F.O. "Red" Bateman, Washington Par., Louisiana Submitter: Maude Ann Gilmore Date: Sept. 8, 2006 Donated by: Bonnie Dier Source: The Daily News, Bogalusa, La., June 22, 1976 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ F. O. "Red" Bateman Pioneer Silviculturalist (EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the last of three articles about F. O. "Red" Bateman, chief forest ranger for the Great Southern Lumber Company in the days when the company in Bogalusa was pioneering in reforestation.) by Philip C. Wakeley Red was enthusiastic about his work with all species but almost passionately enthusiastic about longleaf pine. The surest way to get a longleaf problem solved was to hint to Red that it was insolvable. By 1923 he had nursery and planting techniques for loblolly and slash pines pretty well under control but had not yet attempted to raise and plant longleaf seedlings. In the spring of that year, V. H. Sonderegger, then state forester of Louisiana, gave the Great Southern Lumber Company a half pound of longleaf pine seed. From a combination of courtesy and curiosity, J. K. Johnson had Red sow the seed in the company nursery. Both men were interested in how the seedlings might develop in prepared soil. At lifting time in the winter of 1923-1924, Johnson ordered Red to dig up the five hundred or so longleaf seedlings and throw them away. Red, who was on good enough terms with Johnson to take orders with a grain of salt, asked "Why?" For answer, Johnson tossed him some sort of popular, mimeographed news release from the Washington Office of the Forest Service (an "Uncle Ray's Corner" type of thing) which said that it was impossible to plant longleaf pine because the tap roots were too long to lift and plant without injury and the slightest injury to the roots would be fatal. This blurb didn't impress Red much. He grunted, stalked out, dup up the longleaf stock, pruned the roots to six inches with his jack-knife, and planted the seedlings in an open part of the fenced South Pasture. They survived at a rate of about 90 percent, started height growth the third year after planting (remarkable for longleaf pine), and have since been thinned repeatedly, first for pulpwood and then for poles. On the strength of Red's insubordinate venture, his company planted some seven thousand acres of longleaf pine only five years later. During the Great Depression the Civilian Conservation Corps planted more longleaf than anything else on the southern national forests. BUILT DRILL SEEDER Read sprang to the defense of longleaf pine again in 1928, when he was drill- sowing slash pine seed in the nursery with the "Brig Young" seeder. On the way to work one morning in February 1928, I remarked idly to Red that it was a pity that the persistent wings of longleaf seed prevented our drill-sowing that species. When I came in for lunch that noon, Red flagged me down on the road and asked me to stop by at the nursery with him. He said he had something to show me. During the morning he had designed and built a drill seeder that worked with longleaf pines. It was a trough five feet long to fit the five- foot-wide nursery beds. It was hinged to open at the bottom and drop the seeds onto the bed. A pair of tall, curved handles at each end permitted opening it without the stooping or kneeling which had made all previous seeding troughs impractically slow and fatiguing to use. Two men, one on each side of the bed and each with a bucket of seed and a suitable measuring cup, scattered seeds evenly along the trough, tripped the trough with the high handles, closed it again, and moved it six inches along the bed to sow the next drill. They easily sowed two hundred five-foot drills per hour, economically feasible with labor at the 1920s rate of $1.50 per ten-hour day. Sowing in drills in this manner gave much better control of seedling stand density than did the hand broadcasting of seed employed before my casual challenge to Red. It resulted in a marked improvement in the uniformity and quality of longleaf pine nursery stock. During the heyday of artificial reforestation by the Civilian Conservation Corps on southern national forests, the Forest Service had elaborate procedures for selecting particular sites to be planted and for evaluating and reporting results. These were printed in the "Manual," which in turn was supplemented by special memoranda, and they required the use of special mimeographed or printed forms. To assess results, two-hundred-tree sample rows were run diagonally across plantation rows, and each sample tree was marked with a stake. The sample trees were examined and reexamined at prescribed intervals and described in writing by professional men-usually junior foresters- especially schooled for the job. The system yielded the desired information, or at least some of it, but it was expensive. PLANTING BY MEMORY At Bogalusa Red selected his "planting chances" and sized up the success of planting at far less expense while mixing work with pleasure. The Goodyears, of rubber fame, had strong financial connections with the Great Southern Lumber Company. One of the Goodyears, whom I knew only as "The Colonel," was an enthusiastic hunter and came to Bogalusa every fall to hunt quail on horseback with his favorite guide, Red Bateman. Most of the land around Bogalusa was good though perhaps not exceptional quail range, and covies were well distributed throughout the cutover areas and young [unreadable] . . . steered the Colonel through the more recent plantations and over the areas he had in mind to