The author, w/Beechcraft T-34 Mentor trainer in the background. Naas Saufley Field, 1957.
The Nez Perce tribe called it the Land of Winding Waters. When the late nineteenth-century European immigrants arrived, they dubbed it the American Alps. It is that jumble of scenic mountains and valleys that make up the northeast corner of Oregon.
At the end of World War II, my dad loaded our family of five and all our belongings into a 1937 Chevy pickup and moved us from Chico, California, to one of those scenic little alpine valleys. I started third grade there in a one-room school, with about 20 other kids, grades one through eight.
Pine Valley had managed to survive the first 45 years of the twentieth century without yielding much. Farmers still tilled and harvested with horses, and mounted cowboys moved the livestock around. Dad bought a ranch about eight miles from the main town of Halfway, and that was home until I graduated from high school in 1955.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, we got our first tractor. It was a little Ferguson. I loved that tractor. Unlike a team of horses, you did not have to feed it, harness it, put up with its cantankerous behavior, or scoop its poop. It would not kick you, or bite you, or balk. When you wanted it to go, you simply mounted up, put it in gear, pulled the throttle lever back, released the clutch, and off you roared.
High school was a game for me. It provided welcome relief from the drudgery of ranch work. I played football, participated in Future Farmers of America (FFA), joined the debate team, and tipped over outhouses on Halloween. Even so, I was glad to see it end when our class of seven students finally graduated.
I enrolled at Oregon State College and lasted two quarters until my savings ran out. Working my way through college, washing dishes held little attraction, so I joined the Navy.
Naval Training Center (NTC) boot camp in San Diego was hardly a vacation of sunshine and beaches. But nothing they threw at me could compare to ten hours in the hot summer sun, bucking bales. Besides that, it was finite. I knew it would be over in six weeks.
Toward the end of boot camp, my company, along with several others, was assembled in a large hall and presented with a series of timed tests. The results of the General Classification Test/Arithmetic Reasoning Inventory (GCT/ARI) tests would determine the level of training we qualified for after graduation.
When we reassembled to learn our test results, the announcer started naming the recruits who had qualified for officer training. I was surprised to hear my name called. Those old country schoolmarms must have done something right. I could select either Officer Candidate School (OCS) or Naval Aviation Cadet (NAVCAD) training. I seized on the chance to fulfill a lifelong secret desire to be a pilot. Following an intensive screening process, I reported to the seat of naval aviation, Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola, Florida.
Preflight was 16 more weeks of boot camp, only considerably more intensive than anything NTC San Diego had to offer. It finally ended, and I started Primary Flight Training flying the Beechcraft T34 Mentor. I survived the familiarization phase (Riding in the back seat while an instructor pilot performs a full regimen of aerobatic maneuvers) without puking, then learned basic maneuvers and started landing practice. Every day was an exciting new challenge.
During an early session of shooting touch-and-go landings (Landing and taking off without stopping), I entered the final wide of the landing approach path. While trying to figure out how to correct things, I heard the word “power” from my backseat instructor over the intercom (IC). I reacted quickly and pulled the throttle back just like I had on the old Ferguson. The ensuing silence was deafening.
The throttle took on a life of its own and slammed forward. “I’ve got it,” the instructor yelled into the IC as the engine roared back to life. He took over, flew the airport landing pattern, and set us on the ground.
During the long walk to the debriefing room, my rattling on about the difference between a tractor throttle and an airplane throttle fell on deaf ears.
The debrief was very brief. “You could have killed us up there,” the instructor stated as he handed me my first down.
No more needed to be said. The message was clear. This was not a game. What we were doing was real. Few of life’s lessons would ever be so clear. I was 19 years old and growing up fast.
Final note: I completed training and earned my Wings of Gold as a designated Naval Aviator in June of 1958, three months after my twenty-first birthday.
A lot of the social interaction in the novel War No More takes place in and around the Hotel Pend Oreille. The model for the hotel is the historic Hotel Charbonneau, now a National Historic Place.
