Living Room: Cleaning and Mom

Cleaning was kind of a perpetual event especially in the living room. It wasn’t that we just had to pick up on a daily basis but in addition there was the frequent dusting and making sure that the house was in order, the house really meant the living room because the living room was the first impression that people had when they entered the house. Mother always believed that if you spent good money, you got what you paid for and so with appliances she always wanted to buy the very best that we could afford. Then, as cognitive dissonance would have it, she would defend that purchase to the bitter end, even if the appliance was a lemon. For example, when she got a new vacuum cleaner she insisted on an Electrolux because it was the best vacuum cleaner made, not the cheapest but the best. This decision caused quite a row on the home front because it was, to our family, a huge expense, but mother insisted and when she insisted, Daddy found a way to figure it out and get her what she wanted because, if he didn’t he would pay in other ways. So we got the Electrolux and we used it and as was usually true, it was a work horse that never let us down. That machine must have lasted at least thirty years because it was the same vacuum that they had until Daddy retired and it was one that took a lot of abuse, especially from the kids in the family.
One of the things that I liked best about it was that my favorite cat, a long haired black beauty named Sam loved to have his tummy vacuumed. Whenever he would hear me pull out the appliance, he’d come running into the living room and throw himself on the floor so that I could give him a good vacuuming. I always thought it was strange that he didn’t mind the noise and he loved the results. He always looked beautifully groomed and that’s not easy for a long-haired feline. I never saw this with any other cat until our old boy Bandit lost his hearing when he was around 17 years old and then he didn’t run and hide from the vacuum any more, he’s let me give him a good old suctioning. That, of course, was because he couldn’t hear a blessed thing and so the noise didn’t scare him.
The windows in this room were Mom's nemesis. The house did not have a foundation and Longview WAS in Washington State, not exactly the driest climate in the nation. These windows had small panes and were wooden framed, so they sweat a lot. All of us hated cleaning the windows, the bottom pane was large and not so difficult to clean but the top of the window was separated into six small panes and the work was always painstaking and monotonous. There was a constant mildew problem in the house and Mother fought it with a vengeance. But, these windows were a constant reminder that she was defeated.

Bev, Mom & Me

1948

The One thing that you could depend on when I was growing up is that when we were expecting company Mother would spend at least two days tearing the house apart making sure that every tiny place in the house was spotless. This tendency grew exponentially worse after the boys left home and joined the service. First they were off to boot camp for what seemed like forever and then they would start coming home on leave. As soon as they that they would be coming home for a visit Mom started to go nuts preparing their special foods, cleaning house and making sure that everything was absolutely shipshape (or at least shipshape for Arlen since he was in the Navy, it was probably spit and polished for Larry and Bob who were in the Marines!) If, per chance, they were sent overseas then the cleaning frenzy got worse because they were gone for a longer time and the expectations for their home coming was enlarged. As the cliche' goes, it's always darkest before the dawn, and this was certainly the truth when in came to the cleaning frenzies; the house always looked much worse mid-cleaning than it did at any other time pre OR post cleaning. The vacuum temporarily took up permanent location in the middle of the living room, cleaning rags laid helter-skelter throughout the house, the sink was constantly full of hot soapy water. Mother would race from room to room in a nasty old house dress with a bandana around her head fussing and shouting orders to whoever might be within hearing distance (probaly including anyone within 100 feet of the property line).
When Bobby left home permanently he joined the Marines and one of his longest times away from Longview was when he was stationed in Hawaii. We all thought it sounded really romantic to be in the Islands and we were sure he was having an incredible time. There was great concern when he was hurt (I think it was a broken clavicle) while playing football for the Marines. He was not one to write home frequently like Arlen or Larry. I think Arlen wrote every week and Larry though less often, at regular intervals, but Bobby would never pick up a pen if he could avoid it. I can remember that Mother would get exasperated with him and then contact his commanding officer and then it would hit the fan! Bobby would be beyond angry with her, but it was the perfect plan because she would start getting letters fast and furious. The first time he came home from Hawaii (I must have been about 11 or 12 years old) he wrote and said that he thought he’d be home sometime around a particular date, I have no memory of what the date might have been but I do know that it was during the late Spring or early Summer. Mother took this to mean that it was exactly that date and so a day or so beforehand she started her race for the cure, cleaning and moping and waxing and fussing. Everyone of us was pulled into duty, we rubbed and scrubbed and made every place shine like the top of the Chrysler Building. I remember thinking to myself that she didn’t seem to like him too much when he was home, why all the fuss now that he’s gone? So the last day prior to his arrival I heard Mom and Dad talking about not really knowing which day he was arriving, and it gave me an idea. Now was the time when I could fix Mom for good. So as she was mopping the kitchen floor for the third time I stood up, looked out the opened front door and yelled in a delighted voice, “Bobby! Bobby! We’ve been waiting for you!!” At this point Mother let out a terrific cry of despair. She knew that she and the house were a disaster area and that she couldn’t do a thing about it. Of course Bobby was nowhere in sight, I was just pulling her leg. But, when I rolled on the floor in laughing fits, she didn’t think it was anywhere near as funny as I did. To say the least, she was none too happy with me. I’m not sure that we ever had the same sense of humor, but I still look back at it with a twinkle in my eye, because I got her good that time.


Bobby 1966

The Living Room

The downstairs of the house consisted of a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a large back porch. The living room seemed quite large to me. The majority of my preteen/teenage years the room held a couch, Mom's chair, Dad's rocker/recliner, the piano, and the television set. The floor was a dark brown tile that was made of a composite material. Mother would keep it dusted, and we knew someone special was about to arrive when it got a new layer of wax. The room faced South and you entered it from the front porch, the kitchen or the hall. This was the room that was most “lived in” and whenever we had guests, this was the room where we entertained. Most every night we watched television in the living room. This is also where we practiced the piano and sang along to old songs with mother. The living room didn’t always have this appearance. Before I was born and when I was very young a lot of one corner of the room was taken up with a large, dark behemoth of an oil heater. I hardly remember it, but the little I recall it was enormous and blazing hot. This was eventually replaced with baseboard electric heating which was a huge relief to everyone in the family since it gave us consistent warmth and less danger of getting burned.

