Interview
This is a Transcription from a taped interview of Robert L. Martin. The interviewer is Douglas Martin. The date of the interview was 26th of November 1998. Robert is the son of Leonard Alexander Martin one of the owners of Columbia Terra Cotta Company.
Talking about the Columbia Terra Cotta Company in Vancouver Washington.
ROBERT: First thing that comes to my mind is their packing a freight car with various blocks of terra cotta and they pack them in , setting them down on straw, then they put some more straw down on and then put another in and they stack them up. Then after they got all that they are gonna put in there they build a kind of a rack or something, out of two by four or something in there to squash them tight so they can’t jiggle. My father says that the secret is that they can’t move. Once they move a little bit then they can move more. Then on the outside of the freight cars, I remember the sign that says “do not hump”. It’s a sign to the switching engine crew not to release a car and let it go whomping into the train, but to take it up gently. In the distributing yards they still do: they’ll have one built up a train that got a train, the back one a mile down that way and they bring the switch engine up and they get it going and they release it and they adjust so it just makes it. Sometimes it makes it with a bang. That’s called humping.
And then ... uhh, this is a vague memory. I do remember them in the shop. They make a mold out of plaster, plaster of paris rather, and then they put the terra cotta body in and they whomp it down. Some of those things weigh a hundred pounds and you gotta lift them and hold up sometimes it takes two men to do it. When its once settled in there tightly, that’s the secret: make sure there are no air bubbles in it. How do you get these motions on the tape? Then they just put it in the drying room and the moisture from the terra cotta body goes into the plaster of paris and then is absorbed and the thing shrinks and they can pull it out. I remember that.
I also remember there was a big kind of like one of the tanks they used to use to store natural gas in, you may have seen those. It’s like a can with another one that sits on top of it and inserts and then they put water in there and this will float because of the gas in there, just go up and down. But it was abandoned and so it was this kind of oily greasy messy scary pool of water sitting in this thing out there. When ever we drove by it I was very frightened by it. That’s about all I remember at the moment.
DOUG: Well this was in the late 20’s.
ROBERT: Yah, well from the early to the late 20’s. I don’t know how often I went down there.