The Hotel Charbonneau was originally constructed in 1912 by Charles and Dora Charbonneau (architects PJ Young and Charles Charbonneau). During the first half of the 20th century, Priest River and the Hotel Charbonneau, which is located one block away from where the train station used to be, was a popular stopping-off point for people traveling to nearby Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint, and Priest Lake. In 1920, Dora Charbonneau added a brick addition onto the south side of the hotel to accommodate more guests. After the brick addition was built, the Hotel Charbonneau boasted 27 guest rooms with more than half of them having their own private bathrooms; an extravagant luxury at that time.
The Charbonneau operated as a hotel/boarding house until the late 1980s, when it was abandoned and risked being condemned. In 1991, the Priest River Restoration and Revitalization Committee (PRRRC), a local non-profit group composed entirely of volunteers, took control of the Hotel Charbonneau and saved it from complete deterioration. Among the PRRRC’s accomplishments was having the Hotel Charbonneau added to the National Register of Historic Places (11/19/1991), which protects the historic structure for future generations.
You can see the Hotel Charbonneau in the 1914 photo above on the left. The photo was taken before the brick addition was built. https://hotelcharbonneau.com/history.html
The following pictorial shows the hotel and surroundings as they exist today. War No More is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/War-No-More-Robert-LaRue-ebook/dp/B0GC9MKK7N free on Kindle Unlimited or $3.99 to buy, $14.99 for the paperback. Check it out. (Photos by the author.)
Hotel Charbonneau (Fictional Hotel Pend Oreille in War No More) as it appears today.
Abandoned filling station (Seaton’s Garage in the novel).
National Register of Historic Places placard at the entrance of the hotel.
The railroad tracks still run by, but the depot is long gone.
But they still saw logs at the mill across the river.
I’ll always remember the summer of ’52, the year we built the dam at Fish Lake. It changed my life forever.
I grew up on a ranch in a small valley at the southern foot of Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. We raised cattle and farmed the land to feed them. Except for school, my world was that ranch until the summer of ’52—the year I turned fifteen.
I knew some of the history of my world. The Nez Perce Indians made their home among the peaks and valleys of the Wallowa Mountains until the Nez Perce War of 1877. The Indians put up a ferocious fight, but the U.S. Army ultimately won. Chief Joseph famously declared, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,” and the tribe was shipped off to Oklahoma.
The Nez Perce called their home the Land of Winding Waters. After their removal, Oregon Trail pioneers rushed in and began farming the land. Their crops needed water, so they built dams and ditches to capture every drop they could find in the streams and lakes of the Land of Winding Waters.
They named one of the high-country lakes Fish Lake. In the 1880s, they erected an 800-foot-long earthen dam along with a spillway and headgate made of logs and planks across the lake’s natural outlet. Fish Lake was still supplying irrigation water for our neighbors and us in 1952.
Through the years, this structure was known to fail, flood the canyons below, and leave the irrigated fields dry. An often-repeated story tells of a band of 2,000 sheep drowned during one such dam burst. Fear of another failure, followed by a year without water, loomed over us.
From the time I was about ten, I shouldered a shovel each spring and joined my dad and the other ranchers when we cleaned and repaired the maze of ditches, creeks, and dams that carried the water to our fields. Crawling around on moss-slick logs repairing Fish Lake Dam presented a persistent, dangerous challenge. After one such repair, the assembled ranchers decided they needed a new dam.
U.S Soil Conservation Service engineers designed the new dam and assigned a project engineer. Labor was to be provided by the landowners. My dad volunteered me as our laborer. I jumped at the chance. Any excuse to get off the ranch and try something new was good by me. Armed with some food, a bedroll, a pup tent, and a fishing pole, I became a member of the Fish Lake Dam construction crew.
I joined a small tent camp where the crew stayed. The crew consisted of the SCS project engineer, an equipment owner/operator, his wife, who served as camp cook, their two preteen kids, and two other landowner laborers in their twenties. Other workers came and went as the job progressed. Some stayed, and others commuted from the nearest town, Halfway, 20 miles of dirt roads and almost an hour away.
