Stuart MacDonald
October 5, 1994I grew up in Kentucky and moved to Bend in 1940. One of the reasons I came out here was to try to get young Tom Shevlin interested in the lumber business. He and his sister owned 60 percent of Shevlin-Hixon. My family had an interest in Shevlin-Hixon, too. Tom's grandmother was Dad's sister and his mother was my first cousin, and they hoped that I could get him interested in the business. His father had died while building the mill in Bend when Tom was just two years old. Tom and I were second cousins and we were almost exactly the same age.
My father had six sisters. One of them married a Hixon, and another sister's daughter married Tom Shevlin, Sr. who founded Shevlin-Hixon. The Hixon boys had large retail yards in Toledo, Ohio, but Tom Shevlin and his children never got active in the lumber business.
The Shevlins originally came from New York then moved to Michigan, then to Minnesota. The Hixons were from Ohio. Shevlin-Hixon and Brooks-Scanlon mills started in Bend in 1916. Shevlin came in about three months before Brooks-Scanlon. It was the larger of the two companies. When I came there in 1940 they had 1400 employees. Brooks had about 1100. In 1949 or '50, Shevlin-Hixon's trustees were trying to buy out Brooks-Scanlon when both of the men died within six weeks of each other. When that happened, Brooks-Scanlon turned around and bought out Shevlin and acquired all of Shevlin's timber lands.
I was studying to be a CPA at the University of Louisville during the Depression. I worked days and went to school at night. Then I became general accountant for DeVoe and Reynolds, the biggest paint company outside of Sherwin-Williams. In 1935 or '36 I went into the building business with a friend. We built homes and schools and one hospital. When he was offered a job as general superintendent of construction and maintenance for another company, I finished up the business and came out here in May of 1940.
I came to Shevlin-Hixon as a sales trainee. When you're a sales trainee you go into sales eventually. But first you start out by doing everything in every department, mostly common labor. You get paid common labor wages regardless of what you are doing. My starting salary at Shevlin was $.51 an hour. The employees had just been given a five-cent raise before I got there. Fifty-one cents an hour. It wasn't very much, but money was pretty scarce in those days.
In the 1940's the lumber business was one of the last ones to get out of the Depression. But by then this country was giving help to England and France in the war effort and business started to pick up. We were making ammunition boxes and so on. The plant worked a lot of overtime. I left Shevlin in August of 1942 and went into the Navy until 1946.
When I got out of the Navy in '46 I came right back to Shevlin. They kept my job open and I was immediately made Assistant Sales Manager, which job I held until May of '49 when Alexander-Yawkey needed a Sales Manager and offered me the job. It meant more money. I had lost track of Tom Shevlin. He was wandering around the country with John Roosevelt on the government's Point IV Program which was designed to help backward nations. Obviously, I was of no help in getting him interested in the lumber business.
In Prineville, the only street that was paved was Second Street. The city was getting ready to pave more streets. There was a big housing shortage. Alexander-Yawkey had either bought or rented some 70 odd houses for their employees when they came here in '38 and later. Counting workers in the woods they had 275 to 300 employees. Ochoco Lumber Company had built a mill in '39 and Hudspeths, who had been east of here with several small mills, built a mill. There weren't enough houses to take care of all of those people. We moved into a house owned by Junior Daggett built in 1906. He had moved to a new home on the heights. He was General Manager at Alexander-Yawkey.
In 1951, John Alexander bought out Tom Yawkey. Tom Yawkey owned most of the Red Socks. Alexander set things up so that his mother's estate had 50% ownership and he had 50% ownership. His mother's maiden name was Stewart and the company name was changed to Alexander-Stewart Lumber Company.
In 1959 there was quite a battle for timber going on. Timber prices were going higher and higher. The company's board of directors decided to liquidate and the mill was closed that same year. The sawmill was sold at auction and the timber was sold to Brooks Scanlon. Subsequently, Leonard Wilkinson bought the mill site and established COIN MILLWORK which is now American Pine Products.
I knew where I was going at least six months before I had to leave Alexander-Stewart. After the decision was made to liquidate, it was my job to notify all of our customers of the shutdown. They were given six to seven months to rearrange their production. One of those customers was Contact Lumber Company. When Leo Donnelly, owner of Contact, got my letter the next morning he asked me to come aboard with them, and I did. I remained with Contact and Clear Pine Mouldings 35 years, from 1959 until January of 1993. Leo Donnelly had bought out Carl Peterson's interest in Clear Pine. Leo already had a 72% ownership in the plant by putting up the money to build it.
Contact Lumber Company was a wholesaler. I 'wholesaled' all over the country. I bought and sold lumber for the company buying at a price that would allow a commission for Contact. I became Treasurer of Clear Pine Mouldings and Vice-President of Contact Lumber Company, its parent organization. Bob Donnelly, the son of Leo Donnelly, was President.
A lot of the people I did business with at Contact were old Shevlin-Hixon people, dating back to the 1940's. I knew their grandfathers, their fathers, and, later, their sons.
We had membership in lumber organizations such as Ponderosa Pine Woodwork, Western Pine Association and National Lumber Wholesalers, and so on. I traveled a lot, too. I made two or three long trips a year all over the United States.
Anne and I were married in Kentucky in 1935. She was in law school and I was going to the University of Louisville. She also worked in Judge Dretzman's office. Anne passed the bar in June of 1936 but she wasn't old enough to get admitted, so she had to wait until July 30th, her 21st birthday. She practiced law while we were still in Kentucky until we moved out here. The children were coming along then. When I went into the service she and our two-year old daughter went back to Louisville to live on the same street as my mother. She took over the practice of a friend who'd gone into the Army. When the War ended we moved back to Bend. After the children were grown she took the Oregon Bar and practiced law here. She served as City Judge for ten years.