Sharing History :: From the Compost

Jan

Sharing History: Not a Chip Off the Old Block

By Kim · Comments (1)

When I was 9 we lived on an acre in farm country, although our place wasn’t a farm, we were just surrounded by them. My best friend lived on such a farm right up the grassy rutted track from my backyard blackberry bushes. Her older brother was in 4H and raised sheep and pigs. One day when visiting my friend she took me out to see her brother’s brand new piglets that had just been born to his prize sow. The piglets were adorable; plump and pink with cute little snouts and wiggly ears.

Oh how I wanted one of those piglets – so much cuter than dogs! Well, why not? So I tore off running down the grassy track back to my house, and burst into our kitchen where my father sat peacefully reading the Sunday paper. I shrilled out, as only a 9-year-old can, “Daddy! Can I have a pig? Can I can I? They’re so cute and he said he’d sell me one for only $10, can I have $10 please, Daddy?”

Now most suburban fathers, normal ones that is, would say something like, “No of course you can’t have a pig. Don’t be silly.” But my father was not your average father, or normal either. What he said was, “Well that’s an interesting idea, let’s discuss it.” In the background my mother, standing at the stove, said, “Oh, Armond …” in a warning tone, but my father ignored her. She said “Oh Armond” a lot, whenever he got an idea.

So we discussed it, and my father got out paper and pencil and he helped me figure out how much money it would cost to build a pig pen in our back yard, and what the pig’s food would cost, and the straw, and how much we could expect to sell our pig for, when it was grown, and whether the whole operation would make us a profit. (You can probably tell that my father was a successful businessman.)

I of course could think of nothing but the cute little pink piggy and its wiggly ears. The upshot was that I did indeed borrow the money from my dad (he made me keep an account book), we bought the pig, built a pig pen, and food, and for about a week I was the happiest 9-year-old around.

Until I got tired of slopping the pig every morning before I went to school, and until the pig grew huge, much bigger than me, and mean too. With teeth. And he was fond of making mud in his pen, the mud being made of pig pee and pig poop, with some straw added for texture. I had to wade through this stinky mud whenever I had to put more straw in his pen. The pig also figured out how to get out of its pen, and discovered the neighbors’ gardens, which he raided regularly.

When we sold the pig I was so relieved I didn’t even blanch when I learned that we sold him to a butcher who promptly killed him. The butcher gave the pig’s feet to my mother, who pickled them and kept them in jars in the pantry. I’d often look at those pigs feet and they would remind me to think before I asked for anything.

And to top it all off, since I bought the pig when pork was high, and sold him when it was low, I lost money.

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Jan

Sharing History: Experiencing Life

By Kim · Comments (0)

My father was big on what he called “experiencing life.” He said he wanted his kids to feel at home in a 5-star restaurant or a backwoods cabin. He wanted us to know our own country and our own world, so that we could take our rightful places when we were grown. He wanted us to experience all the juicy interesting bits of life. Therefore our family vacations were always built around something “educational.”

We went camping on the Olympic peninsula and drove though the Indian reservation, where we stopped at a small store and my father engaged the suspicious Native American clerk in a long conversation about his family history, while we kids traded stares with two antagonistic young men, and my mother refused to get out of the car.

We went to Hawaii and visited the active volcano Kilauea and my father threw my brother’s shoe out onto the hot lava so my brother could see it burn up. It convinced all of us that we’d better stay away from lava, and made my mother so nervous she went and waited in the car.

Also in Hawaii, we went on the glass bottom boat tour – my dad, my brother and myself – Mom didn’t go because she was nervous of sharks – this trip was especially memorable because my brother threw up overboard and we got to see the fish making a glorious meal of his vomit – a sight which caused me to throw up too.

We went to an archaeological dig in eastern Washington where we handled old bones and fossils and my father told us stories about their lives of the bones owners – even giving the bones names and making up fantastic, horrible, or funny details of their lives. My mother came on this trip because she wasn’t scared of bones – although she was sure my 5 year old brother would fall into a pit so she drove him crazy by clutching his shirt collar.

