Around the time of World War I, Morton wasn’t a place where newcomers came to settle. People there were all Anglo-Saxon, many of them pioneer stock. They were the Temples, the Broadbents, the Stiltners and the Crumbs. Most of their fathers and mothers had packed in to claim narrow strips of land. The Crumbs had gotten theirs at the time of Abraham Lincoln. Only the Broadbents had made more than an ordinary amount of money.

Everyone seemed to find a place. Everyone knew exactly what was going on, and when a stranger came to town. Everyone was subject to unwritten laws. To break them would cause more attention than it was worth. The community was sure of what was right, though it made no claim that everyone was perfect.

We had a town drunk. Every so often he would get bleary-eyed and stagger down the street ripping off fence pickets. Everyone knew that in a day or so he’d be nailing them back up.

Most of the time, he’d sit with the older men in front of the pool hall or the barber shop. In winter, they’d move inside my father’s hardware, sit on nail kegs, and spit tobacco juice into the pot-bellied stove. The hardware didn’t have a cracker barrel like the grocery, but it had a more masculine tolerance, and customers kept the flow of information fresh and lively.

We had a town prostitute, the oldest girl from a big farm family — hardworking, not much money. She was discreet. She’d go out to Tacoma for a week, and she’d come back with new clothes. People asked — where did she get the money? How could you earn all that in one week? She was good-natured, plump and naturally blonde. I remember seeing her, and the comments, “There she goes on the bus again.”

She was still in Morton when I came back to teach there, in 1940. She’d married a war veteran, who was sick and had little money. That was the time that women of my mother’s age, who could remember this woman’s past, argued about whether to let her in the Eastern Star. They finally did.

When my father had decided to go into the hardware business, he chose Morton by asking hardware salesmen. The salesmen said, “Up at Morton, they don’t have any hardware. There’s a lot of timber, and there’s loggers.” Before he left he hired a clerk he knew, and paid him double what ordinary clerks got, to move to Morton. Later they became partners.

Another young man came with Dad to Morton. When Dad built his store, he included a narrow strip for this young man to establish a haberdashery. It was logging country up there; loggers needed shirts and boots and pants. This haberdashery didn’t run the full depth of the building. The back opened right on to Dad’s potbellied stove.

The haberdasher did well. He married and had two daughters, and one was named Alverna, after me. Later, he took up with a redheaded woman in town. My mother said that when this redhead came in to look for an umbrella, the haberdasher locked his front door and pulled down the blinds. He didn’t have any business for half an hour or so. Dad and his clerk knew what was going on, but they didn’t presume to say he couldn’t.

Well, Morton was a little town. Things like that get around. Everybody could see the blinds down in the middle of the afternoon. And at public dances, the haberdasher would dance with this woman.

The haberdasher’s wife responded by making the redhead her best friend, inviting her to Tacoma in their new car. This was to stop all the talk. But it didn’t stop the talk. It didn’t change anything, except to show that his wife wasn’t breaking up her marriage on account of a redheaded woman.

My dad carried mostly very useful things in the hardware: stoves, simple furniture, plain dishes, ropes, chains, bolts and nuts and things for logging camps. He had a credit business, but he ran it carefully. He knew which men were entitled to credit — which men would pay. He’d be understanding when a man might be working hard, and living on venison. If that man needed an airtight stove because his other one was falling apart and he had five kids, of course could have credit.

Sears & Roebuck would sometimes write and ask my dad a man’s credit standing. He felt it was ridiculous for them to ask, because they were competitors. Why should he tell them? So when a man was poor at paying — and often, people who had ruined their credit with him would try to get it elsewhere — Dad would write, “Fine. Give the man all the credit he wants.”

Dad’s hardware also carried coffins, because nobody else in the community would take care of a death. So he did. He learned how to do embalming, and was licensed. But he tried to dissuade people who couldn’t afford it from buying expensive coffins.

One widow insisted on having the most expensive casket he had. He tried to persuade her not to buy it, because he knew she couldn’t pay for it. She shouldn’t even try to pay for it; the money should go to her children. But no, sir, she wept and wailed, and insisted on having the very best. So my dad let her have it, knowing he would never get paid. He was careful not to give too much credit, but in this case, with a woman deep in grief, he just gave in.

Dad loved to play cards. In the early days, he’d play cards with the salesmen who came up to Morton to sell hardware. Sometimes they gambled.

