A life devoted to trees
Leslie Ainsworth Corkum – 1922-2020

For the latter part of his long and rich life, Les Corkum was a living legend in Nova Scotia’s forest industry. Now he is just a legend – remembered for his wide knowledge of the woods, his leadership in fire control and Christmas tree cultivation, his open-mindedness and curiosity, his wit and good humour, and his gifts as a raconteur. He died in his sleep on April 1 – the timing would have elicited a wise crack from him – at his home in Falmouth, N.S., at the age of 97.
Born in the Chester area of Lunenburg County, where his father ran a sawmill that remains to this day, Corkum graduated from the Maritime Forest Ranger School in 1948, and worked for the provincial Department of Lands and Forests until his retirement in 1981. Always proud of his vocation, and supportive of professional development, he was a founding member and the first president of the Nova Scotia Forest Technicians Association. His enthusiasm for forest management extended well beyond his working life, and in 2002 he was named Provincial Woodlot Owner of the Year.
Corkum was inducted into the Nova Scotia Forestry Hall of Fame in 2004, the same year as Dr. Wilfrid Creighton and Dr. Douglas Embree. In the company of his esteemed colleagues, he stood out as a practical man. A biographical blurb from that time notes his contributions to the design of pumper trucks for fighting forest fires, the hand primer for Wajax fire pumps, and mechanized Christmas tree balers – as well as his keen interest in tree genetics.
In an interview with Atlantic Forestry Review in 2013, just after his 90th birthday, Corkum was asked how he got started on his career path, and he replied, “Well, I don’t want to get involved in a long story here, but I can’t get around it any other way.” Sure enough, there ensued a fairly exhaustive but thoroughly entertaining story. Corkum liked to start at the beginning, to put things in proper context – and because he had the kind of intellect that sought causes and connections, one story often led to another. In his honour, we are reprinting excerpts from that interview. This is Les Corkum, in his own words:

AN INAUSPICIOUS START
Dad had a brother who graduated from Acadia in business and started a store in Halifax, and was doing good, and so Dad said to him, “Why don’t you build a store in Chester? The American tourists are pouring in and there’s room for another good store in Chester.” And he said, “Well, I just don’t have the money, so I’ll have to wait awhile.” So Dad said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll build you the store but you’ll have to stock it and run it from there, and you’ll pay me back when you can.” Okay, so it was all set up that he was to move into the store January 1, 1923.
Anyway, on Halloween night – he had a grocery store on Spring Garden Road, next to the college there, and the college students were in and out all the time and playing tricks on one another. So Halloween night this fellow comes in with a revolver and says, “Hand over all your money.” And he thought it was one of the college students with a Halloween joke. Had a mask on, you see. And he just said, “Cut the comedy.” And this fellow was very nervous, and he said “I’ll give you until I count to three,” and “One” – bang, the gun went off. That was it, he shot him. So Dad was left with the store on his hands.
He was my uncle. He was shot Halloween night, and I was born 17 days later, on the 17th of November. So I inherited his exact name. Dad always wanted me to take the store over. He never told me this much, but in hindsight I can see it all now. He wanted me to take the store over, so when I was through high school – in the meantime he had it rented – he wanted me to go to Bridgewater to take a business course. Success Business College, it was called. And I didn’t really want to, but I didn’t want to say no.
So another fellow and I went over and registered, and they showed me the classroom and the pretty typewriters and whatever. And we were on the Bridgewater hill going home, and I said, “You damn fool, what are you doing?” So I stopped and turned around, and I said to Reg, “You can suit yourself what you do, but I’m not going through with this.” So we went back and cancelled, and even cancelled our boarding house, all within a few hours, and came back home. And Dad was disappointed, and he said, “Well, what are you going to do?” I said, “Well, I guess I’ll go in the woods with you.” He said, “Nope, got my crew hired.”
Well, I didn’t expect that. So like I said, the war was starting, and I didn’t know which way to turn there for a bit. I was in the post office and I saw a sign there: War Emergency Training Program. No money up front or anything. So another fellow and I went over to Bridgewater to get interviewed. No problem, and in a very short time we were in Trenton, Nova Scotia, taking a machinist course. That lasted three or four months or whatever it was. And we were hired right on there, and we were making marine deck guns – a four-inch deck gun. So I worked there probably a little less than a year, and I joined up from there. I joined the Air Force.
And then after the war was over Dad said, “What are you going to do?” and I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Why don’t you take up surveying? You know, it’s hard to get a good surveyor around here now.” I had helped Dad and a surveyor survey our lands down through the years. I said, “Yeah okay.”
So I went into the Halifax DVA (Department of Veterans’ Affairs), and I said, “I want to go to Lawrencetown and take surveying.” When you got discharged there was a kitty of money there that you could draw from. You could draw it for education, or for investment in a home or a business. Not a whole lot, but a little. So he said, “We’ve got a new forestry school opening up in Fredericton, and they’ll teach you forestry and surveying.” He said, “I think it’s a lot better course.”
I said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind having forestry too.” Well, of course what he didn’t know and I didn’t know was I wasn’t going to get my land surveyor’s papers with my certificate. But at any rate, while there, Bob Burgess was one of my instructors, and he said, “Nobody here knows, in fact this is quiet, but this is my last term here, and I’ve been hired on with the Department of Lands and Forests in Nova Scotia.” And he said, “When I get there, I’d like for you to come and work for me.” And I said, “Yeah, fat chance.” But at any rate, that’s the way it worked out. And we were a good team for many years – and Creighton, the three of us.

