West Coast Lumbermen

The West Coast Lumbermen's Association (WCLA) was the main trade body for mills in the Douglas fir belt of Oregon, Washington, and northern California. Founded in 1911, it moved its headquarters to Portland in 1946 and maintained a Statistical Department that collected monthly payroll and production data from members — exactly the data this letter was trying to clean up. In 1964 the WCLA reorganized as the Western Wood Products Association, which still operates today.

Smith's concern is retroactive wage payments — back pay issued in a lump sum when a labor contract settles after the period it covered. The International Woodworkers of America, the dominant union in Pacific Northwest timber, engaged in documented strike activity in 1952; any wage settlement that year could have generated exactly this kind of delayed payout. Because the WCLA computed average wages as a ratio of total payroll to hours worked, a one-time lump sum landing in August's totals would warp that month's figure for every affected mill.

The second correction concerns "log scale production" — the estimated board-feet volume of timber, measured at the mill against a standardized scaling formula (the Scribner Decimal C scale was common across the Pacific Northwest). Smith tells members to exclude logs purchased from outside contractors, because the efficiency metric — man-hours per 1,000 board feet produced — was meant to reflect only the company's own workforce. Mixing in purchased logs would make in-house labor look more productive than it was.

• "Portland 5, Oregon" in the address is a postal zone number, used in larger cities before ZIP codes were introduced nationwide in 1963.
• The initials "HES:ap" at the foot identify Smith as the drafter and a separate typist (initials "ap") as the person who prepared the final copy — standard secretarial notation of the period.