The end of World War II in 1945 brought many changes to the home front. Germany surrendered in May. In August, the world’s first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan gave up. Living in the farmlands of the Sacramento Valley, I do not remember a lot about the celebrations that took place. I do remember that shortly thereafter, we were loaded up and off on a new adventure.
Migration from farm to city marked the American experience from the beginning of the Industrial Age. That movement accelerated during WWII. Although he would not have thought of it in exactly those terms, my dad determined to do the exact opposite. He decided to get as far away from city life as he could, own his own piece of land, and farm full-time. With the war over and the government’s control of his movements ended, Dad set about to fulfill his dream.
In short order, he sold our little farm in Chico, California, and quit his job at the air base. He loaded our belongings into the back of a 1937 Chevrolet pickup truck, loaded Mom and the three of us kids into the cab, and headed north. The young hobo of the depression had traded his knapsack in for a truckload of family and possessions. But he was determined to live by his own rules nonetheless.
Dad drove, Mom sat on the right side holding baby sister Deanne. I sat in the middle, straddling the gear shift lever. Little brother Wes variously stood and lay down at Mom’s feet. Our route over the Sierras remains unknown to me. I do remember stopping at a wayside, perhaps around Lake Almanor, for lunch. A cool breeze wafted through towering Ponderosa Pines, a welcome relief from the summer heat of the Sacramento Valley. The scent of the pines, combined with the delicious pan-fried pheasant Aunt Marie had packed in our lunch hamper, remains with me to this day.
We pressed on to Alturas, a small ranching center in the northeast corner of California. We arrived in the late afternoon. The town was in a festive mood with banners stretched across the main street announcing its annual fair and rodeo. Cowboys and cowgirls, afoot and horseback, lined the streets and sidewalks. We found this all very exciting until we discovered that there was no lodging available. The war was over, and it was time to celebrate. People coming out of the hills and valleys surrounding the town had taken every room available.
Lakeview, Oregon, is about 55 miles north of Alturas. It was dark by the time we got there. It too was full up with the overflow crowd from its neighbor.
With the aid of a flashlight, Dad found a dot on the map about 85 miles north of Lakeview called Wagontire. We passed through the dark, starry night until a small sign and darkened buildings announced our destination. A gas pump, a café, and living quarters for the owners made up the entire town. A lighted window in the living quarters indicated that someone was still awake. Dad knocked on the door with the intention of asking if we could camp in their parking lot.
Perhaps it was learned behavior from his hobo days, or perhaps it was just in his makeup. My dad always exuded an air of quiet confidence and honesty. I like to think it was the latter. Anyway, he explained our plight to the man of the house. The man looked us over, invited us in, and put us up for the night. Who knows how often the Wagontire proprietors were called upon to tender such an act of charity along that lonely stretch of highway? I can only attest to this one event. And I have no way of knowing if any money changed hands. I am sure that we patronized their café before we departed.
That’s just the way things were done out in the country, on the home front, in 1945.
The author, w/Beechcraft T-34 Mentor trainer in the background. Naas Saufley Field, 1957.
The Nez Perce tribe called it the Land of Winding Waters. When the late nineteenth-century European immigrants arrived, they dubbed it the American Alps. It is that jumble of scenic mountains and valleys that make up the northeast corner of Oregon.
At the end of World War II, my dad loaded our family of five and all our belongings into a 1937 Chevy pickup and moved us from Chico, California, to one of those scenic little alpine valleys. I started third grade there in a one-room school, with about 20 other kids, grades one through eight.
Pine Valley had managed to survive the first 45 years of the twentieth century without yielding much. Farmers still tilled and harvested with horses, and mounted cowboys moved the livestock around. Dad bought a ranch about eight miles from the main town of Halfway, and that was home until I graduated from high school in 1955.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, we got our first tractor. It was a little Ferguson. I loved that tractor. Unlike a team of horses, you did not have to feed it, harness it, put up with its cantankerous behavior, or scoop its poop. It would not kick you, or bite you, or balk. When you wanted it to go, you simply mounted up, put it in gear, pulled the throttle lever back, released the clutch, and off you roared.
High school was a game for me. It provided welcome relief from the drudgery of ranch work. I played football, participated in Future Farmers of America (FFA), joined the debate team, and tipped over outhouses on Halloween. Even so, I was glad to see it end when our class of seven students finally graduated.
I enrolled at Oregon State College and lasted two quarters until my savings ran out. Working my way through college, washing dishes held little attraction, so I joined the Navy.
Naval Training Center (NTC) boot camp in San Diego was hardly a vacation of sunshine and beaches. But nothing they threw at me could compare to ten hours in the hot summer sun, bucking bales. Besides that, it was finite. I knew it would be over in six weeks.
