A Doyle who couldn't be foiled

After a childhood spent eating lard sandwiches during the Great Depression, Doyle Hall did more than just pull himself up by his bootstraps.

The Sutherlin man fought his way through the ranks of professional boxing. He guided a mill crew at Mt. Mazama Plywood Company in Sutherlin to an industry record for a single shift of plywood production that still stands to this day. And, perhaps most important, he single-handedly improved log-peeling output for all veneer mills with the development of a line of lathe sharpening tools and gauges that can help skin logs into paper-thin sheets.

All that and more is told in a newly published biography, “You Can’t Lose if You Don’t Quit, The Life and Times of Doyle Hall.”

“He’s a man’s man kind of guy,” Skip Calhoun, Hall’s biographer, said by phone Friday from his home in Eugene.

At 163 pages in length, the book chronicles the life of the 76-year-old Hall. It was written over a six-month period between January and June 2008.

The book was published by iUniverse in early November. (For $16.95, it can purchased at www.iuniverse.com, Amazon.com, and in Barnes & Noble bookstores.)

Though Hall and Calhoun both boxed for the same trainer in Portland during the 1950s and ’60s, respectively, the two didn’t come to know each other until recently. It was at a favorite watering hole of both men, the Village Inn in Springfield, where the two got to know each other by trading stories.

After a while, Calhoun suggested that Hall should pen a memoir about his life. Hall remarked that his friends and family had been telling him that for years, but that he had never got around to it.

Calhoun, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in various newspapers and magazines, said he was the man to write Hall’s story.

“It took probably six to eight months of talking about it before actually sitting down to do it,” Calhoun said.

Hall is a “quiet tiger,” Calhoun said, a man whose modesty belies a ferocious desire from within to succeed.

“He’s known all around the world and you wouldn’t even know it,” Calhoun said.

Hall has spent a lot of time on the road since the mid-1980s as a veneer production consultant and representative of Doyle Tool & Gauge Co. (www.doyletoolgauge.com).

“It’s been good to me,” Hall said of the plywood industry.

When Hall first began working in mills, the industry used four-edged stones for sharpening the knives that were used to peel veneer from logs. A carpenter’s protractor and a 6-inch ruler were all that were used to keep the knives in place.

Hall thought that was antiquated. And he saw the inferior equipment produce lots of waste.

So by the mid-1960s, Hall began designing and testing his own lathe sharpeners and instruments.

Working in the Arcata, Calif., area, Hall’s reputation preceded him when he applied for a job with U.S. Plywood. He was hired almost immediately as a supervisor for its Reedsport plant.

Hall was later lured back to Sutherlin to help turn the then-defunct Nordic Plywood plant into the Mt. Mazama Plywood Company. However, Hall had one condition for Mazama owners Forest and Jerry Solomon: a chunk of ownership in the company.

At first the Solomons bristled. But Hall wasn’t just any plant manager. At a time when timber was cheap and most plant managers oversaw operations with their feet kicked up on desks, Hall had trained himself inside and out on all veneer plant operations.

After reconsidering, the Solomons made another offer. Hall accepted with a 10 percent stake in Mazama, beginning in 1975.

Three years later, Hall and his crew wrote Mazama into the history book with a plywood production load of 235,008 square feet of core veneer pressed together in a single shift. The mark smashed the previous record of 214,720 square feet of core line held by the Valley Plywood Company in Junction City since 1953.

“That was just getting people to work together and really try hard,” Hall said.

Hall was the general manager of Mazama until 1981. He left to oversee his own plywood plant, Falcon Plywood in Eugene.

Five years later he was working strictly as a consultant and salesman for his own line of tools.

Hall still works as a consultant. He lives in Sutherlin with his second wife, Donna.

As for the book, he said he more or less had it written as a record of his life for his family.

However, the book also doubles as inspiration.

“It just shows what you can do if you really put your mind to it,” he said.

• You can reach reporter Adam Pearson at 957-4213 or by e-mail at apearson@newsreview.info.