James J. Kopp | Oregon Places: Forty-One Cents: The Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107.4

OREGON PLACES

Forty-One Cents

The Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line

by James J. Kopp

A QUARTER, A DIME, A NICKEL, a penny. One coin from each of the slots in the cash register drawer. Fast, efficient, and simple enough that many of those who had to pay it could retrieve the coins without looking. Forty-one cents.

For nearly three decades, from the early 1950s through the 1970s, forty-one cents was the charge for shipping as much as thirty pounds on the freight line between Pendleton and Pilot Rock, two eastern Oregon towns separated by fifteen miles of wheat fields, a bowling alley, a grange hall, a reservoir, a golf course, some sagebrush, and, on many days, a strong west wind. Over those years, forty-one cents represented the simple and sincere service that characterized this small business and the families that operated it. And in the twenty plus years since the last package was transported between Pendleton and Pilot Rock for that amount, forty-one cents continues to be remembered as the symbol of the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line. It is also the basis for family lore, because the story of the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage line is as much about family as it is about business.

Family-run "short-haul carriers," such as the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line operated throughout the state for most of the twentieth century, with routes from Coos Bay to Powers; from Baker to Halfway; from The Dalles to Shaniko, Arlington, and Heppner; and from Portland to many different cities and towns. One of the few documents that provides a snapshot of these common carriers is a report issued in 1969 by the Transport and Logistics Research Center of the College of Business Administration at the University of Oregon. The forty-eight-page report, Oregon Short-Haul Regularly Scheduled Common Carrier Trucking Characteristics, examines some of the reasons for the severe financial problems encountered by the short-haul carriers. Thirty-two short-haul carriers are included in the study, fourteen of them with fewer than ten employees in 1968. Of those, five were included in Class III of the Oregon Public Utility Commission Classification, with operating revenues of less then $50,000 — Halfway Garage & Sales, Pendleton–Heppner Freight Line, Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line, Sandy Truck Line, and Tigard–Sherwood Truck Service.¹ The average length of haul for the short-haul carriers was 59 miles (one way), with the longest distance being 201 miles and the shortest being 15 miles. The 15-mile trek was that covered by the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line.

IT WAS IN 1926 THAT MY FATHER, Bill Kopp, was asked to drive a truck for a friend of the family, Evan Cameron, who ran a stage line between Pendleton and Pilot Rock for freight and passengers. When Bill agreed to drive the Model T truck for a few days, neither he nor anyone else imagined that he would be operating the freight line for the next sixty years. Cameron was attending a convention in Portland and injured his leg while on the trip, so my father's short-term commitment was extended. The injury did not heal in a timely fashion, and Cameron asked my father to join him in a partnership in the company. Soon, Cameron decided to get out of the business altogether and offered the company to Bill. In the agreement between Evan Cameron and William J. Kopp, dated October 22, 1926, my father purchased "the Buss [sic] line between Pendleton, Oregon, and Pilot Rock, Oregon, for the sum of $600.00." He also agreed "to carry the United States Mail, on said Buss line From Pendleton, Oregon, to Pilot Rock, Oregon, and From Pilot Rock, Oregon, to Pendleton, Oregon." The operation of both the freight and mail component and the passenger business, then consisting of a seven-passenger Paige touring car, was more than a one-person operation, so my father asked his older brother Joe to join him in the business. In late 1926, the Kopp brothers took over ownership and management of the Pendleton–Pilot Stage Line and were issued permit number 83 from the Public Utility Commission.²

Bill and his brother Joe Kopp were the sons of Franz (Frank) Kopp (1858–1930) and Katharina Adams Kopp (1864–1951). Franz Kopp grew up in Oberemmel, Germany, and served in the German Elite Guard for Kaiser Wilhelm I from 1879 to 1882. Soon after leaving the army, he headed to the United States to join his brother John (1853–1938), and the two homesteaded on land south of Pilot Rock near the foothills of the Blue Mountains. After trying their hand at gold mining, they settled on their land to raise cattle and grow wheat. Franz sent for Katharina, who sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, to New York and then took the train to Pendleton in October 1889. They were married the following January, and over the next six years they had four children on their original homestead: Mary (1891–1939), Frank (1893–1970), Anna (1894–1972), and Joseph (1896–1982). In 1900, the family moved to a larger homestead on Webb Slough, and the fifth child, William John (1904–1986), arrived.

