Stories from the hill

Chapter 1

Seattle,Beacon Hill

Forward....

The Hill

Seattle  had  a  population  of  557,080  people  in  1960  and  the  Boeing  Company  had  just developed  the  707  which  went  into  service  a  couple  years  earlier .  The  hill  was  dotted  with communities  of   farmers  ,  aerospace  workers  and  blue  collared  working  families . Some women  had  stayed  home  to  rear  their  children  and  to  do  the  laboring  tasks  of  being  a  house wife ,  while  others  worked   outside of  the  home  in  different  trades .  Some  local  resident women worked either in the local grocery store or in a State Liquor store or as a Meter Maid for the City of Seattle.

We lived on the south end of Beacon Hill,  which at that time was predominantly occupied by a slowly growing mixed ethnicity of people. With its two lanes, Beacon Avenue was the main thorough fair that led people across the hill going north and south. In about a 5 mile stretch there were two taverns , two grocery stores, and an elementary school.

The Hill was where a forest of evergreens , Maples and assorted hardwoods had met field and farms from which the Italian community delivered their produce to the public market in downtown Seattle on the weekends and perhaps at times during the week. There was a low income housing project called “Holly Park”, where, during the summer months it came alive with parents taking their little ones down to the shallow pool for them to play around the sprinkler head in the center and the water around. The hub of the housing project was a community center that served not only for senior nights and bingo, but for our Boy Scouting affairs as well. A couple miles north of the park was a major golf course called Jefferson Park where many hours were spent looking for overshot golf balls to sell back to golfers. Across from the park was the Veterans Hospital.

"The Accident"

One evening while driving down a twisting thin road called Carkeek Drive, myself with some freinds, came    upon a car wreck. Two of the individuals we knew from high school . Panic stricken, we stopped to help them. With the fumes of gasoline everywhere, an older boy that was driving the wrecked vehicle said  they all had been drinking. He was injured and asked us to help get him away from the scene of the accident where he had literally wrapped a 1949 Ford into a U shaped mess around a tree. We of course helped him and the others.

"Field and Farm and Railroads"

Down the hill from our home, which overlooked Boeing Field, we had terrific views of the field and its sounds of the jets and the periodical propeller engines that would soar overhead, and where farm fields of vegetables, fruit trees and an unattended pecan grove that met the down hill graveled street called Military Road which name had been taken from the days of World War II, but that's another story piece which I won't get into today.
It was  where I just loved to pick up the nuts in the summer and fall. I can still see the rail road tracks down below Military Road and the wooden stairs we used to scramble down to the railroad tracks, and upon occasion roll tires down the hillside till one day we got chased away by the railroad cops. These were the tracks upon which rolled The Union Pacific and Burlington Northern lines with its hundreds of different box cars from all across the country. I can still hear the sounds of the whistles in the evening that we rolled our eyes to and dosed off to sleep with. One day we walked down the stairs and discovered an open sewer cover that was over flowing with all sorts of disgusting waste.One of the kids I was with had fun dancing in it, we all laughed and went on our way.

Some days we would go down and play around the box cars, looking for opened ones. Many were empty but a few were full of grain, we tried playing inside one once but it seemed dangerous to us so we left it alone. I can still vision the pigeons swarming down upon the grain that spilled out of those type of cars. The dust oozed just out of the top of the car as we were having fun and being silly and care free.

"Family Life"

We were a family of 4, our mother, whose soft touch and caring ways kept us close and scolded us when we needed it. With my brother being the eldest, he seemed to always be near, when I or my sister needed a helping hand. My sister was the youngest, and then there was myself. Our father and mother divorced after about 8 or 10 years of marriage. Between his drinking and her family the twain never met. I can picture the old back door with a hole in it from where our mother told us he had thrown the coffee pot , I believe they could never reconcile their differences.

Our mother worked the rest of her life providing for us three and keeping the family lifestyle in order as much as a single mother could have done. She was very good at it, and was always there for us. She had dated a number of times and brought a few men home for us to meet whom she felt would be a decent man figure for us children. Only one seemed to be of our liking, but he had 4 children of his own. I think they came close to deciding to tie the knot but decided it would have been too hard with seven kids. The relationship ended and our mother didn’t date much after that. She seem to settle into her ways with us three kids and just having a family and keeping us close to hers. She had been raised in a family of 14 children and they all stayed rather close. Her closest brother seemed to always be there for as well as the others in her family.

