Bio of a B.C. Logger
Gordon Barney was born in Vancouver in 1947 and moved to Ladysmith on Vancouver Island at a very young age. His father George Barney was a faller for McMillan, Bloedel at Copper Canyon near Chemainus for 31 years.
Gord went to work at an early age in the woods as did most young men around Ladysmith at that time. The jobs were many, pulp mills, saw mills, but he chose to work in woods. He started work in the woods "punkin" whistles and then worked on the Riggin' and moved upward until he was a machine operator a few years later. He operated one of the first Grapple Yarder's built by Madill machinery in Nanaimo when it came to the camp he was in, near Kelsey bay in 1968.
He logged up and down the West Coast of British Columbia and the Queen Charlotte Islands in many of the small logging camps for many years, where he collected many of his stories.
He always drew cartoons as a young man and then put them to use, drawing caricatures of his logging buddies and making fun of some of the woods bosses as he improved his technique.
He wrote down stories that he heard in the bunkhouse on scraps of paper and then in later years copied them on to a computer disk, to write into a book he knew he would write one day.
He is now retired from the forest industry and his book
Camp Inspector and
Haywire are now written and published by Fir Grove Publishing. He lives in Ladysmith which is near his two sons Clay and Martin. Gord has drawn many logging cartoons and submits written material to the Green Gold Logger's Newspaper regularly.
He is well known as a Logger, Poet, Cartoonist and Writer in the Vancouver Island area.
Bill Owens, Editor, I.W.A. (Local 1-71)
Now USW Green Gold Newspaper