Loggers' Playday

On the evening of September 12, 2026, at Historic Olympic Stadium in Hoquiam, Sam Womer of Shelton climbed about 60 feet up a pole and cut the top off. It fell onto a watermelon sitting on a Volkswagen Bug and, in the Daily World’s account, “hit the mark perfectly.” The Loggers’ Playday committee says the watermelon tree began as a way to show the crowd the skill needed to top a tree. In recent years the target has been a Beetle painted to look like a watermelon, one of several donated by Norm Callaghan and his daughter. The 2026 commemorative t-shirt showed Callaghan and one of his cars. Rain had come in as the show began, and the paper reported that it dampened neither spirits nor attendance.

That show closes the Hoquiam Loggers’ Playday, a single Saturday that the committee places the Saturday after Labor Day. The 2026 edition was the 62nd. The logging show belongs to the Hoquiam Loggers’ Playday committee, a non-profit. The rest of the day is run by the town’s clubs, and it fills Hoquiam from six in the morning until after dark. Entry to the show is a Loggers’ Playday button: $5 for a regular button and $10 for a scholarship button. Buttons are sold in local stores, by members of the Playday court, and at the gate.

From pancakes at six to the Elks at nine

The Hoquiam Rotary Club starts serving pancakes at 6:00 a.m. at Our Lady of Good Help Catholic Church, and the proceeds go to scholarships and community projects. At 9:00 a.m. the Jack Reynvaan Memorial Run starts, a five-kilometer race with sign-up from 8:00 at the Hoquiam Elks Lodge. The City of Hoquiam Street Fair opens at 10:00. In 2026 it filled 7th Street with more than 30 vendors.

The Elks Grand Parade steps off at noon. In 2015 it was scheduled to march through downtown from noon until 2:00. In 2026 it took more than 90 minutes to pass. That year the nonprofit Ocean Shores Pirates fired their cannon along the route, and the Playday royalty court was made up of former royalty, who rode in the parade as alumni. The Elks’ own site for the parade carries the line “61 Years of Tradition.” After the 2026 parade it posted: “See you next September.”

At 2:00 p.m. the Hoquiam Lions Club begins its salmon dinner at the old Washington Elementary School. The plate costs $20, or $15 for youth, and holds salmon, coleslaw, a baked potato, a roll, a juice, and an ice cream. The Lions credit Mike Lytle with often getting the salmon donated. A volunteer crew headed by the Wayman family works to get the food out quickly and hot. A 2024 account gave the salmon bake’s hours as 2 to 7 p.m., and in 2026 it ran until the logging show. Spectators begin filling the stadium stands at 5:30, and the show starts at 6:00.

At 9:00 p.m., almost directly after the show, the Hoquiam Elks hold a dance at their lodge for those 21 and older. The local band Joker’s Wild plays. The cover is $10, and a scholarship button gets a wearer in.

The events on the field

Before dawn on show day, contestants sign waivers at the stadium. At 8:00 a.m. the Bull of the Woods gives a safety message and runs time trials. Only the top eight to twelve contestants or teams in each event make the evening show. In 2026 the Bulls of the Woods were Jarrod Todd and Doug Jones. Local and professional timber-sport athletes compete for shares of a prize package that the committee puts at $10,000 to $15,000 a year.

The committee’s rules describe each event in detail. In the axe throw, the bullseye is set 60 inches above the ground and contestants throw from a line 20 feet away. Each contestant gets one practice throw and three scored throws. In choker setting, a contestant carries a choker across a pond on one log, sets it around another log, and runs back across on a second log. Anyone who falls in climbs back on near the spot where they fell and keeps going.

Double hand bucking uses a seven-foot saw on a log 22 inches through. Ma and Pa bucking puts one man and one woman on the saw, and in both events a helper may oil the blade and drive a wedge. The committee’s page says it hopes the buckers “don’t have to saw through a blind knot.” In the springboard chop, contestants notch a nine-foot tree, climb three springboards high, and chop a block off from both sides. In the speed climb, climbers ring a bell at the top of the spar and must sink their spurs into the tree at least four times on the way down. The hot saw is run with single-cylinder saws whose starter handles are tethered. The log chop alternates between a horizontal and a vertical chop from year to year. In the relay, four local contestants combine choker setting, axe throwing, obstacle pole bucking, and power saw bucking.

