What Would Mr. Vergello Think Now?

There were always a few black families in Kennydale and we usually had one or two kids in our classes. I went all through what is now known as K-12 with Carmen Bradshaw and knew some of the Gutter girls from a family living on the other side of Devil's Elbow - no snickers, please. We kids pretty much didn't know there was a race problem. Some of the grown-ups around us did, though.

Mr. Vergello and his wife lived across what is now Meadow Ave. No. (then 106th Ave SE in King County) from our back field in those days when our property ran all the way from Park (104th) to Meadow. Their place is still there on the north side of the east stub of 38th No. What had been his very extensive garden is now a parking and storage area for construction equipment and fill overseen by a large , probably "volunteer", English Walnut tree. We had a basically friendly, sometimes crusty relationship with the decidedly old school Vergello's.

In the early 1950's my dad was offered, and for awhile took a position at the Weyerhaeuser Snoqualamie Falls Timber Company as Superintendent of the planing mill there. He was looking to possibly sell our Kennydale place and move on a 10 acre farm in that area the company would help him buy. When Mr. Vergello heard we might sell, he was concerned and decided to make that known.

Vergello came to our front door (a first; all neighborliness previously had occurred in the field or garden; he hadn't ever been in our house nor we in his; much later, I was invited in when collecting for the paper). He was worried about n...... moving into Kennydale and he wanted my dad's assurance that "you wouldn't sell to one would you?" Now my dad turned out not to be a perfect human being , but what with his communist friends and aquaintances and a gay nephew he really liked he was a pretty open-minded guy. As far as I ever knew he hadn't a racial attitude anywhere in his mind. He also was a McNeely, though, and "being a McNeely" according to my mother meant, among other things, he wasn't above pulling folk's chains. So when Mr. Vergello asked this insensitive question Pa replied, "Sure. I'm even going to go look for some and sell to the first one that's got any money!" History doesn't record how taken aback our neighbor was. Must have been a bit.

As it turned out, pa left the Weyerhaeuser job after a few months , mostly because he didn't like the idea of being boss over so many old buddies and relatives. Presumably they didn't want him "being a McNeely" in that role, either. Kennydale and Mr. Vergello got to keep us. Our neighborhhood has , of course, become considerably multi-hued since. I wonder if Vergello had a concern now, whose nearby door he would knock on?

You Can Call Me Mr.

Names kids use are interesting. Real young folks tend to leave off first syllables, and teens the last - "'fessor" and "prof" respectively, when referring to the college teacher, for example. They sometimes create nicknames that last a lifetime; and come up with the answer to the questuion of how to name grandma. There are challenges, too. For instance, what besides "Timmy's dad", should Timmy's dad be called? Thorny issues alright. In Kennydale we had a simple solution to some of these dilemmas: We used unadulterated first and last names a lot.

The only enduring nickname I can remember right off hand is my next older brother, Lloyd's. At some point in his pre-teens it looked like he was going to be a "tall one" (eventually got to a respectable 5' 11") so he became "Tiny", but only to family and friendlies. If he didn't know you well he wasn't shy about advising "you can call me Lloyd." My dad called me "Pokey", but no else did. Oan and I didn't become "Stupid" until we were in our 40's. Usually in our youth we just used real names. I did that, and still do with the added conceit now of usually not using contractions or short forms - Carol's brother is "Robert", not "Bob"; "Jennifer" is Jennifer and "Theodore" is Theodore. Once, in philosophical discussion I even objected to using the short form of a race horse's name as disrespectful to the animal. "Thirsty Knight" could NOT be called "Thirsty"! I wasn't that bad as a kid, but I still named names, not nicks.

This endearing formality wasn't ironclad for kids (sometimes Don Rogers was a..h...) but was fairly pervasive. Grown-ups around us, though, were ALWAYS called "Mr." or "Mrs." I cannot recall ever addressing an adult non-relative elder by their first name or in any other way. "Mr. Nimtz"; "Mr. Budd". Some teachers got "Mr." or "Mrs." dropped but, for instance, our music and PE guy was still "Shoemaker". I still refer to our long time elderly neighbors "Mr. and Mrs. Robbins" instead of "Sam and Valerie". Even the demanding Anderson guy at the end of a long driveway on my paper route who complained and never paid on time was "Mr." "Mr. A..H..."

