We arrived in Seattle early in the summer of 1925. I was 12 years old. Our furniture had preceded us, was unloaded from its freight car, uncrated, and installed at 1612 16th Street, a house rented for the new bishop until a more permanent arrangement could be made. For some reason the Ford had not made the trip so we were into walking, riding the streetcar, or depending on friends. Fortunately, the streetcar was only a block away, and the Piggly Wiggly, an early version of the supermarkets of today, was a short walk. This pioneer of do-it-yourself grocery shopping had baskets that one carried on one's arm while plucking things off of shelves or out of iced trays. It also had check out girls and cash registers. It was a vast improvement over the time-honored system of telling the grocer what one wanted while he listed it on a pad. He then collected your order on the counter, added up the prices listed on the pad, made change, and bagged your order. Mother was very impressed. I know about all this because I was often conscripted to help carry the groceries home.
One of the first things to get done after the move from Texas was to get the school age kids enrolled in school. My parents were strong believers in public education but finally accepted the scholarship proffered by the private Lakeside School for Boys, which was outgrowing its small quarters beside Lake Washington. Kindergarteners and first graders now occupied these; new quarters were being built with dining hall and a dormitory on land about half a mile from the lake. With the acceptance of the scholarship, the question of “What Grade?” came to the front. In those times Texas, along with many southern states, had an eleven years through high school system, as compared to the twelve-year system in the north and west. Thanks to my start at the Calvert School I had skipped the third grade in Texas and at the end of four years completed the seventh grade making me ready for high school. The Lakeside School apparently took the position of ready for high school in Texas, ready for high school in Seattle, and thus I skipped the eighth grade and entered the ninth grade at the age of thirteen.
Lakeside had a classical program for its students: English, four years; Latin, two years; French and German, two years each. There was also a year each of algebra, geometry, chemistry and physics. Social studies, including history, plus gym and outdoor athletics, in season, rounded out the curriculum. Latin was taught by the principal, Mr. Charles Bliss, new the previous year from the University of Chicago. Mr. Bliss was an excellent teacher but not a physically imposing man. The word around school was that the students had not been too impressed until one day when some of the boys were kicking a football around out on the field and a ball had gone astray. Mr. Bliss, who had been watching, intercepted the ball and dropkicked it back to the players on the field. Snickering stopped after that. I believe it turned out that Mr. Bliss had played football for Chicago in his younger years.
My first year at Lakeside was, I believe, the second year for the upper school, and the student body was small. There were four members of my class; Clint Backus, Bob Balcom, and Bob Pelz were the other three, but the number of boys in each classroom varied, generally between four and eight, depending on the often-varied status of other members of the upper school. The point is that compared to class sizes of most of today's schools, the classes were small, the teaching excellent. We were a fortunate group. I wish now that I had kept my report cards, but so far as I know, they no longer exist. My impression is that grades were mostly A's with a few B's. I know that many an evening was spent at Grandfather's rolltop desk, memorizing foreign language vocabularies, reviewing the day's material, planning for the morrow. Along the way I found time to read a lot; Sherlock Holmes and The Trail of Lewis and Clark come immediately to mind.
The Seattle area is well known for its winter drizzles, punctuated with an occasional snowfall. Usually I walked to school, a distance of perhaps a mile and a half. In very inclement weather a streetcar was available, but it only cut a mile off of the outdoor exposure. I do not remember ever having a ride to school. Summer weather is delightful, and the family usually spent summers somewhere in a cottage on Puget Sound. Often these cottages were at Port Madison on Bainbridge Island, a one-hour trip on a perhaps 70-foot passenger steamer that took residents from various points on the Island to Seattle and back. This ship enabled the family to spend the summer together while my dad commuted to his office until August when he took his vacation.
Each year that we vacationed on Puget Sound my father rented a rowboat for family use, but mostly so he could fish for salmon, which were plentiful in the Sound. He almost always took me along, and we had some good catches. Occasionally a fish was big enough to bake, which pleased Mother. She was an expert at baking salmon, having been taught by some of the best cooks in Seattle - members of several Episcopal congregations.
The tides on Puget Sound average about 16 feet, a fact that often startles residents of the East Coast accustomed to a more modest range of three or four feet. In the harbor at Bainbridge Island was a large rock reef, probably connected with preparing the dock for the commuter boat. This reef teemed with life: crabs, starfish, barnacles, mussels, kelp, and other life forms too numerous to mention. I was fascinated and visited the reef at every low tide opportunity. Someone gave me a copy of the now out-of-print Seashore Animals of the Pacific Coast. I took it very seriously, read it three or four times, identified specimens, and learned their zoological names. Years later I was able to startle a docent at one of the California aquaria when I asked about their specimen of Pycnopodia helianthoides, Brandt, a little-known member of the starfish family with twelve arms instead of the more common five, and more properly known as a sunflower fish.
