A BIT OF HISTORY
Dad with sleigh, Montana, 1923My dad was an itinerant Methodist minister, although he called himself a preacher, who landed in Montana right after the First World War. In those days, Montana was a wild and wonderful place. Miners and cowboys running around with six shooters. Drinking, gambling, whoring and everything else imaginable going on in the saloons. And just to make things more interesting, renegade Indians from Canada raiding the farms and driving off livestock. The real last frontier. If you have seen the movie “A River Runs Through it”, you might have some idea of what things were like in those days.
You may also have heard of the Methodist “Circuit Riders”. These were some hardy preachers who roamed the West, utilizing whatever conveyance was available. Armed with not much but a Bible, they ministered to all those poor lost souls. Sometimes the meetinghouse was a Church, but more often a school, or even a saloon was called into service.
Anyhow, my dad was the last of this breed. Utilizing a car in the summer, a horse and sleigh in the winter, and riding a horse in spring and fall (The gumbo in those seasons w
as so thick that nothing else could get through), he made the rounds of cow towns and mining camps, spreading the word of God throughout his territory. He had a string of churches, but if the occasion demanded, he would stride into a Saloon, announce that the bar was closed, set up shop and preach to the sinners. (The piano player, if there was one, sometimes even knew a hymn or two,)Incidentally, while traveling through Montana about eighty years later, on a rainy spring day, we hit one of those gumbo back roads, and could barely get through it, even though our SUV had mud and snow tires, and was in four wheel drive, low range.
After about a dozen years, things were getting slightly more civilized, but there was still a shortage of eligible women. So my dad shopped mail order, found a Southern Belle, enticed her to Montana and married her. And in 1932, I came along.
BROTHER VANSpeaking of Circuit Riders, now is as good a time as any to spin a tale about one of them who preceded my dad in Montana, by a couple of years.
His name was Rev. William Wesley Van Orsdel, but everybody in the territory knew him as Brother Van.
Now Brother Van preferred to make his rounds on a horse, eschewing any mechanical contraption such as a buggy or the newfangled automobile. He also spent quite a bit of his time in Radersburg, a wide open mining town in the foothills of the Rockies, near Helena.
The church was right next door to the largest and baddest saloon in town, so it was natural for Brother Van to tie his horse to the saloon’s hitch rail, while he went about his business at the church and elsewhere.
Well, the Montana sun can get kind of hot, and the saloonkeeper, being an ornery ol’ cuss, decided that Brother Van was abusing the horse, and lodged a formal complaint with the Town Marshal, alleging cruelty to animals,
So the Marshal had no choice but to arrest Brother Van, and eventually the case went to court. The whole town turned out for the trial, and after hearing all the testimony, with Brother Van acting in his own defense, the Judge made his ruling. He acquitted Brother Van, as had been expected, but he sentenced the saloonkeeper to attend church services once a month for the rest of his life.
Frontier justice, you bet!!!
My dad had a "Circuit" in the mid 1930's which included Radersburg, which was still a pretty wild place, and I accompanied him there a few times. When Pat and I visited the place again, in the 1980's, it was a true ghost town. My mother, when told of this excursion, inquired if we had met anyone I knew.
MONTANA HOMESTEAD
But back to my story.
When I was six years old, my dad’s “circuit” was six churches, so we moved to a centrally located small town called Chester. The house we moved into was considered “modern” because it had a light bulb on a cord dangling in the middle of each room. There was also a real sink in the kitchen, with a cold water tap. The water though was undrinkable, with potable water being delivered periodically in ten gallon milk cans. Hot water was provided by a reservoir in the wood stove. I can’t recall what we did for hot water when we retired the stove, but I think that it was a contraption called a sidearm heater. There was a kerosene heater in the living room, which, sort of, provided heat for the whole house. (This was an improvement over our previous home, where the heat was so inadequate that in winter, up to two inches of ice would form on the inside of the outside walls.) For baths, there was a tin tub hauled into the kitchen on Saturday nights, where everyone took his or her turn. An outhouse handled sanitation requirements. This was a twin hole affair stocked with last years Sears catalog. This book served a dual purpose as both reading and wiping material. In the winter, a lifeline was rigged from the house to the outhouse, so one would not get lost in the blizzards. At 40 below, you better believe that one did their “business” quickly. It was one mile to school, but after 40 below zero, they closed the school, so one did not have to walk the mile in that cold.I remember the time my father brought home a wind up phonograph and a big box of records that he had obtained for five dollars. Another five dollar purchase, which pleased my mother, was a used electric range. This banished the old wood range to the garage, where it was used in the winter to heat the garage up to zero so the car would start. This sure beat the previous system of draining the oil out of the engine in the evening, and keeping it (the oil) warm in a container behind the stove all night. One other purchase, however, didn’t work out so well. One day my dad brought home a small heating stove which he had bought somewhere for a couple of dollars. He hooked it up in the kitchen, and since it was full of paper and miscellaneous trash, he just lit that stuff off rather than cleaning it out. About two minutes later there came a string of explosions louder than firecrackers, and everyone ducked for cover. Seems that along with the trash in the stove was a box of 30.30 shells, which were set off by the fire. Fortunately no one was hurt, but my mother’s nerves were shot for several days.
