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Before Dad went to WWII I was four or five years old. Dad owned a Phillip's gasoline service station. Full service, in those days, meant the service man might even powder your fanny if you asked for it. He had a 2 bay garage and a little grocery area as well as a cafe. Dad paid me pennies to do small fetch jobs around the station. Sometimes I used my tri cycle and wagon to move things.  
In a dream this morning I relived one of the happiest days of my childhood. Sometime in 1946, after Dad, and my uncles returned from WWII, They pooled their allotment checks, GI savings, and Separation moneys so as to have enough to move to the “promised land”, Oregon and go into the lumber business. One of the Uncles-in-law once removed (Big Duc) had contacts in Oregon to buy an Army surplus bulldozer and a portable sawmill. The saw mill had been used on the Alcan highway. Our destination once we left Cement, OK was Springfield, OR where my Dad’s Uncle Willie lived. Once there Willie would direct them to Mount Baileyhill where land could be purchase and trees harvested. In Cement the men bought a flat bed truck with side boards. This truck had a hole large enough to drop one of those old giant watermelons through. Remember those melons? The men covered the hole with several layers of canvas. All the food staples like pinto beans, flour, sugar and clothing were loaded into the bed. Also many jerry cans of water and gasoline. I remember one huge chainsaw but cannot swear to that. Also loaded into the back of the truck were a herd of kids. Me, my brother, Cousins Janet, Robert, Marla, Daryl, Shryl and cousins in law one removed: Little Duc, Big Angelo, Little Angelo, and a third cousin whose name I never learned. We caravanned out with one of the three men driving the truck by shift and one of the women driving the car. The men and women kept the same schedule. They worked out some rotation where one drove, one slept and one was companion. They stopped only for gasoline to fill the Jerry cans. I was too young to understand or even to care about the routine. The men pumped gasoline from the cans to the truck tank or the car fuel tanks on the move. The men worked up some kind of rig with hoses and pumps to refill the tanks on the fly. Uncle JV, Navy man, got the idea watching ships refill at sea during the war. I guess after watching all the destruction and fires during that war a simple gasoline fire seemed practically insignificant. Somewhere in western OK one of the men climbed over the side of the truck bed, pulled the canvas off the hole and squatted over the hole. That was our toilet the remainder of the trip. The women apparently could “hold it” until the next gas stop. We kids were fascinated by the sight of the road slipping beneath the truck. The men were constantly yelling at us to “stay away from that damned hole of you’ll fall out and we ain’t turning around for you”. The wind whistling up through that hole seemed colder than ice. When we grew sleepy we would crawl under the tarp covering the supplies and try to sleep. But the wind pressure was so heavy that I felt suffocated under the tarp. Only by burrowing into a self made tunnel could one avoid the crushing pressure. My brother got the idea of dropping pinto beans through the hole to leave a “marked” trail so we could find our way home or find the truck if we fell out of the truck. By the time we got to Colorado he had dumped almost a full bag of beans into the hole. The plan was to stop overnight in Colorado for the women to cook a large meal and we would overnight in one of the “Okie” camps. But the men were so PO’ed by the loss of beans they decided to keep driving and stop somewhere for hamburgers. Hamburgers were to us kids, in 1946, exotic food. I think the GIs must have lived on them. Somewhere, long after our kid brains declared ourselves as starved to death the vehicle stopped and Dad climbed into our space and counted us kid. There were 11 kids and 6 adults. The adults allotted each kid one burger and two for each adult. That made 23 burgers and they added one for “Big Duc’s” wife who was “in a family way”. When Dad went up to the window to order the 2 dozen burgers the manager refused to cook them until Dad paid for them and he saw with his own eyes this group of Okies. In 46 Okies were still considered less than dirt in the western states. I don’t really remember the burger but I do remember how incredibly good it tasted all greasy and warm. Looking back at that remembrance I realize there was no tomato, lettuce, cheese, or onion. Just bread and mouth watering hamburger meat. It is just my luck to remember that burger today on my weekly fasting day! I do not remember another stop on that trip. I do remember stopping at “Uncle Willie’s very early one morning and spending the night in the ice cold truck waiting for daybreak. Once the sun came up the family greeted one another and Willie’s wife went out into the coop and killed a bunch of chickens and fried them up for breakfast. We had biscuits, gravy, fried chicken, corn meal mush and burnt potatoes. Cement, OK to Springfield, OR is about 2,000 miles. Today with the modern highways, better cars and higher speed limits, and many motels and hotels the trip would be a lot easier. The speed limit then mostly was 35 mph but few cars could handle that speed for long. Flats were frequent. We left early one evening and drove continuously through three sunrises and arrived before the fourth sunrise. I think they must have driven for about 80 hours. Now that I think about that trip I remember only that one meal on the road. Surely we ate somewhere or sometime but that memory is lost in time. I remember the day I learned to read. I was laying on the living room floor close to the stove, wood burner, looking at the Flash Gordon comic strip in the Eugene Register newspaper. It was a Sunday I know because the comics were in color. All of a sudden I realized the things inside the bubbles over the characters heads were words. I already knew words because I could talk and that meant I could also read. So I began to read Flash Gordon to Mom and Dad. They thought I was just guessing well so I read Alley Oop, Lulu, and Dick Tracy. Then they believed me. But I cannot recall what the words looked likebefore I had the paradigm shift.
