The Store and Neighborhood
In the 1950’s, G.I. Joe’s was an especially fun place to visit. You never knew what surprise thing you were going to find in one of the bins. Part of the fun was trying to figure out how you could use your “finds.”
Years later, adults would sometimes talk to me about visiting the store with their fathers when they were kids. They would tell me what a treat it had been, and of special treasures they had found. After listening to these stories, it became clear to me, that to go to the store on a rainy Saturday was an event.
But, I believe it was more than just a fun place. Looking back, G.I. Joe’s represented a wave of the future for the Northwest, because so much of the G.I. surplus was a prototype for recreational sporting goods that had not been developed yet. The products sold at the store obviously were not used by customers for their original purpose, which was military action. Instead, they were used to get out in nature, or in creative ways, like making a wading pool out of a rubber raft.
Also, the store sold more than army/navy surplus, and this made it different from many similar stores. There were always the cigarettes, hardware, and heavy equipment in the product mix, and shoes were added early on. The variety of products made it very hard to categorize the business.
I would say that the area where my family lived the first four years of the store’s existence was very hard to categorize too. There was farmland to the rear of us, and between our house and the business. These were cucumber fields that were crop-dusted by small airplanes, with the mature cucumbers being picked by jail inmates.
Across the street, a dairy cow grazed in a field, which was part of a small, family farm. David and I got to be friends with the kids who lived there with their grandparents for a while. We would go over to the hay-filled barn some late afternoons at milking time, and the farmer was kind enough to let us try milking. These neighbors also raised chickens. That is where we would go to buy eggs.
Next door, there was a dog kennel named the Flo-Bob. These neighbors raised cocker spaniels and that is where we got our darling puppy, Tarps.
I am sure there were all sorts of critters on the land, but what stands out in my memory are pheasants, red winged blackbirds and caterpillars. The adult male pheasants were multicolored and glorious, as they flew across the sky, or searched for food in the back forty. One afternoon, I looked out our kitchen window to the neighbor’s weeping willow tree, and saw that it was covered with pheasants! A number of them were perched in the tree! It looked like a scene on a blue and white plate from China.
The red winged blackbirds, with their distinctive call, could be seen and heard, as they perched on stalks in the slough, on David’s and my walk to school. I loved to see the flash of crimson as they flew from one cattail to another.
As for the fuzzy caterpillars, soft to the touch, they formed a colony in the birch tree in our backyard. However, they proved no match for the G.I. flame thrower.
There were many wonderful things about living in this Columbia River area, but what I did not like were the small sloughs. They ran on one side of the road going to David’s and my school, and on both sides of the road going to the store. These sloughs were 3 or 4 feet wide, filled with turgid, brown water. I was always concerned about the possibility of falling in.
Adding to the area’s mix, was a golf course and the Columbia River Yacht Club, which we passed on our way to school. .
Some schoolmates lived in homes along the river, their yards sloping down to the water. Many of these homes had been flooded in 1948, just like our home. There was also an anchorage with a network of docks below the yacht club. That was a fun place for me to go sometimes, with my friend, Nancy Sells, whose father had a boat repair business there.
But, one place I did not go was to the island in the middle of the river channel, between Oregon and Washington. When I looked across the water, firmly standing on the levee by my school, the island looked like a magic place to me. It was sandy and flat, covered with small trees and bushes. I was just sure if only I could go there, that it would be so special. In my imagination, I even thought that there might be buried treasure.
I finally got to explore the island as a teenager, when Dad got a ski boat that we took out on weekends for a few summers. We went boating and water skiing on the Columbia. It was fun to sit down to a picnic of Mother’s fried chicken on that island or others, but it was not magic and I didn’t find any buried treasure!
Portland Meadows Horse Racing Track was also in our area. At Columbia Grade School, children of people working with the horses would attend the part of the year that the racing was taking place. I even got to present a winning horse with a blanket one Valentine’s Day, but that was when I was a teenager.
So, where my family lived was so different from homogenous housing tracts of today, or the city neighborhoods of the 1950’s. There was farming, raising cows and horses, golfing, boating, and horse racing. Slightly further away, was the Portland Airport and the Air Force Air Base. At the edge of the area, there was cookie and cracker maker, Nabisco, a meat packing plant, and the fun and amazing amusement park, Jantzen Beach on Hayden Island. And, finally, there was one of my favorite places, where I took English riding lessons for a short time, the Columbia Riding Academy, also on Hayden Island.
I like to think that the area we lived in, on that Columbia River flood plane, was like a mirror for G.I. Joe’s. Both store and neighborhood offered such a variety of treasures that could be enjoyed in creative ways. They were both wonderful places and not fancy or pretentious, really “down home.” And, that is the way my Dad was too.
With almost everything around us being named Columbia, it is obvious that the Columbia River dominated the area.
My family, along with other residents on the flood plain, paid a lot of attention to the river and its many moods, especially in the spring. That was the time of the snow melt and spring runoff, when the Columbia ran fast, swelled with new volume. How fast was the melt? How high was the river? How many feet to the top of the levee?
In the late fall and winter, we would keep tabs on the snow pack in the mountains. Would there be a lot of snow this year? What would the temperatures be? Would there be a rapid melt off with a sudden change in temperature?
Obviously, we studied the Columbia and its origins, because it could personally affect us. The 1948 Vanport Flood was too fresh in everyone’s minds. There was an unspoken question in our minds, every spring. “Would the river flood this year?”
But, instead of voicing this worry, we would focus on things that could be measured, like river height, or feet or inches from the levee’s top. That fear of flooding was the downside of living close to the Columbia, before all the dams had been built.
The upside for me was that I became more attuned to nature than if I had lived in a typical suburb. I loved that river, and still do today. Its power and majesty in those days, as it rolled to the sea, is something that is still deep in my heart.
In fact, I find it a little hard to drive up the Columbia Gorge today, and look at the placid river, tamed by all those hydroelectric dams. I know that it is the Columbia’s potential to run fast and gloriously, filled with salmon. That is what I see in my mind’s eye.
As an aside, Mom and Dad took David and me up the Columbia Gorge in order to see Native Americans fishing the traditional way at Celilo Falls. It was awe-inspiring to see the fishermen with their nets and spears, standing on the flimsy wooden platforms above the crashing, roiling water!
I believe that that was the last spring salmon run through Celilo Falls, before the fishing site was destroyed forever. The Dalles Dam, upon it's completion in 1957, backed up the river and inundated the falls and fishing site.
All of us who live in the Northwest, lost a tremendous treasure with the destruction of Celilo Falls. While watching the fishermen back then,, I didn’t understand the significance of what my brother and I were seeing. I am just grateful that my parents had the foresight to take us to witness an important part of Pacific Northwest history. I am also grateful that I got to take part in that last celebration of spring and fishing and renewal, even in the small way of being an observer of 11 or 12 years old.
Today, I think of that roar of Celilo Falls as a hymn to the Creator by the Umatilla, Yakima, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce Tribes, the Native Americans who fished there for generations beyond count. While we may not hear that magnificent reverberation of falling water with our ears any more, it still exists somewhere. And, I believe that those of us who hold the Columbia River in our hearts, no matter who we are, also share in that continued hymn.
