[They have located a few dozen people who remember Vanport but so far I am the only living person who remembers Vanport and East Vanport both.]
Just a little about Vanport and East Vanport
Authorized before Pearl Harbor, the new DuPont smokeless
gunpowder plant near Pryor, Oklahoma, soon needed workers faster than anyone
could provide worker housing. We spent the first months of 1942 in a tent on a
plywood floor, a pot bellied stove in the center, and a hydrant sticking up
from the ground outside the tent, a few hundred feet from the entrance to the
plant. I kicked and screamed as they
tried to make me use the new but shit-smeared community outhouse; I was allowed
to use a chamber pot after that. In a
canvass annex laced to the main tent I awakened at least once with snow on my
face. While we were in the tent my
doctor found a doctor in town who would do a tonsillectomy on my sister without
anesthesia. We took a bus to school in Pryor
until the cyclone on 27 April turned the sky a putrid green and blew the school
open in the process of killing what Collier's
later referred to as "seventy-odd Oklahomans." I was baffled and resentful when I read that
in 1947. Why did everyone think Okies
were odd, and feel free to say so in print?
At the University of Delaware after 1979 I remembered the tent and the
squalor every time I signed myself as the "H. Fletcher Brown Professor,"
for my chair was endowed by the DuPont executive who had been in charge of smokeless
gunpowder.
After the cyclone in Pryor, the mother and the children
waited in half a telephone operator’s house in Wister, Oklahoma, to be summoned
West to a shipyard. The house may have been built from the same plans as the
house where Sissy Spacek lived in Raggedy
Man. Through the late spring of 1942 my father's dark, impossibly tall
granduncle John Glenn (son of a six foot five Mexican War soldier), dressed in
black and wearing the only tall black stovepipe hat I ever saw in actual use,
brought fresh vegetables to the door of our side of the tiny house. Special trains, later specified as
"Kaiser trains," were carrying workers from the South to work in
shipyards and live in Henry J. Kaiser's instant city, Vanport ("Van"
for Vancouver, Washington, and "port" for Portland). Our train was
mixed, hauling troops and hauling white hillbillies and Southern blacks. (Newspapers show the much smaller count of Kaiser
workers coming from the Northeast.) Vanport in weeks had changed from empty
flood plain to the second largest city in Oregon. In late 1944 and 1945 we were in the new
adjunct, East Vanport, separated from the Columbia River by a reddish loose dirt
berm about 20 feet high, easy to dig into.
Part of it caved in on three bigger children I knew by sight. One they dug out seemed OK. The other one they
rescued was hollow-eyed and green afterwards, spectral. The state, I see on the Internet, had a history
of fierce prejudice against blacks dating back to the Oregon Donation Land Act
of 1850, which specified that free land was only for white settlers. My father had once lived where there was a
sign on either side of town advising any black man not to let the sun go down
on his head there. In the shipbuilding
plant where all the facilities were shared he looked hard at a black man who
was topping a toilet seat with strip after strip of toilet paper. The man
explained himself: "You never know who's been sitting on these seats." This man's fastidiousness was a revelation to
my father, who told the story on his prejudiced self for the rest of his life. I don't know whether he ever applied it to
times when he had been discriminated against because he was so obviously part
Indian. Like the shipyards, the schools
in Vanport were integrated, a first for Oregon. I didn't realize that integration was an
enforced experiment there. The only prejudice I saw in Vanport was against a child
whom I and the other kids taunted for being an Oregonian (but was he also Japanese?).
I was afraid of George, a black classmate.
He was not mean, but he could throw a rock over the tallest tree the bulldozers
had left on the banks of the Columbia and I was sure he could poke a finger
right through your chest so it came out the other side. I was not a healthy kid.
Like everyone of mixed races, the older Parkers had been
alert to shades of color. I was an old
man before I learned why my Aunt Betty was always called Blanket: she came out
so dark they might just as well have given her a blanket and left her off at
the Reservation. Okie humor. It would never have occurred to me that there
could be prejudices against Indians. My
best friend in East Vanport, Billy Shoemaker, was interesting not because he
was Indian but because he was Kiowa, not a tribe I had kinfolks in. Around June
1945 I learned just how different other people thought all American Indians
were: a cousin of a cousin arrived across the river in Washington, puffy, bloated,
doughy, listless, rescued just weeks earlier from a concentration camp where German
doctors had been gleeful at their luck in acquiring a genuine Red Indian to perform
medical experiments on.
In Vanport and East
Vanport the older children all dropped out of school and got jobs. My sister worked in a shipyard. The younger brother was a waiter in a big
Portland restaurant (where he served Alan Ladd once and brought home an
autograph). The older at 14 was
assistant manager of a grocery store in Portland. The Portland Oregonian printed my name in 1943 (I may yet locate the issue) because
in the third grade I came closest to guessing the number of pinto beans in a
goldfish bowl. Trust an Okie, used to
eyeing and prospectively dividing the available resources, to come up with a
good rough estimate. In late 1944 and
then 1945 I was much on my own with a small radio (“Terry and the Pirates”), a
growing collection of Wonder Woman comics, money for movies, absolutely
unsupervised at least 90% of the time. I
was secretively ambitious, for I wrote in pencil on the bottom of a trophy from
Jantzen Beach, a chalk Superman, "this has given me a story." My mother and my visiting sailor cousin,
Ishmael (thin like Grandpa Costner and extremely tall) turned Superman upside
down but could not read my words. I kept
my secret. Why did Ishmael have to say
he had seen Mickey Rooney turn in a full circle in front of him and other
sailors as he urinated on a floor?
Stories that could not be true could disturb your imagination a long
time. At nine, a month or two after
FDR's death, I was put to work, riding out on the back of a flatbed truck to
pick strawberries and other crops. Older
workers favored me with the vilest kind of confidential talk that I mostly did
not understand. Some of the things I was
told, I believe now, were physiologically impossible as well as morally
repulsive.
After being pushed out of Pryor by a cyclone, we got out of
Oregon almost three years before the catastrophe, the flood that wiped out Kaiser's
whole hastily thrown up cardboard metropolis.
Somewhere in central Oregon my father discovered my cache of Wonder
Woman comics under the back seat and threw all of them out the window. What would they be worth now? We were parked on the bank of the Snake River
in Idaho where someone had left a pocket knife with broken blades and some feet
of fishing line when the older ones passed around a paper with headlines about
a bomb falling on Hiroshima. (In the second decade of the 21st
century I learned that the pilot of the Enola
Gay, Paul Tibbets, was a Warfield cousin of my father’s and the man who
denounced the bombing later in 1945 was my mother’s cousin, David Dellinger.)
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