All of the children attended the Ridge School, where Franz served as the director from 1906 to 1908. The school, located about three miles south of the Kopp house, generally had a twenty-four-week term that began in early spring and lasted until late September, with time off in midsummer.³ During the winter months, the school was closed and the Kopp children attended St. Joseph Academy in Pendleton, usually boarding at the school.⁴

Bill Kopp, with his son Jimmy smiling on the left, stands in front of the 1947 Chevy truck used to haul passengers and freight on the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line.

All photographs courtesy of the author

My father, who completed his eighth grade education in 1916, worked on the ranch for the next six years. In 1919, when he and several members of the family were stricken with smallpox, the fifteen-year-old Bill had to take charge of herding the family's cattle to the winter feeding ground. Three years later, he enrolled at Mt. Angel for high school, where he played for the baseball team. When he returned to Pendleton in 1925, he took a job with the railroad at the express office, where Joe was working.

PENDLETON WAS THE LARGEST city in Oregon east of the Cascades for most of the years the freight line operated. The city is famous for its annual rodeo and Wild West pageant, the Pendleton Round-Up and Happy Canyon. It also is home of the Pendleton Woolen Mills, familiar to many for its shirts, blankets, and other woolen products. Named for George Pendleton, the town is the county seat of Umatilla County and a transportation hub.

Pilot Rock is a working person's town. Situated at the confluence of East and West Birch creeks at the base of the Blue Mountains, Pilot Rock was named for the cliffs that overhang its western edge — cliffs that supposedly served as a guiding landmark for travelers on the Oregon Trail. Like many communities in Oregon, the town's existence, economy, and energies have focused on the lumber industry. During the years of the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line, Pilot Rock was home to three industries that provided the bulk of the work for its citizens, as well as many from Pendleton and other towns in eastern Oregon. One industry was a lumber mill to which the Ponderosa pine and increasingly the much smaller lodgepole pine were hauled to be transformed into lumber, chips, and other products. The two other industries served as feeders off the lumber mill — a manufacturer of "knocked-down" furniture and a manufacturer of siding, ceiling tiles, and other building products.

Bill Kopp stands with the seven-passenger Paige touring car used for hauling passengers and mail between Pendleton and Pilot Rock.

The Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line was a remnant of the Odgen–Dallas Stage Line that had ceased operations in 1908 when the railroad came through.⁵ As I child, I recall listening to the stories of one old stage driver who had long since turned in his team of horses for one of the first pickup campers in the region. From its warm and smoky confines, ripe with smells of coffee, a hint of bourbon, and a seldom-emptied spittoon, we were regaled with the stories of lost or stolen cargo from that earlier era. There was a certain appeal to retaining the "stage line" label. As Kenneth Durr and Philip Cantelon observe in their study of Consolidated Freightways, a long-running freight company with its roots in Oregon,

the persistence of the phrase "stage lines" in the names of Pacific Coast bus companies through the 1920s reflected the region's strong western heritage. Nothing invoked the romance of the Old West as effectively as the image of a lone horse-drawn stagecoach braving the desolate expanses.⁶

Although there was no longer a horse-drawn stagecoach traveling between Pendleton and Pilot Rock, the "stage" part of the name was continued for years.

The Model T truck and the Paige touring car gave way in the 1930s to a series of vehicles that had both a passenger compartment and space for freight. Special rules had to be applied for seating so chaw-chewing riders could be positioned toward the rear of the passenger compartments. Even though the vehicles did not travel that fast, the law of physics and "tobacky" presented a danger to those who might sit behind. When automobiles became a little more regular, the passenger traffic declined; but even until the 1980s there were occasional passengers to be transported one way or the other, still for the seventy-five cents it cost in 1950.

Bill (left) and Joe Kopp drove the combined passenger and freight truck on the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line in the 1930s and early 1940s.

THE VEHICLE THAT SERVED THE longest and became a symbol of the company was a 1947 Chevy truck with a blue cab and a silver-gray box. Above the cab on the front of the box were the letters P.P.R. — for Pendleton–Pilot Rock — faded over the years to almost illegible letters in a one-time shade of blue. The truck had at least three engines during its years of service, and the numbers on the odometer were mostly worn clear by their slow rotation around and around. (The other numbers were almost illegible as well because of the cigarette, pipe, and cigar smoke that often filled the cab over the years.) When the '47 Chevy was finally retired from service, Bill Kopp figured that it had easily traveled the distance to the moon and back. The old truck was remembered not just for its hauling of freight, but also for high school hayrides, for trips to the dump, and as a hiding place for children when it was parked at the curb next to our house.