ON CROWN WOOD
As a former Lands and Forests employee I couldn’t say this before, but the Department of Lands and Forests has not been kind to woodlot owners. I’m talking about regulating the price of wood – because they’re dumping so much cheap wood on the market. On the other hand, probably that’s all the market could stand. It’s hard to say.
In the old days, when I came in with the department, we decided what parcels would be put up for tender. In certain cases, maybe industry would say, “We’d like to have it,” but on the other hand, we might say, “We’re not going to put it up yet. It’s not ready.” So therefore industry didn’t have full control. 
The main thing I liked about it was that we put it up for public tender. It always went to public tender, and to me that was fair. Probably in the first place we used to put up a little bit too much at once, and the small mills said, “We can’t put up that much money. We can’t use that resource.” So then we put up smaller blocks after that.
On top of that, you take here in Stanley, we had fire crews, and to keep them on a yearly basis, we had to keep them employed, so we had woods crews – Georgefield and Stanley, Chignecto, and so on – so they’d be gainfully employed in the meantime. So we were producing pulpwood, and we always put that up for tender.
They would tender on a parcel of 50,000, 100,000, and they would say, “I don’t know if it’s fair,” and there were under-the-table deals and so on. And I said, “Look, those tenders are going to be opened in the Halifax office in a certain room on a certain date, and if you have any questions at all about it, you be there.” I said, “Those are sealed envelopes, and they’re opened and it’s open to the public, no questions asked. And the highest bid takes it.” Now there were some qualifications, if they had problems with some bills not paid from a former contractor or something. There was a little clause there, so they weren’t necessarily accepted, but generally speaking.
I’ll say this about it. In hindsight, what we were under was good forestry, but it was a little bit top-heavy in management, I think. After the war our whole department got reorganized, and probably because most everybody was ex-military, it got built around a military type of organization. We had an organization big enough to manage North America, I think. Way too top-heavy on management. And putting those tenders out in the paper was a little bit expensive, and we did a lot. You see, as it is now, my god, this wood gets sold and it’s moved, and there’s not much cruising and there’s no scaling. It’s loose – very loose.

ON MANAGING BLACK SPRUCE
It’s not that they wouldn’t live long, but they wouldn’t respond to a thinning. I ran into this in Stanley. We didn’t know this. They did a lot of thinning in Black spruce in Stanley. No diameter rule, just eyeball it – spacing, more or less. So I came along some years later. The Stanley management unit was drawn up in Truro by the planning division. When I came to Stanley – to Windsor – I expected to open up this management plan, and here we were and here we are and here’s where we’re going. But there was no such damn plan! 
I went back into all the records – I spent a whole winter on it. I determined we were only cutting one fifth of our Crown land county increment, so I knew we were OK that way, and then I went back to see what had been done and what was successful and what wasn’t. And I went back into those Black spruce, and I couldn’t believe my own eyes. No increase in increment whatsoever. So what’s the use? 
Our training would have indicated that we should go that way – but if you can’t look back and learn from past mistakes, you’re in bad trouble. So we couldn’t do anything else but clearcut. There was no other alternative. Small areas, small clearcuts is what we did.
Red pine was growing on Black spruce bogs out there, which CFS in Ottawa were shaking their heads on. They came there and studied them many times. You know, they’re just not supposed to be there! I don’t know if they took that seed source and tried to adapt it to other Black spruce bogs or not.
That was one of our cash crops, the Red pine out there. They went to Domtar in Truro. Those regulations and specs are very critical. That high-grade stuff is big money. Then we got into studwood. Anything that didn’t make poles or piling, what was left over, we had studwood, and then below that we put into pulpwood, so we had quite a utilization out there in Stanley. I think altogether in the summer with fire crews I had about 60 on the payroll. They had a cookhouse there in Stanley too.
We used to sell Black spruce to the farmers for fence posts, eight-foot wood. Well, they didn’t want eight-foot wood, they wanted six-and-a-half-foot wood. So we started being more particular about it, and started selling fence posts. There was a bit of work to it, because we had to pick them over and grade it a bit. If we were getting so much a cord, it would add three or four dollars a cord.
So they came back after a year or two and they said, “When you buy a car, it’s got an engine and four wheels on it. If we buy a fence post, we want it peeled and sharpened.” I said, “We’re not in the fence post business. That’s your problem. You’ve got the Federation of Agriculture, take it up with them. It don’t matter to me, but I’m not volunteering to get into it.”
Well, I couldn’t believe how fast, I think it was a matter of two weeks, I had a letter: “What’s the potential for fence posts, and can we get into it?” So I drafted up a report and put a proposal in – how much money it was going to cost to get a peeler and a pointer and to sell them roadside. And they came back and wanted to know what I thought the potential volume was. At that time, we were selling about 30,000 posts. So I kind of stuck my finger in the air and said, “I think we can make 60,000.”
So we went into production then. Al McNeil was my foreman out there in Stanley – son of a farmer – and Al said, “What are we going to charge for those posts?” I said 80 cents. He said, “Good thing we got that runway out there to pile the posts up. We’ll never sell them.” 
I said, “Good, if we can’t sell them, we’re out of business, and it don’t hurt my feelings a bit. If we can’t produce posts at a profit, then we’re not in it.” 
He said, “They won’t pay it.” But we never heard a whimper. And the last year I was there it was 62,000 we sold. That’s a lot of goddamn posts! At that time, normally our crews were paid by the hour, but when we put that machine in the woods I said, “Al, anybody who goes on that machine goes on by piecework. Not by the hour, it won’t work.” My opinion was, and Dr. Creighton’s was too, always, Crown land should pay for itself. 
(These excerpts are from a 2013 AFR interview with Les Corkum, who died April 1, 2020.)