CATEGORY: HIGH SCHOOL
PHOTOS: 1: ME AT SEVENTEEN
2: HARRY BRUNS

Most of the things I remember from my high school years are the things that happened outside of school.  Mother got a teaching job in Moro with increased wages, and we moved from Grass Valley into an apartment in the Moro Hotel.  When she was only fourteen, my sister Mary, with the help of my father, had run away and gotten married, so there was just my heart broken mother and myself.  I had loved my mother so much and when this happened, both Mother and I seemed to collapse into some inner place.

As soon as we were settled in our new lodgings, I got a job working in the Moro Hotel Coffee Shop as a waitress.  I liked the people who came into the restaurant, many of whom I got to know well.  I remember getting a crush on the crop dusting pilot who set the mold for my future preference for tall, good looking, sun tanned, blue eyed, blonde men.  He was married, but he later got a divorce and then married one of my younger school mates.

One of the restaurant customers was a nice young man.  I thought he was nice because he thought I was nice.  He worked for the REA (Rural Electric Administration) building a new power line that was being installed through Sherman County.  His name was Tim.  He talked with a southern accent.  The power line employees signed their meal tabs because the company paid for their meals.  I thought that maybe Tim didn’t really know how to write because of the way he labored over signing his name.  Sometimes he signed it Tim Paine, and sometimes he signed it Tim Payne.

I especially recall the hunters that came to Sherman County in the fall to hunt ducks.  They stayed in the Moro Hotel.  They got up in the wee hours of the morning to hunt.  They had to sit still in their freezing cold duck blinds.  They drank whiskey to keep warm.  By the time they came into the restaurant for breakfast, they were so drunk they had trouble walking.  Not only were they drunk, they were still stiff and cold.  They could hardly pick up a fork or a coffee cup.  But they were such polite drunks!  One of them gave me a five dollar tip, because I had to clean up the mess he had made.

After my freshman year, I no longer wanted to live with my mother.  I was a terrible teenager and would hardly speak to her all my high school years.  I blamed her for things that I didn’t understand–that were too deeply embedded to understand.  I hated her because I wanted someone to hate.

So my wonderful mother arranged for me to live with my sister, Gracie, who was then married and living in Moro.  Gracie played the piano for a dance band and the band practiced one night a week at her house.  She had turned the whole living room into a dance floor with only a piano, a sofa and some chairs for furnishings.  The band’s practice nights were party nights with many of her friends turning up to drink and dance.  I never drank, but I did like to dance!

Also at the restaurant, I got to know Harry Bruns, a salesman for packaged foods in grocery stores and who lived in Hood River and had a weekly route through Moro.

He came into the coffee shop to eat, and then started coming to Gracie’s parties.  He was an ardent amature photographer; he asked me to pose for him.  He had spot lights for special effects, a tripod for his camera, and he even developed his own photographs.  He liked to take glamour shots of me.

Wow!  From a gawky kid to glamour?  That was heady stuff!  It caused a vague split in my personality over the issue of prettiness: on the one hand thinking I really was pretty, on the other hearing the echo of my father’s voice yelling about how ugly I was and demanding that mother to get me out of any room in which he happened to be.

One has to understand that in those years, being pretty was one of the few things a girl had going for her, or so I thought.  It was before it was believed that a woman could possibly be accomplished.  Women could be secretaries, clerks, teachers, nurses, but never doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, engineers.  And they could only be secretaries, clerks, teachers, nurses until they were married but not beyond.  I finally learned to be grateful I was alive and well, but always appreciated that I looked nice and didn’t get fat.  And I learned to be accomplished in unexpected ways.