Fred has given out ten things about himself to further illuminate his sterling personality and all that stuff. Now it's my turn to give out with personal details you didn't know (or cared) to find out.
10. From the picture above, you can see that as a lad I once took a burro ride at my parents' urging while on a camping trip to Yosemite National Park, Circa 1966. I was looking out at the world from the wrong end of a donkey. From such humble beginnings...seriously, I had a lot of fun in those days. Northern California was a great place to grow up.
9. Although I've lived in Oregon for the last 19 years and lived in Florida as a high-school kid, I consider myself a Californian. I grew up in San Jose, California--before it became the overpriced and all-too-crowded "Silicon Valley". It was a reasonably safe neighborhood. My friends and I ran and biked and ran all over the neighborhood--there was less danger for kids, or there were so many of us 'baby boomer" kids back then, perhaps we were just more expendable.
I lived across the street from my elementary school and I got to play a lot of pick-up baseball, basketball and football games (I was an only child,so I made a lot of friends because I had enough time to myself at home. ) We usually didn't have to come in until dark in the Summer time, which was around eight or nine o'clock.
8. As a young 12-13 year old , I would sometimes sneak out of my parents house late at night, meet up with a few friends and we would go "T-P-ing" houses. (Covering the trees in front of people's houses with toilet paper.) I was lucky we never got caught. I'm not proud of this mischief, but I don't want you to think I was one of those "nice little boys" who tattle-tale out their friends for having fun to the school principal or something. ( I was a bit of a budding delinquent.)
7. I played in football and baseball sports leagues for kids growing up, but it only baseball where I had reasonable success. I played baseball in high school for awhile and was a decent left-hand hitter. I also played in a couple softball teams when I grew up. I've been a lifelong baseball fan and student of its history.
6. I came back to California and the Bay Area with my parents in 1978. At 22, I graduated from Cal-State Hayward with a BA degree in Political Science. I started off getting into teacher training, but my heart wasn't in it. I'm an introvert and being in front of people for a long time gave me panic attacks. The only thing I regret was not studying harder so I could have got into a post-grad slot at UC-Berkeley. I don't think I'd have done more with my life, but Berkeley or Stanford would have been a great atmosphere for learning.
5. As religion goes, I was an atheist and an agnostic most of my early years. I only began to believe in God at 32 and became a practicing Christian a couple years afterward. I belong to the Presbyterian Church in my town. In fact I got very little religious education as a youth--my father was very skeptical of organized religion and my mother a lapsed Methodist. This actually paid off for me because I became a believer as an adult with both eyes open so to speak.
4. I've read books all my life--"Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad is my favorite novel--but to tell you the truth movies are my favorite entertainment activity. The day I got to go to a grown-up movie all by myself around age 11 was one of the happiest days in my life. I love all kinds of films and was lucky to grow up with friends who shared this passion--one of whom became a film editor. I made Super 8 movies in high school with friends--nothing fancy, but with car chases and action-adventure themes--and to this day I look back on that part of my life with great pleasure.
3. I've been married twice. (Had my first real date at 17. Seems like I was a bit of a late-starter, but now I look back and realize I had a lot of time and no reason to be anxious.) I take responsibility for 60 percent of my first marriage going wrong. I have no children, but I have two great kids who call me "Grandpa Doug". Such is the wonder of blended families.
2. I like blogging because it gives me a chance to talk to people all over the English-speaking world and it saves on travel expenses and me having to walk up to people I've never met and say, "Is that so? Well here's what I think." Introverts don't just jump up and greet people. This is a good way for me to communicate.
1. My wife and I watch the daytime soap opera "The Young and the Restless" every weekday night after dinner, unless we have guests or are out of town. I get a kick out of the plot twists it and barely plausible machinations of all the desperate characters. (There, I saved the most shocking revelation for last.)
This is my dad again in uniform, this time playing on the Electric Steel Company amateur baseball team, circa 1953.
He had left his job at the accounting department at Portland's International Harvester Company regional headquarters some months back. The job he held at ESSO was better paid, but it was still offfice work. and this was not a long-term answer for him.
As he wrote earlier, dad was used to being competitive from his youngest days, and there wasn't much competition at a desk doing the routine work at a regular business. Being on a baseball team for some of the year probably helped him. but he was eventually "promoted" from the pattern department over to accounts-and-billing. It was more money, but he was back chained to a desk. He compared his working life at this time to the character Jack Lemmon played in the Billy Wilder film classic "The Apartment" (1960). "I was just stuck to a desk and an adding machine, forty hours and then some a week" I remember he told me while we watched the opening of that movie on television once . "It was dull, dull, and more dull."
"I had a great office job, but I was not cut out for that type of work. I could not sleep nights for thinking about my daytime work. Eventually I had to go to the doctor. He told me I had a bad case of "nerves". I had to quit the job for my health."
