MAKING CHANGE
R.S. Baker Trucking Vernonia, Oregon
By Darin Burt

Some people go out of their way to find a haul. Bob Baker went clear across the state.
Baker got started in the timber transportation business in 1978, driving for Bill Titus, out of Forest Grove, and for Noffsinger Logging, in Garibaldi. 
The work was good and a year later Baker bought a truck of his own.
“I’d been wanting my own truck for years and I just decided to go ahead and do it,” he recalls. “I bought an old 1966 Autocar and went to work hauling for Harold Hordway and did okay for a couple of years.”
When the timber industry fell on hard times in the early 1980s, Baker moved to Stanfield, in Eastern Oregon between Hermiston and Pendleton, and let his log truck go back to Brattain International. He continued to drive, however, but switched over to hauling freight and other cargo over the road.
Baker joined up with his brother Dick in a firewood business a few years later, cutting the logs and hauling them in 24-foot lengths to customers. 
They started out with an old 1963 Rio gas-powered truck and eventually began trading up to newer and better trucks. Baker eventually got a hauling permit and began transporting chip wood into Umatilla for Jim and Jack Barrymore. He also hauled logs for Ericson Air Crane over in Idaho with his other brother, Dennis, who owned a 1976 Kenworth.
While he was doing a job for Sid Brit, another Eastside logger, things got slow and he heard that Copper River Forest Products in Toke, Alaska was looking for log trucks. He packed his bags and off he went.
Baker moved to Vernonia in the spring of 1999 and lived in his camper while he looked for work. He didn’t have a job lined up, but he had some friends in the area and had hauled some for the Banks mill yard during the off season a couple of years earlier. Then one day, an opportunity was literally served to him on a plate.
“I just took off one day and went for a drive through Tillamook, up the coast and over through Astoria and I stopped at a little restaurant on highway 30 for lunch,” Baker says. “I got to talking with the waitress there and she said to call Bob Anderson. I called him that night and he said he had just fired somebody that day.”
Baker hauled for Anderson’s K&R Logging for a year and a half, before getting on with Fishhawk Logging. He was hit and miss working for other local loggers, but took it upon himself to keep checking in with Ollie Berg, Fishhawk’s dispatcher, to see if he had any openings.
Fishhawk had been using two trucks and thanks to Baker’s persistence, he eventually got the call to join them. The job has been steady so far with Fishhawk’s tower side, which puts out three to five loads a day. He has been hauling for Fishhawk for nine months. When the work gets slow, he also hauls for Mike Pihl Logging, Big Horn Logging and Eric Hepler.
Baker points out that despite being separated by the mountains, there are very few differences between logging and trucking on the East and West side of the state. Over on the East side the logs are further up in the brush and further from the mills and they are typically hauling red fir and pine. 
The attitudes among the loggers and truckers on the East and West sides of the mountains are pretty much the same,” says Baker. “The only real difference, he points out, is the kinds of weather you have to work in over there - mainly snow. The one downside is that the logging season runs from June through the end of February, which forces truckers to park their rigs or look for other work such as flatbedding.
Baker has done it both ways. He sat idle for 12 weeks one year and another time he worked hauling spuds.
“I like it over here. I’m not too found of the rain, but I can live in it just fine,” he says.
And with a preference for owning new trucks, he tries to work as much as he can.
Baker’s newest truck is a 2002 Western Star Constellation equipped with a 600 ISX Cummins motor, 18-speed transmission, 46,000 lb. Rockwell singe-speed rearends, Hendrickson air-ride suspension and a Watson-Chalmers drop axle. Mike Snow, from Art Atack!!, in Vernonia, completed the package with an awesome vinyl door graphic and stripes.
Baker traded in a 1999 Western Star at Woodpecker in Portland for his new rig. The deal worked out fine for him because he had planned to sell the truck himself and ask $65,000. Woodpecker made him a better offer — $66,000.
“I don’t think it would have been too tough to find a buyer, but it worked out great for me,” Baker said.
Baker is loving the roominess of the cab on the Constellation series, as it is 15 inches wider, 4.5 inches deeper and 4.5 inches taller than a standard Western Star Heritage model cab. The big engine, he says, is a necessity.
“Pulling 105,000 lb. weight, there were a few times where if I didn’t have the 600 hp engine I would never have pulled out of the hole we had to come out of,” Baker says.
