Dressed in a gray tweed jacket with Army-green pants, David Darrow sought to strike a balance of eager, rugged and laid-back.
Being too dressy might signal desperation, yet being too casual could be interpreted as indifference. Such ruminations spun through his head as he awaited his second interview for a job as a customer-care representative for a cell-phone company setting up a new operation here.
To Darrow–approaching 40 and having languished in recent years as a waiter, truck driver and at other jobs that have paid in the $8-an-hour range–the $9.52 starting wage plus generous benefits and prospects of a long-term career were the main draws.
Even so, that pay is far below the peak he earned when he was working in the sawmills in his 20s: $11.45 an hour, an amount that would be almost twice as much in today’s dollars. Like friends, neighbors and generations of timber workers before him, Darrow in 1982 walked into his first mill job; the only qualifications needed were his brawn and high school diploma.
Ten years after the job market here changed forever with the closing of the sawmill that for nearly eight decades established this area as timber land, Darrow is seeking to recapture past prosperity–and so are many others in this picturesque region in central Oregon surrounding the city of Bend.
Across the country, small towns and big cities from Galesburg, Ill., to Gary, Ind., to Flint, Mich., to Binghamton, N.Y., have stumbled after their main industries–appliances, steel, automobiles and cigars, respectively–faltered.
But unlike those communities, the Bend area managed to reinvent itself in the 1980s and ’90s by becoming a tourist destination with first-class ski resorts and golf courses and an upscale retirement community.
Still, the thousands of new jobs in the tourism and retail industries that supplanted the mill jobs largely pay $20,000 a year or less.
So over the years, displaced millworkers who opted to stay have bounced from one low-rung job to the next and struggled to exist in an increasingly affluent area. Darrow has battled to refit himself into an economy that has little resemblance to the one he entered, while competing with some 10,000 newcomers–many of them are highly qualified and willing to take pay cuts–moving to central Oregon every year.
Now for the first time in recent memory, there is hope. T-Mobile, the cellular company that uses actress Catherine Zeta-Jones in its advertisements, has constructed a $20 million, 80,000-square-foot call center near the airport on what once was part of a pine forest. The company is hiring local residents for 700 entry-level jobs to be filled over the next year, a number that would make T-Mobile among the area’s larger employers.
T-Mobile fosters hope
The company has been flooded with applications and inquiries from legions of people who are unemployed or earning $8 an hour or less–including a Transportation Security Administration screener from the airport, a clerk from a local motel, a mechanic from a nearby Jiffy Lube, a DirecTV salesman and former timber workers such as Darrow.
“I think [T-Mobile] will definitely bring more money into the community,” Darrow said at a community college where the interviews were held.
He expressed confidence because earlier in the day he had passed tests assessing his personality, computer skills and ability to interact over the phone with customers. Moreover, he works for another cellular company in a job similar to the one for which he was applying.
“It will allow for more growth and it will provide opportunities to dislocated millworkers,” he said.
Local economic development officials, who launched an aggressive campaign to woo T-Mobile to the area, believe central Oregon desperately needs middle-tier jobs in the corporate sector to balance the area’s manufacturing and tourism base.
Nevertheless, the lingering question for many down-on-their-luck applicants is whether their desire to find high-paying work will dissolve once again into disappointment.
Prospectors in the late 1800s dubbed this section of Oregon as Farewell Bend, for the bend in the Deschutes River they encountered on the way out of the area. The stretch of wilderness contained about a dozen sheep ranches and cattle ranches and an abundance of 400-year-old trees measuring 12 feet around with “ponderous” droopy branches that they called ponderosa pine.
Soon timber mills in the Midwest discovered the area’s vast resources. Around 1900, mills in Minnesota began secretly stockpiling land, using phony homesteaders to take possession before they turned their plots over to the companies.
By 1916, the Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon timber companies were a major presence in Bend, having shifted their operations from the Midwest, where forests were nearly depleted. New rail lines opened a nationwide market to the mills, allowing them to capitalize on the postwar housing construction boom.
