Portland, Oregon
1942 to 1945

30 April 2011

We lived at 806 NE Grand Avenue on the east side of Portland in this time. Our home was only a block away from the main north-south highway through Portland at that time.

Some random notes about living here

Sullivan’s Gulch about four or five blocks to the south where we would first experience “wildlife” in the form a ponds filled with frogs, tadpoles and other critters. I have no idea how we got there, but do recall the ponds and catching tadpoles to bring home and raise to see them turn into frogs that were then presumably returned to the wild.

Long walks to the north, to Broadway and a neighborhood store where we purchased milk and other daily needs. Milk bottles had a pinched neck that allowed the thick, yellow cream to separate as the bottle sat. A cold winter and the frozen milk pushing the cream and the paper bottle cap several inches above the top of the bottle. A refrigerator with a “bird-cage” on top that was in fact the condenser for the circulating refrigerant.

A dry yard to the north that we converted into a “Victory Garden” where we grew radishes, lettuce, beans, squash and perhaps sweet corn. This was during the war when we all experienced shortages and rationing of many goods as every activity was put into the war effort.

A walk to Holladay school that went past a “mansion” surrounded by a wrought iron fence above a concrete wall that enclosed the raised ground next to the sidewalk. The house was set in the center of the block. The house was home to one humongous Great-Dane dog that would charge down to the fence to observe/scare us as we walked past.

A Goodwill store on Broadway where National Geographic magazines were recycled, where I collected the entire series detailing birds of North America, the variety of dogs and cats that people raised. These are still in my possession in our basement. Some of them go back to the very early 1900s. Here is where I also learned a bit about the human body as did many boys and girls over the years – exploring the photographs from exotic places and societies around the world. The early issues included black and white images, in the 30s these shifted increasingly to color images, some photographs, other colored paintings.

South of us but a block west was “French Quarter” where the buildings came out over the side-walk supported by columns that came down to the ground next to the street. Along here, close to Burnside street was a curio shop with all kinds of oddities in the windows, two-headed snakes in fluid in a bottle, similar bottles containing two-headed calves. A variety of weapons, knives, guns and other oddities. I seem to recall visiting a similar store many years later along the waterfront in Seattle.

This part of Portland was often crowded with sailors on leave from the ships berthed along the waterfront, mostly on the west side of the river and up stream of the Burnside Street Bridge.

The C&H sugar sign on the waterfront across the river from us that had a bag pouring sugar out to fill a pyramid of lights. This was frequently turned off during the war to match up to the imposition of blackout rules on the city.
I also had dreams or nightmares of this time, sometimes I was falling through cluster after cluster of cottonballs, no sound, no feeling, no sense of being slowed, just smothered, lost in the cottony wasteland. Others were brilliant red and orange as fires swept around us set off by incendiary bombs dropped by the Japanese from balloons.

The ritual pledge of allegiance every morning in the class-rooms, the singing of popular songs such as “Don’t Fence Me In” and the nonsensical “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey, A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you? .” We also had daily prayer and were released several afternoons to attend religious classes away from the school. My sister and I went to some Methodist classes. Methodism was the “default” religious choice of our parents, though both eventually drifted to atheism later in life, most particularly my father.

My brother and I got caught playing with matches near the tennis courts on the street behind our flat. We had taken the matches from the kitchen and were setting little fires in the grasses and twigs we found along the fence of the tennis court. Mom and Dad found out about these capers and Dad took us to the basement, I think, where he had us each hold a white handkerchief which he set afire at one corner and forced us to hold till it had burned about half-way across the handkerchief. I remember sobbing violently the whole time and promising never to do this again.

Pigeons roosted on the eves and window ledges of our upstairs flat. They were messy and noisy as they cooed away in the morning. They raised their young on these window ledges in the center of the “U” formed by the wings of our flat at the back. We got some education in life here – the mating of the pigeons, the hatching and growth of the young and the death of the aged birds.

Behind us was Northwest Pacific Dental College. The class-room windows overlooked the place between the rear of our flat and that of the college. Students there were learning to fill teeth and to make false teeth and plates. Frequently the students would put the plaster casts outside on the window sill to dry, some of these would be knocked to the ground where Bill and I collected them and sometimes buried them. We had to dig them up to return to the students when they came looking for them.

We had a cold winter in Portland one winter with about 15 inches of snow, probably in the winter of 1944. That snow was unusually deep, probably about 15 to 20 inches.

The family often went to various parks on the east side and to Washington Park and the zoo on the west side. Trips to the zoo were special since it was clear across the city on the west side. The parks on the east side were far more accessible, we would often go to Laurelhurst Park where we would walk around the pond and take stale bread to feed the ducks that lived there. These were probably all domestic ducks that had been turned loose by families when the cute little ducklings turned into large, noisy difficult to manage ducks. They were mixed in color, some had spots of white in their otherwise Mallard-like plumage. All were larger than the wild Mallards. These ducks could be spread over the pond, but as soon as they saw a family arrive with children they would come swimming across the pond, sure of a free lunch from the family.

Street-cars or trolley cars were a part of Portland at that time. The bridge transfer came down Grand Avenue from somewhere to the north, perhaps Broadway. Just in front of our flat the cars turned onto Oregon Street so that they could cross the Steel Bridge into downtown Portland. My sister Mary and I would often ride the trolley across into downtown to go in and out of the five and dime stores (Woolworth’s, Ben Franklin, Newberry’s) and J.K. Gills stationary and book store. During the war I would spend a lot of time browsing through the booklets that had paper airplanes that could be cut out and glued into three dimensional models of the warplanes of that time. We also spent enjoyable hours at the main public library and the art museum. At one point Mom signed me up for an “art class” at the museum because I had begun to draw and to work with modeling clay. My recollection of the class was that it was extremely confining because I could not follow my own inclinations. I did not stick with the class for very long. This is perhaps where I developed a great antipathy toward teachers who insisted on a strict single interpretation or way of doing things.