ACROSS THE COLUMBIA, A NEW FREEDOM

Homeless for a while in Portland.  Wartime activities everywhere.  Hustle here, hustle there, ships, airplanes, adrenaline all around.  Trips around the area to see what it's all about stretched imagination to the limits.  A whole town built in 110 days.  Three shipyards turning out ships as if they were cars on an assembly line.  The world had never seen anything like it.  I was there.

Transcript

Across the Columbia, A New Freedom

By James R. von Feldt

All Rights Reserved

We used a borrowed truck to move from Portland.  The new housing project was across the Columbia River, a few miles east of Vancouver, Washington.  We were moving into a wilderness. There were thick woods and trees everywhere. The Columbia River was only a mile and a half south of the house we lived in.  A brand-new public school was being built a mile north of the project on Lieser road.  The school was surrounded by wilderness.  They cut lots of trees down to make the school playground.

I’ve seen a picture which was supposed to be the place we were living.  What we lived in didn’t look like that at all, but it was a roof over our heads.  The roofing was tar-paper.  Some houses didn’t have windows.  The place for a window was boarded up.  Materials were hard to get, even for the government.  The war was on.  We all knew it.  Dad said it was a lot cheaper to live there.  

Anyway, Dad got his job as a welder in the Vancouver Shipyard, and mom went to work in the local Vancouver hospital.

There were buses that came to the project 24-7, so people could get to work on all three shifts.  They ran every day of the week.  Most people worked seven days a week, sometimes twelve-hour shifts.

There was a small, old two-story house at the edge of the housing project.  The house was both a store and a bus terminal.  The busses turned around there.  We came to know the store and proprietor, Eli Grimm, very well.

My dad’s family are German Catholics who came out of Russia in the 1860s and ended up in western Kansas.  They say the Russian Steps are just like western Kansas.  Mom’s family came from Europe way back in American history.  They eventually ended up in Davis County, Iowa.  

Well, there is an old historic Catholic school and orphanage in Vancouver called the Academy, so that’s where we were enrolled.  It just so happened that three of our immediate neighbors in the project had kids our age.  They were Catholic.  They were enrolled at the Academy too.  We were even in the same class.  We became close buddies.

I did go to the Lieser Road school for a term.  I’ll get to that later on.

But to get on with the story.  War was on, an all-encompassing war.  Armies were fightin.  Cities were being bombed.  People were dying.  It was in the paper all the time.  “Loose lips sink ships,” was a common phrase.  Where we lived, someone was policing the housing area every night to ensure that lights were out.  I think they thought we might be bombed or something.  There were rumors of spies among us.  

Everybody had a small victory garden.  Food, clothing, cars, and materials of every kind were rationed, sometimes impossible to get.  You couldn’t buy things without ration stamps of some kind.  

Many houses had a black flag in the window, signifying someone in that family had died in the war. 

Even with all the new houses being built, there wasn’t enough.  Lots of families doubled up.  That is, two or three generations were living in the same house; the moms, kids, and grandparents.

Since the adults were all working, there was minimal supervision for the kids.  

We experienced freedom, unlike anything young people today experience or possibly could experience.  It was scary, dangerous, and exhilarating.  We grew up quickly.  

The vast northern forest started on the north side of the project and went to Canada.  The Columbia River was close by.  

Of course, we had to go to school, and a good bit of our time was spent in school, including going and coming to school.  

We would dress up in our homemade uniforms.  My sister wore a pinafore dress and a blouse, I wore a white shirt and black pants.  Off to school, we would go.  When we got home from school, we would change into our everyday clothes, and out we would go to play, rain or shine.

Mom worked the second shift, that is, from eleven in the evening to seven in the morning.  She would sleep while we were at school so we would have some parental direction when we got home from school.  However, she had to work double shifts most of the time.  My dad didn’t like welding and got a job working for a group that organized entertainment and plays.  He was gone a lot.  

My sister was in charge when our parents were gone or working.  She is a year older than I am. We didn’t give her too much trouble.

The public school was finished soon after we moved in.  The school doubled as a Community Center.  It offered all kinds of activities for anyone that showed up.  It was open before and after school as well as Saturdays and Sundays.  It offered special events and regular events.  

A special event would be like when the Globe Trotters, a nationally known basketball team, came to play our high school team.  A regular event was the Friday night movies for a nickel in the gym.  When school was out for the summer, the Center stayed open 24 hours a day.

We spent some time there but most of our time was exploring, going fishing, swimming, overnight camping, and playing in the woods.   The world around us was open, and we rushed in with all the gusto and energy we had.   

Adventure was ours.  We created stories and lived them.   We were explorers, mountain men, soldiers, marines, cowboys, Indians.  Or sometimes we were Buck Rogers flying in rockets to other worlds or the good guys or even the bad guys.  We fought invading armies, bears, wolves, tigers, and lions, enemies you can’t imagine.  We built forts, tree houses, wagons to ride down hills, backpacks, bark rope, spears, bows and arrows, and fighting knives.  We learned to box as well to scrap with other kids in the neighborhood.  We even earned money picking blackberries, strawberries, beans and other crops.  There was nothing we couldn’t do.

Our secret treasure was the city dump where we would scavenge treasures to trade.  It was there we became proficient in shooting rats with our home-made bows and arrows.  That was the place where our dads came with their rifles and pistols to target practice.  We learned to shoot.  We got good at it.

Well, that’s it for now.

From where the corn grows tall, and pigs fly.

Take care.  All my love,   

Grampa Jim