“The Last of the Log Cabins” on Laurel Lane at Hazel was built with 53,000 lbs. of lodgepole pines from Twisp Mills on the Canadian border in Washington.They lay on the ground but with the help of pioneers Harold & Naomi Hansen (Jana’s note: I changed the spelling from “Handsen” to match what I’ve seen in Wilsonia) we built it to celebrate our Bicentennial in 1976.

But we had to get congressional and county approval in hearings in Fresno. (Note from Jana: Wilsonia is in Tulare County.) They said we had to prove that these logs met the heating standards in California. We found there were approved log cabins near Shasta.

In 1975 after we bought the two lots, we found the Lincoln Log design in a lodge on the Athabasca Glacier in the Colombian Ice fields, moving down the mountain, which meant it could withstand California earthquakes.

As a Eagle Scout who ran the John Muir trail every summer, and as a professor of Biology and History, I wanted the cabin to fit the ecology of Wilsonia. I built schools in Kenya, a year before Obama was born during the bloody Mau Mau rebellion, after I’d climbed the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, speaking Swahili in 1960. The next year I was in JFK’s first Peace Corp, and built schools in Ghana and Guinea. Then I returned and used the Peace Corp spirit, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!” As President of the AFT I built LASW College after the Watts Riots, then founded LA Mission College in a poor area of NE San Fernando Valley in 1975, being named by CA Senate, Assembly & Chancellor as “The Faculty Father of LA Mission College” for the LACCD “The only Faculty (nonAdmin) ever to build a college in California.

We built the roof stretching well beyond the cabin so it is sheltered even in deepest snows, based on our observations of other Wilsonia cabins. A draft portrait of Woodrow Wilson hangs above my desk, with the other one in the White House, painted by my cousin who knew him before he was elected in 1916 by S. Seymour Thomas. (Jana’s note: Wasn’t Wilson elected by the voters?)  Thus the Wilsonia tradition will stay alive with your book. Thanks from our hearts. (You are most welcome, Professor Dirks!)

I met my wife Xiaoping Liu, when I was the only college professor to get into forbidden Tibet in 1988, taking my students through Lhasa and the Dalai Lama’s Palace and to monasteries above 16,000 feet behind Mt. Everest. I met her during the “Democracy Movement” at the University in Xian, in the Chin Kingdom (Chin – China) where she’d been Presidents’ Carter, Reagan and Queen Elizabeth’s doctor in China. A year later when the leader of the Democracy Movement died, a million people gathered in Tian An Men Square in April and in May when Gorbachev had the summit meeting but couldn’t go to the square because of the millions still there, (Jana’s note: I’m confused!) so Dr. Liu left thru Hong Kong the week before the Tien An Men Massacre. She came here, became a professor of Microbiology and Napa, (Jana’s note: What is a professor of Napa?) then came down here to find that mad professor (Jana’s note: by “mad professor” I think the author is referring to himself) from Mission  (Jana’s note: I think he is referring to LA Mission College) who predicted the massacre if they pushed democracy too hard. She found me, we became friends and then family and our son Darwin evolved, East meets West and 1/2 + 1/2 is twice as smart.

And thank you, Professor Dirks, for sharing your most interesting life and cabin story with my blog readers! (I removed many personal details about your son to protect his privacy, which I also would have done if this was published as a comment on my blog.)