Saturday, January 7, 2012

Tuffy's War: Part One of Six.


Tuffy’s War
(Part One of Six)

by

Wally Lee Parker

… an opening thought …

“Tuffy’s War” tells the tale of two brothers — Alvin “Tuffy” Luhr and Orland Luhr — who exemplify all the qualities newsman Tom Brokaw intended when he characterized those who carried the burden of America’s struggle during World War II as our greatest generation.  Both brothers once called Clayton — a little town in the northeastern part of Washington State — their home.  One brother has gone on to live a long, productive life.  The other did not survive the war; resting ever since on a small, ancient hill just a few miles from his hometown — a hill overlooking the farm speckled sweep of the Little Spokane River Valley.  This is their story — presented in six parts as an oral history augmented by materials drawn from newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and a slew of private and government documents.
… regarding copyright …

My original version of Tuffy's War was published by the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society.  It is under copyright to that organization.  This reuse and expansion of the original story is done with their permission.  Among the alterations are the addition of comments by Alan Berg — those comments obtained after the first publication.  Anyone wishing to reprint this blog version of “Tuffy’s War” will need to obtain permission from both the C/DPHS and the author, Wally Lee Parker, to cover the entire content as presented here.

Part One
… watch out for that little guy ...

            Our interviews took place at Tuffy Luhr’s Spokane residence, an assisted living apartment attached to a nursing home.  It seemed a good arrangement for Tuffy.  He had frequent sessions with the facility’s physical therapist — more to maintain the mobility of his 90 plus year old body than anything else.  And Tuffy’s apartment provided a convenient central location for all his friends and business associates – including the secretary who frequently stopped by to type memos and work through the details of this or that business contract.  But it did feel different to carry out these interviews in what was essentially a nursing home with Tuffy’s own car sitting just outside the window — the same car he’d use to drive himself to Colville, Chewelah, or Kettle Falls when consulting with businessmen from places as far-flung as China and Australia.  Tuffy both was and is a businessman, both was and is a lumberman.  As he explained, for a short time he’d had experimented with retirement — maybe four or five months some thirty or forty years before.  That bout of inactivity convinced him that he needed to find some kind of hobby that could hold his interest better than golf and still keep him busy — so he went back to what he knew.  He went back to work and hasn’t stopped since.
            As Tuffy explained it …
            “Back in the old country — Sweden — my great-grandfather Luhr was very well to do.  The Luhr family was rich enough to have a Finnish girl as a live-in housekeeper.  And even though it wasn’t proper to get involved with the servants, my grandfather, A. L. Luhr, just a kid then himself, got sweet on the hired help — got sweet on the future grandma Edith.  So great-grandfather bundled the two of them up and shipped them off to America.  A. L. went back and forth between here and the old country a number of times, but grandmother never did go back to visit the homeland.
            “In 1898 great-grandfather sent his son enough money to buy some land in the Reno, Washington, area — that was in Cowlitz County, along the road between Woodland and Mount Saint Helens.
            “While I don’t know an awful lot about the Luhr family, I do know that on the 20th of May, 1915, my dad, Elmer Harry Luhr, married my mother, Lucille (Lucy) May Dutcher.  I was born in August of 1918.  My sister Mildred had come along a year or two before that.
