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Growing Up On Jefferson Street, set 4

“Opposite Sides Of The Street” and “Upper Lower Or Lower Middle”

Dear Jack,

In our own family vernacular, the address 1832 Jefferson, rings a bell that immediately summons our attention. No translation necessary. We know we’re talking about our very own childhood street of dreams where we resided during most of our growing up years. The locale for many of the events that shaped our world view while providing the security of a warm and safe neighborhood.

Here’s a little poem I wrote a while back:

Sun Dust

Saturday movies were only a dime,
as were strawberry sodas and crusty grilled cheese.
My friend, Charlotte, a Tarzan at ten,
flew through the trees that jungled our yards.
Hot August days of lemonade stands
quenching the thirst of Charlotte on Trigger
Kicking up dust,
While I sang the songs.

******************

Opposite Sides Of The Street
by
Marilyn Loughary Kok

Across Jefferson Street, opposite our house, lived the Martin family, mom, dad, son and daughter, Charlotte. For most of my childhood, Charlotte was my best friend. We were the same age and would spend our childhood years as close friends.

When I was five, before the advent of pre-schools or kindergartens, Charlotte and I would spend our morning hours playing in our front yards in the safety of our own sides of the street. Some days we would wheel our doll buggies down to the corner located only a house away from ours. Both of us were restricted to our own side of Jefferson Street. We would lay out our blankets and dolls (my favorites were Dinah and Nancy Ann) on to the neighbors lawn, setting up our tiny cups and teapots and pretend that we were actually together. The traffic must have been sparse, as we ere able to converse without shouting.

Eventually we grew older and were allowed to cross the street and enlarge our repertoire of games. We both loved Tarzan movies and would spend hours acting out our own versions of life in the jungle.(Charlotte always playing the role of Tarzan, while I took on the role of too sweet Jane.) One of our dolls would become Boy, and Cheetah, the chimp was evidently there in spirit only.

Charlotte excelled at coloring. She was adept at keeping neatly within the lines. There was a time when we would stage contests to see which of us was the most acclaimed artist. Our housekeeper, Eleanor, would be asked to judge. After numerous attempts, it became clear that I was hopeless in color-book art. I couldn’t seem to get the knack of following the rules and understanding that the lines were there to keep one from spilling into the margins. It should have been a forewarning, but, no, following prescribed rules has continued to be a big problem for me. (You’ll note that there has been a decided lack of awards and acclaims in the ensuing years.)

We both became voracious readers. Not the kind of kids who were delighting in Dickens at eight, but name a Nancy Drew mystery and we had read it. We both began to amass large collections of books that kept us quiet and entertained for hours. Reading about secret passages, hidden clues and clever detectives became the base for more days of role playing and wishful dreaming. We were sure that we were destined to become famous and conquer new worlds.

Charlotte was a small and agile child. Her dad constructed a set of exercise bars in her back yard where she practiced acrobatic tricks daily. My own lumbering self was finally able to hang by my knees and do a back-flip landing. She, in the meantime, became accomplished at Round-the-World spins, chin-ups, and a move that lifted her onto her chest where she could remain balanced.

Actually, I was hopeless at most physical feats, a fact that caused me considerable self-hatred when I became older and able to understand the rules of school cliques. I was unable to catch, hit, or throw in baseball, consistently panted my way in last in any race, had a dread of my glasses being crushed in my face by a moving ball and gained a reputation for being the last chosen for a team.

However, I did have a very creative imagination, a musical talent, liked to dance and a yearning to be someone spectacular. And, I loved to be in charge, a trait that some may have more aptly described as being bossy. I loved creating ideas for role playing and most of all, directing the action. You know, the kind of kid you’d like to stuff in the closet.

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Dear Marilyn,

And, as I have told you, I enjoyed immensely your Opposite Sides of the Street with Charlotte story. I don’t know if you recall, but one reason the two of your could probably pull off the “distance play” is that in those days18 th Street essentially dead ended at Jefferson Street. There was a short dirt road extension west of Jefferson at the time your story takes place so the traffic was relatively light. After the city “pushed” 18 th Street west through to Chambers, our little Jefferson Street neighborhood changed forever.

Upper Lower or Lower Middle
by
Jack Loughary

The Jefferson Street neighborhood in which Marilyn and I grew up ran from about Willamette Street 6 blocks west through Jefferson Street and on two more blocks to Monroe Street. From north to south it stretched from 13th Avenue to 19 th Avenue. During our first few years there, Jefferson literally terminated at 19 th. Some people who didn’t live on Jefferson Street per se but withing the boundaries just specified would argue about whether or not it should be referred to as the Jefferson Street Neighborhood, but that is their problem. On the Willamette street end it included a Safeway super market, Ford dealership, and other small businesses. Within the boundaries was Francis Willard Elementary School, Woodrow Wilson Junior High School and Eugene High School. A couple mom and pop stores were located across from Eugene High and the Walsh family operated Walsh’s Grocery on the Corner of 19 th and Jefferson. They did deliveries on request via their four door Plymouth sedan, but most people did their basic food shopping at Safeway because they thought it was less expensive.