Our home was a small two bedroom home with my brother and I sharing one bedroom, and my sister and mother sharing the other. In later years our mother must have refinanced the home and had the old carport remodeled to make a recreational family room with two built in beds and a closet where it became her bedroom combined for family usage as well. The second bedroom became our sister’s room.

The old carport had held many young memories for us as well, like the time my sister stepped out the back door just as my uncle was burying the hatchet across the pet ducks neck, for our mother had grown tired of the constant mess upon the porch where it had roosted at night. My sister dropped like a fly to the kitchen floor and I remember mother picking her up and rushing her to the faucet to run water over her forehead. Upon another occasion I remember my uncle showing my brother and I what happens to a chicken after you ring its neck. My uncle at the time was an avid hunter and I believed he had done a few things to discourage us from becoming the same. Well he rung the chickens head right off of its body to show us two boys how the body kept jumping around, yep, it discouraged me alright.

The house was heated by oil and still is to this day. The smells were abundant around this neighborhood, the musty and dusty smell of the dry graveled bed of the road in summer, the spring smell of a new mown lawn and there was always the lingering smells of the alley and the pungent odor of the seepage from the over flowing septic tank in the side yard that our mother had her brothers come over and dig trenches and lay pipe to connect to the new sewer system that the city was putting in the deep trenches out in the street. There was an alley in the back that had so many pot-holes in it that residents were always throwing their yard debris into it to fill up the potholes as the city would never repair or maintain this back alley. The only vehicles that would dare brave using this alley were usually the garbage disposal trucks or residents with trucks that had a high center as to not get stuck.

With us two boys we were always finding things to do and get inventive when there was nothing to do, such as building plastic model cars in our room with the windows closed and we were sitting in there for hours using plastic glue adhesive and the fumes I’m sure were strong, as mother would come in the room and just say “Oh my God” and go over and open up the window. At other times when there were no other kids to go hang out side with upon occasion we would go down underneath the house with our green army men and other toys and our shovels and be digging trenches around the foundations of the house. After about a week of that our mother would be searching for us outside and upon finding us she would say the same thing, “Oh my God” and drag us out from underneath the house. The only thing I didn’t care for underneath the house was the smell coming from the oil furnace. But we did manage to find my sisters pet cat’s carcass. She had been missing for a couple months.

There were a couple meadows where neighbors had their horses and some property where  a junk yard of old World War II aircraft fuselages, wings and a mixed melody of parts and windows with real bullet holes from B17 parts to B24 turrets. The glass windows were about one and a half inches thick, and in the crafts cockpits there were all the gadgets still intact and the seats had some blood stains, now that was a most important factor to a young boy who dreamt of flight and fighting the enemy , that’s where we played as well and let our imaginations run amok. Who ever thought that this young lad would once again in his life view many of the same types of parts and materials as an older man working at the Boeing Aircraft company, the same people renowned for the famous B-17 of World War two and would end up becoming a veteran of the United States Air Force during the wind down of the Vietnam conflict .

I can remember delivering papers to the residents of the area and on the nights I had to go make monthly collections in the dark of the early evenings things seemed a bit eerie at times. I used to take a short cut down to Portland Street through a small meadow that separated the local areas. Upon this one night I was crossing this meadow and I could hear something following me, I hollered out, “who’s there?” and received no answer, the foot stepping noises became louder and louder. Frightened I began to run and I could hear the quickening gallop of whatever was behind me. All of a sudden it leaped upon me pushing me to the ground. To my foolishness it was a very friendly black lab dog of the name I cannot remember that was licking me every which way. We got up and walked together down to the neighbor’s house to collect payment.

A few of the homes in the area were in disrepair and one had been vacated but a lot of things were left behind. Broken tables and chairs missing legs, with colors of age showing through the peeling curled up veneer and a grand piano hunkered down in a corner leaning on its side that was missing a few of the black and white keys and some that had loosened from age and weather. Scattered around the floor of this old home were blue medicine bottles and a large stuffed Moose head that was missing one of the glass eyes and was pretty tore up. I had always thought that a physician had lived there at one time.

