Times might be a little tight for logger Willie Bunting and his company, Pickin’ Pines Inc., located here, but not too terribly bad, he says. There are plenty of folks in his line of work (logging and timber purchasing) not doing nearly so well. And by all accounts, Bunting is doing okay.

In the early 1990s, outlaw country rocker Travis Tritt had a minor hit, now obscure, in a blue-collar blues anthem called “Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man.” One line in the song summed up its theme by asking a question: “Why’s the fat man busy dancing/while the thin man pays the band?”

Mill town crowding also contributed to an increased incidence of contagious disease, especially in the early decades of the boom era, when companies paid less attention to employees’ health. Claude and Liddie Kennedy left several dead infants behind them in different mill town graveyards. Around 1903, smallpox and typhoid became so bad at the new Kirby mill town of Silsbee that the company doctor ordered wives to keep their children inside, lest they be infected by germs shaken from the pine coffins of disease victims wagoned through town on their way to the cemetery.

In the midst of these tough times it’s sometimes easy to forget how good most of us actually have it. It’s trite but true: no matter how bad you have it, someone else always has it worse. Money is tight, businesses are failing and jobs are scarce. But, even then, most of us are still living a more comfortable existence than just about every other person who has ever lived anywhere in the history of humanity.

You expect peak performance from the forestry equipment you use every day, so putting aside some time for basic undercarriage maintenance not only ensures maximum uptime but also could help head off potential problems.

My first item of business here is to again publicly thank John Deere for its continued generous support of the American Loggers Council. John Deere hosted ALC’s focused lobbying visit in Washington, DC in May and dispatched Andrew Bonde and Nate Clark to join our group. It was a very successful event.

Ancient Egypt was old. It was inhabited by gypsies and mummies, who wrote on hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

Fifty years ago, about the only major pest threatening forest resources in Texas was the southern pine beetle, a native bark beetle that affects pine forests in all Southern states. Then, in the early 1980s, oak wilt became a focus of attention as large acreages of valuable live oaks and red oaks in central Texas succumbed to this disease. Research, suppression and prevention efforts on these two pest problems alone have occupied Texas forest entomologists and pathologists for many decades.