Horses, Chickens and Baseball: Memories Growing Up

By William Arnold Lansing

Ten years ago, Bill Lansing decided to commemorate his memories of growing up on a small ranch in northern California. Like most baby boomers, not much was ever relayed about their parents history. So he decided to remedy that for his future descendants. The book starts out with his parents courtship in 1920s and connects the narrative memories from 1946 with personal photos in a chronological manner until 1969. Many of the stories are funny, as Bill writes with passion and humor. The title comes from three general sources: growing up with horses, beginning at age six; hating the bandy chickens his mother coveted; and Bills passion for baseball. These three topics anchor the flow of the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543466201

William Arnold Lansing

William A. Bill Lansing is the former President and CEO of Menasha Forest Products Corporation headquartered in North Bend, Oregon. He and his wife Ann have made their home in North Bend since 1969, raising two sons in the area. Bill grew up near the small town of Colfax, California. He graduated from Sierra Junior College in Rocklin, California, majoring in mathematics and forestry, and worked summers as a firefighter for the California Division of Forestry an experience that lead him toward a career in forestry. Following graduation from Sierra, he attended Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Forest Engineering in 1967. Bill then went on to the Yale Graduate School of Forestry in New Haven, Connecticut to further enhance his education. Upon graduating from Yale in 1970, Bill went to work for Menasha Corporation in North Bend, Oregon. The Menasha position was intended to last only until, in his words: until something better came alongbut Menasha was a good fit and nothing did! After thirty-seven years at Menasha, in what he thought would only be a transition job, Bill retired in April 2006.

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Copyright © 2017 by William Arnold Bill Lansing. 770617

   ISBN:   Softcover   978-1-5434-6621-8

      EBook   978-1-5434-6620-1

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.

Rev. date: 11/28/2017

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MEMORIES GROWING UP

Let me start by telling you a little about my mother and father. It seems only appropriate to start with them, because without them, I would still be floating around in the stars waiting for the stork to call. As with so many biographies, I did not engage my parents or grand parents in a discussion about their lives. Fortunately, my mother was particularly conscientious about keeping albums, even before she and my father were married and I must confess that I developed a little different understanding of my parents after studying her albums; some dating back to the early 1900’s. I am thankful for those photographs and the little scribbled notes she made beneath them, so I have decided to share some of them in this story.

Growing up, I never got it straight how my parents met. I knew that mom loved animals, particularly horses and dad had dropped out of high school in his junior year. He claimed to have dropped out of high school to support his parents, but I don’t know if that was true or not. Mom always said that if dad had not married her, he probably would have had a brief career as a minor league pitcher in Oakland. As a young man, dad worked for Fenton’s Ice Cream in Oakland. As children, I recall being taken to one of the Fenton ice cream parlors where my favorite sundae was called a black and tan, but by then, no one remembered dad. I think mom worked as a secretary in the old Ferry Building in San Francisco, but that is only a dim possibility.

There were many photographs of dad in mom’s albums that covered the period from 1925 until they were married in 1939; dad was 31 years of age and mom was 29 when they got hitched. From tidbits I picked up, mostly by mom, I gathered that she was smitten with a young rancher from Scotts Valley, California by the name Bill Mathews. I met Bill on several occasions, and even went deer hunting with him once up Shackleford Creek behind his ranch in Northern California. Apparently this was in the same vicinity where mom and he rode horseback years before. As we sat around the campfire in the evenings planning the next day’s hunt, Bill would frequently look over at me with a bit of a sparkle in his eye and say: So that is Ginny’s little boy or state emphatically that Al (my father) had moved faster than he and married my mother before he could get around to it. Dad never seemed comfortable around Bill Mathews, so I surmised that back in those early days there must have been competition for my mother’s attention.

One side bar that I never knew until mom was in her early 90’s was the fact that she had married a man named Bill somebody or other a few years before she married dad. This was not Bill Mathews, but another man named Bill who rode a motor cycle. Apparently he was a bit of a gigolo and a bigamist as he had another wife when he courted my mother. I never asked about that fling, but when my brother and I cleaned out mom’s home in Auburn in 2001 we found some correspondence between my mother and her uncle, Herbert Breed, who was an attorney in Oakland. He got the marriage annulled after mom had been married to Bill for only a couple of days.

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Mom and dad were married in San Rafael, California on July 3, 1939. Dad never went in the army during War II as he had stomach ulcers – so I was told. They spent the first year of their marriage on an extended wilderness honeymoon living in a wooden shack at Dog Creek, north of Redding, California. As mom described it, the place had no electricity or running water and they bathed in a wash tub. When the weather turned warm, they swam in a water-filled big redwood tub. My Grandmother was appalled at the living condition as she was a bit of a society lady from Oakland, but mom and dad stuck it out until winter of 1940 arrived.

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Mom and Dad at Dog Creek in December 1941

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Mom and Dad’s first home at Dog Creek, 50 miles north of Redding California. July 5, 1939 – two days after they were married in San Rafael, California.

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Mom and Dad as newly weds in front of the redwood swimming tank at Dog Creek – July 7, 1939

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The big redwood tub at Dog Creek served as a swimming pool for Mom and Dad. Here, ByJoe (Henry Alston Arnold) and Grandma (right) Imogene Nellie (Henderson) Arnold and Mom (middle) take a dip during a hot summer day in August 1939.

After Dog Creek, they spent a year as the caretakers at Mrs. Lora Knight’s elaborate home at Emerald Bay on the southwest side of Lake Tahoe.

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Mrs. Lora J. Knight -1941.