Beverly & I in the living -room

Christmas 1958

Entering the House

Beverly & I 1955ish

The front door opened from the porch into the living room. It was the one door in the whole house that was built from some kind of solid, heavy wood. It was dark and had a large metal handle that was extremely difficult to open for the youngest one in the household (that would be me). When I finally grew old enough to have a key of my own I seldom, if ever, used the one to the front door; I much preferred going to the back door, even if the way was dark and scary. On dates, however, I could always have the young man leave me at the front door since Mom invariably left it unlocked. The ritual for returning home when I was out after hours as a teen was that I would enter the house (alone through the back door, on a date through the front door), turn off the light on the stove in the kitchen and head for bed. Usually I would stop in the folks bedroom for a brief play-by-play of the evening’s activities. Mother told me much later in life that Daddy thought this ritual was hysterical since there was never any question of what I’d been up to, I always spilled the beans, unlike any of the other kids in our family, my life was an open book. I was always more than willing to tell all…mostly because there wasn’t that much to tell. This ritual was not one that Mom and Dad had concocted, but one that I had devised. Why, because there wasn’t anything to hide…I was a pretty straight shooter, with little to keep secreted away from my parents (no wonder my sister and her friends thought I was a little goody two- shoes!)

Karry, Dad, Mother, Larry & Bev

in front of "the door" 1959

The Front Porch

The front porch was a large wooden structure that was covered by a roof that reached from the upstairs bedroom windows to the front steps. This was held up by four white wooden pillars that I thought were quite stately, but upon adult reflection look kind of puny and only substantial enough to hold to roof up. The front porch held the mail box, the milk box, and a whole lot of bicycles. Whenever someone who had never been to our house before called and asked for directions, Dad would tell them how to get onto Fifteenth Street and then how many blocks to drive away from the lake before they would be on our block. Then he would say, “Just look for the house on the right with all the bikes on the front porch.” This never failed to help the visitors spot the correct house. The front porch was the main portal into the house and a natural place to use as a backdrop for pictures, so we have pleanty of photographs taken from that vantage point.

Karry & Bev

Circa 1950

One of my favorite pictures of the five kids

Christmas Petticoats

The steps to the front porch were framed by two small bushes that Daddy kept clipped down neat and tidy. One Christmas evening when I was about seven, Beverly and I were the happy receivers of one of the most popular items of the year, Alice Faye petticoats. Alice Faye was a dancer on the Lawrence Welk television show and she always wore these huge petticoats and every little girl just had to have one of those petticoats. The ones we received were nylon on top with rows and rows of netting below. We were so proud of those slips! This Christmas evening had been a long one, but eventually we were sent to bed, and we grudgingly dragged our exhausted bodies up stairs. At the same time Mother was extinguishing the candles that sat atop the television in the front room. For some reason she became distracted (undoubtedly she was yelling at us to be quiet and get the heck in bed, for once and for all) when one of the candlesticks fell over and caught the living room sheers and drapes afire. Mother yelled for Daddy and immediately screamed for us to get out of the house. Naturally, our curiosity was more important than following orders, and we fussed wanting to know what all the screaming was about. Daddy immediately ran to the living room and pulled the drapes down flinging them on the bushes by the front steps while Mother called the fire department. Before too long we could tell from the frantic sound in our parents’ voices that this was no time to ignore orders, and we scurried out the front door. The neighbors were out of their houses and standing across the street to watch the action as they stared in horror at the two little rag-a-muffins in their new Alice Faye’s bouncing down the steps inches from the flaming drapes. Blithely we ran into the arms of our “Grandma” Burr who gave us such a scolding. This was one Christmas that would allow us to stay up later than ever before and one that we would never forget.

The Front Yard

Viewed from the street our house sat back from Fifteenth Street about in the middle of the lot. There was a large green grass lawn that ran from the main street sidewalk to the house bifurcated by a cement walkway. The front porch was surrounded by gardens on either side of the wide set of three stairs to the porch. On the left side of the porch was a rock garden that held various perennials and sedums making a beautiful entrance to the front of the house. On the right side were various bushes, a very large blue hydrangea and a fence that separated the backyard from the front yard. The sidewalk that ran down the length of Fifteenth Street separated the parking strip from the front lawns and held magnificent maple trees that ran the length of the street on both sides. In the fall they would drop their leaves in the street, parking strip and lawn giving the kids in the neighborhood many hours of chores and a lot of fun piling them up and jumping in them. As we grew older, we found them less entertaining and more of a pain in the butt. In the winter they stood as naked sentinels and in spring they would sprout to life spreading seedling whirligigs across the yards. The most beautiful season for these towering giants was summer when they were fully leafed out and would create a magnificent tunnel covering the entire road, and shading and cooling the yards and houses that they protected.

