John McGhee
Growing Up In Seneca

When he was in Seneca, he lived in the lot across from Brad Smith’s house (the corner of Park and A St. ), but the house is gone now and the lot is overgrown. Before John was born, his parents lived in cheese boxes as singles. The houses didn’t have running water and were very small. The men used a shower house up at the old bunkhouses on the hill on the south side of town to clean up after work, but the women just had to make due. John has a picture of his mom on the front porch of a cheese box with her hair all sudsed up.

The funniest story John remembers about Seneca happened when he was a child. Kitty corner from where he used to live was the McCoshum’s place. Mr. McCoshum was a mechanic and he had two kids. John played with the kids, Morris and Vickie. They had a dog named Sonny. Mr. McCoshum took inner tubes and cut them to make a harness to go on the dog and he trained the dog to pull a sled and Sonny would pull the kids around town.

Growing up in Seneca, there was always something for kids to do during their free time. John and his friends would go to the gravel pit to play. There were little cliffs they would jump off of. They called the game, “jumping off the Cliff”. There was half a log cabin in a ravine up past the gravel pit, and they played army soldiers and cowboys and Indians. They would make bike trails through the sagebrush and willows and try to wreck their bikes. He was so rowdy he broke four bones by the age of thirteen. John’s older brother, Mike, would take him up to Porcupine Rock, which is a couple miles walk from town or up to Big Tree, which is no longer there. His favorite pastime was to fish with willows and a fishhook and hand-me-down fishing poles, and he and his friends would also find old railroad ties along the Silvies River near the old train bridge, strip naked, get in the water and nail the ties together to make rafts (This is a Tom Sawyer adventure).

Another fishing story he told also had some adventure in it. One time he and his brother went fishing in Bear Creek west of Parish Cabins. A black bear crossed the creek between the two of them. It turned out his brother was between the mamma bear and her cub. John tried to yell “black bear” at his brother to tell him, but his brother thought he was yelling black bird and really had a start when he finally saw the bear.

Wintertime also held many opportunities for fun. The kids would ice skate not only on the ponds and frozen Silvies River , but on the streets around town or hooky bob behind cars as they went past. With no laws, they got by with a lot. They would go to the dump and rip the hoods off of old cars.  The hood was then attached to a pickup with about 20-30 feet of rope, and kids would pile on. The group was ten to fifteen kids in size sometimes. They would come down the hill through town, spinning doughnuts in the parking lot across from the store and the kids would go flying off. They thought this was great fun.

Another daring and dangerous snow adventure got John into a bit of trouble.  There were sledding trails coming off the gravel pit. The kids had a running challenge as to who could sled down one of the trails and be the closest to cross the path of the logging trucks as they drove by.  Once John did manage to slip through under a slow moving log truck and come out alive and unhurt, but his mom was visiting Bubba and Zane Lindley’s mom, Margaret, at the time and saw John’s feat. He couldn’t sit down for a week after his dad got finished with him. John admits it was a very dangerous and foolish thing to do.

 The Seneca School also had some fun in mind when it came to the snow. Once or twice in the middle of winter, they would close the school and would take all the kids and any parents willing to drive cars to Starr Ridge for a day of sledding and tubing.

John never celebrated the 4^th of July in Seneca, but would go to Baker to see the parade and along the way they would pick up his grandparents in John Day . Sometimes he would go to Burns to celebrate and then to Hines for the fireworks over the golf course.

The road to John Day was paved when he was a kid, but was dirt and gravel before he was born. His dad would tell the story of how on a trip home from John Day, he and John’s grandmother came around a corner on the graveled road on Canyon Mountain one time and the sun was in his eyes, temporarily blinding him. He was driving a model A or model T and went over the edge. They were carrying a lot of eggs and the eggs were all over everything. It was quite a mess, but luckily no one was hurt.

In remembering the store and other attached buildings, John said the gas station and its two pumps were added on to the end of the original building. His mom sold tickets at the “Olive” Movie Theater when she first came to Seneca as a teenager. She also worked at the restaurant between 1937-39. She worked from 4:00 in the morning until the bus came and then after school until 9:00 at night.

When John was in grade school, each year the school would show a film for the Christmas party. The first of these that John saw was when he was in the first grade, Christmas 1960, and it was shown in the old Olive Theater .  It was the only movie he ever saw in the old theater. It was the old black and white Disney movie about a wild horse called Tonka with Sal Mineo.

When asked if he had ever been in the Coconut Grove he answered, “No, but the women’s auxiliary held meetings up there as well as fundraisers and potlucks.” He said he wanted to go join one of the potlucks to eat the food.  He recalled his mom telling him about the women’s auxiliary in the early 40’s and how they put on fundraisers to buy the playground equipment for the school that was used for years and years thereafter.

