L to R: Brother Wes “Chip,” Neighbor Girl, and Yours Truly on the farming operation in Chico, California
Even as a six-year-old, I could sense the change in my parents. I understood my own anxiety. The move from Baldwin Park to Chico had toppled my entire world. But grownups were not supposed to have those feelings. I could only hope that our lives would somehow get back to normal.
I did not have long to wait. My dad was a very resourceful man. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had just turned seventeen. He entered adulthood during very trying times. He was a product of the Great Depression.
His parents were schoolteachers. Thus, education was paramount in their lives. Dad tried to keep the peace in the family by remaining in school. But money was short, and he was of an independent nature. For the next seven years until he was 24, he alternated between academic pursuits at Northern Arizona State College in Flagstaff and Arizona State College in Tempe, and the “school of hard knocks,” riding the rails and living in hobo jungles throughout the United States. He learned at an early age to be “quick on his feet.” Survival required it.
The free life ended in 1936 when he married my mom. They were married on the first of June, shortly after Mom graduated from high school. I was born nine months later on March 24. Dad was now a family man.
Dad was up to the task. With the help of my grandparents, he bought a lot in Baldwin Park, California, and built a home for us. He went to work for McMullan’s Dairy milking cows. He worked his way up to foreman, and we moved into the foreman’s quarters on the dairy. My mom helped in the little store where they sold the dairy products they produced. Despite the war, their life seemed secure.
Therefore, it came as a shock when the government suddenly transferred my dad away from the life they had built. The consequences of war had robbed them of their independence. Their secure life had suddenly evaporated. They were reduced to living in a farm worker’s shanty. Dad was back to starting over as a common hand on a large farming operation, milking cows. The war had taken control of their lives.
Ever the man of action, Dad set about righting things. Over the next few months, he turned our life back around. He met with the draft board, or whoever controlled such things, and managed to transfer from the dairy to Chico Army Air Field. He bought a twenty-acre farm and moved us into the old house that came with it. Our new home was far from luxurious, but it was far better than the farm worker’s quarters we moved from. My parents were happier. They were regaining control.
The move was like an answer to my prayers. I hated the school I was enrolled in. I felt like I had been dropped into an alien world without a friend in sight. The move came with a change in schools. Whereas the old school had seemed large and impersonal, the new school felt warm and welcoming. It was a rural two-room facility that had grades one through four in one room and grades five through eight in the other. The teachers and other students made me feel at home. I could walk to school from our house without taking a bus.
Chico Army Airfield, called “the base” in everyday conversation, was established in 1941 to train pilots. Dad worked in the paint shop. He also rode on or drove the ambulance whenever there was an accident. I can remember him coming home visibly shaken following some of those accidents. He detested that part of his job. But like almost every citizen at the time, he pitched in and did what he had to do to help win the war.
It soon became apparent that being on ambulance call, working full-time in the paint shop, and trying to farm all at the same time formed an impossible task. I don’t know how it worked, but apparently, when you worked for the Army during World War II, you didn’t just up and quit because you had something you’d rather be doing. As a consequence, my mom’s parents, along with my uncle Jim, who was about five years older than me, came out from Arizona to live with us. Grandpa Thompson was a hard-rock miner and a farmer. Dad continued to work at the base, and Grandpa took over the farm. Sometimes it took a family’s teamwork to survive on the home front.
Eldon LaRue had not forgotten his survival skills. He was still “quick on his feet.”
Growing up on a ranch in the mountains of Eastern Oregon, my exposure to live music was an occasional Saturday night at the local VFW dance hall, listening to local ranch hands and loggers tune up acoustic guitars and fiddles and perform songs like Hank Williams’s Your Cheating Heart. At home, we listened to tunes like The Wreck of the Old 97 on a few scratchy 78 rpm records on an old-fashioned wind-up RCA Victor phonograph, its logo featuring Nipper the dog next to a speaker horn. We also heard the Hit Parade on Mom’s radio whenever Dad got around to buying a battery for it. Anyway, music was not a high priority in our world.
I graduated from high school in the spring of 1955 and traveled across the state the following September to join the freshman class at Oregon State College in Corvallis. It was quite a lifestyle transformation for a country boy fresh off the farm. I pledged to a fraternity and set about learning a new way of life.
I met a cute coed who mentioned an upcoming Duke Ellington concert she was eager to attend. I had no clue who Duke Ellington was or what a concert entailed, but I told her I would take her. Any chance to date her was okay with me.
The concert was held in a gym with ample dance space. The sweet, melodic sounds of Ellington’s swing jazz opened my ears to a new realm of music. And when Louie Bellson performed his drum solo, I was mesmerized. My date and I danced the night away. It was a magical experience for a country boy.
My academic career lasted for two quarters until I ran out of money. Like many of my generation, I joined the Navy to see the world. I qualified for flight training and became a Naval Aviator by hard work and determination, and an Officer and Gentleman by act of Congress.
During those years, I was introduced to many kinds of music in bars and gin mills and on the radio wherever I flew. I heard jazz in New Orleans, country in Texas, pop in movie theaters, and rock and roll everywhere. I acquired a cabinet stereo and a collection of LP albums with everything from Lena Horne blues to Mort Sahl comedy. But I always remembered the sound of Duke Ellington, live, with his big-band jazz orchestra, back in the gym at Oregon State.
