By Bob Sandberg, 1922-2010 – Forks Forum Archives 1980s

(Editor’s note – Bob Sandberg grew up in Sappho and later was a teacher at FHS in the late 1970s-1980s.)

Every time I drive through Sappho, my thoughts go back to when Sappho was a vibrant little town. Well, maybe not really vibrant, but the chug of the steam locomotives as they pulled in and out of Sappho did vibrate a little. I remember how huge those trains looked to me as I stared up at them. My brother ran one of them and sometimes would give me a ride from one end of Sappho to the other.

Halfway to the river stood a large water tank with a swinging pipe 6 or 7 feet long. The trains would pull up to the water tank, swing the pipe over the train and fill the boiler; then it would slowly chug to the siding for the night.

As a six-year-old, I would watch the brakeman change the switches and then motion for the engineer to move the train onto the siding.

The siding was an open-ended track, long enough to hold a couple of trains and enough length so they wouldn’t run off the end.

I was standing by the switch one evening as the speeder brought men back from the woods. The speeder was a platform on railroad wheels powered by a small engine. They called them speeders because they could travel pretty fast -maybe as fast as 30 miles per hour.

As the speeder rounded the bend just south of Sappho, I decided to be helpful si I pulled the switch like the brakemen did. It took me a while to figure out why all the men were waving their arms and jumping up and down. Just in the nick of time, I changed the switch back to its original position. The men gave me a sigh of relief as they scooted past the siding knowing they wouldn’t be bouncing along without a track! My first lesson as a brakeman.

Besides all the bunkhouses for the single workmen, and the homes for the families, Sappho had a store, post office two gas stations, a garage a tavern and a barber shop. The barber used to chew garlic. My dad asked him one day, “Why do you chew garlic?” and her answered, “It keeps the colds away.” It worked too. Nobody could get close enough to give him a cold.

Most of the men worked at logging and lived in the camp across the road. Before they got a haircut, they would tank up at the tavern and then the garlic didn’t bother them.

The loggers were a hard-working, hard-drinking lot. They put in long hours left for work at dark and returned to the camp about dark. They didn’t have radios or TVs (TVs hadn’t been invented yet) so they would swap tall tales. And they could sure make them tall!

a lot of the stories had to do with Paul Bunyan the super logger. “Why, Paul Bunyabcould saw a tree into logs so fast the crow sitting on the limb didn’t have time to get out of the way.” Paul killed more crows that way. Another would break in with, “I used to work with Paul bunyan back in Minnesota. He and I fell trees together, I didn’t have to work very hard because when Paul’s axe hit the tree, the trees and it would cut itself.”

They would spend hours exchanging tall tales, and they believed every one of them. At least they acted like they did. They were great story tellers and I loved to listen to them-just wish I could remember more of their stories. Since the advetn of radio and TV we have lost the art of story telling.

I started school the old Beaver school house. My best friend was Arnold -somewhat of a rascal. He was the self-appointed pencil sharpener, seated at the back of the room.

When Arnold and I were about nine years old we went looking for something to do. Behind Sappho not far from the river we found a powder house stuffed with tools of fuses, packages of dynamite caps, and boxes of dynamite.

Arnold “borrowed” a roll of fuse and a box of caps. We rook them behind our house above what was once a gravel pit and there we shot off the best firecrackers ever. A dynamite cap could blow a pretty good chunk of rock high in the air.

There were a number of interesting people in and around Sappho. The night watchman was a fellow named Tom Clancy. Tom had a slight speech impediment, he talked through his nose. One day Tom was fishing something, and my Dad said, “Tom, if I were you I would do it this way.” To which Tom responded in his nazalized voice, “If you were me, you would do it exactly like I’m doing it.” That was the end of the conversation.

As kids we used to like to follow Tom around and listen to his nasal twang. One day he pulled a nickel out of his pocket and said, “Someday they will make a bomb no bigger than this nickel that will blow up a whole cit,” Tom must have known something a lot of scientists didn’t know. the bomb that was dropped a few years later on Hiroshima was a bit larger, than a nickel, but not a whole lot bigger.

And there was the Fish Merchant. George was probably the laziest man I have ever known. He wasn’t afraid of working, just didn’t like it. But he was a most interesting conversationalist. He could spin wild yarns by the hour; there wasn’t a subject that could stump him. He knew everything about everything – but work.

George would drop in at any time -usually just before dinner. O course, Mom would ask him to stay and ear with us which he never refused. Once he was let in the house, time was forgotten as he told story after story. He never knew when to go home and his poor wife never knew where he was nor when he would come home. She finally divorced him.

I vividly remember one evening before Christmas. There wasn’t much money for extras in those days, but Dad splurged and bought some hard candy. George dropped in and sat at his favorite place – the kitchen table. On the table was the dish of candy. George began to talk and as he talked he kept dipping into the dish until it was empty. All the time I was hoping my Dad would say something to George but he didn’t. That took care of our Christmas candy.

Why was he called the Fish Merchant? That’s what he did – peddled fish house to house. He would drive to La Push in his old pickup, buy whatever fish he could at the cheapest price and then sell the fish. Work in the woods? Not George. When he sold fish, he could talk and he couldn’t do that in the woods.

Eventually, the logging trucks took over from the locomotives and with the change went the logging camp …That’s called progress.