A Memoir

I'm facing my 61st birthday in a few days. My short-term memory isn't always what I'd prefer it to be, but I often find myself reminiscing about my past. The following hits some of the highlights (and omits many of the lowlights) of my life up to age 16. It's an autobiography that I find myself adding to periodically and, hopefully, I'll get around to bringing it up to more recent times and events. So, if you'll excuse my self-indulgence, here is an abridged version of my first 16 years.

I guess some people would say I’ve had an interesting life. I grew up in the country, two miles from a little town in Washington called Sedro-Woolley. I had twin neighbor boys, Jack and Jim, who were a year younger than me and my mom babysat two other boys, Rick and Terry, who were a little younger than me, when their mother decided to resume her teaching career. We were able to play in explore the “woods” which were basically alder groves which had sprouted up after the area was logged off around the turn of the 20th century. We built houses out of the small alder logs we cut down with axes and hatchets. We even built a four-story tree house between four alder trees.

There as a creek in the woods and we boys spent hours damming it up, much to the consternation of a witchy old downstream neighbor woman who used the creek to water her herd of dairy cows. She never caught on to the concept that “boys will be boys” and she should just accept that and go milk her damn cows and stop complaining to our parents about our dastardly deeds.

There was also a forbidden lake, which abutted our property. My sister Joan, who is 12 years older than me, used to watch boys from town skinny-dip there from our back yard before I was born. A couple named Everett bought the lake and surrounding property for $10,000 in the early ‘50s and fenced it off. It was a private lake, and the people who owned it would not allow us boys across the fence to try our hands at fishing there, much less swim in their precious pond. Hell, I was in my late thirties when I was finally able to visit someone’s home on that lake and get my first good look at the entire body of water. When I die, I’d like to have my ashes scattered on what I knew as “Bottomless Lake.”

One of the twin neighbor boys would go on to work for Boeing Aerospace. When we were kids, he was the one who engineered the alder houses and the four-story tree house. He also conceived the clubhouse with the secret underground passages and subterranean room where we smoked cigarettes, which had mostly been shoplifted from various merchants in Sedro-Woolley. Hmmm – he converted to the LDS faith when he got married, so I doubt he smokes now. Anyway, the clubhouse itself was built with scrap lumber that the twins’ dad brought home from his job at Diablo Dam. It started out as a tiny little hut. There was a trapdoor in the floor that led to a tunnel that went to an underground room. That was the smoking room. We added on to the little hut and built a larger room above the subterranean smoking room. We strung a heavy-duty extension cord from one of the outbuildings that was maybe a hundred or so feet away to the clubhouse and we had light and a radio. There was also an old mattress that covered the whole floor of the clubhouse. We spent many nights in that cozy little shack playing poker, listening to the radio and reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, Mad, Cracked and assorted other magazines and comic books. Often, another boy, Ken from down the hill from us would come and spend the night too, as would some of our other friends. I must have been 11 or 12 that summer.

I recently uprooted a large, sticky weed which had sprouted in front of our house here in desert-like Kennewick, Washington. The aroma from it brought back instant memories of how the moist woods of western Washington smell in the summertime. It’s funny how aromas can evoke memories of specific times and places.

My parents were hard workers who grew up with next to nothing. My mother was born in Arkansas and her folks moved their family to Colorado when my mom was fairly young. She worked very hard to lose her Arkansas drawl so the other kids would stop teasing her. She had five brothers and three sisters, one of whom died in infancy. My dad was one of four boys and two girls, and I have been told they were extremely poor. They migrated to Washington from Nebraska after my grandfather, after whom I am named, died of diabetes. Neither of my parents received a high school education, because they had to go to work to help support their families.

My parents said on several times that when they were married in the early 1930s, they were so poor that they didn’t even realize the Great Depression was going on. Their first home was in a mill town called Ardenvoir in Chelan County, Washington. Dad worked in the mill and mom ran a boarding house.

I don’t know when my folks acquired the big old house I grew up in. It was constructed with used lumber from a hotel that had once stood at Clear Lake, Washington. Some of the interior doors still had room numbers on them. It was built on a knoll on the west side of State Highway 9, about two miles north of Sedro-Woolley. I believe that the house and property on both sides of the highway were purchased by my grandfather Morgan, and then later purchased from him by my folks. The property was not good farmland, but Grandpa tried to make it so by draining a cranberry bog on the east side of the highway. All he managed to do was create a mosquito-infested swamp. We later turned that part of the property into a chicken farm, and in back of that, a gravel pit.

