Our farmhouse in Oregon

My parents and their six sons moved from northern Utah to eastern Oregon in June of 1947, two years before I was born. They found an eighty-acre farm in the Big Bend area about six miles from Adrian.

The house and yard and barn were on the southeast corner of our farm. The small frame house we lived in was not at all modern. It had electricity but precious little plumbing. (I've written elsewhere about our lack of indoor plumbing and about our party-line telephone service.)

The house had only four rooms—a kitchen, two bed­rooms, and an all-purpose living-dining-sleep­ing room—plus an en­closed front porch that was used as an extra bedroom and a small back porch off the kitchen that served as a utility room and storage room. Joining the two bed­rooms to the front room was a teeny little hall, where I used to hide during thun­derstorms to be as far away as possible from any windows or doors.

We had a round dining table. I have no idea if it was big enough for everyone to sit around at the same time. By the time I came along and grew old enough to start remembering things, I have memories of sitting on top of a large metal can painted yellow with a blue lid. The can, as I remember, was used for storing cloth­ing and yardage. It was apparently tall enough for me to be able to reach the table.

In addition to the dining table, with its associated chairs and metal can, the all-purpose living room also contained a small oil stove that as far as I know provided the only heat in the house during colder months. I remember cuddling around the stove to dress on cold winter mornings.

The room also had a couch for sitting by day and that folded out as a bed for sleeping by night. I think when I was younger I slept on that hide-a-bed. When I was a little older I slept in the enclosed front porch, which was only big enough to hold the bed that was in there. And always, always I slept with at least two other brothers, which was fine except when any of us were still at ages when we wet the bed. That was not so fine.

I do not remember if there was any other furniture in that living room. The only other thing I remember was a television set. In 1953 television came to south­western Idaho and eastern Oregon. Our family must have been among the first families in the whole area to buy a television set. KTVB, Idaho's oldest television station, signed on the air July 12, as KIDO-TV. According to my mother's diary, she and my dad bought a televsion in Ontario two days later for $625. It was delivered on July 18, one day before my fourth birthday.

Our set was a big cabinet model that included a tele­vision, a radio, and a record player. It was an RCA because I still remember the picture of the old faithful dog listening at the gramophone to his master's voice. That was the RCA logo at the time. I was only three or four years old when we got a tele­vision, but I re­member being so excited about watching it that we would even watch the test patterns as the station got ready to start broad­casting each afternoon and as it would sign off early each evening.

During the last year we lived in Oregon, in the fall of 1958, we built a new barn out of cinder blocks that was actually nicer and probably bigger than the little frame house we lived in.

I visited the old place years later. The barn was still stand­ing, but the house was long gone.

Last summer [2008] I took my oldest son and his four oldest children to visit the farm and other haunts from my earliest childhood. The house and barn and trees and driveways were all gone. The foundation of where the house once stood was still visible from the stateline road where we had parked to take pictures. As we were taking those pictures that August morning, a pickup drove down the hill and stopped to ask if we were having car trouble. When they saw we had a camera, they concluded we were not.

"We're just taking pictures of where I used to live," I told the elderly couple in the pickup. "I lived in the house that used to be here until I was nine years old, almost ten."

"Oh, the Cleverlys," the lady replied. "We lived just up over the hill." I was so startled—it had been nearly fifty years since our family had moved from here in February 1959—that I failed to remember their names. She told me, but it was not a name that I could remember from the distant past of my childhood.