Watching the Submarine Races

I did not call the Navy recruiting office but I sure did sme heavy thinking.  It was stunning news.  I was now eighteen but the age limit for acceptance for the Annapolis examination was twenty.  I had lost a full year.  I also thought long and hard about my job and the fun I was having using the car and dating girls.

Then, too, there was Mr. Garrison, owner of the CC Store.  He was a very kind man and was encouraging me to save my money and go to college and take Business Administration.  He had even paid the fee and enrolled me in a public speaking course evenings that the Rotarians were sponsoring for local businessmen.  Mr. Garrison was taking the course with me.  I had a feeling somehow that if I suddenly left I would be letting Mr. Garrison down.

In the end I told dick “no soap”.  “Dang it, they turned me down once and now things are different.  If the durn Navy doesn’t need me, I sure as heck don’t need them!”

“Okay, nipple-noggin,” he replied, “suit yourself, but you mark my words, there is a war coming and you will probably wind up getting drafted into the Army and go slogging around with a rifle getting shot at.

“Not me, boy.  I am going to be out there on a nice clean ship—or maybe even an airplane—with a good place to sleep and three squares a day!  You will be sorry, just you wait and see.”

I pooh-poohed him and laughed off it off, but I must admit that I watched with a feeling of envy the morning he packed that little green zippered bag and caught the bus to Portland.

It was not long after Dick left for boot camp that I got myself involved with Shirley Mills.  She was one class behind me and had a sister, Mary, who was one class behind her.  I knew them, but casually and knew that their father, Chapin Mills, was a state senator.  They lived over on the east side at 25^th and “F” streets.  Being an old westsider, I considered them to be a bit out of my class.

Shirley was a full-figured girl with a moon-round face and a pug nose.  She had long platinum blonde hair.

  I used to see her sort of drifting dreamily down the halls at school in a shapeless coat, clutching a stack of books to her chest.  I never considered her more than mildly pretty, although she did have very good legs.  I never considered dating her, especially after I heard one of the fellows comment, “Boy, those Mills girls are sure squirrely pair!”

An afternoon in late March, I was coming up the basement stairway of the store with an armload of boxes of ladies’ stockings.  On the middle landing, Shirley cornered me.

“Conrad,” she said, “Mary and I are going to have a party at our house next week and  I would like you to come as my date.”

That jolted me, coming as it did right out of a clear blue sky.  “Well, I dunno,” I stammered.

“Ah, come on,” she said with her best smile, “it will be fun.  You know Mary’s boyfriend, Pat Madden.  Pat will be there.”

I looked her up and down.  She had herself all gussied up and was wearing a sweater that showed off her bosom and a tight skirt over her full behind and plump thighs.  Her calves were nicely tapered to trim ankles.  I probably blushed and finally said, “Well, okay.  What night and what time?”

It turned out that the party was quite small.  There was just Shirley and me, her sister Mary and Pat Madden, and two other couples I do not remember now.  The girls’ parents were out at Eastern Star or something.  They came in later while we were having refreshments, greeted all of us, then went off to their bedroom in the back of the house.

The other two couples left fairly early.  It was obvious that the Mills girls did not consider the evening over but we turned the music down because of the parents.  Not knowing what to say or do next, I finally suggested that we take the Chev, drive over to Swan Island airport in Portland, and watch the big airplanes come in.  We could stop at waddles on the way back.  The sisters readily agreed.

I had been serious about watching the “big” airplanes.  United Airlines had just put the first DC-3s into service and, to me, that was a big sleek airplane.  I drove across the Interstate bridge, and in on Union to Swan Island.  There was a dark perimeter road around the airport.  I parked a little way away from the lights of the terminal.

We ended up necking instead of watching planes.  And so it began.  I took Shirley to the movies then out for hamburgers a couple of times.  She asked me to go to the Class of ’40 senior ball in April, which I did.  That sort cooled my relationship with Elaine for a time.  When I walked into the senior prom with Shirley on my arm, Elaine sort of glared at me and her manner was a bit icy when I danced with her later.  Shirley assumed we were “going steady” but I did not.  I continued to regularly see Pat Cross and some others, but I did continue to date Shirley from time to time.  That full figure of hers was a definite attraction.

Working at the CC Store

When I was back in Vancouver, I went to see Mr. Garrison at the CC Store.  Sure enough he needed a combination janitor and stock boy.  Thanks to Mr. Marshall’s letter I promptly  got the job for twelve dollars a week.  Richard had gone to Cheney for the fall term at EWCE so I had the large upstairs front bedroom at home to myself and plenty of the old Chevy.

The CC Store (originally Carter and Carter), Vancouver’s largest men’s and women’s clothing store, was an anachronism even back there in 1939.  The main floor was a high-ceilinged space with men’s clothes on one side and women’s on the other.  Shoe departments and restrooms were in the back.  Over near the dress goods and bedding, a wide stairway led down to the bargain basement where all the unsold odds and ends wound up and where the stockroom was located.

The main floor of the CC Store looked like something from around the turn of the century [19^th] , which I guess it was.  There was a mezzanine balcony across the front of the store that held both Garrison’s office and the central cash register.  The cashier sat up there with a commanding fiew of the entire main floor.

On the floor there were about six clerk stations from each of which a steel cable ran on a slant upward to the cashier.  When a sale was made, the clerk put the money and the sales slip into a wooden canister that hooked onto a little wheeled trolley on the cable, gave a yank on a cory, and the trolley went whizzing up the wire to the cahier.  Soon the trolley came coasting down with the receipt and the change.  The cashier was a very pretty and personable little blonde whom I liked, but I never tried to date her because she was so much older than me—she was at least in her middle twenties.

