Table of Contents
PROLOGUE (9)
MOM AND DAD: THE EARLY YEARS (13)
Mom: Reflections on Ethel
Dad: Leon Leaving the Blue
1918: Ethel & Leon Meet & Marry
Early Years
1923: Homesteading
Bernice’s Eyes
1927: Our Widow Years
More Widow Years
The Stuff of Heroes
QUINCY STORIES (47)
1930: Olive School
Sonny
Quincy Road Neighbors
The Organdy Dress Incident
1932: Old George
TO THE RIVER STORIES (71)
1934: Downriver
1934: The Flood
1934: The River Bottom
The Levee Home
COMING OF AGE (95)
1935: Night in the Chicken Coup
After the Secret
720 Safford
Sweethearts at Safford Street
Ralph
1940: My First Date
FRESNO (127)
Fresno State College
1941: That December
The Accidental Pin Up
1942: White Trash Episode
Tip
Forget Florence
A Choice
1943: How to Spend a War
ARMY (167)
1944: The Battle at Hoff General
1945: The Battle at Dibble General
The Waste Bucket Incident
Bill
AFTER THE WAR (209)
1946: 720 Safford Burning
1947: Conestoga at Sather Gate
1963: Reunion
1983: Studs Terkel
1984: “The Good War: Betty Basye Hutchinson,” by Studs Terkel
EPILOGUE (235)
MOM AND DAD: THE EARLY YEARS (13)
Mom: Reflections on Ethel
Dad: Leon Leaving the Blue
1918: Ethel & Leon Meet & Marry
Early Years
1923: Homesteading
Bernice’s Eyes
1927: Our Widow Years
More Widow Years
The Stuff of Heroes
QUINCY STORIES (47)
1930: Olive School
Sonny
Quincy Road Neighbors
The Organdy Dress Incident
1932: Old George
TO THE RIVER STORIES (71)
1934: Downriver
1934: The Flood
1934: The River Bottom
The Levee Home
COMING OF AGE (95)
1935: Night in the Chicken Coup
After the Secret
720 Safford
Sweethearts at Safford Street
Ralph
1940: My First Date
FRESNO (127)
Fresno State College
1941: That December
The Accidental Pin Up
1942: White Trash Episode
Tip
Forget Florence
A Choice
1943: How to Spend a War
ARMY (167)
1944: The Battle at Hoff General
1945: The Battle at Dibble General
The Waste Bucket Incident
Bill
AFTER THE WAR (209)
1946: 720 Safford Burning
1947: Conestoga at Sather Gate
1963: Reunion
1983: Studs Terkel
1984: “The Good War: Betty Basye Hutchinson,” by Studs Terkel
EPILOGUE (235)
EXCERPT - 1930: Olive School
When I entered second grade, I was confronted with a piece of paper to “fill out,” whatever that meant.
“Don’t fold or tear the paper, don’t erase, be neat, stay in the lines,” said my pretty teacher, Miss Wallace. She was the sole teacher at Olive School, a one-room, eight grade schoolhouse on Quincy Road in Oroville, California that served rural children from as far away as Berry Creek, Bidwell Bar, and other towns I had not seen yet. “Bettie Lou is a new out-of-town student,” my new teacher told the full classroom.
There were three eighth graders at Olive who importantly parked their family trucks or old cars under the oak tree next to the Nickersons’ big plow-horse who stood all day waiting to carry his family of two back to home after school. Smoky the horse was tethered out front where I headed during recess to join Lester. Cora Nickerson was giving Lester a turn petting Smoky. Lester said I could stand next to him and maybe get in a short pet also. That is, if the big boys didn’t get tired of leaning on the fenders of their cars next to Smoky and cut in ahead of me.