Plank Walking

This morning I wobbled up on the sofa to execute a minor repair on our front window blind. Struggled with my footwork a bit. Amazing how something that was simple beyond thought in early Kennydale is a challenge these days.

It seems like we spent half our time carefully walking or climbing on narrow precarious substrate like the boom or (sometimes) rolling logs at the millpond or the railroad tracks. We frequently tried to walk the tracks, without stepping or falling off, from Kennydale Beach to Spencer's Lake Washington lot near the Bar B and sometimes we made it. Trails to May Creek were pretty easy but fallen tree and rock crossings required varying degrees of skill; and we generally had it, for easy wheeling just about anywhere. Just about.

There were, however, the Liberty ships anchored at what is now Gene Coulon Park - the concrete shoreside anchor blocks can still be observed there just north of the canoe launch and north restroom. These ships had been towed through the Ship Canal into Lake Washington after WWII for storage and a wait for salvage. They were linked deck to deck by planks waaaay above the water. Mostly the "big kids" spent time exploring these vessels and running from one to the other. Just once, though, I was with my brother Tiny and Vince Grace when they began this, needless to say, forbidden activity. In order to participate fully and keep up I was required to cross on one of these 12 or so foot long beams. I was told I "could do it, Mike", but if I "wouldn't" I "should" just go home. It was a scary deal alright. I did make it, side step by side step, but was sufficiently impressed with the situation that I decided I didn't want any more of THAT. Those guys weren't that much fun to hang with anyway. Thereafter I limited my plank walking to figurative and metaphorical circumstances. Until I climbed on that couch this morning.

Justice! Justice?

Over the years we had a lot of dealings with the Rogers boys - Jack, Don and Jimmy - and, to a lesser degree, their older sister. The Rogers lived across Meadow from our back field so we were close neighbors as well as classmates. A lot of interaction there and some good stories to tell ( and some definitely NOT to) about our love/hate relationship with these folks. One of the first involved their dad.

While we always had hassles with the kids and were leery about their mom, who may have had substance abuse issues or other problems, we actually liked Mr. Rogers, even if being a bit afraid of him. A supervisor at Pacific Car and Foundry in Renton - the "car shops" as they were commonly called - he seemed pretty easy going . He'd had an injury that resulted in a hook hand just like those you see in urban legend representations. Pretty scary, but Oan and I , 6 and 8 or something like that, decided to approach him anyway when we were feeling particularly aggrieved about some injustice Jack and Don had done us, the nature of which I can't even come close to recalling now. So we went to him with our story and hopes he "could do something about it". I'm not sure how we rationalized that this wasn't simply tattling, but we must have done, because even at that early age we viewed "telling" with contempt. Mr. Rogers wasn't fooled, though. He considered for a moment or two, rubbed his chin and opined as to how he guessed he'd "just have to cut their bloody fingers off." Oan and I agreed that that would be going too far. Just barely, but too far.

Game Games

We see a lot of wildlife in Kennydale these days, much more of most species than when I was growing up here. Deer regularly "visit" our garden and fruit trees; neighbors have semi-serious problems with raccoons; Stellars Jays and Eastern Grey Squirrels wage warfare over the unripe filberts in August. If sheer numbers were the metric, of course, Starlings, English Sparrows and Crows would, all by themselves, win the comparison many times over. In things biological, though, numbers aren't the only thing. What you want to have is diversity - sustainable populations of a lot of different kinds of critters to fill all the niches. I believe we had that in the 40's, 50's and 60's but it was hard to tell for sure because no more would some animal show its face than it would likely get shot at.

In those days there weren't any hard and fast rules about shooting. Some folks hunted deer in the May Creek Valley and we got an occasional ring neck pheasant in the back field. Pa would shoot robins with his .22 and hang them in the strawberry patch (along with twirling strips of tin foil) to discourage their illegal harvest. The .22 got a further workout on rats in the barn. Most kids had, or wanted to have BB guns - perhaps a future post topic, but my own experience with one is almost too painful and humiliating, still, to bring to mind long enough to write of it. So, in mid-century Kennydale, between the guns and the free-ranging dogs (another future post, maybe) any species was an endangered species! That certainly isn't true today. Our guns are registered, the dogs leashed and mellowed. Wild animals now are protected and they know it!