During the months I spent at the CC Store, I did quite a bit of everything.  First of all, I was the janitor who swept the floors daily although the clerks, three middle-aged women, were responsible for keeping the merchandize neat on the racks and dusting the counters.  I also had to clean the restrooms.  That unpleasant duty convinced me that women are not very neat in someone else’s toilet.  The Men’s room was not too bad, but the Ladies was something else.   [This is the opposite of my own experience]

The big stockroom at one side of the basement was my domain.  When I first went to work, it was an unorganized mess and I had trouble finding things.  I got the store manager to let me in one Sunday when the store was closed, hauled everything out of there, and re-organized the place.  Mr. Garrison made not of that, I guess, and some of the other things I did because a month after I went to work there he gave me a raise to fourteen dollars a week.

Each week, it was one of my chores to wash the big plate glass display windows that were on the Main Street and 8^th Street sides of the CC Store.  The manager, a dapper and whimpish fellow in his early thirties, usually did the arranging of the displays.  I thought they were a bit haphazard and not very imaginative.  On one occasion I made a suggestion to him about a display.  The next thing I knew, I was in charge of window displays.  He had not liked crawling around in there changing displays (we had no curtains to drop) with people walking by.  I did not mind—I could wave at girls I knew as they passed.

My age was a problem when I began to clerk part time.  The clerks all had to belong to a union and I was underage.  Once in a while, usually each month, a union steward would drop in unannounced to check on things and talk to the clerks.  We worked out a system so I would not get caught.

The cashier, who had full surveillance of the main floor, had a little bell that she would ding twice to alert everyone if she thought she saw a shoplifter in the store.  If she saw a union steward come in, she would ding the bell three times so I could drop whatever I was doing and disappear to the stockroom until a clerk came and gave me the all clear.  It worked as I never got caught during the time I worked there.

Those months at the CC Store were a good period in my young life.  I gave little thought to the future and just enjoyed life.   I gave little thought to the future and just enjoyed life.  I should have been putting money in the bank but I did not.  Instead, I spent my wages on some clothes and gasoline for dates since I had practically full use of the car with Richard away at Cheney.

I did not have a “steady girlfriend”.  I dated a different girl every week or so.  I usually just took them to a first-run movie at the Broadway in Portland and would then stop at Waddles on the way home for hamburgers and cokes.  None of my dates ever went any further than some harmless necking in the car and a tentative goodnight kiss.

But the Navy didn't Want My Dad

War in Europe erupted.  Hitler’s panzer “blitzkrieg” rolled over Poland and England and France declared war.  It was a “paper war” for a time with British bombers dropping only leaflets over enemy territories.  Then Hitler attacked and his seemingly invincible goose-stepping Wehrmacht and panzers rolled into the Lowlands and started driving the British Expeditionary Forces toward a little town on the Belgian coast called Dunkirk.

Although the U.S. remained neutral and was still divided by isolationist and pacifist policies, American industry stirred and began cranking out the materials of war that would be convoyed to England on a “Lend-Lease” program.  We became “the arsenal of democracy” and the last vestiges of the Great Depression were wiped out by rising employment.

Unhappily for those such as Mr. DeYoung, my little editorial was being proven right on the mark.  The bumbling and ineffective Nevile Chamberlain was replace by Winston Churchill as England geared for war and for possible invasion once Hitler’s forces rolled through France and stood on the shores of the English Channel.

A personal tragedy awaited me in the spring of 1939.  As the war in Europe gained momentum, I became always more and more determined to get into the Navy.  I turned seventeen on March 3^rd and decided the time had come to take the plunge and enlist.  I had inquired and knew that I could sign up then and leave for boot camp right after graduation.

My good friend Dave Daniel’s family had moved away to Rainier, Oregon, the previous fall andI had begun to pal around with Kenneth David, a genial tall, black-haired boy who lived on a farm east of Vancouver.  I did not really want to join the Navy alone so, without mentioning my ambition about the Naval Academy, I told Kenny that I was going to join the Navy.

Being a happy-go-lucky type, Kenny declared that was a great idea.  He would like to see the world so he would sign up with me.  The only problem Kenneth had was that he had turned a tractor over on himself the year before and he walked with a decided limp.  He was fit enough to play football, however, and figured that would not be a problem.

One Friday in April, we were out of school because of a teachers’ conference.  Kenny and I caught the Portland bus (the old interurban trolley had been abandoned), found the Federal Building, and marched into the third-floor Navy recruiting office.  We filled out all the papers then they took us separately for physical examinations.  Being still toughened by those years on the farm and heaving those bales of hay, I breezed through the physical until I got to the dental part.

When I was about twelve years old, one of my molars on the upper right side developed a big cavity—in fact, it was half rotted away.  Instead of trying to fill it or make a crown (Dad did not have the money for that sort of thing), the dentist in Greenfield simply pulled it leaving a gap in my teeth.  I was accustomed to it and could chew on that side as well as the other.  (As a matter of fact, that gap is still there. I never did have a bridge installed.)

I still believe that part of the reason that I was rejected was that the Navy dentist was in a hurry.  He was wearing golf clothes and a bag of golf clubs was propped inside the door of his office.  He plunked me into the chair, started his examination, then tossed his tools onto the tray and said to the corpsman standing by, “Molar missing—not enough chewing surface on the right side—rejected.”

The dentist picked up the golf clubs and departed.  The corpsman removed the neck cloth and said, “Too bad, Mac.”  He handed me my papers with instructions to leave them at the recruiting desk on the way out.