The crew was clearing overgrowth from the old dam when I got there. The other two laborers felled the bigger trees and bucked them into truck-ready logs using an old Mall two-man chainsaw. My job was choker setter. A choker is a heavy cable you wrap around the butt of a log and hook to a caterpillar tractor that drags it to a log deck. The log can make unpredictable moves and slam you if you don’t pay attention. I paid attention. When the trees were cleared, the equipment operator brought in a bulldozer and pushed the remaining tree stumps, small trees, and underbrush into slash piles for later burning.
I grew up using a variety of hand saws and power saws, but the chainsaw was new to me. Fascinated by its operation. I itched to fire it up and fell some big trees.
Tired of lugging the heavy machine around, it didn’t take much coaxing to get my companions to let me spell them off. The old saw was a noisy, heavy, pulsating beast that blew acrid exhaust in my face. It was not the fun toy I thought it would be, but I loved yelling timber and watching a big tree crash to the ground.
The camp’s alarm clock was the smell of wood smoke from the cook’s black iron cook stove mixed with coffee brewing and bacon frying. We sat on wood stumps and ate our fill of bacon and eggs, fried potatoes, hotcakes, and biscuits. My teenage appetite created the source of much good-natured ribbing. “Leave some for the rest of us,” someone would shout as I slathered butter and honey on yet another biscuit.
Winter comes early in the high country. We raced to complete the job before the snow flew. A big Le Tourneau earth mover scraped up dirt and spread it on the new dam. A rolling device called a sheep’s foot packed it in place. I watched in awe as the sweeping arc of the dam took form.
The hours were long, but no one complained. We were well fed, and each day ended with a sense of accomplishment. At day’s end, the crew gathered around a campfire, drank beer, and told stories.
Too young to drink beer, I would dig some worms, row the project’s boat out on the lake, and fish for trout until I caught about a dozen big enough to keep. Then I would row back in, clean the fish, and turn them over to the cook. We all loved her fresh trout, rolled in cornmeal and fried in bacon grease, added to our breakfast fare.
As the job progressed, I became increasingly accepted by my fellow workers. They would even share a beer with me if I promised not to tell my dad. My duties varied. I held the survey rod and drove stakes for the engineer. I delimbed logs for the logging truck. I continued to dodge logs and set chokers. Near the end of summer, we bulldozed the old spillway and headgate and filled the gap with dirt. A concrete contractor brought in his portable cement mixer. His son Tom, whom I knew from high school, accompanied him. I finally had someone near my age to talk to.
Tom’s dad put us to work building forms and hauling concrete in wheelbarrows for the headgate and spillway. That is how I finished the summer until school started. It was nice to get back home and sleep in a real bed. But after a summer of working with a construction crew and holding down a man’s job, the return to being a schoolboy was a huge letdown. I was forever changed by the summer of ’52.
An old schoolmate recently told me the dam we built that summer is still in use. It made me feel good somehow.
Airmen on the line suffered a terrible toll during Operation Rolling Thunder, a codename for an American bombing campaign during the Vietnam War. Originally slated as an eight-week campaign in spring 1965, it lasted until October 1968. While Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara played war and handpicked targets from the armchair comfort of the White House, an estimated 900 aircraft went down as U.S. forces delivered 643,000 tons of destruction.
One of those downed aircraft was piloted by my friend Al Stafford. I first met Al when we were stationed at NAS Whidbey Island, Washington, in the late 1950s. Whidbey Island was a rather isolated duty station in those days, so the Officers Club served as the primary social outlet for young bachelor officers. There was an old upright piano collecting dust in one corner. Al could play a few chords. Not long after his arrival, he had a bunch of us gathering around the piano, singing old pilots’ favorites like “Torque me into the Runway” and songs remembered from college, such as “The Whiffenpoof Song.” We sang, sipped stingers, and smoked Pall Mall cigarettes into the night. We called ourselves the Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society. For some of us, that camaraderie would last a lifetime.
Al, Jim Turner, Chris Phelps, and I rented a house off base and formed what Naval Aviators call a Snake Ranch—a party pad occupied by bachelor officers. The house had an unfinished basement that we converted into a makeshift bar. For a time, the four of us presided over a version of Party Central until new assignments broke up the party, and we all moved on.
