CHAPTER 8
Alpine
1946-1949
When we got to Alpine we stayed with Uncle John for a few days before Dad rented an old house a few miles to the west. On the computer map it would be at the intersection of Nichols Road and Cherry Creek Road. Uncle John’s house was on Cherry Creek Road. Ours was a big house with a second floor but had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Darwin and I were upstairs and I had a lot of room to work on a big P-38 model airplane. Uncle Ray and his family lived in another little house on Uncle John’s place. The sawmill was up in the hills northwest of Alpine. Uncle Ray, Uncle John, Dad and one hired man operated it. It was powered by two Allis Chalmer engines. The four men not only sawed the logs but they cut down the trees and pulled them to the mill with a small Caterpillar. The sawmill was semi-portable so when they had sawed all the logs within a half mile they would break the mill down and set it up in a new place.
Shortly after we got to the house Mom told me to cut some kindling to start the cook stove fire the next morning. I went out to the wood shed and it was full of bark chips where wood had been cut before. I figured that would be great to start a fire with so I brought it in and put it in the box by the stove. Mom didn’t notice and I didn’t know that bark was hard to burn. The next day she gave me more explicit instructions.
There was an apple tree close to the house. It had many small apples on it but they sure looked good. Darwin and I picked some to eat but they tasted terrible. We found out later that crabapples are for making jelly, not eating.
One night we were out in the yard and it looked like every star in the sky was falling. You could see three or four at a time and it was never more than a few seconds between shooting stars. It was the biggest meteor shower I have ever seen.
We didn’t live in this house too long when Mom and Dad bought 160 acres of timbered land a few miles to the west. It was a little more than a half mile south of the intersection of Alpine Road and Nichols Road. The house had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen plus an upstairs attic that Darwin and I slept in. It had hand split shakes for a roof and it sat on the side of a very steep slope. The down hill side of the house was on stilts about eight feet tall and the uphill side was even with the ground. (See figure 9.) The bad thing about this was the road came in on the down hill side; to get to the front door, which was on the back of the house, was a real chore when it was raining and muddy. There was no indoor plumbing but we did have electricity for lights. We got our drinking water from a spring that was just a short distance up the hill from the house. About 30 yards below the road was a little creek that would average about eight feet wide. The whole area was surrounded by giant Douglas fir trees. There was a barn on the down hill side of the road just past the house. The road went on through our place to one more neighbor that lived even more remote than we did. It was a beautiful place.
Alpine school had grades one through eight. High school kids went into Monroe. Our mailing address was also “Monroe”. When school started, I was in the sixth grade; sixth, seventh and eighth grades were in the same room. The first day of school I came home scared to death because I had a “man” teacher. A few days after school started, they reorganized the classes. Then they put the fifth and sixth together and Mr. Wagner had the seventh and eighth. Mrs. Springer taught the fifth and sixth grades and I don’t think I learned any thing that year. Mr. Wagner later became one of the favorite teachers of my whole school career. He had cut his right hand off just below the wrist in a sawmill accident years before.
We hadn’t lived at Alpine very long when Cheryl was born. When Dad took Mom to the hospital (they had to go to Eugene about 35 miles away) Darwin, Linda and I were left home alone. When they were gone longer than I thought they should have been, I got worried almost to the point of being sick to my stomach. There had been some kind of mix-up at the hospital and some nurse wouldn’t let Dad see Mom until he finally got mad and raised a pretty big ruckus. She was born on 12 December 1946. Her full name was Beulah Cheryl Cook; she was named after Beulah Herman, Dad’s boss’s wife at Morrison Knudsen. The Hermans had several sons and she wanted a daughter real bad; she got mom to promise to name Cheryl after her if she was a girl. Although Mom did not like the name “Beulah”, she loved Mrs. Herman and kept her promise. As far as I know, Mrs. Herman never got to see her namesake.
When Cheryl was about three months old she got real sick. For two or three days she would just scream when she cried. It just tore your heart out to hear her. Each day Mom and Dad would take her to the doctor; they couldn’t find anything wrong so they would bring her home at night. I remember one night after she had cried for several hours I said to myself, “I wish she would just shut up and let me go to sleep”. Then I felt real guilty for thinking such thoughts because I knew she couldn’t help it and was in excruciating pain. After about the third day a baby specialist found her intestines were telescoping into each other and had blocked her bowels. They operated on her and got it fixed but she was sick for a long time. She had this same operation two more times before adulthood.
