Lorine (Mom) Pursley Farrell

By Jim Farrell

On May 3, 2022, she would have been100 years-old, an age she wanted to achieve, but she died three and a half years ago.  This lady was raised in the logging camps of the Olympic Peninsula, on the “west end”, where the only way to even reach Port Angeles, WA was by logging train or boat.  Her father ‘Dick Pursley’ was stationed in the logging camps as a solder of the “Spruce Production Division” during WW1, when the Army stationed 30,000 troops from, Crescent City, California to Juneau, Alaska. These troops had been sent to work in the spruce forests for two purposes.  First was to replace the loggers who had been drafted out of the woods into the army, and the other was to suppress the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) who had been striking in 1917 for better pay and working conditions. (Another story for another time). 

Upon discharge from the Army in 1919, he went back down to Southern California and married Florence Kennedy, and caught a ship back up to Twin Washington, where he began to operate the exact same steam “logging donkey” that he had learned to operate as a US Army solder.

Mom and her brothers moved from logging camp to logging camp, throughout her early life even escaping two raging forest fires, one at 6 years old along miles of a forest trail with her mother telling her “Lorine, if you walk the whole way you can go to school this fall” as her mother was holding her two younger brothers. Her dad who had been fighting the forest fire, heard that they were walking out on a trail that would have led them into the path of the fire, ran after them, sending them down a different trail to safety.

The other in a school bus heading to Eddyville where they lived, when the fire jumped HY 101 by Lake Crescent, both in front and behind the bus, and the old bus driver, known to be a hard drinker, yelled at her and the other kids “you little bastards get down on the floor”, as he drove through the furious flames on both sides of the highway, sustaining burns all over his body and pealing paint off the bus.

When Mom was maybe a freshman in high school, a woman teacher who was know for beating children with a length of rubber hose, started to beat her, when mom grabbed the hose and beat the teacher.  The teacher tried to get mom kicked out of school, but Grandpa Dick came to her defense, and the teacher was fired (as I remember the story).  In many ways, no, in all ways, mom was one of the original feminists. 

Her dad had taught her that she was as good as any man, as Russ Farrell found out when he met and married the then 17-year-old in 1939 and made a life with her. Soon after the marriage, the first of four kids came along.  She loved to tell the story of when her number two child, Sandi stopped the war during WW2, while living in Sappho near Forks, WA.   Apparently, two-year-old Sandi, had taken off all her clothes in the middle of highway 101 and had the Army heading eastbound stopped, and the Coast Guard, westbound also stopped, before mom ran out and grabbed her, thus allowed the war to continue.

She raised her four children on our 88 acres ‘stump farm’, she and dad bought for $120.00 from a timber company after they had taken off most of the easy to get to timber. They were able to clear off a 20-acre lower field by the creek and another 10 acres where they built a house.  They raised the money by buying some timber near Freshwater Bay and between the two of them, fell, bucked the trees and using a log jack, jacked them into Freshwater Bay to form a log raft to have towed into Port Angeles mills to sell. 

On the stump farm, they grew at least an acre of garden and maybe half an acre of Old Fashion Marshall strawberries, which all of us kids, hated to pick and weed. They kept milk cows, pigs, chickens and even rabbits, all for the milk, eggs, and meat, all which fed our family of course along with a deer of two…

One time this little 4’10” lady saw a herd of deer cross the field by the house during hunting season and without thinking too much, grabbed the Winchester 32 special lever action rifle, steadied her shot…err…, shots, and brought down six of them (the 32 special only holds eight shells).  Realizing what she had just done, and only having her own and dad’s deer tags, proceeded to call neighbors to bring down theirs.  Hey, that was the way it was in a rural neighborhood when loggers were out of work a good part of the year.  Besides that, the statute of limitations has run out.

All this while her husband, Russ, was trying to make a living as a logger and helping organize the IWA (International Woodworkers of America) into a union to fight for an 8-hour day, unemployment insurance, and safer working conditions for loggers. She joined dad in the union fight as part of the IWA’s Women Auxiliary, and even attending its convention in Portland as a delegate from the Port Angles local.

Then in the last 1950s, Rainier, Crown Zellerbach, Pope and Talbot and the other lumber barons blackballed him from working in the woods.  At that point, this lady had to take on most of the responsibilities, not only for the kids, but the farm as well, because dad had to be gone for a week at a time, away from home to work where he could.  Somehow, she even found time for a part-time cleaning job at the Lake Crescent Lodge, who also hired two of my sisters.

In 1960, she had enough of her husband being gone for up to two weeks at a time and, having two of her children off on their own, decided to follow him as he worked in power line construction with the other two.  First off to Redmond with her high school kids in tow, got a job in a restaurant, then a couple of months later, on to Burns then finally to Portland, all in one year. That year was spent with many pleasant Sunday car trips around the Pacific Northwest, learning its history and geology.

In Portland, she finally was able to blossom and at around the age of forty was able to get her GED, then a college degree, all the while being a mother of teenagers and working mostly full time as a waitress.  Here she came on to her own, supporting the Civil Rights movement and participating in the lunch counter sit-ins of Woolworth’s in downtown Portland.  She and dad also helped with the strike and grape boycott of Farm Workers Union of Cesar Chavez, which led to better housing and wages for even the farmworkers in Oregon. 

She walked side by side with dad as his equal through the struggles in Portland for equal justice for all, the closing of the Trojan power plant, women’s rights, the right for a woman to own her own body, anti-Vietnam war, the war in Iraq, and even a wildcat strike of the Electrical Workers union construction division, where she reaffirmed that she still had a deadly punch, as this writer seen once when he was a teenager…

…The punch that straightened out fifteen-year-old Golden Glove boxer, came when he took his sister’s car one night without permission to do something with his friends and upon coming home to the apartment faced a very angry 4’ maybe 11”, 120 lb. mother, with tears in her eyes, called him a little SOB, and hit him in the stomach with her fist, so hard that he tumbled over the couch to the floor.  Needless to say, he never did that again and gained one hell of a lot of respect…

… the next time he saw that frightful fist in action was years later following the wildcat strike of the Electrical Workers, The IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) those of us, my dad, Chuck Johnson, and other leaders, I was in college, but worked summers.

The union’s executive board held a closed-door meeting at the union hall with the strikers and their families just outside the door, decided that they had to discipline the strikers, or the electrical construction companies would take the union to court.  It resulted in a fine of $6,000 for the leaders, and $1,000 for those who helped.  The main antagonist was the union’s representative, Leo Marshal, who had been allowing the company to start the worker’s day when they got to the job site, which was at least an hour away on the power line, not the shop. They also had workers ride in the back of four-wheel drive pickups, without cover.

When the verdict came out of the back room, and the men ‘s penalties came out, they faced a group of angry linemen and their families.  Foremost of the group was the 4’11”, 135 lb. of an angry wife who saw the smug smile on the face of a 6’3”, 250 lb. Marshal, ran up to him with tears in her eyes and said, “Are you the SOB, Leo Marshal?”, and swung up with her deadly right hand, hitting him in the face and knocking off his glasses. 

In less than ten minutes, no less than five big policemen came charging into the union hall to calm things down.  Leo Marshal pointed to 4’ 10” Mom as his assailant and the Sargent, looked at mom then walked over to Marshal and said, “Are you sure that you want to press charges on that little lady?”, which by then red-faced Marshal politely declined.  Yep, be oh so careful not to antagonize that lady when she has tears in her eyes, for her dad had taught her to box, early.

This isn’t the end of the story, and I’ll be adding to it, with photos as time goes on as my sisters will correct my faulty memory where appropriate and may add their own memories of this remarkable little lady… Editor