Toward the end of boot camp, my company, along with several others, was assembled in a large hall and presented with a series of timed tests. The results of the General Classification Test/Arithmetic Reasoning Inventory (GCT/ARI) tests would determine the level of training we qualified for after graduation.
When we reassembled to learn our test results, the announcer started naming the recruits who had qualified for officer training. I was surprised to hear my name called. Those old country schoolmarms must have done something right. I could select either Officer Candidate School (OCS) or Naval Aviation Cadet (NAVCAD) training. I seized on the chance to fulfill a lifelong secret desire to be a pilot. Following an intensive screening process, I reported to the seat of naval aviation, Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola, Florida.
Preflight was 16 more weeks of boot camp, only considerably more intensive than anything NTC San Diego had to offer. It finally ended, and I started Primary Flight Training flying the Beechcraft T34 Mentor. I survived the familiarization phase (Riding in the back seat while an instructor pilot performs a full regimen of aerobatic maneuvers) without puking, then learned basic maneuvers and started landing practice. Every day was an exciting new challenge.
During an early session of shooting touch-and-go landings (Landing and taking off without stopping), I entered the final wide of the landing approach path. While trying to figure out how to correct things, I heard the word “power” from my backseat instructor over the intercom (IC). I reacted quickly and pulled the throttle back just like I had on the old Ferguson. The ensuing silence was deafening.
The throttle took on a life of its own and slammed forward. “I’ve got it,” the instructor yelled into the IC as the engine roared back to life. He took over, flew the airport landing pattern, and set us on the ground.
During the long walk to the debriefing room, my rattling on about the difference between a tractor throttle and an airplane throttle fell on deaf ears.
The debrief was very brief. “You could have killed us up there,” the instructor stated as he handed me my first down.
No more needed to be said. The message was clear. This was not a game. What we were doing was real. Few of life’s lessons would ever be so clear. I was 19 years old and growing up fast.
Final note: I completed training and earned my Wings of Gold as a designated Naval Aviator in June of 1958, three months after my twenty-first birthday.
A lot of the social interaction in the novel War No More takes place in and around the Hotel Pend Oreille. The model for the hotel is the historic Hotel Charbonneau, now a National Historic Place.
The Hotel Charbonneau was originally constructed in 1912 by Charles and Dora Charbonneau (architects PJ Young and Charles Charbonneau). During the first half of the 20th century, Priest River and the Hotel Charbonneau, which is located one block away from where the train station used to be, was a popular stopping-off point for people traveling to nearby Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint, and Priest Lake. In 1920, Dora Charbonneau added a brick addition onto the south side of the hotel to accommodate more guests. After the brick addition was built, the Hotel Charbonneau boasted 27 guest rooms with more than half of them having their own private bathrooms; an extravagant luxury at that time.
The Charbonneau operated as a hotel/boarding house until the late 1980s, when it was abandoned and risked being condemned. In 1991, the Priest River Restoration and Revitalization Committee (PRRRC), a local non-profit group composed entirely of volunteers, took control of the Hotel Charbonneau and saved it from complete deterioration. Among the PRRRC’s accomplishments was having the Hotel Charbonneau added to the National Register of Historic Places (11/19/1991), which protects the historic structure for future generations.
You can see the Hotel Charbonneau in the 1914 photo above on the left. The photo was taken before the brick addition was built. https://hotelcharbonneau.com/history.html
The following pictorial shows the hotel and surroundings as they exist today. War No More is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/War-No-More-Robert-LaRue-ebook/dp/B0GC9MKK7N free on Kindle Unlimited or $3.99 to buy, $14.99 for the paperback. Check it out. (Photos by the author.)
Hotel Charbonneau (Fictional Hotel Pend Oreille in War No More) as it appears today.
Abandoned filling station (Seaton’s Garage in the novel).
National Register of Historic Places placard at the entrance of the hotel.
The railroad tracks still run by, but the depot is long gone.
But they still saw logs at the mill across the river.
I’ll always remember the summer of ’52, the year we built the dam at Fish Lake. It changed my life forever.
I grew up on a ranch in a small valley at the southern foot of Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. We raised cattle and farmed the land to feed them. Except for school, my world was that ranch until the summer of ’52—the year I turned fifteen.
I knew some of the history of my world. The Nez Perce Indians made their home among the peaks and valleys of the Wallowa Mountains until the Nez Perce War of 1877. The Indians put up a ferocious fight, but the U.S. Army ultimately won. Chief Joseph famously declared, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,” and the tribe was shipped off to Oklahoma.