For generations the tall, red, barnlike buildings with their distinctive smokestacks, covering more than 400 acres, dominated the skyline. A piercing whistle, signaling shift changes and triggering the entrance and exodus of thousands of workers, could be heard throughout the town.
Clark Gable worked the mills
The promise of steady work and high pay drew eager young men from across the country. Among the famous transients was Clark Gable, who worked in the mills in 1922 before finding his way to Hollywood.
By the time Darrow graduated from high school in 1982, the timber industry was in decline. Shevlin-Hixon had been closed nearly 30 years, the result of dwindling timber supplies. Animal-rights activists were making noise about the endangered northern spotted owl, demanding that the federal government protect it by halting the harvest of old-growth trees.
Still, numerous other mills were going strong. And the industry was the most logical destination for non-college-bound young people.
Darrow’s first mill job involved drilling holes into window frames for latches. The repetition bored him, and he left after four months, beginning a 16-year on-again, off-again relationship with the industry.
He spent a few years working at a restaurant frying chicken and at a now-defunct airline in San Diego taking reservations. But after meeting his future wife on a return trip to visit a friend, Darrow found himself back in the mills.
After three months working as a sawyer, he switched to working the paint line at another mill. Eventually, in 1988 he landed at Consolidated Pine in nearby Prineville, where at age 24 he earned his all-time high wage of $11.45 an hour.
“The saws sounded like a fire department alarm going off constantly,” Darrow recalled while eating an eggs-over-easy breakfast at a diner a few weeks after his job interview with T-Mobile. There was the danger of getting hit by knots flying off the saws, “and guys were constantly getting their hands crushed and stuff.”
Today he still can point to scars where wood splinters punctured his hands.
The backbreaking work gave him an enviable physique. He bought a new red Pontiac Firebird and could afford to have his wife stay home with their two young children. And he was able to make regular treks to Reno for gambling and golf.
But the signs of the mill’s demise were clear: The federal government was cracking down on old-growth harvesting, and the company, Darrow said, was investing little in much-needed new equipment. He jumped before he was pushed.
Three months after he left, the mill laid off the entire line on which he had worked.
Residents say the eclipse of the central Oregon timber industry was complete on Jan. 11, 1994, when Crown Pacific Co. closed the former Brooks-Scanlon mill. The 227-acre property was sold to developers who built a mall with a cinema and shops such as Victoria’s Secret and Banana Republic.
The foundation for the area’s post-timber economy was laid in 1971, when Mike Hollern, then president of the Brooks-Scanlon mill, began brainstorming with other local movers and shakers. They settled on tourism. After all, Scandinavian millworkers transplanted from the Midwest in the 1930s had turned several mountains into Alpine ski slopes. And the area’s vast open spaces and streams had long drawn hunters and fishermen.
“When timber jobs went away, the whole recreation business seemed to be a natural to replace it,” said Hollern, who is chief executive officer of a real estate development company spun off from the defunct mill.
Mt. Bachelor and other ski resorts invested millions of dollars into state-of-the-art lifts to attract more visitors.
But the main strategy was to cater to the affluent crowd through the construction of luxurious hotels, high-end golf courses and year-round condos.
“The most significant shift is that 20 years ago, we were primarily a winter skiing destination. Now we are primarily a golf destination,” said Alana Audette, executive director of the Central Oregon Visitors Association.
According to the Oregon Employment Department, the number of timber workers in central Oregon has remained constant — 4,541 in 1976 compared to 4,704 in 2001– but thousands of higher-paid sawmill jobs have been replaced by lower-paid jobs in the so-called secondary wood product plants that manufacture window and door frames.
During the same period, the number of workers in the tourism industry nearly quadrupled to 10,181 from 2,600.
“I see tourism as the saving grace of central Oregon,” Audette said.
Darrow’s effort to reinvent himself, though, has not been as smooth.
