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.