Bill Kopp delivers a load to the general store in Pilot Rock in about 1938.

Although the company name suggested its roots as a passenger service, the mainstay was hauling freight between Pendleton and Pilot Rock. In the days before deregulation of the trucking industry and before Federal Express or even United Parcel Service, the attractiveness of a business that hauled freight between the two towns was perhaps one of the best kept secrets around. The three industries in Pilot Rock always had something that needed to be hauled, from construction materials for buildings, to raw materials for their products, to gaskets for their machines and toilet paper for their restrooms. The Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line also transported produce and meat for the grocery stores in Pilot Rock, books and papers for the schools, furniture and appliances for people's homes, liquor and ammunition for the licensed dealers, and necessities from auto parts to ice cream cones. The return trips to Pendleton might include a truckload of furniture or ceiling tiles or a can or two of milk from a local dairy. For years, the newspapers were delivered to Pilot Rock by the Stage Line, and during Prohibition there just might have been some supplies for the speakeasy somewhere on the manifest.

From 1926 to 1934, the stage line also carried the mail, an experience that led the two Kopp brothers to undertake an almost forty-year commitment to delivering mail to communities and households north of Pendleton. On April 15, 1938, my father signed a subcontract with the government to take over rural mail route 73115 between Pendleton and Holdman. The contract called for delivery of the mail, including the depositing and collecting of mail along the route, three days a week from May 1, 1939, to June 30, 1942. For this service, they received $766.80 a year.⁷ The route was 46 miles long. In 1948, the route more than doubled and included delivery to Helix by way of Wildhorse Creek, and then through Middle Cold Springs, down Missouri Gulch, and up Despain Gulch and Stage Gulch, a total of 104 miles. The route also was extended to six days a week, with the full route covered on three days and a shorter route on the other three days.

Although my father signed the subcontract, he shared the responsibility for the route with my mother Lorraine, his brother Joe, and Joe's wife Morvia. Because my father and Joe were busy with the truck line, much of the burden of the mail run was carried by the two women, who worked out an alternating schedule. After Joe retired from the freight business in the 1960s, he drove with Morvia until 1977, when both families retired from the mail delivery business — after thirty-eight years and some 800,000 miles.⁸

With the women handling the mail run, the Kopp men hauled freight and passengers to Pilot Rock. It was around 1951 when they raised the minimum rate for shipping an item that weighed less than thirty-one pounds to forty-one cents. Whether it was a bouquet of flowers, some pork chops, or a new iron, it cost forty-one cents to ship it from Pendleton to Pilot Rock for almost thirty years. If an item happened to weigh more than thirty pounds, it jumped up to fifty-nine cents (which conveniently is forty-one cents less than a dollar). Whatever they were, Bill and Joe handled the forty-one cent items as if they were the most valuable freight to be hauled. That care and level of service was evident with everything they transported, whether it was a piano to be placed in the farthest corner of a house up some stairs and around a corner or a new carpet for someone's family room. "Forty-one cent" service became a hallmark of the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line.

Joe worked daily on the truck until he retired in the 1960s. He continued to assist with the books, and weekly "settlements" were part of the routine for the Kopp brothers until Joe passed away in 1982. My older brother, William C., began to work for the stage line after Joe retired and eventually took over Joe's share in the company. Other family members, including most of my siblings and Joe's three daughters, as well as nephews, cousins, and in-laws, logged considerable miles on the truck or, in those all-too-frequent afternoon trips by car, to deliver a package of auto parts, a bouquet of flowers, or something from The Fixit Shop, each for forty-one cents.

FOR THOSE OF US WHO WORKED at one time or another on the truck line, whether it was a summertime job or an after-school delivery, the "forty-one cent" service often seemed like a tedious and unnecessary level of dedication. When the cost of gasoline crept up and then skyrocketed in the 1970s, the idea of keeping this level of pricing and service seemed as silly as the '47 Chevy. But my father stuck to it, and it was only after the trucking industry was deregulated and other delivery services had discovered the business in Pilot Rock that he conceded and made a change. By then, though, many of us had come to realize the value of the "forty-one cents" and what it symbolized in simple and direct service.

Working on the truck line was a family activity, with friends and neighbors helping out. Here, Bill Kopp stands in his characteristic overalls with his wife Lorraine and oldest child Bill (right). Donald Scharn, a family friend, is on the left.

