 I'm Paul Tipton, I'm president of the McKee Bridge Historical Society and we're here today at the McKee Bridge Centennial Celebration. What do you mean, Sathri? Evelyn Williams. What are you doing here? We're descendants of the McKees that the bridge was named after. And we belong to the Historical Society. The McKee Bridge Historical Society. I came to Southern Oregon in 1972 after having been in US Navy Seabees for three years and made two trips to Vietnam. I grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My great-grandfather was a photographer at Savoy taking pictures of the aftermath of the Civil War. I came here in 1972 to get away from the war and the fact that I wasn't very well accepted in my community when I came home from Vietnam. But I've been here. I started working for the Forest Service the first year that I came to Oregon and worked for the Forest Service as a seasonal employee for about six seasons and worked right here in this area in the Applegate Drainage and Star Ranger District. It's actually where I met my wife and we've been married now for 40 years and have three children and that we've raised up in the Applegate on Humbug Creek is where we live and we've lived there now since for 40 years actually since 1977. I came to be interested in the McKee Bridge and the Historical Society because as a boy I grew up fishing from a covered bridge right outside of Gettysburg, the Sacks Covered Bridge which is only about a mile down the road from the Eisenhower Farm. And as a boy I really enjoyed hanging out around the bridge and fishing and I still enjoy fishing and hanging around old bridges. The place that I grew up was a very conservative place and I think that the West Coast in this area is a bit more liberal generally. I actually came here to visit a friend that I had been in the service with and had been through some experiences with. He was getting a teaching degree at Southern Oregon College at the time and I ended up going to college at Southern Oregon College over a number of years and eventually got a degree in creative writing there at Southern Oregon State College. That was about 1984 whenever I graduated from there. Lawson's a good old friend of mine. We've connected a long time actually. I did know art. I did know art. He's not involved. Is art still alive? Okay. That's what I was thinking. I was thinking that he had passed. Well he was much younger than he is today but then so am I. I remember Lawson being someone who was very open to most anybody in the community, a very open person. I especially given what I came to find out about Lawson and everything that Lawson had been through as far as being in the camp, the internment camp in Tule Lake and all of that. So that really struck me that he was such an open person given what he had to experience in his own life. The spoken part of it is what I've always enjoyed as a poet myself. I've enjoyed for the most part the spoken aspect of poetry. It's nice to get your works published because more people can see them that way but they can only hear them if you speak them. So I continue to be involved and Lawson actually came out to the Applegate area about a year and a half ago and Jonah Peterson, you may know Jonah and Chris Lawson are longtime friends as well. So at her urging he came out and got a bunch of people together at the same time. So we started an Applegate Poets Group. So we've been doing poetry readings locally in the area and just a month and a half ago we did a reading over at Bloomsbury in Ashland, a couple of readings actually. I was only in one of them. So Lawson still continued to be an inspiration for a lot of people I think as far as all of that. He was a great influence on me at that time as far as getting into writing and through writing classes that I did with him and others there at school. I eventually wrote quite a bit about my Vietnam experiences. Some of it published as individual poems and short stories, vignettes of different things. I have a longer body of work that I hope to put together someday but haven't had the chance to do that at this point. A lot of the stuff that I wrote then and I still am afflicted by it, I guess I can't seem to get away from the Vietnam experience as far as how it still affects me. I am considered a disabled veteran and the PTSD aspect of it has certainly influenced my whole life. But there is a certain value still to me in being able to express in that way to get feelings out in some sort of form that's workable I guess. Well I didn't know for sure. I hadn't been here before so I didn't know what it was going to be but I found Ashland to be a very liberal place and certainly there had been a lot of anti-war demonstrations through the college and stuff at that time and that was all pretty much over by the time I got there but there was not as much of a prejudice I guess against those of us who had been to Vietnam simply as patriotic sons and did our duty and came back and found that people didn't want to hear about it or had already made decisions about who we were or how we were from our experience and I think we were prejudged in a lot of situations. I moved into a relatively rural farming community and I had a hard time finding work in those days. I did a lot of farm work I actually worked at Valley View Vineyard for about six years after Frank Woznowski the person the man who started the vineyard there he died in a diving accident during the filling of Lost Creek Lake back in 1978 I believe it was he died and shortly after that I started working at Valley View picking grapes and then