Next Mother reported that a hundred people had asked for books. Men wanted adventure, a boy asked for forestry, an old lady who was ill sent in for cheerful stories, women who lived in lonely places asked for books. She concluded this article by saying, “Our children need and are entitled to the use of a library just as much as city children are.”
Crates of books began to arrive from the Oregon State Library in Salem. At last Yamhill had books for children—and what good books they were! The first I recall was Joseph Jacobs’s More English Fairy Tales, which included a gruesome little tale called “The Hobyahs.” I was so attached to that story that Mother had to pry the book out of my fingers at bedtime.
Books by Beatrix Potter were among the many that came out of those state library crates. My favorite was The Tailor of Gloucester, not only because I loved the story, but because of the picture of the waistcoat so beautifully embroidered by mice. I studied that picture and knew that someday I wanted to sew beautifully, too.
Mother wearied of reading aloud so much. “I’ll teach you to read,” she said.
“No.” I was firm about this. Little girls who were to enter the first grade in the fall had spent a day at school in the company of big girls. I had such a good time that I wanted to learn to read in the real school with other children, not in our kitchen alone with Mother. I could hardly wait.
That brave little library brightened the lives of many of us that winter, and in the spring, when flowers bloomed again, the library had a hundred and forty-two books in addition to sixty-two state books.
One Saturday was particularly pleasant because we combined picking flowers with walking to the library. Yamhill’s war hero, George Welk, who had captured thirty-two Germans single-handedly (“I think he just got excited,” said Mother), had written to the Record asking the people of Yamhill to collect blue pinks. The blossoms would be sent to Portland for sea color on the U.S. Marines float in the Rose Festival parade. “George Welk takes pride in knowing Yamhill can do it,” wrote the editor. Mother and I, along with others, gathered armfuls of blue bachelor buttons, which we left in buckets of water in front of the store on our way to the library. This was the last time we picked wildflowers in Yamhill.
That summer everything changed. Father was proud of his bountiful harvest of heavy wheat, laden fruit trees, woolly sheep, fat hogs, cows that gave rich milk. This was followed by bitterness because he could not sell any of it for enough money to meet expenses. We stopped subscribing to The Oregonian because, as I understood it at the age of six when I missed “The Katzenjammer Kids,” the Oregonian did not say nice things about farmers.
Someone had borrowed money, Father had agreed to cosign, and when the person (perhaps an uncle) could not repay, my father had to assume the debt. Years later, Mother recalled that year with sorrow. “We had everything,” she said, “everything except money.”
Money was needed for things we could not grow, that mysterious, invisible mortgage payment, a pretty hat.
One day Father, looking worried and exhausted, came in from the barn. “I’ve had enough,” he said. “I’m quitting.”
Mother, who had been standing at the kitchen stove, dropped into a chair. “Thank goodness,” she said.
Father found someone to lease the farm, and our livestock was sold at auction from the wagon in the barnyard. When the animals were being led away, and Mother learned the amount of money they had brought, she said, “Oh dear.” I was sad, without understanding why.
Our possessions were loaded onto a truck. We left behind the beautiful walnut wardrobe because, as Mother explained, city houses had closets. Then, with Grandma and Grandpa coming along to wave goodbye, we walked to the depot to catch the train to a new life.
Leaving Yamhill did not distress me, for home was wherever my parents lived. I looked forward to Portland, where I would have children close by to play with, school, a real teacher who would teach me to read. Even though adults had troubles, I was secure. Yamhill had taught me that the world was a safe and beautiful place, where children were treated with kindness, patience, and tolerance. Everyone loved little girls. I was sure of that.
Photographic Insert I
Mother worries because her daughter’s ear sticks out.
Mother poses in her aunt’s apartment the year she attended high school in Chicago. On rainy days on the farm she recalled this period of her life, particularly the opera, with longing.
Mother stands between her two cousins the year the three left Michigan to teach school in Washington. They find dressing in the clothes of a male relative hilarious.
