Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: July 5th, 2014

After you graduate from high school, you gradually leave home, although you still feel strong ties to home. I graduated in 1955 and started at Oregon State that fall. I was terribly homesick, I missed Bob terribly. Bob had moved upstairs leaving the younger boys with the boys room and they had so many projects there was no room for big brothers. In 1957, Bob graduated from high school, though about going to college and then decided to put it off for a year. He wanted to be a writer and felt that he needed some experiences to write about. He went to work in a logging camp and it was there that winter that he learned to smoke. I was disappointed, but felt that maybe it would work out. The next year when I was a senior, he decided to come up to Oregon State. He came winter term. We roomed together and it was wonderful. At last we were together again. He took the usual courses, one was in creative writing and he was doing well in that and his instructor thought he had talent. Things were going along just fine, but after about five weeks, we got a call from mom. Mom said pop had had a minor heart attack, he was in the hospital but doing well. Bob was a bit savvier than I was and knew that there was more to it than that, said he was going home to support the family until pop got back on his feet, asked me to get him released from his classes, he got into his car and drove off.

As it turned out, mom was right, it was a minor heart attack, but pop was not going to be able to work for a couple of months and so Bob went back out to the woods. After a week pop came home. He felt completely cured, planned to go back to work in a week. Mom thought he should have something to amuse himself and so she got a television set, our first one. So, that morning, pop got up, chopped some wood, built a fire, and settled down to watch TV which he did the whole day. In the late afternoon, he had a massive heart attack. Pop had not been exercising because of his knees and had put on quite a bit of weight by that time, I do not know how mom was able to get him into the car and to the hospital. I got a phone call and she said, I better come home, pop has had a massive heart attack, he is in the hospital and it is not clear that he is going to make it. I got a friend of ours, Norris MacDonald, to drive me from Corvallis to the Keizer Hospital in North Bend and was immediately taken into his room. On the way down, though, I had had a strange experience. I was worried sick, there had been extensive flooding and so we had to come by way of Drain and Reedsport. About Drain, though, all of a sudden I had a vision, the closest that I can describe it is like when you crack a fertilized egg into a frying pan, you can see blood vessels all though the dark yellow yolk with the heart beating in the center and I got this feeling, Don’t worry, all will be OK. No matter how hard I tried after that, I could not worry. When I saw pop in the hospital, he looked terrible and he had tubes coming out of every pore in his body. Later he told me that the only thing he remembered from that horrible night was my coming. I told him, not to worry, he was going to make it and we were there for him. So, then Norris drove me home and dropped me off, mom came later, she asked me to help put the children to bed. I can still remember the looks on the faces of all the children. They looked frightened but I told them not to worry, all would be OK and that he was going to live and then I sat down and started to play the piano, all the songs that we knew. I remember seeing Don with tears streaming down his face and he said, I don’t know why I am crying, I am happy. One by one, the little ones fell asleep and Bob and Louise gathered them up and brought them to bed. Afterwards, there was only Bob, Louise and I. It was not clear what was going to happen, but we did decide that we would wait for a couple of days before making any firm decisions. Louise was a senior in high school and she could not afford to miss school, Bob was going to continue working and I was not sure what I would do. Well, a few days went by, the heart attack was on a Thursday, I believe, and on Monday I went back having missed only two days of school. I did have to drop a class, but basically, that was it. We felt that all would work out.

Well, things were a little dicier than the three of us realized. Pop was in the hospital probably about a month and his sick leave ran out. He had been one of the best employees of Pacific Fruit, but the branch manager came down and told him that he had to get back to work the following week or he no longer had a job with PFruit. That was typical anyway in the good old days. No company wanted to pay retirement and you did not get vested in retirement plans unless you had work twenty years, pop had nineteen years with PFruit and by getting rid of him, the retirement that he had paid in all those years went back to the company. Later the unions put a stop to that but in 1959, that was the way they operated. So, no job. Pop came home from the hospital, but he was not depressed. He and Bob had hatched a plan. They would start their own company. He had been the best salesman in the area for PFruit and was known to everyone in the area. Bob wanted out of the woods and was not sure what he wanted to do. So, they set up their own company. It was called Tri-City Produce. It is not simple to set up a company, Bob continued working in the woods, I continued my studies as did Louise. I had a few job offers, none of which I took, and we all watched to see what was going to happen. They were able to get a warehouse out by the airport, they got a delivery truck, signed a bunch of legal papers. It was decided that I would help out to get started, mom would do the book keeping and handle the telephone calls, take the orders, that sort of thing and the three older girls would baby sit.

To be continued.

