Joe Truax

LIVING

Joe Truax first moved to Seneca in 1936. In his free time, Joe liked to hunt blackbirds, fish, and also make beanies.  During the Fourth of July, he and his family would go for a picnic, often to Wickiup Campground on Canyon Creek.

The road to John Day was only paved from the J Bar L to John Day and was dirt from J Bar L to Seneca.  Cars couldn’t travel very fast then either. The road was also very narrow. At times, two cars would meet on the road. One would have to back up all the way to the nearest turnout, or wide spot in the road, so that the other car could get by. You can still see the old dirt road as you drive down the mountain by looking over the side of Highway 395.

Seneca had three company nurses in the years Joe lived here. The first one was a Mrs. Rounds, the second was Carine Williams, and the third was Genevieve McGhee. After Mrs. McGhee, Carine returned and served the community for many years. Joe said, “She was called our ‘angel of mercy’.” Joe explained that the company nurse was a first responder in emergencies and stabilized logging accident victims until they could get a doctor out to the accident site or until they could transport the victim to a doctor. It was not unusual to see Carine walking down a street at 2:00 a.m. on her way to tend to someone who was sick. There were many times that Carine helped townspeople, in addition to the company workers, when they had emergency situations such as broken bones, allergic reactions, burns, etc.

 The company developed Seneca money or tokens.  This was a coin system that could only be used in Seneca.  Employees could charge items at the company store, using a draw on their salary. The change was given to them in tokens. Joe thought that was part of the reason they were such a close-knit community.  There were different coin values such as $0.25, $0.50, $1.00, and $5.00. 

Joe didn’t live here on the record-breaking day of cold which was -54º,  but he did live here when it was -52º and he said he bundled up in a coat, long johns and a scarf, and then “toughed it.”  He said that you also put a scarf over your nose and mouth, and breathed through your nose. If you breathed through your mouth, you could frost your lungs.

                                          WORK

          Mr. Truax had many different jobs in Seneca.  In 1947, Joe was 18 years old and started working in Seneca. His first job was working for the Edward Hines Lumber Co., feeding the jaws on the rock crusher. He had to break the “too large” rocks up with a sledge hammer, so the jaws could handle the smaller pieces of rock.  His second job was powerhouse foreman. He fed fuel to the fire boxes to keep the steam pressure up to a certain temperature. At 7:00 a.m. when the day shift started, the pressure had to be 70 lb. with a hot fire box so the day man could open the damper and raise the steam pressure to about 90 lb. His third job was working on the rip track repairing log cars. This involved replacing broken wooden decking, and replacing triple valves in the air brake system.

Later, when he was a warehouseman, he had a great supervisor, Leroy “Roy” Seebart.  At first, Joe didn’t know why he was so fussy, but Roy always had to have everything perfect.  Joe finally realized it was so that they would never have to retake an inventory. The Seneca inventory was always close enough for the outside accountants who checked the inventories, and so it never had to be retaken! 

One year, the Seneca inventory was off, according to the accountants’ report. Roy and Joe checked out the obvious points where they might have made an error. They worked on it during any spare time during the day, and then came back after supper and worked on it until 10: 00 or 10:30 p.m. each night, from Monday through Thursday, trying to figure it out. Finally, Roy slammed the books shut and said, “Let’s go home. I am going down to Hines tomorrow.” Joe worried all Friday. When Roy returned in the afternoon, he had a smile on his face. The mistake had been made in the accounting department down in Hines, not by Joe and Roy! Joe commented that the most fun part of his job was that they always beat the Hines’s mill inventory.

Mr. Truax used many different tools on his different jobs.  When he fed the jaws, he used a sledge hammer to break the rocks up.  The jaws were used to break up rocks to be ballast for the railroad tracks. When Joe was a warehouseman, he used a slide rule.  He used wrenches when he repaired the log cars on the rip track and for replacing the triple valves. He used bars and hammers for repairing the decking.  

When Mr. Truax was working, many jobs were available if you were qualified.  He could have fallen timber, set chokers, or driven skid cats.  He also could have driven a log truck. Joe said in 1947, loggers would have been paid $1.28-$1.50 per hour. The loading crew would load about 25-40 loads per day.

