Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: November 8th, 2014
I said that pop had saved money and had bought a car, which was true, but Uncle Ed reminded me that mom and pop actually borrowed Grandpa JB’s car for the honeymoon. That was because pop’s car was an old rattle trap and Grandpa JB did not think it would make it to anywhere, let alone to a nice honeymoon location. Before they left, pop found a nice, one bedroom apartment in North Bend for them to move into when they returned and so they were all set up. A short honeymoon, my recollection is that it lasted about two days, and they were back in North Bend so that pop could get back to work. When they got back though, they found that Grandpa Sam had already moved in and had taken over the bedroom. So, pop hung sheets around the outside porch and made up a bed outside and so for the next three months they slept on the porch and Grandpa Sam had the bedroom to himself. I think he probably wanted to see if the marriage would stick. It stuck, for 56 years is stuck, until pop died when his death did them part. In the middle of September, Grandpa Sam decided to move back to the Spokane-Cheney area. As he left, he paid mom the greatest compliment that he could: Well, he said, if John had to marry, and I suppose he did, I am glad that he married you.
He was a hard one to take care of and it was up to mom to take care of him. She was glad to see him go, if for nothing else, to have some privacy. Uncle Dick, though, was very unhappy that she had married. What are we going to do, he said, we have always been together. But he stayed on the farm, at least for a while. The store where pop was working, as I said, I believe the name was Dunham’s Grocery was sold to Safeway and pop did not like working for them. He got the opportunity to take over the store in Powers for a month and he seized on the chance. That was a risky move at that time. It was the fall of 1935 and jobs were hard to come by. But pop thought it was a good opportunity and so they went. Pop was a good salesman, he was an awesome salesman, he could sell anything. In those days, the stores were small. You would go into the store with your list, hand it to the store keeper and he/she would find what you wanted and then hand them to you. That is the way it was at Granstrom’s Grocery in Glasgow when we moved out there. You handed Granny Granstrom your list and she got the stuff. You had no choice. Well, pop went in and he made up everything, put prices on them and let the people choose for themselves. The result was amazing. He double the take in one month. The fellow came back and he was furious. He thought pop was just trying to show him up. So that opportunity of future employment thankfully vanished or we would have ended up down there in Powers. They came back to the Coos Bay and started to look for another job.
At at that point, another opportunity opened up. Things had been going very well for Grandpa JB. He was the chairman of the board of the Coos Bay Mutual Creamery and was spreading out, bought a couple pieces of property, increased his herd and his milk production and he needed help and so he offered pop a job on the farm. Pop moved out on the farm with mom, of course, and he started farming. He hated it. He was not good at it. He was miserable. He would build a fence and the cows would walk through it and whole herds would head down the highway. There was one cow that he particularly hated. That thing kicked him all over the barn, it had a number, if I remember right, it was old Number 10, and old number ten was one cow with a mind of her own. In the meantime, mom found herself pregnant, so pop was pretty much stuck there on the farm. When she was seven months along, though, she noticed that her belly never pooched out like that of other expectant mothers and so she went to the doctor to see what was wrong. The doctor examined her and said, “You are not pregnant, you will never be pregnant, you cannot have children.” Mom was crushed. She had so wanted to have children, she had always taken every opportunity possible to baby sit the children of other married couples and now she could not have any. They decided to make the best of it.
Pop decided that he would start up his own grocery store and repeat his experience from Powers. So, they quit the farm, much to pop’s relief and moved back to North Bend. The grocery store, though, was in Marshfield (Coos Bay) not too far from where the Blossom Gulch school is today. It was called Johnny’s grocery. He was very successful, too, in getting merchandise moving, he sold a lot, but lost money. Mom helped out and loved it. The main reason was, the Perrys, and particularly Aunt Berchion would come in and take what they wanted and needed and expect not to have to pay for it, after all there was so much there and pop did not need it and she already had two children, Don and Marlene. So after two months it became apparent that they were not going to make it. Then they heard that Pacific Fruit and Produce was looking for a truck driver. They wanted somebody who could drive and make deliveries. Pop had never driven a truck in his life, but headed on over there and told them that that he was an ace, number one truck driver. In those days, trucks had a couple of gear shifts and there was a lot to do just to run them, also there was no power steering. So, he went over early in the morning and got somebody to show him how things worked, was able to convince the boss when he showed up for work that he could drive, and got the job.
In those days, Pacific Fruit and Produce was the biggest whole saler on the West Coast and second biggest in the nation. The plant in Marshfield was huge, employing over fifty five people. They even had their own mechanics to work on the trucks and change the oil and so on and he convinced them to take care of his car which turned out to have the consequence that he never thought cars needed any work and he pretty much destroyed cars after a while. We come by our worthless approach to cars naturally, therefore. This turned out to be a successful move for pop. He stuck with it. Mom in the meantime kept the house, did her best to make things nice at home, visited her parents and Uncle Dick a lot, and enjoyed life.
To be continued.