            “My uncle down in Reno had a nickname for everybody in the family.  He called me Tuffy — and everybody else started doing the same.  I didn’t know I had another name until I got into school and they needed my real name for the records.
            “That was a long time ago.  About all I have for memories are a few images.  My Reno uncle had a toy monkey that would climb up a string — a puppet kind of thing.  He’d stretch that string from the bottom of the Christmas tree to the top.  Watching that monkey climb up the side of the tree is the first memory I have of Christmas — and maybe my first memory of anything.
            “The Dutcher side of the family came from Holland to New Amsterdam in 1652.  The head of the family had contracted with Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor of New Netherlands, to work seven years to pay for the family’s passage — husband, wife, and all ten kids.  After fulfilling the contract, the family settled in the Catskill Mountains.
            “About 1904 or ’05 our part of the Dutcher family moved into the Woodland, Washington, area.  And ten years later my mom married into the Luhr family.
            “Grandma Dutcher moved over to the east side of Washington State, over to the town of Clayton, sometime during the First World War.  My folks, still living Reno area, got a divorce when I was about two years old — about 1920 — so mom, Mildred, and me came up to Clayton to live with grandma Dutcher.
            “I’m not sure how long we lived at Clayton that first time, though it was just a matter of months till Mom and Clayton’s Pete Burg decided they wanted to make a life together.  He worked at the terra cotta plant as a model maker – making forms.  But Pete wanted to be a wheat farmer, so the two bought a ranch down south in Asotin County.  My brother, Orland, was born while we were down there.
            “Mom was pregnant with Orland when she divorced Orland’s dad.  For years I thought Orland was my half-brother — that my step-dad was his real dad.  I thought that because for whatever reason the folks had decided to always use the last name Berg with him even though the last name on his birth certificate was Luhr.  That changed when Orland went in the army and everything official after was done using the name on his birth certificate.”
            Agreeing to an interview for this article, Tuffy’s half-brother, Alan Berg, explained the eventually extent of their blended Berg family. “My dad had been married before, and had a boy just about Tuffy’s age.  So there were eight kids in our family, with one of them, Rolland, living in Spokane with his mother most of the time.  That left seven of us kids living in the Clayton household.  The three oldest of that bunch, Mildred and the oldest two boys, had a different dad — not that such made much difference to any of us.  The three after me were girls, so even though I was about four years younger than Orland and eight years younger than Tuffy, I kind of gravitated toward them.  And as far as I could tell, I was always just their little brother.”
            Tuffy’s recollection of that early time in Washington’s Palouse country is a bit fuzzy.  “I started school at a little one-room outside of Asotin.  When the wheat market went to pot around 1924 or ’25, my stepfather got a job in Seattle, and we lived there until I was in the 6th grade.  Then we moved back to the Clayton area, to a farm just a few miles southwest of the town in Williams Valley.”
            “Now Tuffy was always a ringleader — always had some deep thinking going on,” Alan recalled.  “One time out on the Williams Valley farm he had us counting hay shocks — you’d shock the hay mowed down in the field by gathering it into loose stacks so it’d be easier to fork up onto the hay wagon.  He also was wanting to make sure that all the stacks were about the same size.  I didn’t know why at the time, but when I asked years later he said it was ‘cause we owed the guy that owned the farm a third of the hay.  Tuffy just wanted to make sure everything came out square and nobody got shorted.  He always had that kind of business head.”

