Before I turned left at Albuquerque...

The place where I (did not) grow up

The memory that sticks most in my brain about my Grandpap Friend is his shoes. They sat on the porch because they were outside, barnyard shoes. Brown, crinkled, lace up work boots. They were caked with mud and cow shit and chicken droppings… I can smell the barnyard when I think of them. First, it smelled like a chicken coop. Then as you walked farther into the animal areas, there was the smell of cows, different when they were wet. Their poop was everywhere with it’s own pungent odor that permeated everything. The barn smelled like hay…

What I realize is that I didn’t really know anything about my Grandpap. I didn’t realize then how weird it would someday seem to me to call him that. It’s a Pennsylvania name. I was aware even then of differences in language. My cousins talked with an accent that I sometimes found interesting (and amusing). They would say “I h’aint goin’ there” or “You’ns”. Later I would read an article about a forensic language expert who consulted with police to help solve crimes based on language clues. (Maybe more on that later).

What I knew of my Grandpap is that he was a farmer. Roy George Friend. His wife was Besse, nee Krepps. We just called them Grandma and Grandpap. He was born in the 1890. She was born in 1895. They were farmers… I already said that, but later as I started figuring out that the world was bigger than my personal perspective, I heard stories that he worked as a gandydancer on the railroad. And that he used to patrol the railroad tracks during the depression at night with a lantern, on the look out for hobos who would sleep on the tracks. (Why would anyone sleep on the tracks?) After working for the railroad during the day, he would spend the rest of the evening doing farm work. But my impression of him was that he was a farmer. I heard from my dad later that Grandpap loved horses. By the time I knew him though, he had a 1950s era Ford tractor. That was the first vehicle I ever drove. 

Roy and Bess had 7 children. So there must have been more going on in that house than I ever thought of… I don’t think I ever saw them kiss. He was the lord of the manor. We never sat at his seat at the dinner table. Grandma watched the Pittsburg Pirates. There were pictures of race horses hanging on the walls in the TV room. My dad always had a job list waiting for him when we visited the farm. I remember one was fixing the TV antenna so they could watch the Pirates. I decided I liked the Pirates too. Those were the days of Roberto Clemente. Later I would switch my allegiance to the Cincinnati Reds… Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan. 

They had 5 girls, all married women by the time I knew them. Then finally, Grandma and Grandpap had two boys who could help out on the farm, George Roy and my dad, the baby of the family, Edgar Luther. They apparently were expected to do the manly farm work, but as my dad tells it, he wasn’t at all interested in that. His interest was cars. He and I once counted; by the time he was 80 years old, he had owned 80 cars. That’s a story all of it’s own. 

My Pennsylvania memories begin when I was 7 or 8 years old. Before that all I know comes from stories. Those memories revolve around the farm but my mother’s family was just as prominent. They lived in Ohiopyle… pronounced “HowPal” by them. Currently that town is known for river rafting and recreation but at the time, it was a small town in the Appalachians that didn’t seem to have anything going on except subsistence living. My mom’s dad, known as Jockey, seemed old to me. He died in the 1960s when he was 49 years old. My mom’s mom was not living with him at the time… that I remember. I think she was the post-mistress of the town and worked at the local grocery store. Both my grandmas were loving and kind, although my mom says her mom was quite strict. Both sides of the family were big. The Friend side had lots of cousins because of those 7 children. We only saw them during church or family reunions. Or on the rare occasion when we visited down in the “hollar”. My mom’s family, the Woodmancys, were big too, but mostly because everybody seemed to be related somehow through marriage. My mom, Marie, has two sisters, Carol and Susie. Her father’s real name was Ralph and her mom was Edna. 

It strikes me that names are indicative of time and place… is anyone named Roy, or Besse, or Ralph or Edna anymore? Where did those names come from? Were they popular at the time? I’m sure I can find out because virtually all knowledge is literally at our fingertips these days; however, thinking back to my childhood, if I wanted to find something out I had to either ask someone or look it up in a book… most likely an encyclopedia. I used to read the dictionary! Shucks, I even used to “read” the phone book. 

I also didn’t think about it at the time, but most of the men (and I didn’t realize it until my mom pointed it out but also many women) were not even known by their birth name. Everybody in Ohiopyle had a nickname. My granddad was Jockey. He was actually Young Jock because his dad was Old Jock. 

