The Pittsburgh Press (January 19, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SCOTIA, Cal. – In these past few years of traveling and reporting, I have gone through factories, foundries, mills, canneries, shops, abattoirs, assembly plants and mines until I feel like a walking edition of the American Review of Industry. I’ve become so adept at looking without seeing that I can now spend three hours in a plant and not know whether I’ve been in a shrimp cannery or a steel mill.
And yet, being thus thoroughly satiated with factory-touring, I have just spent a whole day inside a mill and actually enjoyed it. This was the mill of the Pacific Lumber Co. – the biggest redwood lumber mill in the world, I believe.
It was only by special dispensation that I got through.
In previous years the mill was wide open to tourists. As many as 20,000 would flock through in a season, following route lines painted throughout the mill. And whenever a lumber man or a foreign visitor came through, he was given a special guide.
One of the officials who took me around said it made him as mad as a hornet to think what saps they’d been. “Just typical bighearted Americans,” he said. What he was referring to was the Nazi visitors they’d had on several occasions. They posed as lumber buyers from Hamburg, and were given the run of the place. They never did buy any lumber but they took lots of pictures and measurements.
So now, visitors are forbidden. That is, all except well-known spies like me.
One mill covers 500 acres
A lumber mill is really just an amplification of a backwoods sawmill, but what an amplification! The resemblance between the old sawmill and a modern lumber mill is about the same as that between a peg-legged man and Fred Astaire. They both can stand up.
This mill here, with all its auxiliary sheds and kilns and drying lots, covers around 500 acres. They’re building one new storage shed that takes a whole trainload of lumber just for its construction. More than 1000 men work in the mill, and 600 more out in the woods cutting down timber for it.
Redwood is the only timber in the world that has to be barked before it is sawed. The bark is so thick and pulpy that it just “cotton-mouths” in the saws. They have known bark on a big redwood tree to be 18 inches thick.
Until a few years ago, redwood logs were barked in the woods where they fell. It is done by men with sharp-pointed steel rods, who jab the rod deep into the bark, they pry down and peel it off. It is a hard, tedious and expensive process.
But now the logs are hauled in with the bark on, and they are barked (still by the hand method) right in the mill. The barking is much faster and cheaper, due to machinery for holding and turning the logs.
They find a use for bark
But the main point is that they now utilize the bark. They grind it into fine chaff and make insulating material out of it. You know the old slaughter-house gag about utilizing every bit of a pig, even the squeal. Well here they utilize every bit of a log, even the bark. (Be a better joke though if they were sawing up dogs).
And take the sawdust. That’s all used now too. They mold it into round logs about a foot long for use in fireplaces. They are called Prestologs. They’ve been doing it for several years, but I never heard of them till I came to California this time.
Other lumber companies do this too, with other kinds of wood. All my friends in San Francisco use Prestologs for their fireplaces. But they don’t use redwood, because you can’t buy them that far away. They can’t even make enough here to supply the demand a few score miles up and down the coast.
The machines that grind up the bark and all the waste pieces from the saws are called “hogs.” They are ghastly brutal machines. I’ve seen a tough green plank five feet long and a couple of inches thick slide into the mouth of one of these “hogs,” and you’d hear a heavy, vicious “bzzt” lasting only a fraction of a second, and the whole thing would be mere sawdust.
It has never happened here, but there have been cases of workmen falling into the hopper of a “hog.” That was the last ever seen of them. And there have been cases of men jumping into them to commit suicide.
Since we have supplied Japan with so much metal in the past, I suggest we now send over a few of these “hogs,” accompanied by written instructions on how and where to jump.