A Different Time To Grow Up

I grew up in a much different place than my mother.

She was the third oldest of 12 and grew up in a two-bedroom home near the Mission Mountain range in Western Montana. I’m the youngest of three who had the basement to myself in our Clarkston split-level.

She spent part of her impressionable adolescence in Spokane.

My mom was part of a church program that sent poor Indian kids to schools in bigger towns. Nuns picked out students they thought would benefit most.

For three years, she attended Spokane’s Marycliff High School and lived with different South Hill families.

In exchange for room and board, she did babysitting and light housework. From 1953 to 1955, Spokane was her home.

For three years, she lived among people who exposed her to a foreign way of life in which people went boating, men sometimes did housework, where there was money to buy gifts for near-strangers.

Before Spokane, she passed her days picking raspberries, chatting with the funny priest who did a Charlie Chaplin imitation and who sometimes showed kids how to ring the church bell.

As winter came to Spokane, she was sent to school with her first pair of gloves, a gift from a host family.

She lived with different families, headed by a postal carrier, a Cadillac salesman and a construction company manager named Clifton.

For a year, she lived in a home up past 45th Avenue on the South Hill. A couple of months before I began working here, she showed me the house.

“That man worked at the Cadillac dealership,” she said as we drove by slowly. “Every year he’d come home with a new car. I thought they were the richest family. Their home was the biggest I’d ever seen.”

It was about half the size of her current home, a fact that won’t change her memory.

When she was homesick, she’d buy a small bag of penny candy and by pay phone call her parents. They’d talk for a few minutes before they had to hang up to save money.

She spent her free time with the other Indian girls.

She’s lost touch with them. Their names are familiar still in this area: Campbell, Santos, Mathias.

“On Friday nights we’d go downtown,” she said.

They’d shop at a downtown dimestore, run errands or stop in a burger joint and grab dinner.

“They used to have booths on the street corner where you could buy bus tokens,” she said.

Sometimes they’d catch a movie at the Fox Theater downtown. Or my mother would lose herself in the crowd at the roller-skating rink called Dishman’s.

“At that time I didn’t have feelings of being different,” she said. “I don’t recall any bigotry, but I wasn’t really dark.”

Nuns did their best to keep the girls out of danger. They warned them to avoid Trent Avenue and Main Street.

Good girls don’t go to those places, my mother was taught.”We’d always look down that way, but we’d never go down there.”

In December, the U.S. Air Force guys would stand downtown in uniform and sell large Red Delicious apples to raise money for a food drive.

“We’d buy one apple and carry it around all night long so they’d leave us alone,” she said.

She could stay out till 11 p.m.

“I had more freedom than I had at home. I had my own room. At home I had other sisters to fight with. It was a good experience for me.”

When I called to tell her I was writing about her, she told me a story I’d never heard before. It was like she’d been waiting for the call for 30 years.

She told me about Sonny, my grandpa, a big man with a round face, large shoulders and powerful hands. She only saw him really nervous the day he came to visit her in one of her temporary South Hill homes. It must have seemed like Bel-Air.

“Dad was so polite when he was around people he didn’t know very well. He took his hat off, held it in his hand and smiled a lot.”

I’m sure he wore work boots, sturdy pants, that dusty blue work shirt and worn suspenders as he stood in the entrance.

Sometimes I feel like he’s beside me, hat in hand, when I venture up the South Hill.

My mother once told me that she’d always wanted to buy a house on the South Hill. That would have been the greatest thing for her.

As she neared graduation, she left Spokane and graduated in Montana. She went on to St. Patrick’s School of Nursing in Missoula, married my dad and followed him through Montana, Minnesota, Maryland, Idaho and Washington.

She retired a couple years ago from an Indian Health Service clinic in Lapwai on the Nez Perce Reservation, about a year before I came back.

I don’t know if Spokane remembers her or not, but some of her patients from the reservation never forgot her.

At an annual Indian golf tournament in town, I walked up to a scoreboard, put my finger on my name and traced it to my scores. Someone behind me caught my name.

“McDonald? Who’re your folks? I know your mother,” a woman said. “Your mother was the best nurse. She gave the best shots,” she said.