Even though the jobs were hard work, the men often made a game out of working.  The loading crews often competed against each other for fun while working.  Some of the other crews did, too. As they got off the man buses after work, one crew would ask the other crew, “How many loads did you get today?” If it was less than what they had done, the crew that got the most loads would kid the others about being “pikers.”

At times, the workers liked to make fun out of the work by challenging each other. One time, Joe wished that he hadn’t taken on a challenge. While the rock crusher foreman was on vacation, Joe was temporarily assigned to tamping ties on the railroad, which meant tamping the crushed gravel under the railroad ties.  The men worked in pairs, each tamping from the end of a tie to the center. He was tamping with Bill Wright. Ronnie Benner and Bob Francis, who usually worked as a tamping crew, were on the other side. They were ahead of Bill and Joe by one tie, grinning teasingly at Bill and Joe.  Joe asked Bill if he wanted to get ahead of the other pair, and Bill said, “It’s up to you.”  Joe said, “Let’s go!”  They had started at 7:00 a.m. and by 10:00 a.m. , Joe wished that he had not taken the challenge. Joe said, “Be careful when you challenge someone at his own game!”  Shortly after that, he got his second wind, but that was the toughest work day he ever put in.   

Joe said there were about 800 people living in Seneca in the 1950’s.  Mr. Truax’s father, Frank Truax, was an engineer on the Shay locomotive on the railroad before he worked in the shop as a foreman. He ran a Shay locomotive from Seneca up to around the Lemcke place, up Scotty Creek , and the upper parts of Bear Valley on the Silvies River . In the early 1930’s, spur tracks like those up Scotty Creek were too steep for rod engines, so they used Shay engines which were not too fast on the level, but could climb a steep grade that a rod engine could not get up.

 Once, Frank had to take the 529 locomotive to Summit Prairie to bring some loads to town. Joe felt lucky because Joe fired the engine and was brakeman for him to Summit Prairie and back.

SCHOOL

Joe attended Seneca School for four years from 1936 - 1939 and 1942 – 1943. The principals for the first years he attended were Maude Trudsdell and Cassie Jones. At that time, some of the teachers were Miss Lyons, Miss Walls, and Miss Russell.

Some of Joe’s friends when he lived in Seneca were Bud Lohf, Glenn Gray, Marvin Merrill, Nita Burke, Shirley Rommel, Anna Johnson, Lois Zierer, and Leonard (Sonny) Rider.

Some sports they played were basketball and football.  On the basketball court, they had to sweep off all the snow just to play! For recess everyday, the kids in the Seneca School would play football or basketball.  When they played football the seventh and eighth graders would play against the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. It was tackle football, and Joe said “sometimes it hurt pretty bad when a tackle was made if you were a younger kid.”

Joe Truax remembers one time when they were playing tackle football and the school’s principal, Ivan Lueman, was watching and thought that the teams were unfair.  To even up the teams, Ivan joined the younger kids’ team as the quarterback.  For almost every play, Ivan would have Joe and Lou Cozad, the two fastest kids in school, run out for a Hail Mary, (which means one player down one side and one down the other) and get the team a touchdown. When Louie or Joe caught the ball for a touchdown, Mr. Lueman would be bent over laughing at the 7^th and 8^th graders. That was one of the most fun games they had.

One year, the Seneca School put together a softball team. They didn’t have enough boys to make up a team of only boys, so they had a girl on the team.  She was Artis Stratton, who played second base. She was a good second baseman, and had a good glove and arm. The bonus was that she was also a very good hitter. Joe kind of doubted that even if there had been a ninth boy available that he could have beaten her out of the position. The team went down to play the John Day Grade School team. When they trotted out on the field, the John Day kids sure gave them a funny look because they had a girl on the team, which was really unusual back then. Joe said, “It didn’t bother us any, and John Day found out why as soon as the game started!”

FUNNIEST STORIES

Joe told three stories about funny things he could remember. The first story was about Eric Anderson and his Model A Ford.  Using blocks, some of his friends jacked up the pickup and put some wooden blocks underneath the rear axle to keep it off the ground, just a little.  When Eric got in the pickup, he gave it some gas but the pickup didn’t go, so he rocked it back and forth until it came off the blocks and the tires hit the ground.  When the tires hit the ground, it backed right into a locomotive pit.  Eric and his pickup were unharmed.

