NEIL MILL (INTRO): An interview conducted by Neil Mill with Vernon Hatler on May 19, 1974.

MILL: Mr. Hatler, when were you born?

VERNON HATLER: In 1891

MILL: In what part of the country?

HATLER: In San Joaquin County by Lathrop.  I was literally born in a barn.

MILL: Where is Lathrop? Is that San Joaquin County? Is that around here?

HATLER: San Joaquin County is over by Stockton and Lathrop is south of Stockton, oh, about five miles.

MILL: Have you always lived in Northern California?

HATLER: No, we spent eight years in the state of Washington around the Spokane area.

MILL: When did you come to Sonora?

HATLER: We came to Sonora in…let me see…we came to Sonora in 1923.

MILL: what did you do at that time when you settled here?

HATLER: I taught at Belleview School.

MILL: How long did you do that?

HATLER: thirty-two years.

MILL: did you have your mill operation at the same…?

HATLER: No I didn’t have my mill operation until after the end of World War II when the boys came back from the service I wanted to do something besides work for other people.

MILL: And this was a family decision to…was it your decision to start the mill or was it kind of a collective family decision?

HATLER: It was a collective family decision.

MILL: and how many boys do you have?

HATLER: I have six.

MILL: Are they all associated with the mill?

HATLER: all but one. One is working on the farm or at a mill, I’m not sure, up in Oregon.

MILL: Did…I understand that your wife taught at the school too—at Belleview.

HATLER: Yes, she taught at the school during the war.  She substituted for me quite a bit and after the war and after we started the mill she took over the school.

MILL: Did you help found the school or was it going when…?

HATLER: No, this was one of the oldest schools in the county.  It was where (_____) Morgan taught in his early days. In fact, I believe that it was his first school and a school house itself has been removed from various locations and now we are located over by (Name of a ranch??) Ranch. 

MILL: You say you had, between you and your wife, forty-eight years at the Belleview School?

HATLER: Yes.

MILL: And then your daughter teaches there now.

HATLER: no.  My grandson teaches and his wife teaches also.

MILL: Has the school been basically the same? It’s always been just a one-room school concept with all the grades together.

HATLER: Yes.  That was true up through the last few years. We’ve become a two-room school.

MILL: Do you thing with that many kids together in the old style of school was that…did it seen to work or better or worse today. Do you think…I mean, how do you think of schools today as compared to then? Do you have any thought on that?

HATLER:  As a matter of fact I do. I believe that we’ve lost quite a bit of a real objective of a school which I believe is not so much to teach in books and so on, but people-to-people relationship, which I believe in a large school we lose a great deal of. It’s a great deal about, like any other thing, if a family works together and gets along well usually they have arguments. It’s better, I believe, than to scatter out and not make a human develop. And in the school, the younger ones are n\benefitted by the older ones and also, the older ones are benefitted more than they realize by the younger ones; and it gives children chance to meet a great deal of people that they wouldn’t meet.  Also, they have a good background for getting along with people.

HATLER: How did you handle discipline in the school?

MILL: Well, my wife, Anna, was one way and I myself was another. But it really wasn’t too much of a problem one way or another with me because I seemed to get along quite well with parents and it’s as important to get along with the parents as it is to get along with the children.  And in those day we, well, we were more or less on our own because we didn’t have something which we call communication, now, with every parent and we have the PTA and other influences which are alright in their way, but I don’t believe that they could take care of the real intimate association as the teachers and the pupils had in my day.

MILL: Was the school a center at all for any social event?

HATLER: Very defiantly.  We had dances, we had picnics, we had get-together’s of every kind. 

MILL: This was parent and kids together?

HATLER: …the whole community—parent, bachelors, and (_____).  In other words, it was the center where everybody gathered on all kinds of social events—even had cake contests.

MILL: Did they have…were social events in those days…how did liquor play a part.  Was there beer and wine or were they mostly…?

