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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (April 24, 2019)
10A | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2019 | COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL Offbeat Oregon Serving Cottage Grove and all surrounding areas of Lane County for over 11 years. Old-time loggers and millworkers were tough, stoic characters By Finn J.D. John for The Sentinel N early everyone whose family has been in Western Oregon for more than one or two generations has an older male relative who’s missing some parts — one or more fi ngers perhaps, or part of a foot — as a result of an industrial accident in the woods or at the sawmill. It was, throughout the fi rst three-quarters of the last century, just a com- mon risk of the job. One was constantly working with sharp, fast-moving ob- jects — axes, circular-saw blades, and later chainsaws — designed to tear through tough material. A thumb in the wrong spot, a slip of the foot while swinging an ax, and something really bad could happen. Dr. E.R. Huckleberry of Garibaldi was the man who was called to the scene when it did. Over his 50- year career, Huckleberry patched up dozens of acci- dental amputees, and was oft en left shaking his head at the mental and physical toughness of his patients. “Th e heavy, outdoor la- bor seemed to breed a hardy race of men or eliminated the weaklings. I am not sure which,” he wrote in his 1970 memoir. “But they were a group of stalwarts, who recovered from injuries quickly, and took trouble in stride.” Of course, the average person has no real idea of how he or she would react if disaster of the sudden-am- putation variety struck. Of- ten people are astonished at the competence and tough- ness an average person displays. Th e story of rock climber Aron Ralston, who, pinned under a rock and knowing he’d starve to death if he didn’t, summoned up the courage to amputate his own arm comes to mind. Likewise, there was a stu- dent at Crane High School in Eastern Oregon who, about 10 years ago, crashed his “four-wheeler” miles from home, badly enough that his forearm was torn off ; he somehow summoned the presence of mind to rig a tourniquet, collect the arm, and ride back to town with it. Still, some of the cas- es Huckleberry recalls are hard to top. Getting one’s limbs amputated in a hor- rifi c accident isn’t a contest, of course; but if it were, one of his patients would proba- bly win it. Probably the most egre- gious of these was a man who’d already lost his left hand at the wrist in an ear- lier on-the-job accident and had learned to use his ax one-handed. Th is fellow was deep in the woods do- ing some contract work, bringing out some shingle bolts, working alone, when his ax slipped and bit into his left forearm — cutting all the way through one of the bones and severing an artery. “He walked almost half a mile to where he had left his pickup,” Huckleberry writes. “When he got there, he found he had a fl at tire.” Not only that, but his jack and lug wrench had gone missing. So, he hiked back to the job site, where he’d left his ax; retrieved it; and came back to the spot. Th ere he cut a sapling to use as a lever; used it to lift the side of the rig up (it was probably a Model A Ford pickup, so this would be less diffi cult than it sounds to- day); tapped at the sides of the lug nuts with the edge of his ax until he got them to start turning; changed the tire; drove 10 miles to Dr. Huckleberry’s; and present- ed himself for treatment. Huckleberry ligated the ar- tery, stitched up the cut, and set the bone — while the logger sat there and took the pain like it was no big thing. “Needless to say, he was pretty white by the time the job was fi nished,” Huckle- berry wrote; “but he drove his pickup home and was back at his contract in less than a week.” C utting shingles seems to have been a particular- ly amputation-prone way to make a living. Huckleberry recalls having to patch up and treat stumps for a lot of them — particularly shingle sawyers, who did fast close- in work feeding shingle blanks into a bandsaw. “In fact, a few stubby fi ngers was sort of a status symbol among them,” he writes. “One day a young shingle sawyer was brought in with the fourth, third and second fi ngers severed at the base. I sewed up the stumps, and they healed nicely. About two weeks af- ter he returned to work, he was brought in again, with a saw cut halfway through the fi rst fi nger.” Luckily, the cut wasn’t far enough to clear the bone, so the fi nger could be saved. Huckleberry patched it up; then the young man looked over the job, and said, “Doc, it’s a good thing those fi n- gers are gone, ‘cause if they had been there, I’d have cut them off , sure as hell.” It wasn’t just their ability to soak up gruesome inju- ries that earned the loggers and mill workers Dr. Huck- leberry’s respect. It was also their cool-headedness in the face of near death. One sawmill employee was standing on scaff olding painting the top of a new 200-foot smokestack one day when a gust of wind caught him at the wrong moment, and he toppled over the edge. As he fell past the scaff olding, he grabbed at each “fl oor,” trying to catch himself. Somehow, he managed to get his arm over the third or fourth one and hang on. In the process, he scraped himself up pretty badly. “He pulled himself onto the platform, climbed down the ladder, and came in to have the skinned places dressed,” Huckleberry re- calls. “Th en he went back to the job, got another bucket of paint, climbed up to the top, and started in where he had left off .” A somewhat similar sto- ry involves highway workers, working on cut- ting a roadbed out of the face of Neahkahnie Moun- tain, near the top of a nearly vertical cliff 300 feet above the ocean. Two men had been lowered from the cliff top on bosun’s chairs to drill holes in the cliff for dyna- mite charges to go in. Th ey were working at dif- ferent levels, one just above the other, when the man above fell off his chair. Th e man below grabbed him as he fell past — but the sud- den tug on his shoulder caused it to actually dislo- cate. Despite the pain, the man did not let go, and pulled his buddy up onto the chair. Th en the rescued man pulled the two of them up to the top with the block and tackle and drove him to Dr. Huckleberry to have his shoulder-bone put back into place. “Th en he went back on the mountain, let himself down over the cliff , and re- sumed drilling, all alone,” Huckleberry concludes. HUDDLE AUTOMOTIVE WELCOMES Matt, our new Service Writer & Jason, our new Technician. Our team will diagnose your vehicle, service and repair them. We specialize in gas and diesel engines and work on all makes and models. SPEND $500 & RECEIVE A FREE OIL CHANGE Call us today to schedule and appointment, we would love to see you! E ven when life wasn’t at stake, loggers and mill- workers seemed to have a particularly stoic attitude toward pain, and some of it may have been cultural; many of them were Scandi- navians, and Scandinavians have a reputation for sto- icism. “One day a squarehead (Scandinavian) came into the offi ce with blood pour- ing from a scalp wound,” Huckleberry recounts. “He was a lumber piler and a sudden gust of wind had blown a board from a near- by pile, hitting him on the head.” Th e cut was a big one. Huckleberry got the bleed- ing stopped, cleaned it up as much as he could, and put in a bunch of stitches. Th en he advised the man to take a few days off work to recu- perate. Nothing doing, said the “squarehead.” “Vith a cut like dis on my leg, or my arm, I no can vork,” he explained in his thick Norwegian accent. “But on my yob a head I don’t need. I vork.” HUMANE SOCIETY OF COTTAGE GROVE Th anks our sponsors for sponsoring our successful Jamboree that was held in on April 6th. KNND Radio Cottage Grove Sentinel JIM DOWNING REALTY Banner Bank of Cottage Grove Jonathan Backer, DDS Gayle Downing Avon Th e Flower Basket & Gift Boutique Wall to Wall Carpet Cleaning Humane Society of Cottage Grove Members Dehart Family Construction Th anks to David “Elvis” Lomond. Cameron Reiten Tatiamo Calvary Creek (Sources: Th e Adven- tures of Dr. Huckleberry, a book by E.R. Huckleberry published in 1970 by Oregon Historical Society Press.) 800.273.8255 If you or someone you know is depressed or having suicidal thoughts, we are here with immediate crisis counseling, resource referrals, hope and help. 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