Sharing History :: From the Compost

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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Sep

Sharing History: Voting Rights for Women

By Kim · Comments (0)

It was only 91 years ago, in 1920, that women were “given” the right to vote. This is how it’s usually worded, but that word “given” bothers me. It was NOT a gift. It was a long-delayed recognition of a right.

91 years ago my paternal grandmother was 28, and my maternal grandmother 17. I personally knew these women! It boggles my mind that one of my grandmothers was not allowed to vote until she was nearly 30. She died when I was a child, so I never got to ask her how she felt about her new right. (Darn.) I don’t know who she voted for in the presidential election of 1920. (Another darn.)

I suspect she may not have voted that year at all. In November 1920 she had 5 children aged 10, 8, 6, 3, and a baby of 8 months. They lived on an Idaho reservation in a shack with no running water. They had no car. The nearest town was Myrtle, Idaho, located on the Clearwater River in Nez Perce County. Myrtle is about 20 miles from anything that could be called a city, Lewiston. Even today it’s about as remote as you can get.

But I like to speculate on who she would have voted for, if she could have got to the polling place. She was a determined woman with strong opinions, and the backbone of her family. (Don’t get me started on her husband, my grandfather. The least said the better.) So I bet she would have voted for Warren G. Harding, who did indeed win the presidency.

Many historians think that the Republican Harding won because the outgoing Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, was deeply unpopular and blamed (somewhat unfairly) for America’s entry into World War I. There was probably no way that a Democrat could have won that election.

Some historians note that Harding did very well with the new constituency, women, often speculating that this was because Harding was handsome and photogenic – thus trivializing the reasons women would vote for him. However, I think it is more likely that many women voted for Harding because as a Senator, Harding had supported and voted in favor of the 19th Amendment “giving” (that word again) women the right to vote.

The moral of this story is – ask your parents, grandparents, or if you’re lucky, great-grandparents, how they contributed or participated in the events of their time. At the very least, you will hear some interesting stories. And you might learn something, too.

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