Mother, in her high school graduation picture, faces the future with determination.
Father is photographed at the beginning of World War I for his mother, who insists on pictures of her five sons because they may go to war.
Mother and Father pose for their engagement picture.
My parents, at the time of their engagement, clown with Mother’s cousin.
The entire farm is my playground, a source of interest and delight.
My grandparents pose on the porch of the Bunn house in Yamhill.
I celebrate my first birthday by waving my very own hairbrush. Mother, who had tried to curl my hair, always remarked of this picture, “I thought your hair never would grow in.”
On my second birthday, when I have the measles, I refuse to hold still for the photographer. Swinging my legs was fun.
Winston and I stand together as bride and groom in the Tom Thumb wedding. I feel beautiful; Winston is miserable.
Winston and I are dressed for a party. By now my hair is thick enough to support a bow, even though the bow keeps slipping.
Too young to be trusted to wind the Maypole, Elma and I are bewildered flower girls in Yamhill’s May Day festival.
Yamhill celebrates the Fourth of July by having a board nailed across the stomachs of little girls so they won’t fall off the float. I represent Ohio, second from the left in the front row with dirty knees that show I have fallen down. The parade route is short because Yamhill’s main street is only four blocks long.
Mother organized her library in the Commercial Clubrooms on the top floor of this bank building. Forty years later the china cabinet, empty of books, and the worn leather chair remained in the dusty room where a dead bird lay on the floor. (Yamhill County Historical Society.)
PART TWO
Portland
The Big City
Portland, city of regular paychecks, concrete sidewalks instead of boardwalks, parks with lawns and flower beds, streetcars instead of a hack from the livery stable, a library with a children’s room that seemed as big as a Masonic hall, buildings so high a six-year-old almost fell over backward looking at the tops. I loved elevators that lifted me, leaving my stomach behind, and escalator stairs that moved, so I did not even have to raise my feet. Mother patiently rode up and down, up and down, with me.
On Halsey Street, we rented a six-room two-story house with a furnace instead of wood stoves; it seemed warm and cozy after the big farmhouse. The city lot had been part of a farm at one time, for old cherry and plum trees and a bramble of loganberries grew in the backyard. An acre or so of hazelnut brush flourished across the street, and beyond, in Sullivan’s Gulch, railroad trains huffed and chuffed, dividing the city.
A plumber, who lived behind his corner shop, sang “O Sole Mio” into a washtub. A French widow, who took in boarders, lived next door. She had a fascinating accent and called me “Bevairly.” Best of all, children lived in almost every house.
And toys! I had never seen such toys. A boy who, with his father, boarded next door, had an Uncle Wiggily board game, Parcheesi, and Tinkertoys. Girls had whole families of dolls. One girl, Elizabeth Ann, had a rocking horse, a tricycle, and, in the corner of her dining room, a large and completely furnished dollhouse. Her parents owned a radio, the first I had ever heard. Everyone had roller skates. I sat on the front steps, longing for skates of my own and for a skate key on a string aroun
d my neck, hoping someone would offer to lend me theirs.
And then one day my father brought home a pair of roller skates of my very own, and I, too, became part of the neighborhood, skating up and down the gentle slope. My knees were constantly skinned, but I picked myself up, screwed my skates in place, and skated on with blood trickling into my half socks. Sometimes I squatted on my skates and, with my arms wrapped around my legs, coasted down the slope.
We made stilts out of two-pound coffee cans and twine and clanked around the block yelling “Pieface!” at children on the next street and bloodying our knees when the twine broke. When we tired of clanking, or someone said, “For heaven’s sake, children!” we pounded rose petals with rocks and soaked them in water, hoping to make perfume. We hunted for old bricks among the hazelnut bushes and pounded them into dust in a game we called Brick Factory. With scabs on my knees and brick dust in my hair, I was happy. I had children to play with who could be summoned by standing in front of their houses and yelling their names. Telephones were for grown-ups.
