Part IV, in which we will
move yet again (surprise)……
It was while
we lived in Goldendale that Mike had a huge paper route (really bigger than his
resources could handle) for a time, and so did Dennis (a more modest
enterprise, one that could be walked). I
used to help Dennis with his route, and one year, for having signed up a
certain number of new subscriptions, he managed to accumulate enough points
that he and I both got to go on a chartered Greyhound bus, all the way down the
river to Portland, Oregon (the newspaper in question was probably the Portland Oregonian, but it might well
have been the Oregon Journal). In Portland, we were taken to Jantzen Beach,
a large amusement park, known far and wide.
We spent the day and had a great time.
Dennis also managed to buy himself a bicycle at the local Western
Auto. Speaking of Western Auto, this was
truly an American original. Every town
of any size had a Western Auto. These
stores sold everything for the car, from batteries to tires, and all parts,
plus most things for the home. They
carried hardware, great bikes (and everything you needed for your bike; Western
Flyer was their brand), their own line of radios, TV’s, appliances, and parts
for appliances. These were just a few
brands carried by Western Auto: "Tough
One" Batteries, "Wizard" Tools, "TrueTone"
electronics, and "Citation" appliances, and “Revelation” firearms,
(and I think, also sporting goods, like footballs, basketballs, and the like).
Also, in
downtown Goldendale, on Main Street, very close to Western Auto, was the local
‘five and dime,’ or dime store, like a Woolworths. I guess these stores were sort of a high
class Dollar store, if you can believe that.
I mean, obviously, if they sold mostly stuff that only cost a nickel or
a dime, that price range might well suggest junk. Yes, they had a lot of Japanese junk, all
right. (It must be understood that
literally everything from Japan, in the fifties, was very poor quality, and
that meant both workmanship as well as raw materials). But, everything was displayed more openly,
and instead of racks and hooks, and shelves to shop from, there were these big,
open flat-topped bins, with everything reachable, and touchable, and easy to
get hold of – oops! Can’t end a sentence
with a preposition, now can we? Let’s
say, easy to reach, instead.
Goldendale’s
Main Street, in addition to the theater, featured a small supermarket, locally
owned, the newspaper office (the Goldendale
Sentinel, a weekly publication),
a barber
shop, a Dentist Office (Ol’ Doc somebody or other - West?), upstairs above some
other business), the local creamery, a couple of restaurants (The Simcoe Café
and Mac’s Café), various shops, J. C. Penny, and a Safeway. I think there was also OK Tire and Rubber
company (part of a chain that sold new tires, and ‘recaps,’ which were just
that: old tires, whose rubber had worn down, but whose walls were still in
decent shape, so new rubber was molded onto them; they typically cost a
fraction of what a new tire cost, but the rubber was likely to come rolling off
at speed, especially in hot weather).
Needless to say, the old man bought a lot of recaps.
I also got
the opportunity to play Little League baseball, and our team traveled to places
like White Salmon, maybe Lyle, and other towns down along the Columbia
River. The Old Man liked to fish, and
while it was usually Dennis who went with him, I do recall going fishing a time
or two. This was strictly stream fishing
using night crawlers for bait. We kids
had the job of getting the huge worms, and this was actually very easy to
do. Just go out into the front or side
yard with a shovel. Push it down into
the usually moist earth, and lean it one way or the other, and look at the
exposed earth. Inevitably, you would see
one or more worms moving (this was best done at night; don’t ask me why) by the
light of a flashlight. You just grabbed
as many as you could, and put them into an old coffee can. Fishing always required an early morning
start, and it really did not take all that long to get a good number of good
sized trout. Occasionally, we went for
Steelhead. The myth (story I seem to
recall hearing from the Old Man) was that a trout was the young version of a
Salmon, and the Steelhead was the in-between version. Supposedly, those trout that could make it
from creek to river were able to grow into Steelhead, and then, if the
Steelhead could make it down river, to the ocean, and then return, you had a
Salmon (hey, that’s what somebody told me, and I’ve never forgotten it, nor
have I ever researched it to verify it this is for real).
Actually,
there was an incident involving fishing and a barbed wire fence that might be
worth recounting. On one particularly
auspicious (? For lack of a better word) occasion, Dennis and Garun (I don’t
know how to put the phonetics into the pronunciation of his name, as uttered by
Bernie, his helpmeet, especially when in her cups - Oh, God, now I’m going to
get side tracked big time, trying to sort this mess out – OK, time out:
Bernie,
which is short for Bernice, my mother’s name, mistakenly thought – for many,
many years – that the way to help and to try to control the old man’s drinking,
was to drink with him, trying, as it were, to keep pace with him. This was, of course, a hopeless task which
she set for herself, as no one in their right mind would want to keep up with
him. Although - in a deliberate aside -
in later years, keeping up with him became relatively easy, since his tolerance
for alcohol decreased with the years, and he’d be smashed long before he could
see the bottom of the bottle of his cheap booze of choice. So, she’d get
mushmouthed drunk even quicker than he did, so that his name, when pronounced
by her (she always called him Garland instead of the ‘Al’ that he preferred) in
this condition, sounded something like, “garn,” as in, darn, but pronounced
with a serious deep south accent, which, of course, she did not possess. So, now, we’re talking about Gaaarrun, but
say the last syllable very fast, so as to kind of pass over the ‘u’ – thusly,
“I’ma…..I’ma……..I’ma gonna tel’ you sumpin’, Garn, you ‘bout drunk!”
OK, now that
we’ve dealt with that important little matter, back to the fishing trip with
Dennis and Garn……..
