Orchard Days Roy Betlach Recalls The Trials And Tragedies Of Valley Life During The Years When Orchards Reigned

Roy Betlach was saddlesore from a four-hour mule ride behind Liberty Lake with one of his daughters.

He doesn’t mind a bit, being sore.

“Feels so good when it stops,” he says with a smile.

Betlach, 73, knows about hard work. He was sheriff of Spokane County, head of the Washington State Patrol and postmaster for Spokane, then all of Eastern Washington. Everyone knows Roy, one neighbor brags. After he left public service, he went into logging. If anyone has earned the right to go fishing, ride his mules and enjoy his grandkids, Betlach has.

One afternoon recently, Betlach told stories of his youth. He grew up in a long-ago, far-away Spokane Valley. No suburbia, no strip malls, no eight-lane arterials.

In the 1930s, the Spokane Valley was all orchards - “beautiful like you can’t believe” - thieves picked apples in the night; and $600 hidden in the cellar supported the Betlach family all winter.

A strong boy, Betlach worked harder and longer hours than anything dreamed of by today’s young athletes. That’s what children did in those days. Never mind mowing the lawn or flipping burgers or saving for college. Young people labored to help their families.

“Everything today is so easy, you know,” says Betlach, from his home high above Ponderosa. “Oh it’s dangerous, with drugs and all. But it’s easy. Kids don’t know how to work.”

Betlach’s shoulders are still broad, his handshake strong. “I don’t know where the time has gone,” he says. “I was 14 yesterday.”

His mule-riding daughter, Shelly Bartlett, 42, says she can’t keep up with him. A childhood fraught with hardships overcome may explain Betlach’s spirit.

He was born in Nebraska. His father’s ranch was so far from town, high school kids and their mothers boarded in town all winter. His parents moved to Spokane in 1928.

Betlach was 5.

“I remember everything. The names of the horses, the names of the dogs - Bruno and Silver - the Shires, the stacker team, the old bull.”

The family made its new start in the Valley in apples.

The year after they arrived, the stock market crashed. “Dad lost everything. I don’t know exactly how. The money was in the bank, but it just - disappeared.” Bewilderment still shows in his voice, all these years later.

Betlach’s father kept their five acres, though, and went into the rabbit business. Hundreds and hundreds of rabbits, with so many hutches that, to feed them, his father drove a wagon down the middle of the rows. “If you ever become poverty-stricken, go into the rabbit-raising business,” says Betlach. Regular customers included the posh Spokane Club.

Chores for the Betlach brothers included tending the six-foot hog wire fencing. “Killer dogs would come through the fence, after our rabbits.” People couldn’t afford to feed their dogs.

Outside school, Betlach worked. “We were either at school or at home.”

As a teenager, he hired on with a neighboring farmer. During apple harvest, from 4 p.m. to midnight, he stacked boxes of the fruit. Each box weighed about 40 pounds. “I lifted 20 to 30 tons every night,” Betlach calculates.”

Valley night are now punctuated by traffic noise, train whistles and sirens.

Betlach recalls different sounds from his youth. “In the morning, at dawn, at 3 a.m., there were so many robins, turtle doves and cedar waxwings in the orchards, you couldn’t converse with someone 20 feet away, there was so much melody in the air.”

The three Betlach brothers slept in one bed. One morning, the oldest, Fred, called out. “Mom, I can’t seem to get out of bed.” He never moved again.

Polio.

The family turned the house into a de facto hospital, with an iron lung for Fred. “Mom and Dad and I took turns every night massaging him for an hour, through the portholes.” Betlach works his fingers, as though reaching into the iron lung. He was 13.

Fred died in a year. “He never complained,” Betlach says. Several years later, Roy’s younger brother, celebrating his graduation from high school, dove into the lake at Wandermere and never came up.

Betlach grew tall, 6 foot 3. He ran fast, hit hard - “I was strong from lifting all those apple boxes.”

One day, making his way home from work, Betlach heard something - or someone, a thief? - moving in the orchard. He went to find his employer, Fred Keeler. “We drove down the apple rows and he started to run.”

Those were hungry years. Thievery was a problem - apples, seed potatoes, the canvas cover off a haystack. Organized apple theft was so bad, with pickers sneaking into the orchards at night and trucks loading up their haul, a growers association offered a $25 bounty for the arrest of a thief.

In the orchard, Betlach tackled the thief.

“Well, Mr. Keeler came up with his .38 and talked with him and turned him loose. Mrs. Keeler was mad. Twenty-five dollars was a lot of money in those days.”

Eventually, there was time for fun. Betlach and the West Valley High School basketball team made it to the 1941 state tournament. He could play basketball in the winter. “But I couldn’t go out for football or baseball. I had to work.”

Summer evenings, Betlach would drive his dad’s 1917 Ford, pick up buddies like former Spokane County Commissioner Harry Larned and go swimming in the Corbin Ditch, a major irrigation canal that’s long since gone.

Some of today’s beliefs weren’t even alive then. Parents’ involvement in schools, for instance. The Betlachs had no telephone; there was literally no communication between the schools and his parents.

“And we didn’t talk things out with Dad, then. Maybe with mother, a little. It wasn’t like today. I didn’t really know my Dad very well.”

After high school, Betlach went into the Army, then become a state trooper and, after 10 years, Spokane County sheriff - the state’s youngest sheriff when elected in 1954 at 31. He was appointed to the state Liquor Control Board, in charge of enforcement and investigations in 1964. He gave up public service and went into logging after his job overseeing postal operations in Eastern Washington was transferred out of state.

Roy and Bernie raised five children.

“They’re all over 40 now, so they’re starting to listen a bit,” Betlach says, with a smile.

“That’s what he thinks,” quips daughter Shelly.

Today, the Betlachs dote on nine grandchildren. He keeps mules, his third Chesapeake retriever and a garden, raising his electric fence inch by inch as the vegetables grow. The deer, you know.

Shelly remembers a childhood imbued with her father’s work ethic.

“Once school ended in the summer, we didn’t come down off that mountain (above Ponderosa). We built fence, planted Christmas trees. You can look around and see how much work that place takes, the barn, the horses. Our dad always had a project for us to do.

“Looking back - it was not by mistake. He was going to teach us.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)