My little saga continues.
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.
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:
(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………
No comments:
Post a Comment