There was one problem, however, in the midst of all this joy. Because the children of pioneers considered education unnecessary for sons, who were expected to farm the land and hand it on to succeeding generations, my father’s education consisted of two years of high school—all that Yamhill offered at that time—and a few courses in farming at Oregon Agricultural College, which left him ill equipped for city life. He became a night guard, from 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., for the Federal Reserve Bank, his one Portland connection. At some time in his youth, he had worked guarding Federal Reserve gold shipped by train to San Francisco. Trying to sleep daytimes with all the neighborhood children skating, yelling, clanking, and crying over skinned knees was difficult. He moved a cot to the attic and sometimes yelled out the window, “Quiet down there, you kids!” We tried to be quiet, until we forgot.
While my father slept in the attic, Mother took advantage of city culture and enrolled me in a ballet class overtown so I would become graceful. In Portland we did not go “uptown,” as we had in Yamhill; streetcars took us “overtown” because we crossed the Willamette River. There, in a basement room (could it have been in the Civic Auditorium?), I laced my ballet slippers and shivered my way into a yellow camisole with attached bloomers, slipped my head through a hole in a square of yellow China silk, and tied a ribbon around my waist. With other shivering members of the class, including one resentful, tearful boy, we exercised at the bar under the direction of Alice May Brown and pranced around the room in steps with names that sounded to me like “gallop” and “sauté.”
At home I galloped and sautéed around the living room while Mother played “The Glowworm” on our old upright Ludwig piano from the parlor in Yamhill. The neighborhood children, denied or spared this cultural activity, pressed their noses against the front window to watch. As her glowworm glimmered around the living room, Mother said, “I do wish those children wouldn’t smear the glass with their noses.”
Mother also took me to the Portland Library Association, as the library was then called, where we walked across the marble floor, now hidden beneath composition flooring, to the room for children. Mother chose books to read aloud to me, and I ran my fingers along the spines of thousands of books I would soon be able to read to myself.
In the evening, Mother read aloud The Blue Bird, by Maurice Maeterlinck, the story of two children seeking the blue bird of happiness. “It’s true,” she said when she finished the book. “We find happiness in our own backyard.” Mother did not have to tell me. Happiness was all around me. I couldn’t wait for school to start. Then happiness would be complete.
School
Father brought home two books required for the first grade, The Beacon Primer and The Beacon First Reader, which cost fifty-two cents apiece. These businesslike books, with dark green covers lettered in black, were thin and easy to hold. I buried my face in the pages, inhaling the new-book smell, eager to join other children in reading from them.
The day after Labor Day, Mother walked me the six blocks to the two-story red brick Fernwood Grammar School, where I joined a confusion of children from the first through the eighth grades. Mother left me with other first-graders in the basement, where teachers lined us up, two by two. Clutching our books, tablets, and pencil boxes, we were all excited and bewildered.
Someone blew a whistle and called out, “Mark time!” Imitating other children, I pumped my knees up and down. “March!” Led by the first-grade teacher and still pumping our knees, we marched up the stairs to our classroom, where we were each assigned one of forty desks in five rows of eight, each row bolted to two boards so individual desks could not be moved. All the seats were occupied.
Except for one girl who lived across the street from me, the room seemed one big blur of children. Everything was strange: the American flag hanging indoors, the letters of the alphabet written across the top of the slate blackboard, the picture of a serene little girl in a white dress with a pink sash that hung above the blackboard.
The teacher was a tall, gray-haired woman who wore a navy blue dress and black oxfords. “Good morning, children,” she said. “My name is Miss Falb. It is spelled F-a-l-b. The l is silent. Say, ‘Good morning, Miss Falb.’”
“Good morning, Miss Fob,” we chorused.
She then wrote Miss Falb in perfect cursive writing on the blackboard and instructed us to get out our tablets and copy what she had written.
