Reunited

My next clear recollection of that train trip was when we came down the Columbia River Gorge on the last day into Portland.  We had been in dry and almost barren brown hills of eastern Oregon then, a few miles beyond Pendleton we were suddenly on the bank of the mighty Columbia River.

I moved to the right-hand side of the coach and gaped in awe.  I had never seen so much water in one place before.  At home in the Ozarks, especially during the drought years, I could throw a rock across the biggest river I knew about.  Now I was gazing at a mile-wide expanse of water that was headed for the Pacific Ocean.

The best was yet to come.  After a short stop at The Dalles, we were into the heart of the Columbia River Gorge.  The brown hills gave way to mountains covered with green Douglas firs and rocky cliffs over which streams tumbled in great waterfalls.

I moved back to the left side of the coach and, nose pressed firmly against the windowpane, gaped ecstatically as we passed Horsetail Falls, Bridal Veil, and Finally double-tiered Multnomah Falls.

During the final hour into Portland, I felt a kinship with old Brigham Young as I kept repeating silently to myself, “This is the place!  THIS IS THE PLACE!!!”  That train began a love affair with the Pacific Northwest that would remain steadfast during the remainder of my life, no matter how much of the rest of the world I saw.

My father had borrowed Uncle Austin’s black Plymouth sedan to come to the train station at Portland and he, holding baby Sandra, and my mother were on the platform to meet the train.

My principal memory of that reunion was the reaction of my mother.  She had left behind in Missouri a tow-headed youngster that she could kiss on the forehead but I had grown a full six inches or more during those months.  Instead of little Conrad, she was looking at a gangling youth, arms and legs hanging out of that too-small grey suit.

As I stepped down from the train, I heard my father exclaim, “There is is!” and as I turned toward them my mother stood stock still as I advanced, her mouth open in surprise.  As I came near, she finally said “Conrad?” in a questioning voice then gave me a big hug.  The top of her head came barely to my nose.

“Conrad Ross Frieze,” she said in mock severity but with delight, “I swear you have grown a foot in just seven months!  Just look at you—we are going to have to get you some new clothes!”

Shifting little Sandra, now a roly-poly one-year-old to his left arm, my father gravely shook hands with me.  He simply said “You are looking fine, boy.”

The drive to our new home was fascinating.  We crossed the long Interstate bridge over the Columbia to Vancouver.  Below on the water I saw a tugboat pulling a big raft of logs slowly downriver—just like the picture in the atlas at Bona School.  Upriver there was an honest-to-gosh sternwheeler steamer thrashing along.  My father pointed out the DuBois sawmill from the bridge where he worked.  He had taken the day off to come get me.

It was a wonderful feeling to be with the family once more.

The Way West

I woke shortly after sunrise.  The landscape outside had changed during the night.  The undulating prairies had given way to rolling hills and rocky outcroppings as we approached the Rocky Mountains.  I was enthralled.  We were getting into cowboy country. 

I was hungry and feeling the call of nature.  I made my way slowly through the swaying car to the lavatory at the end.  For a country boy fresh from a two-holer outhouse, the train lavatory was opulent.  The sink was marble with gleaming brass fittings and there was a fancy light up beside a gilt-framed mirror.  I wondered where electricity and hot and cold running water came from on the train.  The toilet was flushed by a foot treadle.  I was fascinated by the fact that the treadle simply opened a flapper valve and, peering down, I could see the ties flashing past.  Now I knew the reason for the sign that said “Do Not Flush While Train is in Station.”

I washed my face and combed my unruly mop of hair, then made my way across an open platform into the dining car.  It was a bit overwhelming.  Each table was set with a white linen cloth, heavy silverware, white coffee cups with gold rims, and water glasses that must have been crystal.

There were few passengers in the diner at that early hour.  I took a seat at the nearest empty table.  The white-coated black waiter, flashing his white teeth in a big smile, placed the menu in front of me with a flourish and a “Mawnin’, young suh!”

He waited while I studied the menu.  I was appalled at the prices.  At home in Greenfield a complete breakfast of eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, toast, juice and coffee could be had for 35 cents—twenty-five cents without the juice.  You could also get a hamburger for a dime.  Here on the train, a glass of juice was twenty cents alone and a bacon and egg breakfast was seventy-five cents.  On the lunch part of the menu, a hamburger was fifty-five cents.

