These are the stories my father told me of his life from 1916 until 1985. Since I was born in 1948 I began hearing these stories as a little child. The flavor of them is unmistakable. You can feel the carry over from the wild west cowboy days quite a bit in them as even when I was born in 1948 there was a wildness in many places in California and throughout the Western states even then. Often when my parents took me to places in Eastern California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico it wasn't hard at all to imagine the wild west because we met many people when I was a child that were born around the time of the Civil War and after. People who were born in the 1860s were in their 90s in the 1950s when I grew up. So even my grandparents were all born in the 1880s and knew life before cars, trucks and airplanes. So people like this were just very different in how they saw life than now in every way.
I was enthralled by the stories of my elders as a child. I think this is one reason why I always tended to be more grown up in my thinking than a lot of my peers even at 4 to 6 years of age.
This is the beginning of my father's life:
He was born in 1916 in Morenci, Arizona. At that time Morenci was an open pit copper mine and likely still is. His father (my grandfather) was an Electrical Contractor that was wiring up the homes being built for the workers of the mine and hired by the mining company to do this. So that people could come from all over the world to work there at the copper mine.
When my father was about 2 years old his older brother Bob (My Dad's name was Fred like me). Now Bob was 4 years older and so that would have made him about 6 years old kept either a wild fox kit or a coyote kit. I think likely it was a coyote kit in a cage and fed it. Well, one day it got loose after getting grown up enough and got out and bit a chunk out of my father's side. Bob was chasing his coyote and the family dog helped protect my 2 year old father so he didn't die. When they got Dad to a doctor, the nearest doctor was miles and miles away so it was sometime in the first few days after a chunk was bit out of my father's side, the doctor told my grandparents that the coyote had come within 1/100 of an inch of biting into my father's kidney which likely would have been fatal because of the distances to doctors and hospitals in those days. Bob had many infected bites from the coyote but it was luckily not rabid so the boys didn't die. Doesn't this sound like a completely different world than you now live in?
So, even though my father got pneumonia soon after that he didn't die from infection which could have been a problem because there were no antibiotics then.
When Bob was about 10 years old they moved to Breckenridge, Texas because my grandmother I believe was from Texas. She had two sisters. One owned a gold mine in Gila Bend, and I think she lived in Flagstaff as an adult and was married and lived there with her husband. When my father turned 18 he went to help with her gold mine for 6 months or a year in 1934 in Gila Bend. He loved Arizona because it seldom rained there and because he mostly grew up in Seattle after he was 12 to 15 years old when his Dad bought a home there.(Seattle rains a lot but is beautiful).
So when the went to Breckenridge, Texas Bob was getting beat up by a bully every day he walked home from school and was very upset about being the new kid. So he asked his Dad what to do. His Dad said, (Now remember this is likely 1920 and a completely different time than now). "Son. You have got to get this guy to stop beating you up. If you can't defeat him in a fair fight then get a big stick and wait around a corner and then hit him in the head with it and knock him out. He won't bother you again."
So that is what Bob did he got a big stick like a piece of lumber and waited for the boy and then knocked him out with the stick. The boy never bothered Bob again. You can see this is not like now at all. Since the law (sherriffs, Marshals and the like were few and far between) one had to defend oneself most of the time in the western states back then. This would have been normal behavior in many areas back then in 1920.
Even during World War II Grandpa was raising a Victory Garden in Wenatchee, Washington and went to get his gas coupons to bring his crop to the market to sell and they told him that the season ended last week and they wouldn't give him gas coupons. So he got his shotgun and brought it in and laid it on the counter and said he needed his gas coupons to bring his Victory Garden to market. They gave him his gas coupons. One would not get away with this now but this was just how things were done in the late 1800s and early 1900s. You defended your rights personally. And even during World War II everyone knew enough people like this so they understood. Just like in the movie "Secondhand Lions" my grandfather was just like the guys in this movie the way he dealt with people. This seems impossible to people today in 2010 but everything was done differently back then.
Another true story about my Grandfather was that he had a mining Claim of several thousand acres near Elk City, Idaho. The mining laws were changed around 1960 so that unless you showed you were taking out a certain amount of gold, Silver, or whatever you were taking out of the ground you couldn't keep a claim that big and live on it anymore. So, when a Forest Ranger came to tell him to move off his land, Grandpa shot the man's hat off with his 30 odd 6 rifle from World War I. To show you just how different things were in 1960 than now the forest service left him alone and waited until Grandpa died to return the mining claim to the forest service and to make it a part of the National Forest in Idaho. Grandpa lived Spring, Summer and Fall in Idaho in his cabin on his mining Claim and spent late Fall, Winter and spring until the snow melted in Idaho with his wife in Seattle at their home there. Grandpa was born in the 1880s in Kansas and was a baseball pitcher that was Nicknamed "Pinky" because of his red hair when he was young before becoming an Electrical Contractor and marrying my Grandmother.
