But then the Army called you and stopped all that fun.
DF: Yes
JM: Tell me what happened. Where did you go?
DF: Well, I went to Fresno. We were inducted there. Actually I was inducted with a bunch of young men from California because that’s where I enlisted in Glendale. And so there were several hundred of us inducted at the same time, and almost all of them were from California. I would say we only spent a week or two in Fresno, and then they shipped us out to other places for basic training.
I was sent to what was called Kearns, Utah. It’s just outside Salt Lake City on the salt flats there. It was a desolate place, but that’s where I went for my basic training.
I had a definite advantage over most of these California boys. Two things: One is I had had some hardworking jobs up here, so physically I was in pretty good shape. I’d worked hard. Second thing was, McNary is at 7,300 feet altitude, and they came from sea level and they went to Salt Lake City, which is near 5,000 feet, and they suffered. It was very strenuous. If I hadn’t been in good shape and already acclimated to altitude it would have been a painful experience, but I got along pretty good.
Then I was sent from there to Denver and I was at Lowry Airfield, which still exists, but I don’t think it’s very active anymore. There I took what they called armament school. You were trained in the handling a processing of bombs and machine guns and cannons and stuff like that. It was armament type school, and I had about three months there. I learned a great deal there. That was a school that taught you quite a bit.
I left there and went to Las Vegas, Nevada. And there I entered gunnery school, and that was aerial gunnery. We fired machine guns while airborne, learned how to supposedly hit targets, which I doubt if we ever became very proficient.
JM: Not like nowadays.
DF: But there was a period of time when I was flying in gunnery school on B-17s. Now I didn’t go to war in B-17s, but we were in B-17s. They had a chin turret, if you know what that is. It’s a turret that’s right on the front of the nose of the plane and you could fire ahead of you. That’s called a chin turret.
After we’d do our required gunnery runs in that Nevada desert. It was a desolate area then. You’d go over the mountains away from the city there and the only thing out there was occasionally a stray cow. Well, the pilot would get right down on the ground. We’d be 30 feet off the ground, you’d run along and there was a cow, and boy we’d just let her go!
JM: Oh my gosh! I’ll bet the ranchers loved you.
DF: I don’t think they realized too much about what was going on. This was such a desolate area. They probably never rounded up those anyway. But anyway, we had a lot of fun.
JM: Well, it’s the practice.
DF: Yeah, it was more practice.
And I left there, it would have been January of ’44, I don’t remember exactly, and went to Barksdale Air Field in Shreveport, Louisiana. There we were assigned to the planes that we would be flying.
I had become classified as what they called a Flight Engineer. And all that is in that day and time was really, you were trained as a mechanic but you flew with the plane in case there was anything you could do when there was a problem. But airborne, there was such a little bit you could do that you didn’t practice much mechanical work.
I was assigned to what was classed as a Martin B-26. It was a twin-engine, medium-level bomber that didn’t fly high altitudes. We didn’t carry oxygen, but we flew from 12,000 to 15,000 feet. We made up crews there. They were six-man crews. We were assigned to a crew at that time. It was the first time I met the people that I would spend the rest of the war with.
JM: You stayed together the rest of the war.
DF: Yeah, until we came home. We left Barksdale and went to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and there we did just flight training, formation, navigation, and all the things to make us more proficient in the air. We spent a couple of months there, and then in the summer of ’44 we went to Europe. I spent the first four missions; I believe it was, in England. I flew the English Channel, which is a terrible experience.
JM: Why was that?
DF: There were so many planes that went down in the English Channel, and it was such frigid water that you would not live very long.
JM: They were being shot down or?
DF: They would be damaged or shot down, yes. Or damaged and they couldn’t make it all the way back to England. And you had to cross that strip of water and you knew you didn’t have a chance if anything happened to you. Of course, there were still German fighters in France at that time, so you were subject to being shot down.
