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About this Episode
World War II was raging. Workers were streaming west to take jobs in the shipyards along the Columbia River. The whole world had gone mad, and yet a child's world was just forming. It leads to a fictional story that isn't all that fictional.
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
No junk mail presents World War II, traveling west, read to you by the author, James
R. von Felt.
It's still there.
The grade school I went to during World War II.
You can see it on computer maps.
Go to 301, South, Lisa Road, Vancouver, Washington.
The zip is 98664.
Of course everything around it's different now.
We were way out in the country then.
It was a wilderness with just one paved road going to town.
The war was raging, battles were being fought in Europe, and we were desperately building
warships.
The shipyards on the Columbia River employed 40,000 workers.
Temporary housing was desperately needed and hard to find.
I was about eight years old when we moved from Wichita, Kansas.
There were four of us kids.
We were bored by the long drive west but perked up when we drove through the mountains.
Portland, Oregon was our destination.
Dad moved west because of the jobs.
When we got to Portland, we lived in special housing for new arrivals.
We stayed there for a week or so.
It was a big building with lots of rooms, a place to eat, another for kids to play, and
a place to sleep.
It was an interesting place.
There were lots of adults and kids.
All the men slept in separate barrack areas.
My brother and I slept together in a lower bunk bed, dad in the upper.
Mom and my sister slept in the women's area.
During the day the family stayed together as dad went house hunting.
It took a couple of weeks but he found a house for us to rent.
I remember the house to be old and spooky.
That was a great big house and had an upstairs.
There were lots of rooms to explore and we found a stairway that led up to an attic.
I found spider webs when I explored the attic.
I avoided the attic.
I remember a few events about our life in Portland.
For instance, one morning, all of us, that is my two sisters and my brother, were on the
second floor of the house at the top of the stairway.
We thought there was a ghost or something scary downstairs.
We couldn't see anyone or hear anyone.
We hollered.
We cried out but there was no reply.
Eventually we got an idea.
We found a tube of mom's lipstick and marked up my little sister.
It was probably four or five years old and sent her down the stairs.
She was just scared of the ghost away.
She went downstairs just as we had instructed her.
She turned a corner and disappeared.
Soon after we heard an awful scream, it was my mom.
She had found my sister and thought she'd been attacked and cut up with a knife.
Other memories about me meeting three neighbor boys that chased me home.
Well, when school started, my sister and I walked to school.
It must have been close.
There were lots of kids in the class.
The teacher was always frustrated because we made so much noise.
I don't remember learning much, but I remember spending most of my time drawing fighter airplanes.
I thought I was good at drawing P-38s and P-51s.
I could draw a tank too.
The war was on everybody's mind or in the background all the time.
My sister and I skipped school one day and played in the grove of trees across the street
from the school.
No one seemed to notice and that soon was boring so we went back to school.
No one missed us.
My mom got a job in a hospital right away.
Mom was a registered nurse with a degree from Iowa University so she didn't have any
trouble finding work.
Dad was offered all kinds of work and had many choices.
He started working as a welder in the shipyard.
It was about then that dad sold the car because he couldn't get gasoline, but that didn't
matter since buses ran everywhere he could get to work.
Portland had a lot of beautiful gardens, trees and flowers you don't see living in
Wichita, Kansas.
Sometimes we went on sightseeing trips by bus on weekends.
We could see Mount Hood from some places.
It had snow on it even in the summer.
One weekend we made a trip to see the three shipyards.
The Columbia River is the boundary between Oregon and Washington states close to the shipyards
and right next to the river was a new town.
There were lots of houses.
Most were large and could accommodate several families.
There was public schools for the kids that lived there because of the war and the urgency
of the time these homes were built in a swamp.
A huge dike had been built to keep the river away and water was pumped out.
Then the houses were built.
They were below the river level.
It was built in a hurry, 110 days for 40,000 people.
It ended in a big disaster.
I'll tell you about that later.
The Columbia River was over a mile wide at that point.
There was a long bridge that went across the Columbia to the town of Vancouver, Washington.
The bridge had a span in the middle that lifted high and let big ships go through.
There were shipyards on the Washington side of the river, too.
I was amazed at the river, the mountains, the trees.
I was amazed at all the things I saw.
They were so new and different.
Well, we didn't stay in Portland very long.
By the next school year, we moved to a brand new government housing project on the Washington
side of the Columbia River.
I was going to the fourth grade and was growing up quick.
Well, that's it for now from where the corn grows tall and pigs fly.
Take care, all my love, Grandpa Jim.
