CH2_story
Chapter Two: The Early years:
God is Love!
We know now that God exists but we don't know precisely what He is. But the same tools and techniques we have used to uncover the few secrets of the universe we know can be used to uncover who God is. Those tools are our eyes and ears, our senses, and our intellect.
It is pretty obvious that God does not need things. God is not contingent on anything. So, He did not create things for Himself, he created them for others to share and enjoy. We are the only ones we know of who can explore and experience His creation. So a reasonable conclusion is He created the universe for us to enjoy and particularly the earth for us to live on and enjoy. What a gift!
He could have merely created the things on earth that we needed to survive. For example, we don't need thousands of different kinds of trees, or thousands of different kinds of plants and insects and animals of all types and sizes and shapes and colors. He didn't need to give us beautiful flowers or magnificent vistas. He didn't need to give us enjoyment from different sounds that we call music. He didn't even need to create color. We don't need thousands of shapes and sizes of mountains and hills and valleys and deserts. We could survive on a smooth sphere covered with one type of grass and a single type of tree and a single animal. But rather He created a multitude of flowers of remarkable intricacy that we can hold and study and marvel at and arrange in our houses for pleasure. And He created a multitude of different trees, many with varieties of fruits for us to enjoy. And he created a multitude of animals for us to enjoy. And our planet is unbelievable beauty. And every part of the human body is a magnificent discovery: The intricacy of the eye, the complexity of the brain. The concept of a timeless Creator creating a universe that has a time dimension is a mystery my old mind cannot grasp. Evolution is a mystery also. It appears the human was given a soul at some point in evolution. That was a departure from all other forms of creation. With this addition came the evolution of knowledge: curiosity, discovery over generations, and a gradual revelation of the universe, and its Creator. We are able to endlessly explore, to have unlimited curiosity, and to have the constant joy and wonderment of discovery. There is only one explanation for the wonderful variety and beauty God created. It is for our enjoyment!
Humanity itself is also obviously the crown of God's creation. Some animals roam in packs or herds and have some bonds with one another. But those bonds are bonds of need; it is more efficient to hunt in packs and herds provide more protection for the hunted. Humans come together for some of these same needs but also from an enjoyment of community. We have a need to share ideas, to explore and expand these ideas. We have a need to share our feelings just as we share our ideas. Also, God created man and woman and made them integral to the process of procreation. Reproduction could have been done in any number of ways. Like the trees, pollen could have been dumped into the air and attached to anyone who walked through it. But man and woman have a bond far beyond trees and far beyond simply reproduction. The sharing of ideas and feelings reaches a special peak between certain pairs of a man and a woman. This peak of emotion or communion between these pairs stirs up emotions, which make them enjoy and want to be together. They share a special bond we call love. This creates a special environment, which is conducive not only to the reproduction but also for the wellbeing and the development of the children.
By reading Shakespeare's plays we can learn a bit about Shakespeare's character. If we study Einstein's writing we can learn Einstein's theories and something about who Einstein was. If we look at the creation, we can learn something of the creator. The universe is a wonder: a wonder of complexity (we may be just on the very beginning edge of understanding) and a wonder of intricacy (from immeasurable massiveness to so tiny we haven't yet found ways of probing the size; or shape or composition for that matter. It is the ultimate in wonderment; it is all interdependent and synchronous and has been a wonder of discovery for thousands of years past and will be for untold millennia to come. So, what does creation say about our Creator? It says love. For no other reason but love of us, He has given us life and our capacity to enjoy His creation. An unimaginable gift. A gift of love. God is love!
My Mom and Dad lived in several places between Gilbert and me being born. My Dad worked for a fellow named Pat Cornell during most of this time. They lived at Four Mile when I was born. Four mile is several (more like 8) miles south of Bandon and Mom had to drive (or be driven, I don't know which) from there to Coquille where I was born. It is probably only about 25 miles but in those days the cars and roads were such that 25 miles was an interesting journey, especially if you have an unknown but critical deadline! We got there in time. (Tony Russell, a classmate in BHS was also born the next day and when he refused to agree to come to our 60th class reunion, I accused him of still being jealous because I was the cuter baby in the nursery. He didn't come.)
They had moved to Charleston when Gilbert was still small and I was a baby…Dad was hauling logs from up the Seven Devils road and entered the highway at Charleston. They lived in one of two apartments just up the hill about a hundred yards from the junction. One day as my dad came down the hill in his truck; Gilbert was out in the street. He stopped the truck, got out and blistered Gilbert's butt all the way to the apartment. They bought a halter and tied Gilbert up after that so he wouldn't run away.
The first place I remember living was at "The Dunes". We must have moved there about 1941 or early 1942. They talked about living at Bar View before that (just out of Charleston on the way to Empire). Gilbert remembered that but I didn't. One incident did happen during the time before we moved to "the dunes" which I don't remember but have been told about many times. About the time WWII broke out my dad bought a new 1941 dodge 4-door sedan because he was either afraid or had heard that cars were going to be hard to get during the war. Anyway, one day Mom was driving Uncle Dutch from Coos Bay (Marshfield at that time) to Coquille to visit Aunt Irene who was in the hospital, for what I don't know. Gilbert and I were in the back. The story goes that I opened the door and since the rear doors on this car were hinged in the back as soon as the wind caught it, it flew open and I was thrown out. Uncle Dutch told Birdie and I this story years later and he said they were going about 40 or 45 and that I bounced on the pavement like a rubber ball.
I guess the only damage was I was skinned up pretty badly and had to go to the hospital. Apparently, it must have knocked a lot of good sense into me. As far as I know the highway was undamaged. After this, Dad took the inside door handles off both back doors. From then until he sold the car, to get out of the back you had to either roll down the window or have someone open the door from the outside. So, Dad was the creator of the first child locks for back seat doors!
