Gettin' hitched and moving to Grandview

I came down to Yakima often to see Mickey. We would go to movies and to the hamburger stand. I had become infatuated with her. I would go back to Cle Elum and stay for a few days, working around the farm. She would write me short letters. They were plain bread-and-butter letters - she didn't want to show her hand too soon.

I was helping John clear the Indian John Hill property. We were dozing it preparing it for a farm. The Caterpillar that Donald had bought and we shared had bad rollers, so I bought some new ones. I was underneath the tractor, pulling the bolts and tightening them - it was raining that day. I was thinking, "What am I here for? I could be in Yakima with Mickey." I got the idea that this was the time.

I went down to the jewelry store in Cle Elum and I bought a ring set with a great big diamond (Grampa showed the size of the diamond - it's about the diameter of the tip of a toothpick). Donald had built a house in Selah, where we now live. Mickey's family and Elsie's family (Donald's first wife) were intermingled. Her uncle was Elsie's stepfather. I asked Elsie if she would make a cake, which she did. I put the rings in Mickey's piece of cake.

There was a casual dinner, and afterwards Mickey ate her piece of cake and ran into those rings. Gramma just said her thought at the time was "It's about time!" He just asked her this morning if he had asked her to marry him - she said, "No, you always said, 'when we get married', like you knew it was just going to happen."

I wanted to get married in the Catholic church. I went down to talk to a priest and asked how long it would be before we could get married in the church since she was not a Catholic. He said it would take about 6 months of training. I had already put a down payment on the property in Grandview with Donald and didn't want to wait that long. So, it was too complicated to get married by a priest and I let Mickey's side of the family choose the place. I just asked for it to be on my birthday, November 11. I think it was a Methodist church. The reverend said, "When I tie the knot, I tie them pretty tight." The church was old with wooden pews, and was later destroyed.

We had a reception at Donald and Elsie's new home, and I have some movies of us cutting the cake. They're pretty grainy. The ceremony for the cake cutting was to have the one in charge of the house would have their thumb on top the knife. For a minute she and I thumb wrestled for who got to have theirs on top of the knife. I eventually won. I remember someone spiked the punch with vodka, and I remember Aunt Pluma trying to kiss me, which I managed to escape.

After we married, we stayed at Donald and Elsie's in Selah through to January of '49 when I went to Youngs Lumber, where they made small pre-fab war time housing. I bought one of them and had it taken down on a truck. They took it down to the property in Grandview, put it together, and we had a house. We didn't have a well or an outhouse, but we had a house.

Our first few months in the house were doing the cold months. It was hard for the car to start. I would keep it warm by putting blankets over the carborator. One morning I looked out the window and the blanket had caught on fire and burnt the hood of the car up. I took it down to the GMC dealer and they put it back in shape. After that, it always smelled like burnt tar.

We'd go across to the neighbors to get our water using ice cream buckets.

We also needed an outhouse. I got enough boards together to make a three sided one. We didn't have to worry about a door, as there was no population, but we did put a blanket over it. We had a big windstorm one day and it blew the sand all over, blowing the outhouse over and into the canal.

That was the beginning of our life down in Grandview. I eventually decided that we needed our own well. I didn't like that we lived right next to the road and across the road there were workers who would get in drunken brawls every night. I borrowed some telephone poles from the neighbors and lifted the house up onto the skid and pulled the house farther away from the road, where the house ended up staying. I ended up drilling our own well. I didn't have a level or a square and the way I leveled that house was with a rock and a string. We didn't have a septic tank or bathroom, so when the well was drilled I just had a hose into the house sink. We had three rooms - a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room. The kitchen was only 4' wide. We still have our old fridge - it still runs.