“No recess if you don’t finish it,” Miss Wallace had added. This increased my anxiety. “Stay in for recess!” I gasped silently. What a terrible punishment. Here I was overwhelmed by this white piece of paper in front of me. Bernice, my sister, who had walked to school with me, was sitting two rows away with third graders and had already begun “filling it out.” My whisper didn’t distract her from her equally formidable job. No help there, so I turned to Lester who sat beside me. He was my only hope. Lester had lived in this neighborhood in a clapboard house across the road from our house since he was born in it eight years ago. He knew everything. However, our new friendship was rather tenuous because I was a girl. I didn’t want to spoil it by asking questions at which he would laugh, or embarrass me later by repeating “Red. Red. Wet the Bed.”
My family’s recent move from Fresno had made us late in registering at Olive School. Lester had ventured over to play with me after school, but he also chided me for not attending. “Maybe tomorrow,” my mother kept saying as she unloaded boxes and sorted through them looking for “better” school clothes for the first day at Olive School.
On my first day of school, when I re-read the first few lines on the paper, I found they were easy. I didn’t know what RFD meant (Rural Free Delivery) but I knew the right number to put after it: Number 3. The word “surname” I guessed by eliminating other possible names it was asking for. But, then it got to the really hard part: “Occupation.” I leaned over to Lester to ask what the word meant. “Work,” he whispered, causing Miss Wallace to glance our way. Quickly I entered the word “NO,” but Lester punched my arm and whispered: “Not ‘NO,’ dummy, just ‘Farmer.’” Disbelieving, my pencil hesitated in the air. I was remembering we had already had an unresolved argument about that very subject.
The first time Lester had crossed Quincy Road to play, he had plastered mud over the sign on our gate that read: “White Washed Trees Ranch.” Lester argued that our eighty acres of olive and apricot trees, on which my family was tenant farming, was not a ranch as the sign read. It was a farm, he insisted. “You have to have horses to be a ranch,” he said. Our sign was a lie. I didn’t want him to be right. I couldn’t put down “farmer.”
Since a disagreement had launched our somewhat rocky friendship, I was overjoyed when it was cleared up by a dramatic event when he came running across Quincy Road, yelling, “Cattle drive! Cattle drive!” He, being an old-timer to the area, had recognized a familiar distant noise before it came around the bend. In this fall of 1930, herds of milling, lurching, bawling cattle were being driven from their mountain pastures down our road to the town slaughter house in Oroville. Half in terror at the closeness of the mass of the beasts and half in awe of the cowboys on horseback, we rushed to the roadside to watch the “drive.”
Enthralled, we scanned the dirty faces of the cowboys, and strained to hear their calls and words. We were picking up clues for a glamorous vocation on horseback. I was delighted to discover one cowhand was a woman with hair flowing like the mane of her palomino. Sun-tanned and skinny, from the back of a sleek brown and white horse, she deftly maneuvered the wayward cattle to rejoin the end of the mile-long parade. Hanging on the fence rails long after the drive had passed our homes and the schoolhouse, we strained to hear the noisy procession fading down Quincy Road. In spite of our disagreement over differentiating “farms and ranches,” we had discovered something important: When Lester and I grew up we were both going to be cowboys.
Back at my desk, my hesitation continued over the “occupation” line. I was straining to think of another word that would do instead of “farmer,” since Lester probably was right. We had four cows and a bull, but no horses. The question of any father’s occupation was not easy to answer if you contemplated the domiciles in our neighborhood, Lester’s included. Most of the man-built structures on Quincy Road sat around crumbling from disuse, alongside an assortment of abandoned farm machinery and wagons. An occasional man, not unlike my stepfather or Lester’s brother Lafe, might wander into their yards to kick at a wheel or creak open a rusty hinge, but what they worked at was not easily formulated in my young mind.
