Father found a buyer for the farm. Sixty-two acres of fields, an orchard, a pasture and woodlot bordered by the Yamhill River, a beautiful old house, and all the out-buildings brought $6,500. At some point earlier, Father had sold about twenty acres.
Father paid off the bank loan and a loan from Grandpa Atlee.
“Now at last we can afford a house of our own,” said Mother.
“By grab, I’m going to buy a car,” said Dad, “so we can get out of Portland once in a while.”
“Of course,” agreed Mother. “We all need to get out once in a while.”
All I wanted was a sunburst pleated skirt, the kind that stood straight out when one twirled. But Mother always hesitated to give me anything I really wanted. Because I was an only child, she was afraid I would become spoiled rotten.
“First things first,” said Mother. “No daughter of mine is going to grow up with crooked teeth if I have anything to say about it.” I was surprised. Other children wore bands on their teeth, but somehow it had never occurred to me that anything could be done about mine. I had accepted them.
With money in her handbag, Mother took me to an orthodontist named Dr. Meaney, a kindly man in spite of his name. Mother told Dr. Meaney she could not afford monthly payments, but offered him two hundred dollars to straighten my teeth.
Dr. Meaney examined my overlapping incisors and lopsided canines, considered the problem, and took me on, even though I was old to begin such extensive work. I have often wondered if he accepted out of kindness to a child, or if he did not often see two hundred dollars in cash when everyone felt pinched. My mouth was filled with warm wax, a mold was made of my teeth, and I was fitted with bands and wires.
For the next six years, I went overtown to his office, alone, twice a month, sometimes once a week. In his waiting room, where hundreds of plaster casts of crooked teeth grinned from glass cases, I saw some very interesting teeth but none as crooked as mine.
My father decided he could not wait his turn on the list of people eager to buy the new Model A Ford, which was replacing the Model T and which was so desirable because it was enclosed. Drivers would no longer have to climb out in the rain to snap on side curtains.
Dad bought instead a Model A Chevrolet with a black top and a dark green body so grand I stared in awe when it was delivered to our house. He got in and sat behind the steering wheel, where he began to study a book of directions. I climbed into the front seat beside him. With his eyes on the book and one hand on the ignition key, he started the car.
“Beverly, I think you’d better get out now,” Mother called. With a few “damns,” Dad taught himself to drive by reading each sentence carefully and following instructions—a sensible way to learn anything, I thought.
Every Sunday, Mother read real estate advertisements in the Oregon Journal and marked possibilities. Dad wanted a house with a porch where he could sit outside on summer evenings. Mother’s requirements were a good neighborhood close to a good high school, solid construction, a location out of the wind, and plate-glass windows in the living room. I did not care where we lived.
With the marked advertisements in hand, we hunted the ideal house. To test the thickness of glass, Dad always produced a nickel, which he pressed against living room windows. The nickel cast a double reflection. The distance between the two reflections was the thickness of the glass. I always enjoyed the nickel test to see if the front windows measured up to Mother’s expectations.
One house had a bedroom with a window seat where I could picture myself prettily leaning against cushions, reading a book like the girl in Jessie Wilcox Smith’s 1924 Book Week poster. I sat on the window seat for practice and said that I liked this house. Mother frowned, shook her head, and whispered it was too expensive. I was not disappointed. All I really wanted, and desperately, was that sunburst pleated skirt. I became so bored with house hunting that I was finally allowed to stay home with a book.
In March of 1928, my parents found and bought a house that fulfilled their requirements, a square white house set on one of Portland’s usual fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lots on Northeast Thirty-seventh Street, two blocks south of Klickitat Street and sheltered from the wind by a hill. We now lived one block from Claudine Klum’s house, which was next door to that of the Miles family—parents and five daughters who had recently moved from Oklahoma, where Mr. Miles had sold his business and invested in the stock market. One of the girls, Lorraine, was a semester ahead of Claudine and me.
