Still later, George acquired a veneer mill. I seem to recall it was surrounded on three sides by a "state forest" or "national forest", but I may be mistaken here. There was a lot of 'moonlight' logging by his crews at night in this "forest", however, and poaching of prime hardwoods that were getting hard to find elsewhere.

    In any event, it was a full-fledged veneer mill, complete with boiling-water pool (size of a swimming pool!) into which the logs were slid to soak for hours - sometimes days - till they were "cooked" and soft and pulpy. Many a hapless worker, too, slipped into this hell's bath in those days and was scalded for his troubles in this pre-OSHA time...

    But when the logs were ready, they were fished out and chucked up in special veneer lathes: long-bedded wood lathes which could take an entire tree trunk between their dogs. They were then brought up to speed in rotation and the long veneer knives cranked in and the veneer began to flow off the log in a hot, wet, steaming sheet. I recall he said that something that worried them more than anything else were the cannonballs in the trees! He referred to the trees from this "forest" as having come from where a "battle" had taken place long ago. Since if I recall my Civil War History rightly, only one battle in the Civil War - the Battle of Pea Ridge - took place in Arkansas, I wonder if this veneer mill was in the vicinity of Pea Ridge? It's possible, I guess.

    But when the lathe knives "bit" into a cannonball buried in the trunk interiors, all hell broke loose! The knives would be hopelessly chipped at the very least and operations would have to cease while the knives were removed and sharpened. At worst, an entire lathe lockup might ensue and the log jump out of retention between the dogs...

    The better logs and the cabinet grades were used for fancy veneer stock, but the more inferior grades were reduced to "shook". Shook - or box shook as it is sometimes called - is the thin veneer from which berry and fruit baskets are made. Central Arkansas is a big berry producing region and the mill's output of shook was always in demand.

    To prepare the shook, it was taken in sheets after cooling and drying, and cut into all manner of shapes and sizes that went together as boxes and trays and berry baskets and containers. (As managing editor at a later date for George's Industrial Woodworking magazine, I was in time myself to become familiar with shook mills...). To get the fullest measure from each sheet, draftsmen usually design the boxes, and the designs are then nested on the sheets for minimum waste. Then the cutting knives and even dies which are sometimes used, reduce the sheets to the dimension stock.

    Even so, there is often a sizable residue of splinters and odds and ends left over. In most mills, this is routed to the boilers as in-feed in the fuel stream, thus assuring minimum waste. But this was not good enough for George, no sir! He puzzled day and night on how to make something useful - and salable - out of his shook waste. His problem was not unlike that of the proverbial slaughterhouse foremen whom, we are told, still seek uses for the pig's final squeal and the cow's final moo...

    But one day George was inspired. Chancing to grasp a bundle of thin, useless shook slivers in his hand, he idly stood them on end - and accidentally let them go. As he regarded the jumbled assortment before him, something "clicked" - he had a feeling that "somehow everything was starting to work".

    Thus was born "Nigger-In-The-Woodpile" - a game once popular everywhere West and down South: I remember the cans it came in myself. The object
of the game was simplicity itself: it was only old "pickup sticks" in a new form. What George did was to package one black (dyed) sliver in a bundle of hundreds of white slivers and then write up a complicated bunch of rules governing how
sticks were to be removed to get the 'nigger' out of the woodpile...

    This game was very popular. Games of all kinds were profitable items in the Depression, as George often pointed out, for when times are good folks go to work, and when they are bad, they stay home - and play games. I fear for our own parlous times: only recently have I begun to see repeat ads on TV for that all-time board favorite, Monopoly...

    This creation was soon followed by a birdhouse kit, likewise a product of George's febrile imagination. He puzzled for days on end with the flat triangular pieces of shook leftovers before he hit on a pattern that went together as a tiny wren's house. Another new, and salable product line emerged from the mill! This was doubtless the world's first modular birdhouse... a first in any event.

    The early bird (or duck) gets ... the worm!

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