BACK TO WASHINGTON

After we moved from California, we lived in Peg's folks house in Puyallup. Her folks had moved to an apartment nearer downtown closer to his work. Also, they knew we were coming and let us use their house. That worked out fine, but I just couldn't find any work that paid a decent wage. I tried lumber yards, sawmills, every place; and I couldn't find anything to do. Lester finally told me if I wanted to go out to his place in Orting, I could saw stove wood and he would pay me. Somehow that didn't appeal to me much, but I probably would have if I'd stayed on.

Cliff came down to see me one night. He had been working in Seattle for North Coast Transportation Company. He said, "I've got an opening where I work. You could go to work there."

It was night work in the garage, cleaning buses. I went right back with him and got the job. I remember I worked a couple of nights before they came to get my personal history. The foreman came around and asked, "How old are you?"

I said, "I'm twenty."

He said, "You can't work here until you're twenty-one." So he wrote down twenty-one.

We handled those big buses in a little old building, We had to run them in to wash them and back them around. There was a gas pump there, just standing in the middle of the floor. I hadn't been working there very long until I back a bus into the gas pump and broke it off. Gas went all over everywhere. I went ahead and finished working that night. The foreman came around the next night and said, "I don't know what we'll do about this, but I'll see what I can do."

He went to the superintendent. The superintendent said, "Fire him, hell! Make him pay for it."

He came around the next day and told me what happened. "If you want to pay for it, it will be several hundred dollars, but we'll just take it out of your pay check a little bit at a time."

I said, "Okay." That's the last I ever heard of it. They never did take anything out of my pay check. Come to find out, somebody else had done the same thing twice before. When they put it back this time, they put some great big steel posts down in the concrete, around the pump. We didn't have any more trouble.

I got to talking to one of the other fellows. He said, "They can't take money out of your pay check to pay for it because then you would have an interest in the company. They would have to pay you royalties on everything that moves, if you went to court over it."

I continued to work there at North Coast Transportation Company. We lived for a few days with Ada and Cliff while we house hunted. We found a little three-room house with a basement and coal furnace. It overlooked Lake Union on Bagley Avenue. We paid thirty-five dollars a month rent. That was pretty high rent at the time.

I was getting sixty cents per hour for my work and I thought, "Boy, oh boy, that's something!" I'd never gotten more than fifty cents per hour for anything before. Well, I worked there until times got harder and jobs got scarcer. They cut my wages to fifty-nine cents per hour. They were cutting everybody's wages.

We lived in the house on Bagley Avenue until Barbara was almost two months old. Then we moved into a basement apartment near Woodland Park. Ada and Cliff lived in the upstairs. We were living there and I was still working for North Coast, when we got itchy feet and decided to move to the country. We went to a real estate outfit and they had acreage to sell about half way between Seattle and Tacoma. West & Wheeler was the real estate company. We went out and found a three-acre piece of land, not right on highway 99, but on the second row of lots back from the highway. Daddy John Clarke loaned us the money to make the down payment on it.

We built a sixteen by twenty-four foot house that we intended to use as a double garage later on. We moved into that when Barbara was about six months old. The land was covered with timber, brush and stumps. We cleaned it up, made a garden and got it quite livable.

Then Dad and Mother came to Washington. (In the meantime, they had sold their California property and moved to Independence.) They had driven back through California to visit Milla and Hunter. Ada met them there. She went down by bus and drove them on up to Seattle.

Ada was going to go to work so Mother stayed and took care of Ada's kids and house. Dad stayed with us for a couple of months until school was out.

About the time Jack was born, Mother came out and kept house and took care of Barbara, Dad and I. Peg went to Ada's for about three weeks before Jack was born.

The folks were living with us at the time Jack was born. Shortly after, they bought Daddy John's little shoe repair shop that was built on the lot as their house at 1111 West Pioneer in Puyallup. Daddy John had earlier moved his business into a building nearer downtown. We moved the building out behind our house and that's where Mother and Dad lived.

While they were living there, Dad had to be rushed to the hospital during the middle of the night for hernia repair.

I was still working for North Coast but things kept getting rougher, the economy worse, and times just going downhill. Marion and Lottie had gone to the Missouri Ozarks. They had traded their equity in property in Tacoma for forty acres in Texas County, Missouri, a place they had never seen. They had gone there in an old Chevrolet truck. Lester and Gladys had gone down there and bought eighty acres close to Marion.

They found another eighty acres right close by that could be bought for five hundred dollars. It had an old house on it. We managed to make a down payment on it to hold it until we could sell our place.

We sold our three-acre place in Washington for twelve hundred dollars. It had our house, Dad's house, a big chicken house and a little cow barn on it. It was all fenced, in a bunch of cherry trees were just beginning to bear, a big garden, it had electricity and municipal water. We sold it along with the furniture in the house for the twelve hundred dollars. We got three hundred dollars down payment. We got it in three one hundred dollar bills. Peg got a real thrill out of it because it was the first time she had ever carried around a hundred dollar bill.

We sent the three hundred dollars to Lester and Marion to put a down payment on the land in Missouri we were buying from John Tune. Even though we had sold our place and put a down payment on the Missouri land, we planned to stay on in Washington longer.

Ada and Cliff had moved way out on the edge of Seattle on 95th Street. We rented a house in the same end of town. Peg was in the process of getting her naturalization papers, and this had to be done in Seattle.

Mother Clarke was getting so feeble that it was difficult for her to take dare of herself; so we found a house further north. We planned to rent this house and have them move in with us. They were going to rent or sell their house on Pioneer Street in Puyallup. Daddy John was going to sell his shoe shop. He was going to quit work or maybe set up some of his machinery in the basement where he might do some shoe repair work just for the neighborhood.

The economy kept getting worse, and it was in the midst of all this planning that I got fired. We had just made arrangements to rent that house. It had a big furnace in the basement and I had gone out with Cliff where he was cutting wood and cut a truck load of wood and dumped it in the basement. Then I got fired. We left the wood there for their promise of letting us rent. They weren't going to allow children. Barbara was five and Jack was about three years old; but they had decided to let us rent anyway.

We moved back down to Puyallup to the Clarke place where Peg could care for her mom. They had, in the meantime, left the apartment and moved back to their house.

While we were there, I needed some dental work done. I cut wood to pay the dentist for it. He was going to make partial plates for me. Then, I decided to go to the Ozarks before I got it all done. There didn't seem to be much else to do. We were getting into the depression and things were just snowballing with unemployment.

Cliff and Ada had an old Overland four-cylinder car that he had cut the back end off and made a little truck body on it. When I decided to go to Missouri, they said, "You can have this." It didn't have any top or cab on it. I brought it over to Puyallup and started building a cover over it. I didn't think I could afford to buy anything to build a permanent cover so I was going to take some heavy building paper and stretch over it. George Brady, from the next door neighborhood grocery store, came over to see what I was doing. I told him and he said, "That won't work." He came bringing over three sheets of plywood that he had been using for something. I put one piece on each side and one piece over the top. Then I took the trimmings off the sides and made a back. I got it all closed in.

Lawrence Reed wanted to go to Missouri with me, but he didn't have any money. His folks were dickering to trade their place in Puyallup for a place in the Oakside School District not too many miles from where Lester and Marion lived. Frank Wilcox wanted to go with me and he didn't have any money either. Anyhow, the three us drove back to Missouri. Peg packed a lot of food and made a lot of pies and cakes for lunches.