RANGELEY – Bill Coolong of Avon was inducted into the Loggers Hall of Fame during the 24th annual Logging Festival on July 23 at the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum.

Coolong was inducted by museum President Rodney Richard Sr. Also present at the induction ceremony were Coolong’s daughter, Lori Savage of Avon, and his employer, Mark Beauregard of Rangeley.

Still working in the woods at the age of 70, Coolong says, “Well, I like the work. I like the sounds and the smell of the woods, the wide-open spaces. I worked in a factory for a while, for the paper company. The hum of the machines, steady, for eight hours – I just felt like I was caged right in.”

Born in Avon in 1934, Coolong started peeling wood when he was 12, working with is father, Charles Coolong Sr., and his older brothers Leon and Charles on their family’s 200 acres.

Forest work is in his blood. His grandfather George Coolong logged with several teams of horses in the Jackman and Rangeley areas, and cut a million board feet of wood a year. Coolong’s great-grandfather, a woodsman, emigrated from Canada to settle in Fort Kent.

When Coolong was 15, he twitched wood with his father’s horses, and cut with crosscut saws and bucksaws. In the 1950s, the Coolongs began yarding with a small John Deere crawler tractor. Then came arches and skidders. In 1972, he bought his 1965 Pettibone skidder from one of his employers.

Coolong has worked throughout Franklin County, on Saddleback, at the outlet of Rock Pond, at the Landing by the Sandy River town line, in Dixfield at the Boise tree farm, on Speckled Mountain, and for Paul Bolduc in the Davistown Camps, Magalloway, Richardson Lake and Beaver Pond. He also cut for Maine Dowel in Farmington, New Portland, Madrid, Fayette and Livermore.

“I traveled around quite a lot over the years,” he said.

His most challenging job, working with Targett and Vaughn near the Height of the Land, was also his coldest.

“It was 45 below, and the wind was blowing. And it was cold. I was chopping yellow birch for veneer.” He kept warm by working, “You can generate enough heat usually to keep pretty warm. Worst trouble was keeping your hands warm. The chain saws weren’t mounted in rubber to take up the shock; you had to grip the saw pretty hard. You needed big mittens with liners in them – a chopper’s mit. My wife, Leola, knitted quite a lot of mittens for me, about all colors.”

Once he broke his leg when he was sawing a “popple” tree that broke and came down and hit him. “It pushed my ankle out of the socket, and they had to operate because it shattered the bone. I was laid up about seven months.”

Although Coolong “retired” eight years ago, he’s doing selective cutting in Phillips for Hugh and Betty Montgomery, cutting white and rock maple, beech and hornbeam on their land for firewood.

Hugh Montgomery “didn’t want anybody that was going to hack it up,” explained Mark Beauregard, the Montgomerys’ woodlot manager. “He wanted a high quality job, and Coolong is one of the best selective cut loggers in the state of Maine.”

“I try to keep the job looking good,” Coolong explains, “I don’t want to damage other trees, just take out wood that’s damaged. Sometimes you can’t always leave the young healthy trees, but I try to leave as many as I can. And you work off the roads; you don’t just go all through the woods everywhere. I probably learned quite a lot from twitching with the horses years ago.”

Coolong’s wood piles are legendary among local loggers. “When he cut hardwood bolt wood on the top of Blake Hill,” Beauregard remembers, “Bill would pile his four-foot wood, and you could snap a chalk line on it, and that chalk line would hit every stick. His wood piles were the nicest looking wood piles you could find anywhere.”

“It’s just the way I do things,” Coolong explained modestly. “I just have to have it looking good, or somewhere near it. I have to satisfy myself.”

The Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum welcomes visitors to see the Logging Hall of Fame plaque and other exhibits during museum hours on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 to 2.

The museum is also open by appointment, which may be arranged by calling 864-5595.

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