THE HANDS CHAPTER 4 LOWELL HAND HAND FAMILY MANUSCRIPTS

REMINISCING
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CHAPTER 4

VISALIA AND SUGAR PINE

Visalia had many trees and the leaves were all over the ground when we arrived, a real contrast to McKittrick. I still think about Visalia when ever I smell leaves burning. It seemed like a big city to me, at four years old from out in the oil fields. We rented a 2 bedroom house and Dad rode a bicycle to work. I never ventured away from home there because I didn't know my way anywhere. A Chinese vegetable man came by with horse and wagon and Dad bought groceries home from the store. But brother Bert didn't feel intimidated by city life and took off one day. I helped look for him but was afraid to go too far from the house. When Dad got home I walked with him to the police station and sure enough someone had turned Bert in and we decided to take him back.

Then one day Mom took us up town and we visited "Dad's store," Isacson Brothers, if I recall correctly. I also recall watching the local bakery making bread. The dough squirted out of a machine two loaves at a time onto trays which were transferred to heated plated in the floor, where the dough would rise. Then they went into a large oven to bake. I was really impressed with that operation.

We also went to the Visalia Baptist Church and Dad who had been sprinkled as a baby in the Methodist Church, finally was persuaded to be baptized as a believer. I barely recall the evening service when he was baptized and I began to have some recognition of God. So one day when an old man with a long white beard came by the house with his horse and wagon, calling out, "Knives sharpened, pots and pans mended." I took notice of him. He had a small forge which smoked and I rushed to the house yelling: "Hurry Mom, God has come and He has a bucket of smoke."

In the spring Bert and I came down with measles. I didn't feel too bad but had to stay in bed (doctor said to) and they kept the shades down. Of course after that, the house had to be "fumigated" by making a fire in the cast iron stove in the dining area and putting sulphur in the fire. We sure had to stay out of the house that day.

Brother (#2) was born in Visalia on March 5, 1918, when I was 4 1/2 years old. Grandma Ahlstrom came on the train from Los Angeles and Dad took Bert and I over to Exeter to meet her. She took care of us until Mom was back on her feet. Where Dad got the car I don't remember but I suppose someone loaned it to him.

Visalia is subject to San Joaquin Valley fog and Dad had trouble with "catarrh" as they termed sinus trouble in those days. So he talked to his drummer friend again and was offered a job in Sugar Pine. He ran the Commissary Department for a large saw mill. It was owned by the Sugar Pine Lumber company with headquarters at Madera, California. We moved that summer to Sugar Pine at almost 5000 feet, with clean mountain air. Dad felt good up there. It is locate just a few miles from the Mariposa Big Trees Grove. The mill was built at a junction of two creek that flowed the year around and supplied water for the mill pond and a flume that ran down the mountain to Madera, a distance of about 50 miles. The lumber was stacked and clamped in bundles which were pushed into the flume and arrived at Madera in about 2 hours.

We lived in a house built along the side of a canyon with the creek and rail road running along just outside the fence. Mr. Woodson, mill superintendent, lived in the second house, we lived in the third and the doctor in the fourth. Just beyond, the rail road ended at the company hospital. There were also houses across the creek, and everything was owned by the lumber company. One day the lumber jacks got into a brawl and cut each other up with their knives. So they were brought down, laid out on a flat car which the locomotive pushed up to the hospital where the doctor sewed them up one after another. But when another man got appendicitis the doctor didn't tackle that problem. Instead they stopped putting lumber in the flume and put in a boat, kept available for that purpose. The sick man was put in and another man to ride with him and they were in Madera in a hurry. In the winter the flume formed huge icicles where water seeped out, sometimes a foot in diameter and 6 or 8 feet long.

The company railroad was a private line and didn't connect to anything outside of the Sugar Pine area. It hauled logs down from the logging areas to the mill where the logs were dumped into the mill pond. There were saw frames in the mill with 10 inch wide band saws. They ran day and night. The logs, one at a time, were placed on saw carriages that were driven back and forth past the saw blades, slicing off boards. Three men rode right on the carriage in those days. One in a seat, controlled the carriage and two at each end of the car hung on to a big lever with which they moved the log out, after each slice. These men got sea sick until they became accustomed to the carriage motions.

