GROWING UP

The war was raging, and everyone was busy attending to their jobs.  We were left on our own a lot -  all the kids were.  It was exciting and sometimes scary.  We were growing up quick.

Transcript

NO JUNK MAIL                       

PRESENTS, GROWING UP

Read to you by the author

James R. von Feldt

As I was saying, the City Dump was our secret Treasure.  It was off the road a bit, west of the paved road going to the school, maybe a half mile from where we lived.  That was where trucks from the city got rid of garbage and junk.  There may not have been any regulations in those days.  Maybe people didn’t pay attention because of the war.  

It was simple.  Every day a truck or two would drive off the paved road into the woods to the edge of the dump.  They would back up and unload whatever they had.  The dumping spot was at the top of a steep ravine.  Everything would tumble down – maybe a hundred feet or more.  It was a deep-wide ravine that curved like a semi-circle going away from the road into the woods.  

We would climb down the slope and start sorting through the junk right after they dumped it.  Sometimes it stunk, but we didn’t care because we usually found something we could trade or fix up.  

I found an old watch once.  It didn’t work, but it had a band and everything.  I traded it for two wheels that were from a small wagon.  Eventually, we had enough wood and wheels to make a race cart that gave us hours of fun going down hills.  

The famous Dump Bike.  Over a few months, we found enough parts to put together a bicycle that worked.  It looked funny because it had a pipe for handlebars and a big motorcycle seat, but it worked.  The wheels wobbled, and it ran on the rims.  Getting tires was impossible.  It ran just fine though you had to be careful on gravel.  

We had a bike, that was really something.  You couldn’t buy a bike then if you had lots of money.    It was known as the dump bike in our neighborhood, and a lot of the kids rode it.

Another thing we found that turned out to be very important to my buddies and me was the sword.  When we played by the river or in the woods, we’d be building a fort or something and didn’t have a way to cut a branch, much less a log.  All we had were our pocket knives.  What we needed was a saw or hatchet or maybe an axe but that was out of the question.  

One day Alex spotted this piece of metal in the dump and dug it out of the stuff dumped.  

“Lookat what I found,” he yelled at us.  

At first, we had no idea what he was talking about.  He was waving a broken part of a car spring.  

The sword took us weeks of working every day to grind a cutting-edge using a flat rock.  Next, we fashioned a handle from electrical tape.  To carry it around with us we made a sheath from the skins of a rabbit and a big tom cat.  We took it everywhere we went.  

A backpack went with us too.  Billy found it in the dump.  It needed work too.  We had to replace material that had rotted, and a strap was torn loose.  Like I said, the dump was our secret treasure.  

The ravine was deep and wide, and there was room for a natural shooting range.   When you got down to the bottom, it was flat and maybe three hundred feet to the other side where it sloped up sharply.  Not only that, but it was long and curved.  The men in our housing project made a shooting range with a rest table.  They had everything for sighting in rifles and shooting pistols.  There were target frames set up at different distances to hang targets on.  

Some of the shooters were very good.  From time to time, “Turkey Shoots, were held.  That’s a contest to see who could shoot the best.  Everyone got a chance to try his skills, even the kids.  

Whenever we heard people at the shooting range, we would go.  Many times, whoever was shooting would let us take a shot or two.  We were comfortable handling pistols as well as rifles.

3 minutes

The people making up our housing area came from a lot of places.  Our next-door neighbors were Inuit from Alaska.  We played with Philip and Daryl a lot.  Mister Grimm, at the store, told us he grew up in Alaska too.  He told us stories about how he grew up in the wild with his dad and uncle.  They even panned for gold and trapped for a living.  

Billy’s dad was from the Bronx and had a funny accent.  We were from Kansas, Looney was from California, and Alex was from Boston.  But it didn’t seem to matter where people were from, they were all right here for one reason; to help win the war by building and repairing ships. 

Billy, Alex Loony, and me, we did everything together.  Occasionally somebody’d get in a fight over something and go home mad, but they’d always get over it.  There were other project kids we played with too.  There were a lot of kids living in the project.