Dad put in for a transfer and got himself a tryout over at Sales Promotion at Esso. It was a turning point in his life. He found he liked selling, going out and meeting people getting to know regular customers, and closing sales. Wheras Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman" was a guy who chased other man's dream into a lifetime of unhappiness, I think in many ways my father was the reverse of Arthur Miller's famous character. Dad initally thought the key to success as an adult was to get enough college under his belt to be the best business-type he could be, and evenutally he would do well enough to get a promotion to some big managerial job. Actually, the rigor and routine of standard American business in the Fifties was literally driving him to a probable couple of ulcers, and then liklely capped off by a big heart attack in middle-age. He saw a new path with selling, but a lot of his work at ESSO was still what we would call today "cubicle work". After he had a "personality conflict" with his boss, he left the company in 1955.
His next job was at Sears-Roebuck:
"That was when I became a real salesman and never regretted the change in occupations. For one thing when the end of the day arrives and you have waited on your last customer. your day is over. Generally, you don't have to think about the job until the next day and the next customer.
"I sold jewelery at Sears at first. I sold enough over Christmas the the other holidays to get myself through the lean times. I wasn't making as much money as before but I I liked people and enjoyed talking and making connections with different people every day. Of course, I still had to sell the watches and all the other sundry goods but I found I had a knack for it. And if you can selll jewelery and make decent money at it, you can sell anything!" 
(My dad, photographed--and probably caught unawares-- at Sears.)
My dad back at his old house in 1957, the last Christmas he had with both his dad and mom. His father died at 82 in Feburary of 1958. His mom lived in the little house her husband had built in MIlwaukee, Oregon, for many more years. She finally went into a nursing home toward the end of her life and passed away in her nineties.
More from my father's writings:
"I was really enjoying myself. I found that working in a department store had many benefits for a single guy. I met a lot of girls. In fact, about three years working in a store one of my associates and I decided to get married. A year later my son came along. I needed to make more money. It was a good thing the store decided I was a good salesman and they put me into one of the "big ticket" departments--major appliances. I sold washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc. I found it was no great stress to sell the service policies the store was pushing. I had learned a lot over at my other situation and found I really liked doing this."
Truth was, I think it was hard work for my dad and it was competitive--if not so much at Sears then certainly later on when we moved to California (the San Mateo and later the San Jose area, just south of San Francisco ) and he left Sears for other companies until he became a sales manager in his forties with the WT Grant company and his responsibilities went up. But i gathered he liked the challenge.
My mom, alas, had to leave here job as a sales manager in the women's department after she and my dad were married. (Company policy.) She stayed at home for the first few years with me and in those days the economic conditions on the West Coast were better than now--a family could make it on one good paycheck, at least for a few years in the 1960's. Eventually when I was old enough she, too, went back to work part-time and later full time. But we lived in a nice house in a good neighborhood and I never felt neglected because my mom would usually be home soon after I got home from school.
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My mom and dad's wedding day, November, 1959. And (below) the full wedding party including my Uncle Mel and his wife Bernice.
(above) This is me and my dad outside our house in Milwaukee Oregon in August, 1961. AS you can see, I was already on my old man's back about something. 
Around Christmas, 1962. I'm sitting with mom and dad. (There's a deviant look about my eyes already!) This was our last Christmas in Oregon. The next year we were in San Mateo California in a townhouse apartment near the Sears store my dad had transferred to. He sold men's clothes and suits there until an opening happened for him back at the appliance department. We had moved out of Portland because of my mom's early-on set arthritis, which made living in a wet climate difficult.
My dad's writings end pretty much at the point where I was born. There will be more things I plan to write about my family from time to time, but most of the writings will be from my experiences. As I said earlier, I was lucky to have such great parents and to have a dad who was around for me for 47 years. Our relationship improved a lot after my adolescence and I was proud he was both my father and my friend.
To left: The main administration building at Oregon State College, Corvallis, Oregon (later Oregon State University), circa 1948, the year my dad entered as a freshman.
It's a public land-grant school founded in 1869. The chief rival of the more famous University of Oregon. My dad had thought about going to the bigger school, located in Eugene, but he found that campus to have too much of a "country club" atmosphere he didn't much care for. Corvallis, smaller and less elitist, suited him better
Oregon State's chief claim to international fame in academics is that it was the university-home of Doctor Linus Pauling, a double Nobel Prize Winner (for Chemistry and later for Peace.) Currently, OSU holds the distinction for having won the National Collegiate Baseball World Series in 2006 and 2007. For a relatively small university, it was a major accomplishment to beat such baseball powerhouses as USC, Texas, Stanford and Arizona State.
Like most cross-state rivals, the University of Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers have long been sports rivals. The annual football game between the Beaver squad and the Ducks (called by the media, apparently without irony, "The Civil War") is the biggest sporting event in a state which has no NFL football franchise.
Though he only went there two years, dad was a keen follower of Beaver sports all the way through his life. We went to some basketball games OSU had in Berkeley against the University of California Bears when I was growing up in the Bay Area. HIs biggest passion though was baseball and I was glad that OSU managed to win those baseball titles before he left this world. I found some clippings of the baseball college championships in one of his old yearbooks.
