Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: May 11th, 2014
Things at the new place were rather primitive when we first moved out, but Bob and I loved it. We had no idea that it was primitive. It was a paradise. I think that mom must have had a hard job doing everything that had to be done. As it turned out, pop’s own fences were no better than the fences that he had built for Grandpa JB. The cows just walked right through them. But this time he had another idea. He built an electric fence and then drove the cows into the fence so they would get a good electric shock and then they didn’t go through the fence any more for a couple of years.
During that first year, there was a lot of internal remodeling as I have already indicated. One thing, though, we all slept upstairs. I had a single bed, Bob had a crib, a yellow crib that was really neat. By bouncing on it, it slowly settled down onto the ground. Bob loved riding that crib down. Louise slept next to the folks in her bassinet. The first day out, Bob and I walked down to the bay, mom say us just as we disappeared. The tide was in, the water was warm, and mom came running after us, screaming all the way. The bay was off limits after that for years. During periods when there was a break in the weather, he shoveled a nice walk way for us down to the creek. It was over by where the swinging bridge was, past that giant alder tree. He set up a picnic table and chairs there and later in the summer, Bob, Louise and I could play in the creek and mom would watch us. He also built a little love seat in that giant stump that at that time was covered with roses. Uncle Dick and bulldozed out the turn around, but he also leveled the ground for a badminton court. Pop also took up archery at that time and he made Bob and me a neat bow and arrow set and bought himself a nice bow and set up targets by where the swimming pool was eventually was. He dug out some horseshoe pits because the Perrys loved horseshoes and set up a dart board. Mom told us we were never ever to play with those darts, so the first thing Bob and I did was sneak down the hill and play with the darts. It turned out that I hit Bob in the forehead and the dart stuck and we went up to mom who pulled it out and gave us a good scolding. But this was a wonderful time. For years after that, Bob and I always referred to the time when he was two and I was three as the great time in our lives.
But the war came. I barely remember Pearl Harbor. It did not make an impression on me. We listened to Gabriel Heater and his opening line: There’s bad news tonight, or There’s more bad news tonight. The fact is, the first two years of the war had plenty of bad news in it. I remember vividly when the Japanese conquered the Philippines, the Germans used gliders to take Crete, General Wainwright surrendered and the whole army spent the rest of the war in a Japanese prison camp. A Japanese submarine came up the Oregon coast, blasted the house of an old lady in Charleston and then lobbed something like 29 shells into the camp just outside Astoria. Dominic Megale was there at the time. He was to be our dentist later but at the moment, he was just a private. He said everybody was scared, jeeps were running around, the officers did not know what to do. They were all more dangerous to each other, more so than the Japanese shells, that turned out to do no damage. I remember the fall of Wake Island, it was a disaster. The navy came in and took over the airport that Grandpa JB had started to build. They came in with heavy machinery and built the airport in a matter of months. They took over the surrounding hills and made that whole area off limits. In the end there were about 5,000 men stationed there at the peak. Planes were flying constantly. Gold stars were going up on the board by the post office at an alarming rate. Rationing set it. We got our ration books at the Kentuck school house. That was an amazing school. It had about 18 students at the time from grades one through eight. The teacher was an old schoolmarm like you read about in books. She was about eighty years old, it was her first and last job, she had been there sixty years and could really teach the children how to read. I still have my last ration book, but everything was rationed, in particular gasoline. As you might expect during times like this, the black market flourished, but nobody talked about that. Uncle Dick joined the army air corps, grandma initially ran the farm for a while, and then hired somebody to take over the day to day running of the farm. In early 1943, she decided to sell out, but the place was in probate. Still, she moved into town, bought a house on the corner of sixth street just south of the Catholic Church, the house is still there, then she sold that and moved into an apartment house. She had difficulty getting the will probated. Finally, mom suggested she move out to our place. There will be more on that later.
When spring came the year of 1942, he took that old plow horse and plowed up the area for planting. They planted about two acres in vegetables. Horses are expensive and so the folks sold the horse. I was sorry about that, but pop was delighted. He couldn’t stand the thing anyway. It was fun to watch them plant, particularly the corn. Pop would dig a hole and shovel in some cow manure and mom would plant the seeds and move on to the next place. The put in roughly a third of an acre in corn, I would think,maybe a half an acre, then there were peas. The Barnes had put in some asparagus. It had finally matured and mom was delighted with that. It was over between the big maple tree and the stump where he had put in the love seat. Pop pretty much destroyed that patch. He hated asparagus anyway. After a couple of years, the asparagus surrendered. It was obvious that the house would not do and besides that outhouse was miserable. I hated it in the winter time, myself. Besides, the odor pretty much put you off anyway and those things are hard to keep clean. So pop decided to take the materials that had been designed for the in laws of the Barnes and use it to build on an addition. He worked all summer on that and at the same time,smoothed out that badminton court.
Building that addition was not so easy, either, because getting materials during the war was hard. Besides, he was working by himself. Not only that, but every Sunday, he would have people out. He was in the process of building a monster. That was typical of pop, and for that matter, Big John as well. They would both create a monster that they could not take care of. At least Big John had the good sense to sell his monster, but pop just kept creating.
To be continued