Alpine was a perfect place for a twelve year old boy. Darwin and I explored the hills and valleys, played in the creek and in general had a wonderful time. There were a few small trout in the creek; we found that if we used a small spinner about the size of your fingernail and baited the hook with a worm you could always catch a fish or two. If you just used the spinner alone or the worm alone they wouldn’t bite. One time Dad took us to Astoria to go salmon fishing. Darwin and I bought special rods and reels with money we earned picking beans in the Willamette Valley. Dad bought about a ten foot boat and a five horsepower outboard motor. We still had the old pickup and camper shell; we put a mattress in the back and slept parked on the beach. It is a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves there. We would troll in the boat; we got out in the middle of the Columbia River one time and the tide started going out. All at once we looked up and we were about 100 yards from where the ocean breakers were coming into the mouth of the river; they were probably eight or ten feet tall. It was over a mile to land on either side. We turned the boat around and headed up river with the throttle full open; if you looked at the water you would think we were going pretty fast and would soon be out of danger. But when you looked at the shore you couldn’t tell if we were going forward or backward because the current was so swift. After a while you could see that we were making a little progress. In the meantime, there were two waves that came over the back of the boat and it looked like we might be swamped; they only put about a gallon of water each in the boat and we kept going. If that motor had even sputtered we would have never made it. After about 30 minutes we got back where the water was smoother and we breathed a little easier. We never went that far down the river again. Darwin was the only one that caught a fish on that trip, but we all had a lot of fun.
Since sawmills were in fashion in Oregon, I made one to play with. I made a paddle wheel by nailing four boards, each about six inches square, on the four sides of a two by two shaft. I made a saw blade by cutting teeth in the top of an old tin can lid and nailing it to the end of the shaft. I mounted the shaft in a “U” shaped box and diverted creek water to the paddle wheel. It would really make the saw hum. The saw blade wasn’t tough enough to cut wood so we used skunk cabbage. Skunk cabbage grew along the creek bank and had a stalk similar to celery in size and consistency; we would break the leaves off and hand feed it through the mill. You had to be very careful because, as we found out, the saw would cut fingers as well as it would cut our logs. The only disadvantage of using skunk cabbage was that it had the faint odor of skunks; the fun easily overcame the disadvantage.
I also made a boat to use in the creek. It was made of two 1”x12”s about six feet long, nailed together on one end to make a “V” that was about 18 inches wide on the other end (which was the stern). I nailed the stern and bottom on and caulked the cracks with some tar Dad had on hand for some other use. There were several problems with the boat. For one thing, it was hard to get it caulked water tight. Also, the creek wasn’t big enough to maneuver. With blackberry vines hanging over the water and the current pushing the boat, it was easy to get tangled up in the thorns. But the worst thing was that the boat was not stable. Every time we used it you could count on at least one dunking. The creek water was cold.
I made a swing set for Darwin, Linda, Cheryl and me to use. It had a seesaw and two swings. One swing had a seat and the other was a bar higher off the ground. It looked a lot like a swing set you would buy today except it was made from wood poles and boards. (See figure 10.)
Our play wasn’t always that innocent. One time my cousin Loyd was playing with us and we started throwing dirt clods at each other for fun. It escalated to rocks, and before long I was behind one stump; Darwin and Loyd were behind another. We were throwing hard. Pretty soon I noticed a rhythm in the way they would stick their head over the stump, throw their rock and duck down again. I decided that if I timed it just right I could throw a rock, bounce it off the top of the stump just as one of them stuck their head up and nail them. The plan worked to perfection. Just as Darwin’s head came above the stump, a rock about the size of an egg hit him right above the eye. Blood went everywhere and the game was over. I don’t remember if I got a spanking or not but I felt like I needed one. Sometimes kids can do stupid things.
We kept a cow for milk and some chickens for eggs. The old jersey cow ran loose on the place and would graze wherever she wanted. She would usually come up for the feed when it was time to be milked but sometimes we had to go find her. She wore a bell because it was almost impossible to find her in the timber and brush without it.
One time we heard something in the chickens. Dad followed a trail of chicken feathers and finally found the dead hen but he never found the varmint (probably a coon). That is the only time I remember something getting into the henhouse.