(Above Karry & Beverly

Circa 1949)

Roller-skating Cracks Me Up

One of the few negative results of having these lovely monarchs guarding our homes was the fact that they were so large and therefore their root systems were likewise enormous. The sidewalk displayed this problem quite vividly where huge roots would gradually heave the sidewalk up and crack apart the cement leaving uneven pavement along the length of the street. Although it didn’t disrupt foot traffic except for the occasional trip of the unsteady walker, it played untold havoc on anyone who wanted to roller-skate, and I always wanted to roller-skate. When I was young every kid on the block had a pair of roller-skates and from the time I was very little I wanted a pair more than practically anything else. I thought it looked like so much fun to glide down the street; it looked like you could almost fly. The kids who had them looked like they really enjoyed them. I thought it was fascinating because boys and girls took on completely different personas when they had skates on. The boys would hunch over and race up and down the street pushing each other and seeing who could make the other one fall over, but the girls coasted by as if they were flowing across space not simply perambulating down the street. Naturally, since I was the youngest of the kids on the block, I had to wait the longest to get a pair of skates, but eventually I did. The roller-skates that we all had were not shoe skates like you might see in roller rinks or on television in a roller derby, they were metal shoe plates that had four, inch and a half metal rollers on the bottom. They were held on to our shoes by a heal that fit over the heals on our shoes and the fronts were held on by clasps that attached to the front of our shoes. These clasps had some flexibility so that several kids could share the skates even if they wore different sized shoes. This was accomplished by the use of a skate “key” that tightened or loosened the clasps. Most kids on the block would wear these skate keys on a string around their neck so that they wouldn’t loose them, and so that they could take the skates off if they got themselves in a jam somewhere down the block, away from their own front porch. When I was finally old enough to have my own pair of skates I discovered that being able to roll down the sidewalk was not as easy as I had guessed it might be. I had to find my balance and it wasn’t easy. My sister really helped me by talking me through the first few experimental rolls, but from then on I was on my own. To my surprise, it took a lot of practice and the result of not learning quickly was a lot of nasty falls on extremely hard and rough cement. As a result of the first few tumbles, I decided that I should only roll horizontally across the sidewalk because this sort-cut would allow me time enough to get my sea legs without permanently scarring my knees. I spent several days practicing before I dared to try to first stand up from the front porch steps and then try to roll up and down the smooth, straight sidewalk in our front yard. The biblical quoting, pride goeth before the fall, fits perfectly here, because I did not consider the differences between the nice smooth sidewalk in our front yard and the root-broken cement walkway of the main street. By the end of the first week of skating I boldly thought I was ready to skate up and down Fifteenth Street, and decided to escape the confines of our private sidewalk. Filled with self-esteem and pleased to be flashing through the neighborhood for all to see, I picked up my speed and headed out onto the main drag. The crash was not a pretty one and both knees took time to recover as did my dignity. Eventually, however, I learned to take it easy around the cracks and to leave the speed to the boys of the neighborhood.

Karry 1955ish

More Bits from the Side Yard

The DesJardins and the Gang

The house that was right next door to us on the West side and next to the side yard belonged to the DesJardin’s when I was quite small. They were a family with several children, all older than me and some quite a bit older than I was. They had children who were my brother’s age and the youngest one was Beverly’s age. The girls that I remember were beautiful and somewhat tom boyish, which I admired. The DesJardin kids ran with a pack of other kids in the neighborhood. When My brothers were in grade and high school, they seemed to be the center of the action in the neighborhood. If there was a baseball game, it was in our front yard, if there was trouble to get into, the Kavanaugh boys were right there and if not instigating it, at least participating, though I doubt much went on that they didn’t instigate. By the time the boys had grown up, Beverly and Kathy DesJardin were good friends and kind of ran at the back of the pack trying to keep up with the boys and watching and learning all they could about how the big kids did things. When brother and Larry was 16 years old, Bobby was 13 and Beverly was six the gang was going strong and Beverly, the precocious thing she was, learned fast. At this time I was only three and so I was still under Mother’s strict control. It would take several years before I was able to scuttle about and learn from the big kids, but by that time the boys were well into high school and wanted little to do with some little one following them around. On the other hand Beverly didn’t want me hanging around with her and Kathy either, since I was just the annoying little sister. However, every once in awhile I would be allowed to tag along and learn all sorts of big kid stuff.

The Gang of Kids From the Block

The Little girl in front is a DesJardin

The DesJardins had a woodshed like we did only Daddy turned our tool shed into a workshop by the time I was old enough to really remember very clearly so the woodshed next door was quite intriguing to me. It was a small shed that was filled with wood and the floor was covered with wood chips. It was warm in the cold wet winter and it smelled wonderful with all those woody scents filling the air. The one time I remember being allowed to tag along with Beverly and Kathy and their gang of kids, we went to the DesJardin’s woodshed. They were going to have a “meeting” (whatever that meant, I’d never heard of a meeting before). So everyone gathered together in this tight woody space and someone had a cup as a gavel and started the event saying in hushed voices, “Order in the court, Judge Roy Bean, Wife’s in the bathtub shooting submarines.” The room burst into giggles and I stood there completely be befuddled. I didn’t know what was going on but I guessed that it was something naughty, but I had no clue as to what any of it meant and I probably just wanted to go home. I sure wasn’t going to tell Momma about any of this stuff…it must be really bad. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to grow up any more, if I didn’t understand what the big kids were talking about, I’d just stay home where it was safe and I was pretty sure I understood most of the stuff that was said.

Karry & Her Kitty 1953 Side Yard View

Conservative Christianity Comes to the Neighborhood

The next family to move in stayed for several years. Their last name was Heimbach and they became close friends of my parents. They had two children, a boy and a girl and were generally nice people. I was particularly interested in the kids because this was the first child I’d ever met who had the same first name as me and this Kari was a BOY! It seemed strange that I had never met another Karry nor had I ever met another Kavanaugh (much later in life I would learn that Kavanaugh is a very popular name in Ireland). I really believed that I was unique from the whole rest of the world. I knew other Beverlys and I knew other Bobs and Larrys but no one else had my moniker. To me the new family was perfectly fine, and my folks seemed to like them a lot. I guess I originally thought that this might be a potential baby sitting opportunity for me and that I might earn extra bucks by finding another family that I could wrangle out of a few dollars in exchange for occasional child care. This, of course, never amounted to anything and I soon learned it was because preachers from this church didn’t earn a hill of beans. They were the truly poor, perhaps not in spirit but certainly in currency, but they were lucky because they lived next door to Pete Kavanaugh who was forever hiring people to drive school bus for him. Before every long, Daddy had Mr. Heimbach driving bus for him on a regular basis.
The next thing I learned about this family came from Mrs. Martin the Catholic lady who lived across the alley from us. One day she came over to our house and said that a friend of hers lived right next to the church where Rev. Heimbach preached and that every Saturday morning he would come to the church, open the windows and then begin practicing his Sunday morning sermon. These sermons it seemed were continually becoming more anti-Catholic every week. If this was not the truth, then something very strange was going on. Why would someone who purported to be a friend of the family and who was able to feed his kids better and raise their standard of living because of my Dad, preach bad things about the church that our family attended? But when we looked into it further the truth was that was exactly what he was doing. He would say horrible things about Catholics and then treat my Dad like his best friends. It didn’t take long for the friendship to cool off on the home front, but Daddy continued to keep Heimbach on the job and never said a thing to him about what we had discovered. Daddy didn’t seem to care if the other guy was a two-faced jerk, the preacher needed Dad's help and he kept his job.

