Grandpa Fleming and the Palouse, my Infancy and early Childhood

It is of some importance to note that all the grandparents of all the children I played with, and went to grade school and to Sunday school with--in the benign immensity of the Palouse of the 40's and 50's--all of them knew one another, and were, for the most part, friends.  Telephones were eavesdropping and information sharing devices: party-line wall-phones, usually in the kitchen, with magneto cranks to signal the operator (one long crank) or the other people on the line (by a sort of Morse code of long and short cranks).  Needless to say, with a dozen or more members per party-line, the wall-phone rang all day long--and th'industrious Palouse farmwife (with or without a girl to help her, preparing three solid meals a day, for a dozen-odd family members, hired men, and whoever else happened to be there at meal time; plus canning, preserving, cleaning, cream-separation, butter-making and such endless jobs as egg-candling) had to keep an alert ear out for her own identity code (say, two longs and two shorts) and that of whomever else (say, Amanda Gordon, three shorts) she might be gleaning dirt on.  

Actual physical communication, over the gravelled roads between ranches, and paved roads near town, was by pickup truck for men and kids, and by car (nearly always a Buick, but sometimes a Cadillac) for farmwives and grandparents.

The grandparents who owned, and, with their progeny and hired hands. inhabited the Palouse during my infancy and early childhood, were those who had worked through the initial, failed staking of claims and establishing of homesteads from the 1880's to the 1910's, and had bought up the farms of the improvident and incompetent first-comers, welding two or three or four farms together into one "ranch."  As a child, lithping in numberth, I was well aware that my mother's father's "ranch" consisted of at least four different properties:  The virgin land that he had broken out himself at the age of nineteen with the backing of a character loan from a bank, and where he had built, with his own hands, the house that my mother was born in, and that I was conceived in; the property adjacent to it, the "old Whiteman place," with the artesian springs, groves of ancient trees, and the vast, untidy old farmhouse where my mother's older brothers and their children lived; wheat-land, property adjacent to the old Whiteman place, purchased, I think, from elders of the Gordon family; and lastly, bought from the Gordons, Pampa, an idyllic oasis named for a town that had disappeared by the time I was born, with green pastures along a creek that flowed out from the pond fed by year-round springs, a pretty, big old farmhouse surrounded by fruit trees and poplars, two immense gardens, tended severally by my grandmother and my grandfather, of flowers (nearly an acre of irises) and vegetables.  There with some ceremony, bidding his sons and son-in-law (my father) take over the wheat growing and harvesting of the composite larger acreage, my grandfather retired at the age of fifty-eight, and, with the help of a dour, devoted collie dog, raised a small herd of Guernsey cows whose preternaturally rich, golden (high carotene content) milk virtually inundated his family and neighbours.  I, born at the flood of those Channel Islanders' lacteal production, vividly recall  from my earliest years,  an abundance of butter, home-made ice cream, great pitchers and tall glasses of milk, and breakfast cereal with clotted cream--thumb-sized chunks of pure, delicious butterfat.

The most remarkable thing about my grandfather, although it was not noticed by his friends or family because of his sometimes abrasive gruffness, was that he never in his life, however mightily provoked, raised his hand in anger to an animal or a child--nor would he permit his sons or sons-in-law to do so.  I think, upon reflection, that he doted on me, and I know that I loved and admired him:  He was, after all, the former Kid Fleming, who came West, from Iowa, at age thirteen, supporting himself by working as a clerk in his uncle's grocery store in Yakima.  Then, at age fifteen, he joined a group of wild horse capturers and tamers ("breakers") working mostly out of the Horse Heaven Hills near Pasco, whence with skill, courage, and a non-violent system of horse-breaking uniquely his own [hitching four wild horses to a buckboard and giving them their head], he acquired his grubstake and his glorious sobriquet.  He was a wonderful man to listen to the Lone Ranger with--who teared up just as I did at the Lone Ranger's splendid chase-music, and at the noble sentiments and manly valor evinced by our hero.  I think he may have been gay.

"An impossible man to work for, or with," my father proclaimed his father-in-law to be; yet the fact that he was rich and the president of the local draft board enabled my maternal grandfather to procure for my father, who'd have made a poor soldier anyway (despite his good looks), an exemption from military service on the grounds that he was a "Worker in an Essential Industry." And, truth to tell, the work was not all that hard, leaving my father plenty of time to practice his two favorite hobbies, drinking and flying a succession of small, private airplanes--and to his credit he never drank when flying; and as soon as I was of an age (four years old, I think), he began to take me flying with him, calling me his co-pilot, first in the Piper Cub, then in the petite, pretty cherry-red little Funk.  We flew all over the Pacific Northwest, Idaho and Montana, my father and I--and, though it was a near thing on a couple of occasions, I never once wet my pants.  Vividly--what a wonderful first memory!--I remember, of a brilliant sunny day, flying among towering cumulus clouds, then "disappearing" into their mysterious, misty interiors.

But in fact, my very first vivid memories are of feasts, feasts such as farmers reward themselves with--Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, as well as harvest meals, and a local event held in June, called the Farmers' Day Picnic to which all the farmwives who considered Lacrosse to be their official, local town, contributed lavishly, according to their virtually unlimited means of patriotic and victorious prosperity, every viand, delicacy, vegetable and sweet imaginable--with certain notable, white, middle class American omissions: There was, to be sure, no beer or wine proffered at a Farmers' Day Picnic, or snails, or baby rabbits, or sea urchins, or song birds "baked up in a pie," or ducks--and though there were pheasants from the teeming hedgerows and ditches, these were cooked up tough, savorless and dry, due to the unbending abhorrence of local farmwives of anything even remotely like the "rotting" of game fowl.

It is also of some importance to note that, as well as not eating or drinking a number of things that European peasantry can scarcely do without, we wheat-ranchers of the Palouse, unlike our Continental counterparts--with the exception of our grandparents--even in the 1940's, bathed at least once a day.  Our grandparents, however, continued not bathing oftener than once a week. And frankly they had an odor, not that unpleasant, but pungent in my young nostrils, of what the Japanese call "old-people stink."