Our house had five rooms, a breakfast nook, a floored attic, and a half basement. Most interesting to me was a little door beside the back door, just big enough for the milkman to set two bottles inside so the milk would not freeze in winter or sour in summer. Whenever we locked ourselves out, I was boosted through the little door to unlock the back door from the inside.
I was given a choice of bedrooms and chose the front, even though I liked the back bedroom better. When friends came—someday maybe even boys—I wanted my parents separated from the living room by more than a wall. I was quiet about this thought. If Mother knew, or even guessed, I would have been given the back bedroom.
Mother made many trips overtown to choose curtains to harmonize with the elaborate wallpaper, which, if one studied the design closely, turned out to be exotic birds roosting on cauliflowers. She bought an overstuffed davenport and matching chair upholstered in scratchy taupe mohair, a covering popular at the time because it wouldn’t show soil and would wear forever. Dad bought from his brothers and sisters several pieces of antique furniture that had furnished the Yamhill house in his boyhood. He began to spend evenings refinishing them at a workbench in the basement.
Because I now had a longer walk to school, Dad bought me a secondhand bicycle. My Arizona uncle had sent me five dollars, which I spent on the sunburst pleated skirt in practical navy blue, the first new ready-made skirt I had ever owned. I enjoyed riding my bicycle in my sunburst pleated skirt past Ulysses S. Grant High School to Fernwood.
We were proud of the little white house with the porch box of geraniums and petunias and the green-and-white-striped awnings to shade the living room and dining room from the western sun that might rot our new overstuffed furniture. Mother gave a card party to show off our house to old friends who had once lived in Yamhill.
And then something frightening happened. On May 16, 1928, three months after we bought the house, a mortgage holder demanded his money. My parents were stunned. Inexperienced in buying property, they had not taken seriously the letter from their lawyer when they bought the house, pointing out that there was a mortgage against it “in the sum of $3,750.00 dated May 16, 1925, payable three years after that date.” What would we do? We no longer owned the farm. All three of us felt numb.
Finally Dad, through the bank where he stood so patiently on the marble floor, was able to refinance the house, taking out a second mortgage, and we were saved—for the time being. Saved, but pinched for money once more. After that, whenever Mother left the house on an errand, she walked halfway to the corner and then returned—to make sure she had locked the back door, unplugged the electric iron, turned off the water heater—as if she was afraid the house might have disappeared when her back was turned.
With our house safe, we were now free to enjoy the car. First of all, we drove to Yamhill, where we parked at the foot of what had once been our path. Dad sat looking silently at his boyhood home, the home he had not seen since we moved to Portland.
“It really is a beautiful old place,” said Mother with a sad smile. She could admire the house now that she was free forever from scalding the milk separator, cooking for harvest crews on a wood stove, and washing clothes on the cold back porch. To me, the house seemed almost as if I had read about it in a book, so many years—seven—had passed since we had lived there.
Next, as we drove around the small towns of the Willamette Valley, Dad appraised farmland with a practiced eye and pointed out property that had once been the Donation Land Claims owned by his aunts and uncles. Once we stopped to pick armfuls of fragrant wild trilliums, which grew in abundance in unfenced woods.
“See how each part of the plant is divided into threes: the leaves, the blossoms, the stamens, and even the pistil,” said Mother, always the teacher. I marveled at the symmetry of the perfect blossoms of such intense sweet perfume.
Mother’s interest in Oregon history was stimulated by our Sunday outings. “Just think—the names of these little towns tell how much this beautiful valley meant to the pioneers who braved the journey to get here,” she said as we drove through Garden Home, Harmony, Sublimity, New Era, and Sweet Home.
In Oregon City, Mother pointed out the falls in the Willamette River where my Great-grandfather Hawn built the mill in 1843. As we drove up the Columbia River Highway, we stopped to admire every waterfall along the way. At Multnomah Falls, Mother reminded me that here my great-grandfather and his cold, starving family had been blown ashore during the dangerous trip down the river. My father and I climbed through the cave of brown, slippery rocks behind the falls, a thundering curtain of water between us and sunlight dousing us with spray while frogs leaped from our path.
