Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know I like to travel.
Last night during my usual two A.M. wakeful period I got to thinking about life as it was when I was young and thought I would write about things as I saw them seventy-some years ago. Travel through time can be fun too.
Last night as I revisited my youth many things passed through my mind. The way things were in Alderwood during the war; the grandparents' farms and how the old family farm differed from what we see today; communication, from the old wall-mounted phone and tube radio to the ubiquitous electronics of today; transportation; schooling; child labor and many more differences came to mind.
It is impossible to deal with those memories all together so I'll think (and write) about the old days one journey at a time. Today we visit Alderwood, a suburb north of Seattle, where we lived during the time of my earliest memories. The old house was still there last I went by and it's not but about 19 miles from where we live today although on this trip through time it is a long way away---to the early 1940's.
People who live in that area today probably would be surprised to learn that our bathroom facilities consisted of a two-hole outhouse and hot water heated by the old kitchen wood stove drawn occasionally for a bath in the kitchen using an old round galvanized washtub. We did have a regular bathtub but since my father was remodeling that part of the house (in his spare time) the bathtub, and the rest of the bathroom, was not hooked up.
I started school there, walking about one mile each way from our house to the Alderwood elementary school. Until about 15-20 years ago that school, a nice little brick building, was still there on the plot of land in the SW part of the intersection formed by 196th Street and I-5. It finally bit the dust when the I-5 interchange was expanded. It might surprise today's parents but, as a first grader, I walked down 38th and then along the relatively busy old two-lane 196th Street all by myself. Sidewalks were nowhere to be found in that part of town and the shoulder was narrow but I made it to school and back without mishap. Well, except for the time I pooped my pants on the way home. Just couldn't make it home in time and didn't think of going into the woods as Mom advised when I finally arrived home in tears.
At that time there weren't a lot of houses in that neighborhood. Across 38th to the southwest lived the Greifs on a nice little farm and on our side of the road to the south, a couple hundred feet away, lived Franny C.(I'll abbreviate his last name for privacy, even after all these years his family might care.) Franny had come back from the Pacific Theater severely affected by what today would be called PTSD. He had collected enemy ears during the fighting and brought the collection back with him. I never saw them but my father said they were pretty grisly. We seldom saw Franny outside since he apparently slept in the daytime and roamed around at night.
To our north lived a family of immigrants from Europe. The two children, Almond and Thierry (sp?) were about our ages so my brother and I sometimes played with them. I have memories of building roads with tunnels under the roots of an old fir tree and using small pieces of wood or cones as vehicles and actually using our own mouths to simulate the sounds of the cars, trucks and earthmoving equipment we imagined moving around our world. Pretty primitive toys but we may have learned more, or at least stimulated our brains more, than do modern kids with high-tech toys and electronic devices to keep themselves entertained.
As I recall, my paternal grandparents never visited us but I remember my mother's parents making the trek from their farm on Orcas Island all the way to what today is known as a northern suburb of Seattle, a few times during our stay in Alderwood. Sometimes Grandma would bring us a banana each, or sometimes it was an orange. Wonderful treats in those days before fast modern transportation, and especially during the War when many things were rationed and others just not available.
Childhood memories are long lasting. We had a child's metal rocking chair. One day I was climbing on it, probably doing some kind of goofy thing when I slipped, the chair tipped and as I fell I hit my chin on the back of the chair, biting my tongue almost off. I don't remember the trip to the doctor or the pain that followed but I do remember the descriptions often given by my parents that it was dangling only by the blood vessels and nerves at the bottom. The scar was quite visible when I was younger. I just went and looked in the mirror. Even now, these many years later that scar is still visible about an inch and a quarter back from the tip of my tongue.
Another lasting memory is when my brother drank the fuel oil from the can that was positioned under the carburetor on the back of the oil-fired space heater in our living room. It was put there to catch the drip in the fitting that never got tightened properly. I'm not sure how much oil he drank but we were loaded into the old '38 Chevy and Dad drove down the road blowing the horn and skidding around corners. After his stomach was pumped, I don't remember my brother drinking fuel oil again. but the leaky fitting was tightened and the drip quickly cured.
Paine Field is not far from Alderwood and we often saw small planes practicing stalls with the following spin-outs looking like a sure crash until the last moment when the pilots would recover, climb to altitude and do it all over again.
The regular bombers and sometimes fighter aircraft of the day flew over that area with B-24, B-17 and even B-29 flights not unusual. I'll always remember a B-36 flying low over our place one day as my brother and I happened to be outside. It was a six-engine bomber using pusher propellers and it made a distinct noise. Later models added four jet engines but the one I remember had just those huge pusher propellers.
We moved back to Orcas Island in August of 1947 so this trip back through time on the magic wings of memory draws to a close.
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