Ray Bilderback
By Ray Bilderback
When I was a boy, in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, we looked to the radio for information and entertainment. I remember sitting with my grandfather Lloyd, listening to Gabriel Heater at six in the evening. Grandfather rarely missed a broadcast. Mr. Heater loved to come on with a fulsome, “There’s good news tonight.” Of course, in the first years of World War II, there was seldom good news. Germany had run rampant over much of Europe by that time, Japan had struck Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, and the islands of the South Pacific were overrun by Japanese soldiers. The radio helped us keep up with the news and strengthened our resolve to do whatever we could to help. There was a tremendous effort on the home front as well as in the battlefields.
But I get ahead of myself. We kids had a regular schedule of 15-minute radio shows we dared not miss: Captain Midnight, Terry and the Pirates, the Lone Ranger and Tonto to name a few. They were sponsored by Wheaties, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Ovaltine, Pepsi Cola and lots more. Each product had its own program and the competition for young listeners was fierce.
I had a friend in the fourth grade that liked the same programs and we would go to my house one day and his house the next. We were more restrained in my house because I lived in a wartime duplex in Vallejo (next to Mare Island shipyards). The man in the other half of the duplex had the night shift and needed his sleep (Mother had a time of it trying to keep three boys quiet enough to satisfy the neighbor).
But I had started listening to boy’s soap opera after school before the war. I must have started when I was six and I remember saving enough box tops to earn a Captain Midnight decoder ring.
I sent the box tops and the 12 cents and waited patiently (for about three days) before I began haunting the post office. The postmaster was just as happy as I was when the ring finally arrived, for I asked him nightly on my way home from school if the ring had come. “Please check again.” He was a patient man and humored me.
When the ring came, I started coding and decoding amongst other kids. It helped our reading skills immensely, until the baseball season came and the rings lay forgotten in a dresser drawer.
At the turn of the 20th century, people could keep track of the news through their local newspaper. But there was no radio, television, cell phones or movies. How did they entertain themselves?
Loren Moos in The Lincoln County Centennial History & Cookbook gives this account:
“An idea of a picnic on Crab Creek discussed at a sewing party at the farm home of Mrs. Grange Porter turned into an institution that lasted 27 years.
Earlier picnics before that consisted of saddle horse races on existing roads. There were foot races, songs, speeches and food for a one-day celebration. In 1902, this Pioneer Picnic officially became known as The Lincoln-Adams County Association …To be a member you had to have lived in either county before 1889 when Washington was still a territory….”
In 1903, a racetrack, a grandstand and a dancehall were built (I know that the covered dance floor was 100 feet by 200 feet because my father-in-law and I stored hay in the dance hall in the ‘70s.) From pictures in my possession, I judge the covered grandstand to be 300 feet in length and at least 10 rows deep. The racetrack oval appears to cover a mile.
These folks were serious! Some of them came a week early to get a favorable spot for the family tent. There were outhouses and a good well for drinking water.
There were baseball games; no matter how small they were, each town at that time had its own baseball team and rivalries were serious. Sometimes they hired professional pitchers, they were so intent on winning.
There was professional horse racing employing horses imported for that purpose. There were professional jockeys as well. I rely here on my father-in-law’s memory. He said the horses were walked several miles on farm roads to get to the picnic grounds from the railroad siding at Keystone. He said he and several other kids liked to play under the dancehall. Sometimes they would be run off by the jockeys who gathered there to gamble and quarrel; nasty bunch according to him.
I have tried and failed in my effort to count the cars in my photo. Way more than 100 anyway and mostly model T Fords (you could have any color you wanted as long as it was black). My photo is not dated but I think it was taken in the mid-’20s by the number and shape of the cars.
Besides the horse racing and baseball games there were balloon ascensions, foot races, speeches, band concerts and food. To top things off, there was a big dance at night on that floor that measured 100 by 200 feet.
The big depression of 1929, the aging of those eligible for membership and a menagerie of other factors closed in. The last official picnic at that site was held in 1929. You have to admire the effort they’d go through to have a little fun and that dance…I’d love to get on a magic carpet and take in that affair!
I would like to thank Maureen Bourne, Joe T. Smith and Loren Moos for help (each in their own way), with the information necessary to write this article.
Ray Bilderback, creator of the Reuben Braddock novels, was born and raised in the Sierra foothills of California. He served in the U.S. Navy Seabees during the Korean War and taught for many years in the west. He makes his home in the mountains of eastern Washington with his archeologist wife, Madilane Perry. “In the 1930s and 1940s, where I lived, we still used horses and hand tools, canned and preserved what we grew or raised, lit our kerosene lanterns, stoked our woodstoves. In my writing, I draw from those times like water from a sweet well.”