For Emory Clark, cutting and selling Christmas trees is a way of life

Emory Clark remembers the day he cut his first Christmas tree.

He was 14 years old, living in Clark Fork, Idaho, and selling each tree for $1.50 a pop. Sixty-three years later, he’s still at it, albeit at a slightly larger scale.

In November, Clark loaded 1,500 Noble fir trees cut on Mount Spokane into the back of a Home Depot semitruck headed for New Mexico and Arizona.

“I had to get them all baled, tied up like little green torpedoes so they all fit on that big truck,” he said.

Clark, a spry, energetic 77-year-old, calls that a “remarkable bit of business.”

It all started in October when Clark went to a Christmas tree trade show in Portland. He took a sample tree, cut from Mount Spokane. A Home Depot buyer liked it so much he ordered a whole truckload.

“My gosh, the buyer loved the sample I’d gotten,” he said. “The Home Depot people were looking for a new tree to try on their market.”

Clark has sold Christmas trees every year since he first trudged through the snow in North Idaho as a 14-year-old. He’s worked as a probation officer, a schoolteacher and most recently as an inventor.

He invented the Swring, a ringed swing that helps build vestibular awareness in children with autism. It’s now used in about 250 pediatric clinics nationwide. He also invented the Noxon Tools, a line of spring-powered products sold nationally.

Throughout all that, the “Christmas tree has been my hobby business,” Clark said.

And for the past three years, he has given away one tree for every year he’s been in business. This year, he’s aiming to give away 63 trees.

He got a good start on it Friday, when he delivered 50 Alpine firs to St. Margaret’s Shelter. Those trees will go to the women and children living in the Catholic Charities Spokane facility, as well as those who have moved out.

Cutting and baling the trees is hard work, he said. But work he loves. This fall, he worked seven days a week, leaving his house at 6:30 a.m. and returning by 4 or 5 p.m.

“I need to work,” Clark said. “It’s either work or go to the gym or stay really physical, and Christmas trees are an ideal way to do it.”

Clark also runs a tree farm out of Airway Heights called Storybook Trees.

“I have no intention of ever stopping,” he said of his tree cutting. “If you’re a reporter for the next 20 years, you will see me.”