Grandpa's Store

My father had a phenomenal memory.  It wasn't photographic the way Uncle Dick's was, but he remembered sounds and smells and emotions from his entire life, from claiming to remember being born to every minute of December 7th 1941.  And he wrote it all down.  His memoire could easily be two books, his childhood in the Missouri Ozarks and the WWII and Boeing years; each unique and attractive to different audiences.  It may well be that I divide it thus, but for now, as I put it into a form that may or may not be saleable, I am including his childhood with all his description because it directly influenced events that still lay in the future as he fished, hunted, and, yes, walked miles--sometimes carrying his little brother--to a one room school which he reminded me of occasionally when I complained of the six blocks I had to walk.  My father's memories of a childhood in the Ozarks is of a way of life largely vanished.  I think it is worth preserving.

Original drawing of Grandpa Stanley's store in Bona, MO done by the author in the late 1930s and the basis of a painting done in 1967

The buildings in Bona were shaded by many large trees.  The churchyard in particular had several large maple trees and one huge mulberry between the church and the Todd house.

                Grandpa’s store was a low one-story frame building.  By the side of the dirt road in the edge of the churchyard was the community well from where Grandpa and Grandma had to carry water in buckets.  The town well did not have a pump.  Instead there was a slender well bucket that was let down to the water on a rope over a pulley.  Back in those hills we just did not have much in the way of modern conveniences.

                The front of the store was a concrete porch shaded by a slanted corrugated tin roof.  There were two gasoline pumps at the corner of the porch.  On the store porch there was always a row of empty milk cans that made a handy place for loafers to sit in the summer when it was warm.  In the winter or when it was raining, which it did not do very often back in the days of the great drought, the loafers would sit in the back of the store by the big black pot-bellied coal stove.

                Entering the store through a creaking screen door, you were immediately assailed by a deliciouis mélange of scents.  It was compounded of the heady aromas of tobacco, dried beans, leather, flour, candy, cookies, oil from the compound with which Grandpa swept the wood floor, and so on—even including the scent of the glue on the sticky strips of flypaper that hung at intervals throughout the store.

                That store had everything country folks might need or want crammed into a space that was about forty by sixty feet.  As you came in the front door there was a glass candy case to the left and beyond that a tobacco case with all sorts of smoking and chewing tobacco.  Twists of chewing tobacco hung from the low ceiling above the case and flat tins of snooze, sacks of Bull Durham and Golden Grain, and myriad other items were on the shelves beyond the aisle behind the cases.

                Across from the candy and tobacco cases, fronted by the red Coca Cola cooler, was a long rack of shelves holding a variety of canned goods.  I was particularly fond of the canned Vienna sausages, canned salmon, and the canned oysters that my mother got when she could afford them to make oyster stew. [Having been raised in Missouri herself, as were her parents before her, I have no idea where my grandmother got a taste for or recipe for oyster stew.  Hers were the only oysters I would eat, but by then the family lived in oyster country.]

                At the rear of the store, on the left beyond the patent medicines, was the counter where orders were made up.  It had a big roll of brown wrapping paper on a rack at the end just over the flour barrel and, next to that, a Toledo “Honest Weight” counter scales.  Immediately below were the brown paper bags that Grandpa would snap open with a flourish when he was bagging beans or something for a customer.  Also right under the order counter were bins and kegs of loose product (we call them bulk food foods today) like pinto or navy beans, coffee beans, cornmeal, and I do not remember what all else—each with its special fragrance.

                On the other side of the store to the front was the drygoods section.  There were stacks of blue hickory work shirts and either blue or blue and white striped bib overalls.  There were shelves of bolts or cotton prints for women to use for dresses, aprons, and poke sunbonnets.  There were shoes which were mostly work shoe clodhoppers and a few Sunday oxfords.  When folks wanted fancier clothes and could afford them, they went either to Greenfield, the county sea, twenty miles away to Rubenstien’s or else to Springfield which was about forty miles away.