THE 1939 CHEVROLETMy folk’s idea of a vacation when I was a little guy was to load the kids in the old car, (a 1932 Chevrolet) and either go camping, visit relatives, or both. My mother also insisted on an obligatory visit to any state capital on or close to the projected route. As I said, we usually camped or stayed with relatives, but when we did utilize the occasional fifty cents per night “tourist cabin”, my mother required that everyone sit in the car, until she had washed the whole place down with Lysol. These trips were generally extremely boring, but one stands out in my memory as having had some interesting action.
This was the summer of 1939, and we headed for the Pacific Northwest for camping, relatives, and some kind of religious seminar at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Incidentally, instead of saying in a hotel or one of the college dorms like normal people, my dad insisted in camping out in the woods behind the college, using one of the dorm’s facilities for showers, calls of nature, etc. We also had pulled along with us a large utility trailer, loaded to the gunnels with camping equipment and about 1000 Mason jars. So while my dad got educated, or whatever they do at seminars, my mother scoured the surrounding countryside for produce, then canned it up, in the Mason jars, using a Coleman stove on the tailgate of the trailer.
Somehow, in Tacoma, my dad got mixed up with a car salesman, and we became the proud owners of a brand new 1939 Chevrolet. The price was $835, and I believe my dad borrowed on his life insurance to raise the money. Anyway, the next Saturday we went to the beach, and not being familiar with beach driving, my dad managed to get the car irretrievably stuck. With the tide coming in. A panic call for a wrecker retrieved the situation, and the car, in the nick of time, and nothing was too badly damaged except my mother’s nerves.
A couple of days later we were headed up a winding one lane dirt road to a logging camp in the Oregon Coast Range. This camp was named Valsetz, and my Uncle Metz was a meat cutter there. My dad was no stranger to mountain dirt roads, as we had many of them in Montana, and in driving them he only had two speeds, wide open and stopped. When he came to a blind corner, rather than slow down, he would lean on the horn and press on. Apparently there was a bit more traffic in Oregon than in Montana, and the new Chevy had more power (and more speed) than the old ’32, so you can imagine what happened. He wheeled around a blind corner and head on into another car. So the new car finished the trip behind a wrecker, and my mother really freaked out.
As a sidelight, many years later when I was running a construction job in the West Indies, I signed on a drifter who said that he was from Valsetz. He was really surprised when he found that I knew where the place was.
WARTIME OREGON
After ten years in Montana, the Southern Belle (my mother) was tiring of the frontier life. In fact, things finally got to the point where dad quit the ministry, and we all headed west into the sunset.
We landed on a small farm near St. Helens Oregon, just up the Columbia River from Astoria. My sister and I were promptly enrolled in the nearby one room grade school, while my dad eked out a living peddling Fuller Brushes and Watkins patent medicines to the farm ladies in the region.
I learned a lot in that school, most of it non academic. Things that particularly stick in my mind are the times the teacher would lock herself in the girls outhouse to avoid the advances of the eighth grade boys, and how we used to hide for hours in a hollowed out woodpile while the teacher frantically searched for us.
Then came December 7, 1941, and the world turned inside out. For some time after Pearl Harbor, Japanese I class submarines roamed freely up and down the Pacific coast, torpedoing ships at the mouth of the Columbia, taking on the coast defense fort at Fort Stevens near Astoria, and generally raising havoc. Some of them even carried and flew off airplanes, which certainly added to the confusion. Everyone was sure that the Japanese would be landing on the beaches any day, and reacted accordingly.