Dad told me many stories about growing up in Coos Bay, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. I think this next story was in Coos Bay, Oregon. My Dad was 6 years old and his brother Tommy was 4 and his older brother Bob would have been 10. Grandpa gave Bob a small shotgun, my Dad at 6 a .22 rifle and his brother Tommy at 4 a .22 pistol and told them to go hunt doves for dinner. So off they went on their first hunting adventure without an adult present. (Even when I was growing up my Grandmother gave me my first .22 rifle at age 8) so to her this was pretty late to start using a rifle for hunting. Since boys in this era were expected to emotionally be like adults by age 4 to 6 we were capable of this kind of thing without accidents. Children were expected forced to grow up in many ways very quickly before the Viet Nam War in the Western States and throughout the world for that matter.
So, as a child there were always two worlds. The serious adult world and the child's world and adults always let you know which one you were in. So you would hear. "Now you be safe with that gun or I'll beat you within an inch of your life." And since adults meant this when they said it you knew you had to be adult in your behavior no matter how you felt or thought at the time. Your life depended on it.
So, there was always the child playful world and the adult completely terrifying world. So in this way boys especially were trained for warfare and to die if necessary in an instant defending themselves and their families and friends even if they were 4 to 6 years old. We were conditioned that way to be ready for anything at any time. It had been this way for thousands of years. We didn't like it but we all understood it perfectly. So, children (especially boys) were much different then than they are now because this kind of thinking now is considered abusive in polite society in the U.S. and Europe. However, none of us know if or when it will be absolutely necessary once again for the survival of our nation or world.
Dad said one day "The Old Man" bought a German Luger pistol. At that time it was the finest regular pistol in the world. It was like a Glock 9 mm pistol of today. It had I believe a 10 round clip that fit snug into the handle like a Glock and many other semi automatic pistols of today. Well. My father at 13 or 14 and his two brothers snuck the pistol out without their Dad knowing it and were firing it into the dense forest around Lake Forest Park. After firing off a bunch of rounds into the forest they put it back and thought that all was well with no one the wiser. However, the next week they found out that one of the rounds fired into the dense forest had made it over a mile away and went through a lady's house while she was playing the piano and went over her head and lodged itself into the front door behind her. Though they all knew they had accidentally done this by being kids and thinking no rounds would hurt anyone. But since they were all kids no one every knew who had done this not even their Dad.
Another time Dad and his older Brother, Bob, had been trained by their father to blow up stumps with Dynamite. (Basically, you just dig under a stump and put the right amount of dynamite and then pack in the dirt and the stump blows right up into the air and out of the ground. The danger is putting too much dynamite or too little under the stump. Too little dynamite will not lift the stump out of the ground and too much might lift it so high it lands on top of a car or truck or house or barn or a person standing too close. So it was an is both an art and a science much like when you see buildings blown up to reuse the property for something else.
Well. Bob was a senior in High School and he and Dad wanted to impress their girlfriends and friends. So Bob got about 50 sticks of dynamite on a Friday night after School at about 9 pm in Seattle out in the country and put these 50 sticks of dynamite on top of a high 6 foot tall stump of an old growth forest tree stump. They lit a 30 minute fuse and took all their friends to a hill nearby to watch the fireworks. When it finally went off it was very impressive indeed and shot flame straight up into the sky over 100 feet. But they were probably the only ones who saw it flash that high. However, the problem was that the concussion was so loud it killed all the chicks in the eggs for 25 miles in diameter because the blast was just so incredibly loud. And the newspaper the next day talked about the Mysterious Blast. A week later the newspaper said, "Mysterious Blast Still Mysterious". When Dad and Bob checked what it did to the top of the stump it just sort of put a crater in the top because almost all the force went straight up so it did almost no damage at all to the stump.
Another time during High School they made Potato Vodka in a bathtub for their friends party. However, because they didn't really know exactly what they were doing it made all the kids at the party go unconscious because the alcohol level was just too high to be completely safe. However, everyone survived so they all had a good high school story to tell.
Another time Bob took apart the stearing mechnism on his car and put it back backwards, so when you turned the steering wheel left the car went right and vice versa. But Bob had a party to go to and tried to drive the car anyhow. He made it about a mile before he put it in a ditch.
Another time during World War II during gas rationing Dad and some friends wanted to drive to Yellowstone National Park. Since they weren't allowed to buy that much gas because of the war they converted and old 1929 Duesenberg touring car to fuel oil the kind used in heating homes which wasn't being rationed at that time. They tied 2- 50 gallon drums of heating oil on the back of the Duesenberg and drove all the way to Yellowstone from Seattle and back. At the time Bob and Fred were electrician's building Liberty Ships in Seattle Harbor and had already served time in the Marines before World War II began. They had been Marine gunners on Hellcats, a biplane gunship that carried two. So, when they were given time enough off they went to Yellowstone on vacation with their friends in their converted Duesenberg. They said it blew blue smoke rings of smoke all the way to Yellowstone and back.
The above is a 1929 Duesenberg similar to the one my Dad and his brother converted to run on Heating Fuel oil so they could visit Yellowstone when gas was being rationed during world war II.
Everything about all these stories tells you that this was a completely different era than now. But understanding what life was like back then helped me a lot to understand my father, Grandfather, and uncles and other family members. As you can see my Dad's family was very colorful in their lives. And I can tell you that living around them they all were larger than life. It was a lot like living around a real bunch of real life John Waynes all the time. But I must say it got at times to be a bit much. I loved them all a lot but they all were pretty scary too. They had to be scary enough to survive the times they lived in.
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