It is impossible to truly finish sharing about Daddy’s life in one blogpost! I do want to include comments that he has personally made, as well as recounting a few of my own memories from over the years.
And so they were farmers again (although Grandpa couldn’t help being a realtor and builder, as well!). Daddy said that one year he won a prize at the fair ($1.00) for the biggest pumpkin! He also had a white rabbit named Snowball, and a dog named Pat. And here's a photo of Daddy and a cow in front of a '28 Chrysler being used by Walt to haul hay:
Daddy reported, “My Dad once took a beef cow in to be butchered; the butcher remarked on how extremely good the meat was, and my Dad told him it was totally grass-fed beef.” There was a barn built for the cows there; it was south of their home, towards where our home and the duplexes were eventually built on Alanita Lane. The family also had a Jersey cow named ‘Grandma’; Daddy said she was “really old, hard to milk, but had really good milk.” He said that Grandpa got her as a trade on one of his business deals. In this photo it looks like she’s wearing his hat!!
In talking about his studies, Daddy said that “even though my Dad had only an 8th grade education, when I needed help with my math, he was able to show me how to do math computations with just a few steps. But - the teacher wouldn’t let me do the problems that way!” He said that Grandpa’s response was “the more steps, the more chance of error!” In addition to homework from school, Daddy took piano lessons from Estella Kinney, and was in the scouting program:
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| (He said he may be the one with the mustache!) |
Fishing was a favorite activity in Daddy’s family growing up. He remembers one time they had gone fishing at Galice, and had two creels of fish tied on the outside of the Studebaker, but they were ruined by the engine heat. Daddy recounted another memory involving the Studebaker; on a trip up to Crater Lake, he and Kay rode on the running boards, holding hands across the hood of the Studebaker!! (Don't try this at home.)
I found some old DMV records online, for Grandpa and Walt; and Daddy and I added comments:
1942 - Grandpa - 1937 Oldsmobile - Daddy said Grandpa bought it for $800 with 5,000 miles on it, and he had to mortgage the house to do it. At 54,000 miles they had to put new rings in it - “one thing that’s better now.”
1946 - Walt - 1937 Buick convertible - I remember that Uncle Walt still had this when we were kids; I remember it being black with a ‘rumble seat’, and I seem to remember getting to ride in it once. Mom and Dad used that car on their honeymoon; it turned to 100,000 miles while they were driving it. They went down the coast, to San Francisco, and on to Los Angeles. Daddy remembers not caring much for the hills of San Francisco.
When he was 16, Daddy got his 1st car, a 1931 Oldsmobile Patrician Sedan, with a synchromesh transmission and lots of chrome. It was 1943, and he drove to town and got his license! He said that his ignition key would fit both his dad’s 1937 Oldsmobile and his brother’s 1937 Buick. He sold the car in 1945, when he went into the Navy. He said the garage at 1017 Fruitdale Drive was in a different place then; a gap made a canvas cover carport off to the side. The original garage was moved and lifted up to make the apartment above; there was a pit to do mechanical work.
In addition to taking piano lessons, Daddy played in the band when he attended Grants Pass High School. It is my understanding that he knew how to play every brass instrument in the band, although the trombone and baritone were his specialty. Daddy was involved in band rather than sports, although he did injure a finger while playing basketball. When he and Mom were dating, during his senior year, she went to all the games in order to hear him play in the band.
Mom was a junior when Daddy was a senior; so at his graduation she was one of the girls who ‘carried the arches’. The girls made beautiful arches, featuring many local roses; with two girls per arch, they dragged them onto the field where commencement was held, swung them up in the air, and were then responsible to maintain them as an arch while the members of the senior class marched under them. Daddy’s marching partner was a girl, Rosemary Barber, and Mom told him that if he held the girl’s hand, she would drop the arch on them. I bet he didn’t hold that other girl’s hand!
When Daddy was talking about his grandfather (August) preferring to write with pencil, and Grandpa not liking fountain pens, he said that when he was in the Navy he purchased a ball point pen for $20 at the ship store. It was supposed to write underwater, but it didn’t work; so he took it back and traded it in for a pair of sunglasses, which he had for a long time.
Mom and Dad were married in 1947; a year later Alan joined the family. Daddy worked at a music store; he said that he got a chromatic harmonica there at Sherman Clay for $20, and then went to work at Lipman-Wolfe in downtown Portland (now on the National Historic Register), where he made $165 a month selling sox. Mom said that at one point he sold Christmas cards door to door in July, and she knew then that she never had to worry about Daddy having a job!
