Relative Appreciation

When I was a kid, major new acquisitions were nowhere as easy or common as they are now. If someone got a new car it was required to either drive around to the relatives to show off or call folks to come see. Same applied to appliances and the first TV's. In our extended family camping for hunting and fishing were big deals and we were always trying to upgrade equipment. I remember when my uncle Charley and aunt Jane bought a "just new on the market" Coca Cola ice chest/cooler . It was about the size of your standard issue 24 quart styrofoam job today; made of galvanized sheet metal with a tray inside and bottle open riveted to one corner. Bright red with raised white "Coca Cola" lettering. So, of course, we all had to head on up to Hazelwood to inspect and ooh and aah over the thing. Everyone wanted one of those babies! And it wasn't too long before everyone did.

Can you 'here' me now?

In the Kennydale neighborhood of my youth we didn't make appointments or play dates. We'd just head to our pal's back yard door and yell for him/her. Just yell their name: "Ooaaannn!"; "Mmmiike!" and they would come out. No need to call ahead or knock and risk being faced by a mother, sister or some other unrequired person. The yellee would then come out to see "what's up" having gotten all domestic (non)permissions, warnings, etc. out of the way inside, sans yeller's presence (sometimes it was "you go out and tell him you can't come out 'til you..."; sometimes, "we're eating"; whatever). This simple, effective means of communication was used a lot in our immediate circle of friends. Not sure how widespread it was beyond our block. Somehow, I don't believe this would go over very well in our culture now, perhaps partly because kids don't "go out to play" as often or in the same way (we didn't "hang out"; we did stuff). Oan still drops in at the back door, but he quit yelling awhile ago.

Dirty Rotten Pinkoes

Clint Eastwood wasn't the only famous guy to put Kennydale on the map. Joe Robel may not be a household name anymore, but back in the paranoid "red scare" days everyone knew that he was one of several members of the Communist Party around here and that he was involved in an epic fight with with the Justice Department.

Like my dad, he was a machinist and they were casual friends, loaning to and borrowing from one another from time to time. My older brothers, Jim and Tiny occasionally did jobs for the Robels. Kathy Robel was prominent in my circle of younger friends (read: within one year of me; as opposed to my elders like Oan, Ray Pickle and Jimmy Chapman - as much as two whole years older).

The Robel family lived at the northeast corner of 36th and Meadow, one of the few older home in Kennydale that has now been restored rather than bulldozed (though what was their property has been subdivided with new construction on both sides now). They were close, loyal to one another and progressive.

Robel was a Communist, perceived to be a very bad thing then. He worked at the Naval Shipyards and at the peak of the hysteria, when writers, directors and actors in Hollywood were getting blacklisted; when job applications had a question: "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"; when Hoover and McCarthy were running rampantly amuck; when we were deploying Nike missiles on Cougar Mountain to shoot down the Russian bombers we were sure were coming to attack the Boeing plants, he was fired from his job. The basis for it was that no Communist should work at a defense facility. He fought the dismissal in a legal wrangle that went on for several years, all the time continuing his work pending court decisions, and eventually got to the Supreme Court. He was victorious and vindicated there.

I have always been a little proud that it never occurred to us kids to discriminate against, pick on or talk trash about any of the Robels. He might have been a Communist, but he was also a pretty nice guy and his kids were our friends. This wasn't a hard choice for us. There wouldn't have been serious repercussions whatever we did.

Not so for the adults. If they were too supportive of Joe they risked being "fellow travelers". My dad straddled. He was always friendly and welcomed Robel when he came to visit, but also declined to provide supportive affidavits or testimony or become involved in the court case in any way.

There's one other curious link between Joe Robel and the McNeely's. My transient orchard worker brother Jim, aka "Okanogan Red" for the color of his hair, who had worked for the Robels and who, if not an actual Communist, had fairly pronounced leftward leanings of his own , was run over and killed by a train at the King Street Station in 1983. A few years later Joe Robel wandered away from his home in north Seattle onto the railroad tracks nearby and was hit by a train. I wonder if a conspiratorial campaign against Kennydale's dirty rotten pinko reds was unrelenting, consistent in its methods and, in the end, diabolically successful?

Rain, rain, come today!

Here we are (December 26, 2008) waiting for warm and wet weather to wash away our weeklong accumulation of snow and ice. Not the first time I've hoped the sky would open up.

Used to pine for rain every weekend during the winter when it was "pruning season". We had LOTS of apple trees in the back field when I was a lad - Kings, Gravensteins, Astracans, Transparent to name a few. The Spitzenberg by the Bergman's fence is the last of the apple orchard on the place (large, almost expired pear tree in front is an heirloom, too). There were also cherries and prunes, but as far as I was concerned these were low maintenance and user friendly because only the apples had to be pruned every year.

