Dennis Carter's memoir

Chapter 1 The first 6 years

DC Memoir Chap 1

 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.