Portland, city of regular paychecks, concrete sidewalks instead of boardwalks, parks with lawns and flower beds, streetcars instead of a hack from the livery stable, a library with a children’s room that seemed as big as a Masonic hall, buildings so high a six-year-old almost fell over backward looking at the tops. I loved elevators that lifted me, leaving my stomach behind, and escalator stairs that moved, so I did not even have to raise my feet. Mother patiently rode up and down, up and down, with me.
On Halsey Street, we rented a six-room two-story house with a furnace instead of wood stoves; it seemed warm and cozy after the big farmhouse. The city lot had been part of a farm at one time, for old cherry and plum trees and a bramble of loganberries grew in the backyard. An acre or so of hazelnut brush flourished across the street, and beyond, in Sullivan’s Gulch, railroad trains huffed and chuffed, dividing the city.
A plumber, who lived behind his corner shop, sang “O Sole Mio” into a washtub. A French widow, who took in boarders, lived next door. She had a fascinating accent and called me “Bevairly.” Best of all, children lived in almost every house.
And toys! I had never seen such toys. A boy who, with his father, boarded next door, had an Uncle Wiggily board game, Parcheesi, and Tinkertoys. Girls had whole families of dolls. One girl, Elizabeth Ann, had a rocking horse, a tricycle, and, in the corner of her dining room, a large and completely furnished dollhouse. Her parents owned a radio, the first I had ever heard. Everyone had roller skates. I sat on the front steps, longing for skates of my own and for a skate key on a string around my neck, hoping someone would offer to lend me theirs.
And then one day my father brought home a pair of roller skates of my very own, and I, too, became part of the neighborhood, skating up and down the gentle slope. My knees were constantly skinned, but I picked myself up, screwed my skates in place, and skated on with blood trickling into my half socks. Sometimes I squatted on my skates and, with my arms wrapped around my legs, coasted down the slope.
We made stilts out of two-pound coffee cans and twine and clanked around the block yelling “Pieface!” at children on the next street and bloodying our knees when the twine broke. When we tired of clanking, or someone said, “For heaven’s sake, children!” we pounded rose petals with rocks and soaked them in water, hoping to make perfume. We hunted for old bricks among the hazelnut bushes and pounded them into dust in a game we called Brick Factory. With scabs on my knees and brick dust in my hair, I was happy. I had children to play with who could be summoned by standing in front of their houses and yelling their names. Telephones were for grown-ups.
There was one problem, however, in the midst of all this joy. Because the children of pioneers considered education unnecessary for sons, who were expected to farm the land and hand it on to succeeding generations, my father’s education consisted of two years of high school—all that Yamhill offered at that time—and a few courses in farming at Oregon Agricultural College, which left him ill equipped for city life. He became a night guard, from 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., for the Federal Reserve Bank, his one Portland connection. At some time in his youth, he had worked guarding Federal Reserve gold shipped by train to San Francisco. Trying to sleep daytimes with all the neighborhood children skating, yelling, clanking, and crying over skinned knees was difficult. He moved a cot to the attic and sometimes yelled out the window, “Quiet down there, you kids!” We tried to be quiet, until we forgot.
While my father slept in the attic, Mother took advantage of city culture and enrolled me in a ballet class overtown so I would become graceful. In Portland we did not go “uptown,” as we had in Yamhill; streetcars took us “overtown” because we crossed the Willamette River. There, in a basement room (could it have been in the Civic Auditorium?), I laced my ballet slippers and shivered my way into a yellow camisole with attached bloomers, slipped my head through a hole in a square of yellow China silk, and tied a ribbon around my waist. With other shivering members of the class, including one resentful, tearful boy, we exercised at the bar under the direction of Alice May Brown and pranced around the room in steps with names that sounded to me like “gallop” and “sauté.”
At home I galloped and sautéed around the living room while Mother played “The Glowworm” on our old upright Ludwig piano from the parlor in Yamhill. The neighborhood children, denied or spared this cultural activity, pressed their noses against the front window to watch. As her glowworm glimmered around the living room, Mother said, “I do wish those children wouldn’t smear the glass with their noses.”
Mother also took me to the Portland Library Association, as the library was then called, where we walked across the marble floor, now hidden beneath composition flooring, to the room for children. Mother chose books to read aloud to me, and I ran my fingers along the spines of thousands of books I would soon be able to read to myself.
In the evening, Mother read aloud The Blue Bird, by Maurice Maeterlinck, the story of two children seeking the blue bird of happiness. “It’s true,” she said when she finished the book. “We find happiness in our own backyard.” Mother did not have to tell me. Happiness was all around me. I couldn’t wait for school to start. Then happiness would be complete.