Unearthing a life.....

My little brother and me with our parents, Othello, WA, 1936.

As you’ve gathered by now, I lived in Othello in my early years and in Smyrna during my grade school years (and the summers of my high school years).

My dad worked for the Milwaukee Railroad. Between 1938 and 1940, he began to get temporary jobs as a relief section foreman. I assume this was the temporary replacement of regular section foremen when they went on vacation, or when a section was "open" and waiting for the new regular section foreman to be selected.

During this period, we lived so briefly at Smyrna that I don’t even remember it. Perhaps we didn’t actually move there. Maybe Dad "commuted".

I do remember Cle Elum.

We moved there in April of 1939 for a three month "tour of duty" while the regular section foreman, Pete Genetsis (Jen-eet’-sus), traveled to Greece to visit relatives in the "old country". It was Pete’s misfortune that his vacation coincided with Adolph Hitler’s invasion of Greece, and he had a difficult time getting back to the good ol’ U.S. of A. He finally returned in November, which made our stay in Cle Elum seven months rather than three.

We made friends with a family by the name of Johnson who lived nearby. Mr. Johnson worked in the coal mines at Roslyn (site of the TV series Northern Exposure) and one evening we drove up there to pick him up after work. With a clanking roar, the men erupted from the earth riding on a "train" of little ore cars (probably being pulled out of the mine by a cable and winch system). There was so little overhead clearance in the tunnel that the miners were laying down in the cars. And they were black-faced and black-handed.

I still remember the shock of seeing all those sooted-down men emerging from that dark hole in the ground...and I remember being glad that my Dad got to work out in the open air and not in a scary place like that coal mine.

At some point after that, Neil, Norma, and I were playing in the corner of the yard when a black-faced, black-handed man came walking by along the railroad track. I should explain that we had a large-square, woven wire fence and at the corners of the yard there were two-by-fours nailed across the tops of the fence posts for bracing. This is only important as a visual aid to the imagination. The three of us scrambled up the fencing wire and did belly whoppers over the two-by-four brace. Three raucous magpies hangin’ on a rail!

Thinking the man was a coal miner, we began yelling questions at him, primarily repetitions and variations on the theme "Hey! Mister! How come you don’t wash?"

Mom must have heard the commotion we were making because she quickly appeared with a switch in hand and sent us all Ki!Yi!ing into the house with her switch nipping at our butts. Then she told us that the man was not an un-washed coal miner; that he was a negro; and that negroes had black skin and stayed black even when they washed. I can’t speak for my brother and sister, but I thought she was making it up as some unexplainably dumb part of our punishment.

During that summer of 1939, our family and Johnson’s (and multitudes of other "locals") went swimming in the Yakima River a bit southeast of Cle Elum. A railroad trestle crossed the river at this swimming hole and I remember the thrill of watching "older people" climbing up the trestle timbers and cannon-balling into the Yakima. That high in the Cascades the river is very shallow, so I suspect that this diving hole was likely created by the trestle or the trestle’s construction.

A salesman came by the house one day. He was selling hobby-horses for $1 each. Mom bought three. As I recall them, they consisted of a mop-handle-sized stick with a painted silhouette horse head on one end. The reins were a wide, orange, rubber band loop such as might have been cut from an orange innertube - and probably was. These were fine dependable steeds. They never tired before we did.

Dad had a bookcase with wood-framed glass doors. It held his vast collection of Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, as well as Mom’s Nancy Drew books. One day Neil hooked his horse’s rubber reins over the arm of the couch, hauled back on the stick body, and launched his wooden pony across the room. He scored a direct hit through one of the glass windows of Dad’s bookcase. We tried to sell Mom on the idea that the horse had galloped into the window. She wasn’t buying and subsequently scored several of her own direct hits on the seat of Neil’s pants.

It was also at Cle Elum that we acquired our dog Hitchhiker (thereafter known simply as "Hitch"). I remember Dad "unveiling’ the puppy as it lay in a cardboard box on the back porch. It was a mostly white pup with a few scattered black patches. Hitch was Dad’s dog. We played with him once in a while, but he was relatively unobtrusive and spent the hot Smyrna summers sleeping under the house till Dad came home from work. When coyotes howled at night, stupid dogs charged off into the darkness to bark at them. Myth has it that coyotes would jump these stupid dogs and kill them. I never knew anyone to lose a dog to coyotes, but Hitch must have had an instinctive belief in this myth. He would charge to the edge of the circle of illumination thrown by the porch light and do his barking from there. I believe he lived till about 1955 -- three years after I grew up and left Smyrna for a job at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

In May of 1940, Dad was sent to Whittier for two months as a temporary replacement for the foreman, who had bid on and got a job as a relief gang foreman. The fellow didn’t like his new job and returned almost immediately, turning our two month stay at Whittier into two weeks. It seemed much longer to me.

Whittier was about halfway (up) between Cle Elum and the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. A dirt road cut off the highway west of Easton and wandered, maybe a mile, through dense forest to a house that was a duplicate of the one in Smyrna. The remainder of Whittier was one tool shed for the "speeder", one roofed shed over the outdoor hand pump, and one outhouse. I think the section "hand" lived in the upstairs of the foreman’s house.

There were two wonderful things about Whittier.

First there was the pump house, a weathered, moss encrusted, partially un-walled structure built to keep the pump free of the six feet+ of annual winter snow accumulation. The pump was a little thing -- of the type that was usually found indoors. Mom’s Uncle John and Aunt Ruby had one like it mounted in the kitchen counter next to the sink (in the old Evans family farmhouse on the wheat ranch south of Rosalia). A long V-shaped wooden trough led from the Whittier pump and emptied out through a big hole in the back wall of the shed. The pump house was a kid-sized magical place.

Secondly, beyond the pump house was a "swamp". Glossy black water floated a tangle of old logs. Skunk cabbage and water lilies grew abundantly in and around the dark waters. Our favorite pastime was exploring along these logs, stepping or jumping from one to another. I think Mom may not have been aware of what we were doing.

Once Norma (from right beside me) slipped and fell into the water. My memory is that she went under and when she re-surfaced, I had a grip on her and "popped" her right back up on the log. I was six years old -- she would have been three -- so I suppose I could have done that.

One day Dad came home all excited because they’d seen a bear from the Speeder. He loaded the family on the contraption and we went Pop! Pop! Bang! back up the track to a high trestle that crossed a ravine with a stream coursing the bottom. They had seen the bear down along the stream. The critter had not waited for our return. What marks that in my mind is that Dad took the Speeder across the trestle and back. From a seat on the Speeder, that was like being a thousand feet in the air with nothing under you.