Another story was of the 'logging camp' where Dad & a couple of his buddies were somewhere cutting Port Orford white cedar to be made into 'battery separators.' Vake came and looked at the 'operation' and decided to have nothing to do with it. They had hired a mule to drag the logs out to a specified place (where I think they were going to dump them over the bank and haul them all out at once - probably at night). Anyway, during this operation, they ran out of food. There was only a couple of potatoes, maybe some bacon, and some evaporated milk left. Well, Dad made a stew/soup which went over as a real hit! (He was still making this kind of thing - by the gallon, & freezing it - in the years between when both Bette & he died.)
Susan adds: Add clams, and you have Vake's famous clam chowder.
Whether from this operation or another logging project, Vake ended up the owner of a stack of Port Orford White Cedar planks that he had the local cabinet maker mill into tongue-and-groove paneling. He used the paneling to finish the second story of his house on 30th Street in Florence. That was the 1950s, but he was a natural ecologist to observe that the White Cedar grew nowhere north of the Umpqua River, and that some sort of disease was killing it off. It turns out that the tree was affected by a root fungus, and when last I checked, scientists were working on breeding a resistant variety.
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