Before the chicken house, and before the gravel pit, that piece of property was most often the Wild West where we boys ambushed each other as cowboys and Indians (I was usually Roy Rogers or an Indian). We found that ripe blackberries make great “war paint” when rubbed on your face, but it’s hell to wash off. We experimented with boat and raft building, employing the swamp my grandpa had made to test the seaworthiness of our crafts.

On the other side of the highway, there was pasture for the few cattle we kept for milk and beef. There was a small section below our house and to the south. Below that, some cedar, birch and alder trees and skunk cabbage and swampy ground led to the fence that separated our property from the lake. In back of the house to the west was more pasture. It’s hard to describe the lay of the land, but I’ll try. As I said, our house was built on a knoll. The back yard was maybe 25 to 30 yards and then dipped away to a kind of gully. About halfway down, we had a barn. The hayloft was actually on the main floor. The cattle came into the barn from below and you had to walk down some slippery stairs to feed and milk the cows. It was pretty spooky down there in the dark. Below the barn were more cedar, alder and swamp teeming with odiferous skunk cabbage by the lake. Part of the pasture was on a steep hill from the lake up to level ground. That hill provided excellent sledding during the few winters that we had sufficient snow.

Like all kids, I loved snow. One winter in the early or mid-1950s I remember, we got over a foot of the white stuff. Area schools were closed for a week or more. The Bloom and Sapp boys and I spend hours packing down sled runs on that hill, and then many more hours pulling our sleds up the hill for that few seconds of unadulterated joy we experienced sliding down those hard-packed runs. I recall being sick and tired of snow by the time the crocuses began poking up and there were still patches of dirty slush in the shaded parts of our lawn. Of course, by the next winter, I was hoping for “Susie Snowflake” to come tumbling down again. Stan Boreson, a kids’ TV host on KING TV back then used to sing a little ditty about “Here comes Susie Snowflake. Look at her tumbling down….” Funny the little things you remember through the years.

At the top of the hill was an old orchard in which grew old Gravenstein and Transparent apple trees and some Greengage plums. My dad built me a tree house in one of the Gravenstein trees (which came in handy a couple of times when I was being chased by a bull that we kept to make the cows contented).

We had one of the first television sets in the Sedro-Woolley area – an Admiral console with a radio and phonograph also in the cabinet. It was given to my mom in lieu of payment for helping some friends who owned an appliance and repair shop. We got it in either 1949 or ’50. One night I saw a ventriloquist on the tube and asked my folks how he made that little figure talk without moving his lips. They explained as best they could and I immediately dragged out my sister’s old, stuffed panda bear and began to practice. I acquired a number of hand puppets, some of which my mom made, and a Howdy Doody marionette that my sister got me for Christmas one year and put on shows for my cousins at home and classmates at school. Finally, one Christmas in the mid ‘50s, my folks put out about 30 or 35 bucks (a princely figure for them in those days) for a Jerry Mahoney vent figure. I enjoyed doing little ventriloquist skits for my classmates, but it took my sixth grade teacher, Jack Ross, to prod me into performing for several hundred people at the annual Rotary Club talent show. He even wrote a script for me. I won second place in the contest -- 10 or 15 bucks. Either singers or tap dance acts always won first place in all of the talent shows I entered, but I consistently placed second or third. A few years later, my folks presented me with a larger Jerry Mahoney figure with a movable head. I still have both vent figures, the Howdy Doody marionette and several of the hand puppets.

Our house was fairly large, with three bedrooms downstairs and a large, unfinished upstairs area, which we five boys (and sometimes more) used to exercise our imaginations during rainy days. I have always had a deep and abiding love of the theater, so it seemed only natural to me to convert part of that upstairs area into a showplace for the plays I wrote and the other young thespians I recruited (the other boys had little choice – I was older and bigger than them). The father of two of the boys, an old showman himself, scrounged up a large piece of fabric for us to use as a curtain. Some old chairs had been stored up there, so we had seating. We used a large old wooden crate as a box office. The price of admission was a dime, but was negotiable.