Two titles are awarded. The All Around Logger goes to the professional with the most points, and Cody Labahn held it in 2024 and 2025. The High Point Local Logger goes to the top local competitor, and Nicholas Strachota held it in the same two years. Between events there are exhibitions: the watermelon tree, and log rolling, in which a professional demonstrates and then teaches the court members to roll. In 2026 men and women competed in more than eight events. Before the pole climb, safety crew member Dyllin Drolz helped Johnny Boggs into his gear.

The 2026 chairperson, Monica Ewing, said the day turned out to have even more moving parts than she had expected. “It was more work than I thought it would be, but it was also fun,” she said.

The voice over the field belongs to Don Bell III. By 2024 he had emceed the show for 27 years and been part of Playday for 33. His grandfather, Don Bell, was one of its founders.

Emerson Field, 1965

The first Playday was not held at Olympic Stadium. It took place at Emerson Field on September 18, 1965, which was the second Saturday after Labor Day that year. Photographs by Bob Peterson from that first parade show a convertible carrying “Billy Timber” and a MAC lumber truck loaded with cedar.

Accounts of how it started differ. Hoki Moir, a longstanding committee member, told the Daily World in 2024 that it grew out of the question of how to mark the 75th anniversary of Hoquiam, founded May 21, 1890. Mayor Roland “Omar” Youmans took the question to Jack Reynvaan and Bill Anthony, two men who had worked on successful logging shows outside Hoquiam. The Washington Secretary of State’s office translates the city’s name as “Hungry for Wood,” and in that telling a logging show suited the place. Reynvaan and Anthony agreed, and local loggers and businessmen pitched in.

Jack Reynvaan’s son Greg, speaking in 2015, credited his father and Don Barton, Sr. He said the two had seen a logging show on a trip to Alaska, where they had a logging outfit. “They really thought it was just going to be a one-time thing,” Greg Reynvaan said. “When they came back home they put on a show here and then one in Coeur d’Alene for the Boy Scouts of America.” He also recalled that the event was first called the Loggers Jubilee, and that it was renamed a couple of years later. He was about eight that first year. “Once the event started, I think I went somewhere to play and ended up missing most of it,” he said.

Eleven days after the show, Youmans wrote to Omar Parker, the event’s acting secretary:

“Because of the gratifying interest shown in your recent logging show, I have been requested to call a meeting to bring together men who would like to see this show become a yearly event.”

The first official meeting followed on October 12, 1965, at Hoquiam City Hall. In Moir’s account, 13 founding members attended and each put in $20 to open the first bank account. By-laws were drawn up, and Hoquiam Loggers Playday, Inc. was incorporated on November 4, 1965, at 2:55 p.m. “I’m incredibly thankful that Mayor (Roland) Omar Youmans and the founders of Hoquiam Loggers Playday worked together to make our show an annual event rather than a one-time affair,” Moir said.

Chairmen, a memorial run, and the money

Jack Reynvaan chaired Playday in 1965 and 1966. After his death the city put on a run in his honor. Over the years it ran on the Hoquiam High School cross-country course, and later from the high school to Olympic Stadium just before the show. After a short hiatus, the group Run Hoquiam Run took the race back, and the 5K returned to Playday in 2026.

In 2015, the 51st Playday, Greg Reynvaan was committee chair. That year Evening Magazine’s Best of the Northwest named the event one of the state’s Best Small Town Celebrations. The 2015 show honored David “Dewey” Dupont, owner of Double D Logging, who had been involved with Playday since 1980 and chaired it in 2011. He died on December 16, 2014, at 56, from injuries suffered in a logging accident near Belfair. “David was a logger’s logger — just a great guy,” Reynvaan said.

The committee says the proceeds go back to Hoquiam. They fund scholarships and grants and sponsor little league teams. Greg Reynvaan has added Babe Ruth baseball and work done on Olympic Stadium to that list. John Larson, director of the Polson Museum in Hoquiam, has called Playday “the signature event in Hoquiam.”

Don Bell III has described his own part in it. “This is the one thing in my life that I know I was put on this Earth to do,” he said in 2024, “is to stand in front of a crowd and be a part of something to give back.”