The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

28 | Who Gives a Hoot?
On the 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 refugees
or old country immigrants—Swedes, Finns, Germans and Croatians.
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 greatgirthed
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 Peninsula,
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
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