With regard to the socio-economic status, years ago an anthropologist by name of Warner postulated 6 social status levels. He labeled them:

LL Lower Lower, UL Upper Lower, LM Lower Middle, UM Upper Middle, LU Lower Upper, UU Upper Upper.

Simple enough with a sort of common sense ring. The four main criteria for measuring social status level were: Educational Level, Source of Income, Amount of Income, and Neighborhood/ house type. Of course, I didn’t know all of this back when were we growing up on Jefferson Street, but later on I found it interesting to apply the social status construct to Jefferson Street.

How would we Jeffersonians be pegged? It is not as difficult as one might think. We were a homogeneous bunch when it came to social status. To start, you could eliminate the two top categories. There probably wasn’t a Upper Upper or Lower Upper family withing shouting distance. Nor, I would guess, were there many lower lowers either. They are usually out of sight, either in city slums or isolated rural areas. Regarding the out of site notion, here the upper uppers and lower lowers have much in common, but not for common reasons, obviously.

Probably the majority of adults had some high school education and most were graduates. Both our parents were, and Mom continued to attend summer and evening courses at the University of Oregon. We eventually were graduated the same year, 1952. Many occupation were represented in the neighborhood including: Eugene’s utility company’s only engineer, one dentist, a university assistant professor, a law school librarian, a few small business owners, some civil servants, perhaps a couple small retail store managers, a smattering of school teachers, nurses, and sales people. But the majority of males were mill workers, route men, clerks, tradesmen, truck drivers, maintenance workers and other hourly employed people. Most women were not employed “outside the home.”

The houses looked very much alike, all being wood frame, except for ours and a couple others that were California stucco. As many or more people owned than rented, I assume. The majority were small, two bedroom with a one car garage. The homes were built somewhere between 1900 and 1925. I can’t recall any new construction in the neighborhood until after the war in 1947 or 1948 when the city extend Jefferson Street from 19 th Avenue up the hill and south towards 28 th. All of a sudden there was a bunch of building going on, and within a few years the old small neighborhood was no more.

The neighbors seemed to get on well, but not frequently. The widow next door to us was pleasant. We had nearly mirror image houses. Story went that originally a fellow from Palo Alto, California moved to town in the early 20's and built twin stucco houses each in the traditional mini-mission style complete with a covered front porch with arches. He planned to live in one house and move his married daughter into the other. Apparently Eugene was too wet for his wife, and he soon sold both houses and moved the tribe back to California. Eventually, the widow neighbor bought the house a few years before Mom and Dad bought ours.

The widow had three teen age children, several years older that Marilyn and I. Dad would often help one of her sons tune up his Model A Ford convertible. The widow tried remarrying but that wasn’t smooth sailing. The first sign of trouble was when the newly acquired husband decide that the house would look better without the small arched front porch. He apparently was a man of action and late one Saturday afternoon, perhaps following a couple of snorts, he wrapped one end of a chain around one pillar of the porch and the other around the back axle of his car and proceeded to drive off, pulling the porch down behind him. The demolition project got nasty before he got some help to haul away the debris.

A few weeks later the new husband was observed chasing the his wife around the house with an axe. Her oldest son put a stop to that and the husband was never seen again. As far as I knew, that was the extent of neighborhood domestic unrest, but I was probably uninformed. Actually, all the neighbors were essentially uninformed about one another. Because mother worked, she was essentially out of the female neighborhood social loop. Dad treasured his discretionary time and filled it with gardening, house maintenance and reading. There just didn’t seem to be much of the over the back fence stuff. I don’t recall ever being invited to a neighbor’s home for a meal, and our parents didn’t extend any such offers. I wager that many adults in big city apartment neighborhoods had more neighborhood interactions than did we.

The younger set was much more social, as is often the case. There were 9 or 10 boys in the immediate area that were in the same year in school. There was also Patty Boles down the street who could run farther, climb faster and hit a ball harder than any boy and used to whip us at marbles in the vacant corner lot on the corner of 17 th and Jefferson Streets.

As Marilyn noted, come the end of the dinner hour on summer evenings, the street would suddenly fill with neighborhood kids playing kick the can and just hanging out. Sometimes we would venture into the remains of an ancient apple orchard in the field behind Marden Crabtree’s house. Marden was the first kid I knew whose parents were divorced. He was very good at building and fixing things. One winter we made open cockpit airplanes out of Orange grates in his garage and barnstormed the country. But that was when we were still in the third grade.

But, Mostly we limied our evening activities to Jefferson, Madison and Washington streets and the several numbered cross streets. School yards were not a place for evening hanging out for any of us, nor did we wander out of the neighborhood until someone reached age 16, obtained a drivers license and the use of a family car, or better acquired a clunker of his own. The era ended just like that!

Love, your getting on with life brother, Jack

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