Kennys Loggin – A Job Upgrade

Sep 18, 2024 - one year ago

In 1986 I was 34 years old, logging for over half of my life. Considering myself an experienced logger I wanted a better job.

Kenny's Loggin' – A Job Upgrade — *Dump machine and booming ground at Menzies Bay. Photo courtesy Gordie Lee Collection.*

I wasn’t interested in working on the rigging so much. I wanted to be a landing bucker or hooker, with a better pay rate. In the union, seniority was key, and I was low on that list. So down to Canada Employment and Immigration office to see the man in charge of getting jobs for loggers. I told him what I wanted and he said, “Have you ever thought about scaling?”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t know anything about it.”

Up until this time, B.C. Forest service did all the scaling for government stumpage fees. The government was passing this job on to the industry and the government employees would be the check scalers making sure the scale was up to standards.

I soon learned that Manpower and North Island College were offering an eight-week course in scaling. I had to take a leave of absence from M&B, take a math test, and get a letter signed by my employer saying there would be a job for me. Unemployment Insurance was going to pay me.

North Island College hired Mike Stanley, a government scaler, to be the instructor. Four women and eleven men were in the class. We were in the classroom for three or four days of the week, then out to Menzies Bay or the B.C. Forest Products booming ground to scale and look at logs. The classroom instruction consisted of learning all the grade rules by heart, and how to calculate the scale for each log.

On one of our trips to the Menzies Bay booming grounds, we ran into a bit of a problem. One of our female students fell in, which caused quit a commotion. Being fairly large, it proved difficult for her to get out of the water. Everyone was freaking, wondering what to do. Some guys jumped in the water to help. We finally got her out — one man even lost the top plate of his false teeth! That was it for going out on Menzies’ booming grounds; Terry Stanley, boom foreman, banned us. After that, he found a place where they set up some logs on dry land for us to use.

At the B.C.F.P. booming grounds, I knew a few of the workers. I went to school or played sports with them, so it was pretty social when we went there.

Mike Stanley taught us how to pass the test to get a scaling license — not necessarily how to scale. That was something we had to learn if we passed the exam. The exam was a two-day event in Vancouver. We stayed at the Blue Boy hotel, wrote our written test there, and went on scaling logs the next day. There were three parts to the exam: a written part, logs, and volume. You had to average 75% and you couldn’t get below 50% in any of the parts to pass. Eleven out of fifteen of us passed, which was away above standards. The examiners would only tell us if you passed or failed — not what you got for a score. If you passed your scaling license, it came in the mail. Mike Stanley, our instructor, knew our final grades. The testers called him to congratulate him on the high percentage of passes from his class, 11/15 it was usually only a forty to fifty percent pass rate. So, the Manpower/North Island College experiment was a success. I still see a bus go by my place with trainee scalers in it. I also hear it costs seven thousand dollars for the course. I only had to buy my scaling stick!

Well, I passed the test, but the company didn’t want me to go scaling just yet, so I worked on the rigging for a bit. I spent some time in Iron River. A loader pulled wood out of the windrow and Laurie Pendergast and George Siegler were bucking and grading it, and I would scale it for volume. It was private land in Iron River, so export wood made top dollar.

On July 17, the I.W.A. went on strike! We went on picket duty to receive strike pay. Four hour shifts, twice a week.

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.