Dealing With It -1 Southerly Migration

Only those of us with a low Social Security number will remember going to the Saturday matinee in anticipation of viewing the short thriller that preceded the featured movie.  It was a continuing drama designed to bring us back to spend our dime to find out how the protagonist escaped the terrible fate awaiting him/her at the end of last week's episode. 

But while these episodes are brought to life from that other century,  I will give them a Twenty-first Century TV series format where it was like you were waiting each week to see what mischief Tony Soprano was up to. This will be a series about the family I grew up with.  The series name is, Dealing With It.  There will be seven episodes. Followers of this blog may have no interest in reading about my family so go back to your TV and watch Coronavirus news until July 9 when I'll be back with non-family episodes.

                                                      

                                      Dealing With It-1      Southerly Migration

                                                                                                              

In 1937 my parents, John and Eunice Landers, moved our family from La Grande, Oregon to a six and a half acre farm seven miles west of Grants Pass, Oregon, on the Redwood Highway. Here's how our southerly migration came to pass...

John had been friends for years with Major Karl. Major (his name, not his rank) lived outside Grants Pass, Oregon where he raised egg-laying chickens on a three acre farm.  He was the brother of the wife  of John's older step-brother, Bill Beckwith. Major sold John on the plan to buy a farm and live on the bounty of the land (eat what you can, what you can't eat you can.) Major promised to teach him everything he needed to know about making that work. 

A year and a half before the move John had suffered a serious accident while working as a railroad switch tender for the Union Pacific Railroad.  One night he swung off the engine to throw a switch and his pants leg caught on a hose hook causing him to be swung under the engine and having it run over his right leg. It was, of course, a bloody mass of flesh and bone which the doctors planned to amputate but John ruled that out and so he was sent to St. Vincent Hospital in Portland where he came under the care of one Dr. Dodson. A year later, after multiple surgeries,  John, with his cane, walked out of St. Vincent where Eunice awaited him in their new 1937 Dodge touring car. The railroad had settled his claim for 10,000 Depression-era dollars.

"Eunice," John said, "Let's pack up and move as far away as possible from the Union Pacific Railroad.  Let's go see Major Karl."

                                                         (To be continued)

Crime Pays

I was attending the University of Oregon in 1950 when I received a phone call from my older sister, Virginia, calling from Grants Pass. "Did you have a little problem with the Portland Police last summer?" she asked me. Oh, that.  "As a matter of fact we did have a small misunderstanding, but why do you ask?" She told me she had intercepted a phone call from the Multnomah County Court instructing me to appear before them the following month regarding my arrest for minor in possession of alcoholic beverages last summer.  She gave me the date and the place to appear and said she had not mentioned this call to our mother.  How do you put a dollar value on an older sister?

I was on the down-state football All-Star team that played in the inaugural Shrine All-Star game in 1948 and as a player I received two complimentary passes to all future games. So the next summer I thought it would be fun to attend that year's game and see all my teammates from the year before. I invited a friend from Grants Pass to attend the game with me and we drove to Portland in his car. After the game there was a get together of former players from both teams that my friend couldn't get into, so we agreed to meet at a later time that night.  I fell in with a bunch of guys who had played against us from the Metro All-Stars and one thing led to another and we all thought it would be a grand idea to buy a case of beer and go up above Grant High School and pop some caps. I stressed I had to be back to our meeting place at the appointed hour and away we went.

Do police show up when clueless young boys gather in a neighborhood and drink beer and make noise and pee in people's bushes? Yes they do. I remember this big policeman greeting us and saying, "Well, well, look at this. A bunch of little juvenile delinquents."  Short story: My new friends ratted me out as the beer buyer and I was incarcerated at the 2nd & Pine police station and then released at 2:30 AM.  Missed my ride home.  About $1.50 in my pocket. A little tired and a bit hung over. Time to walk from downtown Portland to where I could start hitch-hiking home to Grants Pass. It's not easy being young and stupid.

Showed up for my appearance to rat out the beer seller. A clerk told me to stop at the desk on the way out to pick up my check.  Check?  Round trip mileage from Grants Pass to Portland. Yowsa! A big wealth infusion for that poor college boy. Crime pays.

Whoop, whoop !

The best Reuben sandwich on the planet Earth is served along with two carrot sticks and a scoop of terrific potato salad plus a slice of dill pickle at the Goose Hollow Inn, in Portland, Oregon. Thank John Elwood "Bud" Clark for that and for making his tavern a beloved institution in the Rose City, right up there with Powell's Books. In 1967 Bud opened his tavern and over the years built a diverse clientele of Portlanders that included doctors, lawyers, mill hands, college students, artists, anarchists, you-name-it.

