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.