The next time I saw Al was ten years later on television. It was 29 January 1969. I was sitting comfortably in my suburban living room in San Jose, California, idly watching the evening news on NBC, when they showed a clip of two emaciated Vietnam POWs hanging a Merry Christmas sign on a wall. I did a double-take when I realized one was my old Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society buddy, Al Stafford. The other was Dick Stratton, whom I remembered from Chase Field in Texas. Until then, I had largely avoided all the controversy surrounding the war. I had put the military behind me and decided to let Johnson, McNamara, and the generals run the war. Suddenly, the war was right there in my living room. I was struck with a new understanding of why pundits were calling the Vietnam War “the living room war.”
What I didn’t understand at the time was the relentless torture the two men had undergone before agreeing to pose for the North Vietnamese propaganda photos. Nor did I notice Al’s right hand with the middle finger raised, expressing his true feelings about the occasion. However, Al told me later that US Military Intelligence took note, and his subtle message helped set policy at the time.
For most of America, the enormity of the Vietnam POW experience would not be realized until the victims could tell their stories after Operation Homecoming in 1973. While the conflict continued, the Johnson administration kept such information classified. I wrote letters to the Navy Department and State Department, asking how to contact POWs, and was referred to the Red Cross. So much for country boy naivety.
Al was flying an A-4 Skyhawk off the USS Oriskany when he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. His replacement pilot was a fellow named John McCain, who was shot down a few months later.
In 1990, Al collaborated with author Geoffrey Norman and published a book called “Bouncing Back: How a heroic band of POWs survived Vietnam.” In it, he relates an interesting anecdotal insight into the Stafford-McCain relationship.
The Al Stafford I knew was a bit of a renegade. Incarceration did little to change that. He delighted in pushing his captors’ patience to the limit. Not surprisingly, he was rewarded with more than his fair share of time in solitaire. He was enduring an extended stay in an isolation cell called the Corncrib at the prison called the Plantation when he first encountered John McCain. The following excerpt from Bouncing Back describes that encounter.
“Then, one morning as he [Stafford] stood at the door, watching through the cracks, he saw a POW on crutches being led slowly across the yard by a guard. The man had shockingly white hair, almost as though he had suffered some traumatic fright. Stafford knew that the man had to be John McCain. Nobody else in the Navy had hair like that.
“…As Stafford watched, McCain detoured out of his assigned path and hobbled a painful fifteen or twenty feet on his crutches before the guard could stop him. By then, he was standing directly in front of Stafford’s cell.
“Hey, Al, baby,” he said cheerfully as though they were meeting on the street somewhere. “You hang in there, now. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
The Vietnam POWs networked in many ingenious ways. One method was to hide notes for each other in secret stashes. Al found one such note from McCain when he was allowed an infrequent bath. It explained that he [McCain] had been Stafford’s replacement in VA-163 on the Oriskany, and that, like Stafford, he had been shot down, captured, and through the all too familiar interrogation routines the POWs endured, including the torture chamber they called the Green Knobby Room at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain noted that he had also been moved to their present location, the prison they called the Plantation, and ended with these words: “Listen, Al, since I seem to be following you around, I would appreciate it if you didn’t do anything stupid and get us both in real trouble.” John McCain had his share of detractors in later political life, but they didn’t know him when he flew wing during trying circumstances.
Al and I reestablished contact a few years after his release in 1973 and kept in touch, more so with the advent of the internet. In 1999, I received an Email in which he stated that there was an upcoming POW reunion in Wenatchee, Washington. He planned to attend and make it a nationwide road trip from his home in Pensacola, Florida. He planned several stops before he got to my place in Hauser Lake, Idaho, followed by a stop in Spokane to visit fellow POW Jim Shively. From there, he planned to proceed to the reunion and then travel to San Diego to see his daughter before returning home via the southern route. He made the trip, and he and I had a grand reunion of our own.
In 2003, I received a notice from Al’s wife, Sharon, that he had flown west on 28 December 2003 at age 68. They held a memorial service for him at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. He is missed but not forgotten.