Beverly & Karry in Side Yard

The Side Yard

One side of the house had a little sidewalk that connected front with back yards, and the other side was cut off by a six-foot fence separating back and front portions of the house. If you traveled on this path you went under a lovely white rose arbor that held Daddy’s favorite red climbing rose. This was also the means by which our cats accessed the roof and our upstairs bedroom whereby they could secretly enter the house and find a nice warm haven from the cold outdoors. Further on down the walk was a flowerbed next to the house and a lawn that lay between our house and our neighbor’s house. Fences, gardens and lawns were in constant need of attention. Both Mom and Daddy were kept busy with mowing, weeding, repairing, and general maintenance. It wasn't as though we children were without responsibility; we had our chores and were expected to pitch in. I myself would always rather help Dad with an outdoor project than help Mom with household chores (big surprise!) There was one time when I was telling a friend of mine that I’d much rather work outside in the garden with Dad than in the house doing the mundane chores of keeping the home clean. At this Daddy loudly guffawed and I felt embarrassed and in self-defense stated that it was the truth. I never knew if Dad thought I didn’t want to do any work or if he doubted that I liked being outside more than being in the house. But it wasn’t as though we had a choice in the matter, we were expected to do what chores we were assigned, and so I think it was more a laugh at the absurd idea that we had a right to a preference.

The side yard held a small white picket fence separating back yard and garden from the side yard and its garden. The tiny garden area at the end of the yard held a beautiful snowball tree that blossomed every spring. This tree was blamed for every sniffle and sneeze that my mother suffered. She seemed to be terribly allergic to any plant, except her precious fuchsias and the snowball tree was her favorite culprit when it was blooming. Naturally, this was my favorite tree mostly, I think, because it had beautiful big perfectly circular flowers that carried the most incredibly beautiful scent throughout the yard. Eventually, Mom would have her way and the tree would be cut down, although this didn’t seem to abate her “hay fever” for a moment.
The little sidewalk that ran from the back yard to the front yard on the right side of the house separated another garden from the side lawn area. This garden held beautiful orange poppies that had black centers and as they died back towards the end of summer left large peculiar looking seedpods. After these pods dried each year we shook out the seed into the garden beds hoping that we were insuring another year of these lovely plants.

More Cat Stories
The Mouse Gift

The little sidewalk was our only access between the front and back yards. When we were washing or polishing the living room floor this walkway allowed us to access the other end of the house; likewise once the kitchen floor was scrubbed and we were waiting for it to dry, we used this pathway to access the front of the house. I had a cat one time who frequently brought us “gifts” and left them on the back door steps. He did this so frequently that we began to carefully look out the back door before we ventured to tread on one of those steps. Too often one of us would be surprised to spot at the last moment a field mouse, or baby bird’s body lying there as we skipped out the back door. One day, when I was a teenage, after I had finished scrubbing the kitchen floor, the phone rang in the living room. Since the floor was still wet, I madly dashed barefooted from the back door, around the outside of the house to the front door to grab the all-important phone, my lifeline at the time. In my haste I failed to check the back steps, but luckily there were no gifts lying in wait for a misstep. However, as I was running around on the little sidewalk I was going so fast that I was almost to the front door before I thought to myself, “Wow that sure felt funny, I wonder what I just stepped on.” The phone was forgotten and I slowly turned around and retraced my steps down the little sidewalk to a few feet from the entrance to the back yard. There on the sidewalk lay a dead mouse, and not too long dead because the warm furry feeling on the bottom of my foot lingered to remind me that in my haste I had run right over and landed on another “gift” that my feline friend had not quite gotten to the back step. I can still feel the squish under my foot and the surprising delayed reaction I had running over the poor little thing.

Left to right: Bobby Larry with Karry on his shoulders, Arlen withBeverly in front

Circa: 1950

Attack of the Lonely Cat

Daddy was never a defender of cats and sometimes not even close to being friendly with any cats that happened to be around him. To him cats were supposed to be working animals, they had one purpose in life, not as pets but as pest control. He had been raised on a farm and when he was on his family’s farm cats were supposed to keep the farm free of vermin. Cats weren’t supposed to be fed; they were supposed to find their own food, preferably any spare mice that happened on their path. Any of this nonsense of spending hard-earned money on pet food was just a ridiculous waste of funds.