But after four missions, D-Day occurred and shortly after that, we moved to France to an airfield north of Paris. We were there through the rest of the summer and winter. In the next spring, the war in Europe was over, but during that period of time I flew 43 missions over Germany.
JM: So, you’d leave France, fly over Germany and bomb? Were you bombing?
DF: Yes, we were bombing. We dropped bombs. We were considered a tactical application in that we didn’t saturate bombs, we were supposed to identify targets and knock those targets out. Maybe even support ground troops at times when they were having trouble. But it was considered a tactical air force.
We had a squadron and a group. A group was 4 squadrons. We were assigned to a squadron, and you never knew if you were going to be assigned to the same squadron as someone else you knew.
JM: What did you think of living in France?
DF: After a few months we began to get some passes, and they were always to Paris, so I did spend some time in Paris. At that time the people were very cordial, very friendly. They were still reeling from being occupied by Germans for several years and they were so tickled to see the Americans that they would do anything for you. So we enjoyed a period of good time there.
The following spring, our outfit was moved to Belgium because the targets we were hitting were in Northern Germany, and that was closer to it, a couple hundred miles closer than where we were flying from. And that helped us. So we flew our last few missions before the War was over out of Louvain, Belgium.
After the War was over, I was moved to a base in Holland. That was actually a processing field to get us processed to get us home.
JM: So you were just going north, north, north!
DF: Yes, and I don’t remember the name of that town.
To understand the magnitude of what was going on there. The American military had 16 million men in uniform at that time. Sixteen million! Today if we have 200,000 we think that’s a big standing army. Of course, wars are different now. I understand that. But they had probably 2 or 3 million men in Europe that they had to process and put on boats and ship home.
Now, I came home. I left Antwerp, Holland and came home on what they call a Liberty ship. It was a small cargo freighter and their concession to comfort to bring us home was laying wooden boards over the steel deck. And that was our beds.
JM: My first question is, you flew over there, why didn’t you fly back?
DF: Well, right after the war they told us we would be flying back. But there was such a great flux occurring at that time, the orders you got today were probably rescinded tomorrow when something different was happening.
JM: You didn’t take anything seriously then.
DF: You couldn’t rely on it. But they finally decided, and I didn’t learn this until some time after the War. There was about 900 B-26s in France. That’s the plane we flew in. And they decided they served no usefulness, and they were of no value and they weren’t worth flying home. So they put them in fields, put a dynamite charge in each one of them, and blew them up!
JM: Oh, that’s incredible.
DF: Yes
JM: Millions of dollars
DF: Oh yes. But they were so designed to fight a war that they were not practical for anything else.
JM: So they would have just come back and been mothballed somewhere.
DF: Yeah, uh hum. Our plane weighed about 16 tons. I think it was 32,000 pounds. It had twin-engines. Two engines each produced about 2,200 horsepower each, and it had some derogatory names because of that tendency not to want to leave the ground. It was very difficult to get airborne, but once it was airborne and you had your speed up it flew great. It flew almost like a fighter plane. We did real well. It was a good flying plane, but to land and take off, we probably lost more planes on the runway either landing or taking off than we lost in combat.
JM: That’s not good.
DF: But you couldn’t do anything else.
JM: Losing a plane loaded down with bombs is not good at all.
DF: Oh, it blew up occasionally, uh hum! We lived in a different world then.
JM: Yes, we did. So you came home on a Liberty ship.
DF: Yes, landed in Boston
JM: Lying on the ground
DF: On the decks, uh hum
JM: Stacked like cordwood
DF: Yeah, and actually the ships were so packed full of men, just bodies. You could be on 2 or 3 decks below the surface deck, and wherever you were assigned a space, you would go there about the time it got dark. You had to get in and get in your place because there were no aisles, no passageways. There were bodies everywhere. And if it were dark - no lights. If you went in there after dark, you walked on people and they didn’t appreciate it. So you got in your place and laid down and you stayed there until daylight. But it only took us 10 days.
