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STAN BISHOP—A TRUE SOURDOUGH 

EARLY YEARS IN CALIFORNIA

Louise: How old were you when you came up here the first time?
Stan: Nineteen. I went to work for wages when I was 15 and I had a lot of projects going on. I had a tree nursery in my home town. I raised Bartlett pear trees and sold 'em to the local orchardists. And I had a big flock of chickens that I raised according to the directions from the farm agent, extension service. They set me up for a chicken ranch and so I had a lot of things going all the time. I was never idle very long at a time.

So it was quite natural for me to get a job anywhere I could get it. And when I got up to Bend, Oregon, I was pretty young but I got a job in the sawmill, tailing a gang edger where they put eight logs through at a time in a gang saw and then they break 'em loose all at once and here all this mass of boards come out as they're traveling at a goodly rate of speed and you've got to throw the edgings off either side down onto a conveyer underneath and jump around in between these boards 'cause they're traveling at you and still not miss any of 'em because if you miss one, then you gotta shut the conveyor belt down and go down and get that piece off because it goes into the cut-off, ....you did that all day. There was no such thing as taking a break for anything. In those days you got 10 minutes to go to the toilet. They give you ten minutes. But you had to be back at the end of 10 minutes. You had to call a relief man in to take your place while you went to the toilet. And it was hard work. But I gloried in it.

Don: Would that be redwood?
Stan: No, Ponderosa Pine. It was in Bend, Oregon. They had vast, beautiful timber in those days. It was all virgin pines, tall pines that go up 40, 50, 60 feet without a limb on it at all, two and three feet through.

And when I got ready to go back to school, the foreman came around and said, "Where are you going, kid? I hear you're quittin'." I said, "I'm going back to go to school." He said, "Well, you better just stick around here. You'll never do anything with school. I'll put you on a better job. I've had my eye on you." "Well, can't help it," I said, "I gotta go back to school." So I quit and bought this Ford I was telling you about for 14 dollars. And I ran out of money and picked up scraps of copper wire to sell at the junk yard to make money enough to buy gas to get home with.

Irene: Tell them what you did with your money, though.
Stan: Oh, well, at the last minute I wanted to do something good for my family so--we had a new house built in California, but we didn't have anything in the bathroom. We had a bathroom built but nothing in it except a water bucket and wash basin. So I bought a complete bathroom outfit at Sears and told 'em to deliver it to Georgetown [In the Sierra Nevada foothills, on Highway 193, north of Placerville] up in the mountains. And my mother wouldn't accept it....and the trucker didn't know where it came from or anything. He says, "We got instructions to leave it here." "Well," she says, "you might have to come back and get it later on." So they deposited the tub and sink and toilet and toilet bowl …it didn't take me long to install the whole thing when I got back home. And that was our first bathroom. We'd been taking a bath in a wash tub before, galvanized wash tub.

Louise: So why did you come up here?
Stan: Well, that's a long story, too. I'd been guiding and helping the Hoover family on their trips to the mountains and their nephew was about the same age as I so we got along fine together and I went along with 'em and showed 'em where to camp and used my local knowledge to show 'em around. And this was Mrs. Hoover, Lou Henry Hoover, and her father, Mr. Henry, and he was pretty old and had to be watched all the time, [he] could easily get lost, and their Filipino cook and Delano, their nephew. He was about the same age as me and when we could take the time off we went fishing together and stuff like that.

But I went along as kind of liaison between the country and the Hoover family and they kind of adopted me. And when Hoover was nominated for president, they invited me down to the nomination. And I had to drive all night with this old rattletrap car I had and I pulled up in front of their place at 327 Laredo Street in Palo Alto and was showed to our room. And I was so proud of this old car that I had. Mrs. Hoover came to the door and said, "Stanley, if you don't mind, I wish you'd drive that car around to the back." I didn't know what she wanted me to do that for, she said, "It might be in the way of some of the people coming to visit." So I moved around off--I guess it was kind of an eyesore to them.

But I had a beautiful room in their Spanish house. Every room had a little patio with flowers on it and everything. You could look all over Palo Alto and Stanford University campus...And for several years I visited them and I learned a lot from Mrs. Hoover. She was a very gracious lady, well-educated and hospitable and although I was just a mountain boy, not even dry behind the ears, she told me how to eat. And they had lots of famous company and I had my place at the table just like the rest of 'em. And she told me, "Stanley, start with your outside silver, you work from the outside in, that's the way it's arranged, that's the way it'll be on the table. And she said, "If you're in doubt, watch other people." And things like that, you know that I hadn't known about. And it was mainly through them that I got this job out at the hatchery. [The Yes Bay, Alaska salmon hatchery.]

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Related Alaskan stories:

"Stan and the Milk Run"

"Tales of Yes Bay, Alaska"

         
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