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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)
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