Description
Book SynopsisPresents a story of gyppo loggers, longshoremen, millwrights, and whistle punks. The author describes Coos Bay's transition from timber town to a retirement and tourist community, where the site of a former Weyerhaeuser complex is home to the Coquille Indian Tribe's Mill Casino.
Trade Review"Relying heavily on interviews with residents of the Oregon coast, Robbins focuses on the social history of a community and the impact on it of outside forces. He examines workers, work and living conditions, technologies, unemployment, and ways of surviving joblessness. He explores the rise and decline of labor unions and writes of mills--as well as of woods and of small firms (the "gyppos") and the giants such as Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific." Richard S. Kirkendall, Western Historical Quarterly "Historians will find this study useful in its survey of the southern Oregon timber industry, in its indictment of the unwise exploitation of resources in the West, and ... as a model for a study that can be read and appreciated by those who matter most--the people who are the history." Allan Kent Powell, American Historical Review "Both scholars and general readers will find this book a cogent microcosmic chronicle of Oregon's leading industry told in very human terms." Craig Wollner, Oregon Historical Quarterly
Table of ContentsMap 1 Coos County, Oregon
Map 2 Coos Bay area
Prologue to the Revised Edition
Preface to the Original Edition
Introduction
1) Poor Man's Paradise
2) An Empire Itself
3) The "Big Mill" and Its World
4) Logging the Coos Timber
5) Getting By
6) Surviving the Great Depression
7) The Second World War
8) Lumber Capital of the World
9) Timber Fever
10) Bosses and Workers
11) Hard Times and Survivors
Post Mortem: Reflections on the Present Condition
Epilogue to the Revised Edition
Notes
Index
