Donald: A Family History and Memoirs of a Journalist and Professor

By Donald Upham Reed

DONALDS WORLD leads on a young boys trip to the top of the tallest building

between San Francisco and Los Angeles during the 1930s When he returned

home he climbed a 60-feet tree in his back yard to see from a distance where

he had been.

Who is this boy? The answer comes in chapter 2 -- from birth to his mothers

commitment to a state insane asylum. Thirty years would pass before she is

released under his care and gardianship.

Chapter 3 explores the family tree and adventures by those who made the

Oklahoma land rush of 1888 and their departure later because of crop failure.

It took Donalds great great grandfather 65 days in all kinds of weather to return

to Tennesee from Oklahoma. One can take the same trip today in less than 100

hours!

Mrs. C. Jackson arrives on the scene in Chapter 4 to take care of Donald and his

older brother, Stanley. Donald didnt know until she died many years later that her middle name was Charity.

The headline for Chapter 6 is The White Avenue Gang. Donald recalls being

only a bystander when the rich kid was tied to a church tree on White Avenue

and one of his captures rode the boys red and white motor-bike around the

block. He and his brother looked like the Balkan who assassinated Archduke

Ferdinand to start World War I.

Elsewere the book involves Donalds school days, summer work in the Sierra

before joining the Navy and being saved by bombs that crushed two Japanese

cities. He cast his first vote for Harry Truman. After that his presidential votes

went only to Republicans. During college Marcia and Don where married

before their sophomore year. After graduation Don joined UP and 34 year

career followed by 10 years as a journalism professor at Oklahoma State

University. He retired in 1994 and now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

7543 S. 70th East Ave, Tulsa, Ok 74133 918 494-3634 E-mail [e-mail]

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 3, 1999
• ISBN: 9781469112893

Donald Upham Reed

A memoir of a career in journalism and academe by DONALD UPHAM REED who rose through the ranks of reporter, writer and world-wide managing editor for United Press International and later a professor at Oklahoma State University.

Book preview

DONALD’S

WORLD

Donald Upham Reed

Copyright © 1999 by Donald Upham Reed.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

OUR TOWN

CHAPTER 2

OUR HERO

CHAPTER 3

FAMILY TREE

CHAPTER 4

MOTHER

CHAPTER 5

CLYDE AND GRACE

CHAPTER 6

THE WHITE AVENUE GANG

CHAPTER 7

SCHOOL BELLS—PART 1

CHAPTER 8

TRAVELS WITH MRS. J & OTHERS

CHAPTER 9

SCHOOL BELLS—PART 2

CHAPTER 10

WW II

CHAPTER 11

GOING HOME TO COLLEGE

CHAPTER 12

THE WEDDING

CHAPTER 13

UP / UPI

CHAPTER 14

TO ACADEME

CHAPTER 15

WINNERS & LOSERS

APPENDIX ONE

APPENDIX TWO

To my wife Marcia, sons Hal, David and Richard and their children, Caleb, Courtney, Cameron, Christian, Preston, Garrek, Peter and Luke.

PREFACE

To write one’s memoirs, there should be a reason.

For some, it is an ego trip, undertaken with the sole purpose of indulging in one’s own interest or self-expression. For others, a written account of events that one has lived through and of the character of people whom one knew can be a legacy for future generations.

I am of the latter category. I feel compelled to leave an account for those now living in the family and those yet born. For more than four decades as a reporter, writer, editor and professor I chronicled the lives of strangers. Now it is time to write of myself and those who have touched my life through 70-plus years.

Like every other branch of art, biography must have form and conventions. Usually one starts with the family tree in order to answer the question: What made this man? Once my early years have been detailed, the ancestral roots will be explained. Then the ensuing years of my life will be explored through my remembrance and those of others.

By weaving quotations from myself and others with third-person statements the boring over-use of the vertical pronoun I will be diminished. In actuality, I’ll interview myself at times to make the memoirs more of a tale.

Third-person statements will result from my collection of historical family history. Quotations will be as remembered vividly or from letters set aside through the years from relatives.

Inaccuracies may occur, however, as to names of non-relatives. Some names from childhood have long been forgotten. I can only recall the face and the incident of my life in which they were a participant. In these cases, they may be given names to complete the story.

