Don and his grandson Reese inspect Don’s airplane. He built the RV-6 from a kit over 20 years.
Don Moore first worked for Weyerhaeuser shortly after graduating from high school in the summer of 1974. He landed the job through a friend whose father was a logging supervisor, but he felt uneasy in the woods.
“On my first day, the logging foreman gestured to a skidder and said, ‘There it is. Get on it and go after it,’” he recalls. “I had no training on this big machine, and my more seasoned colleagues played harder than most people fight.”
With no experience and little guidance, he felt out of place and unsafe and eventually decided to quit after a few months.
But an empty wallet and a desire to work led him back to Weyerhaeuser. On January 21, 1975, he was hired as a common laborer at our former Mountain Pine, Arkansas, sawmill. He still remembers his first paycheck — he started on a Tuesday, so his workweek was 32 hours and his paycheck was $98.
“For a kid with no money, that felt like almost robbing a bank,” he says.
Fast forward 50 years, and Don is now a land-use forester in De Queen, Arkansas. And over his five decades with the company, he’s witnessed a transformation in how we work — especially in safety and technology.
Don, right, with his twin brother Lon around 1979, preparing the ground for reforestation.
A PERSONAL SAFETY JOURNEY
“When I started, there wasn’t the same safety focus we have today,” Don says. “We were just beginning to realize that not everyone knew how to recognize a hazard or what to do about it.”
Don’s job at the mill was to pull a cable that released boards from a rack into a buggy. When the buggy was full, he rolled it down an incline to the center of the lumber yard, where it was loaded onto a transfer vehicle and transported to the stacker.
“One day, something went wrong, and the young man who ran the transfer got pinned between two buggies and suffocated before we could free him,” Don says, his voice choking with emotion at the painful recollection. “That was the first time someone close to me died at work, and it’s stuck with me.”
In 1976, Don transferred to the truck maintenance shop on the east side of the mill complex. A year later, tragedy struck again when a 21-year-old log truck driver died.
“We had graduated from high school together, and I became a pallbearer at his funeral,” he says.
Looking back, Don says the truck his friend was driving would never be allowed on the roads today. It would be tagged unsafe and taken out of service until critical maintenance was performed.
“Back then, we did our best to avoid getting hurt, but we didn’t have the resources or a formal way to raise concerns like we do today,” he says.
He experienced the heartbreak of four more work-related deaths of people close to him over the next two decades. Each loss deepened his appreciation for the need to proactively identify and address safety risks.
“As the years went by, all the extra attention on safety training and hazard recognition started to pay off,” Don says. “Six people close to me died on the job in my first 25 years. Over the last 25 years, no one close to me has died. That speaks volumes about where we were and what we’ve accomplished.”
Don, right, and Lon inspect a bedding plow in the late 1970s.
BACK INTO THE WOODS
In 1977, Don switched to forestry, where he acquired skills in operating heavy machinery for road construction, timber cruising and fireline construction for combating wildfires. By 1982, as much of this work shifted to contractors, Don audited their work for contract compliance.
“Our forest inventory was done by hand,” he says. “We recorded data on paper, and stand maps were drawn on large mylar sheets that hung in the office.”
Around this time, a supervisor mentioned the office would soon get its first computer. Half-jokingly, Don said he didn’t want “those things” to alter his life, but they did.
“The inventory process changed almost overnight. What used to take hours —sometimes days — took far less time with aerial photography linked to GIS.”
In 2004, Don became an inventory forester, his first salaried position. He later transitioned to silviculture before taking on his current role as a land-use forester. Over the past 20 years, the growing sophistication of our IT system — and its integration with laptops and handheld devices — has consistently made his work more efficient.
Don revisits the same parcel where he and Lon worked on the bedding plow.
IT’S THE PEOPLE
As he thinks about his 50th anniversary, Don says the talent, dedication and selflessness of the people he’s worked with inspired him to stick with Weyerhaeuser.
“I wouldn’t be where I am today without the patience of so many people who took the time to teach and mentor me,” he says.
He’s also deeply appreciative of colleagues from near and far who provided unwavering support after his wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and passed away a few years ago.
As he focuses on the future, Don plans to mentor those around him and encourage his next-generation colleagues to bring a can-do attitude to work and believe in themselves. His twin brother Lon retired from Weyerhaeuser after 40 years in 2016, but Don isn’t quite ready to set a retirement date himself.
“I’ve said at the past three holiday parties that each one would be my last,” he says with a chuckle.