The Nez Perce called their home the Land of Winding Waters. After their removal, Oregon Trail pioneers rushed in and began farming the land. Their crops needed water, so they built dams and ditches to capture every drop they could find in the streams and lakes of the Land of Winding Waters.
They named one of the high-country lakes Fish Lake. In the 1880s, they erected an 800-foot-long earthen dam along with a spillway and headgate made of logs and planks across the lake’s natural outlet. Fish Lake was still supplying irrigation water for our neighbors and us in 1952.
Through the years, this structure was known to fail, flood the canyons below, and leave the irrigated fields dry. An often-repeated story tells of a band of 2,000 sheep drowned during one such dam burst. Fear of another failure, followed by a year without water, loomed over us.
From the time I was about ten, I shouldered a shovel each spring and joined my dad and the other ranchers when we cleaned and repaired the maze of ditches, creeks, and dams that carried the water to our fields. Crawling around on moss-slick logs repairing Fish Lake Dam presented a persistent, dangerous challenge. After one such repair, the assembled ranchers decided they needed a new dam.
U.S Soil Conservation Service engineers designed the new dam and assigned a project engineer. Labor was to be provided by the landowners. My dad volunteered me as our laborer. I jumped at the chance. Any excuse to get off the ranch and try something new was good by me. Armed with some food, a bedroll, a pup tent, and a fishing pole, I became a member of the Fish Lake Dam construction crew.
I joined a small tent camp where the crew stayed. The crew consisted of the SCS project engineer, an equipment owner/operator, his wife, who served as camp cook, their two preteen kids, and two other landowner laborers in their twenties. Other workers came and went as the job progressed. Some stayed, and others commuted from the nearest town, Halfway, 20 miles of dirt roads and almost an hour away.
The crew was clearing overgrowth from the old dam when I got there. The other two laborers felled the bigger trees and bucked them into truck-ready logs using an old Mall two-man chainsaw. My job was choker setter. A choker is a heavy cable you wrap around the butt of a log and hook to a caterpillar tractor that drags it to a log deck. The log can make unpredictable moves and slam you if you don’t pay attention. I paid attention. When the trees were cleared, the equipment operator brought in a bulldozer and pushed the remaining tree stumps, small trees, and underbrush into slash piles for later burning.
I grew up using a variety of hand saws and power saws, but the chainsaw was new to me. Fascinated by its operation. I itched to fire it up and fell some big trees.
Tired of lugging the heavy machine around, it didn’t take much coaxing to get my companions to let me spell them off. The old saw was a noisy, heavy, pulsating beast that blew acrid exhaust in my face. It was not the fun toy I thought it would be, but I loved yelling timber and watching a big tree crash to the ground.
The camp’s alarm clock was the smell of wood smoke from the cook’s black iron cook stove mixed with coffee brewing and bacon frying. We sat on wood stumps and ate our fill of bacon and eggs, fried potatoes, hotcakes, and biscuits. My teenage appetite created the source of much good-natured ribbing. “Leave some for the rest of us,” someone would shout as I slathered butter and honey on yet another biscuit.
Winter comes early in the high country. We raced to complete the job before the snow flew. A big Le Tourneau earth mover scraped up dirt and spread it on the new dam. A rolling device called a sheep’s foot packed it in place. I watched in awe as the sweeping arc of the dam took form.
The hours were long, but no one complained. We were well fed, and each day ended with a sense of accomplishment. At day’s end, the crew gathered around a campfire, drank beer, and told stories.
Too young to drink beer, I would dig some worms, row the project’s boat out on the lake, and fish for trout until I caught about a dozen big enough to keep. Then I would row back in, clean the fish, and turn them over to the cook. We all loved her fresh trout, rolled in cornmeal and fried in bacon grease, added to our breakfast fare.
As the job progressed, I became increasingly accepted by my fellow workers. They would even share a beer with me if I promised not to tell my dad. My duties varied. I held the survey rod and drove stakes for the engineer. I delimbed logs for the logging truck. I continued to dodge logs and set chokers. Near the end of summer, we bulldozed the old spillway and headgate and filled the gap with dirt. A concrete contractor brought in his portable cement mixer. His son Tom, whom I knew from high school, accompanied him. I finally had someone near my age to talk to.
Tom’s dad put us to work building forms and hauling concrete in wheelbarrows for the headgate and spillway. That is how I finished the summer until school started. It was nice to get back home and sleep in a real bed. But after a summer of working with a construction crew and holding down a man’s job, the return to being a schoolboy was a huge letdown. I was forever changed by the summer of ’52.
An old schoolmate recently told me the dam we built that summer is still in use. It made me feel good somehow.
