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Newspaper Archive of
Shelton Mason County Journal
Shelton, Washington
May 20, 1965     Shelton Mason County Journal
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May 20, 1965
 
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Sec. C--8 i ..... .......... , m , ,. Supplement of SHELTeR-MASON COUNTY JOURNAL :i:i! i i~ ~, AS IT ONCE tracks were r road Avenue ton's main e fare looked, camera lens curved aspect Railroad and First Avenuq right. The from atop a at the Railroad, Hollywood Editor's Note: The following ar- ticle is reprinted from the Arg~ls, a.n indcl)endent news, comment and /)pinion magazine of the Pa- cific Northwest printed in Seattle under the editorship of Philip Bai- ley. The article, written by Shelby Scales, is one of the finest, liveli- est and most snccinct historical pieces ever compiled on the Simp- son Timber Company. For that rcasou The ,lournal is reprinting it in this special Simpson 75th an- niversary edition. It originally ap- peared iu the December 11 and 18, ].964, editions of The Argus. There's no business in the North- west like the timber business, the raison d'etre for the area's devel- opment, and no company quite like the Simpson Timber Co., pos- sibly the largest family-owned corporation in this nation of in- visably-owned corporations. Simpson celebrates its 75th, birthday in 1965, a stark fact! v. hich llides a good share of Wash- ington's history and an industrial evolution exte.ncting from ox-teams i.o acoustical tile. In that span Sol Siml)son's logging outfit has ma- tured into an industrial giant with the kind of dimensions that im- press Boston bankers tl~e way Miss America's anatomical figures sway Hollywood producers. Not. just the size has changed. Simpson's logging legacy is a comlmny that farms and logs ; ! "~'" [ !i' P' ' "~' vellcer, his/l)( r find illsUlattion I)oard, then goes out and sells its I.)roduct. The nature of the busi- ness has (tllllllge(l. Equally important is a h/nnan leg'acV, li'ronl a VVol'k force of 50 ~lle|l and 12 horses Simpson has (~()me to enlploy 5,500 pers(ms, most of thenl living and working in such pla.ees as Shelton and Mc- Cleary, \¥ash., Lyons, Ore., and .Arcat'.a, Calif. Ill these towns, as Simpson goes, sO goes the local ! ~¢ottomy.. It isn't certain how many rag- ging companies have come and /4ont during that 75-vear period, bnt l/l(!l'C :tFe havd 'FcasoHs foF MARK E. REED Simpson's endurance and growth. Sol's grandson, William Reed, heir and board chairman of the busi- ness, talked about them one day recently. "I don't think a box full of se- curities would be as satisfying as the day-to-day challenges of a business," said Reed. "I want to he active in business and pass on the responsibilities to my heirs. I suspect they will feel 'the same way." His family owns about 80 per cent of the Simi)son Co., the value a well-guarded family secret. M'ost of the rest of it is o{vned by heirs of Alfred Anderson, a giant of a nlnn with a flair for' finance who (:,,alue west frool YVi:,;consiu to joi~ with Sol Simpsm in his logging venture. The balance is owned by 55 of t.he company's key men un- der a stock purchasing plan. SHELTON CIRCA 1890 ' IL takes a moment of'mental ad- .~tlutme~t to ~hiit one's thoughts from Shnpson's carpeted, wood- p:lncled, executive offices on the 20th floor of Seattle's Washington Building to the point where it all BEST WISHES SIMPSON TIMBEI COMPANY 75 years of progress and conservation have built a strong community in the Shelton Working Circle COTA GRILL "WE NEVER CLOSE" 111 Cota Street began, r0ugh-and-ready Shelton on the Northwest frontier in the 1890s. The most popular place in town those days was Billy Forbes' sa- loon, The Bear. Nearly all the cus- tomers were woodsmen, a lot of them employed by Sol Simpson. They were an unhomogenized col- lection of Swedes, Noz~vegians, French - Canadians, Easterners, Southerners and Finns. Some of them still had the smell of steer- age. The only American place they'd known before Shelton was Ellis Island. Billy entered business for him- self on a stake built up by driving Mason County bull-teams. History, moving swiftly then as now, failed to nail down this specific point, but it's just possible that he left the woods when Simpson, a revo- lutionary, switched from oxen to horses as the means for dragging his logs from the forest. Every- body at the time said Sol had gone plumb out of his skull. They said the same thing years later when,1 Simpson introduced a steam-pow- ered donkey engine to handle some of the logging burdens. Actually, it wasn't that compli- cated. SimpSon was simply stay- ing one step ahead of his compe- tition, sn aim his heirs in the company have shared. By 1895 the prospering Simpson and Anderson ialterests were con- solidated and growing. Their logs kept buzz-saws humming along Puget Sound and the lumber that emerged was helping build a na- tion in the throes Of its great post- Civil War expansion. DIFFERENCE Ste.wart Holbrook, the late Bos- well of the Northwest woods, has written that the m o s t signifi- cant difference between Simpson and other logging companies