Another funny memory involved a sound torpedo. A sound torpedo is an explosive device that is put on a train track so that when the locomotive runs over the device it lets the engineer know there is a bad spot in the track.  Bobby Penton, his friend, put a sound torpedo in front of the locomotive wheel.  Then they started talking about what would happen if a boiler blew up.  Shorty, the night watchman, was listening to the conversation about the boiler the whole time.  When the locomotive started to move, the torpedo blew up. Everyone ran, but Shorty ran faster than you could possibly imagine! Everyone else stopped to watch Shorty’s little legs run so fast.

Another time, Joe and his friend Adrian were working on the rip track and one guy was a real big loafer.  He was getting all the easy jobs because he would pull all the work order tags before Joe and Adrian got to work each morning.  One day, Adrian said he had a sound torpedo in his locker. They thought the loafer was asleep in the fuel car and it was time for lunch.   Adrian said, “How about if we wake him up?” They put the torpedo in front of the car wheel and gave it a push. There was a big “BANG!”  Everyone around heard it, including Joe’s dad and the general manager, A.R. Dewey.  So Joe’s dad chewed him out all the way up and back from lunch, even though no harm was done.

SOFTBALL

The Seneca softball team was legendary.  This amazing team was full of great players like Boo Williams; Boo was the team manager and he was their pitcher.  He had a bad right arm, but was still able to throw a fastball with his left arm, and was the best pitcher in Eastern Oregon .  Carine Williams was the nurse and Boo’s wife.  Some more great players were Mercy Mitchell, Lloyd (Butter) Shields, George Kern (who was logging superintendent when the team picture was taken), Bob Gullet, Frank Truax, Clarence Schwartz, Ike Garret, Duce McKrola, Hank McKrola,  Ken McGhee, and Morris Gullet.  The joke of the time was that if you could play baseball, you could work for Hines Lumber Co.!  All teams have a batboy and the Loggers’ batboy was Glenn Gray.  The Loggers had such a great team that no one in Eastern Oregon could beat them.  They were so good that they went to the regional play-offs where there were many different western states’ teams.  During this time there was a paving crew who went across the state and played all the baseball teams that they came to and beat them.  Since John Day was Seneca’s rival, John Day set up a game for the Seneca Loggers to play this other amazing team.  When the Loggers got there and the paving crew got there, almost all of John Day was cheering for the Pavers! Finally the Loggers beat them and then John Day people just shut up and didn’t say anything else.  Later in the year, they had a re-match and Seneca beat the Pavers again!

          One time at a game in John Day, Frank Truax stood at homeplate and hit a ball across the race track at the fairgrounds, over some trees on the near side of the river, over the river, and high up into the trees on the far side of the river.  He hit it with a bat that was Joe Truax’s and he described it as a bat that had live wood and was short – only 34 inches, instead of the usual 35-36 inches.

The Seneca Loggers were one of the best teams in Oregon and they showed it more than once with all of the players who were ‘just loggers’ who played their best!

BASKETBALL AND FOOTBALL

Joe recalled that Seneca’s town basketball team was one of the best teams in Eastern Oregon in the late 30’s and early 40’s.  One time in the 1950’s, the team had a game with the Harlem Clowns up in the Seneca gym.  With Seneca’s small gym, “slow down” offense, and relentless defense, they actually beat the Clowns.  They won because of Carl Belshaw’s awesome hook shots, Gene Dicky’s ability to sink a shot from the very edge of the corner, and the defense getting in the point guard’s face at every play.  Joe remembered hearing one of the Clowns players saying, “If we don’t pick it up we are going to lose.” By the end of the game, Seneca had claimed the victory.  A little while later, the Clowns came back for another try.  Mr. Truax said that the Clowns were ready for them this time.  He said that both teams worked very hard to win this game.  But, Seneca got too big-headed about their last win and thought they could run with the Clowns, but found they could not.  During the game, whenever one set of five on the Seneca team got tired, they would just send in another set of five because their team had ten players.  Even though Seneca played a good game, they still lost.