Anyway, in his own words:
"I enrolled at Oregon State College after two years in the Marines in September of 1948. My major was business with a minor in "forestry--business and technology". I was told by my advisor I would be better off going forty miles down the road to the University of Oregon in Eugene, mainly because he wasn't too impressed with my math and science scores...but I didn't feel comfortable on the campus in Eugene, so I stayed put."
"My first year I had a girlfriend and was doing pretty well in my classes. One of the things I did as far as extra-curricular stuff was become a student volunteer in the Presidential campaign between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey, who was governor of New York. Dewey had been a "racket buster" district attorney back in New York in the 1930's and was very popular. Most of the magazines and newspapers picked him to be the next President. To me, he was a banker-type and a phony to boot, unlike Truman who made it up on his own bootstraps. I remember seeing Dewey on a newsreel trying to milk a cow in Wisconsin or somewhere--the guy was milking this cow wearing a suit!
"Among other things, I drove a truck with a loud speaker and a banner for the Democrats. We worked hard at getting out the vote for President Truman. Oregon was a tough state for him to win, because of all the conservative farmers who had started making big money in food exports to Europe and other places after the war. The farmers naturally jumped back to the Republicans from the Democrats now that the Great Depression was over. Despite the fact that he was predicted to lose the race and all the white southerners went over to Strom Turmond over the segregation issue and some progressives went to Henry Wallace(ex-FDR vice-president 1941-45) , Truman won."
That he did, to my father's surprise and delight. Truman engineered his famous come from behind victory by hitting hard at (i.e, "giving hell" to) the "do nothing 80th Congress" for its lackluster record and attempts to roll back elements of the New Deal. Dewey turned out to be a lackluster campaigner who said little and went about spouting platitudes like "the future is ahead of us", taking for granted the Democratic hold on the White House was over. Although Truman was not a strong Civil Rights President, he was open enough about the changes in the racial divides in America to lose the Deep South in a rift within the Democratic Party that had been growing under Franklin Roosevelt's tenure.
My dad for years maintained Truman had won Oregon voters as well as the national vote. His memory was actually a little faulty--years later when I looked up the 1948 vote and discovered that Oregon had actually voted for Dewey and awarded its electoral votes to the Republican. He was a little crest-fallen at that update, but it mattered little because Oregon was the only Western state Truman didn't carry in November of 1948.
from Wikipedia Nominee Harry S. Truman Thomas E. Dewey Strom Thurmond Party Democratic Republican Dixiecrat Home state Missouri New York South Carolina Running mate Alben W. Barkley Earl Warren Fielding L. Wright Electoral vote 303 189 39 States carried 28 16 4 Popular vote 24,179,347 21,991,292 1,175,930 Percentage 49.6% 45.1% 2.4% 
To continue my dad's narrative:
"The first year went by fast with no problems. The GI Bill paid our room and tuition and we got so much a month for living expenses. It seemed funny because many of the other students around me were so young, just out of high school, and I had already seen so much and aged.
(Here's' my dad, taken about the time of his return from college.) "The next Summer (1949) I got a job driving a taxi cab in Portland. It was different, to say the least. Some riders made me nervous when they insisted they ride up in the passenger side of the taxi with me. Drunks were my least favorite fare. I met a whole lot of people from all walks of life.
"Back to school in the Fall, I made a big mistake academically and otherwise: I enrolled in the Army ROTC program. It required a lot of math and figuring coordinates and I was just not good at that type of thing. The regular courses became harder also and my grade point average suffered. After the second year I resigned from the ROTC but it was too late. I had to leave Oregon State. I enrolled up at Vanport College (later Portland State). I concentrated up there on business and accounting courses. My grades started going back up. Before going to Vanport that (Summer 1950) I worked as a route manager for the Oregon Journal newspaper. I hired all the carriers and supervised the delivery. I got my first real experience in sales, selling newspaper contracts to dealers who carried the paper at sidewalk stands.
"While at college, I saved up some extra money working graveyard at a plywood mill. In the Spring of 1951 I found I was just tired of school. I bought myself a railroad ticket and took off for the East Coast. When I got to Washington D.C., I found I liked the place. I interviewed and got a job for the Washington Post in the circulation department. But I thought it over the night before I was going to start and decided to get back on the train again for the West Coast. When I got back to Portland, I took a job with the International Harvester Company in the accounting department. Conditions were very good. Wish I could say the same for the pay."
Considering all the work and the Marine hitch and all, I think my father was just restless and bored with school. To me, he was lucky he did so badly in the ROTC; had he done well he would have stayed in and been on for the Korean War. (The Army called after he was dropped for the course when war broke out. They wanted him to enlist as a soldier; my dad later said he thought "if the Marines couldn't kill me in two years, why give the Army a second chance?") I'm not sure why he even went in to ROTC program at Oregon State at all, but he did once tell me that if I was drafted into the military he hoped I could stay in school as long as I could so I could go in as an officer. The idea of me as an officer in anything but the Salvation Army is, frankly, laughable but my dad's experiences were his own and some things can't be answered unless you are with that person and in that environment.
