Kevin loadig his trailer at Sierra Mountain Mills in Celestial Valley, California, in 1977.
Jay Wilcox had another cat skinner that ran Jays old 7E and it was just a winch machine so he needed a choker setter. His name was Bruce and he lived in Challenge and he was a drinker, but conscientious and hard working. He would get off of work and suck the beer down. They rode home with me from up above LaPorte with me in my pickup. I didn’t drink, but they wanted to stop at the LaPorte store and got a twelve pack, and he and his choker setter had finished the twelve pack by the time we got to Challenge.
We had a couple of days off when it rained and then we were going to go back to work, so Jay called Bruce up and said, “Okay, Bruce, we are going to work in the morning.” It was late in the afternoon when Jay called him and Bruce had been hitting it pretty good. Jay shows up the next morning to take him up to the job and knocks on the door, Bruce comes to the door and says, “What do you want?” Jay said, “Well, we are going to work.”
Bruce and Jay argued about whether Jay had called him until Bruce got pissed off and called him a liar and slammed the door in his face. Jay gets in his pick up and drives off and figured that he would wait until Bruce cooled down, and Bruce eventually came back to work.
The guy that was setting chokers for him had been the vice president of a company that fell apart and so he became a choker setter and also the designated driver for the crummy. Jay had never really had a nice crummy before he bought this two-tone brown Ford van. This guy did a pretty good job for a while, then he crashed and totaled the van.
When I was running the de-limber at Robinson, they had hired a guy and taught him how to run the Prentice, because they were having a hard time getting anybody that wanted to run a loader. They hired Bruce and he came from crankster country up there at Clipper Mills and he was doing an OK job, he was kind of a slug, but he was doing an OK job. Little Joe gets the call at the office one day, “Hey, you have a pickup up here on Highway 80; are you going to come get it?.” Bruce got stopped,
had no license and they took him out of the pickup.
Ralph Garrison ran the loader for Jay. He used to work for Robinson and he was a really good loaderman, especially big logs. I don’t know who he ran loader for or why he quit or got fired, but he drank like Bruce. One morning I made arrangements to load first and Ralph asked me to wake him up when I came by the motel in Pollock Pines. He had rode up with me to go to work, so, at 3:30 the next morning I stop at the motel room and knock and he comes to the door in his underwear and he tells me to wait a second and walks out with a 12 pack of Coors under his arm. He was a fixture there at the Beer Garden in Rough and Ready where the old post office is. So much promise and he threw it all away from staying drunk. The truck drivers used to take him beer. He ended up dying at 43 years old.