The lost novels of AberdeenBy Ryan Teague
Beckwith At the height of the Great Depression in 1935, a wide-eyed Weatherwax High student named Bill Coldiron decided to make a little money and ended up writing a novel. The lumber industry was in an uproar over demands for new contracts by union workers affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. By May, 30,000 timber workers -- nearly 50 percent of those working in the Northwest -- were on strike. Mill owners were desperate for scabs. "The plywood industry had imported a lot of people and hired a bunch of us kids," Coldiron recalls from his home near San Francisco. "We did it more for a lark than anything else -- well, not for a lark, I mean, we needed the money. They made a vow to the death that our jobs were safe and all that nonsense. Then they made a deal with the union and -- boom! -- we were out in nothing flat." Coldiron was upset, but not nearly as much as his friend Ben Cochrane, whom he he had met during his time as a scab at Harbor Plywood in Aberdeen. Cochrane was a real Jack London type, born on one of the largest stock ranches of Washington. He later boasted that he had hoboed all over the West by "side-door Pullman" train car and "working in the mines, lumber camps and mills, saw life as it really is." During the strike, Cochrane had been a muscle-man for the owners. "He was sort of a rough-and-tumble character, the kind of guy you wouldn't want to get into trouble with in a bar, that's for sure," Coldiron says. "He was sort of the majordomo of the group that was in opposition to the unions. They used to roam around and windows were broken and things like that. He was the guy that led the troops, so to speak." He was also one of the first to go when the strike ended. For all of their promises, mill owners couldn't keep a hired thug around once the union was back in the mill. Cochrane stewed over his situation for a while and decided what he wanted to do: He was going to write a novel. A fictionalized tell-all account, revealing the tactics of the strikebreakers and showing the disillusion that he felt as one. Not having had much education, he turned to Coldiron, who had sold his first short story -- a Western -- to a magazine a year earlier at the age of 16. Over a month, the two collaborated on the manuscript for a novel they called "Disillusion." Cochrane left town and Coldiron next heard from him four years later when he received a few copies of the book from a Portland publisher. If that was all there was to his story, Bill Coldiron would be just another footnote in the history of literature in the Pacific Northwest. Even he doesn't think the book he co-wrote was very good, and he hasn't seen a copy of it in years. But the publication of "Disillusion" just before World War II also marked the end of a remarkable era of literary productivity on Grays Harbor. In the eight years between 1931 and 1939, five different novels were published that were set in and around mills on the Harbor, nearly all in Aberdeen or a fictional version of it. Books by Louis Colman, Clara Weatherwax and Robert Cantwell melded realistic accounts of life in the timber industry with radical socialist politics and helped define an entire movement of blue-collar fiction across the United States. Robert Cantwell's second novel, "The Land of Plenty," is a genuine classic of Northwest literature and a good read, no matter the era. The other books are more interesting for their historical value and the author's politics than they are for any purely aesthetic reasons. But aside from a handful of academics, few people remember the forgotten novels of Aberdeen. |