During our summer vacation we would often leave for an extended period, often a couple of weeks or a month, and stay with our Grandparents in Medford or go for an extended stay at the beach. Most of the time Daddy wasn’t able to stay with us the whole time, but would drive us to our destination and stay for the weekend, but then he would head back to Longview and his job. In preparation for these long absences Mom would madly work in the kitchen to prepare meals ahead of time and freeze them so that all Daddy had to do was take one out of the freezer and heat it in the oven for his dinner. I sometimes wonder if he didn’t just chuck them all and go out to dinner with friends. The house must have been very quiet and subdued while we were away, and although it would have been a relief to have some peace and quiet it must also have been somewhat lonely after a bit of time had elapsed. It also must had been kind of a pain in his backside to take care of any pets that we had, especially a cat that was supposed to be self sufficient.On one particularly long summer visit to Medford Daddy left us on Sunday morning and headed home for a week of work in Longview. Now this was not a quick trip up the Interstate, it was a long tortuous journey that took at least six hours, so it was not taken on without some forethought. This time he was going home for a couple of weeks and would then head back to spend a week of vacation with us in Medford and then we’d all take the final grindingly boring drive back to Longview. We all looked forward to the day when he’d arrive back in Medford with news from the home front and any mail that might have been of some importance. It was always better when he arrived because we seemed to be whole again, complete when we were all together. When Daddy arrived this time we were all stunned to see that one arm was quite damaged with several large cicatrixes covering the wounds down the length of his left arm. The story was that when he arrived home from his long car trip a fortnight ago he was in no mood to greet the cat or pay any attention to him, he was tired and was headed for the back door and bed as soon as possible. As he headed down the side-yard to the back door, the cat greeted him and he ignored the cat, per usual. However, the cat had decided that, after being left alone for several days, he was not putting up with being ignored. It was his time to have some attention, some petting and some food. So, rather than let Daddy just walk on by without so much as a “Howdy,” he was going to get some attention. A scuttle around his legs led to a shooing away, which only encouraged the animal to show a bit more aggression by climbing his leg and flinging himself into Dads arms. It was like oil and water, to say the least and the result was that Dad was the worse for the wear. Winner, cat; looser, Daddy. More surprising than anything was that the cat survived the attack, there was never any doubt that Daddy would survive…he was a survivor if nothing else. But in the end, I think Dad found a new kind of respect for the cat because they seemed to form some kind of a contract from the event. Daddy fed him and gave him the little attention that he needed and when we all returned home the two of them carried out a certain unique détente throughout the remainder of the cat’s life.

L to R: Arlen, Bob, Beverly in wagon, and Larry

Circa 1947

Back Yard: Sleeping Outside & the Lath House

Sleeping Outside

Another entertainment that we enjoyed when we were little was spending the night out doors sleeping under the stars. We didn’t do it every weekend night in the summers but often we were allowed to get out the sleeping bags and bundle together in the backyard. Often we did this when we had friends over to spend the night. It was always somewhat scary because it was dark, and this was always exacerbated by the fact that the older kids would often tell frightful stories of ghouls and goblins and things that go bump in the night. This, of course, would scare the littlest ones (me and my friends) into scooting into the house. The older ones thus given a respite from the boring little brats. As I got older, I learned to stifle my fear, and often my ears, and never show a bit of fear so that I could finally stay outdoors and share the evening under the stars.
Once in a long while Mom would let us have a slumber party where there were a bunch of girls and we could all sleep in the backyard. Often we would hang several white sheets on the clothesline and get one of Daddy’s shop lights (a big reflector with a light bulb in the middle) and set it up on the other side of the sidewalk. In this way one group of kids could put on a shadow play for the other group of kids who were sitting on their sleeping bags and watching the “show”. It was always great fun and we often made it into a guessing game making one group guess what the other group was trying to portray. It usually ended with a pile of girls giggling hysterically until Mom and Daddy were forced to growl at us about making too much noise.

Beverly's Second Birthday 1947

The Lath House

Mother kept fuchsias for many years; this was like a hobby for her. She had many different species and was very proud of her collection She spent many hours working with her plants. She would take cuttings and prune and pot and nurse these flowers every year. One year Daddy built her a lath house in the back yard. It was green and had shelves to hold her potted plants and hooks to hang her baskets from. I think she was quite successful with this hobby, and as I recall she had over a hundred different varieties of fuchsias. We all got in the act in some ways, even if it was only helping to water the plants. This particular kind of plant had to be kept watered daily especially in warm weather. There were large galvanized tubs were dragged out into the middle of the back yard and filled with water. Then we unhooked the hanging baskets and dunked them in to the tub and let them soak for a while as they greedily slurped up the water. The fun part of this chore, of course, was that we got to play in the water and still do a chore! I can remember how difficult it was to hang the saturated pots back up after they had been watered. They weighed much more than they did when they were dry and the dirty water would run down our arms as we stretched to hang the pots on their assigned hooks. By mid-August the sport of watering the fuchisias became a pain and a task that I did not look forward to. I learned to loath the chore and eventually the flower species.

In the winter Mother would have to bury all her fuchsia plants in sawdust so that they wouldn't freeze. There were a few of the hardy variety that could simply be covered in leaves to protect them, but the annuals would be cut back and buried in peatmoss and saw dust, and then in the Spring we would dig them up again. The amount of work she put into this hobby was incredible, but the beauty of her lath house was incredible too. You knew that she really took pride in this endeavor. Our great pleasure was to go out when the blossoms were just about ready to open and pop them. This made a delightful sound and felt wonderful to our little fingers. Naturally, this was not beneficial to the plant and Mom used to blow her stack when she'd go out and find that her prize buds had been prematurely burst and would never be the hoped-for blossoms that she'd worked to develop the whole season. It never entered our heads that we were being destructive, it just felt good. I have looked through all of the old photographs and cannot find one picture of the lath house. I suspect it was torn down by the time I was graduated from high school. I am sure I did not mourn its demise.

After I grew up and became a mother, it became a habit for Jim and the kids to get me a beautiful big fuchsia for Mother’s Day. For years I smiled and hung the lovely plant in a tree or on the end of the carport never saying anything negative but secretly hating the watering ritual that was necessary to keep the darned things alive. Almost every summer I would eventually let the pot die from lack of water, simply because I hated that daily ritual held over from my childhood. Eventually, I told Jim that I didn’t want him to waste another penny on trying to please me with the Mother’s Day gift that I didn’t really appreciate.