Orland, Alan, and Tuffy
on the Williams Valley Farm.
(Photo from the Alan Berg Collection)
            Tuffy continued, “From Williams Valley we moved to a place just south of Clayton — down on Beaver Creek, close to where the fairgrounds are now.  Eventually dad — my stepdad — had about 60 to 70 milk cows.  His dairy was the top producer in Stevens County for a while.
            “When the original Berg family came over from Norway, they eventually bought 160 acres about two miles from Clayton.  It was already a big family.  So added all together, we were quite a clan.
            “When I started school at Clayton, my 6th grade teacher was named Anna Sater.  In 7th and 8th I had Mister Cuttybank.  Alice Singer was Principal. 
            “I weighed 110 pounds as a freshman — so naturally they put me on the football team as a tackle.  Considering that the entire high school part of Clayton’s school had something like two dozen students, they didn’t have much choice.   I remember being hunched down on the line, with the other team in its huddle, and hearing one of those guys say, ‘Watch out for that little guy.  He’ll crawl underneath and fouls up the play!’
            “Our biggest rival was Deer Park — just a few miles to the south.  The fighting back and forth pretty much went away later on, after the schools were blended together.
            “I got a letter for my sweater.  It was a ‘C’ maybe twelve inches tall.  It just about rested on my belt and then caught me under the chin.  I guess it was made for the bigger boys.
            “Allicena was our football coach.  You could tell by the name that he was Italian, like a lot of people in Clayton back then.  Before becoming a teacher he’d played for the University of Washington and the Washington Redskins.”
            Little brother Alan recalled, “We had a lot of fun both in school and out.  Of course, with me being the smallest, I usually got the most bruising when we’d be doing something.  As long as they we’re doing the bruising, that was fine.  Let somebody else try, somebody not part of the family, and they’d become downright protective.
            “Now Orland was closer to my size, so when we played ball — baseball, football, soccer — Tuffy would throw the ball as hard as he figured we each could handle it.  But between Orland and me, we just went all out.  I think Orland was just a competitor by nature. 
            “We didn’t have a soccer ball, so we made one out of an old rubber boot.  We packed some stuff in it, tied it up into a ball shape — more or less — and that’s what we played with.  It was lopsided, but closes enough.
            “And while Tuffy always calculated things, Orland would just go all out.  He had an adventurous, reckless streak that got him hurt more than once.  Some cousins had a set of gears out of an old washing machine.  If you could get them spinning fast enough, they’d make a screaming noise.  We’ll, Orland got to spinning those with his bare feet, and one foot slipped into the gears and got tore up pretty good — good enough that the folks had to take him to the doctor.  That took months to heal.  And one time he was scooting along pushing a wheelbarrow when he fell.  He hit the back of the wheelbarrow’s bucket and knocked a bunch of teeth out.  Then there was the time when he was clearing brush for the Civilian Conservation Corps and planted the ax in his foot.
            “I remember the first time Orland shot a deer.  He must have been about 15, and he was so excited he could hardly stand up.  The deer was running uphill and Orland missing like mad — though he did finally bring it down.  I think he really liked being excited like that.”
            Tuffy had a few recollections of the relics left behind by the area’s legendary Arcadia Orchards Company.  In 1930 the company’s foreign backers finally threw in the towel and the company went bankrupt.  Various concrete and steel remnants of their ambitions can still be seen throughout the northwestern segment of the Little Spokane River’s drainage basin.
            “The old Arcadia irrigation flume ran just north of Clayton — ran eastward right behind Washington Brick & Lime’s old terra cotta building.  It was elevated there, so we had to crawl up to get in it.  The water was running from Loon Lake to Deer Park.  It was a nice place to cool off in the summertime.
            “The flume was something like three foot wide.  It had sloping sides.  The water was about a foot deep in it.  The trouble was that they weren’t too fussy about keeping the nails tapped down, so you had to be careful.  My mom and all the kids would go up there to ‘swim’.
            “Tile, metal or wood pipes ran along the fields out east of Clayton.  When they came to a road they went under it and back up the other side.  They did that with solid concrete structures you can still find passing under the roads in places.   But they also used different pipes to go down and under the creeks, and, in some places, over the tops.
            “They had barrel-stave pipes, bound by wire.  Wood from those, and the flumes, ended up in a lot of the barns and buildings around here.  I think the barn on the Milner’s place out in Williams Valley has a lot of flume wood in it.

