This is a story that I’m working on about growing up in a small town. Comments and critiques are sought.
LOOKING BACK
A Childhood in Wenatchee, Washington
by Steve Featherkile
“It’s a semi-true story, believe it or not; I made up a few things, and there’s some I forgot. But the life and the telling are both real to me. and they all run together, and turn out to be a semi-true story.” Jimmy Buffett
It is common for aging Sailors, worn by the long years at sea and strenuous dissolution in the ports of the world, to remember their youth in roseate hues that never were. But, dammit, we really did go barefoot. And had BB guns. And the dog could go anywhere it damned well pleased and come back whenever it chose.
Wenatchee, Washington in 1957 was a small town like countless others in Eastern Washington, with a statue of an old soldier with a captured Confederate cannon chained to a concrete pad in the town square down by the Courthouse, and little evidence of government interference of any kind, which was well since it didn’t need any. What government that we did have was accomplished by our friends and neighbors, whom we both knew and trusted. The folks in Eastern Washington are among the most patriotic of Americans, yet they have the least use for government interference in their daily lives. In this I heartily concur.
Although my father was a well liked and respected music teacher in the local school system and perhaps entitled to social pretensions, he didn’t have any. Consequently I lived as a half-wild disciple of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. So did most of the town’s boys. Come summer, we at first tentatively abandoned shoes. No one thought this odd, because it wasn’t. Soon our soles toughened to leather and we walked everywhere, even on gravel, without ill effect.
And nobody cared. Oh, sweet age of nobody cared. Clucking busybodies, like Mrs. Grundy, didn’t show up, officious passive-aggressive snots, to carry my parents away. Today they would, droning censoriously of hygiene and worms and crippling cuts from broken glass and parental irresponsibility, and yet we seemed to thrive. Many of my friends lost feet to the perils of worms and broken glass. To this day you can see them rolling about in wheelchairs in their dozens, in the town square by the Courthouse, by the cannon and the statue of old soldier.
Foot-nekkid and fancy free, we went to the Ernie’s Market just across from Triangle Park, piled our ball gloves and BB guns inside the door, and read comic books for hours. The owner, a frizzly baldheaded man in his seventies whom we knew only as Ernie, liked us kids. Today this would be thought of as odd, and he would be required to undergo therapy and wear an ankle bracelet. Actually, Ernie just liked kids. And since it was his store, nobody at corporate got their panties in a knot because the comic books were read into virtual dust without ever being bought. Come to think of it, perhaps this was because there was no corporate. We bought our BBs at Ernie’s, and later, when we were older, we bought our .22 LRs there, too.
Sometimes we went to the Owl Drug Store, just down from the Town Square at the Court House to get a Coke (never a Pepsi, because Bob’s dad was foreman of the Coca Cola plant in town) or milkshake at the soda fountain. The government drones from the big city back east had not yet regulated small-town soda fountains to protect us. Fifty-seven years later, much has changed. The Owl Drug Store is gone, but the current owners, whoever they are, had the decency to preserve the original soda fountain, they just had to move it down the street a bit. The devastating plagues that swept Eastern Washington in those years, mercifully unrecorded, were doubtless the result of bare feet in The Owl Drug Store.
BB guns, I said. We all had them. Most were the Red Ryder model, costing I think $4.95 in as-yet uninflated currency. Mine was the Daisy Model 1938, with open sights. Every corner store sold big packs of BBs. We went everywhere with these lethal arms, often with a baseball glove hung off the barrel for convenient carrying. Today children of six years are led from classrooms in handcuffs for merely drawing a rifle (curious in the world’s most militarily prepared country). I suppose we would have been executed for actually having one. But, as I say, the saving benefits of government counsel had not yet reached Wenatchee.
What did we do with these weapons? First, we didn’t shoot each other, or anyone else. We weren’t stupid. We didn’t want our prized BB guns taken away. Stupidity properly comes with adolescence, and then is directed into girls and insane driving, as it should be. A BB gun provides excellent training in marksmanship because you can see over the sights the little coppery pellet arching into the distance. It produces an eye for elevation and windage that shows up on the rifle ranges of Parris Island and Camp Pendleton. Now a BB gun is a highly inaccurate weapon. It is a smooth bore, short barrel gun, shooting an irregular sphere with no quality control in its manufacture. Once fired, that BB rattled down the barrel, bouncing from side to side, and you really never knew just where it was going to go, once it left the barrel. To “Hit the broad side of a barn” from 50 feet was considered the height of marksmanship. However, if you stayed with the same brand of BB’s, once you had your BB gun sighted in, you could hit that barn fairly often.
