There’s a new show in town. The Timber Processing & Energy Expo is scheduled for October 17-19, 2012 at the Portland Metropolitan Exposition Center in Oregon. The event will be sponsored by Hatton-Brown Publishers Inc., which publishes several magazines in the forest products industry, including Timber Processing, Panel World, Wood Bioenergy and others.

Through the years a variety of individuals have won the prestigious Timber Processing Man of the Year award, and the honor was envisioned with the independent sawmiller in mind: innovative and successful, tempered by experience and insight, driven to succeed through good times and bad while looking out for their businesses and communities.

When Eddie Wood began milling part time on his father’s old sawmill some six years ago he had no idea he and his father Henry would soon have, between them, two independent sawmill businesses operating under a single roof, seven employees and more than two million board feet of production per year. Regardless of what Eddie thought might happen when he began sawmilling, the reality for both he and his father has been consistent growth even through times of economic stress for the industry as a whole.

Knowing how many of you are college football fans, I am compelled to relay the following story. If you are a college football fan you are probably aware of StubHub, the ticket brokering web site on which sellers list their tickets and to which buyers go and buy them. I had used StubHub several times, however when I ordered four end zone tickets to the national championship football game between Auburn and Oregon, I was nervous from the get-go.

Spanish Trail Lumber Co. in Cypress, Fla. starts 2011 with Price LogPro’s new 3rd generation infinite trim sliding saw bucking system featuring electric saw control. The new merchandising system replaces a hydraulic log trimmer system. Spanish Trail was looking for a more flexible bucking system that would be much less maintenance intensive than the previous fixed 2 ft. saw system.

Don R. Johnson, principal of D.R. Johnson Lumber Co., died November 25 in Roseburg, Ore. He was 83. Johnson began his career in the lumber business at a young age when he worked summers and part-time in his father’s mill in Veneta. When he returned from the military he started his own small logging company in the same area, but by 1950 was looking for an opportunity to expand. He settled in Riddle in 1951 and immediately began building a sawmill where the current D.R. Johnson Lumber Co. still stands.