After the Navy, I settled in the San Francisco Bay Area to go back to college at San Jose State and complete my education. I entered the workforce and worked nights at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. During that time, I met a beautiful young lady named Kathy. She loved jazz. Her private collection of LP albums included jazz artists Dizzy Gillespie, Ahmad Jamal, Dave Brubeck, and many more icons of the genre. She would bring her albums to my place, and we would invite friends and party all night long while listening to good jazz on my stereo. We had so much fun, I ended up marrying her.
The Bay Area was a mecca for jazz lovers during the sixties. Kathy kept her eye out for live performance advertisements nearby. The first recital we attended was with the Dave Brubeck quartet near the San Jose State campus. It was held in a small, second-story walk-up auditorium, a surprising venue for one of the leading progressive jazz artists of the day. We sat on folding chairs and listened to Brubeck’s jazz magic with famous numbers, including Take Five. A highlight of the evening occurred when Mongo Santamaria sat in, drumming solos on the conga and bongos with his fingers. There was no dancing. The only audience participation was limited to toe tapping, finger snapping, and lightly clapped applause at the end of each number.
Kathy and I soon discovered the Blackhawk Jazz Club in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. In the mid-20th century, the Tenderloin provided work for many musicians in the neighborhood’s theaters, hotels, burlesque houses, bars, and clubs. The premier jazz club was the Black Hawk at Hyde and Turk Streets. There, jazz musicians Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and others recorded live albums in the late 1950s and early 1960s. You could hear legendary jazz icons like John Coltrane, Art Pepper, and Stan Getz on saxophone, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Shorty Rogers, Art Farmer, and Chet Baker on trumpet, vocals by Mary Stallings and Johnny Mathis, Art Blakey on drums, Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax or clarinet, Thelonious Monk, Horace Parlan, Dave Brubeck, and Andre Previn on piano, and Russ Freeman on guitar. And when Charlie Parker was supposed to be opening across town at the Say When Club, he could be found instead jamming on saxophone at the Hawk. The Blackhawk offered good drinks, friendly service, and great jazz in a dark, smoke-filled atmosphere. No one danced; you came to listen. We even saw George Shearing demonstrate his famous fugue on piano. With my tin ear, I had no idea of what he was talking about. But I could fake it like an aficionado by just knowing the term. We were saddened when the Blackhawk closed in 1963.
Sometime later, Kathy spotted a small ad in the San Jose Mercury newspaper announcing an appearance by the Cal Tjader band at a nightclub on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. Telegraph Avenue runs through downtown Oakland to the edge of the University of California, Berkeley campus. I assumed the venue would be near the U.C. campus and cater to the college crowd. It seemed like a fun thing to do, so we decided to take it in.
I guided my 1958 two-tone tan Chevy Bel Air hardtop up the Nimitz Freeway from San Jose to Oakland and exited onto Telegraph Avenue. Kathy watched for the street number in the ad. After a few blocks, she pointed excitedly and said, “There it is.”
“Naw,” I replied. “This is the colored part of town. We need to be farther up toward Berkeley.” I kept driving.
After driving about four miles through stop-and-go traffic, a sign showed, “Entering Berkeley.” Kathy reminded me that the ad said Oakland, so I turned around and backtracked to the location of her original sighting. A small sign over the door identified the place as the advertised venue. I parked, but was reluctant to go in. At Kathy’s insistence, she was a huge fan of the celebrated vibist Cal Tjader. I finally relented, carefully locked the car, and escorted her to the entrance.
A well-dressed Black hostess greeted us nonchalantly. “Here for the band?”
I said yes, and she guided us to a table. A polite, friendly Black waitress took our order and served our drinks. Looking around the crowded room, I noticed only one other white couple. I nodded, and they half-smiled back. Everyone else was black except for a few white women accompanied by Black men.
The crowd cheered enthusiastically when Cal Tjader’s Modern Mambo Quintet walked into the room and took their places—Cal behind the vibraphone he was famous for, brothers Manuel and Carlos Duran on piano and bass, Benny Velarde on timbales, bongos, and congas, and Luis Miranda on congas. They started their first number. The audience rose en masse and started dancing. We could not sit still and joined in after a couple of numbers. It was a memorable evening. It was the first time I had danced to jazz music since the evening with Duke Ellington back at Oregon State.
Admittedly, Tjader’s Caribbean Afro-blues and Ellington’s big band sounds made dancing more engaging than the resonances of modern jazz. But the exuberance I had felt in the college gym and now in the black nightclub went beyond that. The audience response was different. They did not just hear the music; they lived it. And the band played its hearts out to an enthusiastic audience.
Race issues were at the forefront of the turbulent sixties. But during that evening with the Cal Tjader band in downtown Oakland, we were all just Americans enjoying the magic of the best music of all time, America’s Classical Music called jazz. It made no difference where you came from.
