I wrote the following after a visit from my sister Delores in the mid-1990s. I am not sure of the exact date. The reason this is being included on this site is simply to furnish a little more insight into who I am and some of my background. It may or may not be of interest to anyone in future generations including my own children.

As Delores’ Plymouth station wagon turned the corner and disappeared from view heading up the hill to the freeway which would take her to Seattle to visit her daughter, Denise, I was filled with a sad, empty void. The sadness and the emptiness was not caused by her leaving, in fact I was rather happy to see her go, but rather by what she was taking with her – and by what she left behind.

Delores arrived Friday evening and left Sunday morning. A short stay of less than two days. But the longest of the half dozen visits we have had in the last 40 years. In some ways I wish it had been shorter, or not happened at all.

We were able to work in a pleasant visit to St.Helens to see Diana and her children Saturday morning and then we dropped Dorie off at home to finish arrangements for a dinner with John & his wife, Carol, in the evening.

Delores and I then went to the Rose Test Gardens and took an auto tour of Portland. Her biggest concern was that she didn’t see any “bums or winos” laying around the streets near Burnside and Broadway. This really seemed to disappoint her. And she wanted to know where the red light district was. I told her honestly that I didn’t know.

I couldn’t seem to have an actual conversation with her. Whether it was me or her, I don’t know, but I seemed to be constantly warding off a confrontation by simply letting a conversation die. Whenever politics or religion was discussed (who, in their right mind, brings these subjects up, anyway?) she initiated the discussion with a sharp statement in a manner which dared anyone to disagree. Not the best way to begin amicable conversation.

During one of her infrequent lapses when she forgot to be confrontational but was simply reminiscing, she mentioned the times we visited our grandmother in Montana. All of a sudden, the flood gates of my memory were opened. Suppressed memories sprang forth from deep recesses where I had managed to bury them for so many years and I was filled at once with both a sadness for the past and a sure knowledge that if the past had been different, so would today.

As I gaze out the windows of the passenger coach at the telephone lines, they constantly dip and rise again to meet the next telephone pole. Up, sway down, and up again to the next pole. Mile, after mile of nothing but telephone poles and lines standing like sentinels between the rails and the untold acres of grain marching across Washington. Occasionally the scene is broken by a glimpse of the steam engine or its smoke rushing toward the back of the train. The scene is both hypnotic and boring.

Extra engines are added to help pull us over the pass out of Spokane. Sharp curves and steep grades permit us several times to look down and see the last cars of the train below us.

The train finally pulls into Missoula, Montana, and we get off. Delores and I ask around and are taken to a bus terminal and board for Corvallis (or Hamilton – I cannot recall for sure). It is night when we get to Corvallis.

We are supposed to me met, but no one is there for us. The station agent (he owned the pharmacy as I recall) placed a telephone call and after sometime we were taken out to our grandmother’s farm.

Thus starts this great adventure! Delores is here to start school! But not college as one might think. This train ride is my earliest memory and Delores is six years old and starting first grade. I am three. The year is 1940. Where this trip originated, Portland or Klamath Falls, and why we were sent away from our mother I don’t know.

I can’t remember much about the next year. Only several things have stayed in my memory over the years and these things I have always recalled.

Grandmas home

Grandma's home after it was remodeled.

Turning off the main road, you passed a gravel pit on the left and then came to a beautiful two story, white farm house. You turned to the right down her lane, passed her large garden, to her small two room home. Near the house were the shop and feed storage and several large chicken houses.

Grandma and Shorty

Grandma Ethel Cox and George "Shorty" Korman

Grandma would later marry Shorty and they combined their farms and turned his home into a milk separating shed.

As I recall, uncle Duane and his youngest sister, aunt Betty, also lived at home then and I seem to recall several others also, so we must have been quite crowded in the small home. Grandma had several cows, hundreds of chickens and raised alfalfa, peas, strawberries, watermelon and sugar cane.

The last two were experimental crops underwritten by the government to try and help the small farmers find what crops might grow in areas where they had never been tried before.

This was not finished at the time although I had the best of intentions. That is one of the reasons for this blog. I will try to do better in the future and continue to post memories and happenings as time permits.

The bottom picture is of my grandmother and Shorty on the front porch of her home as it looked in 1937 when I was born in the bedroom of her 2 room home.