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 9th,
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.
