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1. IN THE BEGINNING

I was born on October 22, 1943 in Sacramento, California, exactly 58 years to the day after the birth of my maternal grandfather, Charles Randall, who lent me my middle name. In 2006, my grandson, Oloan Randall Carter, was born just four days shy of October 22nd. I urged his mother, my daughter-in law Tara, to try to hold on for four more days to complete this unusual natal connection between grandfathers and grandsons, but as she was already overdue and not feeling exceptionally comfortable, she was pleased to deliver Oloan on October 18th.

I was a big baby, somewhere in the neighborhood of eight pounds. When I was about five and I and my two older brothers would talk with Mom about childbirth, because as I was growing up she seemed always about to have another child, Mom would note that I was the biggest baby. My two older brothers would chime in “yeah, and you’re still the biggest baby.”

Mom would go on to bear eight children and to miscarry a ninth. She bore children easily, relatively speaking. Her first, my oldest brother, Dave, was born on the living room sofa while my dad was still in the bathroom shaving, getting ready to take mom to the hospital. My birth certificate notes that mom was in the hospital only fifteen minutes before delivering me. Clearly, she did not like hanging around hospitals.

She bore eight children over seventeen years, and when asked why, she just said “we really like children.” She called us her “little people.” And she and my dad gave us all names starting with the letter “D”, as in David, Donald, Dennis, Duncan, Dale, Darrel, Dwight, and Debra Sue, in that order. Mom and Dad never really came up with a convincing story explaining why they fixated on the letter “D.”

Dad earned a degree in chemistry at UCLA in 1935 and he jokingly referred to UCLA in those early days as “a one-room schoolhouse.” Duncan joked at dad’s memorial service that it was a lot easier to get a degree in chemistry then because the periodic table of elements was so much smaller. Even for a person with a college degree it was difficult to land a good job in 1935, the middle of the Great Depression. He worked for a time for Sperry Flour, inspecting grain. His favorite job was skiing in the Sierras, gauging snow depths for the State of California. At the time of my birth he worked for the State Department of Agriculture.

In the spring of 1945 we moved to Pullman, Washington so Dad could pursue a doctorate in chemistry at Washington State College (now Washington State University). After Dad got established in Pullman, Mom and her three children followed on the train, which took three days because of wartime priorities in which passengers were outranked by cargo. Dad was waiting for us when we arrived at the Spokane train terminal to drive us to Pullman. I was all of eighteen months old and running all over the depot, which caused an amused bystander to remark “they sure grow them vigorous in Washington,” not realizing I had been in the state just a few hours.

The next six years, 1945-1951, we lived in Pullman, first in a small house on Columbia Street, then later in a large house on College Avenue, right on the campus. The house was a large old Craftsman-style structure which was owned by the college and which we rented.

My only recollection of the Columbia Street house was an unpleasant one. It was here that I committed my first crime. For reasons which evade me now, I threw our cocker spaniel, Duchess, down the stairs into the cellar, and she was permanently injured. For the next ten years she limped around, reminding me of my bad deed. I also unintentionally maimed our

other cocker spaniel, Duke, many years later, as he was asleep and hidden from sight in an alfalfa field that I was mowing with our garden tractor. Mom and I rushed him to the veterinarian, who sewed him up, and he lived for several years on three legs. I was never again permitted to have a cocker spaniel.

During the five or so years that we lived in the big house on College Avenue, we grew to a family of seven with the addition of my brothers Duncan and Dale. Additionally, we sub-let a room to a young Canadian couple, Dick and Jorga Stapp, who were earning veterinary medicine degrees. They ate with us and were part of the family.

Growing up on a college campus was great fun. Sometimes the college girls would take us on a “date,” buying us a Coke at the little store on the same block where we lived. We learned all the secret entrances to the buildings nearby and learned to climb up

the inside of the Bryan Hall clock tower and sneak into the Science Building across the street from our house. When the building was closed we would roam the museum rooms full of stuffed animals and other interesting displays. We caught crawdads down at the river and put them in the fountain at Stimson Hall, the residence building across the street. Once my brother Dave started up a bulldozer left on a building site over the weekend and we ran away before the police came, pretty sure we had committed the Crime of the Century.

I loved to ride my trike when I was three or four, and since the city of Pullman was located down a long hill and across a causeway from our house it was an easy ride. The first few times I took this journey, I neglected to check out with Mom, but the people at the freight depot at the end of the causeway had mom’s phone number and would report, each time, “He’s here again,” and she would come and collect me. She never seemed exasperated. Just resigned.

A couple of months before my fifth birthday I started in kindergarten. The school I attended was located in a church on the far end of the campus, nearly a mile distant. Mom walked me over to the church two or three times, then I was on my own. To this day, I marvel that Mom would let a four-year-old walk a mile across campus and back every day to attend kindergarten. But she could not afford to be a helicopter parent with several other charges to supervise, lending credence to my brother Dale’s comment in later years that “we had a free range childhood”.