Standing L to R: Uncle Len, Aunt Lee, Uncle Joe, Aunt Fran, My Mom Dee. Seated L to R: Aunt Sue, Aunt Rae, Me
As World War II wore on, life on the home front became increasingly chaotic. Everything was in short supply. Ration stamps came into being. The “black market” raised its ugly head. Outside forces were taking over people’s lives. Unwelcome regimentation was extending from the military down into the civilian population.
The magician we call memory has many tricks up his sleeve. Trivial things often stand out ahead of major events. His sleight of hand hides some experiences and makes others clear. Perhaps we choose what we remember; perhaps what we remember chooses us.
As a firstborn son and grandson, love and security surrounded me. A doting grandmother watched over me while my mom went to business school. Three aunts, ages 17, 19, and 21, the year I was born, spoiled me. My world was safe.
I remember bits and pieces. Aunt Sue’s idea of babysitting was to strap me in the front seat of a Piper Cub and fly around Southern California as she built up flight hours. She let me take hold of the stick and bank and turn and climb and dive. At least I thought I was in control. I loved it. Aunt Fran had married, and her father-in-law lived with them. He had a handcart that he pushed around the neighborhood, selling fruit and vegetables door to door. I delighted in tagging along as his “helper.” Aunt Rae was busy with nursing school, but always had time for a hug and a kiss for Bobby.
My memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor and our entry into the war does not stand out. Maybe my parents shielded me from the details. Sometime during those early years, we moved out from the town of Baldwin Park to the foreman’s house on McMullan’s Dairy. Scary things like the blackout sirens and the disappearance of the Japanese people next door stand out in my memory. Even so, the daily routines of the dairy kept me occupied and maintained my sense of security.
In 1942, kindergarten caught up with me. I reveled in it. My grandfather was the Baldwin Park School Superintendent. If I received any celebrity or favoritism from that fact, I was unaware of it. I fell in love with Miss Rice, my teacher. At the end of the school year, our parting was heart-wrenching.
Even so, my sense of bliss was not being shared by the world at large. The world was at war. Lives everywhere were in a state of flux. Governments were intruding on people’s lives and becoming more and more controlling. My world was about to come apart.
When war broke out, my dad tried to enlist. He was deferred because he worked on a dairy farm and had two children. Three of his siblings did join up. Uncle Len joined the Navy and completed Officer Candidate School. Aunt Sue became a Women’s Army Service Pilot. Aunt Rae became a Navy Nurse. Dad and Aunt Fran stayed home.
In 1943, an event occurred that remains a mystery to me. But it changed my life forever. For reasons that were never made completely clear, we were suddenly uprooted and moved from Baldwin Park, 500 miles away, to Chico, California. It had something to do with the draft board and someone wanting Dad’s deferment. Whatever the reason, Dad was transferred from McMullan’s Dairy to a dairy on a large farming operation in the Sacramento Valley.
The move was traumatic for the whole family. My parents were none too happy. We moved from a cozy bungalow on a showcase dairy to a shack in a row of farm workers’ quarters. Our new home could have been right out of John Steinbeck’s novel, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Dad was demoted from Dairy Foreman to common milker. I was torn away from everything I had known for the first six years of my life.
I started first grade in strange surroundings, knowing no one, afraid, and lonely. War on the home front had taken its toll. Miss Rice and my paths would never cross again.
Paul watched through the windshield as the bus descended Sunset Hill and the buildings of Spokane came into view. Late afternoon summer solstice sunshine bathed the scene. They pulled into the depot, and he stepped down into the arms of his waiting sister. The two hugged unashamedly, something they had not done since they were children. Paul spotted his father over his sister’s shoulder. The two men shook hands around the clinging girl. “You’re looking mighty fine there, soldier,” Sam Harper beamed with uncommon emotion.
“Thanks, Dad. You’re looking pretty fit yourself. Here, here, Sis, easy does it. People will talk,” Paul said with a grin as he pried Barbara Harper’s arms from around his neck.
“I don’t care if they do. I’m just happy you’re home alive and safe.” Barbara gave him a big kiss, leaving red lipstick marks on his cheek as she reluctantly let go.
Paul gathered his gear from the baggage handler and shouldered his duffel bag. Sam grabbed Paul’s ditty bag and led the way across the parking lot to a shiny new Ford sedan parked off by itself. He opened the trunk and set the ditty bag on one side. Paul dumped his duffel bag next to it. “Nice car, Dad,” he exclaimed.
“Yeah, it’s brand new. We just got it about a month ago. Willie put us on the waiting list a while back, and our name finally bubbled up to the top, I guess. It drives real nice. I parked it away from the other cars so it won’t get dented. She’s been a long time coming. Here, you give her a test drive, see what you think.” Sam proffered a key ring to his son.
Paul pushed the hand holding the keys aside. “Nah, you drive. I haven’t had much practice lately. Wouldn’t want to wreck your new ride.”
Sam pressed the keys into Paul’s extended hand and used his other hand to close it around them. He held his son’s fist in both his work-hardened hands and looked straight into his eyes. “Welcome home, Son,” he said evenly. He broke the spell with a warm Sam Harper smile and released the hand. “Now this is your Old Man speaking, and if I say you drive, war hero or not, you’ll by God drive. Now get in there and take us home before your Ma has a conniption fit from waiting.”