The other big "what-if" was what would have happened to my dad if he had stayed on the East Coast. I know Washington's atmosphere must have been heady stuff for him. (Portland was not a big city back then; it was really a large town.) Next to sports, politics was a major passion of his, and most of his reading of biographies and history was of a political nature.
So it's 1951-2 in this life-story and my dad is fully grown and on his own with a decent job and a car and a hankering for romance and all that. The next part of the story I will tell about his finding his real calling and his true love in life.
This is a shot of my dad from his first year at Oregon State College (later Oregon State University) in Corvallis, Oregon. He was mustered out of the Marines just in time to get into college for the 1948--49 academic year.
Two things I didn't mention about his hitch in the Marines--one was "The Battle of San Clemente". As my dad told it to me, two guys went AWOL and my dad, then a corporal, and another military policeman, came across the deserters at a beach. My dad and his partner were in the cliffs overlooking the beach. The AWOL Marines were just above them on another cliff above the Pacific, and they weren't interested in surrendering. At least one of the guys was armed with a handgun. "Come and get us, you b---ards!" was the tone of the wanted men. It seemed the only way to capture these guys was by force, calling up a dozen or so other MPs and risk a big shootout.
After some more fruitless negotiation, yelling back and forth over the noise of the waves pounding against the shore, another couple of MPs drove across the beach near where the mini-siege was taking place. (They had been radioed not to get too close as the situation was serious.)
Luckily the new MPs were driving a large jeep with a canopy over the back. My dad and the other MP put their heads together and came up with a plan. As the second jeep stopped, my dad's partner yelled out "C'mon you guys. Hurry up with the Fifty Cal! We ain't got all day to fool with these jokers!"
"Fifty Cal" was slang in the service back then for a fifty-caliber machine gun. The threat of that much firepower did the trick. The two AWOL guys came down from their perch with their hands up. The bluff had worked and "The Battle of San Clemente" ended without any casualties.
I think my father liked to recount that incident now and then because he liked the idea that, given a choice, it was better to outsmart your opponent then to rush in with guns (or fists) blazing.
There was also his encounter with Betty Grable.
Betty Grable was probably the number one pin-up girl for American GI's in World War II. Her legs were reportedly insured for a million dollars by her home film studio, 20th Century Fox. The war was of course over, but Betty still had a few years of popularity left.
My dad got a leave for a few days and he and a friend took off to Los Angeles for some site-seeing. They went to see the "Weird Al" Yankovics of 1947, Spike Jones and his City Slickers, at their radio show at CBS, then stood outside a movie theater during a traditional Hollywood premiere. I don't remember which movie it was, but my dad did mention that the girls in the crowd went crazy when Mickey Rooney arrived at the premiere. The diminutive male star obliged the young ladies by kissing each one of them who were standing near the security ropes. It's a wonder to me that my father didn't go straight into acting school after he was discharged after seeing such feminine attention bestowed on a rather ordinary-looking guy.
At one of the southern California racetracks, my dad and his friend went to do some low stakes gambling on the ponies. As it happened, they spotted Miss Grable sitting in the VIP section of the Del Mar Racetrack, along with his then-husband, the bandleader Harry James. My dad told me he was too awestruck and shy by himself to have tried and get through to the posh part of the track seating and get Betty Grable's autograph. But his fellow Marine talked him into going along with him so he could get her autograph. (The thinking was that one Marine might be stopped by the security usher, but not two men serving their country would stand a better chance of appealing to Miss Grable's patriotism.)
It started out well. The two intrepid Marines went to the usher and asked if he would ask Miss Grable (or Mrs James) if they could get an autograph. My dad remembered Betty Grable turning around when the usher came over to her and asked her if she'd mind signing an autograph. . She had a huge smile on her face, my father recalled to me in wistful tones. She seemed friendly to men in uniform as she had all those guys she had met in the Hollywood Canteen or on military posts all over the country during the war. She waved my father and his pal down to the box she and her hubby were in. It looked like my dad's friend would get that autograph after all. Heck, they might have got a picture with her, maybe a chaste kiss, perhaps an invite for a screen test with the film siren, heck, the sky was the limit.
And then...disaster.
After some quick small talk, Miss Grable was offered an autograph book to sign. Unfortunately, my father's friends nerves got the better of him and he fumbled the autograph book at a critical moment. As he tried to retrieve it in mid-air, he fumbled the hot dog and wrapper he was carrying in his other hand. Said hot dog and bun stuffed with mustard fell right on Miss Grable blouse. She let out a exclamation about the ruination of her silk top. Harry James, the gallant trombonist-husband, stood up and yelled. The two servicemen beat a hasty retreat sans autograph and one hot dog.
Shortly after that incident, and despite his disgracing of the uniform by aiding and abetting in an unintentional act of "lese majeste" against Hollywood's biggest female star, my father was honorably discharged. He went back to Oregon and Corvallis to begin his college years.