HATLER: In the early part of my teaching I made a…I don’t know how you would express it, but I made a rule that I would permit any kind of liquor and if they wanted to smoke, why, they’d have to go outside to do it. We didn’t permit it in the school. And we’ll have one or two difficulties about the liquor.  There were one or two fellows that has a flask on their hip and as the night progressed, why, they got a little out of line and I had to ask them to leave, which they did without too much trouble.

MILL: what kind of an administration did you have over you? Who were you responsible to, like a board of directors or…?

HATLER: We were directly responsible to the trustees, but not in a teaching sense.  In the salary that was paid and in the supplies that were bought, and so on—the trustees took that over. The other responsibility was from the county office which consisted of, in those early days, one person, Mr. Morgan. And he took care of all of the technical details and we perhaps had a visit from him once a year.  So you could say that we were unsupervised.

MILL: How did you decide how to teach?  I mean, were you limited…like, was McGuffey reader still going on in those days or was it reading, writing, and arithmetic, or did you get into social sciences or…?

HATLER: Well, it was reading, writing, and arithmetic, actually. The only social science that we got into was the art of trying to get along with people. And I think that we did a pretty good job of it.

MILL: through practical experience rather than reading about it?

HATLER: Yes, very few people were taughtered up with the book knowledge. 

MILL: Was there physical discipline with the kids like spankings or how was that handled?

HATLER: Of course it was an improvement over the real old-time school because I had larger pupils and as a matter of fact, when I went to school we had boys and girls in there eighteen to twenty-one years of age and so obviously you couldn’t take a “pow” to them. You had to work ont heir pride more than anything else. They didn’t want to be exposed to that fact that they were considered bad people and so we worked on their pride to a great extent. The smaller ones you had (___) but you could punish them in any way you please. It was corporal punishment or it was the punishment of standing in the corner—I did plenty of that one myself.

MILL: Was it awkward for the older kinds, especially eighteen, to be in the same room with the younger kids?

HATLER:   Not at all.  The older ones liked to help the young ones out and the boys had enough people gathered around the school for a center so that they can have a little entertainment.  And they weren’t self-conscious at all about it because the people that I’m talking about had homework to do that kept them out of school for practically two-thirds of their time.

MILL: How did the students get to school?

HATLER: Walking mostly.  We had also people who live father away drove a buggy or rode on a horse. 

MILL: How long was the school day?

PHONE RINGS AND THEY PAUSE THE INTERVIEW

HATLER: 240 minutes exclusive with no recess.

MILL: are a lot of your students that you had then, are they still living around here or did they leave?

HATLER: The students that we taught have scattered around considerably, but there is quite a number still around. 

MILL: Have any of your students have ever become famous professionally?

HATLER: No, I don’t believe so. I don’t remember.

MILL: When you finish with the school, and you decide to go into the lumber mill business, did you have a background for that you knew you could do it or was it a matter of making a decision to do it and hoping that it would all work out.

HATLER: No we had a…well, at least I had a good background and a few dollars that I had saved up and I worked at sawmills before and I worked in the woods and the boys were all willing and really smart in a mechanical way.  So we decided that we’d risk what money we had and go see what we can do.

MILL: How did you raise the money to start an operation that big? Was it all out of your own resources or did you have to raise it?

HATLER: Personally speaking, it was out of our own resources. We had a few hundred dollars to spend on a location and you could do without a great many things that we think are necessary now.

MILL: Would you be able to make that decision and do it today with the prices and the kind of equipment you’d have to start with today or was it…?

HATLER: No, I don’t believe you could.  I believe that you’d have to have a much greater background in machine repair and care and you’d also have to have a lot of equipment that we didn’t think necessary at the time.

MILL: As your Mills developed, have you kept up with technology and gone with it or have you tried to keep it without having to get into the big technology.  Like Pickering (note: this is a name of a competing mill) said today would cost fifteen –million dollars to start a mill.

HATLER: In comparison to the Pickering, why, it would cost about a million-and-a-half for us to start. 

