Vern’s Stories: Daddy and the Trees
From what I remember hearing, Daddy in his early years (probably before he was married) had had some experience with removing trees and I think running a large circular saw, cutting up firewood. Jim Kneen whom I think Daddy grew up with, became a big contractor in the Santa Monica Bay area. He was primarily a grading-excavating, paving contractor. As the towns grew and traffic increased, most of the main arteries through the bay city towns needed to be widened. This presented a problem as most of these main boulevards had been planted with Eucalyptus Trees in rows along both sides of the streets, some 50-60 years before, to make shade for the carriage traffic of those days. The problem was by now these great trees on either side of the street had grown close together and to widen the streets, they had to be removed. It was no small problem as these trees had become giants over the years, some of them measuring 5 feet or more across and 100 feet high.
The first of these projects in Santa Monica was Wilshire Blvd. Jim Kneen was the primary contractor. The first we kids heard about it was that Daddy had got the contract to take out these giant trees on Wilshire Blvd. from the ocean to the city limits at Sawtelle where the Old Soldiers home and the National Cemetery were. The first 6 blocks were palm trees and the rest were eucalyptus. There were about six miles of trees on both sides of the street spaced probably about 12 feet apart, figure 5,280 feet times 6 miles and you have a lot of trees. To make matters worse this was a heavily populated area with houses, stores, filling stations, etc., a job an old experienced contractor would have had some reservations about taking on, but not our Dad! (As far as I know he had never undertaken a job like this before.) He rolled up his sleeves (so to speak) and waded into it like he had been doing it all his life. All the more remarkable was that all the equipment he had when he contracted for the job was a Model T Ford truck and a 5-ton White dump truck and probably a pick and a shovel.
Daddy was the second one to be awarded the tree contract. The first one, after a week or two of getting nowhere, (I don't think he got one tree out.) gave up. Mr. Kneen told Daddy, it was his baby!
Daddy got a crew of Mexicans digging around the trees, cutting all the main roots down several feet. He bought a long steel cable and 2-4 block sheves strung up to give him a purchase of 5 to 1. He had a climber hooking a chocker up in the top of the trees and with his big dump truck hooked on to the cable, he soon had trees laying all over the street.
He hired Uncle Charlie's steam shovel to load the giant stumps on his dump truck. There was a big ravine out in Sawtelle that needed filling in so Dad had a place to get rid of the stumps.
When the job was complete, he had two big wood yards stacked full of eucalyptus wood, which was a slow-burning wood almost like coal and was greatly in demand for fireplaces. He was now in the wood business and had a well-earned reputation as the premier tree-puller in the Santa Monica area.
There was just one little problem. Eucalyptus is undoubtedly the hardest wood in the world to split. The grain, unlike most logs, doesn't run in a straight line but spirals around and twists. Big heavy steel wedges could be driven into it with a sledge hammer, as deep as they could go and the log would not open up at all. Daddy sat down and put on his thinking cap and surveyed the situation; he soon had the solution.
Daddy bought a hoist and built a tower about 30 feet high with two 20-pound rail guides running up the sides. He bought a large chunk of steel 2' high by 18" wide by 18" thick, weighing probably 600 to 700 pounds. It was cut vee shaped on the bottom, looking like this.
One man could place the logs under the machine, then hoist the wedge to near the top of the tower and let it free fall. When it hit the log, there was no stopping it, it went right through. He soon had great piles of wood split up in different lengths, two foot, two and a half foot and three foot, for different sizes of fireplaces.
Daddy was soon delivering wood all over Santa Monica, Venice, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, etc. The big mansions around the area liked his split Eucalyptus wood better than the oak they had been burning and at $25.00 a cord, it was much cheaper. He had a good business going. When it was cold and rainy, he and his hired help could hardly keep up with the orders. We boys helped sometimes when we weren't in school. He was also taking out trees for individuals and on some smaller streets in Santa Monica.
A little later a job came along at Clover Field. There had been a tall row of eucalyptus trees at the end of the field where the planes came in to land. In order to make it safer to land, they had topped this whole row of trees, cutting them about half way down. The Army Air Corps had a training station at Clover Field, and I think they were the ones that cut the trees the rest of the way down to the ground, leaving the huge stumps. They wanted to lengthen the field a little so they called on Daddy to take out the stumps. Not having a tall top on the trees to get leverage on, Daddy elected to use dynamite to raise them out of the ground. This was the first time I remember his using dynamite to take out trees, although he evidently had used it before, because he knew how to use it.
It was quite a sight to behold when the stumps came out! He drilled with an earth auger down under the center of the stumps. He then loaded each stump with 60 or 70 sticks of dynamite. He was using fuse and blasting caps to detonate the dynamite, using black power fuses, which were lighted with a match or other type of flame. He had them all loaded up and ready to light off one evening after the planes were through flying for the day. He started at one end, lighting fuses, running down the line from one stump to the next. The row of stumps must have been close to a half of a mile long. By the time he had reached the half-way point lighting fuses, the first ones were blowing out of the ground. It was quite a sight! He continued on to the end, lighting fuses with the stumps blowing up behind him, flying through the air with the greatest of ease!
About three years later when he got the contract to take out the trees on Ocean Park Blvd., he reasoned that he could take these trees out much cheaper with much less labor by using dynamite. In checking the laws in Santa Monica, there seemed to be nothing in the law to keep him from using dynamite, so that became the game plan with just a little different twist. Instead of using a powder fuse which had to be lighted with a flame, he decided to use electric caps to detonate the charge. Instead of a four-line block, he used a single line hooked to a large track-laying tractor. His technique was so good, he could lay these huge eucalyptus trees down in between two houses without touching either house. The cable was fastened high in the top of the tree. The tree was loaded underneath with 50 to 70 sticks of dynamite, depending on its size. The cat would start pulling toward the place he wanted the tree to fall. The top of the tree was quite flexible and it would bend over quite a ways. As the tree top reached the end of its flexibility and the cat started to pull down, Dad would shove the plunger down on the magnet that would detonate the charge. There would be a mighty "Whomp," the tree would rise up several feet and as the cat had it going in the right direction, it would continue on course.
This whole job was carried out in a busy city with only one casualty. Son Vernon broke his arm because he was doing something he shouldn't have been doing. He had seen an older young man hang on to the cable as the cat started ahead, raising him off of the ground. He always let loose and dropped to the ground; it looked like fun! When Vernon tried it, he was tossed into the air and landed amidship and broke his arm; it was rather embarrassing!
One amusing incident happened during that time: not having a better place to store his dynamite, Daddy kept it on the back porch of our house. One day a police officer came to the house. He said it had been reported to him that Daddy had a case of dynamite on his back porch. Daddy replied, "A case of dynamite? I've got 25 cases of dynamite on my back porch." With alarm in his voice, the police officer said, "You can't do that. Don't you know that is against the law?" Daddy replied, "No, it isn't. I checked the laws before I started this job and you have no law against it." The officer said, "Well, if we haven't a law against it, we will make one." Daddy said, "Well, that's OK, by the time you get your law made, I'll be done with this job and be out of here."
Dad finished the job and went back to his homestead at Muroc to the quieter life of raising cattle on the desert. When he finished the job on Ocean Park Blvd., he brought home five head of cattle, a cow and four heifers. When the Army Air corps moved him out ten years later, in 1939, he had over 100 head of cattle. Muroc has become Edwards Air Force Base, known the world over.
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