This is the Milwaukee Oregon High School Class of 1946, pictured a year before graduation in 1945. (My father is in the back row, the fifth from the left.) Looking through the Milwaukee High Yearbook, I noted that there were no African or Asian Americans in the school. (Although I imagine there must have been black students in other Portland area schools.) The Japanese kids that my father knew about had been removed by the government in 1942--entire families forced to sell their businesses and homes at fire sale prices to whites and then "relocated" to internment camps.
By the next year (1946) there was one girl of Japanese extraction at the school in my father's class. I assume she had been at one of those dratted camps.
From Wikipedia:
"After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps.[4] In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders,[5] while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue outside the scope of the proceedings.
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Over 120,000 persons were "relocated" to bleak areas of the West, and put into concentration camps. One such center, in Tule Lake California, is not far from where Ilive today.
I asked my father about this bleak chapter of American History when I learned about it in elementary school. He replied that of course it was unjust and racist but that "you had to be there at that time to understand why" so many political leaders and non-Asian citizens supported this draconian program. My father didn't try to defend it; he wouldn't anymore than he would have defended racism, period. I understood better the climate of those times after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
There was also other types of racism as well. This is a page from the Milwaukee High Yearbook, the Maroon.
The minstrel show cartoon in a non-Southern part of America shows an iota of just how far prejudice against blacks carried even to the Pacific Northwest. The Class of 1945 Seniors had put on a minstrel show--with white kids "corked up" to sing and dance and play on cruel stereotypes of "darkies"--as:part of the class play that year. I don't know how my father felt about this stuff at that time, but I know as an adult, although he and my mom were not political activists, they were anything but racists.
I'll let my father continue his story, starting in the Summer of 1946:
I had been turned down by the Army because of a severely irritated eardrum.
The Marine Corps had two-year enlistments, the only branch of the service that did. I wanted the GI Bill so I could go to college. I had a very short time before the Bill would stay in effect for recruits and draftees. The Portland Marine Recruiting Office was very particular about physical exams. They had a small quota to meet. The Sergeant there advised me to get some work done on my teeth and go to Seattle, which I did.
I took a bus to Seattle. After he examined me, I remember the doctor at the recruiting office up there asking me how bad I wanted to get in. I said I wanted to get in real bad because of the GI Bill. He passed me. I was put in charge of four other enlistees and was given train tickets and meal money and put on a train down to San Diego. I had a little trouble keeping the guys together, but we made it and were all whisked off at our last depot stop and sent to the Marine recruit barracks. It was quite an experience for me; for the first time in my life I felt homesick. It was just the idea of being alone in a strange part of the country. The first day, which started in the middle of the night, was hectic: at first we had to train in our old clothes, then had our hair cut off and were issued uniforms. The next morning they got us up about six, and we went to breakfast. We were then assigned to a platoon and reported to our new home (a Quonset hut). Then came indoctrination movies, and then the real training began in earnest.
Those first eight weeks were a living hell. We were made to feel like we were nothing. The Drill Instructor (D.I.) was not only verbally nasty, he was also a drunk. He would come back to barracks in the middle of the night, plastered from being somewhere, and then get us out of the sack for general clean-up. The whole place was spotless. Then we'd get back in bed for a cheerful three hours of sleep, maximum, and then up around four in the morning for chow, even before the mess-men arrived. It would take me six months to detail all the nasty stuff this guy did. Everybody hated the DI, which was just the way he wanted it.
Anyway, I made it through boot camp and was sent up to Camp Joseph E. Pendelton, assigned to a headquarters company, We were the guards for the camp: sent to ammo dumps, warehouses, someplace out in the boondocks, wherever they needed a guard. It was three days on duty and two off. Normally I was on duty for four hours, off eight and then back on.
I was sitting around the barracks one day and I heard this commotion up front. I went up to see what was going on. Some big Master Sergeant was standing on a locker. The next thing I knew he pointed at me (I was way in the back of the crowd) and another guy.
"Get your sea-bags!" he barked. "You're both coming with me."
I was taken down to the town of Oceanside, just outside the base, and put on town patrol. It was good duty. We lived in the quarters down by the beach. We got to fix our own breakfast and got our noon and evening meals brought to us.
(above--my dad on patrol with the Officer of the Day, circa 1947)
I was rotated next to San Mateo Barracks where we minded the rear gates and ran the motor patrol around that part of the base and on the beach. I had that duty for about eleven months before being sent to the main gate at Camp Pendelton.
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".
Here is my dad again in his senior year at Milwaukee High School, circa 1946, He's wearing his Letterman's sweater. I wish I had more pictures of his childhood to show you, since this segment was much earlier in his life.
There is only one story that my father shared directly with me from his writings, the first time when I was about ten, roughly the same age he was when a fellow named Bill Davidson came to live with his family. He wrote at least four different variations on this story--he called him his most unforgettable character. I don't know if he ever sent this to "The Reader's Digest" magazine, since they advertised a series on personal accounts of "unforgettable characters". If he did send it in, they certainly didn't print the story. "Reader's Digest" always struck me as wanting folksy Americana in their amateur submissions. There's nothing folksy here. The setting is about 1937, when my dad was nearly ten years old.
MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER by George Noakes
"We had word that Sunday Afternoon that a man was asking for my father. We jumped into our automobile and drove about two miles. Sure enough, there he was. His car (a beat-up Model A Ford) had broken down on a steep hill.
"My father had known Bill Davidson as a childhood friend back in North Dakota. It had been over thirty years and the two had not seen or communicated with each other in anyway. How he knew my dad's whereabouts I'll never know.
"The country was still in the Great Depression and and Bill came to live with us. He was a Scot originally, and his talk and manner left no doubt as to his nationality. His wife, who he loved deeply, had passed away and he was very sad. I remember him crying at the mention of Annie Laurie.
"Our house was small. My brother was away in the C.C.C. and so Bill moved in with me. He was neat and helped around the house, including cooking."
My Note: It had been several years since Nona Noakes, my grandmother, had come down with something akin to a permanent nervous condition, brought on, my dad thought, partly by her menopause experience. This explains why someone was needed to help out with housework. My father relates of his mother at that time that, "(She) went through a change of life trauma, She had terrible headaches, and did very little housekeeping. When I was in grade school I was teased unmercifully about stinking and wearing dirty clothes. Of course for a child in the first or second grade couldn't do much about that. My father was no help around the house because he worked long hours and would come home dead tired. He wore the same clothes, only changing them on weekends, and did not seem to care how he looked.
"My mother was very nurturing and was a good mother in some ways. But she became almost childlike, and couldn't seem to help it. Today, with prescription drugs, she could have been helped (if my dad had the money and/or health insurance ). When I reached the age of nine or ten I began doing things for myself--washing my own clothes, getting haircuts and plain doing the necessary things to live properly. I also began to cook and clean house. About the fourth grade things got better for me at school and I stopped being teased except by a few kids who had gone to school with me earlier."
And back to the Bill Davidson interlude, my father again narrating:
"Bill had a charming manner and everyone seemed to like him. He even took over my dog Tubs--who would follow Bill wherever he went. The one thing that we didn't know about him until later was that he was a wino. Not only that--he got a job in a grape orchard near where we lived! His favorite was blackberry wine. When he was sober he was okay, but when he came home stinking drunk I would have to take care of him. (Remember I was only ten years old at the time.) My father threatened to kick him out if he kept this behavior up, but my mother felt sorry for him. I tried to get him to quit but to no avail. I went through hell on earth. I couldn't sleep at night when he was on one of those binges. He also smoked while drinking and I was afraid he would come into my room, fall asleep with a lit cigarette, and burn the house down.
"He used to have wine bottles stashed all over the house. It got so bad I would have to find the hiding places of his wine bottles and break them, but he would just get more. Bill would be gone for three days to a week, sleeping in the woods or whatever. I used to hate it when he returned, stumbling about and stone drunk again. Even at my age I felt bad about breaking those wine bottles because it was such a waste. He didn't earn much and paid good money for that wine.
"Eventually my father had to tell him to get another place. Bill wound up living in a shack a little ways from our house. One night a little after he left us he did cause a fire where he was holed up. He burned up.
"The only good thing that came out of all this was that I learned about alcoholics and how drinking could suck the life out of you and make a good man a bum."
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Growing up when my dad did, in those circumstances, I can understand why he was very guarded about his emotions at times. He was not a man to look back at the past very often, especially as he got older. And most of the stories he did tell me about his boyhood when I was a child were of a humorous nature, kids doing goofy things at play and gettting into minor scrapes and annoying very annoyable neighbors and such. I remember this story jarred me as a kid when my dad read it out loud to me one evening.
There is a sort-of sequel to this story, one that happened when I was about my father's age back then. It was 1969 or 70 (not sure which) and we were living in a nice tract house in the suburbs of west San Jose, California. My parents decided to throw a New Year's Eve Party for some of our neighbors. Most of the families who lived around the three of us had moved into the neighborhood around five years earlier, when the subdivision came in so these neighborhood get-togethers were not unusual.
Some time after the New Year had been brought in by the revelers in my parents living room, my father (who only had a beer or two after work at night, and was strictly a social drinker when it came to hard alcohol) decided he was tired and a bit looped and just wanted everybody to go home so he could go to bed. I believe my mother had already turned in as well. But some of the neighbors wanted to stay up and continue the partying. Being a gracious host, he told them to keep it up if they wished, but be sure and lock the door when they got ready to leave. And so my dad bid all a Happy New Year again and headed for the main bedroom. (I was already asleep across the hall from my folks.)
The next morning my father was the first of us to get up. I was up soon after. I remember my dad just standing in the kitchen, looking at what should have been a mess of bottles and glasses and other after-party dishes and stemware all over the place. But the kitchen was in complete order. Even the dishes had been done and left to dry on the plastic rack next to the sink. He was smiling, happy that someone or some couple had cleaned up everything before they left. Both he and my mom got a kick out of not having to clean up after their party for a change.
