The Folks
In Oregon in the thirties there were dance halls in every small town or junction. The building might be a grange hall during the week, but on Saturday night a band would come in and tables would be set up and a crowd would gather to dance and drink, and sometimes fight. Up the McKenzie River was a small town called Blue River, which featured a Saturday dance. One night in 1937 Carl brought his two oldest daughters to the dance hall. He kept a close eye on them, but finally allowed his oldest daughter, Lois, to dance with a young man with curly hair, a disarming gap between his front teeth, wearing a double breasted blue serge suit with a powder blue tie. That was my dad and mom. They danced the two step, which is kind of jumpy to look back on, but they found themselves in perfect coordination, and danced several dances together. Everett, my dad, asked Carl if he could call on his daughter at a future time and a date was set.
He arrived at their home in Wendling in his Hudson Terraplane in his blue suit with a yellow tie. Carldene, the youngest daughter answered the door. He asked her if she knew the barnyard shuffle, which turned out to be a pantomime of a man cleaning off his shoes, which caused her to laugh uproariously. He came in and chatted with grandma and Mom and Rita. Grandad stayed behind his newspaper. As the couple went out the door he emerged to say "eleven." He was a man of few words.

They were married a few months later. I was born over a year later. Mom pointed out to me one evening when I was in college and while she was ironing, that my dad was the only one of his siblings whose first child was born over nine months after the wedding. This was a point of some pride to her, and it was also an admonishment to me to be careful.
 Their first house was a little yellow house on fourth street in Springfield, but in 1940 the 41st Infantry Division, a National Guard unit, was activated and dad was stationed at Fort Lewis. We had an apartment in Steilacoom, close to Tacoma, where mom would take me on walks on the pebbly beach of Puget Sound. I had a friend named Willy, an African American boy whose grandfather was a friendly and amusing old gentleman.
One Sunday morning there was a speech on the radio which caused mom to burst into tears and dad looked solemn and a few days later mom and I went to Fort Lewis. Dad was the top sergeant of the headquarters company. A lot of the men in his company came to give me a hug and shake mom's hand and they all got on trucks and drove away to board a train, the first step of their long trip to Australia. In a few minutes mom and I stood with other dependents in an empty parking lot, the wind off of Puget Sound blowing memos and receipts and chewing gum wrappers in a swirl as we all looked at the tail lights disappearing down the road.
We moved back to Wendling then, staying with the grandparents. Carldene was married to David and Rita was married to Gordon, and they had a little boy I called GD.  The bedroom used by the girls was available and we stayed there while mom got a job in the Booth Kelley Lumber Company office. Then David was drafted and he and Carldene went to Georgia, and Rita was killed in an auto accident and Gordon joined the SeaBees and went to the South Pacific. Mom and I moved into his house. And GD and I began our lives as little boys together.
Nick