I surreptitiously felt of my pocket where, after the movie in Kansas City, I had little more than four dollars to see me to Portland which was still two and a half days away.  I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair.  “We-ell,” I said, “I am not very hungry.  I’ll just have a glass of milk and some toast, I think.”

The waiter never batted an eye but I realized later that he knew the reason for my discomfort.  He smiled, “You sho’ that’s all?”  When I nodded wordlessly, he leaned down before he turned away and said in a low voice, “Tell you what—when we gets the folks from the Pullmans fed, Ah’ll be comin’ through the coach with some sandwiches—they is only two bits apiece.”  Then he turned away to get my milk and toast which was going to total thirty cents here in the dining car.

The black waiter was not only as good as his word, he was better.  About an hour and a half later he did indeed come through the coaches with a tray of ham and beef sandwiches.  When I held up my hand and dug out a quarter, he flashed that big grin again.  Without asking my choice, he pulled a sandwich from the bottom of the pile.  Instead of cold ham or beef, it was a bacon and egg sandwich still warm from the grill.

After that I did not go near that expensive diner but bought sandwiches three times a day and sometimes a bottle if pop when a vendor came through.  A grape NeHi was a dime instead of a nickel that my grandpa charged at his store.

There was not much else during the trip that made a deep enough impression on me for me to remember more than fifty years later.  I recall that there was a boy a couple of years older than me sitting across the aisle.  We struck up an acquaintance and would sometimes get off and stretch our legs when the train was in a station.  I still remembered that other trip when I thought the train was going to leave my mother behind so, even though I now knew that the train would not leave until the whistle blew and the conductor call, “All aboard!”, we never wandered very far from our coach.

I do recall one scene clearly the second day out, probably somewhere in Wyoming.  I knew that I was finally “out west”.  There was a dirt road paralleling the railroad track.  I watched as we passed a man wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and driving a buckboard behind a spirited team of horses.  Behind him loped a young fellow on a pinto rocking along in a silver-mounted saddle.  I was a bit disappointed that he did not seem to be packing a six shooter.

Heading West

Chapter 13

The Way West

Even though I was fresh out of the backwoods hill country, I set off on my great adventure with complete self-confidence as becoming any fifteen-year-old.  After all, I had been to Vancouver, Washington before (ignoring the fact that I was less than five years old at the time), and we had lived for a year in Kansas City.  I did not consider myself a “hick from the sticks” but I combed my hair carefully to make sure there was no hayseed there.

There was no hitch in my travel plans at Kansas City.  One of my older cousins, Denton Hayward, met me at the bus depot and took me and my luggage to Aunt Ora Hayward’s house on 35^th a couple of blocks off the Paseo.  That was familiar territory since in 1930 or thereabouts, we had lived on 37^th just about three blocks away.  Faxon School where I had gone for the third grade was just two blocks down the Paseo beyond the big Katz Drugstore on the corner of 35^th and Paseo.

My cousins Ennis and Buddy Fulkerson, who were near my age, came to stay at Aunt Ora’s while I was there.  I forget who was getting married, but I believe it was Raymond Hayward, Aunt Ora’s youngest son.  Uncle Hubert and Aunt “Ory”, with their bevy of three sons and four daughters, had created a Kansas City branch of the family of which I could never keep track.  I mostly remember the boys (all grown then) Wilbur, Denton, and Raymond, the youngest daughter Maude who was still living at home at the time.  There was also a very pretty little second cousin, Jackie Lou who was near my age. [Not, sure but Jackie Lou may have actually been a first cousin once removed.  This sort of thing is confusing.]

Aunt Ory was the undisputed matriarch of the Kansas City branch of the family.  (Uncle Hubert had died back around 1934.)  She had a huge house that was sort of a catch-as-catch-can boarding house with all sorts of people, mostly relatives, coming and going.  It would be unthinkable to go to Kansas City and not stop in on Aunt Ory.

