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They were sitting beside a flickering campfire in the heart of the forest-covered Blue Mountains.Harold lester Schudel (B.S. ’40; MSC ’41) lifted his steaming coffee mug and took a

long, satisfying swallow. The blazing slabs of yellow pine at his feet sent up a shower of dancing sparks, and a hoot owl screeched once ... and then twice ... somewhere deep in the evergreen forest of northeastern Oregon.

It was a November evening in 1954, and Hal Schudel – the former agronomy major at UNl – was sitting beside his buddy Paul Goodmonson and speculating on what the future might bring.

All day long, the two pals had been roaming through the Blue Mountains in search of Oregon’s wandering herds of elk. Carrying 30.06 Winchester rifles, they’d crept along the tree line near the remote Starkey National Forest, looking for signs that the majestic animals might be near. Hawk-eyed and silent, the two skilled hunters had spent hours scanning the freshly fallen snow for the telltale, four-inch hoof prints of the great forest mammals, which often grow to a height of five feet and can easily weigh more than 700 pounds.

It had been a long day, but their arduous quest had brought them nothing. Once or twice, the then-36-year-old Schudel (pronounced Shoo-DEll) had spotted a flash of movement among the towering Douglas firs and the soaring yellow pines. Once or twice, he’d listened to the crunching sound of animal footsteps in the heavy underbrush. But those were false alarms, as it turned out, and with the arrival of dusk the two men realized that they would not be bringing home a mighty bull elk on this day.

Breaking off the chase, they’d returned to their campsite for a quick meal of fire-cooked hot dogs and beans and coffee and toasted sourdough bread. And now with a pale moon glimmering occasionally through patches of mountain fog, they were relaxing beside the campfire and talking about the unhappy fact that both of them once again faced what Schudel always referred to as the “yearly cash shortfall in the family budget.”

Money was tight for Hal Schudel in 1954, and no wonder: as a struggling young agronomy instructor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, he earned a mere $2,000 for teaching several courses in agricultural science each semester.

like his cash-starved pal, Paul Goodmonson also was struggling to make ends meet. A former forestry instructor at OSU, Goodmonson had recently left the university in order to launch a forestry consulting firm that worked with timber companies, local farmers and government agencies to better manage the timber resources provided by Oregon’s vast evergreen forests.

But Goodmonson’s fledgling business was still getting off the ground and he was constantly reminding his pal Hal Schudel that he didn’t have “two nickels to rub together,” and that if “money was dynamite, I’d have trouble blowing my nose!”

Sitting beside the roaring campfire that night, the two men were exploring various ways in which they might be able to make some badly needed extra cash during the next few years. At one point, as they talked about their professional expertise and how they might use it to create a profit-making business together, a light suddenly flashed on in Hal Schudel’s laboring brain.

Christmas Tree Czar

The

by Tom Nugent

As the co-founder of the Oregon-based Holiday Tree Farms, Inc. – the world’s largest supplier of Christmas trees, with more than one million shipped each year – Hal Schudel built an immense agricultural enterprise that’s often described as one of the most successful “start-ups” in the history of modern American business. Now, at the tender age of 91, Schudel looks back on an amazing life that saw him rise from being “a poor farm boy” at the height of the Great Depression ... to his current status as America’s legendary “Christmas Tree Czar.” Describing his personal philosophy in a single sentence, Schudel will tell you: “It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’m very grateful for all the good things God has given me.”

26 fall2009

Fifty-five years later, during a lengthy interview with Nebraska Magazine, Schudel remembered that key moment. “I guess you could say everything began that night beside the campfire,” he recalled with a smile of pure nostalgia. “It happened pretty much by accident, as we gabbed about the fact that he was a forester and I was an agronomist. Paul knew lots of stuff about growing trees, and I knew lots of stuff about soils and fertilizer and using chemicals to control weeds and other agricultural pests.

“Well, that was the takeoff point. We looked at each other and we asked ourselves a very simple question: what if we put our talents together and bought a little land and tried to grow some Christmas trees on it? And what if we managed those trees like a [regular farm] crop?”

As the history of the enterprise later revealed, the idea of growing traditional Christmas trees (in those days, mostly Scotch pine and Douglas fir) on “plantations” – rather than simply cutting them down from “wild stands” growing in forests – was a new and daring concept.

“At that point, nobody even knew if it would work,” said Schudel. “The idea was brand-new and pretty risky ... as we discovered when we tried to get a loan to start our first tree farm. We needed to borrow about $28,000 to buy 300 acres, and when we went to one of the larger

banks in Corvallis, the guy in charge just shook his head.

“He told us, ‘I’m sorry, boys, but there are just too many unknowns here. Nobody has ever tried to farm Christmas trees before, and there’s no guarantee that you could make it work.’”

Frustrated and somewhat subdued, the two entrepreneurs finally did manage to talk a local credit association into making their first-ever loan for growing Christmas trees. Then, with 300 acres firmly in hand (they paid the rock-bottom rate of only $80 an acre), they set out to grow thousands of “Doug firs” from seedlings ... knowing that it would be seven to nine years before they could begin delivering their crop to California wholesalers. It would be a long wait, but Schudel said he was greatly encouraged when a major wholesaler told him: “Hal, that’s the tree of the future.”