Now this was a time prior to the freeways coming through and the state buying up all the property it could to make way for the cement monster that was to invade our state of Washington. Upon these times were hard times for I’m sure a lot of people in the area giving up their residences in the name of progress. Well as kids we roamed the streets a bit and seen a few of these abandoned homes that would be eventually torn down. When we had to walk to our high school; as our mother had no vehicle as yet, we would take all the normal short cuts we could to get to what was then called “Swift Avenue”, as we walked down this long stretch of road on the west side of street was a huge Victorian mansion that had been a been bought up by the state. Now there were many homes and the state apparently had not the time to post no trespassing signs or to rope things off. At a later date we went down to see the insides of this old home. Inside there were exquisite spiral stair cases that lingered up to the upper floors, carpets still laid out everywhere and some furniture pieces were left behind . It just mystified us why everything was left this way. In a matter of weeks it was sadly torn down.

I suppose when I first felt the wind, it was on a chilly October evening and I was standing out in the middle of the graveled street near the old wooden telephone pole that was across the way from our home. The single bright light bulb with its metal rusty shroud above it glaring down upon the street gave one a feeling of warmth even in the cold months of winter. In the summer evenings the moths would swarm around it, sometimes appearing as a small fog as we would be playing hide and seek with the neighbors.

This was the spot that all us kids called “home base” for the evening times after dinner playing hide and seek and served as focal point for meeting up with others.

I could hear the whistling of the monthly winds blowing through the clouds way up above my head as if one of the many Boeing jets were passing over our home. As I stared to the stars above I looked up and down the street as I if was seeking something; perplexed I could see the telephone wires wriggling forcefully against the wind.

I was a young fellow 12 years of age with a few friends but not many, as most of the kids in the neighborhood were girls or boys older than my self. I had a brother and a sister and a single mother divorced from our father when I was about 8 years of age. I was feeling left out a lot at that age in my life. When other kids were doing things with their fathers; well I was let’s say; feeling left out a bit even though I knew that our mother was always there for us. I didn’t come to realize till many years later as I saw her get worn down with life how hard things were for her and if it were not for the help of her family, well I will not go there , for that is another story.

The neighbor hood was one from the 1950’s. With lots of room for kids to go investigate, and use their imaginations and play all day with others in the forest of maple’s and fir’s and see nature in it’s splendor. No freeways here, that was certain. We had come to see that the closeness of nature was dear to our hearts. And we all had each other to help when there was need.

With each winters nearing came the wind and rain along with some thunderstorms. It was always a delight for me, for I enjoyed this time of year every year. Watching the rain pound upon our window panes and going out in between the squalls to race boats or pieces of wood and make dams in the street gutters was always a must do pending our mothers decisions. The names of the surrounding streets I remember well to this very day. Names, such as Austin, Webster, Beacon, Lafayette, Holden, Portland, Chicago, military road, and Airport Way, streets just to name a few.

Between Beacon Avenue and Airport way, south of Portland streets laid the great wood. A forest of undeveloped land that we boys called home, for our tree camps, and tree climbs this was heaven. The parents seemed unconcerned about the many hours we would be gone playing and discovering, most likely because they knew we were all together or at least in pairs. There were special occasions I tend to remember more than others like the time we were down in the wood with our BB guns hunting big game. We had came upon a great red squirrel, the likes of which I had never seen again. A coat of red fur so thick, that the BB’s did not bother it at all. This was a definite memory!

And the times in the wood that we would climb the trees and have another person chop it down so we could ride the tree down to the ground and hear the big whoosh of all its branches. And on other days others would climb way up into the branches and try crossing from tree to tree, this we gave up on as one of our neighborhood chums fell a long ways down to the ground and stopped breathing , but eventually breathed on his own, just had the wind knocked out of him.

"The Rock and Roll Stars"

One day I remember our mother coming home from work. With her she had two electric guitars and two amplifiers. One for me brother and one for myself. We were entering into rock and roll heaven. My brother being a Ricky Nelson Fan thought it was real neat. Myself I didn't know what to think except start banging away. Soon other kids came with their insturments of choice or affordability.