Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: October 31st, 2013
After school started, pop enrolled for his senior year in Marcus High School. Marcus is a small town up close to the Canadian border on the Columbia. After the Grand Coulee Dam was built, the old town of Marcus was inundated by the lake behind the dam and the town was moved up on the hill overlooking the old town which is no longer visible except during certain times when the water is low. Pop enjoyed that year. He participated in sports. His father did not approve but no longer tried to stop him. The Columbia river up there froze over that winter and they went ice skating on the river, built big fires on the shore, enjoyed themselves. He also got involved in a dance band. They played all over. A large smelting plant was built in Trail on the Canadian side and they played for its dedication. The smoke stack was so large that the people danced inside it.
They often played in Canada, but they also played throughout upper central Washington including where Bing Crosby had once entertained before he became a big star in Hollywood. It was also during the time of prohibition and so there was a lot of booze being smuggled over the line. It turned out that those old cars had a wheel base exactly the size of the train tracks and so people would remove the tires for the car, wait until no trains were coming, and then drive the cars at night over the railroad tracks to Washington. There was a fellow in the band, Carl Bedinger, who was the son of the richest man in town, enormously fat, a boozer among other defects, who played the bass drum in their band. This was the beginning of the era of the big bands so you had many different kinds of instruments. Carl eventually married a girl named Bertha, originally a good friend of Aunt Noma and then later a good friend of Aunt Berchion. We will hear more about here in the meantime. But at the moment, he was married to her, but once when they were leaving a place where they had played, Carl fell down a flight of stairs and his drum broke and it was full of whiskey bottles. The band was horrified. They could have all ended up in jail. But that seemed to be an old story. There was plenty of boot legging going on.
Pop loved that band. They would play as long as they had agreed to and then start to pack their instruments. The people would take up a collection and pay them to play on and they would, often until the wee hours of the morning. The people in that era seemed to have more stamina than they do now, they certainly drank a lot more. You did not have to worry in those days about being arrested for drunken driving of such things. That was still the way it was when I was in college and later. If you got in a wreck and were drunk, it was not your fault. It couldn’t be, you were not responsible for your actions. You were after all dead drunk. If you were caught weaving down the road, the policeman was more likely than not to tell you to go home and sleep it off. Ah yes, those were the good old days, the police were a lot more forgiving than they are now.
We used to have pop’s letters from sports from that era, but they have all been lost. Nevertheless, his senior year was a good one and so was the following summer. He then got an offer of a full ride to play football for Cheney Normal. That school is now Eastern Washington State University, but in those years was mainly involved in training teachers. Every school, big or small, had a football team in those years, but getting an athletic scholarship was not all that usual, so this was quite an honor. Pop was delighted and reported when he was supposed to to play. He kept that letter for years, I once saw it when they still lived in the lower place but it has long since disappeared. At any rate, he went there, started practice, had no trouble making the team. In those years, you did a lot of just plunging into the line, the forward pass was not as well developed as it is now, and if you had a speed demon that could occasionally run around the other team, that was a big plus. So, pop was really a desirable commodity. One day, before school started and right in the middle of practice, Grandpa Sam walked out on the field and said, “Come on, John, I have a line on a gold mine in California. We’re heading out.” And so pop, walked off the field, put on his clothes, got behind the wheel of the car and they headed out.
One last thing about the Last Dutchman Gold Mine. There was a man who apparently located the Peralta map of the mine and set out to find it. This was in the mid 1930-s. His name was Ruth. He was looking for the Weaver’s Needle and asked a couple of sour doughs where it was and let it slip that he had a map of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine and he thought it was legitimate. A few months later, he was found with two bullet holes in his head. The map was gone, but scrawled on a piece of paper were the words, Veni, Vidi, Vici (I cam, I saw, I conquered. Those are words the Julius Caesar wrote at the end of the Gallic wars. That is the only hint that he may have found something. He was neither the first nor the last who was murdered while looking for the mine. But this is the last that I will say about the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. I would say more, but I don’t know any more.
To be continued.