Their huge gamble paid off handsomely, however, when the wholesalers evaluated the elegant-looking trees that emerged from their careful breeding and trimming (or “shearing”) regimen ... and found them to be strikingly handsome artifacts that easily surpassed the trees cut randomly from wild-growing forestlands.

“you can imagine how we felt when we took our first major load down to northern California and discovered that the buyers loved ’em,” said Schudel. “They took one

look at the quality of the trees we’d brought ’em, and right away it was clear they’d be willing to pay premium prices for so much quality.

“We were off and running at that point, and so we went to work with renewed energy. And during the next few years, the business just grew by leaps and bounds. Pretty soon, we were growing tens of thousands of trees, and we were also expanding our marketing efforts from coast to coast.”

What followed quickly became an entrepreneurial legend in the annals of American business, as Schudel and Goodmonson assembled an outfit that now ranks easily as the largest Christmas tree producer and seller in the world.

These days, Holiday Tree Farms is an immense international enterprise that ships more than one million Christmas trees each year ... while growing millions more on 6,500 acres of prime Oregon forestlands. Equipped with a fleet of six helicopters and 35 flatbed trucks, more than 1,500 part-time Holiday employees work feverishly in the late fall – along with about 30 full-timers – to get tens of thousands of trees cut down, neatly baled, and then headed off to giant retailers (think Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot) each day, as the pre-Christmas crunch reaches a roaring crescendo.

Hal Schudel 1940

nEBraskaMAGAZINE 27

“This is a wonderfully exciting business in the days right after Thanksgiving,” Schudel said with a brilliant smile, as he described how he became the universally acknowledged Christmas Tree Czar. “If you drop by Holiday Farms in early December, you’ll find the sky full of helicopters and the big trucks roaring in and out with their loads of trees.

“There’s a lot of pressure on us at that time of year,” said the czar, who bought out his partner way back in 1972 and now reigns supreme as the maestro of both the Douglas fir and the Noble fir (now his two most popular Christmas trees), “but there’s also a great deal of joy to be found in our business just before the holiday season.

“Whenever I watch our crews bringing out the trees in late November and early December, I realize all over again that we’re shipping a whole lot of happiness to people all around the world.

“That’s a great feeling, and it makes my own Christmas morning especially nice, as I imagine the thousands and thousands of families everywhere who are waking up and wishing each other ‘Merry Christmas’ beneath a tree from Holiday Farms!”

Born and raised on a busy hog farm in rural North loup, Neb., (current

pop.: 339), Harold Schudel was the oldest son of two first-generation German-Swiss Americans who taught him the value of hard work at an early age.

“My maternal grandparents came to this country from Germany and they helped to settle the Nebraska frontier,” Schudel said, while remembering their early struggles to survive. “They settled down on a hill-farm between Ord and North loup, and during their first 19 years in Nebraska they lived in a ‘dugout’ house built into the side of a hill. These folks were tough, tough, tough ... and they passed a lot of their toughness on to my parents, who were very strong and very courageous people.

“My dad, E.O. Schudel, grew up farming, and he eventually built his own 1,200-acre hog farm not far from the North loup river. I was just a teenager when the Great Depression struck ... but we all felt its impact, believe me. We worked long, hard hours, but fortunately

we always had enough to eat and we four kids never went without.”

After an adolescence spent feeding farm animals and hoeing weeds – and listening to FDr’s “Fireside Chats” on the big cabinet Zenith radio in the front parlor after supper – Schudel was bracing himself for his approaching life as a farmer. But then, soon after being elected valedictorian of his senior class in high school, he suddenly received an unexpected piece of good fortune.

“I woke up one morning to discover that I’d been awarded a $500 scholarship by the local 4-H Club,” he recalled with a nostalgic smile. “All at once, I had a shot at going to college! And that would never have happened, otherwise; there was simply no money for it. I’m still very grateful today for the fact that I was able to link up with my Nebraska cousin, Kenneth Koelling, and head on down to lincoln to study agronomy.”

Having arrived at UNl for their freshman year in the fall of 1936, the two

pals found living space in a “lady’s basement not too far from campus. We wound up with four guys living in that basement,” he remembered, “and it worked out just fine. The rent was only $20 a month for each of us, and that included electricity. These days, it’s hard to believe you could get by with $20 for rent and heat in the winter, but that’s how it was. We also saved money by taking our laundry home every couple of weeks so our mothers could wash it for us.”

Schudel said his UNl experience was “so exciting and so eye-opening” that he decided to stay on for an extra year in order to earn a master’s degree. An eager student, he thrived under the inspiring leadership of the late Professor F.D. Keim, a former UNl Agronomy Department chairman who gained fame for his studies on wheat-growing methods in Nebraska.

