MR. J. W. ANDERSON

Millmen will never know Mr. J. W. Anderson personally because he doesn't sell goods, or travel through mill territory. The work he does is not even of value to millmen. But at the same time his is such an unusual, and yet important, employment that we believe his picture and a short description of his work will be of more or less interest to the readers of the DISSTON CRUCIBLE.

Then, too, Mr. Anderson has a sort of fellow feeling for the millmen, because while he started life as a farmer, he also owned a small sawmill at one time. But all this has nothing to do with Mr. Anderson's business, which you are now probably curious to know about. Well, here it is:

He is an Apple Log Explorer!

That leaves you as much in the dark as ever, but we will explain just what this means. In the manufacture of saw handles various kinds of wood are used. It has been found, however, that Apple wood is the favorite for hand saw use. It is soft and easy to

the hand, and possesses great durability. The demand for it, therefore, is very large, and not at all easy to supply. A good live orchard bearing bountifully every season is a paying proposition, and as it takes some years for an Apple tree to begin to bear, the owner of a good Apple orchard is not inclined to sacrifice his trees for saw handles. It requires constant search from end to end of the Apple growing districts to find suitable trees, and no little business ability to conduct the negotiations for their purchase.

This is Mr. Anderson's "job"-to find proper trees to supply our steadily increasing demand for Apple wood to make into saw handles. His early life as a farmer, during which time he devoted a great deal of attention to Apple growing, fitted him for the special work which he took up in later years.

There are only certain sections of the country where Apple trees grow to a sufficiently large size, and while Mr. Anderson's travels take him as far as Oregon, it is mainly in the East that he obtains the best trees for his purpose. Trees under thirteen inches in diameter are very seldom bought. Mr. Anderson recently succeeded in locating and purchasing a tree in Adams County, Pennsylvania, which was thirty-eight inches in diameter and perfectly healthy. This was an unusually large size.

Only live, healthy trees are of any use, and it takes an expert to pick them out. In addition to his early experience with Apple trees, Mr. Anderson has now been engaged in the business of exploring for Apple logs about twenty years. He tests the quality of the trees while standing by sound, and by the appearance of the bark. And he seldom makes a mistake.

Mr. Anderson is still greatly interested in the scientific growing of Apple orchards and has an orchard of his own now, consisting of 110 acres in York County, Pennsylvania. In the excellent likeness of him which accompanies this article he looks more like a Mexican revolutionary leader than a plain business man. This was taken in front of the Balancing Rock, Colorado Springs, while on one of his exploring trips.

Before beginning his country wide hunt for Apple logs, Mr. Anderson was familiar with DISSTON SAWS. He says: "I ran DISSTON SAWS for twenty-five years in oak, etc., and never had to have a 'saw doctor' for one of them."

WHO'S WHO IN THE SAW WORLD

YO

MR. L. E. LULL

OU have come face to face with some good men under this heading, but in point of service, experience and ability, Mr. L. E. Lull, whose picture appears here this month, stands in the front rank.

For the last fifteen years Mr. Lull has successfully sold DISSTON SAWS in the service of the C. T. Patterson Co., New Orleans branch of HENRY DISSTON & SONS. Mr. Lull enjoys not only the entire confidence of his house, but is on the friendliest of terms with the trade in his territory, which covers Western Florida and Southern Alabama.

Mr. Lull was born thirty-five years ago in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he spent his early life. He now resides in Mobile, Alabama. He had extensive experience as a saw salesman before joining the Patterson Co., and, as his customers know, there is no one better equipped, from the standpoint of experience and general knowledge, to take care of their business.

In many parts of the west snow is leaving the mountains earlier than usual. Foresters say that this may mean a bad fire season, and they are making plans for a hard campaign.

WHERE PENCIL WOOD COMES FROM

The principal portion of wood used for the manufacture of lead pencils now comes from Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas, in the Ozarks. Formerly a great deal of this came from Florida, in the cedar swamps.

There is a mill in Branson, Missouri, which cuts out lead pencil stock. This mill cuts the stock up into eight inch lengths, and into little slabs about oneeighth of an inch thick, and varying in width from seven-eighths of an inch to three inches. These little pieces are bundled and shipped to the pencil factories in this country and in Europe. It is said this mill cuts enough stock each day to manufacture a quarter of a million pencils. All told, there are sixteen mills cutting pencil stock.

Only the heart of the cedar is used. It is fine grained and does not warp. As a rule, the trees are small and stunted, seldom being greater than twelve inches at the butt. -West Coast Lumberman.

SAWDUST AS A FIRE EXTINGUISHER

Sawdust as a fire extinguisher sounds absurd, but recent experiments in Boston proved it to be very successful in quenching fires in oil, and much superior to sand for fires in tanks of inflammable liquids. The experiments were conducted with tanks of burning lacquer, though the same principles appear to apply largely to tanks of burning oil. The floating sawdust forms a blanket that shuts off the air from the flames; and, as sawdust itself catches fire only slowly and then does not burn with a flame, the sawdust blanket was completely successful in putting out the fire in these tests. It made no difference whether the sawdust was wet or dry.—Saturday Evening Post.

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