Wednesday, Mar. 25, 2009

Mill, town saw generations pass through

STANDARD — The closure of the Sierra Pacific Industries sawmill will end generations of putting dinner on Dunbar family tables.

Sanford Dunbar worked there after coming west decades ago. His son, Clifford Dunbar, toiled for 50 years in the mill, for Pickering, Fibreboard, Louisiana-Pacific and Sierra Pacific. Another family member, Vernon Shaw, spent his career in the mill as well.

Clifford Dunbar's son, 50-year-old Robert Dunbar, vowed he wouldn't follow their lead. But after years of driving trucks, he hired on at the mill 13 years ago.

Dunbar grew up in Standard, in a home near the town's wading pool, and now appreciates the impact the mill made on him, indirectly and directly.

"It's been a big part of my life," he said. "Basically, I've been raised by this lumber mill. I lived in Standard. It was like a big family in that town. It was the greatest place in the world for a kid to grow up."

His options? Hoping to retrain for another job in the Sonora area or moving elsewhere if he's lucky enough to get hired at another Sierra Pacific property.

"I've got my family here," he said. "Everything I own is here. I really want to stay in the area. But if I have to, I will go."

Ellis Ralls, 55, went to work at the Chinese Camp mill in 2005 and moved to the Standard mill a year or so later. He has been in the lumber industry since 1964.

The son of a sawmill worker, Ralls said he went on to get an engineering degree but found the lure of the mills too powerful to leave.

"The people I've worked with have always been decent to me everywhere I went," he said. That included Brazil, where he helped build sawmills and where he met his wife.

He said Sierra Pacific officials say they'll basically mothball the mill, having it ready to go again should the economy turn.

"We just hope it comes back," Ralls said.

Steve's Place, a bar on Tuolumne Road, long had been a favorite after-work watering hole for employees of the mill.

But with the closure of the site's box factory in the late 1970s and its plywood plant in the mid-1990s, and the loss of sawmill jobs to technological advances, the saloon no longer draws the pine-scented clientele of old.

Still, employee Pam Michael said, the final closure in July will be rough on the economy.

"It's hard enough up here anyway when it comes to finding work," she said. "But at least (employees) got a heads-up."

Bee columnist Jeff Jardine can be reached at at 578-2383 or jjardine@modbee.com.