My mother worried about gambling. She always had her ears out. Apparently she heard about it, because one time she went to the pool hall and into the back room. The table was covered with chips and cards and gold. She said, “Aha! I knew it!” And she turned the table upside down in front of the men. Dad would occasionally tell this story, and laugh. He’d say, “You know, I was winning, too.”

 I think that ended his gambling for money, but he still loved to play cards at the pool hall two blocks from home. I knew he was up there in the evenings. I guess the chips had to be taken out in merchandise, because he’d come home with candy bars and chips. Marie and I used to be given chips, and we could go back to that pool hall and buy ice cream.

My father played cards with us, too. When we were children, as soon as we could hold cards, my father organized simple games. While he did it, he taught a moral lesson. It was that the cards demanded moral standards. You don’t cheat. You don’t peek at somebody else’s hand. You don’t fidget and give away that you have a bad hand, or say, “Woooo! I’ve got a wonderful hand!” You’re stoic. The game demands this.

If you got a bad hand, you were not to feel downhearted because you lost. If you played all the tricks you could get, you were a success. If you didn’t play them right, Dad didn’t scold you. But afterwards, he told you how you could have done better.

So, while some people felt that cards were sinful because people could gamble with them, my father taught moral lessons with them.

Only about five students a year made it through Morton High School. Girls often married at sixteen, and any strong boy of sixteen would usually rather be out logging than in freshman English. If he did get to high school, it was more schooling than his pa had, and likely more than he’d ever need.

I was the fourth of five children. My two older brothers did not finish high school, and my older sister came to graduation and didn’t qualify for it. Well, I think the teacher and the superintendent, who both knew Dad,just made it up between them: if my sister outlined the history book, she could get credit for history. She didn’t get it all done, but they passed her anyway. She didn’t have any ambition to go to college or do anything with it. The next year, she was pregnant.

I was different. I did well in school. Everything was easy. One geography book. Well, I could read down that two-page assignment, and I’d have it memorized. And when it came to reading Ivanhoe,I wanted to read ahead. The English teacher would say, “Now, Alverna. Don’t read ahead.” 

At eleven, Dad signed me up for violin lessons. Dad had a violin that had come down from his grandfather. There had been three generations of fiddlers who could play by ear, but I was to learn to read music. Mother said, “Myfather wouldn’t allow a violin in the house. He felt the devil was in it.” The violin made people dance, and that was wicked. But Mother didn’t feel that way. 

No one at Morton could teach me the violin. My father drove me Saturdays on the new road to Tacoma, about 60 miles away, where I could take lessons and he could place hardware orders. When it came to my senior year in high school, 1923-24, my father sent me to Tacoma to live in a boarding house so I could go to Stadium High School. I went on from there to the University of Washington, where I earned a degree in music.

I wasn’t the only one to be sent out. One pioneer farm family, the Crumbs, sent its firstborn son out of town for four years of high school. That was unheard-of. That family couldn’t afford such extravagance. In due course, without the village approval, they sent out the second son, the third and the fourth. The fifth son didn’t want to go, but by that time it was a tradition, and everybody agreed that he had to go, too.

There weren’t many charity cases in Morton, and the businessmen handled them in a quiet way. There was a Civil War veteran. He was so old that people marveled that he could take care of himself alone in a one-room shack. He’d been a Mason, so the Masonic lodge saw that he had what he needed. But when they offered him better housing, he was too proud to take it. He said, “Oh, I don’t need much. A little tobacco. After all, when I was young, I helled around.”

When it got cold, he’d come down to the hardware and join the men telling stories, chewing tobacco and spitting in the stove.

The other charity case was the minister. Morton wasn’t a church-going town. Saturday-night dances drew nearly everyone, but Sunday-morning services in the Methodist church — the only one in town — would have about ten people. The minister wasn’t called on often to officiate at marriages, which were usually elopements. Only at funerals did everyone require the minister, who conducted them with lavish formality.

My dad would give the minister $50 or $100. He would tell the minister, who looked half-starved, “This is not to go to the mission in China. This is for you.” Mrs. Broadbent, who was related to one of the pioneer families, arranged for the minister to have one good meal a day at the hotel.

People expected the minister to live in genteel poverty. When a minister came who had a little Ford, and he used it to get from the parsonage to town — only about six blocks — he was criticized. It wasn’t right that he should have a car and burn up gas for that. He soon left.