Note:
If you think that the foregoing is an exaggeration, your attention is directed to any definitive history of the Pacific War, or a book such as “Thousand Mile War” which spells this stuff out in some detail. Incidentally, almost forty years later, I had the pleasure of a long lunch in Tokyo with two Japanese naval officers who had been Captains of these I class subs. They had been engaged in this activity off the US Pacific coast, and related their experiences in some detail.
Imagine the impact of all this on a nine year old boy. Soldiers with machine guns guarding road junctions and major installations. Aircraft spotters on most every hillside, and Coast Watchers peering intently out to sea. Airplanes zooming overhead, Navy ships on the Columbia, and military traffic on the major roads. Not to mention air raid drills, blackouts, food rationing, and other such civil defense measures.
It was really more exciting than scary, with the older folks being considerably more worried than the kids.
Eventually the panic wore off somewhat, and everyone settled down to a wartime existence. Those of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and packed off to concentration camps, and all the men under forty were either drafted or joined the military. Everything from gasoline to food was rationed, and it was impossible to procure anything made of rubber or metal. The general population was continually reminded that there was a war on, by Bond drives, scrap metal drives, patriotic rallies and an unremitting stream of propaganda over the radio and in print media. Thankfully, television was still in the future.
There was though, a bright side. Due to the shortage of manpower, my dad (who had already been in one war) landed a laborers job at the local paperboard mill, at a very decent wage, and my mother got in an occasional few days of substitute teaching.
ADVENTURES IN PROSSER
In the midst of this, my dad kept feelers out for a permanent job with the Methodist Church. This finally paid off, and he landed a decent appointment at Prosser, Washington, So we loaded our belongings in an old truck and headed for a new adventure, a couple of hundred miles eastProsser turned out to be quite a place, and I settled down to a pretty interesting life. The Superintendent of School’s kid, Billy, (who turned out to be gay), the prosecuting attorney’s kid and myself, who were all the same age, formed an alliance and really started to beat up the town. What one didn’t think of, the others did, and we were all ready to try anything. Some of which chronicled in the following anticdotes.
A CAMPOUT IN THE PARK
My first real independent travel was with my good buddy and best friend Billy, when we were twelve years old. But let me tell you the whole tale.
As I said, Billy and I were twelve, and we really wanted to go to the Portland Rose Festival. Now Portland was 200 miles away, but as far as accessibility for 12 year olds, it might as well have been on the other side of the moon. We considered, tested, and discarded several proposed means of transportation, including bicycling, and riding the rails. (Also known as hopping a freight) While exploring this latter mode of transportation, we happened upon some bums in the local hobo jungle, and they talked us out of it. We finally settled on hitchhiking, and after a couple of test runs around the valley verified that this was a cheap and relatively reliable form of transportation. As for lodging in Portland, I knew of a city park relatively close to downtown, which had some undeveloped acreage, and we figured we could camp there.
So we each told our folks that we were going camping in some hills about five miles from town and would buy our food at a nearby store. This set up the cover story and got us a few bucks for a grubstake. Finally the big day arrived, and we packed our essential camping gear in a big box, stashed the balance of the stuff in my basement darkroom, (Where adults never went), put the box on a bus for Portland, and hopped the same bus to the next town. We then started hitch hiking and made our way to Portland in record time, and without incident. Upon inquiring at the Portland bus station, however, we found that our box would not arrive till the next day. We worked this problem handily though, by spending the first night in an all night theatre. Next day, we took in the Rose Festival parade, retrieved our box from the bus depot, and hopped a streetcar for the park. At the park, we found an almost impenetrable thicket, hacked out a space for our camp, and set up. Actually snug as two bugs in a rug.
After three days of seeing the sights of Portland, we broke camp, put our box on the bus, and hitch hiked back home. We did get stuck though in the little town of Goldendale, and had to sleep in a building entryway all night. Anyway, we arrived in our hometown the next day, retrieved our box, dug out our camping stuff, and made our appearance, with no one the wiser. Our buddies were really impressed, as we had taken the precaution of obtaining dated sales slips from stores in Portland, so that we could prove that we had actually been there.
It’s hard to believe, two twelve year old kids wandering around a big city, at all hours of the day and night, but we pulled it off. Sure couldn’t happen in this day and age.
