Ted reached into the back of Grandma's Willey's Jeep and shook me awake. "Jimmy! Mom is driving through a tree!"
It went dark, like someone had switched off the lights. Then, just as quickly, the sun came back and was beaming through the windows.
A moment later I hollered to Mom, "Let's stop and buy a postcard for Grandma. She won't believe we drove through a tree."
) Redwood National Forest tree that Jim & Ted passed through in June 1943. (Sierra Magazine, May/June 2008) |
It was June 1943 and I was six years old. We were in the Redwood National Forest on our way to Menlo Park, California. I didn't know Mom had kidnapped Ted and me after Dad dropped us off at Grandma's house in Everett. I thought we were going on a vacation.
For as long as I could remember, we had lived with Dad in Lakewood, Washington, a suburb of Tacoma. I had no memory of my parents' divorce.
I was happy to be with Mom. Dad was moody and could get very angry. I wasn't old enough to know that he suffered from manic depression.
My first memory of Menlo Park is picking artichokes and corn in the dark. When I asked Mom why we had to do it at night, she said if we picked during the day the artichokes and corn would taste sour.
It was scary picking in the dark. One time, the corn stocks began to rustle and I whispered to Ted that the boogeyman was after us. Ida, the black lady with a big bosom, who had taken care of me in Tacoma, had said the boogeyman would get me if I wasn't good. Ted told me to hush up. He said it was only a cow, but I didn't believe him.
Sometimes, we ate hamburgers with corn and artichokes, but usually with potatoes. We dug them behind our one-bedroom house that separated the corn and artichoke fields at the end of our long dirt driveway. Ted and I shared the bedroom. He was two years older. Mom slept on a couch in the living room.
When school started in the fall and I entered the first grade, we left early because Mom was the school-bus driver. She drove a military van during the day, then the school bus again in the afternoon.
I liked school in California. We could play outside at recess because it hardly ever rained.
Near the end of winter, just after my seventh birthday, I got the shock of my young life. Mom overheard me say "f--- you" to Ted.
She dropped her knitting and flew out of her chair. "Don't ever say that dirty word again!" Then at the kitchen sink, she washed my mouth out with soap.
"What's so bad about f---!" I yelled. I'd heard the word at school, but I didn't know what it meant.
When she finally let me spit the soap out, again I asked why it was a dirty word and she wouldn't tell me. She said I was too young to understand.
Ted didn't say anything, but I suspected he knew what f--- meant, because he giggled when Mom turned her back. He told me later that f---ing is how babies are made. I didn't know what he was talking about, and I was too afraid to ask Mom.
My first experience with death came on a balmy spring night at dusk. Ted and I were playing outside when a car raced past us. The driver must not have known about the hairpin turn at the end of the cornfield, because seconds later we heard squealing brakes, then metal grinding against asphalt. Ted and I sprinted down the driveway all the way to the corner. The top of the car was caved in and most of the windshield was gone. It was lying upside down against a telephone pole across from the country store. The telephone pole had kept the car from flying into the cornfield.
Sixty-five years later, I can still see that man lying in a pool of blood. I had seen a lot of dead cowboys and Indians in western movies, but that was make-believe. As I looked at the body, I realized for the first time that I could die and I began to cry.
Then the store owner came running across the road. "Go home, boys!" he yelled.
The owner knew Ted and me. We were his best candy customers, and Mom often used the store's telephone when she shopped, because we didn't have a phone.
I looked back at the crash before Ted and I rounded the corner to go home. The store owner was on his knees, with his fingers pressed against the driver's neck. He looked at the people who were getting out of their cars, and he shook his head. Then he took off his apron and put it over the man's face. As Ted and I turned into our driveway, a siren blared. Seconds later, an ambulance sped by.
A few weeks later, when Mom was visiting Grandma in Everett, I got another shock. Dad came to the house, and Mom had told me he didn't know where we lived.
He took Ted and me to the San Francisco Zoo that day. I remember, because we were squirted by an elephant. Then he took us, and the lady who was taking care of us, to dinner. He left the next day, after telling us he hoped we would be spending a few weeks with him in Tacoma over the summer vacation.
At the end of the school year, we packed all of our things into Grandma's Willey's Jeep and Mom moved us back to Everett. I didn't know why we had to leave California.