Beverly at her 8th grade graduation 1959

The Back Steps

The back yard had a long thin cement walkway that led from the garage to the back porch. The cement walkway ended in two cement steps that led to the door into the house and these steps were the site for many activities. They were the entrance to the house, but only for family and close neighbors who lived across the alley, and they were a kind of quiet escape when inside the house became too raucous for anyone in their right mind.

Beverly and Dad on the Back Steps

Smelt: The Fish Not the Odor

When I was growing up Daddy was the Superintendent of Transportation for the Longview School District. This meant that he was in charge of getting every kid who couldn’t walk to their neighborhood school building . He was also responsible for all of the after-school-activities that required transportation, that meant any kind of movement of children in Kindergarten through high school from sports to music or field trips; any activity that was sponsored by the school district. Because Daddy’s job gave him the opportunity to hire quite a few men in town to drive school buses and help run the garage, he got to know most of the families who lived in Longview and its near environs. Many of the men who worked for Dad were guys who lived out in the country and/or were real sportsmen. This was a blessing during hunting or fishing season because we were often the recipients of any over-flow of game, fish or fowl, that happened to fall into his employees grasp. I however, dreaded the Spring when no matter how hard I prayed, if we left the house for even a short trip to town or a drive out in the country, when we returned there on the front porch would be a big galvanized bucket smiling mercilessly at us as we drove down our street. Mama would clap her hands with glee and squeal, “Oh goody, someone left us a bunch of smelt.” “Smelt, oh God not smelt,” I’d scream to myself. “Anything but smelt!” Smelt were these little six to eight inch long (from tip of shiny head to tip of scaly tail) silver fish and Spring was when they “ran” the rivers. Now, it wasn’t that I didn’t like to eat smelt, which I didn’t, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like the smell of them, which I didn’t. It was simply that once Mom had taught me how to clean them, that was my and only my job. I’d have to get the bucket from the front porch and head to the back steps. I’d sit on the back steps where there was a garden hose real close and I’d get to behead and gut the little suckers. It was not only a disgusting job, it was often very cold and the garden hose gave no life-giving warm water to ease the aching cold from my waterlogged hands. I was taught that the easiest way to clean these little brutes was with a pair of scissors rather than a knife, and that did make the job quicker and less deadly. As I got older I often thought that the knife might put an end to my mother rather than the smelt, but none-the-less Mom survived and the smelt did not. Mother delighted in dredging the little buggers in flour and frying them in grease. It was a delight to the rest of the family but it may have been where I initiated my general dislike for most kinds of fried fish.

Beverly & Karry circa 1952

Hopscotch

The walkway in the backyard was the perfect size for hopscotch. Every year from the time I was quite small until I graduated from high school as soon as it was dry enough my sister Beverly and I would get out the chalk and draw our hopscotch numbers in each square of cement. One block would have the number 1 the next the number 2 the next the number 3. The fourth cement square would be divided into the numbers 4 and 5, then six was in the next square followed by another divided square for 7 and 8. Numbers 9 and 10 were in the last two squares. I never went from the house to the carport or patio or garage without hopping down the sidewalk, and most summer evenings Bev and I spent at least a little time tossing a penny or marker of some kind into the squares and hopping from one to another. It was a simple, game with all kinds of silly rules (don’t step on a line. and you can’t hop in the square where there’s a marker). One of the hardest parts of the game was when you finally got your marker to square 10, then you had to pick it up on your next turn and turn around and drop it over your shoulder into the same square without turning your head around to see where you were dropping it. This movement often took many turns to complete successfully. I can remember rushing out to get something out of the car or vacation trailer, never being in such a hurry that I wouldn’t automatically hopscotch down the walkway and I got to the point that I could practically run and still hop at the same speed. Couldn't do that these days!

The Summer Party

The carport was often used as another covered entertainment spot that we could use as an extension of the patio. If rain threatened then we had two places that people could gather in the backyard to escape the downpour. In the summer between my Junior and Senior year in high school I decided to have a party in the backyard and this would be the first big “girl/boy” party of the group of kids that I ran around with. We were probably a bit retarded in high school, our partying days were mostly left for our early twenties, but when we finally got to it, we made up for it with a vengence.

Nevertheless, when asked Mom agreed with the plan and we set about deciding what we’d serve and who we’d invite. The gang of kids that I ran around with were pretty eclectic, to say the least. Most of them were from the neighborhood, but some were from the other high school (RA Long) and some were friends I knew from Castle Rock and Kelso. This was not going to be a big party, probably no more than a dozen people all together and it was just going to be an excuse to get together before the new school year began. Mom said that we could play records and dance and have refreshments. So we moved the ping-pong table to the carport so that we could dance on the patio and have food and drinks under the carport. I don’t remember what the food consisted of, but I do remember that Mom thought it would be cheaper to have punch instead of soft drinks, so she got the big punch bowl out and filled it with some sickeningly sweet concoction that she thought the kids would like (which really meant that she would like since no one in their right minds would drink the sweet stuff that she enjoyed). The party started in the late afternoon and as the day wore away and evening set in some guys, as guys are wont to do, showed up who were not invited. It wasn’t that we didn’t know them, we did, but we had not invited them and they, as you might expect happened to bring a little hootch along for the ride. As Mom scurried in and out of the house making sure that the food was kept replenished and that everything was in order, I noticed that surreptitious sips were being taken from the bottle of firewater. But as Mom made another dash for the door one of the guys sidled up to the punch bowl lifted his shirt unscrewed the lid from the bottle and tipped the whole thing into the pot. Now, we were in for it. There was no going back; this was going to be a party! I’m sure that my already pale complexion blanched a couple of degrees as I envisioned the coming disaster; plastered kids lying in heaps all over the backyard, raucous shenanigans being carried out in all kinds of dark, dank places, and God forbid, Daddy coming home and the ensuing fiasco. However, this was not to be. Mom came to the rescue as she blithely bounced out the back door and announced for all to hear, “Well, now I think it’s about time I had a taste of that punch.” The crowd jerked to attention, someone scored the paper cups and quickly announced that we were out of cups and that she’d have to go get some more. Oh good, she could be helpful and still have a chance to taste the sticky brew, so she headed back in the house to procure some more cups while the guys swept the punch bowl up promptly dumping the contents in the nearest garden bed. By the time Mom returned to the party, the punch was gone; everyone was sad to say that they had drained the punch but that it had been delicious. In the days following the party I carefully watched the garden and particularly the white trumpet lily that took the brunt of the liquor-laden potion from the party. I was happy to report that the garden survived none-the-worse for the wear, and thanks to my quick moving and quicker still thinking friends I too survived what may well have been my parent’s murderous rage at their moonshine sharing daughter.