Several summers, a medical student, Lew Hutchins, who was a great admirer of my father, would invite us to join him for a hike in the Olympic Mountains. Lew spent his summers as a scoutmaster at the scout camp on the Hood Canal, at the foot of the Olympic Range. He had a one-week vacation each summer and claimed that he preferred a hiking vacation of three persons as a rest from his usual twenty plus. Dad, in his fifties at the time, did very well. He slept on the ground like a veteran for three or four nights, scrambled up and down trails, and in all ways served as a role model for his teen-age son. We were both very grateful for the unusual and special experience provided by Lew Hutchins.
At fourteen in those days children were eligible for drivers licenses. Shortly after our arrival in Seattle Dad had bought a Chrysler sedan. Shortly after my 14th birthday my dad surprised me by taking me out on the highway north of the city for a driving lesson. It must have gone well because after three or four such expeditions we went in for the required driving test (including parallel parking) plus a written test and lo and behold I was a licensed driver. It was thus that I joined my classmates who were all older than I, and had driven for several years. They could all double clutch; I had to learn. Double clutching was an art form required by the gearshift and clutch arrangement of the cars of the day, long before today's automatic transmissions. When going up a hill (there are lots of hills in Seattle) one starts in high gear, but soon slows and has to shift to a lower gear, a long and noisy operation unless one is adept at the double clutch. The two sets of gears, say high and low, are turning at different speeds and won't mesh until they are synchronized. If the shift is split into two phases, high to neutral followed by neutral to high with a pause between, and during this pause the clutch is briefly let out, then the slow gear is speeded up and the two will mesh. The pause has to be just right, but that quiet shift was regarded by teenagers of the era as the badge of an accomplished driver, and was therefore a must. Needless to say, I learned.
Speaking of those classmates, every day we had a morning recess, probably 15 minutes, but perhaps a half hour. Every day during that recess we walked in a nearby park. The other three smoked. Despite constant urging, I did not. I had tried it once and didn't like it. “Oh, but you have to inhale.” So, I tried but choked. “Take a quick inhale.” I tried but got dizzy and decided on the spot that if I had to go through all that for a long time to get anything out of it, smoking couldn't be good for me. After that I never smoked. I am 87 [writing in early 2000]; those other three, alas, are dead.
During the Seattle years the size of our family varied from time to time. The first year our cousin, Esther Brotherton, lived with us while attending her freshman year at the University of Washington. Esther was the eldest of three lovely daughters of my mother's younger brother, Larry, who lived in Mount Vernon, Washington. About 1938 word reached my father that his older brother Clifford, a widower living in the country north of Cincinnati, was not doing well after the death of his wife. Dad drove east, sized up the situation of his brother, loaded him and his goods and chattels into the car and brought him home to live with us. There he did very well indeed, thriving as a member of the family until his death in 1951. Grandma died in her sleep in 1927, leaving a very large hole in our family life that she had filled since before 1912. Family deaths were handled differently in those days. I never saw Grandma in death, was sent to school as usual, and when I came home her body had been taken away. She is buried in the Bogen family plot at Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.
Another contributor to family variation was my sister, Ann. As soon as she was old enough she entered the Annie Wright Seminary, an Episcopal Church-sponsored girls boarding and day school in Tacoma, Washington. One of Ann's school stories deserves repeating. A classmate, Jane Ringling North, was a member of one of the families owning and operating the famous circus. On the day the circus was scheduled to perform in Tacoma, Jane begged the principal for a day off so she could visit with her family. Permission was granted, but the principal was not amused when she watched the circus parade and saw her teen-age student dressed as an houri and riding on the head of one of the elephants!
On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in Paris. The news electrified the world, with no less effect on a kid in Seattle. I followed every newspaper article printed, including his return to the U.S. and his nationwide flight in his airplane visiting most of the prominent cities of the country, including Seattle. I still have the negative of the picture I took of him in the open limousine as he was driven from the airport to the University of Washington Stadium where he addressed a large crowd of admirers.
Shortly after the start of the 1929 New Year, when I was sixteen and on the verge of graduating from high school, the newspapers announced a national contest. This event and the course of events that resulted from it are more than can be included in the present section. They have their own chapter, “Thomas Edison and Me.”
Copyright © 2002 by
Wilber B. Huston.
All rights reserved.
Inquiries to
Herb Huston
<herb_huston@yahoo.com>.