The whole thing seemed unreasonable to me. If the l was silent, why was it there? I picked up my pencil with the hand closer to the pencil. Miss Falb descended on me, removed the pencil from my left hand, and placed it in my other hand. “You must always hold your pencil in your right hand,” she informed me.
No one had ever told me I had a right or wrong hand. I had always used the hand closer to the task. With her own pencil, Miss Falb wrote Beverly Bunn on my paper in the Wesco system of handwriting with its peculiar e’s, r’s, and x’s that were to become a nuisance all my life.
The business of right and left hands worried me all day. At home, I asked Mother how to tell one from the other. She happened to be sitting in front of the sewing machine, so she said, “Face the sewing machine.” I did as she directed. “Your right hand is the hand closer to the wall.” Oh. I went through the first grade mentally facing the sewing machine every time I picked up a pencil.
School always began with a strange song about “the dawnzer lee light.” We sounded out words, c-a-t and d-o-g, and chanted rules: “e on the end makes a say in cake” and “i before e, except after c.”
Miss Falb passed out thin paper, about two inches square, for exercises in paper folding to teach us to follow directions. “Fold the paper in half,” she directed. “Open it. Fold it in half the other way. Open it again. Fold each corner to the center,” and on and on. Mother marveled at my skill when I took my folded paper home.
Miss Falb supplied each of us with a small yellow box filled with blue cardboard counters the size of nickels. “Place five counters in a row,” she directed. “Take away two. How many are left?” I liked the little counters, but, thanks to Grandpa, I could already add and subtract, and with real numbers, not counters—a skill Miss Falb did not notice.
Once a week we sang. Miss Falb taught us to stand, clutch our elbows, rock our arms as if we were holding imaginary babies, and after a tweet on her pitch pipe, sing something about “Baby’s boat, the silver moon.” Mother said it was a lovely song, but I preferred rousing hymns like “Bringing in the Sheaves” or “Yield Not to Temptation” any day.
At first, reading was dull but easy. The stories, though they could scarcely be called that, were about Ruth, John (What was that h doing in John?), and Rover. I managed “See mamma,” “See kitty,” and “I have a kitty.” (Why were there two m’s and two t’s when one would do just as well?) Reading picked up after that, for gold stars were pasted on pages beginning “I have a doll,” “I have a ball,” and “Rover is my dog.”
; Then chicken pox kept me home from school for a week, perhaps longer, and ended my ballet lessons as well. When I returned to school, I had fallen behind. I got no more gold stars.
One day Miss Falb swooped down and whipped my hands with her frequently used weapon, a metal-tipped bamboo pointer. Probably this was for letting my mind wander, though I was not sure because I was so surprised. My hands burned, but I felt I must have been bad because at home I always knew any punishment was deserved. I tried to hide my tears of pain and humiliation and was too ashamed to tell my parents.
Miss Falb made children sit on a stool facing the corner. Once I was ordered, without being told why, to the cloakroom, where I huddled, sniffling, among rubbers and lunch bags. For weeks after that, the smell of peanut butter sandwiches made my stomach curl. Once a plump and cheerful girl named Claudine was punished by being sentenced to crouch in the dark cave under Miss Falb’s desk with Miss Falb’s feet in their ugly black oxfords. When her sentence was reprieved, she emerged chastened but not much worried. Claudine, a city girl all her life, was braver in class than I.
Soon every school day became a day of fear. When I needed to go to the toilet, I was afraid to ask to be excused because Miss Falb had scolded the class for asking to leave the room so often. I was also afraid to go alone down the steps to the girls’ lavatory in the dim basement. One day, inevitably, I wet my pants. Miss Falb sent for the janitor to mop up my puddle and ordered me home to change my clothes. I walked six blocks with my wet bloomers slish-slishing with every step. Mother put me in fresh clothes and sent me back to school, where I was sure the whole class would remember my disgrace all the rest of their lives.
A Girl from Yamhill Page 5