It is my sincere hope to be correct as possible, without hype or hokum. My objective view is that my life has differed only little from the average man. I have sometimes failed to quickly understand why this happened. Only in mourning all who loved me before they departed this life have I been comforted, as the Son of Man promised so long ago in the Sermon on the Mount.

People are born, things happen to them, and in an allotted time they die. Those who loved them in turn were loved by others and die, too. The memory of each generation may soon be forgotten without a record. Fading photographs won’t do, providing only a glimpse of people as they were at a given moment. A biography or memoir can offer much more, especially a remembrance of enduring love.

In his small novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder decided that love in its various manifestations may be the one lasting, significant force in the world. His final sentence was this: There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Donald Upham Reed

CHAPTER 1

OUR TOWN

In the center of town, the Pacific Southwest building rose 15 stories at the intersection of Fulton and Mariposa streets. The office windows were normal double-hung wooden sash with the trim painted dark brown to contrast with the gray tan exterior brick. The four-sided rectangular roof of Spanish red tile slanted upward to a small galvanized steel cap that covered an observation area large enough for two people to peer out in all directions.

It was the tallest building between San Francisco and Los Angeles. For every school kid, the building was the landmark that made Fresno different from all other Central California towns in the Great Depression. Although the town generally was flat, the top portion of the building could be seen from some areas of town.

I can remember one kid who lived near downtown boasting that he could see the building from his bedroom window. I was envious because I could barely see the top of the building by climbing the 60-foot tall poplar tree in our backyard a dozen blocks away.

Our house was on a zig-zag route to the building, from the south alley for White Avenue across the vacant lot to Belmont Avenue, then two long blocks on Glenn Avenue to Divisadero Street, which was the northern boundary of the downtown core.

The town originally was built along the Southern Pacific railroad tracks that were laid in a northwest, southeast axis. As the suburbs moved north the streets were set on north/south and east/ west directions. This meant that after Divisadero, the blocks became shorter heading southwest until Van Ness when it was necessary to turn southeast to get to Mariposa and Fulton.

One Sunday afternoon, my father and I walked to town along this route to a cardroom on Mariposa, across the alley from the Pacific Southwest building. I was 11 years old and sat on a stool watching him play rummy. The stakes were small, 5 or 10 cents a pot bets, with 50 cents to the parlor owner to join one of the tables of about six players each. My father loved cards as a diversion to life’s cares, not for high stakes. He took me along this Sunday because my brother was at work and our housekeeper had recently left us.

Late in the afternoon, my father took me across the alley to the building. Somehow he knew the Sunday elevator operator who cheerfully took us to the top floor where he opened a doorway leading to a short flight of stairs to the roof observatory. I was just tall enough to get my chin over the ledge to look at the view that I had only imagined. A few passing clouds seemed so close one could touch them.

To the west, the Coast Range mountains were outlined in a purple haze. To the east, the snow-capped Sierra Nevada rose majestically above a wide band of evergreen forests and a nearby range of brown foothills. The San Joaquin Valley farmlands stretched far and wide both to the north and south.

The town of Fresno, a Spanish name for ash tree, was indeed at the center of California’s great valley that produced almost every crop known in America’s breadbasket. At this time, 1938, Fresno boasted a population of about 55,000, including children on about every block around downtown.

I could hardly wait to tell other kids on my block about the outing to the top of the building. But, my father said I should tell no one because the elevator operator might get in trouble for letting us go to the observation deck. So, I remained silent, not even telling my brother.

It was late summer, a time when many things that happen are soon forgotten with the business of a new school term. Fifty years passed before I thought again of the journey to the top of Fresno’s tallest landmark.

In those years, the town changed drastically—upward in population, metropolitan area and major buildings—like most American cities. The house my father bought in 1924 was demolished, because the land was condemned for a proposed highway project.

In 1979, on a visit back home, only an auto tire lay forlornly in the weeds of the 50 by 75 foot lot where my childhood memories began. Other houses were missing too from the block that once had teemed with children at play. White Ave.eventually was buried under a sprawling freeway interchange.

Four years later, at the peak of my journalistic career, the window in my 14 th floor New York City office looked out at the Empire State Building. The view of the Manhattan skyline was especially marvelous at sundown, invoking some of the same feelings from the childhood trip to the Pacific Southwest building in Fresno. In a long climb to success in pivotal positions across the country, my office floors never were higher than the 14th in New York.

