Tribute by Joanna Grammon

Eye of the Storm
By Joanna Grammon
Skamania County Pioneer
Weds. Jan 16, 2008

When I was young, I didn't realize my father had unusual abilities. Couldn't everyone's dad carry a refrigerator on his back up a flight of stairs, as I once saw him do? I didn't think it that unusual when he picked up a rattlesnake by its tail and cracked the whip, sending its head flying. That happened where the lawn met the sagebrush next to the tiny church on the Yakama Reservation where he preached a year or two.

Dad grew up in Kansas in the "Double D" years, drought and Depression, and learned the rattlesnake trick while herding cattle barefoot, saving his shoes for school. Shoes were just as important years later. With 14 feet to be shod -- for several years, all seven of us were in school all at once -- we were a shoe salesman's worst nightmare. We lined up in the chairs as Dad measured feet and pinched toes to make sure there was plenty of growing room in those sturdy saddle shoes.

Dad worked his way through high school as a soda jerk, because the farm was too far away from town to take a bus every day. His mother had been an 18-year-old teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, then she met his father, a French Canadian farmer 18 years her senior.

Working at the soda counter, Dad learned to make ice cream, something we did often growing up, cranking the handle for a batch of French vanilla or peach. He worked hard to feed and clothe us, borrowing thrifty tips from his mother, who had made her own soap and canned mulberries and rhubarb, the only fresh fruit to be found on the Plains. When we were small and visiting the Kansas farm, Grandma would send us out to the garden with a salt shaker to eat tomatoes fresh off the vine, telling us to look out for rattlesnakes.

We always had a big garden. We raised our own beef, milk and eggs. Dad worked for Carnation as a fleet mechanic, and bought three surplus ice cream freezers. He crafted metal insulated lids for them, and we filled them with meat, vegetables and fruit from the bountiful Yakima Valley. We were never hungry.

Mom and Dad moved to Archer Mountain Road above Skamania in the early '70s. Dad built that house from salvaged lumber. He dug a cistern; they lived off the grid several years. They were comfortable in that house 25 years, before the winters got to him.

Now Dad is in a nursing home near Salem. His eyes are closed much of the time, and he can no longer eat solid food. My neighbor, Mary lee Delbridge, gave me a winter squash from her bounteous garden. I took it to Mom, who pureed it and fed it to him. He loved it and smiled, though he can't say much.

My brother in Louisiana, Dean Clyde Grammon Jr., worked hard last fall to transfer to digital form 377 slides taken by my father over the years. He chronicled birthdays, trout caught, days at the beach and my great grandmother. I turned those pictures into 2008 family calendars. Jan. 18 is his birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad. And thanks.

Tribute by Lois Grammon-Simpson

One of my favorite essayists, Calvin Trillin, writes about his attempts to keep his Kansas roots and Midwestern values alive while raising his two daughters in New York City. At times, the cultural and generational divide was so vast, his expectations and values so seemingly incongruous, he struggled to find a way to explain himself to his children. Eventually it came to him, the theme that might make his actions more comprehensible: "Despite all evidence to the contrary, you are being raised in Kansas City."

Of all the driveway moments in my life, none have ever resonated in quite the same way as listening to that native son of Kansas reaching out and offering me the key to my childhood. Months after hearing Mr. Trillin and experiencing that epiphany, I shared his story and family theme with a few of my siblings.

We laughed, identifying with it, swapping our own stories. Then we began to expand on it. Not only was our father born at home on a Kansas homestead to a schoolteacher mother and an older French Canadian immigrant father, but he was raised during the Great Depression and the "dust bowl." Shaped by their twin hardships, he then came of age during World War II.

A half a continent away, our mother grew up part of the same generation, volunteering for the Army Cadet Nurse Corps in World War II. Before she graduated, the war drew to an end. At about the same time, a certain young man left behind his roots, leaving Kansas to work in the Yakima Valley. They met, fell in love and were married in a whirlwind romance, convinced they could overcome just about any challenge through faith and being frugal, self reliant, stoic and resourceful. Years later, I have decided that, despite all evidence to the contrary, my siblings and I were raised in Kansas during the Dust Bowl, Great Depression and World War II.

Saturday January 19, 2008
Lois Grammon-Simpson