Header image header image 2  
 
 
First Memories as a Child
 
By the time I was old enough to remember any of my childhood, we were back in Oregon. I say back, because that is where my parents met and first lived as a couple. I have a few blurring images in my mind of my early, preschool years. I use this word: preschool loosely, for when I was a child, we did not have kindergarten, let alone preschool. So what I really mean is before I started school. These images are set due to some sort of significance or impression that was made on me to even consider it worth remembering ... I guess.
 
The first home that I can remember living in as a child, was located in Salem, Oregon on a street called Fairhaven. Directly across the street from our house, lived a large family known as the Davenports. It was one of these boys that twirled me around, while holding onto my feet at the ankles, “accidentally” let go of my feet. I went flying and hit my head on a rocking chair. It created a big ol’ bump on the back of my skull ... I still have a small reminder of that bump to this day (fifty-one years later). The Davenport's daughter, Elaine played with Lonnie and I. One time the three of us found a ladder on the side of the Davenport's house; propped it against the roof and climbed to the top. Lonnie was about three and I was nearly five. I think Elaine was about the same age as Lonnie.
 
In our front yard, stood two very large willow trees that afforded my mother an ample supply of switches that could be used on our backsides when we misbehaved. The day we climbed on the Davenport's roof got us a good switching. My mother would merely go out to the tree, cut a thin branch and strip the leaves off it to prepare this instrument of discipline. We sort of got it in our heads that if we hide mom's switch, it just may delay the beating long enough that the beating would not be as long in duration. Then one day she was cleaning in my bedroom and found a rather large stash of them under my bed.
 
Looking out the front door of our house, to our left lived a family called the Hayes'. The man's name was Lonnie, just like my younger brother, who was and still is nineteen months younger than I.
 
Next door to the right I remember there were a couple of little girls that lived there. My brother and I never were allowed to play with these girls, not by my parents’ wishes, but due to the mother of the girls. We would “talk” through the chain link fence at each other, but that was all we could do. One day (I was about four or five years old), these girls chanted a little songful phrase at my brother and I, “You're baddy, baddy boys, and we're goody, goody girls”. Ooh, that infuriated the two of us. We grabbed a dirt clod for each hand and proceeded to pelt these “goody, goody girls” in an attempt to show them who was “goody, goody” and “baddy, baddy”. I think we showed them!
 
Down the street to the left from our house lived a man that had a yard full of cars. My mom merely said that he was a “junk dealer”. Man alive, he had some pretty neat junk, then. They were old racing cars and car bodies. I would sneak over there and climb inside one of the vehicles and pretend that I was driving ... man, I wanted to be a junk dealer.