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STORIES OF ME AND MY FAMILY |
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Planes Parades and Mines We
never intended to do real dumb or dangerous things when we were kids.
There are a few things looking back now that would probably qualify us
as not being to smart. Remember that most of my early youth, there was
no TV to distract us and we had to come up with out own entertainment.
Oh, we did go to the movies when our parents could afford to sent
us to them, but no boob tube to baby set us all day. After school or in
the summer we all kind of meet and decided what we were going to play.
Some times one of us had gone to a movie the day before or on the past
weekend, and that may influence what we were going to do. Most of the
movies we saw, were westerns, which was great for us, because we loved
to play cowboy. One
of the movies we had all seen had a mine in the story. An old
prospectors gold mine. It seemed to us that we could easily find gold in
the dirt and become rich. We never heard of anyone finding gold in our
little valley, but we could be the first. The closest thing anyone of us
got to gold was owning a square inch of Alaska.. On of the cereal
companies of the day advertised on the radio and sponsored the Sergeant
Preston of the Yukon radio show. As part of their advertising they
offered one square inch of Alaska if a person sent in some box tops form
their cereal box and about 50 cents as I remember. We all waited in high
anticipation for the day the postman would deliver the official
certificate that proved we owned part of a cold field in Alaska. I think
all three of us Fred, Denny and me all had the certificates in our
rooms. We loved to listen to the show anyway and my dog Bosco was a
husky as was sergeant Preston’s, so I felt an especial kinship to the
show. The
certificate was nice, but we were not making any money off it so after
viewing the movie about the mine, we decided to build our own mine
behind Fred’s house next to the ally. Fred’s father always had a big
garden each year and the soil there was soft and easy to dig, so we
decided to start our mine there. We assembled tools from my dad’s shed
and Fred’s dads garage and started to dig down into the soil. We went
down far enough that the hole was almost as deep as we were tall. I
guess in those days about four foot something anyway. After going down
we decided to go horizontal in a direction that would pass the mine
under the ally way behind Fred’s back yard. We knew that mines had
wood bracing to support the walls and ceiling of he mine. Mr. Baker, who
owned the blackberry field across the ally, had several rough-cut poles
lying in the berry field that he used to support the berry vines. We
took a few of these poles to use as supports in our mine. The mine was
not going to be tall enough for us to walk in it, but just big enough
for someone to crawl on his stomach. We had to cut the poles down so
that they would fit in the little mine we were building. We used various
shovels to accomplish the digging, including some of our mom’s big
kitchen spoons. The work was very hard and of course there was no light
in the hole so we had to use flashlights to see what we were doing. Fred
seemed to be the best digger and he usually took the lead in the hole.
We built bracing from he old poles as we dug deeper and deeper toward
the ally in back of the house. Day after day we dug eating our lunch our
moms had made our of our Roy Rogers lunch boxes. Our parents had no idea
what we were doing our there. They trusted that we were just building
another project as we normally did. In
those days our moms had a lot to do in that most families canned and
made a lot of the stuff they ate and wore. I remember that Fred’s mom
was very structured and did washing on a particular day and baked bred
on another day. Each week was the same, if it was Monday she would be
washing, if it was Thursday, she would be making bread. My mom and
grandmothers were much the same in doing things around the house. I even
remember my mom and dad getting fresh milk and making their own butter
with a churn they had at the house. I also remember many times finding a
half of a pig laying on the dinning room table ready for dad to cut up
and rap. We used all of the pig even the head which dad made head cheese
our of. This work was done along with their other full time jobs outside
out of the house. I bring this up to say that our parents were not
negligent in watching us kids, but that they trusted us and were busy
taking care of things that the family needed. The
tunnel went on and on for several days, it got so long that we had to
have all three of us boys lay on our stomachs stretched out in the hole
and pass dirt back to each other. The last boy would dump the dirt
outside the shaft. We hung on to each other ankles as we dug to keep in
contact with each other. The only light we had was with the lead digger
and the rest of us were laying underground in complete darkness. This
was not a place for anyone with a fear of closed in spaces. The tunnel
got long enough that we had to recruit other boys in the neighborhood to
help us get dirt out of the tunnel. I think this fact lead to the
eventual discovery of what we were doing buy our parents. We never
thought what would happen if the dirt crashed down on us. There would
have been no way we could have gotten out. One day Mrs. Keller happened
to see a group of boys looking down in her back yard and she came out to
investigate. When she saw what were doing she just about had a fit. She
screamed at us to get out of the tunnel right away. She told us to all
go home and not to play in the tunnel anymore and that our dads would be
told what we were doing. We did not understand or appreciate what she
was saying to us. We felt safe and were sure we were on the verge of
finding fabulous wealth soon. Fred’s dad refilled the hole that night
and he told my dad what we did. Dad understood what we thought we were
doing but told us in no uncertain terms that we were never to build a
tunnel like that again, and what might have happened and how easily we
could have been killed. Looking back I think it was a miracle we
survived this adventure. I know I would never want any of my kids or
grandchildren doing this. It was real dumb and just shows that even good
kids can get carried away having fun and not use their heads sometimes. Another
time we were having fun with the knowledge of our parents but we could
have gotten hurt as well. The Puyallup valley was once famous for
daffodil and tulip fields. Some of the people who immigrated to the
valley were of Dutch heritage and grew flowers as a profession as they
had done in their former homelands. At the end of the growing season, a
parade was held to celebrate the crop. It is still in existence to this
day, but not to the extent it was when I was a child. Most of the
businesses and organizations in the valley and Tacoma would sponsor
floats decorated with thousands of daffodils. Most of the high schools
would also participate with bands and drill teams. In later years Denny
and I had an opportunity to ride on a float and play music. Jackie was a
member of the Fife High School drill team and she marched in the parade.