I wonder now if he looked over the cleaned-up kitchen and thought to himself about how different this was for him than so many bad experiences thirty-odd years earlier, starting when his father's old friend, Bill Davidson, had come into his unprepared youth, courtesy of a nearly broken-down Model A Ford.
To tell more of my father's story I need to start a bit further back.
The picture to the left is of my father's father, George Frederick Noakes, and his wife Nona Belle Noakes (Townsley). (It might be a wedding photograph, taken when my grandfather was in his late twenties and my grandmother all of 18.)
I'm not sure what year this is but I do know my grandfather was born in London, England, (East End) in 1876. At age 12 he was being cared for by a older sister named Ann. She apparently was an actress or a singer in the Music Halls of that time. Their mother was dead and the father was either dead or "out of the picture" as they say. My dad regarded his father as an orphan. Some "benevolent society" group decided George Frederick was better off if he was declared a "Home Child" and was sent to Canada on a tramp steamship in 1888 or 9. I imagine the authorities had enough trouble educating poor kids in Victorian London and were afraid he'd drop out and grow up to be a criminal, a vagrant, or a politician.
My dad didn't know what became of the great-Aunt who stayed behind in London. One hopes she had a good long life.
At some point my grandfather got out to Canadian prairie provinces, where he was "farmed out" to a farm family from one of the Orphan Trains that went from the bigger cities back east from the USA and Canada out to the Middle West of North America. Parent-less kids were taken on as cheap labor by farm families who would adopt them mainly to help work the farm in most cases. My dad said his father didn't talk too much about this experience(s), but he apparently worked hard and did everything from learning how to be a stone-cutter to breaking horses.
Around the turn of the century, my grandfather came down from Swaskatawan Canada to Jamestown, North Dakota. He bought a small farm and worked it for a couple years. Apparently the blizzards were so strong in the Dakota winters he had to tie a strong rope from the house to the barn in order to keep from being blown into the storm and be unable to find his way back to shelter. Around 1904 the occupation of rancher/farmer in the Winter blizzards and Summer dust storms of Jamestown had lost their initial luster for George Frederick. He packed up and went to Grants Pass, Oregon, and got a job working in a timber mill. In Grants Pass he met Nona Townsley in 1905 and they had a a daughter, Winifred, in 1906. Soon they moved up to the Portland area where jobs were more plentiful. My grandmother's mom and most of the "Townsley tribe" moved up north with them. They all wound up living on the same block. My grandfather and my one of my dad's grandfather's on the Townsley side built five homes altogether in that corner of Milwaukee, Oregon. My Aunt Betty, now 88 years old and still living on her own, lives in one of those houses today.
One of the occupations my grandfather got during the Depression was as a "powder monkey" for the Oregon Public Highway System. A powder monkey would be in charge of setting the dynamite to blow up mature and very entrenched douglas fir tree stumps. The tree stumps had to be removed to make way for automobile roads to connect Portland with the rest of the state.
The 1910 Census records shows that George Frederick and Nona had another girl, Bernice, after Winifred was born. She died young of illness. My father's only brother, Melvin, came along in 1919. My dad was not born until December 13, 1927, when his father was 51 years old and his mom 42.
My grandfather's main job during the Depression was in a paper mill. Hours were long and working conditions less than ideal. From what my dad said of him he had a temper, but also a sense of humor. A distant relative of mine a good deal older than myself remembers my grandfather as a "funny little man with an English accent" who was handy with tools and "outsourced" himself as a jack-of-all-trades if there was a temporary job to do, or something to help his relatives/neighbors with.
This picture below is one of the few I could find of my dad as a kid, I'm guessing it was taken sometime around 1934-5 when he was six or seven. I don't know the name of the cat he's holding, but the dog was my dad's favorite childhood pet. He had the unlikely Wodehousian name of J. Wellington Tubs. (Or just "Tubs" I suppose for informal occasions).
These are some of my dad's memories:
''There was quite a bit of difference in ages between my brother,Mel, and myself. When I was five he was fourteen. Our house was small and my brother had the back bedroom I shared that room with him for a time until he went into the CCC's (Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal work program for young people) in 1936. He came back home to Milwaukee later. When I turned fifteen he was gone to the war.
"Things were tough in those days before television. Radio programs came on at night. In Summer or just after school we played baseball, basketball and football, all in season. I was a better than average athlete because I got to play with older guys. I used to tag after my brother. They called me his shadow.
"There were many guys around my brother's age--sixteen or so--and there was not much for them to do. Most had dropped out of High School and made money wherever they could. When the older boys played ball I was around to fill in wherever needed. When you play with older guys you get better. I could throw a pass at seven, run and dodge like an older kid in football and dribble and shoot baskets.
"When I was in second or third grade I was probably the best athlete in my class. I could pitch and hit a softball hard because I was playing with the older guys. I believe this was the only thing that saved me in school socially.
"In the daytime, besides playing ball games, we played "hide and seek", "red light", run sheep run", "hop scotch" or any old game at night to stay out longer and have fun. The night games were fun, especially when girls were involved. In those days there were no drugs and we didn't need liqueur or beer. I guess that's why our parents didn't worry about us too much.