We landed at Baltimore. We only stayed there one day, I believe, and they put us on a train. And this train was another experience. It was made up of boxcars. There were no facilities other than that. And they spread straw on the decks of the boxcars for our comfort, and we rode that train five days and nights from Baltimore to Los Angeles. And the railroads were so congested that you couldn’t just get on a rail and go. The first two days we were in Canada. They routed us around that way.
JM: From Maryland to Canada?
DF: Yeah, and we came back in at Detroit or somewhere along there in the United States and went from there almost due south to El Paso. And then from El Paso we went through Tucson and Phoenix and Los Angeles.
JM: Did you stop along the way and soldiers were jumping off?
DF: No, they didn’t.
JM: Oh, they had to go and be . . .
DF: They had to go to their depot that would check them out.
JM: Oh, I see. So you had to go all the way back to California?
DF: Yes
JM: Because that’s where you joined.
DF: That’s where I joined. I was discharged at Fort McArthur, in Los Angeles. The Army considered it their responsibility to furnish us transportation after we were discharged, and since I enlisted in the Los Angeles area they gave me like $1.65 for bus fare to downtown Los Angeles!
JM: Whoopie!
DF: So, I got on a train there and rode it to Holbrook, and my folks met me in Holbrook and I came back to McNary. That’s not true! I came to Winslow. I got off the train in Winslow, La Posada.
JM: La Posada! So your folks met you at the La Posada, but it wasn’t a restaurant then.
DF: Well, yes it was!
JM: Oh, it was!
DF: Yes! It was built in the 1920s and that was a famous place to eat and famous people stayed there. That’s where I got off the railroad. My parents had moved from McNary to Winslow by that time, so when I came home I went to Winslow. And about a year later, I had met Maxine.
JM: Is she from Winslow?
DF: Yeah, she was from Winslow and we both went to the Baptist Church, and we got married just a year later.
JM: So now you lived in Winslow.
DF: We lived in Winslow until 1949, and actually I got a chance at a job back in McNary that I thought was an improvement. It turned out that wasn’t true, but I didn’t know it at the time. So, we moved to McNary and lived there just about a year. Maxine and I were married and we had two small children at that time and we lived in McNary. That’s what brought us to Show Low.
When I lost my job in McNary, the Company owned all the housing and there was a housing shortage, so if you were not gainfully employed you were evicted almost immediately. So we left McNary destitute. We did own a car and a few pieces of furniture, but nothing else, and virtually no money.
We made it as far as Show Low. We stopped here. We rented a motel cabin in downtown Show Low. It’s about where the New Yorker is now. There was a bunch of old wooden cabins there, and we rented one of those to live in for a while. I expected to be moving on to wherever I could find some work. I didn’t have a job and didn’t have anything to do. It was very hard to find a job then because these 16 million men were still trying to get back into the economy and. . .
JM: And Rosie the Riveter had taken the jobs.
DF: Lots of jobs, uh huh. They were a great benefit during the war, but after the war it just complicated the matter. Women in general, they never did really return to the home again like it had been before, to raising families and taking care of kids and establishing a household. They were interested in working and making their own money and being independent. I don’t know that I criticize them for that, but it was a radical change in that society in that day. So jobs were hard to come by, anything that you could support a family on.
I eventually, without finding a job, set up a power saw shop, gasoline powered chainsaws had just come on the market a year or two before that. So I set up a shop here and I sold power saws to the loggers and I repaired and maintained them. I did that for a couple of years. I almost worked myself to death, but we made good money. That was the first time I ever really made any money.
JM: There was a definite need around here because that was the main industry wasn’t it?
DF: Yes, that was the industry. We had a sawmill here in Show Low, and the loggers were working all over the country. Luckily I had become a dealer for one of the better saws at that time. That was the McCullough saw. I sold lots of them.
JM: And you knew people because of being in the industry.
DF: Yes, I knew quite a few of the loggers and the people up in this area, but I also sold saws all the way as far as, almost to Payson. Along the Rim there were a lot of loggers there.
