1 A Business Move

From the start young Keith Jesperson was bewildered by his family’s sudden emigration to central Washington. The town of Selah was only four hours south of Chilliwack, but to the twelve-year-old it might as well have been Bangladesh. “I didn’t want to leave Canada—none of us kids did. I knew every tree in our woods, every ripple in our creek. I knew when the first hummingbirds arrived and the last duck left for the winter. My paper route kept me in spending money. Chilliwack was the greenest place on earth. Selah was green, too, but only where it was irrigated. A mile or two out of town you were in desert. A lot of it was a bombing range.”

In later years, Les Jesperson explained the move as a business move, a necessary step upwards: “I was approached by a group of hop growers to migrate to the United States and design machinery for the hop industry. I started an engineering office in Moxee, a little town in the Yakima Valley. It was surrounded by hop fields, and there was a heavy demand for the W-shaped clips that I invented. I could have moved my family to six or eight nice towns in the area, but I selected Selah because of the school system. Selah had that old-fashioned hometown image, and I thought my children would grow up there without so many temptations surrounding them.”

At Eastertime 1967 Les moved Gladys and their three sons and two daughters into a six-bedroom house with three bathrooms, a four-car garage, formal dining room, oversized kitchen, pond and bomb shelter. The house was in a comfortably middle-class neighborhood just outside the Selah city limits, and Keith soon learned that the neighbors weren’t much different from Canadians. “Mr. Hertel had a 1909 Marlon sportster and a Model T Ford. South of them were the Joneses—they rode motorcycles and snow-mobiles and went on hill climbs. Mr. Hall worked for the electric company, and his son became a sheriff. The Adamses, the Words, the Williamses—they were all good people. But I never really felt like Selah was home. I felt like a visitor. I missed Joe Smoker and Reg Routley and the other kids. Every time Dad went back to Chilliwack on business, I begged to go along.”

 

With his unflagging energy Les installed lavish landscaping and erected a barn and other outbuildings. For his children he built a miniature log cabin and decorated it with seven plywood dwarves teetering across a log.

In the late spring of 1967, just after Keith’s twelfth birthday, his mother enrolled him in the final quarter of the sixth grade. Canadian schools had high standards, and he found himself far ahead of his classmates at Sunset Elementary. “I just floated through the rest of the year—didn’t speak up in class, didn’t study, didn’t take part in anything. I just showed up so I wouldn’t get in trouble.”

For a long time he felt detached, unconnected, as though the Selah kids were a different species. “I felt closer to cartoon characters like Porky Pig and Superman. I’d never been tight with my brothers and sisters, and I started to fall away from Mom, too. I appreciated the good things she did, but it was always in the back of my mind that she was sleeping with the enemy. Mom was the only person on earth that could keep Dad from hitting me with his belt, but she didn’t do it often enough. That’s the way I saw things at the time we moved to Selah. It was just me and Duke against the world.”

 

Keith had always been considered a little different by his fellow Canadians, but to the Americans he seemed just plain strange. To most of them he was the stereotypical backwoods Canuck, and from his first days in the new country he didn’t bother to upgrade his image. “Nobody spoke to me when I walked into my first class. I think they expected to see a big geek in snowshoes. When I spelled my name for the teacher, the kids giggled. I thought, What the hell’s so funny about “Keith Hunter Jesperson”?

“I was considered an immigrant, a foreigner. Feeling left out wasn’t exactly new, so it didn’t bother me. The Selah kids made fun of my clothes, my shoes, my accent. ‘Hey, Keith, you comin’ oat?’ They didn’t know about Canadian pronunciation. If you didn’t talk like them, you were stupid. I went home and told Mom I had a speech defect.”

 

A pretty classmate named Sandra Smith nicknamed him “Tiny” in recognition of his bulky shape and his height, just under six feet. He was still ungainly, and soon he was being called “Sloth,” after the slow-moving South American animal, and “Monster Man,” as well as generic pejoratives like “Fatty,” “Hulk,” and “Tubby.”

His younger sister, Jill, recalled that the nicknames didn’t seem to bother him. “He tried to act cool about it. He didn’t get all hurt and cry. He just played along as though it was a game. He’d always been teased, especially by his brothers. But the move from Chilliwack definitely changed him. He began laughing about morbid things, found disgusting things funny. He’d never been that way in Canada.”

Keith tried not to make any complaints to his new schoolmates. “If I griped, they would’ve just thought of something worse to call me. Anyway, everybody had nicknames—I wasn’t the only one. Mom told my brothers to stop calling me names, but they wouldn’t. Pretty soon everybody in the school was doing it. It was just one more thing to hate my brothers for.”

 

The Washington school year was a month shorter than British Columbia’s, and Keith used the bonus time to learn his new territory. “By midsummer my dog and I had checked out five miles in every direction. It was either orchard or desert. I didn’t try to make friends. I figured if it happened, it happened. Let them come to me. I met a kid named Tom Haggar (pseudonym), and sometimes I played with a few other kids in my class, but I always had the feeling I didn’t fit into their little area of comfort. I was different. I didn’t mind. I knew how to play by myself.”

 

During the summer his father assigned irrigation responsibilities to the thirteen-year-old boy, including unplugging the gravity-flow ditches, building earthen dams and maintaining a steady flow of water to keep the pastures green for the family horses. It was hard work, and he negotiated a reward from his father. “Hill-climbing was a big deal, and Dad agreed to buy me a new trail cycle if I did my job right. I worked my ass off for that bike. In the spring of 1969 Dad took me and my brother into Yakima and bought a red Honda 90 Trail Cycle for Brad and a yellow one for me. I was so goddamn mad! I’d worked my ass off to earn mine, and Brad got his for nothing.

“When I complained to Dad, he told me to consider it a learning experience. He said, ‘Remember, Son, I can always take your bike back.’ Right about then I began to realize that Dad saw me and my brothers different. In some ways Dad and me were the closest, but my brothers were the ones that counted. He was already making plans to send them to college. I was the family drudge.”

 

Despite the tension over the bikes, Keith and his father continued to work closely together. “I loved my dad and it gave me a warm feeling. The previous owner of our house never hauled any metal trash away, so we were constantly yanking wire and steel out of the fields. The fences needed repair. And Dad always had some project up his sleeve. He was a genius with tools, and before long we had workbenches, a welding setup, and a lathe, drill press and cutting torch. He taught me how to weld and fabricate, drive heavy equipment, ditch and trench, install drainage pumps, dig basements, build houses—any job involving wood or steel. He was so gifted! He could be an impatient teacher, but he taught me just about everything I know.”