A Pillow To Dream On

I skipped the graduation ceremony at the University of Oregon in June of 1954 but that didn't invalidate my Bachelor's degree in History that landed me a job as an executive trainee with the Bon Marche department store that was opening in Eugene, Oregon.  I would be the assistant to Ralph Robinson, Divisional Manager for domestics (bedding, towels, yardage, notions) and women's lingerie. My pay was not quite as much as that paid most school custodians and in all the years I worked there no one ever asked me to explain the American cultural influences generated by post-Civil War policies of the federal government.  So much for my B.S. in History.

But I learned to fold towels to make attractive displays and how to make buying plans for trips to resource markets. And as an executive trainee I could work off-the-clock hours without overtime pay.  Not to mention learning the techniques for circumventing certain policy rules that were not beneficial to Divisional Manager Robinson's bonus objectives.  Like the price tags on merchandise that carried a date indicating how long a particular item had been in the store. Ralph's bonus was penalized for old merchandise so his assistant could work after hours in the warehouse making new tickets to put on old merchandise.

And then there was the pillow crisis.  One day the State of Oregon pillow inspector (What? You didn't know Oregon had pillow inspectors?) came through and took one of our pillows to be inspected by a lab. A week or two later the report came back and it wasn't good.  Among a number of unfortunate contents in our pillow, some of the feathers contained traces of urine.  Apparently the New York pillow resource we used purchased feathers from Europe where citizens would sell the feathers from their own bedding to the feather buyers who would then use those feathers in their pillows.  So we took our pillows off the sales floor, which had a serious negative impact on Robinson's bonus.  He got on the phone to New York and told the feather merchants to send him the best pillow ever made that would pass an inspection.  The new pillow came to us by air and on the inspector's return he got it for the lab which gave it a glowing report.  Our pillows came back onto the sales floor.

Best of all, Ralph gave me the test pillow and I enjoyed years of peaceful sleep on America's finest goose down urine-free pillow.

Leo's 20 Year Crusade

The University of Oregon hired its first professional athletic director, Leo Harris, in 1947.  A successful administrator of a large school district in California, he had played football at Stanford and coached both football and basketball at Fresno State.

Leo Harris had the solid build of a football guard and his administrative style was a gruff, take no prisoners assault on roadblocks to his objectives.  He looked a bit like Jimmy Hoffa with a similar demeanor except Harris was open and honest.  There was never a doubt of what he meant in the decisions he made. The athletic program he took over in Eugene was in shambles. Financially depressed and faced with old facilities for the major sports of football and basketball, the challenge to the new administrator was daunting. Doing a triage audit of all the problems, he pinpointed the football stadium at Hayward Field as his number one priority.  It may have been historic but in the family of big time collegiate sports it was an embarrassment.

Harris created a secret piggy bank and no contribution to Porky was too insignificant to be dropped in the slot. Head coaches (much to their dismay) to save travel expenses, were required to call alumni and ask to surf their couch on recruiting trips.  He limited the football coach as to how many players he could take on away games (Leo loved the early years when the same players played both offense and defense). He scheduled football games with the major powerhouses in the country (Ohio State, Miami, Penn State, Nebraska and on and on) to get a piece of those huge stadium gates.  On those Saturdays it was always skinny David facing a giant Goliath and unlike the Biblical David, David's sling shot for Oregon rarely dropped the giant (at Ohio State players filled double rows of benches and their offense featured three enormous fullbacks taking turns crashing into Oregon's defensive line).  All elements of Leo Harris' conduct of Oregon athletic affairs were colored by the central focus of feeding Porky. 

And so it went, year after year, with Porky putting on weight until one fine day Leo Harris grabbed his sledge hammer and said,  "Thank you, Porky, for your years of loyal service but your work here is done." Leo had his $1,000,000 nest egg and now he sold 1,000 seats for $1,000 each (giving a 20 year licence to buy tickets for the best seats in the stadium.) The special section was filled with chair-back seats covered with a roof that held powerful electric heating units. Naming the stadium for alumnus Thomas J. Autzen brought in $250,000 (way too cheap) and the finished cost of the magnificent facility was $2.5 million. Unbelievable!

On September 23, 1967 the Colorado Buffaloes spoiled the opening of the stadium with a 17-13 win over the Ducks led by QB Eric Olson.  The years that followed buried that loss as Autzen earned its reputation as one of the premier football arenas in the nation.

For me it will always be LEO HARRIS STADIUM, Home of the Ducks.

Dealing With It-7 Where There's Smoke

                                          

Strauss Walker, John's cousin, lived in Los Angeles and rode a bus to Grants Pass to visit the Landers one summer.  In the course of their lives, he and John had developed an extremely close friendship.  At the end of his visit, John drove Strauss to the bus depot along with Eunice and Ella Maude.  There was much hugging and Strauss was tearing up a bit as he held Ella Maude and told her how he would miss her.  She too was shedding tears as she told him she also would miss him.  They all waved as the Greyhound pulled away and Ella Maude caught Eunice's sleeve and asked, "Who was that man?"