of the first half of this century was the company's retention of cut- over land. Other firms reduced their chances of snrvival, assure- ling they, like Sim I~on, wanted to sm'vive~ by allowin~ their lands to revert to 'the counties for unpaid taxes. William Reed says that this par- ticu]ar company policy probably started as nmch by accident as de- sign. "They may have reasoned that if they let the land go for taxes, the company would have to make up for it in tax monies in some other way." Whatever the reason, Simpson has held its land and three-quar- ters of a century later they have the hemlock and Douglas fir that it produces. The man mainly responsible for this difference was Reed's father, Mark Reed, who was born near Olympia within earshot of axes tearing at a stand of Douglas fir. He was a towering figure in his industry and in the state until his death in 1933. "In some ways," says a thought- ful company spokesman, "the story of Simpson is the story of Mark Reed. He was the man who took it over the first transition from a logging company to a log- ging and sawmill company and carried it through the labor trou- bles of the post World War I era." Reed was a shrewd businessman with what liberal writers of a lat- er generation were to revere as "social conscience." As a youth he got a taste of logging camp Just a Simple but Sincere THANK YOU SIMPSON TIMBER CO. for Things Too Numerous to Enumerate ,ir,;{.~i Eells & Valley Appliance Center ! SOL G. SIMPSON life, a crude existence of bad food, long work hours and the fir-bough bedrolls. Long before the emerg- ence of the Wobblies, Rccd vowed that if he ever ran a logging camp those conditions would be improv- ed. He carried out the vow. Simp- son camps didn't eater to hewers of wood with Waldorf Astoria ac- commodations, but the cooking was good, mattresses replaced fir boughs for bedding and the cab- ins were clean and warm. Simpson camps got a reputation for hav- ing better conditions than most others, a key factor in the com- parative lack of labor difficulties faced by the company in the Wob- blY era. REED'S REFORMS Reed married Sol Simpson s daughter and served as the corn-: pany's president from Anderson's death in 1.914 until his own death in 1933. He didn t confine his re- forms to the logging camps. As COP majority leader in the state House of Representatives, he push- ed through the nation's third set of Workmen's Compensation Laws, a fact that may come as a sur- prise to some Goldwater Repub.. licans. His fatal illness and death, the reader of old ncwselips will dis- cover, was front-page news to Se- attle papers for a week. It was Mark Reed who extended Simpson's operations from . the woods into lumber. He built a sawmill in Shelton in 1925. The firm's next great leap forward came under the aegis of President Chris Kreienbaum. It was a hard business deal with humanitarian overtones and came in 1942. . Henry McCleary founded and owned, lock, stock and smoke- staek,i the town of McCleary, near Shelton. Its several hundred resi- dents, living in company houses, made their wages working for Mc- Cleary either in the woods or in the town's door-manufacturing plant. In 1912, their timber depleted, the McCleary interests decided either to sell out or simply quit. Simpson stepped in, purchased the town, then re-sold the houses to their occupants. The firm was no}v logger-sawmill operator and man- ufacturer and the citizens of Mc- Cleary had a place to work. William Reed was called back from the Navy during World War II to take control of the firm on the death of his older brother, Frank. "During i:hose war years the company was pretty well run along ti~c lines laid down by the War Production Board," Reed re- calls. LOTS OF CASH "After the war'we had a h)t of cash, a small amount of timber A.H. ANDERSON and a plant in badneed of repair. I decided then that if we were to in Shelton which went into opera- stay in business we needed more tion in 1947. timber and more plants." "Reed and Kreienbaum had al- Reed dispatched Fenwick Riley ready made the great decision to an ace timber appraiser, on a mis- take' us into manufacturing with :don to find his firm more trees, the purchase of the McCIeary in- He actually had Manchuria in terests," said Henry Bacon, the mind, but p'olitical developments-- firm's president, whose office is the approaciting takeover by Chi- across an uncluttered reception nese Reds-- closed the door. Rilev room from Reed's. "But Bill wasn't looked elsewhere and found red- going to stop there, or even with wood in California and oiher tim- the insulating board plant. bet' in Chile. That set the stage PULP AND PAPER for a massive timber acquisition "In 1946 I decided that we want- of one billion feet of redwood, ed to get into the pulp business," Meanwhile, back home in Wash- says Reed. "I thought it would be ington, Reed and Kreienbaum se- logical to buy a piece of Rayonier. cured a 100-year contract with the I did, but it didn't work out. U. S. government for joint ha.r- I lost a fight for control of the vesting and growing of timber company, sold my stock and start- within all area embracing about ed searching elsewhere