Some Pictures of the Back Yard

That have nothing to do with the silly story above

Beverly's First Communion circa 1952

(yes, at one time she did look innocent!)

Arlen, Bobby, Beverly (front left) Larry holding Karry

circa 1950

Scratch the Car

There were many adventures that took place in the cars that sat under the carport and many tales to tell about that little white car. It wasn’t fancy or cute but it cruised town just fine and got me from place to place. Cruising, by the way, was the main occupation of every teenager in Longview when I was a kid. I don’t when, why or even if it went out of fashion, but in the mid-sixties, it was the thing to if you were in your teens and you had any kind of four wheel transportation at all. I am very sure that in the new millennium the term “cruising” has a completely new and different meaning than it had when I was a teenager. Way back then by “cruising” we meant a bunch of kid, didn’t matter what gender usually just the group that you happened to be hanging out with at the time, would pile into a car and drive from one drive-in restaurant to another. I know it sounds completely purposeless, but behind it all was a very important social structure and meaning. The main purpose was to see who was in the other cars driving around town, and the social and economic structure of both local high schools could be discerned by who was driving around with whom. There seemed to be a circuit that everyone drove that was unique to the town you lived in, in our case it was fairly precise. There weren’t that many drive-ins around town but you had to at least hit the main one’s: Captain Yobi’s on 15th in Longview, A & W Root Beer on Commerce, DJ’s, and finally ending up at Captain Yobi’s in Kelso. And then came the real inventive part, once we’d hit all of those places we’d turn around and replicate the same trip over and over again until we either ran out of gas or found something more interesting to do.

One night I was the A&W Drive-In when I was supposed to be at the library studying.I was with my friend Diane and we were waiting to meet up with a guy she was dating. I had told the boy I was dating that I had to go to the library to study for this big test (same as I’d told my folks), when all of the sudden the guy I was dating pulled into the parking lot. I was lucky that we were parked facing the street where cars entered so that I could see him long before he saw me. My quickest response was to throw the car into reverse and head for the alley in back of the Drive-In as fast as I could. This was a great escape plan until I heard (and felt) the passenger door scrape the orange post as I scurried out the back way. I knew that would be the end, I’d have to ‘fess up to the folks and figure out a way to pay for whatever damages I’d caused. Diane and I were both befuddled until we pulled into a well-lit Safeway parking lot and saw that the scrape wasn’t anywhere near as bad as we thought it was, no dent, no major damage. So we slunk home. I dropped her off at her house and drove quietly through the alley and into the carport . Since the car sat with the driver’s side exposed to the world and the passenger side next to the fence, it was easy to just leave it be for the night and wait until daylight to assess the damage and fix what I could prior to any explanation that would have to be presented to my parents. The next morning Mom and Dad went off on some errand or other and I crept out to look at the car. It took a went rag and some detergent to get the orange paint off to where I could finally see that there was no major damage, just one tiny little scratch that could easily be explained away. So I cleaned up the car, and crossed my fingers. It took about a month but eventually Mom came in the house one day and said, “did you see the scratch on the passenger door?” I said I had no idea where it came from and that maybe it had been there for a long time (a month is a long time isn’t it?) and Mom just kind of shrugged and said she hoped Dad wouldn’t see it and get upset. He didn’t to my knowledge because I never heard another word about it. I think those were always the major kinds of lies that I was prone to, the omission rather than the commission kind. Leaving out information about an accident was less of a sin than deliberately causing a catastrophe and then lying about it. Is that denial or what?

The Back Yard

The back of the house was blessed, or cursed depending on who was doing the mowing, with a large lawn area and flower gardens that ringed the property. We had a one-car garage and a woodshed turned tool shed that Dad used to do his tinkering in. Beverly and I used to hide any kitten that happened to "follow" us home from school in this shed. Mother loved the little kittens as much as we did, but she knew that Daddy wasn't a fan of pets and so we had to win him over one way or the other. The best predictor of the kitten's longevity was if they could spend one whole night in the shed without Daddy discovering their presence. Most of the time we would get up the morning after we had secreted our kitten away and rush out to the shed to see if it was waiting for us (most of the time it wasn't), but once in awhile we'd be surprised and then we knew the possibilities had quantifiably increased at least a hundred fold for our little prize. Our next job was to gradually introduce the two warring factors to each other. It was always a matter of setting the introduction time to the exact moment when Daddy was in the mood to please his girls. If this was done properly, success was highly likely.
The Patio
In the Sixties Dad decided that we needed a patio in the back yard, so he worked his tail off planning, pouring cement, and building the cover for it. The patio was attached to the garage and was constantly used. It turned out to be a very nice addition enabling us to spend more time out doors even when it was raining buckets, which it usually was. One year Dad decided that he would build a ping pong table for Beverly and me. I think the idea was that it would be something that would keep us occupied and give us something healthy to do at home, rather than sit around and watch television which he wanted to control. He worked for weeks on the project. We were told that when Dad was in the work shed we were not to look outside or wander into the area. It didn’t take Beverly but a few days to find out what the hell he was doing, but I made her promise not to tell me so that I could be surprised. I think the table was much more time consuming and difficult than he anticipated. It was a really wonderful table that even folded up and had rollers so that it could be put out of the way if it ever became necessary. However we used it for just about every occasion that we could think of. It was a ping-pong table, a dinner table, a craft table and any number of other uses. Dad used to brag that it had over a hundred pieces and I must admit it was a real beauty and lasted for many years giving the whole family much pleasure.