I sat there in the chair stunned for a moment.  It was a devastation blow.  My plans were suddenly all down the tube.  There would be no Navy white hat for me and no “Crackerjack” dress blues, not to speak of the coveted gold braid.  I walked down the stairs and out of the building in a daze.

My glumness undoubtedly showed clearly.  Kenny David was sitting on the concrete balustrade along the steps.  He took one look at me and said, “Turned you down, huh?”

I nodded mutely and Kenny went breezily on, “Well, don’t worry about it.  They turned me down, too.  Said I had too much of limp in that leg that got caught under the tractor to march right.  Told ‘em I didn’t know sailors had to march much but they turned me down anyway.

“Hey, the Army recruiting office is in there on the first floor.  They aren’t as particular as the Navy, I hear.  Let’s go join the Army.”

I shook my head.  “No way, boy!  Don’t want anything to do with the Army.  Dad was in the infantry during the World War.  I don’t want to be slogging around in the mud packing a rifle!”

I had very little to say during the dismal bus ride back across the Interstate Bridge to Vancouver.

For days I moped around and was not my usual ebullient self.  I felt aimless and did not know what I wanted to do when school was out.  My mother noticed, of course, and kept asking if I was sick.  Richard had a different idea.

“Aw,” he said flippantly, “he probably thinks he is in love again.  Old nipple-noggin there gets a crush on a new girl as often as I change my shirt!  Who is it this time, bird-brain?”

I just smiled wanly and ignored my sarcastic brother.  Patty Cross was the only one to whom I poured it all out.  She could only sympathize but it got it off my chest.  It was several days before I began to feel like myself again and started trying to make plans now that my little dream world had come crashing about my big ears.

Russian Visitors in Vancouver

There were other memorable events during that summer of 1938 before I started my senior year at VHS, both involving airplanes.  The first occurred while I was still working at the riding academy.  One afternoon Charlie Barnett came in and told us that a big Russian airplane had landed at Pearson Field in Vancouver from a direct flight over the North Pole from Russia.

When I got off work that afternoon, I was burning with curiosity since anything having to do with airplanes always got my full attention.  I had the bicycle that day so I raced across the Interstate bridge and out to Pearson Field.  There, guarded by soldiers from the Barracks, sat a sleek monoplane.  The slender fuselage was painted green and the long, tapering wing and the tail surfaces were red.  It had a single in-line engine in the nose.

I was a bit disappointed.  I had expected to see something really impressive like the fabled Maxim Gorky that was the largest airplane in history (until Boeing build the 747 many years later).  The Russian monoplane did not look big enough to carry much of a crew and it definitely was not a passenger airplane.

Since I could not get close to the airplane because it was in the Army part of the field and was guarded, I went around to the private part of the field where I had several friends.  There I found that it was truly an historic airplane and flight.  A Russian crew of three had taken off from somewhere in Russia and had flown, without refueling, directly across the North Pole.  They had evidently been heading for San Francisco, but had run short of fuel and had landed at Pearson Field which was shown as a military field on their charts.  It was a real milestone in the history of aviation.

The following Saturday, I was in Gerhart’s Drugstore with David Schaeffer, Ariel Mansfield, and a couple of the others.  We got to talking about the Russian flight.  None of the others had been in an airplane and I told them about the flight Dave and I had taken.  They were very skeptical and did not think we had really done it.

I had my weekly pay from the riding academy in my pocket and was sort of “feeling my oats” so I said cockily, “Okay, I tell you what I am gonna do.  I am going to down to Pearson Field right now and have an airplane ride.  I will have the pilot fly over here and I’ll wave to you to prove that I have been in an airplane!”

The others pooh-poohed the idea so there was no backing out.  I got on my bicycle and pedaled down to the airport.  I found a fellow that had a Bird biplane and bought a twenty minute ride for three or four dollars with the condition that he would fly over the courthouse square as low as the law would allow.

The airplane was an open cockpit biplane and I felt like David Niven or Errol Flynn in “The Dawn Patrol” when the pilot strapped a parachute on me and handed me a helmet and goggles.  When we taxied out to the runway, I was wishing I had a long white scarf to throw around my neck and let flutter in the slipstream.

The flight went great.  I gloried in the open cockpit with the wind rushing by and the engine making so much noise that voice communication with the pilot was impossible.  He knew what I wanted, however, so he broke out of the patter and headed across downtown Vancouver at less than five hundred feet.

I did not see anyone in the vicinity of Gearhart’s during our first pass over the courthouse.  I signaled the pilot to go back by pointing at the drugstore then made a waggling motion with my hand to indicate that I wanted him to rock the wings.  He nodded and threw the little airplane into a steep bank to fly back over the square.

That time I saw Ariel and a couple of others come out of the drugstore and wave while they jumped up and down.  The pilot rocked the plane and I stuck my arm out into the slipstream and waved.  As we flew over the apartment building at the end of the block, I saw David Schaeffer leaning out of a window waving a white handkerchief.  It was a very gratifying experience.

Only for Show

It was sickening the way fat George treated those fine saddle horses.  There was not a mean horse in the bunch but he mistreated them all the time—jerking their heads with the reins of those Spanish-style riding bits and kicking them when they did not move when they should.

George’s precocious four-year-old son, Kit, put the snapper on one day and convinced me that I should have a chat with Charlie Barnett about George.  One noontime I was eating my sack lunch in the tack room when Kit wandered in.  I asked him if he had had his lunch.  “oh, yes,” he said airily, “I ate but Mama wants me to go outside when Daddy diddles her unless it’s raining—then sometimes I watch if they don’t shut the door tight.”