for a pulp 400 square miles. In return for property." getting' exehlsive rights to the par- Reed says he was re.ady to cruise chase of timber from the govern- the coast seeking a pull~ mill, but ment lands, the firm had to come got no farther than Everett where up with the means for complete the Everett Pulp and Paper Co., a tffilization of the timber. This gave firm established by the Rockefel- birth to an insulating board plant lers in 1889, caught his eye. ................................................... At this l)oint in the firm's ex- pansion the problem appeared to hc financing. Reed hegan to look for the man who could raise the mi!qions needed to carry out his program. Among those'he called FRANK REED Son Of Mark Reed on was Thomas Gleed, theu pres- ident of the Seattle-First National Bank. Gleed suggested himself. Reed accepted. "Tile big expansion came dur- ing the Gleed period," says Henry Bacon, who had gone i.o work as Reed's assistant in 1945. "It was Gleed who sold the insurance corn- panics on the idea of investing in land and timber with long-term loans. Consequently, we were no longer dependent on the hanks." The first of these acquisitions was Everett Pulp and Paper. In 1955 for $20 million Simpson bought the Schafer Brothers Log- ging Co., a ~,¢l.cp that COnsolidated its land holding.:; in the Shelton trea. Then in 1956 Gleed psved the way for a $90 million prop- 2rty expansion that included large sdditlons of timberlands in Oregon 'and California. These pnrchases included the M&M Woodworking Co., the Nortlmrn Redwood Co., and the Sage Land arid Timber Co. in California. Later the Everett Pulp and Paper mill was merged with Lee Paper Co. of Michigan to fern" the Simpson Lee Paper Co. Simp- son ow]m 60 per cent of the firm which has annual sales of $30 million. GLEED AND MUCKLEY "The trick in all of this was ~he skillful ability of Gleed and his assistant, Joseph Muckley, to make the financial deals," says Bacon, now Simpson's 1)resident. "This fixed us with sufficient land in Washington and California. Mv job now is to make it all pay off." It now seems slightly incredible but at the l:ime Reed made his decision to pllSh Sinlpson onward and upward in the immediate post- war era, there was some feat, and trembling about the state of the nation's economy. Some feared de- pression. "We thought that in the long run the countl:y's econonly "~ras going to be good," Reed said. "Frankly, I don't worry about whether we are going to have a boom or a bust next year---as long as we are ,~ jump ahead of the pack in development." The major challenge of the im- mediate future fro' his firm is sell- ing the products that it produces; a production firm has become a producing and m~rketing business. To help push their products, Simp- son now has a building and supply division with offices in eight cities. To stay ahead of the pack in other areas, Simpson has phmged into the international and research fields. Its new research office in Bellevue employs scientists trying to find new products that can be made from trees. Acoustical tile. is one of these and Bacon is bet- ting his boots there'll be others to follow. Non-combustible wood is one of the Simpson objectives already achieved in softwo()d pro- ducts. CH I LE Simpson actually went interna- lional with the purchase of 40 per- cent of the largest and ol~test fm'est products company in Chile. "We decided that we'd better quit complaining and get. into the in- ternational market field," said Ba- con. The firm is now doing business in 42 countries and Simpson In- ternational, the export-import div- ision, in three years has increased its sales from virtually nottiing to $11 million. At. the same l.imc Simpson is in the throes of a $21 million ex- pansion and modernization pro- gram, and, if earniugs permit, this will be followed by a $10-year pro.. gram of investing $6 million a year in new plants. ' "There is a problem with the geographical location of our plants with regard to our markets," said Reed. "We will have to review this sitnation." A bone in the company's throat ---one that also bothers other Northwest the Jones quiring U.S. between coa~ ,The most who Midwest "We have markets onr inte The ter-rich QUICK From son and prescllt, bottom ing apPm to call a a routine effect, is decisions in con, and Tom Iwho is Finance since nlo New York, ident of KreienbaUm man three years in the As for tr ments, ties. could fall now and ial to take feet of this yond these, there is a young mana have eyes P now coming the Univers: the Harvar' Now an( conlea up a Timber Co.' status as a and becom~ the otl~er cerns, a ptl "I don't Simpson's. three chtl~ and" some his SIMPSON'S means SHELTON'S Here's to another 75 Years for both of us. SHELTON EL] • ,' to ..... Simpson Timber "?" ',, ~ , , Oll your ..... 75th ? NNI¥ E: i1! , '" With 0ver Fifty Memories of the Life Growth and of this GEORGE GRISDALE was an today the model logging corn- early-day Simpson camp fore- reunify, was named after him man who earned the compliment and his brother Bill. George died ~IA~"~ ~1" Of being a "captain of men, a in 1929. U.a.~L]' ..LVJ., friend to all". Camp Grlsdale, i