I'll never forget the day we arrived in Everett at Grandma Elsie's house. We would live with her and Mr. Irving, her second husband, until Mom could buy a house.
Mom parked alongside the garage in the alley behind the house, and we took in a load of our belongings. When we returned to the Jeep, a gaunt, gray-haired black man was standing next to it.
"Mam, could you spare me ten cents for coffee and a donut? I haven't eaten in two days."
"I spent all my money on gas and food driving up from California," Mom answered. "But, I always keep a silver dollar in case of an emergency." She unzipped a secret compartment in her purse and took out the silver dollar. "You take it. She put the silver dollar into his hand. "It should feed you for a couple of days until you find work."
"God bless you," he said, then turned and walked out of the alley.
"Mom, why did you give that man your last dollar?" I asked.
"He needed it more than I did, and I start working at the radio station tomorrow. They'll give me an advance."
For the past sixty-five years, I've tried to emulate my mother's generosity.
The winter of 1945, when I was in the second grade, I discovered I had a conscience. It was a Saturday and Ted and I took a bus to town to go to the movies. We lived on the north end two miles from the city center.
After the double-feature of cowboy films, we went to Kress's ten-cent store to buy candy. As we were leaving, I saw a double-barreled pirate pistol with cocking hammers that exploded caps. The pistol cost seventy-five cents. Together, Ted and I had barely enough money for our bus fare home. I looked to see if anyone was watching, then I put the gun into my waistband under my coat and we left the store.
On the bus, I began to feel guilty. By the time we reached Ninth and Colby, our stop, I knew I had to go back. I told Ted I was staying on the bus and taking the gun back to Kress's and I didn't have enough money for bus fare home, but not too worry because I knew the way.
I returned to Kress's, checked that no one was watching, and put the cap pistol back on the shelf. When I walked out of the store, I was certain that every eye was following me.
As I started home, the sun dropped below the horizon. Twenty minutes later, it was raining and the sky had blackened. I thought every shadow concealed some form of demon.
Then Mom's headlights silhouetted me. I was soaked to the skin and terrified. She got out of the Jeep and threw her arms around me. "Jimmy, I'm so proud of you."
Few days go by that I don't remember my first and last theft, a lesson that stood me well.
A year later, my sibling rivalry with Ted turned serious. One evening while playing poker, we got into an argument, which led to a major brawl.
"Stop it! Stop it now!" Mom screamed as Ted and I wrestled on the floor.
When she tried to separate us, she strained her back and had to go to a doctor. Dad came the next morning before school and took Ted back to Tacoma with him. I missed Ted. I was small for my age and, even though we fought a lot, he had always looked out for me during school recess. Now I didn't have anyone to play games with before bed, either. Mom was always busy writing advertising jingles for her job at the radio station.
A few weeks after Ted left, I got my first lesson in accepting responsibility for my actions.
"I'll get it!" I yelled as my baseball went flying into Mr. Smith's flower garden during a game with neighborhood friends.
When I ran into his garden, Mr. Smith came rushing out onto his porch and shouted at me to get out of his yard. We didn't have another ball, so the game ended.
On our way home, my friend Hartley and I made a pact to go back after dark and get our ball. We tramped through Mr. Smith's garden that evening with our flashlights. The ball was lying next to a mushy pile of dog poop. Harley and I looked at each other and smiled, both thinking the same thing.
We scooped up the poop with leaves, crept up onto Mr. Smith's porch, and shoved the poop through his front-door mail slot. We admired our work a little too long, however. Before we could get off the porch, Mr. Smith was out the door after us.
"I know who you are!" he yelled.
When I got home, Mom was talking with Mr. Smith on the phone. Hartley and I had to go to his house and clean up the mess. Worse, my allowance was docked for a month. It was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, though, because at a very young age I learned about consequences.
For a short time, when Ted and I were living with Dad, before we went to California, Mom was married to Jack. Mom told me they had dated while students at the University of Washington and that he was a war hero. I didn't like Jack, because when Ted and I fought, he spanked us with a kindling stick.
While we were living with Dad in Tacoma, we spent many nights with Grandma Ada. We called her Adock. As a baby, my oldest cousin mispronounced Ada and it stuck. Adock lived on the seventh floor of a north end apartment building overlooking Tacoma's Commencement Bay. Ted and I couldn't wait to visit so one of us could race the elevator while the other ran the stairs. The first one inside the apartment immediately went to the candy bowl. The same bowl now awaits our grandchildren.