Baker likes to buy a new truck every three or four years in order to stay protected under warranty and avoid all the headaches associated with owning and maintaining an older trucker.
“If you don’t want to make the payments and you would rather work on the truck yourself and you can maintain it then you can do that,” he says. “I know guys out here, though, who are making the same kind of money that I am making, but they aren’t taking home any more than me because they are having to maintain that older truck.”
Dependability, Baker says, is another important factor in owning a new truck.
“With an older truck you might also have downtime and be missing work. The reason that I got the job I found when I came over from Eastern Oregon is because the guy who was hauling for the company that I went to work for had four or five old beater trucks and they couldn’t depend on them to come back for their next load,” he adds. “One of the things that loggers around here have found out about me is that if I am working for you and you have logs, I will be there.”
Baker switches between pulling a 1997 Better Weigh long log trailer equipped with Vulcan scales and mule train set-up consisting of a 1988 Alpine long log trailer with a shortened reach connected to a standard log trailer.
He typically pulled the short logger more than the long logger on the east side, where he worked for Sid Brit and Iron Triangle in John Day, because many of the mills over there require loggers not to double in their loads.
Baker got the idea for the unique mule-train while he was working for Crown Zellerbach near Seaside on the Oregon Coast. It was common for Crown’s trucks to pull three or four loads of logs down the road to the log dump, and Baker figured the same idea would work on a smaller scale out on the main roads.
“I set it up and went down to the DMV office in Umatilla and they said they didn’t know why it shouldn’t work because there was no rule against it,” Baker says. “The first year I pulled it they classified me as a truck with two stinger steer pull trailers and I could have 90-feet of length and I could haul 104,000 lb with the seven axles. Now they have me classified as a truck and trailer which can carry 80-foot logs and top off at 105,500 on eight axles.”
“A normal mule train set-up, even a cheap one, can cost six thousand dollars and they have a tendency to tip over and they don’t track all that well,” he adds. “You can buy a long log trailer for around a thousand dollars, cut the reach off and put a hitch on the back of your trailer and you’ve got a mule train.”
Baker has a lot of good ideas which he puts to use as the treasurer for the Oregon Forest Products Transportation Association’s board of directors. He is also the chapter president of the Clatsop-Columbia-Washington Counties chapter. He has been an OFPTA member since 1993 and he wishes that more people could see the benefits of belonging to such a worthwhile organization.
“Even though most people complain that membership costs too much, it costs a lot more not to belong because if you don’t belong you don’t have the same representation,” he points out. “If we don’t increase our membership we’re not going to be sustainable in the future and there will be nobody working for the cause.”
Baker’s chapter is one of the most active in the association with 40 members. He holds a chapter meeting every month with between 8 to 10 active members in attendance. With a new truck to pay for, however, Baker doesn’t have as much spare time as he would like to sit on very many committees, but he helps out where he can. 
He is the master of ceremonies for the auction at the annual convention, and his wife, Georgia, is also very active in the OFPTA, helping on the budget and raffle committees.
Georgia also takes care of all the bookwork for RS Baker Trucking. “She is my partner in the business,” Baker says.
OFPTA Executive Director, D.E. Bridges, says that Baker is one of the association’s strongest supporters. 
“He’s one of our hardest working members and is always thinking of ways to make the organization stronger,” says Bridges. “Bob and his wife, Georgia, are among the first people we call when we have problems that need solving. I consider them to be among our industry’s best examples of hard-working, clean-living, patriotic Americans. I’m proud to call them friends.”
Baker’s, father, Ed Baker, was a logger over in Eastern Oregon, and like many people who end up working in the forest industry, Bob got his first experience tagging along on the job when he was just a kid.
“I’ve always liked the trucks. When I was growing up I would go up to the woods with my dad and ride back into town with the log truckers,” he recalls. “I don’t mind working for somebody else, but I have always wanted to be an owner-operator.”
That he is, and a pretty successful one at that.
“We don’t have a mansion, but the wife and I get by just fine and everything works out for the best. The key is just to keep a cool head and don’t get excited when things start looking like they are going to get bad,” Baker says. “I’m in the logging business today, but come tomorrow, if there wasn’t a stick of wood out here to haul I would be hauling something else.”