Chapter one continued....
To the west, half way out the eighteen miles of two-lane
highway that leads to the rival town of Vale – then as now the county seat –
Malheur Butte poked indestructibly into the northern skyline. Created by lava
uplift, it rose above the bluff that helps define that end of the Snake River Valley.
The muddy Malheur River wound past the butte’s base, idling through
potato, sugar beet and alfalfa fields after flowing down from sagebrush
badlands and cattle-dotted valleys to the west, reaching toward its rendezvous
with the Snake River and a race to the Columbia.
A six-foot diameter metal pipeline
– in the 1950s a symbol of man’s
effort to tame the land – continued to carry reclamation water across the Malheur River at the base of the butte.
Back in town, some man-made landmarks remained as they were
in 1956 when the population was slightly less than half what it is today. A Quonset-style gym and finger-shaped high
school building sat well-worn and fully used at the top of the hill at the end
of Idaho Street,
a mile west of downtown. Down the slope, the freshly groomed football stadium
provided a visual frame for the high school. The field appeared in better
condition than the school.
Two water towers still bracketed the residential
neighborhoods north and south of downtown, giving Farewell Bend’s cluster of houses
and trees the appearance of a thousand small towns across the West.
On the east side of the railroad tracks, north of a dingy
underpass that divides the town, a strange name, Heinz Frozen Foods, was plastered across the side of a vast
frozen food plant. Locals know it as the place where two Mormon brothers
started the Ore-Ida potato processing business that put the town on the world
map until the brothers moved their headquarters to Boise and then sold to a
bigger corporation.
Southeast of the underpass at the juncture of East 3rd Street
and Southeast 4th
Avenue, the Idaho-Oregon Buddhist temple still
served descendents of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated at Minidoka
during World War II.
A two-story structure on Oregon Street that held The Farley Hotel,
the town’s infamous bawdy house, looked much the same as it did half a decade
ago. Minus its tiny marquee and the wooden stairway that led up to the second
story hotel’s back door.
On that sun-baked July morning in 2001, the structure’s front,
second-story windows stood open, curtains blown in and a small air conditioner
sitting idle. A buffed and polished army recruiter in starched fatigues emerged
from the Spuds and Suds Tavern & Café below the Farley flat. He whipped out
a key and let himself in the door that opens at the foot of the staircase
leading to the rooms above.
Six blocks away on 2nd
Street, a green, L-shaped frame house with a
redwood deck off its living room shimmered in the summer sun. The color and
configuration of the house appeared as I remembered, but it looked smaller,
boxier. Asked inside, I discovered it
crowded with the debris of its current tenant. It was the house that I knew,
and yet it was not.
Saturday evening, behind the green and yellow façade of
Farewell Bend’s Holiday Inn, the words “Pardon Our Mess –
Remodeling in Progress” greeted my classmates as we all gathered for our
forty-fifth high school reunion banquet. The relentless July sun was beginning
to disappear behind the low-lying Eastern Oregon
foothills. Struggling to step lively towards the motel’s main entrance, we cast
long shadows across the parking lot.
By a few minutes after eight, most of one hundred twelve
diners, representing half the graduating class and their spouses, gave up on
their tough steaks. We launched into the usual round of self-congratulatory
speeches. Eight classmates took the opportunity to revisit that still
unforgotten senior football game with archrival Vale. Some of the women tried to change the
subject. But when former players spoke of dropped balls and missed plays, they
drew choked guffaws and peals of male laughter. Even those of us who never saw
a moment of action – especially some us – knew
we would take the game to our graves.
After dinner, Coach Ed Glover, a shell of the man who had
tormented me – mostly by ignoring me –
shuffled up. He held out his hand and said how happy he was that I had
finally returned for a reunion. I tried to think of what to say, but before I
could come up with anything, he wandered off.
Vernon Anderson stood off to the edge of one of the
chattering circles, still bending his long legs as if he were too tall for the
rest of us. I wandered over and with minimal prompting, he launched into an
explanation of how it was no problem for him to work as a public relations
consultant for Livermore Laboratories from a home 400 miles south, atop the
beach at San Juan Capistrano. He was sipping a beer, making it clear he’d never
returned to the Mormon fold.