There were times, however, that I climbed mountains or was a passenger aboard airplanes for pleasure or working assignments. The most memorable was the first flight to the United States aboard the Concorde from Caracas, Venezuela to Dallas, Texas. The supersonic jet roared through Mach 2 at nearly 60,000 feet and speed of more than 1400 mph. The sky above was black, not blue, and below white clouds and little Caribbean islands rippled by in our wake.

In 1983, a corporate change of ownership ended my 34-year journalistic career. After a short stint in Connecticut real estate sales, I opted for a more leisurely career in academia at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, which is not far from Guthrie, where my father was born, or Tulsa, home for family members who someday may read this book.

By 1984, I no longer wanted to be among the mass of men who philosopher Henry David Thoreau said lead lives of quiet desperation. Thoreau did his thinking many years ago along the shores of Massachusetts’ Walden Pond. For the next 10 years I did my thinking in a third floor university office, with a limited view of the OSU campus. The move from Fresno to Salt Lake City, San Franciso, Dallas, Chicago and New York was necessary in my news service career. All are great places but not for lifetime living.

As of this writing in 1994, I’m retired at Holiday Island where the views at 1,500-foot elevation in the Arkansas Ozarks are spectacular. The community of 2,000 is comprised mostly of families from the frozen north of the Midwest. When low, gentle clouds roll by this place, they are another reminder of the Pacific Southwest building and childhood dreams of escape from the flat lands.

CHAPTER 2

OUR HERO

Donald Upham Reed was born on Wednesday, Nov. 17, 1926. He arrived at 10:10 p.m., weighing 7 pounds, at Burnett Sanitarium in Fresno. He was the second son of Grace Lucille and Clyde Edgar Reed.

From his father he had blue eyes and a slight cleft in his chin. Facial features and body physique came more from his mother. A small birthmark on the left side of his throat disappeared in young manhood.

Many years later his mother would tell him: Your birth was the worst thing that ever happened to me. They never gave me enough morphine. I kept asking but they wouldn’t give me more morphine to stop the pain.

A bump the size of a large shooter’s marble on the back of his head may have caused difficulty in his delivery into the world. As a man, his hat size was 7-5/8th inches, the largest in the family then. With his hair thinning by his 60th birthday, however, his hat size had dropped to nearly 7-1/2 inches.

Before his first birthday he was walking well. His first word was Mama and he called his brother Stanley, Auday. Stanley was his senior by six years and five months. Donald had no memory of seeing his mother as a child but had long had feelings of her presence on at least two occasions when he was little, probably between age 3 and 4.

The first was while sitting on a blanket in the backyard of the family home at 1456 White Avenue. A water hose was nearby in the grass. The recollection of the incident has always been the same through the years:

I think the hose was orange in color. I saw a green worm, probably a caterpillar, crawling toward me on top of the hose. The mid-section of the worm would rise slowly as it inched out its body and then brought up the rear. I guess I got excited and let out a cry as the worm drew near.

Suddenly, I was swooped up and carried inside the house by strong arms. The scene fades momentarily and then I’m seated on a stool at the kitchen counter. I apparently had been crying but the memory is without sound.

A gas cooking stove and water heater was at one end of the kitchen and a sink and icebox at the other. Above the sink was a window overlooking the backyard. On one side of the kitchen a counter, built-in drawers beneath and cabinets above, stretched from the sink to a door leading into a hall, a bathroom and two bedrooms. The opposite wall had two doors, one to the dining room and adjoining living room, and the other to the screened back porch, where two laundry tubs were hung on the wall next to the screen door to the yard.

Behind Donald as he sat on the stool, an ironing board was shoved into a built-in closet. The iron, with cord attached, had been placed on the icebox to cool. His memory of the kitchen is vivid, bright yellow with green trim.

A sandwich was put on a plate before me, placed there by a shadow-like figure over my shoulders. Next, a large black woman came in from the porch with laundry in her arms. With her appearance the memory fades again. I don’t think she was the shadowy form I had noticed before. I’m guessing it was my mother.

The second remembrance was August 1930. Stanley was at summer camp when a large black touring car arrived