Jim's logging career ended when he was working for Gildersleeve Logging in the early fifties. During a miserable, wet afternoon as he shivered and huddled near a stump, Jim decided to move away from the coast and give higher education a shot. He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in industrial design and worked in product design for years, including developing aerospace hardware for use by the early Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts. In 1990, Jim returned to his property at Kimsquit on the Dean River Delta where he lives in a cedar log cabin.