Miller: Have the advances in technology pleased you in the sense that…I mean, has it forced you to have toget into against, perhaps, your will or had it all worked out…are you as happy today with the technological advances as far as everybody working and being happy?

HATLER: I don’t believe that I quite thoroughly understand you question, but if I do, I feel like this with a family working together and being on a small spaces to start I think that your, if you use care, you’ll eve0olve a little at a time and you’re never forced to go too far out.

MILL: Tell me about how your transportation developed from when you started, how you got the logs in, and where you are today?

HATLER: Well, we first started, we used what we call a misery whip, which was nothing more or less than a cross-cut saw run by two men to follow them up the trees and we limbed them with an axe and used a army six-by-six to drag the limb to the landing and, finally, that same year we found it necessary to do better than that, so we got a AC14 Caterpillar and we used that for a while and then we bought another one, and so on we kept increasing our fleet of loggers and also our fleet of lumber trucks.  Till now we have about twelve loggers and three lumber trucks and we are we are well fixed up for transportation. 

MILL: what was the road system like that was here when you developed? Was Big hill much as it was today?

HATLER: Do you mean the quality of the road or the location. 

MILL: Access to the logs and quality. Did you have to do a lot of your own road building?

HATLER: Well, we either had to do it on our own road building or we had to do it off the road.  And all of the roads in the country, even going as far as Stockton, were dirt roads and in the winter time they were pretty darn tough.  But we gradually improved the situation and the county has a very good system of roads and of course the forest service supplements that system, or you might even say it surpasses it.

MILL: I’m told that the sold road is the old Sonora Trail that had a lot of historic importance in the sense that it was the main route to Twain Harte.

HATLER: that’s true.

MILL: Are there historical landmarks along here? These old ranches and everything, are these the old…the early pioneer families?

HATLER: Yes.  That is true. It was dark just below the mill.  We have all the (___) in Garso Place and we have Montgomery Place which is an old place.  And the Sierra Gelntwood, we call it the Haslum.  And when I came we had the Robertson Place which was not developed, and the Langiree place which was and still is an apple orchard and I was…don’t recollect what the next ranches were, but you ended up in Twain Harte. 

MILL: do you still have contact with these families? Are they still the original families or are a lot of them sold off to new people?

HATLER: Most of them are sold off to new people.  We have the Sierra Glen—they’re new people and they have changed hands several times.  The Montgomery Ranch has been changed to a man named Keith Alderman—a logger by the way—who’s at… Langiree place is being held mostly by one of the boys.

MILL: how did you choose the site to put your mill on? Was the property already owned?

HATLER: We located a piece of property called the Grant Hallen Place and we were located in the building there because we had close access to our logs.

MILL: As the years developed, have you been pleased with the site that you chose?

HATLER: We are no longer on that site.  We are out on what we call Big Hill or the Yankee Hill and we only stayed in on the original site for about four or five years.

MILL: Have you always had sufficient labor to work the mill? Have you ever gone through any shortages?

HATLER: No, there was enough labor all the time at any point—sometimes too much.

MILL: Do you ever get into...do you ever have minorities working in the mill? Minority races?

HATLER: Yes. Mostly Mexicans.

MILL: do you ever have any race conflicts or anything? Is there any problems there among the workers?

HATLER: No.  Not that I’m aware of is all.

MILL: How about Chinese.  Are most of those gone by the time that you got going?

HATLER: I don’t believe that there was a Chinaman in the county when I got here.

MILL: Over the years, how have relations been with your competitors? Like Pickering and other mills.  Has it been goods and everybody let life live or has there been any strife?

HATLER: We had no trouble form a labor standpoint and we have had no trouble whatsoever with our competitors except a period of time, which had long past, where we had a little difficulty in buying timber.  Sometimes we thought at our competitors were offering too much for it.

MILL: In your operation, it seemed like the railroads played a big part in Pickering’s, but I sense that you didn’t use the railroads in you operation.