“When he does what?!”

“When he diddles her—you know, he takes down his overalls and she gets on the bed and spreads out her legs.  He sticks his peter into her hole—that’s diddling, dummy!”

At the next opportunity when no one else was around, I had a long chat with Charlie.  I told him exactly how I felt about George, how lazy he was, how he mistreated the horses.  When I first came to work, it was obvious that some of the box stalls had not been cleaned and fresh straw put in for more than a week.  By that time both Charlies and Art Farr had a great deal of respect for the way I worked and handled the horses so Charlies listened.  A week later George, his wife, and Kit had packed up and gone.

George’s replacement as barn boss did not turn out to be much of an improvement.  I gorget his last name, if I ever knew it, but his first name was Gus.  Art Farr hired him and I always suspected that Art found him on skid row.  When he was hired, Gus talked them into an advance so he could buy some proper clothes.  Hel did not get overalls or coveralls (which I wore in preference to bib overalls) or other proper work clothes.  Instead, he went to town and came back dressed in a pair of green riding breeches, a green checkered shirt, and an Army campaign hat.  I had to stifle a belly laugh when I saw him because, not being able to afford a pair of riding boots, he had bought a pair of leather puttees (his excuse was that boots hurt his feet).

It was quickly obvious that Gus had no intention of forking horse manure and straw out of the stalls very often so the burden of the work continued to fall on me.  Gus usually puttered around in the tack room, presumably cleaning saddles.  More often than not I saw him swigging a drink of fortified wine out of a bottle he always had stashed in there behind a pile of saddle blankets.  Evidently Gus had no home as he brought a tent and set it up out on the river side of the stables and that is where he slept.

I quit the Columbia Riding Academy two weeks before school was to start.  Farr wanted me to stay on through a horse show the following week, but I had enough of him and that goldbrick wino, Gus.  I wanted some free time before school started.  The family was glad because I would no longer come breezing in right at suppertime smelling to high heaven of the stables.  I was not allowed to come to the table until I had cleaned up and changed clothes.  I paid no attention to the smell of the horse manure and sweat, but Dick and Rex would hold their noses when I came in and little Sandra (obviously coached by Dick) would giggle and shout, “Stinky Connie!”

It was not quite the last of the Columbia Riding Academy, however.  The horse show was to be the following Thursday evening after I quit.  On that Thursday, around noon, Charlie Barnett telephoned.  He wanted help.

“Frieze,” he said plaintively, “you gotta help me out.  That show is this evening and that samn wino Gus is so drunk he doesn’t even know which saddle goes on which horse!  He’s got everyting all mixed up!  I really need you!”

Well, I dunno.  I sort of had plans for this evening.

Charlie was desperate.  “Look, I’ve got a couple of hands to help with putting up the jumps and such, but they don’t know diddly about the horses and tack.  I’ll pay you five bucks out of my own pocket and you can be the barn boss for the evening.”

“Well, okay, Mr. Barnett.  I’ll do it but you know Gus won’t like it.  He likes to be the big man when the lady riders are around.”

Charlie breathed an audible sigh of relief.  “Don’t worry about Gus.  I’ll keep him out of the way.  I will give him a bottle of whiskey and tell him to stay in his tent all evening or I’ll kick his butt out.  May do that anyway as soon as I can find someone else.  He is so drunk right now on that cheap wine that I don’t think he knows what day it is!  Come as soon as you can.”

It is a good thing that I got to the academy a couple of hours before the horse show.  Charlie was right.  Everything was a mess.  Horses were not groomed, saddles were on the wrong racks, and the bridles were all mixed up.  The sawdust area was freshly harrowed, but only because Charlie had done it himself in the afternoon.  He was as good as his work, too.  I peeked into Gus’ tent out back and he was snoring away on his rumpled cot, a nearly empty whisky bottle beside him.

After a fast scramble, the show went off just fine.  Charlie had rounded up three men to help and had them dressed in white overalls.  They helped handle the horses and the equipment in the arena.  Every horse and rider went through the door right on schedule except there was a minor holdup when we got the drill team ready to take the arena for the finale which I don’t think anhyone but Art Farr noticed.

It took quite a while to bed down all the horse and get the gear put away properly.  It was about eleven o’clock when I came out of the tack room and found both Charlie and Art Farr waiting on the platform for me.  Charlie handed me the promised five dollars.

I waited for Farr to jump me about the delay with the Lancers but he didn’t.  He took the igar out of his mouth, twisted his face into what pass for a friendly grin, and said, “We wanted to talk to you about next year, boy.”

Charlie looked at Farr with a frown for that “boy” and spoke up, “Frieze, I know you are graduating from high school next year and we would like you back.  You would probably be the yojngest barn boss in history, but the job is yours if you want it.  Pay would be fifty—no, sixty dollars a month.  You think it over and let us know. “

I ducked my head and scratched it, then with a wry grin looked them in the eye and said, “I’m much obliged to you Mister Barnett—and Mister Farr—but I don’t think so.  I love those horses and will miss them, but to be honest with you, I’m going to join the Navy as soon as school is out net year.  Thank you just the same.”

Charlie shrugged and they both said goodbye and good luck.  I put on my brown leather jacket, zipped it up, tucked my white overalls under my arm, and started the long walk home across the bride through the darkness.

