EARLY YEARS

Admiral Byrd was in Bellingham that evening to lecture on his polar flights, but I was much too young to notice, having just entered this world at 4:09 PST that morning, January 14, 1931. Many other facts, like a birth weight of “9 lbs. 2 oz.” and height “21 inches,” are recorded in my “All about Our Baby” book, but the one of most significance to me is that I didn’t smile until my fifth day; Republican domination and the Depression obviously required considerable adjustment, even at that tender age. My parents were engaged, “betrothed” is the word in Mother’s marriage booklet, on June 28, 1928. “Mr. and Mrs. Gust Holstrom announce the marriage of their daughter, Mildred, to Rev. Gordon L. Johnson, Wednesday, March the twelfth, at eight o’clock, Nineteen hundred and thirty.” (The middle initial stands for Lothar, a name he soon dropped.) Both the ceremony and the following reception were held at the Salvation Army Temple in Portland, Oregon. The wedding portrait is remarkable for its fineness of detail.

Mother was born on September 22, 1909, and evidently lived in Portland until her marriage. I have very little information on either parent’s childhood. This is the earliest photo I of her I have; she signed it much later in life but did not give her age. “Mildred K. Holstrom” graduated from Chapman School (I took this photo a few years ago when her Portland relatives and I visited the school grounds to watch thousands of swifts, Chaetura vauxi, spiral into the school chimney for the night in an amazingly short time.) on January 26, 1923, thereby gaining “admission to high school, without examination,” which privilege she exercised at Lincoln High School, completing “the college preparatory course of study” on January 28, 1927; her middle initial is written on this diploma, and always afterward, as “C,” for Christine. At the school’s ninety-fourth commencement, held that night, she was listed as one of thirteen “first honor graduates.” Nothing appears on the backs of these portraits, but I assume they were taken to celebrate her high school graduation. Mother subsequently spent two years in business college, I recall her telling us, but the only records I have show her progress with the typewriter: “Mildred Holstrom, a student in the Behnke Walker Business College has written on a Remington Typewriter at a net speed of 29 words per minute for fifteen consecutive minutes, September 30, 1927.” There are two other awards from the same college, but for speed on the Royal Typewriter: on January 31, 1928, 37 net words per minute with 3 errors; and on March 28, 1928, 62 net words and 5 errors. When I was first old enough to appreciate such skills, I discovered for myself that she was a superb speller, typed unimaginably fast, and displayed beautiful penmanship.

Dad (This is the earliest photo of him I find; Mother wrote on the back “2½ or 3,”) was born in Cokato, Minnesota, on April 1, 1903, and in the following spring his parents moved to Oregon. He did well in the third grade at Union School (location unknown), the only year for which I have a record, scoring in the nineties in all subjects, including deportment, being absent nine days but never tardy, and not surprisingly earning promotion; the year was 1912-1913. At age seventeen he left home for California, where, two years later, he enrolled in the Salvation Army Training College in San Francisco. Following graduation, he served as an officer in Los Angeles, Bellingham, and Portland; it was likely during this last work that he met Mildred.

Deciding to become a Baptist minister, like his father before him, he attended Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Portland during the two years 1927-1929, where his marks concentrated in the eighties. The transcript indicates he graduated, but no date is given. During this period of study, he also served as student pastor of Pleasant Home, Oregon Baptist Church. In summarizing his life much later, Mother wrote, “In 1929 he began doing evangelistic work in northern Washington. This he continued until September, 1930, when he was called to the Swedish (later renamed Emmanuel) Baptist Church of Mt. Vernon.”

The final document in my possession states, “Gordon Vance Johnson was publicly ordained to the work of The Gospel Ministry, on the Eleventh day of June, 1931, by a Council of Baptist Churches, composed of 18 messengers from 8 churches, convened at the call of the Swedish Baptist Church at Mt. Vernon, Wash.” By this date I was nearly five months old. This photo is from a brochure advertising his sermon topics.

The baby pictures start at “6 weeks, 4 days” (and usually carry no other information than the place where they were taken). On the picture captioned “Sunshine, 8 months old,” Mother wrote at the bottom, “We’re living with Dale’s–Daddy has typhoid.” That family was certainly generous toward us, almost like a third set of grandparents, and Mother often spoke lovingly of “Mother Dale.” The portrait of me holding my toe was not posed that way by the photographer; just as he was about to snap the shot, I pulled up my leg and grabbed it. At that time the closest I could come to pronouncing my name was “Waboo”; I’ve always associated that mispronunciation with the picture.”

