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A Georgia-Pacific redwood tree-and more.

It'll be one of the prettiest and most versatile woods in the world: smooth, straight, richly colored.

It'll be Green Redwood, Douglas Fir or Hem Fir: a renewable resource that lends its natural beauty to any setting.

It'll be rustic redwood siding, sappy cofirrnons, or gardengrade lumbe4 kiln dried, air dried, milled with precision at G-P's Ft.Bragg mill. And it will be professionally graded by RIS rules.

And its beauty will end up enhancing a deck, a fence, a house-and your bottom line.

For your redwood customers, dtoose the redwood that has werything going for it: looks, promise, and a fine family narne. Choose G-P redwood. Amember of the Calificrnia Redwood Association.

For more information, call the Ft. Bragg mill, (707) 954-0281, or the G-P Distribution Center nearest you.

DAVID CUTLER editor- publisher

Wanna start a lumbeJ yald?

We don't subscribe to the theory that the Depots and Bases of the world will eventually kill off all the independents in building supply. We never have because it doesn't compute. The most likely scenario is that the big boxes will peak with less than half the market. Many of the existing independents and small chains will strengthen. Aggressive new independents will start up and succeed as they fill the various niches, nooks and crannies in the market.

In less than two decades the warehouse retailers have changed this industry forever. Their revolutionary concepts have been as dramatic in this field as fast food and supermarkets in theirs.

The cry "Home Depot is coming to town" filled many of our traditional operators with fear and rightly so. Many failed as the new retail concept burst upon tle scene. Some were well run companies, many were not. A safe location saved some but not all. Some parts of the country still face invasion by the bigs.

But something interesting is happening as the invaders roll on. Surviving independents are leaming how to compete successfully. They are quitting head to head competition and doing what they know best. Some enlarge their scope to include areas tle big boxes either don't know or don't want. These remaining retailers are discovering that the bigs, for all their power and expertise, don't know it all and can't hack it in every category.

When supermarkets frst appeared they wiped out most of the small corner markets. Some survived through service, specialties and plain hustle. Today, the equivalent of those mom and pop groceries are back. Now we call them convenience stores. They co-exist very nicely, thank you, with today' s huge supermarkets.

We think the same sort of thing is going to happen in this business. The size and complexities of many of the products and systems argue for a layer of merchants who sell what you can't carry in a shopping cart. Additionally, real service, convenience and location still count more than savins a few cents to a sizable percentage of buyers.