In 1948, Vake and Milly moved to Coos Bay so I could have medical care. They lived with Sofia and Eli, who had their own familiar lifestyle, so Milly had nothing to do. She finally “blew her cork,” to quote her, so Vake and Eli built the little house next door so Vake and Milly could have their own household. Still, Sofia would come in during the early morning hours and start a fire in their wood-burning stove (“trash burner”) so the house would be warm when they got up.
Early in 1949, Milly was pregnant. She gained weight like crazy, and she craved carrots. She said that she could easily eat two pounds of carrots every day. When Eli would run to the store, or make his every-other-day run to the creamery for bottles of milk, he would ask Milly if she needed anything while he was out and about. “Oh, how about some carrots?” she would say, trying to sound casual about it. In November, Vake and Milly had just started a long walk out onto the mud flats along Coos Bay to dig clams when Milly knew that it was time for her to check into the hospital, at once. Sandy was born promptly thereafter, on November 20, 1949, with hair the color of carrots.
Vake and Milly pondered choosing a name for the new baby. There was a song that was popular at the time, “Frieda the Clam Digger’s Daughter,” and they considered tagging Sandy with that. Evelyn sent a note to the hospital (they didn’t have telephones in every room then) suggesting “Barbara,” but the note didn’t arrive on time. Vake and Milly chose “Sandra Lee,” and somehow, that seemed to be one of the most popular names of 1949.
Milly and Vake were living on a tight budget, so when a nurse at the hospital tried to sell photos of the new-born, Milly turned her down. In retaliation, Milly figured, the nurse brought her the wrong baby, and treated Milly like she was psychotic for rejecting the infant, but Milly had already seen Sandy’s red hair, and would never mistake her for a little stranger.
Every day, Milly ran the household and Vake went to work. She turned the radio to “The Breakfast Club,” based out of Chicago. “It’s time to get ready for the breakfast club!” the theme show ran. Gabriel Heater delivered the news in the 1940’s style newsman’s staccato and serious tones. Then there was a suspense show: “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man? The Shadow knows! Ha ha ha ha ha!” But after that, the soap operas started, and she didn’t follow those.
By lunch time, the kitchen was filled with the aroma of macaroni and cheese that took an exasperatingly long time to cook—why do you have to boil it first, then bake it, as well? One day an itinerant photographer knocked on the door, wanting to sell baby pictures. Milly didn’t have the money, and told her so. The woman smelled hash cooking, and said she would give Milly a picture if she could have some of that hash for lunch. That’s how Vake and Milly got my hand-tinted toddler picture that looks like I’m about two years old, before Sandy arrived.
Money was tight enough that when Milly carried me into Woolworths and I grabbed something glass and shattered it on the floor, she couldn’t pay, so she hurriedly walked away.
From time to time, Milly would load Sandy into a baby buggy and take her and me on an excursion to downtown Coos Bay. She was worried about the poor quality of public education, even then, and wanted to stimulate our brains. We had routine stops downtown. One was the Buster Brown Shoe Store, where we could stick a foot under the fluoroscope then look in the top to see an X-ray of the foot, so see that the new shoes fit—but I was never tall enough to have one foot at the bottom of the machine and to see in it at the top at the same time. Another was the butcher shop with a live alligator (probably a caiman) in the front window. Another was the feed store where chicks were available in the spring. The last was “the Sweet Shop,” a soda parlor where we learned that it was rude to make slurping noises with a straw when we got to the bottom of our milk shake, and it was unsanitary to pick the gum off the bottom of the table. We walked past the imposing marble columns of the bank that looked very bank-like, according to the style of the day, with the donation boxes for the March of Dimes posted outside to help cure polio. We passed the Egyptian motifs of the 1920s-era theater, then walked down the alley to Bay Hardware, where Vake would just be finishing up his work day, and we would ride home in his pick-up truck.
The ride home crossed a short segment of street riddled with potholes that Vake called “Foxhole Boulevard. “ Sometimes he would stop at a Piggly-Wiggly grocery store where he had worked as a youth. For a special treat, he would stop there to buy a treat of buttermilk, sold in a truncated waxy paper cone for Milly; or hard-tack (rye crisp) and a jar of pickled pigs’ feet for himself. Many years later, I went to lunch with clients at an exclusive French restaurant where the special of the day was pickled pigs’ feet. Of course, I slurped them down, to the dismay of the others at the table, who wouldn’t touch them. But don’t ask me to eat a snail.
Neighbors , Isabel and Cecil Kemp, persuaded Milly to babysit their little boy Bobby during the day. The Kemps explained that they were from Oklahoma, and Bobby was just learning to speak. They didn’t want him to grow up with an accent that would make him sound like “an Okie.”
Vake worked at Bay Hardware as a plumber’s apprentice, but as soon as the five-year apprenticeship was over, he went straight to becoming a master plumber, never going through the journeyman stage. In May of 1953, he and Milly moved to Florence and opened their own business. Milly always said that Sampsons did better working for themselves.
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