The Whitfield Estate: How We Found Hardwood Magazine

In March of 2025, I got a text from a buddy who frequents storage unit auctions around the Portland metro area. "Unit in Milwaukie," he said. "Boxes of old magazines. Looked like girly stuff. Thought of you." He sent a blurry photo of a wall of bankers' boxes with neat handwritten labels on the sides.

I drove down the next morning.

The Storage Unit

The unit belonged to the estate of Dale Whitfield, who had died in 2019 at the age of 84. His grandson, who lived in Boise, had been paying the monthly fees but had finally decided to let the unit go. The auction was set for the following week, but the grandson agreed to sell me the contents directly for three hundred dollars sight unseen.

I backed my truck up to the unit and started loading. Fourteen bankers' boxes, all in good condition. Cool, dry, well-organized. Whatever else Dale Whitfield was, he was meticulous about his archives.

I didn't open anything until I got home.

What Was Inside

The boxes contained the complete archive of Hardwood Magazine—every issue from Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1971) through the final issue in 1985. One hundred and twenty-six issues in total, with the run switching from monthly to bi-monthly in 1980.

But it wasn't just the magazines. There were also:

• Original 35mm negatives and contact sheets for dozens of photo shoots
• Paste-up boards and typeset galleys for several issues
• Correspondence with advertisers, models, distributors, and readers
• Dale's personal notebooks with circulation figures, printing costs, and distribution routes
• A box of unsold copies of the final issue, still in their plastic shipping wraps

It was, as far as I can tell, the only surviving archive of this publication. The printer, a shop in Southeast Portland, closed in 1992. The distributor, Pacific News out of Seattle, went under in 1988. Whatever copies they had are long gone.

Who Was Dale Whitfield?

Piecing together the story from his notebooks and correspondence, Dale Whitfield was a Portland businessman who ran a small printing brokerage in the 1960s. He arranged printing jobs for local businesses—menus, flyers, brochures, that kind of thing. Somewhere around 1969 or 1970, he got the idea to start a regional men's magazine.

The concept was simple: a magazine for Pacific Northwest men featuring local girls, local advertisers, and local content. Dale had seen how Playboy and Penthouse were distributed nationally but didn't reflect anything about where his customers actually lived. He figured there was a market for something closer to home.

He was right—for a while. Hardwood launched in January 1971 and quickly found its audience. At its peak in the mid-1970s, it had a circulation of roughly 12,000 copies per issue, distributed at newsstands, drugstores, and gas stations along the I-5 corridor from Eugene, Oregon to Vancouver, British Columbia.

The magazine featured local models—waitresses, students, office workers, outdoorsy types—photographed in Pacific Northwest settings. Log cabins, hot springs, mountain lakes, coastal beaches. The advertising was all regional: timber companies, fishing outfitters, local breweries, auto dealerships. The feature articles covered steelhead fishing, road tests of trucks and 4x4s, hiking trails, and profiles of local characters.

It was, in its own modest way, a love letter to the Pacific Northwest.

The Decline

By the early 1980s, the national magazines had become widely available in the region through expanded distribution networks. Chain bookstores replaced independent newsstands. The audience that had supported Hardwood could now get Playboy at the Safeway checkout. Dale's regional niche was no longer a niche.

The last issue came out in 1985. Dale's notebooks from that period are sparse—just a few notes about printing costs and a brief mention of "calling it quits." No big farewell. The magazine just stopped.

Dale continued running his printing brokerage until he retired in 1998. He died in 2019. According to his grandson, Dale rarely talked about the magazine in his later years, but he never threw anything away either.

The Scanning Project

Digitizing this archive has been a substantial project. Each issue runs 48 to 64 pages. At 300 DPI flatbed scanning, each page takes about two minutes to scan and process. Some pages required conservation work first—careful cleaning, flattening of curled edges, treatment of foxing spots.

The photographic negatives are a separate challenge entirely. I'm working with a local photography shop in Portland that has professional negative scanning equipment. The quality of the original negatives is remarkable—Dale used good film stock and stored everything properly. The scans from the negatives actually look better than the printed pages.

I'm releasing the issues chronologically, starting with Vol. 1, No. 1. At the rate I'm working, it'll take a while to get through all 126 issues. But there's no rush. These magazines waited fifty years in a storage unit. They can wait a little longer for me to do this right.

— Glenn