Chase Gardens

Chase Gardens

In the thirties and into the early fifties, it was common for women to wear a corsage when they went out for dinner or dancing on a Friday or Saturday night.  In the southern Willamette Valley, these corsages were provided by Chase Gardens, which was a company  owned by the Chase family with a great number of greenhouses on the north side of the Willamette River, between Eugene and Springfield. They also grew fruit and vegetables for winter sales to the grocery stores.  The Chase family owned many acres of land along the north bank of the Willamette River, where they grew peaches and beans, a vast collection of bean yards where generations of Eugene and Springfield teenagers, from my parent’s generation up to and past my own, spent the summer picking the bean which went to the cannery and were sold all over the West Coast.   In the late sixties the Chase family sold their land for real estate development. The land is now freeways and businesses.

During the depression it was hard for Freeman and Everett to find work.  Ben was laid off from the U of Oregon maintenance department.  The only money that came in that first year was from the two boys finding a job at Chase Gardens pruning trees at ten cents a tree.

Freeman subsequently found work driving a truck delivering finished lumber for the Booth Kelley Lumber Company.  Everett joined his dad contracting, doing odd jobs, painting and roofing and glazing.  They spent one year in Portland as glaziers, putting up green houses on Portland’s east side.

With this experience Everett was able to get a job at Chase Gardens working on the greenhouses.  After a few years Ben was rehired at the U of O and once again the family had money coming in.

After returning from his war service in the South Pacific, Everett was able to regain  his old job at Chase Gardens, as head of maintenance.  Mom and aunt Carldene got jobs there also, making corsages.  This involved sitting a large table covered with boxes of gardenias.  The ladies trimmed the stem, then wrapped the stem in a green paper tape, a gentle downward twirling motion, then poked a pin with a nice looking glass head into the stem and put the gardenia, a lovely smelling white flower with dark green leaves, into a white box.  The boxes were gently packed and taken by truck to flower stores all over the valley for weekend sale.

The two ladies worked at Chase Gardens for several years after the war, until David, Carldene’s husband, took advantage of the GI Bill and moved to Monmouth to attend the Western Oregon College of Education. 

Mom got a job as a school cook, a job she had until retiring at age 65.

Dad found that working in the steamy greenhouses reactivated his malaria, contracted in the jungles of New Guinea, so he got a job at the Georgia Pacific Plywood Mill, where he worked until he was 62.  Then he told his foreman that he hated his job and he was quitting, and went out drinking.  Mom said he arrived home quite drunk.  He was able to work full time raising cattle on his 98 acre spread until Mom retired and they got a double wide trailer in Queen Valley, Arizona.

Mom said that Dad suggested they drive to New Orleans.  On the way they stopped to visit friends in Queen Valley, a small community east of Phoenix. Mom said she was surprised when Dad bought the trailer house.  She complained that she never did get to New Orleans.

Springfield Days

Springfield Days

At the beginning of 1946 we left Wendling.  The mill worker’s union decided that since the war was over they would go on strike for higher wages.  The Booth-Kelly company decided that they could get along without a sawmill in Wendling and moved everything to their Springfield mill.  The workers housing, A, B, and C Row, were torn down, and most of the other housing as well. 

Dad used the new GI Bill to order a new house built in Eugene, and until that was finished we were to live with his parents, my Squires grandparents.

In Springfield I took a school bus across town to Brattain Elementary School.

On weekends my parents liked to drive up to Wendling to drink beer and visit with Carldene and David.  The two army veterans, and others who showed up,  usually one or more of David’s brothers, enjoyed talking about their war experiences, and delighted in teaching me various ways to defend myself.  Many of these involved breaking arms or backs or trachea, which was far beyond anything that ever occurred to me.  However when I began school in Springfield at lot of the self defense moves came in handy.

Brattain Elementary School was much larger than the Wendling school, and the quality of education was nothing like the North Texas teachers laboratory school in Denton, Texas.  In the classroom I was bored, and would often get up from my seat and wander to one of the displays or bookshelves along the wall to find something interesting.

On the playground, crowded with kids from mill working or logging families, I had a hard time fitting in.  A lot of the boys carried knives in their knee high boots, and mumblty peg was the popular game.  This involved throwing a knife into the dirt in an attempt to make it stick, a skill I still sometimes practice.  I had several cousins at Brattain who gave me some social life but in general I spent a lot of time by myself reading.

The Squires grandparents lived on Kelly Street, at the foot of Kelly Butte.  Grandad Squires who was recently retired from the painting department of the U of O maintenance department, had built the house himself.  The house was el shaped.  At one end was the kitchen, which had a door opening to the back lawn and fruit trees, a door off of the driveway that abutted a covered walkway to the garage, a container in the wall to hold stove wood for the cookstove that had an outer and inner lid, to keep out the cold.  Out of habit, the old people kept a dipper which they filled with water from the tap.  There was a pump in the back yard in case the city water ever gave out.

From the kitchen one entered the dining room, which featured a large oak dining table, a cabinet for dishes and silverware, and at the other end a bookshelf holding adventure and mystery novels left there by the five or six children who had grown up in Springfield.

On the north side of the dining room was the grandparent’s bedroom, separated by a curtain, and a stairway leading to the second floor.

On the south side was a sitting room, creating the el shape, which contained a big wood stove for heating the house in one corner and in the other was a table on which sat a large radio.  In front of the radio was a rocking chair, for Grandad, and in front of the wood stove was a big stuffed chair, for Grandma.  In the southwest corner was a long couch with a small table in front.

The front door was in the northeast corner of the sitting room.  There was a shelf next to the front door holding a picture of Ronald in his WWI uniform and a picture of my dad in his WWII uniform.

Upstairs, which was unfinished, was one large room with several beds where the girls had slept, and around the corner was another room, which was for the boys, Everett, Freeman, and Bruce.  Here there piles of old magazines of a male nature, usually about boxing or mystery magazines.  Bluebook, a magazine for men, was also available.  This was a men’s version of Redbook, a magazine for women.

The lumber Ben had used to build the home was all cedar, still red and slightly fragrant.

Their house was on a double size lot, with a large vegetable garden taking up one half.  Every spring a friend of granddad who owned a team of plow horses would come to plow up the lot.  Ben and Ellen would grow corn and other tasty plants for canning and eating during the winter. On the open land north of the house was a large plot of strawberries, growing big and fat and juicy in the soft loamy soil.

Early in my residence there I discovered a chicken house up the hill on the northwest corner, with fat hens and a couple of roosters pecking the soil.  To my six year old delight, the chickens ran when I approached them.  I was happily chasing the chickens when I heard heavy breathing and the sound of pounding feet behind me.  My granddad was chasing me!  And he was angry!  I veered away from the chickens and led the chase into the house, where I escaped into my mom’s lap.  After a few minutes of heavy breathing granddad calmed down.  He urged me to never chase the chickens, which request I honored.  He taught me to find eggs the chickens had laid, piling them carefully in a basket for breakfast.

Behind the house was a steep hillside, the east side of Kelly Butte.  This was a scene of exploration.  I found a section of mud which cousin Skip and I slid down one spring day, sliding over and over in the gooey mud, till we were both barely visible beneath our layer of silt.

I tried the same thing one summer day, but the mud had dried and I bounced rather than slid, and ripped the sleeves off my shirt, and tore my forearms as well.

At the top of the butte was a section of exposed rock, where I had my first rock climbing experience. 

I also climbed the trees on the hillside.  I was just then reading Tarzan, and found places where I could leap from tree to tree.

We lived there for almost two years, then in the spring of the third grade we moved