In May 2025, HistoryLink's Jill Freidberg interviewed journalists John Hughes and Doug Barker about their experiences as reporters and editors at the The Daily World, in Aberdeen, before, during, and after the decline of the timber industry in Grays Harbor County. Hughes (b. 1943) got his first newspaper job delivering The Daily World at age 9 and was hired to write for the paper in 1966. He became the editor in 1977, and the editor and publisher in 2004, working at the paper for a total of 42 years. He later served as Chief Historian for the Washington Secretary of State's Oral History program, where he oversaw publication of 18 books on Washington history before his retirement in 2025. Barker, born in Pasco in 1953, studied English at Washington State University and got his first newspaper job writing about the mining industry, in Wallace, Idaho. In 1984, Hughes hired Barker to write for The Daily World; his beat included the timber industry. Barker was editor of The Daily World from 2011 to 2021 and now teaches at St. Martin’s University in Lacey.
Growing Up in Aberdeen
Hughes has spent most of his life in Grays Harbor County. He graduated from Aberdeen High School and attended Grays Harbor College before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1962. After serving four years, he was discharged as a sergeant in 1966 and immediately went to work in the newspaper industry.
John Hughes: I was born in 1943 in Vallejo, California, while my mother was at U Cal Berkeley. My parents split after World War II, and my mom heard that there were jobs in Grays Harbor, where my aunt and uncle were living ... (we) arrived in Grays Harbor in 1944, and she became an executive secretary at Boeing's sub-assembly plant in Aberdeen, and then got a job with a telephone company and worked her way up to regional manager over the years.
The best part of it, though, is that my uncles had moved there in the early [1930s] because both were union business agents for the International Woodworkers of America, a classic 1930s CIO union. And by 1950, they were the president and vice president of the International Woodworkers of America. So, I grew up in this household steeped with folk music and unionism, and it was an amazing place to grow up. Grays Harbor, Aberdeen, Hoquiam, in the 1950s, it was a lively town, much bigger than Olympia, that's for sure ...
You were supposed to be 10 to get a paper route, but I got one at 9 because my mom knew the Foelkners, who owned the newspaper. And the best thing about having a paper route for the World is, if you played your cards right, the World was an afternoon paper and, for a while, I delivered the [Seattle] P-I in the morning. On weekends, the really cool gig you could get, the Portland Oregonian was then one of the great newspapers of the West, second, I think, only in size to the Los Angeles Times and maybe the [San Francisco] Chronicle. And on Sundays, you'd really need to pump up the tires in your Schwinn, your balloon-tired Schwinn, to deliver the Oregonian, because you could get a hernia with that thing. Some of those were probably 150 pages. It was a great gig, yeah. It was a great childhood. Aberdeen was a hummin' place.
Becoming a Newspaper Man
Barker, an Eastern Washington native 10 years younger than Hughes, took a more tentative path into journalism.
Doug Barker: I was born in 1953, in Pasco. My dad was in Korea when I was born. After the Tri-Cities, we moved to Spokane, so there were always woods in your neighborhood. But we didn't really camp or hunt or hike in those classic ways that people use the forest these days.
I was an English major at WSU and quit with a semester to go. I quit, knocked around, worked in factories around Spokane. It just had never occurred to me to be a journalist, but I liked to write. I liked the notion of public service. And so I went back to WSU for a year just to take as many journalism classes as I could and work on the school paper. My first journalism job was a little daily in Wallace, Idaho, and it was a ton of fun. We covered mining, hard-rock mining, deep-tunnel mining, and that was … couldn't believe I was getting paid for it. It was really, really fun.
I had a friend from WSU, Eric Stevik, who was working for John in Aberdeen, and he was talking all the time about how great that was, how great it was to work for John. And there was an opening over there, a kind of copy editor type job came up, and I came over, and there we go. Didn't intend to stay around for all that long. Kind of thought I'd go to the [Seattle] Times like everybody else there. Had kids and just stayed and stayed and stayed.