plant next. With his intimate knowledge of the country, his keen observation, and his retentive memory, he needed only his regular travel and a few spot checks, in addition to hunting trips, to give him control of his planting operations. By and large, I should say his control was better than that of the Forest Service. What manner of man was it who did all these things? He was big, powerful, energentic, and quick-moving; he was affable, enthusiastic, and informal to a degree. I met him originally as "Red," and it was years before I learned his initials, let alone his full name. On excellent terms with his immediate superior, J. K. Johnson, and with the general manager, Colonel Sullivan, he was on equally good terms with his workmen and especially with three prolific and able local families, the Joneses, Knights, and Mileys, from whom he recruited many of his foremen. Red ran his crews far more by virtue of knowledge, wit, and personality than of virtue of his official position. He gave orders with easy assurance, and in all my many contacts with him and his men, I never heard his authority questioned. Yet he could bring a very forceful personality to bear when need arose, as when he caught three wee-grown boys, on their way to a high school dance, wantonly setting fires in the company's longleaf plantations at Plainview. Red was alone, but he compelled the three to whip out the several hundred acres of fire with pine branches. It took them until one o'clock the next morning. They not only missed the dance but ruined their best clothes in the process and ended by swearing they would never set fires again. Despite confidence in his own observations and judgment, Red was a modest man. Much that was noteworthy about his work I learned from his boss, J. K. Johnson, who consistently backed Red's undertakings and delighted in describing their results, and from the Mileys and other men who worked under him. Red was a naturally tactful man, too, and had a fine, old-fashioned courtesy, especially toward professional or official guests of his company, the Southern Forest Experiment Station, or the School of Forestry at Louisiana State University. At the same time he was quick to cut through formalities and share either technical information or good clean fun with anyone, regardless of official position, in whom he sensed a kindred spirit. On the morning of January 7, 1926, on instructions from my New Orleans office, I met the morning train at Bogalusa to pick up Walter [?]. Bond, assistant state forester of Texas , and show him the Station's experimental plantations. Under similar instructions from Colonel Sullivan or J. K. Johnson to show Bond the company's forestry operations, Red was at the depot before me. It was raining hard, and Red was anxious. "We can't take a State man out in this rain," he said. "He'll wet his ass!" Walt Bond (afterward for many years an economist on the Station staff) duly arrived. He was a good forester, emphatically an officer and a gentleman, and one of the most kindly and amiable men imaginable. He and Red took to each other immediately. We got into Red's Ford, Walt beside Red on the front seat and I in the back, and started out. The rain came down hard and seeped in around the curtains of [unreadable line] . . . turned into the road through South Pasture, Red pointing out each plantation as we passed, and all three of us talking shop "twenty to the dozen." Walt had come to Bogalusa to learn planting, and Red gave him a combined under-graduate and graduate course. I first learned the history of many of Red's earliest efforts during that trip. We stopped and got out at one place where a tiny patch of loblolly pine seedlings was all that remained of several hundred acres of direct-seeding that had failed. Red's crews had just been over the ground a second time, planting 1-0 slash pine nursery stock. All three of us got thoroughly wet. Then we drove on and came to the steep dip leading down to Ben's Creek, reputed locally to be "the steepest hill in Louisiana." It was raining harder than ever now, and the wheel ruts in the rough road were running six inches deep in muddy water. Although we were already going fast as we started down, the irrepressible Red shoved the gas lever of his Model-T Ford still higher, turned to Walt at his side and said, "There may be a bridge out at the bottom of this hill. We'll see in a minute." [Unreadable line] bridge over the small stream was a good hundred yards beyond the foot of the hill, but Walt didn't, and for a moment he turned a sort of pale green. As we slowed down on the flat before coming to the bridge, Walt burst into laughter, as Red had known he would. This quick cutting through title and position to the real man underneath was an outstanding characteristic of Red's. With comparative strangers, such as the hundreds of visiting dignitaries, influential landowners, and professional foresters Red guided through company forestry operations his speech was generally careful, staid, and sober, though lightened by occasional flashes of humor and wit. Given his intimate knowledge and understanding, he could explain his work to a professional forester with remarkable clarity and in great technical detail, but with less slang and less jargon than the forester himself was likely to use. With his work crews and the officers of his company, and with professional foresters with whom he had much regular contact, he dropped naturally into the colorful local idiom of him time and place. PROBLEM SOLVED In the middle and latter 1920s, several