It started in Little Chicago in the late 50s. I lived in a small house on the south side of Kelso (they called it “Little Chicago”) in the state of Washington. Our house was small, but on a double lot on the corner, and it sat back a little ways from the road. We had a small orchard in our yard. We had apples and pears and cherries and plum trees in the yard, with a burning barrel in the corner of the yard. Across the street there were berry bushes, and down the trail was a slough.
It was a two bedroom house with somewhat of a garage next to the house and a wood pile next to it. The front walk and doorway started with a porch. There was a door made of wood and glass. The glass was small squares. Past the door was an entry way into a wooden door that led to the front room with a bedroom on each end, a kitchen behind the front room, and to the left was the bathroom. Off the kitchen in back was a rear door that led to the garage and a gravel driveway. On the same side as the driveway, the neighbors had two huge St. Bernard dogs and a chain link fence.
My father drove taxi and my mother stayed home with 3 kids, and my mother was pregnant with my younger sister. I was 2; my brother was 8; and my older sister was 10 when I remember living in Little Chicago. We had a black and white t.v. with an antenna, and you could, if you were lucky, maybe get 3 channels. Those were fuzzy and usually you didn’t watch shows all the way through. That was 1960 or 1961. I remember watching Wanda the Witch, Howdy Doody, Romper Room, and Captain Kangaroo, some cartoons, and old movies.
My father came home and lots of times fell asleep on the couch. One morning he was lying on the couch and died, and his upper body slid off the couch from his waist up. My mom tried to keep us kids in our rooms, but we all seen our father lying there, which forever stuck in my mind. My father had a heart attack at age 31. He had an enlarged heart from rheumatic fever when he was a child, at age 13, I believe.
All my memories of my father were good ones.
The Columbus Day Storm was about a year later. I was told my brother was holding on to metal garbage cans, trying to get them in the garage, and the wind was blowing him down the road. I was looking at the front window, and everything was blowing around and there was a roaring from the wind.
I remember we had an old wood stove and that’s what heated the house. There was a wood pile next to the stove, and huge rats were caught in traps, daily. As soon as you heard the snap of the trap, my brother would run over there, and if it wasn’t dead, hit it with a log and pack it outside.
Around 1962, my mother met my soon to be new stepfather. She was a single mother, trying to raise 4 young kids, one a babe in arms. Soon thereafter, my mom married my stepfather and we moved to Longview and the Highlands. I was about 4 years old then, and The Beatles were hot. My first memories of the new house were of pictures of the Fab Four on the wall of my sister’s new bedroom upstairs. My brother and I had the other bedroom upstairs.
The house was laid out like this: in the front of the house there was a walkway that led to the stairs and a porch. Bushes were on either side of the walkway and the porch. Facing the porch was a long driveway made of cement going to a garage and the back door.
Inside the front door was the living room, to the left a fireplace, to the right was a glass door and the other half of the living room. The next room was the bathroom, then the downstairs bedroom, then next the kitchen and the doorway to the upstairs two bedrooms. In the kitchen you could either go back into the front room or out back through the kitchen door to the laundry room and the outside door in back that went to the garage or the patio to the right. On the left was the driveway.
From age 4 to about 17 years old, I lived there in the highlands.
—Randy Long
https://primitiveentertainment.wordpress.com
http://readadamnbookwithrfy.blogspot.com
https://schoolofmadnessastruth.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/richard.f.yates/
No comments:
Post a Comment