Because of his time in the Navy, he was able to take advantage of the GI Bill when he went to school at Lewis and Clark in the fall of 1949. The weather that winter was particularly cold and miserable, and he decided that he might as well go to school where it was warm! So in January of 1950, Daddy and Mom (expecting me) and Alan got onto a greyhound bus and headed south, which is why I was born in Phoenix, Arizona. They returned to Oregon at the end of the school year in June.
Daddy told me a little about his job history and connection with people in Grants Pass over the years. He got his first job at a service station. He was close to 16, because soon after that he got his first car and passed his driving test. He was working for Harold Prestel, because their neighbor "Aunty Prestel" was Harold’s mother. When he went to work there, a girl named Hallie Massey (the daughter of the postmaster) was also working for Harold Prestel. Another guy working there was named Wally Martin. They washed a lot of cars for the power company, and Daddy can recall Wally saying to Harold Prestel, "Come out and scrutinize it." Pretty soon, both Hallie and Wally worked elsewhere, and Daddy was there by himself. Harold was a hard taskmaster. He wouldn't let anyone sit down at all, all day long, and Daddy was working 8-6, when it was supposed to be 8-5. Harold Prestel ended up firing him, because he wasn't fast enough at washing cars. Wally Martin's dad later worked at the post office. In even later years, Wally Martin was an attorney who became a judge in Grants Pass; and Harold Prestel, in later years, became postmaster! Daddy stated that every person in this narrative was where they were because of who they knew.
Daddy later had a job as a salesman of appliances at Montgomery Ward, but he just wasn't a salesman. Daddy and his brother Walt went to the unemployment office to meet with a John Luica, who came down to Wards and told him about a job at the saw shop. Wards paid in cash, and Daddy had to wear a suit at Wards. He was so excited about being hired to work at the saw shop, he put his cash from Wards in the suit coat pocket and forgot about it!
Daddy was working at the saw shop, for Archie McCloud and Glenn Clark (known as "Gus") and they laid him off. He expected unemployment, but they only had two employees, so they hadn't paid into unemployment. Daddy had a family to support then, and on November 13 he went back and told them he couldn't get by. Gus, said "Why don't you try down at the post office?" Daddy got on there, over Christmas. Cliff Driscoll, who was postmaster at that time, also had a motel (where all the Y's come together, on the 'BiMart' side, where there is a car wash now). Daddy was working at the post office part time. There was a great deal of mail in those days, at 3 cents a letter. They used the armory building for parcels - there were also many parcels back then! Daddy was using a truck to make deliveries, driving down 6th street, and waved at someone standing on the curb. She happened to be the wife of the Justice of the Peace; and she claimed Daddy almost ran her down. Cliff Driscoll took him out to Cave Junction, to smooth things out with the Justice of the Peace, and saved Daddy his job.
When the Christmas job ended, Cliff hired him to work at his motel. He told Daddy he would get him on at the ground floor at the Post Office, when they were making new routes. Daddy’s starting year there was 1952, the year Charlie was born, and he retired in 1982. Later, Cliff had lost his job as postmaster, because things went from Democratic to Republican; that's when Harold Prestel came in as postmaster, and Daddy was working for him again! Daddy believes Harold Prestel had the Pontiac agency, also. Daddy mentioned that he goes to visit Wally Martin now at a nursing home, but Wally doesn't know who Daddy is any more.
Several years ago I asked Daddy, just to check (because it’s so hard to believe), whether one of his daily walking foot routes as a mail carrier was truly 20 miles long. He corrected me, saying that it was only (!) 18 miles long!
My first memories of ‘home’ are from the house on Alanita Lane, which was just down the road from Grandma and Grandpa’s home. I have early memories of Daddy reading to us on Saturday mornings. I know that he read through the Oz book series; and I remember listening to him read Swiss Family Robinson. I’m so glad that we caught the love of reading from he and Mom!
As time went on, the family grew. As Daddy recounts:
“We were living in Fruitdale, and wanted to get into another place. We looked for property there, with an irrigation ditch. We looked at one place where the irrigation ditch cut through six times! In the meantime, my mail route had been made a 'full' route, by having a second delivery for businesses each day. I was delivering mail to Southern Oregon Land Company. One day, on my second delivery, I dropped into a chair when Al Hoover happened to be there. I described wanting a place with irrigation, and Al Hoover said 'how would you like a place with a creek in it?' He said it was a kind of a ‘pocket’ deal - he was the only one in the office that knew about it, and he had told the Brumbeloes that he would only bring someone by if it was a sure thing. I was sold when I saw it! God made all kinds of details happen for us to own the farm!”
Growing up on the farm was a wonderful thing! We had a pasture, cows, goats, chickens, ducks, geese, a garden; and we also had a woods, a creek, an irrigation canal that ended in a waterfall that dumped into a swamp - a perfect place for all kinds of adventures!
