COLLINS AND DICKSON WERE TWO TALL FIRS--THEIR ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN ADVANCING FOREST PRACTICES WILL LIVE FOREVER

By Dave James

	CHAPIN COLLINS of The Montesano Vidette and Dave Dickson of The Elms Chronicle. A pair, as the poker wizards say, to draw to. No newspapermen in the Pacific Northwest ever gave greater study and support to responsible forestry in terms of stable communities.

	Their careers were in the era that felt the discouragement and setbacks of the Great Depression. Yet neither would be halted or flattened by the dark times of the '30s. Each was a respected leader in his home town, both advocates of hope in the years when hopelessness thrived.

	Both were Seattle natives, trained in journalism at the University of Washington, reporters on daily newspapers who left the cities to succeed as small-town weekly editors. Their noteworthy accomplishments in advancing forest practices were the Elms Survey of 1941, in which Dickson played such an effective role, and the American Tree Farm Movement, which Collins inspired and espoused from 1941 through the next 30 years.

	THE Elma Survey was the first instance during the Depression of a small American community sizing up how it could rebuild its economy when its original forests were cut out. The survey made such widespread impressions it was featured in an article economist Stuart Chase wrote for The Readers Digest. The survey inspired other communities across the nation to look for a way out instead of whining.

	(As a matter of history, every library and history society in these parts should have a copy of The Elma Survey. It can be found in the College of Forest Resources library at the University of Washington).

	Dave Dickson was the communicator who made the self help project known to Elma area residents. He was chairman of the steering committee, aided by School Superintendent Paul A. Davis and businessman P.E. Barthen. Attorney Eugene S. Avey, a fisherman and naturalist, who wrote frequently for Harbor newspapers, was chairman of an Elma Chamber of Commerce Committee of 21. The survey was conducted and prepared by the Washington State Planning Council in cooperation with Elma people and assisted by private, county, state and federal agencies.

	IN his foreword to the completed survey, B.H. Kizer of Spokane, chairman of the planning council, wrote:

	"It is believed that this is the first survey undertaken in the Pacific Northwest, perhaps the first in our country, where so thorough an effort has been made to survey and appraise all the factors pertinent to regional welfare, the good and bad news alike, and where so many individuals and agencies have joined in the task.

	"Although conducted by the state planning council, the people of Elma feel it is their own. They helped make it..."

	Full credit was given to Editor Dickson by Elma people for encouraging their participation and energetic support. The gist of the survey was its call for reforestation and sustained yield management of timberlands supportive of the area.

	ABRUPT closure of the Malone sawmill in 1938, casting out of work a third of the area's millhands and loggers, had come as a stunning blow. Compounding the concern, it was known that Henry McCleary's aging plywood and door plants in the town of McCleary were out of timber and about to close. It was a bleak period, indeed. Not known when the survey was made public in 1941 was that Simpson Logging Company's purchase of the McCleary company, town, mills and cut over lands would come on the last day of 1941.

All that Dave Dickson did for the Elma region in his 25 years as Chronicle editor resulted in an unusual final edition in February, 1953, the week after he announced he would sell his paper to Jim Coble. His health failing; Dickson had arranged to move to Olympia. That final week, unbeknownst to him, business and professional men of Elma filled the Chronicle with ads and statements thanking Dickson for all he had done for the town. All of his fellow publishers from Grays Harbor County signed a glowing tribute. Leading newspapers around the state editorialized on his departure, for Dickson was a popular man in his profession. He died a month later. Memory of his years as a county editor are his monument in Elma.

DOWN the road a piece is neighboring Montesano. Here the Vidette, founded in 1883 and the senior citizen of all Grays Harbor newspapers, became the forum for ideas the imaginative William Chapin Collins would weave and spin for 36 years.

	"Chape" actually preceded Dave Dickson in Elma. In 1926 he came to the town where, years earlier, editor Paul W. Harvey had cleansed the streets of wandering milk cows. Collins ran the Elma Chronicle for a year before the Vidette came up for sale in 1927. Collins saw Montesano as a place where the action would be if he kept a close eye on the county Courthouse.

	So fate fixed it that when Collins stepped into the Vidette, Dickson stepped into the Chronicle.

	For over 40 years there have been signs on the outskirts proclaiming Montesano as the home of America's first tree farm. This was the timber country first logged by Charlie Clemons, father of Montesano's amiable historian, Charles H. Clemons. Acquired by Weyerhaeuser, the Clemons lands were put under tree farm management in 1941, the first of 15 American tree farms registered in that historic year.