A couple of years later, 1947 I believe, Billy and I upgraded, taking a train (as a passenger) to Portland and staying in a real hotel.
KID ENTREPRENEURS
A kid has to have some money, so Billy and I, after a couple of abortive get rich schemes, managed to wangle the franchise for the Spokane newspaper, for the whole town, including newsstand sales. In this operation we acted as independent contractors, buying the papers from the company and selling them to the townsfolk. We recruited kids to help with the actual delivery, with ourselves generally concentrating on sales and collections, and the money just rolled in. We were clearing $60 to 70 per month each. I kept this up till I was 14, when I graduated into a job at the local Hudson car dealer, learning the automobile business from the ground up.
One interesting item about the Hudson dealer. This was 1946, and new cars were in short supply. Also Hudson did not offer a convertible in 1946. The boss wanted a convertible, so we took a brand new 1946 Hudson Commodore Eight, removed the body (from the firewall back,) and bolted on a 1942 Hudson convertible body. We then transferred all the 1946 stuff, like seats, dash etc, to the 1942 body, and presto, a 1946 Hudson convertible. The boss was really proud of this machine, and drove it all over Eastern Washington.
ONE HOUR PHOTOAnother of our get rich schemes didn’t do too badly. Construction was to begin on McNary dam on the Columbia, about 35 miles from our house, and there was to be a great ground breaking ceremony. Billy and I were reasonably competent photographers, for 13 year olds, so we decided to attend the ceremony, shoot pictures, quickly process them, and then peddle them to the onlookers. A kind of early day one hour photo. Some experiments in my darkroom actually proved the technical feasibility of this approach. We could develop the film and make prints in a little over an hour, but what would we do for a lab? We solved that problem by enlisting a 14 year old friend, Les, who knew how to drive, sort of, and although Les didn’t have a driver’s license, he did have a relative with a Model A pickup We borrowed the pickup, scrounged two old refrigerator cartons, which we built into a darkroom on the back of the truck, and then modified all our equipment to run on six volts. Further testing proved that we could actually process pictures with this improbable setup, so we were set to go. Early morning on the big day, after giving our parents some story about going camping, we took off in the truck, parked in a good location, and wormed our way in with the press photogs. I think that they gave us a break because we were kids, and they thought that we were harmless. Janis Page, the movie star, was the prime attraction and we had front row seats. She arrived in a helicopter, the first one that we had ever seen. Anyhow, we got some great pictures of Miss Page, the helicopter, and the officials turning over the first spade full of dirt. We then repaired to the darkroom, developed the film, whipped out the prints, and peddled them to the crowd for 25 cents each. I don’t recall how much we cleared, but it was definitely worth our while.
Incidentally, while cleaning out some files in the summer of 2004, I actually found the old black and white negatives with Miss Page’s image. The pics accompanying this story, are photoshopped images of those old negs.
This photography stuff actually proved useful in many ways. For example, at summer church camp we would set up a darkroom and invite the girls in to see what would develop. The same line also sometimes worked in Junior Hi. And photography also stood me in good stead when I joined the Air Force, but that is getting ahead of the story.
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
My first venture was designing and building a homemade electric bicycle. I found a junk bicycle, scrounged a Studebaker starter and an old battery, and then assembled the whole shebang. I got it out on the sidewalk, mounted up, hit the throttle, and away I zoomed. BACKWARD!!! Oh well, can’t win ‘em all. Lucky there was no audience for that one.
Another experiment, which didn’t go much better, was a primitive two way radio between my house and Billy’s. This consisted of the same car battery hooked to a telegraph key and thence to a Model T coil. The high tension output from the coil was routed to a spark gap on an antenna about 20 feet above the house roof.
So, you hooked up the battery and tapped out the message in Morse with the telegraph key. The only problem was that the thing was wide band, and I mean really wide band. When we were transmitting, it knocked out radio reception in the whole town.
Twenty five years later I guess my skills had improved somewhat. I ran a small organization, which developed the first computer installation in a police car. We called it a Mobile Digital Terminal or MDT, a name that remains in use to this day. I designed the computer/police radio interface myself, (similar to today’s modems) and it worked.