Papering Things Over

I knew it couldn't last. I was sure the Seattle Times would win the decades long competition between our two big metropolitan dailies. I suspected from the start the PI was a flash in the pan and after a hundred and thirty-some odd years, I was proved right. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer caved and its last delivery today came with a note that it had humiliatingly transferred its subscriber list to the Times, my old route paper. For the PI, papering things are over. An on-line version will continue, for awhile at least. I'll bet it's a flash in the pan.

Though I switched over to the PI for home delivery several years ago, mostly because I thought the Times wasn't playing fair when it gave up its historic afternoon edition and decided to go head to head with the PI in the morning, the Times was the McNeely's newspaper of choice. I grew up with it and my brothers and I had Times afternoon routes with varying degrees of success, excess and trauma. Those route stories are for other posts, but I recall here a vignette specific to the Times and our lifestyle that on reflection seems mildly interesting today.

In the 50's Seattle was a serious union town. Dave Beck, the notorious Teamsters boss started his rise here; crafts unions were in constant battle with employers; everyone knew what AFL-CIO was (American Federation of Labor- Congress of Industrial Organizations, a joining together of unions). Strikes of my dad's union, Machinist Local No. 79, were fairly routine and sometimes lasted quite awhile; we became somewhat resigned to them. When the Seattle Times went on strike, however, we knew a new kind of pain. We weren't able to keep up with the comics! What was going on with the many serial stories? I read them all and was VERY concerned. Here are just a few that come immediately to mind:

Terry and the Pirates
DickTracy
Mary Worth
Brenda Starr
Smilin' Jack - you never got to see anybody's face, only a profile
Li'l Abner - especially Daisy Mae (I'm pretty sure I would have like Blondie, too, but she was in the PI)
Lil' Orphan Annie
Mr. Milquetoast, The Timid Soul
Nancy
Major Hoople (Egad!)
Gasoline Alley - the characters actually aged, though I don't think anyone died

So I was wondering how we'd ever catch up on their exploits. Not to worry it turns out because when, after several weeks, the strike ended the paper published pages and pages of the missed comics completely bringing everything up to date. We could read a whole Dick Tracy story line at once! How cool was that? We had as many as a dozen pages of comics several days in a row to get things caught up. So the Times literally papered over that problem.

I still follow comics regularly. The story lines are a bit more obscure or subtle than in the old days and more socially relevant. Now that the PI is going down I need to find a way to keep up with Drabble, Sherman and his lagoon pals and the babe in 9 Chickweed Lane and her lame boyfriend. Guess I'll just have to go on line 'cuz the PI's papering is over.

Box 89, You Bet!

Before home mail delivery to xxxx Park Ave. No. Renton or , even earlier, to xxxx 104th Ave. SE in King County, there was Kennydale Post Office where you went to pick up your own damn mail. Kennydale PO was on the lower part of 33rd No. just up the street from the Salon on Lake Washington Boulevard (which used to be a local store, the root from which 7-11's sprang, I'll bet). The PO building still is there , converted now into an apartment. We were box 89.

Mail came to the Postmaster twice a day and it was a quick stop for my dad on his way home from work to pick up both deliveries. Sometimes I'd check in when going by there on my paper route to see if the afternoon mail had been late and Pa had missed it. So we had a pretty unremarkable drama free system almost all the time. Unlike with several other of our institutions in those vintage times, I can't remember doing anything criminal, humilating or disgusting in or around the Post Office. Strictly business. Except when I suspected something was coming in the post for ME! Early on, this would be stuff from the cereal box top market operated out of Battle Creek, Michigan; you know, so many box tops from Wheaties or Cheerios and a quarter for a secret de-coder ring. Later, I blush to confess now, it might be a letter (the root from which e-mail sprang, I'll bet) from a girl. On these special days, or series of days, I monitored postal activity assiduously to assure I would get first dibs. Lots of times I'd jog down to the PO (maybe 3/4 of a mile) to meet the first delivery and do it again in the afternoon for the second. Besides fulfilling my anticipation I needed to protect myself from teasing (the root from which trash talk and "ball breaking" sprang, I'll bet).

Box 89 eventually came to pass and the small town/rural culture in Kennydale was thereby diminshed some (the roots from which our engulfment by the City of Renton sprang, I'll bet).