My stepfather’s time was spent fishing and hunting as far as I could determine, but was that work? He returned from these trips with such long monologues of adventure and intrigue that I couldn’t put that on the line reading “occupation.” That wasn’t work, was it? Pictures of farms I had seen in my school primary readers and on the Watkins Products calendar always showed a farm with a white house by a road and a cow or two out in the backyard. Often chickens pecked neat rows of vegetables while hollyhocks leaned against a picket fence. Those pictures did not match our place at all, farm or ranch. Most neighboring plots contained subsistence gardens, small family orchards, a vineyard, or some hay fields. They each held an assortment of farm animals: chickens, goats, rabbits, and one milk cow. The neighborhood barns varied and were often indistinguishable from an out-house or a rabbit-hutch. By contrast, our barn stood out. It was a magnificent reproduction of a New England barn, just like in my primary readers, with an upstairs hay loft to jump down from and a rooster weather vane that still worked in the wind. The barn was painted in chalk-white to match the stumps of the olive trees that lined our fence along Quincy Road and gave our ranch its name: “White Washed Trees Ranch.”
“The barn is big enough to hold four horses,” Lester had said.” It should have at least two to make it a ranch.”
It was growing close to recess time according to the octagonal clock whose pendulum was swinging behind the teacher’s head. I was determined to get done in time to pet Cora’s horse. So I wrote my word.
When Bernice and I walked home from school, I learned that she also had a problem in filling out the form. I asked her what she had written for “father’s occupation.” She answered: “I thought about fisherman and hunter. But just yesterday I watched Ralph unload a load of pine fence posts off his truck and put a sign on the stack that says, ‘For Sale.’ So, I wrote ‘fence-post seller.”’ Then she looked at me. “What did you write?” I chose the father I preferred, though dead: “Cowboy,” I said resolutely even though I blanched a little when she sucked in her breath the way she did whenever I’d say something she was going to tattle to Mom.
“Don’t fold or tear the paper, don’t erase, be neat, stay in the lines,” said my pretty teacher, Miss Wallace. She was the sole teacher at Olive School, a one-room, eight grade schoolhouse on Quincy Road in Oroville, California that served rural children from as far away as Berry Creek, Bidwell Bar, and other towns I had not seen yet. “Bettie Lou is a new out-of-town student,” my new teacher told the full classroom.
There were three eighth graders at Olive who importantly parked their family trucks or old cars under the oak tree next to the Nickersons’ big plow-horse who stood all day waiting to carry his family of two back to home after school. Smoky the horse was tethered out front where I headed during recess to join Lester. Cora Nickerson was giving Lester a turn petting Smoky. Lester said I could stand next to him and maybe get in a short pet also. That is, if the big boys didn’t get tired of leaning on the fenders of their cars next to Smoky and cut in ahead of me.
“No recess if you don’t finish it,” Miss Wallace had added. This increased my anxiety. “Stay in for recess!” I gasped silently. What a terrible punishment. Here I was overwhelmed by this white piece of paper in front of me. Bernice, my sister, who had walked to school with me, was sitting two rows away with third graders and had already begun “filling it out.” My whisper didn’t distract her from her equally formidable job. No help there, so I turned to Lester who sat beside me. He was my only hope. Lester had lived in this neighborhood in a clapboard house across the road from our house since he was born in it eight years ago. He knew everything. However, our new friendship was rather tenuous because I was a girl. I didn’t want to spoil it by asking questions at which he would laugh, or embarrass me later by repeating “Red. Red. Wet the Bed.”
My family’s recent move from Fresno had made us late in registering at Olive School. Lester had ventured over to play with me after school, but he also chided me for not attending. “Maybe tomorrow,” my mother kept saying as she unloaded boxes and sorted through them looking for “better” school clothes for the first day at Olive School.
On my first day of school, when I re-read the first few lines on the paper, I found they were easy. I didn’t know what RFD meant (Rural Free Delivery) but I knew the right number to put after it: Number 3. The word “surname” I guessed by eliminating other possible names it was asking for. But, then it got to the really hard part: “Occupation.” I leaned over to Lester to ask what the word meant. “Work,” he whispered, causing Miss Wallace to glance our way. Quickly I entered the word “NO,” but Lester punched my arm and whispered: “Not ‘NO,’ dummy, just ‘Farmer.’” Disbelieving, my pencil hesitated in the air. I was remembering we had already had an unresolved argument about that very subject.