I graduated in 1959 from college, Louise from High School, I came home and the business was ready to go.  We were undercapitalized, in fact, we had NO capital, none, no savings, bad business.  So, the idea was that I would help out and work in the mill for the family until things got going.  So, immediately after I got home, I went to work for Weyerhaeuser.  I took the swing shift from five to one forty five, got home at two, up at five and down to the plant.  I was supposed to make the deliveries.  Bob and pop had been out getting orders and we had a lot of them.  So rather than working part time, I found myself working full time.  I made deliveries until about twelve.  The truck was small so I had to return after the first delivery.  Restaurants came last because they did not need anything until just before lunch time, at least not anything that we had to offer.  After about twelve, then, there was a lot to do in the plant, bag potatoes, unload crates that sort of thing.  Bob and pop worked liked slaves from about four until noon, putting up orders, loading the truck, that sort of thing.  Then at noon they headed out to get orders for the next day.  We delivered from Lakeside to about Greenacres.  At two, then I headed home, got a couple hours of sleep and then was at the mill at five.  We were out competing PFruit which really tickled pop, but we were killing ourselves.  I remember the fourth that year.  The year had been dry and sunny and so people were going out for picnics and the grocery stores pretty much cleaned us out and they needed watermelons.  Luckily, we heard that Safeway had watermelons on sale and so as soon as Safeway opened, Bob and I headed over there and bought every melon they had and gave them to our customers at cost.  That was pop’s idea of course.  So, when the people came for water melons, our customers were the only ones that had them.  We felt pretty smug about that.

But my Weyerhaeuser pay check was going to the family, the family was working itself to the bone, and we were making no money, in fact, we were losing money.  Bob was the first one to see that this was unsustainable.  Pop had had a heart attack, he and pop were working sixteen hour days at least, I was working 8 hours for Weyerhaeuser for the family and then another 8 hours on essentially a sinking ship.  Nobody could keep that up.  I had also been awarded a Fullbright scholarship for study in Germany.  But after a month, it became apparent that we were not going to make it.  It was heart breaking.  I had always felt that our family was invincible and that if we worked hard enough at something, we would achieve it, but this time it did not work.  I felt we had been defeated.  I never talked about that time with either pop or Louise, only once with Brother Bob and that in connection with a time that I had had a minor wreck running into a drive in hamburger stand.  That guy was so mad.  He himself was going under and did not last the year.  I talked about it only twice with mom and I asked her why we did not go for unemployment insurance.  We had it coming.  Mom, Bob and I had talked it over and decided that we would take no public help.  We were too strong and proud to do that.  What we did not realize was that was insurance that pop had been paying into for years, it was money coming to us, but we were too proud. So, we had to give up after a month.  It had been a good run.  Closing a business is not easy, either.  There are bills to be paid, contracts to be voided and so on.  Each of our customers had to be visited, some of them owed us money and they all paid.  A grocery store like Dobbins Grocery in Bunkder Hill and Charleston paid up and less than a year later went broke themselves.  Bob and mom went to every store and to our lawyer, I kept working at Weyerhaeuser.  Pop had a nervous breakdown as they said in those days, that is, he went into a state of complete depression and went to bed for three weeks.  He was beat.  What really did him in though was afterwards when he went to get a job.  Nobody would hire him.  Day after day, he went to town looking for work and day after day he came home.  He never gave up and finally got a job taking care of vending machines.  A year later he walked in to his old friend, Red Jordan, and said, Red, you have to give me a job and Red did.

In the mean time, I worked right up until it was time to leave for Germany.  I left all by $100 dollars from that summer with the family, three months work, and felt that I was rich.  Bob stayed on and worked in the woods for three more months for the family, felt they were on their feet, and headed out to Alaska with no money. He took all our guns and fishing equipment and we never saw it again.  The Fulbright commission gave me some money to set up and I used it all to buy Christmas presents.  My last big input into the family came a couple years later when I taught at SWOCC for the summer for myself and Weyerhaeuser for the family.  But the family was changing by now.  Louise after our big effort was hanging out with some friends and one of those friends turned out to be Bill Lucero, fine husband material.  Bob found the sweetest girl imaginable in Alaska and married her in 1962.  He and Angie had a wonderful marriage.  I married in 1964 and as we married and left, we started our own families.  We made presents to the family, but that was different.  One by one we left, or as pop used to say, we all shucked out.  The disaster of our own business was never talked about.  We had been defeated.  It hurt.

So, now you have seen how things started and how things ended from my perspective.  I have a lot more stories in between that I will fill in, but as the family aged, others had stories to add and now is the time to add them.