Adam Dumphy
Herding caterpillars; raiding a neighbor’s tall peach tree by means of stilts; constructing a fake “Loch Ness Monster” with canvas and a derelict canoe; machinations in a Pawn Shop to obtain the fur coat of a ‘genuine’ Eskimo Princess: or even adding paddling (with a real paddle) as the initiation fee for the prestigious San Francisco based Paddle and Canoe Club are hardly crimes. To the participant they rate more properly as just boyish exuberance.
In such affairs as these Johnny was the brain, Chuck the muscle and the author as youngest and smallest, was the unfortunate shuttle cock sent aloft to the winds of chance in walking, swimming or producing any chicanery necessary, to complete the plan.
And as for an author age eighty, like Adam, memories can expand or recoil like a worn out accordion or a “Slinky” going down stairs, it is no problem for him to combine the actual happenings of eight summers spent in a cabin in the tourist town of Monte Rio on the Russian River in Northern California into one summer’s adventure.
Add the first burgeoning forth of a very shy, very tentative romance and you have this story.
Locale, circumstances and incidents are true. It has been colored in part for reader interest.
To Adam Dumphy memories are priceless and so are memoirs.
Priceless not only for an individual but also for the many for they make up the warp on which history is written.
Not the revisionist history as by definition that means an author who was not there at the time and cannot understand the nuances of the language or the times, but the real history
Priceless also for the individual.
For example his beloved grandfather was still robust less than hundred years ago but he knows little about him.
What was Sweden like in his boyhood? What happened to him in the Chicago fire? How could one stand homesteading in the winter in South Dakota? Did he prefer Teddy or Franklin D?
And not just in the big things. Did he play poker or pinochle? Was whiskey to him a boon or curse? Did he like his roast rare or well and with or without mustard? He would love to know.
And as old people do when approaching their final exam, Adam wonders what did his grandfather think of the complaints or Job or the answers in Habakkuk.
He can never know.
So here are some of Adam’s memories written particularly to show the peace, calm and decency of one area of the U.S. in the late thirties.
“Hut sut ralston on the riddle rah and a brawla brawla suet....”
Early summer of 1937 and the Hut Sut song was very popular. Everybody was singing it. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know what the words said; besides everybody pronounced them differently anyway. The high school band had just got the arrangement and was kicking it out at the best party I had ever seen.
“Hey, Timmy. You got to dance with my sister.”
That is, I amended; it had been the best party just up until that minute. Not that I had expected a little kid’s party with paper hats and balloons. Johnny was sixteen today and his party was class.
Firstly best ever because it was couples. Twelve boys and twelve girls. The girls in billowy, party frocks and the boys in suits. Well mostly. Actually I was wearing a new sport coat and the same old slacks I wore on Sunday to church, which didn’t exactly match, but I thought I was beautiful.
The affair started with a sit-down dinner, with waiters even, in the sunken dining room of the big, new house on Arbor Drive in San Leandro. Just a short commute across the Bay from San Francisco, San Leandro was becoming a rich man’s suburb of “The City”. Springing up in the midst of the cherry orchards just across the bay from Trolley Town were new houses everywhere you looked. Set in orchards over a low rolling landscape, free of fog and sunny like in the California ads. But the McLean’s new house was the biggest and the newest.
Called Nordic Modern or something it meant all natural wood outside. And inside three stories almost with steep roofs and skinny windows and lots of gables. Inside it was all natural wood too. Stairs led up and down to four different levels, some even on the same floor.
This party was a kind of open house and birthday party combined. Parents dropped by to say ‘how do’ and ‘oh my’ but out of sight and sound of the birthday festivities.
So at dinner we gourmeted and generally caroused in a genteel way. After dinner we trooped out into the back yard where a dance floor had been laid down and a couple of green and white tents were waiting. Johnny opened a bunch of presents including a couple of ‘nickel-brick’ baseballs and then came THE present. A 1935 Ford V-8 pick up, a little banged up but in bright red.
Only one guy in the whole school had a car at that time. A shiny green Studebaker but it had so much chrome on it, it was called the ‘tinsel monster’ and the owner ‘tinsel Tony’ and both were looked down on.
But the truck in red was just the right touch and with elan. For fishing or hunting trips, hauling stuff to the ranch or just piling it full of kids to drive up to the Russian River in Northern California for a swim. But for now there was the six-piece band and the ‘Hut Sut’.