“Okay, okay,” Paul relented. He opened the driver’s door and crawled behind the steering wheel. His sister took the back seat, and his father took the passenger side. After a moment of orientation, Paul inserted the key and stepped on the starter. The V-Eight engine roared to life, idled back, and purred contentedly. He stepped on the clutch, shifted into low, and eased out of the parking lot.
Neither Paul nor his passengers were surprised at how he threaded through downtown traffic onto Trent Avenue. Shortly after passing Millwood, his father waved his arm out the window at the large industrial complex that had grown up on the south side of the highway. “There she is, the old salt mine,” he announced. “It was just getting started when you left for the war. Look at her now.”
“Mom wrote and said that you’d went to work at Trentwood. I didn’t know what she meant by that. I never knew there was anything around Trentwood worth working for. What’s that all about?” Paul asked.
“Well, it’s kind of a long story, but here’s the shorter version. You remember that when you left in ‘42, I was still working on the Grand Coulee Dam. Only problem was that the project was finishing up, and work was getting pretty scarce. About that time, the government decided to build an aluminum plant over where you see it now. I hired on and worked construction there all the time the plant was going up. Then, when it went into operation, I got on with Alcoa and have been working there ever since. It’s been real nice working close to home and not having to chase construction jobs from here to hell and gone,” Sam explained.
“Yeah, but I hear that they’re going to shut the whole thing down now that the war is over,” Barbara added from the back seat.
“That’s the rumor. But there’s a new rumor going around the plant these days. It seems that Henry Kaiser might be about to take over and keep it running. If that happens, I should be able to stay on. I had a good enough record with old Henry J over at the Grand Coulee,” Sam continued.
“Yes, but Dad, what are they going to do with all of that aluminum with no war going on?” Barbara asked.
“That I don’t know. But I’ll tell you for sure, if there’s anybody around who can figure it out, it’d sure as hell be Henry J. Everything that man touches turns to gold,” Sam concluded.
They had reached the side road that led to the Harper place in Otis Orchards. Paul slowed and swung the car off the pavement onto the country lane he had known since childhood. The sound of gravel crunching under the car’s tires awakened a forgotten memory. Afternoon sunshine glistened off fresh leaves in trees lining the lane. Green grass filled the ditches alongside the road. Cattle, sheep, and horses grazed contentedly in pastures lush with spring growth. A farmer waved from the seat of a mowing machine drawn by a team of thick-bodied draft horses. The smell of new-mown hay filled the air. A brown Jersey cow stood mooing at a barn door, waiting for her afternoon milking. Paul felt an eerie sense of de ja vu. The sights, smells, and sounds surrounding him were just as he had left them four years and an eternity of experiences before. Nothing had changed. He was home at last.
Sam and Barbara remained silent as they watched Paul drink it all in. An almost magic spell hung over the shiny new Ford as it turned into the lane leading up to the Harper family home. Two-spotted Pointers rushed toward the car, their undocked tails wagging high in the air. Martha Harper stood at the bottom of the steps leading into the house. She clutched the railing tightly, resisting the urge to follow the dogs. As soon as the car stopped, she wrenched the car door open and gathered her son hungrily in her arms. She was crying, laughing, and smothering him with kisses all at the same time. Paul did not resist but hugged her tightly in return. He was home, safe at last.
Martha regained her composure and backed out of the car. She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron as she dragged Paul from the car with her other hand. “Come on, stand up. Let me get a good look at you,” she urged.
Paul crawled out from under the steering wheel and stood. “My, how handsome you are in your uniform. Stay right there. I’m going to get a picture,” Martha turned and ran up the stairs into the house.
“She better make it quick, because this uniform is coming off for good in about two minutes,” Paul kneeled and roughed the hair of the bouncing dogs.
Martha reappeared, Kodak Brownie camera in hand. She snapped a picture of Paul standing next to the new car, then one of Paul with his dad and his sister. She handed the camera to Barbara, who dutifully took pictures of Paul with his mother and Paul with both parents.
With the picture-taking complete, Sam opened the car trunk, and the two men retrieved Paul’s gear. Martha led the way into the house. The aroma of frying chicken greeted Paul as he dumped his duffel bag in the foyer and roamed back into his favorite room—the kitchen. “Of all the things I’ve missed, I reckon this is what I’ve missed the most,” he announced.
“What’s that?” his mother questioned from the doorway.
“This,” he said as he lifted the lid from the frying pan warming on the stove. He grabbed a drumstick and took a big bite. “Um, um good,” he closed his eyes and sighed.
Sam walked across the room to a sparkling white refrigerator standing where the old brown icebox had stood when Paul left home. “How about a beer?” he asked as he opened the door.
“Sounds good to me,” Paul responded, followed by Martha’s “Me too, please,” and Barbara’s “Me three, let’s celebrate.”
Sam pulled four Olympia stubby bottles from the refrigerator and placed them on the counter. He lifted an opener from its nail above the counter and pried the cap from each bottle. He handed the bottles around and lifted his own. “Here’s to family,” he announced. They all clinked their bottles, took a sip, and sat at the kitchen table.