Our long term couch surfer had become a member of our family. Brought home like a stray cat by John, he seemed to fit our particular environment with his wit, his guitar playing of pub songs rendered with a nice "This ain't no good life, but it's my life" feeling. He had suffered infantile paralysis as a teen ager and it left him with a hump-back slonch-wise walk but after you knew Don and enjoyed his cheerful personality you never saw the disability. Don earned his keep by managing Ella Maude and he often said he marveled at how her mind worked. He would compliment her on her rock collection (Grandma picked up rocks from the fields around the house) which she kept in a corner of her room.  The rocks had no special features. They were just rocks.

One afternoon John was taking a walk and Don was reading on the couch when he thought he smelled smoke. When he investigated he found it was coming from Ella Maude's room but when he tried to open the door it wouldn't budge.  He put his shoulder to it and managed to get it open a few inches so he could look through the gap where he saw Ella Maude across the room with a maniacal look on her face. She had set fire to a wad of newspapers and it was a chest of drawers she had slid over to block the door.  Don was screaming at Ella Maude who selected one of her prize rocks and like Babe Ruth lobbing one in from deep center field, she drilled McDougal right between the eyes.  He dropped like a pole-axed ox but the day was saved by Eunice who had returned from the chicken house and with an adrenaline fueled lunge,  moved the door enough for her to get in and stomp out the fire.  

Don rallied and helped Eunice with Ella Maude while she cleaned up the mess.  The two of them removed the door from the middle bedroom. A close call.

Don moved on and a year or two later so did Ella Maude to the Granite Hill cemetery out River Road from Grants Pass. Many years later curiosity prompted me to visit the cemetery and I brushed the dirt and twigs from her stone marker.  I did notice the leaves on the tree overhanging her grave were kind of crinkled and strange looking. 

                                                              Roll the credits

                                                     Editor                      Jeffrey Landers

                                          Key Witness                       Bill Landers

                                                Catering                        Russellville Park

                                               Best Boy                         Methuselah

                William Tell Overture Music                       Lone Ranger

                                                   Drugs                         Grants Pass Pharmacy

                                                        

                                                            ############

                                                              

Dealing With It-6. Run, Grandma, Run

                                              

Eunice was the first to notice that she hadn't seen Ella Maude for awhile.  Not in her room. Not anywhere outside that she could see. "Have you seen your mother?," she asked John. He hadn't seen her and now Eunice was increasingly concerned. John said, "Let's give it a couple or three weeks and see if she shows up."  Eunice had just told him that they had better call the Sheriff's office when the phone rang.  It was the police station in Grants Pass and they had Ella Maude.  She had told them a disturbing story and the policeman asked Eunice and John to come into the station.

She had carefully timed her move when nobody saw her leave the house and she crossed the Redwood Highway, where she flagged down an eastbound car (she knew which direction to go) and told the driver she was fleeing from a threat to her life and needed to get to the police.  The story she told the police was that she had not been given food for three days. After the police established that the old lady was in no danger of being murdered (they probably understood why she might be) they sent her home.

From time to time Grandma would make another run for it and a policeman (who Eunice and John were now on a first-name basis with) would call and say, "Grandma's back."

At another placement in cosmic time Ella Maude might have won fame in Vegas as a standup comic because her timing was dead on. Dinner time became her favorite venue.  John was known for misplacing things (he was always losing his cane) but when his false teeth went missing from his night stand jar where he put them at bedtime, it became a three or four day mystery.  Then his mother made her appearance at dinner one evening with those choppers wedged in her mouth, sticking out in a bizzare face-mask from hell. Virginia almost went under the table laughing, as did Bill and Mary. John, of course, exploded with a lot of new words and Eunice lost it.  "Good God," she gasped as she sprung up and snatched the teeth out of Ella Maude's mouth.

Another dinner with a slow start and no dessert.  You think that's hard to top? Don't leave.

                                                     (To be continued)

Dealing With It-5 The Pot Is Boiling

                                                  

Ella Maude Landers was programmed to always keep the pot boiling.  At 5' 4" and probably not close to 100 lbs., she was in good health and active for her 87 years. Virginia asked our mother once if it was old age that made Grandma act the way she did and Eunice replied, "No, she's been like that as long as I've known her." Over a lifetime of loading her disruptive tool kit, she had learned how to discover other people's sensitive buttons and her timing at pushing them was exquisite and creative.  Particularly on her son, John Earl. 

It's dinner time around the large round table in the dining room and Eunice lets Ella Maude know by calling into her bedroom (once Bill's bedroom). Ella Maude makes her appearance  wearing a pair of her son's long-john underwear as a pullover sweater, her head through the back flap and each arm down a leg. This leaves the rest of the garment forming an attractive cape down her back.

Let us hear from her son: "Jesus Christ !" as he kicks back out of his chair and storms outside. Another successful mission accomplished.  Or at another dinner Grandma might go into the kitchen and return with a can of Bon-Ami scrubbing compound and shake it liberally on her hamburger patty, take a bite and announce, "My, you don't know what a difference that makes."

Grandma had some classics that she would return to with satisfying effect.  One of Eunice's church friends might be visiting and Ella Maude would say to her, "I couldn't help noticing that lovely locket you're wearing.  I had one that was exactly like it right down to the color of the side stones.  One day it just came up missing."  The implication being that the lady had sneaked into Ella Maude's room and stolen it from her jewel box. And of course, it could work for clothing, purses, whatever the target might be showing. 

One of her favorites acts earned the name, "She's gone again."  To which Virginia, Mary and Bill would offer up a prayer: "Please, God, let it be true."

                                                                                (To be continued)

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)