Dad and Uncle Ray found a fawn caught in a wire fence near their sawmill. She had a bad injury on her rear leg where it had been in the fence. (See figure 11.) Eventually she lost her foot but we got a special permit from the state game department to keep her and we fed her with a baby bottle. We named her Flag after the deer in the movie, “The Yearling”. It just happened that Uncle John and Aunt Ola had taken Darwin and me to Corvallis to see this movie shortly before Dad found our deer. One day I was feeding the chickens; Flag was trying to eat the chicken feed and I was trying to keep her out. While I was bent over trying to get the grain in the feeder she came down on my back with her front feet. It felt like I had two spears in my back. That was the only time I ever saw her act aggressively. She would come and go; sometimes it would be several days between sightings. She had a small bell around her neck and at night we often heard her walking through the timber. At other times we could hear her running. When we moved to Creswell we were going to take her with us; we put her in the house so she wouldn’t wander off while we finished loading the last of our things. She wasn’t used to being in the house; she got excited and jumped thru the glass window so we decided to leave her in Alpine. Sometime later our neighbor at Alpine told us he saw her with a fawn of her own. Later he told us he saw her again with a gunshot wound and he never saw her after that.
Besides feeding the chickens and getting the cow up, Darwin and I had several other duties. Mom or Dad milked the cow but our biggest job was cutting wood and kindling for the heat stove and the cook stove. There was plenty of wood there but it wasn’t the right size. For a while Dad would cut a tree down then Darwin and I would cut it up into fire wood using a crosscut saw, ax, sledge hammer and wedges. Finally Dad bought a reciprocating saw ran by a gasoline motor; it was mounted on a wheel and looked something like a wheelbarrow with a motor in the middle and a long saw sticking out one side of the back. Then using the Caterpillar from the saw mill, he dragged a big log about six feet in diameter up to the house. We put the new saw on it and cut off a slab about 18 inches long. We would use the ax, sledge and wedges to cut some in kindling, some into 2”x2” pieces for the cook stove and if it was winter, bigger pieces for the heat stove. Dad had built a wood shed so we could work out of the rain and we could cut up a supply that would last several days and keep it dry. It did rain a lot there in the winter and when it rained our road became a quagmire. It rained so much the neighbors had built a shed that looked like an outhouse for the kids to stay in while waiting for the school bus. We had to walk a little over half mile down the muddy road to get to the bus stop.
Mom bought an electric washing machine with a wringer on it and I would help her wash while Darwin entertained the girls. Before she got her machine she would often go to Uncle John’s to wash; one time when she went to plug in the cord, she got hold of a bare wire and it almost electrocuted her. She couldn’t let go of the wire. If Uncle John had not been right there to turn it off she probably would have been electrocuted. Every time we washed, Mom would warn me not to get my hand caught in the wringer. When it was raining we would hang the clothes out to dry in the attic where Darwin and I slept.
One summer Darwin, Loyd and I got a paying job picking beans. The farmers in Willamette Valley would send busses out to pick up kids and take them to the bean fields. The green beans were used for canning. They were grown in rows on a wire frame about five feet tall. We would put the beans in five gallon buckets and they would be weighed at the end of the row. It was a lot easer than picking cotton because you didn’t have to stay bent over all day.
Darwin and I liked to explore the place. There were so many hills and creeks and valleys that we never did get into every nook and cranny. One day we were quite a distance from the house when we found this big track. It really scared us; we ran all the way home and never went back to that corner of the place again. I think it was probably a bear track but I’m not sure because I never heard of a bear sighting around there.
Up the road past our place, lived the Gardner family: Jimmy was a bachelor in his late twenties, his mother, a widow and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe. I liked to hear Jimmy talk. He had several expressions I had never heard. For example, when someone said something to him, his reply might be, “Well I’ll be a sad dog” or “I’ll be a biscuit eater”. He had others but I can’t remember them. Jimmy worked in the sawmill for my uncles and Dad. One day he came running into our house yelling, “Fire!” I thought his house was on fire but it was ours. Mom and Dad were there and it didn’t take long to get it out. It burned a hole in the roof about two feet in diameter. If he had been a few minutes later in coming by, I’m sure the house would have burned to the ground. Evidently a spark from the chimney had fallen on the shake roof and started burning. When ever the humidity got below a certain point, the state shut down all work in the timber to prevent fires. I know there were times Dad would come home during the middle of the day because it was too dry. There was a forest fire to the west of us one summer. It never got real close to our place but we could see smoke during the day and flames at night. Dad and many of the men in the community were gone for several days fighting the fire.
