CATEGORY: CENTRAL OREGON

The first thing I did when I moved to Tumalo and had my own phone, was to put an ad in the Bend newspaper advertising my services doing dressmaking and alterations.  It was when the length of skirts was going up, so the bread and butter of my business was shortening skirts.  I went into Bend once a week, delivered the work I had done during the week and picked up the next week’s work.

One of my early customers was a man.  His last name was Singer.  He told me over the phone that he had about five suits that needed the pants and sleeves shortened, about twenty pairs of slacks that needed shortening plus several smoking coats and shirts that needed the sleeves shortened.  Smoking coats?!!!  I had never even heard of smoking coats.  This was a huge order.

I went to his house to pick up his clothing and do the necessary measurements.  I met both him and his wife.  Mr. Singer had dark hair, brown eyes and rather dark skin.  I guessed he was Mexican, but he had no accent.  He was fairly young and rather nice looking.  He wore three or four rings on his fingers.  One of them was a large diamond.  One was black onyx with a diamond in the center.  This was in BEND, OREGON.  I mean, give me a break!

His wife was a very attractive woman with natural light brown hair.  She was not flashy as one might expect of the wife of someone who wore multiple rings on his fingers.  On the contrary, she was extremely subdued.  The only words I ever heard her say were “How do you do?” when I first met her and “Goodbye” when I left.  They had a large, very nice house.  The living room was furnished with THREE identical ivory colored embossed leather sofas and a bar that looked like it had come out of a club in Las Vegas.  It probably had, and the sofas as well.

When Mr. Singer gave me his load of clothing, he wanted a receipt.  I had never made out a receipt before, so he showed me how.  He gave me a piece of paper and said, “Write: Received of L J Singer——”  He spelled it for me: “S-I-N-G-E-R.”  Then he had me list every item of clothing:  three morning coats (they were satin), five suits (he included the colors), four sports coats, all the slacks and shirts.  Then I signed it.

I couldn’t possibly do all his alterations in one week, so I delivered what I had completed each week on my trips to Bend.  Each time, his quiet wife wrote a check for me.  She signed her last name “Singher.” (Shades of Tim Paine/Payne when I was in high school.)

One day Mr. Singer/Singher showed up unexpectedly at my front door.  I happened to be working on his clothes.  I invited him in and offered him a cup of tea.  He told me that he had an airplane and that he just happened to be on his way to the airport to go flying.  He wondered if I would like to go with him.  I declined.  He was very polite, and didn’t seem like he was “on the make.”  In the course of our conversation he mentioned that he sometimes flew his plane to Canada.  He left.  I wondered how he had found out where I lived and how he could be on his way to the air port driving along The Cline Falls Road, seven miles northwest of Bend when the airport for Bend was in Redmond on the other side of the Deschutes River and the east side of Highway 97.

I told my sister, Mary, about this strange un-Bend-Oregon-like person.  She was a long distance telephone operator.  She said she thought he might be the same Mr. Singer for whom she often placed person to person calls to someone in Canada.  After that, she listened in on his conversations.  She told me that a man always answered the phone there and that they spoke in short, one word sentences.  It was as if they were talking in code.  She thought it was about picking up and delivering something, because there were times and dates involved.

I will never know who Mr. Singer/Singher was, but I think he was smuggling something from Canada into the United States (and/or visa versa) with his airplane.  He was the closest thing to a mobster I have ever known.  I often wonder where he wore his satin smoking coats.  Maybe on his trips to Canada.  I imagined him staying at the Banff Springs Hotel, having breakfast in his hotel room wearing his luxurious attire and asking the maitre d to send “one of the girls” up to his room.