The house we lived in at which my Mother referred to as "The Dunes" was several miles south of Winchester Bay but before you reached the turn off to Lakeside. Pat Cornell was logging on the south end of Clear Lake and my dad and Ray Dean were hauling the logs from there to the dump at Hauser (a few miles North of North Bend). Pat had built a truck shop and a saw shop at the site and my Dad and Mother converted the saw shop into a place for us to live. There are a few things I remember while at the dunes:
First, Gilbert and I played logging most of the time. There were two uprooted trees on the hill above the house which we used as donkeys…some limbs were the levers and brakes etc. (note. In logging, a donkey is a machine that has a large engine and three or four drums for cables, at that time mounted on a boom built out of logs.)
After we had yarded and loaded the logs, we hauled them down the hill using can lids as steering wheels and making all the necessary sounds of engines and gear shifting. Honking was done by pressing on the tin lids. But our biggest thrill came when we were able to experience the real thing by talking our Dad or Ray Dean into taking us on a trip.
Whenever they stopped at the truck shop for anything we would beg for a ride and some times they would take us. The loading was done with a haystack boom and this was the only time I have ever seen one of these.
The logs were dumped into the slough at Hauser and Pat then rafted them and pulled them up the slough with his boat to the pulp mill on Coos Bay between Empire and Charleston. Logging was pretty lucrative during the war and Pat made a fortune and bought a nice big house on the North End of North Bend just after you cross under the Welcome to North Bend sign.
Pat was married to a blonde named Hazel and I would meet up with her again in my high school logging days. After the war Pat had a struggle with both business and his wife and ended up committing suicide by driving off the wharf in North Bend in about 1948. My dad went down to identify the body and would never eat crab again. But back to the story.
Second, the mechanic who ran the truck shop was named Slim and he and his wife, Jackie, were long time friends of my parents and lived in Charleston and later started a hardware store there that they operated for a number of years. I still don't know whether Slim liked Gilbert and I or thought we were pests; probably both. Slim seemed to have had a passion for electricity; if one of the truck engines was misfiring, he would ground one hand and grab the spark plugs with the other one at a time until he discovered which cylinder was misfiring. Anyway, he had a power generator for the shop and it produced a voltage that was enough to shock someone but not enough to injure them. So, he convinced Gilbert and I separately to put our fingers in the light socket from this generator; supposedly to teach us not to put our fingers in sockets, which it did. Or, more likely to get us to stay out of his shop, which it did temporarily.
For my birthday (probably fourth) I got a neat toy logging truck. It had a little wire (wire with some fuzzy stuff on it) figure for a driver. That's about all I remember of it. Anyway, I was afraid Gilbert would get it if I left it out unattended so I looked for a place to hide it. It turned out that a truck was in the shop being worked on and when they needed to come into the shop they didn't load the trailer so it was pulled behind and, in this case, extended outside the shop. I hid the toy truck between the two dual wheels on the trailer. However, before I retrieved my truck, the real truck was fixed and backed out and mashed my toy logging truck. Sad story ends with sad boy!
Gilbert had a friend at the dunes who was the son of the Coast Guard captain who ran the lighthouse on the Umpqua. Gilbert and him were going up into the sand dunes that could be seen just across the highway from our house to fly kites. Of course I wanted to go. Somehow my eye got injured or something in it or both. My mother tied something around my head covering the eye (ala Moshe Dyan) and I had to stay home, disappointed. And finally, not long before we left the dunes, I remember trying smoking up in the woods with Gilbert for the first time; I was close to 5. Carole was born about this time and we moved to North Bend soon after she was born, if not just before. When my mother was due to have Carole, I went to stay with Aunt Nadine and Uncle Kent who were living "in the valley" either at Corvallis or Cottage Grove. After I had stayed there with them a time, they were coming back to visit in Bandon and stopped at our house and I made such a fuss (reportedly even crying although that was probably an Aunt Nadine exaggeration) that I was allowed to stay with my mother.
We moved to a house in North Bend that was on the corner of 12th Street and Broadway.
I am sure the house had a number but Mom (who apparently had a flair for naming places) just used the fancier sounding address: "12th & Broadway". That had sort of a downtown New York sound. Our house faced Broadway and the house across 12th street from us faced 12th and became the home of the Boatwrights. Those were the only two houses at the intersection so my Mom just used 12th & Broadway as our address and the mailman figured it out. Two things changed when we moved to North Bend. First, we now had a baby sister and the second world war was on and a Naval Air Station had been built not far from our house; and, in fact, the Avengers and Wildcats approach went right over us. Gilbert and I had also become more independent and several events befell us.
Life was good in North Bend. I started first grade and Gilbert was in third. We went to a school in Bangor (section of North Bend we lived in) that only had two rooms and three grades (2nd & 3rd were together) and was near the high school. I had the measles (or chicken pox) when school started so I was two weeks late in starting. However, the teacher said that as long as I didn't get to far ahead of the other students, I could join the class…maybe it was if I could catch up, I have forgotten which. Anyway, I was there to stay. One memorable thing was one day I came up the steps and at the top, Gilbert was bent over getting a few swats from the principal. Apparently he felt he was wronged, because he got mad and went home. I don't know what happened after that, but it must have been worked out since his schooling continued the next day.
The first-grade teacher was Mrs. Robinson. She was rather strict. I sat right behind a girl named Yvonne and one day right after we had come in from recess and were just settling in our seats, I leaned forward and kissed Yvonne on the cheek. Yvonne feigned indignation and turned around and slapped me in the face and the noise of the slap was heard throughout the classroom, perhaps around the world. Mrs. Robinson came back and drug out of us what had happened (maybe the drug out of only pertained to me, Yvonne was pretty willing to give her side). I then stood in the corner with my face to the corner for the prescribed period of time. This is how sexual harassment was handled in my day. But Yvonne had not heard the last of me.
