Silliman's Papers

With 97 years of hard work and self-sufficiency, ‘old timer’ lived a life of logging

BY DANIEL SILLIMAN
PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
SEQUIM — For 97 years John Kirner has been in the logging business.

He has has lived the life of the logger, with the sweat and the saws, in the forest and among the lumber.

“Seems like I’ve been in the logging business one way or another all my life,” says Kirner, a Dungeness resident. “I cut logs most of the time.”

For 97 years he has watched the industry and he has lived the industry. He has worked hard and spent his life relying on that hard work and self-sufficiency.

“The new loggers do a lot more in the way of accomplishment, but none of them worked harder than we did,”

Kirner said. “You couldn’t just stand there and look at the logs. You had to get out there and work.”

Kirner, a self-described “old timer” believed to be the oldest logger on the Olympic Peninsula, has held to that hard-work ethic all of his life and found it to hold true.

“Just about anything you fly at, you have to work at,” he said.

Kirner put in that hard work across Clallam County where he independently logged, running his own business and selling lumber to whoever was buying at the best prices.

An independent man, he likes working for himself — he liked being the boss of his own company.

“If you worked for somebody else you were dependent on that man for everything,” Kirner says. “Working for yourself, you were depending on yourself.”

But it isn’t necessarily easier.

The work was always hard and no one pushed the self-employed to get to work.

“If you were able to get out there every morning and get to work every morning, in the end you were better off if you worked for yourself,” Kirner said.

Kirner says he, like many in logging, drove themselves to do that work everyday.

“It was all hard,” he said. The business, the work and the industry were hard.

Logging got easier as time went on and technology developed, he said. Kirner remembers when the chain saws came to the North Olympic Peninsula.

When Kirner began logging he worked with a two-man, crosscut saw called a “misery whip.” The work was easier with every development, but it was still hard work.

The development of the chain saws was one that made the hard work easier.

“The chain saws started to come in and boy I was happy to see them,” Kirner said.
He heard his first chain saw before he saw it.

“I was up in Sequim and I heard a great big noise behind this building,” he said. “I went over to see what it was and here was Ron Buck demonstrating a chain saw.”

Immediately he decided he had to have one.

He stopped by Buck’s home later that day and worked out a deal to buy a saw.

“It was a good saw too,” he said. “Better than the ‘misery whips.’ It was nothing compared to what we have now.”
Kirner ran his own crew and they cut trees around Clallam County, selling to the highest bidder.

“I jumped around quite a bit you know, for the best prices you could get,” he said.
Kirner and his crew used a variety of logging methods. They often used “cats,” or tractors, to move the logs.

It was more dangerous, but sometimes they highlined, using a “spar tree” and a wire rope to pull the logs into a pile where they could be loaded.

Kirner said he and his crew were cautious and had insurance for every job. The only accident that ever happened on one of Kirner’s jobs was a broken arm.

They were careful and they were good at their work, but that expertise only came from experience.

Experience was earned by hard work and by working on jobs where he didn’t know what he was doing. Kirner had to learn quickly a number of times to complete jobs he had started.

“I actually didn’t know how to do it,” he said of one contract he took, “but I learned in a heck of a hurry.”

Experience came early and often to Kirner. He became familiar with the trade as a child from his father and others in the community.

“He was into everything,” he said of his father, the son of German immigrants who moved to Sequim. “He was mostly a farmer I’d say, but he did some logging too.”

But personal experience was the real key, he said.

“Of course I learned a certain amount from him but in logging you had to go out there in the woods and learn it yourself,” Kirner said.

He began logging when he finished high school and used the work to pay his way through the University of Washington.

He worked on a boom for Bloedel-Donovan Logging in Clallam Bay in the 1920s.

After graduating with a degree in Business Administration and Accounting, Kirner went back to logging, this time working for himself.

“I couldn’t be inside,” he said. He knew logging, lumber and the forests of the Peninsula and he couldn’t leave them.

Kirner used the education to kept his own books and run his business.

Men in the timber industry did more that work.

Kirner was an active baseball player, playing ball across the Peninsula all through high school and pitching for the Huskies in 1927 and 1929.

He remembers playing against Art Langley who later became a Governor of Washington and Joe Sullivan, who went on to play in the major leagues.

“He stayed there for seven or eight years, pitching to the likes of Babe Ruth,” he said of Sullivan. “He had that damn knuckle ball. He threw that fast knuckle ball.”

On October 3, Kirner celebrate his 98th birthday. It’s been a long time since 1902 when he was born, but Kirner continues to live the life of the logger.

Sitting in the new home he built, Kirner recalled felling the lumber for the house last year.

“I don’t know if we saved any money, but the fellow building it thought we did,” Kirner said.

He personally, at the age of 96, felled spruce trees for studs in the walls and maple trees for the hardwood floors.

Kirner’s feat of self-sufficiency is but another in a life time of such feats. His history and the industries history are full of hard work, independence and self sufficiency.

Starting up his 1963 cat, a bulldozer like tractor, Kirner smiles.

“I’m an old timer,” he says, planning to get back to work.