JM: Standard, was the Standard running then?
DF: Standard was close to Pinedale. Yes, so sold saws in there.
JM: Was Maverick going then?
DF: No, not at the end of the war. I think that they had closed it down by then. It was before.
JM: And was there a sawmill down in Hop Canyon?
DF: Yeah. I also sold saws over into New Mexico. I covered the area.
JM: And you had to drive out to the camps?
DF: I’d find these camps, or if sawyers lived in a town, I’d get up real early in the morning, 3 or 4 o’clock. I had my car. I had an old Plymouth coupe which had a long turtle deck in the back, and I could put 5 saws in there. I’d drive to wherever these men lived, and then followed them into the mountains because once they had disappeared I couldn’t find them again. I’d follow them in and then sold saws to them.
It was very interesting. I developed a technique that turned out to be very fruitful. Most of the time, when I’d drive up to a bunch of these loggers in the woods, they didn’t know me, so we were strangers. They looked at you with a questioning look, “What are you doing here and what do you want?” Well, I would get out and open up the trunk of my car and set these bright, shiny yellow saws out on the ground there.
JM: And they knew instantly!
DF: And they knew instantly! Yes! They picked up their saws, they’d had their cup of coffee, they’d built a fire, and they went off into the woods around where we were there and they started cutting logs. Well, by the middle of morning, they’d come in for a break and they gathered around the fire. And they’d left their saws out where they were cutting. They’d have coffee and of course, by then they would come over and look at my saws. They’d pick them up and they’d say, “Oh, those are too light. They wouldn’t stand what we’re doing here.” And stuff like that. So, I developed a technique and I told each one of them. I said, “I’m going to spend the day here. You can take one of my saws and cut logs with it. You bring your old saw in here. I will tune it up and shorten your chain for you while you do that. And I’ll be here all day.” And I would say that in 4 out 5 cases, they never gave me my saw back.
JM: (Laughs) Did they have to buy these saws themselves?
DF: Oh yes, they had to buy them themselves. Remember now, this was in poor economic times and they were selling for $400. They were very expensive. That would be equivalent of maybe $1,000 - $1,200 today. They were very expensive.
JM: Well, how did they buy them? They didn’t have the money on them.
DF: They made good money, some of them. No, they didn’t have money on them, but they could give me a check, or I actually financed after being in business awhile. I began to finance them on six-months contracts. So I made the profit on the saw as well as got the interest on the money. But it worked out. I would occasionally lose a saw. A guy would default on it and disappear and I’d lose it, but as a whole it worked out very well.
After a couple of years I was worn down, worn out working 18-hour days, making good money. By then we had the third child. We had three children and we lived. Let’s see if I can think how to tell you. Do you know where Pat’s restaurant is, Pat’s Place? Yeah. Across the highway, you turn down in there where the Senior Center is.
JM: Where City Hall is?
DF: Yeah, I lived down in there in that area. The old house is still there, and I built it.
JM: Oh, in your spare time! How did you do that?
DF: Well, in the first I didn’t have much business and we had to have a place to live to get out of the tourist court, that two-room tourist court. That’s a building. That house is another long story and I doubt if you want to get into that.
JM: Something you won’t forget, huh?
DF: I bought the lot from Arlie Maxwell. He owned Maxwell House?
JM: Did he own those cabins too?
DF: No, he didn’t. A man named Clifford Potts owned those cabins. We rented one from him, and he was an engineer with the Highway Department.
But I bought my lot that I built my house downtown from Arlie Maxwell, three hundred dollars for the lot. It didn’t have water. It didn’t have sewer. And I think that it didn’t have power, but the electric company did bring in power for it. Another guy and I hand dug a trench about 300 feet to get a water line to my house.
JM: You were down there by yourself at that point.
DF: Yes, there was hardly anything down there.
JM: So you built this house yourself and put down the utilities and everything.