“Professor Keim was a terrific teacher and he always took a strong interest in his students,” Schudel recalled. “He also helped my finances a lot by hiring me for summer projects related to work in wheat-growing. I remember spending one whole summer on a field bindweed project in the Nebraska wheat fields, digging up bindweed so he could study it. Well, those were the days before backhoes, and you had to dig deep holes to study the root system, which sometimes went 20 feet deep in the ground.

“I nearly broke my back that summer, but I dug all the way down and somehow Dr. Keim didn’t fire me from the job!”

Although Schudel’s college career suffered a painful interruption when his beloved older sister, Dorothy, died of Hodgkin’s disease during her senior year at UNl, he nevertheless remembers many joyful moments in lincoln ... such as the time when an angry traffic cop chewed him out on the way to a Nebraska football game.

“We were rabid football fans in those days, and we couldn’t get enough,” he said with a hoot of laughter. “I remember one Saturday afternoon when I had a bunch of guys with me, and I’d loaded ’em all into this beat-up old Studebaker Dictator I’d managed to buy somewhere for about $50.

“Well, we were just getting in close to the stadium, and the traffic was bumper to bumper, and the damn thing stalled on me. Can you imagine? It was almost game time, and everybody was yelling and honking because we were blocking the road. They were all desperate to get into the stadium, and there we were, blocking the way. Of course, we’d all jumped out of the car by then, and we were pushing it along as fast as we could.

“Then all at once, out of nowhere – this cop suddenly appears, and he takes one look at us with the dead Studebaker, and he roars: ‘Get that heap outta here!’”

Schudel smiled, and his eyes shone with the memory of those long-ago college hi-jinx. “Oh boy, those were the days. That was just a heck of a lot of fun. Get that heap outta here!”

S t udebaker Dict at or

1938 Cornhuskers

GET THAT HEAP OUTTA HERE!”

28 fall2009

The rest of Hal Schudel’s story reads like a chapter out of a book that might be

entitled: “America’s Greatest Entrepreneurs reveal Their Secrets.”

After training as a B-24 pilot in the western states and virginia (and teaching other cadets how to fly for several months) during World War II, the gung-ho UNl grad was eager to head for air combat in the South Pacific ... but got a major shock when the war against Japan ended on the same day he was due to ship out.

By then, however, he’d fallen in love with the “agricultural paradise” that is eastern Oregon, and he decided not to return to Nebraska ... but instead to seek a Ph.D. in agriculture at Oregon State in Corvallis. By the time he finished earning his doctorate (in 1953) at OSU, he was already quite knowledgeable about tree soils and tree-growing methods in that neck of the woods – so that when the moment of vocational truth arrived (during that fateful elk-hunting trip with Paul Goodmonson in 1954), Schudel was fully prepared to meet his chosen entrepreneurial challenge head-on.

What he accomplished as a farmer-businessman during the next 40 years was extraordinary, to say the least. Along with devising entirely new methods for raising Douglas and Noble firs in enormous quantities on Christmas tree “plantations” where each plant in the yearly “crop” received individual attention, Hal Schudel

(along with his three sons: Dave, Steve and John) built a hugely successful nationwide marketing operation from the ground up.

So what was the key to his astonishing success?

According to many of the experts in his field, the secret behind the remarkable growth of Holiday Tree Farms over the years was Schudel’s uncanny ability to protect his trees from pests (and especially from the same kinds of weeds he’d studied at UNl) ... along with his unique ability to gradually shape them into pleasing, full-bodied forms that would satisfy every family’s hunger for “the perfect Christmas tree.”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that, over the years, Hal Schudel has had an enormous influence on the entire Christmas tree industry,” said Bob Kintigh, another successful tree farmer and a partner at Mountain ranch in Springfield, Ore. “I think everyone in our industry understands that Hal has been an extremely effective marketer. At the same time, however he has set a new standard in the management of competitive vegetation [weeds] through the effective use of herbicides.”

Along with these accomplishments, Hal Schudel has earned a national reputation in recent years for such innovations as using helicopter teams to lift freshly harvested trees from steep hillsides – a maneuver that allowed him to avoid cutting new roads through plantations, and thus to protect

the hills against needless erosion.As the father of three sons and half a

dozen grandkids, the still youthfully energetic Schudel has spent his years since retirement in 1992 engaged in a “second life passion” – raising prize black-angus cattle on an irrigated ranch located in central Oregon.

These days, Hal and lois Schudel enjoy many hours each week hiking through the green hills of western Oregon, while gazing out over long, symmetrical rows of Schudel family Christmas trees that stretch to the far horizon. At 91, Hal seems spry and healthy and full of a kind of rare, bubbling joyfulness as he talks about his daily routine.

“I’m not worried about getting sick or getting old,” he said with a cheerful laugh. “I have no fear of death – I just don’t want to be there when it happens! Hey, I’m still having fun out here, and I still enjoy the challenge of waking up every day to see what will happen next.

“I was raised to believe that life is a gift from God, and a great blessing ... and I’m very grateful for every single day I’ve been given.” n

HEY, I,M STILL

HAVING FUN OUT HERE!