                Back beyond the clothing and drygoods was the hardware section.  The walls back there were hung with horse and mule collars.  There were always piles of plow points on the floor alongside kegs of horseshoes and horseshoe nails.  There were sledge hammers, axes, all kinds of ash and hickory tool handles, doubletree clevises, singletrees, and all the other stuff that is inclined to break or wear out around a farm.  Most of those things can be found only in museums now.

                The real heart of Grandpa’s store was at the rear of the main part.  That was where the big black pot-bellied cast iron heating stove sat.  Loafers would gather around that coal-fired stove to whittle and talk when it was too cold to sit out on the store porch and do those things.  Grandpa had a place rigged at the end of the canned goods counter near the stove where he nailed together egg cases of white pine while he talked with the loafers.

                By the wall near the stove there was a Toledo floor scales where the live chickens and cans of cream brought in to be traded were weighed.  Just beyond in the corner was a little room that had the coal oil tank and where eggs were candled to see if they were fresh.

                Opposite that little room there was a small glassed-in room that Grandpa had built where he tested the cream for butterfat content.  On the wall beyond the stove by the back door was a big old Regulator pendulum clock tick-tocking away.  That Regulator clock was supposed to also tell the phases of the moon, too, but I don’t believe that part worked.  That did not matter though, as everyone could see the moon and always knew the phase it was in.

                That big old pot-bellied stove was a delight on the cold winter nights.  Loafers would sit around on wooden cases, cream can, or whatever else might be handy including the floor.  In between spitting tobacco juice into the stove they would whittle and talk.  Some of the tales they would tell were downright mind-boggling for a little boy.

                Of course, when I was there, I knew to sit back and be quiet.  In those days children were to be seen but not heard.  We would not dare to intrude in an adult conversation when they were talking about such important things as Politics, Old Times, or whether there is life in the Hereafter.  We kids just listened and if they were not talking about something interesting like Old Times or ghost stories we could always go somewhere else and play.

                I remember two sounds about Grandpa’s store besides the talking of the loafers.  One was the tick-tocking of that Regulator clock and the other was the tap, tap-tap of Grandpa’s all little metal hammer he used to nail new egg cases together.  He had to make a lot of them as the eggs remained in the cases when he took them every week to market in Springfield.  He bought the white pine parts already cut to size and kept a supply of them down in the barn behind the house.

                That straight grain soft pine was just dandy for whittling.  Pieces of it were what the loafers used there around the stove.  After I got big enough to carry my own pocket knife, I whittled lots of boats, airplanes and wooden guns that we made to shoot innertube rubber bands at each other out of the white pine.

Bona, Missouri

My father's description of Bona (pronounced Bonnie) reminds me of Harper Lee's description of the fictional Macomb, Alabama except that Bona would have made Macomb look like a metropolis. 

After about two years in Vancouver just off-bearing lumber at the sawmill, Dad was not getting ahead much and being a very independent type he was sick of working for wages.  He was probably tired of the winter rains, too, and I am sure that both he and Mother were homesick for the Ozark hills. Except for missing Grandma and Grandpa Stanley, our maternal grandparents, and some pieces of candy corn or a box of Crackerjacks from the store Grandpa had in Bona (and Grandpa sent us those in a package in the mail sometimes) I guess Richard and I did not care much was we could always find plenty of things to do wherever we were. 

                Anyhow, in 1927 when I was five years old, Dad scraped together enough money to buy coach tickets on the train for Mother and we three boys and he sent us off to Missouri.  He apparently had to stay and work until he had enough to get himself back there.

                I remember a few things about that trip back to the Ozarks on the train.  The train coach had green plush seat.  Mother had bought Richard and me each a little notebook to scribble and draw in and she got each of us a new little toy car.  We would run those cars along the back of the seats and sometimes we sent them scooting down the aisle.

                Mother did not have enough money to take us to the dining car to eat so she would get us sandwiches either from a train vendor or from the stations when the train stopped for a little while.  At one such stop somewhere, she left baby Rex with a fellow passenger and got off the train to get some baloney and bread for us to eat.  While she was gone they were switching cars on the train and the one we were in suddenly moved a little way.