One time in the late 1960s we went to New York City and had dinner at the Plaza restaurant and rode in a cab with a huge black Afro’d cabdriver named Innocent Henry who my dad made friends with and convinced him to become our personal chauffeur over the three days of our stay. Innocent Henry even took us to Harlem and showed us the sights – I remember the Apollo Theatre – and we walked down the street, the only white faces on the block. My mother, of course, waited in the car.

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Nov

Sharing History: In the Closet

By Kim · Comments (1)

My father recently died, and my brothers and I cleaned out the house where he’d lived for 45 years. There were many surprises. I would not have called my father a sentimental man – he was a realistic hardheaded businessman who liked to discuss (we won’t call it argue) politics, economics, business – you know, topics for “real men.” Yet in his bedroom closet, way in the back, we found scrapbooks of memories and boxes full of his written musings about life, love, romance, babies, art, religion – what he would have categorized aloud as “for women” and not worthy of serious discussion. He had been stuffing these in his closet for not only the 45 years he’d lived in that house, but some of these musings, letters, clippings, poems, song lyrics, photographs dated back to the 1940s, which he must have moved closet to closet when he changed houses. He did not throw them away.

One of the things I found that surprised me most was a single sheet of paper with song lyrics printed in his crabby hard-to-read handwriting. Now, my dad thought real songs had ended with Bing Crosby, and he was especially scornful of rock and roll, which when I was a teenager he labeled as “the element that is destroying the only country I know and love.” Yet here was this piece of paper that he had saved in his secret stash, with song lyrics from 1986 written by Bob Seger, who I would have swore he’d never heard of, and if he had, would have dismissed as another low life rock musician. Yet here they were:

My hands were steady
My eyes were clear and bright
My walk had purpose
My steps were quick and light
And I held firmly
To what I thought was right
Like a rock.

My father impressed with the words of Bob Seger, amazing. Where had he heard this song? I cannot wrap my mind around him even listening for a minute to a rock and roll song, much less writing down the lyrics.

How little we truly know the people we think we know best.

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Oct

Sharing History: Beget by the CCCs

By Kim · Comments (0)

In 1937 my father was 19 and in common with many adults as well as teens, could not find steady work. He had quit school to work in a casket factory, making “boxes for stiff people” as he put it. Although mostly he worked as a janitor while he learned casket carpentry. But even though just as many people died during the Depression as other times, work in the casket factory was spotty. Sometimes Armond could find work in the nearby sawmills, but competition for those temporary jobs was fierce.

Then in the summer of 1938 the casket factory failed and there was no work at all. Dad had heard of the CCCs, or the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program designed to benefit out-of-work young men and their families by providing jobs working in the national forests – creating structures, making roads, and fighting forest fires. There was such a camp a half-mile away from Darrington, a tiny mountain town in the Cascades.

Although driven to the CCCs by unemployment, Dad was happy to learn that they provided another benefit – the CCC boys were allowed to attend local high schools or take correspondence courses paid for by the government. The CCCs also sent a portion of his earnings back to his mother – $8 a month, which at the time could buy a lot of groceries. Since education (he didn’t want to be a casket carpenter forever) and helping to support his mother were important values to him, Dad joined the CCCs, and moved to Camp Darrington.

Camp Darrington consisted of two barracks and a mess hall, and could house up to 200 men. The boys were under the jurisdiction of the US Forest Service. The country adjacent to the camp was rough and mountainous, accessible with great difficulty, so the primary jobs of the CCC boys was road building and ditch-digging, focusing on the Sauk and Siuattle truck trails. Over 40 miles of road was laid by CCC boys, most of it through solid rock. The work was hard and demanding. But it was also full of spectacular scenery and wildlife that was truly wild. Since most of the CCC boys were from the city, they were often stunned to confront black bears, deer, mountain goats, even grizzlies.

Meanwhile, my mother was 17 and also going to Darrington High School. Mom, in common with all the other Darrington girls, was bowled over by the citified CCC boys. To girls from a tiny hick town in the mountains, miles away from any city, those boys could have come from another planet. They seemed glamorous, sophisticated, and dreamy, to use some 1930s slang.

It took another six years and a world war before they married, but I guess you could say that without the CCCs, I would not be here.

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