My dad was an ambitious, hard working guy in those days and on weekends in the winter there were always projects going on, trimming the trees among them. Every weekend he'd be out on the ladder snipping away and we'd be running around picking up suckers and hauling them to a burn pile. It seemed like all day, but probably wasn't. Unless it rained.

Pa didn't really like working wet and would find something else to do if it did. Too many bad weekends, though, with spring approaching it had to be done (HE sez) no matter what. A silver lining in this borderline child abuse was the brush fires we had when the work was done.

Pa was a pretty stern taskmaster, but also generous with the hot dogs and marshmallows. Sometimes in the afternoon looking at the neatly shaped trees there was even a grudging sense of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment. But I still "wished it would rain" tomorrow.

Clint and me

I note in the paper this morning (December 27, 2008) that Clint Eastwood has (again) a couple of movies being touted as potentially Oscar-worthy. That's fine, but around here his Hollywood career is a mere sideline since it became widely known that as a young man in the very early'50's he was a lifeguard at Kennydale Beach.

There was a Renton Recorder telephone interview awhile back where he said that he certainly remembered those days: "It was a pretty rural area then. Folks were real enthusiastic about swimming, especially the kids. I don't think we ever lost anyone so I guess I did ok."

Well, I recollect those lazy hazy days, too. I almost drowned there when I was five, maybe six, teaching myself to swim so he didn't have to save me later on. During the summers of his era (sometimes our "summer" began in April or May) we'd trek on down there two or three times a day. After laying in the sand for a bit we'd say, "I'm going in" and head for the water. Twenty or so swimming minutes later: "I'm going in". Back to the beach to tan and burn.

The rest of the time we just ran around being "real enthusiastic". Yeah, that's right: When you add all the stuff Clint did to my activities, together we put Kennydale Beach on the map!

It was hard, ciderin'

In 1957 I got a brand new 1957 Lambretta 3-wheel scooter upon which we mounted a home custom made marine plywood box. I was 15 (so we're illegal here already) and the plan was to abandon my bike in favor of this exotic vehicle to ease the delivery of newspapers on the two Seattle Times routes I had gotten myself into (total about 185 daily and Sunday customers).

Well, I did that with some mixed success and you will no doubt hear more later about my paper route adventures. Here, though, a few words concerning one of my after after hours scooter-based initiatives.

In August or September of '57 a bunch of us decided to make apple cider and let some of it "harden". Because the potential reward was very attractive, it wasn't difficult to recruit a teen crew from two of my several social circles. We motored around Kennydale, picked up apples from a bunch of different sources and carried them in the scooter paper box to a central cider press location at the Robels where we conducted a press party. This was in the days when everyone had a few trees and apple maggots weren't yet a problem. So we had a good inventory of quality raw material.

Truth be told, we finished with about 20 gallons of pretty fair fresh cider in old vinegar jugs. Everyone got a few to take home. So that was good. In addition, and more to the point, Oan and I took three extra bottles to ferment and distribute at a later time. Because it was still pretty warm we hid them under some hay in the nesting boxes of an old chicken coop at the back of Nimtz' property (actually, this coop was at the middle of the fenceline across the back yard of Tom Carrolli's cottage -Fred Eckholm's, then - where your mother and I lived from 89/90 to late '93.

Oan's property, the coop, fence, Tom, Fred and the little house are all gone now, but WE'RE ok). Anyhoo... at first we checked almost daily on the cider hardening process and were mildly disappointed with the (non) progress, but later on when the brew rapidly turned green and foamy we figured we had it made, so to speak. Not so. Foul tasting vinegar. As I recall we escaped detection by our elders but had wasted several gallons of hard earned cider and had some explaining to our collaborators to do. It was hard, that ciderin'!

Early buds get the warm

Was out pruning back the forsythia by the front porch yesterday and noticed the buds are already starting to swell. When they do that, maybe even BEFORE they do that, it's possible to bring them in the house and put them in a watered vase to force a (very) early bloom. Until they do open up, though, they look exactly like what they are, a bunch of twisted twigs.

With some evergreen foliage - Oregon Grape or Camelia, for example - this can make a cozy winter fresh flower arrangement. Can't remember a time of my life when I wasn't aware of this little known fact. Not everyone was, however.

In fifth grade I brought a bunch of these to my teacher, Miss MacMillan, and spoke the equivalent of, "forsooth, the fair forsythia forya; put this fruit jar of water full of sticks on the heat register by the window and in a week or so you'll have a nice yellow bouquet". She was skeptical, maybe even a bit reluctant, but, probably not wanting to hurt my feelings, she did it.

It only took a few days. On Monday morning she was surprised and amazed. They were in full bloom. Should have had some greens in there, but I wasn't sophisticated then like I am now. Beyond thanking me for my thoughtfulness Miss MacMillan never said more to me about this. During teacher conferences, however, she related the whole incident, including her initial doubtfulness, to Ma. Pussywillows are next. Of course there aren't any pussywillows around here anymore.

P.S. You cannot force apples, no matter how hard you try.