Near Deer Park.
A large diameter wooden irrigation pipe of the Arcadia Orchards system.
  (Photo courtesy of the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society)
            “After the Arcadia shut down we’d go dig up these four foot diameter irrigation pipe — these big red colored terra cotta pipes — and use them for lining wells and such.  Washington Brick & Lime made them down at the Mica plant just south of Spokane.
            “When a couple of my aunts were teenagers they worked packing Arcadia apples down at the little town of Dennison — I don’t think there’s anything left of that place anymore.  They worked night shift, which tells you something about how many apples the company was shipping out.  I remember early morning car rides down to pick the aunts up and bring them home — before school car rides.  But that’s about all I can remember.
            “When I was a teenager I helped at the Clayton Moose Hall when they were having dances.  Eddie Hampton and I would run the ‘check room’ for people coming in who wanted to hang up their coats and so forth.  The charge for taking care of a coat, hat, purse, or whatever was a dime.  That was before 1936 — before I got out of high school.
            “The Moose Hall was a pretty active deal before 1936, but I think they were having money troubles.  They had Moose Bay on Loon Lake.  Members could buy lots — those high up on the hog could anyway.  When the depression came, all that started downhill.
Clayton's Moose Hall — circa 1925.
(Drawing courtesy of Loon Lake Lodge #855, Loyal Order of Moose)
            “We were using horses to work the Clayton farm up until dad got a tractor.  Dad bought the horses and their harnesses for $125 from a guy who lived about five or six miles west of Deer Park.  I think it was $100 for the two horses, and $25 for the tack.  We used them for everything from plowing to hauling the cord-wood wagon around.
            “The farm depended on the horses, so Dad was fussy about how they were cared for.  We’d keep them in the barn at night.  In the morning, we had to feed them at least an hour before starting work — to make sure they had time to eat everything.  It took around half an hour to get them harnessed up for work.  At night we made sure the horses were clean and that their bedding was down, and then at 8 or 9 we had to go out to the barn and make sure they had something to munch on at night and so forth.
            “We also had to keep watch on the tack — patching whenever necessary.  To keep the harnesses pliable and moisture resistant, Dad would treat the leather with a mineral oil concoction every once in a while.
            “They were a good team – Dolly and Queen.  When they got too old for the amount of work Dad had to do, he sold them to Pete Michie out in Big Foot Valley.
            “Michie was known for caring for his animals.  When he worked them he’d cut a switch from an aspen tree, but he’d leave the twigs and leaves on the switch so it wouldn’t hurt the horses.  I think the swishing sound was enough.
            “For years, whenever we were out that way, I’d see those horses.  They were out roaming around the pasture most of the time.”
Pete Michie with his team, Queen and Dolly,
 on the Michie's Big Foot Valley farm.
(Photo courtesy of the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society — from the Pete Coffin collection.)
            “It seems we worked with horses until I was out of high school.  Then Dad bought a little Farmall ‘A’ tractor.  It was just big enough to do the work of one team.  And it was running day and night.
            “It was so handy.  Start it up and you were ready to go to work right then.  I think Dad paid somewhere around $800 for it new.  There were bigger tractors.  And a lot of guys needed bigger tractors.  But dad got what he figured he could afford.
            “Compared to horses, that was a fantastic machine.”
            Little brother Alan had his own take on working the farm.  “On the dairy it was up and out at five-thirty or six to milk the cows.  It was all done by hand then.  We didn’t go to machines till I was well into high school.  Other milking chores — like washing the cows’ udders down — we didn’t do that when we had to go to school.  We’d just milk the cows, run in and change clothes, and then be off to school.  And when we got home, it wasn’t but maybe half an hour and we’d be back out in the barn milking again.  Summers and weekends we still milked as usual, but then we’d do did everything else for the cows as well.”
            “I left home when I was in the 11th grade”, Tuffy continued.  “I went to work for the gentleman who had been our next door neighbor when we lived in Williams Valley, Dale Milner.  Dale worked for the Deer Park Lumber Company at the time.  And he was trying to get a herd of milk cows started at the same time so he had to hire someone to milk the cows while he went to work.  He hired me for 10 dollars a month and room and board.
            “That was the same year I switched from Clayton’s school to Deer Park’s.  Clayton’s high school wasn’t accredited — I don’t think they ever were when I was going there.  I wanted to go on to college, and you had to graduate from an accredited school for any of your high school grades to count.
            “When I left there to go off to college, Mike Burdette took over my job.
