WRITER - Truck Logger -
The Originals
Pack a lunch. Pack two. And a breakfast, and a couple of dinners.
That might have been the call back in the days when the MacKenzies, and the Bendicksons and the Alisons and the Olsens and the Hayes clans first started their companies. Back in the days when a trip from the Royal City to Richmond might take several days, forget Port McNeil or Lesquiti Island, for godssake.
The basics haven’t changed. Although much else has – helicopters, computers, cell phones – the almost eternal verities of the Truck Logger are still there. Get a truck. Build a Road. Haul timber.
What is extraordinary and so compelling about the story of Truck Logging in B.C. is that it has always been a family business. Still is. Three and four generations later.
Which means that the real sense of what is required for a good honest day’s work in the forest is, by now, almost genetic. It’s in the hands, and it’s in the eyes.
In the case of the Mackenzie family (And sometimes that’s McKenzie because way back when, a Mac married a Mc, if you know what we mean), women and men are both from Mars. As in Mars Industries.
Today, Alison Mackenzie is the General Manager of Mars Contracting Co. Ltd. and Star Contracting Co. Ltd., both of Kingsway Avenue in Port Alberni. But her great-grandfather Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first non-native man born in Port Alberni, began the family business in1912 with a horse and wagon, shoring in the coal mining industry. Alexander’s widow, Ivy, the seamstress, is still alive and strongly opinionated at 105! It was Alexander’s son Ken, who passed away last year at the age of 86 (see Truck Logger Magazine, winter 2002, “Tribute to Ken Mackenzie), that began Stamp River Timber with the rights to log the “McKenzie Farm” along the Stamp River. When Ken and his friend Doug Ruttan teamed up in the mid-50s to form Mackenzie and Ruttan, they borrowed a letter here and there and thus Mars was born. Alison’s dad, Larry, was running a Cat by the ripe old age of 13.
If you dig into the Truck Logger archives, you’ll see this choice entry about the Mars gang in the August 1966 edition: "Ken Mackenzie is owner, and Larry Mackenzie, woods foreman, with Jack Mackenzie as manager of the Port Alberni office.”
Ultimately, Mars was owned by Larry Mackenzie, and a Truck Logger article in the summer of 1993 showed a fine photo of Mars owner Larry Mackenzie with then woods foreman Brian Dalziel, who at the age of 33, already had chalked up more than 15 years of logging experience. At that writing, Mars was still proudly running a 1964 Kenworth hauler that had been in continuous use for almost 30 years. Three drivers, one engine rebuild, and 30 years of service. Not bad.
The Mars Industries base at that time was Kildonan (Is there a Kildonan in every province in the Dominion?), about half way down the Alberni Inlet in the direction of Barclay Sound. Over the years, the 100 or so employees have been whittled down to about 50. Remote camps in places like the Sarita area have pretty much been replaced today by “town jobs.” Gone, by and large, are the legendary sudden blowouts of big pay packets by cabin-fevered camp loggers. Men come home for dinner and family life is decidedly more…well, family.
