Bruce Starker Memorial Fund

Bruce Starker was born in Portland, Oregon on March 4, 1918 to T.J. and Margaret O. Starker. Bruce’s grandfather had moved the family west in 1907 after visiting the Portland Exposition. When T.J. joined the faculty in Forest Management at Oregon Agricultural College, the family moved from Portland to the Corvallis area. Bruce was just four years old at the time, but the name, “Starker,” soon became synonymous with expertise in the wise and careful management of timber resources.

Bruce attended Harding Grade School and Corvallis Junior High (then located in Central Park). He graduated in 1936 from Corvallis High School in the first graduating class at the then-new high school on Buchanan Street.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Bruce Starker entered the School of Forestry at Oregon State College. His father was still a faculty member at the college, and Bruce had early on caught his dad’s spark of enthusiasm for forestry. Bruce earned his bachelor’s degree in 1940, and a master’s degree from Yale in forest management in 1941. Bruce evaluated timber for the estate of E.S. Collins for a short time before World War II.

Early in 1942, Bruce enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard and trained as an officer at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. As skipper of a submarine chaser, he spent two years in Brazil training Brazilian officers in anti-submarine warfare and commanded a sub chaser based in Rio de Janeiro. Subsequently, he was transferred to Coast Guard transport duty on ships bringing men home from Asia.

Following his release from active service in 1946, he returned home to Corvallis and married Elizabeth “Betty” Bond, whom he had met at Corvallis High School ten years earlier. The couple had two sons: Bond, born in 1947, and Barte, born in 1950. Their first home was on West Hills Road, where they lived for several years before moving to the west end of Van Buren Street. In 1961 they built a spacious home on Philomath Boulevard, which now serves as the offices of Starker Forests.

Using his money from four years in the service, Bruce purchased his first piece of land for tree farming, near Blodgett, OR. He set about acquiring more timberland which, with his father, became consolidated as Starker Forests in 1971. Bruce managed the partnership, which consisted of T.J., Bruce, his wife Betty, and his sons Bond and Barte.

As general manager of Starker Forests, Bruce was responsible for more than 50,000 acres of timber: husbandry, planting, brush control, timber sales, supervising extraction, improving timber, and thinning. Today, Starker Forests, Inc. is a fifth-generation family-run business, with more than 90,000 acres of forestland.

Bruce was involved in many forestry-related organizations:

• He was elected chairman of the Oregon-Washington Reforestation Council, of which he was a founding member. The organization consisted of both government and industry representatives who, like Bruce, were dedicated to promoting further forest research by agencies and landowners. 
• In 1972, Bruce was instrumental in setting up a landmark project to compare intercompany research results for the Pacific Northwest reforestation effort. 
• That same year, Oregon Governor Tom McCall asked Bruce to serve on the Northwest Oregon Forest Practices Committee. He was also responsible for getting the Forest Practices Act passed, which promised to maintain healthy and reforested timber lands.
• Bruce was a member and Trustee of Western Forestry and Conservation Association, and active in their Silvicultural and Reforestation Councils. 
• He was Benton County Chairman of Keep Oregon Green. 
• He served as a trustee of the Oregon Forest Protection Association and held membership in the Society of American Foresters and Xi Sigma Phi, Forestry honorary.

Bruce was also a concerned and active citizen of his community, serving several organizations. As a youngster he had been active in the Boy Scouts, which he continued to support later in life. He served on the United Fund Board and Budget Committee, was an enthusiastic member of the OSU Beaver Club, and worked frequently with the Corvallis Chamber of Commerce.

The Starker family made a practice of playing as well as working together. Bruce, Betty and the boys learned to scuba dive right in their own indoor swimming pool. This sport prompted them to travel far from home to enjoy diving in Guaymos, Mexico, Hawaii, and Tahiti. A charter sailboat trip from Martinique to Grenada in 1967 included diving and sightseeing.

An adventuresome lot, the entire family also took to the skies. Their interest in flying started one day when clamming was good at the beach, but they were too busy to take off from work for several days. As a matter of expediency, they chartered a small plane and were flown to the beach to clam, returning back home after just a few hours. This trip inspired Betty to take flying lessons at Corvallis Airport, and Bruce soon decided to join her. He found it an excellent way to pursue one of his other favorite hobbies: photography. Barte and Bond also flew some in the four-passenger Cherokee they owned.

Bruce found that flying served as an efficient way to survey their forest lands, and he began to use their plane more for business than for pleasure. It was on one of these scouting trips that a tragic crash claimed Bruce’s life. On July 27, 1975, Bruce and Bond were inspecting timber prospects and Starker holdings in Polk County. Their plane crashed, and it was missing for two days. A skydivers’ club from Sheridan, Oregon, joined the search, having heard an emergency locating beacon. They found Bond still alive, barely, having suffered severe hypothermia from the unusually cold weather.

Bruce’s sons Bond and Barte carried on the family business of Starker Forests, Inc. Barte retired in 2015, and passed away in December 2017. Bond retired from his position of President and CEO in 2017.