                I had watched from the window while my mother got off and when the car moved I thought they were going to leave her behind.  It was traumatic—I panicked and started running down the aisle crying and yelling, “Don’t leave my Mama! DON’T LEAVE MY MAMA!!”  It was a great relief when she got back on safely with the bread and baloney and I felt very foolish for having made such a scene.

                I do not remember much about our arrival back in Bona except I sure was glad to see Grandpa and Grandma Stanley.  Their house was right alongside Grandpa’s general store, separated only by a small front yard.  “C. B. Stanley, General Merchandise” it said in gold lettering on the front window of the store—and that store was a wonderland for little boys.  There were many treats in the candy case, the rack of cookie boxes, and the red Coca Cola cooler were Grandpa kept bottles of Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, and all flavors of NeHi pop on ice.

                Grandma and Grandpa Stanley lived in Bona, Missouri, which was truly a backwoods crossroads village.  Bona was at the top of a hill on the road from Dadeville to Fairplay in the North Morgan township of Dade County.  The east-west crossroad went from Aldrich, seven miles to the east, through Bona to Cane Hill and over to Arcola.

                Grandpa’s house and store occupied the northwest corner of the crossroad.  The southwest corner was the churchyard of the white wood-framed Bona Church [and where Uncle Dick, his daughter Janice, my son Frank, I scattered my father’s ashes in 2002].  The northeast corner was, in the late ‘20s when we came back from Washington, a vacant lot that had only a hitching rack used by buggies and wagons coming to trade at the store or, on Sunday, coming to church.

                The southeast corner of the crossroad was occupied by the second store in bona, Whiteside’s Store.  Actually it did not amount to much compared to Grandpa’s “General Merchandise.”  Next to Mattie Whiteside’s store there was in those days a blacksmith shop operated by the Slagle brothers.

                There were maybe six other houses and buildings in Bona in those days.  South of the blacksmith shop there were two small houses.  Across from those and south of the tree-shaded church yard, there was a board and batten house where our cousins Claude and Billy Todd lived.  Just beyond it there was a little building that Eulas Todd, Claude and Billy’s father, called the Bona “garage,” but I never saw him working on a car there.

                West of the crossroad there was not much except just down the hill from the churchyard there was another board and batten house where Cook Neil and his family lived.  Across from that and west of Grandpa’s barn there was a frog pond.

                Just north of Grandpa’s house there was a large white two-story house called the Welly Depee house.  Old Welly Depee was a crippled old man who made brooms for a living.  He had a small shack out behind Grandma’s flower garden that was his workshop where he made the brooms.

                Down the hill to the east there were only a couple of house, both of which were occupied by what was left of the Whiteside family.  In the first lived Mattie Whiteside’s daughter and her family and beyond, in the second, was where Mattie and her illegitimate grandson Frank lived.

                Dade County, Missouri where Bona was [there is little left of it, save the church and one or two houses in the 21^st century] located on the edge of the “Ozark Mountain;” however, there are no mountains around.  There the Ozarks consist of gently rolling hills that are tree covered except where they have been cleared for pasture, cornfields, or other crops.

Life in Vancouver--the first time

Life in Vancouver

Conrad Frieze (l.) and brother Richard, 1926

We finally arrived in Vancouver, Washington with no major mishaps that I can recall and my father got a job in the DuBois sawmill on the waterfront of the Columbia River.  Having come from where the largest river was narrow enough to throw a rock across, that Columbia River looked like a big ocean to us kids.  We liked to sit on the docks and watch the chugging tugboats pulling or pushing big rafts of fir logs to the sawmill.  I also enjoyed the big sternwheeler steamboats thrashing the water to a froth as they chuffed by the muddy waters of the huge river.

                We remained in Vancouver for two years that first trip West.  In the beginning we lived for a while in an apartment on the second floor of a store building on Kauffman Avenue on the West side.  The only way up to the apartment was via an outside stairway which was not very nice when it rained—which it often did.  There was no bathroom in the apartment.  The only toilet was at the bottom of the stairway which was not much of an improvement over a country privy when you had to go on a cold rainy night.  The porcelain of the toilet was stained brown and the place stunk as bad as a country outhouse.  Kauffman Avenue was not actually on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, but you could sure hear the train engines chugging from there.