Some nicknames: Fuzzy, Pop Dean, Bud & Lippy, Butch & Buck, Hopper & Auger,  my uncle Kitty Fleming (whose sister was also Kitty — his brother was Ducky), Funny, Bud, Diddly, Bunny, Charge, Eggs, Cappy, Beany, & Deacon. I didn’t make any of those names up, the list goes on.

Was Pop Dean my great-grandfather? Was he called Pop by everybody or just his kin? I remember seeing my Grandma Dean when I was a kid. She was tiny. I remember her in a kitchen, small, old, wearing a sack dress and an apron. I think I was told she was in her 90s when she died. If that was in the 1960s, then was she was born in the 1870s? My imagination wanders back to Pennsylvania in the 1870s. Was it still wild there?

Back in Mill Run, the Friend farm was very near a famous Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater. I may have known it was there at the time, but it didn’t make an impression on me. I’ve never been there even though it was within walking distance of my grandparent’s farm. My dad says he used to pass by it on the way to school. He tells a story about how when the Kaufmanns, who owned a department store in Pittsburg, decided to build their new house they put it out to the neighbors that the old house needed to be torn down. My grandpap and his sons took it apart and built another house near the farm with the pieces. My dad said his job was to pick up every nail and put them into a can to be reused. Years later, if I wanted to build something, my dad still had a can of used nails in the garage. I reached into the can and took out a bent nail, put it on the cement floor and pounded on it with a hammer until it was straight enough to use. More often than not, it bent again as I pounded it into the wood. Anything I built had a plethora of bent nails holding it together. 

What did I build? Nothing sophisticated… a box, a lean to, a skateboard…

I was not a finish carpenter. Nothing was sanded or straight unless it came that way. You found a few pieces of wood and nailed them together. A skateboard was a 1 X 6 with metal skates nailed to the bottom. The nails must have gone through, so you just bent them down and hit them enough times to make the pointy end sink into the wood enough that you could stand on it. The skates were metal, the kind girls used to strap on their feet (boys didn’t skate). Cut the straps off, pound flat the parts that stick up and nail it to a board. One pair of roller skates made two skateboards, one for me, one for my brother. Some of my friends made their fancy skateboards in shop class. If I wanted to get fancy, I rounded off the front of my board with a file. I probably did use sandpaper for that part too. I remember carrying that skateboard around. No tricks, just riding down hills and turning at the end of the ride. Down the driveway, onto the sidewalk. Over and over again. 

I’ve never lived any place longer than I have here in Hood River, Oregon. Oregon was never on my radar. When I was a kid, I wanted to live in California. Or the wild west. If you ask me where did I grow up, I don’t want to answer because (even now) I don’t want to think of myself as grown up. I lived most of my childhood near Akron, Ohio — in Portage Lakes. It was near Kenmore, which is where I went to 9th grade. I probably lived there for 11 or 12 years… 2960 Pikes Avenue, Akron, 14, Ohio. My sister, Jamie was born in Ohio in 1960 so we were there by then. All the rest of us, Me (1952), Todd (1954), Lyle (1956) were born at Price Hospital in Confluence, Pennsylvania. We moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico (the wild west!) in 1968. I left home for good in 1971 to go to the Air Force. 

My childhood was idyllic. I can’t think of a single bad thing. It was freedom and adventure and wonder. The American dream. I think I remember the 1950s. At least toward the end of them. I do remember the 1960 presidential campaign, which must have taken place in 1959. I was going to school at Guinther Elementary. Boys in the bathroom were talking about how a Catholic could not possibly be president. I believed them. I was 7 years old. Third grade was a momentous year. We listened in class, on the radio, to the first US astronaut, Alan Shepard go into space; I was the lead in the class play, Johnny under the Christmas tree; I wanted to kiss a girl. I was in 6th grade when JFK was assassinated. There was an announcement on the PA. We were sent home. I had to walk, which memory claims was unusual, probably because parents were not notified that school had been cancelled. Yes, assassination is a bad thing, but it was disconnected… not personal. There were many days of watching the aftermath on TV. All the search for the killer. It was amazing somehow that we watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on live TV. What a change in the way we saw the world. Everything was more immediate after that moment. TV shows were history… or a version of history that story-tellers wanted to present to us. But the news was in our face, sometimes in the moment. Riots, protests, war.

My next post will be about that influence…