HATLER: No what I do and the railroads are at odds, you might say. Pickering was depends on railroads for quite a bit of work and they still are, but not to the extent that they used to be. They, even after I can to the country, they used logging railroads and I don’t believe that they used any steam donkeys to get the logs out of the woods.  But they did use the trains to bring the logs into the mill. 

MILL: Did that give them an advantage over you as far as being able to keep their costs down. 

HATLER: No, I don’t believe it did.

MILL: How have your relations been with the neighbors up here as far as what you are trying to do? Have you had any problems with pressure from neighbors trying to influence you operation?

HATLER: No, maybe a little bit of trouble with your pollution deal.  We, by the way, we have the only mill in the county that’s conforming to the pollution law and I’ve seen one or two ladies that made snide remarks that didn’t amount to anything. 

MILL: How about county agencies and the people that do monitor you operations.  I mean, I sense that in the old days you had the free reign to do what you want as opposed to ecological laws and things like this.  Are these changing in your operation or causing you to constrain in any way?

HATLER:   Not that we are aware of.  In other words, we have a very good relationship with the county roads, for example.  We help them and they help us. And, like in this pollution deal, I cooperate with them in any way I could and this ecological deal that they’re going on now, I don’t know how much effect that will have on our operation and what will have no effect for a year or two, because we have our contracts all made.

MILL: Sounds like you had, for such a big operation, a fairly smooth operation without any major…have you ever had robberies, or crime, or vandalism, or arson, or any of that ever been a problem?

HATLER: Arson has been a problem. Although I shouldn’t say that arson…it was never proven, but I know perfectly well that no fire could have started the minute that it started unless it was assisted.  And we’d have three mills burn out. 

MILL: at this current site?

HATLER: Mhm.

MILL: and you think that arson played a role in some of that?

HATLER: I know that arson played a role in the last one because it was targeted in three different places at the same time.

MILL: do you remember the dates of these three fires?

HATLER: No, I do not.

MILL: DO you remember roughly that last one?

HATLER:   About four years. 

MILL: You’ve never had any payroll robberies or anything…

HATLER: No. We never used anything but checks for our pay.  Either payroll…

MILL: Have you notice a difference in the quality of workers that you get over the years?

HATLER: Absolutely.  Very defiantly.

MILL: Can you associate it with a period; like, were workers better when you started?

HATLER: I think that the older workers, the ones that really started, were not so money conscious, and they were more reliable as a whole.  We have down in the mill in our whole operation we have a number of men that you couldn’t ask for a better crew.  And we also have a group, I guess you would call it a crew, well they are here today and gone tomorrow.

MILL: was that less of a problem, this transient in-and-out in the old days? Did people stay longer?

HATLER: Oh yes, it was a… 

(talking to a dog that is interrupting in the background)

MILL: Has technology that has come into your mill made any difference on workers attitudes and perhaps a contentment?  I mean, I sense, and it is only an idea, that in the old days of being in the woods there was less noise and more of a…as opposed to the chainsaws and the big machinery today.  Do you think that this makes any difference on the enjoyability of being out in the woods?

HATLER: No, I really don’t.

MILL: Just in general, not necessarily the mill but going back even further, do you have any…the changes in lifestyles that you have seen…do have anything that you’d like to say on that compared to older lifestyles than today’s?

HATLER: I believe that it is accepting to say that I think that those changes have come about gradually and we’re really hardly aware of them.  One of the subjects that I would like to mention…we never have the vandalism and the mischief and the damage of the sort in those days that we have now.

MILL: Your family, I’d think, is unique today, as I understand it, I think it would be true to say that you have built your family around a work ethic lifestyle and the belief that you keep the family together.  That seem unique today, and apparently it has had some success.  Can you say anything about the problems, the pleasures, or as you reflect back are you glad that made the decision to keep the family together and work?  Has it been more pleasure than problem or is it…?

