Sensational Seniors – August 2020

Lorin Severson has experienced Jacksonville, off and on, for over 70 years, so like the Farmers Insurance ad goes, “He has seen a thing or two.” That he’s here in Jacksonville and able to sit for an interview is a bit of a miracle given his rocky start in life. Lorin weighed eight pounds when born on May 4, 1938 in Tujunga, California, but, because he was born with an inverted stomach, he couldn’t keep food down and dropped four pounds. The delivery doctor gave his mother the bad news with this advice, “Take him home and keep him as comfortable as possible, because he will not last long.”

A few days later, his mother was attending the Angeles Temple, a Four Square church, when she was approached by a lady who said an angel had wakened her that morning and told her that what the Severson baby needed was Alberti baby food—Alberti being a smaller rival of the better known, Gerber. Desperate to try anything to save tiny Lorin, she started feeding him Alberti baby food, and he started gaining weight and growing stronger to the point that, by the time he was two, his nickname was “Butter Ball.” While Lorin’s serious medical condition was remedied, he was to suffer the loss of his mother from cancer in 1942 when he was only four. “I do remember that I was alone with my mother when she died. Sensing something was wrong, I went to get an older brother and then I was whisked away.”

Lorin’s father was left with ten children after his wife’s death, resulting in the kids eventually being scattered around to other family members. In Lorin’s case, in 1947, he was sent to live with his grandparents, Rasmus and Lena Rasmussen, in Jacksonville, Oregon. Rasmus was a retired pastor and Lorin was to spend three years with his grandparents, attending Jacksonville Elementary School for grades two through four while receiving a firm foundation in his Christian faith. In 1949, Lorin returned to Southern California to live with his dad, who’d been a research and development executive at Lockheed. Unfortunately, his father had moved from job to job and had also become a hard drinker and was no longer capable of providing for any of his children. As Lorin remembers, “I was really in an unbearable situation. By the time I was 13, I had to provide for my own room and board, doing whatever odd jobs I could find. By the time I was 15, I was living on the streets, sleeping in cars and a member of a vicious gang that did a lot of bad things, but I drew the line on armed robbery. I did land a job at John and Pete’s liquor store in Hollywood making home deliveries. Lucille Ball was one of the customers, and for a tip she would dump the change from her purse into my hands.”

At 17 Lorin was taken in by his brother, Page, and his wife, Donna, and he returned to the faith of his childhood and started to get his life turned around. Another brother, Jerry, was in the Navy and had left a closest full of nice clothing for Lorin to wear. So, wearing Jerry’s clothes, Lorin went to church well-dressed and as he relates, “I became and stayed a Christian from that moment on for the rest of my life. I think my faith was what carried me through some really difficult times, especially when I had three brothers who went insane and one who was killed.” He made a short return to Jacksonville in 1956 for a seasonal Forest Service job but, on returning to Los Angeles, realized that he was going to be drafted. Rather than wait for the draft notice, he enlisted in the Marine Corps where he was assigned to the tank division for a two-year commitment with four years of reserve training to follow.

After his service time, Mr. Severson headed to Los Angeles to attend his brother Loyal’s wedding, but his brother Page who had now moved to Jacksonville persuaded him to make the move also, and Page further enticed Lorin when he told him about a special young woman in their Jacksonville church who deserved a look. Once in Jacksonville, Lorin started helping Page who had started a business building and installing commercial kitchen interiors throughout the Northwest. As part of this work Lorin took an interest in stainless steel metal fabrication which led to him being hired by Brill Metal Works in Medford. He worked for them for six years until their business slowed down. Always looking for a way to make a living, Lorin in 1964 purchased a bulldozer and proceeded to build home sites and roads all over Jacksonville and the Applegate. In 1968, Page purchased the Jacksonville Inn building and rented Lorin one of the four apartments located in the building, and on July 19,1969 that young lady from Page and Donna’s church, Carlene Wall, married Lorin. They were to enjoy 56 years together.

Utilizing his metal working skills, Lorin started assisting Page in building restaurant interiors. One of these was the interior of the well-known Mustard Seed restaurant. When Jack Bate and his wife, Karen, purchased the Jacksonville Inn from Page in 1968, Jack contracted with Lorin to gut the building and create a restaurant and dining room which was the birth of the long-established Jacksonville Inn. This was a year-long job. Lorin hired 15 employees, including two men to work in the metal shop he had built. Because of the low clearance in the basement area, Lorin used a garden tractor and a small trailer to haul out the yards of debris which is why one end of the parking lot is higher than the other.