                Next we lived in a little weathered wood house located in a small cul-de-sac off Kauffman near the store building.  That was where we were living when my brother Rex Donald was born on May 9^th, 1926.  Being only four years old at the time, I do not remember much about Rex as a baby except that we were sure proud of our little brother.

                My memories of living in Vancouver that first time are quite sketchy, but a few things stand out.  I recall that once while we were there we went down to see the ocean at Seaside, Oregon.  I recall standing on the sandy beach and my mother trying to explain to me how big an ocean is.  I looked real hard at the far horizon and, if I squinted, thought I could see shapes down along where the sea met the sky.  Oh,” I said blithely, “it’s not so wide.  I can see buildings over there!”  Mother tried to convince me that I could not, but I went away convinced I could see across the Pacific Ocean.  But it was pretty darn big at that.

                Unfortunately, I had a couple of bad memories about that time in Vancouver.  Both times my mother cried which I had never seen her do before.  That made me feel bad. My first bad memory from our first time living in Washington was because of my cousin Emma Lee.  Emma was the daughter of Uncle Austin and Aunt Macy, who was my father’s sister and the reason we had come to Washington.  Although Uncle Austin had a good job with the water department, they lived with their children in a little house near us and so close to the railroad tracks that you could not only hear the trains that come through several times a day, you could pretty near throw a rock and hit them.  Anyway, my mother cried when she overheard Emma tell one of her friends about us, “Oh, those are our poor relations from the Missouri Ozarks.”  I resented being called a poor relation (even though we did not have much in the way of money and things and Dad had been forced to sell the Chevrolet.). I did not like it because it made my mother cry.  Even in later years I never felt real fond of Emma although she grew up to be a very nice and gracious lady.

                My second bad memory of Vancouver was that, while we were living in that little weathered brown house in the cul-de-sac, I developed a morbid fear of dentists that I did not loe until about the time I was in high school.  My mother developed an impacted tooth.  I recall going out into the back yard by the clothesline and finding her out there holding her swollen jaw and crying.  It made me want to cry just to see her do it.

                I asked my mother what was the matter and she said through her sobs, “My tooth hurts and your daddy is going to take me to the dentist!”

                Her voice was so anguished that I did not think to ask her if she was crying about going to the dentist or because her tooth hurt.  Instead, my three-year-old mind decided that going to the dentist must be terrible.  It made a deep enough impression that a few years later when I was ten or twelve years old, my father took me to the dentist in Greenfield, Missouri because of a decayed molar that had to be pulled.  Before the dentist even touched the tooth, I screamed and hollered so loud that they probably heard me all over the courthouse square.  That embarrassed my father no end.  I felt very foolish later and vowed to myself that no matter how much something hurt me I would not even flinch.

Here is the beginning of Chapter 1 of my father's memoire.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

                It is said that the active memory of a child begins at the age of four or five.  That may be true; nevertheless, there are many early memories buried deep in the subconscious.  As a matter of fact, I “remember” the moment of my birth.

                Before you say that is ridiculous and toss this aside, allow me to explain.  I do not actively remember; however, between preschool age and about ten, I often experienced a very vivid nightmare.  It was always the same—I would “wake” and become aware that I was in a very small and confining space.  It was rather like a tiny igloo expect that it was soft, warm, and snug.  It pressed at me, however, and I would suddenly have an overpowering urge to escape.  Almost in panic I would struggle against the resilience that enfolded me, desperate to find a way out.

                With all my being I wanted desperately to go back into that soft and safe warmth, but I always knew that I could not.  No doubt that was when old Doc Drisdel smacked me on the bottom and I drew my first breath, then expelled it in a howling wail of protest in that lamp-lit farmhouse bedroom on a cold and blustery night in the Ozark hills.  It was sometime in the early hours of March 3rds, 1922, when I was first stuck with the world and it with me.

                My earliest active memory goes back to when I was about two and a half years old.  The family album has an old snapshot of my older brother Richard and me with Dad’s best friend “Skinney” Neill.  In that faded old photograph, Richard—typically solemn faced—is in a clean Sunday outfit.  Both he and Skinny are looking at me who, in dirty rompers and with a very dirty face, is grinning into the camera.

