Sonny Rider

          Before Sonny Rider lived in Seneca, he lived in Lakeview and Hines , Oregon . His family moved to Seneca because his father needed a job. The thing Sonny remembers most about Seneca from back then was it was a great place to go to school and everyone was friendly.

Sonny Rider attended Seneca School from 1937 through 1943. The principal was Mr. Gorseline. The teachers that Sonny remembers are Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Cossie. Everybody was a friend. There weren’t many sports for kids at the school. There was baseball and basketball. The gym was built after he graduated from high school and was in the Navy. At recess there were different types of games the school set out for the little kids. When you got older, you were allowed to have snow fights and play football. Even though they didn’t have much playground equipment, the kids still had fun.

          Sonny Rider lived in several different places in Seneca. He first lived where the burner used to be. Then he lived in one of the ‘cheese boxes”. These weren’t made out of cheese. It was half of a boxcar made into a house. Sonny’s family had five people in it so he said, “It was very cramped. When we had company, which we did a lot, we would sometimes have to sleep on the floor. In the summer, the kids would sleep outside in tents.” That gives you an idea of how small the “cheese boxes” were. Before that they lived in half a boxcar sitting on the rails out by the wigwam burner. You had to go outside to get water and carry it in buckets up the steep steps into the boxcar. There was no electricity there so they just used kerosene lamps. It was really cold living there in the winter because the cold air would just go under the boxcar, and he can still remember the snapping and crackling sounds from the cold. Sonny remembers running around in the back yard and bumping into the diapers on the laundry line, hung out to dry. He said that it would hurt to run into them, because they were frozen solid! Then the boxcars were moved to Third St. and made into two bedroom apartments with electricity and inside toilets.  

          The funniest story that Sonny remembers from Seneca is when he was working the railroad under the supervision of Fred Holmburg. Fred had just gotten a new speeder, which is a two man work car used on the railroad, and Fred was really proud of it. Everyone was joking, saying that it would run him over some day. One day the people working for Fred put a motor bomb in the motor, and when Fred turned on the speeder, it sparked, whistled and went BOOM! Fred jumped out and started screaming. He said, “Why he doggone hell happened now?!” Fred was Swedish and he didn’t speak much English. Fred thought the explosion was the new carburetor.

          In Sonny’s free time he would hunt, fish, play in the hills, help work at the restaurant, and help keep the swimming pool clean. In town the holidays were usually celebrated inside the family. For the 4^th of July, his family would go to Joaquin Miller resort and set off sparklers and ate ice cream. There were rarely any large fireworks though.

          When someone in Sonny’s family got sick his family would mainly use home remedies because Seneca was 25 miles from the nearest doctor, over a rough mountain road. If it got really bad, they would go to John Day to the doctor. If they had to go to John Day , it took about an hour and a half if there were no problems. The cars only went about 25 to 30 miles per hour and the road was only one lane and was not paved. If they had to go to Burns it took nearly all day. When the Hines company hired a company nurse, she took care of all sorts of sicknesses and injuries.

          At the Seneca Store there was everything that you could need. You could purchase items with Seneca money or regular money. Seneca money was nickels, dimes, quarters, half-dollar, one dollar, five dollar, and ten dollar coins. There was no paper Seneca money. The old store was a big brick building that also had in it the movie theater, restaurant, and the tavern. The gas station was on the same lot as the store building. People went to the Coconut Grove for union dinners, meetings, dances, and social events. The Coconut Grove was just a big room above the theater and it didn’t really have coconuts, but people called it that as a joke. At first it was very plain, but later they decorated it.

          When the hotel was built it was built in four sections. If they needed to have room for more men, they could just take off the roof and add rooms. All of the hotel’s heat came from the boilers at the mill’s power plant.

          In the old movie theater, the movies were black and white and some didn’t even have sound! There was only one movie shown each week. One movie Sonny remembers seeing was The Hounds of Baskerville.  He said it scared him to death. A lot of the time, Sonny would sneak into the movies without paying. The kids did that by having one kid distract the cashier while the others snuck in. Another way he snuck in was to leave the back door of the theater unlocked after he cleaned the theater. Sonny’s job at the movie theater was to bring money and film up on the bus to the Seneca Theater when he was in high school, and to run the projector. He earned $2.50 per week.  The theater closed in the 1950’s because the theater owner died of a heart attack. Years later, the store and theater building burned down. Some people think the new owner had just bought it so he could burn it down and collect the insurance money.

          In the summer, the kids spent hours and hours at the pool over by the train barns. When Sonny went to the pool, there was a place he would have to walk through to disinfect himself. At the pool there were two different diving boards, a wading pool, and the regular pool went from two feet to eight feet. The pool was heated by steam from the shops.

          Sonny Rider thinks Seneca has changed a lot from 1937 to now. Back then there were not paved streets or streetlights. The town was busy and there was always something to do. The houses were more like shacks than houses. There was more wildlife than now, and you could camp or park anywhere. The forest was like a big park. People thought they would never run out of trees to cut. Hines Company had a contract with the Forest Service to put out forest fires, and the employees usually had them put out before the Forest Service got there. Back then, it only took one or two dozen men to take care of the entire forest. Now it takes hundreds.

            Back then there were all sorts of jobs in Seneca. There were eighteen or twenty pairs of fallers, and forty carloads a day of logs that were sometimes as big as four feet diameter.  He worked in the restaurant, ran the movie projector in the theater, poisoned squirrels, cut timber, worked at the planer and saw mills, was a hub smith, and a gandy dancer.  He was only eleven years old when he started working at the restaurant peeling potatoes, doing dishes, and waiting on tables. He had to get up at four a.m. and earned thirty dollars a month working eight hours a day, six days a week.  He set planer for fifteen years in Seneca, and also loaded train cars with lumber. Sonny explained that gandy dancing is working on a section of rails, where you tear down and build tracks. Sometimes the rails would stretch in the heat and have to be tied in.   When he was logging, he got paid 87 cents an hour. At the mill, you were paid $450 to $500 per month. When he worked on the speeder out in the woods, the foreman would hold up five fingers to let you know it was time to take a five minute break. Then they would get to go swimming in the river on their break.  His favorite job was poisoning squirrels for the government because he got to ride horses, which he loves to do. 

          He never got to ride on the train to Hines, but he did go in the train tunnel. He remembers that there was just room enough for the train.

          Sonny remembers that members of the Indian tribe would come every summer and camp in tipis on the south end of town.

          In the winter, when Sonny was working in the woods, it would often get down to –30 degrees. People just wore long underwear and heavy warm clothes.

          Sonny used lots of tools to work out in the woods. He used axes to cut trees, and to bump knots off of the trees before they were loades.  There were no power saws then. When he set choker, he used the cable and arch. When he worked as a “gandy dancer” he used spiking mauls, tamping bars to tamp down the ricks, and big crowbars.