Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Sixties for sale

Signed first edition of Dennis Hopper’s photography book “Out of the Sixties” in very fine condition.   It was given to me as a gift over 20 years ago and has been wrapped in plastic (not a publishers wrap) and laid flat on a shelf ever since then.  There is a very slight, very small smudge on the front dust cover.  It is signed on the introduction page where he wrote about himself.  He signed it “D. Hopper”.  Price: $439.

This book is now listed on Amazon.com

Contact me at carollight@sbcglobal.net

Across the country by rail 1959

In September, 1959  I was packed and ready to go by rail to Northampton, Massachusetts to enter Smith College.  Until then I had never been east of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  And I had never been anywhere on my own.  I was a very protected young lady.  I clearly remember my mother saying to me as we waited for the Northern Pacific train to pull into the station: “I have taught you everything I can.  It’s now up to you.” 

I got on the train, exhilarated, waved to my parents and sisters, then over the next four days, watched America roll by.  The Rocky Mountains were just taller versions of the Cascades.  The plains of eastern Montana, however, were astounding: so flat it was possible to see the curve of the earth.   

In Chicago where I had a few hours layover, I was surprised to be waited on by a black salesclerk.  The dominant ethnic groups–and we never thought about people that way in those days–in Spokane and much of the Pacific Northwest  were Swedes and Norweigians.  The tiny black population of Spokane was almost invisible.  In Chicago they were very visible. 

I changed trains in Chicago and found myself on what could have been called  the “Eastern College Express”.  Somewhere in Montana, 3 or 4 young men heading for Harvard had boarded the train and we had talked.  Now there were dozens of students going to the colleges in New England.  We all identified ourselves, somehow or the other, and the midwest rolled by almost unobserved because there were so many new people to meet.

The train rolled through small midwest towns where laundry was waving on the clothes lines and past farm lands which could have been in the Willamette Valley where I spent much of my early life.   One thing I noticed immediately as the train crossed into Massachusetts was how close together towns were and how charming they looked, as if taken from a story book.  Over the next four years this lack of space–well, that was and is how I define it–made me eager to go back out West after I graduated.  I love the open spaces of the American West.  I love the idea that you can walk through forests or out into the desert and put your foot where no human being has ever stepped before.  I love being able to look around and see no evidence of human beings, only the land and the sky.  New England eventually began to feel very claustrophobic.   At the end of 4 years Smith College did, too.

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)

Doing time in Spokane

About six months ago I received a phone call from a woman who said she had been in the Class of ’59 at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane.  And “We’re going to have a 50th reunion!!!!”   And “Do you plan to attend??!!” 

I laughed. 

Then told her:  “No, I do not plan to attend.  I spent 3 years living there a long, long time ago.  My life has been in another world.”

Undeterred, she chatted away about this person and that person who were coming to the reunion.  None of the names did more than faintly resonate in my memory.  It was as if I were listening to a total stranger rambling on about her high school years in a place I had never been.  I ended the conversation–and she was very persistent in trying to get me to say “Yes”–with the suggestion that she send me whatever information she had.

When the package showed up in my mailbox it was even funnier.  One of the events scheduled was a luncheon based on what Spokane Grade School a person had attended.  Grade school?!?   That left no doubt that the people organizing the reunion were born and raised in Spokane and never left.  Spokane Lifers. 

My family moved to the South Side of Spokane–which in those days was the best part of the city–the summer before I entered 10th grade.   I hated the place–primarily because it was new to me.  Suddenly, I went from being a very popular girl in a tiny high school (fewer than 300 students) in Dayton, Oregon to being a new girl in a large (over 2,000 students) urban high school where I knew absolutely no one. 

The teenagers at Lewis and Clark high school were like those in the movie, American Graffiti.  There were the cool kids.  There were the outsiders.  There were social clubs–I was invited to join one my senior year, but by then I knew I was on my way out of Spokane, so I turned them down. 

 There were dances in ballrooms and country barns. 

There were summer days spent hanging out at the city pool and taking tennis lessons and getting a sun tan.

There were sewed-down pleated skirts, white suede shoes, and a red-and-white striped blouson style blouse I really loved.

 There was Sputnik and the Cold War.   The launch of the Russian Sputnik was announced in the middle of a high school basketball game.  Lewis and Clark was playing North Central.

There was rock ‘n roll–although Elvis Presley had come along while I was still living in Dayton.  When Elvis played Sp0kane, I sat in the second row and screamed my lungs out. 