Sam pulled a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and lit up. Paul followed suit with Lucky Strikes. Barbara reached over, snatched the cigarette pack out of Paul’s hand, extracted a cigarette, and held it up between two fingers. Paul obediently lit it for her. Martha frowned at her daughter’s smoking but said nothing.
Paul took a long pull from his beer. “Um, boy, that’s good and cold. You got a new refrigerator there, I see. New car, new refrigerator; what else is new around here?”
“Not a whole lot. You couldn’t buy much of anything, even if you had the money during the war. If it wasn’t rationed, it just wasn’t available. Even now, you have to get on a list for just about anything you want. Your Mama’s got a new electric stove coming any day now. The only thing is, it ain’t going to do her much good unless we can get an electrician out here to put in the wiring for it. They say it takes two-twenty to run a stove, and we only got one-ten. Problem is that everybody and his brother wants to do the same thing at the same time. The electric shops don’t have enough people to keep up, and can’t get enough parts to do the job, even if they have the people. It’s a hell of a mess, but I reckon it’ll all even out when we all run out of war money. Then maybe we can get back to normal like the good old days when the Depression was on, and nobody had any money,” Sam stated with a hollow laugh.
“Well, anyway, things look a lot more prosperous around here than I remember. The job over at Trentwood must be treating you pretty good,” Paul observed.
“It’s hard and dirty work, but it’s steady, and the pay is good. The money was good enough on the Grand Coulee Dam, but it was tough living over there in a cockroach-infested barracks and only getting home weekends if at all. It’s nice working close to home. That’s why I hope Kaiser can come in and keep things going,” Sam replied.
“How about you, Sis, what are you up to these days?” Paul asked.
“Oh, I finally got through business school, and Uncle Johnny put me to work in his office. It’s kind of boring posting journals and ledgers all day long, but it sure beats my old job waiting tables down at the diner. At least I don’t have to put up with a bunch of idiots telling dumb jokes and trying to play grab ass all the time,” Barbara answered. “How about you? What are your plans, Brother? I hear you guys can go back to school on the GI Bill if you want to. Are you thinking of something like that?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Right now, I just want to shed this monkey suit and get into some decent clothes. I do know that I’ve seen all the Army green I want to see for the rest of my life,” Paul said with a grin.
“Your room is all set just as you left it, only neater. Your clothes are in the closet and the dresser just like always. I hope everything still fits you,” Martha volunteered.
“It should. I gained weight going through boot camp before we went overseas. After that, though, real meals got to be kind of few and far between. Then there’s this damned malaria bug I keep fighting. I think I’m probably skinnier now than I was when I left,” Paul answered.
“We’ll work on fattening you up now that you’re home. Dinner will be ready whenever you are. By the way, Willie called earlier and wanted you to give him a call,” his mother responded.
“Okay, I’ll call him later. Funny thing, I met a guy on the bus coming over the hill today who knows Willie. The guy works down at Paulsen’s Photography,” Paul said as he rose to leave the room.
“That’s not surprising. Willie’s quite the popular man about town these days. Everybody knows Willie Womack,” Martha called out as Paul disappeared down the hall.
***
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The Falk’s Store in Falk’s Store, circa 1892. Courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society Digital Collection
“What are you doing here?” I asked the little group of people milling around my pasture.
“We’re looking for buried treasure,” the big fellow scanning the ground with a metal detector said with a laugh. He glanced around at his five or six cohorts for assurance.
“Why here?” I asked.
“You never know what you’ll find where an old trading post used to be,” he answered.
Perplexed, I asked, “What old trading post?”
“Why, the old Falk’s Store. Don’t you know?” he said.
I didn’t know, but I didn’t let on. New to the neighborhood, I didn’t want to seem unneighborly. “Well, okay, but please don’t leave a mess,” I admonished them and stalked back across the field to the house. That was my introduction to the fact that my new homestead held more than a passing historical significance. It was, in fact, the home of a vanished pioneer community. It was the site of Falk’s Store, Idaho.
In the fall of 1969, I took a job with Boise Cascade and moved my family (wife Kathy and sons Frank and Rob, ages 12 and 11) away from the urban madness of the 1960s San Francisco Bay Area to the relative sanity of Boise, Idaho. Boise still had a small-town feel and, to me, offered a much better lifestyle than San Jose, California. However, it was still a city, not a place where you could grow your food, raise livestock, and experience the freedom of a rural lifestyle. We set up housekeeping in a rented house in Boise and began searching for our piece of paradise.
Following many weekends of canvassing the countryside and looking at small acreages, we finally found the answer to our quest—sixty acres of irrigated pasture in the Payette Valley near the small farming town of New Plymouth. The location involved a 35-mile commute to my job in Boise. But after suffering commutes of similar distances on the crowded freeways of California, thirty-five miles of open country road presented no problem. We replaced the old ramshackle farmhouse that came with the property with a modern Boise Cascade Manufactured Home, replaced the outhouse with a modern septic system, hooked up the well and electricity, and moved in.