CAMPINGImmediately south of town was a range of small mountains, about 2000 feet high, which were colloquially referred to as “the hill”. When not up to something else, and particularly in the summer, we would range the "hill" with dog and gun, hunting rabbits and generally enjoying ourselves. (Inexplicably, my mother had given me a .22 for my twelfth birthday.) At one time we built a “camp” in a secluded valley about two miles from town, and spent many enjoyable afternoons and nights in this hideaway. Only problem was, after it got dark the coyotes started their eerie howl, which invariably got the dog’s attention. The dogs were smart enough not to get mixed up with coyotes, and deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, they would head back for town on a dead run. Often upon investigating in the morning, we would find the place full of coyote tracks. Those curious animals had been checking us out as we slept.
SUMMER CAMP
As a kid, two things we always looked forward to in summer were Boy Scout camp and Church Camp. Scout Camp was in a small community in the Cascade Mountains, where Supreme Court Justice William Douglas actually lived. It was two weeks of sheer fun. Hiking, woodcraft, hijinks of every sort, and getting to know other boys from all over Eastern Washington.(This was before the high cost of liability insurance made it necessary for Scouts to go to camp with their own troop, with their own Scoutmaster being responsible.)
Church Camp was a bit different, although in a facility similar to, and only a few miles from the Scout Camp. First off, it was coed, and the discipline was substantially more relaxed. Also, my dad was the Camp Manager, so we could be in residence there for the entire time that the camp operated, not just a week. My friend Billy and I were also the official camp photographers, and were always running around snapping pictures, half the time with no film in the camera. Then we would invite the girls into the darkroom, to see what developed. In our spare time we wired our tent for electricity, making a surreptitious tap off the wheezing old camp generator. Between those activities, other hi jinks, and hiking around the nearby mountains, we would always manage to spend an enjoyable month. (Between Scout and church camps, in those years, I managed to climb every 9000 to 10,000 foot mountain in the vicinity of Chinook Pass.)
OLD CARS
I could go on and on about Prosser, but you get the idea. Anyway, after five years, my dad moved on to greener pastures, literally. A dairy farming hamlet called Allen, in the Skagit valley.
Once settled in, I started getting interested in cars. My first car was a 1922 Dodge Brothers touring car, which had kind of been converted to a pickup. (Dodge Brothers was the name of the company, before it became part of Chrysler.) I bought it for $2.50, then had to dig it out of a mass of raspberry bushes, where it had resided for at least ten years. (Interestingly enough, my dad’s first car had been a 1923 Dodge coupe, one year newer than mine). Getting that car to run, though, was a real challenge. My dad had mentioned many times in his sermons how he had fixed his Dodge with ingenuity and baling wire, but he turned out not to be too much help in the real world. I finally found an old blacksmith who remembered these cars, and between us we coaxed it back to life. Those of you who are car buffs might be interested in some of this cars unique features. Like a twelve volt electrical system, a combination starter/generator which was chain drive to the engine, a backward pattern on the gearshift, a multiple disc clutch, and external band brakes, on the rear wheels only.
Over the next couple of years I traded up to 1929 through 1932 Chevy’s, and a 1932 Rockne. (A kind of a Studebaker.) It finally got to the point where there were so many old cars out back that the place looked like a wrecking yard, and the Church Board of Directors told my dad in no uncertain terms to clean it up. So I got rid of all the iron and became the proud owner of a slightly modified 1936 Ford. This was my first (but not my last) experience with a hot car, and this one would actually outrun the ancient paddy wagons driven by the State Patrol. The County Mounties though, had Hudson straight eights, which would really go, and the State cops finally got smart and switched to Olds 88 V8s, and supercharged Frazier Manhattans.
AND OUT INTO THE WORLD
I the meantime, by taking extra courses, I managed to get through high school in three years and graduated in 1949 at the ripe old age of 16. At this point I took a look at my options and made the decision to leave home. This wasn’t as tough a call as it sounds, because as you can see from the above adventures, I had been pretty much on my own since I was twelve. Anyway, I stowed my excess gear here and there, upgraded my transport from the 1936 Ford to a 1938 Pontiac, enrolled at College of Puget Sound for the fall term, headed to Eastern Washington to earn some money as an itinerant farm worker, and never looked back.
NOTE: The images accompanying this story are 60 to 80 years old, and were dug out of various archives, so the quality may leave something to be desired. A good number of these were taken, developed, and printed by me when I was 12-14 years old, so the quality may not be professional. Some prints were not available so the images were Photoshoped from the original, and somewhat deteriorated negatives.