	DURING the study years of the Elma Survey, Chape Collins was making his own observations of the fate facing all Grays Harbor communities as the donkey whistles retreated deeper into the hills.

	Chape spent days at a time soaking up knowledge of soil types and tree species that could bring new forests to replace what had once seemed like endless spreads of old growth. He hounded foresters for the facts.

Convinced that timber could be replaced, he began swinging his editorial ax at government agencies and private corporations without favor. He saw it as a public responsibility for those owning forest lands to replant trees, prevent fires, control disease and develop new processes for converting second growth into the thousands of wood products needed by the nation's consumers.

	This, began before 1940. Industry was being prodded by Col. William B. Greeley, former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, to prove to the public by action, not words, that timber harvesting followed by replanting was a creator, not a waster, of forest lands. Chape used that message as his editorial cudgel.

	He coined the term "tree farm." He saw the regrowth of trees as a process of farming. Others have claimed credit for inventing the term. Credit mattered little to Chape. He said it made no difference "who thought it up" as long as it carried the message.

	Chape's evangelism for America's only renewable natural resource was shunted aside in 1942 when the War Department decided it must have the bespectacled and non-militaristic Vidette editor to shave off Adolf Hitler's mustache. Chape took off his printer's apron and went into itchy khaki without protest. His "Chapin's Column" continued to appear in the Vidette but the subjects were about the despair of generals trying to make him into a soldier. Chape stuck it out for a year before Eisenhower decided he'd never fit into a foxhole and demobilized him.

	That freed editor Collins into getting back to writing about tree farms.

	COLLINS became so well known that American Forest Products Industries, a national trade group, lured him into becoming its national director in Washington, D.C. Chape and his family endured life in Foggy Bottom from 1943 until 1948, when the Vidette beckoned him home to Montesano. His contributions to reforestation and fire prevention benefited every state where tree farming took root. Millions of trees now maturing into product size were planted during Chape's working years with A.F.P.I. (Another former Harbor editor who represented A.F.P.E. in the Pacific Northwest was The Aberdeen Daily World's ex-managing editor, Harold "Viking" Olson, now chumming with Father Time in Woodburn, Ore.)

	Chapin Collins gave the appearance of being a shy guy who hung back, waiting for others to speak first. This was his polite way of doing business. He had a mind as sharp as a falling ax and a gentle way of asking the right questions with the disarming grin of a kindly pixie.

	Keeping Montesano's neat appearance was one of his favorite topics. Flowering trees, green shrubs and bright flowers resulted from his "tidy up" editorials. While Chape was away in the East, Montesano's city fathers chopped down blocks of shade trees that had beautified the streets for decades. Damage to sidewalks was given as the reason.

	It saddened Chape that he had to be away at a time when he would have defended what he considered one of the town's scenic assets. He wrote:

"We cannot expect Montesano to become a great industrial center, but it can become the most attractive residential area of Grays Harbor. But it must be inviting and it must be beautiful. Our front yard bids visitors linger here a while. It suggests to them that here is a community of people who love their homes and who are proud of their city."

	CHAPE had good reason to be proud of many constructive projects he got going through the columns of his Vidette. Perhaps his greatest satisfaction came from guiding into the building of Montesano's fine library a citizen's bequest of $70,000 that narrowly escaped becoming a swimming pool. It took some wily maneuvering by Chape but the city council finally went for books and knowledge the year around instead of a swimming hole useful only in hot weather.

	Chape didn't shirk public service. He willingly accepted being a doer as well as a commentator. He was elected to the Port of Grays Harbor Commission in 1954 and served for 18 years.

	Chape's 36 years as editor of the Vidette ended in 1963 when he sold his paper to the Perkins Press of Olympia. He recognized the toll of the passing years. His final column said:

	"I'm realistic enough to know that 'Kid Collins' who came to Montesano and the Vidette at age 26 isn't fast enough today to dodge all the blows and deliver some, too, as a good newspaperman must."

	On the other hand, in the late '60s Chape accepted an offer to cover the Courthouse for The Daily World and still had some good blows left. Always a good newspaperman, he studied budgets and reports and often had officials squirming.

	The Port of Grays Harbor honored Chape by naming a "Collins Avenue" in its Westport development. In 1977, five years after his death at age 71, the City of Montesano dedicated its 5,000-acre watershed as the Chapin Collins Memorial Forest. A fine tribute to a fine man.

	A retired vice president of public affairs for the Simpson Timber Co., Dave James was a newspaperman in the Northwest for 20 years. He has written a number of books, including "Grisdale: Last of the Logging Camps" and edited Ed Van Syckle's two definitive books on Harbor history.--The Daily World, June 2, 1991