I just recently found a packet of stuff Mom saved from Baileyhill. Elsewhere I have a picture showing my cousin Janet and I in a class room at Baileyhill. I have always remembered that as a one room class room with six grades in it. Mom had saved a newspaper clipping about a PTA event that shows two first grade teachers and 5 teachers for first through sixth. Again I find my memory has been "modified and massaged" to suit my needs.  I learned that my teacher was either Mrs. Chase or Shirley Davis. We certainly were not politically correct about sexual roles in those days. I don't remember either one and, in fact, don't even remember any teacher. Whichever teacher I had I must not have paid much attention to instruction. The two images below are the outside and inside of a thing I made for Mom. I suspect it may have been under teacher's orders for Mother's Day. If you would print the two picture and try to assemble the thing you would see that I put the message upside down on the inside of the front flap. Sometimes, looking back at my early life, I am surprised my parents and other adults in my life let me live. I must have had a great smile!   The colors and ink was very faded so I enhanced the images to bring out the printing. I have no idea what the 6 year old me was trying to say. I think I was trying to tell Mom "Dear Mom It is true. I LOVE YOU". I really did love her but I know now just how precious she was to me. She died in 1977 and I still consider and think of her daily. Sometimes I find myself talking to her spirit. When we were living outside Eugene, Oregon my brother and I wanted bb guns since our cousin Robert had one. He shot the rats up in the barn. Dad would not let us have one said we were too irresponsible and would kill somebody. Well Dad came home one day from the sawmill he and his BIL and a friend ran up on the hill and had a bullet hole in his steel helmet. Yeah! Those responsible grown men had been playing bullet tag up in the woods. Object was to shoot the other guys hat off his head. Dad won because he had a chin strap to keep his hat on. We still did not get a bb gun. Logging In the packet that my sister Beverly had was a picture that took my breath away. I show my Dad wearing a hard hat up toward the top of the picture and on the right side. Our Uncle Marlowe is the tall skinny man just to the right and above the Caterpillar bulldozer that Big Angelo was driving. This is the only image I have ever seen from the logging operation the three men were running on the hill at West 11th. The trees they cut were all more than 30 inches in diameter. I know it was 30 because our cousin Marla was only 30 inches tall at the time. Mom and Aunt Bessie used to worry that something was wrong with her. I have not seen Marla in over 40 years so I have no clue how she grew.  The picture was badly faded and the image was washed out because the photographer was shooting uphill into a bright Oregon sky. I cut out rectangles around the three men and tried to enhance them to bring out the men. Then I pasted the pieces back onto the picture. I doubt that anyine not familar with venue could identify or even find the guys. Lord just looking at the picture recalls the taste of the sap we used to pry off the logs and chew. I miss that hill. I sometimes think of West 11th as my true home. Deer The deer on our mountain were big Mule deer.I was so young I knew nothing of hunting laws. It seems like Dad and the Uncles were always bring home deer. We had so much deer that Mom used to can it. Actually she put it up in jars. The meat was cut into small cubes or strips to fit. Mom fed some of the smaller bits to Pooch. Once she ate so fast she ended up standing on her front legs with her muzzle deep into the pan of deer meat.
Goshen My mom had an almost mystical faith in cod liver oil and a mixture of several drops of kerosene on granular sugar. I didn't dare cough or not eat everything on our plate. Coughing got the sweet kerosene. Not eating was a sure signal for the cod liver oil. That still causes my spine to shiver. I don't remember being sick in Goshen but my brother almost died from the "Croupe". I remember the year that Raymond and I began to suspect funny business about Santa Claus. Ray slept in the top bunk and I in the bottom. He always carried a piece of bread to bed for some reason. Anyways Christmas eve he and I vowed we would keep each other awake to see Santa Claus. I don't remember if we did stay awake or not. I know I didn't see Santa. In my later years I have pored over maps to help visualize that house to no avail. One of goals is to go to Goshen and try to reconstruct that important era. I recently (Nov 2003) found a class picture from the second grade in Goshen. I have no idea who any of the kids are since we left there in 1949. Click on the picture for a larger slightly bigger picture.  Science and I I have known since the second grade (1947-1948) that I wanted to be a scientist. I started experimenting with chemicals while in the second grade in Goshen, Oregon. I would do my experiments in Dad’s workshop. Of course I did not ask permission. And I am pretty sure Dad didn’t know. He, like most fathers in that time and area, left the parenting to Mom. We had an outdoor toilet. Dad, being a true genius, combined his workshop and firewood storage area with the toilet. The whole thing was a good-sized outbuilding that we moved once in the years that we lived there. A half century later I cannot remember why we had firewood stored. I remember my brother and I carrying it into the house. It rained almost daily so Dad laid a plank path from the shed to the house. One very rainy day I was experimenting with Prestone anti-freeze to try to determine its composition. I was using a card table as a work bench. Since the shed had no electricity I was using an alcohol lamp for light. Methanol burns with an almost invisible blue flame so was dangling an asbestos wick into the flame to make an incandescent (visible) flame. My brother and I got to wrestling and bumped the table which caused the Prestone to spill. We wrestled a lot. All of a sudden the table was covered in fire which was dripping onto the floor. Luckily it was a dirt floor or we would have been engulfed in flames.