My favorite thing in school was the swing. We had a slide and bars also but that was it. The third graders played football but didn't allow me, a lowly first grader, to play. The school only had three grades and was right across our playground from the North Bend High School. The high school was a three (maybe only two) story building with ivy growing all the way up the walls. We could look out the window and see as some of the students would climb out of the classroom windows during class and scale down the ivy and escape. We were impressed.
Usually we walked to school but occasionally Gilbert took his bike and I rode on the cross bar. To get to school we went up the alley next to the Mitt's house and then down a hill on a dirt road that ran into Marion street which was paved. So, the most hazardous part of the bike ride was the dirt road. About halfway down this hill the road had an area probably twenty feet long and as wide as the road that filled up with water when it rained. The water was always muddy so we weren't sure how deep it was. There was a trail that bikes and pedestrians could take around this giant puddle. One day we are starting down the hill, him in control of the bike and me the passenger, and he comments that he thinks he can make it through the puddle. I don't remember my feeling on the idea but it didn't matter as he had already began picking up speed. It turns out the puddle was about a foot deep in the center and that is about where we ran out of speed and stopped. Both of us were dumped into the puddle. I don't recall my Mom's thoughts when we got home, but it must have worked out as our schooling continued the next day.
Aunt Dorothy is 14 years younger than my Mother and 11 years older than me. Years after the event she told us about visiting us while we lived in North Bend, when I was 5 or 6. We went on an outing, probably a picnic, to Sunset Beach. Sunset beach is a nice beach just past Charleston that as I remember is like an alcove with a large sandy area. There was a small creek that ran across the sand and into the cove there at Sunset beach. A couple of ladies with small children had built a sand dam in the creek to make a pond their children could play in. Gilbert ran down the creek with me, his wingman right behind, and through the pond destroying the dam and letting the pond empty into the ocean. The ladies were not very understanding! Somehow Mom kept them from killing us and I am sure we had a fun day at the beach. While looking at pictures of Gilbert and I when we were young, I ran across one I had gotten from my Aunt Nadine that was Mom with Gilbert and I at about this time. On the back Aunt Nadine had written: "Ethel and the two monsters!" I don't know where she got that.
On week ends, Dad and Mom would often go to Bandon to visit our grandparents; stopping first at the Strader's who lived on the Gallier place on the Beach loop road out of Bandon. Then on to the Siewell's at Denmark. Carole was a cute baby and everyone doted on her and made over her. Gilbert and I weren't doted upon. So, when Carole was about two or so they decided Gilbert and I were old enough to take care of ourselves and left us home. They were right, we survived-sometimes just barely!
One of the challenges we had was the oil stove. This was a heater in the living room that consisted of a cylinder that dripped stove oil (or diesel my father got from work) into the bottom and burned. It had a screen shell to allow heat out but protect people from the hot cylinder. Well one day we turned the oil on and then got sidetracked with other important projects and didn't remember it until it had dripped quite a pool of oil in the bottom. Being conscientious, as we always were, we turned off the oil before we tried to light it. But when we dropped matches down the cylinder into the pool, they were just drowned and went out. We were trying various things when I hit on the genius idea of lighting a ball of paper and throwing that in. It worked, the oil lit. The heater got warm. Then it got warmer, much warmer. Pretty soon we noticed the cylinder began to glow red. We were not alarmed; that is until the whole stove started dancing and making some awful noises. We were afraid it was going to blow. So we went outside and played for awhile. When we came back in, the house was warm and the stove had calmed down. A close call but we had managed it!
Our dad was never a big hunter but every year Pat Cornell would take some of his employees and they went to Eastern Oregon to hunt for a week. So, our dad had to equip himself and part of his equipment was a 250-3000 Savage deer rifle. He kept it hung on the wall in his room like the prized possession it was. We had to go into his room occasionally for things like cigarettes and the rifle did not go unnoticed. Gilbert loved to tell this story and he could do it better because he was a player and I was not. But I was observant. Anyway, one of the weekends that we were left alone, Gilbert and the neighbor delinquent, Elton Sells, decided to take the gun up into the park and shoot it. So, they did. However, they got it jammed and couldn't get it unjammed. They worked on it until they were tired (or they expected Mom and Dad back, whichever was first) and then they just hung it back up, jammed! The next time we were left for the weekend they got it down and managed to get it unjammed. Another close one but managed none the less.
The war was going on and there was an old German guy who lived by himself in a little shack about a block a way. We were convinced he was a German spy but we were also afraid of him. However, we did on one occasion sneak up and look into his window to try to see the radio or whatever he sent his messages out with, but we couldn't see anything. We remained suspicious and kept an eye on him until the war ended.
Once in our explorations we discovered an interesting opportunity. The Naval Air Station had put their dump close to the fence. Also, what they thought was useless stuff was, in the right hands, useful treasure. The fence was pretty high and had barb wire on top and bottom. We managed to work our way through the barbed wire on the bottom and scavenged the dump. We did find at least one live shell (at the time I thought it was huge but from my memory I believe it was probably a 50 caliber) but what interested us most were the things that looked like shot gun shells but were just full of powder. I believe they were used to start the planes. We found plenty of those that had not been fired. I don't know what ever happened to the live shell we found. It is possible that Mom, over protective as she was, thought that was going too far and confiscated it. Anyway, we took the powder out of the shotgun shell/starter things and tried to emulate the movies where they had long trails of powder that would burn and end with a big explosion. We apparently never mastered this skill because I don't remember ever blowing anything up and I would probably remember that.
Like most kids, we played cowboys and Indians. We made bows and arrows out of wood we gathered in the park. We called one plant, Indian arrow wood, but I doubt it had any connection to real Indians. Anyway, one day we were out in front of our house with one of our bow and arrows and the kid, Jackie Waugh, who lived on the hill next to the park (which was across Broadway from our house) was playing with us. Gilbert decided to shoot him in the stomach, I don't know if this kid had done something or it was just in fun. He was standing only about 6 inches to a foot at most from this kid and shoots at his stomach and hits him just above the eye (guess our bows weren't too accurate). That kid let out a loud bellow and headed for home; yelling all the way. He was kind of a sissy anyway. I don't recall whatever happened over that but apparently not much. We continued to shoot arrows at cowboys.