On October 4, 1931, Mother sent a postcard to Dad’s mother. After using the salutation “Peace”–in later years expanded to “Grace and Peace”–that began every item of correspondence she ever wrote, I think, she reported, “Gordon came home (Although I had read this postcard several times before, it was only a few weeks ago that I noticed its return address. A close friend who knows the town well drove me there and found the house, still in good shape in a well-kept neighborhood on the hill just east of downtown.) from the hospital today. Feeling pretty good. Has to stay in bed and can only have certain things to eat. Was sure glad to come home and we’re mighty glad to have him home, too. Hospital bill minus discount is $106.40. We’ve paid $32.00, balance is $74.40.” The only other fact I have about his illness is that I was first taken to visit him in Mt. Vernon General Hospital at age 7 1/2 months. During most of his stay in Mt. Vernon, Dad also was pastor of a church in nearby East Stanwood, driving there for Sunday afternoon services I believe.

I often characterize Dad as an itinerant minister, and my own interest in travel may come from his habit of changing pastorates quite frequently, a practice that he seemed to enjoy. My first trip, “about twenty-eight miles, from St. Luke’s Hospital in Bellingham, to our home in Mt. Vernon,” occurred when I was “only twelve days old.” We “took the trip in Daddy’s Ford coach,” during which the “baby slept all the way home in his little pink basket.” Since these photos were taken a few months before my birth, I assume they are of the car in which I took my first ride. Much later in life he told me that the Mt. Vernon Chief of Police, whom I assume was a church member, had led the way to the hospital with lights flashing and sirens screaming; I’ve always regarded that part of my history as apocryphal.

Trips to Portland, a “distance of about 270 miles,” to visit the grandparents and other relatives, were made three times my first year, at ages of two, five, and seven months. These photos show Mother’s parents and brother, more about all of whom later, and me at eighteen months. Portland remained a favorite family destination for many years.

The second of the four Johnson sons, Wesley Dean, was born at 4:00 p.m., May 8, 1934 at Mt. Vernon General Hospital. Dr. Julian Coleman was again Mother’s attending physician. Wesley’s Certificate of Birth, from the Washington State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics is the only such document I’ve ever seen, and it is quite informative. The family had moved since my birth and now resided at 108 East Section Street, a site just a few blocks south of the town’s center, very near the railroad, and only a few blocks from the church. Mother confirmed that she had worked as a bookkeeper and typist in a lawyer’s office for two years ending on March 1, 1930, only a few days before her marriage. Dad gave his profession as Baptist minister, naturally, but his assertion that he had done this for twelve years surprised me at first, since this would take him back to age nineteen. It must be that at that early age he had made a commitment to a life of Christian service.

Mother’s summary of Dad’s life continues: “In September, 1934, he was called to the Grace Baptist Church of Anaconda, Montana, leaving to do evangelistic work again in September, 1935.” It was here that I had the first two experiences I can recall for myself. The more vivid was the recovery from bronchial pneumonia; my legs were initially so weak, it seemed like learning to walk again. The other was the extreme heat and steam in the sauna much frequented by close “Swede-Finn” friends of my parents; even then I knew I was one hundred percent Swedish, zero percent Finnish.

My happiest childhood years were spent in Preston, a little town east of Seattle, consisting then of a lumber mill, a Swedish Baptist church, Butch’s gas station, a post office, a barbershop, and a two-room school serving the first seven grades. These two items show the church very much as it was during our stay, and I suspect the building in the foreground of the newspaper photo is the descendant of Butch’s gas station as it was in 1996.

The school actually had four classrooms, but only the lower two were used when we lived there; it was moved once to accommodate construction of the I-90 freeway, and its last classes met on November 25, 1966 when the school was fifty-five years old. “He received a call to the Preston Baptist Church and began that pastorate in May, 1936, serving until February of 1941,” according to Mother. My third-grade report card is most interesting for its C in penmanship and the assertion that I attended all 180 days without being tardy once. Miss Runbeck instructed the first four grades–we moved again shortly before I would have finished the last of these–all in one room, and my class had five members. She remained a close family friend after we left and was present at my wedding; by then she had taken a doctorate and joined a university faculty. I was very sad to leave, having developed a close friendship with one of the boys in my class and imagining myself deeply, although very secretly, in love with a girl whose hair was the lightest blond imaginable and whose eyes were bluer than the sky itself; apparently it was no secret since I was teased about it at Mother’s memorial service over a half-century later. In this school photo I stand just behind Miss Runbeck’s shoulder, he is next to me, and she is in the center of the second row; Mr. Johnson taught the upper three grades. The first of the state’s sometimes floating bridges was still under construction in those years, so we drove around the south end of Lake Washington to reach Seattle. It would have been very much in Dad’s character to take the ferry across Lake Washington from Kirkland to Madison Park, but I don’t remember his ever doing that. It was during the family’s stay in Preston that the other two sons were born, both in Seattle: Robert Dale on September 7, 1937; and Richard Gordon on June 12, 1939. I don’t know what physician attended their births; could it have been the peripatetic Dr. Coleman? Rather than attempt a description of the childhood excesses of these four brothers, I refer interested readers to the picture gallery concluding this chapter. The photos are arranged, as best I can guess, in roughly chronological order, although I’m not always sure who is who. This uncertainty reminds me of Mark Twain’s remarks to an especially cantankerous reporter during a difficult interview. After mentioning that he had a twin brother, he observed that one of them had died at birth, but nobody was certain which. “Some say it was my brother; some say it was me. I’d give worlds to know.”