I put the fire out by beating it out with a frying pan which just happened to be handy. Seems strange that there was a skillet in that shed. Some time later I learned that methanol was used as an anti-freeze in the years following WWII. That was what caught fire. I never quit experimenting and did become a scientist, of a sorts. I am an industrial analytical chemist. Have been for 30+ years and cannot imagine any other job.
Toppenish Motor Court Raymond and I had just seen the movie "The Thing" with James Arness. We and the neighborhood guys were playing in a garage that belonged to a German family kitty-corner to the Motor Court where we were living. Raymond pretended he was the "Thing" while we pretended to cower in the dark of the garage waiting in ambush. Ray was so realistic that one of the younger boys peed his pants and the rest of us were justed as scared. For one moment Ray was the "Thing" and so powerful was the boyish imagination only luck prevented us killing "Thing". That was such a chilling happening that Ray and I never played pretend games after that. The Motor Court, upon reflection, was relative luxury for Mom except for the very fine black volanic dirt. It got into everything. But Mom had a real washing machine. That was her first and she never went back to the rub-board that was her washing equipment before. The black volcanic dust defeated her since she cold not hand clothes on a line outside. So Dad rigged clothesline and radiant lights in the wash room along with a fan that vented the moist air out of the apartment. The very best Christmas present Raymond and I ever got were replicas of Thompson sub-machine guns Dad made out of 1 inch plywood. The detail, at least in my memory, was staggering. But in one of those inexplicable boy moments, Raymond and I broke them in a fit of anger towards our Dad. Rack my brains as hard as I can and I still don't remember why we were mad. We went to Moses Lake often as sort of a picnic. The lake was actually small (in my memory) and set in a depression in this vast area of black volcanic sand. That stuff would get so hot your feet would blister through shoes. Once we saw a Great Dane dancing on alternating three legs. When he got near the water he jumped in and gave a great gleeful howl. We were in the depression one evening near sundown and heard this giant sound. Mom and Dad being from Oklahoma first thought of tornado. We were all craning our heads trying to see when this majestic shape burst into view. It was a Northrup B49 Flying Wing. It was so low we could actually see the manifolds in the engines as well as the rivets. We found out that the strategy for fighting with the wing was near ground level insertion into enemy air space.And loud. It was so loud the noise was painful. Sometime while we lived in Toppenish
Mom and Dad took us to a watery place to swim. I know it wasn’t the ocean because I remember the water was not salty. My brother thinks it was a lake, probably Moses Lake. I believe it was somewhere along the Columbia River near the Dalls. With both parents and most of the older kin gone I’ll never know. After fooling around in the water a while and discovering that Mom and Dad were not paying attention we went exploring. All we found was what later became known as “litter”. Bottles, cans, paper, etc. We found a beer can with a live mouse inside of it. The holes were too small for it to escape. No pull tabs in those days. A triangular hole was punched with a "church key". We always suspected that the mouse got in when small and grew too large inside the can. Now I realize that the mouse could not have gotten that much bigger while in the can. Probably it did not leave the can because we were scaring it. For decades after moving to Texas I have massaged the memory so that beer was Lone Star. I now realize that Lone Star could not have been the beer because it was only sold in Texas. The red and blue label makes the beer most likely a Pabst Blue Ribbon which was very common in the Pacific Northwest. The trip must have been very significant to both of us because we still talk about the "mouse trapped in the beer can". Nelson's Farm Raymond and I stood outside while Mom had hysterics in fear Dad would be called back into the Army because the North Koreans had just invaded Korea and Truman (June 27, 1950) was calling up the reserves. Just outside Quincy WA. Never rained. Irrigated large wheat farms. Combines would come over the horizon and leave over the other horizon. Saw "Wizard of Oz" there. First movie. Ephrata Elementary 1951 or 1950 Sometime just prior to or after our time at Nelsons farm my brother and I went to school at Ephrata Elementary. I remember a magicians act in the playground at the school and could almost visualize the school. I think we had mumps while there.  I saw a post card being auctioned at Ebay and just had to have it. I paid the "Buy it Now" price to abort any hostile bidders. The picture if the front of the school brought a rush of memories with no connection to any time or events. I Will Never Get Back Home Leaving Washington for last time. Dad driving the pick-up. He had build high, way high, sideboards on PU and rigged the tailgate to hold their mattress. When we stopped at night he would fold down tailgate for bed. Dad also rigged, I forget how, gear for camping. Mom driving 52 Chevrolet packed to the gills. Ray and I, I think swapped between vehicles. But as we crossed the line into Idaho, I was looking back toward what is still 50 yrs later home, the radio was playing "Ghost Riders in the Sky". That song makes me homesick still. |
| Chapter 2 | An Aunt Remembers |