I lived in Bates 20 years to the day. I was born in Prairie City on Sept 27, 1956, and left Sept 27, 1976; so the memories I have span that time, but the history of my family and of the people who lived there go back further.

I was the youngest of four children. My parents were Harold and Stella Blume. My father came to Bates in 1945, after serving in World War II, in a submarine off the coast of New England.

He worked for Hines (lumber company) for 33 years. He pulled green chain for 11 years, then went into the woods to become a faller.

He was known as one of the best fallers in Bates. A photographer went to the Hines office. They wanted to do a display for the Grant County Fair and they wanted the best logger in the woods. Leona Reid, who was the only woman to work at the mill in the office, told him that would be Harold Blume. The pictures showed my dad falling trees and bumping knots. When the office closed, Leona called my sister, Charlene Ledbetter, and gave the photos to her. Our family has the photos of my dad doing what he loved and what he did to support his family.

My father was injured several times in the woods. He cut is leg almost off twice. Had a tree fall on him that injured his back. That kept him out of the woods, and for a time he tried driving log truck. But the woods was where he wanted to be. He worked with broken ribs, pneumonia.

He had his first heart attack in the woods. The next day was the first day of deer season. Him and My brother, Bruce Blume, who came from Alaska, went out, shot a buck, gutted it out.

My father sent my brother for the rig, and he pounded himself on the chest and kept walking around to keep his heart pumping. The doctor said later that had he sat down he would have died. He came home, told my mother he didn’t feel well and wanted to go to bed. She finally realized what was the matter and got him to the hospital. You didn’t take sick days or time off in those days . The men in Bates, like my father, got up every day – when it was 20 degrees below zero .Or when they were sick and went to work. There is a song about loggers – “Where there walks a logger there walks a man.”

People always said my father looked and acted like Lee Marvin the actor, and he did .

My dad either liked you or he didn’t. But people respected him. He worked hard all his life. He worked hard, lived hard, drank hard. And loved his family. He worked right up until the end. After his last heart attack he developed phlebitis of the intestines. I think he knew he was dying He didn’t know what was wrong, just that he was ill. The doctors told him he needed to change his lifestyle, but my dad didn’t know another way to live. He wanted to die in the woods. On Aug. 3, 1979, the last time I saw my dad alive it was in John Day at the Saw Shop, with his cork boots Levi work pants and his hat tipped to one side getting his saw worked on. He died at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eugene on Aug 18, 1979. He was 53.

My mother came to Bates in 1945 from Harrisburg. She lived in Austin at that time. My great-grandfather, Garett, helped build the mill at Bates. My mom’s brother, Earl Clark, helped tear out the Sumpter Valley Railroad tracks from Austin to Baker City. All her brothers worked at the mill and lived and raised their families there.

My cousin, Gunther Clark, had one of the first motorbikes at Bates and he was our Evel Knievel. We would watch as he tried to get his bike up the reservoir hill that was very steep. He tried to clime every steep hill around and would eventually get it done, either on a bike or jeep.

All the kids in Bates learned to drive at a very early age. The town was private property; so the state police could not touch us unless we crossed over onto the county side or state highway. They use to set on the highway and watch us and wait . They did manage to get some of us. I was stopped the first time at 13. He told me to go home and park that rig until I could see over the steering wheel. I never got a ticket, but my two sisters and brothers all did. Mother would have to take them into Canyon City to court. The judge would let them off.

And, yes, we did hooky-bob. There was a lot more snow then, three or four feet every winter and very cold. Before I was born, a girl, Carol Holtuson, lost her leg. Her brother was pulling them and he went around a corner and her sled got too close to the tire and she tried to kick herself away from the tire and her leg got wrapped around a chain. It tore her left leg off.

We didn’t get snow days in those days We went to school no matter what. I never missed a day because of the weather. The school at Bates went grades first through eighth until the early 1970s. Then just to the sixth. Then we went to Prairie City. That was a shock, not just for us kids, but the teachers at PC. They weren’t always sure what to do with the kids from Bates. We had small classes – two classes in one room. And we were not use to a lot of structure. And then to be thrown into all that. They said the Class of ’76 was the worst. We were the last graduating class from Bates before the mill went down. There were

12 kids from Bates that graduated in 1976 from Prairie City .

Myself and three other girls skipped school the day the last log went through the mill. We were never allowed to go near the mill when we were growing up. And I wanted to see the power house, where they blew the whistle. My brother-in-law worked there. And I wanted to see how it all worked and what it looked like and to see where my father and brother and uncles and cousin and people I had known all my life went and worked every day.

The principle at Prairie City at the time was Bryon Rudishauser. We had went to him and asked if the senior class could take a field trip to Bates and watch the last log go through, since so many of us had a connection to the mill. He would not give us permission and told us to get to class. Most of the class went back to class, except myself,

Julie Wright, Kim Zimmer and Susan Horell.

We got notes from our parents and off we went. We drove to Bates went to the office to ask Leona Reid the office manager if she would take us through the mill. She gave us hard hats and off we went. And on that day myself Julie, Kim and Susan watched as Chic Thompson sawed the last few logs from the mill pond that my father had cut down go through the mill to the green chain then over to the dry kiln. Later the logs would would be trucked over to Seneca and put on railroad cars to Burns.