While an invasion by local amateur archaeologists was not exactly to my liking, it did pique my curiosity. I grew up in Eastern Oregon, and for as long as I could remember, the name Falk had been synonymous with quality merchandise. Falk Mercantile Company, headquartered in Boise, had stores scattered over most of Idaho and Eastern Oregon. To discover that I owned the site of the original Falk Store seemed peculiar.
Nathan Falk was born in Eggenhausen, Bavaria. He emigrated to New York City when he was fifteen, then took passage to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama. He joined his brother David in the frontier town of Boise in the spring of 1864.
The brothers opened a store they named Falk & Co. in the Payette Valley near the Placerville-Umatilla stage stop. The Falk Store post office soon followed, and the town of Falk grew up around it. By 1877, the town had developed into a thriving community, boasting two stores, a hotel, a saloon, a meat market, and a blacksmith shop. According to one account, “Everything that the pioneer family needed was carried in stock or could be ordered by stage from Boise. Customers came from as far as Malheur River in Oregon, Weiser River, Middle Valley, and Indian Valleys in Idaho.” In the 1870s, the gossip said that Falk’s store alone did an annual business of $60,000.
During the Nez Perce and Bannock Paiute wars and intermittent raids of the late 1870s, the locals erected a fort at the store. When Indians were spotted, and signal fires burned on the hills surrounding the valley, settlers would turn the cattle and hogs loose, hide the most valuable pieces of furniture in the sagebrush, and hightail it to the fort with all the women and children.
Even though the community continued to grow, Nathan Falk moved back to Boise and joined his brothers, David and Sigmund. They created the Falk Mercantile Company, which went on to dominate merchandising in Idaho and Eastern Oregon for more than a hundred years.
The coming of the railroad at the turn of the century marked the end of the stage stop at Falk Store. The town fell into decline even as other towns in the valley, Emmet, New Plymouth, and Payette, continued to flourish. On February 7, 1922, fire gutted the last general store at the settlement. The other buildings fell into disrepair and either burned or were torn down. When we moved there, the little clump of trees near the county road was all that remained—mute testimony to the temporary nature of man’s footprint on planet Earth.
As a farm family of the 1960s, we LaRues quickly adjusted to the rural lifestyle our new home had to offer. We stocked our place with a small herd of cattle and horses and raised chickens. The plot we fenced and had a neighbor plow for a garden somehow never reached fruition. But we did keep the pastures irrigated and even milked a few cows and shipped milk to the creamery in Payette. The boys were good athletes and matriculated into the New Plymouth school system without incident.
In the beginning, our neighbors viewed us with a degree of suspicion. I suppose seeing a guy going off to work in a business suit came as something of a surprise. But with time, we gained acceptance. I traded my sports car for a pickup truck and my Florsheim oxfords for a pair of Tony Lama boots. However, I could not shed the business suit, and the employees at the Farmers Feed & Seed in Emmet viewed me with some degree of amusement when I pulled up for a load of grain on my way home from work.
We lived in the Payette Valley for about four years and eventually sold out and bought a real working ranch near my parents’ place in North Central Oregon. When they say, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy,” they may have been talking about me.
“Elgin, Elgin, come have a wee taste,” Mr. McMullen’s Scottish brogue rings out from his front porch. We climb the stairs, and I watch with the curiosity of a five-year-old as the two men share a glass of wine while discussing the status of the dairy and events of the day. I know my dad’s name is Eldon, and I wonder why Mr. McMullen always calls him Elgin.
We take our leave and walk on out toward the cow pasture. We pass McMullen’s walnut orchard. I listen curiously to men talking in Spanish as they tend the trees.
Dad opens the gate, and we follow the cattle down the lane to the holding pen outside the dairy barn.
The milkers take over and shout the cries of western herdsmen as they sort and move the milk strings into their respective stanchions.
Pete, the dairy operator, comes out of his house. He scoops me up, swings me around, and teases me in his Dutch-accented English. He sets me down, and he and my dad discuss the condition of the herd. When the cows are locked in their stanchions, Dad straps on his milking stool, sets his bucket under the first cow of his string, and the never-ending task of a dairy farm begins anew. Pete walks me back to our house and hands me over to my mom.
Mom is listening to the Hit Parade on the radio. She sends me out to play while she tends to her household chores. I approach the backyard fence and listen to the singsong voices of the orient coming from the truck farm next door. The people speaking are bent over tending their rows of plants. A pretty little girl about my age leaves the group and crosses the field toward me. She sits down across the fence from me, and we play in the dirt.
My parents have tried to explain that these people are Japanese and somehow different. I don’t understand. I can see that she is darker than Mr. McMullen’s redheaded granddaughter, Sharon. Her eyes are different. But she is just as fun to play with. We play with few words, but words are not needed. Still, the fence separates us. She does not come to my house, and I don’t go to hers.
The afternoon wears on. A woman comes and leads the girl away. The woman smiles and says something that I don’t understand. I watch as they walk toward their house. The girl turns, and her hand comes up in a small wave. I wave back.
Dad comes home from the afternoon milking. Mom sets out dinner, and we eat. After dinner, Dad and I go to the living room while Mom cleans up the kitchen and nurses my baby brother. Dad turns on the radio.