When my father's heart finally decided that its trip was complete in October 1986, we had another reminder of the effect of his "forty-one cent" approach. At his funeral service, as the family solemnly squeezed into the black limousine behind the hearse, we looked out to see the '47 Chevy truck headed up the street in front of the church. Although the old blue truck had been sold seventeen years earlier and metaphorically put out to pasture, it was still being used to haul debris to the city dump. As the truck passed and the funeral procession turned the corner and started up the street toward Pilot Rock, we all exchanged silent smiles. Someone whispered quietly, "The truck knows." I was thinking "forty-one cents."⁹

Notes

This essay is adapted from two stories in a volume titled "41¢ and Other Essays" compiled in January 2004 in honor of the centennial of Bill Kopp's birth.

^1. Roy J. Sampson and Thomas V. Van Dawark, Oregon Short-Haul Regularly Scheduled Common Carrier Trucking Characteristics (Eugene: Transport and Logistics Research Center, College of Business Administration, University of Oregon, July 1969), 12, 44–45. The short-haul carriers included in the study were Coos Bay Transfer, Cottage Grove-Eugene Freight Co., Eugene-McKenzie Freight, Farny Truck Service, Flatt's Truck Service, Fourier Truck Service, Gresham Transfer, Halfway Garage & Stages, L.C. Hall's Truck Line, Larmer Transfer, Lehman Truck Line, Leighty Truck Line, Lester Freight Lines, McCracken Bros. Motor Freight, Nehalem Valley Motor Freight, Newberg Auto Freight, Paradis Transfer & Storage Co., Pendleton–Heppner Freight Line, Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line, Reddaway's Truck Line, Reedsport Motor Freight, Risberg's Truck Line, S&M Truck Line, Salem Navigation Company, Sandy Truck Line, Sites Silver Wheel Freight Lines, Siuslaw Motor Transport, Tillamook–Portland Auto Freight, Trans Western Express, Tualatin Valley Transfer, Willamette Valley Transfer, and Woodburn Truck Line. See also Robert F. Karolevitz, This Was Trucking: A Pictorial History of the First Quarter Century of Commercialized Motor Vehicles (Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1966), and Ron Kowalke, Trucking in America: Moving the Goods. A Nostalgic Reflection on the Rigs that Rolled the Roads of America in the Glory Years of Truck History (Iola, Wisc.: Krause Publications, 1995).

^2. Information here and elsewhere is derived from Patty Kopp Bowers, "A Brief History and Genealogy of the Descendants of Franz Kopp" (1984), in author's possession, and Lance Robertson, "One Week's Work Results in Lifetime Ambition for Kopp," East Oregonian, June 28, 1975.

^3. See Umatilla County Pioneer Schools (Pendleton, Ore.: Umatilla County Historical Society, n.d.), 103.

^4. Mary, the oldest, completed her schooling at St. Joe's and entered the convent there. Upon taking her final vows, she became Sister Michaelina and was later Sister Superior, first at St. Andrew's Mission, east of Pendleton, and later at an orphanage in Tekoa, Washington, and at St. Ann's Orphan's Home in Tacoma. Anna married Glen "Dutch" Rogers (1891–1975) in 1917, the same year that Franz and Katharina moved from the ranch to Pendleton. Joe married Morvia Chapman (1900–1998) in 1919, and they stayed on the ranch until 1922, when Frank and Marie Mettie (1895–1979) were married. In keeping with the tradition of primogeniture, Frank assumed sole operation of the ranch when he married, and his younger siblings moved to Pendleton.

^5. See Oregonian, December 14, 1907, 16, December 15, 1907, 6.

^6. Kenneth D. Durr and Philip L. Cantelon, Never Stand Still: The History of Consolidated Freightways, Inc. and CNF Transportation, Inc., 1929–2000 (Rockville, Md.: Montrose Press, 1999), 10–11.

^7. According to a Notice of Change in Star Route Schedule, November 27, 1939, the subcontractor was to leave Pendleton by 9:30 am on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and arrive in Holdman by 11:30 am, with the departure from Holdman at 11:45 am and arrived in Pendleton by 12:30 pm.

^8. See East Oregonian, July 8, 1977.

^9. On February 13, 1987, the Pendleton–Pilot Rock Stage Line was sold to David Hall, who had worked off-and-on for the company. Within a few short years, amid the consolidation of trucking companies, competition from other sources, and fiscal challenges for the short-haul carriers, the rights of the Stage Line were sold and the company ceased to exist.

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