WORLD WAR II, TRAVELING WEST

World War II was raging.  Workers were streaming west to take jobs in the shipyards along the Columbia River.  The whole world had gone mad, and yet a child's world was just forming.  It leads to a fictional story that isn't all that fictional.

Transcript

World War II, Traveling West

By James R. von Feldt

All Rights Reserved

It’s still there.  The grade school I went to during World War II.  You can see it on computer maps.  Go to 301 South Lieser Road, Vancouver, Washington.  The zip is 98664.

Of course, everything around it is different now.  We were way out in the country then.  It was a wilderness with just one paved road to town.  The war was raging, battles were being fought in Europe, and we were desperately building warships.  The shipyards on the Columbia River employed forty-thousand workers. Temporary housing was desperately needed and hard to find.

I was about eight years old when we moved from Wichita, Kansas.  There were four of us kids.  We were bored by the long drive west but perked up when we drove through the mountains.  Portland, Oregon, was our destination.  Dad moved west because of the jobs.

When we got to Portland, we lived in special housing for new arrivals.  We stayed there for a week or so.  It was a big building with lots of rooms, a place to eat, another for kids to play, and a place to sleep.  It was an interesting place.  There were lots of adults and kids. All the men slept in separate barracks areas.  My brother and I slept together in a lower bunk bed, dad in the upper.  Mom and my sisters slept in the women’s area.  During the day, the family stayed together as dad went house hunting.  It took a couple of weeks, but he found a house for us to rent.

I remember the house to be old and spooky.  It was a big house and had an upstairs.  There were a lot of rooms to explore, and we found a stairway that led up to an attic.  I found spider webs when I explored the attic.  I avoided the attic.  I remember a few events about our life in Portland.  

For instance, one morning, all of us, that is, my two sisters and my brother, were on the second floor of the house at the top of a stairway.  We thought there was a ghost or something scary downstairs.  We couldn’t see anyone or hear anyone.  We hollered.  We cried out, but there was no reply.  Eventually, we got an idea:  we found a tube of mom’s lipstick and marked up my little sister, who was probably four or five years old and sent her down the stairs.  She was to scare the ghost away.

My sister went downstairs just as we had instructed her.  She turned a corner and disappeared.  Soon after, we heard an awful scream.  It was my mom.  She had found my sister and thought she had been attacked and cut up with a knife.  Another memory is about meeting three neighbor boys that chased me home. 

When school started, my sister and I walked to school.  It must have been close.  There were lots of kids in the class.  The teacher was always frustrated because we made so much noise.  I don’t remember learning much, but I remember spending most of my time drawing fighter airplanes.  I thought I was good at drawing P38s and P51s.  I could draw a tank too.  The war was on everybody’s mind or in the background all the time.  

My sister and I skipped school one day and played in a grove of trees across the street from the school.  No one seemed to notice, and that soon was boring, so we went back to school.  No one missed us.

My mom got a job in a hospital right away.  Mom was a registered nurse with a degree from Iowa University, so she didn’t have any trouble finding work.  Dad was offered all kinds of work and had many choices.  He started working as a welder in the shipyard.  It was about then that dad sold the car because he couldn’t get gasoline, but that didn’t matter, since buses ran everywhere and he could get to work.

Portland had a lot of beautiful gardens, trees, and flowers I had not seen living in Wichita, Kansas.  Sometimes we went on sightseeing trips by bus on weekends.  We could see Mount Hood from some places.  It had snow on it even in the summer.

One weekend we made a trip to see the three shipyards.  The Columbia River is the boundary between Oregon and Washington states.  Close to the shipyards and right next to the river was a new town.  There were lots of houses.  Most were large and could accommodate several families.  There were public schools for the kids that lived there.  

Because of the war and the urgency of the time, these homes were built in a swamp.  A huge dyke had been built to keep the river away, and water was pumped out.  Then the houses were built.  They were below the river level.  It was built in a hurry – 110 days for 40,000 people.  

The Columbia River was over a mile wide at that point.  There was a long bridge that went across the Columbia to the town of Vancouver, Washington.  The bridge had a span in the middle that lifted high and let big ships go through.  There were shipyards on the Washington side of the river too.  

I was amazed at the river.  I was amazed at all the things I saw, they were so new and different.

We didn’t stay in Portland very long.  By the next school year, we moved to a brand-new government housing project on the Washington side of the Columbia River.  My dad changed jobs.  

I was going into the fourth grade and was growing up quick.

Well, that’s it for now.

From where the corn grows tall, and pigs fly.

Take care.  All my love,   

Grampa Jim