Airmen on the line suffered a terrible toll during Operation Rolling Thunder, a codename for an American bombing campaign during the Vietnam War. Originally slated as an eight-week campaign in spring 1965, it lasted until October 1968. While Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara played war and handpicked targets from the armchair comfort of the White House, an estimated 900 aircraft went down as U.S. forces delivered 643,000 tons of destruction.
One of those downed aircraft was piloted by my friend Al Stafford. I first met Al when we were stationed at NAS Whidbey Island, Washington, in the late 1950s. Whidbey Island was a rather isolated duty station in those days, so the Officers Club served as the primary social outlet for young bachelor officers. There was an old upright piano collecting dust in one corner. Al could play a few chords. Not long after his arrival, he had a bunch of us gathering around the piano, singing old pilots’ favorites like “Torque me into the Runway” and songs remembered from college, such as “The Whiffenpoof Song.” We sang, sipped stingers, and smoked Pall Mall cigarettes into the night. We called ourselves the Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society. For some of us, that camaraderie would last a lifetime.
Al, Jim Turner, Chris Phelps, and I rented a house off base and formed what Naval Aviators call a Snake Ranch—a party pad occupied by bachelor officers. The house had an unfinished basement that we converted into a makeshift bar. For a time, the four of us presided over a version of Party Central until new assignments broke up the party, and we all moved on.
The next time I saw Al was ten years later on television. It was 29 January 1969. I was sitting comfortably in my suburban living room in San Jose, California, idly watching the evening news on NBC, when they showed a clip of two emaciated Vietnam POWs hanging a Merry Christmas sign on a wall. I did a double-take when I realized one was my old Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society buddy, Al Stafford. The other was Dick Stratton, whom I remembered from Chase Field in Texas. Until then, I had largely avoided all the controversy surrounding the war. I had put the military behind me and decided to let Johnson, McNamara, and the generals run the war. Suddenly, the war was right there in my living room. I was struck with a new understanding of why pundits were calling the Vietnam War “the living room war.”
What I didn’t understand at the time was the relentless torture the two men had undergone before agreeing to pose for the North Vietnamese propaganda photos. Nor did I notice Al’s right hand with the middle finger raised, expressing his true feelings about the occasion. However, Al told me later that US Military Intelligence took note, and his subtle message helped set policy at the time.
For most of America, the enormity of the Vietnam POW experience would not be realized until the victims could tell their stories after Operation Homecoming in 1973. While the conflict continued, the Johnson administration kept such information classified. I wrote letters to the Navy Department and State Department, asking how to contact POWs, and was referred to the Red Cross. So much for country boy naivety.
Al was flying an A-4 Skyhawk off the USS Oriskany when he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. His replacement pilot was a fellow named John McCain, who was shot down a few months later.
In 1990, Al collaborated with author Geoffrey Norman and published a book called “Bouncing Back: How a heroic band of POWs survived Vietnam.” In it, he relates an interesting anecdotal insight into the Stafford-McCain relationship.
The Al Stafford I knew was a bit of a renegade. Incarceration did little to change that. He delighted in pushing his captors’ patience to the limit. Not surprisingly, he was rewarded with more than his fair share of time in solitaire. He was enduring an extended stay in an isolation cell called the Corncrib at the prison called the Plantation when he first encountered John McCain. The following excerpt from Bouncing Back describes that encounter.
“Then, one morning as he [Stafford] stood at the door, watching through the cracks, he saw a POW on crutches being led slowly across the yard by a guard. The man had shockingly white hair, almost as though he had suffered some traumatic fright. Stafford knew that the man had to be John McCain. Nobody else in the Navy had hair like that.
“…As Stafford watched, McCain detoured out of his assigned path and hobbled a painful fifteen or twenty feet on his crutches before the guard could stop him. By then, he was standing directly in front of Stafford’s cell.
“Hey, Al, baby,” he said cheerfully as though they were meeting on the street somewhere. “You hang in there, now. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
The Vietnam POWs networked in many ingenious ways. One method was to hide notes for each other in secret stashes. Al found one such note from McCain when he was allowed an infrequent bath. It explained that he [McCain] had been Stafford’s replacement in VA-163 on the Oriskany, and that, like Stafford, he had been shot down, captured, and through the all too familiar interrogation routines the POWs endured, including the torture chamber they called the Green Knobby Room at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain noted that he had also been moved to their present location, the prison they called the Plantation, and ended with these words: “Listen, Al, since I seem to be following you around, I would appreciate it if you didn’t do anything stupid and get us both in real trouble.” John McCain had his share of detractors in later political life, but they didn’t know him when he flew wing during trying circumstances.
