Benson leaves legacy
of lumber

By Heather Lende

Buster Benson, a sawyer whose solitary and steadfast devotion to his trade made him a legend to carpenters and homebuilders, died Feb. 2 of pneumonia at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. He was 82.

For the last 32 years, Benson worked full-time at his small outdoor mill, each year cutting up to 300,000 feet of local timber into lumber known around town as “Busterboards” that became parts of decks, sheds, homes, bridges, even sailboats. He sold to customers in Skagway, Juneau, Fairbanks and the Yukon and cut cedar logs for totem poles.  

Benson was a logger for 30 years before starting the mill. He worked as a woods boss for sawmills, owned a 60-employee logging company in Oregon that went broke, and felled trees with handsaws before the advent of the chainsaw. He married twice and raised six children. “I’ve had a full life,” he said in a 1994 newspaper interview.

A few years ago, shortly after Benson returned to town after heart surgery, carpenter Chris Kemp arrived at the mill on a cold, slushy morning and was alarmed to see a tube from Benson’s personal oxygen tank extending into the mud under a loader.

When Kemp called out, asking if he was okay, Benson slid from underneath the machine where he’d been working, wearing an oxygen mask. “He said, ‘I’m doing pretty good today, Chris. How are you doing?’” 

Friends built a barn over Benson’s open-air mill on Major Road 18 years ago when they decided he was too old to be working out in the rain. “They kept me busy cuttin’ while they was nailin’ up. It was quite a circus out here for a while,” Benson told an interviewer in 1999.

Besides grit, Benson earned admiration for friendly service, including an honor system that allowed customers to get lumber after hours by jotting their names and purchases on a pad hanging on the mill wall. “He was very respectful, he didn’t hold grudges, and even when people took advantage of him, he’d give them another chance,” said Mike Carter, who worked for Benson 11 years.

Leroy Benjamin Benson was born May 4, 1925 in Astoria, Ore., one of John and Lillian C. Agren Benson’s 10 children. He was raised on a dairy farm in Jewel, Ore. His grandfather was a woodsman and sawmill operator, and by the time he was 15, Benson was working as a “whistle punk,” signaling men operating the steam yarders that moved the logs in the days before walkie-talkies.

 At that time, trees were felled by two-man saws or “hand- fiddles.” Benson soon worked up to the “fiddle” and spent a winter sawing through trees up to six feet in diameter. “The two of you would fall about three trees a day…I was young and tough then. It didn’t bother me too much…It kept you warm.”

Benson served as an Army infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II and helped liberate American and British prisoners of war from a Japanese prison in the Phillipines.

He returned to the woods after the war but his career changed in 1951 when his leg was dragged under a bulldozer track. He spent three months in bed recovering from injuries including a fractured hip socket and pelvis. “It near tore off my right leg. I thought I was being chewed up.”

He became a “woods boss,” overseeing logging operations for an outfit before launching his own company, which he operated 19 years. A market slump in 1962 wrecked the business, but Benson took pride in paying off creditors instead of declaring bankruptcy. “I tried to sell, but I damn near had to give the equipment away. I found out it’s not good to get too big. You can’t look after things.”

Benson brought wife Eunice Grant and three stepchildren to Alaska in 1968. He went looking for work on the North Slope but headed to Haines after hearing about the timber industry here. He worked as a woods boss six years for Alaska Forest Products before the mill at Jones Point closed in 1975.

Weary of being at the mercy of forces he couldn’t control, Benson went to work for himself, forming B & D Lumber with partner Loren Deadorff. With a mobile dimension saw, they cut their first timbers from boom sticks, large timbers used to hold together rafts of logs for transport. Benson and Deardorff eventually earned enough to buy logging equipment, and divided their time between logging and milling.

When Deardorff moved south in 1980, Benson took to hiring a hand, including stepson Bob Grant. The mill operated nearly year-round, shutting down only when winter weather depleted the mill’s log supply or temperatures dropped below 20 F., because frozen wood doesn’t cut evenly.

Benson’s ability to cut timbers within one-eighth of an inch earned him the respect of timber-frame house builders and carpenters, and in recent years he said he could “see” the lumber in a log without a tape measure. “I’ve been in the business long enough. I know the size logs I’m looking for just by eyesight.”

Once known for being so bow-legged that he couldn’t “stop a pig running down a blind alley,” Benson had both knees replaced 15 years ago and joked that he gained four inches in height. A heart attack and bypass surgery didn’t keep him from working into his eighties. He was also missing a couple of fingers, lost to a silage chopper when he was ten years old.

“They tried gluing them back on, but they didn’t have the know-how back then, so they just finished them off,” Benson recounted.

Benson and his dog Junior were a fixture at the mill and each day at 10 a.m. sharp would head to town for a doughnut – for Junior. Benson preferred bagels. “When I die, I want to come back as Buster’s dog,” neighbor Ernie Wilkins used to say.

Benson took no interest in retirement, saying in 1999: “I’ll run that sawmill until I can’t run it no more. And then whatever happens, happens, I guess.”

Benson also was a water witch, using a bent stick to divine where wells should be drilled. Millworker Carter said Benson would witch for anyone who asked, and although he never took any money for it, a pie was most welcome.

Benson was not bound to convention. He saw an acupuncturist for pain and took pride in a solar panel mounted on the side of his mill to keep its battery charged.

Longtime friend Erwin Hertz said when Benson first arrived in town, he worked for Hertz as an electrician. “He was an amazing man. He could do anything and he was really efficient. He wouldn’t even stop for lunch.”

Benson liked to sport fish and hunted moose and mountain goats, and was a lifetime member of the Elks and the American Legion. Son John Benson said the family would remember him for his “hundreds of stories” and “as a good father, grandfather and human being.” He said the family was hoping to keep the sawmill operating under new ownership.

 Benson is survived by sisters Idel Cahill and Gertrude McNett of Portland Ore., daughter Susan Sessions of Crescent Ore., son John and Mary Benson of Anchorage, stepson Bob and Jessie Grant of Haines, stepson Roger Grant of Eugene Ore., step-daughter Marlene Logan of Cripple Creek Co., daughter-in-law Donna Benson of Mount Angel, Ore., granddaughters Misty Villastrigo of Palmer and Mindy Jurik of Wasilla and grandsons Cory and Jared Grant of Haines.

A local memorial service is tentatively planned for Feb. 23.

Some of the information used in this story was first published by Alaskan Southeaster magazine in April 1999.