Timber Town Split to Roots : Child’s Tale by Dr. Seuss Lays Bare Tensions That Threaten to Topple Reign of Loggers

There’s a little tale about trees that has quickly become required reading all across timber-rich Mendocino County--not just in the classroom, but in the coffee shops and service-station waiting rooms as well.

It’s not about the stately redwood, the towering symbol of a once-thriving economy in this depressed lumber town of about 900 residents--a place without even one traffic light, a mere eye-blink along U.S. 101, about 150 miles north of San Francisco.

The fascination is with the bright-colored truffula trees, the imaginary plants that play a major role in “The Lorax,” a 1971 book by Dr. Seuss, the beloved children’s author from La Jolla who for decades has charmed young readers with his rhyming whimsy about green eggs and ham and cats with hats.

Folks here say you can’t find the book anywhere within 100 miles. Word is, you have to drive clear up to Eureka just to find a bookstore that hasn’t already been cleaned out.

“There’s been a run on ‘The Lorax’ all across the county, that’s certainly safe to say,” said Marianne Loeser, president of the Long Valley teacher’s association in Laytonville.

“People just don’t know what to make of the book. They’re talking about it, it seems, everywhere you go. It’s not just the kids, even people with college degrees have differing opinions of what it’s all about.”

The critical reviews started this fall when two prominent logging families claimed that the book, which for a year has been required reading for second-graders in the 570-student Laytonville Unified School District, is a thinly veiled attack on the lumber industry.

In the book, a mossy, mole-like creature named a Lorax fights a fruitless battle against the ax-wielding, water-fouling Once-ler family, which wreaks environmental havoc on a make-believe forest by greedily harvesting all of its truffula trees to make a multipurpose stocking called a thneed.

Eventually, the fuzzy-headed Lorax suddenly disappears, presumably at the hands of greed, after the Once-lers--”with a sickening smack of an ax on a tree”--cut down the last truffula. The book ends, however, on an upbeat note as the remaining Once-ler asks that a seed from the last tree be planted and raised with care.

Unfair Attack on Industry?

The book’s environmentalist theme, loggers argue, condemns an industry that for decades has been the region’s lifeblood.

Two weeks ago, after several children came home from school to question their parent’s lumber industry jobs, a campaign began to buzz-saw the book from the school district’s required reading list--downgrading it to alternative reading.

Even though a specially appointed review committee voted this week, 6 to 1, to keep the book on the second-grade core list, “The Lorax” isn’t out of the woods just yet. Logging advocates say they will appeal the issue to the school board, which meets again next month.

“The book was written 20 years ago, it’s outdated,” said 63-year-old Bud Harwood, whose family-owned logging company in nearby Branscomb employs about 300 people and is by far the area’s biggest employer.

“To teach this book is insensitive to us as pillars of the community. In our eyes, it’s an attack on the integrity of our industry. It’s not justified to have kids come home and tell their parents they’re working in a bad industry, that they’re criminals because they take the homes away from little animals.”

Without the controversy, teachers say, the book might well have been removed from the list soon enough. But not now. The issue now borders on censorship, they say.

The attempt to ax “The Lorax” reveals the tension that has been building in the community for months--even years--locals say.

Invasion of Outsiders

Underlying the most recent haggling is the resentment felt by many logging families, who have lived quietly here for generations, against the often college-educated outsiders from San Francisco and Southern California who have invaded the region in recent years.

Over the past decade, illicit profits from scores of acres of illegal marijuana crops have rivaled even the timber dollar here, causing resentment among old-timers but giving many outsiders a foothold to express their environmentalist ideas.

With increased federal efforts to close down the pot growers--added to a several-year decline in the logging industry--tempers are often short in Laytonville.

“Even the kids have been dragged into it,” said one coffee shop waitress who teaches dance part time. “One little girl came up to me recently and said “Teacher, are you for the loggers or the hippies?’

“They’ve taught their children that anyone with an environmentalist stand is a hippie. They even sponsored a campaign recently to tie a yellow ribbon on your car to show your support of the logging industry. This is a divided town.”

A three-hour drive north of San Francisco, Laytonville is more than a million miles away from the big city in character and spirit.