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The front entrance of Mrs. Knight’s castle at Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe. She was a wealthy Chicago widow who purchased an isolated site at Emerald Bay and instructed Lennart Palme, a Swedish architect, to design a home to be a fully detailed reproduction of a Norse fortress built around 800 A.D. Apparently many of the furnishings that Mrs. Knight wanted for the home were of such great historic significance that the Norwegian and Swedish governments forbade their export, so she had them copied in every detail, down to the exact measurements, coloration and aging of the wood. Dad used to tell us stories about having to ski into her home during the winter months from the road that ran around the lake. He also took Mrs. Knight’s boat to North Shore of Lake Tahoe to fetch the mail and groceries.

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Mrs. Knight’s boats that dad would take to Tahoe City to get the mail and groceries – winter and summer. Dad is perched on the cabin of what they called the mail boat waiting to head into town in the spring 1941. Mrs. Knight’s other boat was called the Valkyrie and was more of a yacht used for touring the lake. Dad piloted both boats.

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Mom and their dog Butch on a dock at Tahoe City in 1940. I don’t remember Butch, except through stories. I was about two years of age when Butch died.

One of the stories I remember Dad telling involved Mrs. Knight’s eccentric behavior whenever she ate her meals at the house. It did not matter whether she ate in the kitchen, dining area or living room, a fire had to be laid in the fireplace (there were many scattered throughout the house) where she was eating in such a fashion that it would burst into flames with only one match. It was put out immediately when she departed the room with a fire extinguisher and another fire was laid in for the next meal.

After a year as caretakers for Mrs. Knight, in December 1941, my parents moved into a small rental cabin just north of Colfax, California along the old U. S. highway 40.

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The little cabin to the right of Wimpy’s restaurant is where my folks lived until they purchased their home in Eden Valley, California. When I was really small, I remember visiting Wimpy’s, but probably only really recall my parents talking about it when I was older.

In the summer of 1942, the folks purchased three acres of land in Eden Valley, California. It was located five miles south of Colfax and bordered the Placer Hills County road. Mom said that ByJoe (my step-grandfather on my mother’s side) loaned them $5,000 to purchase it. The property adjoined the land owned by ByJoe and Grandma and eventually the pasture portion of the adjoining lots were merged, although title never passed to my parents. After our grandmother passed away in 1965, ByJoe deeded two five-acre parcels of his land, one to my brother Gene and the other to me. Gene built a home on his five acres, but I did not. I sold the land several years later and used the proceeds as a down payment on land I purchased in Coos County, Oregon after I was married.

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In 1942, my folks purchased what would become my home in Eden Valley, California. The garage was incomplete when they purchased it. Note the Model T Ford coup in the yard (I think that belonged to dad before they were married). They called it their little Live Oak estate. The massive live oak tree that is seen over hanging the left side of the house would end up causing a significant problem during a snow storm some 20 years later.

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Looking up the stream valley from our home toward ByJoe’s place 1942. Our home is on the left of this photo.

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ByJoe and Grandma’s place adjacent to our property in Eden Valley, California. The pasture in front of the house was eventually fenced and connected with ours – ca early 1940’s. There was a little stream that ran from right to left about 30 feet from their front door. I recall during heavy rainfall that the creek would swell to the point where it lapped over their front porch, but never got inside the house. ByJoe cleared a portion of the grass seen in the photo on the road side of the creek to plant boysenberry and raspberry bushes. Each morning during early summer when the berries would ripen, he would pick a bowl full to have for breakfast. Of course we kids could always eat our fill when we walked up for a visit.

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Unlike Mrs. Knight’s castle, our little home in Eden Valley was never quite finished, at least the upstairs portion where we all slept. In today’s jargon, it might be called an open beam style, but without the beams. Dad had left the 2 x 4’s and plywood roof sheathing exposed from the inside and it was not insulated. I think we finally painted it when I was in high school. We all slept in separate beds upstairs in a bunkhouse style environment with mom and dad on one end of the house and Gene and me on the other. In later years, I wondered how our parents ever had any private time. But I guess we aren’t supposed to think about that sort of thing.

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Our home in Eden Valley, California - 1949. Note the well house in the lower right. The best I can determine is that the house must have been painted white shortly after I was born in 1946. Note the little Deodar Cedar planted in the front yard. That tree caused many problems for me during my imaginary baseball games played out on the lawn. The live oak tree is clearly shown draping over the left side of the house. It made for great episodes of skill and daring to climb as high as one could. Of course, brother Gene always went much higher than me.

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These charts show how each floor of our house in Eden Valley was laid out:

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While my mother’s step father, ByJoe and her mother, Imogene, played an integral and important part of my child hood, I really don’t remember much about dad’s parents. From my research into the genealogy of the Lansing family, I know that my grandfather on dad’s side was born in New York in 1871, but moved to Oakland, California in November 1917, due to the health of his first wife Jesse Elinor Cain (b.1873). I never knew my dad’s biological mother as she died in 1919. Grandpa Lansing then married Mary Belle Lloyd in 1921 and I have only vague memories of them coming to Eden Valley to visit. They both died in 1950 when I was only 5 years old.

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I always liked this photograph of my father and my brother Gene taken in 1945

I also never met my real grandfather on my mother’s side. His name was Peter Alexander Henderson (b. 1880, d. 1939). He, too, was born in New York, but met and married my grandmother, Imogene Nellie Rickley in California some time around 1905. He was apparently unfaithful, among other things, and once my grandmother divorced him, she ripped every photograph of him out of every album in her possession. I was fortunate to have found only one.

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My grandmother, Imogene Nellie Rickley Henderson my grandfather, Peter Alexander Henderson and mom 1913.

MY STORIES FROM BIRTH TO AGE 10

My mother told me that I was born on February 19, 1942 at 8:05 am at the Community Hospital in Grass Valley, Nevada County, California. Dr. F. Lynn Smith of Colfax officiated. My birth certificate confirms the event, but I don’t remember anything about that day. I am told that is normal for