HATLER: Well, I believe that it has been more of a pleasure than a problem.  Of course, you understand that any operation, I don’t care that it’s the family or not, there are going to be problems that arise, but if you are acting as a unit, you have a better chance of solving the problems than if you’re acting independently. 

MILL: Do you provide the family leadership? Is there a sense that when big decisions are made that you have the final say or is it a collected vote or…?

HATLER: I, on many decisions, as is hang up, in other words, the boys can’t come to a solution, and I give the final decision, but I try to avoid any such methods.

MILL: Have there been any major incidence over the years that you’d like to highlight?

HATLER: In what manner.

MILL: Well, you mention fire.  I suppose that would come as a major incident or anything of that major that would be of interest that I’d like to put in.

HATLER: I don’t believe that I have a good enough recollection.

MILL: when you had a fire that was a major disaster like that, how did you recover?  Was it through your own resources, or did insurance just…

HATLER: We had no insurance.  We never have had insurance on the mill because of the cost.  And the main lawsuit on the mill fire is not the loss of the mill itself, but the loss of production while we were rebuilding.  And as to how we got back into business we had enough capital to do one of two things: we could pay all of our bills or we could keep the money and leave the mill. On account on moral values, we had quite a decision to make and we finally decided that we’d pay all the bills if possible and then we’d depend upon our suppliers to give us credit, which they did—some of the up to a year. And using our own efforts and the good relations we had with the suppliers, why, we managed to get it built back up to where it was producing.

MILL: How about recreation and travel—being this far up here; do you and your family mainly stay around here or do you…what do you do in your leisure time.

HATLER: The Sawmill family—they have no leisure time. 

MILL: Do you have any reflections on the period of the depression and how this affected people’s lives and how they responded to it?

HATLER: I believe that I do.  In fact, I have rather honest convictions about it.  But, the depression came along and people lost their jobs to a great extent and there had no welfare to go on or unemployment of that type, so they had to wrestle for themselves to a great extent. But I found out by watching my neighbors and people around town, and so on, that most people could get along under the circumstances, even if they have to tighten up their belts.  And we had a number of things happen during the depression that showed up a lack of character I really believe.  You didn’t see the hustlers that really wanted to make it, they ran around doing nothing.  You saw them little for work—any kind of work at any kind of a price.  One man that I know of worked for me for a dollar a day and I couldn’t even give him the dollar because I couldn’t trust him to take it home.  I had to go buy the groceries and take them home to him. And he was a very excellent craftsman.  He was really a super worker, and just the way the he reacted.  He didn’t go on welfare and I mentioned that I couldn’t pay him more than a dollar and the reason was because I didn’t have the dollar.  And, yet, we got a long very well and we were had to face the fact that a great many people that weren’t on relief on some type each hacked as they could get in whole people weren’t so dependent on the state to take care of themselves.  They go on welfare without any real reason at all.  There’s a greedy little graph to the system.  One way or another, there’s people on the system that had no right to be on at all.  And there’s people out of the system that should be on.  So it isn’t a fair deal and what I’m more concerned with than that is the matter of fact that I think it is very endureouse to their moral.  When you get a family that…I’ve had dental welfare for three generations.  I think the physicians are getting pretty bad.

MILL: What you started the mill and you divided up the function among your family, how did this work? I mean, who decided who was going to be a mill operator, who was going to be the forester in the woods.  Did this just kind of evolve or was it…?

HATLER: When we first started, we ran the mill part of the time and we were in the woods part of the time, and as we got a little more confidence, or whatever, we sort of worked it out so that each person had the opportunity to get his own job. The division of labor has pretty well carried out by the idea. 

MILL: Are optimistic about the future of your particular mill and logging in general around here.  Have we reached a point where it’s getting more difficult to keep operation or how do you feel?

HATLER:   I feel that we’re going to accept—we’ll have to accept—a poor quality of the logs as being the first grade obstacle and outside of that, if we adapt to using smaller logs and being more careful of our, so called, waste products, I think we can make it alright.