I remember afternoons of shooting at rattlesnakes (frankly, if we hit one it was just by accident) from the rusting iron bridge over the creek near the no longer extant icehouse in the railroad yard at Appleyard. The icehouse had been used in earlier decades to provide ice for refrigeration of apples from Wenatchee orchards as they were shipped in railroad refrigerator cars across the United States. Mechanically refrigerated railroad cars rendered the icehouse obsolete, which is why no one bothered us as we milled about it. When we ran out of targets, we could hitch a ride on a switch engine as it went about its tasks in the yard. That was before the suits took over the Great Northern Railway. The railroad men were our fathers and older brothers or cousins, anyway, and would look out for us as we did “Kid Stuff.” The icehouse was still there when I left Wenatchee to join the Navy. I understand that it was finally destroyed when a tank car blew up in Appleyard, destroying the Roundhouse, the electric engine house, and the car repair shop, in addition to the icehouse and numerous smaller outbuildings. Parts of the tank car found their way by air clear across the Columbia River to East Wenatchee, no mean feat.
Further, we tried to shoot dragonflies that flitted in iridescent blues and greens among the swamp weeds, wings making a papery rustle. Usually we missed. These insects, known in varying locales as the Devil’s darning needles, snake doctors, or ’skeeter hawks, are elusive. Today they would be a protected species. Buying a BB gun would require proof of adulthood, capacity would be restricted by law to seven BBs, the purchase of which would require registration and a waiting period. In 1957, Wenatchee figured that BB guns were none of the government’s damned business. That concept has been forgotten, more’s the pity. However, I suppose, regulation is not without reason. If you walk around the town square today, down by the Courthouse, next to the cannon and the statue of the old soldier, you will notice that perhaps just over half of the men are blind in at least one eye from BB wounds, as they roll about in wheelchairs because of feet lost to going barefoot.
My pooch at the time was Fred, a friendly female dog given to occasional promiscuity. This was only human of her. How did she get the name Fred, you ask? My sister liked the name, so no further questions are allowed. Fred was a cross between something and something else, as dogs should be. I do not like snooty purebred dogs that eat only at the finest restaurants and probably have psychiatrists. At night Fred sometimes slept on the foot of my bed, common in those days. When she wanted to go out, she scratched at the door, and went. I don’t know where she went. She was a grown dog, competent to manage her affairs, so I didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell. When she returned, she scratched, and came in. This did, on two occasions, result in new little dogs, but no system is perfect.
Today she would require a license, vaccinations, enrollment in doggiecare, and an implanted chip so NSA could monitor her activities in whatever anti-terrorist program they had going at the time (always common in Wenatchee). She would have to be constantly on a leash, like all other Americans, and Mrs. Grundy would carry my parents away for letting her sleep on my bed. This would be for our own good. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that between 1950 and 1960, 1.2 million Western children died of dog poisoning. Further, unleashed dogs like Fred frequently killed and ate old people rocking on their porches. I didn’t understand that when Fred licked my hand, she was checking for flavor.
Baseball. Baseball was king in Wenatchee, in its proper season, of course. Wenatchee sported a Class A team, the Wenatchee Chiefs, that farmed for the Milwaukee Braves. They were our heros. Some of the players even went on the Show. No, I don’t remember who, but when I was 12, I could rattle off their stats. On a hot summer’s eve, we would go down to the Chief’s park and climb the Left Field fence to watch the game. Nobody cared that we were there, as most of the adults had spent their childhood climbing the same fence, for the same reason. I caught a few home run balls on that fence, which is quite a feat, without killing yourself. We had a field next door to my home where we played “Work-up.” It’s a form of baseball in which you start as left field, or some other position, and work your way up to pitcher, then batter. As long as you don’t strike out, or are put out, you can stay on offense. We used cherry trees as bases, because that is what we had. We became skilled at calling our shots. Hitting a tree was an automatic out.
In the winter was sledding on our “Flexible Flyers.” Our hill was just up the street from our block, and was very steep, probably 45 degrees at its steepest, certainly Double Black Diamond. From our starting point, we had two routes. The first was straight down, towards the barn, then a quick jog to the right, followed by a jump to the street. If the snow was particularly fast, we could ride the sled all the way past our homes down to the arterial street. The other route was diagonally to the left, past the horse corral, and then we had to bail off the sled before it crashed through a barbed wire fence separating the pasture we were in from old man Blanchard’s apple orchard. I can still hear the giggles of the kids as they rolled in the snow, just inches from sure death. If the fence didn’t kill them, their parents surely would. One year, one of the kid’s parents came with a load of horse manure to spread before the fence, thinking that would stop us. Not a chance. There was plenty of snow, enough to cover the horse poop, and it snowed a foot, that night. Woo hoo!
Such was Wenatchee, when I was growing up. It was a helluva town, warts and all, and growing up in Wenatchee was a helluva childhood.
“It’s a semi-true story, believe it or not; I made up a few things, and there’s some I forgot. But the life and the telling are both real to me. and they all run together, and turn out to be a semi-true story.” Jimmy Buffett
