There were many sweet old ladies in Payette back in the 1950s when I was a boy. My grandmother, a kind but demanding social climber was not among them. Neither was Hasty Woodward, the doyen of one of Payette’s leading families with a razor sharp tongue and no patience for children or fiddle-faddle.
The sweetest was Addie Pence, whom we called Aunt Addie. Our families were not blood related, but, in those days, marriage was an equally strong tie. My uncle Bob Thurston had married Addie’s daughter, Jean, and that made her my aunt and all Pence children my cousins, which they remain to this day.
It also made Senator Herman Welker, who was married to a Pence, my uncle, which came in handy until he was defeated by Frank Church in 1956. I guess you could say Payette was an inbred town in those days, but little different than other small towns.
Little of the old inbred society remains as generation after generation went off to college to become professionals and settle in big cities. Nonetheless, newcomers are still well advised to be careful what they say about people at public gatherings. You could be talking to their second cousin once removed or an even closer relative.
All of Aunt Addie's brothers were also our relatives under this system, of course, and that was not something that made my grandmother in particular uncomfortable. Addie Cram had been co-valedictorian of the Payette High School class of 1900, but the men of her family were better known for drinking than studying. One brother was born mentally retarded and didn’t work, the other operated the town dump.
Looking after the dump didn’t take much time in those days and Robert Cram spent most of his days propping up the bar at one of Payette’s few watering holes. Unlike Weiser, which had two bars for every church, Payette had very few drinking establishments. It was a Christian town, affirmed my grandfather, who went to his grave without a drop of liquor ever touching his Methodist lips.
Aunt Addie looked after her brothers as best she could. Several times a week she would package up a lunch of meat, boiled potatoes and vegetables in tinfoil and take it to him at the bar. If we kids happened to be at her house for lunch, we went with her.
I only went once when I was about five years old. It was the first time I had been near a bar and it was utterly fascinating. Bars were fully lit in those days; you had to be able to see to shoot pool and play cards. Dimly lit cocktail lounges were for amateurs sipping sissy drinks like brandy Alexanders and slo-gin fizzes. There was only one of those at the Bankcroft Hotel.
We must have made quite a site going into the bar. Aunt Addie in a calico print dress, hat and gloves leading a group of five and six year olds into the Town Tavern. There were only three or four men in the bar and they greeted us warmly. While Aunt Addie unwrapped and served her brother his lunch, they prodded and kidded us. One magically pulled nickels from behind our ears and gave them to us.
To me, they seemed a lot more fun and friendly than the Methodist elders and Masons who regularly dropped by to consult with my grandfather. None of them so much as said hello to us as we where herded from the room and told to go play outside. Somehow, I knew instinctively not to tell my grandparents this.
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