We drove the narrow, twisting road to Mount Hood, where we stood above the timberline, but below the snow line, transfixed by the panorama of forest, of snow-covered peaks to the south, and of the Willamette Valley. “What a beautiful sight this must have been to pioneers after the long, hard journey across the Plains,” said Mother in awe. “It really was the promised land.” In the foreground near a pop stand, a caged bear drank Orange Crush from a pop bottle.
When Dad’s vacation came, he wanted to return to the country he had run to when he was supposed to go to the meat market at the age of fifteen. He also wanted to visit his sister Dora, who lived near Prineville. Dad was concerned about her health because she had been ill with tick fever. We packed the Chevrolet with blankets and cooking utensils, which were not supplied by auto courts, and an army cot for me to sleep on and took off for two whole weeks of travel. At The Dalles, Mother reminded me that my Great-grandmother Hawn had built and run a hotel after the death of her husband and had survived both a flood and a terrible winter when horses froze standing up and Indians sliced off frozen flesh to thaw for food. Who cares, I thought, wishing Mother wouldn’t go on so about Dad’s grandparents. We turned south into scenery such as I had never known—and a country of sagebrush, juniper trees, and black lava rock. I had thought all of Oregon was as lush and green as the Willamette Valley, but of course I had never been a hundred miles from home before. We spent the nights in auto courts, where Mother always inspected the mattress for bedbugs, and Dad warned me to be on the lookout for rattlesnakes among the rocks.
Near Prineville, we turned off onto a dirt road so narrow that sagebrush clawed the car, bouncing over ruts and dipping through washes on our way to visit my beautiful Aunt Dora, the only female member of the family to resemble my grandmother. Aunt Dora taught in a one-room school someplace out in the brush. In good weather, older boys were kept out of school to work on ranches, so they continued in school long after city boys finished the eighth grade. When they did come to school, they were sometimes drunk. Dad felt his sister, weakened by illness, was working too hard.
Finally, covered with dust, we arrived at the two-room unpainted house on the small ranch worked by Uncle Joe, an uncle I did not remember having seen before. He was a handsome man with eyes so brown they looked black. During supper the adults all laughed about the bullet hole in the house. While cleaning his gun, Uncle Joe had accidentally fired a shot that narrowly missed Aunt Dora, who had been working in the kitchen.
After supper, while my father and his sister reminisced about their childhood, Uncle Joe saddled a horse—Aunt Dora’s transportation to her school—so I could ride around a freshly mown field. The horse ignored me, trotting around with my seat slapping on the saddle. Now and then, on some whim over which I had no control, it jumped haycocks. This was scary, but I didn’t mind. I was riding a real horse on a real, though very small, ranch. Wait till school started and I could brag to Ralph!
That night the three of us slept out under the stars, and during the night, coyotes howled. Very early the next morning, as the sun was rising over the mountains to the east of Prineville, we drove on along a narrow empty road. “I wonder,” remarked Mother, “if that bullet that came so close to Dora really was an accident.”
Dad was silent for a while before he said, “I don’t like her living out there on that place so far from anyone.” For some reason I did not understand, none of the family liked Uncle Joe, but everyone loved Aunt Dora. Uncle Joe was an intense, unsmiling man, different from my uncles related by blood, but he was kind to me. The family’s dislike puzzled me.
Suddenly Dad shouted and stepped on the brake. A mule deer had leaped out of the juniper trees and now stood in the middle of the road, staring at us. We stared back for one astonished moment before it bounded on into the junipers on the opposite side of the road.
“Well, I’ll be—!” said Dad.
“Wasn’t it beautiful?” said Mother.
We were all silent, wonderstruck by that one frozen moment. Then we drove on toward Portland.