I was a couple months shy of my sixth birthday, when mom took me to a school official for an interview to determine if I was ready for first grade or if I had to wait another year, because the rules were that a five-year-old could not enroll in first grade. The serious-looking gentleman asked me, among other questions, if I knew what an engine was. I innocently replied that it was a “Red Man.” Both he and Mom were very amused and though my answer was politically incorrect, I was permitted to start first grade. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was already making bad puns.

Our neighborhood was a fun place to grow up, with lots of playmates on our block. One neighbor was Remo Fausti, whose daughter Janee was a playmate. Another was Mr. Lickey, who bought a brand new bright red 1949 Ford sedan, which he polished every day, or so it seemed. The Hazens lived next door. Cecil was a pilot, and his daughter, Ruby Jane, was Dunc’s age. Just a block away was The Commons, where the students who lived in dorms took their meals. On Sundays I would help my brother Dave sell newspapers in the lobby. Reserve Officer Training (ROTC) was a required course for all male students, and some wore their uniforms to The Commons. Some had insignia which said “U. S.” and some said “U.N.” (for United Nations, the force which was then arrayed against the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War). I thought the U.N.-wearing students

were the other side, and thought it was so nice that both sides could take meals together.

They were happy years, but I do remember some unhappy times. Once, I looked forward for weeks to attending a Cub Scout Jamboree, and on the day it was to occur I went to the wrong park and waited several hours, finally giving up and walking home and learning of my mistake. I was inconsolable for a time. Another time our boarder, Jorga Stapp convinced me to swap my chocolate pudding for her dessert, which she wouldn’t show me but labeled “Canadian bread pudding”. She painted it in such glowing terms that I agreed. Her dessert turned out be be some dried bread crusts.

One evening my older brothers were tittering about the word “brassiere” until my exasperated mother announced that the next person who uttered “brassiere” would have to wear one. Of course Dave and Don tricked me into speaking the forbidden word, and I had to wear a brassiere for the rest of the evening, much to my shame and their delight.

Dad always had a huge vegetable garden in the vacant lot behind our house. One of my favorite photos shows me at age two or three chewing on a carrot, a sampling from Dad’s bounty.

We moved to the Yakima Valley when I was seven and I did not return to Pullman until the summer before my junior year of high school. The old house was gone, along with the rest of the homes and businesses on our block, replaced by a large building which houses WSU’s Education Department. But the rest of the campus was very familiar, except that everything was much closer together than I remembered it.

We enjoyed wonderful family vacations in the summertime with weekends in the Blue Mountains and longer trips to Yellowstone and Banff and Jasper in Canada. Our family vehicle was an old

four-wheel drive Army ambulance with plywood back doors which Dad had fashioned to replace the damaged originals. Somehow, Mom and Dad shoe-horned five kids (Duncan and Dale had joined the family by then) and all our camping gear and groceries into this vehicle.

Mom and Dad drove the whole family to Ventura to visit our grandparents every third or fourth Christmas vacation. In 1946, Dad loaded up our other vehicle, a 1931 Model A Ford, for the trip. Model A’s had a cruising speed of 40-45 MPH and mechanical (read barely effective) brakes. We three older boys were in the back seat and Dad and Mom, holding Duncan on her lap, were in front. Seatbelts did not exist at that time. When we were traveling through Cow Canyon on U.S. 97 in Oregon, we experienced a cloudburst. Because rain saturated the rubber coated fabric roof and began pouring through the roof, we held towels over our heads to try to remain dry until the storm passed. I was only three at the time, so this is probably my earliest memory. Looking back, I am astonished that Dad and Mom possessed the courage and patience (or foolhardiness) to drive a Model A Ford loaded with six people and their luggage over 2000 round-trip miles.

Dad completed his coursework at Washington State and took a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a food chemist. He was assigned to a position at a research and extension station, a cooperative endeavor between Washington State and the USDA. His job was to develop foods based on the produce grown in the Yakima Valley in Central Washington, which is one of the nation’s great cornucopias. This station was located near Prosser, Washington, a community of 2,763 souls (1960 census).

The 140-mile distance from Pullman to Prosser is easily traversed in less than three hours, but on the day of our move, many disasters befell us. While dad was burning some trash behind the house, Duncan, who was five, caught his pants on fire and

sustained a severe burn on one leg, which had to be treated at the hospital. When we finally got underway, we travelled some distance before realizing we had forgotten Duke, one of our cocker spaniels. So we went back to Pullman to collect him and started back toward the Yakima Valley. We made it all the way to Lacrosse, some 46 miles, then camped overnight in the city park.

The next day we made it to Grandview, the town just beyond Prosser, and to a farmhouse out in the country which my parents had rented. As we travelled up the highway between Richland and Prosser, the temperature was nearly 100 degrees and I looked out the window at the treeless hills covered with sagebrush and despaired that I seemed to be coming to a God forsaken place. After six years growing up in the middle of a college campus, my life was about to take a dramatically different path.