Dad did a couple of things to improve the house. The most exciting thing for me was when he, Uncle Ray, and Uncle John moved it. As I mentioned before, the house was on the uphill side of the road; when it was raining it was a real challenge to get up the hill. Dad decided that if it was moved down the hill and placed between the road and the creek we could park the car and walk right in the door. So the men made two rows of logs starting under the house and running down the hill to where they wanted the house to end up; it looked like big railroad tracks. They put 2”x4” guides on top of the log tracks and made inverted “U” shoes to fit over the guides. (See figure 12.) Then they jacked the house up, took out the stilts it had stood on and replaced them with braces going down to the U-shoes. To start the house moving down the tracks, they tied a cable to the down hill side of the house, ran the cable through a pulley that was tied to a tree down by the creek, ran the cable back up the hill and under the house and then tied the cable to the back of the Caterpillar they had brought over from the sawmill. To keep the house from shooting down the tracks and into the creek they tied another cable to the front of the Cat, ran it on up the hill, through another pulley tied to a tree up the hill, back down past the tractor and tied it to the front of the house. When they were ready to move the house they just ran the Cat up the hill. It worked like a charm except for the fact that the Cat ran over a nest of ground dwelling hornets. Uncle John was driving and I can still see him standing on the hood of the Cat with his face over the exhaust pipe trying to make the hornets go away. They put the stilts back under the house, pulled the log rails out and we had our house in a new location.
Uncle John wasn’t the only one to get in the hornets nest. Some months later I was walking in the same area he hit with the Cat and they came after me. Just one stung me on the back of my neck and I started breaking out in hives all over my body. I ended up with hives from head to toe. Then years later a doctor told me the next sting could be fatal without treatment. He gave me a shot to keep handy all the time in case I was stung again. I avoided all bees and wasps the best I could and was never stung again until we moved to Decatur. When one finally caught up with me it just caused normal pain and swelling.
The other improvement Dad made was to add running water. Since the spring we got our water from was above the house, all we needed was pipe; gravity supplied the pressure. The only place the pipe went was to the kitchen sink but that was a big improvement.
When I was in the sixth grade I started coming home from school with a cramp in my stomach. I thought it was from bouncing on the bus ride home and by the time I would walk the rest of the way home it would really have me doubled up. After a while it got so bad Mom took me to the doctor. When we got there he said he wanted to x-ray my stomach. But first he said I had to drink a milkshake. When he said that, I really got excited because I had always heard how good a milkshake was but had never had one. When the nurse brought it in, it looked good. There must have been at least a quart. At first taste I knew I had been had. It wasn’t milkshake, it was chalk and water. I like to have never got it all down. Later he decided I had yellow jaundice, a disease of the liver. He prescribed rest. I spent the next six weeks in bed. This was the most boring time of my life. Mom made a cot for me in the living room so at least I didn’t have to spend my time in the attic by myself. The radio was in the room and I got hooked on the soap operas: Young Widow Brown, Lorenzo Jones, Stella Dallas, Pepper Young’s Family and others I can’t remember. When I finally went back to school I really missed knowing how the stories continued.
Mom would go to Junction City once in a while to buy groceries. One time when Mom, Darwin, Linda and I were there we decided to eat in a restaurant. This was rare indeed because we always ate before we left home or after we got back. We all had a hamburger and Linda couldn’t eat all of hers. Mom asked us boys if we wanted to finish it for her. That is when Darwin and I really embarrassed Mom and ourselves. We both made a grab for it like we were starving to death. Mom said we looked like a pack of hungry wolves and that she wasn’t going to take us back to a restaurant until we knew how to act.
We took several trips to the coast to see Mr. and Mrs. Rogers. They were Mom’s baby brother, Uncle Earl’s in-laws. They lived in Nehalem; it seemed like it was always cold and rainy on the beach. One time we went out on the ocean in a charter boat from
Coos Bay. Another time Uncle John took Darwin and me on a trip to see Crater Lake. I still remember how blue the water was.
