The House

Our house was set in the working class district of Longview (531 15th Street to be exact). The city was set up so that housing was available for all levels of workers. The socioeconomic structure of the city was plainly viewed. Every resident in Longview knew where they stood in the pecking order by the address where they lived. As a child we could figure out our economic status without a word from the adult world that surrounded us. My parents’ house was in the working class area, better than some and worse than others, maybe on the cusp of being right in the middle. (Is that possible, the cusp of the middle?)

The house, not originally but by the time I was old enough to remember, was a two-story affair built when most of the original houses were built (around 1923) as a home for the mill workers. It seemed like a huge home to me when I was little. It was a cedar-shingled house that changed colors over the years of our occupancy. For the majority of the time that I can remember it was gray with white trim on the windows. The front of the house had four white, square, wooden pillars on the expansive front porch. This porch was always the directional indicator for anyone looking for our residence. "Just come down the street, it's the one with all the bikes on the front porch."Each house was set back from the front street with a fairly good-sized front lawn, a sidewalk and a parking strip of lawn that supported enormous maple trees. These lovely trees were, much as the town, both a blessing and a curse. In the summer they created a tunnel effect by spreading their leafy arms across the streets. This effect was particularly beautiful and created a cooling effect on warm summer days. They also dripped a sticky substance on the parked cars that they hung over, dropped copious quantities of leaves that we were responsible for raking up, and sent roots out to erupt the sidewalks making walking-and worse yet for the kids, roller skating,-a particularly dangerous activity. I think my love of the arboreal life came from lying on my bed upstairs and staring out of the window into the center of these beautiful trees. They were later to be replaced by little blossoming cherry trees, much less work for the natives and much less beauty as far as I was concerned, but a necessary change after the great storm of 1962, but more about that later.

The Yellow Paint Job

The summer after I moved out of home to Portland Mom decided that she wanted to have the house painted. Her idea was that we would change the house from charcoal gray to yellow with white trim, and that I could come home from Portland and help Dad with the job. Dad thought that was almost as good as his idea, which was that I would do all the painting. I had a few concerns about this project, but not as many as I was to eventually have. The first weekend I had off I took the Greyhound from Portland to Longview and arrived home with expectations that I would have the job at least half done by Sunday evening and I get free food and lodging. The food and lodging were certainly mine to have but the "free" part was not exactly accurate (it seems as though we always pay in one way or another). I came home nonetheless and Mother had a gallon of yellow paint waiting for me. Her thought was that she might not have exactly the color that she wanted, so maybe I should just paint the back part of the house and we could let it dry to see if the color was perfect the next day. Saturday morning was spent with the first can of paint and another trip to the paint store for a lighter color of yellow. Saturday evening was spent painting another large section of the back of the house, and Sunday was spent repainting the first section a lighter yellow yet.

Front of House

The next weekend I was back in Longview again and the days went by similarly with the exception that my week-long vacation holiday was arriving soon with no expectation that Mother was even near getting the color had in mind for the house. After two "lost" weekends, I think she was clearly getting the idea that if she wasn't careful she would loose the only free labor she had and by the third weekend she found the perfect yellow color for her project. Dad and I spent the next week working on the job up but not before I was at my wit’s end and the house wasn’t nearly completed. To Dad’s chagrin he was stuck with finishing thepaint job, and I was extremely happy to go back to my mundane job at the public library in Portland.

Side yard

Move to Longview

By the time I was born the Kavanaughs had lived in our family home for about six years. Both my brother Michael (who died near childbirth) and my sister Beverly were born previous to my arrival, and there were three older brothers who were ten, thirteen and seventeen years old when I popped onto the scene.

You might well ask how the Kavanaugh clan landed in Longview in the first place. Although the story is somewhat convoluted, suffice it to say I’m skipping most of the tale and giving you a cursory look at look at what happened before they became Washingtonians. Mother was raised in Medford, Oregon, and Daddy was originally from North Dakota, but through a whole lot of unusual events they both ended up widowed and living in Medford. Mother had one son, Bobby (about 4 years old), and Daddy had two sons with him, Arlen (about 11 years old) and Larry (about 7 years old). While in Medford they decided to marry, and Daddy packed up his new family and moved to Portland where they tied the knot. He worked in the shipyards and learned the welding trade that he coupled with his car mechanic skills that he had developed in North Dakota. They were living in an apartment that was much too small for them, and Dad was working at Fred Schwary Chevrolet as a mechanic. This was situation was not conducive to a long, happy marriage however.