"Radio was the big thing at night; the sound effects were convincingly real. I liked "The Green Hornet", "Homicide Squad", "The Lone Ranger", "Jack Armstrong (All-American Boy). The program "Suspense" was often quite scary. My favorite radio comedian was Jack Benny."
Benny was also my dad's favorite comedian, all-time. I watched reruns of the Jack Benny television show with him when I was growing up. I believe his favorite Benny film was "George Washington Slept Here" (1942), where Jack plays a very urban New Yorker whose lovely wife (Ann Sheridan) buys a very, very run-down country house in the wilds of Pennsylvania behind her husband's back. The new abode rapidly becomes a "money pit". A very funny film, I think it holds up nicely even today.
(to be continued)
This is my father I'm guessing around December of 1945, as a senior class-man in Milwaukee (Oregon) High School. He was about to turn eighteen.
He was busy working while going through high school, which was not at all unusual even today. What was unusual was that because of the manpower shortage stateside he had one job working at the shipyards in the Port of Portland, as a 16-year old helper, or "rivet boy" supplying hot rivets to the iron workers making Liberty ships for duty in the Pacific War.
One summer he got a job in the US Forest Service, being trained and then working on fire-lines for major blazes that afflicted the Warm Springs Indian Reservation every dry central Oregon Summer.
My dad was told the fires he and the other young men in the crews fought ( often with shovels and primative backpack units that squirted water on blazes) had their genesis with Japanese submarines off-shore. The enemy subs would apparently surface and launch balloons filled with flammable liquid that the Japanese Navy hoped would set forests ablaze in the Pacific Northwest and tie down troops. Only one case of this has actually been documented, because several people died and the remnants of the bomb were analyzed. While at Warm Springs, my dad also accidentally walked into the path of a black bear while alone one afternoon walking along a fire trail. He was careful to back away slowly and make himself look as big as possible. The bear did not pursue him but I imagine that was all the noble beasties of nature he wanted to see that day.
Somehow, with these and other jobs he had to help out at home, Dad manged enough time to play offensive end (a position now called wide receiver) on the Milwaukee High School Varsity Football Team. He was also in his high school's branch of the local Future Farmers of America. He had to raise a pig and then take an ax to it as part of an assignment. After doing the deed, and feeling pangs of remorse over his erstwhile "pet", my dad swore off any possibility of becoming a farmer.
World War II had ended a few months after the senior class photographs were taken. Four years earlier my dad had been a 14 year old kid playing basketball one Sunday morning in early December with his older brother, Melvin, and a cousin (Randall), along with a few other guys. That was where my dad was when he found out that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
In 1945, Melvin Noakes (nine years older than my father) , was just back from the US Army after four years in active service. Uncle Mel, as I called him, had previously been in the Oregon National Guard before the Pearl Harbor attack. My dad spoke very little about my uncle after he died in 1972 ( I was 12 then, and had seen my uncle only a few times on trips from San Jose up to Portland.) It was painful for my dad to talk about Uncle Mel. He told me his older brother had been in New Guinea during part of the war, in the fight the Americans and the Australians/New Zealanders had to keep the Japanese forces from getting a major hold on the southern part of the island. My Uncle survived whatever he faced, but his already-genetically weakened heart was not helped by the tropical climate and the diseases that abounded there. ( I remember my Uncle as a sickly-thin man who loved to fish on his boat in the Willamette River and play cards. He looked more like my Dad's father than brother.)
Dad did say that one of Uncle Mels' jobs had been to help build a stone walkway for the American Commander, Douglas MacArthur, for his Headquarters in Port Moresby. I gathered MacArthur's HQ was rather palatial, and my uncle personally thought MacArthur was a bit pompous. (Many of the "dog-face" GI's called their supreme commander "Dugout Doug" when no officers were about, and there were songs along those lines as well the GIs sang. ) Years later, when I read more about MacArthur's massive ego and his pretensions to imperial trappings, my dad assured me I was NOT named after the general.
Randall Townsley, just a few years older than my dad, was not coming home after the war. He was a soldier killed in combat earlier that year fighting in the Philippines. My father kept the letters "Rand" sent him from overseas, the last one of which told him not to worry, that the war would probably be over soon and he hoped my dad wouldn't be sent overseas, and that he looked forward to coming home and chatting and smoking with my dad. It was the last letter his cousin Randall sent before was killed.
Thirty years later, my dad took me to the National Cemetery in Portland where his relative had been laid to rest long ago. My father was not one to shed tears, but I could tell he was deeply moved. Of course, there were many millions of others who lost loved ones. Needless to say if my father had been a couple years older you might not be reading this now.
My dad didn't go to war. His time in the service as a Marine was one of those all-too short periods where the USA wasn't at war and sending men a long, long way from home.
In the next blog I'll include my father's writings on his growing up .
Below--Here's my dad in the back row (center, number 18) on the Milwaukee High football squad.