Needless to say, with a wedding going on the day after I got to Kansas City, Aunt Ory’s house was even more of a “madhouse” than usual.  We boys—Ennis, Buddy, and me—mostly just tried to stay out of the way.  We ate whenever and whatever we could get our hands on—which was no problem as there was food all over the place.  I believe we spent my Grandpa’s two dollars by sneaking off in the evening after the wedding ceremony and taking Jackie Lou to a movie.

A day or two after the wedding, my Uncle Elbert Fulkerson drove me to the Union Station to catch my train to the Pacific Northwest.  I recall being worried that we might be late and the train would leave without me, but Uncle Elbert would just smile and say, “Stop fretting, boy, we got lots of time.”  Not owning a watch, I had no way to dispute him.

At the Union Station and for the first time the old country boy from the Ozark hills was out of his element and bewildered.  The only other time I had ridden a train was when I was five years old when Mother brought us kids back from the Pacific Northwest.  To me, the Kansas City Union Station was a scurrying mass of people and a bewildering number of ticket windows and gates to trains that were chuffing in and out of the station.

We already had my ticket so Uncle Elbert herded me through the bustle, checked my guitar box and suitcase and led me to the right track when they called my train.  He found me a red plush seat in a coach up ahead of the dining car, patted me on the shoulder, and with a last “goodbye boy” was gone.

The train lurched, jerked, then chuffed out of the station onto a westbound track past the Kansas City stockyards.  As it picked up speed through the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansad, and out onto the plains, I had a very strange feeling.  I was completely on my own for the first time.  It was as if a door had closed behind me and another was swinging open ahead.  I liked the feeling.  Even through the long first night I had no qualms and felt no homesickness for the Ozark hills—I was on my way home and was eager to get on with it.

Heading West

Chapter 13

The Way West

Even though I was fresh out of the backwoods hill country, I set off on my great adventure with complete self-confidence as becoming any fifteen-year-old.  After all, I had been to Vancouver, Washington before (ignoring the fact that I was less than five years old at the time), and we had lived for a year in Kansas City.  I did not consider myself a “hick from the sticks” but I combed my hair carefully to make sure there was no hayseed there.

There was no hitch in my travel plans at Kansas City.  One of my older cousins, Denton Hayward, met me at the bus depot and took me and my luggage to Aunt Ora Hayward’s house on 35^th a couple of blocks off the Paseo.  That was familiar territory since in 1930 or thereabouts, we had lived on 37^th just about three blocks away.  Faxon School where I had gone for the third grade was just two blocks down the Paseo beyond the big Katz Drugstore on the corner of 35^th and Paseo.

My cousins Ennis and Buddy Fulkerson, who were near my age, came to stay at Aunt Ora’s while I was there.  I forget who was getting married, but I believe it was Raymond Hayward, Aunt Ora’s youngest son.  Uncle Hubert and Aunt “Ory”, with their bevy of three sons and four daughters, had created a Kansas City branch of the family of which I could never keep track.  I mostly remember the boys (all grown then) Wilbur, Denton, and Raymond, the youngest daughter Maude who was still living at home at the time.  There was also a very pretty little second cousin, Jackie Lou who was near my age. [Not, sure but Jackie Lou may have actually been a first cousin once removed.  This sort of thing is confusing.]

Aunt Ory was the undisputed matriarch of the Kansas City branch of the family.  (Uncle Hubert had died back around 1934.)  She had a huge house that was sort of a catch-as-catch-can boarding house with all sorts of people, mostly relatives, coming and going.  It would be unthinkable to go to Kansas City and not stop in on Aunt Ory.

Needless to say, with a wedding going on the day after I got to Kansas City, Aunt Ory’s house was even more of a “madhouse” than usual.  We boys—Ennis, Buddy, and me—mostly just tried to stay out of the way.  We ate whenever and whatever we could get our hands on—which was no problem as there was food all over the place.  I believe we spent my Grandpa’s two dollars by sneaking off in the evening after the wedding ceremony and taking Jackie Lou to a movie.

A day or two after the wedding, my Uncle Elbert Fulkerson drove me to the Union Station to catch my train to the Pacific Northwest.  I recall being worried that we might be late and the train would leave without me, but Uncle Elbert would just smile and say, “Stop fretting, boy, we got lots of time.”  Not owning a watch, I had no way to dispute him.