newly established state forestry departments and extension services and several industrial concerns tried to reforest old fields or cutover longleaf londs by direct-seeding, sometimes in units of a thousand acres or more. This was some thirty years before William F. Mann, Jr. and his colleagues found out how to utilize new chemical compounds as bird repellents. Almost without exception, the early attempts failed. I could have saved these agencies and companies thousands of dollars if I had been permitted to publish, verbatim, Red's dissertation on his vain attempt to direct-seed longleaf pine in plowed furrows. He described it to a couple of us young research men: When we went [unreadable] to start seeding, there was a pheellock [field lark or meadowlark] sitting on a fence. When we started down the furrows, he whistled, and up come fifty more pheellocks. We went down the furrows, dropping five longleaf seeds every six feet. The pheellocks followed us down the furrows and, gentlemen, when we got to the end of the furrows, there wasn't a damn thing left in the furrows but bird- --! Red's language, though not always quite that robust, was always vivid and picturesque. On the morning of March 21, 1928, when I was halfway through the third-year reexamination of the Station's experimental plantations at Coburn's Creek, I had an early appointment with J. K. Johnson and his staff to discuss the Station's work on the ground. It was a bright, sunny morning, and Red Bateman arrived before Johnson, accompanied by his younger brother, Bryant, a recent forestry graduate. The young slash pines I was measuring were still sparkling with dew. Bryant, who had been my field assistant for a short time while still an undergraduate, relieved me of the tallyboard as a matter of course and took notes for me while we waited for Johnson. He and I went down one thirty-three-tree row and back up the next in the familiar routine. Red ambled along beside us, making jokes. At the uphill end of the second row Red paused, looked off across the plantation, and said, "You know, young slash pine always puts me in mind of a little boy going along with his face washed, all proud." My own firstborn, a son, was two and a half at the time, and I knew exactly what Red meant. No photograph I have ever seen or technical bulletin or dendrology text I have ever read has rendered so precisely the essence of a pure stand of young slash pine. I remember Red Bateman quite as much for that bit of unconscious poetry as for all his great contributions to the silviculture of the southern pines. [see photo of Red Bateman on Washington Parish Photo webpage] INSERT Until a year or two after the Model-A Ford came into common use, Red drove his rounds in Model-T Ford touring cars. I say "cars" because he wore out a car about every nine months, driving like Jehu over washboarded gravel main roads, back-country dirt roads, and stump-studded, cutover longleaf pine lands alike. Professor Walter Mulford of the University of California School of Forestry visited the Southern Forest Experiment Station in December 1930. Roy A. Chapman and I took him to Bogalusa to show him our own and the Great Southern Lumber Company's plantations. I stuck our car in a mud hole in one of the plantation roads. It took Roy and me two hours of jacking up, backing, and filling to get the car out, with Professor Mulford patiently fetching us pine knots to put under the wheels. Moments after we had labored out onto firm ground, Red Bateman came by in a car just like ours and drove right through the same mud hole without stopping; his speed sent some of Professor Mulford's pine knots flying over the tops of young pines in the plantation. After watching him open-mouthed, Mulford said, "I never saw the like except in the movies, and then I thought it was faked!" Like many another such swashbuckling driver, though, Red hated to ride as passenger in anyone else's car. About six week before the Mulford episode, he had paid me one of the greatest compliments of my life when he had twenty other drivers to choose from and elected to ride with me. The occasion was a field inspection of Southern Station and Yale Forest School experimental plots in Urania, Louisiana, by the Station's advisory council, together with professional foresters, forest industrialists, influential landowners, and other dignitaries to the number of a hundred or more. There was a professional photographer along to photograph the crowd at lunch. He and his wife were in their car in the middle of the procession, which stopped at the "holly Plots," an early thinning experiment on an obscure woods road through thick underbrush and young second growth. While the foresters in the party were inspecting the plots, the photographer, who had no interest whatever in thinnings, left his wife in their car and went off into the woods to "obey a call of nature." Not realizing this, the leaders of the field trip went on to the next stop, followed by the first half of the cars. The rest of us were stuck behind the photogrpaher's car, with nobody present who knew where to go expect Milt Tannehill of the Urania Lumber Company, in the very last car of all. Suddenly there was a tremendous crashing in the woods to our left, and here came Tannehill's car, plaowing through the underbrush and riding down you pine trees two and three inches in diameter, to lead the stranded party on. It was a fearful sight. Red Bateman, in the back seat of my car, beamed broadly, patted his hands together, and said, "That's the way I like to see a man drive!"