Our Home
My family and I lived close to G.I. Joe’s, just a mile away on Columbia Avenue. It was a mixed area of small farms, a trailer court, a small housing tract, and houses on an acre or less of land.
We also lived close to the Columbia River, which was about a half mile away. Our house was located on the Columbia River flood plain. While the store had not been flooded in the 1948 Vanport Flood, our house had been. In 1951, when we moved in, there was still dried mud from the flood waters on the floor of the unfinished room on the second floor!
Our house was a 2-story traditional, with an unfinished basement, where inventory for the store was kept. In the basement, in addition to Mom’s clothes washer and a ping pong table, were piles of army knapsacks, canteens with holders and belts, stacks of inflatable rubber rafts and ammunition boxes, and other surplus items.
It did not seem unusual. That just was the way it was. And, the smell was just the way it was. Opening the door to the basement from the garage, the perfume of army surplus would waft up to you, or surround you as you went down the wooden stairs.
So, G.I. Joe’s took up space in our home, and took up space in family conversation. Sitting down for dinner together, topics of conversation were not only what all of us had done during the day, but also what the store’s sales had been for the day or week. Dad would tell us what was selling well.
One evening we heard that there had been a huge sale of tarpaulins, which are like pre-plastic covers to keep things dry or rig up as a tent. We celebrated that sale, by naming our new cocker spaniel puppy, Tarps or Tarpsy. She was a sweet dog named after a sweet sale!
The whole family worked for the company. When Dad started it, I was 8 years old. I was about 9 when I started going to work with him on occasional Saturday mornings. Besides “neatening” bins, I would straighten shoes, matching up pairs, and then dust them. My brother had the more challenging job of cleaning cosmoline off of small machinery items, and Mom did the payroll.
David and I also worked at home. G.I. Joe’s carried hardware, as well as surplus. Sitting on the hearth in the evening, our job was to screw nuts on bolts, so that they would be easier to buy. Customers would not have to search through nuts and bolts separately to find matches.
We got paid a penny for each 10 units, or ten cents for 100 nuts and bolts. This was Dad’s way of teaching us that to make money, you had to work. As we were working he would tell us, “Money is stored-up working hours.” David remembers making $1.80 one day, which was one heck of a lot of nuts and bolts to screw together!
The most exciting work David and I did was to sell fireworks in the store parking lot, in a little booth. I think that was in 1956. I felt very grownup, even though we only sold sparklers, snakes and smoke. And, I heard later that we were being checked up on all the time by employees, to make sure that we were doing OK.
A fun thing David and I got to do occasionally was to go along with Dad to the wholesaler to pick up cases of cigarettes and candy to sell. It was special to ride along in Dad’s pickup truck. And, the question we would be asking ourselves was, would we get to have a candy bar?
Dad always wore a khaki shirt and pants to work, just like he was still in the Army Air Corps. When I was little, I did not think about it. I just thought that was what all fathers wore.
David and I knew that our dad had been a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II, and that he had served in New Guinea. We were aware that he had the rank of Captain when he left the service. And, we also knew that he was in the Jolly Rogers Bombing Group, and that the symbol for the Jolly Rogers, on the tail of his plane, looked like a pirate flag. But, instead of displaying a skull and crossbones, it showed a skull with two crossed bombs under it.
He was serving overseas when I was born in 1944. The story is that my dad and crew received a bottle of whiskey in celebration of my birth, and their latrine ended up getting burned down in the fun of it all! Now, how many people can say that an outhouse was burned down in their honor?
That was about all we knew of Dad’s time in the service when we were kids, because he did not talk to us about it. It was not until a few years ago, that an older cousin of mine, Bruce Orkney of Seattle, told me more.
According to Bruce, Dad “flew 52 combat missions and he and his crew returned unscathed every time. That was remarkable; he was very proud of that!” Bruce continued, “He was the squadron leader, as you know, and later the group leader; always the number one plane on all their bombing runs.”
As an adult, my brother David talked to Dad about his World War II service. Dad told him that the Jolly Rogers Bombing Group suffered losses of about 40%, mainly due to adverse weather conditions. When you consider the pilots, flying those heavily laden planes across the empty Pacific to a small island or group of islands, it is amazing the losses of men and planes were not higher.
The crews were not flying with what we take for granted today. They had no radar, no computers to figure out where they were, and only so much fuel to reach their target and return to their base. I ask myself now, how did they do it?
But, as I said, I did not know any of this when I was a kid. My dad was just my dad, and the visible link to his time in the Army Air Corps was his constant wearing of khakis.
One memory I have of my dad, dressed in khakis of course, is of him holding a G.I. flame thrower, the wand in one hand, and the tank in another. He was standing in our back forty, or large grassy field behind our house, shooting flames to put the weeds on fire, in order to clear the field. The grass and weeds did indeed burn up, and thankfully, the house did not.
Dad also came to the rescue of the view-impaired school bus that David and I rode to school, on mornings when we did not walk. In the winter with all the rain, it could get quite steamy inside the bus, and David and I noticed our driver was having a hard time keeping the windshield clear. We told Dad and he brought home, what I guess was a portable G.I. defroster, and we passed it on to our bus driver. However, I wish I could say that it worked as well as the flame thrower!
(If the story ends here on your computer, please click on "Older Posts" below to read Part III through Part V, and Dedication and List of Sources.)