On one of our overnights, we asked Adock about our grandfather. She said that Grandpa Fred, who died in 1931 before we were born, left his family's farm in Wisconsin in the late 1880s. He hopped on a freight train and hid in a boxcar until the train reached Tacoma. (The Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad was completed in 1883.) Adock said Grandpa's first job was laying trolley track down Tacoma's Pacific Avenue. He was paid one dollar for a twelve hour day. When he saved enough money to buy a horse and a wagon, he began delivering wood and hauling freight. As the business grew, he purchased additional teams (horses and wagons) and kept them operating year around by hauling feed and ice in the summer and wood in the winter. She said that by the early 1890s, Griffin Transfer was Tacoma's largest freighter.
) Two horses pulling a trolley down Tacoma's Pacific Avenue in 1889 (from Tacoma Public Library archives). |
) Griffin Transfer freight wagon, circa 1890s, (from Tacoma Public Library archives). |
Then Mom married Bill in 1946, her third marriage. Bill was tall and thin, with a wiry muscular build. He had a full head of curly, sandy-brown hair that was parted in the middle and combed straight back. I liked him right away, because he was interested in what I had to say.
Bill had a cabin on Whidbey Island, across Puget Sound from Everett, where we spent weekends crabbing, digging clams, and salmon fishing. He was the log manager at a mill and, if he came home before dark, he played baseball with me. He even let me take his college baseball-team mitt to school.
) Ted, Dad & Jim (summer 1947). |
In November 1947, a month after Mom gave birth to my sister Nancy, we moved to Oregon. Bill had accepted a foreman's job in Sutherlin, a sawmill town I couldn't find on the map. Sutherlin was where I met Green Eyes and, more than a half century later, I'm still haunted by his angry eyes looking at me through the window.
We left for Sutherlin over Thanksgiving weekend in Bill's gray Buick; with a hood ornament that looked like a prehistoric bird. I rode in back with Bill's floppy-eared Cocker Spaniel, Crumpet. I was squashed against the baby cradle that was stuffed with everything that wouldn't fit into the car trunk.
To entertain myself, I followed our progress on the map, anticipating when we would reach Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, Albany, Salem, and Roseburg. Ten hours later, I was asleep.
"Jimmy," Bill said, reaching back and shaking me, "look, you can see the mill's burner."
"Huh?" I blurted, rising up and banging my head on the ceiling, and dumping Crumpet onto the floor.
"We'll be home in another ten minutes," he said.
While I was wondering how Bill could call Sutherlin home, I saw the mill's burner. Thousands of golden-orange sparks were shooting out of what looked like a giant tepee, lighting up the sky like an erupting volcano.
Sutherlin, in the eastern foothills of Oregon's coastal mountains, was bisected by Highway 99. Bill slowed from fifty miles-per-hour to twenty-five as we entered the town. We passed a gas station with a repair garage, a church, a bank, a café, a tavern, a country store that Bill said sold food and just about everything offered in a Sears catalog. Houses were interspersed between the businesses. It was so long ago that I can't remember the names of the businesses. Bill pointed down a side street and said that was where I would be going to school. The Rock Island Lumber Company sawmill was on the east side of the highway at the end of town.
Our house and the manager's house, both owned by the company, were across the street from the mill, next to the woods and away from the ear-piercing racket of a saw knifing through logs. The two houses were separated by a row of leafless oak trees and a lawn strewn with shriveled dandelions. At one time, the houses had been painted green with white trim, but soot from the mill's burner had turned them gray.
The houses were no bigger than double-wide trailers. The room in front faced the mill across the road and was our living-and-dining area. The house was furnished, but Mom said everything looked like it was purchased at a garage sale. A yellow, threadbare davenport and matching cushioned chairs were backed against the front window that faced the mill manager's house. On the other side of the front door was a cedar-plank table with six chairs with missing or broken spindles.
Two bedrooms in back looked out upon a forest and the mountain foothills; they were separated by a bathroom and a closet that opened onto a hallway to the kitchen. In Everett, I'd had my own bedroom and bath. Here I had to share a bedroom with my baby sister and the single bathroom with my parents.
