Part I-Early Years, Chapter 10-Moses Lake

CHAPTER 10
Moses Lake
1951-1953

When we got to Moses Lake, Dad had rented about 80 acres of irrigated land from Ray Clink. It was located on the west end of what is now called Pettigrew Road. It was in Cascade Valley and the land ran all the way down to the lake. Mr. Clink raised race horses and our house was in one end of the stables. A wall was all that separated us from the horses; you could hear the horses bumping the wall all night. Dad put water to a kitchen sink but we had no indoor bathroom. After having one at Creswell, this was a real disappointment. I think the horses ran all the mice out of their end of the barn and into ours. We finally got them under control with poison and traps.
Dad bought a model A John Deere tractor and some hay equipment. We grew mainly alfalfa hay and planted one field in beans. The beans had so many weeds in them they didn’t do well and finally the weeds overtook them. We plowed them up and planted barley, but it was too late in the season and it didn’t make either. The soil on this place had a lot of oval rocks in it; they varied in size from egg to football. We did make some pretty good hay but there wasn’t a lot of money in it. Dad bought a front end loader for the tractor with a big fork on it. (See figure 15.) We would pick the hay up in the field with the loader and bring it up by the house where we stacked it until a buyer from a dairy on the coast would come buy it. Mom was on top of the hay one time helping stack and I was driving the tractor. When we finished, I told her to get on the loader and I would bring her down from the top of the stack. When she got on, I dropped the loader as fast as it would go; she came down about the same speed as if she had jumped. I did slow it down before it hit the ground. I felt bad about it later, but at the time, thought it was funny when she screamed.
Just before we moved to Moses Lake, I would break out in hives around my waist about supper time. At first it looked like two or three mosquito bites, but it got worse as time went on. After several weeks they got so bad I would have splotches bigger than my hand all over my back and stomach. When this started happening Mom took me to an allergy doctor in Spokane. The doctor drew about one inch squares on my back, rubbed a little spot raw in each square and put different things on the raw spot to see if I was allergic to them. When he started doing that, it was about the right time of the day for my hives to come out, which they did. Then he couldn’t tell which ones were my hives and which ones were his. He wanted me to stay and try again in the morning; Mom needed to get home to the other kids so she rented me a hotel room close by and I took the bus home the next day. It turned out I was allergic to several foods, including milk, eggs, honey, beans, and about a dozen others. The hives went away immediately when I stopped eating these foods. I gradually started eating them again and they haven’t bothered me except on rare occasions. Mom always thought it was all started by eating so many turkey eggs in Oregon.
In the spring the west wind would come scooting through and since they were leveling much of land in the Columbia Basin for irrigation it would pick up a lot of dust. Much of the soil was very fine so it would make a good dust cloud. I don’t remember it being as bad as Oklahoma, but it was a close second. Then in the fall the air was filled with something else. Ducks and geese would come through Moses Lake on the way south. They would be the thickest about the time it was getting dark. The sky would literally turn dark when they started swirling around looking for a place to spend the night.
Mr. Clink told us of the time his wife got sick while they were out on the racing circuit. He called the doctor to come see her (they used to make house calls) and the doctor put her off until the next day. The next day he put her off again. The third day the doctor called to see if he still needed to come. Mr. Clink said he told the doctor, “No, that’s okay doc, she died,” and he hung up. He told that story several times and each time he told it he would laugh a little harder. I think every time Mr. Clink told a story it had the phrase in it, “I sez to myself, I sez…”
We started going to church with Mom’s Aunt Susie and Uncle Francis at the Moses Lake Church of Christ; Dad started going too. Mom’s cousins, Marion and Del, also went there. I was trying to be facetious one day not too long after we started going there and said to Mom, “Those people think they know everything, don’t they?” Mom said something to the effect, “They do seem to know the Bible pretty good.” I had a change of attitude on the spot; I started really listening to the preaching and Bible lessons. Soon after moving to Potato Hill Mom, Dad, Darwin, and I were all baptized on the same Sunday morning.