The whole mill was driven by one large steam engine and a very large belt. But the saw carriages were driven back and forth by a long steam cylinder ling on the floor between the carriage guide rails. The steam came from 3 big boilers that burned saw dust and wood scrap. The company operated an electric generator but supplied electricity to the mill and machine shop for repairing locomotives, cars, the mill and the steam "engines" that pulled logs out of the woods with chains. In winter the mill shut down and most of the men went out on vacation, leaving the mechanics to repair all the machinery in preparation for resumptions of operations in the spring.

For me Sugar Pine was like being with Alice in Wonderland. I understood how all the mill worked and knew the men who ran it and they knew me. I wandered around on my own checking on everything. I decided to make a windmill to put out on the fence. So I whittle out a propeller and with a piece of wire went down to the boiler man and asked him to heat the wire in the furnace and burn a hole thru my propeller. I didn't have a drill in those days. The workman on the railroad used hand cars to push their tools and materials along the track. On summer week ends our family would put (brother #2) and Bert on one of these cares along with a picnic lunch and push the car up to a meadow. When we finished our picnic we would all get on and coast back to camp.

One day I climbed some tall tree near the hospital, to sway in the breeze and I noticed some hand car wheels abandoned in the brush below me. With another boy to help we got them out and set them up on the rails. Then we found some old boards to nail across the width and trimmed them off with our wood saw. So we had our own hand car which we pushed along the track. Then we decided to change the switch so we could push the car down to the store to show Dad. Well it just happened that Mr. Woodson saw us change the switch which was right near his house. I expect he was secretly amused at two 6 year old boys and their hand car, but he got to Dad and told him my hand car would have to go. So Dad made me knock it all apart.

The first winter when the mill shut down, Mom took her three boys on a trip "down home" and left Dad in Sugar Pine. He was paid $180.00 a month and we got the house for free. So the family had more to spend than ever before! Now the train passed by a narrow place between a large rock in the bank and the boarding house dining room. Dad was standing there talking to the head cook with the side door partly open, when a locomotive came by and snagged his clothing pulling him and the door around so several ribs were crushed against the engine. In the spring grandpa loaded us all in the old 1914 Reo touring car and took us back to Sugar Pine. Mom discovered then that Dad had been in the hospital while she was away and never let her know.

While grandpa and grandma were with us we all went over to Yosemite on a Saturday. We slept there on the pine needles for one night near the present Camp Curry area. On Sunday after looking at the sights we made it back to Sugar Pine before dark.

We had lots of company. Aunt Lillian and uncle Wilford came with cousin Winifrid also about 6 years old. They also brought their friends, Mr. & Mrs. Astley. I don't remember where we all slept but things were much more casual in 1919. On their way home the Wares also visited the Mariposa Big Trees, Glacier Point and Yosemite. They drove a Knox touring car with acetylene gas head lights, an expensive car for those days. They stayed in hotels so I thought they were rich. Uncle George Dufner and aunt Grace came next and George got a job at the mill, so they were around for the rest of the season. The last visitors were the George Webbs with aunt Corinne, "llittleCorinne, Geraldine and Jessie Jane. Corrine ffelloff the fence and broke her arm and it didn't get properly set. Mom carefully read to me from aunt Corrine's letter that they had to break it again to reset it, hoping I would remember to be careful and not break my arm.

The second winter Mom stayed in sugar Pine. It was a rugged experience because the snow got 4 or 5 feet deep. It was difficult with three kids and an out house about 20 feet up the hill behind the house. It was really just a cabin with up ad down boards ad battens. In preparation for the winter Dad lined the whole inside with "Beaver Board," a thick paper board which gave some insulation. We had plenty of wood stored under the front porch and there was a trap door to get down to the wood without going right out into the snow. The big pot-bellied stove was going continually all day with a final charge of wood upon retiring. But by morning it was plenty cold when Dad got up early to start the fire. When I came out he would be gone to the store and the stove pipe was often red hot, so I'd close the damper a little before starting to get my clothes on.

In the fall of 1918 World War I ended and the mill blew the noon whistle and 11:00 AM to celebrate the event. I didn't understand and thought the war was coming so was much relieved when we got that idea straightened out. But with the end of the war the demand for lumber slumped and recession followed in the business world. Mr. Wehmeyer, a machinist who lived across the creek suggested he and Dad should start a Dodge agency in Upper Lake, California. Wehmeyer's brother lived there and thought the Dodge would be a better car than Fords in the muddy roads of Lake County. Wehmeyer was to be the mechanic and Dad the car salesman. Mom wanted out of the Sugar Pine winters anyway, so in the spring of 1920 we started out for Upper Lake.

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