Memories salvaged from razing of former lumberyard

While Marion County road and bridge workers knocked down and began hauling away the former Mack-Welling Lumber & Supply Co. building last Wednesday to make room for a new county jail, one local observer had more than a passing interest in the project.

Ralph Popp helped build the facility on Fourth Street across from the county courthouse as a young man, then managed the business for 35 years before retiring in 1985.

?I?m not sentimental about it,? Popp said about the demolition of the 12,100-square-foot building, though he and a few family members did take one last tour of the structure the evening before it fell.

?For a jail, that?s the perfect site,? he said. ?The area is big enough for it. I hated to see it just destroyed, though. It would have been nice to kind of salvage it.?

A family business

Because of the involvement of family members in the business during his years as manager, Popp, now in his 80s, will salvage plenty of good memories.

Wife Kathryn worked as part-time bookkeeper in the business, and their two children, Joanne and John, helped out from their grade-school years through high school.

?Paint was their speciality,? Ralph said of the kids. ?We mixed everything in those days. It was something they could learn and do.?

?That was kind of our life for a long time,? Kathryn said about the business.

Starting out

Born ?out on the prairie? between Durham and Tampa, Ralph Popp moved with his family to a farm south of Marion when he was 2 years old, then to a house in Marion near the alfalfa mill.

?I walked from there up to the high school every day,? he said. ?We walked, we were on time and we carried our lunch in an old paper sack and then brought it home and used it for lunch the next day.?

With World War II erupting, he enlisted in the Air Force, eventually serving with the ground crew in Guam that loaded 500-pound bombs on Boeing B-29 Superfortresses.

When Popp returned to Marion, he took a construction job with Earl Barrett, a local contractor. The pair built a house or two before they began constructing essentially a new building for what was then known as Badger Lumber Co.

?Berg had a heart attack while we were working, and then they had me take over the building of that thing,? Popp said.

In 1950, the owners from Mack-Welling came from Kansas City, Kan., to ask him run the operation.

?I was out at the lake working on a house,? he said. ?They wanted me right now and I had to arrange to cut (the project) short and go to work there.?

The following year, Marion was hit with a major flood.

?I remember the ?51 flood,? Popp said. ?We had built (the building) up pretty high, but it still got to be knee deep (in water).?

He also recalls the tornado in 1970 that damaged the county courthouse across the street before ripping off one of the big doors at the business.

Business operations

Operating a lumber yard was different in the early days than it is today.

?When we built the lumberyard there wasn?t anything like ready-mix concrete,? Popp said. ?We had sand, cement, a little mixer. If I remember right, the cement was in one-cubic-foot sacks that weighed 94 pounds.

?We would mix what was about the equivalent of a sixth of a yard and we hauled it in wheelbarrows.?

Sand and lumber came to the business via rail, using a side track near the depot not far from the business.

?An old man lived down there who would unload the rail car for so many dollars,? Popp recalled. ?He could scoop over the side and unload a rail car full of sand in a day with a scoop shovel. You could hardly see him, he was so short. But sand would keep coming over the top.?

Customers bought the sand according to weight.

?We had a scale in the north driveway,? he said. ?Before the co-op built their big scale, it was the biggest scale in town. It was 22 feet long, if I remember.?

Lumber arrived in boxcars.

?Most of the time we?d get half a boxcar and somebody else would get half a boxcar. A full boxcar of lumber was a whale of a lot.?

Popp said he made a lot friends while working at the lumber yard.

?There weren?t many unhappy customers. Most of them were pretty reasonable.?

But Popp also recalled a close encounter of an unpleasant kind.

?A lot of times after we?d close, I?d come home and eat and then go down there at night to sort some stuff or do some bookwork,? he said.

?One night I went down there and there was a guy sitting in my chair at my office. He wasn?t a local person. He came in the back and knocked out a window.

?I don?t think I roughed him up, but I took him right across the street straight to the jail.?

Mack-Welling Lumber & Supply Co. closed about five years after Popp?s retirement.

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