L to R 1937 Chev Pickup, Brother Wes, Dad, Mom, Sister Deanne
I don’t recall much about our move from the row of farm workers’ shacks, where Dad milked cows, to our own place. In my memory, it is as if one day we were there and the next we were at our new home.
Our new 20-acre homestead consisted of a house, a barn, a small nut orchard, and a good-sized plot of fertile Sacramento Valley row-crop land. The orchard consisted of almonds (or, as folks around Chico called them, ammonds) and walnuts. The cropland lay fallow. The house was much too small to accommodate two families. Grandma, Grandpa, and Jimmy needed a home of their own.
For Dad and Grandpa, building a house posed no problem. They were both good craftsmen. The problem arose when they tried to get their hands on framing lumber. Like everything else, lumber was in short supply. The war effort now devoured everything but life’s bare necessities. As happened all too often, they were put on a waiting list.
Once more, family came to the rescue. Dad’s uncle David and his family lived in Chico. Uncle David worked at a local sawmill. He knew how to cut through enough red tape to get the needed lumber delivered. Dad and Grandpa went to work.
The house went up rather quickly. I don’t think it was ever completely finished, but it was finished enough that Grandma reluctantly agreed to move in. At times, you just had to learn to make do on the home front.
In the meantime, Grandpa acquired an old horse and enough implements to start farming. Most folks during the war had small victory gardens. We soon had several acres of victory garden. Jimmy and I got our initiation into the meaning of hard work from that garden. At Grandpa’s direction, we learned to hoe around plants and nurture them into production. Lord help the offender who happened to uproot a watermelon seedling instead of a pigweed. Melons made up the main crop, but there were also beans, corn, tomatoes, and more. When each crop was ready, we picked and loaded it into Dad’s 1937 Chevrolet pickup truck and peddled it to stores around the valley. What we didn’t sell, Mom and Grandma canned. We were well fed.
When the nuts were ready in the orchard, we spread tarps on the ground under the trees. We shook the trees by pounding on the trunks with baseball bats padded with pieces of a rubber tire. The nuts fell to the ground, and we gathered them and put them in sacks. The almonds were easy to shake loose, the walnuts more difficult and required a lot of hand-picking on ladders. The whole family participated, even my brother Wes, who was three years my junior.
Dad continued working in the paint shop at the air base. He also continued with the ambulance and accident cleanup crew. In 1944, Chico Air Base switched from basic training to fighter pilot training in P-38 Lightnings. Crashes and deaths doubled from 14 crashes and 8 deaths during the two years of basic training to 35 crashes and 16 deaths during the 16 months of fighter pilot training. That’s more than 2 crashes a month. The ambulance and cleanup crew stayed busy. Dad tried not to show it, but even I could tell that he was under a great deal of stress.
Summers are hot in the Sacramento Valley. Air conditioning was not widely available in the early 1940s. Makeshift evaporative coolers consisting of wet burlap sacks hung from open window frames with fans in front were not very effective. The only real escape from the heat was finding cool water. There was a public swimming pool in Chico, but my parents were afraid of public pools. They believed them to be a likely place to contract the crippling disease polio. So we did not swim there. We did occasionally go down to the Sacramento River to fish, swim, and picnic. We were enjoying an outing with Dad’s friend from work, Les Robbins, and family, when I decided to take an unsupervised dip. I waded out from shore by myself with confidence. Suddenly, the current picked me up, and I bobbed downstream like a waterlogged cork. I remember looking up at a bluff, high above the river, and seeing my dad preparing to dive when I felt the welcome arms of Mrs. Robins envelope me. My movements were severely restricted following that incident.
Nineteen forty-three moved on into 1944. My sister Deanne was born in August. The war continued unabated. I started second grade in September. The world at war, farming the land, P 38’s from the base buzzing overhead, bickering with Uncle Jimmy, Dad shooting a rabid coyote lurking around our chicken coup, Grandpa trying to start his old car with a hand crank because batteries could not be had and his cussing at it and hitting it with the crank, talk that the war would never end; these things all seemed normal to me. As a seven-year-old, they were all I knew. I had no other frame of reference. As Harry Truman famously said, “The only thing new is the history we don’t know.” We of my generation knew no history yet. The canvas remained to be painted.
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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