John’s dad did not allow them to use Seneca money. The Seneca money was coin tokens made by Hines. It was used when you ran out of money and needed something to tie you over until your next paycheck. It was credit and his dad refused to buy on credit. They could only spend with the money they had. Some months, that meant that a lot of beans and macaroni would be eaten at the McGhee’s.

When asked about the hotel, John didn’t remember a great deal. He said the person to ask was Shirley Harrison because her parents owned the hotel and she lived there. When he was two or three, his uncle lived there and he does remember the wood smoke smell from the stove and the rubber floor to protect the wood flooring from the loggers’ cork boots.

The one thing John recalls most about Seneca is that it was the greatest place in the world to grow up and he is proud to be a Seneca kid. Since there were no crazy people, kids were able to go to every house in town on Halloween. John remembers getting two paper grocery bags full of candy including caramel apples, popcorn balls, and home made doughnuts and taffy (items not safe to accept in today’s time). He even got to help pull the taffy over at the Boswells. Parents didn’t have to worry so much about their child’s safety as they do today.

John remembers the coldest it got in his day was 38 degrees below zero. He was hunting rabbits that day in hip deep snow with his beagle mutt dog near Porcupine Rock. Before John was born, his dad experienced the famous minus 54 degrees. That was the coldest Seneca ever got. He remembers his dad, who was a mechanic, telling him when it got cold like that he had to stay out in the woods with only a couple of hours of sleep. He had to keep the machinery running, so the cats were put in a circle with a bonfire in the middle. In town, his dad would use the welder on his company truck to thaw people’s water pipes when they froze on those cold nights.

The swimming pool was “neat” in John’s opinion. Like all the kids, he liked to crawl across the steam pipe as a short cut across the Silvies River rather than walking the long way down the road. This was dangerous because where the insulation was missing the hot pipe could have seriously burned someone. His favorite trips to the pool, though, were when his babysitter, Linda Lemonds, took him there on her motor scooter.  “Big stuff” for a four-year old.

When John McGhee was a kid he had a few jobs. He never worked in the woods, but had kid jobs such as mowing lawns and chopping fire wood for folks around town. The first job of mowing lawns he had, he was only ten years old. Like all the kids in those days, another way he made money was by collecting and turning in pop and beer bottles at the store. With the money from the bottles, he purchased his first skateboard for just under $5. The eighth graders also paid for a portion of the eighth grade trip in this way and by washing cars, too.

When John was in high school he worked for a haying contractor from Prineville. It was a family enterprise whose name was Flegel. They cut hay on the Lemcke’s ranch and the Biggs Ranch, owned by the Olivers and run by the Thissels. John partially paid for his first car his last year in college with the money he had made in the hay-field by driving the swather and hay rake for the Flegels. The best part of his job was being outside. He felt this was why most people lived in Seneca. He also enjoyed the people he worked with and the machinery.

The jobs that were available for adults were mostly in the woods. A lower paying entry level job was setting chokers. The highest paying job was falling timber. Other jobs were buckers, landing crew, log truck drivers, right of way crew, railroad section crew, and shops crew and mechanics. He can remember that there were landings by the train tracks where they were at any given time in the woods. They would fall the trees and skid the logs to the landing by the tracks. A jammer or loader would load the logs onto the train and the train would take them to Hines. After a time, they stopped running the train into the woods and built a permanent landing by the highway north of town. Jammers would load the logs onto log trucks in the woods and the trucks would bring their loads to  that landing where Whitey Tout would lift the whole truckload off at one time with the Wagner Lumberjack and put the entire load on one train car.  The train would pull the loaded cars to Hines late in the evening each day and return with empty cars for the next day.

The funniest logger story John remembers, happened when his mom was the town nurse for a time. A logger was setting a choker and a cat came by kicking up a jill poke and it hit the choker setter. He was fortunately only hurt a little, but it had ripped off all of the logger’s clothes. The logger was brought in to the nurse trying to cover himself with his hands, worried more about his pride than his injuries. A jill poke was a small pine tree. The cats would bump in to and run over the small trees and they would occasionally flip up on either side of the track with tremendous force and many a logger was seriously injured or even killed when they were hit or run through by them.

When asked how much the mill workers got paid, he answered “I can’t answer that. I mainly knew about the woods side of the operation because of my dad and grandfather.” Earlier he had explained that fallers were the big wage earners. His best guess was that they earned between twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars a year between 1954 to 1970. Their wages were based on the number of trees they cut.  The harder they worked, the more they earned.  “Falling trees was tough work and took its toll on those guys.”  The faller that sticks out in John’s mind was Duce McKrola.  He cut trees his entire life until he retired in his sixties.  Right up until he retired, the young fallers had to really work hard to keep pace with him.