During the early 1990s, he tried selling insurance, as his father did, but he hated it and quit after a year. Distressed over the breakup of his marriage, he moved to Spokane, Wash., and drove a bread delivery truck. Later he moved to Beaverton, Ore., where he delivered pharmaceutical supplies.
By the late 1990s, he was back in central Oregon at yet another mill doing door-molding work. Then he switched to another mill but was laid off after six months. He landed his present job at the iSky cellular call center in 1998 but left to wait tables. He returned last fall.
In frustration, he has watched the area’s middle-class way of life nearly disappear. He laments that residents now fall into two classes–affluent newcomers who are driving up the prices and low-income, longtime residents who are struggling to keep up. While upscale developments have cropped up, Darrow has been living with his sister and her family.
“Real estate has gone way up, and wages haven’t,” he said. “Most [service and tourism industry] jobs are paying $8 or $8.50 an hour. I made that 17 years ago.”
Last summer, T-Mobile selected Redmond from a field of several cities, including Honolulu and Boise, Idaho. Local leaders, seeking to bring back high-paying jobs for low-skilled workers, had wooed T-Mobile through a corporate relocation company owned by former NFL quarterback Roger Staubach.
T-Mobile, the fastest-growing wireless carrier in the country, opened its call center in Redmond last month, with about 225 employees. That number, company officials predict, will grow to 700 by mid-2005. Unlike most other low-skilled work in the area, the T-Mobile jobs are promising to offer generous raises, full medical benefits and a retirement plan.
Bryan Zidar, a spokesman for T-Mobile, said the company was impressed “with the number of people from retail and tourism backgrounds who have worked with customers on a one-to-one basis.”
In the days after his interviews, Darrow found reasons to drive by the construction site, imagining himself at his desk. He dreamed of being able to quit his wanderings, sticking with one company until retirement.
Twelve days after Darrow’s final interview, a letter arrived at his friend’s home where he receives his mail. Darrow’s friend called him, exclaiming that the letter was from T-Mobile.
His friend insisted the letter must be good news. Darrow agreed to have his friend open the envelope and read the letter to him. The letter read in part:
“Dear David,
“Thank you for your interest in a position with T-Mobile.
“A large number of candidates with excellent credentials emerged as contenders. We have completed our initial assessment and, unfortunately, you were not selected at this time. This is not a reflection of you or the quality of your credentials. Rather, it reflects the extremely high level of competition for this particular job.”
Darrow recalled that he and his friend were silent for several moments.
Economic development officials hoped T-Mobile would employ people such as Darrow who have been left behind. Now they concede that their successful campaign to transform the economy from timber to tourism may have backfired.
Affluent elderly moving in
The area has become a magnet for upper-income elderly people–it is consistently ranked by Money magazine as one of the best places in the nation to retire–as well as professionals who will take jobs well below their qualifications just to move here.
“I came here on a skiing trip to Mt. Bachelor with a girlfriend and told myself, `I’m going to move here,'” said Donna Angel, 51.
After the move from Florida, she was unemployed for several months and worked as a temp for several more months before landing a full-time job with an accounting firm. Though she has extensive accounting experience, Angel earns $28,000 a year, an amount she made in 1990 when she was living in Washington state.
“I do everything–hunt, fish and ski,” she said. “I could sit on the Deschutes River waiting for chinook [salmon] to bite all day and be happy.”
Bend’s population has reached 62,900, up from 20,500 in 1990. About 10,000 people move into the region every year, despite dismal job prospects. Central Oregon’s overall unemployment rate in 2002 was 8 percent, half a percentage point higher than the state’s rate, which was the highest in the nation.
Roger Lee, executive director of Economic Development for Central Oregon, said, “It has been an employers’ market for years.”
T-Mobile, he added, has the option of hiring “people with great experience and bachelor’s and master’s degrees for essentially entry-level work.” As an example, he said, 115 people, many with supervisory experience, applied at his agency for an administrative position that pays about $30,000 a year.
Disenchanted with his prospects, Darrow says he has no idea what he will do.
“This is my home. This is where I want to be,” he said. “But it is getting harder to stay here.”