Dad worked long hours and rarely spent time with us. On one occasion, we were out on twelfth street playing 500 (I don't know if that game exists in these days, it was essentially a batter who threw the ball up and hit it down the street. If one of the fielders caught it in the air it was 100 points, on first bounce 50 and a grounder 25. When you reached 500 you were batter). One day my dad came out and played. He played batter! We were impressed first that he came out and played with us and second how far he could hit it. If the ball got past all fielders it could roll down all the way into the swamp. We had never hit it that far, but he did. He apparently had some softball experience in his younger days. Years later, on our vacation to Oregon from Colorado, he played softball with my family in Klamath Falls.
On the rare occasions that we needed punishment; Mom usually declared to us "You boys are going to get it when your Dad finds out!". Like there was some way he could find out other than her telling him. But most of the time she didn't tell him. However, on those occasions we caused her unusual grief she did tell him (Like when we were having a rock fight with the kids across Broadway and some dumb old man drove his car through the middle of the fight and his windshield got broken. She paid part of the repairs even though we told her the rock that broke it came from the other side). He would then make one of two pronouncements: Either "It looks like you dudes need a trimming!" which meant that perhaps with sufficient remorse and promises it would never, ever happen again we might slide by with just a few of dad's choice words about what kind of kids we were and ending with "when you were born I should have knocked you in the head and raised a hog!" Or, it might be "You dudes are gonna get a trimming!" (I never learned the derivation of that word "trimming". When one wasn't imminent, I didn't care and when it was imminent it didn't seem like a good time to ask him). Now Dad had two belts. One was a plain, wide leather belt that he wore most of the time and he would pull it off and hold both ends in one hand and blister our butts. Gilbert was always first. This was bad and good. It was bad since I had to watch and see how much it was hurting him, knowing my turn was coming. It was good in that Dad's anger typically rose and crested while he was still working on Gilbert. His other belt was a wide leather dress belt with lots of colored beads attached with some metal clips. Once in his haste to get started, Dad grabbed this dress belt and started on Gilbert and those glass beads started flying off the belt. As he realized his belt was being ruined, he became madder and the madder he got the harder he hit and the more they flew off. By the time he was done with me I don't think there were any beads left on it. Dad kept that belt with all the empty little metal clips that once held the glass beads and he enjoyed telling that story with a hint of pride in the event that wasn't shared by either Gilbert or I.
Every year in those days we had a marble season. I don't remember just what time of year it was but it always happened on schedule. There were several versions of marbles we played: square pot, circle pot, and a game that had five holes; four on the corners of a square about ten feet on a side and one in the center. The games involved shooting marbles and knocking them out of the pot. Whoever shot them out kept them. The winner was the one who accumulated the most marbles. Usually the winners were the older kids and the suppliers of marbles were the younger kids. Every kid up to about the fifth or sixth grade became a marble player. After a time, every year the marble season ended and we were back to the normal mischief.
Our weapon of choice was normally the sling shot. We made these ourselves by cutting two about a half inch rings from a rubber innertube and cutting them to make a strip and attaching one end of them to a fork cut from a bush and the other ends to a tongue cut from an old shoe. Later we moved up to staple shooters which were the same idea only we used large rubber bands and shot staples. One time I was under the porch in the front yard when Jerry Boatwright came over. We had a long walkway from the street to our front porch. This day, Jerry came walking up the walkway to knock on the front door. There was also a hole at the end of the porch which we went in and out of and I slipped out of the hole and shot a staple at him. Since I don't recall ever hitting anything prior to this event, you can imagine both of our surprise when the staple lodged in his head near the temple. He went screaming home. His mother came immediately to confer with Mom even though the wound turned out to be just superficial.
There was a drainage ditch that ran along Broadway and crossed under the street just before getting to our house so it passed through our yard under the walkway in the front. When it rained hard, the water got pretty high and almost touched the walkway.
My Dad's hunting and fishing outfit included a pair of hip boots. He hardly ever used them and was proud of the pristine condition he kept them in. One day the ditch was high and for some reason I needed to wade into it. So, I put on the hip boots. Of course, there was a problem of height so I had the boots folded over. It turned out that the water was higher than my waist, which was much higher than the top of the boots. So, the boots were muddy inside and out. My Dad was furious. You know they say that sometimes we block out traumatic events. Well I don't remember the punishment but I am sure it was traumatic.
During the war years while Dad's boss, Pat Cornell, was riding high he had a few toys such as an airplane (V tailed Cessna) and a large ranch on Big Creek which is Southwest of Charleston. Pat of course had a large stallion with a fancy silver saddle which he rode at least once a year during the fair. Dad had a brown quarter-horse which he kept on the ranch, rode at least once in the fair and used for a time to ride to and from where he was working and where he had his camp trailer. He also used the horse to help round up the sheep that Pat kept on his ranch. The sheep were allowed to run wild in the brush until once a year he tried to round them up. On one occasion they found a real young lamb whose mother had been killed. So, Dad brought it home and Gilbert and I fed it milk through a nipple and kept it in our bed room. We had two metal framed youth beds and the room was just large enough for the two beds and space between them to walk through. I don't recall what we did about the lamb's 'accidents' on the floor but since there was no other option there must have been many. Anyway, the lamb finally got so big it couldn't turn around between the two beds and Dad took it back to the ranch and turned it loose. This story obviously brings up more sanitary questions than I remember answers to. Bottom line, we survived.