I became a regular in 1975 and when a movement started as a joke in 1985 to run Bud as a candidate for Mayor of Portland, I signed on. The joke turned into serious business as patrons of the Goose were organized into an army of canvassers who spread out through the city to carry the word about our favorite bar-keep.

I was working a district in southeast Portland when I entered a large trailer park and knocked on the door of one of the units.  The door flew open and I was confronted by a plus-size matron who cut loose on me with a loud dose of her displeasure at being disturbed.  Her anger grew more intense until she finally paused to catch her breath which gave me a chance to say to her (as a way of giving her more fuel for outrage) "I suppose asking to use your restroom is completely out of the question?"  I stepped back expecting a bigger explosion but her demeanor suddenly changed. In a calm, almost kind voice she said to me, "Do you really have to go?" I stuttered out something like, "No, no I'm OK...sorry to have disturbed you and be sure to vote for Bud Clark."

She apparently did because Bud won in a landslide and went on to serve two terms before retiring from public life. His victory made national news and he even appeared on Johnny Carson.  Johnny got Bud to demonstrate an unusual verbal tic: sometimes, for no apparent reason, Bud would add a little, "Whoop, whoop!" to the end of declarative sentences; it drove many of his staff members nuts. We must forgive that small idiosyncrasy because Bud Clark created the world's greatest Reuben sandwich.

Hello Halls

Memories of hiking the forest trails that are within walking distance of downtown Portland (Stephen Wright says everything is within walking distance if you have the time) are fading as the virus plague dictates I must not leave this building I call home. I know exercise is as important as food and water to keep me in the race (my doctors agree) and so I improvise.  My front room is now a gym where I lift bar bells, do body lifts (bent over a stool with legs held down by heavy coffee table)  squats, sit-ups, back arching. And last, The Halls.

My resident building is a huge square, five story structure with a courtyard in the center. Apartments open to the outside and to the overview of the courtyard inside. Each four-side hallway is 1/7th of a mile so you make seven loops and you've walked a mile. It could be tunnell-boredom if you let it but the trick is, don't let it.

Each apartment has a small shelf next to the door and residents decorate their shelves in various ways that make a small bit of interest for the stroller.  Some of these are quite elaborate (mine is very simple: a round disc of wood cut from a log with bark still on the edges. In the center I have printed with my wood-burning tool: METHUSELAH REPORTS WORLD HEADQUARTERS).  Whoever selected the carpet for the hallways gets two thumbs up.  The pattern flows vertically ahead of you as you walk with no horizontal lines that would create the feeling of "breaking barriers".

My apartment on the third floor is almost at the end of one hall so every day I leave my apartment and go left to the next hall, then the next hall, then next hall that brings me to the stairway and elevator.  At this point I am one hall short of a complete loop for 1/7th of a mile.  But now I go down the stairs to the second floor and do three loops.  Then I take the elevator to the fifth floor and do two loops.  Then I go down the stairs to the fourth floor and do one loop.  That leaves me one hallway short of seven loops.  I make that up by going down the stairs to Three and walking that hall to my door.  Seven loops, Willy boy,  And another fun-filled journey generating almost more excitement than one aging citizen can deal with.

The Grayback Boys

In the 1940s all Oregon high school principals were ex-coaches. Simple reason: academic teachers did their post-grad college studies in their academic disciplines while coaches did theirs in administration.  School boards hired administrators to run the schools.

Frank Thomas was Principal of Grants Pass High School when I was a student there in the late '40s and he had a belief that the way to assure getting voters to approve school budgets was to have winning athletic teams.  In my freshman, sophomore and junior years our football teams were not winners. Scores against traditional rivals Medford and Klamath Falls would be like 72-0 and 56-0. The final humiliation came my junior year when we lost to Roseburg for the first time in 30 years.

So Frank Thomas hired the Roseburg coach, Mel Ingram, a full-blooded Native American graduate of Gonzaga University where he had been an all-star letterman in three sports.  Coach Ingram was not soft-spoken and he detested losing.

His first move was to gather together prominent leaders of the business community and pick their pockets for some serious dollars.  He then took volunteer work crews to the Grayback campground in the Siskiyou mountains that had been constructed by Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) in the 1930s.  The CCC barracks were swept clean and filled with cots.  Refrigeration was brought into the kitchen of the mess tent and stocked with food. The playground became a football practice field and the beaten-down Grants Pass High School football players were rounded up, put on a bus and shipped off for two weeks of boot camp hell.