At the Union Station and for the first time the old country boy from the Ozark hills was out of his element and bewildered.  The only other time I had ridden a train was when I was five years old when Mother brought us kids back from the Pacific Northwest.  To me, the Kansas City Union Station was a scurrying mass of people and a bewildering number of ticket windows and gates to trains that were chuffing in and out of the station.

We already had my ticket so Uncle Elbert herded me through the bustle, checked my guitar box and suitcase and led me to the right track when they called my train.  He found me a red plush seat in a coach up ahead of the dining car, patted me on the shoulder, and with a last “goodbye boy” was gone.

The train lurched, jerked, then chuffed out of the station onto a westbound track past the Kansas City stockyards.  As it picked up speed through the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansad, and out onto the plains, I had a very strange feeling.  I was completely on my own for the first time.  It was as if a door had closed behind me and another was swinging open ahead.  I liked the feeling.  Even through the long first night I had no qualms and felt no homesickness for the Ozark hills—I was on my way home and was eager to get on with it.

Heading into the Unknown

The plan was that Grandpa would take me to the bus stop over to the north of Fair Play where I could get the bus to Kansas City.  One of my many relatives in Kansas City would meet me, then I would stay for a couple of days with my Aunt Ora and attend the wedding of one of my Kansas City cousins.  Someone up there would put me on the train to Portland, Oregon.

Grandpa was to take me to Fair Play in the green Chevrolet sedan while Grandma tended the store.  I recall that it was a bright and sunny morning when Grandma gave me a big tight hug on the store porch, admonished me to be a good boy and to be careful on the trip by myself, and said that they were going to miss having me around and all the help I had been.

I looked back as we started off down that familiar road north that I had walked to school so many times.  The familiar plump figure in that ankle-length dress stepped down into the red dirt of the road and waved.  I waved back and I guess it must have already been warm out there in the sun as, the last thing I saw of Grandma as we went over the hill, she was wiping at her cheeks with a corner of her apron.

I do not recall that Grandpa and I talked very much during the trip to Fair Play.  I mostly watched the familiar scenes going by that I was not to see for a long, long time.  There was the little white schoolhouse, closed now for the summer.  We went up the hill past the Lindley house, but I did not see anyone around nor did I see anyone around Rollo Lindley’s place where my erstwhile friend Roundtree lived.

We went through the Little Sac River bottomlands where I had plowed Dad’s rented cornfields with that mis-matched team, then across the steel bridge that Dad had helped to build two or three years before.  In a couple of miles, we turned past the Doc Hunt place where our dog Pal had died and where Richard and I had milked all those cows.

At Fair Play we only had a short time to wait until the Kansas City bus came.  I noticed that Grandpa’s kindly voice was a bit gruffer than usual when he said, “We’re going to miss you, boy.  You have been a great help to your Grandma and me.  We are right proud that you did so well in school and we expect you to make us even more proud of you out there in the west.  I don’t expect we will see you for a pretty long time.”

I suddenly felt that I should comfort him somehow, but he was still that tall figure of authority that everyone looked up to—standing there in his striped overalls, black coat, and black Homberg hat above his gold-rimmed spectacles.  I think I just said sort of lamely, “Well, Grandpa, I sure hope I was not too much trouble for you.  I was real glad to get to stay a while with you and Grandma and I reckon it won’t be too long before we can come to visit.”

(I had no inkling, of course, that the next time I would see him would be in Vancouver, Washington and I would be wearing the dress blues of a first class petty officer in the Navy with a row of ribbons and three major battles in the Pacific behind me.)

The bus pulled in before we could talk anymore and Grandpa helped the bus driver stow my box and suitcase.  Then he handed me the sack lunch Grandma had made for me to have on the bus and he pressed a two-dollar bill into my hand.

“Goodbye, boy,” Grandpa said gruffly.  “That is for you to have something a little extra along the way.”

“Gee, thank you, Grandpa!”  I pocketed the money then started to shake hands but he suddenly did something that he had not done since I was little. He put his arms around me in a bear hug then pushed me toward the door of the bus and turned abruptly away.

On the bus I took a seat on the right side then opened the window and leaned out as the bus pulled out.  Grandpa turned back around and waved his black hat.  I guess it was warm out there in the sun in Fair Play for Grandpa, too.  The last thing I saw he was wiping his face with his big red bandanna as his tall, straight figure receded into the distance behind the bus.