Sports was our biggest interest. We went to all of the home games of North Bend High School and since we had no money we had to sneak into them all. For basketball, we would wait for a large group or family and try to blend in. My guess is the ticket takers were more kind than fooled. Marshfield was the arch enemy and one basketball game, which we lost 42-41, was the greatest game I had seen up until Bandon beat North Bend (but that comes later). North Bend's basketball team was old style basketball. Bill Shattuck was a guard who shot two handed set shots with back spin and the ball went almost to the ceiling of the old gym and then swooshed through the net. It was impressive. The other guard was Tommy Graham and he was more of a driving guard and scrapper. Harold Reeves was center and Tom Crabtree was one forward and I have forgotten the other one but you can be sure I knew at the time. In the game that ended 42-41, North Bend was ahead 41-40 with seconds to go and Marshfield had this new fang dangled offense called the 'fast break' and they were trying to move the ball up quickly. They passed to freshman Barney Holland (who later set the U of O single game scoring record at 32 against Washington in a game the Bandon team, including me, went to watch) who was looking back to get the ball and didn't see Tommy Graham in front of him. Tommy just bent over and Barney went flying over his back. They called a penalty on Tommy for not giving him a step or whatever. We, along with all of the fans, went berserk and they had to escort the stupid referees out of the court after the game. Barney made his free throws. It was long before the one and one rule so I don't know why he got two free throws. It is all a bit hazy in my memory now so there may be some details not quite, exactly, precisely correct but the essence is true - we were robbed by the referees. Marshfield went to state but I'm not sure how they did. I never forgave them but I liked Marshfield a bit better when I went there in the seventh grade and Barney Holland was playing his senior year.
In football two memorable things stand out from those days. One was a game against Marshfield when North Bend was the underdog and they came out with a 9-2 defense and held Marshfield for most of the game but finally lost. Seems like Marshfield almost always beat North Bend, maybe it was just they were painful. The other thing was a neighbor boy, Troy Beulah, who lived across Broadway and up a bit from us and who started for the NB football team, was our hero. I think he later went to U of O but I don't know how much he played. Harold Reeves played football at Oregon as did his brother Willard who was in Gilbert's grade. Willard played center on the basketball team for North Bend when we (Bandon) beat them.
One more sports story. We often had neighborhood softball games. We played work up. We usually played in the empty field in front of Ecklee's house. Ecklee's were a weird bunch. There was an older boy, Howard, a girl Gilbert's age named Leota, and a boy my age named Kenneth. Leota was quite a tom boy. Once she picked a fight with Gilbert and when he beat her up her father came down to our house and tried to get Gilbert to come out and fight his older boy. Gilbert and I stayed on the porch. I don't know where Mom was, but apparently the old man didn't know either because he didn't try to come up and get us. Another time we were playing work up and I was pitching. Who ever was batting was put out. Leota was next up and she picked up the bat to take a few practice swings. I was watching the play at first and walking toward the plate when she connected - with my head. I had to go to the hospital and get some stitches. I missed my turn at bat! Another time Kenneth and I were sitting in the woods together and he asked me if I knew what a rabbit punch was and I said I didn't. He said he would show me and then punched me in the nose and ran off. I don't remember if I was mad that he ran off or glad. Years later I heard that Kenneth was in prison. They were weird!
Just one more sports story. When I was in the fourth grade, we had a basketball jamboree and we played one game against another fourth-grade team. Our team won: 2 to 0. I sank the only and the winning basket, a lay up.
To go to the movies, which Gilbert and I did occasionally, we had to walk through 'the trail' and follow Virginia Street along the viaduct across the slough (the area that became Pony village was all bay and mud flats then and was later filled in) into town and over to the Liberty theater, a pretty good hike. But the movies were worth it. We all sat in front and yelled when Roy Rogers overtook the bad guy and wrestled him off his horse and beat the tar out of him. We also had to walk home, through 'the trail', when it was pitch dark. Not that I was afraid, of course; but it did get pretty dark.
Just a few more stories about our time in Bangor stand out: The back of our house faced an open area and on the other side of the open area was a similar house (owned by the same person who owned our house and who had offered to sell the two houses plus half a city block to my dad for $1400) and in that house lived Mrs. Mitts. She was old, how old I am not sure because I have discovered that age is relative to the one observing and I was really young. However, she was quite a bit older than my mother and she had grandchildren, so she must have been really old. She had the misfortune of living next to the alley and consequently next to the streetlight at the intersection of the alley and 12th Street. Our favorite game was "kick the can". The game started under the street light. The first ritual of a good kick-the-can game was to break out the street light so the can could be placed in the dark right below where the street light would have shined. We threw rocks at the light and made a big cheer when someone got off the lucky throw. If you have never played kick-the-can (there is no limit to deprivation of childhood these days) the game is very simple. The one who is "it" sits on the can, closes his eyes and counts to ten while the others run out of sight and hide. The "it" then tries to find the hidden and if he sees one, he runs to the can and jumps over it and announces that the one he saw is now "it". However, if any one of the hidden can get to the can before the "it", they kick the can and the "it" has to go retrieve it, put it back and start counting all over. The downside of the game (from the non participant point of view) is that everyone's house and property in the neighborhood is in play, so to speak. So, you have kids climbing on roofs, running through fenced yards, climbing trees, hiding in garages, sheds and outdoor bathrooms and in general running berserk throughout the neighborhood. It was not everyone's favorite game! Despite the fact that Mrs. Mitts house was always at the center of the action, she never seemed amused.
On one of my birthdays (probably sixth or seventh), I came home from school and no one was home but sitting in the middle of the table was a new football. I assumed it was my birthday present and there was no party and I was right about both. We wore out that ball. One of our favorite things to do was to throw and kick it back and forth in the space between our house and Mrs. Mitts. There was a power line that ran across this space and it was a challenge to kick it over the line. Occasionally an errant kick or throw would go into Mrs. Mitts' yard. She would run out, scoop the ball up and run back into her house. We then had to get Mom to go sweet-talk her to get it back. I don't know if we had tried and found we couldn't get it back or whether we were afraid to try. Maybe both. Thinking about it now, it is likely she took it just to get company from Mom.