Daryl and Philip lived next to Alex.  They were Inuit.  Daryl was our age.  He went to Leeser Road school and spoke good English.  Philip was older than us but not old enough to work in the shipyards.   His English was rough but we got along fine.  The two of them taught us how to use sign language and all kinds of things, such as fishing, camping, and finding stuff to eat in the woods.  They taught us how to make bows and arrows.  We got pretty good with them.  Daryl and Phillip went with us most times we camped out overnight.  

Billy’s dad taught us how to box, and we practiced regularly in the backyard.   At Billy’s, we used real boxing gloves like they use in the ring Friday nights, so it hurt when you got hit.   The first thing you learn is how not to get hit.  When you got that down good, you learn how to hit.  But really, the most important thing we learned was not to be afraid of getting hit.  That gave us a lot of confidence in a lot of things we did.

Sometimes we would do things for Mr. Grimm at the store.  He would let us manage the comic books and deliver food to people in the project.  There were regular deliveries that had to be made.  We used his wagon for that.  In the summer, we picked blackberries down at the river for the store.  That’s how we earned enough to buy our pocket knives.  

There were two places to find out what was happening; Eli Grimm’s store and the Center.  Both had telephones and a radio going all the time.  The Friday night movies at the Center had a new reel that kept everyone up to date about the war. 

When we were in school, we had some time to play together after we got home.  But then, sometimes, we stayed in town and played downtown.  We would take a late bus home.  

The Columbia River was just a few blocks on past our bus stop going home.  There were warehouses, piers, and lots of interesting stuff going on down there.  We could watch ships unload cargo.  There was always somebody fishing off the piers.  Fishermen would tell us what they were fishing for, what they had caught, and what they were using for bait.  

If it was raining, we would race match-stick boats down the gutters or sell newspapers.  We could earn some money selling newspapers on the street.  Sometimes we just hung around and looked in the store windows.  Occasionally we’d run into kids from town that challenged us.  That could lead to a fight but not often – just us yelling taunts and them returning the same with gusto.  

Fishing was a big deal for us.  First, because it was always a challenge, and next, because we liked to eat fish.  Our folks really appreciated it when we brought back a good catch.  There were lots of live streams around, as well as the Columbia River, and we knew the best spots.  

Our biggest challenge was fishing in the swamp next to the state fish hatchery.  It was west of our housing project, down the paved road about five miles.  It was a challenge because they ran us out every time they saw us.  We had to be really careful and blend in with the woods not to get caught.   We caught large trout in the swamp and could always trade a few for a ride back to the Project.

Have you ever caught smelt?  It’s a small fish, kinda like a minnow, but they taste great, crispy fried.  You stand in the creek and use an A-frame net to catch them as they swim upstream.  We made our own nets.  You fish all night long, and it’s usually in March and April.  When we heard “the smelt are running,” we dropped everything, got our nets, and went fishing.  A bucket full would sell like hotcakes.

Fishing for sturgeon in the Columbia river was a pastime.  Usually, we’d be spending the day or maybe an over-nighter on the river and cast some lines with hooks.  We made sourdough bait to catch them.   You never knew when you had one.  It felt like you hooked a log.  You had to pull in your lines to find out.  They don’t fight.  Some of them get great big – even fifty pounds or so.  If we were just having fun, we’d cut them up and roast steaks over a fire.  They taste good that way.

As you can imagine, we had lots of adventures.  The next podcast will be one of those adventures, the one where we got lost for many days.  I wrote a book about it because it was so meaningful to me.  A friend wrote a short intro to the book that pretty well reflects what happened.

She said it this way:  See through the eyes of the young and innocent: faced with challenges they had not imagined, hardship and adventures in which they triumphed and failed, pain they suffered, and evil they were to confront.  This is an American tale of young boys during World War II living in Vancouver Washington.

Well, that’s it for now.

From where the Corn grows tall, and the pigs fly

Take care

All my love. 

Grampa Jim.