The ceiling joists in the house were exposed to the room below but had been covered with a heavy building paper. One night a rat got up in the ceiling and would run on the paper. You could tell where he was because of the noise he made and you could see the paper sag where he was walking. Dad didn’t want to tear the paper up too bad trying to get him out so he took a twelve gage shotgun shell, took the shot out and replaced it with wheat. By the time he got this done the rat had disappeared. I set a trap by the steps going to the attic. Dad left the shotgun loaded during the night in case he came out again. I felt a little uneasy that night knowing I might be sleeping with that rat right between me and the shotgun. I didn’t think the wheat would penetrate both the floor of the attic and the mattress too but I wasn’t sure. The next morning he was in my trap. It was the strangest looking rat I had ever seen; he had a hairy tail. It was a pack rat. They have a habit of carrying things around and putting them in a different place. There was a pair of folded socks by the trap that he apparently had with him when he got caught. This also explained why some of Mom’s things had been moved around in the house.
I really enjoyed school at Alpine, especially the seventh and eighth grades. At first, I was kind of left out of the “in” crowd but one day I found I had the same birthday as Frank Scott. Frank was the unofficial leader of our grade and we became very close friends. At the end of our seventh grade, he moved to Bellfountain and I was elected president of the 7th/8th grade class room when school started the following fall. Mr. Wagner also let me run the 16mm movie projector used for training films. He couldn’t do it because he had only one hand. We played six man touch football, basketball and soft ball with the neighboring schools. I was on all the teams. We had a pretty good basketball team and Mom and Dad would often come watch us play. I also had my first girl friend in the eight grade. Her name was Charlotte King. When we would go to a ball game on the bus, I would sit with her. I felt pretty important but had the wind knocked out of my sail one day. Some girls were walking towards a bench that was probably 50 feet in front of them. Three of us boys saw they were going for the bench and decided we would run around them and sit down first. We took off as hard as we could go and I had just passed them when I tripped on some weeds and fell flat on my face. The girls all laughed and I just wished I could crawl under those weeds and hide.
LaDonna was born on 1 November 1948, about four months before we left Alpine. I remember when Mom and Dad brought her home from the hospital. I had built a fire in the yard and Darwin, Linda, Cheryl, and I were toasting bread on a stick. It was about this same time that Dad sold the standing timber on the place to some lumber company. They came in with big trucks and hauled out many, many logs.
The summer before LaDonna was born, we took two big trips. The first one was to California to see Dad’s family. All during the 1940’s Grandpa Cook and his kids migrated to California; they were not all there all the time but Dad and Uncle Hap were the only ones that didn’t live there at least part of the time. (Dad did his time there in the 1930’s). Mom, Dad, Darwin, Linda, Cheryl, and I drove to Grandpa Cook’s. We saw Uncle Carl, Aunt Faye, Aunt Pauline and either Uncle Ernest or Uncle Henry (I can’t remember which) plus all the associated aunts, uncles and cousins. Grandpa Cook had a beautiful irrigated farm with a grove of apricot trees. Darwin, my cousin Kenneth, and I got to throwing green apricots at each other. Grandpa Cook was upset with us when he discovered what had happened. Kenneth had already gone home but he made Darwin and me go all aver the farm with buckets and pick up the spent ammunition. The second trip was by train from Junction City, Oregon to southern California where we stayed with Aunt Joye for a few days before getting back on the train and going on to Sayre, Oklahoma. Mom’s folks came up from Mangum and picked us up at Sayre. Dad didn’t go with us this time. There we saw Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan, Aunt Maurine, Uncle Jack, Uncle Ray, Aunt Edna, Uncle Earl, Aunt Gene and a host of cousins. I remember swimming in Grandpa’s big concrete stock tank that summer. (See figure 13.) That is where I had learned to swim years before. I really took a bump on the head when I dived in one time. It was the only time in my life I have been hit on the head hard enough to actually see stars.
We didn’t go to church at all while we were in Nebraska or Idaho but went on a fairly regular schedule in Alpine. We went to a little Methodist Church just across the street from the school. I was baptized (actually sprinkled) in this church. I don’t think Dad ever went with us. The church basement also served as the school lunch room and when we didn’t take a brown bag, we ate our lunch there.
The sawmill was running out of logs where it was set up. Uncle Ray needed to get back to his farm in Oklahoma. Uncle John wanted to get into the commercial fishing business. Dad had sold the logs off our place. It seemed like a good time for Dad and my uncles to sell the sawmill. Dad got a job from a man named Sher Khan raising turkeys in Creswell, Oregon. My class gave me a fancy leather notebook as a going away present. I really hated to leave. We moved from Alpine in March 1949, a couple of months before I finished eighth grade.
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