainus Sawmill to watch the fairly new sawmill in action — he even bought us lunch.

For the rest of 1987, I worked in the Boom Department scaling. In March of 1988, I was off for eight weeks for a hernia operation.

Ken Wilson worked in the logging industry in B.C. for over 50 years. Ken is a regular contributor to Supply Post newspaper with his column “Kenny’s Loggin’”, and resides on Vancouver Island, B.C.