Always looking for a business opportunity, Lorin was convinced by Medford entrepreneur, Jack Day, to purchase his Modern Sheet Metal company, making Lorin an offer he could not refuse. This business eventually became the well-known Metal Masters when Lorin and two of his employees created the new company. Lorin chuckles when remembering, “Since my two partners were in the union, by law they could not be owners. We got around it by having our three wives hold all the stock in the company.” Upon selling this business, Lorin and Carlene purchased the Stage Line Inn in Jacksonville with the intention of turning it into a Christian dinner house, but this never happened because they could not get a bank to finance a dinner house that did not serve alcohol. Undeterred, Lorin and Carlene consolidated what had now become five separate corporations, each with its own accounting system done by Carlene, into one convenient company, aptly named, Lorin Company. He remembers, “We built restaurant kitchens from Arizona to Alaska, including what became the two Jacksonville Mexican restaurants. We usually had four restaurant jobs going at a time.”

In addition to a busy work schedule, Lorin and Carlene found their dream spot on the Applegate River, a 200-acre ranch with a log cabin. In a memoir, Carlene fondly reminisced about this ranch, “It was so far out in the mountains that the very last power pole was on our property. We were completely self-sufficient (with God’s help). I had a wonderful wood cook stove, a gravity-fed spring supplying pure water for our home and the pond in front with plenty more for a marvelous big garden.” By this time, they had two sons, Glen and Mark and a daughter, Lori, making for a busy household.

Unfortunately, their idyllic life came to an end in 1980 when Paul Volker, Chair of the United States Federal Reserve, trying to shrink inflation, caused interest rates to jump from 7% to 20%. The result for Lorin Company was that in two-months’ time all of their customers called and canceled contracts. The company did not generate any income for three years, resulting in the Severson’s losing their Applegate property and all their savings. Lorin found an occasional odd metal fabrication job before he received a call in 1983 from a friend in Alaska asking Lorin to build a kitchen for their church. Lorin said he would like to but did not have money to make the trip. His friend said he would send him one-third of the agreed-upon price, and Lorin was back in business. On the return to Jacksonville after the church job was completed, Lorin stopped at a sheet metal shop in Eugene, inquired about a job and was hired on the spot. He was to spend five years working for this business before launching another of his own companies, Severson Manufacturing, that included his son Glen who, like his father had become a skilled metal worker. At the request and backing of an orthopedic surgeon in The Dalles, Oregon, Severson Manufacturing built video scoping surgery equipment. Before long, the company was producing 40 of these 600-pound pieces of equipment a month and shipping them all over the United States.

Lorin and Carlene moved back to Jacksonville in 1986. Lorin spent some time working in kitchen equipment sales and then bid a job to remodel the Sunriver Lodge kitchen. Lorin remembers, “I actually had the highest bid, but they liked my design the best, so we got the job. Glen oversaw the project. The only drawback was that we had to complete the job in 11 days. We hired 25 men and, by gosh, in 11 days they had a large high school graduation dinner in the lodge.”

Never one to settle down for long, in 1988, Lorin and Carlene purchased an 80-acre irrigated ranch in Chiloquin as an investment, and it proved to be a good one. After having it for a couple years, they sold it and moved to Depot Bay to live in their motor home, an experience that was to last 13 years. Lorin worked at a metal shop in Lincoln City and reconnected with the metal workers union so that in 10 years he would be vested and eligible for a union pension. This work took him up and down the west coast and culminated in a creative project in Seattle, building a cable-to-ground, broken guitar bridge next to the Space Needle for the Experimental Music Project funded by Paul Allen and his sister. This later became the Museum of Pop Culture. Lorin served as the foreman for this project, putting in 60-hour weeks.

Lorin officially retired in 2001 after over 40 years working in the sheet metal trade. Upon retirement, the Seversons moved to Marsville, North Carolina where their daughter, Lori, was a pastor and motivational speaker. The word “idle” is not in Lorin’s vocabulary, so he decided to fulfill a long-time dream and build a custom pickup. First, he had to build a shop for the project, and then he went in search of old pickups, finding four 1951 Ford F-1 pickups from which he thought he could get enough good parts to make one pickup body. Next, he purchased a low-mileage wrecked 2003 Ford Explorer chassis. Then came the long process of getting the Ford chassis ready for the pieced-together pickup body, fitting the cab to the chassis, creating a perfect union. Son, Glen, took a month’s vacation to work on the truck with his dad. The biggest challenge was fitting the 2003 dash to fit the 1951 Ford F-1, but the result, after painting it a brilliant metallic blue, was an amazing pickup eventually purchased by a Saudi Arabian sheikh.

In 2012 Lorin and Carlene returned to Jacksonville to be near other family. They purchased a two-bedroom home in Royal Mobile Estates and, as Lorin relates, “We were never happier than we were living in Royal Mobile.” Tragically, after a 17-year battle with cancer, Carlene died on March 2, 2015. Even with the loss of Carlene, Lorin enjoys model cars, playing solitaire, watching some television, studying the Bible, and doing a lot of reading. More than anything, he enjoys a good visit and has enough fascinating life stories to keep the conversation moving along. Stop by and see him some time.