                We were at Grandpa Stanley’s house beside his country store in Bona, Missouri.  While Mother was dealing with Richard, I wandered out to a flower bed along the side of the store building where my grandmother had planted something called “elephant’s ear.”  I had been shown by Skinny that if you broke off a triangular leaf from the plant, bruised it gently between thumb and forefinger, then blew at the point the stem was broken off, the leaf could be inflated like the belly of a frog.  I had been playing in the flower bed and attempting to duplicate Skinny’s feat.  In the process I made a very dirty mess of both my grey rompers and myself.  Another snapshot taken later the same day during an automobile ride shows that I cleaned up very respectably.

                In 1925 when I was three years old, my father decided to shake the red dust of the Ozark hills off his feet and seek his fortune elsewhere.  He was destined to do that two or three times during his long lifetime; however, he always eventually returned to his roots in Dade County in the Ozarks.

                With whatever money he could scrape together, Dad bought a new 1925 Chevrolet touring car and equipped it to head for the far Pacific Northwest.  One of Dad’s sisters, Aunt Macy, and her husband lived in Vancouver, Washington, and they had written that times were good there and there were jobs to be had in the lumber industry.

                Dad and Mother planned carefully because money was scare as hen’s teeth.  It would be a long and arduous trip over many virtually unimproved roads.  There were a few paved highways in 1925 but the Interstate freeway system was still more than forty years in the future.

                I remember that Dad built a wooden supplies cupboard that he mounted on the left running board of the Chevrolet.  The Chev was a big touring car with a canvas top and very large wood-spoked whells to handle the rough roads and mud that we would inevitably have to negotiate.  The car was, I believe, dark green and I remember my father painted the wooden cupboard balck.  He also bought a lean-to tent that could be pitched beside the car.  It had a flap that attached to the car top.  We would camp beside the road for the most part because motels did not exist then except for occasional primitive “tourist cabins” at infrequent locations.

                There were five of us on the trip—Dad, Mother, Richard, me, and an orphaned teenage cousin, Lewis Hayward, who would live with us in Vancouver and go to Vancouver High School.  Richard and Lewis rode in the back seat, squeezed in with the bedding.  I alternated between sitting with them and sitting on my mother’s lap in front or between her and dad.

                Although I was only three at the time, I remember two events during that long trip quite clearly.  One is that somewhere (it could have been Eastern Colorado) we encountered a severe sand storm.  Dad had forseen that possibility and had included in our gear two pairs of driver’s goggles.  The car had no side curtains; therefore, Mother put a blanket or quilt over we three boys in the back seat to keep some of the dust and sand off.  Occasionally she would keep her eyes closed awhile and give us the goggles so we could take turns sticking out or heads to see the sandstorm.  Being the little one, I did not get to see much of it and probably just fell asleep under the quilt.

                My other clear memory of that trip is probably quite typical of the trivia that will stink in the mind of a small child.  We had stopped in a small town somewhere in Wyoming to get gasoline.  While my father was getting the tank filled and going to the outhouse, my mother held me on her lap in the front seat of the car.  I remember looking across a desert-like area toward some low cliffs in the distance.  They caught my attention because they had an ominous appearance.  To me they looked like a row of skulls along the horizon.  I shivered, snuggled down in my mother’s arms, and was glad when we drove on down the road away from there.

                A quarter of a century later when I was driving between Seattle and Wichita on the same route I stopped in Opal, Wyoming, for gasoline.  There on the horizon were my skull-like cliffs just as I remembered them.  I am quite sure that it was the same filling station but the outhouse had been replaced by ten by restrooms inside.

Forward and Prologue

I believe that I am justifiably proud of my father, Conrad Ross Frieze, who was a part of the greatest generation and probably representative of those who grew up during the Great Depression or "Hard Times" as it was called in the Missouri Ozarks of his youth, those who fought during WWII, and who came home to build the most powerful country in the world. 

I am fortunate in that he left an autobiography which he self-published for his family and which I want to share.  To that end I am inputting his manuscript into 21st century technology since he wrote it just after retiring and with an obsolete word program saved to a long ago lost floppy disk.