The Carport
The carport was another building project that Daddy took on in the Sixties. This became an important addition by the time that Beverly and I were able (also I had to be willing) to drive.

Carport 1967

Mom’s Driver’s License
By the time that we were in high school Mother had decided that she wanted to go to work and got a job at Montgomery Wards first in the warehouse and then in sales. This meant that she had to get her driver’s license and that meant that Daddy was out looking for a second car. Apparently Daddy knew that Mother had driven when she was a young woman, but didn’t know why she quit driving, and her lips were sealed and nothing would get her to open-up and tell the story of how she either lost her license or decided that driving just wasn’t something she wanted to do. It may seem strange in this day and age, but back in the late fifties and early sixties it was not uncommon for a woman to not drive an automobile at all, and so I didn’t think much about it, I just assumed that she never knew how to drive and that she’d never done it before. However, Daddy was certain that he did not want Mother driving his good car and there was no way that either of the girls would ever be allowed to drive it. In the end, and after several attempts Mother did get her license though Daddy was exceedingly concerned about the ability of the people who gave out driver’s licenses. (He KNEW how she drove!) But nonetheless she had the approval of the local licensing bureau and so there wasn’t much anyone could do. Explaining her driving skills might be easier through one of my all-time favorite examples. Throughout my childhood education I found that once in awhile everyone needs a day off from the grind of school. Sometime one needs just a simple mental health day and other times it was case dependent, for example when a test was scheduled that you just weren’t quite ready for. In none of these events did it mean you got to really sleep in, in every case you had to get up, feign a head, tummy or other anatomical parts that were aching, feverish or just plugged up and beg to stay home from school. Most of the time this didn’t work but every once in awhile you were either a good enough actor or Mother just gave you a break and you were allowed to stay home. Shortly after Mom got her license she relented and let me stay home from high school. I popped back into bed for a couple more zzzs and then headed down stairs, blanket in hand, for a date with the couch and a stint of TV watching. Later that morning Mom said that she was going to go shopping downtown and that I was to stay down and get better. I hadn’t expected this spate of good luck, I not only was home with no school but I was also alone and could expect to be so for a

Karry High School Days (What a Hair Do!)

couple of hours. So I waited a good five to ten minutes, making sure she was on her way, before I drug my cigarettes out of my purse and lit up…life was good. I however, did not go so far as to check out the back door to see that she was safely on her way to spend her money. The fact was, that being the “inventive” driver that she was, she always had trouble getting out of the garage with the “good” car (substitute the adjectives “big” and “Daddy’s” here). The problem was that all of the garages on our block were built parallel to the alley and, what made it worse was that between our neighbor’s garage and ours sat a big burning barrel so it was a matter of backing out carefully and maneuvering around the sides of the garage and the barrel. This, of course usually wasn’t a problem if you took it slow and watched your rearview mirrors…oh, and by the way, there was this little white picket fence between the ally/garage and the back yard. This was not an issue with any driver I had ever met before, it really wasn’t in the way at all; except in this one particular case, then apparently the fence, nasty little bugger that it was, grew legs and unkindly jumped from it’s regular position right into the path of the car! I know, I know, but we called the Pope but he simply didn’t believe that this could be counted as a genuine miracle, narrow-minded cuss. Regardless, I had only taken two puffs when Mother burst through the back door using her high-pitched panic voice. “HELP me, HELP me, Daddy’s going to kill me!” or something to that effect. It took me two seconds to practically swallow the burning butt and try to calm her down enough so that I could understand what had happened. Needless to say, she didn’t even smell or see the cigarette. Her only focus was on what had happened when she had backed the car out of the garage. The horror of the whole situation was that she had driven DADDY’s car and she had hit things with it. To say the least I was sure that Armageddon had arrived and I was more than pleased that I had not caused the cataclysm! When we went out to look at the damage, it was amazing. The burning barrel was practically bent in two, the car sat at a strange angle mid driveway and alley, but harder to understand was that the fence had at least half of the pickets smashed. I didn’t even inspect the car to see if it was damaged. If there was even one scratch on it, and how could there not be, I knew it was the end. I calmed Mother down as much as I could and realized that I had found my existentialist focus on life (what will be, will be); she’d just have to wait and see what Daddy said when he came home for lunch. She may have called him at work, though I don’t remember her having the nerve to do so. Regardless, he did come home for lunch and he was not the tornado that we had expected. He sat down at the kitchen table picked up his sandwich and said, “So how are you going to fix that fence?” That was so his way. When we expected him to be upset or angry, he very seldom ever showed it. His response, especially with Mother was that if she broke it by God she could damn well fix it. And the funny thing was that she was always so relieved that she usually figured out how to fix it. So he took her to the lumber company, had her buy the supplies and told her how to take the broken pickets out and nail the new ones on. She was fortunate to have not snapped any of the posts and so the job was not as damaged as it originally looked, and guess who got to paint the new pickets, yep, you got that right, I guess I really wasn’t as sick as I had let on. One new white picket fence and one Mother who was even less sure of her driving than before.

After this event Daddy decided that it was time to buy a secondhand car for her to use. This gave her a little more independence and was welcomed by my sister and I as we neared driving age. We had several used cars over the years. My favorite was a 1948 baby blue bubble-top Dodge (you can see it's rear end in the picture of us having dinner on the pation, above.) It was a stick and quite an adventure to use when I was learning to drive. By the time I was old enough to drive regularly Beverly had blown the engine and we were into a more mundane white automatic.