Al and I reestablished contact a few years after his release in 1973 and kept in touch, more so with the advent of the internet. In 1999, I received an Email in which he stated that there was an upcoming POW reunion in Wenatchee, Washington. He planned to attend and make it a nationwide road trip from his home in Pensacola, Florida. He planned several stops before he got to my place in Hauser Lake, Idaho, followed by a stop in Spokane to visit fellow POW Jim Shively. From there, he planned to proceed to the reunion and then travel to San Diego to see his daughter before returning home via the southern route. He made the trip, and he and I had a grand reunion of our own.
In 2003, I received a notice from Al’s wife, Sharon, that he had flown west on 28 December 2003 at age 68. They held a memorial service for him at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. He is missed but not forgotten.
L to R 1937 Chev Pickup, Brother Wes, Dad, Mom, Sister Deanne
I don’t recall much about our move from the row of farm workers’ shacks, where Dad milked cows, to our own place. In my memory, it is as if one day we were there and the next we were at our new home.
Our new 20-acre homestead consisted of a house, a barn, a small nut orchard, and a good-sized plot of fertile Sacramento Valley row-crop land. The orchard consisted of almonds (or, as folks around Chico called them, ammonds) and walnuts. The cropland lay fallow. The house was much too small to accommodate two families. Grandma, Grandpa, and Jimmy needed a home of their own.
For Dad and Grandpa, building a house posed no problem. They were both good craftsmen. The problem arose when they tried to get their hands on framing lumber. Like everything else, lumber was in short supply. The war effort now devoured everything but life’s bare necessities. As happened all too often, they were put on a waiting list.
Once more, family came to the rescue. Dad’s uncle David and his family lived in Chico. Uncle David worked at a local sawmill. He knew how to cut through enough red tape to get the needed lumber delivered. Dad and Grandpa went to work.
The house went up rather quickly. I don’t think it was ever completely finished, but it was finished enough that Grandma reluctantly agreed to move in. At times, you just had to learn to make do on the home front.
In the meantime, Grandpa acquired an old horse and enough implements to start farming. Most folks during the war had small victory gardens. We soon had several acres of victory garden. Jimmy and I got our initiation into the meaning of hard work from that garden. At Grandpa’s direction, we learned to hoe around plants and nurture them into production. Lord help the offender who happened to uproot a watermelon seedling instead of a pigweed. Melons made up the main crop, but there were also beans, corn, tomatoes, and more. When each crop was ready, we picked and loaded it into Dad’s 1937 Chevrolet pickup truck and peddled it to stores around the valley. What we didn’t sell, Mom and Grandma canned. We were well fed.
When the nuts were ready in the orchard, we spread tarps on the ground under the trees. We shook the trees by pounding on the trunks with baseball bats padded with pieces of a rubber tire. The nuts fell to the ground, and we gathered them and put them in sacks. The almonds were easy to shake loose, the walnuts more difficult and required a lot of hand-picking on ladders. The whole family participated, even my brother Wes, who was three years my junior.
Dad continued working in the paint shop at the air base. He also continued with the ambulance and accident cleanup crew. In 1944, Chico Air Base switched from basic training to fighter pilot training in P-38 Lightnings. Crashes and deaths doubled from 14 crashes and 8 deaths during the two years of basic training to 35 crashes and 16 deaths during the 16 months of fighter pilot training. That’s more than 2 crashes a month. The ambulance and cleanup crew stayed busy. Dad tried not to show it, but even I could tell that he was under a great deal of stress.
Summers are hot in the Sacramento Valley. Air conditioning was not widely available in the early 1940s. Makeshift evaporative coolers consisting of wet burlap sacks hung from open window frames with fans in front were not very effective. The only real escape from the heat was finding cool water. There was a public swimming pool in Chico, but my parents were afraid of public pools. They believed them to be a likely place to contract the crippling disease polio. So we did not swim there. We did occasionally go down to the Sacramento River to fish, swim, and picnic. We were enjoying an outing with Dad’s friend from work, Les Robbins, and family, when I decided to take an unsupervised dip. I waded out from shore by myself with confidence. Suddenly, the current picked me up, and I bobbed downstream like a waterlogged cork. I remember looking up at a bluff, high above the river, and seeing my dad preparing to dive when I felt the welcome arms of Mrs. Robins envelope me. My movements were severely restricted following that incident.