DF: The time I worked in Winslow before coming back up here, I had worked for a sawmill there. I knew these people quite well. We were considered friends, so I went down there.
In those days what they classed as #5 lumber, or low-grade lumber, there was no market for it. You couldn’t sell it. The markets were pretty poor, so they had lots of this stacked up in their yard out there. I bought a semi-truck load of that lumber, low-grade lumber, for $300 and they hauled it up here for me and unloaded it down there on the lot.
Of course, I had no experience. I’d never been around a house being built, much less built one myself. But for the walls we poured a cement foundation, hand poured it. And then, I would lay a 2X6 flat on it and then another 2x6 flat on top of that. And just keep building them up and nailing nails down through them to hold them in place.
JM: Kind of like a log cabin?
DF: Well, kind of like, except it was 2x6’s. And we got up 8 foot high to the top of the wall, for the walls. I had no idea how to put a roof on a house, so I made it a flattop house. And it’s still down there, the flattop house.
JM: Oh, I’m going to have to go down there and look!
DF: We laid up those walls solid. And by then, I was in the power saw business. When we got all through, I took a chalk line and marked out where the doors and windows were supposed to be, took the saw and rammed it through there and just cut them out! Knocked it out!
JM: Poor Maxine!
DF: Actually, it was a nice house! It was better than anything we’d ever had! We put siding on the outside, redwood siding.
JM: No insulation?
DF: No. Of course you’ve got six-inches of solid wood, that’s pretty good insulation, just laid flat on top of each other.
JM: Solid! That house is probably going to be there forever! Did it leak?
DF: No
JM: It didn’t leak? Humm, very good. How big was it?
DF: It was, as I recall, 30 x 40 feet. We had three bedrooms in it and it was about 1,200 square feet.
JM: Oh, that’s good!
DF: We put in a nice kitchen and my wife liked that. We got along real good there. By the time we left there we had 5 children.
JM: Five children, wow! That’s great. So you were there awhile.
DF: Couple of years.
JM: Couple of years?
DF: Three years, maybe
In 1956, when I got out of the power saw business I went into the insurance and real estate business. And how I got there is a long story, but eventually I ended up there. I’ll say the Lord directed my path.
Of course, I couldn’t make much money as we were about to starve to death, except that I’d saved up some money from the power saw days, we couldn’t have made it.
I decided the only way I could make it was to start developing land. We came out here to the subdivision just across the street from the Little League Ballpark in the park out here? That little subdivision there, I bought ten acres of ground in there. There wasn’t even a road to it. You drove through what’s now the park to get to it. You turn off just past Safeway.
JM: On Owens?
DF: Yeah, just past Safeway, and it’s on the right down there just opposite the tennis court and the Little League Ballpark. So we lived there for several years and I built a home there, a much nicer home and much bigger. It must been close . . .
JM: You built it yourself?
DF: I had it built in that case. The first one I built, but we hired a man. I was busy enough then with real estate development and insurance business that I hired a couple of men that I knew. And they did a much better job than I could have. We built a two-story house. We must have had about 2,000 square feet in it. Yeah, it was nice and we enjoyed it there.
Eventually I came over and bought 30 acres in this area, developed this subdivision. That was in the late ‘50s. We moved over here. We moved into this house in 1961. So actually our fortunes dramatically improved over a period of years here, about 10 years.
JM: Rapid years here. And Show Low was growing too.
DF: It hadn’t begun to have the boom that we have seen in recent years, but yes, there was constant improvement. In 1953 I was selected as one of the men by the Board of Supervisors from the County to form a committee to incorporate Show Low. I happened to be on that committee.
JM: How many were on that committee?
DF: Five
JM: Do you remember who all they were?
DF: I couldn’t tell you. I could tell you some of them. There was Louis Reidhead, Lamar Nikolaus
JM: Okay, he had Nick’s grocery
DF: Yes, Hal Butler
JM: He was with FATCO.
DF: He had his own trucking company then.