(There was an unhappy footnote to my time with the Columbia Riding Academy.  Two years later when I came home on boot leave, I was informed that the riding academy had burned and most of the horses had died in the fire.  I stopped by to look at the blackened ruins of the arena and stables and was glad I had not been there.  I preferred to remember Don Dee, Clown, Joker and the little balck mare, and the other as I had last seen them.)

The Joker Was Wild--sort of.

I felt better about working for the Columbia Riding Academy the next day when I met Charlie Barnett, Farr’s partner.  He was pretty much the opposite of Art Farr.  Charlie was a big, pleasant-faced man with a mop of unruly black hair.  Where Farr fancied dude-ish western shirts and that silly string tie, Charlie always showed up in grey riding breeches, black boots not always too well polished, and a white shirt open at the neck.  The only time Charlie duded up was when we put on a horse show and then all he did was to wear an Ascot scarf and a jacket.  There were no pretenses with Charlie and I liked him immediately.

My summer at the Columbia Riding Academy was memorable in more ways than one.  I found out quickly that Art Farr was, indeed, an ornery s.o.b.  As for fat George, he was everything a barn boss should not be.  I do not know what previous experience he had with horses but he was no horseman.

George’s idea of quieting down an unruly horse on the loading platform—whether to saddle or curry it—was to grab a twitch and cinch it on the animal’s nose.  I did not like a twitch and can truthfully say that I seldom had to use one.  There are no mean horses that I ever met—only those who have been treated meanly by someone.  (Dogs are the same way.)

The horses, however, were a delight to this old country boy.  I got acquainted with all thirty-two of them in short order.  In a couple of days I knew all of them by name, and in a week I knew which saddle and bridle went on which horse.  I tried to be impartial, but I quickly had some favorites.  One was “Don Dee”, a big sleek black jumper that stood near seventeen hands high.  He was a gentle horse and could have modeled for Black Beauty.

Another of my favorites was “Joker”, a small (about fourteen hands) palomino stallion with a flowing long mane and tail.  Joker was as mischievous as a small child.  He was quartered in one of the standing stalls and he had a favorite trick when I came into his stall with a bucket of feed.  I would pat him on the rump and speak to let him know I was there and Joker would politely move over to let me by.  Then, when I was beside him half way to the manger box, he would lean—pushing me against the wall of the stall.  I would have to give him a good shove and a slap on the belly to make him move over.  He was not mean—he just like to devil me.

One evening Joker’s antics could have injured me but it was my fault, not Joker’s.  I was late getting the horses fed and had a party to go to that night.  Fat George, as usual, had already gone home to his plump wife, leaving me to do all the feeding.  I was hurrying with my bucket of oats when I got to Joker’s stall and failed to whack him on the rump and speak to him.  The little stallion was standing with one hind foot relaxed, half asleep.

When I rounded the end of the stall, the bucket bumped Joker in the rump and startled him.  Like greased lightning a back foot lashed out in a kick.  I was close enough to him that there was no bone-breaking impact but his flailing leg picked me up and threw me across the alleyway, slamming me into the wall.  Fat George would have gotten up and beaten the tar out of Joker but I knew it was my fault so I just calmed him down and gave him his oats.  Fortunately, I had ridden the bicycle that day as I developed a big purple bruise on my thigh and limped for a couple of days.

One of Joker’s best tricks was his uncanny ability to unseat even an experienced rider.  He especially picked on women.  The experienced lady riders who participated in the Columbia Lancers, our drill team, were allowed to ride the many bridle trails on the west end of Hayden Island alone.  Often they would ask for Joker because he was such a beautiful little horse.

On more than one occasion, after about half an hour, Joker would come moseying back up the trail to the stables all by himself, carefully holding his head to one side so as not to step on the trailing reins.  Unless someone took Joker back, a little while later a very sheepish lady rider would come walking up the trail.  I never saw him do it, but according to his victims, Joker had a cute way of shying sidewise when the rider was relaxed and right out from under them.

I recall one day when the lead lady rider on the drill team came for a canter and asked for Joker.  I reminded her that he could be skittish and offered another horse, but she was insistent.  She was a tall lady who looked a lot like Eve Arden and spoke with the authority of a school teacher.  I just shrugged and saddled Joker.

As soon as she was out of sight, and not being especially busy at the time, I put a wester saddle on Clown.  Sure enough, about twenty minutes later there came old Joker alone.  I swung onto Clown and took the little stallion back down the trail to find her.  She did not have much to say except to thank me and never asked for Joker again if she was going out alone.

The Horse Whisperer

A few days after the airplane ride, I was sitting in Gearhart’s with David Schaeffer and Ariel.  We were just talking and killing tie.  I mentioned that so far I had not been able to find a good summer job.  David came up with a suggestion.

“You know all about horses, don’t you, Conrad?”

“Sure—but what good does that do me when I am trying to find a job in Vancouver?”

“Tell you what,” he said, “over on Hayden Island back beyond the Jantzen Beach amusement park and the midget car race track, there is a big riding academy.  They have a bunch of horses and I’ll bet an old country boy like you could get a job tending those horses—if you don’t mind the smell of horse manure.”

I perked up my ears.  Some people object to the smell of a barnyard but I did not mind at all—it was like home on the farm.  The more I thought about David’s idea, the better it seemed.  I sure was not finding anything better to do.

The very next morning I set off on foot.  I hoofed the long mile across the Interstate bridge to Hayden Island.  West, beyond the amusement park roller coaster and the dirt race track, there was a yellow building with an arched roof.  Big black letters on the arch read “Columbia Riding Academy”.  Strung from a corner of the building there was a row of stalls.

