Evelyn Elaine Holmes was only 15 years old when she married Lynn George Ishmael. As the daughter of a logger, Bud Holms of La Pine, it seemed only natural that she would follow in his boot steps. In the 1950s, she and her husband, Lynn, owned the Ishmael Logging Co. in La Pine.
They cut logs on forest service sales in the upper Deschutes area as contract loggers for the Brooks-Scanlon Mill in Bend. (Contract loggers were often known in the Pacific Northwest as gyppo or gypo loggers.) They had their own trucks and equipment and hauled logs into the mill from La Pine.
Evelyn was a small woman, barely topping a hundred pounds; her tiny frame didn’t even reach shoulder high to her tall husband. Her family called her “Little Bird”, but she was capable of doing every kind of logging job. She mainly drove the big logging truck to Bend, but she could fell trees, buck and limb them, skid the logs into landings and load them on the truck. At the end of her work day, she rushed home to prepare dinner for her family of eight. She and Lynn had 6 children, all girls; Elaine, Elizabeth, Phyllis, Mary, Dottie, and Marguerite.
After dinner, Evelyn monitored the chores, schoolwork, and taught the girls to sew and knit. The girls each had their own knitting projects to work on; there were no idle hands in that family. There was no television but each night was filled with activities. Then off to bed and up at 5 a.m. to fix breakfast and get the older girls off to school. Baby Marguerite often accompanied her mother to the forest, riding alongside her in the tractor, playing under the watchful eye of her mother who got right to business with a chainsaw. One might imagine that was how Evelyn, herself, grew up as a logger’s daughter.
Evelyn became something of a local celebrity when she was featured in a Bend Bulletin article in 1958 and a follow up in the Brooks-Scanlon in-house magazine, Pine Echoes. Her fame might have gone national when Life magazine scheduled a photo shoot and she was also set to appear on the television show, “What’s My Line?” However, both were cancelled when her car was rear-ended in a serious accident in March 1959.
She was in traction for 9 months and doctors cautioned that she might not walk again, never mind drive the big trucks. This was not something that Evelyn Ishmael took lying down. In fact, they moved to Shoshone, California where her father had re-located. Her daughter, Elaine, said her mother continued physical therapy and soaked in the Death Valley hot springs, determined to recover.
Indeed, she did, and not only drove the local school bus for eighteen years, she taught school bus driving. “Little Bird” was as tough as ever. Evelyn and Lynn Ishmael spent their last years in Nevada. They are buried together in The Desert Hills Cemetery in Pahrump, Nevada. Lynn died in 1990 and Evelyn followed in 1995. They are together under one stone dedicated by their daughters.