Mother concluded her summary of Dad’s pastorates in a gush of facts: “He began serving as pastor of the First Baptist Church, Forest City, Iowa, in March, 1941, leaving there the 31st of December, 1943, to begin pastoring the First Baptist Church of Pendleton, Oregon, where he stayed until September, 1946, to accept the call to Dunlap Baptist Church, Seattle, where he served until the end of June, 1960.” I think these photos are of the parsonage and Mother’s Sunday School class.

The two years in Iowa seem unremarkable to me in retrospect, my main recollections being the mumps and the fall of Singapore, which could have been concurrent events. It was there that my first tick was coerced out of its lodging behind an ear, and I was paddled at least once by an otherwise beautiful, dark-haired, sixth-grade teacher with one eye brown and the other blue. I remember very little about our studies except that there was a decided air of competition: spelling bees, races in adding columns of numbers at the board, and Stanford Achievement Tests. We were in Portland every summer, and I very much enjoyed the drives across the country with their visits to Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, and many other interesting places.

I usually spent quite a few weeks with Dad’s parents on their farm near Gresham where I helped harvest Grandpa Johnson’s strawberry crop–three thirteen-pound flats per hour was my standard during the height of the season–and when that was finished, I walked down the road a bit to help Mr. Marx, later of iris-garden fame, pick his raspberry crop; my best mark there, as I recall, was three-quarters of a ton, total, in a three-week season. One summer I unsuccessfully tried to add a third phase of work by picking youngberries or black raspberries, but I lacked enthusiasm for both of those tasks; I had already sensed the culinary superiority of the first two fruits. And once on an August morning, Mother and I went bean picking, but we agreed after only one day that the monetary returns were not worth the effort; the fields were under a flight path to Portland’s airport, and their green produce was that color, not only by its innate nature, but also from the hordes of aphids that enveloped each bean. The recreational activity I remember best was using flags to send semaphore signals from my second-story bedroom window to two brothers living a few houses away; neither family could afford Boy-Scout fees, and mine probably felt that membership in such an organization was at best Christian but certainly not Baptist. Summers on the farm, however, especially the last one, had their special rewards. Grandmother asked me one night, “What would you like for breakfast tomorrow?” “Pork chops and apple pie,” was my quick reply, and, by golly, next morning I had them.

I did not return with my family from the farm to Iowa to begin the seventh grade, but instead stayed with Mother’s parents; I don’t know whose decision this was, but for me it was not a good one. I guess Dad already knew he was changing pastorates at year’s end and moving west again, but why it was thought better for me to study for one semester in Portland rather than going on to a fifth semester in Forest City remains a mystery. (It could well be that my parents simply wanted to get rid of me for a few months.) I did poorly at school there, got into lots of trouble, and more than once Grandmother came looking for me on the streets after dark. Fortunately, she was much tougher than I, and the rule that I go to bed at 9:15, immediately following “Glen Harding and the Alkaseltzer Newspaper of the Air,” was usually obeyed. But it was scary up there on the second floor, alone, in a room off an open attic that was filled with unusual things, frightening enough in daylight, but unimaginably terrifying after dark. The move to Pendleton was a veritable resurrection; at the very least it marked a transition from childhood to adolescence and the entrance into the teen-age years. Picture Gallery.

04 Jun 05

Addendum

Dr. Junet E. Runbeck, 01 Jun 14 - 20 Sep 05, my teacher in the first four grades, was a much more substantial person, as I learned from the program of her recent “Celebrating the Life of” service, than I could possibly have realized as a schoolboy. Born of Swedish immigrants in the very same Preston, Washington, where I began school, she was orphaned at age thirteen and left to fend for herself; and fend she did. The father of her best girl friend offered to lend her enough money so that she could attend college with his daughter, and although the latter died a year later, he continued to provide the funds she needed to graduate from what is now Pacific Lutheran University. She repaid these loans from her teacher’s salary, I presume in Preston where I started school in 1937, and later earned her master’s degree from Stanford and her doctorate from Northern Colorado State. Her subsequent teaching career was spent at PLU and the Swedish Baptist college, now Bethel University, in St. Paul. Among her several honors, perhaps the most prestigious is the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Pacific Lutheran University in 1996. Blessings on your memory, Miss Runbeck. W. Vance Johnson 02 Nov 05