The office was at the south end of the building.  I went in and knocked on the office door but no one came.  Finally, I turned back through the large building which turned out to be mostly a big, sawdust-floored arena—to the stable side.

I found a large, wood-floored area where the horses were saddled and mounted.  There was a tack room adjacent with racks of English saddles and a few Western saddles plus a rack of bridles.  I called out but only horse snorts answered me.  I realized that it was almost noon and probably everyone was gone to lunch.

I walked along the row of box stalls, each occupied by a sleek horse, then back through the loading platform to where there were two more box stalls then a row of standing stalls down the side of the building along an alleyway.  A feeling of nostalgia swept over me as I inhaled the familiar smells of a barn.

Walking back after inspecting the long row of horses’ rumps, I halted at one of the box stalls near the tack room.  In it was a very pretty dainty small black mare with a sore leg.  She backed away from the stall door as I came up.  Her lower left foreleg was trailing the dirty end of the bandage that had been carelessly applied.  I could see the edge of an ugly gash above the loose bandage.

The mare had moved against the back wall of the stall.  I leaned through the open top half of the stall door and spoke gently to her, holding out my hand.  She snorted fearfully at first then came forward to sniff at my fingers.  I kept talking soothingly to her and she finally brought her head close enough for me to stroke her nose and scratch between her ears.

Behind me, on a timber along the alleyway, there was a can of salve.  I reached back for it then, still stroking the mare’s nose and speaking to her reassuringly, eased open the door and stepped into the stall.  The horse flinched and drew back but relaxed as I stroked her un-curried neck.  She even nuzzled me a bit so I knew she was friendly.

I gradually worked my hand along her neck, then down her foreleg until I reached the bandage.  The mare stood quietly so I unwound the bandage and exposed a gash that looked as if she had tangled with a barbed wire fence.  I gently rubbed some of the salve onto the cut, tore off the end of the bandage that had been trailing in the dirty straw, and rewound it on her leg properly.  I was just re-tieing the bandage when there were footsteps across the loading area and into the alleyway.

“What the hell!”  It was a rough masculine voice.

I did not look up right away as I was still busy with the bandage.  The voice then said, more quietly, “Don’t make any sudden moves, kid.”  The stall door creaked.  “Just back away easy so you don’t scare that mare.  She’s mean and will kick your head off!  Come out of there!”

I straightened up and turned, stroking the mare’s neck with my free hand.  “Don’t seem mean to me, mister.  She is a nice little mare.”

The man facing me was a short individual dressed in tan whipcord riding pants, brown riding boots, and a western-style beige shirt trimmed in dark brown.  He had on a string tie.  His thinning hair was mustardy blond and he had a cigar stub clenched in the corner of his aquiline and angry face beneath a thin blond mustache.  “Some dude!” I thought to myself.

Replacing the lid on the can of salve I stepped out of the stall and closed the door.  “I’m sorry, mister, didn’t mean no harm.”

Sensing that it might help, I did something that I have continued to do through the years on appropriate occasions—I lapsed into Ozark idiom that would mark me for a country boy.  “I was looking for whoever runs this here place and I seen that there mare’s leg needed some attention.  The bandage was loose and trailing in the dirt.  I jist put a little of that there salve on her cut and fixed the bandage—didn’t mean no harm.”

The angry flush left the man’s face and he removed the cigar stub from his mouth.  “How in the world did you do that?  Every time George tries to treat her leg that mare fights back.  Can’t no one hardly get near her!”

The mare had her head out of the open upper half of the door.  I stroked her nose again and said, “Well, maybe somebody was been mean to her.  You get mean with a horse, it’s gonna get mean with you every time...”

He laughed and held out his hand—which was clammy when I shook it.  “My name’s Art Farr—an owner of this place.  I don’t suppose you would be looking for a job?”

My heart leaped at his words.  “Matter of fact, Mister Farr, that is why I came looking for someone.  I could use a job for the summer.”

“Well,” he said as he turned, “you got one if you want to be a barn boy.  Anybody can talk to horses like that I can use!”  He stepped outside the stable door and yelled in the direction of a small yellow house on the far side of the parking area, “George!  You lazy bastard--you ain’t got all day for a nooner! Quit pokin’ that wife of yours and get your fat fanny over here!”

I was astonished and repelled by Farr’s uncouth language.  After a minute the door opened and a short very fat little man came out, still hooking one of the galluses of his blue overalls.  He shambled quickly across the parking lot, his fat belly shaking up and down.

As the man approached, Farr said, “Think I’ve got us a barn hand, George.”  He turned to me.  “What’s you name, boy?”

By then I was thinking that maybe I did not want to work for this uncouth man and I did not like him calling me “boy”.  Fat George was not exactly my idea of a barn boss, either.  But then I thought about the horses and the little mare with the sore leg, not to speak of making some money, and meekly said, “Conrad Frieze.”

“Well, Conrad, I’ll pay you a puck and a half a day, seven to four thirty, six days a week.  Sunday’s off because my partner, Charlie, insists we close up on Sundays and George feeds the horses then.  If it is a deal, be here at seven tomorrow in your working duds.”

It was with mixed emotions that I walked back up the dirt road to the bridge and across to Vancouver.  I was elated to have found a full-time job and I like the prospect of working with horses.  My uneasiness came from the fact that I dislike Farr almost on sight and I certainly coubted that I could take a liking to fat George.  I idly wondered if he had rally been screwing his wife at noon.  Oh well, I mused, mine dollars a week isn’t all that bad.  If I worked for two and a half months, that would be around ninety dollars all told.  I strode on home, whistling as I went.