            “Fred Reynolds’ farm was on the next section south of Milner’s.  Fred also owned the bulk milk truck that picked raw milk up at the area’s farms and hauled it to the creamery in Deer Park.  At that time I was going with his daughter, Loraine.  Fred’s first wife, Daisy, was Loraine’s mother.
            “Anyway, one morning it was maybe 35 degrees below zero when Fred called.  He asked me to take my car and pick up the neighboring Kline girl — I can’t recall her first name right now.  ‘She’s walking a mile down to the corner,’ he said.  ‘You’ve got to pick her up before she freezes.’  So I got my car started and took care of that.
            “Not long after, Fred called me up again and asked if I’d like to come to work for him.  I could milk cows, drive his school bus, and the rest of the time go to school myself.  He said I could start the next week.  I figured that would be pretty great.
            “That night I took his daughter out, with the usual understanding that I’d have her back by ten o’clock or so.  I had one of my friends with us on the way home.
            “The car slid off the road.  One front wheel wedged into the snow bank so hard I couldn’t back out.  Ed Falk lived maybe a half mile north of Fred’s, so I borrowed Ed’s horses to pull the car loose.  And it was getting later and later.
            “I was working with the team, and my friend was holding the lantern so I could see what I was doing.  The harnesses began to freeze up — getting hard to work with.  And I was getting a bit mad.  I said a few things, and my friend was standing right in front of me, for some reason waving the lantern side to side.
            “I said something like — ‘Damn these people, putting restriction on when to get their daughters home when the weather’s like this!’  And I said it loud.
            “It was past 10.  Fred had been watching down the road, saw the lantern and all, and had come down to investigate.  He was standing right behind me, listening to everything.  My friend was doing his best to warn me without saying anything.
            “I didn’t show up for work the next week.  I should of, but I thought he would not have had the notion to hire me after hearing all that.
            “I attended the state college down at Pullman from 1936 till ’38.  I think Loraine — Fred’s daughter — went to work as a secretary for a heavy machinery dealer out east of Spokane — and ended up marrying one of the salesmen.
            “People all around had a good opinion of Fred Reynolds.  And those who knew his first wife Daisy thought she was great too.
            “When Fred brought his milk truck by, if one of your milk cans wasn’t clear full, he’d not charge you for hauling the part full can — especially if the weather was hot.  If you tried to keep the can over till you could fill it all the way up, the milk in it would likely spoil.  If you sent it in anyway, you were supposed to be paying full freight on the part-empty cans.  Fred was shipping milk from his own farm too, so he knew how every penny counted back then.
            “Everybody would ride to town on Fred’s milk truck.  If they had to go to Deer Park for anything, they’d call Fred to make sure there weren’t too many people riding that day.  That’s just the way Fred did things.
            “Fred did a pretty good job of farming.  I don’t know how he did it with all the other things he eventually had going on — his freight trucks and the auto repair shop in Deer Park.  But he seemed to like working that way — having more than one thing going at a time.
            “But as I said, I switched to Deer Park High because it made it a lot simpler getting into college.  If you graduated from an accredited high school, they'd accept your high school grades, and then you wouldn’t have to take the entrance exams.
            “For some reason, after looking at my high school grades, they decided I needed to be in bonehead English.  I hadn’t thought I’d done that bad in English, but I went to class and took the first exam.  A couple of days later the teacher asked me why I hadn’t finished the exam.  I thought I had.  It looked like a couple of pages had stuck together or something, because I hadn’t even touched them.  I filled out those pages, and the teacher told me I didn’t need to be there.  She had me go register in regular English before I got too far behind.
            “I started majoring in Forestry.  But then I got the foolish idea that I’d go to work in a drug store, and maybe go on to medical college.  So I changed to pharmacy and pre-med.  I did that — the two different courses — for about three years.  Then, toward the end of the first semester of my last year I got sick and spent two weeks in the hospital.  I dropped out for the rest of the semester, and then I didn’t go back.
            “From 1936 until 1938 I worked at Clayton’s terra cotta factory during my summer breaks to help pay for college.  Eddie Olson was firing kilns at both the terra cotta and the brickyard back then.  At about four or five in the morning, and again at eight or nine o’clock at night, I’d have to haul wood for the kilns.  Between, I’d put in a regular shift at either the brick plant or terra cotta — wherever they wanted me.  At the terra cotta I worked as a kiln setter — stacking the ware into the kiln for firing.


