By Tom Kelly
Editor and Publisher

When Joe Paddie convinced his mother to let him quit school after the fourth grade at Noble, Louisiana in Sabine Parish, he began work that that carried him through a successful lifetime in various specialties in the timber business. At 85, he looks back cheerfully over the career that continues to serve him well, managing timberlands, and continuing to plant trees for the generations that are coming after him.

Mr. Paddie will be recognized as the Oldest Logger, at the 14th annual Zwolle Loggers and Forestry Festival on May 10, an honor he and Mrs. Paddie look forward to with excitement.

He acknowledges that it would take a book to relate all his experiences in the timber business, as he recalled the "high spots" which saw him peeling poles, cutting trees, buying crossties, working at a tie mill, hauling timber, and growing at the peak of his career to operating with a 22-man crew when he decided to "go big." His operation worked separate crews with crosscut and buck saws making fence posts, poles, logs, and pulpwood.

The Paddie family home is on Paddie Road, off LA 191 northwest of Zwolle, not far from the Toledo Bend Reservoir, within a stone's throw of the old-time logging town of Noble. Mr. Paddie recalls cutting timber during the 1950s in the Sabine River bottoms in what is now the Toledo Reservoir area. He had a job to log the timber out of what was to become the lake bottom, with an engineering estimate that it would take the lake ten years to fill up.

"It came up in one spring," he said, when unusually heavy rains brought the water level up rapidly. "We were selling to anyone who had a truck," he said, attempting to save the timber.

Mr. Paddie said he had been buying timber since 1942, and "I never went out hunting for it. They always came to me," because he said he made an effort to get all the value from timber harvested. "I sold to Martinez, poles to Long Bell, Shreveport Creosote, Benton Creosote . . . everybody you could think of," he said.

n During his working life, Mr. Paddie has had other businesses as well, including a store, filling station, sawmill, and tie mill. Along the way he has acquired timberland of his own, and manages sustainably, as the practice is called today, planting seedlings on land that is cutover, to keep a new crop coming on, even though he may not make the harvest himself.

Mr. and Mrs. Paddie both grew up during the Depression years, in homes where a parent was deceased, in what is today called "blended" families, with siblings and other children from prior marriages. He recalled times when "a rabbit looked good, if we killed one," because they knew they'd at least get a taste of it at the next meal. Because of these lessons learned, he allows some hunting on his lands by those seeking to kill for food, but said "I don't like to see the game wasted," in hunting for pure sport.

Mrs. Paddie, the former Irene Anderson, and Joe Paddie married in November, 1943, 64 years ago. They have six children, JoAnn Green of Shreveport, Bobbie Castillo of Converse, Elizabeth Hill of Athens, Billy Ray (Sonny) of San Saba, Texas, Rhonda Tuck, of Noble, and DeNita LeMos of San Antonio, plus 13 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.

While Mr. Paddie walks with a cane and doesn't move as spryly at 85 as he once did, he said of his timber activities, "I still fool with it some. As long as I'm breathing, I wand to do a little something."

Mrs. Paddie will turn 80 on May 17, and while it will be a week early, maybe the Zwolle Festival can be a pretty good birthday party for her.

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