When I entered high school, my mother decided to convert the theater into a bedroom for me. We put up all the sheetrock and did the painting ourselves (my dad sold cars six days a week and managed the damn chicken ranch the rest of the time). The finished product was terrific – lots of room and privacy. It was a long way downstairs to the bathroom and even farther to the telephone though.

I mentioned that my dad worked six days a week. He probably would have worked every day if the old “blue laws” hadn’t been in effect in Washington back then. He always had time for me though. A few fishing trips, one an overnighter in the San Juan Islands. He taught me to hunt. Even after a long day at work, he usually had time to play catch and teach me how to pitch a baseball. I got pretty good as a pitcher, but I was a lousy hitter. I was scared of the ball hitting me and consistently “stepped in the bucket.” I blame that in large part on a boy, who was on my Little League team (the Panthers). His name was Gary, and he took an immediate dislike to me. He was throwing batting practice and intentionally tried to bean me. He took every opportunity to embarrass and humiliate me clear through junior high school. We called a truce in high school, but even then, he managed to damn near put one of my eyes out with a walnut he threw at me from the audience of a melodrama in which I was playing the villain. I haven’t seen him since the 20-year high school reunion, where his band was playing.

I nearly died in the spring of, I believe, 1955. It had nothing to do with Gary the Little Leaguer’s pitching. I started limping at school one day. I still remember a couple of little girls saying they thought I was faking the limp. That evening, my mom rubbed my legs down with alcohol and I went to bed. The next morning, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t even stand up. I was running a temperature of around 104 or 105°. I don’t remember how Mom got me into the car for the ride to our doctor 12 miles or so away in Mount Vernon, and then up the stairs to his office. Dr. McAvila took one look at me, asked if I had had the new polio vaccine yet, and when Mom said no, he had me admitted to the hospital.

I still shudder when I remember the spinal tap they did on me. Dr. Mac’s new, young partner, Dr. Worley, held me down and tried to distract me by asking about baseball and God only knows what else. The spinal fluid was evidently free and clear of the polio bug, so they later drew blood to see if I had rheumatic fever. Didn’t have that either. They shot me full of penicillin several times at day. I hadn’t been overly fond of needles up to that point as it was, so I’ll just say that I wasn’t the best little patient that was ever housed at the old Rowley Memorial Hospital. I thoroughly pissed off one old nurse when I adamantly refused to let her give me an enema.

I was home from the hospital and back in school for several weeks before the doctors told my sister that as nearly as they could figure, I had had a pretty good case of spinal meningitis. Needless to say, I got the first of the series of three shots that were required to immunize a person in those days from polio.

I don’t believe, and my mother agreed, that my energy level was ever the same after my bout with “meningitis.” I still have a gut feeling that that might not have been what I had contracted. Meningitis is highly contagious, and I never did hear of anyone else that I had contact with ever getting sick at that time.

Many people, my wife included, say their high school experience was horrible. I can’t say that. Junior high was absolutely the pits – at least the seventh and eighth grades were. I fell hopelessly in love with a girl named Lois in the seventh grade and carried the torch clear through high school. She never knew, until the 30-year reunion when she came to the table I was sitting at with my wife. She introduced herself to my wife, Alma, who promptly said something like, “Oh Lois! I’ve heard all about you.” I responded to Lois’s questioning look by confessing my unrequited ardor for her all those years ago. The look on her face was absolutely priceless. I suspect that many of my classmates thought I was gay. After all, I didn’t do sports, and I was one of those thespians. Also, I rarely dated girls from my own high school, preferring to go out with out-of-towners. The grass is always greener, don’t you know?

High school was where I found my little niche in teen society. I was never much of an athlete – never was very interested in sports. As a sophomore, I tried out for a role in the Senior Play because not enough seniors had tried out, and the director, Robert L. Dunlap, put out an open casting call. I got cast, and then appeared in seven subsequent productions. I tried to make it a perfect nine productions, but by the end of my senior year, I believe my ego had outstripped my usefulness as an actor in high school plays. Mr. Dunlap did not cast me. I learned from that disappointment and gained a little humility, which served me well when I began appearing in college plays and then later in community and dinner theater.