The Clayton Brick Plant — late 1930s or mid 1940s.
  This photo was taken from the top of the brick plant’s main stack
by Burton Stewart and Leno Prestini.
(Photo courtesy of the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society — from the Charles Stewart Collection)

The town of Clayton, Washington — late 1930s or mid 1940s.
This photo was taken from the top of the brick plant’s main stack
by Burton Stewart and Leno Prestini.
(Photo courtesy of the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society — from the Charles Stewart Collection)
            “Due to the economy, the terra cotta factory’s operation was up and down quite a bit.  The brick plant seemed to run along pretty good, though there were times when it was beat down too.  There was a year or so when the guys could only draw about five dollars a month on what was owed them.  That was old man Fosseen’s doing — trying to keep his factory open.
            “Eric Johnson came in as manager of Washington Brick and Lime about 1933.  Somehow he got fifty thousand dollars’ worth of financing for the company.  Nobody could imagine fifty thousand dollars in those days.
            “Part of the problem was that the old man, A. B. Fosseen, was pretty used to leading a good life, regardless of the times.  Eric Johnson and Neal Fosseen — A. B. Fosseen’s son — essentially forced A. B. out of the company.
            “I remember some of what I did when working for the company.  The terra cotta plant’s round muffle kilns had a solid layer of brick to prevent flames, sparks, or anything from touching the surfaces of the terra cotta.  If anything like that touched the glaze, it would mar the finish.  It was a big deal to properly direct the fire through the space between the outside and inside walls – to smooth the fire out so it would be equal all the way around.  Jim Stelting, Doc Harrison, and a few others, by the seat-of-their-pants, knew just when everything was set up right.
            “The kilns were downdraft — meaning the heat and flame from the fireboxes went to the top of the kiln and then down through the floor and underground to the smokestacks.  It was one smokestack between two kilns.  You’d be firing one kiln while unloading then loading the other kiln.  You’d go back and forth that way so that only one kiln at a time was using the stack.
            “Tony and Hilo Marconi and me filled up and emptied the kilns.  Certain shapes of terra cotta had to be fired in pieces, then fitted together after firing.  We’d move those to the fitting floor.  The pieces were dry-fitted, and any excess stopping them from sitting right chiseled off.
            “After that we’d load the stuff into boxcars or onto trucks.
            “At that time there were lots of buildings — dormitories, the chemistry building, the vet building — being constructed on the Pullman College campus.  They all had to have terra cotta trim around the windows and doorways, as well as other things.  And lots of that was being made at Clayton.  If I was home during the school year and a truckload of brick or whatever was leaving Clayton on Sunday so it’d be available to the workers at Pullman on Monday, I’d sometimes hitch a ride.  Then I’d help the truck driver unload at Pullman — to pay for my trip.
            “The terra cotta wasn’t the only place I worked.  You had to save everything you could — every dime.  So, when the factory was closed, I worked Saturday and Sunday at August and Otto Westby’s gas station on Clayton’s Railroad Avenue.  The Westby brothers had a Dodge and Plymouth dealership there, too.  Their garage was located just to the west, just across the street from where, in the late 1940s, the first Don and Carl’s Phillips 66 would be built.
            “The station sold Shell Oil products mostly.  The Shell salesman came in one time with a 1934 Ford that everyone thought had a blown engine.  It was a company car, so rather than messing with it, the company bought a new car from the dealership.
            “The rest of the car was in perfect condition, so I bought it, and was tearing it down in my free time.  Turned out, all that was wrong was that the camshaft had broken.  I slipped in a new camshaft and away I went. 
            “I think it was in the middle of 1939 when I went in with Ben Renner and bought the lease on a service station on north Main Street in Deer Park.  It was called the Public Station.  George Warner had owned it since somewhere around 1922.  In July of '39 the Shell Oil Company took over on a lease from George.
            “The guy who delivered Shell gasoline knew George was wanting out from under it — knew Shell wanted someone to run it.  He asked us if we’d be interested.  Ben and I talked it over.  For some reason the idea of wearing that white service station uniform — like they did back then — was enticing to me.  So we sub-leased the place from Shell.
            “I don’t remember what it cost us.  I know all I had was the 500 dollars I’d saved for college, but since I wasn’t going back …   Ben didn’t put in any more than I did.  And I don’t recall adding any more to the original sum over the next couple of years.
            “The oil company must have covered quite a bit of the cost — leaving us to mostly cover stocking our inventory.
            “Originally the service station had those old fashion gravity flow pumps.  We’d hand pump the gas up into the glass upper part of the pump.  It ran out of that glass container into the cars.  The glass had lines — gradients — that’d tell you how much gasoline had flowed down into the customer’s tank.  Later on we put in modern electric pumps.

Tuffy Luhr (L) and Ben Renner
at 'Public Service Station' on Deer Park's Main Street
— about 1939.
(Photo courtesy of the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society — from the Tuffy Luhr Collection.)
Ben Renner (L) and Tuffy Luhr at their service station — about 1939.
(Photo courtesy of the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society — from the Tuffy Luhr colleciton.)
            “About two years after we bought the station, Bill Shaw, the manager of the brickyard at Clayton, asked Ben whether he would consider going back to the plant if he could be boss?  Ben always wanted to be boss — I’d work with him enough to know that — so he went back.
            “I kept the service station until the war started.  The War Department came into the service station and took most of our inventory — tires and whatever — for the war effort.  After that, there wasn’t much left to do business with.
            “We been handling the local freight — drop-offs and pick-ups — at the service station for Inland Motor Freight.  When Inland offered me a job working at its Spokane freight depot, I decided to sell the station and take Inland’s offer.
            “Forrest Baker bought the station.  He hired some kids to pump gas and take people’s ration coupons — you got four gallons a week or some such.
            “I worked for Inland Freight for the next couple of years, and did a lot of flying for the Civil Air Patrol at the same time.”

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