pruning and eventually for a number of years I was the farmer in the vineyard there pretty much I was the vineyard manager taking care of the vines there. From that I went into some other agricultural work work was real difficult to find back during the 80s and you kind of had to take what was available at one point I had a job for about eight or ten months with a CEDA program CETA where I was working at what was the Southern Oregon Historical Society Museum in Jacksonville the old courthouse in Jacksonville that still stands. So I had the chance to be working there and be involved in collections so I was working on a lot of stuff that was behind the scenes things going through things and inventorying them trying to preserve some things for later historical value that's just things that were stored away and a lot of it is they have so much stuff that it can't all be displayed and of course these days a lot of that is in warehouses out in White City or something it's just not in the public eye at all anymore. So eventually I went back to doing what I had done in my younger life I started out doing steel work and when I was a teenager and I worked doing steel work while I was in the Navy and I was in the Navy Seabees construction battalions and so I went back into construction and pretty much the rest of my work life until I retired a few years ago was doing construction on local houses and different kinds of projects whole houses remodels that sort of thing. And I actually I live in the woods I live in a fairly rural situation where I don't have a whole lot of other people real close around me and I find a lot of solace in the woods actually the forest has been a very important thing to me. The work I did with the forest service primarily in silver culture and so in the study of and the work of harvesting trees and I did some firework as well I worked on a number of big fires that happened during the early 70s. I had the interesting chance in we had a large flood in 1972-73 the winter of 72-73 flood took out a lot of the bridges throughout the forest and in the local area there was a lot of damage down in Liffey Park and stuff too. So in the three or four years after the flood when those bridges weren't repaired we were often ferried into work by helicopters so we get dropped in on top of a mountain and work our way down and be picked up at the end of the day. It was a kind of a different experience for me because I'd been ferried around in Vietnam to work situations in helicopters I'd lived under 60 or 70 flying around in the air above me at times and I still have a very strong hit every time I hear a helicopter blade clear the horizon it changes something for me but the thing about this was it was very interesting to use the helicopter as a tool to be able to see down onto the forest to see the shape and the lay of things to see where the roads might go to where the cuts had already happened and all of that it was a very good overview because otherwise we only had stereoscopic pictures that we used to be able to look down into a photo of what was down there but flying over it made it entirely different. Things changed as far as forest harvesting from the 1970s into the 1980s. The Forest Service probably hadn't done enough work as far as making sure that they could in fact grow trees where they said they could grow trees. They were harvesting at a very big rate and their justification was that by using herbicide chemicals they could establish plantations of new trees on the areas that they had harvested. So they could clear cut an area and because they could use herbicides to manage the brush and stuff under it their contention was that within five years they would be able to grow new trees. That was totally false and I was one of the people that was going out and collecting data on what had been done and what was going to be done. I quit working for the Forest Service in 1976. By 1979 Christopher Bratt and myself were co-chairmen of Applegate Citizens Opposed To Toxic Sprays and we were successful in writing a number of timber sale appeals that eventually led to those sales being shut down and never sold and that eventually also led to a forest service wide in the western area anyhow a ban on the use of herbicides for a number of years. So it was significant. On the other hand there was that feeling that we were kind of part of what brought the timber economy to its knees locally. That was not our intention. Our intention was to change it to a better managed way of doing things, something that was more thought out than the process that was happening because they were simply going out and raping whole hillsides and just taking everything, burning it, taking blades across it and scarifying it and some of those sites probably they haven't recovered yet. Some of them from back in the 1950s that were done then still have big brush growing on them and very few coniferous trees. They haven't been able to re-establish those plantations still and here we are almost 70 years out from some of that. It will probably take hundreds of years for some of those places to re-grow on their own if they're left alone. Fishing, the two double sided white skeletal combs dipped deep through salmon pink flesh. Only this morning the galley slave oars of a rainbow ship bursting forth in the depths of a lulled lake. Now, butter and mushroom and parsley and sage sauteed, the salmon pink muscles minus the two double sided white skeletal combs feed my body, speed my journey through this life into the quiet of a lulled lake. It wasn't perfect, but it was close.