) Mother, Jim and baby sister Nancy (late fall 1947). |
We spent Sunday unpacking and I mowed the lawn. Monday morning, Mom registered me for school. When I entered the fifth-grade class, which shared the room and teacher with the sixth grade, everyone stared at me. I was short for ten and hadn't lost my baby fat. My friends told me I looked like a monk, because Mom had trimmed my thick, straight black hair using a bowl. But, it wasn't my features that my classmates were staring at; it was my clothes. I was wearing a light-brown sweater Mom had knit, over a blue shirt, with brown corduroy pants and maroon penny loafers. The boys were all sons of loggers and mill workers. They wore heavy, green denim shirts, Levis or overalls with straps, and high-top, lace-up boots. A few days later, I was dressed like all the others.
I first saw Green Eyes - I never knew his name - during Christmas vacation.
Bill had given me a job hauling scrap wood to the burner. Green Eyes wore a faded denim shirt, tattered, mud-caked overalls with straps that fastened over his shoulders, and an old bill cap whose company's insignia was no longer recognizable. His skin was ink black, and his stubby bearded face appeared to have been chiseled from granite. With his gloveless, massive calloused hands that looked like they could crush rock, he pulled eight-inch posts off a conveyor like they were broomsticks.
All work stopped when the noon whistle blew. I went home, because Mom only let me work half a day. The mill workers went to a heated enclosure to eat. But Green Eyes never appeared to have brought a lunch. He always went alone to the burner and sat against the warm sheet metal.
At the end of vacation, back in school, Green Eyes quickly faded from my memory.
On a Friday night near the end of winter, my parents and the mill manager and his wife went to Roseburg for dinner, leaving me to care for my baby sister. As soon as they left, I bolted the front door and grabbed Gulliver's Travels-we didn't have television-and joined Crumpet on the davenport. Nancy was fast asleep in her cradle. I hadn't read more than a few pages when the hinge on the front screen door squeaked. I looked up, wondering why my parents had returned so soon.
It wasn't them. It was Green Eyes. He was inside the screen and his head was pressed against the glass top half of the front door. He was looking at me. He had to know we kids were alone, because the carport was empty. He'd probably watched my parents leave, I figured.
His piercing green eyes sent shivers down my spine as he looked back and forth between me and the baby cradle. Mom had told me the terrible things bad men did to children. When he pushed his shoulder against the door, my heart beat in the back of my throat. The handle clicked, but the deadbolt held. Green Eyes took one last look, and leapt off the porch. I watched him through the living-room window as he ran to the corner of the house.
Then I remembered I hadn't bolted the back door! I jumped up and grabbed the baby. I had to get out the front door and into the woods before Green Eyes got inside! Nancy began bawling when I jerked her awake. There was no chance for us to hide now.
Think! Think! I screamed to myself.
Then I remembered the shotgun in the closet. Bill had let me shoot it when he hunted quail in the hills behind our house. I put my baby sister back into the cradle and raced to the closet.
) Jim learning to shoot. |
In my panic, I knocked the cartridge box off the shelf. It shattered onto the floor and the shells flew in every direction. On my knees, I grabbed a shell and jammed it into the gun's chamber.
A breeze from the hallway brought the pungent odor of sulfur. Oh, God! He's in the kitchen!
Crumpet started barking and Green Eyes came into the hall.
I slammed the gun bolt closed, disengaged the safety, and raised the widely swinging 20-gauge to my shoulder. Green Eyes heard the safety click and stopped two paces away. His hands flew up, his defiant expression changed to terror, and he began to back up.
I got to my feet and followed him, staying well out of his reach. He crossed the kitchen, bumped against the screen door, flung it open, then bolted off the porch. I watched him crash through the fir branches into the woods.
I slammed the door behind him, but I was shaking and I couldn't turn the bolt until I put the gun down and used both of my hands.
I returned to the front room. Nancy had stopped crying. When I looked into the cradle at her, she smiled at me and I thought about what Green Eyes would have done to us.
I shut off the lights so Green Eyes wouldn't be able to see into the room and, clutching the shotgun, I sat against the wall in one of the spindle-back chairs. The mill's burner lit up the night like a full moon, giving me good visibility of both the front and side yards.
It seemed like hours before I saw Bill's car lights. I started crying before the door opened.
"Jimmy, what's wrong?" Mom screamed as she came through the front door and saw me holding the shotgun.
"The black man," I tried to say, but I was bawling.
"What happened?"