It’s a place where only country-western tunes blare over the radio waves, where the locals post signs on the marquee in the middle of town congratulating couples on their latest child, no last names needed--everybody knows everybody here.

The town sits on the southern face of the Redwood Wall--named for the tree that for decades has provided the area not only with an economic base, but an emotional cushion from the noise and pollution of the rest of California.

Redwood Is King

In Laytonville, the Redwood is king. Symbols of the tree are everywhere. Locals call the surrounding region “the Redwood Empire” and the stretch of U.S. 101 where they live “the Redwood Highway.”

They ignore the incessant rumble of the logging trucks running up and down the highway, rattling the windows of the cafes as they roll past.

This is the town that lumber built. On the west side of Laytonville sits Harwood Park--built with money donated by the logging family--with its dance hall, baseball diamond and rodeo arena.

Each year, Bill and Judith Bailey, wealthy logging equipment wholesalers, donate a half-dozen $1,000 scholarships to area children. The Baileys are the family that first pressed the school board about the use of “The Lorax.”

“They think that, just because they bought the town, they can tell people how to think,” said Kathi Cloninger, a member of the environmentalist group Earth First! that has been criticized by local logging interests for its vocal stand.

She said a petition circulated to keep the book on the reading list drew at least 100 names.

“This gets at something that has been going on behind the scenes for years in this town. I hate to see it all blown up again over a Doctor Seuss book.”

Since Laytonville is unincorporated--with no mayor, City Council or police force--political hagglings are often played out on its school board and in its weekly newspaper, the Mendocino County Observer.

Bailey, who drives a shiny new Jaguar in a town dominated by pickup trucks and junkyard clunkers, has written letters to the editor, blasting newcomers for criticizing the town “even while their radiators are still overheating, while their tires are still hot.”

Diane Ackermann, the newspaper’s columnist, has returned the volleys. “The whole thing is a stab of desperation by the loggers,” she said. “Because they’re in a dying business, simple as that.

“Logging is outdated. It’s like using a slide rule in the age of computers. Or driving a horse and buggy in the age of the Jaguar.”

In recent months, the town’s logging interests have taken on the school board, criticizing it for hiring too many inexperienced first-year teachers who come and go within a few years.

Last year, two incidents particularly stirred the loggers wrath. First, a teacher invited a singing group to come into a classroom to play environmentally oriented songs. Then loggers weren’t invited to the school for a career day.

Bailey and Harwood took out several full-page ads in the Observer blasting the school, saying the community had little faith left in its educators.

Art Harwood, the 36-year-old general manager of his family lumber business, used that theme to get elected to the five-member school board this year, becoming the second member with logging interests to sit on the panel.

And then came “The Lorax.”

The Baileys became upset after they discovered a journal their 8-year-old son, Sammy, kept in school about his reactions to the Seuss book, Bill Bailey said.

“He came home one day and asked my wife, ‘Papa doesn’t love trees anymore, does he?’ ” said Bailey, who spent 14 years as a logger before opening his wholesale equipment business.

“He said his papa cut down trees, and therefore the animals got hurt and died. He said that would be like someone coming and taking his home.”

After hearing reports from friends of their own children’s similar line of questioning, Judith Bailey filed a petition with the school district to have the book removed as required reading.

“No one ever suggested that the book be banned,” said Bailey, a college English major who says he has read and enjoyed the book. “But now they’re calling my wife a book banner and a book burner. It’s just not true.”

But the couple saw the need to defend their stand. In his nationally circulated catalogue for loggers’ supplies, Bailey prints a half-page warning against “The Lorax.”

“Ever read it?” the ad inquires. “You’ll nearly drop dead if you do. In the story, the Lorax is this fellow who speaks for the trees (‘cause trees don’t have tongues).”

The ad decries the fact that loggers are made out to be “nature rapers” and declares: “This Dr. Seuss book is unfair to the people in our industry, and the theme that loggers are criminals must stop.”

Bailey says he has received letters of support from loggers around the region, “people who said they wished they had the same guts I did for taking this stand.”

His complaint with the book, he says, is that second-graders are too naive to be introduced to its concepts. “It’s not a harmless book,” he said.