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| The hay was cut with a scythe; we all (including Granddaddy and Sandy and Jimmy) pretended to haul it, but they fastened a car to the ropes to haul it on up to the barn. |
Music has always been a part of Daddy’s life, especially piano music. In talking to cousins, I have discovered that Grandpa and many of his brothers played the piano; and Daddy's sister Kay played on the old Gulbransen piano (which they even had out at the Old Ranch) for long hours when Grandma was expecting Daddy, so he was probably born with a love of piano music.
We didn’t have a piano in our home until after we were living at the farm. Daddy was carrying the mail past Vesta Dillinger’s door, and liked the sound of her studio-sized grand piano. When he commented on how good it sounded, she said he might have a chance to get it, because she was going to be moving into a duplex, and had a small piano that she was going to use there. She told Daddy that he could have that grand piano for $20 a month. It cost several hundred dollars (Daddy says probably $600), and she did not charge interest. Then she got to thinking about how long it would take, and he paid it off ahead of time.
Having the piano led eventually to Daddy’s piano tuning business.
Daddy had always wanted to be a piano tuner. In fact, he had wanted to go to the William Braid White School of Piano Technology, in Chicago. Walter Olson, a piano tuner from Medford, had learned from a blind man in Iowa who told Walter to pass that knowledge on to someone else.
Walter Olson had tuned the piano at Jerome Prairie Church, where Daddy played the piano in the mid-1950’s, and there had been a problem with the piano afterwards. Someone called from the church while Daddy was out cutting corn to feed the cows, and Daddy went down to the church to meet with Walter Olson. The piano had been having a problem with the sustaining pedal not working. That problem had already been fixed by the time Walter Olsen came back and Daddy got the call to go talk to him. But through that call, God brought all the details together to bring Walter Olson into his life at just the right time, to help Daddy realize a life-time dream.
Daddy said that our grand piano was one of the hardest pianos to tune that he has experienced (he said you couldn't ‘go forward’ and ‘back off’), so he learned how to tune a piano that was especially difficult to tune. God gave him a piano that, if he could tune it, he could tune anything! Daddy became a member of the Piano Technicians Guild. The testing for that is very exacting, and done before a board of Piano Technician Guild members. Daddy passed the examination well, and he demonstrated that he could even tune a piano using arpeggios - which is not the usual method!
We recently saw the customer card files from Daddy’s business, Brown Piano Service. Hundreds and hundreds of cards, with names and addresses, and records of the dates he tuned each piano. He tuned concert grands, as well as pianos in humble homes like ours. Whenever he wanted a little work, he sat down with a card file and made a few calls - and soon had all the work he wanted! He continued his work as a letter carrier; but now he was apt to take a suit and his piano tools with him in the morning, in order to tune a piano on the way home after work. My brothers took over farm responsibilities or that would not have been possible.
I’ll close this post by describing a predicament that Daddy and I experienced together.
Probably the first time I truly felt an adult-to-adult connection with Daddy was the night of The Christmas Concert Experience. I had graduated from high school, and Charlie and Larry were performing in a Christmas program, being given by the small school we had all attended earlier, and held at the church where Daddy’s brother-in-law was the pastor. As the two of us sat there together, we were surrounded by people we knew, most of them also friends and relatives of those performing. [If anyone reading this was present that night, and in the beginning band, I apologize now for our behavior.] As the program began, we listened to a variety of musical performances which were very enjoyable.
Until the beginning band began to perform. Oh, dear! We couldn't tell what song they were playing. It was pretty bad. So bad that at a certain point, one of us began to unsuccessfully fight the urge to laugh, then both of us did. I don’t remember which of us began to laugh, but we tried so very hard to stop! After all, the parents or friends of the people playing might be sitting beside us, and would have been able to feel the church pew shaking! Whenever one of us would be able to stop, the other one would start again - truly a bonding experience! On the way home, Daddy said, “Every time I got control of myself, that clarinet would squawk again!”
I am so glad that Daddy is still making memories with us all; and he is still making music, with his harmonica!
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Next up: Walter Brown’s birth in Georgia, and life with his family in Texas and Washington, D.C., and more!
Thanks for sharing all those memories! I'm glad you took the time to write them down.
ReplyDeleteAnita, loved reading this. I'm sad that my sisters and I dontd have this detail of our early lives and our dad's (Lorne Brown) early years. I'm pretty sure he told us some stories, but they are long forgotten.
ReplyDeleteAbove from cousin Lynne
ReplyDeleteThank you, Amy & Lynne, for your comments. Lynne, many of these stories are ones I've learned from my father in recent years; and many of the stories I will be telling have come from cousins (especially Linnea); the more we share, the more we'll all know!
ReplyDelete:)