But the forest products industry was in bad shape when I got there, more from high interest rates. I mean, I think I had just walked through the door when one of the largest independent operators, loggers and millers, the Mayr Brothers Company, had just gone into Chapter 11. It was a couple years after that before the spotted owl was front and center.
JH: When I started junior high, we moved next door to the man who owned the The Daily World, Pete Foelkner. But earlier than that, I had always been interested in writing. And then I worked as a copy boy at the newspaper when I was a teenager, and that was really a lot of fun.
Between my junior and senior years in high school, I spent that summer working at the Montesano Vidette, which was the second-oldest weekly newspaper in the state, and it was operated by a guy who was very much a legend in his own time, Chapin Collins, who, working for the Forest [Products Industry], came up with the idea for a tree farm to emphasize the nature of sustained yield forestry and responsible silviculture. And the first ever tree farm in the American tree farm system was the Clemons Tree Farm, outside of Montesano.
The Vidette was just this classic … There was still a flatbed press at the Montesano Vidette.
I graduated from high school when I was 17, started school at Grays Harbor College, and I was not ready, at 17, to be a college student. So I escaped from there with my D-plus average and joined the Air Force to see the world. I went to tech school for air traffic operations and ended up at McChord Air Force Base, in Tacoma, which was not my idea of seeing the world.
I took all these tests and got admitted to a thing called the Airmen's Education and Commissioning Program, between Fort Lewis and McChord with their relationships between PLU (Pacific Lutheran University) and the University of Puget Sound (UPS). If you were halfway bright, the Air Force would pay your college tuition, books, and everything. You could go to one of the extension centers at Fort Lewis and McCord or on campus at UPS.
I think it was fall of 1962 that Murray Morgan, the dean of Northwest historians, author of Skid Road, was on loan from Tacoma Community College to teach a Northwest history course. And when Murray found out I was from Aberdeen, he sort of took me aside and he said, "Kid, there's one thing I want to know. Is there still at least one whorehouse left in Aberdeen, Washington?"
I said, "Well, Murray, I don't have it on firsthand experience, but I know that if I want to go home on weekends, I need a special dispensation because Grays Harbor is still off limits because of its bawdy past."
He invited me to go to the Poodle Dog Diner, in Fife, and we talked about journalism and about whorehouses and unsolved murder cases. It was just wonderful. He was just the most charismatic, wonderful human being. The best part is that he had been a newspaperman, in the 1930s, on Hoquiam’s morning daily, the Grays Harbor Washingtonian.
But he said to me, "Well, what do you want to do?"
And I said, "Well, I think I want to teach. I want to be a professor."
And he said, "You should become a newspaperman first."
I remember it all came back to me the first time I met Harry Bridges, the legendary president of the ILWU at a longshore picnic in Aberdeen, in the early 1960s. I remembered what Murray told me about paying attention to the way he looked and sounded. I thought to myself for the first time, "Wow, this is really like living history."
When I got to be editor of The Daily World, in 1977, The Daily World was a really good small daily newspaper, 18,000 circulation. And within the first couple of years, profits were so good that I had 21 people in the newsroom. There's three today, but there were 21 then. It was a magical time to be doing journalism.
"Get a Real Job"
Grays Harbor County had been heavily reliant on the timber industry since the nineteenth century. But by the 1970s, the industry was in steep decline and under siege. In 1984, the U.S. Forest Service developed a forest-management plan that required forest managers to consider owl habitat in the sales of timber. This placed in jeopardy the supply of logs from the Olympic Peninsula for logging companies and lumber mills. In 1991, a U.S. District Court ruling blocked timber sales in national forests to protect the spotted owl.
JH: So we'd heard about the spotted owl, and there'd been rumors that there were going to be some cutbacks because the owl, according to the environmentalists, was the proverbial canary in the coal mine, in this case with a lot more feathers.
DB: They would routinely have these meetings for all the independent buyers who would bid on Forest Service sales. They had been going to those meetings, I think, for probably 18 months at least, and hearing about the spotted owl and that that might be something that would affect them. I think they had heard that kind of thing before. It just didn't seem to them like … Sure, everybody will kind of pretend like things are going to be different, and then they won't be at the last minute, and a congressman will step in.