Across Broadway from our house was a trail that ran up the hill into the woods of the park. We called the woods a park and it probably was intended to be since the city built a baseball field there. At the top of the hill was a large fir tree and the woods were so dense that from there you couldn't see our house. More importantly, we couldn't be seen from the house. Generally Mom didn't come looking for us, she was quite content to let us roam since she knew we would always come home when hungry. Often we would be gone for hours. However, one day she decided for some reason to come find us and she went up the trail. When she got to the fir tree, she noticed a pile of cigarette butts and on further examination she discovered they were viceroy cigarette butts. That happened to be the brand that her and dad and very few other people smoked. When we got home that time, we got a good spanking, one of the few times Mom was mad enough to do it and not just wait until Dad got home - Surely a blessing for us.
I will digress a bit to tell a little about our Uncle Bert since he had some influence over us at the time.
He was our Mom's older brother and they were close in age and he and my father had been drinking buddies before my mom and dad married. (as an aside, Uncle Bert had a nickname, Dew Valley, which my father always called him and which he got by getting drunk so often at the Dew Valley dance hall/grange south of Bandon). Bert lived in the Coos Bay area; he had lived at Charleston in the adjoining duplex to where my parents lived and then for awhile at Gardiner. Later, after he married Dorothy, he lived on the hill above North Bend to the south.
During this time there were wrestling matches alternating every week between the North Bend Armory and somewhere in Coos Bay. Dad and Uncle Bert were rabid fans. Occasionally they took Gilbert and I along. We loved it too. There was a masked man who butted his opponent with his covered head. There was one who performed the airplane spin on his opponent; lifted him on his shoulders and spun around until the opponent was dizzy. There were other colorful wrestlers who are lost in some of the wrinkles of my brain. After Dad and Bert got worked up at the matches, they often came home and had Gilbert and I wrestle. Sometimes Uncle Bert would demonstrate a new hold he had learned on us. I wasn't as enthused with this as Uncle Bert or my dad or Gilbert.
Uncle Bert would sometimes stop at our house at 12th and Broadway to visit Mom. He sometimes played games with us; he was pretty good at marbles. He also would hold a fire cracker in his hand when it went off. The trick, so he said, was to squeeze the end that you were holding really tight so it would blow out the other way. I was never sufficiently convinced! On one occasion Gilbert and I were pestering him and mom and so he tied us up. He ran the rope around our necks and tied our hands behind our backs with one end and tied our feet behind us with the other. So, anything we did to get untied, choked us. Then he threw us behind the couch and he and Mom visited and ignored the yelling and moaning coming from us. Uncle Bert had a strange sense of humor. He thought things like that were funny!
Sometime during this period my Dad and Uncle Bert bought a log truck together and hauled logs near Powers. The hill they were hauling down was so steep that many truckers refused to do it. My dad drove the truck and Bert worked in the woods. One evening, on the last trip down that day, Bert rode with my dad. Part way down the brakes failed. Dad said that he had the truck in its lowest gear and it was going about 45 mph and the engine sounded like it was ready to fly apart. He told Bert to jump. My dad stood on the running board and steered until Bert was clear and then he jumped. The truck went a ways farther down the hill and off the road into a gulley where it turned over and burnt up. We went up to view the charred remains. End of the trucking venture.
Gilbert had an Oregonian paper route that only delivered about forty papers but it covered the territory from Virginia Street on the north, to Dead Mans Curve on the south and a few blocks west of Broadway to Marion Street on the east. Anyway, when I was about nine, I took over the route from Gilbert (he took a larger one in downtown North Bend). Gilbert had taught me to ride his bike; he put me on it at the top of a hill and gave it a push. I was terrified for a while but by the time I got to the bottom of the hill I had mastered it and I wanted to buy a bike of my own. The only way to do this was to earn the money. However, Mom loaned me the money to buy a brand-new Murray bike under the assumption I would deliver papers and pay her back. I did okay delivering the papers but it was also up to me to collect the money every month from all the customers. I was not so good at that. Most people were great about paying and all I had to do was show up. In fact, one customer near Dead Mans Curve used to give me gifts at holidays. But some always had an excuse why they didn't have the money at the moment and I would need to come back at another time. So, I usually struggled to break even after I paid the Oregonian for the papers. On Sunday I usually managed to sell a paper and used the money to buy candy at a store along my route.
One day I was out collecting and I was going down a steep hill near Dead Man's curve to collect from the people at the bottom, the gift givers. As I came around a turn, there were two girls from my class pushing their bikes up the hill, one in each rut (the ruts in the road were pretty deep) and not being able to stop I plowed into the one in my rut. It turned out to be Yvonne! It also turned out it bent the forks of her bike so bad she couldn't ride it and had to push it all the way home, which wasn't really that far. Needless to say, Yvonne and I were never close after that. Later in high school I heard that Yvonne was going to school in Myrtle Point and was a cheer leader but by then I was interested in a pretty pepster.
Sometime during our Bangor days, Nadine and Kent purchased a new phonograph and brought their old one down for Gilbert and I. Phonographs were in early stage of development. This one stood about 4 feet high and was probably 18 inches to two feet on each side. It was mostly an empty box with record storage in the bottom and the record player on a platform in the top. The name turntable came from these days because that is all it did. It turned the record and the operator had to lift the arm and place it on the record to start the song and lift it off when the song was done. The needle was like the sharpened end of a nail. They were quite cheap and good thing, they only lasted for two or three plays. The record quality degraded fairly quick also. Kent and Nadine gave us several of their worn out records, I don't remember what any of them were. Mom took us down so we could each buy a new record. I must have been coerced into a quick selection since I ended up with Bill Monroe's Kentucky waltz.
I was never a big Bill Monroe fan nor a fan of Bluegrass music which I think he was the originator of. But it was my start in becoming a music virtuoso.