The First Time

By the time school was out for the summer of 1938 and Dick had graduated from VHS, Dad’s “itchy feet” had resulted in our moving twice.  He first moved us for a time to a small yellow house about three blocks further away from the railroad yards, then to a three-bedroom two-story house on 17^th a block off Kauffman.  Since we only moved a few blocks each time, we were still Vancouver “westsiders” so our friends and the Gearhart Gang remained unchanged.

Dad had apparently gotten some raises at the sawmill because he bought a car, our first since the Model T in the Ozarks.  It was only a dark green 1928 or 1929 four-door Chevrolet, but it was wheels.

When school was out I wanted to get a job that would pay more than a paper route—which I could have gotten since Dick quit the Columbian in favor of a job that he could go to college.  Dave was making enough to keep us comfortably housed, fed, and clothed, but there was no way that he could send us boys to college unless we earned the money.

My good friend Dave Daniels and I were both avid about airplanes.  (When I joined the Navy two years later, the ceiling of my bedroom was literally covered with balsa and rice paper models.)  We never s=missed a movie like “Dawn Patrol” with Errol Flynn and David Niven or “Eyes of the Navy”.  We saw each of them two or three times.

1940 LaSalle

One Saturday Dave and I had a job washing and waxing a big maroon LaSalle sedan that belong to Mr. Larson who had a grocery store on Kauffman near where Dave lived.  It was quite a job as he wanted it rubbed down with carnauba wax.  We worked all day on that car and when we finished it was a gleaming beauty.  Mr. Larson was so pleased that he gave us three dollars apiece for a job that I would have done for a dollar.

Dave and I felt rich.  We trekked off down to Gearhart’s and had a coke while we talked about the things we could do with three dollars apiece.  (It did not occur to either of us that we could put it in the bank.)

I had an idea.  It was still early in the afternoon and was a beautiful, calm, sunny day.  I said, “Hey, Dave, for three bucks apiece we could go for an airplane ride.  There is a fellow down at Pearson Field who has a Curtis Robin that will hold two passengers.  I will go for an airplane ride if you will!”

Dave thought it was a great idea since neither of us had ever been up before.  We downed our Coca Colas, trotted home for our bicycles, and off we went to Pearson Field.  I neglected to tell my mother where we were going because I figured she would object and put a damper on the idea right quick.

Curtis Robin

The Curtis Robin was out on the flight line and its owner agreed to take us up for fifteen minutes for six bucks.  Now a Curtis Robin was a pretty ugly angular high-winged monoplane (the kind “Wrong Way Corrigan flew across the Atlantic) but this one was freshly painted green and yellow and we thought it was beautiful.  We liked the way it smelled inside of fuel, motor oil, and airplane dope.

The pilot strapped the two of us into the rear seat, then slid into the front.  Someone cranked the propeller and the engine caught with a satisfying roar after it coughed a few times.  I believe it was a WWI ox-5 engine.

We taxied out, warmed the engine, and as we roared down the grass runway Dave and I were grinning at each other like fools.  The Robin went bumping along and shaking until it got flying speed, then the nose came up, the ground seemed to drop away and it got smooth except for engine noise and vibration.

We climbed away over east Vancouver into a new and wondrous world.  Objects on the ground shrank until cars on the highway looked like little beetles that scurried along and people looked like ants.  From up there you could not see the dirt and trash and the whole world looked clean and beautiful.  The sky was an unimaginable blue, studded with snowy cumulus clouds that we skirted.

I was exhilarated and entranced with a feeling that I could never adequately describe until, sometime later I chanced across some lines written by one John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a young American that served with the RCAF in England before the U.S. got into the war that became WWII.  After he was killed in 1941 this sonnet, written while he was in flying school, was found in his effects.  For those of us who must fly, this says it:

“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

                And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth’      

of sun split clouds—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and swung and

                Soared—high in the sunlit silence.

Hovering there, I’ve chased the shouting winds along,

                And flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue, I’ve topped

                The windswept heights with easy grace,

Where never lark or even eagle flew.

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

                The high un-trespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

Those lines reflect the jubilance and awe that I felt during that memorable first short airplane flight and, later on, when I few small airplanes alone.  It is a joy that no earthbound mortal, and those who have flown only in bus-like airliners, can know.


That day our pilot climbed to three or four thousand feet and circled over Vancouver.  Dave and I sat there excitedly pointing out individual buildings—the courthouse, Gearhart’s, the high school, and our own houses—all looking like a tiny layout for a model railroad.  It was marvelous and all too short.

We were still excited when we climbed out of the airplane.  I stood, stroked the sleek side of the fuselage, and exclaimed, “Boy oh boy, I sure want to learn to fly!”

Dave threw an arm around my shoulders.  “We will, Con, we sure as hell will!”  And time would prove him right.

Finding a Tribe

There was a double incentive for me to make good grades at Vancouver High.  I knew that the higher I kept my grade point average, the better chance I would have in getting a crack at the Annapolis examination when I joined the Navy.  I also had the incentive of keeping up with my brother Dick.  We had both discovered that our years in those country schools had left us, if anything, somewhat ahead of our peers.  Just one class ahead of me, old Richard was maintaining aggravatingly close to a four-point average.  Matter of fact, seemingly with seldom cracking a book at home.  In 1938 Richard was to graduate on the honor roll, twelfth out of a class of 287.  My work was cut out for me.

                During my junior year at VHS, I still had not shed my shyness and reserve from feeling that I was just an old country boy from the Ozark hills.  Particularly in the presence of the rather new breed of girls that I found in high school, I was almost tongue-tied and not aggressive.  I did start getting acquainted with a few of the west side girls like friendly and very likeable Lena Helm, but most of my friends were boys.