They were running their mills. They just went through the bureaucracy of bidding for timber. You win some, lose some, but basically you have enough. Everybody would have enough to get through the year.
JH: I was in my office on January 19, 1989, when one of the Dahlstrom brothers, Monty or Kirk, came in, and they were really enterprising guys, classic, salt of the earth, Grays Harbor loggers, really good loggers, though, and really bright guys. Walked into my office and said, "Can I close the door?"
I said, "Sure, sit down."
He proceeded to say, "I've just been to a meeting up at Quinault when we got the news that, to protect the spotted owl, it was going to be necessary to reduce our cut, our allocation, to only 42 million board feet. It could drop to as low as 20."
He said, "This is the end of a way of life as we know it. This is economic devastation. We can't survive with a cut that low. The big guys will go on to whatever they're in, in real estate or wherever. And the way that this will impact our community and percolate through with generations of poverty, and who knows where that will lead …"
Well, I remember talking to Doug, and we thought, "Those are really good guys, but that's probably overstating it." Well, it turns out it was understating it.
DB: I think by that time, everybody in the industry was on their heels. They were desperate, and they were trying to organize as well as they could.
JH: On April 28, 1990, about 1,500 people in protest blockaded the main route to the coast over the 6th Street Bridge in Hoquiam. These were people who … their livelihoods were in danger. When you looked at the crowd, you saw a cross-section of kids, teenagers in letter jackets, and babes in arms. This was happening to timber-town people.
There was a big, beefy, hard-hat-wearing, but nevertheless, beyond that stereotype, really bright, really good guy, fervent Christian logger, in a hard hat, and a hickory shirt, and stag pants. And this guy got out of a Volvo station wagon. Talk about archetype, the Volvo station wagon. Walked up to him, thrust an index finger into his chest, and said, "Hey, fatso, why don't you get a real job?"
Those words just ring in my ears. "Hey, fatso, why don't you get a real job?" It was just so inhumane and offensive.
DB: These weren't protester types. They weren't great community organizers. They were running their mills, logging, driving their trucks, and talking about it all the time. So it probably didn't take much to say, "Hey, shit's going to hit the fan on Saturday." You were getting the feel from the way they were talking to us at the newspaper … "You better be there. This is going to be a big deal." So you knew everybody in town knew that this was going to be something different.
They were pretty peaceful. They burned some congressman in effigy in the bottom of a 55-gallon drum that they had set up there for a fire. And for that day, they were pretty happy. I don't know that they ever really felt like this would make a difference, but they felt like it was a big "kiss my ass" to everybody. Then after that, they just tried their best to work their way through a bureaucratic process. But that was just a mismatch. They never stood a chance in all that process.
Industry and Independents
Smaller, independent operators were hit especially hard, Barker and Hughes said:
DB: I think that the independents were the minority. Weyerhaeuser had a lot of land there, and nearly all of it was going to export. They had a sawmill in Aberdeen and a sawmill in Raymond and it mostly got exported to Asia, mostly to Japan. So there weren't many mill jobs from all those logs.
All these little mills, the independents, that didn't own their own land, really that's the difference. You owned your land, you could cut it and export, if it was high enough quality, or send it to the pulp mill if it wasn't. Weyerhaeuser, Rayonier was the other big landowner, and then Boise Cascade, Simpson, Plum Creek, those were the people who were exporting.
The environmentalists took a lot of effort to try and get people to see that, that we were talking about the spotted owl putting a lot of people out of work, but look at all these logs that are going overseas and look at the mechanization in the larger mills.
These independent operators didn't have lobbyists. They just hadn't had to deal with any of that stuff.
And if I could do it over again, I think I would try to figure out a way of at least making that distinction between big timber and independent timber. We made that distinction at times. We would write that big timber had mostly cut all its old growth, so it didn't have very good (spotted owl) habitat. It had private property rights that were different than federal and state rights. Federal and state land had lots of protections.