“How is your mother? Where is she?” Vernon asked.
“She died. Heart attack at 67. ”
“That’s young.”
“She’d had rheumatic fever as a
child. Doctors said that weakened her heart. At the end, she was living close
to me in Southern California,” I said.
“Too bad. I really liked her. She
taught me to dance,” Vernon
said.
“I remember.”
“You
must miss her. When I came home from college, I used to go into the paper to
talk with her. She understood things my parents had no idea about.”
“I didn’t know about that,” I
confessed. She had never mentioned it.
“Dad remarried, twice in fact, and
died last year,” I went on. “They said it was a viral infection that killed
him, but I think it was an angioplasty they gave him when he collapsed from
taking too many drugs.”
I wanted to talk about what a
reprobate he’d become, always a girlfriend on the side that he liked to take me
to visit, bragging about his sex life in the final months before his death. But
Vernon wasn’t
interested. He nodded and turned toward a group that had begun singing the old
Farewell Bend High fight song.
I had thought Vernon might ask about
Kevin, who was living at home when Vernon visited our mother at the Argus
office. There could be a little competition working there, given Kevin’s job as
an academic dean at a prestigious small college in the East. Still, I was happy not to be called upon to
brag about my younger brother. I never got the tone quite right, and Kevin had
no interest in hearing from anyone connected with Farewell Bend.
It bothered me that no one brought up Pete Sanger. Classmates
who still lived in town might know more than I did about what happened to him.
Of course, he was a class ahead of us. I decided they didn’t recall how close
Pete and I had been. I wasn’t going to be the one who started talk about how he
disappeared.
A half hour later, I sat drinking at the bar with William
Osaki, who was about to retire from his job as a psychiatrist at a New York teaching
hospital. Out of nowhere, during a casual discussion of wives and careers, he
volunteered that he had accepted an internment reparations payment even though
he did not need the money. The government had been guilty and should be
punished legally, he said. For him, the payments did that, and they brought a
kind of closure.
I tried to understand why he thought that solved anything.
Then Big Carter, a local contractor, carried his glass of whiskey from three
stools over to tell us how much he hated California
women, in particular his ex-wife.
As quickly as I could,
I headed for my room, fighting off a combination of nausea and exhaustion. This
reunion trip, my wife had stayed home in California. Talking with old classmates, those I thought
I had known well and those I could barely remember, proved both tiring and
exhilarating. A lot had happened in the
intervening years. We couldn’t know the World Trade Center disaster was about
to blow up our world. But we had lived through the Kennedy Assassinations. And
Martin Luther King. While no one talked of them, Vietnam came up. One classmate
had been there as an officer. He liked to mention that duty in the jungle as
part of his world tours in the military. None of our classmates died in Vietnam, but
kids we knew, who came along right after us, lost their lives in the fighting.
One simply disappeared.
I realized there was no way I could make right small, old
slights and missteps, or the new ones I was adding when a face or a name
triggered a blank. The best I could do was go to bed and get rested.
On this trip, the reunion was secondary. The promise of a
Sunday drive to the mountains and a chance to revisit important memories let me
drift off to sleep. I skipped the getaway breakfast and pointed my rental car
toward Emmett on the road to Horseshoe Bend, where I picked up Idaho Route 55
and turned north through the Little
Payette River gorge toward Cascade Reservoir where Pete had disappeared
thirty-seven years earlier.
Nothing was as I remembered it. When I reached the reservoir,
a huge expanse of water stretched north and west from the earthen dam on the
edge of the town of Cascade.
Campgrounds and day-use parks occupied a half dozen locations along the
shoreline. A huge, green mountain meadow provided gently sloping banks on each
side of the water. I strolled to the water’s edge, trying to imagine where Pete
might have gone skin diving in thirty feet of water.
The last time I saw this place, dead trees poked out of the
water where it lapped against steep banks close to the highway. Back then, the
reservoir had been full for less than a decade. Now, in 2001, water covered the
old highway in many places.
Back in my car, I headed on north through New Meadows
thinking of the last time I had seen Pete, in 1963 –
seven years after his marriage, six months after my first daughter was
born, a year before my divorce.