Saying Goodbye

During those final days, I made the rounds of my kinfolks and friends to say goodbye.  I stayed a night with Uncle Claud, Aunt Virge, and Mary Catherine and had some of Aunt Virge’s huge lightbread buns slathered with butter and good molasses for breakfast.  I rode to Aldrich with Grandpa in the truck and stayed a couple of days with Uncle Merritt, Aunt Golden, and cousin Charles.

Around Bona I also had final visits with my schoolmates—many of whom were cousins of one sort or another.  Claude and Billy Todd who lived in the old board and batten house just beyond the church.  Harold and Don Griffin (When I saw Don next he would be a U.S. Marine and I a U.S. Navy sailor on Ford Island in Hawaii not long after the attack on December 7^th 1941.)  There was Frank Whiteside, Andy and Lee Asbell, cousin James Lowell Tygart, Clarence Lee King, and Gene and Evelyn Asbell.  I guess I did not make much of an effort to say final goodbye to most of the girls except when they happened to come into Grandpa’s store during those last days.  (Mary Neil was one of those and it was only later that I realized that she did not buy anything, but just looked around and talked to me.)

I believe that it was sometime in May when the time finally came.  My train ticket had come, along with some money for eats along the way.  I carried water from the Bona well and Grandma washed and ironed my small wardrobe.  I still had the cardboard box that my guitar had come in and, since I did not have a guitar case, packed my overalls and the things I had outgrown in around the guitar.  I tied the big package with binder twine.

There was an old suitcase for my “good” clothes and some memorabilia which did not amount to much.  I had given my collection of Indian arrowheads—half a Quaker Oats box of them—which I had picked up in the corn fields along Maze Creek—to Mary Catherine, I think, and the single-shot 12-guage shotgun to James Lowell.

On the day of departure, Grandma had me put on a clean shirt with my one necktie, the grey suit with the zippered jacket, and my black “Sunday-go-to-meeting” oxfords.  I had a black felt hat.  I felt all dressed up but I had outgrown that grey suit so that the pants only came to an inch above the ankle and the sleeves were more than an inch too short.  In retrospect, with that binder wine tied guitar ox and battered suitcase, I must have been the epitome of a country rube that just fell off the turnip truck!

Graduation

As graduation night approached, Grandma realized that we had a problem.  The previous year my mother had ordered a suit for me out of the catalogue.  It was a two-piece made out of off-white nubbed cotton material.  Unfortunately, I never liked it because it came in the mail just when I was terribly sick with yellow jaundice.  She thought it would make me feel better to see my new suit so she showed it to me when I was so sick I wanted to throw up on it—and the suit and especially putting it on reminded me of how sick I had been and made me queasy.

That was not the real problem.  The problem was that I had grown so much in six months that my arms and legs stuck out of that suit two or three inches.  There was no way it could be altered.  Fortunately, the folks had sent money for clothes and Grandma had bought a grey worsted suit with a zippered jacket for me in the fall.  The legs and sleeves were only about an inch too short.  Grandma let them down as far as she could and, with a white shirt and necktie, we made that do.

I can recall graduation night in great detail because of some mementoes that Grandma Stanley saved and passed along to my mother.  They are a copy of that night’s commencement program with the notes I used on the podium hand written on the back, and the little table paper original manuscript of my valedictory address in my handwriting.

How Grandma got them was that I had folded them up before I departed and left them in the secret “safe” I had made in my bedroom by cutting a hole through the wallboard and inserting a square metal can.  I used a photograph if Lindberg’s Lockheed Orion float-mounted monoplane to cover it.  I was embarrassed to admit to Grandpa that I had cut a hole in the wall so I left the little papers there and secured the photograph to the wall over it with gummed paper tape.

There was a total of seventeen of us in that graduating class and the church was filled with family and friends.  Some had to stand up in the back.  I was very sorry that my mother and father could not be present but Grandma and Grandpa were in the front row.  The class was seated on the raised platform behind the lectern that was used for the pulpit during church services.