In order to
get to the part of whatever stream they were seeking to plant their hooks in,
Garn and Dennis had to get past a barbed wire fence. Usually, this means, one person holds a top
strand up, while the person crossing/passing through, pushes a lower strand
down, so as to create a space big enough for the average person to get
through. Now, I wasn’t there, and Dennis
may not have been the most reliable of sources here (mostly because to the end
of his life, he could not tell this story with a straight face and a serious
amount of giggling), but my understanding of the event is that somehow the
lower strand was either not pushed down far enough, or it snapped up at the
wrong moment in time, like when the old man was halfway though. Somehow, one or more of those nasty barbs
reached right on out and/or up, and snagged the old man’s jewel sack (um, uh,
scrotum?), viciously tearing said sack (pun intended, Mike), causing profuse,
one might even say, perfuse, or one whole hell of a lot of bleeding from said
sack. The fishing trip was thus cut
short, not to mention other certain other well placed hewing or trimming, and
they returned home post haste. The old
man subsequently, like right away, went to the doctor, where he underwent an
emergency “re-sackification,” as it were, thus closing that particular gap. OK, back to the narrative………..
Salmon
fishing along the Columbia River was reserved at that time to what we now call
Native Americans, or Indians. Not too
far from Goldendale, just upriver from The Dalles, Oregon, were the Celilo
Falls. These falls were impressive
enough just to look at, but the Indians had built some very rickety looking
scaffolding all over the rocks, to afford themselves of relatively easy access
to the waters.
They went
out onto that scaffolding when the Salmon were migrating up the river, and
speared as many as they could. Most of
the salmon was then smoked on shore, and sold to tourists, and anyone else
fortunate enough to be able to get some.
That was good eating.
Next must have been
Goldendale and I don’t remember what job Dad did there but I began babysitting
there and earning money for clothes and whatnot. We kids enjoyed being there and school was
pretty stable for that period of time.
After having
the chance to read what I had written to this point, Pat then sent me a email
that added to this narrative:
Wasn’t Goldendale just the
best little town? I remember the five and dime and buying crayons and
fresh paper and even paper dolls at that time. The Penney’s store was the
old fashioned set up with drawers that stocked the bras and panties each in its
size and drawer. I had some girl friends that I enjoyed and remember
always hitting the studing and the grades. My babysitting really took off
and I sat for two families over the time. Mom told me (I was starting
this at the age of 11) that I had to buy my own shampoo and girl stuff which
would include feminine hygiene stuff because I couldn’t expect Dad to pay for
same. WHAT? I was 11 years old for heaven’s sake!
I remember getting a
terrible throat infection one time, the very worst I ever had, and friends
being allowed to come and say, “Hi”, through the window as I was in bed for
some two weeks. When I went back to school all thin and white the
teachers took one look at me and sent me home for another week. That was
also the house where Dad got involved with the woman next door, a single parent
with a girl she was raising, wasn’t it? She was a drinker too I
think. But overall, we did experience small town America at its best for
sure. Thanks for the memories…..Love, Pat
Mike worked
after school in the local creamery (for those not familiar with this term,
small towns used to have local businesses that processed dairy products. These were called creameries, and they would
produce local butter, ice cream, and sell fresh, whole milk) at one point. He also got placed by the old man, I believe,
on some local farm for a large part of at least one summer, hoisting hay bales
on the back of a truck, and into a barn, and performing other seriously manual
labor, for some extra money, most of which was undoubtedly confiscated by the
old man.
Meanwhile
after reading what I have so far, Mike has provided some more memories:
Drove
wheat truck for Dutch Kelley in Roosevelt area (around age 16… lasted some 3-4
weeks) the next summer worked longer for…. ???? in the hay business, bailing
hay and like you say, serious manual labor (damn bails weighed as much as I
did). During school I worked at the “Reliance Creamery” whose products included
butter, ice cream, and ICE. I recall providing ice to the same Indians for
salmon fishing, poking the ice down to 100 or 50 lb. blocks and loading it in
their cars. Cool, late model cars always dirty and trashed out on the inside.
Ice cream was a farce… The owner purchased a mix “wholesale” and we merely
“churned?” in a freezer type machine, dumped it into cardboard boxes (Reliance
Brand) and it was sold in the grocery store you mentioned. The town did have
two grocery stores… one being the Safeway and the other being this independent
(actually, I think the owner was Thompson, the same dude that owned Reliance
Creamery).
(Back to my narrative): Yeah, that was another of his less lovable
traits. He’d require that we find work,
and then take most of the money we earned.
I also remember Mike being involved with his best friend (Johnny
Householder?) in experimenting with model rockets, a big time diversion for
teen aged boys in the fifties. They had
some notable success, as I recall, too.
One kid I knew also had a rocket that was actually pretty
impressive. This was a clear blue
plastic rocket ship that was filled with water.
Then, it was placed on its base, which had a hand pump affixed to
it. We would pump the hell out of that
sucker, and then so much pressure was created that the rocket would fly very
high up into the air. I’d estimate today
that it probably went up at least 20-30 feet.
One friend
that Dennis and I had was a kid down the street, and across the alley from
us. His father was the town barber, and
they had a normal family. What a
contrast to our house. They had a root
cellar outside their back door that was no longer used for its original purpose
(a root cellar was basically a room underground, with rock and cement for walls
and covered with dirt. Its purpose was
to store perishables, like potatoes, apples, canned goods, and things like
that, before refrigeration was common).
We played WWI in that thing, since it served as a bunker, and we could
easily imagine the trenches of WWI, as depicted in the movies. Also, Mike (or whatever the kid’s name was)
had an old WWI steel helmet that we all took turns wearing.
You know
what? We gonna cut this puppy off right
here, and pick it up again, still in Goldendale, but in Part V………
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