"Hold on, son," said Bill as he followed Mom to the cradle. "You're safe now."
"The black man from the mill tried to get us," I blabbered.
"Slow down," Bill said.
"I forgot to lock the back door," I continued, still crying. "But I got the gun loaded before he could grab me."
"You did some quick thinking," Bill said, and he gently pulled the gun from my arms.
"I had to fire him yesterday. I caught him drinking whisky. He picked up his check and left the mill, muttering he would get even. I never imagined he would try to hurt you and Nancy."
Bill called the sheriff. Mom and I sat in complete silence, each in our own thoughts. Tears streamed down her cheeks and bounced off Nancy's head. I couldn't stop wondering what would have happened if Green Eyes had come to the back door first.
A few days later, the sheriff stopped by to tell us that an arrest warrant was out for Green Eyes, but he had disappeared.
Not in my dreams has he disappeared, I thought.
Before school let out for summer vacation, I won the Oregon State safety slogan contest and became an instant celebrity. I couldn't wait to call my grandparents who were always telling me how smart I was. Of thousands of student entries, my slogan "Make Caution a Working Word" won. Six weeks later, printed copies of the slogan were hanging at every industrial business in the state. I received a congratulatory letter from Oregon's governor, along with a plaque and $100 war bond.
In July, the mill shut down because of an oversupply of lumber. We returned to Everett where Bill took a job with Scott Paper Company. We lived with Grandma and Mr. Irving, Grandma's second husband, and spent our weekends at Bill's cabin on Whidbey Island until my parents bought a house.
While living with my grandparents, I usually accompanied Mr. Irving to the Monte Cristo Hotel barbershop for his daily shave. Mr. Irving told me he owned the Monte Cristo Hotel in the 1890s. He had emigrated from Liverpool, England in 1886 at age eighteen. In his late seventies, Mr. Irving was still a giant, with the enormous broad-knuckled hands of a fighter. His white hair had thinned and his belly hung over unbuttoned, green lumberman's pants held up by wide, red suspenders. His brown eyes missed nothing. The book Mill Town (by Norman H. Clark, University of Washington Press, 1982) describes him as "a huge, powerful, roaming terror of a man who could drive four hundred loggers to unprecedented performances."
Mr. Irving loved to tell stories and, most mornings, the Everett old-timers came to the Monte Cristo barbershop to listen to them. I will never forget his story about a world championship boxing match. If memory serves me correctly, Mr. Irving was describing a fight between John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett that took place in 1890s. According to Mr. Irving, half the male population of Everett was in the Monte Cristo bar betting on the constantly changing odds received in a Western Union telegraph after each round. Unbeknown to his friends, Mr. Irving was somehow able to get and keep a telephone connection to ringside, giving him information ahead of the telegraph recaps (the telephone had been discovered in 1876, but was still a rarity). Having his friends find out he had outsmarted them was far more important to Mr. Irving than winning their money.
I can't leave my childhood without mentioning the influence on me of Mr. Irving and Grandma Elsie.
"Did I ever show you where I was shot?" Mr. Irving asked. I was in his den, admiring a Persian dagger (which I later inherited from him, and it was the start of my antique dagger collection).
"No," I said.
He pulled up his pants leg and pointed to a large area of red, blotchy skin.
"In 1916," he said, "a group of Everett lumbermen had a shootout with a boatload of Wobblies who steamed up from Seattle on the ship Verona to burn our mills. Fifty-two men were killed or wounded." When I was older, Mom told me she had watched the shootout from a hill above the harbor. She remembered her Uncle Tom Humes, ex-Mayor of Everett, running to the house to get his gun.
When I asked Mr. Irving who the Wobblies were and why they wanted to burn his sawmills, he told me they were members of the International Workers of the World labor union. He said he and the other mill owners wouldn't let the Wobblies unionize the Everett mills.
I didn't know what unionize meant, but it sounded bad.
Then I asked him why some of the alleys were littered with empty beer bottles. I had just come through an alley on my way home from the store after picking up Grandma's groceries. He told me the alleys were where the drunks and derelicts hung out. He suggested that I rent his wheelbarrow and pick up the beer bottles and return them to the store for their $.01 deposit. When I asked why he wouldn't loan me the wheelbarrow, he said he wanted to make some money, too.
