A Day In The Life

Listed below are thee assorted jobs we performed at the sawmill/shop. It definitely kept us kids and Dad busy and out of trouble but time well spent together as a family. NO REGRETS.

Thank You DAD for teaching how to work for what we wanted out of life... I look back at the way I was raised as a child and use to complain about always having "chores"to do and then I look at my children now-a-days and their peers and wonder if they even know what the word WORK means.
Just kidding kids. *wink

Dad started his business on a farm place that we lived on; when I was about 10 years old; with a portable sawmill set up in the pasture... custom sawing for the neighbors and doing haywagon rack mostly.

I remember playing in the sawdust piles and feeling hot sawdust between my toes if you dig deep into the pile of sawdust/shaving from the mill. It did make a neat pile also for building play roads for the good ol metal TONKA play trucks and cars... Yes even as a child I enjoyed playing with trucks instead of playing house and barbie dolls.

A few years later on we moved to our current homeplace with the chicken barn and house on one side of the road and the sawmill with a shop set-up for making wood pallets etc.. on the other side of the road.

He also sold "STIHL CHAINSAWS" and "WOOD STOVES" along with some tree cutting and clearing for the state and neighbors. Those days were always interesting Traipsing* around in the woods and dad yell "TIMBER!".

I remember once Dad cut into a popple tree and there was bee hive in it and we all got stung multiple times.

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Another memory is working at the sawmill till 10 pm outside with my Dad and my siblings. Forget about having homework because you never got ot do it anyhow. When we were young we got home from school, changed clothes, grabbed a peanut butter sandwich and either went to work at the sawmill with Dad or picked over 25,000 eggs with Mom. The greatest lesson we learned thru all this was too never miss school, because if you were home sick persay ... you only got to sleep til noon then it was get up and go out to pick eggs. *wink

Growing up we all learned to use a hammer. I recall making oak wood pallets in the chcken barn on a cement floor and dropped a finished oak pallet on my winter boot and split my toe open.
We would build oak pallets in the chicken barn in the wintertime with cement floors and I droped one on the top of my foot and it split open my toe. It didn't hurt too bad until I went on the house for lunch and then I took off my boot and seen my sock was red. When I peeled off my blood soaked sock then it hurt! Once the air got to the split toe I felt it then.

We loved it in the wintertime when snowmobiles would come down the road and swipe up our electrical cords that we had strung to the multiple saws that we used after dark... where we were cutting lumber for those darn wood pallets etc...
Unfortunately - Dad had figured that out and that only lasted one winter then he had an electricity pole put up on that side of the road also for the mill and shop in 1976. Now we had lots more work to do as we had lots more power to run the planers etc... and his business grew fast. At this time I ewas about 11 years old whent he sawmill business started hopping but in 1979 we had two misfortunes!

... FIRST OFF IN MARCH: HIS CHICKEN BARN COLLAPSED WITH ABOUT 4000 BIRDS IN IT DUE TO HEAVY SNOW AND ICE ON THE ROOF; AND THEN HIS MILLED ALSO BURN DOWN. SO FOR THE NEXT FEW SUMMER MONTHS WE DID ALOT OF REBUILDING AND THE YEAR BECAME VERY PROFITABLE WHEN ALL THRU. ONE THING ALL OF US KIDS LEARNED FROM GROWING UP WITH THE SAWMILL WAS HOW TO "WORK HARD FOR THE MONEY!"