Memories of home updated

By John Oliver

Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again, but I don't agree with him. You can and can't return. I grew up in Ballard and recently returned after a long absence. What I found was a delicious mixture of then and now. Memories updated.

I searched for the home where I was born. What better place to start but at the beginning? But I couldn't find the house or the exact location. Somebody pointed out a place they thought it might be, but that was wrong. The house where I was born was at the end of a street, open space all around, not some place half way up the hill with neighbors everywhere. Would anybody move a tiny four-room house half a block, prop it up so there's a basement where the kitchen used to be, and build a 10-step stairway up to the front door? Hardly. Maybe Wolfe was right; you can't go home again.

My stomping ground as a kid on Sunset Hill is still pretty much like it was - the places I lived, near Gordy Schullenberg, the home of the five Savage girls next to Dick Roberts, and Neil Twelker - all nearly the same except for the changes of inhabitants.

Tempered by time and refreshed by our recent visit, it occurs to me that much of my childhood happiness was brought on by Ballard itself. It was a happy place to grow up. It was citified but uncrowded, not all pavement like the Bronx or Brooklyn or Chicago. We had lots of open space land beckoning adventure, like the row of tall, ramrod straight cedar trees, across from one place I lived in. I loved to climb to as close to the top as possible so that I could look all the way down to Shilshole Bay and beyond.

No one who has not climbed a 50-foot cedar can know the effort required and the joy of seeing long distances. Inside the long branches is a miserable closely thatched network of smaller branches, twigs and stumps as though painfully braided, thrusting into your face, lacerating your skin and dusting you with environmental soot. My mother nearly lost her sanity when seeing me return from another climb.

There was room for all sorts of shortcuts around town, like the sand cliffs a few blocks from our house, fenced off because of the danger of falling all the way to the railroad tracks, but we kids skirted the fence and slid down enroute to Golden Gardens. Tremendous fun. Our clothes filled with sand, but we saved a half hour walk.

Sure, Ballard is different from those days. Market Street, west of 24th downtown, has filled out. All of that used to be empty land in my era of the 1920s and '30s. The swamp and the cattails - that we cut and dipped into kerosene and lighted into torches - that used to be at the foot of 32nd Ave., near the Government Locks, are gone, but the street still felt familiar. Memory was overriding current reality. The entrance to the Locks is different, bigger, nicer, well landscaped; but the Locks themselves are the same. The place where I caught my first fish is the same, an important milepost in history. Old Ironsides, that historic sailing warship was berthed there for a while.

Puget Sound had its rocky, slimy seaweed-covered beaches, tide flats, the terminal for ferries to and from Indianola across the Sound; Ray's Boat House, a single dock in those days, nothing as magnificent as today's restaurant and marina; and always myriad backyards and alleyways to use as fast tracks to wherever I was going.

Ballard had countless playgrounds - and not all of them government approved! The Great Northern Railroad tracks heading for British Columbia that we walked along enroute to Golden Gardens was one of them. We frightened the engineers, I'm sure. Railroad tracks are not supposed to be a pathway. One time an engineer spotted me and reprimanded me by unloosing a great cloud of steam to shoo me off track. Scared the living you-guess-what out of me. He grinned as I tumbled down the hillside.

Among the main characteristics of Ballard were the bulky, noisy streetcars. They clanked through town and neighborhoods at all times of the day and into the wee night hours. They're gone now, but much remains. As I passed by the old Baghdad theater entrance I remembered all the dimes I spent there on Saturday matinees. Lafferty's drug store has gone, but the Ballard Library building is still there.

Ray Farley's dad, manager of the Price Rite Grocery on 32nd just south of 65th, was a man with a forgiving and trusting nature. I was 16 and ripe to get my driver's license. Mr. Farley offered to hire me as delivery boy once I got the license. On my first day of delivering, with Mr. Farley in the passenger seat to view my performance, I drove to my first target, a home on a hillside where the garage was under the home. I misjudged and plowed the right front fender into the driveway wall.

Still, Mr. Farley kept me on and I worked there for several years. The grocery store is gone, but to my delight the barber shop next to it is still there and looks much the same as when I used to get my haircuts there for 25 cents.

In Part Two, John Oliver tells of going to school in Ballard. He may be reached via bnteditor@robinsonnews.com

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