My father passed away in 2002 at the age of 80 and did not live to meet his now twelve year old great-grandson who saw me busily typing and asked what I was doing. I told him how amazing I thought my father was and he said, "Why don't you post the manuscript at little at a time in installments and then, when you get to the end, you can publish it."  I don't often take advice from my grandchildren, but this sounded like it would make manageable chunks out of what is a large work, give me an incentive to sit down and work every day, and also maybe some feedback on how interesting others think my father's life was.  The pleasure in the entire endeavor is to spend time reading my father's words and bringing his voice to life in my head once more.

My childhood was greatly impacted by my father and the overarching aspects were a belief from a young age that a nuclear war would prevent me from growing up (because of his involvement in atomic testing our family had a plan should the Soviet Union launch missiles) and that it was routine for daddies to go to war, save the world, and have a family.  Most of the daddies of the '50s had. Those opposing ideas managed to live in my head until I became a junior in high school and realized I had better make some plans for an adult life and when my own sons became the age my father was on December 7th, 1941, the day he said he left boyhood behind.

So come now, from my home on a Tacoma alley to the Missouri Ozarks post WWI and to paradise.  I hope you stay for the journey.  I would love to have you come along and let me know how you enjoy the ride.

Prologue

                The Great Depression and the long drought of the 1930s were simultaneous disasters that produced an unprecedented period of hardship for the people of the United States. Unemployment soared to an all-time high.  Breadlines and soup kitchen became commonplace in every city of the nation.  Freight trains were transportation for thousands of hoboes who roamed the country restlessly following the sun and rumors of work.

                Prices in the early thirties, including those of farm produce, fell to unparalleled lows.  A breakfast of ham, eggs, fried potatoes, toast, and coffee could be bought for twenty cents.  A prime steak dinner was less than a dollar.  A new pair of shoes cost less than three dollars.  Laborers worked for less than a dollar a day.

                The economic chaos of the 1930s was a particularly depressing time for the adults who had weathered World War I and who had enjoyed the exceptional prosperity of the Roaring Twenties prior to the crash of the stock market in 1929.  Prosperous families were suddenly deep in debt.  Compounding the problem, starting in the early 1930s, the nation was suddenly subjected to the most extended drought in the history of the country. 

                Month after month and year after year between 1932 and 1938, rains failed to come to the parched earth of the Midwest.  Crops failed entirely or were minimal.  Market prices dropped.  Eggs, for instance, fell to ten cents a dozen.  Farmers were reduced to subsistence living.  Extreme poverty resulted in the National Recovery Administration (NRA) of newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The NRA included a program of federal relief and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which were designed to alleviate suffering with free food, clothing, and government sponsored jobs.

                It was an era of hard times in America; however, even the worst of difficulties can have aspects of advantage.  The benefit of the Depression and drought was to the children born after World War I and reared to maturity during the decade of the 1930s.  It was the crucible of the Great Depression that tempered the generation of Americans who would face the carnage of World War II and who would defeat the Axis powers to keep the Western world free.

                A minimum of luxury and a lack of money was a normal way of life to the Depression children of America.  They would enter maturity with ingenuity, strength of character, and respect for money unequalled by any other generation before or since.  They would look back on a childhood that was not one of hardship but was one of wonder—a childhood that made the most of natural resources and ingenuity.  It was a time that bred self-sufficiency and confidence.

                It is my understanding that I came into this world on a cold blustery night on 3 March 1922 in the downstairs bedroom of the old Frieze home place in Bona, Missouri, a village in the foothills of the Ozarks.  My debut was attended by Dr. T. J. Drisdel of Dadeville by the light of a coal oil lamp.  I do not know if Doc Drisdel came the five miles by buggy or by Model T. Ford.  I assume he was reasonably sober, but I note that on my original birth certificate he listed my father’s name as “Earnest Frieze” instead of Ernest Frieze.  Oh well, they did not get our forbearer, old Jacob Fries name right when he arrived in 1738 either.  At any rate, Doc Drisdel did note on the certificate that I was legitimate.