The Summer of 48

The Summer of 48

Mother recently reminded me of her sister, Linda’s birth in 1948 when Mother was 12 years old.  That lead to the next question directed at me.  “What were you doing in 1948?”  The answer to that question was - Quite a Lot.   I graduated from Roosevelt High School in the spring of 1948 even though i had finished the  graduation requirements six months earlier.  The future always seemed scarier to me than to my peers so I played it safe and took easy high school classes until graduation time.  That may have been when I took a speech class during the sixth period and had a Daphne-Bigelow-like date in high school. (Faithful readers will remember the episode under the title of “The Bombshell of Roosevelt High").  My friend, Jack Welton, who was more adventuresome than I, got an early start at Fresno State College on a baseball scholarship but in spite of our differences we were both looking for the same summer job in 1948.  We thought we found it in the form of a new Thrifty Drug Store in downtown Fresno.  Up till then drugstores were small, intimate establishments with a prescription counter, a soda fountain and anything else that you would find in a bathroom medicine cabinet and for some reason these stores were usually located on the corner of some city block. The location was so universal they were often referred to them as the “corner drug stores.”  Thrifty Drug was different.  It was the first drugstore that I  had seen that was more like a supermarket and it was located in the middle of the block on Fulton Blvd.  They hired a bunch of us high school kids as stock boys so it was obvious that once the shelves were stocked some of us would be unemployed.  We all worked hard to impress the managers in hopes of having employment through the summer but we were no match for Mike Demanty who took bootlicking to a new level.  If I were getting ready to pick up a box while one of the managers was watching, Mike, with perfect timing and with the voice of someone in charge, would say, “Pick up that box!”   It must have worked. By the end of the summer he was the only one still employed.  A year later when I had finished 2 semesters of college and preparing to go on a mission, I felt some unchristian like satisfaction in noting that he was still the Thrifty Drug stock boy.

That was also the summer that Jack Welton’s girl cousin from Utah came to visit for the summer.  She was looking for romance and I lived next door but I was just as ingenuous as I had been in the Daphne Bagelow episode so she moved on to someone more promising - Ken Johnson.  The plot thickened when Jack, Ken and I started playing in the Fresno City Church Softball League and on the way home from one of our games, there were three girls in the car, the cousin from Utah, Kyrma Hickman, Jack’s steady girlfriend, and Marilyn Witt, Kyrma’s best friend.  Marilyn and I were the extra girl and the extra guy  in the car so I was about learn something that served me well in my adolescent psychology classes 20 years later.  The guy who has a steady girl friend has more prestige and more power to determine what everyone else in the car does - and was not shy about using it by making out with his girl friend and forcing everyone else to try to do the same.  i gamefully resisted the pressure until I got to Marilyn’s front door at which time I decided that my resistance might be construed as dislike, so I kissed her and immediately acquired the undeserved  nickname of Hotlips Harmon for the rest of summer.  Marilyn showed up at every game so I never  had to ask for a date until a church dance appeared on the calendar so I felt I had to ask her.  She accepted.  She was nice.  I liked her and we got along well but she lived on the other side of town and the  relationship ended when the summer was over. .

The climax of the summer occurred on and around Labor Day. Grape farmers in the valley were desperate to save the raisin crop by hiring workers to flip the grapes over so they would dry on the other side.  A ward member asked Jack and if we would spend Labor Day flipping his grapes.. We figured that the pay would compensate for the inadequate hours at Thrifty Drug and since he was a friend he would pay us more than other workers.  It was 10 hours of backbreaking work.  At the end of the day we realized that being friends works both ways.  Friends also assume that as friends you will work for less.  He paid us each ten dollars.  We laughed about the pay all the way home, probably because we learned our lesson and partly because we were about to start another adventure in the Sierra Nevadas the next day. There were four of us, Jack Welton, Charles Tucker, Ken Johnson and I. We didn’t have any maps but Kenny had worked in the Sierras the summer before and reassured us that he knew exactly where this lake was where we would catch lots of fish - that no one else knew about.

     

It was going to be a five-day back packing except that no one we knew in those days, carried everything on their backs.  We were going to rent 2 burros for five days.  One day to get there, 3 days for fishing, and one day to get home.  Jack and I packed food and camping gear until midnight while Kenny was working on his car.  This was 1948.  Cars were not manufactured during WWII so his car must have been an early 1930 vintage.   In spite of our Labor Day fatigue, we got an early start, suffered a brief car breakdown en route, before reaching the corrals in General Grant Park in late morning.  They introduced us to the burros, White Face and BlackJack along with some instructions about throwing a diamond hitch to keep the packs secure.  I knew both burros and how to throw a diamond hitch from previous campouts so I was in charge of the animals.  The weather was comfortable and the forest was beautiful until we got past the timberline.  Boulders everywhere obscured the trail.  Our confidence in Kenny began to waiver when his memory of  landmarks began to change.  We had intended to eat like kings for five days but we were so exhausted at the end of the first day that we picked out a site at the foot of a mountain, ate as little as possible, and fell into our sleeping bags.  Noises stirred us awake.  Our flashlights reflected off of the eyes of deer who were eating our fresh vegetables.  We rolled over and went back to sleep.  

The second day we held a pow wow.  Kenny would hike  further inland to find the trail, Jack and Charles would backtrack to see if we had missed a turnoff and I would take the burros back to a lean-to and wait for them to return with information.  Jack and Charles came back with nothing except a harrowing account of sliding uncontrollably down a mount side but Kenny came back with good news.  He had found the lake.  He had even caught a couple of fish as evidence.  The elusive lake was just over the mountain from where we had camped the first night.  

Day three.  We retraced our steps, picked our way through the boulders and entered a treeless, flat space with a lake in the middle.  The  re was very little grass for the burros to eat and we tried tying them to a bolder to keep them from running away.  It was a sparse campsite but if we caught lots of fish it would be worth it.

Day four.  The nameless lake was so ordinary that there wasn’t much to explore but we did walk around, looking for good fishing spots.  That didn’t work either.  We didn’t catch a single fish.  I don’t think any of us liked fish anyway.  Besides, we had been so busy figuring out  where we were, that we didn’t have time to eat all that food we brought.  When we returned to our campsite that day the burros were rolling in our sleeping bags and eating more of our food.  We finally ate one big meal.  We had used up 4 of the 5 days on a food deprived diet.

Day five was quick. It was downhill all the way.  Burros walk faster when they know that they heading back to the corrals and there were no car breakdowns.  Jack and Kenny had girlfriends at home so we were home by late afternoon.  The summer of was over.. It was a fitting end to our age of innocdnce excpet to Charles who had another of high school.

By the following summer I would lbe serving a chrch mission that wouo take me to Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica.  Kenny would be serving in the Swediish Mission.  Jack would have a successful year playing baseball for the Fresno Stae baseball team and Marriage to Kyrma Hickman.