Most affected by the sale of their town were the older, early settlers. On the day after the sale was announced, the Seattle Times quoted thirty-year resident R. D. Downing's lament: "I'd like to stay around here and get in some fishing in those trout streams, now I'm retired, but I don't know. My pension isn't $130." Senior Estates' plan called for a home buyer's pension to range from $130 to $250 a month.
Other long-time residents like Ross and Vera Inman, however, did qualify for home ownership and opted to retire in the new Ryderwood. In 1984 the Longview Daily News reported that at the age of 91, Vera Inman still lived in the same house she and Ross moved into in 1930.
Roy and Ruth Merchant, not yet near pension age, still had four of their eight children at home. The family moved to the nearby town of Winlock. Roy, like many Long-Bell loggers, found work with the new timber powerhouse in the area, Weyerhaeuser Company. But, as Patsy recalls about her father, "all those years with Long-Bell didn't count for anything with Weyerhaeuser." Once a "cracker-jack faller" who settled into the less dangerous job of scaling for Long-Bell when arthritis set in, Roy had to start with Weyerhaeuser as a choker setter, a position in which one must be nimble and quick to avoid the snap of the cable when the tree starts to be pulled in. In 1959 on his first day back in the woods for Weyerhaeuser after an arthritic layoff, a log in a choker caught Roy and permanently disabled him.
Ironically, just as Roy left Missouri to avoid a life like his father's in the coal mines, none of Roy's five sons works in the woods. Furthermore, it's interesting that Nola, who didn't recall Roy's history, but because her father also was disabled in the woods, reflects that "only mining has as many fatalities [as logging does] as an industry."