When I was five or six years old my grandfather gave me a little project. He told me to go out the front door of their house and walk around the block carefully observing everything then come back and tell him what had changed since our family’s last visit from Stockton, California one year earlier.
I was very excited. For one thing, using the front door at 1134 First Avenue South in Payette was a rare privilege granted only to important guests at my grandparent’s home. More than that, my grandfather didn’t entrust these projects to just any grandchild or great-niece/nephew. My cousin Rob Thurston, who was four years older than I, did them regularly. The previous summer, my older sister, DeeDee, was assigned her first project. This year, 1952, it was my turn.
Before going out the door, I proudly pinned my “I Like Ike” button to the pocket of my shirt. My great uncle Clyde had given me the button when neighborhood kids were teasing me saying I was for (Robert) Taft, Eisenhower’s opponent at the upcoming Republican National Convention. For good measure, I added a (Alf) Landon sunflower from the 1936 presidential election, also a gift from Uncle Clyde.
You couldn’t get any more Republican than my Uncle Clyde, who refused to sign up for social security, choosing to live out his years of retirement on savings carefully accumulated since 1902 operating Thurston Drug Company on Payette’s Main Street. I still have both buttons, although I have not voted for a Republican President since Gerald Ford in 1976.
I went out the front door onto First Avenue South. Walking towards town I first passed Christina Bergman’s house. She was my age and lived with her mother and grandmother, Lillie Soule, who made marvelous molasses cookies and didn’t much care for little boys, although she made an exception in my case. She had been a Jacobsen, one of Payette’s leading families, and had married Mr. Soule, a mining promoter.
Their daughter, whose first name I cannot recall, married Mr. Bergman, who had recently died of cancer. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. Only that Mr. Soule and Mr. Bergman were dead. Sometime later my mother told me that he had a mole on his neck that he kept fooling with for about a year. It turned out to be malignant melanoma and, by the time he went to the doctor the cancer had spread to most of his body.
Mr. Soule had persuaded my grandfather, a metallurgical engineer who had been teaching at the University of Arizona, to return to Payette and run a gold mine planned for Delamar, just over the mountain from Silver City. The mine never came about and my grandparents were stuck in Payette, which was all right with my grandfather who loved prospecting above all else. My grandmother, who loved the prestige of being married to a college professor, never got over it.
Next was Dean Daniel’s house. He was a year younger than I was and we played together regularly. His father was a lawyer. I never knew his first name as everyone called him Crabby. They had a brand new Buick Roadmaster with electric turn signals. When they took me for a ride, Dean said you didn’t have to roll down the window a put your arm out to signal a turn. All you did was push this little lever next to the steering wheel, which went click, click, and click. I couldn’t figure out how the car behind could hear the clicking and Dean said he didn’t know either, but that’s how it worked.
Crabby didn’t explain. He just kept driving. He had a bottle of beer between his legs and a Chesterfield dangling from the corner of his mouth. I learned later, also from my mother, that Crabby was something of a drinker. Once in college when he was waiting, already three sheets to the wind, for his date in the living room of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house, he opened the drawer of and end table relieved himself in it and shut it. He thought he was alone, but my mother and Phyllis Ackers were still in the dining room and had a clear line of sight into the living room.
The next house was occupied by an older couple I did not know. On the corner was Pete and Nedra Laddig’s house. They were in junior high school and did not acknowledge my existence except to tease me. Once Pete accidentally hit me with a shovel opening a cut over my eye that needed three stitches from Dr. Woodward.
Pete and Nedra’s father was dead too. He had been a chiropractor and there was a full sized skeleton hanging in his office. Pete tried to scare Dean, Mark Iseri and I once by leading us there in the dark and shining a flashlight on it. It didn’t work, we knew it was already dead and couldn’t hurt us.
Many years later, my father told me that Dr. Laddig had a second medical practice that was a deep secret. Girls went to him when they didn’t want to have a baby.
In didn’t know anyone on the Second Avenue South side block. As I passed one house three American Legion baseball players were loading bats and gear into the trunk of a car. I asked them if they were the Melon Eaters because my grandfather had told me he saw Walter Johnson pitch for the Weiser Kids against the Payette Melon Eaters. They said they were the Payette Pirates. When it got home my grandfather told me the game he saw was in 1906.
Much later I learned that one of those players would be almost as famous as Walter Johnson. My mother told me that was where Harmon Killebrew the home run king of the 1960s grew up.
When I reached home my grandfather asked me what had changed since the year before. I told him I hadn’t seen anything new. He pointed out that there were now television antennas on some of the houses. I said that was nothing, there were TV antennas everywhere in Stockton. But not in Payette, he said.
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