That summer of ’63 I had driven alone to Boise to visit my
mother and talk about my failing marriage. She had sold the paper the year
before and was then into peddling mutual funds. Pete and his family had just
moved from Baker to Nampa, where Pete hired on
for more money as assistant advertising manager of the Nampa Free Press.
I made arrangements with Pete to drive him to Hazard Creek for a day
of stream fishing at a spot where I’d fished as a kid with my father, a spot I
remembered for its cascading waters and deep pools home to a few 12-inch trout.
I didn’t get to visit with his wife and three sons. I figured Estie was still
mad at me about that visit to the Farley.
Pete and I left for the mountains well before daylight. It
was still cool when we found ourselves walking through the dappled mid-morning
forest toward a fishing hole I remembered as the place where the big ones hung
out. The pool we came upon was about twenty-five feet across at the bottom of a
stair-step of short waterfalls. We found it easy to cast all the way across it
from the rocks on the near side.
When we reached the
stream, yellow-white sunlight had already begun to streak down the sides of the
canyon and through the trees to glance off the water. We quickly baited up –
neither of us grew up as fly fisherman
– and threw our spinner-and-worm
rigs into the stream where the waterfall hit with a roar and churned up the
surface into a rippling white spray of water.
A near trophy rainbow must have been lurking near the surface
for it took Pete’s bait immediately, grabbing the hook hard.
“Give it line, but don’t lose it,” I shouted needlessly; Pete
was better at hauling them in than I was. A long three or four minutes later,
he swung the fish well out and up the
bank, clapping both hands around it as he moved well back into the brush where the trout could not leap back
into the stream during the unhooking operation.
“God, it’s a beauty. Probably fourteen inches,” he said.
“The biggest you’ve caught?”
“Stream trout, yeah. For sure.”
Over the next two and
a half hours, I caught six keepers, ranging from six and a half to eleven
inches, with three at the larger end. Pete plucked out another seven by working
the creek hard upstream. By late morning, it was too warm for the trout to be
in any mood to feed. We found a rock, where we both could stretch out near the
big hole, and unpacked our sandwiches. Each of us had lugged in two cans of
beer, stashed in a backwater under a rock so they would be cold at lunchtime.
Our conversation that day revolved around Pete’s desire to start his own weekly
newspaper, a farm-oriented publication he dreamed of situating in Caldwell, near Boise and Nampa in the heart of the Boise Valley
farmland. I decided then that Pete would always find a way to take a new risk.
He was incurable.
A year later, my mother clipped the story of Pete’s
disappearance and mailed it to me. The
clipping came from a July 1964 edition of The
Argus-Observer, obviously a deadline story reported and edited in a few
hours:
Peter Sanger, a 1955
graduate of Farewell Bend High School employed as an advertising salesman for
The Nampa Free Press, was reported
missing and apparently drowned Monday by sheriff’s deputies in Cascade Idaho.
Sanger was believed
drowned when he failed to surface after skin diving in Cascade reservoir Sunday
afternoon. He had been down for more than an hour without surfacing when his
companions became alarmed and started an underwater search.
The Valley County
sheriff’s office was notified at 5:30. The search had to be called off because
of darkness but was resumed early this morning.
Deputy Sheriff Jim Sims
told The Argus-Observer that 10 skin divers were still searching for the body
at 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon. Sims said that it was still believed to be in
the area where Sanger was known to have dived.
The deputy said that
the water was so murky because of algae that the divers had difficulty in
seeing more than four feet in front of them. They were diving in about 30 feet
of water.
A fin and swim trunks
were found and were identified as belonging to Sanger. The deputy said that divers told him that the
weight of the empty oxygen tank and the weighted belt would not allow the body
to float to the surface.
Sanger was 29 years old.
He was assistant advertising manager of the Free Press and secretary-elect of
the Nampa
Chamber of Commerce. He graduated from Farewell Bend
High School in 1955,
where he played three years of football and was very involved in student
activities. He was an active member of the Nampa
Buffalo Club.
Sanger’s wife and his
mother, a retired legal secretary who still lives in Farewell Bend, went to
Cascade Sunday after hearing of the tragedy. Both were hospitalized for shock
at a Cascade hospital Sunday night. On Monday they were still under a doctor’s
care.