We lived in Bangor (section of North Bend on the west side of Pony Slough) until about 1948…I think Maxine was born while we were there but most of my fifth grade we lived up on the hill by Roosevelt grade school so Maxine may have been born while we lived up there. Not much exciting happened during the time we lived there. At Roosevelt I was mostly interested in softball. Every day at lunchtime we had a work up softball game. The student who checked out the bat and ball was one batter and the next two people to get to home plate were batters. I always tried to be one of those two and sometimes I was. Hoddy Shepman was the one who always checked out the bat and ball. A few years later He and I played against each other in basketball when I was playing at Bandon. In fact, most of the players we played against in North Bend were the ones I had played softball with. More of that later.
When I finished the fifth grade, Uncle Bert and my dad got into another venture, this time with a fellow from Reedsport. They were going to log in California. We moved down to a little cabin on the Mad River. Uncle Bert had married Dorothy and they had two girls, Sharon and Shirley, and they lived in a cabin up near the logging site. This was several miles up the mountain from where we lived along the river. Where we lived was pretty ideal for an eleven-year-old. When I first got there, there was a country schoolhouse just a few hundred yards up the creek from our cabin. My mother encouraged me to go up there and I "went to school" with them until they finished up. There were only about half a dozen kids in the school, all different grades and mostly (if not all) boys. They taught me how to find scorpions under the rocks and showed me a lizard they claimed was a Gila monster. They would push a stick into his cave and he would bite it and they could pull him part way out. He seemed pretty big to me but it was a long time ago. The teacher was a young lady probably just out of school herself. We (the boys of the school and I) would go swimming at lunch. The boys would swim in the nude because they claimed the teacher wouldn't come and get them if they didn't have any clothes on. It seemed to work. I learned to swim that summer playing in the river. I had one experience that was not so good. An old friend of my dads, Dirk Johnson, came down to drive log truck. He chewed tobacco. I badgered him to give me some and he kept telling me it wasn't good for me. Finally, I heckled him too much and he took me out away from the cabin and gave me some tobacco to chew and when I got a taste and immediately wanted to spit it out, he made me chew it for awhile, until I got sick, real sick. When he told the story later, he said I turned green! I have never tried chewing tobacco since. Also, during our time in California, I caught a turtle in the river, probably about 6-inch diameter. I drilled a hole in the shell and tied it up in the woods not far from our cabin. One day I went to check on the turtle and it was dead. I dug a hole and buried the poor thing. Carole was about 5 and she was observing all of this. A few days later she was out at the burial site and discovered the turtle had come back to life. We were both amazed. I turned the turtle loose. One other incident here that might be of interest. A pretty good-sized creek ran right next to the cabin and emptied into Mad River near the bridge. There were trout in the creek and during the summer the creek had slowed to a little more than a trickle. Gilbert didn't go the California initially but he showed up later. He liked to fish and made a big deal out of catching some trout in some of the large pools in the creek. So, I went up the creek and damned it up and then drained the pools one at a time until they got so low the fish couldn't swim and I just picked them up. I guess it ruined the fishing and wasn't sporting, so Gilbert complained! My dad and Uncle Bert were having trouble getting their money from this venture and we moved back to Bandon when summer was over.
We moved into a tiny house about two blocks southeast of the intersection of 9th and Highway 101. I started the sixth grade and my teacher was Mrs. Volck. She had been teaching a long time and had taught at Langlois when Uncle Jock was in her class. Cousin Ed was in my class. We became the crosswalk monitors who held the flags and stopped traffic on highway 101 while kids were crossing the crosswalk. We had a good time. Mrs. Volck was a special teacher. Once we were studying about gold mining and she had an old friend who had been gold mining in Alaska. He came in and talked to us about the hardships of mining and told us about 'sour dough'. He gave us a start from his and we made sour dough pancakes in class. She also put together a trip for us up the Roque River on mail boats. In those days they were really mail boats.
I mentioned in Chapter 1 that I spent time with my Grandparents Strader during this period. One other thing of interest to me as an eleven year old were old records. There were records left there by Uncle Elmer. So I got my introduction to Tex Ritter and the Bad Brahma Bull.
which many of you have heard me sing? more than you wished. I also was introduced to 'party records' which included: "The farting contest", "The intoxicated rat", and "Whoa sailor". I played them so much I still remember the words and could sing them on a moments notice.
The major sport for sixth graders was softball. Near the end of the year the big game was between the sixth and fifth grade. They voted me captain so I pitched the entire game. Many of my teammates were unhappy with that and if the vote could have been done over after the game I never would have won. But I ruled with an iron hand! We won! I started the seventh grade in Bandon but my Dad got involved in another logging scheme and we moved to Coos Bay.
Uncle Don (Brown) had a job managing the logging for a sawmill that was built on the lakeshore somewhere out of Lakeside (Ten Mile Lakes). They were logging on a farm that was owned by an old guy whose dad had settled up there. Grampa Seiwell and Kent and Jock and Dad all worked for Brown. Grampa and Gramma camped in a tent near the lake and near the logging area. They yarded the logs (high lead logging) to a landing and then drug them to the lake. The sawmill owner then made rafts of logs and pulled them with his boat to the mill which was on the lake several miles away. The distance from the landing to the lake was too long to pull with a cat but too short to make loading trucks worthwhile. So, Brown invented and built an arch on the back of a deuce and a half army surplus truck and they pulled the logs to the lake with this. This was before rubber-tired skidders had been invented and was really a precursor of those but of course Brown didn't have the education to know enough about patents etc. to protect the invention. It worked great.
Sometime during this time, I went and camped with Grampa and Gramma. Grampa took me hunting with him and we walked along the old logging roads looking for deer. Once we saw a doe a long way away but he took a shot. He estimated how high to shoot above the deer and we saw a poof of dust just above the deer. He made an adjustment and killed the deer. I was, still am, impressed. Anyway, he told me that some day he would give me the gun and years later he did. It is a Marlin 25 X 36.