My Uncle Claud Frieze, an elder in the church, rendered the invocation, then there was a song and after that Mary Neil delivered her salutatory address without making a mistake or being prompted.  I was sitting with sweaty palms hoping that I could do as well.  She was followed by County School Superintendent James Becker from Walnut Grove who made the commencement address.  I did not really hear a word of it as I was concentrating too hard on what I had to say.  After another song, it came my turn.

I approached the lectern with my kneecaps jerking but then, as I laid my page of notes before me and looked at the upturned familiar faces, something happened.  I felt good about being there and I addressed them in a clear, confident voice to deliver the following rather pontifical but sincere address that I had written.

“Friends, teachers, and classmates:  We, the graduating class of ’37 of Bona High School, are standing tonight in a period of transition.  It is that period in which we leave our happy pasts behind us and step out to meet our futures in whatever way may be our destiny.

“The success of the future, which is as yet unknown, depends—in a large mearuse upon the foundation we have laid for it in the past few years we have been sheltered in these halls of learning.

“We have been guided all along by our teachers to whom we owe a debt of deepest gratitude we can only attempt to repay.

“Ever since we entered the sphere of their influence we have been looking eagerly forward to this even which will be the second most important milestone in our lives.  We considered we had reached the first when we sat in this place two years ago.  Now that the event has come again we welcome it with the realization that it is with a definite sense of sadness we gather here tonight.

“We have paused at the turning of the way and as we look out from the shelter we have always had onto the problems of the future, we realize how very insignificant we are and how important we falsely thought we were.  But still we must realize that others will drop out of the scheme of things and we must be prepared to step in and play our part—however small it may be.

“Parents and Friends: We cannot leave this stage of life’s action without thaniking you from the bottom of our hearts for the start you have given us.  We realize that if it had not been for your guidance we would never have made the start we did and would not have overcome many of the obstacles we have succeeded so far in in surmounting.

“You, as well as our teachers, have guided and sheltered us from the problems of life we were incapable of meeting alone; and when we were seemingly adrift and off course, you provided the beacon that guided us safely back again.

“To our Teachers we must also extend our earnest thanks.  None of us realize how very often in the years to come we will look back and then begin to really appreciate the help you gave us.  Doubtless there will be times when we will wish with all our hearts that we could return to the shelter of that guiding hand.  But you have started us on the road to success we long for and have pointed the way to completion of the journey of our lives with an efficiency we can only hope to attain in our works as we go on.

“And may you ever be proud to point us out as products of your workmanship.  I am sure that if at last we achieve the success we long for we will not take all the credit for ourselves, but will give a large share to those to whom it belongs—our teachers.

(I turned to the class.)

“And thus, classmates, we linger at the crossroads, the parting of the ways, in that last sad parting so long looked forward to.  Our race together is almost run and we are nearing the end of the course where we must go forth, each to battle for himself.

“Doubtless, while we linger in this period of our lives, we all dream of great deeds and high positions in life, but—let us not hope for too much as we all realize that it is much better to fill a small job or position to overflowing rather than to be lost in a job too big for us that someone else might fill.

“By all means we must retain our ambition and dream of those bigger things in life, but let us not ruin the life we are destined to lead by grasping for that beyond our reach.  As Malloch says in his immortal poem, ‘be the best of whatever you are’: ‘If you can’t be a pine of the top of the hill, be a scrub in the valley, but be the best little scrub by the side of the rill.  Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.  If you can’t be a bush, be a bit of grass, and some highway happier make.  If you can’t be a muskie, then just be a bass, but the liveliest bass in the lake.  We can’t all be captains, some have to be crew, There’s something for all of us here.  There’s big work to do, and lesser to do, and the task you must do is the near.  If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail.  If you can’t be a sun, be a star—it isn’t by size that you win or you fail, but the best of whatever you are.’

“I thank you all.”

I returned to my seat to gratifying applause from the audience, the faculty, and my classmates.  Grandma and Grandpa were beaming proudly and Grandma folded away the written copy of my speech.

My address was followed by the presentation of diplomas by Mr. John Hembree of Stockton.  The benediction was then given by my grandfather, C. B. Stanley, in that incomparable sonorous voice that he used for recitals at community gathers and to render the morning prayer at church services.

My years a Bona School were finished.  Now I was finally ready to leave the Ozark hills.