Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: November 5th, 2013

We left pop walking off the practice field with his father and heading South to investigate this prospective gold mine in Southern California.  It was actually a terrible thing that grandpa Sam did.  Pop had always wanted to be a coach, preferably in high school.  He never went to college.  But he was a coach at Saint Monica’s grade school and Coos Catholic.  He was extremely successful, gradually beating the teams from schools with established programs from schools with far more students than he had.  In the beginning there were B schools (that is the smaller schools such as Bunker Hill, Coos River, Charleston, Empire, Saint Monica’s, and so on and his teams eventually dominated that league) and then later in the league with the larger schools.  He was so successful that when Bill Borcher left Marshfield to coach at the University of Oregon, Marshfield High School started to explore the possibility of his being an assistant football coach and the head basketball coach at Marshfield.  But then it was discovered that he did not have a college degree and so that did not happen.

     At any rate, the two of them headed South.  The year was 1930.  Pop’s older sister, Berchion, had her first child, our cousin, Don Perry, who later played a role in our lives, and his second sister, Noma, was pregnant with her only child, Alice Pauline, whom all called just plain Pauline.  The depression was in full swing and prohibition was still going strong.  Al Capone had been thrown in jail but organized crime was really coming into its own.  Well, they got down to Southern California and discovered that the gold mine was really nothing, there was no gold, only a hope for gold.  Later it would turn out that there was no gold.  But grandpa Sam did get swindled down there.  In those days, when you wrote something, you dipped your pen into a small bottle filled with ink, the ink well, and wrote a couple of words, then did it again.  There was an great invention that had taken place called a fountain pen where you pulled the ink up into your pen and then could write a couple of pages.  Of course, the ink did not dry very well so you used a blotter.  Well, grandpa bought a formula for quick dry ink and it really worked.  One of the main ingredients was sulfuric acid which you got from old car batteries.  Pop was so mad that grandpa had bought that stuff that he said they would have to pay their way home through sales of it.  Well, they hit all the big offices in every town up the coast, that meant of course, municipal offices, police offices, universities, and so on, and it sold like hot cakes.  Even pop couldn’t believe how well it sold.  The problem was, you pulled that up into your fountain pen and it ate up the insides of your pen.  Those pens were not cheap either.  A good fountain pen cost $25 and if you figure that the average worker got $2/day, you see that it would cost the average work two weeks wages to earn enough to buy such a thing.  Well, they would move into town, hit all the big offices and then get moving as fast as they could to the next county, sell some more.  They were really raking it in.  They got back to Washington, but this was so lucrative that they decided to head over to Moscow, Idaho where there was a big university and also a number of other offices.  So, they got there, mixed up a batch of the stuff, and started to sell it.  Pop was a great salesman, he could sell anything.  I watched him sell produce for Pacific Fruit and Produce when he worked for them and it was amazing how well he did.  So, anyhow, he was selling this stuff at a furious rate when suddenly Grandpa Sam showed up and said, we have to get out of here fast, the cops are on our tail, so they dropped everything, evidence included, jumped into the car and got back over the state line into Washington.  They never sold it again and I never knew the formula.  It is now all irrelevant.

     So, it was back to Marcus, bumming around, playing in the dance band, having fun with friends.  Every nickel pop made went to grandpa and he decided what pop needed so he was always too broke to get into too much trouble.  But he was going nowhere. As it turned out, grandpa had two sisters living in Spokane.  One was our Aunt Molly, who was a school teacher, and the other was our Aunt Elisabeth.  Aunt Elisabeth had her own radio program for a while where she told and read stories for children.  She had had a daughter herself.  Aunt Molly never married.  Grandpa Sam, incidentally, wrote letters for people who could not write and read letters to people who could not read and in those days there was a lot of illiteracy, so he did that.  But Aunt Molly worried about her nephew and the fact that he was going nowhere. 

To be continued.