Later Grampa and Gramma gave up the camping and went home and my parents moved into the tent. One time while putting together a raft of logs the propeller fell off of the boat of the sawmill owner. Gilbert and I swam in that part of the lake quite often and on this occasion we were there. Gilbert dove down and found the part and brought it up. The owner was pretty impressed, and happy. I'm sure he made it worthwhile for Gilbert but I have forgotten how. I started seventh grade in Bandon but soon moved to Coos Bay in a house in the Englewood area.
Uncle Brown had quit his job up Lakeside and come up with another scheme. My grandfather, Uncle Dale, Uncle Kent, Uncle Jock, and my Dad were all involved. My grandfather and Uncle Dale had both mortgaged their property to help finance the South Bay logging co. The story, as I heard it, was that they decided to log the toughest part first and then make money logging the easier part. However, when the hard part was done, the mill owner kicked them out and hired someone else cheaper to log the easy part. I was pretty young to know the details. When it was all over, my grandfather didn't have the farm south of Langlois and he owned Dale's house and a small house on Elm Street in Bandon that he and my grandmother lived in until after I left for the Navy. Uncle Jock lived in the house that Uncle Dale had built and Uncle Dale stayed and worked in the Coos Bay area. My dad stayed in Englewood until I finished the eighth grade.
A few of my experiences in Coos Bay might be worth recording. First, the house we lived in in Englewood was built on the slough. The house was built on stilts and at high tide the water was around three sides and under the house. So, I had to improvise. I invented a game of basketball using a tennis ball and a can on the wall that I played by myself. I also used an old bat to hit rocks out into the slough. At school I started playing football and basketball in the seventh grade. I did best at basketball and on the eighth-grade team I was sixth man. It was a very good team. We ran a real good fast break and we practiced for hours getting in shape to run and learning to cut in front of the ball and pass the ball forward without dribbling. Lots of 2 on 1 and 3 on 2 drills. Our coach was Bruce Hoffine who after my eighth grade became the basketball coach for Marshfield High School. Marshfield high school had a good team when I was in the seventh grade, including star Barney Holland.
Gilbert was working as a pin setter in the bowling alley and during my seventh grade, with his help, I got a job. After a while, he and I were the best setters and on league nights we each took care of two lanes (there were only eight). We got 10 cents a line. The bowling alley was owned by a couple of brothers named Orr. They also owned a night club. Gene was the one we saw most of. He was a good bowler and a nice guy. Once when I was setting pens for him and his friends who were having a "pot game" he got the big four split. So, when he rolled and his ball picked up two pins on one side, I threw a pin back (like it had hit the back and bounced back) and took out the other two. Obviously, it wasn't as clever as I thought. He had a fit. He came back and railed at me and said that better be the last time I ever did anything like that. It was. Pot games were something we setters really liked because they bowled a lot of games and gave tips. Gilbert and I were picked to do them any time we were around. Gene treated me pretty good. The old fellow who managed the alley smoked a cigar all the time. In fact, he had smoked the cigar so much that when he took it out, his mouth and cheek still maintained the shape the cigar had been in. My routine for the summer between my seventh and eighth grade years was to get up late, walk to Mingus Park and go swimming, maybe stop at the dairy queen that was a few blocks from Mingus Park, go to work at the bowling alley about 4 and work until about 11 o'clock and then walk home to Englewood. That summer I saved up money to buy my school clothes and my mother went with me. The in thing for pants were suntans. I wanted to buy some but the store we went in only had suntans with pleats. I was against that but was talked into it by my mother and the salesman. I hated those pants and pleats from then on forever.
A couple of brothers and classmates, Bob and Jim Peterson, lived in Englewood.
We had heard that there was an old road/path that we could take from Englewood through the hills and end up at Charleston. We decided to try it with our bikes. We made it through and spent some time on Basendorf beach and then rode back. Later Bob was an all American center for the University of Oregon football team.
I had a friend in school (I have forgotten his name) who skipped school all the time. When he was caught nothing much happened, he just came back to class. One day some friends and I skipped school and went over the bridge toward Coos River and went swimming in one of the lakes along the slough. We came back and school had gotten out so we went into the school to get something out of our lockers and the principal caught us. I thought it was kind of amusing, but he didn't. He expelled us! My mother had to come in and talk him into letting me back in school. At the time I didn't understand why we were treated so much differently than my friend who skipped all the time, but now I suspect the principal was taking into account the different home environments and wanted to nip it in the bud, so to speak.
Math was beginning to be pushed and there was a competitive test to determine who was the top math student in the eighth grade. The math teacher's son was somewhat of a nerd and good student while I was a bit of a screw off. Much to the disappointment of the teacher, I won.
I had my first date while at Coos Bay. I asked this girl to go to the movie with me. I have forgotten her name. Anyway, she came back the next day and said I would have to come and ask her father. This was more than I had bargained for. But I agreed. She must have been cute! It turned out that her father had a little cobbler shop in Coos Bay and I went down there and talked to him and he agreed and she went to the movie with me. Apparently, we didn't hit it off because we never did anything else together.
One of the guys working for Uncle Brown at Lakeside was a young man named Joe Blondell. He later went into the army and got an award for his shooting at basic training. But he was kind of a fascination for me. He was young and talked with a distinct accent and was drinking buddy with both Kent and Brown. He also was a great Hank Williams fan and he occasionally tried to imitate Hank. I instantly became a Hank Williams fan. In fact, until Waylon years later, none of the country singers measured up in my mind. I spent hours listening to Wedding Bells
Another singing group that I listened to during this time was 'The Maddox Brothers and Rose' who were on the radio a lot. Their song 'I'm Sending Daffydills' was a favorite.
After the eighth grade we moved back to Bandon.