The smooth voice of Lowell Thomas comes over the airways. He tells us the news of the day. Most of what he has to say is about the war. The war is not news to me. Like the endless routine of the dairy, it has always been there. It is a part of our lives. We don’t feel it; it is far away. But we hear about it constantly. It is like the sound of the ocean when we camp on Laguna Beach. It rumbles in the background without end.
It is an afternoon like any other. Pete hands me off to Mother. I go out the back door to the yard. It is strangely quiet. I can hear the strains of the McGuire Sisters’ “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” playing from inside the house. But no singsong voices come from the field next door. It is deserted. The plants still stand, green and growing. But no one is taking care of them. The people are gone. I sit by the fence for a while, alone. A death-like silence wraps around me.
I go back into the house and ask my mom where the people have gone. The Army took them away, she tells me. She tries to explain, but her words are not enough. Not enough to quell the fear welling up inside me. The first chink in my armor of innocence is gone.
“What do you think of the Black problem?” (only he didn’t say Black), the taxi driver asks. As a nineteen-year-old Apprentice Seaman fresh out of boot camp San Diego, I am hard-pressed to answer. The year is 1956, and before joining the Navy, a small farming town in the mountains of Northeast Oregon had been my universe. People of color did not exist in that universe. My only contact with people of color had been with a few Negro recruits in boot camp.
The driver had picked me up at the New Orleans airport for a ride to the bus station. Noting my navy blues and sea bag, he had already quizzed me enough to know that I was from the West Coast and bound for Pensacola, Florida. In my naiveté, the only answer to his question I could think of was that I didn’t know there was a problem. This gave the driver his opening. For the rest of the ride, he regaled me with his version of the history of the South’s racial problems and how the rest of the country had better take notice because big trouble was brewing. I was relieved to escape his tutelage and board the bus.
For me, the 200-mile ride along the Gulf Coast was enlightening. The bus stopped at seemingly endless towns, villages, and crossroads. Watching the cross-section of humanity exiting and entering the bus was fascinating. Seeing the mansions along the route, shaded by leafy trees above sloping lawns, was like seeing something out of the movie Gone with the Wind. I had joined the Navy to see the world, and this was my first real taste.
My fellow passengers seemed well-disciplined and accepting of their way of life. The colored people automatically moved to the back of the bus, and the white people took the front seats. All bus stations had three bathrooms. One was marked men, one was marked women, and one was marked colored. Apparently, gender separation was not considered important for the colored population. And there were always two drinking fountains, one marked white and one marked colored. If there was a lunch counter or waiting room, these were also segregated. For a lad from the West, there seemed to be a lot of wasted duplication in the South. But my short stint in the Navy had taught me that “mine was not the reason why.” The racial tension the taxi driver had warned of did not seem to exist.
I reported to Naval Air Station Pensacola and was quickly inducted into the preflight regimen. As anyone who has undergone military flight training knows, the next year and a half allowed little time for pondering society’s problems. And after graduation, my lifestyle was mainly apolitical while serving as a fleet Naval Aviator. The warrior’s job is to keep the country safe so the folks at home can deal with such matters.
In the 1960s, I returned to civilian life and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. I enrolled in college, first at Foothill College and then at San Jose State, and went to work at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale. Perhaps brought on by my academic endeavors or maybe simply because I had acquired a television set of my own, I found myself taking a greater interest in the news. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum. In 1963, images of Governor Wallace standing in a doorway at the University of Alabama blocking two black students from registering, and the National Guard breaking up the standoff, filled the news and airways. The March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech followed shortly thereafter. Right after that, a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham killed four young girls.
The taxi driver’s warning from days gone by took on new meaning!
Tucked away deep in the mountains of North Idaho, a grove of ancient cedars silently watches the passage of time. When Wyatt, wife Sadie, and brother Jim Earp arrived at Eagle City in 1884, it was a bustling tent city—a gold rush town. The enterprising brothers purchased a round circus tent, 45 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, for $2,250 and opened a dance hall. Later, they opened the White Elephant Saloon. An advertisement in the Coeur d’Alene weekly called it “The largest and finest Saloon in the Coeur d’Alenes.” However, the Coeur d’Alene gold rush was short-lived, and today there is little to show that Eagle City ever existed. The site bears mute testimony to the temporary nature of man’s footprint with the passage of time.
Exit Interstate 90 at Kingston, Idaho, and follow the Coeur D’Alene River for a little more than 20 miles across Prichard Creek. Turn right toward Murray for about 3.5 miles and cross Eagle Creek. Turn left, and you have arrived at Eagle City. From Eagle City, follow Eagle Creek and then West Eagle Creek for 5 or 6 miles to a Forest Service sign announcing, “Settlers Grove Botanical Area.”
The road ends in a large parking area with permanent restrooms. Park your vehicle and step back in time under the lintel of the grove’s open gate.
Settlers Grove, at 182 acres, is one of the last large stands of Western Redcedars in Idaho. While these trees are called cedars, they are actually a part of the cypress family. Mature trees stand well over 200 feet tall, and in Settlers Grove range up to 7 feet in diameter. The oldest trees in the grove are estimated to be 700 to 1,000 years old. Western Redcedars are primarily found in the coastal forests of the Northwest. However, a disjunct inland population exists along the southern British Columbia-Alberta border and in northern Idaho and western Montana.