Nineteen forty-three moved on into 1944. My sister Deanne was born in August. The war continued unabated. I started second grade in September. The world at war, farming the land, P 38’s from the base buzzing overhead, bickering with Uncle Jimmy, Dad shooting a rabid coyote lurking around our chicken coup, Grandpa trying to start his old car with a hand crank because batteries could not be had and his cussing at it and hitting it with the crank, talk that the war would never end; these things all seemed normal to me. As a seven-year-old, they were all I knew. I had no other frame of reference. As Harry Truman famously said, “The only thing new is the history we don’t know.” We of my generation knew no history yet. The canvas remained to be painted.
L to R: Brother Wes “Chip,” Neighbor Girl, and Yours Truly on the farming operation in Chico, California
Even as a six-year-old, I could sense the change in my parents. I understood my own anxiety. The move from Baldwin Park to Chico had toppled my entire world. But grownups were not supposed to have those feelings. I could only hope that our lives would somehow get back to normal.
I did not have long to wait. My dad was a very resourceful man. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had just turned seventeen. He entered adulthood during very trying times. He was a product of the Great Depression.
His parents were schoolteachers. Thus, education was paramount in their lives. Dad tried to keep the peace in the family by remaining in school. But money was short, and he was of an independent nature. For the next seven years until he was 24, he alternated between academic pursuits at Northern Arizona State College in Flagstaff and Arizona State College in Tempe, and the “school of hard knocks,” riding the rails and living in hobo jungles throughout the United States. He learned at an early age to be “quick on his feet.” Survival required it.
The free life ended in 1936 when he married my mom. They were married on the first of June, shortly after Mom graduated from high school. I was born nine months later on March 24. Dad was now a family man.
Dad was up to the task. With the help of my grandparents, he bought a lot in Baldwin Park, California, and built a home for us. He went to work for McMullan’s Dairy milking cows. He worked his way up to foreman, and we moved into the foreman’s quarters on the dairy. My mom helped in the little store where they sold the dairy products they produced. Despite the war, their life seemed secure.
Therefore, it came as a shock when the government suddenly transferred my dad away from the life they had built. The consequences of war had robbed them of their independence. Their secure life had suddenly evaporated. They were reduced to living in a farm worker’s shanty. Dad was back to starting over as a common hand on a large farming operation, milking cows. The war had taken control of their lives.
Ever the man of action, Dad set about righting things. Over the next few months, he turned our life back around. He met with the draft board, or whoever controlled such things, and managed to transfer from the dairy to Chico Army Air Field. He bought a twenty-acre farm and moved us into the old house that came with it. Our new home was far from luxurious, but it was far better than the farm worker’s quarters we moved from. My parents were happier. They were regaining control.
The move was like an answer to my prayers. I hated the school I was enrolled in. I felt like I had been dropped into an alien world without a friend in sight. The move came with a change in schools. Whereas the old school had seemed large and impersonal, the new school felt warm and welcoming. It was a rural two-room facility that had grades one through four in one room and grades five through eight in the other. The teachers and other students made me feel at home. I could walk to school from our house without taking a bus.
Chico Army Airfield, called “the base” in everyday conversation, was established in 1941 to train pilots. Dad worked in the paint shop. He also rode on or drove the ambulance whenever there was an accident. I can remember him coming home visibly shaken following some of those accidents. He detested that part of his job. But like almost every citizen at the time, he pitched in and did what he had to do to help win the war.
It soon became apparent that being on ambulance call, working full-time in the paint shop, and trying to farm all at the same time formed an impossible task. I don’t know how it worked, but apparently, when you worked for the Army during World War II, you didn’t just up and quit because you had something you’d rather be doing. As a consequence, my mom’s parents, along with my uncle Jim, who was about five years older than me, came out from Arizona to live with us. Grandpa Thompson was a hard-rock miner and a farmer. Dad continued to work at the base, and Grandpa took over the farm. Sometimes it took a family’s teamwork to survive on the home front.
Eldon LaRue had not forgotten his survival skills. He was still “quick on his feet.”
Growing up on a ranch in the mountains of Eastern Oregon, my exposure to live music was an occasional Saturday night at the local VFW dance hall, listening to local ranch hands and loggers tune up acoustic guitars and fiddles and perform songs like Hank Williams’s Your Cheating Heart. At home, we listened to tunes like The Wreck of the Old 97 on a few scratchy 78 rpm records on an old-fashioned wind-up RCA Victor phonograph, its logo featuring Nipper the dog next to a speaker horn. We also heard the Hit Parade on Mom’s radio whenever Dad got around to buying a battery for it. Anyway, music was not a high priority in our world.
I graduated from high school in the spring of 1955 and traveled across the state the following September to join the freshman class at Oregon State College in Corvallis. It was quite a lifestyle transformation for a country boy fresh off the farm. I pledged to a fraternity and set about learning a new way of life.