There were hamburgers, fries and milkshakes at the Triple X drive-in followed by the thrill of cruising around the dark streets of Spokane late at night in a friend’s car.  

Then there were the classes at Lewis and Clark High School.  At the high school in Dayton I had been voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”   In Spokane I rose to be in the top 10% of the class, academically.  Lewis and Clark High School was among the top schools in the U.S. at that point.   Most graduates went on to college, even the girls at least for a year or two.    In contrast, my two best friends from Dayton moved to Salem, Oregon after high school where they got secretarial jobs.

As much as I disliked Spokane, had it not been for my parents’ move there my life would have been drastically different.  My parents’ best friends in Spokane had attended Smith College and Amherst and the next thing I knew I was being recruited by Smith and a couple of other women’s colleges on the East Coast.  I applied to Smith, Wellesley, and Mt. Holyoke.  Smith and Holyoke accepted me;  I was wait-listed at Wellesley. 

I was not going to be a Spokane Lifer.  I was going to Smith.

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)

The land of beans and berries

Part 6

In the 1950s the Willamette Valley was noted for agricultural production on family farms.  There were bean fields, strawberry fields, walnut orchards, plum orchards, and some dairy herds.    Today it is still agricultural, but the dominant plant is grapes.  There are vineyards full of wine grapes everywhere. 

As with many farm towns then, the school year ended in time for harvesting the first crop of the season.  Around Dayton it was strawberries. 

To harvest the crops there were crews of itinerant farm workers and their families who lived in unheated one-room shacks tucked away in a corner of a farm.  There were crews of men brought down by bus from Skid Row in Portland.  And in Dayton, there was a crew of local townspeople, mostly women and middle-school age children, my mother, myself and my sisters among them.  Our next door neighbors–the mayor’s wife and her older child–were also in our group.  We knew all the other local people, too. 

Each crew was kept separate–no contact at all.   But we all had the same job: picking strawberries to be made into strawberry jam at a canning plant somewhere near Portland.  I remember kneeling down in the cold, muddy rows picking basket after basket of strawberries on chilly, damp mornings.  Within minutes the knees of my dungarees were soaked and caked with mud. We were paid by the number of baskets we picked.  My sisters were too young to really work.  They ate strawberries and played at the side of the field.  The strawberry season was short–thank goodness.   In three or four weeks the strawberry harvest was in.  To this day I do not like strawberries in any form, except in strawberry shortcake.

There was a break after strawberry season and my sisters and I went to Summer Vacation Bible School at the local Congregational church. 

Then bean season began.  They were Blue Lake beans which in those days were only available canned.  Now, Blue Lake beans are available fresh in farmer’s markets all over Southern California and probably elsewhere, too. 

The bean fields were not cold and muddy:  they were dry and the soil had hardened into clumps.  Picking, however, meant being down on one’s knees to pick the beans near the ground, then standing up and picking all the beans up to the top of the bean plant, which grew up string and wire to about 6 feet high.    So it was down and up and down and up and down and up all day long.   After one field was harvested we moved on to another.  Within a few days we were back at the first field where new beans had grown. 

We picked the beans into large burlap bags and they were weighed when full.  We were paid by weight.  The atmosphere, unlike that in the strawberry fields, was slightly festive, at least among my friends and me.  We kids used to have contests to see how quickly we could fill a bag and who could pick the most beans in a day.    If I remember correctly, one day I picked almost 400 pounds of beans.  I  was never the winner, however. 

Our work days ended in early afternoon and we would walk home and get cleaned up.   Then we would go to the local drug store which had a soda fountain and have a cherry coke or phosphate drink which we paid for from our own earnings.  After that we sit around the park and talk and talk, the way teenagers always do.

So for three summers I worked picking crops and earned well over $200, most of which I put into U.S. Savings Bonds.  I know this for a fact because when I received my Social Security Statement at age 62, there were the earnings from those years listed on the Statement of Earnings.   It was a shock to realize that I had been working and contributing to Social Security for 50 years!  Seeing that, I decided to go ahead and file for Social Security payments–figuring I had better start collecting soon so I could be sure to at least get back the money I had put in during that half-century of employment.

The summer before 10th grade our family moved to Eastern Washington.  My parents had me cash in the bonds I had bought from money saved working in the fields, and those funds were used to move us to Spokane.  I hated Spokane.

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)