                The only achievement I could claim during my junior year, other than a better than 3.5 grade average (which did not please me as I had maintained close to straight A’s at Bona) was at one of the football rallies.  There was to be a contest to see who could show up as the worst-dressed bum.

                That was duck soup for me.  I fished out one of my old pairs of overalls that were much too short, put on a torn blue work shirt of Dad’s from the rag bag, left one suspender hanging down, blacke my face with burnt cork for a beard, donned a beat-up old felt hat, made a bundle in a red bandanna to carry over my shoulder on a stick, and appropriated one of Dad’s old corncob pipes.  I won hands down and was awarded a little cartoon certificate at the next Friday school assembly by Roger Camp, the student body president.  Otherwise, during the 1937-38 school year, I had little claim to fame.

                I did not ignore the “fair sex” entirely.  I had discovered that I had a knack for dancing and often attended the noon sock hops in the gym and some of the evening dances.  I was quite smitten off and on with a variety of pretty girls but did not yet have the courage to approach most of them.  I suppose that I felt that many of them were “out of my league”, not realizing that I was passably personable and many would have readily accepted a date.  I had dance or movie dates occasionally, but always sooner or later I would wind up back drinking Coca Cola or going to a movie with Patty.  I privately wished fervently that she were older so that I could take her to the school dances.

                (It is possible that Pat Cross and I might have developed a more permanent relationship had I not suffered from an attack of stupidity after a while—but that is a later part of my story.)

                Sometime during that year the “Gearhart Gang” came into being—those of us drom the west side that used Mrs. Gearhart’s drugstore as an after-school hangout.  The regulars included pert and pretty Ariel Mansfield who had dropped out of school and lived with her mother in a storefront next to the drugstore, David Schaeffer from an apartment building a half block away, another dark-haired girl from the same apartment (I forget her name), and two or three others, often including brother Dick and an olive-skinned handsome young fellow named D’arcy DeJuan.  I do not recall much about D’arcy but he was often around with Richard and got so he sort of wandered in and out of our house like it was a second home.  My mother liked D’arcy and had no objections even when he showed up for a meal without prior notice.

                The “Gearhart Gang” is difficult to explain.  We rarely chummed around together away from the drugstore except for a dance once in a great while or maybe a little beer drinking down by the river, but it was sort of a second family relationship.  Recently [1989] I found Ariel with her husband Buster Davis (who was in my class) at the 50^th reunion of the VHS Class of ’39.  In introducing her to Phyllis, my wife, I was sort of at a loss to explain our relationship since never once did I date Ariel.  Ariel solved that—in answer to Phyllis’ questions about what the Gearhart Gang did, Ariel tossed her head and laughed, “We grew up!”

Mapping the Way to Annapolis and Extra Cirricular Activities

In September when school started, Vancouver High School was another totally new experience for an old country boy.  Shumway Junior High went through the ninth grade so VHS had the sophomore, junior, and senior classes and there was upward of three hundred students in each class.

                Vancouver High was a large red brick building on the corner of 29^th and Main Streets which meant that we had to walk about sixteen blocks to and from school.  We thought nothing of that, however, after years of walking a mile and a quarter to Bona School.

                Part of the newness, other than size, was that I found that I could choose some of my courses besides the basics that were required for graduation.  We were each assigned a faculty advisor who could help lay out our courses.  I was delighted because I had been mulling over a plan all summer off and on—I wanted to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.

                I made an appointment with my advisor, Mr. Louis Barter who taught history and economics, and explained what I wanted to do.  He said that he did not think I would have a chance of getting a senatorial appointment to Annapolis because they were limited and were usually filled two or three years in advance, often by politicians’ sons.  He pointed out, however, that eighty men a year were taken from the enlisted ranks in the Navy by competitive examination and based on their records in high school.

                Together, Mr. Barter and I laid out my courses for my junior and senior years so that I would have all the prerequisites for the Annapolis examination, should the time ever come.  I was pleased when it turned out that, if I skipped a foreign language, I could still have an elective course each year.  I would also have plenty of time for extra-curricular school activities.

                After tossing that football around half the summer with Rex Lester, I decided to turn out for football with the Vancouver Trappers.  That was a mistake because I weighed all of 135 pounds.  I insisted to Mr. Gustafson, the assistant football coach that I could play end (we did not have “wide receivers” in those days) and he agreed to give me a chance on the scrub team.  Coach “Dutch” Shields took one look at my skinny frame and just shook his head.

                My high school football “career” came to an abrupt end on the occasion of our first scrimmage with the varsity.  I had made a favorable impression on Gustafson by demonstrating pretty good speed and the ability to leap and catch the football form just about any angle.  That first scrimmage game in pads with the varsity was something else however.  The varsity players averaged around 165 to 170 pounds so I was outweighed about thirty pounds per man.

                I did my share of blocking for the halfback and fullback then Gustafson called a pass play to me.  I streaked out into the flat and leaped high into the air for the ball.  I caught it but when I hit the ground it felt as if a truck had hit me.  A 175-pound tackle brought me down and then it seemed as if the whole varsity piled on.  There were no face masks then and my face was buried into the sod until I thought my nose was broken.  The wind was knocked out of me and it took me two or three minutes to get up off the ground after Gustafson came out and made sure that nothing was busted.  I turned in my suit and helmet and, from then on, my participation in football was confined to rooting and once in a while acting as spotter for the announcer at games.