A note that my mother included with the story said that she
had talked with the editor of The
Argus-Observer and Pete’s body had still not been located. The editor told
her he planned a brief follow-up story, but that was it, because Sanger was no
longer a local man. I could still
visualize the last line of my mother’s scribbled note: “I don’t think he
drowned. Not Pete. It just doesn’t add up.”
The hum of the tires of the rental car speeding through the
mountain meadow north of New Meadows came close to hypnotizing me. Memories of
my parents and of Pete began tugging at my mind like fragments of dreams that
come to me at night when I am trying to go back to sleep and can’t.
2
District Attorney Plans
Abatement of Houses
Abatement proceedings will be
instituted against Farewell Bend’s
houses of prostitution, District Attorney E. Otis Smith said this morning.
“I’m going to do all I can to abate
these places,” he said. “I want to close them up. The girls may be out of town
by now, and I don’t know what effect that will have on the evidence. But I
think we’ve got good evidence.”
This official reaction followed
raids early Friday evening on Farewell Bend’s
historic bawdy house, the Farley hotel, and the Snake River Hotel on the East Side.
The raids were conducted by Sheriff
John Elfering with the assistance of Farewell Bend city police who helped in booking the
girls and the operators of the establishments.
Two special investigators from Portland were brought to Malheur County
by Sheriff Elfering to obtain the actual evidence for the arrests. They were
officers from the force of Terry Schrunk, sheriff of Multnomah County.
Posing as hunters, they entered the
hotels and secured the evidence needed, then made the arrests for the Malheur
sheriff’s office.
Helen Guyer, proprietor of the
Farley hotel, was charged with “keeping a bawdy house,” as was Sue Morgan, operator
of the East Side establishment.
The maid at the Farley was also
arrested and charged with vagrancy. Five girls from the Snake River Hotel,
allegedly prostitutes, were arrested on a charge of vagrancy. The girls were
booked on “Jane Doe” warrants and did not themselves appear in court.
The two proprietors posted $150 bail
each and the girls posted $100 bail each, for a total of $900 of bail money
posted in the justice court of Judge Thos. Jones.
Mayor Frank Popper said this morning
that he was “shocked” to learn that houses of prostitution have been operating
in Farewell Bend.
He went on to add that prostitution has been a recurrent problem.
His reaction sketched the nature of
the task that faces District Attorney Smith. Farewell Bend was widely known as a center of
prostitution before World War II. During the war the illicit industry was
closed for a time. In the decade since the war, there has been intermittent
operation except for one year when organized, commercial prostitution was
stamped out by abatement proceedings.
Such proceedings are brought against
the property instead of individuals, making it possible to padlock the
property, taking it out of use for a year.
In former years, this has been the
only effective method of restricting prostitution here.
–—From
The Argus-Observer Oct. 17, 1954
“You didn’t tell me about
closing down the Farley,” I yelled from the couch where I was reading that
day’s issue of The Argus-Observer. I spoke as my father headed out the door for
his usual Monday night turn at the office, preparing fresh layouts to take to
the street on Tuesday to sell for Thursday’s publication.
Dad would not want to talk about the Farley Hotel
with my mother listening, but I wanted to see how he would respond.
The bounce in his step slowed for a
moment as he turned his rounded shoulders in my direction and made his dark
brown eyes look vague behind rimless glasses.
I did not understand why women liked
him as much as they did. He could be a great listener, but his looks were
ordinary middle-aged except that his right cheek was slimmer than the left,
from a bout of polio he had as a child.
He’d been skinny as a young man and now carried what he called a “small
tire” around his middle. His best feature was a full head of black wavy hair
that, at forty, was lightly sprinkled with grey.
From a half-open front door, with
the cold night air rushing in, he stared over my head.
“Not now, Jack,” he said. “Have you
checked the stoker to be sure there’s enough coal? It’s getting real cold these
nights.” He tried to smile, though it
came out looking like a grimace.
“You really ought to be doing the dishes. You can read about
the Farley later,” he said.
“How late are you going to be,
James?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.
“The usual. Nine or nine-thirty.”
Dad quickly closed the door, slamming it to get on his way.
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