9 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Featured Article continues war on a vacation in 1940. For a woman from Queens, the wide-open spaces of Alaska were a wonder. That experience led her to decide to fly to Seattle in September of 1942 and volunteer to go to Alaska. She was shipped to Alaska on a ship convoy. My parents met on the job while my Mother was collecting time sheets. My Dad won out over all the officers in courting my Mother. They married in late December 1943, and moved to Eugene, Oregon, in early 1944 to start their family. WWII ended in 1945. My sister was born on November 12, 1944, and I was born on November 9, 1946. In 1948, my parents moved to Central Oregon and bought a 1,000 acre ranch on Deschutes Market Road, which included 110 acres of cultivated land with water rights. Specifically, the ranch comprised the east half of Section 35 and Section 36, Township 16 South, Range 12 East, Willamette Meridian; it was pretty much surrounded by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property to the east, north, and south of Section 36. Our ranch house was a half mile off Deschutes Market Road. That ranch house is now a vacation rental called The Bend Country Cabin (https:// www.vrbo.com/407766). The old milk parlor, where my Dad studied for his PLS exam, is now one of the rentals, and I have rented the ranch house numerous times with family and friends. My Dad was never successful at farming and ranching, and had to “work out” to support our family and the ranch. The weather, market timing, and health issues were always working against him. During that time he gained more surveying experience with the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service) between 1949 and 1953 in Redmond, and later with Brooks- Scanlon Lumber Company in Bend between 1956 and 1959. He gained valuable skills recovering lost government corners when surveying lands owned by Brooks- Scanlon prior to its logging operations. While going through family letters, photos, etc., I found an employment record for Jean Wm. Hawthorne covering the time prior to his earning his PLS license. There was a handwritten copy, and a copy that my Mother had typed since she had the typing skills in the family. I have included a retyped copy at the end. This document gives more detailed background of my Dad’s early surveying experience and varied work experiences. His surveying experience started during the summer when he was going to college at Fresno State College in California. He had held a job with the US Geological Survey in southeast Alaska as a topographical engineer’s helper. He had told me stories of living on a boat while doing topographic surveying of the inside passage. It sounded like he had a great time. My surveying experience began in the eighth grade. I remember first helping my Dad soon after he got his PLS license when I was in the eighth grade at Tumalo Grade School, and he was still working at Brooks-Scanlon shortly before he quit. I am pretty sure that the job I helped with was off of Cline Falls Highway, just out of Tumalo, close to the Deschutes River. That is where he taught me to use July 1948 at the original house on the county road before we moved half a mile in to the original ranch house where there was no power or running water at first until they had a cistern built and power line installed. All water came from the irrigation ditches.
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