By Richard Odell
I’ve always associated the 1940s with the color blue. Why, I don’t know. The 1930s I’ve seen always as dull green. Picture books, maybe, dated objects, impressed indelibly the child’s perception.
That I associate the 1950s with black and white seems obvious enough, for the greater world first came to this child’s eyes through the half-tones of television, and I would soon enough learn that beyond the waters from our green Island was a city personified by men who indeed wore suits of gray or black and worked in gray buildings.
But why, again, do I picture 1961 as yellow, or rather, the pastels of Easter? 1962 I see simply as bright and open, like the sky being shot through by John Glenn and the new Space Needle, for I was a Pacific Northwest boy, and loved the Gold Cup hydroplanes. 1963 is forever in the rain of November 23rd, with downcast boughs of evergreen.
Yet perception, itself, changed with time. Up until age three or four, a simple object could fascinate, demanding nothing. Things simply were. The world lay yet beyond. One was enclosed by things. Shadows lay in the folds. There was always a warm, larger body nearby.
At four or five, worldly order began to assert itself. The adults stood back and left you on your own in the thing called kindergarten. Divisions had formed. Vashon’s kindergarten, today the low slung green building at the crossroads at Center, was divided into two classrooms, a pattern that would hold for both Vashon and Burton students all the way through eighth grade. Adult expectations, not of parents, but of strangers, began inexplicably to assert themselves, and with them the apple of knowledge. Most unexpectedly, failure entered the world.
Even so, some sense of enclosure, those dark folds of comfort, would yet abide. The ceiling of the kindergarten was low, fluorescent lights had yet to be forced upon us, the floor was dark with varnish; a simple object could yet enthrall. What lay beyond remained closed off by the marker of 1959.
Then something happened, and the world became suddenly spacious and bright, and although I had been on the planet for a number of years, everything seemed suddenly new. Everything had a “first time” quality. It was not merely that certain things truly were happening for the first time – first printed word explained, first one plus one – but I was especially aware that this, and this, and this, were first-times, as such.
Questions were raised. Answers were given and accepted. I settled in for the ride. Other first times would occur as life stretched out, but aside from certain rites of passage, many of these firsts would have a certain, “What now?” quality to them.
In 1960, we had a new president. “Let the word go forth. The torch has been passed to a new generation.” His name would soon be on a plaque at the town’s new post office. I had a new classroom, in a school which was nearly new itself.
Our town had a new Kimmel’s. The dimly lit Kimmel’s corner market in the village, with its crowded little windows, closed its doors one evening in ‘59, and the next morning opened them onto a bright, spacious pavilion on the west edge of town. A supermarket, flooded with morning sunlight, incorporating the independent Lloyd’s Bakery, a merciless seducer that could bend your knees with the scent of fresh bread and doughnuts the moment you came through those wondrously modern, automated doors.
There were fifty feet of packaged meats, an entire corner given over to magazines and books, aisle after brightly lit aisle of household goods, and above it all, a sprawling mural of comestibles and domestic goodness in the ellipsoid line graphics in fashion at the time.
Still, one thing about Kimmel’s remained unchanged – and would remain so a long while. Hattie, a vigorous Japanese lady who ran the floor in the old place, and who I remember for having once pinched my cheek as I sat in a shopping cart, went along with the transfer.
I found her still there, outlasting the original owners, 30 years later; fast-idling and quiet, she seemed the type that could master the life-long routine. She loved to work. At age 34, I had made it home in time to see her off to retirement, a stranger though I may have been to her by then.
We had new roads. Yes, there were roads yet to build, in those years. Even the giant, sea-serpent head of a Cross-Sound Bridge would soon rise to threaten us all; the first of such monster sightings, and my father would play a small but very public role in sending it to hell. Still, the boom times transforming Greater Seattle and the eastside environs could be felt like shock waves on the Island no one elsewhere kept in mind.
Bainbridge was, in reputation, more the bedroom community than Vashon. We never made the papers, but by word of mouth we grew, and the boom-time whip-hand of “Faster, faster,” compelled the county to straighten the main highway in two places along the Northend. A little cluster of homes, along with The Beauty Nook Salon, were relieved of the burgeoning ferry traffic, and Scales Corner, on which my father once flipped the ’55 Ford, was left to scrub willow and salmonberries.
Yet, before all this, there first came the widening of the uphill climb from the Northend ferry, such that giant hauls and slower cars could bear right and let the faster traffic flow. The builders of this second lane needed a nice, level clearing where they could pile their stash of gravel, and a roadside spot near our house was really the only place available.
They approached my father. He cut a deal. Pave my driveway, he told them, and you can pile your gravel as you please. No child could forget the sight of a steamroller in his own driveway, the smoking hot asphalt going under the steel juggernaut. Now my family, too, had a new road. And the roadbuilders piled their gravel high in their chosen spot, never knowing my father didn’t actually own that particular piece of ground.
And the children played King of the Hill.