The first time Lester had crossed Quincy Road to play, he had plastered mud over the sign on our gate that read: “White Washed Trees Ranch.” Lester argued that our eighty acres of olive and apricot trees, on which my family was tenant farming, was not a ranch as the sign read. It was a farm, he insisted. “You have to have horses to be a ranch,” he said. Our sign was a lie. I didn’t want him to be right. I couldn’t put down “farmer.”
Since a disagreement had launched our somewhat rocky friendship, I was overjoyed when it was cleared up by a dramatic event when he came running across Quincy Road, yelling, “Cattle drive! Cattle drive!” He, being an old-timer to the area, had recognized a familiar distant noise before it came around the bend. In this fall of 1930, herds of milling, lurching, bawling cattle were being driven from their mountain pastures down our road to the town slaughter house in Oroville. Half in terror at the closeness of the mass of the beasts and half in awe of the cowboys on horseback, we rushed to the roadside to watch the “drive.”
Enthralled, we scanned the dirty faces of the cowboys, and strained to hear their calls and words. We were picking up clues for a glamorous vocation on horseback. I was delighted to discover one cowhand was a woman with hair flowing like the mane of her palomino. Sun-tanned and skinny, from the back of a sleek brown and white horse, she deftly maneuvered the wayward cattle to rejoin the end of the mile-long parade. Hanging on the fence rails long after the drive had passed our homes and the schoolhouse, we strained to hear the noisy procession fading down Quincy Road. In spite of our disagreement over differentiating “farms and ranches,” we had discovered something important: When Lester and I grew up we were both going to be cowboys.
Back at my desk, my hesitation continued over the “occupation” line. I was straining to think of another word that would do instead of “farmer,” since Lester probably was right. We had four cows and a bull, but no horses. The question of any father’s occupation was not easy to answer if you contemplated the domiciles in our neighborhood, Lester’s included. Most of the man-built structures on Quincy Road sat around crumbling from disuse, alongside an assortment of abandoned farm machinery and wagons. An occasional man, not unlike my stepfather or Lester’s brother Lafe, might wander into their yards to kick at a wheel or creak open a rusty hinge, but what they worked at was not easily formulated in my young mind.
My stepfather’s time was spent fishing and hunting as far as I could determine, but was that work? He returned from these trips with such long monologues of adventure and intrigue that I couldn’t put that on the line reading “occupation.” That wasn’t work, was it? Pictures of farms I had seen in my school primary readers and on the Watkins Products calendar always showed a farm with a white house by a road and a cow or two out in the backyard. Often chickens pecked neat rows of vegetables while hollyhocks leaned against a picket fence. Those pictures did not match our place at all, farm or ranch. Most neighboring plots contained subsistence gardens, small family orchards, a vineyard, or some hay fields. They each held an assortment of farm animals: chickens, goats, rabbits, and one milk cow. The neighborhood barns varied and were often indistinguishable from an out-house or a rabbit-hutch. By contrast, our barn stood out. It was a magnificent reproduction of a New England barn, just like in my primary readers, with an upstairs hay loft to jump down from and a rooster weather vane that still worked in the wind. The barn was painted in chalk-white to match the stumps of the olive trees that lined our fence along Quincy Road and gave our ranch its name: “White Washed Trees Ranch.”
“The barn is big enough to hold four horses,” Lester had said.” It should have at least two to make it a ranch.”
It was growing close to recess time according to the octagonal clock whose pendulum was swinging behind the teacher’s head. I was determined to get done in time to pet Cora’s horse. So I wrote my word.
When Bernice and I walked home from school, I learned that she also had a problem in filling out the form. I asked her what she had written for “father’s occupation.” She answered: “I thought about fisherman and hunter. But just yesterday I watched Ralph unload a load of pine fence posts off his truck and put a sign on the stack that says, ‘For Sale.’ So, I wrote ‘fence-post seller.”’ Then she looked at me. “What did you write?” I chose the father I preferred, though dead: “Cowboy,” I said resolutely even though I blanched a little when she sucked in her breath the way she did whenever I’d say something she was going to tattle to Mom.