Runo Veikko Sampson was Eli and Sofia’s sixth and youngest child, born 11 years after his oldest brother. He was born on April 19, 1914, in a house that Eli had built, over the swamp on the edge of Minnesota Street in Marshfield (Coos Bay) Oregon. He had straight, dirt brown hair and pale blue eyes that his Navy I.D. described as “Gray.” He had a lanky build until he was in his mid -50s, when he finally put on some weight. Before that, two packs a day of unfiltered Camels probably helped keep off the weight, but when he went deer hunting with his son Mark, and found himself huffing and puffing to keep up, he knew it was time to quit. He tapered off, and substituted a package of Life Savers in his cigarette pocket. His wife Milly said that for some time, he kept trying to light up his packet of Life Savers, but he did quit. Later, when he tried to cut down on fried bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning to keep his cholesterol in check, Milly claimed that that was harder for him than quitting cigarettes.
Being the youngest, Vake picked up English from his brothers and sister as well as Finnish from his parents. As an adult, he said that when he thought about his childhood, he thought in Finnish, and when he dreamed, he dreamed in Finnish.
He told of following his mother through a store, hanging on to her coat, but when she turned around to look, he saw that he had grabbed the wrong coat, and sent up a howl that brought his mother running.
When he needed new shoes, Pappy (Eli) brought home a pair from the store, but they were button shoes, and he knew from his older siblings that nobody wore button shoes any more. He raised such a fuss that Sofia made Pappy take the shoes back.
One of Vake’s buddies was Johnnie (“Jussi”) Hakonen. The little boys were watching when the tax assessor came to take the measurements of the house on the swamp. Behind the house, a board walkway with a turn in it led to the outhouse. The boys watched and never opened their mouths while the assessor backed down the walkway with his measuring tape, missed the turn, and fell into the muck.
Vake started school in Oakland, California, and thought it was funny that he was asked to put round pegs in round holes, and square pegs in square holes, in his admissions test. Later, he wondered out loud whether children who were not immigrants, or who did not speak with accents, were subjected to the same test.
He said that there were times when Scandinavian children were mocked as being “Salmon eaters.”
In school, “Runo Veikko” was Anglicized to “Reynold Vake,” but family and friends still called him “Veikko” or “Vake.” Years later, when he went into the Navy, he was required to use “Reynold.” His colleagues nicknamed him “Ray,” and that was the name he used when he met Milly Goers. After she married him and moved to Oregon, she had to adapt—she wasn’t married to “Ray,” she was married to “Vake.” But “Ray” was the genesis of their first child’s middle name, “ Susan Rae;” and of Mark’s daughter’s middle name “Meghan Rae;” and of his first great-grandchild, “Reynold Vake Blaine Martin”; and of Dean’s middle name, “Dean Reynold,” and of Dean’s older boy, “Gregory Reynold.”
By the time Vake entered high school, the family was back in Marshfield, Oregon. Vake swam competitively, a sport that his grandchildren Meghan and Drew pursued during their school days. His daughter Susan had tried, but that was a fiasco. She trained in a lake, not a pool, with the distances estimated. At the meet, she jumped into the pool and swam to beat the band, and popped up at the other end of the pool and finally figured out that she was supposed to turn around and go back. It was a fiasco, and she came down with a migraine. And besides that, Vake had stood beside the lake, but well out of the sun that he was supposed to avoid, because it triggered flare-ups of his lupus. But he didn’t notice the sun’s frying the tops of his feet. It was painful for him to wear his work boots for the rest of the week.
At Marshfield High, Vake was instructed in Latin, penmanship and in writing polite letters: “Miss Otis regrets that she’s unable to lunch today.” Years later, his daughter Sandy found his workbooks in the attic at Sofia and Eli’s house. Vake had assigned names to each of the parties in his polite letters, and the names were in Finnish. He translated. “That one is a pissant,” he said. “That’s another pissant.”
After high school, Vake shared a house with another Finnish comrade, Aino Kiander. They shared clothing, and Vake complained that each one of them got a boil on the back of his neck where a collar rubbed a lesion from a staph infection.
Eventually, Aino became a distributor of candy vending machines that he placed in a large territory throughout Oregon, and he thrived financially. One day he got a long distance telephone call that he thought was from Chicago. “That’s enough” the voice said. He was not to expand his territory further. It already belonged to a mob. He may not have expanded, but Aino remained generous with the candy from his machines. Every time he came to visit Vake’s family, he brought a boxful of candy basrs for the kids that was like Halloween outside of October. He was also instrumental in placing blood pressure testing machines in pharmacies throughout his territory, and it was he who saw to it that testing would always be free. When he was an old man, he called on Vake’s daughter Tina, near Tucson, Arizona—and he arrived with a boxful of candy.
During the depression, Vake was working in a battery separator plant, placing cedar walls between the cells of batteries. That’s when Eli and Sofia let their homestead on Ten Mile creek go into foreclosure for nonpayment of taxes. Later, Vake regretted that he hadn’t paid the taxes. He was working full time, and thought he could have handled it. The battery separator plant is where he was first exposed to lead, acids, cedar, and who knows what else. Late in his life, he had Parkinson’s disease, which in some cases is brought on by toxic exposures.
Late in 1941, Vake received a letter from the United States that began, “Greetings:…” It was an order to report for the draft. But on Monday, December 8, 1941, Vake enlisted in the United States Navy, and the next major phase of his life began.
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