Dealing With It-4 Ella Maude

                                                       

The new house had three bedrooms.  John and Eunice took the front one with Bill in the middle and the two girls in the back one. John's new friend, Don McDougal, who he met at the Wonder Bur Tavern in Grants Pass and invited home for dinner, had been surfing the living room couch for a number of months.  More about Don later.  Eunice was the glue holding everything together and she had an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of tolerance for difficult circumstances.

On a sunny summer afternoon a massive addition to that reservoir occurred. John's mother, Ella Maude, had lived with John's family in La Grande until his accident on the railroad that sent him to Portland.  Then she was sent to live in Baker, Oregon with her older son, Bill Beckwith.

The big Buick came roaring into the driveway, much too fast.  A blast of the horn brought everybody in the house out the front door to see the driver, John's older half-brother Bill Beckwith, opening the trunk of his car and removing a huge suitcase which he placed next to the porch.  Without a word he opened the Buick's passenger-side door to escort Ella Maude Landers,  John's and Bill's 87-year-old mother, to join the family members. He came face-to-face with John and said, "I'm bringing her back, John. I can't take her anymore." Then he returned to the Buick and did a power back-out of the driveway and a gravel throwing exit onto the Redwood Highway as he headed back to Baker, Oregon.

The only one in the gobstruck group left standing outside the open door to the house who seemed completely at ease with the situation was Ella Maude.  There was no hugging.  Adding Ella Maude to

 the family dynamic was like putting a dollop of Ex-Lax into an omelette but that wouldn't become apparent until later.  

                                                                   (To be continued)

Dealing With It-3 Disaster

                                                     

                                                           

The master plan for the neophyte farmers was to raise chickens like Major Karl's (White Leghorns) and harvest their eggs to sell to a middle-man marketer with whom Major would connect them.  A couple of milk cows would graze in the six-acre pasture and the pig pen would be home for a couple of oinkers preparing for their date with the hired bacon and sausage maker.

Major Karl supervised construction of a large chicken house with salvage lumber from a small shut- down saw mill he knew about. He hired a couple of workers to assist him and the chicken house started to take shape.  One day Eunice took the children into town for some ice cream treats while she shopped  for a couple of items. It would be the family's last connection to anything related to fun for the next few months. On their return as they approached the house they saw the terrible sight of a smoking pile of black embers surrounded by the concrete foundation that now etched the outline of what had once been their home.  The shock of shattered lives was dealt with by John's and Eunice's concern for their children.  Hard times.  Hard times.

The chicken house construction crew had spotted smoke coming out of the roof and rushed up to the house to find the entire top of the structure in flames.  They managed to get Eunice's upright piano and a sectional book case out of the house before it collapsed.  Faulty wiring was blamed for the fire.

How John and Eunice managed to find money for insurance premiums in those Depression years is amazing but they did.  And like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of its predecessor, a grand new, three bedroom house with indoor plumbing (goodbye outdoor privy) and a kitchen with a breakfast-nook appeared a few months later.

So we have a glorious happy ending, right?  Uh, not exactly.

(To be continued)

Dealing With It-2 Cast of Charcters

                                                             

                                      

It's unfortunate that the family's move to Grants Pass was too early for TV cameras to track the drama of those Landers Family adventures.  You wouldn't need scriptwriters because the dialogue just bubbled up from the interactions of the individual players.

John Earl was in his forties when the first daughter, Virginia Helen, made her appearance in 1927 followed by William Charles in 1930.  Mary Ella filled out the cast in 1932.  John had been a warrior. He ran away from home when he was 17 to join the US Army and his mother, Ella Maud Landers, was so overjoyed to see him gone she signed the papers for his underage enlistment.  He celebrated his 18th birthday in the Philippine Islands as a part of the United States' deployment to put down the Philippine Insurrection of 1902. While there he went with a detachment of soldiers sent to China to join other European nations putting down the Boxer Rebellion.

John returned to America where he used money he had stashed playing poker to attend a couple of years in college in Kansas then signed up again in the Army under Black Jack Pershing to chase Pancho Villa around northern Mexico.  It was this General Pershing army that formed the core of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) that went to France in World War I.  By then he was a top Sergeant in his regiment.

Eunice Elizabeth Ramsdell was in nurse's training when she and John were married in Cove, Oregon on the 21st of June, 1922.

Virginia was a top student who took violin lessons and became an accomplished player.

William (Bill) was a particularly fine looking boy who was intellectually advanced above his school peers. Good hair.

Mary was last kid who was blessed with a friendly demeanor that set the tone for sibling harmony.

John's mother, Ella Maud, was sent by God to test the forbearance of all the other dwellers on the planet Earth.

Couch surfer Don McDougal became a beloved semi-member of the clan.

Editorial note: This series makes no attempt do be a definitive account of all those family years on the Redwood Highway.  The intention is to give a snapshot of one of the more entertaining periods that features a family member who had a bag of tricks that never emptied. The full appreciation of her force field is difficult to capture with words.

Stand by with the cameras.  Something big is about to happen.

                                                            (To be continued)

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.