George J Noakes, Part Four--School and Work and a Little Play

This is a card I found amongst my father's things in an metal box where he kept important papers.  By the back of the card it states that it was taken in August, 1944.  He was  a sixteen year old kid working in the Portland Shipyards as a boiler-maker's helper. (My father also told me he worked heating up iron rivets for sections of the ships the older men were putting together.)  I imagine a lot of kids were doing jobs like this at his age due to the manpower shortage caused by the war.    Here's my father on school and some of his other jobs.

"I stated earlier that I had become a good athlete for my size and playing with older boys. In junion high (grades 7-8) I was captain of the boys football team and homeroom vice-President.  I started to enjoy school and actually looked forward to it. I was probably now the cleanest boy in the class because of what I had gone through before.   It was an attempt to compensate for my earlier problems. I became attracted to the social sciences: geography, history, and all similar classes. 

(Note: I pretty much had the same academic interests as my dad at this age.)   

"I started working when I was eleven years old, in 1938. My first job was a paper boy on an afternoon route for "The Oregon Journal".  The route I was given had  been a motor route out on an old country road--eight miles out and eight miles back, with 40 or 50 customers. Most of the people paid paid their bill for the paper monthly and were nice, but I had trouble with a few because of the economic times . 

"I delivered on my bicycle in all kinds of weather, and had to deal with a lot of rain and snow, the latter especially in the winter.  After two years I got a better route closer to home."

Note :My own experience with a paper route was when I turned twelve.  But mine was in the more developed suburbs of San Jose, biking around in the morning on paved roads and sidewalks. I only delivered "The San Jose Mercury News" for six-seven months in 1972-73 until  another neighborhood friend of mine expressed interest and took it over.  

 Except for a couple times when my I forgot my gloves on a couple cold mornings and my hands got tingly from the slightly freezing temps, I had no major problems.  One time it was raining so hard one Feburary Sunday morning my mother had my dad get up and drive me around on the neighborhood route. I felt guilty about that--my dad needed his sleep for his  sales job at W.T. Grants Department Store and I was just going to Junior High School and could always sleep in later on on a  weekend morning.  But the paper was heavy that morning and dad seemed okay about it--didn't lay a guilt trip on me.  Truth was , I appreciated the help.  I can't imagine what a sixteen mile paper route in a rural area must have been like in foul weather on a bicycle!     

 My father wanted me to have some early work experience and I enjoyed the adventure of being up early, but it had lost its appeal to me after those months.  My father HAD to make money--I was just working for money for going to movies and Mad Magazines and fast food and opening a small savings account, etc.  Looking back, I wish I could get by today with a hour and a half--two hours tops morning paper route.

  Other jobs my father had later on in high school included setting up bowling pins in a Portland bowling alley.  (He got to Portland from the suburb of Milwaukee via the streetcar system.)  The automatic pin-setter hadn't been invented yet or wasn't widely available.  He said that was a tough job because you had to work resetting pins in several lanes--I'm not sure how many.  He said he almost got hit a couple times by impatient or nasty customers who would throw the ball down the lane before he could fully got out of the way.  He was also a messenger boy for a duplicating company in Portland, and later for a door factory on weekends as a janitor.  One of his other jobs came a little later than the door factory work--he was employed on a shift from five in the afternoon until 2 am Friday and Saturday nights putting advertising sections in the Oregon Journal newspaper, again downtown.  He would have to take a streetcar home in the middle of the night.  

Truth be told I'm not sure when my dad did all these jobs--when he started and stopped some of them, but suffice to say he was indeed very busy.    One Summer--I'm not sure when, probably the early 1940's-- his dad, george Frederick,  came home and announced that they were going on vacation.  The "vacation" was actually a trip to a large hop farm where they picked hops--for making beer I suppose--for a few weeks.  My grandfather apparently was laid off from his mill job, and this was a way to keep the family going. My dad would later laugh about his dad's  "vacation", but it was stoop labor and had to be hard work.  One thing my father did tell me was that they had square dances at night at the migrant camp where they lived and that his father was quite good at calling a square dance.         

  My dad and his dad went to movies as a kid.  My father said he went to a lot of B-Westerns, which George Frederick favored.  The simple black-and-white morality of those "Oaters" and "Horse Operas" movies had an appeal my father spoke of wistfully, although I he saw the world as more nuanced by the time he was an adult,and I usualy viewed those old Westerns (rerun decades later on late-night television) by myself.  He rarely watched old movies as an adult.  He preferred the newer films, only watching a black and white film if my mom expressed interest.   I am the exact opposite.

 

My dad's lifetime love of baseball came on Saturday afternoon when he and his neighborhood friends were able to take a streetcar from time to time in the Spring and Summer and go to the Vaughn Street Ballpark in east Portland and watch The Portland Beavers play against the Seattle Rainiers or the Sacramento Solons or the Los Angeles Angels in the Pacific Coast League.  My father said a lot of the talent amongst ball teams on the West Coast was as good as what you could see in the Major Leagues.  (My own research into baseball in the 1930's thru 1950's bares this out. )  Many of the players my dad watched wither went on to the American or National League teams or came to the Beavers when they still had good skills in pitching, fielding and hitting. My dad was always proud of the fact  that the Portland franchise often outdrew the Seattle team.  (Seattle was a city back then, but Portland was  considered by many snooty Seattle dwellers as "just an oversized town".)   I got to hear a lot of stories about the ballplayers on the Beavers when I was growing up.  Dad later became a diehard San Francisco Giants fan when the Giants moved to the West Coast in 1958.  He always said, however, that the old Beavers teams were his first love as a sports fan.            

To continue my dad's narration, into Milwaukee High School, which he entered in 1942-43 as a freshman (below, the school as it looked then.)

 

"In high school I worked all my off-hours and weekends. I didn't have too much time for dances and dates.  I was not anti-social, but just didn't have time for social activities. What spare time I did have was spent in the agricultural building of the Future Farmers of America.  I was on the FAA Debate Team, an officer in the group and also grew plants in the greenhouse.     

"I was determined to make somerthing of myself; be the first boy in the family to graduate from high school and then go to college.  The only way to do this was to go on the G.I. Bill.  

In the next section I will cover my dad's experiences getting in and serving in the US Marines and how he fought and survived "The Battle of San Clemente".