By the end of the day, I had returned over 300 bottles, making $2.50 (the equivalent of five weeks allowance) after paying Mr. Irving $.50 to rent his wheelbarrow.
Then before we moved to Sutherlin, Mr. Irving suggested that I gather mistletoe in Oregon and sell it when we came home for Christmas; mistletoe didn't grow in Everett. The following Christmas (after we moved back to Everett) I owned my own wheelbarrow and I was selling mistletoe, Christmas trees and wreaths door to door.
I saved enough money to buy twenty-five feet of waterfront property that adjoined Bill's cabin on Whidbey Island. The profit from the sale of that property later helped to put me through Stanford University.
Grandmother Elsie wasn't nearly as tough as Mr. Irving. She gave me cookies and milk whenever I asked. Grandma always looked nice. She wore a white blouse with either a gray or a dark blue suit. The coat reached her knees and the skirt hung all the way to her ankles. She had hazel-blue eyes like Mom. When she took the pins out of her hair bun, her gray hair dropped to her waist.
One night Mom left Ted and me with Grandma when I was five or six. Grandma let me climb in bed with her after I woke from a nightmare. Before I went to sleep, she told me that she and her siblings had come to Everett with her father and mother, from Whatcheer, Iowa, in a wagon train in 1889. Her family had crossed the Cascade Mountains through Stevens Pass (the Great Northern railroad didn't come to Everett until 1892).
On another occasion, a few years later, when I was sitting on Grandma's lap, she asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I don't remember my answer, but I never forgot what she said.
"Jimmy, you can do or be whatever you want, even president of the United States."
Then she said something about setting goals to achieve dreams and that it wasn't how smart a person was but how hard they worked. Grandmother Elsie and Mr. Irving set the course my life would take and gave me the confidence to take on any challenge.
She told me that my grandfather's (Ted Mathewson) uncle, Henry Hewitt, had founded the city of Everett in 1890 when Washington was still a Territory—Washington didn't become a state until November 1889. Mill Town, which I read when I was older, credited Hewitt with acquiring land and then laying out and building the City of Everett. "Almost overnight, a city of 6000 people with hotels, factories, mines, a shipyard, nail factory, paper mill, smelter and churches and schools was born."
Continuing, Grandma told me that my Grandfather Ted had come to Everett from Wisconsin in 1890 at the urging of his Uncle Henry Hewitt-Grandfather was attending Norte Dame College at the time-and joined Joe Irving in the logging and sawmill business.
Then she told me that her brother, Tom Headley, became Mayor of Everett and her uncle, Tom Humes, Mayor of Seattle just after Washington became a state. Excerpts from An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, which I read years later, wrote, "Tom" (Humes) "became a schoolteacher at age 17, was admitted to the Bar in 1870, in 1877, elected to the Kansas Legislature, in 1880, appointed Assistant United States Attorney and served until coming to Seattle in 1882, appointed a Superior Court Judge in 1890 and served as Mayor of Seattle from 1897-1904."
Grandmother Elsie and Mr. Irving set the course my life would take and gave me the confidence to take on any challenge.
Grandma died from an automobile accident when I was thirteen. She was a Christian Scientist and wouldn't go to the hospital, which could have saved her life. Then Mr. Irving became bedridden from a stroke. Losing their council and encouragement was a real loss to me. Everett was never the same.
After finishing the sixth grade, in 1948, I went to live with my dad and his second wife, Sarah, a tall blonde with a model's figure. I liked Sarah because she treated me like one of her own children; she had two children by a previous marriage. Two years later, my sister, Elizabeth (Beth), with whom I have always been close, was born.
Although I had never gotten along with my father, I was happier living with him now in Tacoma. With Mom, I had attended five grade schools over six years-in Everett, Washington and Sutherlin, Oregon-and had no close friends. Whereas, I still had many friends in Tacoma with whom I had kept in touch during summer vacations since kindergarten. Also, Mom was busy with a new baby, Charlie, leaving me to fend for myself. Bill no longer took me hunting and fishing. He had become an alcoholic and spent his afternoons after work in the taverns.
I especially liked Dad and Sarah's big house at Gravelly Lake. I could get lost in it without being missed, and there was a tennis court. Tennis was my new passion.
Ted and I were now under the same roof again, but we had no more sibling problems after he saw my boxing trophy. I had won the Everett, Snohomish County Junior Boxing Championship.