She was real cute in her blew skirt and sweater with white boots. I
never saw her mach in the parade, but saw here in her outfit at another
event. Anyway, when we were children, it was so exciting to see the
beautiful flowers and hear he bands and watch the clowns in the parade.
It was a lot of fun and our parents took us to it each year. In
our neighborhood was a family who had a very large backyard. Most of the
yard was not really taken care of much other than cut high a couple
times a year. This allowed thousands of dandelions to grow each year.
Dandelions are considered weeds to most people, but to us kids they
looked like a field of Daffodils. We decided to decorate our wagons with
these Dandelions to make them look like daffodil floats. We got
cardboard boxes and arranged them in various shapes to look like things
like boats, planes, animals or birds. I made my wagon look like a steam
engine that we saw on the railroad track near our house. We punched
holes in the cardboard and put the stems of the dandelions through the
holes and in this way covered the boxes. We put paper streamers with
dandelions attached to the wagons. We decorated our dog’s harness and
had them pull the wagon by tying them to the wagon handle. At
first the little Daffodil/Dandelion parade was only us three boys, our
dogs and the Larson girls who lived next door to my grandma Sangster. We
would start at the West End of 4th avenue and go up the
street to the east toward Spinning School. We would blow on old whistles
and horns we had in our toy boxes to simulate the sound of the marching
bands. The noise and marching down the street drew the attention of the
adults who lived on the street. They thought we looked quite cute and
several of the neighbors took pictures of us kids in our little parade.
We decided to do it again the next day. The man who owned the field was
more than willing to let us kids take all the dandelions we wanted. This
time there were many more kids who wanted to take part in the parade and
now we had kids marching with outfits on including some of the girls
twirled there batons as though they were in a real parade. Now even more
parents took note and took pictures. About the third day I decided to
have smoke come out of the little coffee can chimney I had made for my
train engine float I had made. I had Denny get under one of the boxes
and put paper in the can and light it on fire to make smoke. He did this
up the road when suddenly the box he was in caught fire and he had to
jump out of it before he got burned. Luckily, he was not hurt and now
damage was done to anyone else, but that was the end of the parade for
us and kind of scared the kids and parents who saw what happened. We did
the parade again the next year but it never got as much attention as it
did the first year. We
boys always felt we could make some kind of machine that would be
capable of flying. We all wanted to fly and had tried different methods
to accomplish this dream. Our rocket adventure was a good example of us
and this desire on our parts. We had a pretty good idea of what it would
take to fly as we had played a lot with kits of all kinds. Fred’s
dad of course worked for a plywood mill and he had a lot of wood sheets
around that we could use. We decided to build a small airplane out of
some of this wood. We modeled it after a picture of a Piper Cub we had a
picture of. We started the project and were doing pretty good, when Mr.
Keller came to our rescue and helped us build the plane. With his
ability we really had a neat plane that actually looked like something.
It had a body and tail with big wings over the cockpit. Mr. Keller put
wing supports and wheels on the plane as well as a little prop. We
played in the plane for days and rigged up a walky-talky to the plane
from and played that we were flying and communicating to the plane from
the tower. We painted the plane silver and it was really cute and a lot
of fun. It gave us many hours of enjoyment and pleasure. We had the
plane there in Fred’s yard for a year or so when we got the idea that
maybe if we pulled it fast enough with enough boys helping that it would
actually take off and fly. We attached a long rope to the front bottom
of the little wood plane and lined up all the guys we could find to
pull. Fred manned the cockpit and the rest of us pulled as fast and hard
as we could. No matter what we did, we cold not get the plane in the
air. We decided to think about it for a little time and then do it
again. The next attempt we tried to make a big rubber band plane like
the small ones we had gotten at Holman’s Grocery Store on the corner.
We used a bicycle inner tube as the rubber band.
We hooked the propeller to the inner tube and winded it up as
hard as we could. This again failed to provide enough trust to lift the
plane at all. In
our last attempt we decided to make the little wood plane into a glider.
We built skids for it on the top back roof of Fred’s garage. After a
lot of effort, we got the wheels off the plane and made 2 by 4 skits
that fit inside the skids we had on the garage. We pulled the plane up
onto the roof and set it on the skid path. Denny was the lightest so we
selected him as the pilot. Denny got in the cockpit and Fred and I
pushed him off as hard as we could. Of course the plane went straight
down in a heap. Denny was scratched and bruised a little but nothing
thankfully was broken except the plane. Mr. Keller was a little upset we
had destroyed the toy he had made us, but relieved we were not hurt. He
had planed on taking it apart anyway as it took a lot of space in his
backyard. Again
we were so luck nobody was hurt. We went on in the years to come to do
other dumb things like making pipe guns that used firecrackers to shoot
marbles. We made them powerful enough to blow large holes in trees
around the place. We could have easily killed or hurt someone with these
things. But, by the grace of GOD we didn’t. These were just fun
adventures I will never forget, growing up on 4th avenue.
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