Celebrating Seeley Lake's Grand Marshals and the legacy of the Johnson family

Editor's note: When I worked for two weekly newspapers in Ennis and Big Sky, we would run features each week that we either called the B feature - because it was the first page of the B section in The Madisonian, which is based in Ennis - or the Not So Average Jane/Joe in the Lone Peak Lookout, which used to be used in Big Sky. These focused on members of the community either really well known of whom we felt folks could use a broader picture, or people who weren't known at all but had a really cool story. I think those types of stories, the ones that introduce or reintroduce communities to their neighbors, are a huge tenet of community journalism. And so, I introduce to you The Path Finders, our series intending to do the same.

Have someone you think should be featured? Email pathfinder@seeleylake.com.

Roger Johnson pointed at pictures on a counter inside Pyramid Mountain Lumber. A couple were from the seventies and familiar last names - Kauffman, Siloti - were sprinkled through the captions. These were a lot of good people, Roger said.

"They don't make them like that anymore," he said, adding that no one likes to work as much as they once did.

Roger retired from his career at Pyramid just two years ago at 86 years old, and two days before the Fourth of July this year, Pyramid Mountain Lumber ran its last logs through the sawmill. The company announced its closure in March, citing a lack of workforce due to the increasingly unaffordable nature of Seeley Lake as one of the main reasons. Roger and his wife Rhea, were honored during Seeley Lake's Fourth of July parade this year as the Grand Marshals, for which they were selected in 2022, but had to pass due to contracting covid-19.

Roger's son Todd, current general manager of Pyramid Mountain Lumber, had a one-word response to how he was feeling about running the last logs through the sawmill - sad.

Roger said at one point, eight sawmills were running in the city of Missoula, including Bonner. Now, Pyramid is the only one left in Missoula County.

"When I look back I think that my father and Oscar (Mood) would be surprised it ran this long," Roger said. "I don't think they'd foresee that."

Roger grew up in Minnesota where his father, Fred, had a sawmill. Fred had a neighbor with whom he worked and who learned about an old sawmill in Seeley Lake that closed down and was for sale after World War II. This neighbor told Fred's eventual partner, Oscar Mood, about the mill and the Johnson and Mood families came out to Montana, checked it out and decided to buy it when Roger was between the seventh and eighth grades. He worked various jobs at the mill during summer breaks from school, like cleaning up and piling lumber, "anything to get a little money," Roger said.

After spending time in the Army, Roger moved into selling lumber and then worked at Pyramid continuously for the next 63 years. The only picture taken of the entire Pyramid Mountain Lumber crew in the last 20 years was snapped at Roger's retirement party in 2022, Todd said. Todd, like his father, worked various miscellaneous jobs at the mill before entering a full-time position.

Rhea and Roger, who were high school sweethearts, stayed in a company house on the back side of the mill before building their first home on Riverview Drive, where all three of their boys were brought up. Rhea worked for a phone company and later as a secretary for a lawyer in Missoula before becoming a full-time mom.

Both Roger and Todd described a variety of factors, like a puzzle that just unfortunately got put together, that led to the mill's pending closure.

Todd said the Forest Service shifted gears from traditional timber sales to a more fire mitigation focus, which promotes forest treatments like clearing and taking out understory, ultimately providing the mill with smaller diameter logs, making the processes at the mill more inefficient.

Only so many logs can be put through a machine in a day, Todd said. If the logs have a larger diameter, the mill can produce more board feet per hour, but if they are smaller and the mill can still only process so many, the amount of board feet per hour produced at the end of the day is going to be less because smaller logs were used.

"For us, the way we're set up, it gives us a lot more smaller diameter trees, which we're not as efficient at as we were with traditional sales," Todd said.

On top of the changes in the land management agency, over the past 25 years Seeley Lake has shifted into a place that blue collar workers couldn't afford to live in anymore, Todd said, even if they were in the upper echelons of the salaries paid at Pyramid.

Todd acknowledged a variety of things that led to this unaffordability, from the town's lack of a sewer system to the fact that everything from housing to gas and food tend to be more expensive in Seeley Lake than in Missoula. Todd said Seeley Lake had been discovered before the pandemic hit, but what the pandemic did to the area was increase sales of rentals and land, leading to a displacement of workers. Pyramid has two employees living in their camp trailers now for that exact reason, Todd said.

"This town has not become a place for blue collar workers, for school teachers, or sheriffs or anything else," Todd said.

Working with those blue collar workers, the good people in the photos that Roger was drawn to on Pyramid's walls and counters, are what make up the most poignant memories for him over a 60 plus year career in a town that respected and admired the labor and love put into the work and the community.

"We've always had a close-knit group here and certainly having my boys work alongside was gratifying," Roger said. "And over 75 years we've had our ups and downs...but overall we've met and worked with some fine people. Seeley Lake has always been fortunate to have a good workforce up until most recently...It's just good people to work with so that's what I remember about my days at the mill."