Leona wrote a letter telling Mr. Rudishauser when we got there and when we left, but we were all kicked out of school anyway. Was it worth it ? Yes it was . I have a memory, along with three other girls, that I will cherish the rest of my life. I can still smell the smells of that mill. Hear the sounds of it. Hear the log and lumber trucks. Listen for the whistle that said it was time to come home for dinner.

Later, an Edward Hines Lumber Co. Scholarship fund was established at Prairie City High School. Mr. Rudishauser told the story of the four girls who skipped school that November in 1975. He did not mention names, but had finally realized the importance and the significance that the mill had on the people of Grant County.

A lot of the people in Grant County thought of the people of Bates as riffraff. Mill people. Poor people. White trash. Yet that mill and the men who worked there spent their hard-earned money in John Day and surrounding towns, and paid taxes that helped the county and the school district. The Grant County Federal Credit Union started at Bates.

There are people from Bates who have done things. Bert Thompson was on the Arizona the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. Robin Thompson was in Vietnam and was hit by a sniper and received a Purple Heart in the 1960s. Freeman Brooks was in the CIA and also has an unofficial stretch of Highway 26 between Prairie City and Bates they call “Freeman’s Freeway.” Denny Cook was one of Les Schwab ‘s first right-hand men in the early days of the company. He worked in John Day and later up in Lewiston, Idaho.

Many good athletes came from Bates and helped PC win many district championships and state championships – in all the sports, boys and girls. They made up a lot of the best teams that Prairie had.

In 1966, we moved out of our Bates house, and we moved into the original Austin House, between Bates and Austin.

Henry Rico owned the land that Bates sat on and the surrounding area. I could look out my upstairs bedroom window and see the whole town. I watched as my town slowly disappeared, as there were less and less lights and the people moved away.

Some took their houses with them . A company came in and moved the houses out. I worked every summer up at the Austin House Restaurant. And I watched them move house after house, and the school house to Prairie City and John Day. Some also went to Sumpter. I watched all this with disbelief, as did most of the people – our town was being wiped out . There would not be anymore Bates . There would be no more weddings or baby and bridal showers at the Community Hall . The Hall had been where we went to church , had vacation Bible school. Had the March of Dimes Bingo Night. Our school Christmas programs. The Bates Women’s Club would be gone. The credit union potlucks.

I received my polio vaccination there. I watched my brother Bruce and sister Charlene graduate eighth grade from there.

There would be no more Fireman’s New Year’s Eve Dance. Yes Bates had its own volunteer fire department. My father was the fire chief for many years. We had a red phone in our house, it was our 9-1-1.

Henry Rockenbrant use to put on ham feeds for all the kids at Bates at his own expense. Halloween – now that was a night. Elk season started about then and in would come the Portland hunters, and they wanted to hunt where our dads went. We didn’t want them hunting in our woods so most of the kids would do our best to keep them from getting down the river road. The kids would fall trees across the road, roll culvert pipe across the roads or just tell lies on where to go. The next mourning the school bus driver, Bill Hamock or Jack Reid would make the boys get off the bus and move all stuff off the roads.

And tell us that was a good way to get our dads fired. No one ever got hurt. It was just a lot of fun.

In the winter we had a great sledding hill, but it was cold so we would go down to truck shop and steal new tires to burn. A lot of beer also was stolen out the back door of the Bates Store. I am sure Mr. Leishman knew all about it and just put it on our dad’s beer bill.

I could not have ever wanted to grow up anywhere else in the world. My mother is an artist. She painted several pictures of the original Austin House where I grew up that still hang in the Austin House Restaurant at the junction, and she also painted a picture from our front door looking down the valley to Bates and the mill, with Dixie Mountain in the background. I have it hanging in my home. So I look at it every day and see the town that I grew up in and then left.

They say you can’t go home, but every two years I go back to a place, step out of my car and return to a place where everyone knows my name and that I was Harold and Stella Blume’s daughter. That I learned to sing on top a bar stool for a pop or candy bar. That my life almost ended on a cold March morning in 1968, when my nightgown caught fire from standing too close to our fireplace – our only heat source. They took me up to the company nurse, Mable Johns, and she gave me a shot of morphine, wrapped me in a wet sheet and they got me to the hospital in John Day. The whole town rallied around my parents. I still have the scars. Or that in May 1975 the little girl from Bates with the big mouth sang her heart out to win the title of Miss Prairie City. I wrecked My folks Buick twice, ran a Toyota pickup off the bridge at Prairie City into the river and by the grace of God walked away.

The people from a little town called Bates open their hearts to love me and accept me just the way I am. They understand who I am and where I came from. In the 30 years I’ve been gone I have never found that anywhere else. My roots run deep in that valley, because that is home to me.

The town is gone, but the spirit that made Bates what it was will go on.

There were 12 kids from Bates that graduated from Prairie City in 1976. We were the last class to graduate while the mill was still running. Of those 12 , five of us were the youngest of our families – myself, Roger Clark, Steve Combs, Donna Frazier and Pat Workman We were the last of our generation that grew up in Bates and watched as our town disappeared . We were the last to go we shut off the lights and closed the door to make our homes someplace else.