Everybody remembers their first date, their first kiss. After being pretty gregarious as a little boy, I turned shy fairly early on, especially around girls. I do believe that my mother and my sister began to fear that I needed a little push into the social scene just before my sixteenth birthday. My sister was married with a houseful of little urchins who required babysitters from time-to-time. They lived about 10 miles from us in a rural area between Burlington and Bellingham called Bow Hill. Although sparsely populated, Bow Hill was home to an inordinate number of comely lasses near my age. There were the Longnecker girls, De Etta and Louella whom I had met a few times. De Etta was having a sixteenth birthday party, and my sister finagled an invitation for me to attend (without asking me if I even wanted to go). I was a month or two shy of my sixteenth birthday, but I had been learning to drive and had a learner’s permit. To entice me to go to the party, I was told to drive to the party solo. My dad even supplied his brand new Dodge demonstrator from work. My sister’s house was only about a mile from the party along a little traveled country road, so there was little risk of my being pulled over by a cop.

I went to the party, and one of the first people I was introduced to was a dark haired cutie with beautiful, flirtatious blue eyes named Cecilia. We hit if off right away and I actually enjoyed myself, much to my surprise. Somehow, my folks and my sister kept finding excuses to go to community functions in Alger near Bow Hill over the next month or two, and I’ll be damned, there would be Cecilia and her family. Was I too naïve to realize that I was being set up? Hell yes! It was years later that my sister confessed her collusion with the Longneckers to invite both Cecilia and me to that party and make sure we got introduced to each other.

As my sixteenth birthday approached, my folks and my sister decided that I should have a big party at our house and invite my friends and my cousin Pam who is a couple of years younger than I. My cousin Josephine may have been there too, but I don’t remember. I know her brother Jim was there, and I’ll explain his part in this a little later.

I wanted to ask Cecilia to the party, but I was nearly paralyzed by fear. I kept making excuses to not call her. Finally, my mom stepped in. This was one determined woman, my mother. One afternoon, we were on Bow Hill at my sister’s mother and father-in-law’s house and Mom sat me in front of the telephone, told me I was all out of excuses, and ordered me to pick up the receiver, dial Cecilia’s number and ask her to my party. She would leave the house until I had completed my call. I finally took a deep breath, “screwed my courage to the sticking place,” and called. Much to my surprise and delight, Cecilia consented to be my date for the evening of April 6th, 1961. Whew!

I didn’t yet have a driver’s license, and my folks knew that it wouldn’t be cool for one of them to drive me to pick up my first real date, so it was arranged for my older cousin Jim to come to my party to be my “chauffeur”. My sister, the schemer, even lined Jim up with one of her neighbor girls to be his “date”. This was a good thing, because Mary knew how to get to Cecilia’s house, which was literally out in the sticks on Bow Hill. I would have missed my own party if we hadn’t had Mary as a guide.

The living room at our old house was huge, and we literally rolled up the rug to make a dance floor and we played my records and probably some of those belonging to the neighbor boys, Jack and Jim, who had grown into scrapping teens. The first time we danced, Cecilia molded herself right to my body and put her head on my shoulder. I wasn’t expecting that, but I did not object. The party was a rousing success.

Cousin Jim, with Mary at his side, drove Cecilia home, with she and I in the back seat of my mom’s ’58 Plymouth. I hadn’t put my arm around the shoulders of a girl since the first grade when I was enamored of Connie Skiles and slipped my arm around her during a reading class. I finally worked up the nerve after three or four miles, and Cecilia snuggled right up. I had never kissed a girl – I mean REALLY kissed a girl and I thought that this just might be a good time to start, but I didn’t know how to approach the process. After a few more miles of hesitation and procrastination, it finally happened. Thinking about it later, I pretty much decided that Cecilia sensed my trepidation and took the matter into her own hands. It was wonderful! So we did it some more – right up to the time we pulled up in front of Cecilia’s front door.

My sixteenth birthday remains one of my most cherished and enduring memories. The efforts of my folks, especially my mom and sister are still greatly appreciated. Cecilia and I dated occasionally over the years and she remains one of my favorite people. My cousin Jim committed suicide several years ago, a victim of alcoholism. He was a helluva good guy and I wish things could have been different for him.