Mary Ulyan Bizzak

Mary Ulyan Bizzak. . Following in her mother's footsteps, Mary (Ulyan) Bizzak, the child who was born to Rose Ulyan as she worked in a camp kitchen, went on to have her own career in timber. After her mother's death, Mary married Joe Bizzak and together they operated a boarding house for the Day Chemical Company in Westline, McKean County. Within a few years, the onset of world war two drastically effected their lives. Many of their boarders and family members left to fight in the war. Against her husband's protests, Mary learned how to drive a logging truck and a tractor to skid logs. She manually loaded the log trucks with up to 3 cords of split wood and then drove the truck to the Day Chemical Plant and unloaded it. In addition to this work, Mary was also driving the morning and afternoon school bus route, bookending her logging responsibilities. , , After the war the chemical plants in the region began to close and the boarders left. Mary and Joe continued to haul wood to the Johnsonburg Paper Mill. They had a logging job at Bloomster Hollow for 13 years where they cut and delivered paper wood. Mary also "girdled trees." This involved carrying a heavy bucket filled with green poison. Mary would use a large brush to apply the liquid on a circle around the tree. The poison would kill the bark. After the trees were treated with the poison for a year, they would remove the bark from the tree for paper wood. Mary would drive the truckload of wood to a "scaling dock" the scaler would scale or weigh, the wood. Then she would unload her wood into an empty "buggy" by hand. , , In 1958, Mary had her fifth child and continued to work after he was born. Mary's last job was near Nansen Hotel during the mid-1960's. She continued to girdle and poison trees for paper wood. By the late 1960's mechanical debarking was developed, and Mary was "eliminated."- her own word to describe her loss. This must have felt like a loss of identity and place in the world to Mary. She lamented. , "I have seen changes over the decades in the lumbering world. Today, there are eye goggles, chaps, hard hats, earplugs, special footwear, we had none of these. Today, there are sophisticated machinery to take a tree down, chainsaws, skidders. We used two-man crosscut saws, sledges, hammers, horses with sleds to get the wood out in the late 30's, my log truck's dashboard contained a temperature, oil and gas gage. I had a simple clutch with a hand emergency brake. If you wanted to stop, I would manually pump and pump those brakes. The back bed was a wooden rack where I manually loaded 52-inch pieces, three racks long by five feet high to make a load of wood worth two-and-a half-to three cords split. My old truck had four tires. Today's trucks have everything imaginable on the dashboard, even telephones and air conditioning: the beds are constructed of steel with mechanical loaders and instead of four tires they have 12, which can carry tons of wood on a load. What took you a week to produce in the early days of lumbering can now be accomplished in one day." , Bizzak, Mary and Rose Ann Counts. "The Lumber World from a Women's Viewpoint." Private manuscript January 1995. , , Like so many women before her, Mary had an incredible work ethic and tackled multiple responsibilities while raising her own family. She challenged the norms of the time and made a lifelong career for herself in lumber loading and hauling wood and girdling trees. Relying on the skills she learned from cooking at lumber camps and boarding houses, Mary went on to work as a cafeteria cook in a local school from 1970-1985.