History at a Glance

The November-December 1976 issue of the Simpson Magazine included a story titled "Babe Munson: Boom Boss of the Water Loggers." This story is based on information in that story.

In 1889, Albert J. Munson and his wife, Esther, moved from Steilacoom to Shelton, where Albert opened a furniture and stationery store and served in several public offices, including deputy sheriff, county clerk, city treasurer, justice of the peace, police judge and postmaster. Albert and Esther's middle son, born in Shelton in 1892, was called "Babe" for the first few weeks of his life. Although his parents eventually settled on the more formal name of Harold Eugene, he was known as Babe for the rest of his life.

During the summers of his high school years, Babe followed on the heels of George Grisdale, Simpson's logging superintendent. He blazed trees, cut paths and performed other woods jobs while Grisdale cruised the timber (estimating the volume of a stand of trees to determine if it could be profitably harvested and transported to the mill).

Straight out of high school, Babe joined a crew of "water loggers" who jockeyed logs out on the Simpson boom. In those days, no Simpson mills were on the waterfront - the company was simply a "logging outfit." Loggers cut trees in the surrounding foothills and loaded them onto the company's steam-powered railroad to be hauled through downtown Shelton and splashed into the bay. There, water loggers such as Babe sorted and moved the logs into rafts, which were towed up the waterways of Puget Sound to be processed into lumber, plywood and other products.

The novice "pond monkey" or "boom cat" learned to sink the steel spikes of his caulk boots into the slippery bark to keep his footing on a rolling log while picking out a log suited to the particular raft he was making, snagging it with the spike and hook of his long pike pole, and guiding it to the raft.

When the United States became involved in World War I, Babe took a break from Simpson and joined the U.S. Navy, where he was a wireless operator on the second biggest oil tanker then afloat in the Atlantic. When he enlisted, he stated his occupation as "timber cruiser," but the enlistment officer found that difficult to accept. The Navy man was familiar with all the cruisers in the fleet, and none of them was named "Timber."

When Mark Reed built the first Simpson sawmill along the Shelton waterfront in 1926, Babe was there with his pike pole and peavey to help corral, sort and feed logs into the "hungry teeth of Simpson's pioneer Sawmill One." He earned the respect of that special breed of water loggers, and was promoted to succeed boom boss Frank Fredson, his esteemed "professor" on the pond. It's estimated Munson "boomed" over 5½ billion feet of logs during his 37 years on the Shelton waterfront.

For recreation, Babe took to the woods. Hunting was his hobby, and together with Mark Reed's son Frank, he worked to establish a duck-hunting project at Cranberry Lake near Shelton, which included helping the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plant wild rice for water fowl. He was also among the Simpson employees who, in the early 1940s, furnished local sixth-graders with red hats and sweatshirts and commissioned them as Junior Foresters to join in protecting the forest resource on which their community depended.

Babe Munson died in Shelton in April 1977 at age 84.

■ Jan Parker is a researcher for the Mason County Historical Museum. She can be reached at [email protected]. Membership in the Mason County Historical Society is $25 per year. For a limited time, new members will receive a free copy of the book "Shelton, the First Century Plus Ten."