The trail through the grove is well-maintained and easy walking. The treetop canopy filters sunlight into a dreamlike array of lights and shadows.
The creek winds along the trail and under bridges with an ever-changing pattern of bright refractions.
Sound becomes muted yet distinct: a bird’s chirp, a child’s voice, the babble of running water. The mind wanders, and time takes on a new dimension.
When Columbus proved the world was round, and Conquistadors first set foot on the golden shores of the New World, some of the trees standing in Settlers Grove had already lived 200 years or more.
When Lewis and Clark led the Corps of Discovery Expedition over the mountains a little south of the grove, these same trees had aged to 500 years.
During the building of the oldest manmade structure in Idaho, the Cataldo Mission, just downriver from the grove, the same trees had been alive for 550 years.
By the time of the Coeur d’Alene gold rush in the 1880’s, the trees were 580 years old.
The 130 or so years span from then until now represent little more than a single century out of seven to these ancient giants. Yet it covers our whole regional history.
The trees have not gone unscathed. Uprooted trunks, broken-off stumps, and lightning scars lend stark evidence to the forces of nature the grove has endured.
Centuries of winter’s cold, summer’s heat, firestorms, ice storms, droughts, and floods have left their mark. Why did some fall and others still stand tall? The mystery remains the “secret of the grove.”
The Snake. In my youth, it ran wild and free through America’s deepest gorge, Hells Canyon. Upstream from the canyon, a placid surface cunningly hid eddies and undertows lurking to pull the unwary into its depths. Venomous reptiles occupied the river’s banks and bluffs, but its name is not for them. In sign language, the Shoshone people used swimming motions with their hands to indicate a river of many fish. Early explorers thought the motion signified a snake. Thus, the name: Snake River.
Annual migrations of those many fish (anadromous salmon and steelhead) fought their way upstream from the Pacific Ocean into the river’s tributaries to spawn and die where they were born. A few would pound their way up our little stream called Dry Creek as it roared through our ranch during spring runoff. Dad speared them with a pitchfork. I tried, but my weak, youthful thrusts bounced off harmlessly.
As I grew older, bait fishing became a passion. A good spot for steelhead and salmon fishing was near my hometown of Halfway, Oregon, where the Powder River cascaded into the Snake. On a sunny Sunday Spring morning, two buddies and I wetted our lines in the swirling waters there. We had been at it for about two hours with no luck. Pete Peterson was driving that day. Hunger took over, and Pete volunteered to get some hamburgers from the nearby town of Richland.
Just then, an unmanned sixteen-foot runabout came floating down the Snake. It caught in an eddy and floated close to the shore near us. I managed to grab its bowline and pull the derelict ship to shore.
At age fourteen or so, Bob Schultz and I quickly became experts in maritime law. In our view, we had salvaged an abandoned craft from imminent destruction on the rocks in the bowels of Hells Canyon. Therefore, it was ours.
Pete was a few years older and counseled moderation. His view was that the craft likely belonged to someone upriver who would soon be along looking for it. We were hearing none of that. We had salvaged it, and it was ours. Our only problem was how to get it out of the river and home. So, we crafted a plan.
We decided to float it downriver a few miles and hide it. I had an old pickup truck. We would come back the following weekend, load it up, and take it home. We would dock it up at our favorite lake, Fish Lake, and fish all summer. Maybe we could even save up and get a motor and water ski. We were dreaming big. We put away our fishing poles and found some driftwood to use as oars.
Pete told us he would catch up with us later and got in his car. We two brave sailors launched our craft, waved goodbye to our land-lubber friend, and set out on our new adventure.
The boat was sound and well-crafted for river running. That was a good thing. Two untested sailors with no life jackets, navigating one of the West’s most dangerous rivers with nothing but pieces of driftwood for oars… what could possibly go wrong?
The river ran fast. By the time Pete caught up with us, we had floated 10 or 15 miles downstream and were nearing the landmark bend in the river called the Oxbow. We had managed to cross the river to the Idaho side and back. That, in our youthful minds, made us worldly navigators. We sang snatches of Cruising Down the River as we floated along. It was an afternoon to remember.
We paddled into a secluded cove surrounded by brush and undergrowth and beached our prize, then piled into Pete’s car and devoured our burgers. We swore Pete to secrecy, and he went along with us. It was not the last adventure we would share, but it was the best to date.
An agonizing week-long routine of classroom boredom went by. Saturday finally arrived. Schultz and I got in my old truck and headed for the river. Our hiding place was still there, but the boat was gone. It was a disappointing end to a teenage dream. But the memory remains.
Starting in 1955, man tamed the wild river of my youth. It is now a series of three long lakes behind dams. Gigantic turbines spin out renewable energy to power our world. But the dams block the steelhead and salmon from their annual migration. They no longer pound their way up Dry Creek to spawn, die, and renew the species. Some call that progress. Some call it an ecological disaster. The debate goes on.