‘It’s Too Sophisticated’

“It bespeaks devastation. It’s a fictionalized account of perceived devastation by the logging industry. It’s too sophisticated, there’s too much social commentary for a second-grader.

“The book could be introduced when kids are old enough to make decisions for themselves on these concepts, maybe the 10th or 11th grades,” Bailey said.

Theodor (Ted) Geisel, who as Dr. Seuss has authored more than 40 children’s books including “The Cat in the Hat,” “Horton Hears a Who” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is baffled by his book’s role in Laytonville’s environmental controversy.

“This book isn’t against logging at all,” he said. “In fact, the book wasn’t even concerned with the wood in the trees, it was the leaves at the top of the trees, that’s all the Once-ler harvested.

“Wood was used as a symbol for many things. I don’t want to throw logs on their fire, but the book is taken up by schools and libraries all across the country as a symbol of conservation.”

“The Lorax,” he said, remains his favorite tale. He got inspiration for the book during a trip to Africa when, sitting at the edge of a pool, looking at the mountains in the distance, he spotted a herd of elephants.

The story became a plea, in Geisel’s signature humor and nonsense, not to destroy things for stupid reasons.

“It came from my annoyance over the fact that natural resources were being plundered--not just lumber but land and other things--for dumb reasons like greed.”

The sure-fire way to get his message to a young audience, he said, was a Seussian story. “I had read so much dull material on conservation--stuff that was just full of statistics. I was bored with it,” he said.

“I just wanted to write something interesting that kids would want to read, because, unless you tackle an issue in story form, you’re going to lose that young audience.”

Geisel, 85, said the book was intended for people of all ages--not just first- or second-graders, adding that several high school and college research papers have been written on “The Lorax.”

Brian Buckley, superintendent of the Laytonville Unified School District, said the book was chosen to help satisfy the history, social science and literature requirements for second-graders.

The core reading list, chosen by a panel of teachers, also included “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and two other books.

“Dr. Seuss is not ‘Dick and Jane’ in any sense,” Buckley said. “ ‘The Lorax’ is about the over-exploitation of finite resources. The reason the book was chosen is because it’s a reduction of these complex issues to a level that’s appropriate for an 8-year-old mind-set. He makes it fun.”

Buckley said he is aware that his school district may be the only one in the state with a Dr. Seuss book on the required reading list.

The San Diego Unified School District, the nation’s eighth-largest, for example, does not require Dr. Seuss books for its literature units in the elementary schools. Many district schools, however, use the books for recreational or enrichment reading, officials said.

“That’s why I can’t understand all the lumber-industry criticism for the school system and its teachers,” Buckley said. “We have a good reputation among our peers as using some advanced approaches.”

Many of the town’s residents are not taking the issue very seriously. In the coffee shops and at the service station pumps, they’re laughing in Laytonville.

“It’s all pretty ridiculous,” said James Griffin, who wore his hair in corn rows, nursing a cup of coffee in a local cafe. In two years, Griffin has seen enough small-town politics in Laytonville to make him want to pack up and head back to Vermont.

“This isn’t the town that hates Dr. Seuss,” he said. “This is the town where the man who hates Dr. Seuss lives.”

Several schoolchildren said they wouldn’t stop reading Dr. Seuss books.

“Dr. Seuss is strange, that’s why you like him,” said 15-year-old Jonah Renfort. “People grow up on him. For a little town like this, Dr. Seuss is about the strangest you can get.”

If the book indeed remains on the required reading list, the school board should force teachers to present an opposing point of view, loggers argue. And Bill Bailey says he has just the book.

The businessman is writing a parody that he hopes to finish in time for the school board to consider for recommendation next year.

“The book is about a little logging town named Happy, run by a mayor who never frowned,” Bailey said. “Well, after the hippies and welfare hounds move into town with all their drugs, the place starts to fall apart, the schools close and the lumber mills fold.

“All this makes the mayor frown for the first time in his life. He replaces the sign with the town’s name with one that reads Sad.

“My story doesn’t have all the rhymes of something by Dr. Seuss, but it tells our side of the story. It will do just fine.”