JM: Okay, he was into the trucking company then.
DF: Yeah, but later he went to FATCO. Yeah, and so we’ve known each other for many, many years. We were on the first committee and we did a little promotion work and had an election, an incorporation election here in Show Low. The people voted for it, and then the County appointed the same people that were on the committee as the first City Council. I was on the first City Council from 1953 to ’56. Actually, we were appointed for one year and then elected for two. Show Low was struggling to become self-sufficient and striving.
One of the things that prompted people to vote for incorporation was our water system was so unsatisfactory, to put it mildly. They got water out of the irrigation ditch.
JM: Yes! Yes! They were still drinking out of that irrigation ditch!
DF: That’s right! Even after we moved here. After we became a city, actually, probably in the first or second year, the Council asked me to negotiate with the owner of the water system and buy his franchise so that it could become a city-owned system. And so, we did. The man’s name was Joe West.
So about the system, we paid him $105, 000 for all of his system, the wells, the tanks and his franchise. Of course, that was a fortune in those days. And many people in town thought that I got paid off to pay him that much for the water company. And I was accused of taking a bribe. It wasn’t true, but we lived through that. It was imperative that we get that water company for the City’s benefit.
Maybe it was more that it was worth, I don’t know. But anyway, we needed it badly. He owned a motel where Hatch Motors is now, called Palace Motel. He sold it and left town.
JM: Oh he did. Hal Butler told me that he thought another reason why they needed to be incorporated was for animal control.
DF: Animal control was an issue, although the early families, the patriarchal families, they fought that tooth and nail because in the morning they’d let their cows out and they grazed the ditches around town and come back at night.
JM: Did they have to cross the Deuce of Clubs? They had a community pasture before, that all the little boys would have to take their cattle across the Deuce.
DF: Put them in the gate. That was across the creek. Yeah, that’s true. That’s after we eliminated them from grazing the ditches.
JM: And everybody had their little barns.
DF: Yeah, in town.
JM: In town
DF: And the cows were brought in every night and milked.
JM: Yes, and then here comes the highway, Highway 60.
DF: Yeah, then they built the bridge across the creek and made Highway 60, went on top of the hill and then on to Snowflake. That did away with this Old Linden Road out to Pinedale. And the road that’s now from Pinedale to Taylor? That was part of that highway.
JM: It’s a sign of a town growing up when the main street becomes an interstate highway. That Highway 60 goes from California to Virginia.
DF: That’s correct. In those early days we were an active member of the U.S. 60 Highway Association that had its headquarters in Pampa. I believe it was, Pampa, Oklahoma, some little town. I think that was right. P A M P A, Pampa. And we were active in that and once or twice they had their annual conventions for Highway 60 Association in Show Low here.
JM: Did they?
DF: Yes, they welcome anybody that would join their association, give them a little money and actively promote the Highway.
JM: Oh, that’s what it was, for promotion?
DF: Promotion, yeah. We incorporated in ’53. Right after we incorporated we had to have an official census taken to get on the tax roll.
And for that first few months, maybe as much as a year, we had virtually no income. And we had taken over police and road maintenance and water and all of this stuff and no income to speak of. I can recall that there were times. We bought our grader, but we bought it on a long-time contract. We bought a grader but there were times when we could not roust up enough money to fill its tanks with fuel so they could go grade the roads.
JM: Navajo County just let you go?
DF: Well, I think politically they had to. Once we incorporated they were not responsible for us, and if they came in and did too much here. I’m softening this a little because they were good to us. They helped us in many ways, but it was a political problem to come in here and do too much because the people of the County would say, “Hey, they’re incorporated and we’re paying for their maintenance.” So you had to be careful what was done. They were very beneficial and I won’t criticize them at all.
JM: We had a sheriff?
DF: Deputy Sheriff lived here. He continued to live here. And we had a Constable, a county employee. There was a Deputy Sheriff at Pinetop, I believe, but I don’t remember who that was. Jim Stock was the Deputy Sheriff here in Show Low for a long time, yeah.
