I met Ken DeLong down in the Bay Area fifteen or twenty years ago. We had been selling his company, Kelleher, some cedar clears and a little Doug fir. A guy named Jeff Barnes was buying it and shipping most of it to Home Depot. I wanted to see who these people were, so I went over to their branch in Novato, out at Blackpoint. Kelleher was sold in 2025 to Woodgrain. Don Kelleher, well into his eighties, chose retirement and financial security over the operational challenge that running a five distribution yard operation can be.
I walk in and there’s just these dudes, kicking around, laughing, having a good time in the middle of a workday. That was the whole first impression. Not a quiet sales floor with everybody’s head down. A crew.
I had actually been introduced to Ken over the phone by Chris Shively out in Hawaii, who I was shipping Doug fir lumber and moldings to. Chris said you have got to get down to Novato and meet Ken. So I did. And during that visit, I remember Ed Schurr saying, Kenny, you have to get Dave to come to your golf tournament. I had no idea what that was, but I was about to find out.
Turns out Ken had had a heart transplant, and the golf tournament was a lot more than golf. They played poker the night before. They golfed. They went bowling. Maybe there were darts, I honestly can’t remember, there was so much going on. It was an all day and all night affair. I went down for it a few times and it was an absolute blast. Those guys took me in like I was one of them, like I had grown up with their crew in Marin County and played ball with them since high school, which I hadn’t. They just decided I was family. That meant something to me.
The business was easy because we spoke the same language. Honesty and common sense, that was it, our guide. Over the years we kept adding to it, cedar, hemlock, moldings. Good years, great people.
Then Ken’s brother Jim moved up to Oregon, right around the start of the pandemic. Ken came up to see him, and the four of us, Ken, Jim, Jack Alley, and me, went down and golfed Bandon Dunes, which is about as good as golf gets on the Oregon coast. We visited Oregon Overseas Timber. We toured up through the valley, McCool Millwork, our plant in Philomath, the works. Good meals along the way, the last one outside overlooking the Pacific.
The whole visit, Jim kept eyeing our low grade. The falldowns, the cedar and fir that comes off the bottom of the run, and he kept asking me, how much is this, how much is that. Finally I said, you keep asking, let’s just send you a truckload and see if you can sell it.
So we did. Shipped a load down to Bandon. Jim put it up on Craigslist, and before I knew it he was calling to buy another. At that point we are talking a hundred dollars a thousand. Dirt cheap. Two thousand dollars for an entire semi load of lumber. Beaded ceiling, tongue and groove, bevel siding, surfaced boards of every size, handrail, short stuff, knots, splits, none of it mattered. Jim sold all of it. Some of it I think he moved as grilling planks, since he was on the coast in salmon country. Dozens of semi loads over a few years, out of the back of a truck, unloaded with a tractor at his friend’s farm.
Handrail is its own little world, and Jim moved that too. We have run a lot of profiles over the years, but it is only a fraction of what is out there, every shape and size and species you can think of. Solid wood, and laminated too, up and down or side to side once the sections get big. Move around the world and the species change with the place. On the West Coast it is mostly Douglas fir, a little redwood, some red cedar. My favorite by far is yellow cedar. It doesn’t splinter, it works easy, and it weathers to a soft silver gray. I have replaced handrails with it myself. There is a run of it in my house near Corvallis, sixteen or eighteen feet, going down into the basement. Not original, but smooth as silk, and it will be there long after I am gone.
It was the simplest business I have ever done. A handshake deal without the handshake, implied from day one. Every month or so a check would show up for the last load shipped, with a note asking for another. No contracts. No back and forth. Those two were about the most trustworthy, honest guys I have ever dealt with. And they knew how to have a good time.
I talked with Kenny a few days before he passed. His heart was finally giving out, and he was calling me from his hospital room. He wanted more lumber shipped. Still living the dream, right to the end. We had a great talk. It hurts and makes me smile, both at once, every time I think of him.