I met a cute coed who mentioned an upcoming Duke Ellington concert she was eager to attend. I had no clue who Duke Ellington was or what a concert entailed, but I told her I would take her. Any chance to date her was okay with me.
The concert was held in a gym with ample dance space. The sweet, melodic sounds of Ellington’s swing jazz opened my ears to a new realm of music. And when Louie Bellson performed his drum solo, I was mesmerized. My date and I danced the night away. It was a magical experience for a country boy.
My academic career lasted for two quarters until I ran out of money. Like many of my generation, I joined the Navy to see the world. I qualified for flight training and became a Naval Aviator by hard work and determination, and an Officer and Gentleman by act of Congress.
During those years, I was introduced to many kinds of music in bars and gin mills and on the radio wherever I flew. I heard jazz in New Orleans, country in Texas, pop in movie theaters, and rock and roll everywhere. I acquired a cabinet stereo and a collection of LP albums with everything from Lena Horne blues to Mort Sahl comedy. But I always remembered the sound of Duke Ellington, live, with his big-band jazz orchestra, back in the gym at Oregon State.
After the Navy, I settled in the San Francisco Bay Area to go back to college at San Jose State and complete my education. I entered the workforce and worked nights at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. During that time, I met a beautiful young lady named Kathy. She loved jazz. Her private collection of LP albums included jazz artists Dizzy Gillespie, Ahmad Jamal, Dave Brubeck, and many more icons of the genre. She would bring her albums to my place, and we would invite friends and party all night long while listening to good jazz on my stereo. We had so much fun, I ended up marrying her.
The Bay Area was a mecca for jazz lovers during the sixties. Kathy kept her eye out for live performance advertisements nearby. The first recital we attended was with the Dave Brubeck quartet near the San Jose State campus. It was held in a small, second-story walk-up auditorium, a surprising venue for one of the leading progressive jazz artists of the day. We sat on folding chairs and listened to Brubeck’s jazz magic with famous numbers, including Take Five. A highlight of the evening occurred when Mongo Santamaria sat in, drumming solos on the conga and bongos with his fingers. There was no dancing. The only audience participation was limited to toe tapping, finger snapping, and lightly clapped applause at the end of each number.
Kathy and I soon discovered the Blackhawk Jazz Club in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. In the mid-20th century, the Tenderloin provided work for many musicians in the neighborhood’s theaters, hotels, burlesque houses, bars, and clubs. The premier jazz club was the Black Hawk at Hyde and Turk Streets. There, jazz musicians Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and others recorded live albums in the late 1950s and early 1960s. You could hear legendary jazz icons like John Coltrane, Art Pepper, and Stan Getz on saxophone, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Shorty Rogers, Art Farmer, and Chet Baker on trumpet, vocals by Mary Stallings and Johnny Mathis, Art Blakey on drums, Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax or clarinet, Thelonious Monk, Horace Parlan, Dave Brubeck, and Andre Previn on piano, and Russ Freeman on guitar. And when Charlie Parker was supposed to be opening across town at the Say When Club, he could be found instead jamming on saxophone at the Hawk. The Blackhawk offered good drinks, friendly service, and great jazz in a dark, smoke-filled atmosphere. No one danced; you came to listen. We even saw George Shearing demonstrate his famous fugue on piano. With my tin ear, I had no idea of what he was talking about. But I could fake it like an aficionado by just knowing the term. We were saddened when the Blackhawk closed in 1963.
Sometime later, Kathy spotted a small ad in the San Jose Mercury newspaper announcing an appearance by the Cal Tjader band at a nightclub on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. Telegraph Avenue runs through downtown Oakland to the edge of the University of California, Berkeley campus. I assumed the venue would be near the U.C. campus and cater to the college crowd. It seemed like a fun thing to do, so we decided to take it in.
I guided my 1958 two-tone tan Chevy Bel Air hardtop up the Nimitz Freeway from San Jose to Oakland and exited onto Telegraph Avenue. Kathy watched for the street number in the ad. After a few blocks, she pointed excitedly and said, “There it is.”
“Naw,” I replied. “This is the colored part of town. We need to be farther up toward Berkeley.” I kept driving.
After driving about four miles through stop-and-go traffic, a sign showed, “Entering Berkeley.” Kathy reminded me that the ad said Oakland, so I turned around and backtracked to the location of her original sighting. A small sign over the door identified the place as the advertised venue. I parked, but was reluctant to go in. At Kathy’s insistence, she was a huge fan of the celebrated vibist Cal Tjader. I finally relented, carefully locked the car, and escorted her to the entrance.
A well-dressed Black hostess greeted us nonchalantly. “Here for the band?”
