When Janet McCrary Webb was 5 years old, she announced there was only one career path for her: working at the family mill, Big Creek Lumber Co.
On Saturdays, her father, Frank “Lud” McCrary, would take her along to the sawmill he co-founded in 1946 with his late brother, Bud, their father and uncle. She loved riding the forklifts and eagerly agreed when the yard guys put her to work sweeping and picking up trim ends.
When her high school classes were done for the day in Santa Cruz, she would wait at a bus stop on Mission Street and catch rides back to the mill on lumber trucks passing through town. She’d spend the afternoons out on the log deck helping scale — measuring the volume of the logs as they came in on trucks.
“It was quite a big responsibility,” said her father, now 93. “But she was really good at it. She was just into it all the time. ”
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