Big timber kind of skated. It would have been better to have kind of pulled the pants down on big timber in some fashion and at least made them take a stand or get involved, but they just … man, they had a pretty sweet deal, really.
JH: And then after all was said and done, they diversified into real estate and pulled up stakes.
DB: Does Weyerhaeuser own timberland much anymore?
JH: I don't think a lot of it. I think Rayonier’s the last bastion there.
Northwest Forest Plan and Later
Signed by President Bill Clinton in December 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan ended logging on millions of acres of federal old-growth forest to protect endangered species and vital habitat while allowing logging to proceed in other areas. The plan promised investments in affected communities.
JH: I was in my office, and I get a call from the White House, in March of 1993. It was George Stephanopoulos. Somebody said, "This is George Stephanopoulos."
And I said, "Really?"
And he said, "No, it's really George Stephanopoulos. But would you like to call me back? I'll give you the White House number."
So I said, "Yeah, I'll do that."
And it was George Stephanopoulos.
And he said, "We're having a timber summit and we would like you to represent the small dailies of the affected areas of the state. There's going to be the AP, the Oregonian, The New York Times, and you."
I thought, "Sold! I'll take it. Great."
So we went to the timber summit, and there was an amazing dog-and-pony show at the multi-spired convention center there, on the east side of the Willamette. And I watched – Murray taught me to watch people as they talk – and Clinton bites his lip, sort of like Muhammad Ali, and he’s listening, sort of like his eyes are going to well up. And Clinton said that, back in his native Arkansas, he’d seen the same sort of economic upheaval, and "I promise you we’ll do the best we can."
So afterward, at the end of the conference, I was summoned, vetted by the Secret Service, and went to a cloistered room in the Benson Hotel, ushered in by Stephanopoulos again. And in came the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States. And I'm 5 feet 10 inches. I had no idea that Bill Clinton was as big as he is. He must be 6-3. Really a very imposing guy. And he just listened so intently. So I said, when my turn came, "There was a story in the morning Oregonian, and it was either by Jack Ward Thomas or Dr. [Jerry] Franklin. The thrust of the story was, we're not certain yet how large the set-asides have to be. And it's possible that we hopefully will find that through modern silviculture and studies that we can have a bigger cut than we thought."
Gore interrupts and says, "You know, I used to be a newspaper reporter, and I know how to ask these tricky questions too."
Whether it was The New York Times guy, or the Oregonian guy, I wanted to hug him. He sort of leaned forward and said, "Well, I don't think that's a tricky question at all!"
It was one of those electric moments. But all throughout, I had the feeling that Bill Clinton really cared what the editor of the Daily World at Aberdeen, Washington, had to say about this. I'd interviewed Carter and Gerald Ford and a lot of celebrities, and I thought that this guy was the best retail politician I'd ever been around.
So we'll fast forward to 2004. I anxiously got Clinton's massive doorstop autobiography, My Life. It's 1,008 pages.
There is not one frigging word in that book about the Forest Summit. Not a word, not a mention. And I thought, what hubris, what bullshit, that they would talk so long and hard about human beings. I mean … we knew that they’d tried to cut it all, that it was over cut, that something had to be done. But my Christian upbringing led me to believe that we're our brother's keeper and that something substantive could be done to help these communities in transition, that there'd be more middle ground. I saw some retraining money that took Rayonier millwrights and made them 7th grade teachers, but I don't think nearly enough was spent to alleviate and to help jumpstart economic diversification in these timber towns.
DB: It was probably not until after the Northwest Forest Plan that any [timber] sales were approved, and then they actually started to log, and then there were injunctions. [U.S. District Court Judge] Bill Dwyer granted injunctions to stop those sales from going forward, and then court decisions were going against the independent operators. That was expensive. And I think some of them had given up, essentially, by then. They were just bitter, bitter, bitter. The government would try and tell them, "Well, we're going to try and replace as many of these jobs with ecotourism jobs or other opportunities." You can imagine how that went over, and none of that ever really happened.
They knew that it was over for them.
JH: You’ve got new generations of generational poverty. It’s not the same place. And it breaks my heart.
