Mendocino Redwood Company


 
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Harry Merlo Interview
Q
Was there any one purchase that you thought was the “jewel in the crown” as far as the MRC lands?
 
Merlo considered F.M. Crawford Lumber Company his best acquisition in Mendocino County. He suggested the acquisition around 1968 when he was still a new V.P. with Georgia-Pacific(G-P) in Samoa, CA. This proposal illustrated Merlo’s early strategy to focus on people rather than timber. “Frank Crawford’s people,” Merlo said, “were the best to be found.” One reason for this assessment, according to Merlo, was that Crawford used the Al Thrasher edger to produce lumber with minimum waste. “If you have the best mill,” Merlo said, “the trees will come to YOU!”
Al Thrasher was born in 1920 in Chelan, Washington and started working at age 10 in the sawmill industry to help his family. Later he became a sawmill owner in Oregon. In the late 1960s, he revolutionized timber saw blades. His technology drastically reduced the thickness of the saw blade and, therefore, increased the amount of lumber recovered from a log. He also designed a “floating” saw that, unlike the earlier fixed collared saws, could easily glide for adjustments.

Although not a technical wiz himself, Frank Crawford hired individuals like Herb Ryan who would pore for hours over log data and propose sawing patterns that would optimize the amount of lumber recovered from a log. Merlo wanted people in the mold of Herb Ryan, who were oriented toward maximum efficiency and could get the most “product” out of a log. In fact, Herb Ryan became a consultant to L-P.

In part, it was a family tragedy that precipitated Merlo’s acquisition of Crawford Lumber Company. Frank (55) and Vivian (53) Crawford, along with two companions, were killed when their Cessna 320, piloted by Vivian, crashed in Canada on September 7, 1966. The group had left Ukiah on September 2 for a fishing trip; they were returning when their plane went down in a remote area, thick with timber. Exactly two years passed before hunters accidentally spotted the wreckage. Struggling in those intervening years to carry on the inivestigation of the missing plane and to keep the business going, the Crawford family finally decided to sell F.M. Crawford Lumber Company to G-P in 1968. Merlo had negotiated the deal with George Schmidbauer, who was married to Peggy Crawford, the daughter of Frank and Vivian. Schmidbauer became G-P’s general manager of Crawford operations.

Shortly before the negotiations, the three family-owned Crawford corporations—Covelo Lumber Company, Dinsmore Lumber Company, and Apache Lumber Company—were merged under the name F.M. Crawford Lumber Company (UDJ 10 April 1968). The eventual sale to G-P included about 62,000 acres, as well as sawmills in Ukiah, Willits, Alderpoint, Potter Valley, Covelo, and Dinsmore, and a re-manufacturing plant in Ukiah (PD 1 September 1968). At the time, there were 550 employees in the Crawford company.

In the mid-1980s, L-P proposed to spend about $2.5 million to rebuild the old Crawford mill and install computer equipment (PD 12 Sept 1983). Around 1993 the mill was shut down; its crew went to the Willits sawmill until LP built the new computerized mill between 1995 and 1996. This mill is still operational and is now the Ukiah sawmill of Mendocino Forest Products (MFP), one of the sibling companies of MRC. MFP has upgraded three of the major components of the sawmill equipment since 1998.


UDJ (Ukiah Daily Journal)

PD (Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

 

 Mendocino Redwood Company - Ukiah, California