Again, I don't want to derail this any further, so I'll keep it short. It WAS a great place to work. The company was started in 1869 and for many, many years was like heaven. There was actually a book written about the place in the '70's called "Life in The Peace Zone". It was a company town and was extremely clean and well run. The school was excellent ,kids behaved. You could rent a house for $75 a month as late as the early '80's. Since the company had a power plant and a water plant, no electric bills or water bills ever. When I went to work in '85 they had not only a VERY generous pension, but an company-matched investment plan quite similar to a 401K. To get a job there you had to wait until someone got fired (almost never) or died or retired. Once you got hired, it didn't matter that you started out pulling boards or whatever, you could apply for any open position and they would train you. Mechanic, millwright, electrician, painter, whatever you wanted. Some people wound up in the main office doing personnel, purchasing or whatever. The company sold stock and split every few years and the employees who bought stock profited greatly. Then came an article in the SF Chronicle that told the story of this place and it caught the eye of a corporate raider in the Texas who bought the place. Things changed but at least he was smart enough to realize the value of skilled workers, and every job there had been perfected through generations of refinement. Over the next 20 years, the owner put next to nothing back into the company,yet took massive loans out against the company's timber until there was nothing left to take and they filed for bankruptcy. A court in Texas awarded the sale of the company assets to the Fisher family (who also own the Gap clothing stores and the Oakland A's baseball team) under the condition that they keep the place running for 5 years. After 5 years they hired a new CEO, who changed the way we do things to his way. Production plummeted, people were fired, he brought in some minions, production dropped even further, costs soared and more people were fired. The ones fired were never the people the new CEO brought in, it was always the guys who'd been there 20-30 years. I saw the writing on the wall at age 51 and left. I'm very happy now, so worked out fine for me, but it makes me sad that a company I had strong emotional ties to is being run into the ground and good people are suffering for it.