The next year we left Clink’s, and Dad rented part of a big farm on Potato Hill south of Moses Lake. It was divided up between four or five different families. We were the only ones that were not Japanese. We moved into a small two bedroom house, but at least it had indoor plumbing. There were fewer rocks on this place and we grew alfalfa, sugar beets, potatoes, and sweet corn. Our third spring in Moses Lake was in 1953; we moved into our third house. It was about twenty yards from the old one but was much bigger. It was a duplex and we got both units so we had four bedrooms two baths and two kitchens. We filled the house up that summer when Chuck was born on July 2, 1953. On the way home from the hospital Mom and Dad brought him by the field where Darwin and I were irrigating; this was the first time we got to see him. Linda, Cheryl, and LaDonna were real proud of him.
In addition to the farm on Potato Hill, Dad rented a small place near the north end of the lake near Larson Air Force Base. I think the owner told Dad he could have it rent-free if he would pick up some of the rocks. For every rock on the Clink place, this one had five. Dad bought a rock picking machine and I was under it making some adjustments while Dad was trying to tighten a hydraulic hose leak. The hydraulic connection broke and a set of iron teeth weighing several hundred pounds fell across my back. Dad lifted the teeth off me and I crawled out no worse for the wear. Dad tried to lift the teeth later and couldn’t budge them. I was picking up rocks with this machine one day when some pilots tried to scare me. They accomplished their mission. Two F-86s came up behind me going over the speed of sound. I didn’t hear a thing until the boom hit me and they were right overhead. They must not have been more than 30 feet high because I felt the wind as they went over.
Dad had a two ton International truck he used to haul sugar beets and corn. He had me drive a load of sweet corn to Wenatchee. Just before the town, there is a steep incline several miles long on the bank of the Columbia River. As soon as we started down I realized I had made a mistake. I got it shifted down one gear but that wasn’t enough. I was afraid to try for the next lower gear because the engine was already revved up so fast I didn’t think I could get it shifted. I passed a runaway truck stop but was afraid if I used it the truck would roll over. The engine kept going faster, and the brakes kept getting hotter, but we finally got to the bottom of the hill. I was a nervous wreck by then. I brought other loads later, but made sure we got shifted down while the speed was still slow enough.
I almost killed myself another time when I high centered the tractor and got it stuck in an irrigation ditch. I had a chain with me and there happened to be a big fence post nearby. I tied the post to the rear wheel and was just congratulating myself on how well it worked when the post came over the top of the wheel and just grazed my right shoulder hard. If it had been two inches closer it would have taken my arm off. If it had been a foot closer it would have cut me in half. I have used that technique several times since then but kept my eye on the post as it came around the wheel.
When sugar beets are planted, there are three or four seeds in each pod. After they come up you have to go in by hand and take out all but the strongest plant and any weeds by hand using a hoe with a handle about one foot long. We called it “blocking” beets. It is back breaking work and would compare very favorably with picking cotton. We would do some, but Dad hired migrant labor to do most. They were paid by the acre. We knew how long the rows were and how many rows it took to make an acre. One day a young man from the air base came out and wanted to block some beets to make extra money. He had never done it before but Dad took him to the field, showed him how and left him there to work. A few hours later he came back to the house and said the work was too hard; he wanted to get paid for what he had done and go home. Dad went down to see how much he had done. Instead of starting on a row and going from end to end he had skipped all over the field looking for places with fewer weeds. Dad was disgusted with him but he got a tape measure out, measured off each spot blocked, paid him, and told him not to come back.