Reveille was at 6:00 AM for a turnout to calisthenics led by a coach (coaches of all the sports were in camp) then a fallout to breakfast. And what a breakfast! The full Monty.  Bacon, eggs, fried potatoes pancakes, milk, OJ.  Most of us had never seen such a display of food. And every meal was like that.

After breakfast came chalk talk with open playbooks and coaches explaining the new system (T-formation). Mel Ingram officiated college football games for the Pacific Coast Conference on Saturdays and he brought back innovations he saw there in both offense and defense to incorporate into his own schemes. At 10:00 we would put on pads and scrimmage until noon. The first couple of days were fairly light drills aimed at getting everybody into shape but then things got serious.

After lunch it was more chalk talk until 3:00 when we would suit up again (slimy wet pads from the morning sweat) and get back to full speed hitting.  Twelve days of that.  Not everyone made it through to the end.  One night a car might go down the mountain taking a drop-out to Grants Pass and in the morning there would be an empty cot in the bunk house.  My bunk mate, Shifty-hips Pollock, was a running back who dazzled the creatures, particularly the turtles, who watched our drills from the surrounding forest (his time for the mile today at his home in Bend, Oregon is just under forty-five minutes).

The team Mel Ingram led off the mountain went into the season of 1947 with no fear of any opponent. A loss to Marshfield (Coos Bay) killed a chance to go on to the state playoffs.  However, the next year the Grants Pass Caveman went all the way to win the state championship, starting long years of winning seasons. Today's football Cavemen play their home games on Mel Ingram field.

And Frank Thomas kept passing his school budgets, which led to construction of a spectacular college-like campus for the high school.

A Different America

The enemy that united America in the early 1930s was the continuing collapse of the national economy: unemployment, extreme poverty, hopelessness.  All across the nation young men were drifting from their family homes, hitting the road to somewhere, looking for something better.  And it created a culture in the country of a willingness to give support to those migrant rovers whenever possible.  Like providing a meal or shelter from a storm.  My mother, Eunice Landers, never turned away a hungry drifter.

Like Wiley Omohundro.  In his early 20s, Wiley was a lanky, tall kid from Michigan who came to our door one day and asked mother if she could spare some food. Wiley might have been a bit slow but he had a friendly, smiling face and he, of course, immediately won over my mother. She prepared Wiley a big fried chicken sandwich on home baked bread with a large glass of milk and while Wiley put that away she listened to his backstory.  Wiley hung around, doing odd jobs and eating for a few months (mother named him Wiley O'Imhungryo). He split wood. He cleaned irrigation ditches.  He went swimming in the Applegate river.

He helped mother can peaches where she taught him to not squeeze the fruit to get it into the jars.  He told her about helping his father move chickens from one chicken house to another one night and how his father told him to hold these three chickens by their legs and not let them go and how he got confused and just let them go and how his father yelled at him.  That was Wiley.

One day Wiley hit the road, never to be heard from again.  The clouds of war were gathering so Riley probably had a military future, hopefully in the commissary.

The New Normal

Sitting on my couch I dozed off while watching a rerun of Singing In The Rain and experienced the most vivid...I guess you'd call it a dream, instructing me how to prepare for the future after Coronavirus.  I knew I had better write down the instructions because I don't trust my memory.

Here is what I did as instructed:  cut a tea bag open and dumped the contents into a cup.  Added a  pinch of hair from my recent self-given haircut (retrieved from the rug), then 3 TRUTH BUDS purchased from the country fair in Eugene, Oregon in 1974. I boiled water from the bucket of collected rainfall on my balcony and poured it into the cup.  After two hours I drained the water  and spread the mixture on a baking sheet where I shaped it to look like the Andromeda galaxy.

You may find this hard to believe but it is absolutely true even though trying to describe it is difficult.  When I viewed the baking sheet of dried tea leaves the next morning the spiral galaxy had taken the form of a cursive The Prince, suggesting to me I should take my volume of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, published in 1532, and lay it open on the table. Something moved the pages, perhaps a breeze from the wings of a butterfly in some far off sylvan glade, and this passage seemed to glow on a page: Nations and individuals will always do what is best for their own self interest.  

Now doesn't that suck?  The freaking new normal is going to be just like the old normal.  And pretty much the same as the normal back there in 1532. Who said The past is prologue?