JM: Oh he was? I know he was the
DF: Fire Chief, yeah
JM: And it was volunteer for a . . .
DF: I was on the Fire Board, not on the Fire Department. On the Board, the political board that ran it when Jim Stock was Chief, so I had a lot of interaction with Jim Stock. We were buying fire trucks and upgrading equipment and stuff like that, but it was a volunteer fire department.
We had to take a census. It had to be an official census, which meant that the U.S. Bureau of Statistics had to conduct it. And so we had to schedule it months ahead of time. And they sent men here from Washington D.C. to train people to go out and take the census and oversee it and then give us an official statement of how many people lived within the City of Show Low. And as I recall the number was approximately 760. And I accused them at that time of counting some dogs!
JM: Didn’t think there was that many, huh? Wow!
DF: But we were incorporated and, probably by the end of the first year, we were on the State tax rolls then, and you get a share of the sales tax, a share of the property taxes, share of the gasoline taxes. All that is apportioned out to incorporated cities and counties. So we began to get money and things just improved from then on.
JM: You were able to hire people and get going on starting to form a town.
DF: But it was a struggle to get started.
JM: Probably another thing that would have been controversial was when you started Planning and Zoning, where you’re zoning district areas for housing or businesses.
DF: That was very controversial. We live in a very conservative area. I don’t know what their political affiliations were or are today, but they are very conservative. And when you start telling people what they can do with their own property, you’ve got war on your hands.
JM: A lot of these people have 160-acre homesteads.
DF: Yes, and you tell them what they can do with that, and what they can’t do with it. Their homes in town and they want to sell them and if they don’t come up to code anymore. This all happened when I was on the City Council as Mayor the second time. I was Mayor from ’72 to ’76.
JM: That was in the ‘70s then.
DF: Yes, Planning and Zoning was coming of age at that time, and I remember when we had federal people come here and talk to us as a Council. And they told us that we had to adopt Planning and Zoning. It was no longer an option. I think in the early 70s that was actually instituted. They forced us to adopt Planning and Zoning. They said, “If you don’t do it, we’re coming in here and doing it for you and you’ll be bound by what we do. If you want control of it, you do it.”
JM: Why was that so important to them?
DF: The federal government said we were going to start upgrading our cities and our towns by planning and zoning. The environmentalists, they were behind that movement.
JM: Because even in the late ‘50s there were sawmills right here in downtown.
DF: Yes, of course, anything that was here was “grandfathered” anyway.
JM: That was our industry. I mean we don’t have a real industry here now, except for tourism.
DF: That’s right. And over the years we have switched from a lumber society to a tourist society, services.
JM: I know the timber industry kind of died up on its own, partly because of environmental issues.
DF: Yes, that’s what destroyed them.
JM: When McNary closed, that probably had an impact on the whole White Mountains.
DF: It did! The whole area was fed by the payroll from McNary. Economically, it was a disaster.
JM: Whiteriver still has that FATCO going, but that’s just for the Indians.
DF: In the earlier years, that didn’t exist. See, that’s one reason why McNary went out of business. The Indians decided to build their own sawmill, probably in the ‘70s, I’m not sure when, but whenever they built it down there. The timber contracts began to run out for McNary where they could log timber off of the Reservation. They wouldn’t renew them again.
JM: McNary is on the Reservation.
DF: Yes, that’s right. It’s on the Fort Apache Reservation. They suddenly we’re having to haul logs, some as far as New Mexico to keep this mill going. It wasn’t economical, so when the sawmill burned that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They wouldn’t come in and rebuild it.
JM: And that was in the ‘70s, wasn’t it?
DF: I think it might have been, yeah. I don’t remember the exact year. Then they went to Eager and built a mill in Eager because it was closer to their timber supply.
JM: So, anyway, there was the timber industry and now we’re tourism.
END OF FIRST CD
Oral Histories of the White Mountains