I don’t remember just where it is, but somewhere north of Moses Lake (the town) there is an irrigation drainage ditch that comes down a bluff. It is concrete lined to keep the soil from eroding. It is probably 100 yards from where it starts over the bluff to the bottom; the first part is pretty steep then it levels out for about 20 yards and the last 10 yards is almost straight down. At the very bottom were some concrete baffles about three feet high to break the speed of the water and prevent erosion; the ditch was just in the soil from there on. Boris Massenkoff, a couple of others and I decided we were going to get in the ditch and slide down it; our plan was to crawl out of the ditch where it leveled off near the bottom before we went over the final drop off. We did just that a couple of times and it was great fun; there was moss on the concrete and it was slick as grease. When we went down it would make a wake like a speed boat going across a lake. We didn’t pay much attention to it but the amount of water was increasing as the afternoon went on. I went down again and couldn’t stop at the level place because the current had picked up. I was clawing into the moss but it was too slick. There was no way to avoid it; I went over the last drop off and just knew I was going to bust my head on one of the baffles below. If I ever had a panic attack in my life, this was it; it was worse than going down the Wenatchee grade. It seemed like it took a long time to drop over the falls but when I finally hit bottom the current threw me over the baffles and I didn’t get a scratch. There was a bunch of sucker fish about two feet long feeding at the bottom and they all went in every direction. That was the last time I ever went down the slide.
When we lived on Potato Hill, I had a hard time getting out of bed in time to catch the bus. If I missed the bus I had to walk about four miles to school; sometimes I would catch a ride and sometimes I wouldn’t. Mom’s cousin Marion and her husband Del had a bicycle shop that I had to go by on the way in. I think they felt sorry for me because Del put a bicycle together out of spare parts and gave it to me. It was Del and Marion that took Darwin and me to Seattle so we could see our first TV at Del’s brother’s house.
Boris Massenkoff was an Airman at Larson Air Force Base. He was born in Russia and his dad had been executed by Stalin. His mother, some uncles, and other family members had escaped Russia by way of China, and found their way to the United States. He didn’t speak English very well and the Air Force was letting him go to high school mainly to learn the language. I think he was 20 years old at the time. We became friends and decided he was going to teach me Russian during the lunch hour. We worked on it quite a while, but I wasn’t a very good student.
I didn’t date much at Moses Lake during high school. I took Cleva Parham to the movies two times and that was it. I did fairly well in school but not outstanding. We had no woodworking shop, but my senior year they built a new agriculture shop and I learned to weld. I was secretary of the FFA club. Our school won the regional potato judging contest one year. We went to state the next year and didn’t win but I had second highest individual score. At graduation I was chosen “teachers favorite” (the kids teased me for being “teachers pet”) and had to give a speech.
The summer after graduating I worked some for Dad but during the week I worked for Pete Valdez. Pete was a carpenter and I helped him build several houses around Moses Lake. We also did a lot of concrete work for a plant that made starch out of cull potatoes. When I worked outside on the farm, I had Mom write my name on my back with medical tape. I then worked in the sun without a shirt and my name would tan on my back. When I went to school that fall I would tell the guys in the dorm that it was a birthmark and that was why my folks named me Tom. It soon faded out.
It cost about $800 a year to go to the state college then; this included board, room, tuition, and books. Through the years I had saved up almost enough for the first year of college. When I was accepted at Washington State in Pullman they wanted the first semester’s tuition; Dad told Mom to write an $89 check and we sent it in. I was also awarded a scholarship from Comstock; I think it was $50. After that I was able to work enough during the summers and during school to pay the bills. I also had to get a copy of my birth certificate for the college. When I sent to Oklahoma City to get it I found the doctor that filled it out didn’t know my name and just put “Boy” Cook on it; the state wanted my “official” name. I wrote back that it was “Tom Roy Cook”; Mom had always written it as “Tommie” and I had been teased all through school that it was a girl’s name so I decided to rename myself. (I received an assignment to a girl’s dormitory at Washington State and the request from Oklahoma for a name for the birth certificate on the same day so I decided to make Tom my official name.)
In September 1953 I left with Jack Reese (a classmate of mine) and his parents for Pullman, Washington to enroll in school. Roy Calvert, another classmate, and I agreed to be roommates at college. (See figure 16.)