I said yes, and she guided us to a table. A polite, friendly Black waitress took our order and served our drinks. Looking around the crowded room, I noticed only one other white couple. I nodded, and they half-smiled back. Everyone else was black except for a few white women accompanied by Black men.
The crowd cheered enthusiastically when Cal Tjader’s Modern Mambo Quintet walked into the room and took their places—Cal behind the vibraphone he was famous for, brothers Manuel and Carlos Duran on piano and bass, Benny Velarde on timbales, bongos, and congas, and Luis Miranda on congas. They started their first number. The audience rose en masse and started dancing. We could not sit still and joined in after a couple of numbers. It was a memorable evening. It was the first time I had danced to jazz music since the evening with Duke Ellington back at Oregon State.
Admittedly, Tjader’s Caribbean Afro-blues and Ellington’s big band sounds made dancing more engaging than the resonances of modern jazz. But the exuberance I had felt in the college gym and now in the black nightclub went beyond that. The audience response was different. They did not just hear the music; they lived it. And the band played its hearts out to an enthusiastic audience.
Race issues were at the forefront of the turbulent sixties. But during that evening with the Cal Tjader band in downtown Oakland, we were all just Americans enjoying the magic of the best music of all time, America’s Classical Music called jazz. It made no difference where you came from.
Standing L to R: Uncle Len, Aunt Lee, Uncle Joe, Aunt Fran, My Mom Dee. Seated L to R: Aunt Sue, Aunt Rae, Me
As World War II wore on, life on the home front became increasingly chaotic. Everything was in short supply. Ration stamps came into being. The “black market” raised its ugly head. Outside forces were taking over people’s lives. Unwelcome regimentation was extending from the military down into the civilian population.
The magician we call memory has many tricks up his sleeve. Trivial things often stand out ahead of major events. His sleight of hand hides some experiences and makes others clear. Perhaps we choose what we remember; perhaps what we remember chooses us.
As a firstborn son and grandson, love and security surrounded me. A doting grandmother watched over me while my mom went to business school. Three aunts, ages 17, 19, and 21, the year I was born, spoiled me. My world was safe.
I remember bits and pieces. Aunt Sue’s idea of babysitting was to strap me in the front seat of a Piper Cub and fly around Southern California as she built up flight hours. She let me take hold of the stick and bank and turn and climb and dive. At least I thought I was in control. I loved it. Aunt Fran had married, and her father-in-law lived with them. He had a handcart that he pushed around the neighborhood, selling fruit and vegetables door to door. I delighted in tagging along as his “helper.” Aunt Rae was busy with nursing school, but always had time for a hug and a kiss for Bobby.
My memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor and our entry into the war does not stand out. Maybe my parents shielded me from the details. Sometime during those early years, we moved out from the town of Baldwin Park to the foreman’s house on McMullan’s Dairy. Scary things like the blackout sirens and the disappearance of the Japanese people next door stand out in my memory. Even so, the daily routines of the dairy kept me occupied and maintained my sense of security.
In 1942, kindergarten caught up with me. I reveled in it. My grandfather was the Baldwin Park School Superintendent. If I received any celebrity or favoritism from that fact, I was unaware of it. I fell in love with Miss Rice, my teacher. At the end of the school year, our parting was heart-wrenching.
Even so, my sense of bliss was not being shared by the world at large. The world was at war. Lives everywhere were in a state of flux. Governments were intruding on people’s lives and becoming more and more controlling. My world was about to come apart.
When war broke out, my dad tried to enlist. He was deferred because he worked on a dairy farm and had two children. Three of his siblings did join up. Uncle Len joined the Navy and completed Officer Candidate School. Aunt Sue became a Women’s Army Service Pilot. Aunt Rae became a Navy Nurse. Dad and Aunt Fran stayed home.
In 1943, an event occurred that remains a mystery to me. But it changed my life forever. For reasons that were never made completely clear, we were suddenly uprooted and moved from Baldwin Park, 500 miles away, to Chico, California. It had something to do with the draft board and someone wanting Dad’s deferment. Whatever the reason, Dad was transferred from McMullan’s Dairy to a dairy on a large farming operation in the Sacramento Valley.
The move was traumatic for the whole family. My parents were none too happy. We moved from a cozy bungalow on a showcase dairy to a shack in a row of farm workers’ quarters. Our new home could have been right out of John Steinbeck’s novel, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Dad was demoted from Dairy Foreman to common milker. I was torn away from everything I had known for the first six years of my life.
I started first grade in strange surroundings, knowing no one, afraid, and lonely. War on the home front had taken its toll. Miss Rice and my paths would never cross again.