John said that because he hadn’t been born yet, he’d never been to Camp 1 when it was in operation, but he’d ride out to the old vacant site on his bike to see what remained when he was a kid.  Out in that same area he’d visit the site of the old Shouten ranch.  There were lots of old pieces of ranch equipment lying around to look at.  John’s dad had told him that the old Shouten ranch house had originally been ordered from Sears and Roebuck, one of the first “pre-fab” homes.  When the ranch was sold, the house was moved into Seneca and the Shields family lived in it up on the hill on the South edge of town when John was growing up. 

John was asked how large the logs were when he lived in Seneca. He remembered them being 3 to 5 feet through and was surprised that they call the trees they cut today logs. He has an old photograph of his grandfather standing on one that was 6-8 feet through. It was a real giant of a pine tree.

Growing up, he can remember the trains going to Burns. In his day, the locomotives were driven by diesel motors and pulled 40 to 50 cars each day to Hines. They would leave Seneca between 8:00 and 10:00 at night. This reminded John of the old steam locomotive that was parked in the shops.

On Sundays his dad, who was a mechanic, would wash his work coveralls in half of an old empty oil drum with steam. The old original steam locomotive was parked next to where he washed them, and so while he was doing that, John would pretend he was driving the old locomotive. He actually did ride on the log train, but not with permission. He and his friends would “just happen” to be building rafts in the river as the train would go by in the evening. They timed this so they could hitch a ride on the back of the train, as it would slowly be moving by. He knew his dad would take skin off of his hide if he knew.

He wasn’t old enough to have helped build the Seneca school, but his father, like many of the men in town, helped build the Seneca School gym. Before the gym was built there was nowhere to play basketball, so they donated a day’s wages and built the gym in their free time. Hines was generous as the workers were and donated the lumber.

John remembers going to Seneca school from 1960-1968. He feels it’s the best thing he ever did. He remembers the principal being Bob Alstott. He was the first principal while John attended. The second principal was Mr. Babcock as John remembers and he weighed about three hundred-plus pounds. The third principal was George Perreard. He was a great teacher and principal. He remembers being taken on field trips by Mr. Perreard to plant trees, and to be taught to take what you need from the woods, but put back for those in the future. He remembers his first grade teacher being Mrs. Ferris, the second and third grade teacher being Dorothy Klabo, his fourth grade teacher being Lula Hendricks, and his fifth grade teacher being Esma Reynolds. In his sixth through eighth grades he remembers his teachers being Mrs. Moore, Reza Augey, Delette Toepel, Herb Horn, and George Perreard. 

John considered Lula Hendricks the toughest teacher.  She was hard on people but fair, and you couldn’t help but learn in her classroom. One time in class he remembers everybody acted up and got whacked on the fanny with “The Paddle”. It had holes and if it was wet, it left big red spots “you know where”. He believes most students would say they didn’t like having her as their teacher, but they got the most out of her teaching.

When John was little he played on the merry-go-round, and giant strides. The giant strides were chains with handles that you could swing on that were attached to the top of a metal pole. Some kids played tetherball, 4 square, and 2 square, and the girls played hopscotch. The first and second graders played out behind the school where the computer lab is. The older students played in the front of the school. Everybody played on the swings, slides, and monkey bars.

John, like most of the other boys was also involved with sports. They played a lot of peewee baseball in the summer. Basketball was a big deal in the winter. When there was a game, the whole town of Seneca would come. He liked it because they would be able to get out of town for away games. Also in the winter, John and his team would practice peewee baseball at the Union Hall in the evening. Boo Williams was the coach and he wanted the kids ready when baseball season started.  They would practice grounders, and talk over how to make plays, etc., so in the spring they were ready to play. The VFW sponsored the Seneca peewee teams.

When asked how the town had changed, John said some places look better now than they did back then and some places look worse. The town was in better shape back then because there were more people. There were some shacks but not as many with garbage.

He said that there was lots of melting snow and rain in the spring that made many puddles on the dirt street for kid’s to play in. He would also catch lots of night crawlers and fishing worms on the streets when it rained.

When he was asked about the difference in the wildlife and the forest, he felt it was hard to answer since he hadn’t been around for many years. He thought the forest looked a lot smaller and that it seemed like there used to be a lot more wildlife in and around town, especially deer. He said that Seneca clearly changed a lot. When the logging started to slow down the people started to move away for more job opportunities.

John McGhee lived, worked, and played in Seneca, and attended Seneca School where he got the best education of the time (and of today). He made great friends, and had fun. He’s proud of being raised in Seneca and thinks it was the best thing that ever happened to him. His experiences and education from this small rural town have contributed to his successful military career and travels around the world. He believes that in today’s times, Seneca is still one of the best places for a kid to be raised.

Theis first photograph is the one I told the kids about who interviewed me and asked if I had lived in a "cheesebox house".  I told them no, but my parents had both lived in them with their parents before they were married and right afterwards as a married couple as well.  After work, the men used the bath house up on "the hill" (where the bunk houses were) to clean up, and the women had to do what they could at home as you can see my mom doing here.