Dean of the Woods

The winters of ‘49-’50 and ‘50-’51 were tough ones in the Willamette Valley. We had heavy snow and cold weather lasting from Thanksgiving until up into March. We were snowed in at one point for weeks. Dean would walk several miles into town for essentials once a week; otherwise we lived off what Mom had canned or frozen.

With the road snowed shut, and freight-weight at a premium, Dean had no access to the newspaper, nor to the dozen or fifteen weekly and monthly magazines he always read. He read The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Look, and Life. His monthlies included Reader’s Digest, Coronet, Pageant, Argosy, True, Popular Science, and anything else that tickled his eclectic fancy. So he missed his reading. We had no T.V.; he couldn’t work. He was going stir-crazy for something to do.

We had a 1947 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he undertook the project of reading it from A to Z. He made it to the W’s. It wasn’t that he ran out of winter; in fact, had the snow melted a bit earlier, he would likely have eventually finished the project.

He was reading one day about the Willamette Valley. I can quote from memory what it said: “The Willamette Valley enjoys a moderate climate; Portland, its largest city, is known as the City of Roses, as they bloom year-around there. The temperature seldom drops to freezing, and never below zero . . .” That was as far as Dean got. The thermo-meter he had in the deep freeze stayed right at zero, and when he had taken it out that morning and set it on top of the freezer, it went right on down to –8 degrees Fahrenheit. Snow had been drifting and packing in the back yard until we kids could step OVER a 5-strand barbed wire fence.

The volume he was reading bounced off the far wall, and the contributor of the article received some criticism that likely hastened the snowmelt by a good week. Dean’s confidence in the Britannica was never quite restored after that.