family history archives - marian cont.

Further Maunderings

So many of the war year things are just impressions rather than events. I know Mother, Tee, and I went to San Francisco to visit Dad before he went to the South Pacific and I have very few memories of that trip. EXCEPT... not being allowed to go swimming because there was a polio scare on, and the pool was full of kids. I recognized the house where we lived before moving to HP when we drove down Bernal Avenue in Burlingame, whether from memory (I was not quite two when we moved) or from seeing pictures. I remember family opinion was that it was from pictures. I think this was before Ned went in the navy, but not sure. He was inducted from Seattle and sent to boot camp at Farragut, which is in Idaho on Lake Pend Orielle (sp?) I know he thought it was pretty ghastly but you have to remember my mother was very protective of her intellectual son and what I remember came from her.

He was then sent for training as a yeoman, or sort of clerk/secretary and stationed at the Ferry Building in San Francisco for the rest of the war. His eyesight had him on limited service. He did come close to substituting for the captain's yeoman on the Indianapolis, which went down with all hands. It was supposedly carrying components of the atomic bomb, possibly a triggering device. At least part of the time at the Ferry Building he lived with family friends in Burlingame so he had a pretty nice war!

I was in second grade at Hunt's Point School when the war started. I had started first grade when I was five and a half on the say-so of Einar Frettheim who was principal of the school. It had three rooms and six grades. There was no public kindergarten and I had gone a couple of times to a private one over on Yarrow Point but somehow didn't attend regularly. I wasn't encouraged to learn to read before I went to school, though Mother read to me a lot. I remember teaching myself to write some letters out of an old book we had. The books Mother read to me were pretty advanced for my age, not the kind of thing a kid learns to read on. She subscribed to a magazine called "The Horn Book" about children's books and by 1941 we were into the Little House books.

The school had a shed we played in when it rained and a small gym which was also the lunch room. It had some wonderful woods behind it with plenty of mud and skunk cabbage. You know how dense those woods are with blackberries and there were only a couple of trails through them. I know we were not allowed down there and I'm not sure how old I was before I used to go anyway. Recess was not my best time. I didn't get along real well with kids in general; they didn't do what I said and I was a lousy follower. I don't think I cared too much except occasionally. I was too interested in grown-ups and their world.

The name of the school changed somewhere in there to the Bay School, its attendance area was the Three Points plus part of Clyde Hill and part of Medina. Mother called it the Base School because under Mr. Frettheim, almost all we did was play baseball. The field was old lake-bottom clay and held the water so long that playing out there was not pleasant. I could never see the ball well enough to catch it, I never learned to throw, and I couldn't hit, either. I was also warned constantly about breaking the glasses I wore from second grade. I was always the last one chosen and that was painful. The other girl's activity was "wall ball" which involved catching and throwing so I avoided that. I was too clumsy to do well at hopscotch. I did better in the classroom so that's where I wanted to be.

When I ran up against the hard, cold world, Mother made me feel it was the world's fault, and that we were somehow "better". She took my side with disagreements with teachers which probably made them leery of disciplining me until my talking got so bad they couldn't teach the class! I walked back and forth to school unless Mother came to get me, but when gas rationing hit and she had that Packard, I think I mostly walked. I don't remember Toddy walking me home that first year, but she probably did.

Third grade was different because they combined the Bay and Medina schools and I rode a bus to Medina. The buildings were similar, I met new kids (like the Kemper Freeman daughters, Sarah and Clotilde - Kemper, Jr. was a preschooler) There was always a mixture of very well-to-do, middle class, and the families of working people. No blacks and the Japanese kids Toddy and Ned had gone to school with were interned. We had an Alaska Native in our class, Stanley Patterson, and he smelled awful and was very slow. The Filipino gardeners and laborers came to the US without their families. I think the social lines were drawn up pretty much by waterfront and non. Clyde Hill was not yet a choice place. I'm sure those schools were miserable for the "with outs". I was only somewhat aware that others had more than I did. My Mother's attitude was such that I tended to find someway to look down on most anyone!

The internment of the Japanese was considered shameful by my Mother, particularly because they interned the citizens along with the Japanese nationals. She tried to explain to me why it was wrong but most of what I got was how upset she was. There was this family called Takioka and their sons names were a family joke. They were George Washington Takioka, Benjamin Franklin, and Babe Ruth. Their daughter Shiziko had her picture taken with Toddy and Elizabeth Park and she had that picture for a long time. Mother helped transport these people and their belongings to the train which came to Willburton, where you may remember the trestle by 405. It was the only time there was a passenger train on that line. I went too, probably no one to leave me with, and I remember my Mother and Mrs. Helsell both crying when the train pulled out. I vaguely remember some talk about who was to look after their possessions and land, but the only ones I know of to have any of it after the war were the people who had the greenhouses there by the 520 exit we used to go to HP They held onto it long enough to make a killing off the land, good for them!

I don't know where Dad while this was going on or how he felt about it. He was always one to defend the US Government no matter what.

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