Pete and Betty Kavanaugh Wedding

May 17, 1942

One day they decided to drive to Cathlamet, Washington to visit with friends (I suspect any excuse to get out of the cramped living quarters was welcome). The three boys rode in the back seat and the adults were in the front. Clearly even the short drives for enjoyment were catastrophically cramped. During the trip Mom and Dad were discussing their living situation when Mother said, “You could get a job in any one of these little towns. You have experience and you’re good at what you do. See, there’s a car dealership. You might be able to get a job there,” (they happen to be driving through Longview at the time). So Daddy thought he’d call her bluff and pulled the car over, got out and went in and asked for a job. When he came back out to the car he said, “OK, so I got a job, now what are we going to do about getting a house?” This was during World War II and the housing situation was difficult everywhere in the U.S. But, as luck would have it, they happened to meet someone who knew someone and they were able to find a house that needed a family on the very same day that Daddy found a job. It seemed like it was meant to be a job and a house and a nice enough little town.

They did end up visiting the relatives in Cathlamet with the news that they would soon be closer neighbors. This was the start of a continued migration from North Dakota to Longview and other Pacific Northwest sites. By the time I was growing up it was not unusual for someone from North Dakota to be knocking on our door wanting to talk to Dad about old times on the farm, and where all of the Diaspora from the old sod were now located.

Introduction

They tell me I was born on February 3, 1948. I, myself, don’t remember the event. Like much of my memory, I cannot separate what I know to be fact from what has been told to me so often that I think I remember. Of the memories that I have written I can only tell you that I either remember them myself, or I have heard the family stories so frequently that I believe them to be true. Longview, Washington, was a town of about 30,000 people 50 miles north of Portland, Oregon, the only fairly large city in the vicinity. Longview was the ideal town, a picture postcard planned community built before its time, the dream of an entrepreneur, Robert A. Long and brought to fruition in the year 1923. Nearly everyone who was born and raised in Longview grew up knowing the story of the birth of their 'city'. However, few people who were born and raised there saw it as the ideal place that it was. Picture the perfect setting of a small town in the 1950s, not in the Midwest but in the Northwest. It has clean streets with working class neighborhoods and schools filled with children from two-parent families with fathers who work in blue-collar jobs and stay-at-home Mothers who take care of the children and have dinner on the table every night at five o’clock on the dot. There is an enchanting lake surrounded by miles of parkland, and a downtown set off of the main drag, isolated and idyllic in its small town beauty. The city center with a central park lit up at Christmas time like a fairyland is surrounded by a majestic hotel, magnificent library, stately post office, and police station. This is the hub of the wheel that the creator of the city, R.A. Long, and his minions of planners fashioned in 1923 out of the hills and valley’s of timberland that nestled at the confluence of the Cowlitz and Columbia Rivers. This is the town that great American novels are written about; where naiveté runs rampant in the streets and little girls grow up to be virgins when they get married and young men go off to war to serve their country. Well, not quite. Like most pictures these are two-dimensional facsimiles of reality, and Longview was just a normal little town with all the things going on that weren't written about in those American Gothic novels. It was the good, the bad, and the ugly, the beautiful, the sublime, and the ridiculous. It was a lovely town blighted by a row of pulp and lumber mills that spewed out the most noxious fumes on its residents, but that also made financial survival possible for the majority of its working class inhabitants. Now, all of us know that the idyllic isn’t really what life is like, but that’s how it was portrayed on television when television began to be a norm in the living rooms of the average American, and pretty much what I remember my home life being like while I was growing up in Longview. It really was the fifties and I really did have a two-parent family where Daddy got up every morning and headed to work at the crack of dawn and Mother stayed home every day, raised the kids and kept the house. And I’m sure that everyone who knew the Kavanaugh clan thought that all was quiet on the western front, but as those of us who grew up under the same roof knew, quiet was not the norm in our family and there, for those who looked very closely and were privy to the ins and outs of the average day, would occasionally be an opportunity to see the initial stages of the crack in the cosmic egg. Here then, for your purview are the stories that I remember about growing up in Longview, Washington.