Some 20 years ago, Sweet Home resident Hobart McQueary decided to try to preserve history by interviewing old-timers in the area.
McQueary, who worked in the wood products industry as owner of a particle board mill and then as a technical director in composite board manufacturing, was the kind of guy who got along with folks, his son Tim McQueary said.
“We moved into the community in 1952,” Tim McQueary said, and over all those years he worked in a lot of community-type positions and knew a lot of people. He was a person who just liked people and looked for what people had to offer.”
Using a Sony video camera, Hobart rounded up some 140 people €“ loggers, teachers, businessmen and women, local historians and others €“ whom he interviewed over the course of several years in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Tim said,
producing a set of 19 hour-long videotapes that included 114 of those people.
“It was a passion with my dad,” he said. “He saw a lot of value in getting what old-timers knew about the area, who had been here when we moved into the community.”
Hobart took on the project as a fund-raiser for the East Linn Museum, Tim McQueary said. After Hobart McQueary died in 2003, at age 87, the tapes wound up in the Sweet Home Genealogical Society Library, until earlier this year, when society member and local history buff Corky Lowen became concerned about their welfare.
Lowen contacted Jim Childers, a Genealogical Society member who serves as a volunteer researcher and “computer nerd,” as he put it, for the organization.
“Corky asked if I could change VCR into DVD,” he said. “I said I could.”
Childers, 71, who retired from the Georgia Pacific paper mill in Halsey in 2001 after working there since 1969 “making toilet paper cores,” enjoys working with electronic equipment.
“I’m kind of self-taught,” he said. “I got my first computer in 1995. I had a bunch of 8 mm film of our family growing up and I put them on video, then on DVDs.
“I just have to have the latest equipment when it comes out,” he added with a wry grin.
Childers said after he joined the Genealogical Society, he found himself working with the organization’s computers in the genealogical library at 13th Avenue and Kalmia Street.
“When I first went down there they had four computers that were running on Windows 98,” he said. “That was almost a full-time job, keeping them running.”
Now, Childers said, the society has five terminals with Internet subscriptions to ancestry.com that researchers use in their quest for family histories.
Childers said he found the McQueary recordings interesting, though most are not particularly visually stimulating, since most feature a head-on shot of the speaker that never varies, and the viewer can hear Hobart McQueary asking questions off-camera in the studio set-up he created for the purpose.
“They’re not real good to watch, but they’re fun to listen to,” he said, noting that because the tapes were 20 years old when he converted them, the color is a little faded. “Back then it was analog instead of digital like it is today.”
The 114 individuals featured in the interviews include loggers Amos Horner, Ted Stock and Vernon Geil; Sam Cairnes, who was a longtime school principal in Foster and Crawfordsville; former Fire Chief Blair Smith; Charles Shipley of Brownsville; Isabelle Braden, a descendent of one of the original pioneer families; lawyer Earl McFarland; longtime teacher Myrtle Caswell; Audrey Bryant, a local Realtor and descendent of early Sweet Home residents; Sybil McTavish, a local activist who fought the Foster annexation process; Jim Riggs, who was principal at Foster; and historian Martha Steinbecker.
Some of their stories stuck with Childers, he said.
He said his own father used to tell the story of a man who would get drunk in a Brownsville saloon each night, then fall asleep in the bar, where the owners would leave him be until he awoke.
One night several customers played a practical joke on him and carried the sleeping man a few doors down the street to the mortuary, where they placed him in a coffin.
“He wasn’t a very big guy, but he was mad,” Childers said. The man, who was rather small, stormed into the bar and announced, “If you ever do that to me again, I’ll kill every one of you,” Childers said.
Funny thing was, he said, one of the speakers in the McQueary tapes told the same story.
Another told how he saw a helicopter when he was newly married.
“He told his wife, ‘I’m going to get one of those.'” Later in life, he went to southern California, bought a chopper and hired a pilot who worked in the owner’s mill and who taught him how to fly the machine.
“I listened to quite a few of them. Hobart would interview them, and he’d ask the questions he wanted to ask. Then he’d ask them if they had anything they wanted to add.
“Almost all of them told young kids to get all the education you can.”