MILL: What changes do you see in your mill? I understand you’re putting in a new operation on your green chain.

HATLER: We are putting on what is going to be an automatic stacker.  That is the first step. It will not be entirely automatic, but as time goes on, it will come out to be probably eighty percent automatic and we are also contemplating putting in a quadrisaw, which means there are four saws working at the same time. 

MILL: How is this going to affect employees? Are you going to be working with less employees or…?

HATLER: When the proposed changes are full in effect we will lose some employees.

MILL: Is this the first time this is happened? Have you steadily grown with more and more employees and now maybe less?

HATLER: Yes, I believe that’s correct. 

MILL: When you first came up here in 1923 how did you use cities like Columbia and Sonora for support?  Was it just for supplies or was there a social life there or dances that people went to?

HATLER: No, I don’t believe that you could say that we were dependent upon the surrounding towns accepting (___) supplies and so on.  I think that our social life was pretty well confined to our smaller communities.

MILL: when you say smaller community, were there any general stores up here to handle that?  There are no stores up here now right around within a few miles.

HATLER: there was a store in Soulsbyville and we do have a store in Unvista.

MILL: what was Twain Harte like in those days?  Is that just a new town?

HATLER: I think you can go ahead and call it a new town.  It has a big grove that is not in the production line.

MILL: I’m surprised that you said Soulsbyville was the nearest…it sound to me like Columbia would be the main town you’d associate with living up here in 1923. Was Soulsbyville more…?

HATLER: I think at that time Soulsbyville was more active than Columbia.

MILL: that was in lumbering? Was that the energy in that town?

HATLER: Soulsbyville was a mining town.  And there was a period of time where all of Columbia, Chinese Camp, Soulsbyville –all those towns—suffered on the count of the lack of mining. And as the occupation gradually expanded, why, the population did too.

MILL: Again, around the 1923 time when people up here wanted to go to town and have a rip roaring time where did they go? Was it Sonora or Soulsbyville? Where was the nightlife and the…

HATLER: Actually, I can’t tell you.  We had a theatre in Sonora, which we waited on a long time. But I didn’t associate with that kind of people.

MILL: Well, the next question you probably wouldn’t know then either.  When I think of people going to town now they go to Sonora and revolve round the bars and the night clubs.  Was it that kind of a bar thing then? Was it, you know, rip roaring, people went in and got drunk and hooted and hollered?

HATLER: yes, I believe that the same situation exists. 

MILL: How about Columbia.  I know that it’s basically a tourist town now.  1923, were tourists coming up then?

HATLER: very few.  As a matter a fact, we hardly knew what a tourist was.

MILL: Well, as I understand it, any social life that went on in those days, again 1923, was mostly community oriented. Does that mean things like barn dances?  Did those things occur up here?

HATLER: yes.  And they had baseball games and a great many of them were interested in baseball at that time and they had dances and, of course, they had regular church going too.

MILL: What was the church up here?  Was it nondenominational or where was the church that people associated with here on Big Hill?

HATLER: the nearest church on big Hill was at Columbia, but most people didn’t go to the Columbia church because that was Catholic and most of them at the particular time were Protestants.  

MILL: Were the dances…were they square dances, or what was the form of dancing then?

HATLER: the waltz and the square-dances were the most prominent.

MILL: Who played the music? Was it just local musicians or did bands come to town?

HATLER: Well, there were several types.  We had phonographs, we had local musicians, sometimes we had a band.

MILL: When you went to the dance, did people go just for the dance or was it like a picnic too—an all day affair—or…?

HATLER: Often when we went to dances they were held in the evenings and…

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Mill, Neil

Interviewee: Hatler, Vernon (Founder of Hatler's Mill)

Name of Tape: Interview with Vernon Hatler, founder of Hatler's mill (hatler_v_0)

When: 5/29/1974

Transcriber: Ariella (10/ 24/08)

Transcriber’s Note: n/a